earlgreytea68 | An Empty House (3/10)

Title - An Empty House (3/10)
Author -

earlgreytea68
Rating - Teen
Characters - John, Mycroft, Lestrade, Mrs. Hudson
Spoilers - Through "The Reichenbach Fall"
Disclaimer - I don't own them and I don't make money off of them, but I don't like to dwell on that, so let's move on.
Summary - As it says on the tin: Sherlock Holmes comes home.
Author's Notes - Thank you to all the usuals, to

arctacuda for the excellent beta and

sensiblecat for the lovely Britpick.

I don't think knowledge of the rest of my Sherlockfic is necessarily needed, although this does exist in the same Scotch-verse. If you're wondering about all the little background facts referenced here (who knows the secret? what's the deal with the violin? why the heck are Mycroft and Lestrade a couple?), you should read "Scotch" and "John Watson's 12 Things Happy People Do." (And, to a much, much lesser extent, "Middlegame.")

Chapter One - Chapter Two

Chapter Three

John looked at Lestrade quizzically and said, “What the hell?”

“I have no idea,” said Lestrade, and followed Mycroft out of the room.

John followed close behind him.

Mycroft was sitting behind a desk in a room that looked like a library. The violin case was resting on the desk, as were Mycroft’s elbows. He had his hands loosely interlaced, his lips resting against them, as he stared at the violin case.

“Mycroft,” said Lestrade, walking over to the desk. “What’s going on?”

Mycroft answered without looking up from the case. “He’d never send the violin ahead, Greg. Not if he was able to take it himself. Which means he’s not able. He sent this to me as a sign that things have gone awry. That’s why he’s not texting or calling. He may have even got rid of the mobile if he’s feeling the need to truly hide his tracks. When I first sent this violin to him, I sent it with a note telling him to bring it back safely. It was uncharacteristic of me, but you had me off-balance at the time, and it was an odd situation. I got a number of texts from him not only criticizing the sentiment of the note but also criticizing the fact that I had sent the violin at all. He has now sent it back to me with an extremely uncharacteristic note. Sending me something for safekeeping? He’d never do that. It’s a message. He’s in trouble. Please play host, if you would, I need to think.”

Lestrade hesitated, and John knew he was probably trying to think of some way to help.

John knew a way to help. He said, “I’m sorry to interrupt, but, Mycroft, I think you should know: Someone sent me a key.”

Mycroft’s eyes left the violin case and focused on John’s. “A key? A key to what?”

“An empty house.”

“An empty house?” echoed Mycroft, incredulously. “What are you talking about?”

“I received a key in the mail, and it opens an empty house.”

“How do you know?”

“I went to the house.”

Mycroft looked at Lestrade and said, accusingly, “See? This is why you should allow me to have surveillance on people. He went off by himself and investigated an empty house.”

“It was an empty house,” John noted, irritated. “It wasn’t dangerous.”

“But it could have been,” Mycroft pointed out. “Where’s the house? Where’s the key?”

“I have the key. It’s still in the envelope it came in.”

“Could you fetch it, please?” said Mycroft, with an air of having made a command instead of a request.

John decided to allow the ordering around, because Mycroft was clearly worried, and John was worried, too, and arguing about it was probably not going to be productive. But he did say, “I’ve no idea where your butler took my suitcase.”

“Reynolds!” Mycroft called, but Reynolds the butler had already appeared, with John’s suitcase and John’s gun, both of which he carefully handed across to John.

“Thank you,” John said to him, and waited until he’d left the room before saying, “Is he, like, magical or something?”

“He’s merely a very good butler,” Mycroft informed him, sounding long-suffering. “The envelope, if you please.”

John fished around in his suitcase, found the envelope, and handed it to Mycroft.

Mycroft examined it very closely before opening it and pulling out the key. “How did you know where to bring the key?”

“The return address,” said John.

“Clever,” murmured Mycroft. “It isn’t Sherlock’s handwriting. Not even disguised.”

“He could have had someone else write it out for him,” suggested John.

Mycroft shook his head. “No. If he’d sent you a clue, he would have told us.”

“Maybe he was telling you. ‘Please check on John.’”

Mycroft put the key back in the envelope and the envelope on his desk and stared at it, deep in thought. Then he decided, “No. He’s been trying to keep you safe, all this time. He wouldn’t involve you.”

“I think we should check out the empty house,” said John.

“Absolutely not,” said Mycroft.

“But I think—”

“It’s probably a trap.”

John took a deep breath, struggling to keep his temper under control. He sat in the chair in front of Mycroft’s desk and said, as evenly as he could, “Mycroft. You’re worried. You’re telling me that Sherlock’s in danger. I just got him back. I just got him back, and I haven’t even had the chance to yell at him for everything yet. Please. This is the only lead we have. We have to use it.”

Mycroft looked at him. “This might not be connected to anything.”

“Please,” said John again.

There was a long, tense pause. “What if I send the secret service in to investigate it?” proposed Mycroft, finally.

“They might miss something.”

“You’ve seen this house. Did it have any clues in it?”

“Not that I could see, but I didn’t really know Sherlock was alive then, I didn’t really…I need to look again.”

“I will send the secret service to the house. We will ascertain if anyone is in the house. If the house is safe then I will allow you to return to the house and make a closer examination.”

“Oh, you’ll allow me to do that?” said John. “Thanks for that, it’s very generous of you.”

“Thank you,” said Mycroft, with a cold smile. “I know.”

***

John thought everything about his current situation was excruciating. Sherlock was alive and possibly in trouble, and instead of being able to do anything useful to come to his aid, he was sitting in Mycroft Holmes’s house watching a Scotland Yard detective inspector teach his former landlady how to play chess. Even more unbelievably, Lestrade had referred to the room they were in as the drawing room, and had done it with a straight face, as if it were perfectly normal for people to have drawing rooms.

John thought it unsurprising that Sherlock had preferred having a flatmate to living in a house like this.

Mycroft was barricaded in the library, apparently thinking. John did not like this. He thought they should all be thinking about what to do next together, as a group. But, as John had no ideas about what to do next, as Mycroft had been in a terrible, snappish mood, and as Lestrade had suggested they should possibly not talk to each other for a little while, John found himself in the drawing room doing absolutely nothing. Well, he’d picked up a book from one of the room’s tables. It had turned out to be a collection of the works of Edgar Allen Poe, and John wasn’t interested in it, although he did have it open on his lap.

“No, no, the bishop can only move diagonally,” Lestrade was telling Mrs. Hudson, who said in reply, “Oh, of course, dear, you did tell me that.”

“It’s quite all right,” Lestrade assured her, and John’s mobile rang.

Lestrade looked up from the chess game, and John felt his gaze on him as he glanced at who was calling. He expected it to be an unknown number, but it was the clinic, which he told Lestrade. “Probably telling me that I’m fired,” he remarked.

“Well, don’t worry,” said Lestrade, going back to his contemplation of the board. “Maybe soon you can be a full-time blogger again.”

If only, thought John, and answered his phone. “Hello?”

“Dr. Watson,” said a voice he didn’t recognize on the other end, and that was confusing because he’d expected it to be his supervisor.

“Yes,” he confirmed.

“You should pretend that you are speaking to your supervisor,” said the voice.

John froze, then realized that his tenseness would be a dead giveaway and forced himself to relax. “Right,” he said, trying to watch Lestrade out of the corner of his eye. “Yes. Of course.” Lestrade had glanced in his direction, but was now answering a question Mrs. Hudson was asking him.

“Mr. Holmes is about to receive a gift,” continued the voice. “I’m sure you will recognize the significance of this gift. It is vitally important, Dr. Watson, if you wish to not receive more gifts of this nature, that you find a way to return to the empty house by yourself and without Mr. Holmes’s admirable entourage of semi-competent employees.”

John considered, staring unseeingly into the fire Reynolds the butler had lit in the room. “When?” he asked, casually, deciding it was a totally innocuous thing to say and wouldn’t pique Lestrade’s interest in any way.

“As soon as possible, Doctor,” said the voice. “I have it on the best of authorities that you should be clever enough to achieve this task.”

“Nice of you not to fire me,” said John, because he didn’t want to think about the implication behind that sentence.

“See you soon,” said the voice, sounding amused.

The line went dead, and John shut his mobile and mused into the fire.

“So they haven’t fired you?” Lestrade asked, from the chess board.

“No,” responded John, slowly, his thoughts very much on other things. “They said I could take as long as I needed.”

“Generous of them,” said Lestrade. “But, after all, you’ve only missed one day so far.”

“Yeah,” John agreed.

“Well, John, you appear to be correct,” announced Mycroft, coming into the room.

John shifted in the armchair by the fireplace so he could see him. “About?”

“The empty house is an empty house. You may go and search it yourself, if you like.”

“With an escort, I assume,” said John.

“Naturally,” said Mycroft.

An escort wasn’t going to work, thought John. Not according to the disembodied voice he’d just spoken with. But if he didn’t go at all, then Mycroft and Lestrade would both get suspicious about his behavior.

He was saved the trouble of coming up with a response by the gong of the doorbell sounding, and, even though Mycroft was standing close to the front door, he still waited for the butler to walk by him to open it.

The butler signed for something, then handed a large box over to Mycroft. Mycroft, frowning, turned and set it on the staircase, regarding it, and John followed Lestrade and Mrs. Hudson into the front hall. The box was tied with a string, as if it were a box of pastries from a bakery, but it was much larger than a box of pastries.

Mycroft leaned over and undid the bow holding the string together, then lifted the top off the box. He pushed aside a frothy pile of tissue paper and lifted out of it a heavy charcoal wool greatcoat, with telltale red stitching over the buttonhole at the top of the collar.

John felt as if he’d been abruptly pushed underwater. The world seemed to go very quiet all around him, sounds muffled by the rush of blood in his ears, and he didn’t breathe for fear he would choke on the thickness of the air in the front hall. He stared at Sherlock Holmes’s greatcoat in Mycroft’s hands. He wanted to snatch it away from him, to close his fists in it to verify it was real, to press his face into it to make sure it smelled like Sherlock, because it could all be an elaborate hoax—it wasn’t necessarily his.

Except that John knew that it was because the voice calling from the clinic had promised the arrival of a gift. Had promised the arrival of more gifts in this vein if he didn’t go alone to the empty house. More gifts of things of vast personal importance to Sherlock Holmes. Since they already had his violin and now his coat, John couldn’t imagine what would come next. The possibilities made him shiver.

Mycroft and Lestrade were talking, something about there being no note, something about what it meant. Lestrade was searching through the tumult of tissue paper the coat had been wrapped in, as if it was going to hold some sort of clue. An idea formed in John’s head, vague but the best idea he had.

He turned to Mrs. Hudson, whose eyes were fixated on Sherlock’s coat, and who was wringing her hands together. John paused, felt the comforting weight of the gun tucked into the waistband of his trousers, allowed himself the familiar flow of calming adrenaline through his bloodstream. Fear faded, tremors subsided, action loomed ahead of him, inevitable and inviting.

“Mrs. Hudson.” He leaned his head close to hers, speaking in a low voice, forcing her eyes to look into his, a hand on each of her shoulders. “I need you to do something for me, and I need you to not ask me why, just to do it.”

Mrs. Hudson looked terrified but she also looked steady, and he remembered that this was the woman who, confronted with CIA-trained killers, had hidden the object of their search down the front of her blouse. “Is it for Sherlock?” she whispered.

He nodded. “I need you to hit Mycroft,” he said.

“When?”

“Now.”

She nodded at him, squaring her shoulders, and, to his surprise, she leaned over and smartly picked up one of Mycroft’s umbrellas from where it sat in the umbrella stand behind the door.

“Mycroft,” she said, firmly.

Mycroft was searching through the pockets of Sherlock’s coat. “Yes?” he said, with absent politeness.

“Thank you very much for your recent hospitality. I’m sorry for this.”

“For what?” He looked up at her then, just in time to catch her whacking him hard across the shoulders with his umbrella.

Chaos broke loose. Lestrade said, startled, “Mrs. Hudson,” dropping handfuls of tissue paper to lunge toward her, but she evaded him and continued to land blows at Mycroft, who kept trying to dodge them, and the butler attempted to grab her, and Mycroft Holmes’s special ops team crashed through the front door.

And John Watson stepped through it in the other direction.

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