Sherlock/ACD Fanfiction: Fifty Shillings

[saki101]

Title: Fifty Shillings
Author: saki101
Characters/Pairings: Sherlock/John, Lestrade, OCs
Rating: light R-ish (I never know)
Genre: AU, Slash, cross-over Victorian Sherlock and ACD
Word Count: ~2.3K
Disclaimer: Sherlock is not mine and no money is being made.
A/N: Written for Come at Once: Round 5 with cleflink's intriguing prompt: "closer to the ground".
Summary: A case and a touch in the dark.

Excerpt: Holmes’s hand closed about my wrist, one finger sliding over my skin beneath my cuff. In the dark, the touch was somehow loud and definitely distracting. He tugged. Thus linked, we went on.

Also posted on AO3.



Fifty Shillings


I had lost my bearings. We had been heading southeast when we followed the Walbrook underground, but after so many twists and turns without any sign intelligible to my eyes, I simply followed Holmes as quickly and quietly as I could. The numbers and letters chiselled into the stone at the confluence of tunnels clearly meant something to him, although at the last two turns there had been none to see when he raised his lantern. That didn’t appear to perturb him. At each, he had glanced back at me with a faint smile and I had lifted my feet high to slosh the muck through which we walked as little as possible as I caught up with him. Together, we slipped through the iron gate he had opened. It didn’t squeak. Holmes smiled more broadly.

The passage was narrower than the tunnels. Rivulets of water streaked the stone to my left. It glimmered in the lantern light. The damp made my shoulder ache and I longed for clarification. Holmes raised a gloved finger as though he knew I was tempted to speak. I scowled. I would have whispered. Apparently, even that would have been too much. He closed the shutters of his lantern. The darkness was complete. I have no fear of the dark, but the moisture and the stench gave it a cloying weight that was repellant. I shuddered. My shoulder sent a pang down my arm. Holmes’s hand closed about my wrist, one finger sliding over my skin beneath my cuff. In the dark, the touch was somehow loud and definitely distracting. He tugged. Thus linked, we went on.

There was a cascading sound. My first thought was of a breach in the walls through which some foul stream was spewing, but then the sound stopped. Abruptly, as water does not. Holmes’s grip tightened. He had heard our quarry.

Around the next bend, a dim light shone. One more turn and we were adjacent to a metal gate akin to the one through which we had entered the passage. A wavering light lit the wall opposite it. A cascading sound echoed off it. From where I stood, I could only see a broad, bowed back covered in grey wool and the edge of a table, a wooden door and the corner of a brick wall behind them. Now though, I recognised that the shower was of coins.

Head down, Holmes shifted to the other side of the gate in a crouch. When he stood again, he raised two fingers at me and pointed towards the side of the room I couldn’t see. I understood that he saw two more people in the room. That didn’t mean there wouldn’t be other accomplices coming through the door any minute, but at least there weren’t more than three at the moment.

There was a scraping sound. Wood over stone was my guess. Perhaps the people in the next room had a well-rehearsed routine or they communicated by signs. Either way, I heard not a word spoken, but one by one and then in twos and threes and more, coins were dropped into something wooden that resonated until the wood must have been covered because soon there was only the jingle of metal on metal. They certainly weren’t being quiet. The lack of speech seemed all the more puzzling because of it.

The back shifted and a hand came into view over the left shoulder. Left-handed, I noted. Good to know. Something clinked near the gate, rolled through it to topple by my boot. I nearly laughed. It was a tuppence. I looked up at Holmes. He was watching me. He smiled and turned back to the room. I thought I understood then. They were separating silver from gold, copper not welcome at all.

Six swift blows, metal against metal, reverberated in the subterranean chambers. My eyes opened wide. Scraping. I saw the head and back of a man shoving something heavy along the floor. He left it by the door and dragged something lighter towards the table. Coins thumped to the bottom of it.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Holmes move. He was putting his watch away. He tapped a finger to his lips and tilted his head. I heard nothing new, but Holmes usually heard things before anyone else. I felt for my pistol and looked back into the room. The wooden door began to open. The plinking continued. Someone they were expecting to start taking the boxes away I assumed until I saw Lestrade’s face and the heads of two tall constables behind him.

The man at the table turned towards the gate. I still could not see his face for he had it covered with a cloth mask. Holmes took a step back and drew a truncheon from his overcoat. I withdrew further for the gate was hinged on my side and levelled my pistol at mid-height. Holmes delivered a blow to the back of the man’s head before he had one foot in the passageway. He crumpled with a grunt that sounded surprised. I trained my pistol on the groaning figure as Holmes pulled the man's arms back and manacled him hand and foot. His groans assured me that he continued to breathe. Holmes pulled off the mask and said, “Ah.”

The scuffling in the other room had diminished to mumbled curses. When Lestrade looked through the gate, Holmes rolled our prisoner over. Lestrade raised his eyebrows very high.

“It’s started to snow,” Holmes said.

Lestrade frowned.

“The accomplice who provides transportation should have been here by now,” Holmes continued. "They should have been spiriting their booty away by the time you arrived. So, how heavy is it?”

“A bit of a squall for a half hour or so. It had nearly stopped when we came down,” Lestrade replied. "An inch or so on the pavement."

Holmes stood and dusted off his hands. “If you bundle these fellows into a corner and wait here, their accomplice and his cart should be with you in under an hour. If the box of coins is still by the door, he may well engage in some incriminating behaviour before he realises anything is amiss. You will find evidence of similar operations in his cart. This is usually the last stop on his rounds.”

The man on the floor groaned again. Lestrade gazed down and shook his head.

“Yes, well,” said Holmes. “If we are needed no longer, I should get Dr Watson home. Neither the chill nor the damp down here best pleases him.”

***

Our journey was slow and Holmes silent except for directions to the driver as to side streets to use to avoid the worst of the traffic. Despite the driver’s cooperation, we were only halfway at the time that would normally have seen us home. It had begun to snow again. Large, wet flakes drifted golden through the beams of the streetlamps and turned to slush on the pavement. Pedestrians and horses alike were slipping in it. Holmes sat back with a sigh.

“So, what did you conclude about our case?” he asked.

I had been waiting to enquire about the identity of the masked man, but was diverted by the question. Holmes wasn’t ready to share that yet or he would already have told me. “They were sorting silver from gold,” I stated, pleased with my conclusion and only just realising, after I had spoken, that I hadn’t looked into the boxes that were still open when we left.

“They were sorting, yes,” Holmes said, "but not by type of metal. You could hear that both silver and gold coins were landing in each of the open boxes.”

Holmes could hear that, his musical ear no doubt helping, but I could not. I sighed.

He glanced at me without turning his head and smiled. “It’s not an unreasonable conclusion to reach,” he said, “just not the correct one.” He patted my knee and left his hand there.

That was distracting, but I maintained my focus and put forward my second thought on the subject. “Ah,” I said. “They were sorting out their shares.”

I covered Holmes’s hand with my own. He turned to look at me and drew his hand out from under mine, up my thigh a little and away.

“Wrong again,” I surmised.

Holmes took off his left glove and tucked it in his pocket. I watched the slender fingers as though expecting some magic trick. Instead, he unwound his scarf, shook it open and spread it over our laps. It was of thick cashmere and added a bit of warmth.

“Still not an unreasonable conclusion,” he said, slipping his bare hand between my glove and my thigh.

I drew in a breath. His hand added considerable more warmth than his scarf. Far out of proportion to its size, I thought. So there was a magic trick after all.

“Well, I’m all out of ideas,” I said. “Tell me.”

“Are you sure you’re out of ideas?” he asked.

“About the coins, yes,” I said, withdrawing my hand. I tugged my glove off and returned my bare hand to his beneath the cloth. I stroked between his fingers. They splayed wider over my leg. I let my breath out slowly and nudged his hand higher. “So, tell me.”

He leaned close, his fingertips dipping between my thighs. “They were separating the coins of value to collectors from those without,” he said.

I pushed his hand yet higher. “Is that worth the trouble?” I whispered and closed my eyes.

“Some things are worth any amount of trouble to have,” he said.

I tightened my legs as though to trap his hand. The heat of it was spreading and I no longer found the weather cold. Holmes stayed near. I felt his breath upon my cheek. I did not dare turn; his lips were too close. He continued speaking. I heard the words; I even understood them. They had a rhythm. His hand moved with it.

“Some are exceedingly valuable and, of course, a large stream of coin passes through an established bank every day, thus a system for spotting them and replacing them with ordinary coinage would be worth the effort.” He shifted closer, his leg pressing against mine from hip to knee. “Plus, I have been assured that, motives of profit aside, there is a certain addictive quality to collecting, to searching out and finding that most elusive, the rarest of coins and having it all to oneself.”

The hansom came to a stop. “We’re nearly there, but nothing is moving up ahead. I can see the wheels of a carriage up in the air at the next corner,” the cabbie shouted down to us.

Holmes pulled away. “We’ll get out here, thank you,” he called. “Pay him and follow,” he added to me and bounded out into the night.

I did as instructed, albeit far more slowly than Holmes, and the cold walk had dissipated some of the heat we had generated in the cab. The house was dark when I arrived. I huffed as I opened the front door. The hall was silent, draped with the long shadows cast by the illumination filtering in through the fanlight. I locked the door behind me, prised off my boots and left them on the mat.

A muffled scraping reached my ears. A thud followed. Stealthy in my stockingfeet, I raced up the stairs and drew up short at the half-open door. I listened, but heard naught else. Pistol out, I pushed the door aside and peered into the sitting room. Not a glimmer of streetlight made it past the closed curtains, the cold grate lacked even an ember to lessen the gloom. The sound of something falling and being dragged along the floor came from Holmes’s room. By instinct I navigated our furnishings, held my breath before his closed door and listened. No light shone from beneath it. I hesitated. If I called out, I would alert an intruder. If Holmes had taken ill, I could find him in the dark without halloing. If he wanted privacy, he would simply have to declare it and I would withdraw.

My fingers feathered down the smooth wood, until I found the door handle. I turned it slowly, my knuckles grazing the key jutting from the keyhole. I felt the latch slip free. I pocketed the key and eased the door open. Still, I heard nothing. Again, I thought to speak, but if someone had ambushed him, held him now, arm around neck, hand over mouth...I rolled my shoulders. This assailant would need to be formidable, because Holmes is not easily overcome. What if he was armed? My grip tightened on my pistol. Another possibility flashed across my inward eye and I cringed. I did not want to think of knives. I shut the door without a click; waited, heart racing, for my eyes to finish adjusting. I wished to say his name. I pressed my lips together, steadied my breath.

The air shifted. I raised my pistol. A hand seized my wrist, bent it downwards. Another covered my mouth. My heart pounded. “Holmes,” I shouted against that hand. I felt an exhaled breath by my ear.

“You liked how it felt when I touched you in the tunnels, even more than in the cab.”

I sagged against the door. Holmes has always been a bit mad and more than a bit right about how much I like him that way.

“I’ve rearranged the room," he continued. "When I let you go, undress, and then see if you can find me in the dark.”

His hand lifted. I reached out, felt a bare hip flex and then he was gone. There was a brief rustling followed by silence.

He had dived beneath something. I was sure. I shed my clothes, dropped to my hands and knees and set out to find him closer to the ground.