Fic for ruyu: Roman Holiday 1/2
Jun. 10th, 2011 06:11 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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holmesticeTitle: Roman Holiday
Recipient:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
ruyu
Author:flecalicious
Characters/Pairings: Sherlock/John
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: ~12,800
Warnings: Non-explicit descriptions of gore.
Notes: Thank you so much to my betas for a hell of a lot of hand-holding and cheerleading throughout this monster. They were amazing.
Summary: “I came to Rome to solve a case, John, and that’s what I’m doing,” Sherlock said. “You have to trust me.” There’s a missing princess on the streets of Rome and Sherlock and John are romantically out of their depth.
Roman Holiday
The heat when they got off the plane hit like a wave.
It wasn’t so much of a shock to John, not after the desert, and this time he was in a thin cotton t-shirt instead of his uniform, but he had to wonder how Sherlock could sit there in his expensive long-sleeved shirt and not look a degree over 25°C. Runway to airport lounge to taxi to hotel was a zig-zag of air conditioning and sweltering heat, and the landscape was passing by like a kaleidoscope, warped by the heat-haze.
“Uh,” John said when they were out of the taxi and standing at the bottom of the Spanish Steps, staring upwards to the word HOTEL etched against the sky in large metal letters. The stone seemed impossibly white in the afternoon sun, the sky clear and arched with the sound of tourists, and it suddenly hit John that yes, yes they really were in Rome.
Sherlock didn’t even seem to notice, just started to climb the 138 steps. He left the suitcases—both of them—with John, who hoped sincerely that Sherlock would have broken out into a shirt-ruining sweat by the time he reached the top.
“And this is definitely all on expenses, yeah?”
Sherlock’s laptop chimed serenely from its new home on the corner of the desk (dark mahogany, paired with an ornate lamp and a vase of fresh white roses); it was already loading Google, Sherlock standing over it with one hand in his pocket and the other tapping out a search term—he typed quicker with one hand than John did with both—and for a horrible moment it looked like he might say no.
“They asked if we wanted the penthouse,” he replied, still hadn’t looked up from a page of Google results that were all in Italian, “but I told them it wasn’t necessary. Classic suite is far less likely to attract attention.”
Even if it was spectacular John was rather under the impression that the hotel had built itself on the concept of attention-seeking, treading as it was the finest of lines between ornate and overdone. He decided not to point out that Sherlock had a sitting room, an office and a walk-in wardrobe as part of the subtle option.
Instead he crossed to the wide window, to the view of Rome that spread out from the hilltop like a corona. There were street vendors in the piazza below, a trickle of tourists clustering around the prints and jewellery. Radio masts stood tall in the distance and the rounded domes of churches gleamed not far away, white stone caught in the sun. It felt almost strange, to be somewhere that lay so neatly between the buzz of London and the heat of Afghanistan, like his two separate lives were meshing themselves together. He thought again about the case, about the picture of the girl he’d tucked into his wallet when Sherlock has cast it aside, no longer needed, and with it he cleared his throat and turned back.
“So,” John began. “Do I have time to settle in or are we getting to work?” In truth he was still shaking off the cramped feeling of the plane and the thought of finally starting on the case, of finding a lost princess in amongst the streets of Rome, had shaken off the fatigue of travel like evaporating water.
Sherlock’s answering hmm? could barely be called inquisitive. He didn’t look up, just murmured something that wasn’t English, and John knew the Google search was getting serious when Sherlock started using both hands to type.
“I’m going out,” he said thirty or so seconds later, as though John had never really spoken at all, and three more taps punctuated the sentence before Sherlock shut the laptop suddenly. He drew his phone from his pocket, checked it and slid it away again, grabbed the hotel room key from the desk.
“Want me to come with?” John asked. Sherlock shook his head and for a moment they stood opposite each other, the tension they’d been trying to ignore welling up in the silence. John thought about all the things he’d planned to say before they’d left, before the case had interrupted everything, and they were on the tip of his tongue before Sherlock spoke, before the silence fractured.
“You should unpack,” he said, and with that he disappeared from the hotel room. If they’d been in London John was quite sure his coat would have been swirling behind him.
“Right,”John had time to say before the door shut. Then, to the empty room: “Well then.”
It was strange to be in Rome and yet not be on holiday, John decided, especially when the reason he was there in the first place was tied up with his flatmate and said flatmate had buggered off; it left him with nothing to do once he’d unpacked his suitcase into the walk-in wardrobe, into the dresser with gold inlay decorating the wood. He tried texting Sherlock, anything you need me to do?, couldn’t help irritation at the lack of reply, and for a while he explored the hotel room, kept shaking his head at the ornate furniture, the plasma televisions (yes, more than one), at the bathrooms that were both entirely made of marble. There was one locked door, but Sherlock has taken his own key and as far as John was concerned he could unpack his own bloody luggage, so he left it well alone.
Twenty minutes were badly spent trying to hack into Sherlock’s laptop, another twenty staring out again at the view, which was aesthetically more pleasing but felt far less like revenge for being left on his own. A little plaque advertising the hotel wifi mocked him from the wall. It was a kind of limbo, stuck between the what-ifs of the case, of what Sherlock might need at a moment’s notice, and his own boredom (his own thoughts, half-crafted things he needed to say). As the afternoon began to cool John thought fuck it and went for his own room key.
“Rubbish,” he muttered in the lift to no one in particular, looking at his phone. Still no messages, and he’d been under the impression that this was a case they were on together, but apparently not. It had been him trying to go over it all on the plane, trying to get Sherlock to pay attention instead of translating the conversations of the other passengers for John, who had badly feigned disinterest (her new boyfriend already hates her, they’re looking for the right moment to slip into the bathroom). Sherlock had barely looked at the notes, had made non-committal noises to everything John had said, and aside from being slightly worrying it had definitely been really, really annoying. Feared was clutching mildly at his chest as he thought it over, vague panic that things had changed and couldn’t be fixed.
Coupled with being cast adrift so suddenly it left John tense, balanced on an edge of frustration. He could put up with the unease his own flat, in his own city, but here it was harder to ignore, thrown into relief by how unfamiliar everything else was, and it felt too like rather a waste; it was hard to appreciate Italian culture when you were in some kind of romantic limbo, neither here nor there.
Exploring, he decided as he stepped into the lobby, as he caught glimpses of Rome beyond the revolving doors. Exploring would take his mind off of it.
He thought about not wandering too far, kept checking his phone to see if the signal was holding up against the close-knit streets and buildings. Ambling across the Piazza di Spagna brought him to a Dolce & Gabanna boutique, windows full of mannequins dressed like Sherlock, and beyond that more designer brands and trendy wine bars buried inside traditional architecture. Yes, John thought, definitely the sort of place a European princess would choose to go missing.
He had a fair sense of direction, felt it enough to let himself follow the maze of streets. They were a mixture of tourists and the Roman population, richly diverse, and he got caught up enough in watching them that it took him a couple of seconds to realise when his phone buzzed in his pocket.
“You’d better not have gone on a shopping spree,” he said, “and ditched me for Dolce and Gabanna,” and it felt good how swiftly the quip left his tongue.
“Are you still at the hotel?” Sherlock asked. Traffic buzzed in the background against rapid Italian. “How quickly can you get to Via dei Condotti?”
“Considering I’ve gone for a walk because you buggered off, I’ve no idea,” John replied, but even as he did he was looking up, looking to see if Rome had stuck street names to the corner of buildings like its English cousin. “I don’t know, I’m on Via Mario de’ Fiori,” he said, tried not to cringe at the vast chasm of proficiency between Sherlock’s Italian and his own.
“Oh, well then just turn left,” and Sherlock hung up.
It was wider than the street he’d been in, more shops and tourists, and John navigated around them on the still-narrow pavement, trying to see past the hundreds of faces for one that was familiar. He’d barely noticed the side street until a hand closed over his wrist and tugged, and he could feel his combat instincts kicking against it before he realised it was Sherlock standing in front of him, a pair of aviator sunglasses perched on his nose. If his skin hadn’t been so pale (more so in the strength of the Italian sun, against the tanned masses walking to and fro) he would have looked positively homegrown.
What he definitely did look was unfathomably handsome, a point rammed home by a cluster of teenagers who giggled and stared as they passed, and John tried to ignore the fact that he thoroughly agreed with whatever comments their Italian translated into (that he could remember what Sherlock felt like).
“Ah,” he said instead, shook his wrist free from Sherlock’s grip and pointed to the sunglasses. “So you did go shopping.”
“A necessity,” Sherlock answered, tone breezy, though as he turned John could see the word GUCCI etched onto the side of the frames. He took them off as he started down the little winding street, tucked them into the V of his shirt (a few more open buttons since this morning, and John knew that meant that he’d noticed). “I thought you might be hungry,” Sherlock threw behind him, and then they were stopping outside an open door, a chalkboard covered in foreign phrases attached to the stone beside it, although John could certainly see the words pasta and pizza for they're meaning.
Inside it was darker, red decor and shady lamps, and catering for the beginning of the rush hour, tables by now half-full. Sherlock had an amicable-sounding exchange with the waiter, followed him to a table near the back and against the wall. When they sat down John realised it was the best place in the restaurant to really see people, everyone from the front door to the kitchen, and he wondered if it was a habit or necessity.
“You going to eat?” John asked, but even as the waiter set the menus down in front of them Sherlock shook his head, eyes tilting from one side of the room to the other. It felt rather odd after not seeing him all day, felt strange to go from tense to suddenly sat across from each other in a restaurant, and John cleared his throat and looked down at the menu, resolutely ignored it when Sherlock began to play with his sunglasses. He tried to remember snatches of what he’d heard, wondered if it would be worth throwing them into Google Translate just to see what the Italian population thought of Sherlock. “What did you do all day?” he settled on instead, and Sherlock stopped watching the couple arguing quietly nearby and focused on John.
“I had some contacts that needed renewing.” He broke a bread stick in half and started eating, and John chalked it up as a win on the sliding scale of Sherlock’s health, who smiled and added, “Rome’s missed me.”
That wasn’t surprising in itself—perhaps Rome was keenly jealous of London, of all the unsolved crimes that might have been closed if Sherlock had been born further west—but he wasn’t elaborating, just watching John with the vague curiosity he reserved for people who actually ate meals. There was a moment of silence, of the chatter of other people against it as John tried and failed to pay attention to the menu, and it was different to the silence of home, of existing in the same space day after day and being entirely comfortable in it. Relocating to a foreign country had highlighted the change, shifted them to uneven ground.
“Listen,” he found himself saying, folding the menu down onto the table. His heartbeat picked up speed as he thought about it, about bringing it all back up again. “I wanted to talk about—”
A sound which could confidently be labelled as delighted flared nearby and next thing Sherlock was obscured by thick dark hair and a tangle of arms. John just pursed his lips and watched, bemused, as the woman eventually drew back, though her hand was still resting on Sherlock’s shoulder as they spoke, so quickly that John could barely differentiate one word from the next. Caro, e' quasi una vita che non ci sentiamo! She swooped down again and kissed both of his cheeks, and Sherlock smiled. John frowned.
“Sì, Caterina. Sto bene, grazie, e tu?” and then, finally, “The restaurant looks wonderful.”
“Ah, I see we are speaking in English,” she—Caterina, it seemed—said, and as she looked properly at John the resemblance began to seep in. High cheekbones, the shape of the face and chin. Caterina’s eyes were darker, a deep blue, but the same shape. John felt a little of the tension ease from his shoulders, chose not to dwell on where it had come from. “Your friend, lui non parla italiano?”
“Un po 'di Dari, but no, his Italian’s limited.”
John coughed, said, “Tashakor,” with obvious sarcasm, and Sherlock laughed. Of course the git understood some of his bloody Dari too.
“Well, ignoring the state of your Italiano, you’re very welcome,” Caterina told him. She took a notebook from the pocket of her trousersuit, brandished a small pen over it. “Presumo che non sei mangia,” she said; Sherlock nodded, so she looked at John, added, “You’re lucky, I don’t usually take the orders.”
“So,” John said after Caterina had disappeared, once he was watching Sherlock with his eyebrows raised in silent question. Sherlock’s face twisted with the ghost of annoyance, like John was being deliberately over-curious.
“My cousin,” he said. “On my mother’s side. This is her restaurant,” he added, hand unfurling in the air as though to gesture, and John could see the sarcasm for what it was, for where it had come from (too many unspoken things).
“Yes, thank you, I guessed that.” The tension rose up, knitting into the air, and Sherlock fished his phone out and started jabbing at it snappishly. John sighed; with the expulsion of air from his lungs the spark of his temper had time to cool, enough to remind himself that arguing wasn’t going to help, that in the restaurant it would definitely be really embarrassing. “I didn’t know you had any Italian—” he began.
“I don’t.” Sherlock didn’t look up from his phone. “Caterina’s mother is Italian, not my uncle.”
“Oh,” John replied, olive branch effectively snapped in half.
It did settle a little as they sat, as John looked around the restaurant and Sherlock wrote and read texts. It must have been about the case, John decided, about whatever Sherlock had spent the day doing that didn’t involve paying €235 for a pair of sunglasses, and as he ate it felt a little better, a little less like things had changed.
“So,” he began. “Am I settled in enough yet?”
“Hmm?”
“To start working on the case. Is—” he checked his watch, “—six hours enough time to get settled in? Come on Sherlock,” John said, leant forward in his chair. “I can’t speak Italian but I can still work on this with you. Why else did you bring me?”
Finally Sherlock looked up from phone, fingers stilling on the buttons. He’d obviously been half listening but his brain had caught up; he looked very faintly bewildered, like John was being obtuse. “It didn’t make sense to drag you around while I reestablished contacts,” he said eventually. “And even apart from how useless your Italian is I thought you’d prefer to experience the culture. You seemed quite—tense. And you would have hated shopping.”
It was all delivered in such a matter-of-fact tone that at first the insult and the confession didn’t quite register, but then John’s shoulders were beginning to shake and he was putting his cutlery down, hand over his mouth to contain his laughter, and even as Sherlock looked even more confused he was trying not to smile.
“So you did go shopping.”
“I’m in Rome,” Sherlock replied. “Of course I did.”
“Mmm, well,” John said, though he was smiling. “My point is that you’re being an idiot. I want to help. Being left alone obviously made everything worse, not better.” He didn’t mention that Rome could never hold the wonder that it might once have done, that the history and beauty no longer meant anything in the same way that London had become flat and dull after Afghanistan. Cities were nothing now without the secret wars, without the darkness hidden beneath the lights (without Sherlock). “I’m not here to look at beautiful things.”
They sobered a little, laughter fading; Sherlock considered him for a moment and John tried to look as earnest as possible (either that or call him an idiot again, and that usually operated on a quota of once every few weeks).
“Like I said,” Sherlock began, finally slipping his phone back into his pocket, “Reestablishing contacts. There’s a man we’ll go and see tomorrow, he’ll have what we need—”
It might not be everything—might not be a resolution to the things (more important, perhaps, than the work) that they had yet to address—but it was a return to something familiar, at least, to the roles they had first set out for each other (colleague, friend), and John grasped onto it tightly; for now, it was all he had.
Sherlock stayed afterwards to speak to Caterina—the harmony of their Italian followed John from the door and into the street—and he only got slightly lost before he found the Spanish Steps. In the fading evening there were still crowds of tourists, a multitude of languages pressing in on him as he climbed from bottom to top, and this time he wasn’t checking his phone every five seconds. Rome was burnished gold by a setting sun and the hotel air conditioning didn’t feel like so much of a shock after the slightly cooler evening temperature.
Sherlock’s netbook was, it turned out, in John’s hand luggage, but as Sherlock had now given him the password he was less inclined to make an issue out of it; instead he logged onto his blog with the hotel wifi, flipped the V to the little plaque on the wall as he did. A few new comments, several from Harry, and out of habit John checked The Science of Deduction. He avoided the forums, had developed an unhelpful habit (unhealthy, Harry would have said, and John would have laughed without humour) of checking old threads, of ones that consisted entirely of posts from Sherlock. Pair of trainers belonging to Carl Powers (1978-1989). Raoul de Santos, the house-boy, botox. The Bruce-Partington plans. Please collect. The Pool. Midnight.
He closed the tab before the mouse had managed to hover over Forums, tried instead to see if the password for the netbook would work on the laptop too. It didn’t, obviously, but it had been an incredibly long shot in the first place, and John moved into his room, found that he had his own desk under the large window. He started the same blog post three times and gave up, saved the draft, began to randomly trawl the internet. He felt a little guilty watching videos of cats doing stupid things when it was Rome on the other side of the door instead of Baker Street, but whatever. He just wanted to get to work on things now, wanted to repair what they’d been sent there to fix (what they hadn’t). He still had the photograph of Anna in his wallet.
He must have fallen asleep with the door ajar, because John woke to find that it was dark save for slats of yellow light from the street lamps outside; the netbook had long ago fallen into hibernation. His neck was stiff from sleeping across the desk and he rolled his shoulders, tried to pinpoint what had woken him up.
“Sherlock?”
Clunks and taps from the sitting room stilled for a moment, then morphed into footsteps approaching his door. The hinges squeaked a little and John opened his eyes, squinted into the dark.
“It’s alright John, go back to sleep,” the silhouette said, and Sherlock’s voice was soft and kind, something more familiar than most people would have guessed. “Preferably not at the desk.”
John rubbed at his eyes, pushed the chair back. His watch said 2:13 as he slid it off, set it on the bedside table, and Sherlock stood at the door for a moment as John unzipped his suitcase. John could feel him watching (or maybe it was that he wanted him to be, because in the faint light John couldn’t quite tell) and his hand stilled at the hem of his t-shirt, bunched the materials in his fingers. He hesitated, breathed in and out, said, “Sherlock.”
There was quiet, just the sound of their lungs working to keep them alive, and further away laughter drifting down from another room. Time expanded, kept going, and Sherlock didn’t reply, just tightened his grip on the door handle. Perhaps it was enough, perhaps it wasn’t, but John drew his t-shirt up over his head, folded it neatly, set it aside. His hands rested at the waistband of his jeans, fingers curled into the belt loops. Even now the air was warm, enough to remind him that this wasn’t home, wasn’t where things had stopped-started, and it was hard to know if that was better or worse.
“I’m going back to sleep,” he said, didn’t know if he meant it. Sherlock didn’t let go of the door handle, though the rustle of his shirt implied movement, and then John remembered the scar on his bare shoulder, that Sherlock had yet to see it. His hand drifted upwards, but it felt too late and John was too tired, too disjointed to care.
“Goodnight,” Sherlock replied, and there were almost too many seconds between the word and the moment he moved, disappeared into the sitting room to become faint sounds; the opening of the laptop, the click of the lamp.
The square might have looked wide if it had been empty; as it was it was filled with stalls, each topped with a white parasol that kept their proprietors in the shade, and Sherlock led John through them with purpose, past stalls overflowing with flowers and fruits and vegetables.
Leading from the square there was a side street, then another until they stood in one that was narrow and straight, filled with light only because it was midday and the sun hung directly overhead; two men sat playing chess on an upturned crate with pomodori stamped on the side and they didn’t acknowledge Sherlock as he swept past into the open shop, the doorway surrounded by postcard stands.
John nodded to them and followed, just in time to see Sherlock brush past the cashier and through the door at the back, the beaded curtain jangling as he did. The girl looked after him with her mouth wide open, then to John as if to say did you see that?, and he could only smile apologetically before going after Sherlock, and her jaw dropped even further.
Sherlock had walked right through to the open back door and the courtyard beyond, already conversing with the man sitting at a little round bistro table. He was smoking a cigarette and listening to Sherlock speak, and his expression rather reminded John of Lestrade. Sherlock nodded to John as he joined them, il mio collega, then a pause as he looked between them, and John felt rather like a player in a tennis match. The man’s eyes flicked to him, stayed for a moment and narrowed, and then he exhaled, smoke curling from between his lips before he stubbed the cigarette out in the ash tray.
“Grazie” he said, and it sounded weary even as he was getting up, beckoning them back towards the shop.
The cashier was standing in the doorway between the shop floor and the back room as they came back in, looking unsure, and the man nodded and shooed her away with one hand, va tutto bene. In a cabinet between stacks of cellophane-wrapped postcards he withdrew a folder, handed it to Sherlock, who didn’t say thank you before he started to rifle through it.
“Look,” Sherlock said to John, handed him a photograph, and John just about had time to prepare himself before he was looking at a body, a young man lying face up on a nondescript pavement. “Pascal Guardini. One knife wound straight through a ballistic vest.”
The young man looked faintly surprised, had fallen like a puppet whose strings had been abruptly cut. He was still wearing the bulletproof vest, subtly stained. John looked between the photograph and Sherlock, then between the photograph and the other man, who had folded his arms and was leaning against the shelves, all full of crookedly stacked tourist trinkets. “So...” he began, then had to think about what it was he intended to say. He turned back to Sherlock. “What’s this got to do with Princess Anna disappearing?”
“Military,” the other man said—Sherlock didn’t seem to have heard either of them—and John turned, said, “Pardon?”
“You’re a military man.” He pointed, smiled. “I can tell.”
“Uh, yes.” John replied. “Retired, though. Sort of.”
“Ah, same, same. Carabinieri,” he said, pointing to himself. “ROS. Or I was, once. Now,” and he gestured to the back room of the shop. “I turisti. They’re almost worse.”
John smiled a little, half-politeness and half-understanding. “I can imagine.”
“It’s nice to get the occasional visit,” he added, and even if he hadn’t nodded in his direction John would have known he meant Sherlock. “He has a habit of making things interesting.”
Sherlock was balancing the folder in one arm, flicking through the pages and obviously not listening, and John was looking at the lines of his profile, of the delineation of his beautiful nose and mouth as he murmured things over to himself.
“Yeah,” John said. “He does that.”
“He was a security guard at a galleria,” Sherlock said once they were in the taxi (and this at last was a familiar feeling, even as the streets they were driving through were so incredibly unknown). “Bled to death after he’d been stabbed. Only once, but it was straight through the heart. They never found the murderer, of course.”
“Of course,” John murmured. Sherlock was staring out into the street, the blur of tourists-natives-tourists, didn’t register the sarcasm. “I still don’t see what this has to do with the Princess.”
Sherlock glanced at him and then away again, the only sign that he’d heard at all. “Someone found him in a street nearby. He was almost empty by then.”
“Poor bloke.”
Sherlock just rolled his eyes. Perhaps if John hadn’t been playing the night before over and over in his head he might have said something—perhaps, even, if he’d had a few seconds longer—but the taxi began to slow, stopped, and Sherlock opened the door and leapt out, looked back in only to say, “I haven’t got any cash.”
Yes, paying for the taxi; that was very, very familiar.
After he’d unfolded the Euros he followed Sherlock across the street, took the pedestrian crossing where Sherlock had run out into the road without looking. The gallery sat behind wrought iron gates, resting amongst large trees and flowers, the promise of long green lawns glimpsed beyond them. Sherlock was already arguing with the security guard when John caught up with him, and he could hear that word again, Carabinieri, and something more familiar, Polizia.
“Sherlock, we can just pay if we have to go in,” he muttered, tried to smile at the security guard, who snapped his arm upwards as though he was tempted to punch someone and said “Vaffanculo!”
Sherlock was as close to glowering at someone who wasn’t Anderson as John had ever seen him. “He really is unspeakably rude,” he said—John presumed it was to him and not about him—and John murmured something along the lines of you probably deserved it before managing to actually pay and get them inside.
“You’d be bloody lost without me,” he said, checking the depletion of their Euros, but Sherlock had already walked away.
“So, Princess Anna gets kidnapped from the embassy,” John began. Half of his attention was focused on the plaque in front of the Rubens, on the chunk of Helvetica that claimed he was the genius of the European Baroque; the other was on Sherlock somewhere to his left, looking out of the gallery window. “Her sister sees the whole thing and raises the alarm, but they don’t find anything. And then this,” he said, gesturing to the gallery around them, to the security guard nearby. “What’s the connection?”
“Repetition, John,” Sherlock drawled, pausing in front of The Deposition. “You know how I feel about it.”
“You’ve barely looked at the notes since we got this case,” John reminded him. “You’re always going on about details and now you can’t be bothered to check? And you still haven’t told me why we’re looking into this security guard. What’s going on—?”
He trailed off; looked, finally, away from the painting to find that Sherlock was staring resolutely forwards, as though appreciating art was suddenly the most interesting use he could find for his time. Tourists moved around them, muttered in multiple languages, probably about how they were starting to block the views of the Rubens, and Sherlock’s mouth pressed into a thin line before he set his hands in his pockets and began to walk away at a leisurely pace. He glanced over his shoulder as he did and John followed, fell into step beside him as they wandered past the rows of paintings.
“I came to Rome to solve a case, John, and that’s what I’m doing,” Sherlock said. “You have to trust me.”
It was like something tugging at the inside of his chest, like something had hooked inside his heart and started pulling. “Of course I trust you,” he said, because he did, with his life (and perhaps with other things, the ones in his chest). “I’d have to, to follow you into half of the trouble you get us into.”
Sherlock smiled, the kind that creased the corners of his eyes, and the pulling in John’s chest increased like some kind of equilibrium had to be maintained, a ratio of Sherlock’s happiness to John’s heartbeat. “So,” he said. “Trust me when I tell you that investigating this murder will prove infinitely helpful to Princess Anna.”
They stood next to each, tourists moving around them, and then Sherlock drew his hand from his pocket, for the briefest moment linked his own fingers with John’s as they slipped from one gallery to another. It was a sudden positive amongst two days of negative signals, and as they clasped fingers John was quite sure that his heart would never slow down again.
Birds were beginning to make themselves known by the time they left the gallery (time in which John had prevented several arguments between Sherlock and the security guards but hadn’t been able to stop him from picking several locks), but instead of heading back to the main road as John had expected Sherlock swerved away, down the gentle slope of the hill and in between the trees.
The lawns were a little less green close up, patches of sun-browned grass kicking up puffs of dust, dehydrated earth that rose with the kick of their heels. A fountain was visible not far off, the glare of sunshine off the surface and the lilt of the water, and people were stretched out on the grass, taking in the evening sun. Sherlock stopped abruptly, knelt down on the grass and then lay down, and John was left to stare down at him and wonder if he cared at all that his £100 shirt might get grass stains.
“What are you doing?”
“Oh fuck,” Sherlock said mildly, threw an arm across his eyes. “I left my sunglasses at the hotel.”
John thought for a moment, decided that hovering over Sherlock wasn’t going to be any help at all and lay down beside him, though a little more carefully, a little slower. Sherlock’s arm twitched fractionally, perhaps so he could see, and when John had settled Sherlock turned his head. “Alright?”
“Fine,” John said. It was mostly true but the pain was negligible, the way it had always been since he’d met Sherlock. He was making a considerable effort not to remember that they’d lain like this before, other times and places. He could see Sherlock better in the sunlight, even if right now he felt further away. “Any particular reason why we’re sunbathing?”
“Pascal Guardini wandered out of the range of the gallery CCTV seventeen minutes before he died,” Sherlock began instead. “The gardens are locked at night in the winter so there were no tourists, probably not even drunk ones unless they had enough hand-eye coordination to scale the railings. Somehow he unlocked the gate whilst he was bleeding to death and intoxicated, but all the eyewitnesses said he’d obviously been crawling down the street when they found him a few minutes later. The police made no conclusions, of course.” He sighed, the kind of dramatic exhale that he favoured when berating the Yard’s finest.
“It must be tiring to look down on the police force the world over,” John quipped, confidence slowly rises after the gallery and now this, and Sherlock’s sigh turned into a laugh.
“Mmm.”
“So.”
“So. Two previous warnings for drinking at work and leaving his post, and both times with a colleague called Orazio Mazullo. The third time he did it he was murdered.”
“What,” John replied, squinted against the sunlight as it continued to lower itself towards the horizon. “So—did the police not interview the colleague? The one he was always drunk with.”
“Of course they did. He had an alibi, obviously, from his wife. Dani Szekely.” Sherlock reached forward and pulled at John’s hair; when his hand came away there was a blade of grass caught in his fingers. “The three of them were childhood friends, apparently. Guardini got Mazullo the job at the gallery.”
“You think Mazullo killed him.” John said, didn’t even bother making it a question.
“No, I know Mazullo killed him.” Sherlock’s voice had grown quieter. He blew the blade of grass from the ends of his fingers and smiled, the one he reserved for cases that allowed him to be horrifically clever.
“Alright, alright,” John said. “Don’t get all egotistical over it,” but he was still smiling. Their conversation trailed off, left them with the buzz of other people enjoying the weather (and probably not talking about murder). He planned the sentence in head, how do you know he did it then?, was intending to say it until he opened his mouth and said instead, “We should talk, you know.”
Sherlock’s eyes stuttered closed, a double-blink, and he twisted to lie on his side, arm pillowed beneath his head. The smile was gone, replaced with a vague frown like he was trying to work something out and couldn’t, not quite. “Why? We never needed to talk before.”
That was the problem, John thought. “It will help,” he said instead, tried to sound as earnest as he felt, wasn’t sure it had worked. “It’s—not exactly been conducive to working conditions.”
The frown slipped for a moment back into a smile, a smaller one, then faded. “Not now,” Sherlock said. “Not with a case on. I can’t.”
John deciphered the silent please (wanted it, perhaps, more than it was really there). It was a war between what he wanted and what he knew Sherlock needed, the eternal conundrum of their partnership so far, and he was aware that his choice rested on what he'd always be willing to give. How much of him he'd let Sherlock take without giving something back.
Sherlock reached forward again, this time for his hand, took it and held it against his chest. It felt like a thank you.
Part 2
Recipient:
ruyuAuthor:
flecalicious Characters/Pairings: Sherlock/John
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: ~12,800
Warnings: Non-explicit descriptions of gore.
Notes: Thank you so much to my betas for a hell of a lot of hand-holding and cheerleading throughout this monster. They were amazing.
Summary: “I came to Rome to solve a case, John, and that’s what I’m doing,” Sherlock said. “You have to trust me.” There’s a missing princess on the streets of Rome and Sherlock and John are romantically out of their depth.
Roman Holiday
The heat when they got off the plane hit like a wave.
It wasn’t so much of a shock to John, not after the desert, and this time he was in a thin cotton t-shirt instead of his uniform, but he had to wonder how Sherlock could sit there in his expensive long-sleeved shirt and not look a degree over 25°C. Runway to airport lounge to taxi to hotel was a zig-zag of air conditioning and sweltering heat, and the landscape was passing by like a kaleidoscope, warped by the heat-haze.
“Uh,” John said when they were out of the taxi and standing at the bottom of the Spanish Steps, staring upwards to the word HOTEL etched against the sky in large metal letters. The stone seemed impossibly white in the afternoon sun, the sky clear and arched with the sound of tourists, and it suddenly hit John that yes, yes they really were in Rome.
Sherlock didn’t even seem to notice, just started to climb the 138 steps. He left the suitcases—both of them—with John, who hoped sincerely that Sherlock would have broken out into a shirt-ruining sweat by the time he reached the top.
“And this is definitely all on expenses, yeah?”
Sherlock’s laptop chimed serenely from its new home on the corner of the desk (dark mahogany, paired with an ornate lamp and a vase of fresh white roses); it was already loading Google, Sherlock standing over it with one hand in his pocket and the other tapping out a search term—he typed quicker with one hand than John did with both—and for a horrible moment it looked like he might say no.
“They asked if we wanted the penthouse,” he replied, still hadn’t looked up from a page of Google results that were all in Italian, “but I told them it wasn’t necessary. Classic suite is far less likely to attract attention.”
Even if it was spectacular John was rather under the impression that the hotel had built itself on the concept of attention-seeking, treading as it was the finest of lines between ornate and overdone. He decided not to point out that Sherlock had a sitting room, an office and a walk-in wardrobe as part of the subtle option.
Instead he crossed to the wide window, to the view of Rome that spread out from the hilltop like a corona. There were street vendors in the piazza below, a trickle of tourists clustering around the prints and jewellery. Radio masts stood tall in the distance and the rounded domes of churches gleamed not far away, white stone caught in the sun. It felt almost strange, to be somewhere that lay so neatly between the buzz of London and the heat of Afghanistan, like his two separate lives were meshing themselves together. He thought again about the case, about the picture of the girl he’d tucked into his wallet when Sherlock has cast it aside, no longer needed, and with it he cleared his throat and turned back.
“So,” John began. “Do I have time to settle in or are we getting to work?” In truth he was still shaking off the cramped feeling of the plane and the thought of finally starting on the case, of finding a lost princess in amongst the streets of Rome, had shaken off the fatigue of travel like evaporating water.
Sherlock’s answering hmm? could barely be called inquisitive. He didn’t look up, just murmured something that wasn’t English, and John knew the Google search was getting serious when Sherlock started using both hands to type.
“I’m going out,” he said thirty or so seconds later, as though John had never really spoken at all, and three more taps punctuated the sentence before Sherlock shut the laptop suddenly. He drew his phone from his pocket, checked it and slid it away again, grabbed the hotel room key from the desk.
“Want me to come with?” John asked. Sherlock shook his head and for a moment they stood opposite each other, the tension they’d been trying to ignore welling up in the silence. John thought about all the things he’d planned to say before they’d left, before the case had interrupted everything, and they were on the tip of his tongue before Sherlock spoke, before the silence fractured.
“You should unpack,” he said, and with that he disappeared from the hotel room. If they’d been in London John was quite sure his coat would have been swirling behind him.
“Right,”John had time to say before the door shut. Then, to the empty room: “Well then.”
It was strange to be in Rome and yet not be on holiday, John decided, especially when the reason he was there in the first place was tied up with his flatmate and said flatmate had buggered off; it left him with nothing to do once he’d unpacked his suitcase into the walk-in wardrobe, into the dresser with gold inlay decorating the wood. He tried texting Sherlock, anything you need me to do?, couldn’t help irritation at the lack of reply, and for a while he explored the hotel room, kept shaking his head at the ornate furniture, the plasma televisions (yes, more than one), at the bathrooms that were both entirely made of marble. There was one locked door, but Sherlock has taken his own key and as far as John was concerned he could unpack his own bloody luggage, so he left it well alone.
Twenty minutes were badly spent trying to hack into Sherlock’s laptop, another twenty staring out again at the view, which was aesthetically more pleasing but felt far less like revenge for being left on his own. A little plaque advertising the hotel wifi mocked him from the wall. It was a kind of limbo, stuck between the what-ifs of the case, of what Sherlock might need at a moment’s notice, and his own boredom (his own thoughts, half-crafted things he needed to say). As the afternoon began to cool John thought fuck it and went for his own room key.
“Rubbish,” he muttered in the lift to no one in particular, looking at his phone. Still no messages, and he’d been under the impression that this was a case they were on together, but apparently not. It had been him trying to go over it all on the plane, trying to get Sherlock to pay attention instead of translating the conversations of the other passengers for John, who had badly feigned disinterest (her new boyfriend already hates her, they’re looking for the right moment to slip into the bathroom). Sherlock had barely looked at the notes, had made non-committal noises to everything John had said, and aside from being slightly worrying it had definitely been really, really annoying. Feared was clutching mildly at his chest as he thought it over, vague panic that things had changed and couldn’t be fixed.
Coupled with being cast adrift so suddenly it left John tense, balanced on an edge of frustration. He could put up with the unease his own flat, in his own city, but here it was harder to ignore, thrown into relief by how unfamiliar everything else was, and it felt too like rather a waste; it was hard to appreciate Italian culture when you were in some kind of romantic limbo, neither here nor there.
Exploring, he decided as he stepped into the lobby, as he caught glimpses of Rome beyond the revolving doors. Exploring would take his mind off of it.
He thought about not wandering too far, kept checking his phone to see if the signal was holding up against the close-knit streets and buildings. Ambling across the Piazza di Spagna brought him to a Dolce & Gabanna boutique, windows full of mannequins dressed like Sherlock, and beyond that more designer brands and trendy wine bars buried inside traditional architecture. Yes, John thought, definitely the sort of place a European princess would choose to go missing.
He had a fair sense of direction, felt it enough to let himself follow the maze of streets. They were a mixture of tourists and the Roman population, richly diverse, and he got caught up enough in watching them that it took him a couple of seconds to realise when his phone buzzed in his pocket.
“You’d better not have gone on a shopping spree,” he said, “and ditched me for Dolce and Gabanna,” and it felt good how swiftly the quip left his tongue.
“Are you still at the hotel?” Sherlock asked. Traffic buzzed in the background against rapid Italian. “How quickly can you get to Via dei Condotti?”
“Considering I’ve gone for a walk because you buggered off, I’ve no idea,” John replied, but even as he did he was looking up, looking to see if Rome had stuck street names to the corner of buildings like its English cousin. “I don’t know, I’m on Via Mario de’ Fiori,” he said, tried not to cringe at the vast chasm of proficiency between Sherlock’s Italian and his own.
“Oh, well then just turn left,” and Sherlock hung up.
It was wider than the street he’d been in, more shops and tourists, and John navigated around them on the still-narrow pavement, trying to see past the hundreds of faces for one that was familiar. He’d barely noticed the side street until a hand closed over his wrist and tugged, and he could feel his combat instincts kicking against it before he realised it was Sherlock standing in front of him, a pair of aviator sunglasses perched on his nose. If his skin hadn’t been so pale (more so in the strength of the Italian sun, against the tanned masses walking to and fro) he would have looked positively homegrown.
What he definitely did look was unfathomably handsome, a point rammed home by a cluster of teenagers who giggled and stared as they passed, and John tried to ignore the fact that he thoroughly agreed with whatever comments their Italian translated into (that he could remember what Sherlock felt like).
“Ah,” he said instead, shook his wrist free from Sherlock’s grip and pointed to the sunglasses. “So you did go shopping.”
“A necessity,” Sherlock answered, tone breezy, though as he turned John could see the word GUCCI etched onto the side of the frames. He took them off as he started down the little winding street, tucked them into the V of his shirt (a few more open buttons since this morning, and John knew that meant that he’d noticed). “I thought you might be hungry,” Sherlock threw behind him, and then they were stopping outside an open door, a chalkboard covered in foreign phrases attached to the stone beside it, although John could certainly see the words pasta and pizza for they're meaning.
Inside it was darker, red decor and shady lamps, and catering for the beginning of the rush hour, tables by now half-full. Sherlock had an amicable-sounding exchange with the waiter, followed him to a table near the back and against the wall. When they sat down John realised it was the best place in the restaurant to really see people, everyone from the front door to the kitchen, and he wondered if it was a habit or necessity.
“You going to eat?” John asked, but even as the waiter set the menus down in front of them Sherlock shook his head, eyes tilting from one side of the room to the other. It felt rather odd after not seeing him all day, felt strange to go from tense to suddenly sat across from each other in a restaurant, and John cleared his throat and looked down at the menu, resolutely ignored it when Sherlock began to play with his sunglasses. He tried to remember snatches of what he’d heard, wondered if it would be worth throwing them into Google Translate just to see what the Italian population thought of Sherlock. “What did you do all day?” he settled on instead, and Sherlock stopped watching the couple arguing quietly nearby and focused on John.
“I had some contacts that needed renewing.” He broke a bread stick in half and started eating, and John chalked it up as a win on the sliding scale of Sherlock’s health, who smiled and added, “Rome’s missed me.”
That wasn’t surprising in itself—perhaps Rome was keenly jealous of London, of all the unsolved crimes that might have been closed if Sherlock had been born further west—but he wasn’t elaborating, just watching John with the vague curiosity he reserved for people who actually ate meals. There was a moment of silence, of the chatter of other people against it as John tried and failed to pay attention to the menu, and it was different to the silence of home, of existing in the same space day after day and being entirely comfortable in it. Relocating to a foreign country had highlighted the change, shifted them to uneven ground.
“Listen,” he found himself saying, folding the menu down onto the table. His heartbeat picked up speed as he thought about it, about bringing it all back up again. “I wanted to talk about—”
A sound which could confidently be labelled as delighted flared nearby and next thing Sherlock was obscured by thick dark hair and a tangle of arms. John just pursed his lips and watched, bemused, as the woman eventually drew back, though her hand was still resting on Sherlock’s shoulder as they spoke, so quickly that John could barely differentiate one word from the next. Caro, e' quasi una vita che non ci sentiamo! She swooped down again and kissed both of his cheeks, and Sherlock smiled. John frowned.
“Sì, Caterina. Sto bene, grazie, e tu?” and then, finally, “The restaurant looks wonderful.”
“Ah, I see we are speaking in English,” she—Caterina, it seemed—said, and as she looked properly at John the resemblance began to seep in. High cheekbones, the shape of the face and chin. Caterina’s eyes were darker, a deep blue, but the same shape. John felt a little of the tension ease from his shoulders, chose not to dwell on where it had come from. “Your friend, lui non parla italiano?”
“Un po 'di Dari, but no, his Italian’s limited.”
John coughed, said, “Tashakor,” with obvious sarcasm, and Sherlock laughed. Of course the git understood some of his bloody Dari too.
“Well, ignoring the state of your Italiano, you’re very welcome,” Caterina told him. She took a notebook from the pocket of her trousersuit, brandished a small pen over it. “Presumo che non sei mangia,” she said; Sherlock nodded, so she looked at John, added, “You’re lucky, I don’t usually take the orders.”
“So,” John said after Caterina had disappeared, once he was watching Sherlock with his eyebrows raised in silent question. Sherlock’s face twisted with the ghost of annoyance, like John was being deliberately over-curious.
“My cousin,” he said. “On my mother’s side. This is her restaurant,” he added, hand unfurling in the air as though to gesture, and John could see the sarcasm for what it was, for where it had come from (too many unspoken things).
“Yes, thank you, I guessed that.” The tension rose up, knitting into the air, and Sherlock fished his phone out and started jabbing at it snappishly. John sighed; with the expulsion of air from his lungs the spark of his temper had time to cool, enough to remind himself that arguing wasn’t going to help, that in the restaurant it would definitely be really embarrassing. “I didn’t know you had any Italian—” he began.
“I don’t.” Sherlock didn’t look up from his phone. “Caterina’s mother is Italian, not my uncle.”
“Oh,” John replied, olive branch effectively snapped in half.
It did settle a little as they sat, as John looked around the restaurant and Sherlock wrote and read texts. It must have been about the case, John decided, about whatever Sherlock had spent the day doing that didn’t involve paying €235 for a pair of sunglasses, and as he ate it felt a little better, a little less like things had changed.
“So,” he began. “Am I settled in enough yet?”
“Hmm?”
“To start working on the case. Is—” he checked his watch, “—six hours enough time to get settled in? Come on Sherlock,” John said, leant forward in his chair. “I can’t speak Italian but I can still work on this with you. Why else did you bring me?”
Finally Sherlock looked up from phone, fingers stilling on the buttons. He’d obviously been half listening but his brain had caught up; he looked very faintly bewildered, like John was being obtuse. “It didn’t make sense to drag you around while I reestablished contacts,” he said eventually. “And even apart from how useless your Italian is I thought you’d prefer to experience the culture. You seemed quite—tense. And you would have hated shopping.”
It was all delivered in such a matter-of-fact tone that at first the insult and the confession didn’t quite register, but then John’s shoulders were beginning to shake and he was putting his cutlery down, hand over his mouth to contain his laughter, and even as Sherlock looked even more confused he was trying not to smile.
“So you did go shopping.”
“I’m in Rome,” Sherlock replied. “Of course I did.”
“Mmm, well,” John said, though he was smiling. “My point is that you’re being an idiot. I want to help. Being left alone obviously made everything worse, not better.” He didn’t mention that Rome could never hold the wonder that it might once have done, that the history and beauty no longer meant anything in the same way that London had become flat and dull after Afghanistan. Cities were nothing now without the secret wars, without the darkness hidden beneath the lights (without Sherlock). “I’m not here to look at beautiful things.”
They sobered a little, laughter fading; Sherlock considered him for a moment and John tried to look as earnest as possible (either that or call him an idiot again, and that usually operated on a quota of once every few weeks).
“Like I said,” Sherlock began, finally slipping his phone back into his pocket, “Reestablishing contacts. There’s a man we’ll go and see tomorrow, he’ll have what we need—”
It might not be everything—might not be a resolution to the things (more important, perhaps, than the work) that they had yet to address—but it was a return to something familiar, at least, to the roles they had first set out for each other (colleague, friend), and John grasped onto it tightly; for now, it was all he had.
Sherlock stayed afterwards to speak to Caterina—the harmony of their Italian followed John from the door and into the street—and he only got slightly lost before he found the Spanish Steps. In the fading evening there were still crowds of tourists, a multitude of languages pressing in on him as he climbed from bottom to top, and this time he wasn’t checking his phone every five seconds. Rome was burnished gold by a setting sun and the hotel air conditioning didn’t feel like so much of a shock after the slightly cooler evening temperature.
Sherlock’s netbook was, it turned out, in John’s hand luggage, but as Sherlock had now given him the password he was less inclined to make an issue out of it; instead he logged onto his blog with the hotel wifi, flipped the V to the little plaque on the wall as he did. A few new comments, several from Harry, and out of habit John checked The Science of Deduction. He avoided the forums, had developed an unhelpful habit (unhealthy, Harry would have said, and John would have laughed without humour) of checking old threads, of ones that consisted entirely of posts from Sherlock. Pair of trainers belonging to Carl Powers (1978-1989). Raoul de Santos, the house-boy, botox. The Bruce-Partington plans. Please collect. The Pool. Midnight.
He closed the tab before the mouse had managed to hover over Forums, tried instead to see if the password for the netbook would work on the laptop too. It didn’t, obviously, but it had been an incredibly long shot in the first place, and John moved into his room, found that he had his own desk under the large window. He started the same blog post three times and gave up, saved the draft, began to randomly trawl the internet. He felt a little guilty watching videos of cats doing stupid things when it was Rome on the other side of the door instead of Baker Street, but whatever. He just wanted to get to work on things now, wanted to repair what they’d been sent there to fix (what they hadn’t). He still had the photograph of Anna in his wallet.
He must have fallen asleep with the door ajar, because John woke to find that it was dark save for slats of yellow light from the street lamps outside; the netbook had long ago fallen into hibernation. His neck was stiff from sleeping across the desk and he rolled his shoulders, tried to pinpoint what had woken him up.
“Sherlock?”
Clunks and taps from the sitting room stilled for a moment, then morphed into footsteps approaching his door. The hinges squeaked a little and John opened his eyes, squinted into the dark.
“It’s alright John, go back to sleep,” the silhouette said, and Sherlock’s voice was soft and kind, something more familiar than most people would have guessed. “Preferably not at the desk.”
John rubbed at his eyes, pushed the chair back. His watch said 2:13 as he slid it off, set it on the bedside table, and Sherlock stood at the door for a moment as John unzipped his suitcase. John could feel him watching (or maybe it was that he wanted him to be, because in the faint light John couldn’t quite tell) and his hand stilled at the hem of his t-shirt, bunched the materials in his fingers. He hesitated, breathed in and out, said, “Sherlock.”
There was quiet, just the sound of their lungs working to keep them alive, and further away laughter drifting down from another room. Time expanded, kept going, and Sherlock didn’t reply, just tightened his grip on the door handle. Perhaps it was enough, perhaps it wasn’t, but John drew his t-shirt up over his head, folded it neatly, set it aside. His hands rested at the waistband of his jeans, fingers curled into the belt loops. Even now the air was warm, enough to remind him that this wasn’t home, wasn’t where things had stopped-started, and it was hard to know if that was better or worse.
“I’m going back to sleep,” he said, didn’t know if he meant it. Sherlock didn’t let go of the door handle, though the rustle of his shirt implied movement, and then John remembered the scar on his bare shoulder, that Sherlock had yet to see it. His hand drifted upwards, but it felt too late and John was too tired, too disjointed to care.
“Goodnight,” Sherlock replied, and there were almost too many seconds between the word and the moment he moved, disappeared into the sitting room to become faint sounds; the opening of the laptop, the click of the lamp.
The square might have looked wide if it had been empty; as it was it was filled with stalls, each topped with a white parasol that kept their proprietors in the shade, and Sherlock led John through them with purpose, past stalls overflowing with flowers and fruits and vegetables.
Leading from the square there was a side street, then another until they stood in one that was narrow and straight, filled with light only because it was midday and the sun hung directly overhead; two men sat playing chess on an upturned crate with pomodori stamped on the side and they didn’t acknowledge Sherlock as he swept past into the open shop, the doorway surrounded by postcard stands.
John nodded to them and followed, just in time to see Sherlock brush past the cashier and through the door at the back, the beaded curtain jangling as he did. The girl looked after him with her mouth wide open, then to John as if to say did you see that?, and he could only smile apologetically before going after Sherlock, and her jaw dropped even further.
Sherlock had walked right through to the open back door and the courtyard beyond, already conversing with the man sitting at a little round bistro table. He was smoking a cigarette and listening to Sherlock speak, and his expression rather reminded John of Lestrade. Sherlock nodded to John as he joined them, il mio collega, then a pause as he looked between them, and John felt rather like a player in a tennis match. The man’s eyes flicked to him, stayed for a moment and narrowed, and then he exhaled, smoke curling from between his lips before he stubbed the cigarette out in the ash tray.
“Grazie” he said, and it sounded weary even as he was getting up, beckoning them back towards the shop.
The cashier was standing in the doorway between the shop floor and the back room as they came back in, looking unsure, and the man nodded and shooed her away with one hand, va tutto bene. In a cabinet between stacks of cellophane-wrapped postcards he withdrew a folder, handed it to Sherlock, who didn’t say thank you before he started to rifle through it.
“Look,” Sherlock said to John, handed him a photograph, and John just about had time to prepare himself before he was looking at a body, a young man lying face up on a nondescript pavement. “Pascal Guardini. One knife wound straight through a ballistic vest.”
The young man looked faintly surprised, had fallen like a puppet whose strings had been abruptly cut. He was still wearing the bulletproof vest, subtly stained. John looked between the photograph and Sherlock, then between the photograph and the other man, who had folded his arms and was leaning against the shelves, all full of crookedly stacked tourist trinkets. “So...” he began, then had to think about what it was he intended to say. He turned back to Sherlock. “What’s this got to do with Princess Anna disappearing?”
“Military,” the other man said—Sherlock didn’t seem to have heard either of them—and John turned, said, “Pardon?”
“You’re a military man.” He pointed, smiled. “I can tell.”
“Uh, yes.” John replied. “Retired, though. Sort of.”
“Ah, same, same. Carabinieri,” he said, pointing to himself. “ROS. Or I was, once. Now,” and he gestured to the back room of the shop. “I turisti. They’re almost worse.”
John smiled a little, half-politeness and half-understanding. “I can imagine.”
“It’s nice to get the occasional visit,” he added, and even if he hadn’t nodded in his direction John would have known he meant Sherlock. “He has a habit of making things interesting.”
Sherlock was balancing the folder in one arm, flicking through the pages and obviously not listening, and John was looking at the lines of his profile, of the delineation of his beautiful nose and mouth as he murmured things over to himself.
“Yeah,” John said. “He does that.”
“He was a security guard at a galleria,” Sherlock said once they were in the taxi (and this at last was a familiar feeling, even as the streets they were driving through were so incredibly unknown). “Bled to death after he’d been stabbed. Only once, but it was straight through the heart. They never found the murderer, of course.”
“Of course,” John murmured. Sherlock was staring out into the street, the blur of tourists-natives-tourists, didn’t register the sarcasm. “I still don’t see what this has to do with the Princess.”
Sherlock glanced at him and then away again, the only sign that he’d heard at all. “Someone found him in a street nearby. He was almost empty by then.”
“Poor bloke.”
Sherlock just rolled his eyes. Perhaps if John hadn’t been playing the night before over and over in his head he might have said something—perhaps, even, if he’d had a few seconds longer—but the taxi began to slow, stopped, and Sherlock opened the door and leapt out, looked back in only to say, “I haven’t got any cash.”
Yes, paying for the taxi; that was very, very familiar.
After he’d unfolded the Euros he followed Sherlock across the street, took the pedestrian crossing where Sherlock had run out into the road without looking. The gallery sat behind wrought iron gates, resting amongst large trees and flowers, the promise of long green lawns glimpsed beyond them. Sherlock was already arguing with the security guard when John caught up with him, and he could hear that word again, Carabinieri, and something more familiar, Polizia.
“Sherlock, we can just pay if we have to go in,” he muttered, tried to smile at the security guard, who snapped his arm upwards as though he was tempted to punch someone and said “Vaffanculo!”
Sherlock was as close to glowering at someone who wasn’t Anderson as John had ever seen him. “He really is unspeakably rude,” he said—John presumed it was to him and not about him—and John murmured something along the lines of you probably deserved it before managing to actually pay and get them inside.
“You’d be bloody lost without me,” he said, checking the depletion of their Euros, but Sherlock had already walked away.
“So, Princess Anna gets kidnapped from the embassy,” John began. Half of his attention was focused on the plaque in front of the Rubens, on the chunk of Helvetica that claimed he was the genius of the European Baroque; the other was on Sherlock somewhere to his left, looking out of the gallery window. “Her sister sees the whole thing and raises the alarm, but they don’t find anything. And then this,” he said, gesturing to the gallery around them, to the security guard nearby. “What’s the connection?”
“Repetition, John,” Sherlock drawled, pausing in front of The Deposition. “You know how I feel about it.”
“You’ve barely looked at the notes since we got this case,” John reminded him. “You’re always going on about details and now you can’t be bothered to check? And you still haven’t told me why we’re looking into this security guard. What’s going on—?”
He trailed off; looked, finally, away from the painting to find that Sherlock was staring resolutely forwards, as though appreciating art was suddenly the most interesting use he could find for his time. Tourists moved around them, muttered in multiple languages, probably about how they were starting to block the views of the Rubens, and Sherlock’s mouth pressed into a thin line before he set his hands in his pockets and began to walk away at a leisurely pace. He glanced over his shoulder as he did and John followed, fell into step beside him as they wandered past the rows of paintings.
“I came to Rome to solve a case, John, and that’s what I’m doing,” Sherlock said. “You have to trust me.”
It was like something tugging at the inside of his chest, like something had hooked inside his heart and started pulling. “Of course I trust you,” he said, because he did, with his life (and perhaps with other things, the ones in his chest). “I’d have to, to follow you into half of the trouble you get us into.”
Sherlock smiled, the kind that creased the corners of his eyes, and the pulling in John’s chest increased like some kind of equilibrium had to be maintained, a ratio of Sherlock’s happiness to John’s heartbeat. “So,” he said. “Trust me when I tell you that investigating this murder will prove infinitely helpful to Princess Anna.”
They stood next to each, tourists moving around them, and then Sherlock drew his hand from his pocket, for the briefest moment linked his own fingers with John’s as they slipped from one gallery to another. It was a sudden positive amongst two days of negative signals, and as they clasped fingers John was quite sure that his heart would never slow down again.
Birds were beginning to make themselves known by the time they left the gallery (time in which John had prevented several arguments between Sherlock and the security guards but hadn’t been able to stop him from picking several locks), but instead of heading back to the main road as John had expected Sherlock swerved away, down the gentle slope of the hill and in between the trees.
The lawns were a little less green close up, patches of sun-browned grass kicking up puffs of dust, dehydrated earth that rose with the kick of their heels. A fountain was visible not far off, the glare of sunshine off the surface and the lilt of the water, and people were stretched out on the grass, taking in the evening sun. Sherlock stopped abruptly, knelt down on the grass and then lay down, and John was left to stare down at him and wonder if he cared at all that his £100 shirt might get grass stains.
“What are you doing?”
“Oh fuck,” Sherlock said mildly, threw an arm across his eyes. “I left my sunglasses at the hotel.”
John thought for a moment, decided that hovering over Sherlock wasn’t going to be any help at all and lay down beside him, though a little more carefully, a little slower. Sherlock’s arm twitched fractionally, perhaps so he could see, and when John had settled Sherlock turned his head. “Alright?”
“Fine,” John said. It was mostly true but the pain was negligible, the way it had always been since he’d met Sherlock. He was making a considerable effort not to remember that they’d lain like this before, other times and places. He could see Sherlock better in the sunlight, even if right now he felt further away. “Any particular reason why we’re sunbathing?”
“Pascal Guardini wandered out of the range of the gallery CCTV seventeen minutes before he died,” Sherlock began instead. “The gardens are locked at night in the winter so there were no tourists, probably not even drunk ones unless they had enough hand-eye coordination to scale the railings. Somehow he unlocked the gate whilst he was bleeding to death and intoxicated, but all the eyewitnesses said he’d obviously been crawling down the street when they found him a few minutes later. The police made no conclusions, of course.” He sighed, the kind of dramatic exhale that he favoured when berating the Yard’s finest.
“It must be tiring to look down on the police force the world over,” John quipped, confidence slowly rises after the gallery and now this, and Sherlock’s sigh turned into a laugh.
“Mmm.”
“So.”
“So. Two previous warnings for drinking at work and leaving his post, and both times with a colleague called Orazio Mazullo. The third time he did it he was murdered.”
“What,” John replied, squinted against the sunlight as it continued to lower itself towards the horizon. “So—did the police not interview the colleague? The one he was always drunk with.”
“Of course they did. He had an alibi, obviously, from his wife. Dani Szekely.” Sherlock reached forward and pulled at John’s hair; when his hand came away there was a blade of grass caught in his fingers. “The three of them were childhood friends, apparently. Guardini got Mazullo the job at the gallery.”
“You think Mazullo killed him.” John said, didn’t even bother making it a question.
“No, I know Mazullo killed him.” Sherlock’s voice had grown quieter. He blew the blade of grass from the ends of his fingers and smiled, the one he reserved for cases that allowed him to be horrifically clever.
“Alright, alright,” John said. “Don’t get all egotistical over it,” but he was still smiling. Their conversation trailed off, left them with the buzz of other people enjoying the weather (and probably not talking about murder). He planned the sentence in head, how do you know he did it then?, was intending to say it until he opened his mouth and said instead, “We should talk, you know.”
Sherlock’s eyes stuttered closed, a double-blink, and he twisted to lie on his side, arm pillowed beneath his head. The smile was gone, replaced with a vague frown like he was trying to work something out and couldn’t, not quite. “Why? We never needed to talk before.”
That was the problem, John thought. “It will help,” he said instead, tried to sound as earnest as he felt, wasn’t sure it had worked. “It’s—not exactly been conducive to working conditions.”
The frown slipped for a moment back into a smile, a smaller one, then faded. “Not now,” Sherlock said. “Not with a case on. I can’t.”
John deciphered the silent please (wanted it, perhaps, more than it was really there). It was a war between what he wanted and what he knew Sherlock needed, the eternal conundrum of their partnership so far, and he was aware that his choice rested on what he'd always be willing to give. How much of him he'd let Sherlock take without giving something back.
Sherlock reached forward again, this time for his hand, took it and held it against his chest. It felt like a thank you.
Part 2
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Date: 2011-06-10 12:38 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-07-03 11:31 pm (UTC)Roman Holiday
Date: 2012-04-14 01:29 pm (UTC)