Fic: Meat 5/8 (Sherlock BBC)
Aug. 5th, 2012 07:43 pm![[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 | 4
John’s not entirely sure what you’re supposed to say after a conversation like that, really. In fiction, these kinds of moments are where the stim fades out, or the film cuts away. Nobody ever tells you how to pick the everyday back up, afterwards, and the silence that follows is almost as uncomfortable as the conversation itself.
He falls back on making more tea, since his has gone cold. Funny, really, how even with the endless influx of brand-names and habits and foodstuffs from all over the globe into the sucking whirl of London, a simple cuppa still seems to soothe something primal in him. Pavlovian, probably. Switch on hot water dispenser, rinse mugs, fetch teabags and milk substitute. Everything’s going to be alright.
There’s the beep of an alert from the deck while he’s in the kitchen, and he’s not surprised to see Sherlock jacked back in when he returns to the living room. Sherlock doesn’t stay in there long, though, surfacing after a moment to say, “John, I need you to do something for me.”
John groans, glancing mournfully at his barely-touched cuppa. “It’s late,” he protests, weakly. “I’m knackered.”
But, I need you, Sherlock said. John, I need you. And John can survive a gunshot wound and put a cranial jack in a man’s skull without damaging his brain and fight out a place in a world that has none for him, but withstand that? He’s got about as much chance as a soap bubble in a monsoon; as organic life on the American junk plains.
* * *
So. Back out into the city, into the neon-striped night. Whitish mist of his breath in the cold, and he hunches down into the collar of his jacket to protect himself—half from the chill, and half from the dozens of (mostly illegally) augmented eyes that turn to look him over as he shoulders open the door of the Crooked Man, the cowboy pub where he should, failing any disasters, find Sherlock’s contact.
Flicker and dart of holographic projections at corner tables; illusionist hustlers showing off the cleanness of their lines, the realism of their textures and colours. Low babble of voices doing business, endless circulation of drugs and microsofts and the most precious commodity of the lot—information.
The hum of sound picks up again after a moment, once he’s been assessed and dismissed as a non-threat. (“People never learn”—Sherlock, some other night, one less cold with anxiety and disconnect.) It drowns out the Japanese pop music piped from hidden speakers to the accompaniment of another holo projected behind the bar—this one all screaming pinks and oranges, the lips of the singer outlined in ultraviolet purple. The projection makes her and her backing group look like they’re dancing with the bar staff, their outstretched arms passing through refrigerator-glass and beer bottles and living bodies with equal ease.
John wedges himself in next to a clearly-wasted young couple, she dressed only in towering chromed heels and a few black strips of microfibre despite the cold. She mumbles to the man whose tattooed arm is resting around her shoulders, her voice sluggish and her mouth drug-slack, and he fishes in his wallet for a baggie of unfamiliar, spearmint-green pills. The woman slips one onto her tongue, catches John’s eye, and smiles secretively. He looks fiercely in the opposite direction.
* * *
Back to the construct (predictably reinstated—‘Jim’ is a show-off, and they never can resist talking about their crimes); back to the out-of-date stim unit; back to the late Connie Prince’s recorded body and the accompanying barrage of sensations.
‘Jim’ lazes in the chair opposite him, face still in shadow. No transformational theatrics, this time. He’s leaning back, casual; he raises one hand in a languid wave as Sherlock transitions into the construct. Let’s dispense with the formalities, the gesture offers. He’s trying to create the illusion of an intimacy between them, to make this seem like a conversation between friends—between equals. To say, I’m on your level.
Sherlock will believe it when he has proof.
And—he thinks—it may not be very long before he does. He’d be lying if he claimed not to feel a small start of eagerness, a welling of curiosity, at the prospect. He’d also be lying if he claimed not to be at all worried.
There can be no ‘guess who’s next’ this time, after all.
He meets his opponent’s eyes. “I assume Ms Noakes is settling into her new job well?”
A smirk. “Very. Shame you had to go and end her contract prematurely. Not nice, that. Best job she’d ever had, she said. Thought you might have had a bit more sympathy. Shared experiences, all that.”
Sherlock ignores the dig. “You will insist on placing your puzzles where even the police can’t fail to see them…”
“Ah, yes, the police. I notice you’ve got your little hotdogger friends out looking for me, but not the cops. Funny, that.”
“You’re as aware of their incompetence as I am, I’m sure.”
‘Jim’ inclines his head minutely. “Or maybe you’d just rather keep this our little secret. Can’t blame you. More fun that way.”
“Strange idea of fun, your threatening my friends.”
“Mmm.” ‘Jim’ makes a thoughtful little moue. “Something else I’ve noticed. Haven’t done quite all you can to protect them, have you? You’ve got something on half the hired muscle in London, I should think. And yet I didn’t see any street samurai trailing Johnny-boy down to the Crooked Man tonight. Well, except that razorgirl who works for your brother, but we both know she’s not there for old Johnny’s benefit.”
Sherlock is suddenly glad of the Botoxed immobility of the host’s features. It prevents his startlement from showing on her face.
“So you’ve got an awful lot of confidence in your ability to outsmart me,” ‘Jim’ goes on. “Or maybe you just don’t want to admit how worried you are. How much you care.”
“Caring has nothing to do with it. You could be threatening strangers, and I’d still be beating you.”
“Because it’s the right thing to do? Don’t get boring on me, Sherlock.”
“No, because I’m better than you.”
A chuckle. Abruptly, ‘Jim’ shifts, sitting up straighter in his chair, clapping his hands together. “Well! We all know what’s coming next, don’t we? I wonder how good you’ll be without him?”
“What do you want from me?”
‘Jim’ raises his eyebrows in amusement. “Ooh, getting impatient now, are we? Looks like I’ve struck a nerve.”
Sherlock doesn’t answer, doesn’t wait for the construct to fade away. He flips.
* * *
John manages to locate Sherlock’s contact—a thin, rodent-faced kid twitching with an excess of obviously-chemical energy—and is sitting behind a corner table (invisible from the door thanks to the curve of the bar) listening to his rapid, nervy chatter, when ‘SH’ blinks up in the corner of his vision. He nods fractionally to acknowledge Sherlock, but doesn’t greet him out loud. People in these kinds of places tend to get nervous if they find out you’ve got a rider.
The kid speaks in an urgent undertone. “It was Westie,” he says. “He’d found something out, something he wasn’t supposed to know. He got a bit twitchy. Mentioned a name, once, when he was pissed, and then got all upset. Made me promise not to tell anyone about it. Jim Moriarty, the name was. No idea who that is, though.”
John nods and keeps quiet. Sherlock, miraculously, keeps quiet too, though John can just picture him ricocheting around the living-room in elation at finally knowing who it is they’re looking for. (Though, no—Sherlock’s accessing his sensorium, which means Sherlock is plugged into the deck. Sherlock doesn’t do much bouncing around the flat these days.)
“Anyway, they found him, Westie. He was dead. The cops said he’d offed himself, but—well, I dunno. Seems a bit suspicious, don’t it? He finds out something he’s not supposed to know, and bam, he’s gone? I dunno if they got him, or—or if he killed himself before they could get to him.”
“And that’s all you know.”
The kid nods, and wipes at his nose with his sleeve.
“Right. Right, okay. Thanks.”
“Fifteen hundred, yeah? ‘S what the Wig said.”
“Yeah, that’s right.” John fishes in his pocket.
Wait, he hears, inside his head. Get this Westie’s address.
He pauses. “Your friend, the one who died. Where did he live?”
“Pott Street, near the station. Flat 47.”
“Anyone else living there?”
“Yeah. His fiancée.” The kid pauses, seeming to consider what he’s about to say, then his face sets and he looks up. “She’s my sister.”
* * *
John.
He’s already paid the kid and got out of there when he hears Sherlock again. He’s almost forgotten that Sherlock’s there, with him, and feels obscurely guilty for having allowed himself to do so. He so often feels that Sherlock is drifting away from him that anything Sherlock is willing to give him—even if it’s just his presence via the rig—seems like it ought to be grabbed and held on to, tight.
He’d like to think of their earlier conversation as something—however painful—to be shored up against the loss, as an indication that maybe Sherlock’s ready to share something with him again, but he’s too honest with himself to believe it wholeheartedly. Sherlock would never have imparted that particular detail about his past life off his own bat.
“Yeah?”
You’re going to check out West’s address?
“I assumed you’d want me to, yes.”
A tiny pause. Yes. Good. Then: Mycroft’s people are following you.
“Aren’t they always?”
Let them.
“Oh,” John says, in surprise. “Um, okay.” He blinks. “Are you going to tell me why the change of heart, or—”
‘SH’ vanishes.
* * *
John gets off the Tube at Bethnal Green, and glances up and down the road for cars. No sign of any of Mycroft’s, but then the hulking great black things his people usually favour would be a tad conspicuous in this bit of London. John’s hand darts automatically to the inside of his jacket, and he wishes fervently that he’d brought his fletcher.
It’s a short walk to the Pott Street flats, but John’s conscious of the shadow tailing him before he gets there. He can’t see who it is—not exactly a thriving business area, this, so the lighting’s poor—but from the quick slide of her movements and the way she vanishes into alley-gloom as though embraced by it, he suspects Mycroft’s mirror-eyed spy.
Honestly, he’s got no intention of giving her the slip, even if he’s not quite sure what’s got into Sherlock with the ‘let them’. This just seems a bit daft, really. If he knows she’s tailing him, and she knows he knows—which she must, because whatever else you might say about Mycroft Holmes, he doesn’t employ idiots—then they might as well just have a civilised chat.
Cautiously, he waits for the shadow to melt into darkness, and glances down the side-street where—he’s sure—he saw her—
—and then she’s behind him, moving with a quickness and a silence that makes him wonder briefly whether she isn’t a holographic projection rather than a real person, makes him glance around frantically for her source. But the solidity of her hand at his neck soon puts paid to that illusion. Her fingernails are petrol-blue acrylic, clearly false, and she taps one of them smartly at the base of his throat. He goes still immediately.
The work is top-class—there’s no way you’d know she had implants just from looking—but from the implicit threat and the fact that she’s otherwise unarmed, it’s evident that those oilslick-shiny acrylics conceal deadly blades.
John takes a breath and releases it slowly, his hands half-raised in surrender. “Alright,” he says, and isn’t quite sure why he’s saying it. “Alright.”
After a moment—apparently reassured that he’s not going to try running off—the razorgirl removes her hand.
“I’ve got to give you a message,” she says, and her voice is mild, entirely at odds with her posture and the whole situation, really. She sounds more like a secretary than a trained killer. “For Sherlock.”
John sags back against the wall, shaking his head. “Your boss couldn’t just phone?” he says, weakly.
“As if he’d get an answer.”
“He could’ve phoned me.”
The razorgirl smiles blandly. “I’m just following instructions.”
John rubs at the bridge of his nose. “Well, what is it? The message?”
“Tell Sherlock he needs to come in and see us. Soon.”
“That’s it?”
“He’ll know what you mean.”
And then, just like that, she’s off, darting into an impossibly small space between buildings and disappearing. John stares at the gap where she vanished.
Let them, he remembers, and hadn’t there been a note of urgency in Sherlock’s voice when he said it? Worry, even, maybe?
Suddenly, disconcertingly, he feels exposed, weaponless and alone in the dark street. He glances behind him one more time, and gets moving.
* * *
Westie’s fiancée—blonde, pretty, off-the-shelf bright-blue eyes whose whites are red from crying—doesn’t seem that surprised to see him.
“Are you with the police?” she asks, and after a moment John decides on a white lie and nods yes. She didn’t ask if he was one of the police, after all. “I know he didn’t kill himself,” she says. Despite the tear-stained fragility, her mouth is set in a determined line. “It was them.”
“Them? Do you know who your fiancé thought he was being pursued by?”
She shakes her head. “I tried asking him. He told me—he told me he’d already said too much. But someone was after him. I know it.”
John nods, trying to look professional-but-sympathetic. Counterintuitive as it may seem, he doesn’t actually deal with a lot of grieving relatives in his day job. In the army, families weren’t generally on hand to be dealt with, and in the event that something goes wrong at the clinic—well, the kinds of people who frequent the black clinics tend not to tell their mums and dads where they’re going. (And, besides that, something going wrong on John’s operating table is very rare. He’s got his professional pride.)
“You weren’t here when it happened?” he asks.
“No. No, I was working—at the Million. I work behind the bar.” She gives a watery blink. “It was a busy night, I was helping clean up. Finished late. My brother found him.”
John raises his eyebrow—that’s one detail the kid failed to mention—but keeps quiet. “I know this might be upsetting for you,” he says, “but can you show me where he was found?”
She nods, mutely, shoves the door wide, and points to a spot on the pavement.
It’s dark, but—it’s weird. John can’t make out much in the way of bloodstains. Just a couple of dark splotches—nothing like the volume you’d expect if he’d jumped out of a window high enough to cause a fatal head injury. It’s possible that it’s been cleaned up, since, but—well, this isn’t the sort of area that cleanup crews are eager to visit with any kind of regularity. John frowns to himself, then turns back to the girl.
“That’s where he jumped from, right?” he asks, pointing at what he guesses is the correct window. “Or—fell, or—well, let’s not make any assumptions just yet.”
“No,” she says, “the one next to it.” And, oh, of course; the plush toy and pink plastic mini holo-projector on the windowsill are a child’s, and nobody’s mentioned West and his fiancée having kids. It must belong to the neighbouring flat. Sherlock would’ve picked that up—but then, Sherlock’s not here. “I can show you the room,” she goes on, “if you like. They’ve already been round, once, I’ve tidied up a few things, but if it helps…”
“Thanks,” he says. “Yes. Yes, I’m sure it will.”
She shows him into the flat and up the narrow staircase that leads to their bedroom. The place is a tip, the tiny landing cluttered with tangled wire and miscellaneous shoes and obsolete hardware, brightly-coloured microsofts littering the carpet like oversized confetti. It looks just like Sherlock’s half (okay, three-quarters) of the living-room, and that—more than the girl’s tear-reddened eyes, or the awful circumstances of her fiancé’s death—makes John feel a pang of sympathy for her loss.
As she reaches the landing behind him, she frowns. “Did you hear that?” she says.
“Hear what?”
She shrugs. “Probably next door’s kids. They’re up all hours.” She sniffs. “Little shits. I’ll just check the door’s locked. Go ahead.”
John pushes the bedroom door open, gently. It’s dark, and he’s fumbling for the light-switch when he hears a muffled cry from downstairs.
“Are you alright?” he calls, pulse quickening, combat instincts kicking in as he listens intently, tries to figure out who—if anyone—is downstairs with her—
—and that’s the worst mistake he could’ve made, isn’t it, because they’re not just downstairs with her, they’re in here with him, and then there’s a bulky form behind him and a blade at his throat for the second time today. Only, this one isn’t being wielded by a pretty razorgirl, and the threat behind it is far from idle, and the last thing John’s brain comes up with before he loses consciousness is, oh shit.
Chapter 6
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 | 4
John’s not entirely sure what you’re supposed to say after a conversation like that, really. In fiction, these kinds of moments are where the stim fades out, or the film cuts away. Nobody ever tells you how to pick the everyday back up, afterwards, and the silence that follows is almost as uncomfortable as the conversation itself.
He falls back on making more tea, since his has gone cold. Funny, really, how even with the endless influx of brand-names and habits and foodstuffs from all over the globe into the sucking whirl of London, a simple cuppa still seems to soothe something primal in him. Pavlovian, probably. Switch on hot water dispenser, rinse mugs, fetch teabags and milk substitute. Everything’s going to be alright.
There’s the beep of an alert from the deck while he’s in the kitchen, and he’s not surprised to see Sherlock jacked back in when he returns to the living room. Sherlock doesn’t stay in there long, though, surfacing after a moment to say, “John, I need you to do something for me.”
John groans, glancing mournfully at his barely-touched cuppa. “It’s late,” he protests, weakly. “I’m knackered.”
But, I need you, Sherlock said. John, I need you. And John can survive a gunshot wound and put a cranial jack in a man’s skull without damaging his brain and fight out a place in a world that has none for him, but withstand that? He’s got about as much chance as a soap bubble in a monsoon; as organic life on the American junk plains.
So. Back out into the city, into the neon-striped night. Whitish mist of his breath in the cold, and he hunches down into the collar of his jacket to protect himself—half from the chill, and half from the dozens of (mostly illegally) augmented eyes that turn to look him over as he shoulders open the door of the Crooked Man, the cowboy pub where he should, failing any disasters, find Sherlock’s contact.
Flicker and dart of holographic projections at corner tables; illusionist hustlers showing off the cleanness of their lines, the realism of their textures and colours. Low babble of voices doing business, endless circulation of drugs and microsofts and the most precious commodity of the lot—information.
The hum of sound picks up again after a moment, once he’s been assessed and dismissed as a non-threat. (“People never learn”—Sherlock, some other night, one less cold with anxiety and disconnect.) It drowns out the Japanese pop music piped from hidden speakers to the accompaniment of another holo projected behind the bar—this one all screaming pinks and oranges, the lips of the singer outlined in ultraviolet purple. The projection makes her and her backing group look like they’re dancing with the bar staff, their outstretched arms passing through refrigerator-glass and beer bottles and living bodies with equal ease.
John wedges himself in next to a clearly-wasted young couple, she dressed only in towering chromed heels and a few black strips of microfibre despite the cold. She mumbles to the man whose tattooed arm is resting around her shoulders, her voice sluggish and her mouth drug-slack, and he fishes in his wallet for a baggie of unfamiliar, spearmint-green pills. The woman slips one onto her tongue, catches John’s eye, and smiles secretively. He looks fiercely in the opposite direction.
Back to the construct (predictably reinstated—‘Jim’ is a show-off, and they never can resist talking about their crimes); back to the out-of-date stim unit; back to the late Connie Prince’s recorded body and the accompanying barrage of sensations.
‘Jim’ lazes in the chair opposite him, face still in shadow. No transformational theatrics, this time. He’s leaning back, casual; he raises one hand in a languid wave as Sherlock transitions into the construct. Let’s dispense with the formalities, the gesture offers. He’s trying to create the illusion of an intimacy between them, to make this seem like a conversation between friends—between equals. To say, I’m on your level.
Sherlock will believe it when he has proof.
And—he thinks—it may not be very long before he does. He’d be lying if he claimed not to feel a small start of eagerness, a welling of curiosity, at the prospect. He’d also be lying if he claimed not to be at all worried.
There can be no ‘guess who’s next’ this time, after all.
He meets his opponent’s eyes. “I assume Ms Noakes is settling into her new job well?”
A smirk. “Very. Shame you had to go and end her contract prematurely. Not nice, that. Best job she’d ever had, she said. Thought you might have had a bit more sympathy. Shared experiences, all that.”
Sherlock ignores the dig. “You will insist on placing your puzzles where even the police can’t fail to see them…”
“Ah, yes, the police. I notice you’ve got your little hotdogger friends out looking for me, but not the cops. Funny, that.”
“You’re as aware of their incompetence as I am, I’m sure.”
‘Jim’ inclines his head minutely. “Or maybe you’d just rather keep this our little secret. Can’t blame you. More fun that way.”
“Strange idea of fun, your threatening my friends.”
“Mmm.” ‘Jim’ makes a thoughtful little moue. “Something else I’ve noticed. Haven’t done quite all you can to protect them, have you? You’ve got something on half the hired muscle in London, I should think. And yet I didn’t see any street samurai trailing Johnny-boy down to the Crooked Man tonight. Well, except that razorgirl who works for your brother, but we both know she’s not there for old Johnny’s benefit.”
Sherlock is suddenly glad of the Botoxed immobility of the host’s features. It prevents his startlement from showing on her face.
“So you’ve got an awful lot of confidence in your ability to outsmart me,” ‘Jim’ goes on. “Or maybe you just don’t want to admit how worried you are. How much you care.”
“Caring has nothing to do with it. You could be threatening strangers, and I’d still be beating you.”
“Because it’s the right thing to do? Don’t get boring on me, Sherlock.”
“No, because I’m better than you.”
A chuckle. Abruptly, ‘Jim’ shifts, sitting up straighter in his chair, clapping his hands together. “Well! We all know what’s coming next, don’t we? I wonder how good you’ll be without him?”
“What do you want from me?”
‘Jim’ raises his eyebrows in amusement. “Ooh, getting impatient now, are we? Looks like I’ve struck a nerve.”
Sherlock doesn’t answer, doesn’t wait for the construct to fade away. He flips.
John manages to locate Sherlock’s contact—a thin, rodent-faced kid twitching with an excess of obviously-chemical energy—and is sitting behind a corner table (invisible from the door thanks to the curve of the bar) listening to his rapid, nervy chatter, when ‘SH’ blinks up in the corner of his vision. He nods fractionally to acknowledge Sherlock, but doesn’t greet him out loud. People in these kinds of places tend to get nervous if they find out you’ve got a rider.
The kid speaks in an urgent undertone. “It was Westie,” he says. “He’d found something out, something he wasn’t supposed to know. He got a bit twitchy. Mentioned a name, once, when he was pissed, and then got all upset. Made me promise not to tell anyone about it. Jim Moriarty, the name was. No idea who that is, though.”
John nods and keeps quiet. Sherlock, miraculously, keeps quiet too, though John can just picture him ricocheting around the living-room in elation at finally knowing who it is they’re looking for. (Though, no—Sherlock’s accessing his sensorium, which means Sherlock is plugged into the deck. Sherlock doesn’t do much bouncing around the flat these days.)
“Anyway, they found him, Westie. He was dead. The cops said he’d offed himself, but—well, I dunno. Seems a bit suspicious, don’t it? He finds out something he’s not supposed to know, and bam, he’s gone? I dunno if they got him, or—or if he killed himself before they could get to him.”
“And that’s all you know.”
The kid nods, and wipes at his nose with his sleeve.
“Right. Right, okay. Thanks.”
“Fifteen hundred, yeah? ‘S what the Wig said.”
“Yeah, that’s right.” John fishes in his pocket.
Wait, he hears, inside his head. Get this Westie’s address.
He pauses. “Your friend, the one who died. Where did he live?”
“Pott Street, near the station. Flat 47.”
“Anyone else living there?”
“Yeah. His fiancée.” The kid pauses, seeming to consider what he’s about to say, then his face sets and he looks up. “She’s my sister.”
John.
He’s already paid the kid and got out of there when he hears Sherlock again. He’s almost forgotten that Sherlock’s there, with him, and feels obscurely guilty for having allowed himself to do so. He so often feels that Sherlock is drifting away from him that anything Sherlock is willing to give him—even if it’s just his presence via the rig—seems like it ought to be grabbed and held on to, tight.
He’d like to think of their earlier conversation as something—however painful—to be shored up against the loss, as an indication that maybe Sherlock’s ready to share something with him again, but he’s too honest with himself to believe it wholeheartedly. Sherlock would never have imparted that particular detail about his past life off his own bat.
“Yeah?”
You’re going to check out West’s address?
“I assumed you’d want me to, yes.”
A tiny pause. Yes. Good. Then: Mycroft’s people are following you.
“Aren’t they always?”
Let them.
“Oh,” John says, in surprise. “Um, okay.” He blinks. “Are you going to tell me why the change of heart, or—”
‘SH’ vanishes.
John gets off the Tube at Bethnal Green, and glances up and down the road for cars. No sign of any of Mycroft’s, but then the hulking great black things his people usually favour would be a tad conspicuous in this bit of London. John’s hand darts automatically to the inside of his jacket, and he wishes fervently that he’d brought his fletcher.
It’s a short walk to the Pott Street flats, but John’s conscious of the shadow tailing him before he gets there. He can’t see who it is—not exactly a thriving business area, this, so the lighting’s poor—but from the quick slide of her movements and the way she vanishes into alley-gloom as though embraced by it, he suspects Mycroft’s mirror-eyed spy.
Honestly, he’s got no intention of giving her the slip, even if he’s not quite sure what’s got into Sherlock with the ‘let them’. This just seems a bit daft, really. If he knows she’s tailing him, and she knows he knows—which she must, because whatever else you might say about Mycroft Holmes, he doesn’t employ idiots—then they might as well just have a civilised chat.
Cautiously, he waits for the shadow to melt into darkness, and glances down the side-street where—he’s sure—he saw her—
—and then she’s behind him, moving with a quickness and a silence that makes him wonder briefly whether she isn’t a holographic projection rather than a real person, makes him glance around frantically for her source. But the solidity of her hand at his neck soon puts paid to that illusion. Her fingernails are petrol-blue acrylic, clearly false, and she taps one of them smartly at the base of his throat. He goes still immediately.
The work is top-class—there’s no way you’d know she had implants just from looking—but from the implicit threat and the fact that she’s otherwise unarmed, it’s evident that those oilslick-shiny acrylics conceal deadly blades.
John takes a breath and releases it slowly, his hands half-raised in surrender. “Alright,” he says, and isn’t quite sure why he’s saying it. “Alright.”
After a moment—apparently reassured that he’s not going to try running off—the razorgirl removes her hand.
“I’ve got to give you a message,” she says, and her voice is mild, entirely at odds with her posture and the whole situation, really. She sounds more like a secretary than a trained killer. “For Sherlock.”
John sags back against the wall, shaking his head. “Your boss couldn’t just phone?” he says, weakly.
“As if he’d get an answer.”
“He could’ve phoned me.”
The razorgirl smiles blandly. “I’m just following instructions.”
John rubs at the bridge of his nose. “Well, what is it? The message?”
“Tell Sherlock he needs to come in and see us. Soon.”
“That’s it?”
“He’ll know what you mean.”
And then, just like that, she’s off, darting into an impossibly small space between buildings and disappearing. John stares at the gap where she vanished.
Let them, he remembers, and hadn’t there been a note of urgency in Sherlock’s voice when he said it? Worry, even, maybe?
Suddenly, disconcertingly, he feels exposed, weaponless and alone in the dark street. He glances behind him one more time, and gets moving.
Westie’s fiancée—blonde, pretty, off-the-shelf bright-blue eyes whose whites are red from crying—doesn’t seem that surprised to see him.
“Are you with the police?” she asks, and after a moment John decides on a white lie and nods yes. She didn’t ask if he was one of the police, after all. “I know he didn’t kill himself,” she says. Despite the tear-stained fragility, her mouth is set in a determined line. “It was them.”
“Them? Do you know who your fiancé thought he was being pursued by?”
She shakes her head. “I tried asking him. He told me—he told me he’d already said too much. But someone was after him. I know it.”
John nods, trying to look professional-but-sympathetic. Counterintuitive as it may seem, he doesn’t actually deal with a lot of grieving relatives in his day job. In the army, families weren’t generally on hand to be dealt with, and in the event that something goes wrong at the clinic—well, the kinds of people who frequent the black clinics tend not to tell their mums and dads where they’re going. (And, besides that, something going wrong on John’s operating table is very rare. He’s got his professional pride.)
“You weren’t here when it happened?” he asks.
“No. No, I was working—at the Million. I work behind the bar.” She gives a watery blink. “It was a busy night, I was helping clean up. Finished late. My brother found him.”
John raises his eyebrow—that’s one detail the kid failed to mention—but keeps quiet. “I know this might be upsetting for you,” he says, “but can you show me where he was found?”
She nods, mutely, shoves the door wide, and points to a spot on the pavement.
It’s dark, but—it’s weird. John can’t make out much in the way of bloodstains. Just a couple of dark splotches—nothing like the volume you’d expect if he’d jumped out of a window high enough to cause a fatal head injury. It’s possible that it’s been cleaned up, since, but—well, this isn’t the sort of area that cleanup crews are eager to visit with any kind of regularity. John frowns to himself, then turns back to the girl.
“That’s where he jumped from, right?” he asks, pointing at what he guesses is the correct window. “Or—fell, or—well, let’s not make any assumptions just yet.”
“No,” she says, “the one next to it.” And, oh, of course; the plush toy and pink plastic mini holo-projector on the windowsill are a child’s, and nobody’s mentioned West and his fiancée having kids. It must belong to the neighbouring flat. Sherlock would’ve picked that up—but then, Sherlock’s not here. “I can show you the room,” she goes on, “if you like. They’ve already been round, once, I’ve tidied up a few things, but if it helps…”
“Thanks,” he says. “Yes. Yes, I’m sure it will.”
She shows him into the flat and up the narrow staircase that leads to their bedroom. The place is a tip, the tiny landing cluttered with tangled wire and miscellaneous shoes and obsolete hardware, brightly-coloured microsofts littering the carpet like oversized confetti. It looks just like Sherlock’s half (okay, three-quarters) of the living-room, and that—more than the girl’s tear-reddened eyes, or the awful circumstances of her fiancé’s death—makes John feel a pang of sympathy for her loss.
As she reaches the landing behind him, she frowns. “Did you hear that?” she says.
“Hear what?”
She shrugs. “Probably next door’s kids. They’re up all hours.” She sniffs. “Little shits. I’ll just check the door’s locked. Go ahead.”
John pushes the bedroom door open, gently. It’s dark, and he’s fumbling for the light-switch when he hears a muffled cry from downstairs.
“Are you alright?” he calls, pulse quickening, combat instincts kicking in as he listens intently, tries to figure out who—if anyone—is downstairs with her—
—and that’s the worst mistake he could’ve made, isn’t it, because they’re not just downstairs with her, they’re in here with him, and then there’s a bulky form behind him and a blade at his throat for the second time today. Only, this one isn’t being wielded by a pretty razorgirl, and the threat behind it is far from idle, and the last thing John’s brain comes up with before he loses consciousness is, oh shit.
Chapter 6
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Date: 2012-08-06 04:59 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-08-06 11:33 am (UTC)Hee, thanks! I think I just wanted to have her being incredibly blase while threatening people. ;) Glad you're enjoying it!