Chapter Text
An ordinary case-- that alone should have clued him in. How many stories has he himself started that way, a character stumbling into trouble through a foolish sense of security? An idiotic mistake.
He understands now that his second mistake had been letting John follow his own nose, letting him investigate alone. He must have forgotten that even when a case is a low-paying, low-stakes waste of time, the criminal parties are not excluded from being heavily invested in its outcome.
That night, by the time Sherlock had discovered the blackmailer to be, in fact, his client’s daughter, and engaged in a brief, unengaging verbal joust with her, John had been absent for a good half hour. Knowing John to not be one to miss the dénouement if it can be helped, Sherlock had grown suspicious and headed through the hotel’s kitchen in search of him. He found himself in the alleyway, with the smell of the same generic vegetal unpleasantness he had come to associate with the work-end of any commercial kitchen. As he walked, he had vaguely hoped that John had uncovered in the storage area a smuggling ring, or a prostitution ring, or any kind of ring, really, if it had the potential to un-waste his night.
Instead, he found John lying in a pile of broken-down produce boxes, bloodied and unmoving.
His first response was a quiet kind of panic that went through him with force enough to hollow him out. His second was concern that he had made an error in the case. His third had been to go to him, pulling out his phone as he moved, panic transmuting to dread as he looked for bullet wounds, stab wounds, head wounds. John was bleeding heavily from his side, he could see, the dirty corrugated cardboard under him gone soft with blood.
He had called an ambulance, white noise in his ears, and submitted faithfully to their instructions. His hands were turned red by John. Authorities were on their way; one of the only times in his life this came as a promise and not a threat. John’s hand had been twisted in a way Sherlock couldn't look at long enough to fully comprehend, his face reddened and ruined. He had a pulse.
Now, the hospital, Sherlock waits for him.
---
John is in intensive care. Sherlock is unshaven and recalcitrant. John’s sister has appeared, but hasn’t said a word. They've been sitting across from each other in the hall for decades, seemingly; Sherlock with his legs sprawled in front of him, her with her purse held tightly in her lap. Sherlock is fine with the arrangement-- he’s had his fair share of daggers glared at him in the past, with no ill-effects to his health so far. Small talk (small talk with family members of those one has directly harmed), he believes to be far worse for the constitution.
There are a number of details that sting like a barb when they come to him. The image of John’s right hand, bent sickeningly where it lay on the concrete. John is left-handed. John is left-handed, writes with his left, favours his left in almost every situation. Sherlock knows this, has watched those hands at work countless times (too much of the time), but he needs confirmation, wants to shake him consious and hand him a pencil and just be sure beyond doubt. The thought of being mistaken turns his stomach.
Another difficult thought is how much, and how absurdly, he wishes for John’s company. How much easier it would be with his stability, his humour, his cool head, his occasional hot head. He wants to rail against this with him, wants to work the case late into the night until they find who is responsible. He wants absolution from him. He wants him close.
Sherlock is surprised to find he is entirely uninterested in the medical specifics of John’s condition. If he hears it too clearly, he suspects, if he understands it in detail, it will be unbearable. He feels his eyes glaze over as the doctor speaks. Get to the point. Can I take him home, yes or no.
Eventually, they’re given permission to move from the hall to the bedside. Sherlock thinks about the sister, to take a break from thinking about John. He knows she’s aching for a drink. He understands; he’s aching for something harder. He entertains the thought of bonding over shared histories of substance abuse, but suspects semi-recovered drug user is not a trait that would endear him to her at this point. They have another thing in common, although he can’t imagine a bedside discussion of their sexual preferences being received well, either.
Another similarity: they both blame him.
Another: they both love John.
---
He holds onto clues from the alleyway with something close to guilt; that anything registered at all is one for the CV. Able to solve crime while administering critical first aid to someone I have overwhelming and complicated feelings towards.
Deliberate injury of John’s right hand: inconclusive. To focus on the hand suggests they know John’s field. To not know which hand is dominant suggests poor research. Could be coincidental.
A bloody footprint: he can’t be blamed for noticing that. He could be blamed for photographing it, possibly, but John was being cared for by that point. Besides, John wouldn’t stand for improper documentation of evidence.
--
The sister snaps in the carpark. Sherlock is smoking alone, needing to clear out the smell of hospital disinfectant in his mouth with something more useful. She is returning from her car when she sees him, crossing the grey expanse and pushing him hard enough to almost lose his balance on the concrete ledge where he had been perched.
Sherlock says nothing, just drops down to stand in front of her, flicking his cigarette away. She seems unsettled by this, wavers in her anger.
“Do you speak?” she asks, after a long moment of silence.
“I do,” Sherlock says quietly. She and John could be twins, almost, the sister harder in some ways, softer in others. He had seen a photo, once, tacked above John’s desk, but the resemblance is more pronounced in person. “What’s your name?”
“Harry,” she says. “I won’t say I’m surprised you don’t know that.”
“John hasn’t spoken of you,” Sherlock says, but that isn’t entirely true. John has spoken of her, but not to Sherlock, not directly. The name Harry has come up, once or twice, and is filed away under open cases in his mind. It would be a mistake to let on to her how avidly he collects John’s minutiae, facts gleaned from overheard phone conversations, text messages he glimpses on the screen on of his phone. It would be a mistake to let John know that, too, even though he must suspect.
“I doubt I come up very often. I know your name.” Sherlock nods, shakes out a new cigarette silently. “A.C. Smith.”
Sherlock pauses momentarily, cupping the flame of his lighter with his hand, then flips it closed, takes a long drag. “Sherlock Holmes, actually.”
Harry quirks an eyebrow, pulls a black elastic of her wrist, rakes her hair into a ponytail, businesslike. “I want you to fuck off. Leave John alone.”
“Sorry,” Sherlock says through a lungful of smoke. “Not happening.” Harry straightens, Sherlock can see in her eyes she thinks she’s pulling an ace from her sleeve. “If you think knowing my pen name is viable dirt on me, you're mistaken.”
She pauses, folds her arms. A loose strand of hair falls out of her ponytail. “I searched online, got nothing. No one else has made the connection. That seems like dirt to me.”
“I’ll rephrase,” Sherlock says quietly, flicks ash into the gutter. “Whatever that would do to my career, my private life-- that’s not nearly enough to make me leave him here.”
“It’s your fault--”
“I know.” Sherlock cuts her off. She looks enough like him to complicate things. “I also know he would be furious at the both of us if he heard that.”
Harry looks away and Sherlock studies her, tries to break that face apart, find pieces of John in it.
“Give me one of those,” she says after a long pause, and Sherlock shakes a cigarette loose for her. She takes it wordlessly, looks at him as if she’s expecting him to light it for her-- to his surprise, he does, without a second thought.
---
Five months, since John arrived. Five months to start radically reassessing certain fundamental assumptions about oneself. Assumptions such as, I work best alone. Such as, I have little romantic inclination.
Such as, my life is a greyed-out void without using, and nothing can change that.
---
The answer, banal as it is, comes to him that night. Hours spent on the moulded plastic chairs in the hallway, re-exiled from John's softly-breathing side by Harry, seemed to cause enough discomfort to allow him to transcend the fog of worry and self-recrimination that had taken hold of him since the incident. A cramp-inflicted meditation, a quasi-transcendent clearing of the mind? No, of course, he overstates the achievement: the answer of John's attacker so obvious as to be embarrassing. Five more minutes more on the scene and he would have remembered to tie up the last loose end, the daughter's shy, periphery-dwelling boyfriend, whom he now realises to be the only possible deliverer of the blackmail messages, and his third mistake.
As he calls it in he feels a kind of relief, not due to pride in his shoddy work, but of being able to think only of John, to be able to now peer through the window at him with the single-mindedness that he deserves. It's another kind of meditation, a provisional mantra he repeats to himself: heal, heal, heal.