Title: The Six Geese a-Laying
Fandom: BBC Sherlock
Rating: Gen
Length: 3,777
Content Notes: Case fic; Humour
Summary: John isn't quite sure how a murder investigation devolved into hiding inside a haystack with Sherlock, waiting for someone to vandalise a teapot.

“Do stay still, John,” hissed Sherlock, his voice quiet and close, but muffled for obvious reasons.

“There’s hay inside my collar,” grumbled John, struggling to dig the offending straws out of the back of his neck. He sighed as his exertions opened a gap for a handful more hay to spill in, tumbling down his back inside his shirt.

Sherlock never seemed to have this kind of trouble; when the game was on his focus was so absolute that no discomfort even registered with him. Besides, his coat apparently repelled stains, lint, and dirt, always as pristine as though it had come straight out of the dry-cleaner’s bag. His hair probably wasn’t even going to be rumpled when he burst out of the haystack they’d been hiding in, even if it would take John a week to cough all the dried grass out of his lungs, and three washes to get the bulk of it out of his clothes.

“We’ve been cunningly disguised in here for three hours, Sherlock,” said John. “I think it’s pretty clear he’s not coming. We’ll have to go with Lestrade’s idea of picking him up on the dodgy side of Little Italy tomorrow.”

“He’ll be coming tonight,” insisted Sherlock. “He came for all the others, knifed a man for the address; he’s hardly likely to give up now. He’s broken parole; his picture’s out to every police station in the neighbourhood; if he’s going to flee the country, he needs money. He’ll be here.’

“Yeah, great,” said John, making another fruitless attempt to get make himself comfortable with the all-encompassing itch.  “Looking forward to it.”

Before today, John had never spent five minutes on a farm in his life, certainly never been to somewhere which sold the experience of the chores associated with a ‘real’ working farm as a benefit: cows to hand-milk and baby lambs to bottle-feed in all seasons, a collection of free range chickens that got into everything, and a farm gate gift shop stocked with fresh produce, hand-crafted homewares, gourmet lunches and a cappuccino machine. Some of these things, John considered, were perhaps not entirely authentic.

Of course, John wasn't to know.  He'd grown up a London boy through and through. The furthest he'd ever been from the big city growing up was a couple of family holidays in Brighton. He’d lived in London, studied in London, then shipped off to Afghanistan, where the closest he’d ever come to farm life had been in the midst of a military convey passing through the countryside under the suspicious steely eyes of bearded farmers and their veiled wives. Once he'd made it home again to London, via various hospitals, he'd never had any desire to live anywhere else.

Still, even in the absence of practical experience, John had imagined he'd developed some fairly accurate expectations about how certain things were supposed to work.  It was disappointing to discover that even in this obviously romanticised illusion of a commercial farming enterprise, in some things he had been entirely deceived.

In particular, hay. And particularly in particular, the charmingly rustic haystack in which he and Sherlock had concealed themselves, which it was becoming clear was not as it had always been advertised. Hay was supposed to be a soft, yielding material in which it might be feasible to pleasantly roll—it certainly was not supposed to be a stiff, scratchy collection of needle-like barbs, in which it wasn’t even possible to remain still without developing all manner of rashes and splinters in unmentionable places. Even without the removal of clothing implied by a proverbial roll.

And now he was thinking about that, if Donovan and Anderson found out that John and Sherlock had been hidden together in a haystack for three hours waiting for the murderer to show up, they would have an absolute field day. Lestrade—with the wisdom of a country-raised boy—had taken one look at the two-meter high pile of dried grass and insisted he’d be closer to the expected target and with a better view to boot watching from the homestay farm’s kitchen window.

John had said this before, on many occasions during his work with Sherlock, but tonight? This really was the most ridiculous thing that he had ever done.

“Well,” he grumbled, “if you could ask him to come sometime soo—“

Sherlock had reached silently through the hay to grab his wrist in warning, making John freeze.

There was someone slipping past them, the form barely visible through the dark and the layers of hay over John’s dry, itchy eyes.  The surge of adrenaline drove all memory of the uncomfortable wait from his mind: Sherlock had been right.  Of course he’d been right.  The figure was clearly far too tall to be the farmer, who had in any event promised to keep himself and his family indoors tonight and out of the way of any potential trouble with a murderous vandal with an inexplicable distaste for geese.

Sherlock’s restraining hand on John’s arm kept him in place as the man—yes, it was definitely a man—crossed in front of them and continued out of immediate view, into the gift shop.

John reached up carefully, separating the hay a little in front of his eyes, and watched through the dark window as the man moved around and rummaged semi-blindly through hand-embroidered pot holders, ugly glazed pottery decorated with farm animals, and blown-out and painted Easter decorations hung with ribbons.

Finally, just when the itching hay was beginning to become unbearable again, he emerged through the doorway holding a novelty teapot.

It was a clear, moonlit night, and the teapot was obviously the very same one they’d seen earlier.  The one that Sherlock had, over Lestrade’s objections, actually bought in the shop earlier, and asked be left in the store in a prominent position.  It was an ugly, kitsch thing, shaped like a goose with a wide blue ribbon around its neck.  Its ceramic-feathered tail made a spout, and its bulbous head sat atop a long neck, which curved upwards and over to form a handle.

John wasn’t quite sure how the case they had started out on had devolved into teapot theft.

Lestrade had called Sherlock in for help with the grisly murder of a successful artist.  And then, the moment he reached the scene, Sherlock had pronounced the body ‘boring’ and walked straight past to examine the remains of the smashed pottery littering the floor of the studio and then on to search the filing cabinets—for what, he wouldn’t explain.   He hadn’t seemed interested in the murder case at all, instead investing the day in reconstructing the shards from the crime scene into two crazed but essentially complete teapots, and in dragging John around to follow up three bloodless vandalisms across town, each one involving the singular theft and destruction of an identical teapot.  Identical teapots, Sherlock had pointed out that evening when they’d arrived at the farm, as though that said it all.  Identical to the two he’d reconstructed in every detail from shards on the artist’s studio floor where Lestrade’s murderer had apparently smashed them.

John held his breath, unsure why anyone would go to such extremes—even killing a man—over a teapot.  While the thing wasn’t exactly John’s cup of tea, so to speak—while he would hardly have spent the hours with a pot of glue and a bag of porcelain shards that Sherlock had put into resurrecting them—surely they weren't so hideous as to provoke any passer-by to a state of uncontrolled rage?  Well.  Not quite so hideous.   Sherlock insisted he and John conceal themselves far away from the scene of the expected crime, too, which was uncharacteristc and frustrating.  They could barely see the man at the door of the shop at all from here!

But the man exiting the building didn't  immediately smash the pot, as John had expected.  Instead, he strode straight back over towards the haystack where John and Sherlock had concealed themselves, stopping barely more than a meter away.  And, when he was standing in the puddle of light beneath the glowing sign proclaiming NO VACANCY, he raised the thing high above his head and dashed it to pieces on the ground.

The vandal’s face was fully illuminated as he bent down to sort through the fragments where they lay on the ground.  They were the ape-like features of Beppo—the man whose mugshot Sherlock had pulled seemingly at random out of the police files and pronounced to be the murderer Lestrade was looking for.  He was a petty thief, who’d spent the last year in jail following a bar-room brawl where he’d pulled a knife, but as far as John could see, he had no particular reason to have a dislike of either geese or novelty pottery strong enough to lead to slitting the throat of the artist who’d created them nor breaking his parole in order to search out and destroy his work.

After a long moment, Beppo stood, holding up a single jagged pottery piece set with something pearlescent and ovoid up to the light, and smiled.

Sherlock exploded from the side of the haystack in a cloud of golden strands, quickly getting between the man and the open road.

Beppo took one look at him, shoved the pottery fragment into his pocket, turned tail and ran.

John struggled out in Sherlock’s wake, hay streaming off him and settling slowly to the ground in his wake as he followed the other two men through the wide, gently sloping lanes of the apple orchard beside the road.

Beppo crashed over the fence of the vegetable garden and squashed through the dark row of cabbages, Sherlock hard on his heels.  Tall as he was, Sherlock could nearly very nearly step over the fence unaided, but it took John another struggling minute to climb and roll over after him, and by then the other two men were ahead.  Grimly, John put his head down and sprinted down the lines of beans and tomatoes to catch up with them—the suspect was known to favour a knife, and not be choosy about applying it, but that would never make Sherlock sensible enough to keep his distance.

On the other side of the farmhouse, Lestrade had burst out through the back door, and was beginning to converge on their position and forcing Beppo to veer off course again, this time towards the barn.

When he reached it, he wrenched open the barn's door and dodged through, letting it bang against the wall and apparently running straight through the middle of a collection of sleepy chickens, because there was a disturbed flurry of clucks as they spilled out of the doorway and scattered in every direction.

“John!” yelled Sherlock, pointing around the side wall and up the hill, even as he skidded through the middle of the confused burk-buurking chickens and through the door into the barn’s dark interior, and up the ladder towards the loft after Beppo.

It was all the direction John needed.  Sherlock was right: the barn was built on the side of the hill backing onto the road where it curved around.  If the man managed to make the upper level ahead of Sherlock and out again, he might get to the road and away before anyone could catch him.  They needed to head him off.

John sprinted around the side of the barn, circling around and trying not to wince at the continuing crashes and squawks from inside as he panted his way up the grassy hill.  At the top was the large double doors onto the road; the end of the driveway where the commercial lorries obviously came in to the upper level to load up the farm produce.

Pleased to have reached the destination ahead of them others, John cracked open the door and concealed himself in its shadow, looking inside at the cavernous loading dock stacked around the sides with hay bales and empty crates and boxes and a towering pile of slatted wooden trays filled with eggs all ready for the following day’s collection.  The empty space echoed with the gentle clucks and ruffling feathers of hundreds of chickens roosting on modified shelves along the walls—and the thunks and soft grunts of two men disturbing their serenity.

Beppo had just made it onto the barn’s upper floor; Sherlock right behind him on the ladder, wildly grabbing for his feet but only making the criminal stumble backwards out of reach.

He bounced off the opposite wall with a loud bang that roused startled squawks from the tall wooden structure behind him.  Beppo gave the thing a brief considering look, paused to grab hold of it, and heaved with all his might before setting to his heels again.

The huge, decoratively rickety shelves filled with roosting chickens and nestboxes creaked and clucked in question as it leaned out dangerously and, for a moment teetered on the brink, before it began a slow, inexorable fall.

John bit back a useless cry of warning as Sherlock surged up into the loft and after the fleeing man, directly underneath the descending structure; at this point the last thing he could do was stop.

Frightened chickens flapped awkwardly past Sherlock out of their roosts, squawking in protest, eggs rolled out and smashed around him like grenades, deflecting off head and his shoulders.  Sherlock plunged on, apparently oblivious to anything but the fleeing criminal.  Then, just when he was nearly clear, hunching over to make it out, Sherlock’s foot found the carcass of a smashed egg and slid out from underneath him, sending him heavily to the ground.

An almighty crash shook the barn not a moment later, and John took a half step out of his cover, heart in his throat.  The semi-darkness was casting vivid images in his mind’s eye of Sherlock: caught in the impact, injured.  Worse.  But after a moment the picture solidified back into moonlit reality; Sherlock’s form had continued tumbling, momentum carrying him clear as he skidded and rolled to a halt away from the carnage behind him.

John breathed out, and refocussed a glare on Beppo, who had stopped, too.  He was at the edge of the loading dock, just on John’s side of the towering pile of crated up trays of eggs.  He was looking at Sherlock as he struggled to regain his feet, and obviously calculating the odds of the other man giving up the chase at any point.  He turned, smirked, and took a step back towards Sherlock.

In his hand, the moonlight streaming through the high windows flashed.

John’s legs had hit a dead run before his brain caught up with his eyes, although when it did he didn’t disagree with his body’s decision.  He hadn’t brought his gun today.  Lestrade was here, so it was unlikely to be necessary and its presence was more likely to complicate a police operation than save a life.  It was no matter; John had once found the military an perfect fit for his character in all manner of ways.  Marksmanship had hardly been the only training area where he'd found himself excelling.

He caught the surprised Beppo around the middle in a flying tackle, grabbed his wrist and gave it a firm twist that made the knife spin away off the upper floor of the barn to bury itself in the hay beneath.  Then they crashed together into and through the pile of crates behind.

Layers of trays above them teetered and slid and crashed, spilling cardboard cartons and their contents out in a devastating spray across the floor.  Eggs bounced and rolled away, or shattered and stuck where they landed.  An entire tray tipped over above them, bombarding John and Beppo with a bruising hail of eggs as the two men rolled over and through the full bottom layer.  Beneath them, the cartons crushed and sank wetly beneath every attempt to gain purchase, giving unevenly like abused bubble wrap.

It was a short fight.  Beppo was vicious and desperate and slippery with egg, but John had trained with the SAS, and he’d fought far more vicious and more desperate men in Afghanistan.  Admittedly, the egg was new.

By the time John had the other man tight in a submission hold, Sherlock had picked himself up again, limping a little as he made his way over towards them.  Beppo struggled, making an indistinct protest as Sherlock reached down to fish the piece of broken pottery he’d retrieved out of his pocket, but John tightened the lock on his arm, wobbling for balance for a moment and then settling as a miraculously intact egg popped under the pressure of his knee.  With liquid gush, it began to soak into the material of his jeans.

Lestrade, cresting the hayloft and pulling himself up the last few rungs of the ladder, gaped at the tableaux the three of them made amidst the widespread destruction.

“I told that farmer that if he just kept everyone out of the way, the only thing smashed would be that one hideous teapot, which you already owned!  You promised me!”  Lestrade spared a worried glance for the farmhouse down the hill where lights were coming on as the house awoke.  Then, “Is that—that’s the pearl of the Borgias!  It was all over the news last year—is that what this is all about?”

Sherlock had swung the big double doors out onto the road wide, and was holding up the shard of pottery he’d taken from Beppo to moonlight, inspecting for himself a pearl the size of a hen’s egg set inside the lumpy, shattered remains of a goose’s head.

Carefully, Lestrade skirted the wreckage of the nesting boxes, picked his way through the scattered, soaking trays to admire the pearl too.

“The goose that laid the pearl egg,” said Sherlock smugly, handing it over.  “It went missing in the same week that Beppo was accused of pulling a knife on a known jewel fence in a bar.  The police arrested him for assault at the artist’s studio where he worked as a second-rate mass copyist.  Where else would he have hidden his prize, when he saw them coming for him, except inside one of his own still-soft works?  Of course, while he was inside, those pieces were fired, painted, and sold.  He knew one shop where the pots would have gone—his cousin works there and gave him the sales records to find them—but when he smashed them, they weren't the right one.  So he was forced to break in to the studio itself and work through the books.  Killed his ex-boss to keep the knowledge of what he was after quiet, smashed the two teapots that had never been sold—but it wasn't in those, my reconstruction efforts showed that all the pieces remained in the studio, nothing taken.  It had to be in the last pot, right here.”

John let Sherlock’s explanation roll over them as Lestrade shook his head and cuffed the egg-soaked Beppo.  He stood and looked around, surveying the devastation, absently rolling the shoulder that only ever seemed to ache after he’d overextended it.

Groups of chickens pressed around their shattered roosting shelves, emitting confused-sounding clucks and awkwardly jostling for position as though the absence of their habitual roosting places could be overcome by repeated attempts ignore it.  And there were broken eggs littering the floor everywhere.  Most had smashed where they fell, broken shells settling over wet pools of egg that oozed outwards to join with others until they formed an unbroken jellied, yellow-streaked sea, punctuated by fragments of shell.  A few lucky eggs had seemed to roll almost safely away out of the carnage, but closer examination showed cracks where the contents were slowly leaking out onto the boards below.  And Sherlock…  Sherlock looked like a Jackson Pollock painting.  He was covered in vivid streaks of semi-transparent white and yolk from head to toe.  It plastered his hair to his scalp and set it into random spikes decorated with white bits of shell.  The side of his pants and his shoe were soaked where he’d fallen, and among the broken fragments an entire half eggshell had adhered to the shoulder of his coat.

John didn’t even bother looking down at himself: he felt soaked to the skin, becoming more tacky every moment as the gooey mess that covered every inch of his body began to dry.  He had egg in places he didn’t even have hay, and that was saying something.  And he’d been wrong: if Donovan and Anderson found out about this, they would entirely overlook the fact that the two of them had been hiding in a haystack, merely to have more mental storage space for the image of Sherlock so completely splattered with egg.

Lestrade was obviously not thinking quite so far afield, watching out the window as the light of a bobbing torch came over the field, heralding the arrival of a farmer who was extremely unlikely to be pleased at the state of his barn.

“You two have no idea of the paperwork you cause me,” he said despairingly.

Sherlock shrugged, unrepentant.  “The reward for the pearl’s return should more than cover the damage.  Besides.”  He grinned suddenly.  “He should have known better than to put all his eggs in one stack.”

“Sherlock!” protested Lestrade.  “That’s not the point!  Look at this place!”

John started grinning too.  “Well, you have told us to walk on eggshells around a police investigation…”

“And really,” said Sherlock seriously, “you’re cracked if you expected us to catch a criminal without breaking eggs.”

“He's a bad egg,” agreed John, deliberately wiping away a trickle of the gooey mess seeping down from his hair into his eyes.  “We were only saving you from getting egg on your face.”

Lestrade gave them both a sour look.  “Get out of here, you two,” he said.  “While I can still plausibly pretend he did the worst of this damage himself.”

“Come on, John.  It’s nearly breakfast time,” said Sherlock, turning to go and making John hurry to catch up.  “If we hurry, Mrs Hudson will make us some extra scramble.”

John shook his head reprovingly.  “She’s not our housekeeper, Sherlock.  Besides, I’m not hungry,” he said, and glanced back at the silently scowling Beppo, still lying in the jellied mess of the tray where John had brought him down.  “I’ve just had an egg roll.”

“Out!” roared Lestrade, and they went, laughing so hard that they nearly had to hold each other up.

They giggled all the way back to the main road and then, as it turned out—since none of the cabs would take them—all the long walk back to the train station.

John grinned internally at the sight of their fellow passengers on the tube eyeing them warily, thinking of hay in his eyes; of eggs popping underfoot and under his back and crash-landing all around him.  Perhaps John was a little cracked, too.

Knowing Sherlock, it wouldn’t be more than another week before the most ridiculous thing John had ever done was surpassed.  Again.

Surpassed by something even better.

---

A/N: A reimagining of The Six Napoleons.  Only with more eggs.  *grin*