Chapter Text
He awoke to sunlight pouring in from his only window. It warmed him, reminded him of heat in Afghanistan. He blinked, looking around flat in confusion. He was expecting to find himself in the barracks to which he had grown so accustomed. He never woke from nightmares in Afghanistan. He lived them, and that was enough. Some of the other soldiers would wake gasping or jolt upright with thoughts of what they had seen, but never John. He had somehow been able to push those dreams away, knowing they needed him to be strong.
In the months since his return, he had tried everything to keep the nightmares at bay, hoping he could awake as gently in London as he had in Afghanistan. Naively, he thought it would comfort him; but now that he expected nightmares, waking without them was much more frightening. He draped an arm over his eyes, blocking out the light and felt the all too familiar frustration of his new life press in on him. He couldn’t win for losing.
When he did move his arm, he saw a blinking light on the bedside table. He picked up his phone and watched the indicator switch on and off for a few beats. He finally unlocked the screen. A voicemail.
“Hello John, this is Ella. I usually leave my secretary to make calls, but I wanted to be the one to tell you... In light of what happened, of what I saw, I took the liberty of leaving a prescription for you at the pharmacy you have listed with your papers. It’s something to help with your anxiety and your episodes. If you’d care to reach me, you have my number, if not, I’ll see you tomorrow and we can discuss it then.” There was a jostling of the receiver before she clicked it down and the line went dead.
He pulled the phone back and stared at it in shock. Then he played the message again.
“Hello John, this is Ella...”
and again.
“...in light of what happened, of what I saw...”
and again.
“...something to help with your anxiety and your episodes...”
He took a slow steadying breath and rubbed his face, like it would somehow erase the part of John that needed medication to be normal. One bullet. Just one bullet and his shoulder, his leg, his manhood, and his mind were all broken. He wondered what one more bullet could accomplish.
John found himself standing in the middle of the room. His gun was held under his right arm, the empty magazine in his right hand, and ten rounds were laid in a pile on his left palm. He picked through them and rolled one bullet, The Bullet, between his thumb and forefinger.
He secured it in the magazine.
John’s phone buzzed against the tabletop, startling him into dropping the ammunition on the floor.
“Dammit.”
The alarm he had set the night before was buzzing incessantly. Call Mike. Call Mike. Call Mike.
He slid the indicator over, turned off the alarm, and opened his contact list. There were only four numbers. Clara, Ella’s Office, Harry, and now, Mike.
There was a moment, a fleeting moment, when John considered just ignoring the alarm and not calling Mike and not finding out about Sherlock and not meeting him at the flat... but as quickly as those thoughts tumbled through his brain, they vanished. Not finding out about Sherlock was simply not going to happen. He had too many questions that a bullet could not answer.
“Hello?”
“Hey, Mike... it’s John.”
“John!” Mike exclaimed, “Did you already see the flat? How was it?”
John blinked a few times, “No. No, I wanted to talk to you.” He cleared his throat, not sure how to present this, “I wanted to ask you a few things about... about Sherlock.”
“Oh, got under your skin then, did he? He’s good at that,” Mike said with a chuckle.
“Yeah. Um... can I come by? I just have a few questions.” John’s face pinched as he bent down to the floor, but he managed to keep his voice light and calm.
“Of course you can! I have class at four and a few papers, but I’m mostly in the office during the mid-day. We could grab a bite to eat if we time it right. What did you want to know anyway? It might not be worth the trip.”
John was crouched awkwardly, phone wedged between his ear and shoulder, one hand holding the desk for support and the other gathering up the ammo from the floor. “Anything you know, really. Who he is, where he comes from, how you met him, that kind of thing. Nothing too serious... I just want to know what I can about him.”
Mike’s chair creaked when he sat back, John could hear it on his end of the line. “I met him a few years ago. We’ve become friendly, but I wouldn’t call us chums or anything like that. No, he mostly keeps to himself, orders Molly around a bit too much in my opinion, and works like a dog. If you want to come in, feel free... but I can’t promise I’d be much help, I don’t really know more than that.”
“Anything, anything is better than going there with nothing on him.”
John could practically hear Mike trying to work out the meaning behind that. “Ya’know he didn’t mean to offend you. He’s just--”
“Well, he did offend me!” John burst out before realizing he was yelling into the phone. He continued on as gently as he could, trying to convince himself that Ella was wrong about needing medication for his outbursts, “...and I’m not going to let that happen again. Not unprepared.” He began popping the ammo back into the magazine with violent, unerring precision.
There was a few beats of silence before Mike finally spoke, “You really did change over there, didn’t you?”
John looked at the cartridges of bullets in his hand. “I can be there in half an hour.”
Mike swallowed audibly over the phone, “Yeah. Sure. Whenever you like.”
John clicked the phone off with not so much as a goodbye thrown Mike’s way. He hastily finished reloading the bullets into the gun and threw it back in the drawer with a thud. His drill sergeant would have been mortified. That thought gave John a pause to smile as he went about his morning routine: shower, shave, breakfast, Bart’s.
Mike’s office was a thoroughly ramshackle room that more resembled a university dorm than a professor’s office. There were bags of crisps and half drunk diet sodas interspersed with empty cans of regular soda. Papers were piled in tower like stacks that Mike assured him had ‘a system’ where nothing was lost.
He was sitting with his hands folded over his stomach for a few seconds, John felt like he was being sized up and didn’t much appreciate it. “Well, go on,” Mike finally said leaning forward a bit, “what do you want to know.”
John swallowed then, realizing that maybe putting Mike on the spot wasn’t as normal as he had convinced himself the night before. “When did he come here?”
“A couple years back, September, I think. He came in requesting use of the labs.”
“Is that standard? To just give him permission like that?”
Mike adjusted, “Ah, no... he was convincing though. He answered all my questions amicably and presented me recommendations from his professors at Cambridge and Oxford. He was nice, though looking back, I think he was putting on a bit. ”
“And that’s all it takes?”
“I don’t want this to turn you off to him... but we,” Mike adjusted in his seat, “we received a letter. Two days before he ever got in touch with us. It was from the government. It said it was a matter of national security that Sherlock Holmes be given full access when he requested it, so we let him.”
“So he works for the government?” John asked, a little taken aback, his own work for the government had landed him with a crap pension, not letters of recommendation.
“Not so much as I can tell... he usually is working on things for the yard, or sometimes for himself. Did you see the website? Our labs stunk of cigarettes for weeks after he brought in all those ash samples.”
John wasn’t going to admit that he’d scoured it over, twice. Instead he said, with a bit of confusion, “...but the letter from the government, it was real?”
“Signed by the Prime Minister, himself.”
“The Prime Minister?” John said gobsmacked.
Mike gave a nod.
“Of Britain?” His eyebrows were ascending to his hairline.
Mike’s smile broadened.
“You’re sure it’s real?” His voice was pitched high in shock.
“Well we didn’t think it was at first. We’d hung it in the lounge for a laugh but then we got a call too...” Mike’s voice dropped pitch as though he expected someone was listening in, “Said we should let him use the labs. Said they’d make it difficult for us ‘round here if we didn’t.”
John leaned forward, putting his elbows to his knees and leaning at the waist. He knew how Mike loved to tell a good story.
“I’d just been put in charge of the labs at the time. It was a good pay raise, better hours, that kind of thing so I was glad to take it. Then, I got this call, direct to my line and...” Mike struggled for a second to find the words, “It was, well, it was all a bit eerie. Said I had a lot to lose if I didn’t comply, and not just the job. They’d known that I’d bought a car with the extra money coming in, and that I had been looking for places closer to Bart’s... said they’d hate for Janey or Hugo to get caught up in this...” He had a picture of his wife and dog on the desk by his phone. “So, I let Sherlock do as he pleased.”
“So they threatened you? And you just gave in?” John said with a little too much military sharpness. He thought, if put in that same position that he would die first, but then, John had nothing to lose.
“I didn’t have much of a choice, did I?” Mike defensively whined. “I couldn’t bear it if I was just being stubborn and got them into some kind of trouble. Don’t get me wrong, I was worried about letting him in here at first, but it’s been years and he hasn’t so much as broken a beaker.”
“Did you ever ask him about it? About how he knows them?”
“I tried once... but he wasn’t too keen on the subject. I said, ‘How’d you manage a letter from the PM?’ and he said, all offended, ‘I didn’t,’ so I said, ‘Who did?’, and he said, ‘The most dangerous person I know.’ Then I heard him giving a lashing to someone on the phone about ten minutes after that. Told him to stay out of his affairs and he didn’t need any help from him, and all that... it was weird, but,” Mike shrugged with a sigh, “that’s Sherlock. You’ll see.”
“So then what?”
“So then nothing. He just started showing up at all hours. He mostly hangs around the mortuary and the labs. He spends a fair amount of time with Molly but that’s it. No one else really ever interacts with him. He trusts me though. I don’t know if he likes me all that much, but he listens at least, which is more than I can say for the others.”
John sat back with his shoulders squared. “So he’s friends with the Prime Minister and an amateur chemist with an oversized ego.”
Mike smirked, “That about sums him up, yeah.”
John puzzled for a second, “...but what about his hobbies? I mean he has to do something more than work in the lab, right?”
“Beats me. As far as I can tell he’s either here or on a case. He’s never mentioned anything else, just the violin, I guess?”
John suddenly imagined Sherlock sat down with a violin against his chin, his fingers cutting fresh calluses against taut string, and a well worn bow wheedling out a tune.
“What about that other stuff you said?” John tried desperately to sound casual. He wasn’t sure why the question popped into his head, but it was there; and as he tried to push away the sound of a violin floating over the buzz of London streets, Mike responded.
“What other stuff?”
John shifted in his chair, not exactly knowing how to phrase the question, “You said he was gay... I mean... how do you know?”
Mike laughed a little, “Well I don’t know. I just get the impression... he’s dodgy around Molly and I’ve never heard him say anything about any women... not that I go fishing for details or anything. He’s just... well, I dunno, he just seems it is all. He dresses well, he’s tidy so far as I can tell. What did you think when you met him?”
John ignored that bit, “Well would you live with him if you had the chance?”
“I would,” Mike said honestly. “I’ve seen Sherlock just about everyday for the last two years. I think the both of us spend more time in this building than in either of our homes, and I’m no worse off because of it. I’ll probably still see him more than you do.”
John gave a lopsided smile that hid a bubble of disappointment. He didn’t want to have an invisible flatmate, he wanted to know everything there was to know about him. Mike was trying to be helpful, reassuring, maybe even comforting with the idea that Sherlock wouldn’t be around that much... but John didn’t want the mystery of him to linger, he wanted to figure him out, just like Sherlock had figured John.
“I told Janey about running into you yesterday,” Mike said, interrupting John’s thoughts. “She said she’d love to have you over sometime.”
John’s eyes flickered to the picture on the desk. Janey was pretty in an unassuming, quiet way... and if she’d have Mike, then maybe John would have a chance at her. The reptilian brain perked up at the thought of this, but John kept his tone light and even, and tried to push the flashing image of what she’d look like naked away.
“Probably wants the dirt on me from back in the day!” Mike’s chair squeaked again as he leaned back, this time lost in his memories.
John had more than few embarrassing stories about Mike. “Like the time you ate all the pot brownies after finals?” John smirked.
Mike let out a single booming laugh, “HA! Oh god, that was a night!”
John nodded in agreement, a touch of a smile pulling at his eyes. He hoped he looked like someone who was having a good time.
“Well anyway, you just you remember I have stories on you too,” he said with a still thoroughly amused grin, “and I’m sure Sherlock would lend an ear if you two end up together!”
John suddenly sobered, a coldness reaching his eyes, “If we what?”
“You know,” Mike’s tried to keep his smile up, “as flatmates. I have more than a few memories of you from school too.” John continued to look at Mike with suspicion. “Really, that’s all I meant. Not that you two would...”
John glanced back down at the picture of Mike’s wife. To Mike, he looked like he was envying their domestic bliss; but in all actuality, John was imagining that he was strong enough to pin her against a wall, her legs over his forearms as he rammed into her. Violently.
John pinched the bridge of his nose with a shaking hand. He hadn’t felt a single stir of sexuality in months, and now it was rearing it’s head over a woman he had no interest in other than to teach Mike a lesson about just how straight John really was. Not good. Not even a bit good. Mike asked him something about a headache, and John responded weakly in the affirmative, not really listening to his friend.
Mike coughed awkwardly, trying to get John’s attention again, “Well, anyway... I hope I was a help.”
“Yes. Yes, anything is better than nothing.” He smiled up at his friend a little pinched, almost worried that he would be able to see the dirty thoughts.
Mike collected his teaching satchel and John stood up, leaning on the cane for support. Once they were out of his office and Mike was locking the door he said, “I can offer one bit of advice concerning Sherlock Holmes.” Mike pocketed his key and adjusted the strap on his shoulder. “Don’t let him get to you.”
Easier said than done. "Thanks, I'll do my best." He clapped Mike on the shoulder and shook his hand in salutations.
There were a few hours to kill between leaving Mike's office and arriving at 221B. He had time to kill... and going back to his place was not an option if he wanted to only kill the time. He considered going round the chemists for his medication. The brutal image of Janey getting fucked raw for revenge was reason enough for him to reconsider the need for drugs.
A fantasy flashed unbidden through his mind. He was pressing her against the tile wall in the Stamford ensuite. You have to be quiet, he breathed into her ear as he pressed himself between her thighs. His hand clamped over her mouth in an attempt to mute her moaning. If they weren’t careful, Mike would hear them rutting like animals against the bathroom wall. It turned John’s stomach unpleasantly.
He had never considered sleeping with someones wife before. Well, maybe his sister’s; and Oh God, that thought did nothing to make John feel better about himself in that instant. He wasn’t even sure of what had brought it up in him. Ella would say something about it being a manifestation of the frustration he felt toward Mike being happy, successful, married, etc., which had turned into psychotic fantasies of his wife. Control fantasies. Dangerous fantasies. Fantasies of things John had been confident about when he was at Bart’s all those years before.
John just thought he was going mad from sexual frustration and that even Janey would be a fine participant if she were willing... and in the darkest corner of his mind he thought he'd have her even if she was not. ...and it was in those thoughts that he was scared. Those desperate savage thoughts. It scared him more than his own suicide. Hell, it justified it. Maybe he should get the medication... or maybe he should just get a leg over with the next person he encountered.
Unrelated though John was convinced the topics were, he began thinking about Sherlock. It gave him an outlet when he puzzled over the man.
John was intelligent. He was a doctor, a soldier, a strategist, and graduated both secondary and university with high marks. John liked mysteries and puzzled, he even considered himself well read. This quandary, this Sherlock Quandary, however had John stumped.
Sherlock had him sized up and pinned down within minutes of meeting. John had spent the better part of two days contemplating him and came up only with wisps of who the man was. He had attended Oxford and Cambridge, dropped out to pursue a career with the Yard that somehow involved the Bart's labs, which he had access to only through a connection to the PM. The facts were substantial, but the how and why simply eluded him.
He was at the entryway of Bart’s when he was given reason to pause. A sign was casually beckoning him down a corridor he had walked years before. There was a single arrow placed under the word ‘Mortuary’. He mostly hangs around the mortuary... He spends a fair amount of time with Molly... Molly. Mortuary. Answers. Right.