Work Text:
Murder (obvious).
Anderson insists on calling it an industrial accident. Accident? With marks like those on the wrists? (Twine: plastic threads. Wrapped around the wrists fourteen times. Snipped off after death with nail clippers, inexpertly disposed of. Will probably find them in a bin nearby.) With the remains of a boot print (industrial, steel-toed, dust and remains from a large flat-pack warehouse, filled primarily with plywood) on the bottom of the trousers, and there, along the left thigh? Did he fail to notice the fingerprint left on the side of the drill that will most assuredly not match those of the murder victim nor anyone who works in the plant? Outrageous! Appalling! And this is what passes for forensic expertise at Scotland Yard? He should never have been allowed to leave primary school. I’ve seen his forensic reports. Still hasn’t learned where to include/not include an apostrophe. Rubbish! He has the gall to disparage me to Lestrade and try to keep me off a crime scene, but he thinks this is an industrial accident? (Clearly, idiots can be fooled by just about anyone.)
Can’t even look at him. “Since you’re clearly both blind and deaf, play dumb as well.” He starts to protest but I tune him out. Wave a hand in his direction, dismiss him. Lestrade will take care of it. Kneel: the rib twinges with a reasonable but not completely debilitating amount of pain. That’s good. Debilitating pain is even more distracting than Anderson’s ponderously plodding thought processes. (I do miss John’s careful ministrations though, which are no longer regularly required. Temptation: get injured in order to be so tenderly cared for again. Pathetic. Ridiculous. But his hands. Those heady moments of closeness. Foreign and awkward and marvelous all at once. Impossible to ever feel used to it.) Slide the phone out of the victim’s pocket; read the last three texts. Lestrade is ordering Anderson off. He’s useless. More than useless; he gets in my way.
The body is surrounded by curls of wood, which are still lightly falling from the machines above like snowflakes. The lathes above had to be stopped quickly, and the refuse from their labours had covered the floor with bits of wood. It smells like a cedar forest, pried open and lightly burned.
Interesting the way the drill corkscrewed through the brain; left an interesting pattern of bone. Broken in every direction, in seemingly arbitrary ways, fractured in wavy lines. Broken like glass, like ice. So many variables inside a living skull. Force plus a slow and steady counter-clockwise spin of uniformly twisted metal creates a unique signature on unsteady human bone. Near-infinite possibilities at each millimetre. And the impact on the brain is spectacular; pulled apart into plaits, draped out of the broken skull like silk. Beautiful. Could gather that brain into a bouquet and put it in a vase to admire it. At least until it started to smell. (More experimentation required: could procure another head from Bart’s, certainly. Drill bits in a box under the stairs. Corkscrew? In the drawer. John’s? Mine? Don’t remember. Does it matter? Might manage to steal industrial drill bit instead; preferable. Place the head in a vice for stability? Or just wedge it between the microwave and the toaster? That would do the trick.)
(John. He might not appreciate another head on the kitchen worktop.)
Glance over at him; he’s looks pale and shocked, distressed. Look back at the body, tilt head, imagine seeing it through John’s eyes, John’s humane, gentle, caring eyes; an awkward death, certainly. Unpleasant. Painful. Frightening. Is that how John sees it? He’s seen enough of the insides of men, he’s not squeamish. Is it empathy? Does he imagine what it would have felt like, himself in this man’s place, a wide corkscrew moving slowly toward him, the minutes between feeling it pierce the skin on his forehead and the point when his brain extrudes through fractures in his skull?
(Wait. No. Stop. Deep breath.)
Don’t much like imagining John as a victim of murder. Makes a bit of panic rise in the back of my throat. Blame Moriarty for that: burn the heart out of me, indeed. If it weren’t for him I might not have noticed, at least, not quite so soon. Caring isn’t a victory, not at all; my feelings put John Watson in far more danger than anything else does. More than the illegal Sig, more than flying bullets and rooftop chases and hired assassins. (If it were me, caught in such a position, the pending victim, hands tied behind my back with Ikea brand twine: an oddly fascinating train of thought. Can think of seven separate ways to escape before the drill bit moved an inch.) But no. Won’t imagine it with John. Not his brain, not his skull. This bloody caring lark.
Watch him: he’s rubbing his forehead, his mouth creased and small. Distaste? Discomfort? Sympathy. (Most likely.) He shakes his head, rocks on his heels. His heart (so selectively) on his sleeve. Makes something twist in my stomach. As much as I don’t understand it, it’s something I love about John. His capacity for sympathy extends out all over the place, touches everyone. Grabby cephalopod of concern.
(Does he find things about me to empathize with? What things? Sally calling me “freak”? My lack of friends but overabundance of enemies? What?)
John’s eyes on the plaits of twisted brain cascading out of that beautifully broken skull. (Just one more head in the fridge. Molly will procure it for me. John will cope.)
“John?”
He looks up, looks at me. “Uh,” he starts, folding his arms behind his back. “Cause of death is pretty obvious, doubt you need me to tell you he got his head drilled through.”
Smile. It doesn’t bother me when John states the obvious. It should, by all rights, but it doesn’t. I could argue that he does it with a sense of critical self-awareness, like a bit of black humour; I do so love black humour at a crime scene. (It’s so rare, and there are so few with the constitution to indulge.) But it’s not that.
Something about his presence unburies a hidden part of me in these moments, I can’t put my finger it. Well, I can guess: his paradoxical nature. The way he is coherently made up of exact opposites. His voice (strong, kind but ruthless, the voice of a man who’s killed (more than once) for all the right reasons, a voice tinged by a complex morality I will never have the skill or knowledge to entirely unravel or understand) against this backdrop (a body, a murder, evidence, a problem to be solved), his steady hands. His squared fingernails (always clean). His blunt force patience. The broadness of his shoulders as compared to his trim waist. (I don’t need to mention the muscles in his pelvis again, do I? Let’s leave the vulgar lustful thoughts out of it, for now; for now, we’re in public, it’s too much.)
The words he uses to describe me, the tingle I feel in the base of my spine when he looks at me with naked admiration. He makes me bleed emotion. It oozes out of me, messy, uncomfortable, something to be cleaned up, disposed of, healed. Treated. I should hate it, but I don’t. He states the obvious in that voice of his, the same one he uses to tell me I’m amazing, I’m extraordinary, the same one that shouts in the night to tune to his nightmares and asks me if I want a cup of tea in the mornings. His voice: the seat of all his dimensions, all his sharp edges and his gentleness. The part of him that, right now, in front of Lestrade and Anderson and the nameless faces of the Met, reaches out and caresses me, from his throat to my tympanic membranes. An intimate touch. (But it’s not, it’s really not.)
“There are marks on his wrists,” John says, his eyes flicking over toward Anderson, who is standing several metres away now with his stupid arms crossed in front of his stupid chest. (What does Sally see in him?) John observes what Anderson does not. Of course he does. Smile even more. John goes on, pointing. “He was tied up, he struggled.”
I nod at him. His eyes on me. (I remember his lips against mine; twice. Barely, but I remember.) I can see the lift my approval gives him; it’s subtle, but present. His back a tiny bit straighter, like he’s on the parade square and his superior officer has turned his eyes on him. Prepared to impress. (What is he thinking? Why can’t I tell, why can’t I read it on his open face?) “Estimated time of death?” My voice has taken a softer tone, there’s an intimacy there. The others don’t seem to notice it, but I think John does. A change. Slight. Not deliberate. Revealing.
He crouches down, looks hard at the body again. He touches a hand, runs a latex-covered finger across flesh. “Not more than an hour ago, I’d say.” He looks up at me, confident in his answer, eyes clear. He rises and assumes his vague, newly-civilian take on at ease. I smile at him, a genuine smile, not a calculated one, almost inadvertently. He smiles back. That’s how it is between us now. More genuine? More affectionate? I don’t know. Something like that. (I kissed him and he let me. Twice. I curled up against him, my fingers on the elastic of his shorts, his hipbone hard under my hands, and he let me do that, too.) Watch his face: eyes so uncomplicated, no internal struggle, no awkwardness. Is that defiant, deliberate ignorance of what he must know (or think he knows) about me, or is it casual acceptance? A trade off for a life that keeps him feeling human? Hard to know. He’s smiling at me. Affection. What’s going on in that head of his? Drilling him open wouldn’t give me the answer, would it?
(Oh, very funny.)
It’s been just over a week. One week, and almost nothing has changed. Except for a bit of extra warmth from him, and, presumably from me. As if we have some kind of quiet understanding. But we don’t. I don’t understand at all. He is completely open, yet completely closed. Tantalising. A man made of paradoxes. Impossible, but here, in the flesh. A Penrose man.
“Well?” Lestrade looks a little helpless, his eyebrows raised. I can almost see the question mark over his head. (How would they manage without me?)
I spot a bin out of the corner of my eye and walk toward it. “The bootprints on the body are from a work boot, the sort of work boot worn by industrial employees, the kind with a steel toe. These particular work boots were covered with the remains of dust, glue, plywood flatpack, bits of card. Who does flatpacked glued plywood? Ikea, obviously.” Peer into the bin. (Of course: there it is. Knew it would be. Rounded cuts dug into it from nail clippers. Burst of pride. That was a bit of a shot in the dark from the shape of the remaining threads of plastic twine on the floor.) Lift the bin and bring it back with me toward the body, where Lestrade is looking over at Anderson, and John is staring at me, looking curious, thoughtful (why?), patient, confident. If only I could open up his mind and read it.
“This twine,” peer into the bin, then display it to Lestrade and co., “it’s the kind they use at Ikea to tie boxes together before they deliver them to their customers. This particular twine was used to tie that man’s hands and feet together, and to tie him to that post so that the drill would pierce his skull. You can see the blood on it; it belongs to the victim. So: you’re looking for a warehouse worker from probably the Wembley Ikea who was temporarily missing from his post after, let’s say,” glance at my watch, “one o’clock in the afternoon, but back before three.” Pull out a brush and dust the drill; the fingerprint there is suddenly blatantly obvious. “This is his fingerprint. You probably have it on file. This isn’t his first crime; given how terrible he is at hiding his tracks, it’s probably not the first time you’ve caught him.”
“Run that print,” Lestrade says, and Anderson, looking venomous, complies. “And why would he murder a man and try to make it look like an industrial accident?” Lestrade asks.
“Try being the operative word.” That was meant for Anderson (of course.) He rolls his eyes. “Easy,” I glance at John, who has that fascinated look on his face, that would be unbelieving except that he knows exactly what to expect by now. A breath. Deliver the punchline. “Our victim spent his lunch hour with a lady friend, a lady friend with a husband, or a boyfriend, it’s unclear. If I had to guess, I’d say husband.” Crouch, open up the right hand pocket of the victim’s trousers so that Lestrade can see its contents. “See: condoms, he comes prepared.” Smirk. Pull the victim’s phone from my own pocket; hand it to Lestrade. “Last three texts on his phone are suggestive in nature, both of a sexual liaison with a woman and of the necessity of secrecy. The woman, obviously, has a jealous husband prone to violence. That jealous husband is our Ikea worker. He’ll finish his shift in an hour.”
“Amazing,” John says. It feels no less good to hear him say it this time than it did the first. “Extraordinary.” He grins and walks toward me. Lestrade is barking orders; Anderson has finished with the fingerprint and is skulking out. The coroner is removing the body. “Well done,” John says, then reaches up and puts his hands on my shoulders.
For a moment I think he’s going to hug me, or pull me forward and kiss me, and while both of those outcomes would be most welcome from John, they both equally frighten me. (Why? Uncertainty, inexperience? The myriad rules involved in these social interactions is dizzying. Every direction looks like a misstep. What do I need to do to ensure John’s good feelings? So easy to do/say the wrong thing and disappoint, frustrate, or (possibly worse) amuse. I may feel a bit of apprehension. I may be marginally afraid.) He sees what must read as distress on my face and his expression changes. “You’ve got--” he starts, then brushes at my shoulders. Wood chips, curls of wood shavings, sawdust. “You were standing in the worst of it. Lean down a little, let me get it out of your hair.”
I bow forward, which is opportune, since I can feel myself blushing a little. These strange relationship dances, where nothing is certain and there are no obvious facts, make me regress into my adolescent awkwardness. I would take a moment to feel some resentment about that, but is John running his fingers through my hair, which feels far better than it has any right to. I close my eyes to keep the dust out of them, to focus on the feeling of his fingers against me. He shakes the wood shavings out of my fringe, gently, from the top of my head, ruffles his fingers through the back, slides them through stray curls at the sides. He runs his index finger around the curve of my left ear, than the right. Runs his hand across the back of my neck. Then starts picking pieces out of my hair gently one by one, untangling them from strands and blowing on his fingers to make the whorls of wood flutter to the ground. I choke back the hum that wants to edge out from my throat and subdue it into a sigh.
“There,” he says, smoothing over my fringe again. I open my eyes. The look on his face; perfectly pleasant, perfectly normal, but there’s something else there. Affection, surely; is it friendly affection? I can’t tell. (Amusement? He’s not laughing, though there’s a slight smile on his face. Tenderness? It’s a fine line.) Pride in my work, still the traces of awe that he gets when he watches me. Is there desire there? (For me?) Nothing overt, nothing inappropriate. I don’t know. What would I do if I saw it, recognized it? (run/hide/collapse/burst into flame/cry/cheer/laugh/triumph/push him up against the wall and have my way with him?) If only I could examine the inside of his brain as easily as one from Bart’s, as easily as the one the coroner is pushing into a body bag. Too many unanswered questions.
I could just ask, I suppose. But that seems like cheating.