Author: Regency

Title: Half of London Knows [Sherlock Holmes Is a Bad Investment]

Spoilers: AU for everything, but with obvious allusions to His Final Vow

Summary: John Watson is CAM's PA. Sherlock is intending to take down the most dangerous man in England, so courting John Watson to get close to Magnussen seems perfectly reasonable. Only John doesn't agree, and John doesn't forgive quite so easily. Sherlock realizes at once that he's miscalculated, not only in anticipating John's reaction, but in underestimating his own.

Author's Notes: We're jumping right into the action, so expect flashbacks.

AN II: Written in response to a prompt from the kink meme asking for Sherlock to woo John who is Magnussen's PA.

Disclaimer: I don't own any characters, setting, or quotes recognizable as being from Sherlock. They are the property of their actors, producers, writers, and studios, not me. No copyright infringement was intended and no money was made in the writing or distribution of this story. It was good, clean fun.

Sherlock was dazed from being slammed into the wall of Magnussen's office.

"You saved my life."

"For some reason, I guess I did." John refused to look at him directly.

"You shot him."

John regarded the body on the floor coolly. "I shot whomever that is in defence of your life, and that's the way you'd better tell it."

Sherlock couldn't get his head on straight. His right ear was ringing from the report of the gunshot going off beside his head. His ear stung from a glancing graze. I should be dead.

"You're angry at me. I assure you the deception was a necessary component of my investigation."

"Bollocks to that, but whatever gets the job done, right?" John's gaze flitted around the office from the shattered glass desk to the file drawers standing open. Nothing there. CAM's too clever for paper records.

"I would never have allowed us to marry under these pretences."

"I would have never said yes, you twat. I'm not that stupid or that hard up. I knew you had an angle."

Sherlock glanced up in surprise. He hadn't thought John clever enough to make him.

"What, you think you're the first certified genius with delusions of infamy who tried to use me to get close to my boss? Please, you're not anything special in that regard." John wiped down the weapon he'd used to dispatch the intruder and secreted it on his person, and then he grabbed Sherlock's arm to shepherd him out of the glass-walled sanctum.

Three flights of plate glass stairs on, Sherlock still couldn't make heads or tails of anything that had happened tonight. "I should be dead."

"You should have two or three holes in you. Remember that you don't when you're thinking about reporting all the facts of this case on that site of yours. Some of us enjoy working for a living."

Sherlock stared blankly at the body of the racist guard as they passed him into John's sub-office.

"Why didn't I know you were armed?"

"You did what most people do: you underestimated me."

John released Sherlock once they reached his desk and sat down at his terminal to type in lines of code with a speed unlike what he demonstrated in creating his blog posts.

Sherlock felt sick. Is this shock? He couldn't be sure; he'd deleted the symptoms the first time he failed to demonstrate them at the prescribed occasion.

"What are you doing?"

"Saving our arses. We needed to hide the records of tonight's little encounter. You shouldn't have gotten in here and neither should the gun-happy busybody upstairs. This incident needs to go away and so do you." John entered a final code and shut down his station. "Let's go."

"Why are we going," Sherlock asked, plaintive, as John proceeded to herd him toward the elevator back to the lobby. There were things he needed to ask John, things that only John Watson in his position as Charles Magnussen's trusted PA would know.

"What part of 'you should not be here' is difficult for you to comprehend?"

"But I am here."

John caught Sherlock and tugged him down till they were easily eye to eye. "You fell back against the wall when burglar turned the gun on you. Beyond that graze, were you hit?" Sherlock flinched where John lightly touched the shell of his singed ear.

"No."

John ran a perfunctory hand under Sherlock's coat, inspecting his torso for holes. Sherlock twisted away irritably. The only pain he felt was bruised pride. How did I miss that he was so much more?

"Did you hit your head?"

"What? Of course not. I'm perfectly lucid."

John made a show of running his hands through Sherlock's hair and palpating his skull for contusions. Sherlock hummed and bore the examination, eyes shutting just so at the practiced certainty of John's hands. Not merely a PA, or a PA and a bodyguard. A PA, a bodyguard, and a medic. A cypher in plainclothes. Sherlock opened his eyes to find himself being regarded by John's.

"You never mentioned medical training."

John shifted his focus to Sherlock's cervical spine and the state of it. "You don't ask the right questions."

Sherlock butted his hands. "I assumed. It was a misjudgement on my part."

"Not the first." John dropped his hands. "We've gotta go."

"What did you do with the security footage? It's common knowledge that nothing in Magnussen's empire can ever be deleted."

"Not that what my boss does is any of your business, but I hid the most recent versions of the file and restored a previous version from a time before this all went down. It should begin to update from here. There'll be an anomaly in the system, but those happen just about everywhere. Someone will investigate and find nothing amiss. We'll be home free."

"And the casualty?" Sherlock watched John's face for distress and found none. Acclimated to violence. A steady shot. Didn't shoot till I was in danger, so a strong moral principle, which I'd previously deduced. Sherlock had seen, yet failed to observe.

John shrugged. "Internal Services will clean it up once I call it in. Not a problem."

"What is it you do for Magnussen, John? That doesn't sound like the work a run-of-the-mill PA."

John shoved Sherlock against the lift doors, his lesser height no matter. "Am I under suspicious of a sudden, Mr. Holmes? Perhaps you should have worried about my bona fides before you tried to kiss me under a streetlamp."

Heat crowded Sherlock's collar till his nape was sweating and damp and he was blinking unnerved sweat out of his eyes. Sherlock was not a man who was easily intimidated, only Sherlock was intimidated by this man he had enthralled, and then overlooked.

That first kiss had been a lark and a gamble. He had wanted John to believe and had convinced himself. The others, they were...not boring. His senses were momentarily overtaken by remember lips, slick tongue, and teeth sharp and quick; the memory of hands underneath his shirt seeking handful upon handful of him and wanting more still. Sherlock hadn't perceived deception in those caresses. He perceived only anger in the one pinning him in place.

"You have a strong sense of morality. That's what made you save me. You wouldn't be involved with Magnussen if you knew what he was capable of."

"It's not my job to know what he's capable of. It's my job to keep his house in order and not ask any of the wrong questions. I'm very good at my job."

"He's not a good man, but you are."

"I've gone to war. Did you ever think just being a PA would be enough?"

John wasn't one to talk about Afghanistan in mixed company; only Sherlock had been able to deduce his pride at his service and his love of it.

"You wouldn't side with someone out for England's throat. I know that much."

The elevator to the lobby arrived and opened wide behind them in wait of a passenger. "Leave my office and don't ever come back."

"If I can prove to you that Magnussen is as bad as I say, will you help me bring him down?"

"You can't prove it."

"But if I could…would you help me?"

"Feed me something that isn't a lie and we'll see."

Sherlock got on the elevator, ear still ringing and body cold on one side whilst sweltering on the other. Shock. "I will."

"Not buying that either. Ta." John walked away without waiting for the doors to close.