Fic Rec: A River Without Banks
Title: A River Without Banks
Author: Chryse
Pairing: Sherlock/John, John/Mary
Length: 203,286 words
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Violence, rape/non-con, character death (Please keep in mind that this is a time travel story, and unfortunate occurrences are not necessarily permanent)
Verse: Sherlock BBC
Author's summary: "You love this, being Sherlock Holmes." He had once. When had it all gone so wrong?
Reccer's comments: First of all, I will directly quote the author from their beginning notes: "I assure you that there WILL be a happy ending, by which I mean John and Sherlock, together exclusively and forever, world without end, amen. (Just so we’re clear.)" So if the warnings scare you, know that EVERYTHING IS TEMPORARY AND IT WILL BE FINE. But the bad stuff still happens, so if it's triggery be aware that parts of this fic get very intense. The first half has a lot of angst, but never fear; there are also happy, romantic times as well.
This story is by the same writer who gave us "The Frost is All Over". The fic begins right where HLV left off, with Moriarty supposedly returning from the dead. In essence, it is a time-travel fic, with Sherlock going back in time in an attempt to put the universe back on its correct course after being shifted out of alignment by Moriarty's actions on the rooftop of Bart's. I am a *sucker* for time travel stories, with all of the paradoxes and twists and turns that that genre entails. And boy, does Chryse deliver in spades. Because not just one journey back in time is required; each failed attempt ends with Sherlock's death in that timeline kicking him back into his own (hence the character death warning). And every time Sherlock makes another attempt, his memory of all the previous timelines is erased, making each journey back its own self-contained story with its own adventure and ending, some happier than others. There's also a case that keeps showing up in subsequent timelines, just biding its time until the 'correct' version of Sherlock Holmes shows up to solve it.
My heart ached for Sherlock during a large portion of this fic, as I watched him struggle, literally time and time again, with the emotional fallout of each and every timeline. The storytelling is vivid and layered, with each timeline building on the previous ones and moving the story forward in Sherlock's search for the 'true' timeline that will set everything to rights. The perfect 'fix-it' fic for Series 3, in my opinion.
Trevor looked away for a moment, clearly thinking, then tucked her hair back again. “Now it grows complicated. Let me tell you what is known first, and then what I believe to be true. About fifteen years ago, for me-so about fifteen years in the future for you-an event horizon appeared in our solar system. To make a very long story extremely short, there had been an increase in entropy starting at the point of my initial experiments and progressing exponentially until it created a black hole. The process might have taken longer, but there was a sharp jump-an increase in the increase--about three and a half years prior to now. It was due to my work, Holmes. It turned out that altering time in a reaction produced an exponential increase in entropy, like this.“ She pulled a pad of paper over and wrote out a series of equations, tapping her pencil on the relevant portion.
“But you could have corrected for that, couldn’t you? Stabilized it?”
“Perhaps. With the models I had in place, I would have had an ideal situation for testing it. Not likely I’ve enough lifetime for that now, though. You see, it wasn’t just the actual physical entropy that increased. What you might call the layman’s entropy increased also, starting from right about now. The amount of disorder and chaos reaches a sort of tipping point, and it seems that your mission is the catalyst. That’s why I had to stop you going. What you do there-it sets in place a sort of chain reaction, and things just…fall apart.” She looked at him sadly. “It hardly matters that the world is about to be swallowed by a black hole, because there’s very little left worth saving.”
Sherlock could only blink at her, stunned. In his wildest imaginings he could never have considered this. “But just stopping me now-that won’t reverse the singularity. What happened three and a half years ago?”
“I don’t know for certain,” Trevor said quietly. “But I think you can guess.”
Sherlock stared. No. This was not-she could not possibly be suggesting that. “Trevor. Are you saying that Moriarty altered time by going into his own past and killing himself?”
“Yes,” she said. “That’s exactly what I think. I think he used my prototype without my consent-or at least I quite hope without my consent-to change something in his own life, but in the process set in motion a devastating chain of events and ripped a hole in the space-time continuum.” She shrugged a bit self-consciously. “In lay terms. Oh, and I don’t think he planned to kill himself. The man was insane to begin with, that much was clear even to me. I think the temporal displacement effect undid him completely.”
“But wouldn’t we be aware of it? You said the primary time stream had its own integrity. If we’ve been affected-if I’ve been affected-by this, wouldn’t I be suffering the effects too?”
“Aren’t you?” Trevor asked, her pale eyes unblinking on his. “How have you been sleeping lately, Holmes?”
Sherlock opened his mouth, stopped, and slowly shut it again.
“How long have you been feeling it? That things have somehow gone wrong?”
“I don’t know,” he admitted, looking away. “A long time.” Since John had moved on. Since Sherlock had come back. Since he died.
“If we can fix it,” Trevor said, “we can restore the primary time stream. According to my calculations that would reverse the singularity.”
“But you don’t even know what the primary time stream is supposed to be! What if Moriarty wins? What if I’m the one who dies?”
“You might. I don’t know.”
Sherlock sat back and frowned at her. “I know I’m supposed to be a raging egomaniac, Trevor, but even I never fancied that I might be called upon to save the universe through my noble death.”
“Not the whole universe; the black hole would probably-“ She caught his look and her mouth twitched slightly. “Ah. Right.”
Sherlock exhaled a long breath. “You want me to go back. To fix this.”
Author: Chryse
Pairing: Sherlock/John, John/Mary
Length: 203,286 words
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Violence, rape/non-con, character death (Please keep in mind that this is a time travel story, and unfortunate occurrences are not necessarily permanent)
Verse: Sherlock BBC
Author's summary: "You love this, being Sherlock Holmes." He had once. When had it all gone so wrong?
Reccer's comments: First of all, I will directly quote the author from their beginning notes: "I assure you that there WILL be a happy ending, by which I mean John and Sherlock, together exclusively and forever, world without end, amen. (Just so we’re clear.)" So if the warnings scare you, know that EVERYTHING IS TEMPORARY AND IT WILL BE FINE. But the bad stuff still happens, so if it's triggery be aware that parts of this fic get very intense. The first half has a lot of angst, but never fear; there are also happy, romantic times as well.
This story is by the same writer who gave us "The Frost is All Over". The fic begins right where HLV left off, with Moriarty supposedly returning from the dead. In essence, it is a time-travel fic, with Sherlock going back in time in an attempt to put the universe back on its correct course after being shifted out of alignment by Moriarty's actions on the rooftop of Bart's. I am a *sucker* for time travel stories, with all of the paradoxes and twists and turns that that genre entails. And boy, does Chryse deliver in spades. Because not just one journey back in time is required; each failed attempt ends with Sherlock's death in that timeline kicking him back into his own (hence the character death warning). And every time Sherlock makes another attempt, his memory of all the previous timelines is erased, making each journey back its own self-contained story with its own adventure and ending, some happier than others. There's also a case that keeps showing up in subsequent timelines, just biding its time until the 'correct' version of Sherlock Holmes shows up to solve it.
My heart ached for Sherlock during a large portion of this fic, as I watched him struggle, literally time and time again, with the emotional fallout of each and every timeline. The storytelling is vivid and layered, with each timeline building on the previous ones and moving the story forward in Sherlock's search for the 'true' timeline that will set everything to rights. The perfect 'fix-it' fic for Series 3, in my opinion.
Trevor looked away for a moment, clearly thinking, then tucked her hair back again. “Now it grows complicated. Let me tell you what is known first, and then what I believe to be true. About fifteen years ago, for me-so about fifteen years in the future for you-an event horizon appeared in our solar system. To make a very long story extremely short, there had been an increase in entropy starting at the point of my initial experiments and progressing exponentially until it created a black hole. The process might have taken longer, but there was a sharp jump-an increase in the increase--about three and a half years prior to now. It was due to my work, Holmes. It turned out that altering time in a reaction produced an exponential increase in entropy, like this.“ She pulled a pad of paper over and wrote out a series of equations, tapping her pencil on the relevant portion.
“But you could have corrected for that, couldn’t you? Stabilized it?”
“Perhaps. With the models I had in place, I would have had an ideal situation for testing it. Not likely I’ve enough lifetime for that now, though. You see, it wasn’t just the actual physical entropy that increased. What you might call the layman’s entropy increased also, starting from right about now. The amount of disorder and chaos reaches a sort of tipping point, and it seems that your mission is the catalyst. That’s why I had to stop you going. What you do there-it sets in place a sort of chain reaction, and things just…fall apart.” She looked at him sadly. “It hardly matters that the world is about to be swallowed by a black hole, because there’s very little left worth saving.”
Sherlock could only blink at her, stunned. In his wildest imaginings he could never have considered this. “But just stopping me now-that won’t reverse the singularity. What happened three and a half years ago?”
“I don’t know for certain,” Trevor said quietly. “But I think you can guess.”
Sherlock stared. No. This was not-she could not possibly be suggesting that. “Trevor. Are you saying that Moriarty altered time by going into his own past and killing himself?”
“Yes,” she said. “That’s exactly what I think. I think he used my prototype without my consent-or at least I quite hope without my consent-to change something in his own life, but in the process set in motion a devastating chain of events and ripped a hole in the space-time continuum.” She shrugged a bit self-consciously. “In lay terms. Oh, and I don’t think he planned to kill himself. The man was insane to begin with, that much was clear even to me. I think the temporal displacement effect undid him completely.”
“But wouldn’t we be aware of it? You said the primary time stream had its own integrity. If we’ve been affected-if I’ve been affected-by this, wouldn’t I be suffering the effects too?”
“Aren’t you?” Trevor asked, her pale eyes unblinking on his. “How have you been sleeping lately, Holmes?”
Sherlock opened his mouth, stopped, and slowly shut it again.
“How long have you been feeling it? That things have somehow gone wrong?”
“I don’t know,” he admitted, looking away. “A long time.” Since John had moved on. Since Sherlock had come back. Since he died.
“If we can fix it,” Trevor said, “we can restore the primary time stream. According to my calculations that would reverse the singularity.”
“But you don’t even know what the primary time stream is supposed to be! What if Moriarty wins? What if I’m the one who dies?”
“You might. I don’t know.”
Sherlock sat back and frowned at her. “I know I’m supposed to be a raging egomaniac, Trevor, but even I never fancied that I might be called upon to save the universe through my noble death.”
“Not the whole universe; the black hole would probably-“ She caught his look and her mouth twitched slightly. “Ah. Right.”
Sherlock exhaled a long breath. “You want me to go back. To fix this.”