sunken_standard

Title: Sherlock Holmes in New York

Rating: R for language, violence, allusions to sexuality, drug use

Pairing: Sherlock/ Irene Adler (past), Sherlock/ John bromance (or pre-slash, if you have your slash goggles on)

Warnings: Nothing extremely graphic, see rating.

Spoilers: All three episodes to be safe.

Wordcount: 24,400

Summary: When Sherlock tracks Moriarty to New York City, he's drawn in to helping an old friend. John isn't sure what to make of any of it.

Betas/ Britpickers: pantropia, herovillian, brewsternorth, marshmellowed

Continued from pt 4

When they returned to Irene's house, Sherlock was nowhere to be found. “Where is he?” Irene asked. She bellowed up the stairs, “Hey Sherlock, you here?” No answer.

John sent him a text. The reply came almost immediately.

Upstairs. Bring up tea. -SH

“He says he's upstairs. And that he wants tea.”

“He's found my studio, then.” Irene pulled out her phone and typed a message. “No drinks allowed. It's kind of a rule I have.” She smiled apologetically. “Did you want something before we go up?”

John declined and followed Irene up the stairs. She led him to the third floor and down the hallway. She pushed open the door to her studio and music poured out. The room must have been professionally soundproofed. The walls were a dark colour and the lighting low, provided by canister lights in the ceiling. Sherlock, shirtsleeves rolled to the elbows, was in his thinking pose on the sofa in the far corner. The angle of the lighting threw his features into dramatic shadows. Irene walked over to her equipment and lowered the volume. “Since when are you into New Order?”

“It's the audiotape left by Moriarty.” He gestured to the metal shelving next to large table overflowing with electronic equipment, not bothering to open his eyes.

There was an old component stereo system on the third shelf. Next to the cassette deck was the clear plastic case that had presumably held the tape. John picked it up, turning it over in his hands. The insert was blue-lined loose-leaf paper. The only thing on the front was Sherlock's name, written in pink marker. The handwriting was bubbly and teen-aged. The 'o' in Sherlock was a heart. He opened the case and slid the paper out. He unfolded it. The same handwriting in the same violent pink colour. Sherlock- I made you a mix tape. Hope you like it. There was another bubble heart, and under that -M xx.

“So what's on the tape?”

“So far, pop music. The songs seem unrelated.”

“What songs?” Irene said, taking the case and the note from John.

Sherlock waved his hand in an airy gesture. “This one. Others. The Clash. I haven't found a pattern yet.”

“So why leave you a mix tape of music? Coded message in the song titles?” John addressed Sherlock.

“I wouldn't know. I've only gotten to the fourth song. Possibly a numeric cipher, the songs chosen for length. Irene, do you have a stopwatch?”

“Uh? No. But in case you haven't noticed, we're in a room with twenty thousand dollars' worth of audio equipment...”

Irene leaned past John and hit a button on the cassette deck, rewinding the tape. “Do you have my laptop up here?”

“Under the cushion.” John looked around the immediate vicinity of the detective. His shoulders and head rested on an over-large embroidered throw pillow. John slid his hand underneath it roughly. “The other cushion,” was Sherlock's sharp reply to being jostled. Sherlock's bare feet were propped on a green wedge-shaped pillow. John lifted the corner of the cushion and was rewarded with Irene's laptop. He tried to communicate to Sherlock that he was behaving like a child through a sharp look, but it was lost, as the man's eyes were still closed. His only movement was the steady rise and fall of his chest and his index fingers (pressed tightly together) moving back and forth over his top lip.

With an internal and long-suffering sigh, he took the laptop to the table. Irene was busy disentangling wires and cables, which she then plugged into the laptop. The tape deck clicked once and the rewind button sprung up. John felt a passing sense of nostalgia- a once familiar sound, but one he hadn't heard in fifteen years.

Irene stretched, one hand on the play button of the deck and the other on the keyboard of her laptop. She depressed the button and the enter key at the same time, then turned up the volume. The mechanical hiss of the tape filled his ears. Irene grabbed a spiral-bound notebook and a pen and collapsed cross-legged onto the floor in front of the sofa. With a glance to the laptop, she made a note as the music began.

The throaty sounds of the opening of Bad Romance filled the room. John snickered. Moriarty was really playing up the gay bit.

“Hmm. Dynamic opener. Musically and lyrically. Clear declaration of intent, if a little cliché,” Irene mumbled.

“I'm sorry, what?” John asked.

Irene looked thoughtful for a moment. “Did you ever see High Fidelity?”

“Not that I can recall.”

“It's a good movie. More a chick flick for music geeks. The book's totally better.”

“The point, Irene?” Sherlock urged impatiently.

“It's all about themes and communication through recorded music. How song choice affects the overall tone. It's more than putting on a bunch of songs you like, y'know? I wrote an essay on it for a book a while ago. I have a copy downstairs somewhere I think. Doesn't matter. In this case, the medium is the message. At this point, I'm assuming he knows as much or more about me than you can find through Google. He's using me and my son to get to Sherlock,”

“Obviously,” Sherlock snorted.

“Shut up and let me finish!” She turned and pinched Sherlock on the back of his forearm.

Sherlock's eyes flew open. They locked with Irene's. She stared him down through the chorus of the song. When she spoke again, she didn't break eye contact. “He's using us to get to Sherlock,” she said slowly, forcefully; brooking no argument. “This is him drawing me into it. I'm not the grief-stricken mother sobbing quietly in the background. He's trying to make this as painful as possible for all parties involved.” She finally looked away, choosing instead let her eyes rest on the notebook, her gaze unfocused. Sherlock continued to stare at her, his face betraying nothing. He tapped his fingers together over his lips.

The song ended and they all watched the seconds tick over on the screen until the next song began. Irene wrote in her notebook. “You might as well get comfortable, John. We'll be here a while.” She gave a perfunctorily polite smile. He sat in the desk chair and watched the time tick by on the counter.

John let his eyes drift over the contents of the small room. It was obviously a converted bedroom. Half of the room had been walled off, with a door leading to the other half. Above the table containing the laptop was a thick glass window. The other room was dark, but he assumed it to be the actual recording booth. The table below the window held the laptop and a mixing board, along with scattered office detritus. On the wall above the sofa was Irene's gold record, surrounded by pictures of what he assumed to be the rest of her band and various people, some he recognized, most he didn't. The metal shelving unit was crammed full of notebooks and binders and equipment manuals, along with cables in neat coils and a battered metal toolbox. A large whiteboard was hung on the wall next to the door to the hallway. Clustered in one corner was a group of refrigerator magnets of all shapes and sizes. There was a series of shorthand notations scrawled in the middle in green marker, but nothing he could decipher. More cushions of various sizes and patterns were propped along the wall and piled into a heap in the corner. The colour of the walls was somewhere between a dark blue and indigo.

John turned Irene's previous comments over in his mind. Moriarty had sent a text directly to Irene. He'd chosen a format that Irene was familiar with for his message. He was involving her. It didn't fit with his pattern of using other people as props in the bombings. Even John himself had been no more than a pawn. Why involve Irene to this extent? John found he had more questions than answers.

Feeling all but useless, he decided to run through all the evidence they'd gathered again. He excused himself downstairs. “Grab something to eat, if you want. Mi casa's su casa,” Irene called as he left the room, her gaze never leaving the laptop. It was eerie, how much like Sherlock she could be. Like attracts like, he supposed.

He made his way to the kitchen. He washed the mug he'd been using earlier in the morning, then Irene and Sherlock's. Unlike Sherlock, John tried to be a good house guest. He filled a mug and stuck it in the microwave. While waiting for the water to boil, he retrieved Sherlock's laptop from their baggage. He set it on the breakfast bar and turned it on. He opened the frankly obscenely large refrigerator to retrieve the milk. The door was filled with an array of condiments, half of which he'd never heard of before. The bottom shelf held an array of bottled beer and cans of Diet Coke and energy drinks. There were plastic containers with neat labels stacked on the shelves. Curious, he picked a container at random. The label was written in some kind of shorthand. It looked like chunks of some kind of meat and veg in a thick brownish red sauce. He cautiously smelled it. Kind of meaty and fruity. Hint of aromatic spices, like a curry. He snapped the lid back on it and picked another one. Yellow rice and beans, very heavy on the chilli if the watering of his eyes were anything to go by. Irene and Nero certainly had eclectic taste in food. Well, everything, really.

John had never really spent much time with artistic types. His close friends had all had similar interests to himself- namely sport and doing well in school. Same thing for University. The army was all about uniformity. Harry had always been the athletic type, dated the same kinds of nice girls he usually went for. It's not that he was uncultured. He could appreciate the arts. He'd been to galleries and the opera. He liked music, but preferred the music he'd grown up listening to from his parent's old records (Motown, soul, even a little funk) to modern rock or pop. He'd never found the need to express himself through fashion. Checked shirts and jumpers were respectable. He'd never had to make himself stand out. He'd never been particularly passionate about anything. He prided himself on his calm demeanour and rationality. It wasn't that he didn't understand the need that some people had to create, he just didn't have it. His blogging was more about feeling that he had to share how amazing Sherlock's adventures were than actually trying to turn a phrase. Possibly proving his life was no longer without meaning. He didn't much think about it until he was actually recounting a case.

He wondered if Irene's creativity had been what attracted Sherlock. When he wanted to, the man played the violin with skill and feeling, and it was beautiful. Sherlock was a passionate man. John didn't know Irene very well, but he would assume her to be a passionate woman. Volatile, yes, but she'd also been under extreme stress for the last two days.

Sherlock seemed to be a magnet for dynamic, larger-than-life characters. People that, by all rights, didn't exist in real life. An arch-enemy for a brother, a psychotic nemesis, now a heroine with a history as a love interest, along with an illegitimate son... John was living in a comic book. Following that analogy, he was the sidekick. He giggled a little to himself, imagining their costumes. Sherlock would have a cape like Batman. He pictured Moriarty as The Riddler, the campy 60's version, not Jim Carrey. Mycroft as the Penguin, waddling around and swinging his umbrella. John laughed so hard he doubled over, hands on his knees. Then he realized he was acting like a fool in a stranger's kitchen and straightened up, clearing his throat and smoothing his shirt. He'd have to remember to tell Sherlock, although it would probably be lost on him.

Continued in part 6