Chapter Text
1.
Joanna Watson is a doctor, an ex-soldier, and the sister and daughter of alcoholics. She's known a lot of drunks in her life, so she is very familiar with the twelve-step recovery system. She has her reservations about its efficacy, but a lot of it boils down to plain common sense, and she's always been fond of common sense. Mostly because it's a great deal less common than the name implies.
She particularly likes the concept of the "moment of clarity." It's an excellent description of the instant that sometimes occurs when you've been living so madly for so long that you've lost all sense of perspective, until something happens to jar you back into your right senses. Like waking up alone in an alley with bruises you can't remember how you'd got, or looking around your flat one day and noticing that you can't see your furniture for all the empty Beefeaters bottles. (Both these things have happened to people she knows.)
Joanna, who is currently tied with her hands behind her back and her ankles secured to the legs of a plain wooden chair, wonders if she might not be having her very own moment of clarity right about now. Because, just a few seconds ago, she caught herself thinking, "you know, this chair is rather more comfortable than if he'd tied me to one of those rolling office chairs. At least this chair has proper legs, so I can keep my feet on the ground."
Joanna has preferences, regarding what sort of chairs she likes to be tied to. This is because she has a basis for comparison derived from multiple experiences of being tied to chairs.
To make matters worse, she's giggling. Because it's just occurred to her that, when her kidnapper returns to the room, she could, if she chose, engage him in conversation on points of legitimate mutual interest. "Do you usually use fishing line, or have you ever experimented with zip ties? The fishing line is more uncomfortable, if that's the effect you're going for, but zip ties are really more secure. By the way, thanks for hitting me with the back of your hand, instead of your fist. The ring you're wearing is definitely going to leave a mark, but there's less chance of fracture to the zygomatic arch. Why yes, this does happen to me rather often, why do you ask?"
Joanna giggles until the tears run down her face, which hurts her swelling eye a bit, but she can't help herself--she finds it all well and truly funny. And her hands, despite being tied behind her back, completely steady. Not a trace of a tremor.
She's honestly unsure whether it's because she goes unnaturally calm in the face of danger, or because she's so completely and utterly bored.
*
The door across the empty room bursts open and her kidnapper tumbles in, looking wild-eyed and vicious. He's holding a gun, and it looks to be real so it probably is--he's the sort who could afford one. More worryingly, his tie is askew. She's made enough observations about his personal grooming habits by now to know that this a very serious indicator of mental upset.
"You," he snarls. "You'd better hope your boyfriend cares more about you than he does about me, or I'm going to send you back to him the fast way."
Joanna frowns at him, honestly confused and wondering if he has access to some sort of top secret teleportation device. "What way is that?"
Her kidnapper--Sir Timothy Paddington-Gore, CEO of Woollen Grady Investments--gives her the annoyed look of a criminal whose threat has just become 50% less effective for being too obscure to be understood.
"Out the window, you mouthy bitch," he says, and begins pacing back and forth.
"Oh. So the Met have arrived, have they?" She could try to comfort or placate him, play on whatever lingering vestige of chivalry he might possess, but she knows the look of a man so consumed by worry for his own dear self that anyone and anything else is fair game. No real point, there.
"Look," she tells him. "I don't expect you'll listen, but--the man who had you investigated in the first place, the man who hired Sherlock--he's my brother-in-law." That was stretching a point, but the complications of her relationships with the Holmes brothers are none of Sir Timothy Posh-Git's business. "If you give yourself up, and don't--you know, kill me or anything, I'll have a word with him on your behalf. He'll listen to me."
Sir Timothy rounds on her, and for an instant astonishment takes the place of agitated fury. "What? You? Related to Mycroft Holmes?"
"Oh, you know him then."
A disparaging look, as though she is being incredibly dim. "We were at school together, naturally."
Oh, of course, Joanna thinks, heroically refraining from rolling her eyes. How could she have been so stupid, naturally all the adolescent toffs in Britain were educated as a unit. Like grain-fed cattle, kept in a special pen, away from the common herd.
Well. Not every adolescent toff. Sherlock hadn't been educated in the usual moribund institutions, so much as he'd been systematically tossed out of them all. For a moment, her heart swells with an uncomplicated comradely affection for him, and she has to choke back a second fit of giggling. That was Sherlock for you. Working class hero in a four thousand pound greatcoat.
"The DI in charge of your case is a fair bloke," she says. "He'll give you a hearing. And if you know Mycroft, then you know how he takes threats that touch on him personally. The Met's really your most painless option."
"What on earth are you babbling about," mutters Sir Timothy, peering out the window with his back to her. "Holmes is an accountant for the Home Office. I'm not afraid of a civil servant."
"--what? Oh. Right. Never mind, then." Joanna sighs, as her own attempt at a threat sinks under the weight of being insufficiently understood.
Sir Timothy Paddington-Gore is not a particularly stupid man, as far as criminals of Joanna's acquaintance go. But he isn't blazingly clever, either, despite the fact that the cost of his educational pedigree probably exceeded the GNP of several small developing countries. His embezzling had gone unnoticed for years, precisely because it was so uninspired. He'd probably still be siphoning money off his clients even now if a clever junior clerk at his firm hadn't spotted the discrepancies in his accounts and confronted him, and if he hadn't panicked and delivered her an almost-certainly-accidentally-deadly blow to the head with an engraved nameplate. Even then, he might have got away with it, if not for the fact that Mycroft had been on the verge of making that clever young clerk--Imani Patel was her name--an offer of employment. Her murder had annoyed him personally, and professionally, he hadn't been able to overlook the possibility that her death was linked to his interest in her. So he had called in a favor from Sherlock, who had pronounced the case the most mind-numbingly boring and artless murder in the history of crime, and announced Sir Timothy's guilt to the world approximately 45 seconds after walking into his office and spotting the empty place on his desk where the nameplate ought to have been.
Unfortunately, in his eagerness to have the case over and done with, it had apparently slipped Sherlock's mind that Sir Timothy's modus operandi in a crisis was to panic and bash the nearest person over the head with a blunt object--this time, a crystal vase holding a sympathy bouquet. Fortunately, he hadn't killed Sherlock, merely knocked him cold.
Unfortunately--again--when Joanna leapt to tackle him, Sir Timothy had shifted beneath her, and she had felt the barrel of a gun pressed against her stomach. She'd been forced to stand up and turn her back. Then it had been her turn to be unimaginatively bludgeoned.
About two hours later she'd awakened tied to the chair, not particularly bothered about it, because this is what passes for normal in Joanna's life these days. But it seems not to have taken Sherlock quite as long as her to recover, because clearly quite a lot has happened since she was knocked out. Sir Timothy is sweating visibly, tugging at his school tie, watching the police barricade go up around the building.
He really was remarkably lazy. He hadn't even left the office where he worked, just dragged Joanna up to a disused floor. Apparently he has some Hollywood notion of trading Joanna's life for a helicopter and a flight to Rio. Joanna, who as a soldier had once seen a helicopter actually fall out of the sky for no particular reason, could have told him his faith in aircrafts was seriously misplaced.
Really, this was what came of a man who'd never had to exert himself in his whole life turning his hand to crime.
I mean, thinks Joanna, in disgust, he hasn't even noticed there's a second entrance to this room. Or that the UV blocked window on the far left was a reflecting surface.
In which Joanna could see the door opening, and the all-black uniforms of the hostage extraction team through the gap.
It all ends rather quickly after that. In fact, as far as kidnappings go, it's probably Joanna's shortest on record. She hasn't even lost feeling in her hands or feet by the time she's untied.
*
"You all right?" says Lestrade, who hurries into the room the moment the tactical team have bundled a writhing, red-faced Sir Timothy away to wherever he's going next. It's Lestrade who cuts through her restraints--not with a dagger concealed in an ankle sheath, as Sherlock would do, but with a plain, serviceable Swiss Army knife that comes out of his trouser pocket.
"I have never been that bored while having a gun trained on me," she tells him frankly, flexing her hands and wincing. Lestrade doesn't miss a beat, but takes her right wrist, then her left, rubbing sensation back into them with clever, callused hands.
"Oh, you were bored, were you." Lestrade places her hands in her lap and ghosts a finger over the swelling of her right eye and cheekbone.
"It ought to be a crime," she informs him, and then the giggling starts again.
Lestrade straightens up and glares down at her. "I ought to have you sectioned," he mutters.
"Sorry, sorry." She coughs a bit. "Adrenaline, you know."
"Adrenaline." His voice is skeptical.
"Yes, adrenaline. I am a doctor. Speaking of--where's Sherlock? I'd have thought he'd be here, how's his head?"
Lestrade's mouth twists, like he's having trouble forming an objective opinion about Sherlock's head. "His brother had to have him restrained to keep him from tearing off after you on his own. He'll be all right, but it was a nasty blow. Might have got something knocked loose, but it's not as though anyone would be able to tell, is it? He's down with the rest of the team, chomping at the bit."
"Oh." Joanna sobers, for real this time. "We'd better go down then."
Lestrade wordlessly offers his arm, and Joanna, finding herself a bit wobbly on her feet, accepts it. He guides her down the hall to the elevator, and they step inside.
"This is getting tiresome, you know," he says, staring at the lighted buttons that chart their progress to the ground floor. "It wasn't a month ago Martin performed impromptu surgery on you. And the pool, before that. A cat would be running short on lives, by now."
"I don't see why you're complaining," says Joanna. "It's not like it's you."
"Come off it," he grouses. "You know perfectly well--" He stops suddenly, and when Joanna looks at him she finds his cheeks have gone a bit pink.
Joanna blinks at him. "Well, look at you," she says, teasing. "That's rather sweet, Greg."
Lestrade makes a humph noise, low in his throat. "First year I knew Sherlock, I never thought he'd make it to thirty alive. In some ways, it only got worse when he got clean. I'd thought, when he met you--" Lestrade shrugs.
"What?" says Joanna, curious. She's never sounded Lestrade's opinion on her relationship with Sherlock before, and she's rather interested what they look like to him.
Lestrade takes a long moment answering. "I'd all but given up trying to persuade him to have a care for himself," he says. "You know what he's like. But I wondered if he wouldn't see it a bit differently once he had you to think about. Doesn't seem to have made much difference, though. Honestly, I'd think you egged each other on, except Sherlock goes mental when you get knocked about. He's shattered--not the sort of thing even he would let himself in for on purpose."
Joanna can't think what to say to that. She frowns at the descending lights on the button panel, suddenly impatient to be out of the elevator and out of the building.
"I worry," says Lestrade unexpectedly, still pointedly not looking at her. "S'all I'm saying."
It's Joanna's turn to feel her face grow a bit warm. "Well, I'll make a special effort in future not to get abducted. How's that?"
Lestrade snorts, just as the elevator dings open. "Believe it when I see it," he says.
They step out into the lobby together, Joanna still leaning rather heavily on Lestrade. In almost the same moment, the glass doors burst open, and Sherlock comes striding in, looking as though he's of a mind to tear the building apart with his bare hands. Mycroft follows swiftly on his heels, a grim expression on his face, as though he's only just restraining himself from catching the back of his younger brother's collar and hauling him back by the scruff, like a cat.
"Sherlock," she calls to him, because he clearly hasn't spotted her yet.
He stops dead, staring at her from across the expanse of gleaming tile floor. His face is abruptly blank. Mycroft, however, relaxes visibly, as though relieved by the prospect of not having to chase his brother up twelve flights of stair.
Joanna gives Lestrade's arm a parting squeeze, the best she can do to acknowledge the fact that they've just had a rather personal conversation. Then she walks out to meet Sherlock, who comes back to life all in a rush and dashes up to catch her by the shoulders. Once he's got her, he simply stares at her for almost a full minute. His eyes flicker from the bruise on her face to the ligature marks on her wrists and bare ankles. His fingers dig into her arms, eight points of exquisitely painful pressure that release when he takes a step closer and tugs her against his chest, resting his chin on the top of her head.
It's Joanna who reluctantly pulls back after a few seconds, because Sherlock doesn't show any signs of letting her go in the near future, and they can't hang about the lobby forever. Besides, she's acutely conscious of Mycroft studying them.
"Let me see," she says, pressing her hands to his temples and tugging his head down. He complies, which is uncharacteristic, and she wonders if the EMTs had actually risked giving him a sedative despite the knock. She cards her fingers through the mass of his hair and locates a golf ball sized lump and two sutures behind his right ear. "Well. That's lovely. Does it hurt?"
"Not anymore," he says in a low voice.
"I am assured that no lasting damage has been done," says Mycroft, who is standing just to the side with his eyes delicately averted.
Sherlock looks at him and snarls. "I told you," he says. "You had no right--"
"Yes he did," says Joanna firmly. "I wouldn't have let you go running after me, either. Anyway, I'm perfectly fine, as you can see for yourself."
"You are not fine!" Sherlock doesn't precisely snarl at her, but it's a near thing. "You look horrible!"
Joanna blinks. Mycroft clears his throat pointedly. Lestrade, behind them, chokes back a laugh.
Joanna glances around at a couple of female paramedics, dithering near the door, as though uncertain whether they have the authority to come and reclaim their patient.
"Sorry, ladies, " she says, in her driest voice. "I know he's a charmer, but he's taken."
Sherlock's face screws up in a way that resembles a toddler on the verge of a tantrum. And Joanna rather suspects that, had Mycroft not chosen that moment to suggest to Sherlock that perhaps Joanna might like to have her injuries tended now, he might actually have fallen down on the floor and had one.
It probably doesn't look exactly like love to the casual observer, she thinks, sitting in the back of the ambulance as Sherlock tucks the blanket in around her. But she'll take it.