Fic for venturous1: The Navigation
Title: The Navigation
Recipient: venturous1
Author: falling_voices
Characters/Pairings: Sherlock Holmes/John Watson, Greg Lestrade, Sally Donovan, DI Dimmock.
Rating: R.
Warnings: Gore, violence, slight sexual content.
Summary: It's symmetrical, human desire. In Sherlock's case, John thinks, it would be labyrinthine, London-like. Someone goes around London cutting off tongues, and John Watson travels blind.
Sherlock falls into the Thames twenty-six hours into a grueling case, and that's a shock, a bombshell inside John's ribcage, fierce and sudden and utterly unexpected. It stuns him, cuts his breath off short. He falters by the edge with his heart in his mouth, and watches Sherlock's violent drag out of the water, his graceless stumble onto concrete land. Sherlock hauls a limp body from the river, pushes at it until it lay facedown, and then staggers to his feet, his coat a wet bruising sound on the cobbles; without it he looks impossibly skinny, drained of colour altogether, eyes blown huge and pale in an alien face.
The image of him - aimless and ghost-pale, limbs made heavy with water - is wide and inhuman, and catches John flush in the stomach. He thinks, very clearly and precisely, what the hell are you made on. He feels rooted to the spot, shocked into staring.
Sherlock grins at him then, a clear joyous thing that splits his mouth in a dark chasm, and John takes in in a breath. It rasps against his throat like a match to sulfur, burns him inside.
"Tonight was illuminating," Sherlock says, wide-eyed as he reaches John. John looks at him, lips pursed, and waits for Sherlock to regroup long enough to look back.
It happens, but slowly, in stages, and Sherlock at length retreats into himself, left hand no longer wandering towards John's shoulder, vertebras aligning into something of his usual stance. He turns away from John, and looks at the corpse he'd gone under for, instead: Edmund Worthington, forty-five, father of two, gone missing for the last six hours, now drowned. Dead, John surmises, at the very least for the last twenty minutes. He says, "Come on, then," in a voice that sounds red and hot, makes him dig his hands deep in his jacket pockets; his knuckles are split and bloody, the meat of his palms scraped raw where he tore them open on metal ladder steps, earlier in the evening, scampering after Sherlock down fire escapes.
They are a very long way from home. Edmund Worthington has been dead for half an hour. The distance from Baker Street has settled dark and heavy in John's bones, and it makes his bad leg ache, makes him irritable and hardened in the corners. Sherlock could very well have asphyxiated to death in the river, and there is a crimson stain of half-dried blood across his throat. He blinks languidly, moves as though his very bones had melted. His usual spare, bizarre elegance seems wasted on him tonight; he looks like a thing on fire.
John watches him pull Worthington onto his back and work at his hard, rigid jawbone, watches him fish his tongue out of his mouth with a soft, joyful exclamation, the thing dark red and forlorn-looking in Sherlock's gloved hands. Worthington's mouth remains open, gaping, all black in beyond the ridge of his teeth.
"Christ," John exhales, crouches beside Sherlock, and secures his hand across his friend's wrist, so that Sherlock will not go and contaminate the evidence by cutting the tongue in two, or licking the tongue, or putting it away in a coat pocket, never to be seen again.
"Sliced off," Sherlock says, dismissive, almost fond. This is the fourth specimen in four days; John is beginning to feel an odd, somewhat dry neutrality for the limp, bloody things. Sherlock exhales in turn, a sweet guttural noise in the back of his throat, curls his fingers close around the tongue, and rises, balanced, to look over John's shoulder at the police cars roaring down towards them from Charing Cross.
"Do you have your gun?" he asks down, at John, who is crouched still and bent over the body, uselessly seeking a pulse at Worthington's wrist. Sherlock's legs are warm and damp against his shoulder.
John touches the small of his back, the Browning tucked underneath his jacket. Sherlock huffs, approving, and twists round, wet coat flaring, to meet Lestrade's approach.
John takes a minute. He takes two. He shuts, very gently, Edmund Worthington's mouth, forcing the jaw into something that was less of a dark, gaping yawn; had they found his body an hour or two later, they would've had to break it open. It would've hung, slack and useless, from the inside of his skull. When he stands, though, his leg is screaming, and Sherlock is talking to Lestrade in his low baritone of a voice, the tongue now in an evidence bag and bobbing angrily between them.
Sally is standing a little way away, bundled in a grey coat, looking tired and miserable, and John remembers her, four hours ago, at the Yard, both her arms around Edmund Worthington's little girls, aged eight and eleven; she asked about their Christmas lists, made them laugh. Now she is looking, eyes narrowed in a grimace, at Sherlock, brilliant and overjoyed and lighting up the crime scene, a bright-lit beacon set against the dark river and the brash police-car headlights. Sherlock is extravagant and luminous tonight, reveling in the sight: four dead bodies with their tongues cut off, arranged in sickly positions for the police to find; it's a challenge, lovely and new.
But he's soaking wet, as well, teeth chattering even as he speaks, gesticulating, and when John comes closer something about his spine stiffens, something of the tension that dissolved between them thirty-six hours ago returning to his posture. "Shower," John tells him, one hand in the air between them - though reaching or obstacle, he doesn't quite know. It makes Sherlock's eyes crease, at the corners.
"Statements!" Lestrade shouts after them, so Scotland Yard it'll have to be, then; John drags him, full of motion, up towards the radiant streets around Trafalgar Square, all emblazoned with theatre façades and flaring black cabs.
He spends twenty minutes immobile, teeth gritted, under a steady, scalding jet of water, comes out feeling slightly less like the city has swallowed and chewed him whole, pulls on his two-days-old clothes with stiff, howling movements. The gun is a grounding moment, and he cradles it in his hands for a minute, nods into the mirror, conceals it underneath his jacket.
Sherlock, of course, only stayed in the showers just long enough to wash the mire of the river off of him before dashing out; John hunts him down into Lestrade’s office, poring over maps of London and the Underground, his coat drying on Lestrade's chair. He leans back against it, long legs crossed, hands joined in supplication.
"Anything?" John asks, knowingly foreboding a negative: Sherlock is thinking, and thinking fruitlessly; it shows in the lines of his mouth, the tilt of his jaw. He shakes his head briefly, a sharp jerk that says nothing at all. "Right. Can I do anything?"
"Highly unlikely," Sherlock replies, clipped, without looking at John at all. His attention is
on the maps, familiar streets sprawling in red and blue and black, lines entangling in a colourful, connected nexus. Sherlock adores London with every fiber of his being; John wonders, sometimes, what it must be like to be the focal point of such unflinching, tangible devotion. Sherlock adores London, and London is failing him, and Sherlock's body is failing him, sleepless and underfed, fingertips quivering where they are pressed together. He hasn't quite yet sunk into his mind palace, but it's close, and John will be damned if he lets him descend into those depths right here, at the core of Scotland Yard.
Of the emotional, physical mess Sherlock was at Baskerville, John remembers him best as he was, sitting in front of Major Barrymore's computer, streams of data flashing blue across his face: PARANOIA, DANGEROUS ACCELERATION, MULTIPLE HOMICIDE, information smoothly, soundlessly falling into place. The reports were horrifying, bloody murder upon bloody murder upon bloody murder, but John has forgotten, by now, the exact wording, the least petrifying pictures, has kept only the essential content of what he could read, while Sherlock devoured it all like a hound on a trail, stored it away to remember.
A great deal happened in Baskerville.
"But it doesn't make sense," Sherlock barks, then, one half of a silent conversation breaking into the open, and turns a scathing look onto John.
"Alright," says John, squaring his shoulders somewhat unconsciously. "What doesn't, then?"
"None of it does," and there's the anger again, the rampaging fury that would cause Sherlock to sacrifice John to his demons and lunacies - has, will again. If he has to, ever again, John doubts Sherlock will even hesitate, and it's not. It's. It's a difficult thing to live with, he thinks, knowledge and all. "How does he move his victims? How does he make it so they die long before I find them, how - don't bother answering, John, I couldn't possibly solve this case on my own -"
"Can it, mate."
"Oh, alright," Sherlock grimaces. "Yes, yes, alright, come here, look -;" and, sprawling the maps open, circles four locations in black: the area around London Bridge Station, Camden Town, the corner between Shaftesbury Avenue and Charing Cross Road, Victoria Embankment. Patricia Aldritch, cooling body buried underneath a stand of apples in Borough Market in the early hours of the morning; Robert Porter, deformed body stuck haphazardly atop a horse sculpture in the stables market in the middle of the night; Samantha Moreno, found hanging from a streetlight by late theatre-goers in the West End; Edmund Worthington, drowned in the Thames. All had their tongues cut out, sometimes a hand or two; Samantha Moreno's earring-adorned right ear was sent to her flatmate in a gory, cheerful little package, thoughtfully wrapped in one of her tights.
"Right, yeah," John says, catching up: "How does he transport them, yeah?"
Sherlock slouches back into Lestrade's chair. His fingers tap a merry little tune on the flat of Lestrade's desk. "The crux of the matter, it would seem."
There are photographs among the maps, the corpses' live doubles from before the minute a madman decided to abduct them and cut little pieces off of them before strangling or hanging or drowning them, fragments of lives unled. Sherlock flips through them listlessly, and instead of thinking of Edmund Worthington and Edmund Worthington's wife and Edmund Worthington's little girls, their sleek black hair and Christmas wishes, John thinks of Sherlock Holmes' hands: bony and long, idle, flicking through photograph and photograph as he seeks out the incongruity, the one singular irregularity that will fire a new train of thought, the sharp flare of hypothesis.
"I'm going," John says, suddenly. "For, ah. Coffee. You want some?"
Sherlock looks up at him. His hand, John realizes, is on John's arm - he has made himself aware of John's physical presence close to him, of John's body present in its ever-constant longing.
"Yes," he says, after too long a moment for it not to be involuntary. "Black, two -"
"Sugars," John says. "I'm aware." Sherlock blinks, and his hand drops to John's elbow, then his thigh, pressing into muscle. He squeezes once, and John steps away.
The coffee is stale and hard, all black, without cream or sugar, and it goes down too fast and too hot. It's nearing on to eight o'clock, though it feels much later: the night fell about four-thirty, long before he and Sherlock even got to Embankment, and the hours have dragged on, it seems, each grittier and darker than the first.
"John." Lestrade, bearing another two coffees and a pastry that might once, in its better days, have been raspberry and cream filling, but now is mostly mauve. "Mind'f I, er."
"Nahh. Your place, innit? Your cafeteria, I suppose."
"Not exactly mine," Lestrade shrugs, drawing a chair in front of him. "Sherlock been driving you wild again," he says, not really a question, with a jerk of his thump upward, presumably meaning: the case, the four corpses lying flat and icy on mortuary slabs, the cold-headed tension brewing.
"He's in a bit of a strop," John says, lying ruthlessly; it's the first he's seen Greg since Baskerville, and he's in no mood to indulge in recriminations. The two of them share an amicable silence, splitting the pastry and coffees, and later talking quietly about the case, about the victims, their backgrounds, their day jobs.
John sometimes regrets quitting the surgery. In days like this it's all he and Sherlock can do to crash against one another, caught in the spaces of Baker Street, colliding mid-sentence and sneaking glances at each other from different corners of the living-room. It's breathless and hot, and it makes the inside of John's stomach warm when he thinks of it, makes swallowing shallower, harder. Talking to Greg evens the score.
At twenty past, his phone hums in his pocket, against his thigh.
"His Highness asking for His coffee?" Lestrade says, wry, but it's not - it's Molly, who's apparently been notified as to their involvement in the case, delivering DNA results. John frowns down at them.
"It’s not Worthinton's," he mutters, getting up, hitting back the last of his coffee. "The tongue. It's not."
Lestrade's chair scrapes backward. "What'd you mean, it's not - Sherlock found it in his mouth. Down his throat, more like."
"Well, yeah. But it was cut off, wasn't it?" John says, pockets the phone, heads to the elevator; Sherlock will be furious, and elated, and will want to dash to St Bart's within the minute, and meanwhile some poor bugger somewhere in London has had their tongue taken out, god knows what else. It's a taunt, John thinks, something akin to a cat bringing home its prowess of the day: some dead mouse, a beheaded bird. A foreign tongue in a dead man's mouth; Robert Porter's five fingers thoughtfully stored in his jeans' pockets, no longer attached to his hand.
When they get up to the fourth floor, though, Sherlock is nowhere to be found. His coat has vanished from Lestrade's chair, though the maps are still spread wide and colourful across Lestrade's desk; Lestrade's office seems oddly deserted without Sherlock's ever-consuming energy, neon light clicking and rattling overhead.
"Left half an hour ago, didn't he?" Sally tells them, from her desk. "Looked in a hurry, too. Didn't he call you?" she asks John, leveling a steady look at him, and John doesn't have to check his phone again to know that Sherlock hasn't. Sally's features do something complicated, not entirely fond but not altogether bitter, and she looks away, looks back at her computer screen. John feels strangely exposed in her presence.
He texts,
Where are you?
and receives no reply. A couple of minutes later, he sends,
Mind telling me
before you dash
off next time?
- ineffective, as well. Calling Sherlock bears the same results - dial tone, and a final click to voicemail. John sits in a folding chair against the wall of Lestrade's office and watches the officers panic, for lack of a better word - the DNA samples will take longer to analyze, now, and that's if they even find the unlucky sod, if he or she is not dead yet, in a ditch somewhere in Hampstead, perhaps, strung high from a staircase in the National Gallery, dumped in the Serpentine. The entire floor takes life, becomes vibrant as all congregate, shouting, exchanging ideas, making calls. Not a single one of them comes one step further than they have been for hours.
Every half hour, he tries again, calling and calling and getting to voicemail every time, until, around ten, the dial tone cuts off altogether. He feels restless, is not certain why - has more friends and friendly acquaintances here than Sherlock has cared to make in years, but his involvement in Sherlock's cases only goes as far as Sherlock does: mad, ardent chases across the city, the odd brawl at gunpoint and knives to the thigh, the return to Baker Street - exhilarated, delirious, formidable. He has months of making tea, afterwards, four in the morning and Sherlock still awake, minutes away from crashing, his body entire slashed at the seams and burning light. Gorgeous. Gorgeous.
This is - uncanny. Sherlock has left John behind dozens of times, hundreds, but this time feels off, jarring at his lungs. It's discordant. It's unusual, and he could be damned if he tried to tell why. He calls, calls again; Sherlock's phone is not been plugged in in well over twenty-four hours, which is fact, a consequence, physical and certain and heartening, but he calls nevertheless, leaving increasingly alarmed voicemails, Where the hell are you, then, Sherlock, we talked about this, you mad bastard, wouldn't kill you to ask me first-
He's mildly, distantly hungry, in the way one is when caught in an all-nighter; for a minute or two he thinks of frying butter and egg, golden omelets in black pans, chopped up red and green peppers, scalding tea with russet tangs. He could, he knows, go back to Baker Street, take the elevator four floors down and hitch a cab ride home; grab some Thai food on the way, pieces of roasted duck in curry sauce, fried rice and shrimp - Phat Thai as well, Sherlock's favourite, as though the flavour and sweet smell could dragoon him home from afar.
After a while, he gets back into Lestrade's office, occupies the space vacated, the warmth of Sherlock's body lingering after it has gone. The maps on the desk tell him nothing, scribbled black all over with Sherlock's handwriting: marks of existence he traces slowly, copies down to his notebook where he can decipher them - some are contextually coherent, some utterly bizarre, Sherlock's train of thought belatedly streaking from one notion to another, slashing apart through previous theories and assessments.
None of it makes any sense to John - or what little does is fragmented and uncertain - but he spends twenty minutes examining the maps, attempting to watch the city as he imagines Sherlock might: essentially, fundamentally alive, neon-bright bodies lighting the way.
In Baskerville, away from London, Sherlock was agitated, overwrought - thrilling still in his inconceivable arrogance, even by the fireplace where he stole John's voice and made himself brutal and remorseless. But the city pulled at his bones, that much was undeniable, a siren call he was inadequate to resist; the light in Baskerville was not all Sherlock's, not all London's, and that was a territory where he operated badly.
The night after Frankland's death, after Lestrade had taken Henry Knight home and John had emerged from the shower damp-haired and tired, Sherlock curled atop the right-hand bed and crashed rather badly, exultant and exhausted in turns. It was an odd night. The lamp remained switched on throughout, and John woke at times to see his friend pacing and pacing about, or seated across his bed with his hands twisted in his hair. Heat navigated from John's toes up to his chest, spreading red, sinking low into his lungs.
"John!"
Ten-thirty: Lestrade - alarmed, dangerous, crashing against his own doorframe. John jolted, flinching at the sight of Lestrade's face, drained of colour altogether. His voice rasps against his throat.
"What?"
"There's - John, I. I'm sorry, I'm going to need you to come out here."
There's, John discovers, this: a package delivered by hand to the downstairs desk fifteen minutes ago, and what it contains; Sherlock's blue scarf, that John saw him twist 'round his neck twenty-nine hours ago, as they left home, now creased and ruined with gore - snugly nestled inside its folds, the fifth tongue of the evening, and John takes a breath, holds it in, hears Lestrade make a faint noise not unlike a groan.
Dimmock, now close by, exhales almost silently, and says, "Christ-"
"Bloody buggering hell," John rasps, and is very nearly violently sick. When he gets himself aright again, Sally's hand is on his wrist like a vice, hard as his own was on Sherlock's hours earlier.
Everything is hot and close and loud; it feels like the entirety of Scotland Yard has turned up, a congested horde pressing together around Sally's desk, closing the gaps. Above it all Lestrade is talking in a hard, thunderous voice, taking charge easily and smoothly, but John staggers into a chair and stares, for a minute or two.
"It mightn't even be his, John," Sally tells him after a while, crouched in front of him and now utterly professional - resentment vanished from her features altogether. Her hand is around his wrist still, and the skin there is whitening under her grip, as though she was anxious that he might do something rash. He doesn't. Then he doesn't. Then he doesn't.
"John," Greg says, one hand on John's shoulder. "He'll be alright."
The other side of the equation, John thinks: Edmund Worthington's little girls. Sherlock. Sherlock. Mouth gaping wide and dark. He doesn't look at the bloody thing any longer, but as it gets taken away an electric thrust careens through his body, without intent or focus. He suspects himself of wanting to rip the package from the hands of the unsuspecting Sergeant who walks away, down towards the stairs and the lab, and he folds himself inward, tucks his fingers together in unconscious mimicry. Bone against organ against bone.
They put a cup of coffee in his hands, and this time it is the good stuff, not the stale, acrid drink he bought down in the cafeteria; this is personal, intimate, someone's secret stash, laced with something that very much resembles whiskey. No sugar, not a drop. He downs half of it in two gulps, swallows. Presses the mug between his chilled hands. Thinks: Sherlock, and Edmund Worthington's teeth, the dark, immense red down inside his mouth.
Sometime before eleven, he relocates to Lestrade's office. There has been no more coffee, but Lestrade has pressed a flask of scotch in his hands, the metal and weight of it grounding against his palms. He isn't altogether certain of himself, in a state like this. Sherlock has been in danger before, has been threatened of death before, in front of John's eyes - a knife pressed tight to his jugular, a gun trained to his temple, the harsh dangerous glint of rifle, red dots waltzing across his chest. Sherlock could have asphyxiated in the Thames tonight. The way he crosses streets - regally, chaotically - he could've been hit by passing cars a thousand thousand times.
But the thing is, now: the uncertainty of waiting is unbearable. There is literally nothing John can do to help, at this point; Sherlock has taken his secrets with his coat and his amazing, formidable brain, and the maps on Lestrade's desk are very little help. John watches them, for lack of a better thing to do: from afar, they look like arcane charts, streets wound together like early, unreliable constellations, Underground stations spangled red stars to navigate by.
Sherlock always preferred physical maps over Google Maps for this sort of thing: he liked scribbling, liked imprinting himself over the paper, leaving marks like pawprints behind. John imagines that if Sherlock ever had a lover - a partner, boyfriend, girlfriend, no matter - he would insist on doing the same: that fantastic mind of his, the very same that makes him prance and swagger 'round, that demands an audience, would claim skin and flesh as it would a dead body, a bloody crime scene, a loaded gun. It's symmetrical, human desire. In Sherlock's case, John thinks, it would be labyrinthine, London-like.
He feels sick. He thinks of Sherlock's tongue in his mouth - in his mouth - and wants to wake up screaming. Sherlock's lips would leave prints of blood across his chest, his shoulders, the inside of his thighs, and it should not make him warmer, harder.
Maps, he thinks; this is the closest he feels to his friend, at the moment.
Considering maps: the four locations Sherlock has circled make up a quadrangle. He's not touched them since Sherlock, has merely - hovered, perhaps, isn't quite the right word, but it's certainly close. He touches them now, spreads them out wider, better. He was rubbish at geography, in school, but it doesn't take a cartographer or a high mathematician to notice shapes and figures, to link nucleus to nucleus, the very core of Sherlock's scrawling diagrams
Camden Town is on top, the odd man out. Victoria Embankment is at the bottom, winged on either side by Borough Market and Charing Cross Road, three ring-like patterns brought tightly together. Sherlock has laced them around each other, drawn a lattice of black threads between them, and in places the pen outline is thick enough to confuse with the Northern - ah. The Northern line.
John frowns, inclines his head, breathes through his nose.
He grasps a pen off of Lestrade's desk - blue, to keep away from Sherlock's own slow peregrinations through an imaginary London - and circles, again: Camden Town, still, but then London Bridge, Leicester Square, Embankment, all Northern line stations, all within millimeters of each corpse's location upon being found.
"Sodding Christ."
John exhales. He calls for Lestrade, for Lestrade's team.
"Let me say that again," Lestrade says, seated, hands folded together. He looks older, somehow, the night taking its toll on his mouth and his eyes "You think he's a tube worker."
John shrugs, calculated, assertive. "Makes sense, doesn't it?"
"Can't just stop the whole train to dump a body topside a couple times a night, can he?"
"Fine. No - before his shift, then, or after. He works the last shift, maybe, or the first one, but he's got to dump the bodies fast, so he kills them close to the station, unloads them somewhere, catches the nearest train and gets on with his day. He's always minutes away from the Northern line, Greg, there has to be a reason for that. Maybe he keeps them somewhere on the tube. Maybe he kills them down there and carries them out, the shortest of them - Samantha was five feet one, well below the national average, if he used a lot of tools and lugged them around everyday in a bag no one'd blink once at seeing him with a slighter larger bag-"
"He'd have to be massive," Sally says, from where she's leaning against the doorjamb, arms crossed tightly together. She looks at John, at Lestrade, what John guesses must be their hunched shoulders and twin postures. "Over six feet, stacked. Military, the big sort."
"Where would he kill them, then, d'you think," Lestrade says, because the greater issue was transportation but the slightly smaller issue is storage: the Underground is immense, delineated, creased all over. There are holes, manshafts, drain pipes leading into the sewers.
"Air raid shelter," Dimmock says, which is surprising. He has sat, for the last twenty minutes, while John unfurled Sherlock's maps all over again, very quietly on one of Lestrade's rare upholstered chairs, listening attentively.
He flushes now, his pale, thin face hot and intent. "WW2 shelters, they - there're plenty of them on the Northern line, most of them further down south, but there's one underneath Goodge Street Station. Deep level."
"That's two stations north of Leicester Square," Sally says. "Four south of Camden Town."
"Right in the middle of Zone 1, too," John murmurs.
Lestrade shifts, uneasy, too-tired. "This is all speculation, you realize."
"It's the best you've got," John says - sharply, enough for Sally to glower at him, for Dimmock to run his hand through his short hair and look out the windowpane at a London that looks dormant, probably isn't. Lestrade exhales, again, creases his hand over his face, his mouth, wipes it with the flat of his palm, and then nods.
"Fine, right, okay - Dimmock, you get me locations, entrances, anything on the shelter and its exit routes - Donovan gets us en route, I want as many as possible moving in fifteen. John -"
"I get it," John says, but Lestrade's computer is abandoned, afterwards.
It takes only a minute to google the shelter and its entrances - Tottenham Court Road, Chenies Street, the shelter itself down below between the two - barely five more to walk away, neatly sidestepping the storm threatening across the floor. He leaves Scotland Yard amidst calls ringing shrill and acid in among the shouting and strapping, lights flickering overhead with the late hour, leaving only dozens of computers screens to light his way past, and then down, and then out.
He takes a cab to Leicester Square but walks the rest of the way, traversing quickly through Soho and Charing Cross Road, his gun a familiar heavy warmth against his palm, in his jacket pocket. London is flaring - past midnight now, almost one, but crowded still: it's a Saturday night, the theatres blown wide open, casinos and grimy nightclubs vibrant with polychromatic neons, every façade bleeding light onto every face. The people are strange here, colorful and deranged in dress and hairstyle, laughing, pushing into one another. Their body language is full-scale, uncontrolled, and John shoulders past them, walks on.
Oxford Street is worse. It's two weeks from Christmas: every shop is blazing. John thinks of energy and entropy and almost turns at every black coat he sees. He doesn't know how else to do this. Sherlock remains a beacon, burning brighter still among it all: the North Star, pulling him in and past the rocks and home.
In Chenies Street, it's quieter, darker. The West entrance to the shelter is down in the Eisenhower Centre, the cream and red stripes at the front of the building embraced in shadow, the redder door only locked to those who have not lived eighteen months with a madman who makes a hobby of handpicking every lock he comes across. John gets past it and in with alarming easiness, leaves the metal door wide open for Lestrade and his people to slam through. He goes in, and deep, down to the core of the building, the long winding staircase sinking downside.
There's light, thank goodness, seeping into the cracked walls from bleeding, electric bare lightbulbs. The railing is rusty where his hand touches it, the steps crackled underneath his steps: people rarely come down, if they come at all. Sometimes there are doors, carved open directly into the stone; sometimes manholes, descending deep into the bowels of the Underground. Above head, the ventilation shaft in the rear of the building roars, sometimes, in great angry howls - heedless, the metal steps slant further and further, until John's pace takes on speed and sound, a harsh slamming beat that pounds up at his lungs, his stomach, the flare of pain across his left shoulder.
From time to time, he catches glimpses of what must be passing trains deep into the tunnels he passes: hacked flares in a hard chopping motion, volatile, then gone. He goes down, and down: the air is sweeter the deeper he goes, smells stronger of fuel oil. It feels like descending into the belly of the whale, counting handrails like rib bones, swallowed and devoured.
When he hits bottom, it's almost a surprise.
The corridors wind, secret and silent and further down. He follows them: there's only one way.
He doesn't quite realize when the light changes. The electric blue and grey adjusts gradually to a warmer brown, then something approximating a grimy, soiled gold, and John's breath hitches, shortens, because he is getting closer; he hears muted clanging, the susurration of a voice, and then, later still, a low, heated howl. He rounds a corner, and finds painted in lamplight across the opposite wall two enormous shadows, dilated, blown to gigantic proportions.
Sherlock is handcuffed, which is strange, but also conscious, alive, eyes wide open and greedy; there is no blood across his mouth. The other man in the shelter is colossal, heavy shoulders distended with muscles - his head is shaved very close, and he wears overalls the way soldiers would wear a uniform. Sally was right, then: the man screams military out of his every pore, walks in the same systematic way John has seen for years, operating in Afghanistan, one tour down and counting.
But Sherlock is not speaking, and that's perhaps the most alarming thing of all. Sherlock has no blood across his mouth, but he is not speaking, not headily taunting the truth out of their serial killer's throat. There is a knife planting his left hand to the ground.
John takes a breath, then lets it out, draws and shoots twice almost without thinking: his first shot goes wide, goes scrambling into the depths of the shelter that are wide and very, very dark; the second catches at the man in the shoulder, but does little more than twist him around, scrapes the flesh but does not sink. John has only the time for another shot - does not see where it plummets - before he is bowled over and knocked sideways and down, head cracking hard into the ground.
There is a bellow forming deep in the entrails of the man whose weight pins him down, a massive hand strained across his throat and inward, and John's chest folds and folds - summoning breath is barely bearable, burning high up into his windpipe. He feels his fingertips scrambling for his gun, the light vacillating overhead, and then: other fingers, thicker, larger, working at his mouth, his jaw, a grotesque mimicry of Sherlock's own efforts down by Embankment. They force him open.
There is no knife - not yet - but the fingers grapple at his tongue anyway, twisting and grasping as though to rip it out on brute pressure alone. John gasps, throat closing, no acrid bile surging up at all; it'd be a relief, he thinks, before he remembers that he would choke on it, would suffocate on his own vomit before it corroded the fingers through.
He keens, high in his throat while he still can, and knees the man in the crotch, he thinks. It barely registers. What does is the fourth shot, and the implosion of blood over his legs: the man's thigh blown open, a shallow shout caught before it began gasped across the space of the shelter before he collapses sideways, and John is just free enough to slam his elbow through his temple, knocking him down.
Above him, Sherlock gasps harsh, panting breaths.
"Fuck," John says, jaw clenching shut, and Sherlock laughs, wide-eyed and miraculous. He rasps out something inaudible, and then says,
"John," and John gulps in an enormous breath and another and another until Sherlock drops to his knees beside him, drags both hands in his hair, and kisses him terribly hard.
His tongue is hot into John's mouth and for a minute it is all John can taste: the heat of it, the grasping reality and the hitching breath still rising in his lungs. Sherlock kisses like a man who's never tried kissing for kissing's sake - sinking into it, into John, bodies dragged together onto the floor. He feels bruised under John's hands, beaten into flinching underneath the fine fabric of his shirt. His cheekbones are impossibly sharp in the painted lamplight, under the brush of John's thumbs.
"Okay," John says, mouth dropping to Sherlock's temple when Sherlock's nose falls to his neck, Sherlock's own trembling mouth pressed tight and hot to his throat. "Okay, Sherlock, okay."
They're still there when the police finds them: an unconscious murderer at their feet, wrapped together like puppies.
It's four in the morning when John finds him again. The long trek back up to the surface takes, it seems, much longer than the descent did, and Lestrade insists on haranguing him for about half an hour before patting him awkwardly on the arm and letting him go. Sherlock is, it appears, kept captive by the paramedics; he has bullied his way into sitting on the steps of the ambulance parked at the corner of Huntley Street, silhouetted black against flaring yellow. The intimacy and absurdity of the moment, feedback loop over feedback loop, catches up high into John's throat.
"Hullo," he says, coming up to Sherlock's level - he rests both hands on Sherlock's knees, braces them close and together. "Sergeant Donovan's just been, ah - explaining everything - serial killer, wasn't he? Dreadful business. Dreadful."
Sherlock's mouth creases open. "You were a ghastly shot this time, John."
"You had the handcuffs open, didn't you," John realizes. "You utter prick."
"Good thing, too. I'm told you traced him here."
"I did that, didn't I. 'Cause you cleared off. Did you let him bump you over the head, too, so he'd drag you down in there?"
Sherlock looks somewhat chagrined. "Sadly, no. I'm afraid he caught me quite by surprise."
"Me, too," John says, softly, and puts his fingers over Sherlock's mouth. They're quite in a dark corner; the ambulance's glaring light makes them into clean black silhouettes to the swarming police down the street. Sherlock's lips part; he draws John's fingers in, touches the flat of his tongue to them unhesitatingly. John shudders once, heavily and all over. The inside of Sherlock's mouth is wet and warm, and John knows it with his own tongue. Sherlock's bottom teeth sink gently into the flesh of his middle and ring fingers.
He catches Donovan's look, slanted towards them.
Sherlock's tongue touches to the depression between John's index finger and his thumb; the tips of John's fingers are dipping against the soft, soft skin at the entrance of his throat. He thinks he would let him sink farther, if he wanted, down and down into the belly of the whale.
"Edmund Worthington’s," he says, then, and Sherlock smiles around his fingers, resurfaces enough to say,
"Yes."
"The tongue he delivered at the Yard," John clarifies.
"Oh," Sherlock murmurs, and his voice is hot, abraded. "You thought it was mine."
"He had it wrapped in your scarf," John says, "what was I supposed to think-"
"You were angry at me," Sherlock says, as usual bypassing all potential digressions and getting down to the crux of the matter; "have been for days."
John is quiet.
"Yes," he says, eventually. "Still am." He doesn't know what this says about him, about Sherlock, their stinging unhappiness, the exultant joy of after-case whiskey and tea. Baker Street is bright in his mind's eye: they'll collapse at the bottom of the stairs in 221B, an inelegant heap of limbs and breath and sex, haul each other up and beat each other down into bed, or onto the sofa, or against the wall right next to the door, exhaling loud and fast in each other's faces, Sherlock's hands splayed hot all across his skin.
He jolts against it, and Sherlock hisses, cradles his left hand to his chest in an unconscious gesture - he has had a knife thrust through it and now six stitches pulled into the skin on either side, none of which John trusts one whit.
"I don't think I can properly say," he says, slowly, his fingers on Sherlock's jaw, "how much it would destroy me if you died on me like this."
Sherlock smiles, says nothing at all. His mouth is set; he kisses John's thumb. The lodestar to see by, John thinks. Everything else has already gone to hell.
No: they will go home and make tea, sit in their kitchen in the dim stove light, and John will take apart every one of these stitches and put in new ones, unmindful of Sherlock's short intakes of breath with every drag of the needle. They'll drink whiskey until this terrible, pounding night finishes. John will have light underneath his eyelids for hours after; Sherlock is all-consuming energy and an enraged sort of brilliance, and it will soak under John's skin, scorching. Yes. That's how it'll be.
Recipient: venturous1
Author: falling_voices
Characters/Pairings: Sherlock Holmes/John Watson, Greg Lestrade, Sally Donovan, DI Dimmock.
Rating: R.
Warnings: Gore, violence, slight sexual content.
Summary: It's symmetrical, human desire. In Sherlock's case, John thinks, it would be labyrinthine, London-like. Someone goes around London cutting off tongues, and John Watson travels blind.
Sherlock falls into the Thames twenty-six hours into a grueling case, and that's a shock, a bombshell inside John's ribcage, fierce and sudden and utterly unexpected. It stuns him, cuts his breath off short. He falters by the edge with his heart in his mouth, and watches Sherlock's violent drag out of the water, his graceless stumble onto concrete land. Sherlock hauls a limp body from the river, pushes at it until it lay facedown, and then staggers to his feet, his coat a wet bruising sound on the cobbles; without it he looks impossibly skinny, drained of colour altogether, eyes blown huge and pale in an alien face.
The image of him - aimless and ghost-pale, limbs made heavy with water - is wide and inhuman, and catches John flush in the stomach. He thinks, very clearly and precisely, what the hell are you made on. He feels rooted to the spot, shocked into staring.
Sherlock grins at him then, a clear joyous thing that splits his mouth in a dark chasm, and John takes in in a breath. It rasps against his throat like a match to sulfur, burns him inside.
"Tonight was illuminating," Sherlock says, wide-eyed as he reaches John. John looks at him, lips pursed, and waits for Sherlock to regroup long enough to look back.
It happens, but slowly, in stages, and Sherlock at length retreats into himself, left hand no longer wandering towards John's shoulder, vertebras aligning into something of his usual stance. He turns away from John, and looks at the corpse he'd gone under for, instead: Edmund Worthington, forty-five, father of two, gone missing for the last six hours, now drowned. Dead, John surmises, at the very least for the last twenty minutes. He says, "Come on, then," in a voice that sounds red and hot, makes him dig his hands deep in his jacket pockets; his knuckles are split and bloody, the meat of his palms scraped raw where he tore them open on metal ladder steps, earlier in the evening, scampering after Sherlock down fire escapes.
They are a very long way from home. Edmund Worthington has been dead for half an hour. The distance from Baker Street has settled dark and heavy in John's bones, and it makes his bad leg ache, makes him irritable and hardened in the corners. Sherlock could very well have asphyxiated to death in the river, and there is a crimson stain of half-dried blood across his throat. He blinks languidly, moves as though his very bones had melted. His usual spare, bizarre elegance seems wasted on him tonight; he looks like a thing on fire.
John watches him pull Worthington onto his back and work at his hard, rigid jawbone, watches him fish his tongue out of his mouth with a soft, joyful exclamation, the thing dark red and forlorn-looking in Sherlock's gloved hands. Worthington's mouth remains open, gaping, all black in beyond the ridge of his teeth.
"Christ," John exhales, crouches beside Sherlock, and secures his hand across his friend's wrist, so that Sherlock will not go and contaminate the evidence by cutting the tongue in two, or licking the tongue, or putting it away in a coat pocket, never to be seen again.
"Sliced off," Sherlock says, dismissive, almost fond. This is the fourth specimen in four days; John is beginning to feel an odd, somewhat dry neutrality for the limp, bloody things. Sherlock exhales in turn, a sweet guttural noise in the back of his throat, curls his fingers close around the tongue, and rises, balanced, to look over John's shoulder at the police cars roaring down towards them from Charing Cross.
"Do you have your gun?" he asks down, at John, who is crouched still and bent over the body, uselessly seeking a pulse at Worthington's wrist. Sherlock's legs are warm and damp against his shoulder.
John touches the small of his back, the Browning tucked underneath his jacket. Sherlock huffs, approving, and twists round, wet coat flaring, to meet Lestrade's approach.
John takes a minute. He takes two. He shuts, very gently, Edmund Worthington's mouth, forcing the jaw into something that was less of a dark, gaping yawn; had they found his body an hour or two later, they would've had to break it open. It would've hung, slack and useless, from the inside of his skull. When he stands, though, his leg is screaming, and Sherlock is talking to Lestrade in his low baritone of a voice, the tongue now in an evidence bag and bobbing angrily between them.
Sally is standing a little way away, bundled in a grey coat, looking tired and miserable, and John remembers her, four hours ago, at the Yard, both her arms around Edmund Worthington's little girls, aged eight and eleven; she asked about their Christmas lists, made them laugh. Now she is looking, eyes narrowed in a grimace, at Sherlock, brilliant and overjoyed and lighting up the crime scene, a bright-lit beacon set against the dark river and the brash police-car headlights. Sherlock is extravagant and luminous tonight, reveling in the sight: four dead bodies with their tongues cut off, arranged in sickly positions for the police to find; it's a challenge, lovely and new.
But he's soaking wet, as well, teeth chattering even as he speaks, gesticulating, and when John comes closer something about his spine stiffens, something of the tension that dissolved between them thirty-six hours ago returning to his posture. "Shower," John tells him, one hand in the air between them - though reaching or obstacle, he doesn't quite know. It makes Sherlock's eyes crease, at the corners.
"Statements!" Lestrade shouts after them, so Scotland Yard it'll have to be, then; John drags him, full of motion, up towards the radiant streets around Trafalgar Square, all emblazoned with theatre façades and flaring black cabs.
He spends twenty minutes immobile, teeth gritted, under a steady, scalding jet of water, comes out feeling slightly less like the city has swallowed and chewed him whole, pulls on his two-days-old clothes with stiff, howling movements. The gun is a grounding moment, and he cradles it in his hands for a minute, nods into the mirror, conceals it underneath his jacket.
Sherlock, of course, only stayed in the showers just long enough to wash the mire of the river off of him before dashing out; John hunts him down into Lestrade’s office, poring over maps of London and the Underground, his coat drying on Lestrade's chair. He leans back against it, long legs crossed, hands joined in supplication.
"Anything?" John asks, knowingly foreboding a negative: Sherlock is thinking, and thinking fruitlessly; it shows in the lines of his mouth, the tilt of his jaw. He shakes his head briefly, a sharp jerk that says nothing at all. "Right. Can I do anything?"
"Highly unlikely," Sherlock replies, clipped, without looking at John at all. His attention is
on the maps, familiar streets sprawling in red and blue and black, lines entangling in a colourful, connected nexus. Sherlock adores London with every fiber of his being; John wonders, sometimes, what it must be like to be the focal point of such unflinching, tangible devotion. Sherlock adores London, and London is failing him, and Sherlock's body is failing him, sleepless and underfed, fingertips quivering where they are pressed together. He hasn't quite yet sunk into his mind palace, but it's close, and John will be damned if he lets him descend into those depths right here, at the core of Scotland Yard.
Of the emotional, physical mess Sherlock was at Baskerville, John remembers him best as he was, sitting in front of Major Barrymore's computer, streams of data flashing blue across his face: PARANOIA, DANGEROUS ACCELERATION, MULTIPLE HOMICIDE, information smoothly, soundlessly falling into place. The reports were horrifying, bloody murder upon bloody murder upon bloody murder, but John has forgotten, by now, the exact wording, the least petrifying pictures, has kept only the essential content of what he could read, while Sherlock devoured it all like a hound on a trail, stored it away to remember.
A great deal happened in Baskerville.
"But it doesn't make sense," Sherlock barks, then, one half of a silent conversation breaking into the open, and turns a scathing look onto John.
"Alright," says John, squaring his shoulders somewhat unconsciously. "What doesn't, then?"
"None of it does," and there's the anger again, the rampaging fury that would cause Sherlock to sacrifice John to his demons and lunacies - has, will again. If he has to, ever again, John doubts Sherlock will even hesitate, and it's not. It's. It's a difficult thing to live with, he thinks, knowledge and all. "How does he move his victims? How does he make it so they die long before I find them, how - don't bother answering, John, I couldn't possibly solve this case on my own -"
"Can it, mate."
"Oh, alright," Sherlock grimaces. "Yes, yes, alright, come here, look -;" and, sprawling the maps open, circles four locations in black: the area around London Bridge Station, Camden Town, the corner between Shaftesbury Avenue and Charing Cross Road, Victoria Embankment. Patricia Aldritch, cooling body buried underneath a stand of apples in Borough Market in the early hours of the morning; Robert Porter, deformed body stuck haphazardly atop a horse sculpture in the stables market in the middle of the night; Samantha Moreno, found hanging from a streetlight by late theatre-goers in the West End; Edmund Worthington, drowned in the Thames. All had their tongues cut out, sometimes a hand or two; Samantha Moreno's earring-adorned right ear was sent to her flatmate in a gory, cheerful little package, thoughtfully wrapped in one of her tights.
"Right, yeah," John says, catching up: "How does he transport them, yeah?"
Sherlock slouches back into Lestrade's chair. His fingers tap a merry little tune on the flat of Lestrade's desk. "The crux of the matter, it would seem."
There are photographs among the maps, the corpses' live doubles from before the minute a madman decided to abduct them and cut little pieces off of them before strangling or hanging or drowning them, fragments of lives unled. Sherlock flips through them listlessly, and instead of thinking of Edmund Worthington and Edmund Worthington's wife and Edmund Worthington's little girls, their sleek black hair and Christmas wishes, John thinks of Sherlock Holmes' hands: bony and long, idle, flicking through photograph and photograph as he seeks out the incongruity, the one singular irregularity that will fire a new train of thought, the sharp flare of hypothesis.
"I'm going," John says, suddenly. "For, ah. Coffee. You want some?"
Sherlock looks up at him. His hand, John realizes, is on John's arm - he has made himself aware of John's physical presence close to him, of John's body present in its ever-constant longing.
"Yes," he says, after too long a moment for it not to be involuntary. "Black, two -"
"Sugars," John says. "I'm aware." Sherlock blinks, and his hand drops to John's elbow, then his thigh, pressing into muscle. He squeezes once, and John steps away.
The coffee is stale and hard, all black, without cream or sugar, and it goes down too fast and too hot. It's nearing on to eight o'clock, though it feels much later: the night fell about four-thirty, long before he and Sherlock even got to Embankment, and the hours have dragged on, it seems, each grittier and darker than the first.
"John." Lestrade, bearing another two coffees and a pastry that might once, in its better days, have been raspberry and cream filling, but now is mostly mauve. "Mind'f I, er."
"Nahh. Your place, innit? Your cafeteria, I suppose."
"Not exactly mine," Lestrade shrugs, drawing a chair in front of him. "Sherlock been driving you wild again," he says, not really a question, with a jerk of his thump upward, presumably meaning: the case, the four corpses lying flat and icy on mortuary slabs, the cold-headed tension brewing.
"He's in a bit of a strop," John says, lying ruthlessly; it's the first he's seen Greg since Baskerville, and he's in no mood to indulge in recriminations. The two of them share an amicable silence, splitting the pastry and coffees, and later talking quietly about the case, about the victims, their backgrounds, their day jobs.
John sometimes regrets quitting the surgery. In days like this it's all he and Sherlock can do to crash against one another, caught in the spaces of Baker Street, colliding mid-sentence and sneaking glances at each other from different corners of the living-room. It's breathless and hot, and it makes the inside of John's stomach warm when he thinks of it, makes swallowing shallower, harder. Talking to Greg evens the score.
At twenty past, his phone hums in his pocket, against his thigh.
"His Highness asking for His coffee?" Lestrade says, wry, but it's not - it's Molly, who's apparently been notified as to their involvement in the case, delivering DNA results. John frowns down at them.
"It’s not Worthinton's," he mutters, getting up, hitting back the last of his coffee. "The tongue. It's not."
Lestrade's chair scrapes backward. "What'd you mean, it's not - Sherlock found it in his mouth. Down his throat, more like."
"Well, yeah. But it was cut off, wasn't it?" John says, pockets the phone, heads to the elevator; Sherlock will be furious, and elated, and will want to dash to St Bart's within the minute, and meanwhile some poor bugger somewhere in London has had their tongue taken out, god knows what else. It's a taunt, John thinks, something akin to a cat bringing home its prowess of the day: some dead mouse, a beheaded bird. A foreign tongue in a dead man's mouth; Robert Porter's five fingers thoughtfully stored in his jeans' pockets, no longer attached to his hand.
When they get up to the fourth floor, though, Sherlock is nowhere to be found. His coat has vanished from Lestrade's chair, though the maps are still spread wide and colourful across Lestrade's desk; Lestrade's office seems oddly deserted without Sherlock's ever-consuming energy, neon light clicking and rattling overhead.
"Left half an hour ago, didn't he?" Sally tells them, from her desk. "Looked in a hurry, too. Didn't he call you?" she asks John, leveling a steady look at him, and John doesn't have to check his phone again to know that Sherlock hasn't. Sally's features do something complicated, not entirely fond but not altogether bitter, and she looks away, looks back at her computer screen. John feels strangely exposed in her presence.
He texts,
Where are you?
and receives no reply. A couple of minutes later, he sends,
Mind telling me
before you dash
off next time?
- ineffective, as well. Calling Sherlock bears the same results - dial tone, and a final click to voicemail. John sits in a folding chair against the wall of Lestrade's office and watches the officers panic, for lack of a better word - the DNA samples will take longer to analyze, now, and that's if they even find the unlucky sod, if he or she is not dead yet, in a ditch somewhere in Hampstead, perhaps, strung high from a staircase in the National Gallery, dumped in the Serpentine. The entire floor takes life, becomes vibrant as all congregate, shouting, exchanging ideas, making calls. Not a single one of them comes one step further than they have been for hours.
Every half hour, he tries again, calling and calling and getting to voicemail every time, until, around ten, the dial tone cuts off altogether. He feels restless, is not certain why - has more friends and friendly acquaintances here than Sherlock has cared to make in years, but his involvement in Sherlock's cases only goes as far as Sherlock does: mad, ardent chases across the city, the odd brawl at gunpoint and knives to the thigh, the return to Baker Street - exhilarated, delirious, formidable. He has months of making tea, afterwards, four in the morning and Sherlock still awake, minutes away from crashing, his body entire slashed at the seams and burning light. Gorgeous. Gorgeous.
This is - uncanny. Sherlock has left John behind dozens of times, hundreds, but this time feels off, jarring at his lungs. It's discordant. It's unusual, and he could be damned if he tried to tell why. He calls, calls again; Sherlock's phone is not been plugged in in well over twenty-four hours, which is fact, a consequence, physical and certain and heartening, but he calls nevertheless, leaving increasingly alarmed voicemails, Where the hell are you, then, Sherlock, we talked about this, you mad bastard, wouldn't kill you to ask me first-
He's mildly, distantly hungry, in the way one is when caught in an all-nighter; for a minute or two he thinks of frying butter and egg, golden omelets in black pans, chopped up red and green peppers, scalding tea with russet tangs. He could, he knows, go back to Baker Street, take the elevator four floors down and hitch a cab ride home; grab some Thai food on the way, pieces of roasted duck in curry sauce, fried rice and shrimp - Phat Thai as well, Sherlock's favourite, as though the flavour and sweet smell could dragoon him home from afar.
After a while, he gets back into Lestrade's office, occupies the space vacated, the warmth of Sherlock's body lingering after it has gone. The maps on the desk tell him nothing, scribbled black all over with Sherlock's handwriting: marks of existence he traces slowly, copies down to his notebook where he can decipher them - some are contextually coherent, some utterly bizarre, Sherlock's train of thought belatedly streaking from one notion to another, slashing apart through previous theories and assessments.
None of it makes any sense to John - or what little does is fragmented and uncertain - but he spends twenty minutes examining the maps, attempting to watch the city as he imagines Sherlock might: essentially, fundamentally alive, neon-bright bodies lighting the way.
In Baskerville, away from London, Sherlock was agitated, overwrought - thrilling still in his inconceivable arrogance, even by the fireplace where he stole John's voice and made himself brutal and remorseless. But the city pulled at his bones, that much was undeniable, a siren call he was inadequate to resist; the light in Baskerville was not all Sherlock's, not all London's, and that was a territory where he operated badly.
The night after Frankland's death, after Lestrade had taken Henry Knight home and John had emerged from the shower damp-haired and tired, Sherlock curled atop the right-hand bed and crashed rather badly, exultant and exhausted in turns. It was an odd night. The lamp remained switched on throughout, and John woke at times to see his friend pacing and pacing about, or seated across his bed with his hands twisted in his hair. Heat navigated from John's toes up to his chest, spreading red, sinking low into his lungs.
"John!"
Ten-thirty: Lestrade - alarmed, dangerous, crashing against his own doorframe. John jolted, flinching at the sight of Lestrade's face, drained of colour altogether. His voice rasps against his throat.
"What?"
"There's - John, I. I'm sorry, I'm going to need you to come out here."
There's, John discovers, this: a package delivered by hand to the downstairs desk fifteen minutes ago, and what it contains; Sherlock's blue scarf, that John saw him twist 'round his neck twenty-nine hours ago, as they left home, now creased and ruined with gore - snugly nestled inside its folds, the fifth tongue of the evening, and John takes a breath, holds it in, hears Lestrade make a faint noise not unlike a groan.
Dimmock, now close by, exhales almost silently, and says, "Christ-"
"Bloody buggering hell," John rasps, and is very nearly violently sick. When he gets himself aright again, Sally's hand is on his wrist like a vice, hard as his own was on Sherlock's hours earlier.
Everything is hot and close and loud; it feels like the entirety of Scotland Yard has turned up, a congested horde pressing together around Sally's desk, closing the gaps. Above it all Lestrade is talking in a hard, thunderous voice, taking charge easily and smoothly, but John staggers into a chair and stares, for a minute or two.
"It mightn't even be his, John," Sally tells him after a while, crouched in front of him and now utterly professional - resentment vanished from her features altogether. Her hand is around his wrist still, and the skin there is whitening under her grip, as though she was anxious that he might do something rash. He doesn't. Then he doesn't. Then he doesn't.
"John," Greg says, one hand on John's shoulder. "He'll be alright."
The other side of the equation, John thinks: Edmund Worthington's little girls. Sherlock. Sherlock. Mouth gaping wide and dark. He doesn't look at the bloody thing any longer, but as it gets taken away an electric thrust careens through his body, without intent or focus. He suspects himself of wanting to rip the package from the hands of the unsuspecting Sergeant who walks away, down towards the stairs and the lab, and he folds himself inward, tucks his fingers together in unconscious mimicry. Bone against organ against bone.
They put a cup of coffee in his hands, and this time it is the good stuff, not the stale, acrid drink he bought down in the cafeteria; this is personal, intimate, someone's secret stash, laced with something that very much resembles whiskey. No sugar, not a drop. He downs half of it in two gulps, swallows. Presses the mug between his chilled hands. Thinks: Sherlock, and Edmund Worthington's teeth, the dark, immense red down inside his mouth.
Sometime before eleven, he relocates to Lestrade's office. There has been no more coffee, but Lestrade has pressed a flask of scotch in his hands, the metal and weight of it grounding against his palms. He isn't altogether certain of himself, in a state like this. Sherlock has been in danger before, has been threatened of death before, in front of John's eyes - a knife pressed tight to his jugular, a gun trained to his temple, the harsh dangerous glint of rifle, red dots waltzing across his chest. Sherlock could have asphyxiated in the Thames tonight. The way he crosses streets - regally, chaotically - he could've been hit by passing cars a thousand thousand times.
But the thing is, now: the uncertainty of waiting is unbearable. There is literally nothing John can do to help, at this point; Sherlock has taken his secrets with his coat and his amazing, formidable brain, and the maps on Lestrade's desk are very little help. John watches them, for lack of a better thing to do: from afar, they look like arcane charts, streets wound together like early, unreliable constellations, Underground stations spangled red stars to navigate by.
Sherlock always preferred physical maps over Google Maps for this sort of thing: he liked scribbling, liked imprinting himself over the paper, leaving marks like pawprints behind. John imagines that if Sherlock ever had a lover - a partner, boyfriend, girlfriend, no matter - he would insist on doing the same: that fantastic mind of his, the very same that makes him prance and swagger 'round, that demands an audience, would claim skin and flesh as it would a dead body, a bloody crime scene, a loaded gun. It's symmetrical, human desire. In Sherlock's case, John thinks, it would be labyrinthine, London-like.
He feels sick. He thinks of Sherlock's tongue in his mouth - in his mouth - and wants to wake up screaming. Sherlock's lips would leave prints of blood across his chest, his shoulders, the inside of his thighs, and it should not make him warmer, harder.
Maps, he thinks; this is the closest he feels to his friend, at the moment.
Considering maps: the four locations Sherlock has circled make up a quadrangle. He's not touched them since Sherlock, has merely - hovered, perhaps, isn't quite the right word, but it's certainly close. He touches them now, spreads them out wider, better. He was rubbish at geography, in school, but it doesn't take a cartographer or a high mathematician to notice shapes and figures, to link nucleus to nucleus, the very core of Sherlock's scrawling diagrams
Camden Town is on top, the odd man out. Victoria Embankment is at the bottom, winged on either side by Borough Market and Charing Cross Road, three ring-like patterns brought tightly together. Sherlock has laced them around each other, drawn a lattice of black threads between them, and in places the pen outline is thick enough to confuse with the Northern - ah. The Northern line.
John frowns, inclines his head, breathes through his nose.
He grasps a pen off of Lestrade's desk - blue, to keep away from Sherlock's own slow peregrinations through an imaginary London - and circles, again: Camden Town, still, but then London Bridge, Leicester Square, Embankment, all Northern line stations, all within millimeters of each corpse's location upon being found.
"Sodding Christ."
John exhales. He calls for Lestrade, for Lestrade's team.
"Let me say that again," Lestrade says, seated, hands folded together. He looks older, somehow, the night taking its toll on his mouth and his eyes "You think he's a tube worker."
John shrugs, calculated, assertive. "Makes sense, doesn't it?"
"Can't just stop the whole train to dump a body topside a couple times a night, can he?"
"Fine. No - before his shift, then, or after. He works the last shift, maybe, or the first one, but he's got to dump the bodies fast, so he kills them close to the station, unloads them somewhere, catches the nearest train and gets on with his day. He's always minutes away from the Northern line, Greg, there has to be a reason for that. Maybe he keeps them somewhere on the tube. Maybe he kills them down there and carries them out, the shortest of them - Samantha was five feet one, well below the national average, if he used a lot of tools and lugged them around everyday in a bag no one'd blink once at seeing him with a slighter larger bag-"
"He'd have to be massive," Sally says, from where she's leaning against the doorjamb, arms crossed tightly together. She looks at John, at Lestrade, what John guesses must be their hunched shoulders and twin postures. "Over six feet, stacked. Military, the big sort."
"Where would he kill them, then, d'you think," Lestrade says, because the greater issue was transportation but the slightly smaller issue is storage: the Underground is immense, delineated, creased all over. There are holes, manshafts, drain pipes leading into the sewers.
"Air raid shelter," Dimmock says, which is surprising. He has sat, for the last twenty minutes, while John unfurled Sherlock's maps all over again, very quietly on one of Lestrade's rare upholstered chairs, listening attentively.
He flushes now, his pale, thin face hot and intent. "WW2 shelters, they - there're plenty of them on the Northern line, most of them further down south, but there's one underneath Goodge Street Station. Deep level."
"That's two stations north of Leicester Square," Sally says. "Four south of Camden Town."
"Right in the middle of Zone 1, too," John murmurs.
Lestrade shifts, uneasy, too-tired. "This is all speculation, you realize."
"It's the best you've got," John says - sharply, enough for Sally to glower at him, for Dimmock to run his hand through his short hair and look out the windowpane at a London that looks dormant, probably isn't. Lestrade exhales, again, creases his hand over his face, his mouth, wipes it with the flat of his palm, and then nods.
"Fine, right, okay - Dimmock, you get me locations, entrances, anything on the shelter and its exit routes - Donovan gets us en route, I want as many as possible moving in fifteen. John -"
"I get it," John says, but Lestrade's computer is abandoned, afterwards.
It takes only a minute to google the shelter and its entrances - Tottenham Court Road, Chenies Street, the shelter itself down below between the two - barely five more to walk away, neatly sidestepping the storm threatening across the floor. He leaves Scotland Yard amidst calls ringing shrill and acid in among the shouting and strapping, lights flickering overhead with the late hour, leaving only dozens of computers screens to light his way past, and then down, and then out.
He takes a cab to Leicester Square but walks the rest of the way, traversing quickly through Soho and Charing Cross Road, his gun a familiar heavy warmth against his palm, in his jacket pocket. London is flaring - past midnight now, almost one, but crowded still: it's a Saturday night, the theatres blown wide open, casinos and grimy nightclubs vibrant with polychromatic neons, every façade bleeding light onto every face. The people are strange here, colorful and deranged in dress and hairstyle, laughing, pushing into one another. Their body language is full-scale, uncontrolled, and John shoulders past them, walks on.
Oxford Street is worse. It's two weeks from Christmas: every shop is blazing. John thinks of energy and entropy and almost turns at every black coat he sees. He doesn't know how else to do this. Sherlock remains a beacon, burning brighter still among it all: the North Star, pulling him in and past the rocks and home.
In Chenies Street, it's quieter, darker. The West entrance to the shelter is down in the Eisenhower Centre, the cream and red stripes at the front of the building embraced in shadow, the redder door only locked to those who have not lived eighteen months with a madman who makes a hobby of handpicking every lock he comes across. John gets past it and in with alarming easiness, leaves the metal door wide open for Lestrade and his people to slam through. He goes in, and deep, down to the core of the building, the long winding staircase sinking downside.
There's light, thank goodness, seeping into the cracked walls from bleeding, electric bare lightbulbs. The railing is rusty where his hand touches it, the steps crackled underneath his steps: people rarely come down, if they come at all. Sometimes there are doors, carved open directly into the stone; sometimes manholes, descending deep into the bowels of the Underground. Above head, the ventilation shaft in the rear of the building roars, sometimes, in great angry howls - heedless, the metal steps slant further and further, until John's pace takes on speed and sound, a harsh slamming beat that pounds up at his lungs, his stomach, the flare of pain across his left shoulder.
From time to time, he catches glimpses of what must be passing trains deep into the tunnels he passes: hacked flares in a hard chopping motion, volatile, then gone. He goes down, and down: the air is sweeter the deeper he goes, smells stronger of fuel oil. It feels like descending into the belly of the whale, counting handrails like rib bones, swallowed and devoured.
When he hits bottom, it's almost a surprise.
The corridors wind, secret and silent and further down. He follows them: there's only one way.
He doesn't quite realize when the light changes. The electric blue and grey adjusts gradually to a warmer brown, then something approximating a grimy, soiled gold, and John's breath hitches, shortens, because he is getting closer; he hears muted clanging, the susurration of a voice, and then, later still, a low, heated howl. He rounds a corner, and finds painted in lamplight across the opposite wall two enormous shadows, dilated, blown to gigantic proportions.
Sherlock is handcuffed, which is strange, but also conscious, alive, eyes wide open and greedy; there is no blood across his mouth. The other man in the shelter is colossal, heavy shoulders distended with muscles - his head is shaved very close, and he wears overalls the way soldiers would wear a uniform. Sally was right, then: the man screams military out of his every pore, walks in the same systematic way John has seen for years, operating in Afghanistan, one tour down and counting.
But Sherlock is not speaking, and that's perhaps the most alarming thing of all. Sherlock has no blood across his mouth, but he is not speaking, not headily taunting the truth out of their serial killer's throat. There is a knife planting his left hand to the ground.
John takes a breath, then lets it out, draws and shoots twice almost without thinking: his first shot goes wide, goes scrambling into the depths of the shelter that are wide and very, very dark; the second catches at the man in the shoulder, but does little more than twist him around, scrapes the flesh but does not sink. John has only the time for another shot - does not see where it plummets - before he is bowled over and knocked sideways and down, head cracking hard into the ground.
There is a bellow forming deep in the entrails of the man whose weight pins him down, a massive hand strained across his throat and inward, and John's chest folds and folds - summoning breath is barely bearable, burning high up into his windpipe. He feels his fingertips scrambling for his gun, the light vacillating overhead, and then: other fingers, thicker, larger, working at his mouth, his jaw, a grotesque mimicry of Sherlock's own efforts down by Embankment. They force him open.
There is no knife - not yet - but the fingers grapple at his tongue anyway, twisting and grasping as though to rip it out on brute pressure alone. John gasps, throat closing, no acrid bile surging up at all; it'd be a relief, he thinks, before he remembers that he would choke on it, would suffocate on his own vomit before it corroded the fingers through.
He keens, high in his throat while he still can, and knees the man in the crotch, he thinks. It barely registers. What does is the fourth shot, and the implosion of blood over his legs: the man's thigh blown open, a shallow shout caught before it began gasped across the space of the shelter before he collapses sideways, and John is just free enough to slam his elbow through his temple, knocking him down.
Above him, Sherlock gasps harsh, panting breaths.
"Fuck," John says, jaw clenching shut, and Sherlock laughs, wide-eyed and miraculous. He rasps out something inaudible, and then says,
"John," and John gulps in an enormous breath and another and another until Sherlock drops to his knees beside him, drags both hands in his hair, and kisses him terribly hard.
His tongue is hot into John's mouth and for a minute it is all John can taste: the heat of it, the grasping reality and the hitching breath still rising in his lungs. Sherlock kisses like a man who's never tried kissing for kissing's sake - sinking into it, into John, bodies dragged together onto the floor. He feels bruised under John's hands, beaten into flinching underneath the fine fabric of his shirt. His cheekbones are impossibly sharp in the painted lamplight, under the brush of John's thumbs.
"Okay," John says, mouth dropping to Sherlock's temple when Sherlock's nose falls to his neck, Sherlock's own trembling mouth pressed tight and hot to his throat. "Okay, Sherlock, okay."
They're still there when the police finds them: an unconscious murderer at their feet, wrapped together like puppies.
It's four in the morning when John finds him again. The long trek back up to the surface takes, it seems, much longer than the descent did, and Lestrade insists on haranguing him for about half an hour before patting him awkwardly on the arm and letting him go. Sherlock is, it appears, kept captive by the paramedics; he has bullied his way into sitting on the steps of the ambulance parked at the corner of Huntley Street, silhouetted black against flaring yellow. The intimacy and absurdity of the moment, feedback loop over feedback loop, catches up high into John's throat.
"Hullo," he says, coming up to Sherlock's level - he rests both hands on Sherlock's knees, braces them close and together. "Sergeant Donovan's just been, ah - explaining everything - serial killer, wasn't he? Dreadful business. Dreadful."
Sherlock's mouth creases open. "You were a ghastly shot this time, John."
"You had the handcuffs open, didn't you," John realizes. "You utter prick."
"Good thing, too. I'm told you traced him here."
"I did that, didn't I. 'Cause you cleared off. Did you let him bump you over the head, too, so he'd drag you down in there?"
Sherlock looks somewhat chagrined. "Sadly, no. I'm afraid he caught me quite by surprise."
"Me, too," John says, softly, and puts his fingers over Sherlock's mouth. They're quite in a dark corner; the ambulance's glaring light makes them into clean black silhouettes to the swarming police down the street. Sherlock's lips part; he draws John's fingers in, touches the flat of his tongue to them unhesitatingly. John shudders once, heavily and all over. The inside of Sherlock's mouth is wet and warm, and John knows it with his own tongue. Sherlock's bottom teeth sink gently into the flesh of his middle and ring fingers.
He catches Donovan's look, slanted towards them.
Sherlock's tongue touches to the depression between John's index finger and his thumb; the tips of John's fingers are dipping against the soft, soft skin at the entrance of his throat. He thinks he would let him sink farther, if he wanted, down and down into the belly of the whale.
"Edmund Worthington’s," he says, then, and Sherlock smiles around his fingers, resurfaces enough to say,
"Yes."
"The tongue he delivered at the Yard," John clarifies.
"Oh," Sherlock murmurs, and his voice is hot, abraded. "You thought it was mine."
"He had it wrapped in your scarf," John says, "what was I supposed to think-"
"You were angry at me," Sherlock says, as usual bypassing all potential digressions and getting down to the crux of the matter; "have been for days."
John is quiet.
"Yes," he says, eventually. "Still am." He doesn't know what this says about him, about Sherlock, their stinging unhappiness, the exultant joy of after-case whiskey and tea. Baker Street is bright in his mind's eye: they'll collapse at the bottom of the stairs in 221B, an inelegant heap of limbs and breath and sex, haul each other up and beat each other down into bed, or onto the sofa, or against the wall right next to the door, exhaling loud and fast in each other's faces, Sherlock's hands splayed hot all across his skin.
He jolts against it, and Sherlock hisses, cradles his left hand to his chest in an unconscious gesture - he has had a knife thrust through it and now six stitches pulled into the skin on either side, none of which John trusts one whit.
"I don't think I can properly say," he says, slowly, his fingers on Sherlock's jaw, "how much it would destroy me if you died on me like this."
Sherlock smiles, says nothing at all. His mouth is set; he kisses John's thumb. The lodestar to see by, John thinks. Everything else has already gone to hell.
No: they will go home and make tea, sit in their kitchen in the dim stove light, and John will take apart every one of these stitches and put in new ones, unmindful of Sherlock's short intakes of breath with every drag of the needle. They'll drink whiskey until this terrible, pounding night finishes. John will have light underneath his eyelids for hours after; Sherlock is all-consuming energy and an enraged sort of brilliance, and it will soak under John's skin, scorching. Yes. That's how it'll be.