The Empty Home

by Chai

Author's Note:

This is meant to take place shortly after "The Hounds of Baskerville" and before "The Reichenbach Fall."

Fans of the original Arthur Conan Doyle stories will recognize the ones I've mashed up and mixed together to create the plot for this. Sometimes the mashing and mixing have produced fairly drastic changes - not everything goes the way it does in the originals, even when characters' names are the same. I hope no one will be too offended by the liberties I've taken with the originals here.

I'm grateful for Ariane DeVere's wonderfully detailed transcripts of all the episodes, particularly "The Hounds of Baskerville," and for the discussion, encouragement, and suggestions that Fang's Fawn has so generously shared with me. I couldn't have written this without them.

Casefic, Friendship, No slash

All the usual disclaimers apply.

The Empty Home

by Chai

For the rest of his life, Sherlock would be haunted by memories from one particular case. He tried at first to delete them, but after many failures had to admit he couldn't because he didn't really want to: they had opened something in him that he found torturous but oddly precious, and he was unwilling to lose the reminders of its existence, however painful he found them to contemplate.

One was the first body, its once-so-familiar features blurred by the passing of time and the processes of death, lying huddled on the carpet in the tiny, windowless, locked room. The skeleton that he uncovered later, with its bits of hair and scraps of clothing still clinging here and there, would have been infinitely more horrifying to most people but had no effect on Sherlock whatsoever - until he looked up and saw John's face.

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Once he had realized that he couldn't delete even selected pieces of the case from his mind palace, Sherlock thought about it often, and sometimes wondered what sort of title John would have given it if he'd ever blogged about it. "The Mystery of the Sealed Room"? Dull. "The Case of the Retired-Colours Man" or "The Two 'Hosh Courtyards of the Coptic Patriarch'"? Either would cover parts of the investigation nicely, but neither could account for the whole. "The Adventure of the Unexcavated Pillbox" would go straight to the heart of things, but to refer to that terrible evening so lightheartedly seemed distasteful even to Sherlock; it certainly would to John.

Probably John would have chosen something more laconic, like "The House of No Gables." That had the virtue of being accurate, considerably more accurate than the name displayed ostentatiously on the hip-roofed old farmhouse's gateposts, "The Gables" - which Sherlock, with an odd pang he found he couldn't entirely defend himself against, hoped had been the invention of some architecturally-ignorant estate-agent, rather than its most recent owners.

"The House of No Gables" also had a certain literary suggestiveness that was entirely appropriate to the case. Sherlock doubted that many of John's readers would catch the allusion to the gothic novel or the film that had been made from it, but it was the sort of joke John himself might very well make under the circumstances. He was more literate than his blog suggested, was fond of old movies — he and Sherlock had actually watched that one together once - and the choice would be typical of the mordant sense of humour he tended to deploy in difficult situations. (This was not lighthearted at all. Ella Thompson would no doubt have called it a distancing-mechanism.)

But John, for obvious reasons, never blogged about the case, and the name Sherlock eventually gave it, though only in the privacy of his own thoughts, was simply "The Empty Home." As a physical description this was far from accurate: the house was not at all empty when Sherlock encountered it, but as well and expensively furnished as one would expect of the country home of an MP who had recently ascended to the giddy heights of the Cabinet. And yet, after learning what had happened there, Sherlock could never think of it as anything else.

That was as fanciful and sentimental as any phrase John would have come up with. But for this case Sherlock allowed himself to make an exception to his usual rule and indulge his feelings a little. He couldn't really help it. Even Mycroft, when he found out about the business - and of course Mycroft did find out, in spite of Sherlock's savagely-best efforts to keep him in the dark - had been disconcerted. Shaken. Perhaps even - Sherlock knew his brother too well not to detect it - somewhat grieved. Caring was not an advantage, but only a fool would believe that either Holmes brother was entirely immune to it, and the story of that particular house was able to touch even the Ice Man's supposedly Siberian and inaccessible heart.

As for John - well, that was only to be expected. All Army stoicism on the outside, of course. But the two brothers kept a very careful eye on him afterwards, and were relentless in making sure that no whiff of the case-behind-the-case ever entered the press.

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It all began on a gloomy day not long after their return from Dartmoor. The atmosphere in the flat that morning could only be described as strained. It had been raining relentlessly all week and Sherlock had been cooped up with no case to occupy his mind. The fact that the cooping-up part was entirely his own choice made no difference to his mood; he was grumpy and, though he would never have admitted it, more than a little depressed. John was also out of sorts. The two men sat in their armchairs opposite one another, the fire flickering beside them, computers open on their laps, and jabbed every few minutes with increasing irritation at their phones.

John's had been buzzing all morning with texts he didn't seem to want. Sherlock's, on the other hand, stayed relentlessly silent in spite of the fact that he was texting frequently himself and waiting impatiently for a reply.

John's phone buzzed again.

"Would you turn that thing off?" Sherlock snapped. "It's intensely annoying."

"Not the only thing around here that's intensely annoying," his flatmate muttered. He switched the sound off as asked, however. Sherlock glanced up at him for a moment, blinking, before apparently returning his attention to his own screen. In fact it was now entirely on John, every neuron of his high-speed brain on alert as he processed his friend's response.

It had been clear to him for some time that John had not yet entirely forgiven him for the incident a fortnight ago in the Baskerville lab. The doctor had been noticeably cool towards his flatmate since their return, withdrawn and sarcastic. Sherlock had concluded that John thought he had crossed a line by trying to slip a terror-inducing hallucinogenic drug into his coffee and then locking him into a lab and watching the results.

That he should be angry about this was, Sherlock thought, quite unfair. The detective had needed information; drugging John had been the only way to get it. Warning John that he was about to be drugged might have skewed the results. And the experiment itself should have been harmless: Sherlock had researched the hallucinogen carefully and been able to say with absolute confidence that John would suffer no long-term effects whatever once he had excreted it.

The only difficulty with that line of reasoning was that it had - possibly - been . . . at least partially . . . lacking. The drug should have been harmless, and on most people would have been. However, Sherlock now realized that he had failed to allow for the possibility that John's former therapist might not be quite as incompetent as he had always assumed. He had not considered that, as a result of John's experiences in Afghanistan, his friend might in fact actually have developed some form of post-traumatic stress disorder - one that, while it had clearly gone dormant once John began chasing across London after criminals, nevertheless remained lurking invisibly in his brain, ready to be roused to life again by some new trauma.

Having a gun held to his head and his girlfriend tied up in General Shan's murder machine apparently hadn't registered in John's mind as traumatic enough to make a difference. Neither had the experience of being kidnapped by a psychopathic criminal mastermind and strapped into an explosives-laden vest, even though the criminal in question had shown every willingness in the very recent past to blow little old ladies and innocent bystanders to bits. Sherlock himself had had a most unsettling reaction to that scene by the pool, one he was quite anxious that no one else should ever know about. As far as he could tell, however, John had slept easily that night and every night afterwards - until two weeks ago.

John had said nothing about what was happening, of course, but a flat mate could hardly have missed it even if he hadn't been an observational and deductive genius. At first Sherlock told himself that he was simply interested: the continuance of the drug's after-effects for a longer period of time than he had originally anticipated was a scientific fact that needed to be observed and understood. But when John continued to wake repeatedly each night in obvious distress (Sherlock could hear him from both his bedroom and the sitting room at the front of the house) the detective became conscious that his thoughts were turning to something closer to concern.

As the effects of these night-terrors became increasingly apparent and John started to limp painfully around the flat and have difficulty using his left hand, Sherlock's concern began to be replaced by a more active worry - which he found annoying, as it interfered with his concentration on the experiments with which he was trying to occupy his mind until an interesting case came up.

And along with both the concern and the worry there was something else distracting him, a train of thought that he kept trying to delete as useless and irrelevant, only to find that it wouldn't be deleted but kept coming back, more insidiously intent on disturbing him than before.

This was beyond annoying. Only idiots wasted time blaming themselves for their mistakes. The thing to do was to focus on finding a solution and then things would return to the comfortable, pleasant, and even enjoyable state they had been in before Henry Knight ever knocked on the door of 221B Baker Street.

The trouble was that Sherlock could think of only one solution to the problem: an interesting case. And it had to be interesting in a very specific set of ways. Intellectual excitement alone would not suffice; a certain element of physical risk was required, enough to bring John's adrenalin back up to the level which had so satisfactorily freed him from the effects of psychological distress in the past. At the same time, the case could not be so dangerous that John might get into a situation in which Sherlock would be unable to keep him safe. That, the detective had concluded after the incident at the pool, was simply unacceptable.

(Mycroft might think that Sherlock never learned from his mistakes, but he was wrong. In the front room of his mind palace Sherlock kept a list of things he really didn't want to have to go through again. As the most recent addition, nightmares about John in a Semtex vest now topped rehab, boarding school, and - Irene Adler's not-unpleasant attentions notwithstanding - sex.)

Unfortunately, London's criminals had not obliged. Lestrade, despite Sherlock's regular requests sent by text every twelve minutes for the past six days, had not obliged. Even Mycroft - to his considerable disgust, Sherlock had sunk low enough to text his brother describing what he wanted - had not obliged.

"Nothing!" Sherlock muttered, checking his phone for the umpteenth time. At the same moment, John let out an exasperated, "Oh, for God's sake!" and threw his own phone across the room.

It landed harmlessly on the sofa cushion. This appeared to annoy John further. He stood up and stalked into the kitchen, huffing under his breath and doing his best to hide the fact that his right leg hurt to walk on again.

"Am I disturbing your concentration?" Sherlock inquired, acidly - which meant both, "You are disturbing mine" (which was what he wanted John to hear) and (what was really in his mind), "Why are you still so angry?"

He was unsure what the gruffness in John's voice indicated when he answered, "No. It's Harry."

Sherlock raised his eyebrows. He had learned from experience that "Drinking again?" was not a comment likely to make Harry's brother happy at the best of times, so he refrained from making it.

John scowled at the kettle, which was shaking noticeably in his left hand. He transferred it to his right one and turned the water on before answering Sherlock's expectant silence.

"It's that damned blog of hers. She's been at me about it all week, asking if I've looked at it yet, and what do I think of it, and why hasn't everyone on the planet linked to it by now, and what should she be doing to get more hits. She seems to think it should have gone viral already! I think she's hoping she can use it as a springboard for a best-selling memoir - "My Life On the Rocks" or something, God help us all. And now her computer's got something wrong with it and she's fussing about that."

"What have you been telling her?"

"About the computer or the blog?"

"The blog, naturally. I assume your medical degrees have not yet made you a qualified computer technician."

"Nothing. I haven't read the damn thing yet."

"Really? I'm surprised. I'd have thought that would be just your sort of thing."

John gave him a baleful look. Sherlock steepled his fingers under his chin.

"Interesting," he observed.

"You must be joking."

Sherlock wasn't joking, but it wasn't Harry Watson's new hobby he found interesting so much as her brother's reaction to it. Even taking John's current sleeplessness and irritability into account, his evident failure to respond to Harry's questions was surprising. Sherlock knew John found her difficult to be around and would sometimes let himself ignore her texts or calls for a day or so, but he never left it longer than that and always ended up bailing her out when she wanted him to. He had, in Sherlock's opinion, a quite ridiculously soft heart when it came to his sister - or, of course, just about anyone else.

John was obviously finding her more irritating than usual. Sherlock knew very little about Harry Watson beyond her drinking problems, but he'd always assumed she was, in a small way, John's Mycroft - lacking Mycroft's overpowering intellect and far-reaching surveillance powers, of course, but nevertheless annoying simply by dint of being an overbearing older sibling, with the frustrating stupidity and emotionalism of the alcoholic thrown in to boot.

But Harry was actually committed to sobriety at the moment, something John invariably felt he had to support. That was the point of the blog. Harry had decided that therapy might be good for her. She'd asked John for a reference and was now Ella Thompson's patient. And Ella had handed down her usual prescription: "Write a blog."

Harry had called John to tell him about it the night they got back from Devon. John had stared at his phone rather blankly after she'd rung off. "Harry's going to write a blog," he'd said. "To help her stay off the booze."

"A blog? What could she possibly have to say?" Sherlock had demanded indignantly. When John didn't answer, he'd found himself expostulating further on a subject that had frequently annoyed him: "Why is it that every Tom, Dick, and now Harry imagines the rest of the world should be fascinated by the tiresome details of their tedious little lives, or the inane reflex opinions generated by the vestigial reptilian stem-cells that pass for their brains? When they have no knowledge or expertise, nothing to write about except their food, their gardens, their knitting, or their cats -"

He took a breath, trying to think of something else denunciatory he could say about the common or garden-variety blogger.

"Dunno," John said. "Think I'll go for a walk. I could do with some fresh air before bed."

The fresh air might have cleared his sister out of his mind, but not the Baskerville hound. He had woken in the middle of the night with a horrified cry. The sounds travelled easily down the heating pipes of the old house; with his keen hearing Sherlock could make out quite clearly the words "dog," "monster," and "run!" as his flatmate gasped and flailed his way back to consciousness.

Now, two weeks later, John put the kettle down and said again, "Think I'll go for a walk."

"Still raining," Sherlock pointed out. "Quite hard." But John was already clumping down the stairs as quickly as his bad-again leg would allow.

He nearly ran down the elderly man standing on the step outside, one arthritic hand reaching for the knocker. Thrown off-balance himself, John nevertheless managed to grab his victim before the old man could actually fall, then steadied him, and - after a series of flustered apologies, questions, and introductions - assisted him back up the seventeen steps to the flat.

"Major Amberley, Sherlock," he said, ushering the visitor into the sitting room, where Sherlock had just sent his sixteenth impatient text of the day to Lestrade and his sixth to Mycroft. "He's here about a case."