Missing Parts

“Lean forward.”

Billie Joe exhaled, shakily doing as he was asked, and watched another dark spot of blood splash onto the polished floor of the lobby. From his seat on the bench by the unattended reception desk, he watched Sherlock reach, calmly, into the inside pocket of his jacket, remove a white handkerchief, and shake it open.

“Hold this here…”

He winced, as Sherlock used the bunched fabric to pinch, gently, at the end of his nose, then raised his own hand to hold it in place. Sherlock stooped low in front of him, his movements slow and deliberate, his grey gaze sweeping almost tenderly over his face. Billie Joe’s breath trembled, when the detective raised both his hands and he felt cool fingers brushing his skin.

“What are you doing…” he mumbled, his voice nasal and muffled by the handkerchief under his nose.

“Checking…” Sherlock answered, quiet but firm, and Billie Joe froze, perfectly still, as Sherlock’s smooth fingertips pressed gently at the bridge of his nose, then brushed across his cheekbones. His lip quivered and his head felt light and he wasn’t sure if it was the shock, the blood loss, or something else entirely. Sherlock dropped his hands back into his lap, keeping his eyes on Billie Joe’s. “… He didn’t break anything.”

“I thought Watson was the doctor…”

“It’s a nosebleed, not a triple bypass. Stop snivelling.”

Billie Joe looked down. He had taken Sherlock’s impudence in good humour all along. Now it made him frown. He wasn’t sure what he had expected. He had hired the guy to do a job – not an easy one, at that – and he knew buying him a coffee in a diner didn’t make him anything more than his client. Still, though, he had felt a connection with the strange, English visitor, felt like Sherlock had somehow understood him in a way nobody else had even tried to do in a long while. He felt as though he had been turned inside out and read like poetry and it was unfair, just not fair, that with Sherlock, he couldn’t even open the damn book.

“Why didn’t you tell me before now?”

He wished he could have kept that pathetic quiver of betrayal from his voice. He didn’t like the way
it sounded on him.

“Because that would have been boring. And, like I said, I wanted to know why.”

Billie Joe huffed into his handkerchief, then took it, experimentally, away from his face. The bleeding had stopped, for now.

“I don’t believe it. I just don’t fucking believe it.”

“Yes…” Sherlock murmured, taking a seat next to him. “Who’d have thought…”

Billie Joe scowled, turning to him.

“You did. You said you knew right away!”

Sherlock sighed, leaning back against the wall.

“The evidence was right under your nose, Billie Joe, yet like everyone else, you see but do not observe...”

“Everyone except you.”

“Apparently.”

Billie Joe stretched his legs out in front of him, crossing his scuffed converse shoes at the ankle. He folded his arms across his chest and sighed, hard.

“Why are you even here? What do you care if I bleed all over the floor? Case closed, right? Great fucking job. The check’s in the mail.”

Sherlock squinted a little, eyeing Billie Joe sidelong for a moment, a hint of amusement on his face.

“Yes,” he agreed, “But, of course, now you’re being stupid, and I might as well be the one to tell you so.”

“I’m being stupid?!” Billie Joe raged, standing up from his seat and throwing Sherlock’s bloodied handkerchief, furiously, to the floor. “He stole our album! By rights I should be ratting him out to the fucking cops right now.”

Sherlock blinked, the smirk disappearing from his lips again.

“Yes, you’re right,” he agreed, earnestly. “Man enters building, for which he has a key, and takes tape, which he owns. The police will be all over this. Use my phone.”

Billie Joe fumbled, catching Sherlock’s Blackberry, clumsily, in his hands. He scowled, pointing the phone, accusingly, at his face.

“You’re an asshole.”

“Really? But listen. Earlier today, you told me that you didn’t care about the damn record and that you didn’t care if you never got it back. You didn’t want anything to do with that tape anymore and even taking it out of its locked cabinet pained you. You hated it and you hated what it said about you and you fantasized about a time when it never existed. So did Mike. So did Tre. The only difference, was that Tre did something about it. Instead of punching him in the face, you should be shaking his hand.”

Billie Joe spluttered for a moment, then kicked his foot against the bench with a growl of indignation. He sighed heavily, rubbing a hand over his face, then offered Sherlock’s phone back to him, with an expression of grim acceptance.

“… I don’t need your phone.”

“I know. Sit down.”

Billie Joe did as he was told, without even thinking to question it, then slumped forward on the bench with his head in his hands.

“What he did wasn’t selfish and it wasn’t stupid,” Sherlock told him, his voice firm, but slightly weary. “It wasn’t born out of anger, or disrespect, or a lack of faith in your abilities. It was the opposite of all of those things. When you calm down, you’ll realise that. He did it because he knew that it was the only thing that would save you all.”

“He tricked us.”

Sherlock raised his eyebrows, considering this for a second, then nodded.

“I’ve seen better tricks. I’ve seen worse, too, of course, but that doesn’t matter. He could have burned those drumsticks, could have swept the dust from the floor, could have staged a break-in to throw you off the scent. It didn’t come close to the work of a criminal mastermind, Billie Joe, and he knew that. He knew there was every chance he was going to get found out and he’d probably taken your punch in the face fifty times in his imagination before he even climbed that fire escape. He decided to do it anyway because getting rid of that tape was worth it.”

Billie Joe took this in, very quietly for a moment, listening to the wall clock ticking behind the reception desk. He felt another drop of blood collecting on the end of his nose and he sighed, lifting the hem of his t-shirt up to his face, not even caring about the stain. He felt Sherlock’s eyes sweep him once and he turned his head. The detective was staring at the wall.

“He should have been able to talk to me,” Billie Joe told him, his voice almost a whisper, “But he couldn’t. And that’s the biggest crime of all.”

“You wouldn’t have listened to him.”

Billie Joe nodded, looking down at his sneakers.

“I haven’t been a very good friend lately,” he admitted, softly, “All I’ve been able to think about is my own fuckin’ writers block and… I haven’t been listening or paying attention to anyone else. I wouldn’t have blamed Tre for walking right out and leaving it all behind.”

“He couldn’t,” Sherlock pointed out, turning to meet Billie Joe’s eyes, then holding them in his icy gaze. “Because it’s like I said before… you’re better than this.”

Billie Joe felt something stir in his stomach, as he watched Sherlock’s pupils dilate, his face close enough to his own that he could feel his breath against his own skin; cool, like peppermint. They watched each other;saw each other, for an electric moment that had Billie Joe’s guts clenching with a strange, panicky realisation that nothing in his whole world made any sense to him anymore. His work, his music, his lifelong friends and brothers had skittered into a fractious, disjointed oblivion and all of the many, enduring feelings attached to those things were skating around his mind in broken pieces. In fact, the only person able to rearrange them into any kind of semblance and make sense of what was going on was the stranger sitting beside him, who had somehow managed to summarise his entire existence in one morning. Not to mention swoop in and figure out his freakshow of a band in apparently less time than it had taken him to make a 911 call.

His heart stuttered a little, when he felt soft fingertips brush the back of his hand and he looked down to see the detective fingering the beginnings of a bruise forming across his knuckles. No doubt it would be the first of many to appear following his battle with a thrashing, muscled drummer on a scratchy studio carpet. He swallowed, raising his eyes back to Sherlock’s, as he felt the warmth from those fingers tremble up his arm.

Fuck…

“Sherlock…”

His voice was a whisper, one with barely enough weight to make its way out of his mouth, and he certainly didn’t have an idea what he was going to follow it with, only that he needed to communicate something; go some way to articulate the mess swimming around inside his head.

Sherlock returned his gaze to lock with Billie Joe’s, open and awaiting, almost anticipative, and the guitarist stumbled over his own breath again when an abrupt, frantic buzzing in the pocket of his faded jeans sliced through their tension like a switchblade.

Billie Joe quickly dropped his eyes from Sherlock’s and began fumbling, clumsily for his cell phone. Once he had fished it from his pocket, he held it out in front of him, letting it dance and flash in the palm of his hand.

“Adrienne. She’s pissed at me.”

Sherlock arched an eyebrow, stretching his legs out in front of him and folding his hands in his lap.

“And you’re able to tell that by staring at the screen? I should get you working for me, we’d make
quite the team.”

Billie Joe rolled his eyes, then answered the call, leaving Sherlock to smirk up at the ceiling as he listened to one half of a conversation.

“Yeah, Babe. I… I’ll be home soon… I know, I know, it’s… we had some developments with the case and I couldn’t leave, it’s… man, Adrienne. I’ve got a fucking shitload to tell you but I…I’ve got some things to fix up here, first… I don’t know, Adie, I… just stick it in the fridge and I’ll heat it up later… soon, I promise…. I promise.”

He hung up, took a deep, quivering breath and turned back to Sherlock. Hearing his wife’s voice had grounded him, somehow, shaken him back to reality.

“I need to talk to Tre,” he exhaled, and the decision seemed to cement itself as the words left his lips, changing from an grudging, precarious reluctance in the pit of his stomach to a real-life certainty with hard edges and sharp corners. “I think you were right, Sherlock… about a lot of things. Wherever we go from here… if anywhere at all… I need to talk to him and figure out how the fuck this happened to us… and Adrienne too. Y’know, I haven’t exactly been the best husband lately and… maybe I should, like… take her out to dinner, y’know, without the kids and just-”

“- Heartwarming,” Sherlock replied, curtly, getting to his feet and striding toward the glass doors that led from the studio building out onto the street.

“Wait – where are you going?” Billie Joe demanded, startled.

Sherlock turned in the doorway, looking at Billie Joe. He scrutinised him closely for a long moment, then shrugged, slowly.

“Case closed, Mr Armstrong.”

He turned up the collar of his jacket and stepped out into the rain.