A/N: hi guys!

Ugh yes, finally another new chapter. I'm so sorry that I haven't uploaded anything for so long. As I said, I had quite a writer's block and was so focused on editing the previous chapters that I didn't even think about a new one. Buuut this one is a bit longer (probably the longest).

Thanks for your patience and reading. I hope you're all good <3

Enjoy,

- jawn

"GARGH!"

A frustrated sound cut through the flat, making John look up from the building blocks in front of him.

"How the hell am I supposed to find my way to the bloody witch's house if I don't have any more breadcrumbs?!"

When Sherlock lifted his gaze from the jumble of loose sheets and books on his desk, his expression exactly mirrored his exasperated tone. Although his face was tense and his skin tone still hadn't taken on its healthiest colour, he looked better than the morning John had dragged him from his room. His hair no longer fell sallowly and greasily down his forehead, but shone neatly parted, almost taking it in with his flashing eyes.

He almost looked normal again. And he acted like it too. Since John had forced him to eat something and freshen up, he did nothing but fling random sheets of paper around the flat and flip through books, only to groan loudly again when he once more received no answers to his questions. John would have liked to be angry with him for the mess he had made of the flat in the last few hours, but he couldn't. The relief of the ruckus was too great. He could hardly believe himself thinking that seriously.

"You've read the Brothers Grimm fairy tales?" he asked now, raising his eyebrows in surprise. No idea what he had expected. "Quantum physics for babies", maybe. Or "naughty sayings for all matters".

"Of course I have. Everyone has," Sherlock replied, putting his hands on his hips.

"It was just a silly comparison. There are just so many possibilities of solutions in my head that it feels like it's about to explode."

He shook his head and dropped his arms again, turning to the bookshelf as he had so often in the last few hours.

"What if you cleaned up this mess a bit?" asked John, lifting a red building block from the ceiling to place on the mini-tower he and Rosie had started to build.

"Then you'd have a bit of a better overview, and maybe you'd be better able to-"

"Sorting the books alphabetically won't help me think, John," Sherlock interrupted him gruffly without turning around.

"And it's not chaos, it's creative disorder. Helps me keep everything on track."

Creative disorder, sure.

John sighed but said nothing in reply, instead turning his gaze back to his daughter, who was sitting in front of him with a concentrated mine, trying to put another block on the tower without knocking it over completely. He had picked her up again a few hours ago, while Sherlock was in the shower and John trusted him enough that instead of locking himself in his room, he wouldn't lock himself in the bathroom as well.

The guilty conscience due to the last few days was still gnawing at him, but John tried to make up for his absence with an extensive game of play while Sherlock didn't need him. And that's not what he was doing.

Mrs Hudson and Rosie seemed to have enjoyed themselves anyway, even without his, admittedly improvable, playing skills, and Rosie hadn't really understood what had been going on in the last few days anyway. Her reaction when she'd seen Sherlock back in his chair had been a surprised "Oh" and then a smile, but that was replaced pretty quickly by a whine that she was bored. Still, it wasn't just John who had grinned.

A book flew across the floor and then skidded towards the kitchen, where it bounced off the leg of the dining table and came to rest a few feet away. This happened several times in the last few hours, so John didn't flinch every time it bounced again. He had his own books in his room, thank God, and not here. Probably most of the spines of the books had snapped in half once, as ungently as Sherlock flung them from the shelves onto the floor.

"Knock, knock."

A timid voice broke through the rustle of leaves and paper, making him look up from the building blocks again.

A shock of light brown hair slipped out from behind the door, immediately followed by a somewhat wrinkled, friendly smiling face.

"Am I interrupting?" asked Mrs Hudson, and without waiting for an answer, opened the door fully to come in. She was holding an old-fashioned looking tray painted with flowers, on which was heaped a small mountain of biscuits. As if on cue, John's stomach began to growl, but this was thankfully drowned out by another rumble from a book flung on the floor. He should have joined in when he had made Sherlock Porridge.

"I heard a noise and thought I'd drop by," she said.

"Besides," she put the tray on the small side table next to John's chair, " Sherlock's finally back and I thought I'd bake you some biscuits for once."

Touched, by her solicitude, John smiled, but Sherlock only grunted.

"I've never been away," he replied gruffly.

Mrs Hudson turned to him, though he did not look at her.

"Physically, no, but psychologically. And you feel that much more acutely sometimes."

"Mrs. Hudson, spare me."

Abruptly, he lowered his arms from the spines of the books he was perusing and turned.

"I have enough on my mind as it is, I don't need life lessons about feelings as well."

At the word "feelings", he shook himself and rustled the sheets he had taken from the desk.

"Oh, don't worry, that's not my job," Mrs Hudson returned and John clearly thought he could detect something ambiguous in her expression.

"Well," she said before he could elaborate further, stroking her purple dress. "I've got to get going again anyway, and I just wanted to check on you and drop off the biscuits."

She gave Rosie one last smile and then turned away, heading back towards the door.

"He's not divorced yet."

Sherlock still didn't look at her, but Mrs Hudson paused and turned back around.

"Who?" she asked, and John also frowned in confusion.

"Who do you think. Your date. He's not divorced yet because his wife won't sign the divorce papers. She probably doesn't have any money. Or no one else she can bug."

What?

"How the hell...?" put in John, but then broke off and shook his head.

Mrs Hudson, unlike him, seemed to know exactly what he was talking about, though, because even from here he could see her posture tighten and her lips press together.

"Thank you," she replied curtly. "I know that too. He told me himself."

With a deft twist, she whirled around and pulled the door shut behind her with a loud bang. At the noise, Rosie lifted her eyes from the tower, which by now was at a dangerously skewed angle, and looked questioningly towards the door.

"All good?" she asked then, and John saw concern spreading through her hazel eyes. He tried a smile and nodded as he lifted a hand to stroke her cheek.

"Yes, everything's fine, love," he replied, picking up a new building block to further emphasise his answer.
"Mrs Hudson is just going to visit a friend."

A snort was heard, but John ignored it and placed the building block on the tower instead. Not a good idea. After all, he could have guessed. The already leaning tower began to wobble under the new weight, until a moment later it collapsed in a loud clatter of colourful wooden blocks.

"Damn," it escaped him and he looked at Rosie, who, however, instead of crying as he had feared, began to giggle loudly. Relieved, John's lips twisted into an apologising smile.

"Sorry," he said, rubbing his forehead. "I guess Daddy was pretty much a klutz then."

"Pretty is good," Sherlock muttered, just loud enough for John to hear, and Rosie slapped her hands over her mouth. John stifled an eye roll and then heaved himself up, causing Rosie to fall silent again.

"I'll be right back," he reassured her, running a hand through her hair. "Why don't you start building a new tower? I'm sure it'll be much better than the other one."

She nodded, smiling again, and he turned away to walk towards the living room table where the tray was. Incredible how easy it was sometimes to make children happy. If that still worked in adult life, the world would probably look very different.

He took a biscuit and his gaze drifted to Sherlock. He had meanwhile sat back in his desk chair and was flicking through some other book with a concentrated expression.

John was almost a little surprised that Mrs Hudson hadn't said anything about the mess piling up on the table in front of him, but she was probably feeling much the same as he was and was just glad to be back to the usual.

"That wasn't very nice," he said as he took a bite of his biscuit. "Mrs Hudson was worried about you, in case you hadn't noticed."

"I am not very nice, John, you should have figured that out by now," Sherlock returned without looking up and flipped a few more pages.
"And I didn't ask about her concern."

John suppressed a sigh and decided that now was not the time to argue or instruct.

"Did you find out something useful, then?" he asked after taking another bite, walking over to him.

"If I had, I think I would say something."

"You haven't, in the last three days," John retorted, to which Sherlock commented with an annoyed groan.

"Because I wasn't finished!"

He flipped the book closed and slammed it down on the tabletop. With a frustrated look, he leaned back in his chair and folded his arms.

"I was able to figure out the last letters using clues. They weren't always directly visible, but they were there. But this time," his lips twisted into a grim smile, "I have no clues at all."

John swallowed.

"Are you perhaps overlooking something?" he asked, but Sherlock shook his head.

"No. Very likely not."

John shoved the rest of the biscuit into his mouth and put it on his mental to-do list to thank Mrs Hudson again for her later before taking a step closer and leaning over the desk. While the top of the desk looked like a bomb had hit it, what John was looking for wasn't particularly hard to find. It was in a small but cleared space, to Sherlock's right, and stood out from the clutter as if black on white. Juliet's shiny black mobile phone and the sheet of paper where the males and the letters were written, which Sherlock had already deciphered. Although he still knew pretty much what was on the latter, he reached for it.

.m. .ere. ..e sl.ne.

Four letters. Four bloody letters they were still missing to be able to move on. A sigh escaped his lips. God, it was frustrating.

"One letter is a."

Surprised, John raised his eyes as Sherlock's voice interrupted the silence.

"What?" he asked, though he understood him perfectly.

"One letter is a," Sherlock repeated. "I just haven't written it down yet."

He straightened to reach for a pen and scribbled two A's over two of the dots.

John blinked and then read the series of letters again. Am .ere. a.e slane. was now written there.

"How did you figure that out?" he asked, puzzled, turning his gaze back to Sherlock, who had leaned back in his chair.

"It was the only thing that made sense."

He shrugged.

"If it had said em or im at the beginning, then the sentence would have been illogical. Besides, it fits because that male," he leaned forward again and pointed to what apparently meant a, "has also been one of the most used in the other messages."

"Right," John muttered. He'd almost forgotten about the frequencies. The way Sherlock reasoned, it sounded like the easiest thing in the world.

"So it's a name?" he asked, pointing to the last two words on the sheet.

"It probably is, yes," Sherlock replied, nodding.

A curl fell into his pale forehead and he raised a hand to brush it back.

"The only question is how we're going to find out the other three letters. Only then will we really have certainty."

John put a finger to his lips and lowered his gaze back to the sheet of paper in front of him.

"What about h?" he asked after a few moments and when Sherlock gave him an irritated look, he shrugged. The idea had just popped into his mind.

"I mean the letter here," he explained, tapping the one dot of the word ".ere".
"It would make sense, at least. You said yourself that sometimes you have to go by probability to solve a problem and 'am here' is, after all, a properly English expression." "Am were" isn't, unless the perp wants to list the verb to be in different conjugations and tenses."

Sherlock's mouth opened slightly, but no sound came out. The confusion swimming in his sea-blue eyes was replaced by something else, something more positive. Realisation? Or a new idea? John couldn't quite identify it and stepped uneasily from one foot to the other.

"Right," Sherlock then said after a few seconds of silence. "Right, John. That's...good."

He nodded and lowered his folded arms to lean forward again.

John tried not to be too piqued at Sherlock's obvious surprise as he put an "h" over the dot with a glowing mine and he turned his gaze out the window.

"Maybe we don't need a clue all the time," he muttered, more to himself than to John, but John nodded anyway.

"Maybe not," he agreed with him.

"Daddy!"
Rosie's querulous voice made John look to her and he raised his hands placatingly when he saw the annoyed expression on her face. Once Rosie started crying, it took ages to get her to stop again. And as angelic as she looked with her curls, she could become just as devilish when she didn't like something. And besides, John still had to make up for his absence of the last few days.

"Carrie will probably call again today," he said before turning away. "Can I tell her what we found out or do you want to do that?"

Sherlock shook his head.

"Neither," he replied and just as John was about to suggest that she might very well do either, Sherlock turned his gaze back to him and beat him to it.

"Carrie's coming over."