Chapter Text
John’s cheek is wet. Actually, his cheek feels like it might be lying in a small, cold puddle. Perhaps his whole body is in this puddle? Johns rolls onto his back with a wet slap of water. Yup. Shit.
His brain feels dense and heavy like one of those tiny silver metal balls one finds in pinball machines. John used to play pinball at the uni. The best part, of course, was drawing back the piston and pinging that ball up the narrow channel and around the corner…but now John is feeling mostly sorry for that ball.
Shit, damn. Why is it always head injuries? John laments.
He starts a mental list the long-term consequences of multiple concussions.
When John opens his eyes, he finds himself in a dank, dark basement. The rank odour of mold fills his nostrils, and he swings his damp arm over this mouth and nose to ease the smell. Slowly, as his eyes adjust to the gloom, he sits up. It’s a warehouse basement, studded with concrete pillars to support the low, concrete ceiling. The large room is dotted with discarded pallets, piles of what John thinks are wet carpet tiles (that would explain the mold), empty plastic carboys, and a rusty forklift. A factory, then. An abandoned factory—how predictable. Why can’t a concussion and a kidnapping ever end at a nice hotel? The Charing Cross hotel might be nice for a change… There are four small windows tucked up against the ceiling on one wall—the only source of light and also the source of the water, which drips generously down the wall, gathers, and collects in a steady stream toward the corner that John has been dumped in.
John rubs his hand over the throbbing portion of his head as he slowly shifts to his knees. He’s got a disturbing bump, but no open wound. They meant to disable me then, not hurt me, John thinks. There’s a weight around one ankle. He glances back to discover a heavy metal shackle and chain bolted around his ankle with an-honest-to-goodness bronze padlock—the old fashioned kind you might find on a pirate’s chest or in a medieval dungeon. John rolls his eyes. His captor’s choice of restraint and prison is suggestive of a person who’s either (a) highly attracted to romance and drama (John thinks perhaps Moriarty?), or (b) stuck several hundred years in the past, or (c) low on modern resources…or (d) all of the above. He registers that he’s thinking like Sherlock would, of course: deducing his situation.
Then, John’s mind clears and it hits him. Sherlock!?
John pushes off the concrete and climbs to his feet, fighting through the dizzy spell and forcing his eyes to focus. Sherlock must be here with him somewhere. He takes in the details and searches the basement for the lithe, familiar figure. Nothing, nothing. But wait. John stumbles forward to the end of his chain and leans around a large pile of stacked pallets. As John stretches, what looks like a pair of shoes materializes into a full body—still breathing—sprawled out on the floor about 25 metres away. The body is clad in a long black coat, but John’s sure it’s not Sherlock. He squints and crouches for a different angle. No, the frame is wrong; Sherlock is long and slender, and while his shoulders are broad, this bloke’s are much broader. He is a stocky man, with short legs and a long torso, and John can see fat fingers poking out from too-long sleeves. The Sherlock side of his brain kicks-in at that detail: not his own coat, then.
John is about to call out, but then, who is this person? Friend or foe? John hates not having backup. Where is Sherlock? John’s sure Sherlock isn’t in the room with him and the stranger, so he drags himself (This shackle must weigh at least twenty pounds!) back to where he awoke and inspects the ring on the wall where his chain is bolted. Well, that’s certainly a little more than finger tight, John thinks as he tests the heavy bolts. He slides down the wall and lands with a wet slop. Why didn’t the bastard chain me up on the high side of this hell hole, John thinks as he dangles his fingers in of the tiny streams that trickle around him. He smells his fingers. Oil and asphalt. Run-off from a major road then. That’s heartening. At least I’m probably close to London proper.
Suddenly tired, John lays his heavy head back against the cold wall of his unlikely dungeon. He closes his eyes for a moment, hoping to ease the throbbing. He lets himself imagine, just for a moment, that he’s back at Baker Street with Sherlock. He’s dozing in his chair with a hot cuppa by his side and a forgotten book in his lap. And Sherlock….John muses as to what he’d like Sherlock to be doing most—busy with an experiment? No, too dangerous. Working on a case? John surely wouldn’t be dozing then, would he? Ah! Playing his violin. And not plucking it with dis-ease as he often does, but actually standing at the window, his back to John, and drawing his bow against the strings with musicality. Like he used to play, before... A slow, sweet melody that Sherlock often played after John had gone to bed, and so familiar to the both of them that Sherlock’s fingers are near-lazy on the fingerboard as he sways to the tune. In this fantasy, John opens his eyes to watch Sherlock’s beautiful, confident fingers dance on the strings, and Sherlock turns toward him. For a brief moment their eyes meet—Sherlock’s eyes bright, liquid, and mesmerizing—and Sherlock quirks a small smile, before—
“Wake up.”
John starts awake and is on his feet in a second, pulled back to his wet, dark dungeon reality.
“Sorry!” the voice sputters. “I didn’t mean to startle you. But your head. Don’t fall asleep.”
“I’m sorry, but who’s that?” John says as he walks to the end of his chain again and leans around the pallets. Sure enough, the figure is awake and leaning back against a pillar, seemingly relaxed. John notes that he too has a shackle and chain on his ankle.
“Another prisoner. Not the news you wanted.” His voice is soft but clear, with hints of a Scottish accent. John guesses the stranger has been in England for quite some time though, as the evidence of accent is faint. “What’s your name, lad?”
“John,” he answers, clearing his throat. “And yours?”
“Maleki. Or Mal.”
John needs information. Needs to know where he is, who put him there, and what sort of risk he is about to face. He sizes up Maleki as best he can between the dark and the distance: he looks to be about John’s age, maybe older, with straight longish black hair that falls chaotically around his face like he hasn’t had a haircut in months. Maybe he hasn’t. He’s stubbly, but not bearded. The way his skin sits on his cheekbones, John guesses he’s been consistently malnourished for quite some time. All his clothes are absurdly too big for his body. His feet are bare and the soles are black.
“How long have you been here, Mal?” John says quietly.
Mal looks to the ceiling, his lips moving softly, counting. “Oh. I’d say about 6 weeks.” He pauses while John takes it in. “You’ve been here less than a day, in case you’re wondering. Unconscious.”
Good, John thinks. Any evidence is still fresh. Sherlock should be putting it all together shortly.
“Do you know who’s keeping you here?” John asks.
“Yes.”
“Can you say?”
Mal looks to the ceiling again, his lips moving, and John thinks that this time he is praying. A tingle cascades down his spine as he waits for Mal’s answer. This man doesn’t look afraid. No, he seems quite relaxed actually, leaned up against a pillar with his legs out in front of him and his hands folded in his lap. After a moment, his eyes lower to meet John’s.
“Everybody’s read about him. The papers call him King Grimm.”
John is frozen. Dead frozen with fright. King Grimm. A case he and Sherlock were working on—gone cold nearly three weeks ago. A gruesome serial killer with a modus operandi that Sherlock had nearly picked apart, but they’d never gotten a lead on where to find him. His murders were linked but each was different enough that even Sherlock couldn’t figure where he’d strike next.
King Grimm, the Fairy Tale Serial.
John slides to the ground and leans against the pallets. Not good, not good. This case had Sherlock frustrated and flummoxed. Just yesterday they’d been arguing about it.
John had come home from the shops expecting Sherlock to be at least as unbearable as he’d been the last three weeks, since the evidence left from Grimm’s last kill had lead nowhere, again. But true to Sherlock’s ups and downs, things had worsened in the hour he was gone. He pushed through the door to the sitting room just as a large brown book flew past his head.
“Sherlock! What—”
“I can’t stand it, John!” Sherlock was standing on the seat of his chair, his fists clenched and his hair an unruly mop of tussled curls.
“Sherlock, get down from there,” John demanded as he carried the loaded bags into the kitchen and looked for a place on the counter to set them down. “And can you please leave at least a patch clear in here? Lab equipment I understand, but books, Sherlock? There are more books in the kitchen than actual food.” He dropped the bags on the floor and gathered a pile of books. “Books stay in the sitting room,” he said with a pointed glare at Sherlock (who was still standing on the chair) as he passed him. There was nowhere to put the books in the sitting room, so John started a neat pile on the floor by their desk area.
“I don’t care for your domestic sensibilities, John. Clean if you must, but my mind is wasted on such trivialities. This, however, is much more important. What if he’s following a specific volume? His targets may seem random but perhaps he’s an idiot savant who’s just going chapter-by-chapter. Not chronologically by publication date, nor by the story’s approximate setting in history as I previously speculated, but by a specific volume. All we need to do is isolate the volume to predict his next victim.”
John stood in front of his mad friend and looked up. “I said get down from there.”
Sherlock collapsed into a curled heap in the chair, his silk dressing down settling around him rather artfully, and he steepled his fingers. “It’s maddening, John. The Grimm Brothers published their first collection in 1812, and since then I can’t even pinpoint the number of re-printings of their works. This country is obsessed with those wrecked fairy tales, apparently. No wonder some madman is making a killing spree of them. Serves the British public right—”
“Sherlock!” John gave him a withering look from across the room where he was stacking multiple versions and volumes of Grimms’ Fairy Tales.
Sherlock sneered at him, but dropped it. “And what if it’s not a specific volume, John? Though it’s nearly worse if it is! Even if we find the volume, how can we possibly track down a person who matches all the characteristics of the heroine or hero before he does? There are 8,308,000 people in this city on the average weekday. It’s infuriating just to consider the odds!”
Sherlock’s pitch was just so that John knew he was genuinely upset, so he pushed his chair closer to Sherlock’s and sat. With a sigh, he reached out and pulled Sherlock’s hands away from his taut lips, and settled them in his own. Sherlock only slightly resisted. He was throwing a tantrum and he didn’t like to be interrupted during a tantrum, but John also knew that Sherlock enjoyed this new development in their friendship: hands. Ever since Sherlock had returned after six months…well, that is after…after The Fall, John had been administering to his mysterious injuries. The injuries he’d never explained, but had quietly revealed to John over the four months he’d been back as each had become too much to tolerate. As far as John could ascertain without bone scans (to which Sherlock would not consent), Sherlock’s left hand had been nearly crushed during his time away, resulting in possibly dozens of micro-fractures along the thin bones of his hand. While the untreated micro-fractures had long healed, Sherlock’s hand still ached in the cold and cramped after waking from a long sleep. John suspected the hand ached most days, all day, but Sherlock only ever came to him when he truly needed relief.
John held Sherlock’s hands in his own and began to gently massage his palms. Sherlock immediately stilled. John leaned back to his side table and scooped a bit of Tiger’s Balm from the canister he kept there, and then began to rub it into Sherlock’s hands. As he did, he focused solely on the long, graceful fingers in his—on healing them, making them dance across a violin again. He could feel Sherlock’s eyes staring down at their joined hands as John worked. Silence between them, for a while.
“Sherlock, I’m worried,” John said lowly. Sherlock didn’t answer, so he continued. “You need to let this case go, if only for a bit.” John wasn’t sure Sherlock was listening, but when he raised his gaze, he found himself startling close to a set of bright, blue eyes. Speculative and defensive. “As your doctor, I require you to eat and sleep—” Sherlock tried to pull away but John clamped down on his hands. Sherlock winced and dropped his eyes. “Sorry, sorry.” He continued massaging a little softer. “It’s okay when you barely eat over a week-long case, but this case has been going on for months. You look terrible. You’re pale, you’re losing weight, and if Mycroft saw you like this he’d be appalled. Your health has almost regressed to when you returned from…” John couldn’t say it, not to him, but Sherlock raised his eyes to meet John’s again. This time the defensiveness was gone, replaced by a sadness that John had only started noticing since Sherlock’s return. “Just….just please put this case away for a while. It’s eating at you. Take a break and come back to it fresh in a few weeks. Yes?”
Sherlock was silent for some time, and then he whispered, “Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella, Snow White, Maid Maleen, and then what, John?”
“Sherlock,” John warned.
“Don’t patronize me, John,” Sherlock spat as he quickly pulled his hands away. “Is that really what you want? The next victim’s blood on your hands because Sherlock Holmes needed a rest?” Sherlock sprung from his chair and began to pace, his voice getting louder and louder. “The work, John! It matters! It matters more than this trivial vessel and who are you to tell me what I need anyway? I alone have to predict the next fairy tale he chooses, and I alone will decide when I need to stop!”
John’s chest was suddenly hot with anger. “Alone! That’s it, isn’t it? Ego too big to consider anybody else’s opinion and a brilliant mind wasted on manic, childish performances like this one.” John stood and faced Sherlock, who was ramping up to reply but not before John got his word in. “I thought you’d changed Sherlock. I thought you’d finally figured out that you need other people in your life. But it’s still all about you and your damned work!”
Sherlock’s voice was truly cruel when he yelled back, “Yes, it’s always the work! And the work went on just fine before we were flatmates, and all the while I was away!”
John clenched his fists and stepped toward Sherlock. He had the pleasure of watching Sherlock flinch before he veered around him and down the stairs. He had nothing to say to the wretched, selfish man.
Nothing, thinks John now as he sits on the cold concrete, except everything I should have said yesterday, and the day before, and the day before that... John remembers how he stormed out of Baker Street and down the sidewalk, aware he’d forgotten his coat and that the air was chilly, but holding too much rage and pride to go back for it. He would hit Sherlock, he was sure, if he’d seen him in that instant.
John looks down at his own hands and recalls how he was resentful that he could still feel the warm, slow burn of the Tiger Balm on his fingers as he’d walked. Sherlock’s hands and words had stung him like a jellyfish.
Now, John wishes he’d brought his coat. He wishes more that he’d stayed and finished the fight. Coward.
He remembers walking up to Regent’s Park, finding a bench, and sitting there to stew until the sun began to set. He doesn’t remember being hit on the back of the head, but assumes this is where he was abducted from. And then he was here.
“John?”
“Right,” John breathes as he settles back into the present. “Sorry, just taking in the situation.”
“You read the papers then. Is it much worse? Before I got here, he’d killed two women and his nickname had just been coined by some private detective.”
Consulting, John thinks. “Yes, Sleeping Beauty, then Cinderella, and two more since you’ve been here.”
“Didn’t pay it much attention, truthfully. Another psycho in the papers. Wish I’d known every detail now.”
John looks over at his cell-mate. Maybe he doesn’t look so much relaxed as he does resigned. He’s been here six weeks, after all. John’s instincts tell him to be careful what he tells this man, but the healer in him wants to help, to offer clarity and information, to maybe sooth what must be a frightening ordeal for this stranger.
“Tell me what you know,” John says. “I can tell you what the papers have said since.”
Mal made a low humming sound before clearing his throat. “He’s crazy. That I know personally. And he’s convinced he’s the king of some fairy world, but everything is backwards there. He kidnaps people and plays out old-fashioned fairy tales. The old Grimms’ tales that end so bloody. He makes them end bloody, even when they aren’t supposed to.” Mal pauses and hums again, like he’s gathering steam for another long speech. “The first girl, that was Sleeping Beauty, the papers said. But it didn’t sound like the story I know.”
John snorts. No it did not. “In the old Grimms’ story,” John shares, “a princess gets a sliver of flax buried under her fingernail, and she falls unconscious. Her father lays her body down on his estate. A king comes upon her, rapes her, and goes home. In the story, the princess gives birth to twins and eventually marries the king, but the killer never got to that part. Eight weeks ago, the police found the body of a woman in Hyde Park, dressed in a silk blue gown and laid on a bed a flowers. The cause of death was an overdose of zolpidem combined with opiates--sleeping pills and pain killers—but it obviously wasn’t a suicide. Rape kit tested positive. And while it didn’t seem important at first, a sliver of flax was shoved under one of her fingernails.”
“Seems tame now, compared to the second murder.”
“Wait till I tell you about the last two,” John replies ruefully. “What did you read about the second?”
Hum. “The papers said it was Cinderella. They found her outside the Intercontinental Hotel, the morning after the opening ceremony of The London Ball. She was a dancer in the competition, I believe. She was dressed in a gown that was later proved to be stolen from the St. James Theatre, who put up Cinderella last year. Her toes and heels sliced clean off. Her eyes scooped out…”
There’s a long pause between them, and then John picks up the thread. “Cause of death was loss of blood. You don’t need to know the implements he used. It’s gruesome. He got the story wrong, though.” It drove Sherlock crazy. “In Grimms’ version, it’s the evil step sisters that slice off their own toes and heels to fit into the glass slipper. And later, after Cinderella marries the prince, the stepsisters have their eyes pecked out by doves. Sherlo—I mean, the police couldn’t figure out why the victim was Cinderella, not one of the sisters.”
“How could they be sure she was Cinderella?”
“The shoes fit. They were her size, and based on rough impressions, her shoes. Both were on her feet when she was found.”
For awhile, they sit in silence. John thinks about working the case with Sherlock, and how miffed he’d been that it was actually John who’d made the connection between the first two murders—that each was a twisted version of a Grimms’ tale. If Sherlock had ever bothered to read a fairy tale as a child, he’d deleted it. In fact, the oddities of each murder had Sherlock in head spin (he’d spent a whole evening in his Mind Palace but none of the details matched what he’d had stored there). John told Sherlock to consider them lucky that as a young boy, John had once found a copy of the Grimm Brother’s Children’s and Household Tales (the original title of the collection) in the library, and that the details of Cinderella in particular had been so grisly that John had retained those images into his adult life. Sherlock told John that luck was for the weak-minded and disorganized. John wonders if this was a compliment…
“And the last two?” Mal finally asks into the dim.
“The third woman was found with her lungs and liver cut out. And a chunk of apple lodged in her throat. You wouldn’t believe it, but the story was Grimms’ Snow White. In the original tale, the Queen sends a huntsman to bring back Snow White’s liver and lungs, which she plans to eat. The huntsman fails but later the Queen gets her with the poison apple, until the Prince comes to save her. This one was pretty graphic.” John shivers as he remembers the smell of iron in the air—so much blood.
“Was she dressed? Like Snow White?”
“No. Maybe he couldn’t find a suitable costume, but he’d applied bright red lipstick to her lips. Real sick. This guy is screwed in the head.” John takes a steadying breath. “The last murder was just three weeks ago. Do you know the story of Maid Maleen?”
“No.”
“It’s a real obscure one. Princess Maleen wants to marry a prince but the king says no and locks her in a tower for seven years with all her servants. After seven years, they break free only to find the kingdom has fallen and the king is dead. They flee to the Prince’s kingdom and take jobs in the royal kitchen because the Prince is betrothed to another princess, though he’s never met her. However, his betrothed is ugly, and on the day of their wedding, she asks Maid Maleen to take her place as bride so the Prince won’t refuse to marry her. Maid Maleen marries the prince and at the ceremony he places a gold necklace around her neck. That night he goes to the wedding chamber to find there is no gold necklace around his bride’s neck, and an assassin has been sent to kill Maleen. He rescues her just in time and they live happily ever after.” John takes a deep breath and continues. “The last victim was found in the penthouse of an unfinished condo project that’s been on-hold for the last few months, so quite isolated. She’d been starved to death. We—I mean, the police might have thought it was unrelated, except she was dressed in a wedding dress, and the important detail, was wearing a gold necklace around her neck.” Sherlock had put the details of this one together, having read all of Grimms’ tales multiple times by this point. He knew the tale in an instant.
Mal makes a sort of grunt of acknowledgement, and John figures there’s really nothing more to say about the previous murders. The serial killer is one of the worst he and Sherlock have tracked, and brilliant to boot. No one detail had led Sherlock to identify the killer yet, and there was zero connection between the victims. Sherlock figured the killer had resources, imagination, and possibly help. John replayed his conversation with Sherlock in his head, and found he still believed that this case was eating away at Sherlock. When it was Moriarty, it’d been a game and he’d wanted Sherlock to advance to the end, but this killer was completely unpredictable.
“You know the Grimms’ tales really well,” Mal near whispers. “Maybe you can tell me how I’ll die? So far I’ve just been shackled here, waiting.”
“I...I don’t know,” John stutters. He didn’t re-read most the tales. Sherlock read multiple copies cover-to-cover. Sherlock would know. He’d glance at dark-haired Mal in the too-big clothes, sitting in a dungeon, and he’d name the story instantly.
“No worries. Guess you’ve got your own story to figure out.”
And that was the rub, wasn’t it? If John was indeed being held captive by King Grimm, then his next big concern was surely what fairy tale character is he meant to be, and how might that character meet his end?
Sherlock, where are you?