Work Text:
“Oh, him?” Lestrade looks over towards where the DI John’s never seen before is staring at the blood pool that’s spread itself across the tarmac. “He’s new.”
“He transferred from another unit because he tried to kill himself and they thought it would be awkward,” Sally explains promptly, pulling on her plastic gloves with a slap of latex against skin and not a little relish.
“But luckily it won’t be now, because that’s confidential,” John deadpans.
She shrugs. “Got to know what you’re getting into.” She curls her lip: “In this game if you’ve cracked once you’ll crack again.”
The new policeman is young, John observes, not particularly tall or built or beefy, in a neat dark blue suit and very pale under the early morning streetlight, like he hasn’t been outside in a while. A slight irregularity of skin near his hairline betrays reconstructive surgery.
Jump from a height then, John deduces automatically.
The man turns and starts heading back towards the main group by the lead vehicle. He walks heavily on a stick.
Well, it’d be one hell of a high-jump that didn’t break a bone in the distal limb, but John feels his skin crawling, a distant ache in his thigh pushing into his consciousness for all it isn’t real.
The man looks up, catching John staring.
Sherlock’s ability to keep his gaze as fixed and unembarrassed as a snake’s in such moments is one of his most sociopathic characteristics and not one John has taught himself to share (unlike being rude to strangers [if only by proxy], considering it normal to have human intestines in the bath and finding the weight of oxygen molecules interesting).
He feels himself flushing. He would look away but to his amazement the man doesn’t, and keeps the shared gaze with a kind of blankness that John recognises from long-past A&E jobs dealing with overdoses.
Or himself, in the mirror, up until only a few months ago. He hadn’t quite gone there – therapy, Harry, anger - a lot kept the walls up round him, but he’d seen beyond to the edges of that place.
“I’m DI Sam Tyler,” the man says, coming closer, holding out the hand without the cane in it. There’s a bitterness in his voice but he’s businesslike, smiling without warmth as he continues. “Who the fuck are you and why are you inside this scene of crime tape?”
“Um,” John manages. “I’m with Sherlock Holmes.”
“Which is what exactly? A firm of lawyers?”
“Um,” John tries again. The pain in this man’s eyes is utterly fascinating – is that Sherlock talking in his head, or is he just better at admitting such a thing for knowing Sherlock? - and he doesn’t really have words for this anyway because Sherlock is always there to...
“Jumping backwards is more effective, preferably into water,” says a coat-swirling presence by way of greeting to both of them as he brushes through the tape and towards the body.
John closes his eyes. “That’s Sherlock Holmes.”
“Look, Sam,” Lestrade has evidently been watching matters unfold. “There’s this arrangement – he’s a consulting detective that we use on occasions where...”
“Do you want some coffee?” John offers, out of who-the-fuck-knows where. “I could explain it to you.”
Sam Tyler looks at him, and John’s smug to see that he’s surprised, that a kind of astonished life has entered his eyes.
“You’re going to be told in about two seconds that I like peculiar and difficult people,” John continues, acknowledging Sally with a nod as she comes up. “So why not?”
Tyler cocks his head to one side, and John’s skin ripples again when he sees the darkness in those eyes. “A leap into the unknown?” he says, sarcastically, deliberately.
“OK, right,” Lestrade begins, stepping between them.
“John!” Sherlock yells from down the street. “Find the nearest chemist and find out who were the last five women they gave the morning-after pill to.”
“But it’s a man!” Lestrade says, just as John, for the millionth time points out: “They are not going to tell me that!”
“I didn’t ask you to ask them!” Sherlock yells back.
John turns, running a hand over his face with a moan, and finds Tyler is gone.
For a moment he feels the strangest sense of unease and then, noticing the walking stick protruding from the door of the nearest squad car, he takes a deep breath and goes forward.
“Trust me,” he says, leaning into the car, hand held out. “This will be interesting.”
He doesn’t know what combination of gesture of word does it, but after studying him again for a long moment, Tyler stands up, awkwardly, and silently, painfully, follows him down the long terraced street towards the shops.