Leverage, 5/?
Title: Leverage, 5/?
Author: jenlee1
Pairing: Holmes/Watson, eventually
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 3633 (this chapter)
Summary: A past case creates unforeseen difficulties.
Disclaimer: I own nothing; written for fun, not profit.
Author's Note: Special thanks to the lovely and talented ingridmatthews for her cover art.
-Watson-
From bad to worse, I reflected bitterly as the carriage bumped along. Most definitely. As unpleasant as it had been to spend the past twenty-four hours locked in a cellar, my current circumstances could hardly be considered an improvement.
We had remained by the house for a time - waiting, presumably, to make certain that the fire would do its work - and the unmistakable odor of wood smoke was thick in the air before the grey-haired man, at last, gave the order to depart. Evidently, he was concerned that I might be recognized, or attempt to signal for help through the window, as I was shoved unceremoniously to the floor of the compartment as the driver whipped up the horses.
The man and his henchman rode in silence, which I found, oddly, to be more unnerving than an open discussion about where we were headed, and what would happen to me once we arrived. My position was distinctly uncomfortable, wedged awkwardly between two sets of feet, and several newly acquired bruises ached in protest. To make matters worse, the blindfold itched, and the new bindings were tight enough to bite into my abused wrists; all in all, it was a thoroughly miserable situation, and I cursed my unsuccessful escape attempt more vehemently with each passing mile.
Far worse than the physical discomfort, of course, was the maddening uncertainly about what was happening. With my eyes covered, it was difficult to guess at where they were taking me, and my odd position on the floor only exacerbated the disorienting effect. In addition, the frequent turns and intermittent stops and starts, although typical of driving through city streets, made it virtually impossible even to keep track of our general direction of travel. I gave it up as a lost cause within the first half hour, aware of nothing but the monotonous rattling of wooden wheels over the cobblestones and the slow, even sound of my own breathing.
Time passed, and I had nearly been lulled to sleep when a particularly rough jolt over an uneven stretch of road caused the little carriage to shudder, and my head bounced painfully against the floorboards. The grey-haired man must have seen me wince, because the hateful voice rang out from somewhere above me, breaking the silence for the first time since our departure.
“Just a bit longer, Doctor. Once we’re well out of the city, I suppose you can sit up.”
He sounded amused, almost indulgent, but I processed his words with a quick, tingling thrill of alarm. Out of the city? The idea that we might be leaving London entirely had not occurred to me, and the implications of this new information were worrisome, to say the least. Such a drastic change in location would make it much more difficult for anyone to find me, and any further escape attempts would be considerably more complicated in unfamiliar surroundings, far from any possibility of help.
Finding myself quite suddenly just on the edge of panic, I tugged surreptitiously at the ropes on my wrists, but they had taken no chances this time; my hands were bound so tightly that I had little sensation left in my fingers, and there was no way of working them free. Think, my mind insisted, as urgency pricked sharply at the base of my neck. There had to be something I could do, and I needed to act before we reached the outskirts of the city.
I breathed deeply, making every effort not to draw attention to myself as I scrambled for an idea that might work. There was no denying the fact that I was at a definite disadvantage, given that I was bound, blindfolded, and outnumbered. And, of course, the grey-haired man still had my revolver. Whatever course of action I chose, it would have to be quick, and sudden; the element of surprise was the only thing working in my favor, and I needed to make it count.
In truth, there were not many options, and only one seemed to have any possibility of success. Long odds, indeed, but I had been working with Holmes for too long to be intimidated by that, and I steeled my resolve for whatever might happen as I awaited my opportunity. Just breathe, I urged myself silently, heart pounding with anticipation. In and out. Be patient.
Lying quietly on the floorboards, I paid careful attention to the minor variances in our speed, as the horses trotted briskly down a relatively smooth, empty stretch, or pulled up a bit for a bump in the road. Moments later, we slowed noticeably for a turn, and I tensed abruptly, all senses on alert. Now.
Without warning, I flung my feet up to plant them on the far side of the compartment, kicking against it to throw myself backwards against the closed door with all my strength. It didn’t budge, and a fluttering surge of panic spread through my chest as I tried to repeat the maneuver, only to feel a large hand close firmly around my upper arm. Reacting on sheer instinct, I twisted hard to the side, lashing out as best I could; the side of my head connected squarely with the henchman’s nose, and he released me with a muffled cry of rage.
Through the blood pounding in my ears and the giddy rush of adrenaline, I was only dimly aware of raised voices and a tangle of grasping, thrashing arms as I hurled myself back against the door once more, with all the force I could muster. Finally, blessedly, the latch gave way; the cold voice snarled in anger - “Grab him!” -but it was too late, as I was already tumbling backwards out of the carriage in a dizzying whirl of cool air, startled cries, and clattering horse hooves.
Unfortunately, with my hands bound, I had no way of controlling the fall. My back took the worst of the impact, forcing the air from my lungs in a pained, breathless grunt, but my head struck the pavement hard. Barely conscious, I managed to roll blindly away from the wheels of a passing carriage as nervous, prancing hooves struck the ground inches from my ear. There was shouting, and a concerned hand on my shoulder, but my head hurt too much to make sense of it.
The last thing I was aware of was a loud, earnest voice assuring me that everything would be all right, and I surrendered myself to the gathering darkness with a sense of quiet, overpowering relief.
******
Sheets, my mind registered dimly, as my senses began to return at last. Smooth, cool bedsheets, and a pillow beneath my head. For a brief, hopeful instant, I thought that I was back home, safe in my own bed at Baker Street, but the familiar, distinctive smell of antiseptic in the air soon convinced me otherwise. A hospital, then, I concluded regretfully. Not surprising, under the circumstances.
Regardless, I was not inclined to complain; lying on my back in an honest-to-goodness bed, warm and drowsy, I was more comfortable than I had been in quite some time. It seemed that my unpleasant ordeal was over at last, and even the lingering ache of countless scrapes and bruises could not dampen my contentment as I hovered blissfully at the edge of sleep.
With a long, noisy intake of breath, I shifted a bit, turning my head on the pillow to open my eyes. To my surprise, the bedside chair was empty, and I glanced around in puzzlement for a familiar, anxious face. Holmes, I felt sure, had been frantic with worry since my abduction; now that I had been found, it was difficult to imagine what could be keeping him away. His conspicuous absence was strange, and something about it niggled ominously at the back of my mind.
The movement had caught the attention of a passing nurse, and before I could consider the matter further, she had bustled into the room to smile brightly at me. “Well then!” she beamed. “It’s good to see you awake.”
Her voice was aggressively cheerful, and rather too loud for my headache; I closed my eyes again in an effort to escape her, but she pressed on relentlessly. “You certainly gave us a scare, I can tell you - it’s not every day we get a kidnapping victim, after all! How are you feeling?”
Without waiting for an answer, she had put an arm behind my shoulders to raise me into a sitting position, plumping up the pillows for support. The room spun briefly as a glass of water was thrust helpfully into my hand, and I raised it to my lips with a rush of gratitude. My mouth and throat were unbearably parched, and I guzzled the contents of the glass as though cool water were the best thing I had ever tasted. Somewhere, the nurse prattled on, but I allowed her words to wash over me without bothering to process them, nodding dutifully in the appropriate places as I struggled to appear interested.
At last, she reached a point in her cheery monologue that caught my attention. “…and, there’s someone here to see you. Shall I tell him that you’re awake?” I raised my head at that, instantly alert. It wasn’t like Holmes to wait quietly outside until he was permitted to enter - when I had been badly injured during a case the previous year, an attempt by the hospital staff to force him to leave the room had nearly come to physical blows - but I shrugged off this puzzling development. He must have had his reasons, and in any case, it didn’t matter now.
“Certainly,” I answered, my voice rough with disuse. “Please, send him in.”
She strode briskly into the hallway to relay the message, and I leaned back against the pillows with a weary sigh. In truth, I was remarkably impatient to see my friend; he had undoubtedly been running himself ragged over the past two days, and I wanted to make certain that his injuries had been treated to my satisfaction. A frighteningly large portion of my life was spent attempting to keep Holmes safe and well, and it was a habit that I simply couldn’t break, even from a hospital bed.
Glancing up, however, I was startled to see that my visitor was none other than Inspector Lestrade, standing awkwardly in the doorway. He stepped into the room with an odd, uncharacteristic hesitation, nodding politely at me as he approached the bedside.
“It’s good to see you, Doctor,” he told me earnestly. “We’ve been concerned.” I had no doubt that he meant it; the sincerity in his voice was plain, but his manner was strange, reluctant somehow, as though there were something he didn’t want to tell me. I waited for him to continue, but he seemed to be at a loss for words, staring down at me with wide, anxious eyes.
Seconds passed, and I could stand it no longer. “Inspector,” I said, my voice carefully steady. “Where is Holmes?”
His eyes flickered away for an instant, down to his boots and back up again, and my body stiffened of its own accord. The nagging voice in the back of my mind had returned, louder and more insistent than before. Something was wrong.
“Lestrade?” I pressed more forcefully, hardly daring to breathe as he still failed to respond. A terrible thought struck me, and my voice dropped to a near whisper, betraying something of my desperation. “He isn’t - ” I swallowed convulsively. “Is he all right?”
“Oh, he is, certainly,” he hastened to assure me. “That is to say - well, the situation’s a bit complicated, to be honest. We can’t seem to find him.”
I blinked, surprised. Whatever response I had been expecting, it wasn’t that. Frowning in confusion, I opened my mouth to press him for further details, but he continued before I could speak. “There have been some… developments, while you’ve been missing.” He rubbed at the back of his neck, still avoiding my gaze, and I struggled to control my growing impatience.
“What sort of developments?” I hissed, fighting down the urge to shake him.
“We found the house you were in, after the fire. There was a body.” He stared meaningfully at me.
I gazed back, utterly baffled. “I know - I shot one of them, trying to escape.” The memory was an unpleasant one, to be sure, and I preferred not to linger on it. Still, I could not understand why Lestrade - or Holmes, for that matter - should have been so troubled by the discovery.
“The man couldn’t be identified,” he explained, when it became apparent that I still did not grasp his meaning. “But we found a pocket watch with the remains - Holmes confirmed that it was yours.”
My breath caught, abruptly, as the implications became clear at last. My watch. In a terrible, icy flash of understanding, I saw exactly what had transpired, and my insides twisted painfully.
“You showed it to him?” I whispered desperately. “You told him - ” My voice faltered, and I couldn’t bring myself to finish the thought.
In truth, the idea was too horrifying for words; my mind had frozen on the image of Holmes, staring at that damned watch in his hand, and feeling what I had felt that day in Switzerland, long ago. I can still recall, with agonizing clarity, the instant that I looked down into the crashing water and knew, with certainty, that my entire world had shattered on the rocks below.
Although the intervening years have softened the edges, the pain I felt in that moment was unquestionably the worst of my life - worse even than the day that my Mary passed, for reasons that I preferred not to examine further. I would not have wished the experience on my worst enemy, never mind my dearest friend, and an involuntary shudder rippled down my back.
Drawing a deep breath, I focused my attention once more on Lestrade, who was still attempting to explain what had happened. “ - at any rate, we brought him out to the scene early this morning to confirm it, but no one’s spoken to him since,” he finished, shamefaced. “We did send someone over to Baker Street, of course, as soon as you were identified in the hospital, but it was well into the afternoon by then.” He shifted his weight uncomfortably. “We’ve asked the landlady, but she hasn’t seen him either. He’s nowhere to be found.”
“He’s nowhere to be found?” I echoed incredulously, unleashing my frustrations on the hapless inspector. “You told him that I’d been killed, you dragged him across town to identify my body, and then you just let him wander off on his own?”
“Now, listen here,” he protested, a bit defensively. “I sent one of my men to make sure he made it home safe - which is more than I’m obligated to do, mind you. It isn’t my job to keep track of him.”
It was a valid point, and in any case, it was clear that he felt badly about the mistake. Forcing my temper back beneath the surface, I refrained from berating him further; there were more important things, now, that required my attention. With an effort, I slid the blankets down and pushed myself upright, turning to swing my legs over the side of the bed. Lestrade’s eyes widened as he stared at me, aghast.
“Hold on now, Doctor. You need to lie back down-“
“I need to find him,” I snapped, uncomfortably aware that my voice was rising in pitch and perilously close to breaking. “God knows where he is right now, or what he’s doing.” A number of unpleasant scenarios had already presented themselves, each more worrisome than the last, and the prospect of lying passively in the hospital waiting for him to turn up was utterly unbearable.
Still alarmed, Lestrade leaned forward, putting out his hand as if to stop me, but I fixed him with the most determined glare that I could muster. Of the two of us, Holmes had always been considerably more abrasive in his approach to dealing with Scotland Yard; my own reputation for gentility had served me well over the years, but under the circumstances, I hadn’t the patience to discuss the matter further.
“Lestrade,” I said, my voice low and dangerous. “Get out of my way.”
Evidently, something in my tone convinced him that it would be unwise to argue. Although disapproval was clear in his expression, he stepped back at once, and I brushed past him towards the door without a backward glance.
******
I arrived at Baker Street in short order, tired and sore, without the slightest idea of what I hoped to accomplish there. As Lestrade had indicated, my friend was not at home; the empty stillness that hung over everything was quite incompatible with Holmes’ presence, and I stood just inside the sitting room, at a complete loss for what to do next. He was bound to return eventually, of course, but I did not relish the thought of whiling away the evening in an armchair with no idea of his whereabouts.
The door to his private study stood slightly ajar, and with only a moment’s hesitation, I stepped closer to peer inside. I had no notion of what I was looking for; although I have many talents, I make no claim to the kind of deductive abilities that my friend possesses, and there was little chance that the cluttered room contained anything that might help me. Still, I ventured forward, stepping over the ever-present detritus of his many ongoing projects: stacks of papers, mechanical devices in various stages of disassembly, jars of discarded chemicals leaking onto the rug.
Though I had often complained about the deplorable state it was kept in, this familiar space was so intimately associated with Holmes in my mind that I half expected to find him here, bent over the scattered pieces of a partially constructed invention, or hard at work on a new monograph on some obscure subject that had seized his interest. The curtains were pulled shut, as always, and my gaze traveled slowly around the room as my eyes struggled to adjust to the usual hovering semi-darkness.
There was nothing out of place, as nearly as I could tell, and I was turning once more for the door when something caught my attention at last. The uppermost drawer of his desk stood open, its contents jumbled together and spilling over the edges, as though Holmes had rummaged through it with great haste. As I drew closer, curious as to what he had been searching for, my foot struck a tiny, familiar glass bottle on the floor.
A cold, tearing ache rose in my chest as I leaned down to pick it up, and I had no need to read the label to identify it. The inevitable syringe lay nearby, cast aside and forgotten, and I collected it as well. Generally, my mind is not particularly suited to the task of reconstructing a vivid mental image from a few pieces of evidence, but I could see my friend all too clearly, writhing on the floor in a drugged stupor, poisoning himself in his desperation for a few hours’ respite from his grief, and his suffocating sense of guilt over what had happened to me. Oh, Holmes.
The little bottle seemed suddenly too heavy in my hand, and my throat was painfully tight as I returned it to its place in his desk. With great care, I slipped the polished syringe back into its case and slid the drawer shut behind it with a soft, hollow thump of finality, as if I could erase the agony he had suffered by restoring the room to order. Allowing my eyes to fall closed for a moment, I leaned hard on the desk, struggling to collect myself.
By merciful chance, my hand on the desktop came to rest on a sheaf of papers - a collection of notes, it appeared, hastily scribbled in Holmes’ handwriting. Upon closer examination, I saw that my name was mentioned several times; he had his own peculiar shorthand that was difficult to decipher, but it seemed that he had been keeping track of the information he had gained from various interviews related to my abduction. I noted, with interest, that he had made some progress toward tracking down the mysterious grey-haired man who had orchestrated the plot.
Abruptly, I straightened up as a terrifying new thought struck me - surely, Holmes would not have been foolish enough to go after this man, alone, without informing anyone of his plans. Even before I could entirely process the idea, my heart began to sink; his sense of self-preservation was shaky, even at the best of times, and I shuddered to think of what he might do in his current state of mind.
I rifled frantically through the papers, searching with renewed urgency for some clue that I could use to track him. He must have had a general destination in mind, and I was positive that the answer was here in front of me, if only I could find it. I scanned page after page of irrelevant information, frustration rising, until at last I came upon a single smudged phrase: Brighton - residence in Manchester.
Manchester. It made a certain amount of sense, after all; this morning, I had been captive and blindfolded, in a carriage bound for someplace outside London. And if Holmes believed that the grey-haired man was headed there, it was a fairly safe bet that he was correct. All that remained - as always, I reflected ruefully - was for me to catch up to him before he did something foolish.
Chapter 6