Major Pieces, Prologue: Initiative
Rating: PG-13 (for adult themes, not sex)
Pairings: Gen
Spoilers: Through The Great Game.
Warnings: Chapters 1 and 2 contain gory crime scenes. Trigger warnings for discussion of (off-screen) sexual assault and violence against women.
Special thanks to: [info]stellar_dust, my beyond awesome beta, who managed to be both insanely quick and tremendously helpful. Thanks also to everyone who listened to me natter (particularly [personal profile] melannen, that one night at Sarah's).
Summary: Sherlock knew that he could thoroughly rely upon John Watson's moral sense. And that's why he knew that Lestrade was wrong, wrong, wrong.
Prologue: Initiative
White, however, has the move, and the move in this case means the initiative, and the initiative, other things being equal, is an advantage. -José Raúl Capablanca, Chess Fundamentals
The case began with a movie.
Or more accurately, it began when John was shamelessly begging for one of the pies Mrs. Hudson had just baked. Sherlock was sitting in the corner, taking frequent breaks from an abnormal psychology text to shoot disgusted looks at John. But damn it, he was starving and hadn't enjoyed a proper meat pie since his mum died.
"Not your housekeeper, dear. Besides, they're nothing much, just trying to use up the last of that roast before it got dodgy. You wouldn't want them."
"They smell delicious," John wheedled. "It's not as if you were Mrs. Lovitt, I know I can trust your beef."
And that did it; she laughed and sent him away with two of the hand-size pies. It was a test of John's self-control, but he managed to eat only one and set the other in front of Sherlock, who actually ate several bites before he fell to digging out pieces of meat and teasing them apart with his fork. It was like eating with a child, honestly.
"Who's Mrs. Lovitt?" Sherlock asked, and John could see from the look in his eye that the question had been burning in him all afternoon. He had obviously heard the name and suspected some yet-undiscovered connection between his flatmate and his landlady.
John stopped licking the gravy off his fork and stared. "You mean you haven't seen- Of course you haven't."
So when there was another afternoon with no case and no work at the surgery and it was pissing rain again because they lived in bloody London, he told Sherlock, "Right, we're going to watch Sweeney Todd."
"What?" Sherlock was only half paying attention, perched on the sofa with John's laptop balanced on his knees.
"Film about an English serial killer. You'll like it."
"I doubt it," Sherlock said darkly, the hint of a sulk on the edge of his voice. John was used to this and ignored it, heading upstairs to get the DVD from his room.
"Sweeney Todd is a fictional English serial killer," Sherlock announced upon John's return. "That's why I hadn't heard of him." He sounded aggrieved, like he suspected John had tried to play a trick on him.
"How did you know that, then?"
"Googled it." Sherlock was busily typing again. John rolled his eyes and stacked a few of Sherlock's larger books on the coffee table to make a platform.
"Just try it, Sherlock. You liked Seven."
In his efforts to find something in popular culture that would derail Sherlock's burgeoning obsession with talk programs, John had begun showing him films about clever or unusual murders. He wondered a bit at what this plan said about his own sanity, but really anything was better than having to watch repeats of Jeremy Kyle in freeze frame so Sherlock could pinpoint "the exact moment at which she realizes he cheated on her, look John!"
