Chapter Text
It’s only temporary, John tells himself. Just until he figures out what to do next.
Working nights suits him. He’s never minded odd hours – medical school and then the service rid him of any squeamishness on that front – and, anyway, he hasn’t slept through the night once since he got back from Afghanistan.
It’s too quiet here. Even in a city like London, there are too many silences through which memories can creep, insinuating themselves into dreams and shaking him awake.
Just as he’s beginning to feel that he can’t spend another night struggling to breathe in the blank dark, he runs into an old acquaintance from Barts who mentions he’s just heard about a position that would be perfect for an insomniac doctor accustomed to high-pressure situations. “Might be a bit rough,” Mike warns, and John has to tamp down on a smile because Mike has no idea.
Which is how John winds up working the night-shift at a high secure psychiatric hospital on the outskirts of London. As stopgaps go, it’s a good choice for him— within reason.
The work is challenging enough that John doesn’t get too restless, and he no longer has to spend his nights lying awake in his narrow bed, memorizing the shapes of the shadows that cross his bedroom ceiling. And now, when he does wake up reaching for his gun, his little flat isn’t quite so still, and he can ease himself back to sleep to the sounds of the city living around him.
It should be lonely, but John needs that distance right now. It’s easier this way. He knows it’s not a permanent solution, but it feels good to just absent himself like this, if only for a little while.
*
Holmes’s arrest and the subsequent hospital order have been the talk of the staff and patients alike for weeks. Debate rages about where he’ll be sent – day room betting odds are on Broadmoor – and when the news comes that Holmes is coming here, there’s an uproar. They haven’t had a celebrity patient in years, and to get someone as high-profile as Sherlock Holmes is considered quite a coup. John doesn’t quite understand their enthusiasm.
Of course he knows who Sherlock Holmes is. He reads the papers, watches telly. Even living on the fringes of the daylight world as he does, it would be nearly impossible to avoid at least a peripheral awareness of the Reichenbach Hero and his precipitous fall from grace. But following the story in the news is one thing; getting excited about Holmes’s commitment is quite another.
John is working an extra shift to cover for a sick colleague the day Holmes is transferred in from the admission ward, so he’s there to see Holmes arrive – him and the rest of the ward. From the crowd that’s gathered, you’d think it was a visit from Kate and Wills. Even old Mr. Braithwaite, who never leaves his room if he can help it, has emerged to witness the arrival of the infamous Sherlock Holmes.
The man who is ushered down the hall looks very little like the self-assured criminal mastermind John’s seen pictured in all the papers. He has the same haughty profile, to be sure, but he looks drawn, his expressionless face almost white. His bearing is upright, but his limbs are loose, offering no resistance.
Ed and Seamus, two of the toughest members of the security staff, walk alongside him, but Holmes seems utterly indifferent to their presence, walking between them as if he were on his own. As they pass the nurses station, there’s a moment, just briefly, when Holmes turns his head to meet John’s eyes. The directness of that gaze is a jolt deep in the pit of John’s stomach. He’s stitched men back together under heavy shelling and disarmed fifteen-stone paranoid schizophrenics without batting an eye, but for some reason the blank look Holmes gives him knocks the wind out of him. It’s as if the man’s been wiped clean, leaving nothing there at all.
John turns his head to watch – he’s not the only one, everyone in the corridor is staring – as Holmes and his escort pass through the double doors at the end of the hall and disappear.
*
As for the man himself, John doesn’t see him again, nor does he expect to. Unless Holmes gets into some kind of scrape one evening, John isn’t likely to see him at all.
John’s role here is largely as a contingency, so that there’s someone on hand in case emergencies flare up in the middle of the night. Despite the reputation of high secure facilities, it’s hardly bedlam here, and the graveyard shift tends to be fairly uneventful, in any case. John was a little concerned that Holmes’s arrival would cause a stir, but so far it’s been quiet. A little too quiet, really, for John’s taste, but, then, that’s meant to be a good thing.
On slow nights, John invents things for himself to do: he chats to the nurses on duty or organizes his desk drawers – anything to avoid working through his endless backlog of paperwork. Often he winds up playing cards with a couple of the insomniac patients, or else he just walks the halls. In the clear, cool quiet of the empty corridors, the only sound is that of his cane on the tiled floor, and for a moment or two, John can imagine he’s entirely alone, that anything could happen. Walking the ward at night is often more restful than his actual rest, a little waking dream of its own.
Which is why, when he turns down a little-used corridor early one pale grey morning and sees a lean figure standing by the window, he isn’t sure, at first, if the man real. But the smell of cigarette smoke is real, and the cool, damp draft blowing down the hall is real, too, and so he says, “How’d you manage to get it open without tripping the alarm?”
As soon as he’s said it, John catches his mistake. The window itself isn’t open at all. One of the individual panes of glass has been popped out of the frame, leaving just enough room for the dark-haired man to ash his cigarette between the wire grating that covers the outside of the window. “Oh, that’s good – it’s the frame that’s wired up to the alarm, not the individual panes of glass. Brilliant.”
The dark head tilts but doesn’t turn, and John realizes Holmes is watching his reflection in the glass. Then he lifts the cigarette to his lips and takes a long, defiant drag, and John can’t help smiling.
The man’s shirtsleeves have been rolled up to his elbows, so John can see the pale circle of a nicotine patch on his forearm. Nearly all the patients use them, since the smoking ban, nicotine being for many of them a cherished, long-standing form of self-medication. “Patch not cutting it for you?”
Holmes cuts his eyes to the side as if to say, Obviously, and blows a long column of smoke from between his lips, though he aims it conscientiously toward the opening in the window.
John knows he should reprimand him for smoking here, and, for that matter, for being out of bed at this hour. He knows he should page Danny and have Holmes escorted back to his room. He even knows, abstractly, that he should be frightened of this man, who’s killed at least one person in cold blood and engineered dozens of other crimes. But John isn’t frightened. Really, all he feels is impressed that Holmes has managed to get this far without alerting security. So instead of reporting him, he comes up slowly alongside the other man and leans on the windowsill beside him, propping his cane against the wall.
He knows Holmes is looking at him out of the corner of his eye, sizing him up, but he doesn’t let his gaze waver from the listless rain breaking over the roofs of the east wing. Nor does he say what he’s sure countless others have already said to him: How’d you do it, then, frame that actor for all your crimes? Instead, he talks about the weather.
“Supposed to rain all week,” he says idly. “Good thing, too. It’s been quite dry. We could do with a bit of rain.”
He can feel Holmes shift next to him, an incremental reorientation of his focus.
“I suppose a lot of people find it dreary,” he goes on. “The rain, I mean. Can’t beat England for dismal weather. But, you know, that’s what I missed the most, the overcast skies and the way the air manages to be chill and humid at once. Well,” he adds wryly, “that, and food that wasn’t boiled in the bag.”
In the window, John can see that Holmes is staring at him full-on now, head turned toward him, and he can’t remember ever having been so thoroughly observed. He feels it all the way down to his knees, though by the time John turns to meet his gaze, Holmes is already looking away, his expression studiously blank. With careful calm, he picks a fiber from his tongue with his thumb and ring finger and examines it carefully before flicking it out the window.
“Well,” John says, shoving off from the windowsill, “I’d best be off.” He adjusts his grip on his cane, distributing his weight more comfortably. “But before I go—”
Holmes raises his eyebrows expectantly.
“I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you for your lighter.”
Holmes blows out a disgusted breath but renders up the lighter, dropping it in John’s outstretched hand. “Thanks,” he says genially, tucking it into his pocket. “And don’t forget to put that windowpane back when you’re finished, will you.”
He makes it about ten paces, his cane loud in the silent corridor, before he stops himself. When he turns around, Sherlock Holmes is staring after him, a frown creasing his brow.
“You’ve got about five minutes before Danny comes around on checks,” he says, although he has the feeling that Holmes already knows. And then he turns to go in earnest.
*
When his shift ends, John goes home and looks up everything he can find about Sherlock Holmes. He reads every article Google turns up, combs YouTube for news footage, even scours Holmes’s own website in his effort to piece together the narrative of the Reichenbach Hero’s decline and fall.
It begins with a consulting detective, promoting his (admittedly extraordinary) services via a modest website, brought to the attention of the national media by a string of high-profile cases, including the return of that notorious Turner painting that earned him his nickname. He didn’t court the attention, refusing to give interviews, trying to shield his face from the cameras’ invasive gaze, but his reticence only stoked the flames of public opinion. The buzz built around him, culminating in the daring heist at Tower Hill by ‘James Moriarty’, the subsequent court case, and Richard Brook’s revelation that he’d been hired by Holmes to stage all of Moriarty’s crimes. Shortly after that awful exposé ran in The Sun, Holmes was discovered in his flat by the police, nearly dead from a drug overdose, Richard Brook’s corpse on the floor next to him. Holmes was arrested for Brook’s murder, as well as all the crimes he’d previously tried to pin on ‘Moriarty’. The tabloids had a field day – ‘ATTEMPTED SUICIDE OF FAKE GENIUS,’ the headlines read – and most of the press had already decided that the gunpowder residue on Holmes’s shirtfront was proof positive of his guilt, but before a jury had a chance to decide, the judge approved a hospital order for Holmes and the trial was over before it’d even begun.
There was quite an uproar. The official story was that he was being institutionalized because of his suicide attempt, but the papers made murky intimations about strings being pulled in the highest levels of government to accommodate some kind of dark mental health history. John finds very little in the way of real fact, just lots of wild speculation and hearsay.
But whatever behind-the-scenes dealings led to Holmes being committed rather than tried, the end result is the same: the world’s only consulting detective is left smoking silently in the middle of the night in a high secure psychiatric facility.