Fic: Meat 4/8 (Sherlock BBC)
Jul. 30th, 2012 12:24 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
anactoriaTitle: Meat
Author:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
anactoria
Characters/pairing: Sherlock/John, Irene/Kate, Moriarty, Mycroft, Lestrade
Rating: R
Warnings/contains: Drug use, prostitution, character death. (None of this takes place ‘onscreen’, and, given the nature of this AU, death is not an entirely stable concept…)
Summary: Cyberpunk AU. Sherlock wants to disappear. John wants to stop him, but how’s he supposed to help when they’re barely in the same world anymore?
Notes: This story is set in the world of William Gibson’s Sprawl Trilogy, but it’s not a fusion; I haven’t tried to slot Sherlock and co. into the roles of Gibson’s characters, and I hope you don’t need to have read them to make sense of the story.
Thanks tokeevacaereni for all her beta help!
Previous chapters: 1 | 2 | 3
John meets Sarah in a café a couple of streets away from the clinic, one he’s been to plenty of times before. Its menu is a mish-mash of all the world’s junk food: ice pearl tea, sickly stimulant drinks and rank black coffee; chips, noodles, and patties of vat-grown meat, all equally greasy. Her suggestion, although by preference she’d probably eat somewhere a bit healthier, more upmarket. John hasn’t been picking up as many shifts as usual, lately, the nagging sense that he ought to do something to keep Sherlock from fading out of the world of the living—even if he’s not entirely sure what—keeping him tethered to the flat. Sarah’s obviously trying to be sympathetic to his budgetary constraints without being too obvious about it, which makes John feel simultaneously resentful and annoyed at himself for being resentful.
She’s already claimed a table, and she gives him a little wave over the top of her coffee cup as he enters. It’s early for lunch, and the place is only half-full, the buzz of the newsscreen on the back wall clearly audible over muted chatter. False windows show a recorded loop of white sand and green palm-fronds, waves lapping the shore in oversaturated blue. The visible flicker and jump of it does nothing to help John forget that it’s London, cold and drizzling and lonely, outside.
He orders coffee and a sandwich and makes his way over, doing his best not to slosh coffee out of his overfilled cup and scald his hands. (New girl behind the counter, dithering over which button to press on the hot water dispenser. Nothing unusual there; staff turnover in places like this is always pretty high.)
“John! How are you?” Sarah asks. She sounds cheerful, even though there are dark smudges under her eyes and she’s drinking coffee even though she normally avoids caffeine. The little voice that John thinks of as his Inner Sherlock informs him that she hasn’t been sleeping well, probably because of money worries at the clinic. Sarah’s good at what she does, and so are the people she employs, but a solid set of ethics is a distinct disadvantage when you run a black clinic. His own inner voice supplies that she’s making an effort to be cheerful, which means she thinks he needs cheering up. He does his best to convey otherwise with a smile and a careless shrug.
“Oh, alright, you know. How about you? Been up to much?”
“Well… things have been pretty busy at the clinic this week. We could use you, if you’re free.”
John is briefly surprised—custom was pretty slack during his last few shifts—but then he remembers the false cheerfulness and notices the way she’s looking at him, a little too intent, her smile a little too bright, and it occurs to him that she’s bullshitting. Offering kindness and trying to dress it up as asking for a favour.
It also occurs to him that she hasn’t asked what he’s been doing lately. And that, until yesterday, his answer would have had to be, ‘sod all.’
He wonders when he went back to being someone people felt sorry for.
* * *
The Connie Prince Show is the early-afternoon distraction of choice for approximately 12.9% of British simstim users.
It’s just a bit of fluff, really, but it’s nice. Lets you get away from it all for an hour. Light entertainment.
Or so Sherlock’s representative sample (Mrs Hudson) tells him. He wouldn’t know. He’s never understood simstim as a source of pleasure—gratuitous meat input amplified to the exclusion of all useful thought, a mess of lightcolourtouchsmellsoundtoomuch, larger than life and pressing in upon the mind from all sides—and he’s not about to start trying. He’s here looking for evidence.
The current guest (singer; Russian; married to her manager and cheating on him with one—no, two—of her female backing dancers) isn’t the model from the construct, so Sherlock deletes her name right off the bat; the mystery is clearly nothing to do with her. The location, too, is different. Today, Prince is in Freeside, sipping white wine on a private balcony bathed in artificial sunshine as she chats. (The stim allows users to experience the taste without any of the symptoms of drunkenness, which seems rather to defeat the point; the appeal of alcohol, like that of simstim itself, is surely the short respite it allows the chronically ordinary from the interiors of their dreary minds.) Sherlock is reliably informed—again by Mrs Hudson—that the setting changes daily; no clue to be had there, either. Which leaves him with Prince herself.
Clothing and makeup: the work of a stylist, carefully managed to project the correct balance of the aspirational and the approachable. (Everybody who uses simstim does so in order to escape his or her own dull reality; nobody likes to feel unworthy of the vessel inhabited in order to do so.) It can tell him little about Prince, save that her employers consider her a property worth considerable financial outlay. Injuries? Any discomfort would be removed in the editing process, but there are no visible marks on her—unsurprising; she has access to some of the world’s most expensive plastic surgeons—and no telltale awkwardness in her movements. She’s in perfect health, and—oh.
It’s an absence that gives him what he needs.
Prince is smiling, leaning back on her chair and twirling her wine glass between her fingers. Her face is perfectly relaxed.
Connie Prince is fifty-four years old, preserved in the appearance of an eternal twenty-seven by an extensive regimen of cosmetic surgeries and—among other things—Botox injections. The associated tightness across her forehead, though: absent. Her features: expressive and mobile.
The woman through whose body he is currently experiencing the stim is twenty-seven, or thereabouts; certainly no more than thirty. Ergo, she is not Connie Prince.
He understands why immediately; all that remains is to find the proof.
This woman isn’t merely a stand-in hired to fill in for illness or a stay in rehab. That would be dull, dull, dull, and his opponent may be many things Sherlock does not yet know, but he is not that. No; there’s only one real possibility. Connie Prince is dead, and someone has an interest in keeping that fact quiet.
He doesn’t wonder who this other woman is. Her name is important only as a piece of evidence, and he already has a good idea of where she has come from.
(In the living room of 221B Baker Street, Sherlock’s hands pause momentarily over the keypad of the deck, his lips compressed in distaste. If a memory flutters briefly at the corner of his awareness, it goes unacknowledged; it has no bearing upon the task at hand. He knows where he must look, now.)
* * *
John’s finished his sandwich and most of his coffee when he sees ‘SH’ flash up in the corner of his vision, and hears Sherlock’s voice in his head:
I need you to go to Soho.
He blinks, surprise making him pause briefly before he answers. “Not now, Sherlock. Out with Sarah, remember?” Setting down his coffee, he gives her an apologetic look, but behind it there’s a brief pulse of something like triumph. See, I’m not as pathetic as you think, and Christ, isn’t that just pathetic in itself? Sarah just smiles back at him, and waves her hand in an ‘it’s fine’ gesture.
It’s urgent, John.
“If it’s that bloody urgent, you can go yourself. Probably do you good to get out of the flat for a bit.”
A moment. Then: Please. I need your help.
Naturally, that does for him. It’s calculated—it’s always calculated—but John already knows he’ll come running. Mostly, he can’t handle the possibility that the day he says ‘sod it’ and refuses to do as he’s told will be the day Sherlock really does need him, after all. Yes, he’s a fool—and the worst part of it is, he’d take being a fool for Sherlock over being sensible and well-adjusted without him any day of the week.
It’s just that, these days, he mostly feels like he’s getting the worst of both worlds on that score.
John? Are you listening to me? The voice inside his head is quieter. Definitely not pleading, but a touch more uncertain now.
John groans inwardly. “Yeah, alright, fine.” He looks at Sarah. “I’m really sorry.”
“It’s okay. I ought to be getting back, anyway. I’ve got a half-past one.” She sips the last of her coffee, reaches for her handbag, checks her lipstick in her compact mirror. Then she looks back at him, hesitating a moment before she speaks. “You should talk to him, John.” And oh, God, there it is, her pity surfacing where until now it’s been submerged, just making faint ripples on the smooth surface of politeness. He won’t be able to ignore it, now. “I don’t like to see you like this.”
Like what? he wants to say, because it might force her to demur, but doesn’t, because it might make her answer, and he doesn’t want to hear ‘lonely’, and know that what she means is ‘pathetic’. John Watson, the bloke whose life consists of nothing but waiting around to run like a lost puppy whenever Sherlock Holmes can be arsed to whistle for him. But that’s not what his, their, life is—or at least, it wasn’t always—and knowing that other people see it like that makes his insides squirm with anger.
There are things he could stand to be pitied for, but Sherlock isn’t one of them.
He shrugs, instead. “I’ll be fine,” he says. “Really. There’s no need to worry about me.”
Sarah’s smile is faint, disappointed. “I’ll give you a ring about work.”
“Okay. Yeah, good.” John gets up, swallows the dregs of his coffee, and then coughs as something solid catches in his throat. He spits it out into his palm and squints at it.
It’s a pip. Orange, he thinks, though he’s no expert on organics. There’s another, identical one still sitting in the bottom of the cup.
Not important. Sherlock. Dismissive. Get a move on, John.
He does.
* * *
“So, what do you need me to do in Soho?”
What do people normally do in Soho?
John blinks. “You’re—hang on, you’re sending me to interview prostitutes? You dragged me away from lunch with my boss, who I fancy—” (Not a lie. He does; dutifully and probably—as he sometimes admits to himself when he’s tired or drunk enough to be entirely honest—because Sarah’s far too professional to date one of her employees, so there’s no danger of anything actually happening.) “—to go and speak to prostitutes?”
Not at all.
“Oh. Well. That’s good.” Pause. “What is it, then?”
I dragged you away to speak to their bosses.
“Great, Sherlock. Thanks.”
Don’t mention it.
* * *
Sherlock’s instructions take John around several of Soho’s smaller, seedier establishments. He has a list of questions to ask, mostly concerning disappearances or resignations of employees during the past two months. If the proprietors seem reticent in providing information—which most of them do, and as usual, John’s got no official documentation to back him up—he ends up furtively casing the rest of the building, looking wherever he’s told until Sherlock’s seen enough to decide this isn’t the brothel they’re looking for.
It’s been over an hour, and he’s feeling painfully conscious of just how much he must look like the kind of sad, lonely bloke who actually uses these places, when Sherlock tells him, Next left, third building on the right, and brings him to a halt before the neat smoked-glass doors of what would look like a respectable business hotel if it were in any other part of town.
Wait here a moment, Sherlock instructs him. This particular establishment has a small data storage facility of its very own. Not particularly secure—honestly, it’s practically extra advertising. Going through the files now. Don’t worry—you’ll just look like a nervous customer.
“Yeah, thanks,” John mutters. Sherlock ignores him, flips, and is back a few seconds later with instructions for John to head inside and ask for ‘Katarina’.
The interior of the place is almost as innocuous as the front door. Coffee tables in the same dark glass, boxy armchairs—faux-leather, not temperfoam—coffee machine, bored-looking receptionist examining her chromed fingernails. The ceiling offers a recording of evening sky in lurid sunset colours: bruise-purple, lipstick-coral-pink, a few baroque licks of gold. A little bit overdone for a business hotel, but nothing that screams ‘knocking shop’. The only indications that it offers more than crashspace for tired zaibatsumen are the fact that the screens set into the coffee-table glass are showing a heaving tangle of breasts and limbs instead of the news, and the projected menu behind the reception-desk.
The foyer’s empty; no lingerie-clad girls or shirtless boys hanging around to try and charm potential customers upstairs. Instead, the bodies on offer twirl in endless holographic repetition behind the counter, pseudonyms and statistics hanging in the air beside them as though they’re characters in a VR game. We are ever silent, the stillness of their plush mouths reassures. We won’t distract you from your pleasure by asking your name. We will never inconvenience you with our humanity.
“Puppet theatre,” John realises, and feels a small, sick twinge in the pit of his stomach.
Well observed, says Sherlock, but his sarcasm has little of its usual bite. Distracted. If it weren’t a thoroughly ridiculous idea—Sherlock’s shown no trace of discomfort with the sex trade so far during the afternoon’s search—John would say that he sounds tense.
Tense. Sherlock. John’s frowning, wondering at it, as he approaches the counter, which earns him a stern, You’re thinking again.
“Didn’t realise you considered anything I ever do worthy of the name,” he retorts, instead of sharing his thoughts. He curls and uncurls his fingers, a half-conscious attempt to still the crawling of his skin, and fights away the welling push of something that’s threatening to break through the barrier of consciousness and make itself clear. Whatever this is—if it’s anything—he can wait until the case is over to ask for (and probably not get) an answer. Now’s not the time.
There are possibilities beginning to worm their way up from the depths of his mind to which he’s not ready to give voice, not just yet. They seem traitorous, somehow.
Yes, John knows that rich kids get into this, and smart kids, too—and some of them come out with memories imperfectly repressed, with occasional irruptions of trauma, jagged like rocks at low tide. He’s seen a few, in the course of his job. They tend to seek out extreme augmentations, maybe in some attempt to reclaim ownership of their bodies, and John refers them to a shrink if he possibly can. He’s never felt easy about treating them.
It could make sense, if he let it, this narrative his mind is piecing together only half-consciously—but it still doesn’t feel like one that Sherlock belongs in.
John hopes to hell that that isn’t just wishful thinking.
The girl on the counter taps her fingernails, paging through an article, illustrated by images of models with bioluminescent implants, on her reader. John shakes his head as if doing so might banish the unwanted thoughts inside it, and approaches her.
He clears his throat. “Er,” he says. “Excuse me. Is Katarina in?”
The girl doesn’t look up from her article. “Nope,” she says. “Isadora’s the same body type, Stephanie does similar specialities. Joshua, too, if that’s up your street.”
Does is really the wrong word, though, isn’t it? These kids don’t exactly do much of anything, and John feels a cold little twist of guilt in his gut just at playing the part.
“Thanks,” he says, “but I was really hoping to see Katarina.”
The girl gives him a curious look—understandable; they probably don’t get many specific requests in a place like this. “I’d offer to book you in, but I can’t actually guarantee she’ll be back. She’s taken some time off.”
As I thought, Sherlock informs him. We need to find out whether she had any unusual customers before leaving, or whether she was seen talking to any strangers. Corporate types or very successful criminals, probably. They would’ve looked respectable, either way.
John nods an okay and draws in a breath to ask, and Sherlock snaps, Don’t be ridiculous, John, she’ll never tell you. Discretion is the watchword of this kind of establishment—at least, where the clients are concerned. Time to leave.
He shuts his mouth. The girl is still looking at him, now with an undercurrent of mildly disgusted curiosity in her gaze. She might as well just ask him what kind of a weirdo he is out loud, really.
“Um,” he says. “Alright, thanks. I’ll be off, then.”
She shrugs, and turns back to her article. But when he glances behind him, opening the door, her eyes are on him.
* * *
We’re going to need the puppet-theatre’s security footage, Sherlock informs him, once he’s got a few streets away and perched himself at the bar in one of the many seedy little drinking establishments that have lined the Soho streets since time immemorial. If we can identify the men by whom ‘Katarina’—real name Kathy Noakes, of Bristol, by the way—was approached, we’ll be able to find out who wants to cover up Connie Prince’s death.
“Oka—hang on, you what?” John garners a suspicious look from the barman pulling the pint he intends to nurse without drinking, and shakes his head in apology. “No way,” he continues, in a lower voice. “It would’ve been on the news. And Mrs Hudson was plugged into her show yesterday.”
As was I, this morning. It’s very simple. Usually, this sort of case involves the faking of a death. A lookalike from some lower stratum of society is lured with promises of fame and fortune, the resemblance is finished off with surgery, and suddenly there’s a convincing body in the penthouse suite. What’s unusual in this case is that our criminals are interested in hiding a death, and willing to spend considerable money to do so.
“Wow. Okay. So, how do we get the video?”
The front-of-house attendant will be taking a break in half an hour. This isn’t a busy time of day, so there’s only one security guard on duty. He’s also overweight, therefore slow, and morbidly anxious about losing his job due to his gambling debts.
“Jesus, you didn’t even see the guy. How did you—”
Never mind that, John. The point is that arranging for certain of my associates to provide a distraction should be simple. All you need to do is copy the security footage.
“Onto what?”
Buy a blank data storage device from a woman called Zena. Back left corner, blue hair, array of startlingly pink microsofts behind her right ear. She’s good; it’ll be untraceable.
“And how am I supposed to get into the computer in the first place? I haven’t exactly got your skillset, in case you’d forgotten.”
The security guard’s office is the first door on the left. Unless he’s changed his habits drastically in the past three years—unlikely—his password will be— A brief pause. Akiko7248.
John doesn’t ask how Sherlock knows that, or what the hell Sherlock was doing in a puppet-theatre three years ago. Hearing the rapid-fire rattling-off of a deduction might reassure him, he thinks, but on the other hand it might not. Not if he can’t be sure that it was made today, and that Sherlock’s not calling up thoughts from—well, from some other time.
He’s not Sherlock, but that doesn’t mean he can just shut off his brain when he wants to. And, somewhere in the back of his mind, his consciousness is weaving together threads of some whole he’s not sure he wants to see; something that ties up with strands of his own thought in a way that makes him feel oddly, achingly guilty.
John knows Sherlock wasn’t always squeaky-clean; knows that he had problems with drugs, and not the kind that are easy to get clean from. He’d always assumed Sherlock’s less legitimate activities were limited to data-theft and dabbling with illegal substances, but something—the odd mixture of familiarity and strained detachment with which Sherlock’s been guiding him around the Soho meat-markets—is making him wonder. And the wondering reminds him of how he felt when they first met, before he clamped down on those feelings and buried them deep, and there’s a place where the wondering and the memories conjoin and end in nausea.
Okay, he’s never been daft enough to let himself hope when he knows it would be fruitless, but he’d have to be blind not to notice that Sherlock has a pretty mouth and bone structure that would make a cosmetic surgeon weep. And those arresting, mineral-grey eyes, the kind of colour Zeiss-Ikon might spend hundreds of thousands replicating—but Jesus, who would ever want to see them closed in unconsciousness, or blank and unseeing? You’d have to be mental—
John. Data storage. You can sleep later.
He’s never been so glad to be snapped at in his life.
* * *
Sherlock sets up a program to scan the Met’s data banks for matches with the men on the surveillance tape, and another to search the endless hours of video in Mycroft’s data cores for them. He doesn’t bother asking for permission. Mycroft tacitly accepts Sherlock’s breaking through his security systems when necessary, ostensibly because, as long as he remains on the (relatively) straight and narrow, he’s using them in the national interest—though in fact it’s more likely that setting up ice that could keep him out would just be too much effort.
He could jack out, now, leave the programs to do their work and check on them later. Eat something, drink tea, talk to John. John would like that. It would boost the self-worth that he has so unfortunately founded upon their association and shared exploits. Sherlock would like it, too, in the moments that it lasted. He would explain his methods, and John would make appropriately impressed noises, even if unable to fully understand them. His admiration would even be genuine. John is so endlessly willing to be dazzled by Sherlock, to see the best of him first. Admiration radiates from him as tangibly as body heat.
Sherlock stays in the matrix.
He burns through it fast, faster, faster, until the endless form and light of it kaleidoscope around him, finance grey and the cold blue fire of government systems, military constructs huge as spiral galaxies and corporate fairylight multicolour all blurring together, a vastness that might hold him forever, if he let it. He pinpoints and turns in half-a-dozen petty data-thefts, none the work of his thief and all of them really beneath his notice, but welcome diversions for now. He will not stop and he will not, cannot, leave.
John would (will) have questions. That’s problematic, and not just because the thought of it distracts Sherlock from his work. Worry was creasing John’s forehead before he left Soho, and it will only have increased in the interim. He’ll be concerned; he’ll try to understand—but he’ll insist upon digging into Sherlock’s past. And Sherlock has no wish to be understood.
Or, rather, he knows that there is no good that John’s understanding could possibly do.
John will tell himself that his concern stems only from loyalty; that any good friend would feel the same. Perhaps, though, underneath it all, there’ll be a touch of jealousy—
But no. Sherlock cuts off that train of thought; that way, madness lies. The point is, John will have questions, and he will have to answer them somehow. But not now. Not yet.
* * *
By the time John gets back to the flat, he’s knackered. Sherlock’s jacked in, working, and for once he feels relieved instead of disappointed. He’s got no doubt that his questions are as clearly visible on his face as if they were spelled out in ten-foot neon letters, and he’s not quite sure how to talk about them, yet. It’d probably be easier if he just didn’t—Sherlock will inevitably insist that it’s none of his business, and it’s not, really—but that isn’t an option.
His suspicions are going to nag at him until they’re allayed, or confirmed. He has to give it a go. He’s just not sure if he really wants to know the answer.
He showers, changes, plugs into the simstim unit and half-pays attention to Tally Isham swimming in a tropical-temperature artificial sea for half an hour. He heats up something cheap and tasteless out of the fridge for tea, opens a can of beer, and alternates between trying to decide what he’s going to say when Sherlock decides to rejoin the world of the living, and trying not to think about it at all.
Meat puppets aren’t exactly a new idea to him—you get puppet theatres all over the world—but John’s always been bothered by them on some fairly fundamental level. He’s not unusual in that; his regiment was split pretty much fifty-fifty between guys who were happy to visit the puppet theatres as a matter of course, and those who found the whole notion faintly disturbing. He did let himself get dragged along, once, when he was younger and more easily influenced—out of curiosity, not with the intention of doing anything, but he’s vaguely ashamed of it all the same—and he hadn’t even managed to sit in the same room with the girl and pretend she wasn’t there while he waited for the others to finish up. He’d actually ended up talking to her, blathering endlessly about Harry and his parents and Mary, the girl from the Sprawl he’d been sort-of-seeing at the time, a couple of the more gruesome injuries he’d seen recently and how he really needed a holiday sooner rather than later. Most expensive whinge of his life.
Anyhow, it didn’t exactly help him to understand the appeal. What’s the point in sex when the other person doesn’t even look like they’re enjoying it?
Until now, though, it’s always been a distant, abstract sort of distaste. But the thought of Sherlock, of all people, slack-faced and inert at the mercy of some stranger, that brilliant mind not just miles away but completely switched off—well, his brain shies away from the image every time, even though he can’t help circling back around to it.
He hopes that’s because it’s impossible.
He drains the last of the lager from his can, and heads into the kitchen to see if there are any more left.
As if he’s psychic, Sherlock chooses the moment that John has his head in the fridge to jack out and breeze out into the hallway, picking up the phone before John can manage so much as a ‘hi.’ John sets the beer he’s just retrieved back in the fridge, and switches on the hot water dispenser for tea, instead. He can eavesdrop while he waits for it to heat up. (One moral scruple of which living with Sherlock has long since divested him.)
“Really, Lestrade,” Sherlock is saying, “it’s quite simple. Prince had an unfortunate accident—probably a botched surgical procedure, though an overdose isn’t out of the question—and her brother saw greater financial potential in grooming a replacement and continuing to siphon money from her income than in claiming the life insurance, especially given that a large percentage of Prince’s anatomy was the property of her employers. He put up enough money to be placed in touch with specialists who would procure said lookalike, and the rest is obvious. I can come to the station if you need my evidence in person—no? Well. Yes. Let me know.”
A pause.
“One more thing. Have you taken on any new recruits recently? Mmm. Background check perfect? Yes? Fire him.”
Another.
“Just take my word for it.”
He puts down the phone, and John takes the opportunity to corner him before he can jack back into the matrix or drift off into one of his silent reveries.
“You did it, then,” he says, keeping his voice deliberately mild. “Celebratory cuppa? You can tell me all about it, then.” He hopes—against hope, perhaps—that the promise of an appreciative audience will have the same effect on Sherlock that it used to, that it’ll make him gravitate towards John instead of turning away and in upon himself.
Sherlock looks at him for a long moment, appraising. Then he nods. “Tea,” he says. “Yes.” He sounds resigned, not enthusiastic, but at least he’s not running away.
John scours the kitchen cupboards for two non-bio-hazardous mugs, pours the tea, and heads back into the living room to offer one to Sherlock, who’s stretched out on the couch, probably with the intention of staying there all night if he gets his way. Their fingers brush as Sherlock takes the mug, and John actually blinks, startled at the contact. Then feels the heat of a blush on the back of his neck, and the faint, sick prickly of guilt as he determinedly doesn’t, doesn’t, connect that innocent, accidental little touch with his earlier suspicions.
Sherlock just keeps his eyes dead ahead.
“I told you Connie Prince was dead,” he says, once John’s settled down into his armchair.
“Yeah.”
“That should have been obvious from the start, in fact; that her many thousands of fans have so far failed to notice it is testament to the stupidity of the general public. Her forehead told me that she was dead—” And he picks up speed, rattling off the thought-process that led him to his conclusion as though it’s the simplest thing in the world, and—just for the briefest of moments—seeming to light up with his old love of showing off, meeting John’s eyes with the twitch of a pleased smile when he shakes his head and says, “And you got all that from the fact her face didn’t hurt? Bloody hell, that’s brilliant.”
“So you’ve said on many occasions.”
“Yeah, well. I’ll keep on saying it as long as you keep on being brilliant.”
Sherlock looks at him sharply, and suddenly John feels the seriousness of what he’s left unsaid.
Talk to me, please. Because I’m the one who sees the best of you, and I sometimes think I barely know you. I don’t want to leave you alone, and I won’t. Unless you make me.
He swallows, takes a sip of tea to cover up his nerves. “Sherlock,” he says, and there’s a heaviness in the air, now.
What he’s about to say is totally inappropriate, by most people’s standards, and once he’s said it there’ll be no taking it back. He hesitates; almost changes his mind. Then takes a deep breath.
“This afternoon,” he begins, cautiously. “You seemed to know an awful lot about that place. The—the puppet theatre. We’ve never been there for a case before. Is there—how come?”
Sherlock sighs, and closes his eyes. He’s silent for a long moment, and John’s just about given up on getting an answer and started wondering how many months he’ll need to spend hiding in his bedroom for the awkwardness to clear by the time he replies.
“You know I didn’t start out as a legitimate operator, John.”
“Yeah.”
“Computer equipment costs money. I’d already been thrown out of school and university, and acquired a considerable drug habit. Mummy was hardly going to fund my experimental forays into data-theft, especially with the scrupulous detail in which Mycroft insisted on reporting my activities.”
“So you found another way of paying for it.”
A small nod.
John sinks back in his chair. “Jesus.”
Sherlock looks directly at him, meeting his eyes for the second time this evening. “It wasn’t such a hardship, John. You’re not conscious, most of the time. The drugs were very good.”
“I just—” John shakes his head. “I know you’re not exactly opposed to self-medicating, but—I thought you went in for uppers. Actually choosing to be out of it completely? It doesn’t seem like you. I don’t get it.”
A shrug. “I delete irrelevant data all the time. In this particular instance, I simply avoided saving it in the first place.”
John tries to keep the sadness out of his face, he really does, but Sherlock’s withering look lets him know that he’s failed.
“It’s just a body, John. It exists to serve my mind, and that’s precisely what it was doing. I knew I’d be able to give it up in short order once I’d established my skills as a console man. It was a perfectly logical decision.”
“That’s what happened, then? You made your money stealing data, and you quit?”
“Not precisely.” Sherlock frowns, and John feels a momentary trepidation, unsure whether he should be glad that Sherlock’s showing some reaction to all this, or feeling shitty for dredging it up. But then he realises it’s a frown of puzzlement, not distress. “It bothered me immensely, at the time. I’m still not sure exactly what happened. I’d had only one new customer in the weeks before the incident, and his ID checked out perfectly; an American tourist, entirely nondescript. I simply arrived one evening and found that they had no record of me. I didn’t work there—I never had. I was forced to take up dealing illegal stimulants, instead. Very inconvenient.”
He looks so put out that John almost laughs.
Sherlock fixes him with a Look. “It was hardly preferable, John. Drug-dealing’s incredibly dull work, and you can’t even be unconscious while you’re doing it. Really, it’s no wonder I overdosed.”
“Overdosed? Jesus fuck, Sherlock, what happened?”
“Boredom.” Sherlock makes a face. “However, my dear brother had been keeping a close eye on my activities, and happened to choose that particular evening to send a friend of his on the police force over to curtail them.”
“Lestrade?”
Sherlock nods. “He called for help, and was still there when I woke up in a private ward paid for by Mycroft and began rewiring the security system in order to get out. With one of those occasional flashes of insight that make his usual dullness so disappointing, he decided against arresting me, and asked for my help instead. You know the rest.”
John breathes out heavily. “Wow,” he says. “I—well, I’d never have guessed any of that, but then I’m not you, so…” He trails off, not quite sure whether he ought to say I’m sorry, or You’re insane, or what.
“I’m glad you’re here, now,” is what comes out, at last.
Sherlock is looking at him intently. “I’m okay, John,” he says, slowly, after a moment. “I always was. Don’t ask me to feel traumatised by something I never experienced.”
“No, I didn’t mean—I don’t—never mind.”
Another long pause. “If it’s any consolation,” Sherlock says, then, “I much prefer my current method of making a living.” He’s looking at John with his head to one side. He sounds… unsure, and John can’t remember the last time he heard that tone from Sherlock, if he ever has.
It almost feels like Sherlock is—offering him something. A reassurance, or—well, he doesn’t know what else it could be. Either way, Sherlock offering him anything is rare enough to be precious. As if he could ever not accept.
“Good,” he says, nodding. “I’m glad.”
Sherlock smiles at him faintly. His chest aches.
Chapter 5
Author:
anactoria Characters/pairing: Sherlock/John, Irene/Kate, Moriarty, Mycroft, Lestrade
Rating: R
Warnings/contains: Drug use, prostitution, character death. (None of this takes place ‘onscreen’, and, given the nature of this AU, death is not an entirely stable concept…)
Summary: Cyberpunk AU. Sherlock wants to disappear. John wants to stop him, but how’s he supposed to help when they’re barely in the same world anymore?
Notes: This story is set in the world of William Gibson’s Sprawl Trilogy, but it’s not a fusion; I haven’t tried to slot Sherlock and co. into the roles of Gibson’s characters, and I hope you don’t need to have read them to make sense of the story.
Thanks to
keevacaereni for all her beta help!Previous chapters: 1 | 2 | 3
John meets Sarah in a café a couple of streets away from the clinic, one he’s been to plenty of times before. Its menu is a mish-mash of all the world’s junk food: ice pearl tea, sickly stimulant drinks and rank black coffee; chips, noodles, and patties of vat-grown meat, all equally greasy. Her suggestion, although by preference she’d probably eat somewhere a bit healthier, more upmarket. John hasn’t been picking up as many shifts as usual, lately, the nagging sense that he ought to do something to keep Sherlock from fading out of the world of the living—even if he’s not entirely sure what—keeping him tethered to the flat. Sarah’s obviously trying to be sympathetic to his budgetary constraints without being too obvious about it, which makes John feel simultaneously resentful and annoyed at himself for being resentful.
She’s already claimed a table, and she gives him a little wave over the top of her coffee cup as he enters. It’s early for lunch, and the place is only half-full, the buzz of the newsscreen on the back wall clearly audible over muted chatter. False windows show a recorded loop of white sand and green palm-fronds, waves lapping the shore in oversaturated blue. The visible flicker and jump of it does nothing to help John forget that it’s London, cold and drizzling and lonely, outside.
He orders coffee and a sandwich and makes his way over, doing his best not to slosh coffee out of his overfilled cup and scald his hands. (New girl behind the counter, dithering over which button to press on the hot water dispenser. Nothing unusual there; staff turnover in places like this is always pretty high.)
“John! How are you?” Sarah asks. She sounds cheerful, even though there are dark smudges under her eyes and she’s drinking coffee even though she normally avoids caffeine. The little voice that John thinks of as his Inner Sherlock informs him that she hasn’t been sleeping well, probably because of money worries at the clinic. Sarah’s good at what she does, and so are the people she employs, but a solid set of ethics is a distinct disadvantage when you run a black clinic. His own inner voice supplies that she’s making an effort to be cheerful, which means she thinks he needs cheering up. He does his best to convey otherwise with a smile and a careless shrug.
“Oh, alright, you know. How about you? Been up to much?”
“Well… things have been pretty busy at the clinic this week. We could use you, if you’re free.”
John is briefly surprised—custom was pretty slack during his last few shifts—but then he remembers the false cheerfulness and notices the way she’s looking at him, a little too intent, her smile a little too bright, and it occurs to him that she’s bullshitting. Offering kindness and trying to dress it up as asking for a favour.
It also occurs to him that she hasn’t asked what he’s been doing lately. And that, until yesterday, his answer would have had to be, ‘sod all.’
He wonders when he went back to being someone people felt sorry for.
The Connie Prince Show is the early-afternoon distraction of choice for approximately 12.9% of British simstim users.
It’s just a bit of fluff, really, but it’s nice. Lets you get away from it all for an hour. Light entertainment.
Or so Sherlock’s representative sample (Mrs Hudson) tells him. He wouldn’t know. He’s never understood simstim as a source of pleasure—gratuitous meat input amplified to the exclusion of all useful thought, a mess of lightcolourtouchsmellsoundtoomuch, larger than life and pressing in upon the mind from all sides—and he’s not about to start trying. He’s here looking for evidence.
The current guest (singer; Russian; married to her manager and cheating on him with one—no, two—of her female backing dancers) isn’t the model from the construct, so Sherlock deletes her name right off the bat; the mystery is clearly nothing to do with her. The location, too, is different. Today, Prince is in Freeside, sipping white wine on a private balcony bathed in artificial sunshine as she chats. (The stim allows users to experience the taste without any of the symptoms of drunkenness, which seems rather to defeat the point; the appeal of alcohol, like that of simstim itself, is surely the short respite it allows the chronically ordinary from the interiors of their dreary minds.) Sherlock is reliably informed—again by Mrs Hudson—that the setting changes daily; no clue to be had there, either. Which leaves him with Prince herself.
Clothing and makeup: the work of a stylist, carefully managed to project the correct balance of the aspirational and the approachable. (Everybody who uses simstim does so in order to escape his or her own dull reality; nobody likes to feel unworthy of the vessel inhabited in order to do so.) It can tell him little about Prince, save that her employers consider her a property worth considerable financial outlay. Injuries? Any discomfort would be removed in the editing process, but there are no visible marks on her—unsurprising; she has access to some of the world’s most expensive plastic surgeons—and no telltale awkwardness in her movements. She’s in perfect health, and—oh.
It’s an absence that gives him what he needs.
Prince is smiling, leaning back on her chair and twirling her wine glass between her fingers. Her face is perfectly relaxed.
Connie Prince is fifty-four years old, preserved in the appearance of an eternal twenty-seven by an extensive regimen of cosmetic surgeries and—among other things—Botox injections. The associated tightness across her forehead, though: absent. Her features: expressive and mobile.
The woman through whose body he is currently experiencing the stim is twenty-seven, or thereabouts; certainly no more than thirty. Ergo, she is not Connie Prince.
He understands why immediately; all that remains is to find the proof.
This woman isn’t merely a stand-in hired to fill in for illness or a stay in rehab. That would be dull, dull, dull, and his opponent may be many things Sherlock does not yet know, but he is not that. No; there’s only one real possibility. Connie Prince is dead, and someone has an interest in keeping that fact quiet.
He doesn’t wonder who this other woman is. Her name is important only as a piece of evidence, and he already has a good idea of where she has come from.
(In the living room of 221B Baker Street, Sherlock’s hands pause momentarily over the keypad of the deck, his lips compressed in distaste. If a memory flutters briefly at the corner of his awareness, it goes unacknowledged; it has no bearing upon the task at hand. He knows where he must look, now.)
John’s finished his sandwich and most of his coffee when he sees ‘SH’ flash up in the corner of his vision, and hears Sherlock’s voice in his head:
I need you to go to Soho.
He blinks, surprise making him pause briefly before he answers. “Not now, Sherlock. Out with Sarah, remember?” Setting down his coffee, he gives her an apologetic look, but behind it there’s a brief pulse of something like triumph. See, I’m not as pathetic as you think, and Christ, isn’t that just pathetic in itself? Sarah just smiles back at him, and waves her hand in an ‘it’s fine’ gesture.
It’s urgent, John.
“If it’s that bloody urgent, you can go yourself. Probably do you good to get out of the flat for a bit.”
A moment. Then: Please. I need your help.
Naturally, that does for him. It’s calculated—it’s always calculated—but John already knows he’ll come running. Mostly, he can’t handle the possibility that the day he says ‘sod it’ and refuses to do as he’s told will be the day Sherlock really does need him, after all. Yes, he’s a fool—and the worst part of it is, he’d take being a fool for Sherlock over being sensible and well-adjusted without him any day of the week.
It’s just that, these days, he mostly feels like he’s getting the worst of both worlds on that score.
John? Are you listening to me? The voice inside his head is quieter. Definitely not pleading, but a touch more uncertain now.
John groans inwardly. “Yeah, alright, fine.” He looks at Sarah. “I’m really sorry.”
“It’s okay. I ought to be getting back, anyway. I’ve got a half-past one.” She sips the last of her coffee, reaches for her handbag, checks her lipstick in her compact mirror. Then she looks back at him, hesitating a moment before she speaks. “You should talk to him, John.” And oh, God, there it is, her pity surfacing where until now it’s been submerged, just making faint ripples on the smooth surface of politeness. He won’t be able to ignore it, now. “I don’t like to see you like this.”
Like what? he wants to say, because it might force her to demur, but doesn’t, because it might make her answer, and he doesn’t want to hear ‘lonely’, and know that what she means is ‘pathetic’. John Watson, the bloke whose life consists of nothing but waiting around to run like a lost puppy whenever Sherlock Holmes can be arsed to whistle for him. But that’s not what his, their, life is—or at least, it wasn’t always—and knowing that other people see it like that makes his insides squirm with anger.
There are things he could stand to be pitied for, but Sherlock isn’t one of them.
He shrugs, instead. “I’ll be fine,” he says. “Really. There’s no need to worry about me.”
Sarah’s smile is faint, disappointed. “I’ll give you a ring about work.”
“Okay. Yeah, good.” John gets up, swallows the dregs of his coffee, and then coughs as something solid catches in his throat. He spits it out into his palm and squints at it.
It’s a pip. Orange, he thinks, though he’s no expert on organics. There’s another, identical one still sitting in the bottom of the cup.
Not important. Sherlock. Dismissive. Get a move on, John.
He does.
“So, what do you need me to do in Soho?”
What do people normally do in Soho?
John blinks. “You’re—hang on, you’re sending me to interview prostitutes? You dragged me away from lunch with my boss, who I fancy—” (Not a lie. He does; dutifully and probably—as he sometimes admits to himself when he’s tired or drunk enough to be entirely honest—because Sarah’s far too professional to date one of her employees, so there’s no danger of anything actually happening.) “—to go and speak to prostitutes?”
Not at all.
“Oh. Well. That’s good.” Pause. “What is it, then?”
I dragged you away to speak to their bosses.
“Great, Sherlock. Thanks.”
Don’t mention it.
Sherlock’s instructions take John around several of Soho’s smaller, seedier establishments. He has a list of questions to ask, mostly concerning disappearances or resignations of employees during the past two months. If the proprietors seem reticent in providing information—which most of them do, and as usual, John’s got no official documentation to back him up—he ends up furtively casing the rest of the building, looking wherever he’s told until Sherlock’s seen enough to decide this isn’t the brothel they’re looking for.
It’s been over an hour, and he’s feeling painfully conscious of just how much he must look like the kind of sad, lonely bloke who actually uses these places, when Sherlock tells him, Next left, third building on the right, and brings him to a halt before the neat smoked-glass doors of what would look like a respectable business hotel if it were in any other part of town.
Wait here a moment, Sherlock instructs him. This particular establishment has a small data storage facility of its very own. Not particularly secure—honestly, it’s practically extra advertising. Going through the files now. Don’t worry—you’ll just look like a nervous customer.
“Yeah, thanks,” John mutters. Sherlock ignores him, flips, and is back a few seconds later with instructions for John to head inside and ask for ‘Katarina’.
The interior of the place is almost as innocuous as the front door. Coffee tables in the same dark glass, boxy armchairs—faux-leather, not temperfoam—coffee machine, bored-looking receptionist examining her chromed fingernails. The ceiling offers a recording of evening sky in lurid sunset colours: bruise-purple, lipstick-coral-pink, a few baroque licks of gold. A little bit overdone for a business hotel, but nothing that screams ‘knocking shop’. The only indications that it offers more than crashspace for tired zaibatsumen are the fact that the screens set into the coffee-table glass are showing a heaving tangle of breasts and limbs instead of the news, and the projected menu behind the reception-desk.
The foyer’s empty; no lingerie-clad girls or shirtless boys hanging around to try and charm potential customers upstairs. Instead, the bodies on offer twirl in endless holographic repetition behind the counter, pseudonyms and statistics hanging in the air beside them as though they’re characters in a VR game. We are ever silent, the stillness of their plush mouths reassures. We won’t distract you from your pleasure by asking your name. We will never inconvenience you with our humanity.
“Puppet theatre,” John realises, and feels a small, sick twinge in the pit of his stomach.
Well observed, says Sherlock, but his sarcasm has little of its usual bite. Distracted. If it weren’t a thoroughly ridiculous idea—Sherlock’s shown no trace of discomfort with the sex trade so far during the afternoon’s search—John would say that he sounds tense.
Tense. Sherlock. John’s frowning, wondering at it, as he approaches the counter, which earns him a stern, You’re thinking again.
“Didn’t realise you considered anything I ever do worthy of the name,” he retorts, instead of sharing his thoughts. He curls and uncurls his fingers, a half-conscious attempt to still the crawling of his skin, and fights away the welling push of something that’s threatening to break through the barrier of consciousness and make itself clear. Whatever this is—if it’s anything—he can wait until the case is over to ask for (and probably not get) an answer. Now’s not the time.
There are possibilities beginning to worm their way up from the depths of his mind to which he’s not ready to give voice, not just yet. They seem traitorous, somehow.
Yes, John knows that rich kids get into this, and smart kids, too—and some of them come out with memories imperfectly repressed, with occasional irruptions of trauma, jagged like rocks at low tide. He’s seen a few, in the course of his job. They tend to seek out extreme augmentations, maybe in some attempt to reclaim ownership of their bodies, and John refers them to a shrink if he possibly can. He’s never felt easy about treating them.
It could make sense, if he let it, this narrative his mind is piecing together only half-consciously—but it still doesn’t feel like one that Sherlock belongs in.
John hopes to hell that that isn’t just wishful thinking.
The girl on the counter taps her fingernails, paging through an article, illustrated by images of models with bioluminescent implants, on her reader. John shakes his head as if doing so might banish the unwanted thoughts inside it, and approaches her.
He clears his throat. “Er,” he says. “Excuse me. Is Katarina in?”
The girl doesn’t look up from her article. “Nope,” she says. “Isadora’s the same body type, Stephanie does similar specialities. Joshua, too, if that’s up your street.”
Does is really the wrong word, though, isn’t it? These kids don’t exactly do much of anything, and John feels a cold little twist of guilt in his gut just at playing the part.
“Thanks,” he says, “but I was really hoping to see Katarina.”
The girl gives him a curious look—understandable; they probably don’t get many specific requests in a place like this. “I’d offer to book you in, but I can’t actually guarantee she’ll be back. She’s taken some time off.”
As I thought, Sherlock informs him. We need to find out whether she had any unusual customers before leaving, or whether she was seen talking to any strangers. Corporate types or very successful criminals, probably. They would’ve looked respectable, either way.
John nods an okay and draws in a breath to ask, and Sherlock snaps, Don’t be ridiculous, John, she’ll never tell you. Discretion is the watchword of this kind of establishment—at least, where the clients are concerned. Time to leave.
He shuts his mouth. The girl is still looking at him, now with an undercurrent of mildly disgusted curiosity in her gaze. She might as well just ask him what kind of a weirdo he is out loud, really.
“Um,” he says. “Alright, thanks. I’ll be off, then.”
She shrugs, and turns back to her article. But when he glances behind him, opening the door, her eyes are on him.
We’re going to need the puppet-theatre’s security footage, Sherlock informs him, once he’s got a few streets away and perched himself at the bar in one of the many seedy little drinking establishments that have lined the Soho streets since time immemorial. If we can identify the men by whom ‘Katarina’—real name Kathy Noakes, of Bristol, by the way—was approached, we’ll be able to find out who wants to cover up Connie Prince’s death.
“Oka—hang on, you what?” John garners a suspicious look from the barman pulling the pint he intends to nurse without drinking, and shakes his head in apology. “No way,” he continues, in a lower voice. “It would’ve been on the news. And Mrs Hudson was plugged into her show yesterday.”
As was I, this morning. It’s very simple. Usually, this sort of case involves the faking of a death. A lookalike from some lower stratum of society is lured with promises of fame and fortune, the resemblance is finished off with surgery, and suddenly there’s a convincing body in the penthouse suite. What’s unusual in this case is that our criminals are interested in hiding a death, and willing to spend considerable money to do so.
“Wow. Okay. So, how do we get the video?”
The front-of-house attendant will be taking a break in half an hour. This isn’t a busy time of day, so there’s only one security guard on duty. He’s also overweight, therefore slow, and morbidly anxious about losing his job due to his gambling debts.
“Jesus, you didn’t even see the guy. How did you—”
Never mind that, John. The point is that arranging for certain of my associates to provide a distraction should be simple. All you need to do is copy the security footage.
“Onto what?”
Buy a blank data storage device from a woman called Zena. Back left corner, blue hair, array of startlingly pink microsofts behind her right ear. She’s good; it’ll be untraceable.
“And how am I supposed to get into the computer in the first place? I haven’t exactly got your skillset, in case you’d forgotten.”
The security guard’s office is the first door on the left. Unless he’s changed his habits drastically in the past three years—unlikely—his password will be— A brief pause. Akiko7248.
John doesn’t ask how Sherlock knows that, or what the hell Sherlock was doing in a puppet-theatre three years ago. Hearing the rapid-fire rattling-off of a deduction might reassure him, he thinks, but on the other hand it might not. Not if he can’t be sure that it was made today, and that Sherlock’s not calling up thoughts from—well, from some other time.
He’s not Sherlock, but that doesn’t mean he can just shut off his brain when he wants to. And, somewhere in the back of his mind, his consciousness is weaving together threads of some whole he’s not sure he wants to see; something that ties up with strands of his own thought in a way that makes him feel oddly, achingly guilty.
John knows Sherlock wasn’t always squeaky-clean; knows that he had problems with drugs, and not the kind that are easy to get clean from. He’d always assumed Sherlock’s less legitimate activities were limited to data-theft and dabbling with illegal substances, but something—the odd mixture of familiarity and strained detachment with which Sherlock’s been guiding him around the Soho meat-markets—is making him wonder. And the wondering reminds him of how he felt when they first met, before he clamped down on those feelings and buried them deep, and there’s a place where the wondering and the memories conjoin and end in nausea.
Okay, he’s never been daft enough to let himself hope when he knows it would be fruitless, but he’d have to be blind not to notice that Sherlock has a pretty mouth and bone structure that would make a cosmetic surgeon weep. And those arresting, mineral-grey eyes, the kind of colour Zeiss-Ikon might spend hundreds of thousands replicating—but Jesus, who would ever want to see them closed in unconsciousness, or blank and unseeing? You’d have to be mental—
John. Data storage. You can sleep later.
He’s never been so glad to be snapped at in his life.
Sherlock sets up a program to scan the Met’s data banks for matches with the men on the surveillance tape, and another to search the endless hours of video in Mycroft’s data cores for them. He doesn’t bother asking for permission. Mycroft tacitly accepts Sherlock’s breaking through his security systems when necessary, ostensibly because, as long as he remains on the (relatively) straight and narrow, he’s using them in the national interest—though in fact it’s more likely that setting up ice that could keep him out would just be too much effort.
He could jack out, now, leave the programs to do their work and check on them later. Eat something, drink tea, talk to John. John would like that. It would boost the self-worth that he has so unfortunately founded upon their association and shared exploits. Sherlock would like it, too, in the moments that it lasted. He would explain his methods, and John would make appropriately impressed noises, even if unable to fully understand them. His admiration would even be genuine. John is so endlessly willing to be dazzled by Sherlock, to see the best of him first. Admiration radiates from him as tangibly as body heat.
Sherlock stays in the matrix.
He burns through it fast, faster, faster, until the endless form and light of it kaleidoscope around him, finance grey and the cold blue fire of government systems, military constructs huge as spiral galaxies and corporate fairylight multicolour all blurring together, a vastness that might hold him forever, if he let it. He pinpoints and turns in half-a-dozen petty data-thefts, none the work of his thief and all of them really beneath his notice, but welcome diversions for now. He will not stop and he will not, cannot, leave.
John would (will) have questions. That’s problematic, and not just because the thought of it distracts Sherlock from his work. Worry was creasing John’s forehead before he left Soho, and it will only have increased in the interim. He’ll be concerned; he’ll try to understand—but he’ll insist upon digging into Sherlock’s past. And Sherlock has no wish to be understood.
Or, rather, he knows that there is no good that John’s understanding could possibly do.
John will tell himself that his concern stems only from loyalty; that any good friend would feel the same. Perhaps, though, underneath it all, there’ll be a touch of jealousy—
But no. Sherlock cuts off that train of thought; that way, madness lies. The point is, John will have questions, and he will have to answer them somehow. But not now. Not yet.
By the time John gets back to the flat, he’s knackered. Sherlock’s jacked in, working, and for once he feels relieved instead of disappointed. He’s got no doubt that his questions are as clearly visible on his face as if they were spelled out in ten-foot neon letters, and he’s not quite sure how to talk about them, yet. It’d probably be easier if he just didn’t—Sherlock will inevitably insist that it’s none of his business, and it’s not, really—but that isn’t an option.
His suspicions are going to nag at him until they’re allayed, or confirmed. He has to give it a go. He’s just not sure if he really wants to know the answer.
He showers, changes, plugs into the simstim unit and half-pays attention to Tally Isham swimming in a tropical-temperature artificial sea for half an hour. He heats up something cheap and tasteless out of the fridge for tea, opens a can of beer, and alternates between trying to decide what he’s going to say when Sherlock decides to rejoin the world of the living, and trying not to think about it at all.
Meat puppets aren’t exactly a new idea to him—you get puppet theatres all over the world—but John’s always been bothered by them on some fairly fundamental level. He’s not unusual in that; his regiment was split pretty much fifty-fifty between guys who were happy to visit the puppet theatres as a matter of course, and those who found the whole notion faintly disturbing. He did let himself get dragged along, once, when he was younger and more easily influenced—out of curiosity, not with the intention of doing anything, but he’s vaguely ashamed of it all the same—and he hadn’t even managed to sit in the same room with the girl and pretend she wasn’t there while he waited for the others to finish up. He’d actually ended up talking to her, blathering endlessly about Harry and his parents and Mary, the girl from the Sprawl he’d been sort-of-seeing at the time, a couple of the more gruesome injuries he’d seen recently and how he really needed a holiday sooner rather than later. Most expensive whinge of his life.
Anyhow, it didn’t exactly help him to understand the appeal. What’s the point in sex when the other person doesn’t even look like they’re enjoying it?
Until now, though, it’s always been a distant, abstract sort of distaste. But the thought of Sherlock, of all people, slack-faced and inert at the mercy of some stranger, that brilliant mind not just miles away but completely switched off—well, his brain shies away from the image every time, even though he can’t help circling back around to it.
He hopes that’s because it’s impossible.
He drains the last of the lager from his can, and heads into the kitchen to see if there are any more left.
As if he’s psychic, Sherlock chooses the moment that John has his head in the fridge to jack out and breeze out into the hallway, picking up the phone before John can manage so much as a ‘hi.’ John sets the beer he’s just retrieved back in the fridge, and switches on the hot water dispenser for tea, instead. He can eavesdrop while he waits for it to heat up. (One moral scruple of which living with Sherlock has long since divested him.)
“Really, Lestrade,” Sherlock is saying, “it’s quite simple. Prince had an unfortunate accident—probably a botched surgical procedure, though an overdose isn’t out of the question—and her brother saw greater financial potential in grooming a replacement and continuing to siphon money from her income than in claiming the life insurance, especially given that a large percentage of Prince’s anatomy was the property of her employers. He put up enough money to be placed in touch with specialists who would procure said lookalike, and the rest is obvious. I can come to the station if you need my evidence in person—no? Well. Yes. Let me know.”
A pause.
“One more thing. Have you taken on any new recruits recently? Mmm. Background check perfect? Yes? Fire him.”
Another.
“Just take my word for it.”
He puts down the phone, and John takes the opportunity to corner him before he can jack back into the matrix or drift off into one of his silent reveries.
“You did it, then,” he says, keeping his voice deliberately mild. “Celebratory cuppa? You can tell me all about it, then.” He hopes—against hope, perhaps—that the promise of an appreciative audience will have the same effect on Sherlock that it used to, that it’ll make him gravitate towards John instead of turning away and in upon himself.
Sherlock looks at him for a long moment, appraising. Then he nods. “Tea,” he says. “Yes.” He sounds resigned, not enthusiastic, but at least he’s not running away.
John scours the kitchen cupboards for two non-bio-hazardous mugs, pours the tea, and heads back into the living room to offer one to Sherlock, who’s stretched out on the couch, probably with the intention of staying there all night if he gets his way. Their fingers brush as Sherlock takes the mug, and John actually blinks, startled at the contact. Then feels the heat of a blush on the back of his neck, and the faint, sick prickly of guilt as he determinedly doesn’t, doesn’t, connect that innocent, accidental little touch with his earlier suspicions.
Sherlock just keeps his eyes dead ahead.
“I told you Connie Prince was dead,” he says, once John’s settled down into his armchair.
“Yeah.”
“That should have been obvious from the start, in fact; that her many thousands of fans have so far failed to notice it is testament to the stupidity of the general public. Her forehead told me that she was dead—” And he picks up speed, rattling off the thought-process that led him to his conclusion as though it’s the simplest thing in the world, and—just for the briefest of moments—seeming to light up with his old love of showing off, meeting John’s eyes with the twitch of a pleased smile when he shakes his head and says, “And you got all that from the fact her face didn’t hurt? Bloody hell, that’s brilliant.”
“So you’ve said on many occasions.”
“Yeah, well. I’ll keep on saying it as long as you keep on being brilliant.”
Sherlock looks at him sharply, and suddenly John feels the seriousness of what he’s left unsaid.
Talk to me, please. Because I’m the one who sees the best of you, and I sometimes think I barely know you. I don’t want to leave you alone, and I won’t. Unless you make me.
He swallows, takes a sip of tea to cover up his nerves. “Sherlock,” he says, and there’s a heaviness in the air, now.
What he’s about to say is totally inappropriate, by most people’s standards, and once he’s said it there’ll be no taking it back. He hesitates; almost changes his mind. Then takes a deep breath.
“This afternoon,” he begins, cautiously. “You seemed to know an awful lot about that place. The—the puppet theatre. We’ve never been there for a case before. Is there—how come?”
Sherlock sighs, and closes his eyes. He’s silent for a long moment, and John’s just about given up on getting an answer and started wondering how many months he’ll need to spend hiding in his bedroom for the awkwardness to clear by the time he replies.
“You know I didn’t start out as a legitimate operator, John.”
“Yeah.”
“Computer equipment costs money. I’d already been thrown out of school and university, and acquired a considerable drug habit. Mummy was hardly going to fund my experimental forays into data-theft, especially with the scrupulous detail in which Mycroft insisted on reporting my activities.”
“So you found another way of paying for it.”
A small nod.
John sinks back in his chair. “Jesus.”
Sherlock looks directly at him, meeting his eyes for the second time this evening. “It wasn’t such a hardship, John. You’re not conscious, most of the time. The drugs were very good.”
“I just—” John shakes his head. “I know you’re not exactly opposed to self-medicating, but—I thought you went in for uppers. Actually choosing to be out of it completely? It doesn’t seem like you. I don’t get it.”
A shrug. “I delete irrelevant data all the time. In this particular instance, I simply avoided saving it in the first place.”
John tries to keep the sadness out of his face, he really does, but Sherlock’s withering look lets him know that he’s failed.
“It’s just a body, John. It exists to serve my mind, and that’s precisely what it was doing. I knew I’d be able to give it up in short order once I’d established my skills as a console man. It was a perfectly logical decision.”
“That’s what happened, then? You made your money stealing data, and you quit?”
“Not precisely.” Sherlock frowns, and John feels a momentary trepidation, unsure whether he should be glad that Sherlock’s showing some reaction to all this, or feeling shitty for dredging it up. But then he realises it’s a frown of puzzlement, not distress. “It bothered me immensely, at the time. I’m still not sure exactly what happened. I’d had only one new customer in the weeks before the incident, and his ID checked out perfectly; an American tourist, entirely nondescript. I simply arrived one evening and found that they had no record of me. I didn’t work there—I never had. I was forced to take up dealing illegal stimulants, instead. Very inconvenient.”
He looks so put out that John almost laughs.
Sherlock fixes him with a Look. “It was hardly preferable, John. Drug-dealing’s incredibly dull work, and you can’t even be unconscious while you’re doing it. Really, it’s no wonder I overdosed.”
“Overdosed? Jesus fuck, Sherlock, what happened?”
“Boredom.” Sherlock makes a face. “However, my dear brother had been keeping a close eye on my activities, and happened to choose that particular evening to send a friend of his on the police force over to curtail them.”
“Lestrade?”
Sherlock nods. “He called for help, and was still there when I woke up in a private ward paid for by Mycroft and began rewiring the security system in order to get out. With one of those occasional flashes of insight that make his usual dullness so disappointing, he decided against arresting me, and asked for my help instead. You know the rest.”
John breathes out heavily. “Wow,” he says. “I—well, I’d never have guessed any of that, but then I’m not you, so…” He trails off, not quite sure whether he ought to say I’m sorry, or You’re insane, or what.
“I’m glad you’re here, now,” is what comes out, at last.
Sherlock is looking at him intently. “I’m okay, John,” he says, slowly, after a moment. “I always was. Don’t ask me to feel traumatised by something I never experienced.”
“No, I didn’t mean—I don’t—never mind.”
Another long pause. “If it’s any consolation,” Sherlock says, then, “I much prefer my current method of making a living.” He’s looking at John with his head to one side. He sounds… unsure, and John can’t remember the last time he heard that tone from Sherlock, if he ever has.
It almost feels like Sherlock is—offering him something. A reassurance, or—well, he doesn’t know what else it could be. Either way, Sherlock offering him anything is rare enough to be precious. As if he could ever not accept.
“Good,” he says, nodding. “I’m glad.”
Sherlock smiles at him faintly. His chest aches.
Chapter 5
