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You arrive just before sign-ups end and put yourself in the lightweight class. Technically you belong two classes down, in bantamweight, but they're hardly going to be weighing you in so it doesn't matter. You watch the room, separating spectators from fighters, your fingers tapping with restless energy and your head singing with excess thought. There is nothing about this room and the people in it that is not tediously predictable.
You ignore the attempts of the diminutive, rat-like promoter to engage you in small talk. You could tell him that based on the fidgeting of the bouncer it’s obvious that he’s being cheated on the door charge, and that the imprints the iron left on the hem of his jacket show that his latest girlfriend is planning to leave him. But it's not especially relevant and there's only so much time you can bear to spend telling people things they should already know. From two minutes of exposure to the man you can see that he’s incompetent, which means the judges will be more stupid than is usual and he will not have bothered to hire a doctor to screen or monitor the competitors.
You wait until the first match starts before you slip into the lavatory and change. You put your coat back on after, because it looks less ridiculous than sitting at the bar in boxing shorts and nothing else. It will take you two minutes, forty seconds to wrap your hands and insert your gum shield. When the match before yours is nearly finished, you put your coat in the custody of the bartender and pick up your gloves and a bottle of water.
You signed in as Jack Reid, but they announce you as 'the Aristocrat,’ which means someone here has seen you fight before. The announcer goes on to name your opponent, but you have already stopped paying attention to the theatrics. You are watching him as he steps into the ring, cataloging and predicting. You are feeling your muscles and your neurons drawn too tight to vibrate, like the strings of a poorly tuned violin. You are listening for the bell.
The man charges in with a bolo punch that’s only a distraction from the right hook that is his real attack. You surprise him by ducking instead of backing away, and respond with an upper-cut that skims in under his guard and back out before he can lower his gloves. Boringly, your opponent has made the dreadfully common mistake of assuming that he can overwhelm you by sheer strength. More interesting is the fact that he is not thrown off by the failure of his initial strategy, but immediately retaliates with a series of short, straight punches. One of them glances off your side and you both back away, circling with new respect.
You cannot avoid observing the rest of the room, the carved wood of the bar (mid-19th century, the second from the left panel damaged in a fight two, no three, decades ago from the coloring of the gouges), the housewife in the second row of tables (nervously tapping at a glass with a hastily-added shot of rum discoloring the coke near the rim, she doesn’t want the brother she’s here with to see she’s drinking), the bus driver in the front next to the ring (stains on his sleeve, new baby at home and the rent money riding on this fight as his clenched and sweaty hands attest- he's bet against you if the sideways looks at you are any indication), the second of the three judges (peptic ulcer, one of the rolls of antacids in his pocket already empty, his thoughts more on his daughter's drug problem than on observing the match).
But this is how it is when you really, truly concentrate. Your focus does not narrow- how you’ve always hated that expression!- it expands. So in addition to every ordinary, pedestrian fact about this room and its contents, you see your opponent so clearly that it's as if he's telling you his life story aloud. You see the teenage son (t-shirt from Deluth Comprehensive, a school which did not exist when this man was in school), the success of the plumbing business crumbling under two alimony payments (double indent on his ring finger, two different rings), the failed stint as an amateur boxer in his late teens (obvious from his stance that he’s had serious training, from his movement that it was some time ago). You see the angle of his left wrist and the bunching of his deltoids and the bit of paunch concealing abdominal muscles that are still quite satisfactory. And as fast as you absorb this data you are processing it, analyzing his body and his history and his movements and predicting that he will close in again with a series of jabs, like so, yes, lovely.
It's not a case, there's no puzzle, but it's adrenaline and intelligence and another man trying honestly to hurt you, and for as much as three glorious minutes at a time your mind is running with the throttle open and you are not bored.
You’re sure he will block your next uppercut but you try anyway because it will make him think you’re more predictable than you actually are. His counter-punch surprises you, landing solidly on your ribs. You are pleased: if a fight was as easy to map out as a game of chess, it wouldn’t be nearly so diverting. You fight with extreme defensiveness, which encourages your opponent to indulge his naturally aggressive style.
You block yet another cross, growing bored with the repetition of his favorite punch, and he replicates your earlier uppercut, landing properly on your jaw and lining you up for the third punch in the combination. The move is derivative, which allows you to predict the left hook and slip out of the way; pain explodes along your cheek as the blow glances off. It spins your body further around than you intended, and you fall to one knee and have to put out a hand to balance yourself. The referee only reaches two before you’re back on your feet and cursing yourself for the error.
He comes back to you with another rapid combination, thinking to overpower you before you can recover, but you’re ready to duck out of the way. You counter with a short straight punch that lands on his chest- no one expects a tall fighter to come in low- and bounce back up with a hook to the jaw.
The bell. You retreat to corners, he to be fussed at by his corner-men and you to drag the glove from one hand and probe at your cheek. It is sore and already swelling, but there’s no sign that the bones have fractured and when you look at your fingers they’re free of blood. You hold your water bottle against your chest and twist off the cap with your free hand, then take several long swallows. You put the glove back on and return to the center of the ring.
You have this man's measure now, and you can spot his errors before he's finished making them. Each one is punished with a devastating counter-attack, targeting the left side of his chest and face. He is no longer surprised by this tactic- he’s clever enough to recognize what you’re up to and fight more strategically as a result, must have been quite something when he was nineteen and training full time- but his left arm is weaker and his blocking is never completely effective. Finally a transparent feint on his part leads you to step forward into his guard, a move he’s clearly not anticipating, and you send him backwards onto the mat with a beautiful cross.
It’s the quickest and hence the most disappointing knockout you’ve managed yet. The crowd is cheering and the promoter is slapping your shoulder and stuffing bank notes into your hand, but all you care about is that the fight only lasted two out of four potential rounds. A bare four minutes twenty-seven seconds of relief from tedium, and your evening is already over. You dress and reclaim your coat and bag with a sort of numb despair, fancying that you can already feel the maddening itch of monotony seeping in to replace the adrenaline.
One of the men standing in the back of the pub follows you out; undoubtedly he witnessed you receiving your pay from the promoter, and he and his friends have decided to rob you of the same. They know you’re a boxer, but they still think you an easy target: because of your clothes, because they saw you fight in a ring restricted by rules, because there are three of them. It's an effort to keep the smile from your face as you take a left into the very next alley you pass.
They don’t think to threaten you first; the short man on the right doesn't even try to pull out the knife in his right hip pocket. They simply close on you, the short man to take the money from your pocket while the other two grab you by the sleeves. You allow them to put their hands on you because your priority is the man with the knife, which you must neutralize before he thinks to use it. Nothing is so dangerously unpredictable as an idiot with a weapon.
Your left hook catches him completely by surprise, spinning him round. Then the upper-cut, the same one that you had opened with in your bout tonight. Obviously this imbecile hadn’t properly watched the fight at all. The hands of his two friends tighten on your coat, but the one on your left has his leg angled toward you, making the side of his knee a beautiful target for your vicious kick. He goes down, and you turn round to meet his friend, catching the first clumsy punches on your shoulder and upper arm.
This man fancies himself a boxer, and has clearly fought a few bouts of his own. His technique is atrocious, obviously learned from his friends, not a proper trainer. You trip him, which is only a temporary solution, but it gives you the time you need to stoop over the short man and pull the folded knife out of his pocket. You fling it down the alley as far as you can, and turn back to face the other two.
The man whose knee you injured is back up, but clearly hindered in his movement, hanging back while the other comes sailing in with another series of jab-cross combinations aimed at your face and neck. A fist jams into your kidney on the right side, and you belatedly realize that you have forgotten to count the six to eight seconds you estimated the short man would take to rejoin the fight. Careless. The would-be boxer gets his arms round you and you find that the man with the knee, while barely able to stand unassisted, is more than equal to the task of using you as a punching bag. Your hands are trapped at your sides, leaving your abdomen and chest open to his solid, well-placed punches.
You know the pain will be intense later- the man is grunting with effort as he pummels you, layering new bruises on top of those incurred in the boxing match. But at this particular moment it's merely another source of chemical enhancement; each impact of the man's fist with your mid-section injects another surge of adrenaline and endorphins into your bloodstream, and the world around you glints with beautiful clarity. Despite the distraction provided by the beating, you feel the short man's fingers in your pockets, scooping out your money and your Blackberry, before he slides around you to the mouth of the alley, clutching his prizes.
“Oi, come on, before someone hears!” he urges his companions. The man before you leaves off, and the man behind you shoves you to the ground and gives you a poorly-aimed kick that glances off your thigh.
They are leaving. The money is irrelevant to you, the phone easily replaceable, and your pride is not the sort that would suffer from being defeated in a purely physical contest. So you could simply let it go at this point, and be none the worse off. But your body is fully awake, your brain fairly hums with activity, and the sheer rush of it is almost as pleasant as a good, complicated murder.
You find, upon consideration, that you are not quite done with fighting for the evening.
You prioritize your targets as you get up from the ground; they’re not really listening for you, which will make the first two easy. You take a run-up and kick the limping man in the back of his injured knee; he goes down, for good this time. The short man is still turning toward you when you grab him by the back of the jacket and deliver a rabbit-punch that would get you disqualified from anything more dignified than a bare-knuckle, country-lane brawling match.
That leaves the would-be boxer who, unlike you, does have the handicap of machismo. He puts up his fists, and you challenge yourself to see how long you can extend the bout before succumbing to the temptation presented by his unbelievably sloppy guard. You hold out for two minutes fifteen seconds before you find yourself losing your adrenaline rush. The man is far too predictable to maintain your interest. At last you step in, slide through his guard, and knock him out with a solid jab to the left temple.
Arriving home, you walk quickly but quietly up the stairs, so as not to wake John. You're almost at the top before you realize that you can hear quiet noises coming from the sitting room. Of course, he knew you were out but not where you were- if you should ever feel a pang of something for leaving John wondering, you remind yourself that you do not need a minder- so he has waited up. Strategic error on your part: had you realized, you would have run noisily up and rushed to your room, so as not to inspire any needless fussing over a few minor injuries. To increase your pace at this stage would appear suspicious and attract all the more interest from your flatmate.
You enter the room and all hope of going unnoticed ends as John jerks his head up from the book he's reading. You head towards the lavatory anyway, tossing your coat over the back of a chair.
"What happened to your face?" he calls after you. "Sherlock!"
You slam the bathroom door behind you, a clear signal that you wish to be undisturbed, and examine yourself in the mirror over the sink. The bruise on your cheek is already quite spectacularly purple, and the swelling is distinctive. Even John's meager observational powers could never miss such a thing.
"Sherlock," John says, muffled by the door. "Were you attacked?"
"In a manner of speaking," you say, prodding the bruise with your fingertips. The throbbing pain competes with the ache that has enveloped your entire midsection. You open the cabinet and dig for the first aid kit, knocking over several bottles of dubious origin and getting the kit wedged against the u-bend. The door opens behind you while you are still struggling with the wretched thing and wincing at the way it pulls at your battered abdominal muscles, and you glance up to see John's concerned face reflected in the mirror. "The door was closed," you say pointedly. "You were the one who impressed upon me the significance of a closed lavatory door, as I recall."
"Medical emergency," he says. "Changes the rules."
You stand with a grunt of effort you can’t quite suppress, and open the kit. "Your definition of medical emergency is a very fluid one, I've noticed. I'm fine."
"Then what are you doing with this?" he asks, taking the first aid kit from your hands and setting it on the sink. "Nothing in here is going to help a bruise, as you well know."
You do, and you were in point of fact looking for antiseptic ointment; you suspect that some of the blows to your ribs may have broken the skin. You can't tell by looking whether the tiny beads of moisture on your dark-colored shirt are sweat or blood.
One of John's hands snakes out and seizes yours; he tilts your hand so that he can see the knuckles, which you now realize are abraded as well. You hadn’t felt the sting of the scratches till now. “Come on then,” he says, crossing his arms and giving you a significant look. “Let's see the rest.”
While arguments can sometimes be a worthwhile diversion, this one would rather spoil the evening- most people’s aggravation is amusing when it’s not just irrelevant, you’re not sure why you find it so distressing when John is angry with you- so you set about removing your shirt with brisk efficiency. John frowns at your torso, and you look down to see that there are in fact cuts in several places. Much of the skin across your stomach and ribs is mottled red, and tender to the touch. The bruises on your upper arms, your chest, and your left side just below the armpit are more circular in shape, better formed, and not as red: clearly made by gloves, not bare fists. The deep ache in your body is non-localized and you can't distinguish between the two types of bruising. Both feel the same when you push deep into them with your first two fingers: tender, painful, but a distinct lack of firmness or lumps that would indicate hematomas. No further endorphins are released, but the ache is nonetheless almost pleasant, as a reminder of your earlier exertion.
“Stop that,” John says sharply. He has pulled a pair of latex gloves from the kit and is putting them on. “I'll take pictures if you want to study them.”
Boring. You have seen bruises caused by bare fists and bruises caused by gloves. You have experienced both, obviously, but this is the first opportunity you've had to observe both simultaneously upon your person. Notes and observations can be recorded, but sensation is always more difficult to quantify for purposes of comparison.
John's gloved fingers shove your hands aside and probe at the bruises, looking between your face and your ribs as he conducts his examination. His touch is gentler than your own exploration, and you almost want to urge him to push harder, add finger-shaped bruises of his own to the mess on your torso.
He reaches for your head and grimaces. “You're too tall,” he says, and you let him push you backwards to sit on the closed lid of the toilet. He carefully examines your head with his fingertips before he backs away, sighing. “Christ,” he says. “Someone really worked you over. I'm surprised there's not more damage to your face.”
“Different perpetrators,” you tell him. Your cheek throbs. “The strikes to my abdomen were primarily bare-handed, so the damage is less diffuse.”
“What happened?” he asks. You answer with a raised eyebrow, as you do when you feel he has grown too reliant upon your explanations of facts which should be obvious. “Oh for God's sake,” he mutters, but he obediently runs his eyes over you, brow furrowed in thought. “Unsuccessful mugging,” he announces.
“Show your work, John,” you prompt when he does not elaborate.
He rolls his eyes. “You aren't on a case, and you didn't expect trouble or you would have asked me along,” he says. “You said different perpetrators, and the bruises to your ribs are a bit fresher, so you were attacked on the way home. I can't imagine anyone robbing you and not taking your fancy phone, and if you lost it you would not be anywhere near this pleased with yourself. So the mugging was unsuccessful. How'd I do?”
You’re surprised that he can see your good mood, you thought you were less transparent than that. “Moderately well,” you say. “But you haven't deduced what I was on my way home from, so only partial credit I'm afraid.”
He huffs out a quick breath, more sigh than laugh. He tilts your head slightly and examines your cheek again, then carefully studies the bruises across your torso, obviously comparing the one under your armpit with the ones on your stomach. Boxing shorts are worn high, and a length of skin has been faintly impressed with red ridges by their waistband. He brushes his finger across the mark, glances quickly at your face, then away. You can see him doubting his judgment, about to give up; he is still hesitant to make deductive leaps without being pushed.
Your disappointment makes you blurt out, “You're close.”
He looks back at you and squares his shoulders. “Boxing?” Your smile is very nearly involuntary. John is shaking his head, touching your cheek again, so lightly that you can barely feel it. “So the boxing, then the mugging.” He wets a flannel and begins to gently dab at the cuts on your midsection, cleaning away the small amount of blood.
“Yes,” you say, your smile threatening to become an entirely foolish grin. You rarely feel pride in anyone besides yourself; but then, so few people make even a token effort to think logically.
He works in silence for a moment. “If I'd been with you, you wouldn't have taken that much pounding.”
“More likely I wouldn't have had the opportunity to fight them at all,” you point out.
John glances up. “And that's a drawback, is it?” He shakes his head, lips narrowing. He is aggravated, why? “Of course it is, look who I'm talking to,” he mutters.
“And while your fighting skills are admirable in many other areas, you don't know how to box.”
“Right.” John picks up the tube of antiseptic ointment.
“I learned the basics for a case,” you explain. He seems strangely unengaged, which is well outside his usual pattern. “I had to gain entrance to a tournament in order to disprove a murderer's alibi. I lost the fight, of course, but the victim's father was a prominent figure in unlicensed boxing and offered me further training out of gratitude.”
John continues dabbing ointment over your cuts in silence. You do not need a bodyguard, nor is John capable of participating in the sport; you’ve pointed out why it’s only logical that John not accompany you, so why does he still seem so put out? Perhaps he doesn’t understand the purpose of the outing? “Don't you want to know why I do it?”
He chuckles, but his expression remains fixed. “Sherlock, I played rugby for six years. I know exactly why.”
Of course. John does not have your mind, but he understands your need to disturb the long stretches of boredom that cause you to atrophy. That cause you both to atrophy.
Oh.
“I could teach you,” you say on impulse.
“What, to box?” John sounds skeptical, but his expression eases into a small smile.
“Yes,” you say, encouraged by that smile. There is nothing quite like the rush of a correct realization. “You're far too old for conventional training, but age isn't a bar in unlicensed fights, that's half the point of them in the first place.”
“Very encouraging, thanks,” John says. “But I doubt my shoulder would stand up to it.”
“Most of the power in boxing comes from weight transfer,” you say. “Your muscle weakness shouldn't affect your form, and left-handed fighters usually have a strategic advantage.” You are considering the limits to John's mobility and how you can modify a training regimen to take them into consideration. The idea is surprisingly exciting.
John chuckles again. “You're not letting this go, are you? All right. I'll let you teach me. But you have to agree to stop running off in the middle of the night to fight strangers without telling me where you're bloody going.”
“Why would I teach you to box and then not take you to matches?” You shake your head. “Sometimes, John, I find your powers of logic severely lacking.”