Fic Rec: Recovery Position

[the-hobbet.livejournal.com]

Title: Recovery Position
Author: Rhyolight
Pairing: Gen
Length: 71,365 words
Rating: gen
Verse: Sherlock BBC
Author's summary: How tasteless would it be to talk about 'picking up the pieces'? John Watson and Greg Lestrade following breadcrumbs... Once you can begin to look hard at a suicide note, it may start to look... different.

Reccer's comments:When John can bear to talk about Sherlock's fall, he starts comparing notes and memories with Lestrade. There is a lot that doesn't make sense, doesn't line up. Once they start looking for clues the threads start to gradually unravel. But even after the case is solved and Sherlock returns, it's not easy.

I love a long, engrossing story and "Recovery Position" delivers pure pleasure with great dialogue, spot on character development, and unexpected twists.

“Yeah, that’s why it annoys me. I usually ask a question before I start waiting, but with him, he just looks at you like he knows what you had for breakfast this morning, and who you had in the back of your car twenty years ago.”

“Because he wins if you show what you’re interested in.”

“Exactly,” Greg says. “I told him I was sorry to hear about his brother. I thought he was about to make some crack about my solve rate, but then his face just fell and he said ‘thank you.’ I asked what had happened; he said, as far as he knew, ‘his brother had cracked under the pressure,’ which I know is bullshit. I asked what pressure he meant? He said, and I quote, that 'Sherlock needed more attention than anyone could ever have gained being sane, and when the attention he sought turned hostile, he just…'” Greg shrugged. “But Mycroft wasn’t a suspect and I couldn’t ride him very hard. He’d have me shot. I asked if there was anything I could do, and he said my colleagues had already done more than enough. I said I felt that way too and he looked marginally less like an android and said he was waiting for his brother’s body to be released, and did I want to come to the funeral? I told him I did, and he said I would be informed, and then damn if I didn’t find myself leaving. And when I got back to the Yard I was asked very nicely to leave there until enquiries could be undertaken. Anything else I know, I read in the papers. Some of it was not stomach-turning. I should have come to visit you in hospital, John, and I’m sorry.”

“If you want to know why there was no inquest, I don’t think you need look any farther,” I said. “What Mycroft doesn’t want, doesn’t happen. And it’s not like there’s any mystery to solve, we know who he was and what happened.”

“No, John, we don’t.” Greg was DI Lestrade again. “I couldn’t find a single person at Bart’s who saw anything, who knew anything except what someone else told them, or what someone else had heard from someone else who heard it from their aunt. I couldn’t find anyone who had even seen Sherlock’s body. I went back again last week and all the right documents had been filed. Cause of death was a fall from a height.”

“Not ‘while the balance of his mind was disturbed’?”

“That would have been the coroner’s verdict, perhaps. Death certificate just says how, not why. You know this, John. I got a copy of the autopsy later; there was nothing to say he was under the influence of anything. Died clean, anyway.”

He was clean, had been since I knew him, barring the time Irene had filled him up with veterinary anaesthetic. I know it’s important to Greg, I know it used to be important to me. Would a few hours of opiate bliss have kept you away from the roof, Sherlock?

“Who signed the death certificate? Who did the autopsy?”

“Molly Hooper."

“What the Christ?”

“I thought it was a little strange,” Greg begins.

“No,” I say. “No, they drum it into us: ‘Don’t practise on your friends or your family. Your objectivity will suffer and so will their health.’”

“But a pathologist—“

“She’s not the only one on staff.”

“She loved him. It was something she could do?”

“I loved him and it’s not something I could do. And Molly’s all kittens and dear little bunnies.” I rub my face. “Jesus, he must have still been—“ I break off. Greg’s face has changed from grave and sorrowful to something more present and stricken. Funny how unspeakable things vary. You wouldn’t think a cop would be so different from a soldier (Commander Vimes’s objections notwithstanding). He looks at violent death at least a few times a week, been shot at himself. But the dead he sees were not alive the moment before, joking and sharing a canteen with him. I doubt that he knows how very little it would have taken for the world to be without me and with …Jim and Neal and Arjun, for a few. I have opened the bodies of my friends to try to keep their souls inside, felt them go from live to dead. But to do it in cold blood, myself, while my friend’s body was still shutting down? Or did she leave him there in a bag and come back once he was cold?

Kind of what-goes-around, comes-around, though it doesn’t bear much thinking about. Sherlock would not have minded if his hands ended up in someone’s fridge, as long as they were doing good science.