Freak - Teenlock/Johnlock AU

Part 8

I've been away so long (sorry about that! Some people would say lazy but I prefer to call it part of the, ahem, creative process) that I don't remember what was supposed to happen next. Don't panic, I have several possible ideas.
Write a plan, you say? In the words of Sherlock, shut up. (You're right, I should).
P.S. Thank you soooo much for sticking with me, and writing your lovely comments. You're all the best, you shameless Johnlock shippers.

Sherlock and I scurried after the secretary as she bustled towards the reception like a homing pigeon. Sherlock kept sneezing and coughing loudly to cover the sounds of the walkie-talkie, which didn't seem to be wanting to cooperate with Sherlock's attempts to turn down the volume. At one point he slammed straight into a bin in order to cover the voice of a policeman asking after himself and John, and the secretary was almost bowled off her feet. Sherlock leaned towards me and whispered, "strike".
Suddenly the secretary seemed to realise she'd lost her walkie-talkie, and oscillated in the corridor as if deciding whether it was better to go back for it or let us continue alone. (A/N: oscillation in the corridor always means there's a walkie talkie affair - sorry, that wasn't even close).
"My mum's just texted," Sherlock said quickly. "She's outside, and will collect both myself and John. Thanks for, uh, escorting us, I really appreciate it."
He gave what he probably supposed was his most winning smile but which to anyone else made him look like the Grinch. The secretary, probably now fearing for her own life, hurried back the way we'd come.
"So, what exactly is the grand plan?" I asked, nodding towards Sherlock's pocket.
"The grand plan, as you will insist on calling it, is to listen to the walkie talkie. It will give us details of the police's actions, and all we have to do is make sure that our own actions don't coincide," Sherlock tells me, as we walk.
"So, not to give us, you know, leads or anything?"
Sherlock laughed and then realised I wasn't  joking. "Oh, you're serious! You're actually serious!" He smiled to himself briefly. "In general I like to move forwards in investigations rather than backwards."
I noticed we were leaving the school, crossing the car park, exiting through the gates I ran through just a few hours earlier, shifting tack so we were strolling down a side alley. It felt a bit dodgy, this alley, but I didn't say anything because Sherlock seemed to know where he was going. Why is this somewhere he'd have wanted to go frequently? I thought, and then, wait, don't answer that. My brain was coming up with multiple reasons, and they were all things that would give the police another reason to be probing the school like a petri dish of volatile organisms - which, following recent events, it apparently was.
Sherlock also had one hand in his back pocket and he seemed to be texting furiously. I said nothing about this, either, but considered where and why he learnt this skill. How was I supposed to keep up with a murder investigation if I couldn't even understand the detective?
"Here we are," Sherlock said, and stopped abruptly. My heart was thumping; Sherlock's long legs skimmed the pavement with ease and not for the first time in my life I wished I was a little bit taller, just a little bit. The "here" in question was a shed, poking through a hole in someone's back fence.
"Whose shed is this?" I asked, not particularly liking the smell coming from the interior.
"For all intents and purposes, it's mine," Sherlock replied. He wandered through plastic craters bobbing on a sea of floorboards and came to rest at a shelving unit. From this he procured, from the inside of a solar-powered maneki-neko-shaped tin, one cable.
"And that is...?" I asked, feeling more incompetent by the second. Sherlock rolled his eyes, and held it forward as if that would help me figure it out. When it didn't, he said with exasperation, "A fibre tap."
Fibre taps, I thought, and something from one of those James Bond books sprang to mind. "Whose phone are you tapping, exactly?"
"Just the school's," Sherlock smiled. "We extract some of the signal going down the optical fibre of the school's line to ours. It's relatively simple, really, why didn't I come up with it?"
"Were you alive?" I asked.
"Dates!" Sherlock responded, throwing his hands up in the air. They caught in a wire and a machine plummeted to the floor, sending shards of metal across the floor. Sherlock looked at it in surprise, as if it leapt off the shelf of its own accord. With a shrug he turned back to the cables.
"Let's do it tonight, then. How does two o'clock sound to you?"
It sounded awful, frankly. Why did this boy in front of me, fingers scrabbling about on the desk with bits of metal, seem to think getting up at 2am to tap the school phone was a perfectly normal thing to do? It was bonkers, ridiculous, and if we got caught...
"OK," I replied.

My father met me on the pavement outside school, in a shiny car, shiny moustache quivering underneath two searchlight eyes.
"John," he said, when I get into the car. "What in God's name have you been doing?"
I checked the clock. I was one minute late, but surely...
"You look a disgrace."
Ah. My jumper was still damp, wool not being the fastest drying material, and there was coffee on my sleeve. My hair, which was neat-ish this morning, was stuck to my forehead, shaped into spikes by the rain. Right then I would have been more at home in a Reliant Robin than the gleaming Audi.
"It's been raining," I said, lamely.
My dad spluttered. "Just because there's a thunderstorm doesn't mean you have to get out and get yourself struck by lightning! And what the eff is this I hear about a murder at your school? I said to your mother, I said, you can't send John and Harriet to that pigsty but she went there so of course you two had to too, (A/N: isn't English ridiculous) and now look what's happened!"
"It's not the school's fault," I replied.
My father started the car, and we rolled out into the road. He honked at a school child trying to cross. "Oh no, not the school's fault for employing a murderer, ha ha. John, you crack me up."
I looked over at him, and although the moustache was twitching he wasn't smiling. I tried to steer the conversation away.
"How's Harry?"
"I don't know, she's never in. Gratitude, I tell you, don't you ever get like that. I'm not a B&B."
I'd like to say to him that if she was in he'd moan that she was "taking his generosity for a ride" or something along those lines, and that he hadn't got enough social skills to run a hotel for rats, but it would have been more trouble than it was worth, so I said nothing. Instead I lapsed into our normal chatter about football, and soon we were outside his city flat.

The evening was punctuated by Harry coming home for some lasagne, and then taking off again. She gave me a kiss on the forehead like I was six again.
"Good to see you, Johnny," she told me. "How long you staying?"
"Just tonight," I replied.
"Talk to you tomorrow then, my friends are waiting for me. Just quickly... How was school?"
She was faffing with her skirt but she stopped to listen. Harry knew I hated school and almost everyone in it, so I surprised her when I said "Alright, actually". She grinned.
"Well, as long as you're valuing that education." With a wink, she was out the door.
I watched her go through my window, disappearing as her shadow blended into those of the buses and buildings. London's outskirts still showed signs of the city: taxis, business executives, fond pigeons, all on their way home. I crawled into bed and after setting the alarm for quarter past one, shut my eyes on the world.