Chapter Text
“Bloody buggering fuck!”
John nudged the curtain aside with his gun as if Sherlock might be hiding within the folds, stared enraged at the empty balcony, while Greg checked under the bed behind him. As this was Castelano’s suite, John had been sure that the missing Sherlock would be here - perhaps injured, perhaps bound, perhaps - no no we are not thinking about that he’s fine he’s fine he’s FINE - but after breaking down the door, they had come up empty.
“OK, tell me again,” said Greg. John whirled on him, breathing hard, and to Greg’s credit, he didn’t flinch. His concerned-yet-calm face helped John drag back some semblance of his own, and he huffed in a deep breath. He paced in front of the balcony doors, in and out of the bright sunshine now streaming in and shadows.
“He had said this was a three on his scale, no need for me to come, so I stayed home and took a shift at the clinic. Then yesterday morning, he texted to say he had narrowed it down to two suspects - Meyerson and Castelano - and he was almost done. Nothing since then.”
“Nothing except Meyerson turning up dead this morning in the hotel pool,” Greg said sarcastically, but still nodding along. “OK, so back up - the Eastbourne nick told me about the case - potentially misattributed suicide in the hotel pool changing rooms, but if it was a murder, it was locked-door - so why would Sherlock say that was a three?”
John banged the wardrobe doors open for a second time before storming out of the room, Greg behind him. “I don’t know! He said it was only going to take a day, didn’t give me any details.” He stared at the hallway of doors, around the other officers and hotel staff, panicked at the number of them, wondering where else to look. They had already been through all the hotel common areas and Sherlock’s room, so if he wasn’t in the missing Castelano’s suite, then where - “He must have wanted to do it alone, fuck knows why though.” Greg walked to the next room door and gestured for the trembling porter to open it.
“Why would he do that? I thought you two had sorted yourselves out?”
John followed him into the empty room, though some sense told him Sherlock wasn’t there.
“Yeah, so did I,” he snapped, knowing all the while that Greg did not deserve his anger, but not having anywhere to send it. He had thought he and Sherlock were past this - past John’s murderous wife and nonexistent daughter, Sherlock’s murderous sister and nonexistent sociopathy, past the secret-keeping and deflections and denials - well except for that one thing, that one thing we will deny until the cows come home so that Sherlock doesn’t run screaming from the flat… But it was obvious now that Sherlock had deliberately kept John from this case. He rounded on the porter, who took a nervous step back.
“And he’s been swimming every day?”
The unfortunate man nodded frantically.
John had never known Sherlock to swim a day in his life.
“Get the rest of these doors open,” Greg said to the porter and the awaiting officers. “Search every room. Downstairs too.”
“Um, but -” the porter ventured.
“Yes?” Greg said, and John felt a minor flicker of guilt as he noted the tremble in the poor man's lip.
“Um, I - I - what about, you know, the occupied rooms?”
“I thought you said most of them left after the conference?”
“Well, yes, except Mr. Smith.”
John’s ears pricked up.
“Mr. Smith?”
“Yes, he booked his suite for a month. I was told - I, I mean the, the manager said -”
“Where is Mr. Smith’s suite?”
“I - it - it’s right underneath that one, I mean, underneath Mr. Castelano’s -”
John was already running for the stairs as he heard Greg start cursing behind him. He crashed through the emergency door, took the stairs two at a time, crashed through the next door, then a few steps down the hall, then he slammed his shoulder into the suite door, once, twice, and it gave, and -
Nothing. It was completely empty, untouched. He stared around, heart hammering, wide-eyed, willing Sherlock to appear.
There was a tapping sound from behind the closed curtains. John lunged for them, wrenched them aside, and -
“Sherlock!”
John heard Greg arrive behind him, heard his exclamation of relief, but spared them no mind as he scrambled to pull the doors aside and swoop down on his crouched friend. Sherlock was curled in a corner of the balcony, no immediately obvious injuries, which was easy for John to establish as he was only wearing a pair of black swimming trunks. However, he hadn’t spoken, and as he raised his face John saw his squinting eyes were glazed, lips pale around panting breaths. There was a drying pool of vomit on the balcony beside him.
“Hey, OK, it’s OK,” John babbled, reaching for him, needing to feel his pulse, needing to know -
Fast pulse dry skin unfocused nauseated heat exhaustion or HEAT STROKE
“Greg, help me,” John said, and Greg was already there, already reaching as well, and the only reaction Sherlock had to their both lifting him under legs and armpits was a sort of befuddled frown.
“Water!” John barked at the nearest officer, who spun around towards the bathroom. “And cold wet towels while you’re at it!”
They got Sherlock laid out on the bed, and while John lifted his fringe off his forehead and felt around his hair to check for head injuries, he saw Greg slide the glass doors and curtains closed and crank up the aircon. They were lucky - lucky! - to be so far south of London, where aircon was a rare sight, but John would take what he could get as he felt the beginning of a cool breeze ruffle his sweaty hair. Sherlock was still looking up at him muzzily, but now there was a dreamy sort of smile on his face, as John ran his hands over his scalp - not broken not bleeding not crumpled on the pavement NO - the smile only dropping away as the officer returned with a glass of tap water.
“No -” he croaked, trying to turn his head away, nudging weakly at John with his hands.
“I know you feel sick, but you must, Sherlock, you must,” John said stoutly, already lifting his head and bringing the glass to his lips. “Three sips, go on, that’s it, good.” After a token moment of pressing his lips together, Sherlock did as he was told, and the officer materialized next to them again with several wet towels.
“Thanks,” John said, barely glancing at him, taking the towels and starting to lay them onto Sherlock’s hot, dry, skin. Sherlock made a mewling sound of discomfort, but apparently didn’t have the energy for further protest, miserably subsiding into the mattress and almost immediately starting to shiver.
“OK, three more sips - hey, none of that now, come on, three more sips -”
“Ambulance is ten minutes away,” Greg said quietly from somewhere off to the side. “What next?”
“Ice.”
Greg nodded, then stepped away to inform the hapless porter. John started pulling off the towels, glancing around and grabbed a hotel menu from the side table and started fanning it over Sherlock’s wet skin. Sherlock’s shivering intensified, and he made that whining cry again, reaching his hands towards John, with a frown. John noted goosebumps beginning to form on his arms and legs, so abandoned the menu and started placing the towels back onto him.
“John -”
“I know, I know, Sherlock, but we need to bring your temperature down slowly,” John said to both his patient and himself. “It might just be heat exhaustion, but if it’s heat stroke, we need to get it sorted out, yeah? Don’t want that brain of yours overheating any more than it usually does.”
Sherlock huffed, folding his arms across his chest, but he did not protest as John coaxed him into drinking the last of glass of water. He focused steadily on the glass as well, and John felt his own heart rate finally start to calm.
“How long were you out there?” John asked, moving into checking his mental acuity.
“Since lunchtime yesterday,” Sherlock said, voice hoarse, but there.
“OK, so around twenty-four hours then,” John said, running a towel over Sherlock’s reddening face. Of course, Sherlock had to get locked on a balcony in Eastbourne in August in one of the hottest summers on record. John remembered from the news in the car this morning that it had been hitting thirty degrees celsius. “How did you get out there?”
“Climbed over,” Sherlock said. “Castelano was armed - did he - ?”
“We don’t know,” John said, and Sherlock frowned. “It’s not important right now -”
“Meyerson?”
“We’ll talk about it later,” John said sternly, in no mood to discuss the case. Now that Sherlock was found - in his presence, in his view, trembling under his hands - the driving panic and then stoic practicality were fading back to the anger he had felt too guilty to fully indulge overnight.
“He’s dead,” said the officer next to him who had just appeared with another glass of water. He smiled incongruously as he said it, as if he were being helpful.
John wanted to slap him with the wet towel.
“Dead?” Sherlock repeated, voice more animated, turning his head, now completely focused. Curls were stuck to the skin of his face, courtesy of the wet towel, and with some vindicated amusement, John cut him off by laying the towel directly over his face.
“John!” This was rather muffled, though the affronted how-dare-you tone came through loud and clear.
“Later, Sherlock,” John said, lifting it off again to reveal a fully-deployed Sherockian pout.
***
Thankfully, it was heat exhaustion rather than heat stroke, which the paramedics had ascertained through asking Sherlock questions to judge his mental capacity (which led to a baritone-driven-diatribe that would have sent lesser men and women running - point Sherlock), and by checking his core temperature with a rectal thermometer (which led to an indignant soprano-squawk which could be heard even out in the hallway - point paramedics). Shrugging into a hotel robe and downing a third glass of water, Sherlock had stalked slowly past a smirking Greg and back to his room to pack his things, with John left standing, staring after him.
Greg gave him a bro-type slap on the shoulder that made him stagger.
“Alright! No serious injury, no hospital visit - only a missing murderer. Based on past experience with you two, this is going quite well!”
John sighed.
“Yeah, t’riffic.”
“Ah, come on. He’s OK. Still an idiot, but he’s OK. Cheer up!” With another slap, he too wandered off, starting to give new commands to the waiting officers.
John sighed again, dragging his hand across his face, then wandered down to the hotel lobby. He felt his own pout developing, now that all the adrenaline had worn off. He sent off a text to both Mrs. Hudson and Mycroft, assuring them that their idiot loved-one was in one piece, then slumped to sit down in an overstuffed chair. Now that he didn’t have anything in the way of his thoughts, he felt positively morose. Sherlock had lied to him, had gone off to solve a potentially dangerous case, alone. Granted, they were not great at talking, and even since John had moved back in, they still avoided some of the darker areas of their shared (and unshared) pasts, but they had talked about how they needed to be better at this - better at letting the other know what was going on. He had thought they were doing better - they were almost back to that easy domesticity they had before Sherlock went away, almost back to that state where a shared laugh over an in-joke crackled around the edges with another kind of potential - and Sherlock had just shat all over it.
John felt petty, and young, and rejected - because what it really came down to was not that Sherlock had almost been seriously harmed, but to a whiny voice inside John’s head that cried -
Sherlock didn’t want to play with me!
He crossed his arms and glared at a truly awful piece of hotel sculpture artwork as if daring it to contradict him. Well, if Sherlock didn’t have a good explanation for this, then ok, fine - maybe John wouldn’t play with him, either. At the very least, he needed to rein in his feelings a bit. As things stood, he had gone back to happily following Sherlock around, basking in his brilliance, feasting on his smiles, his glances, his innuendos-that-weren’t-but-maybe-were-?, and considering that they might finally, finally, tip over into something more-than-friends - partners perfect mine mine MINE - but if Sherlock wasn’t all-in, if he were going back to his secretive ways, then -
Then -
Well then, John would probably bloody well still follow him around, wouldn’t he.
John scowled at the statue just as Sherlock strode into view.
“Ah, John,” he said imperiously while dropping his duffle bag, and John’s glare could have shattered the statue into a million pieces. “Did you bring a car?”
“Yes, Sherlock I brought a bloody -”
John’s annoyance ran into a wall - a wall that was the colour of bright-red sunburn that made Sherlock’s face shine like a ripe tomato. As he stared, Sherlock’s cheeks got almost impossibly redder as he blushed in apparent embarrassment.
“What?”
John smirked, a little meanly, but he couldn’t help it. Sherlock rolled his eyes, but even that seemed to cause him some discomfort.
“Oh, for heaven’s sake. I didn’t exactly have the opportunity to top up my factor-fifty while I was trapped on a balcony.”
John valiantly folded his smirk away, unsure of how successful he was. Sherlock glared at him, then turned and flounced out towards the car park. John noted that he had left his bag where he had dropped it. With one more sigh, he bent down to retrieve it, then followed along after him.