Wait for the Ricochet (6)
Title from Deep Purple song "Child in Time"
Sweet child in time
you'll see the line
line that's drawn between
good and bad
See the blind man
he's shooting at the world
bullets flying
ah, taking toll (killing everyone)
If you've been bad - Lord I bet you have
and you've not been hit
by the flying lead
You better close your eyes
you better bow your head
and wait for the ricochet
Sherlock Holmes opened his eyes.
“About time, brother.”
Mycroft came over to the bed when Sherlock awoke. Even though he knew it would betray the actual level of his concern, he leaned slightly towards him, the rest of his worries hidden behind his usual mask of indifference.
Sherlock sat up, grimacing at the stiffness of his joints, and scowled at the IV lock on his arm. “How long?”
“About one hundred and twenty-two hours,” Mycroft said, checking his pocket watch.
Sherlock murmured something inaudible, searched the bedside cabinet for a sticking plaster and then pulled the lock out, wincing with disgust. Then he got up, far too quickly for Mycroft’s liking. Still on wobbly legs, he made it for the closet where his coat hung and rummaged through its pockets. When he fished out the magnifying glass and checked it against his palm, Mycroft let out a soft “Ah.”
Sherlock spun around and glared at the smug expression of his brother’s face. “Not your business.”
“Well, I am your brother after all,” Mycroft said innocently.
“What do you remember?” he then asked, aware of the common phenomenon that the longer the dreams were, the less was retained from them after waking. Sherlock massaged his neck with both his hands and rolled his shoulders. “Not much,” he admitted reluctantly and disappeared into the adjoining bathroom. His next words were half muffled by the sound of the shower running. “It’s all a bit of a blur. I suppose our target made the dream as unfathomable as possible.”
“What about the code?” Mycroft raised his voice. He was sure Sherlock has heard him but his brother was obviously taking his time with the shower. At last, the sound of water stopped and Sherlock emerged from the bathroom, buttoning up a new shirt.
“There’s no code,” he laughed. “Really, brother, I thought you above the level of idiocy required to fall for such a ploy.”
“Then it was- what, a trap?” Mycroft narrowed his eyes at the air of unabashed glee surrounding his brother. “You knew who Moriarty was - of course. Why did you-”
“You wouldn’t let me experiment on the Navigator if you knew what he could -supposedly- do,” Sherlock pointed out. Mycroft nodded sternly. “Of course. I would never expose you to such a threat.”
Sherlock stopped half-way through an amused snort when he noticed a curtain drawn over the half of the room. He pushed it aside, revealing another bed. The Extractor lying there was in a state of deep coma, his right hand thrown over his chest and clutching just under left shoulder, fingers flexed even in sleep. Sherlock frowned. “Who’s that? Did you send another Extractor after me?”
“Of course I did. You were in for days.”
“That was foolish of you,” Sherlock said with his usual disdain. “When you evaluated the situation as potentially dangerous, you certainly weren’t supposed to imperil outsiders.”
“Forgive me for holding your life dearer than the life of some mediocre Extractor,” Mycroft said, sounding, perhaps, more bitter than he intended to. Sherlock refrained from commenting on that, focusing on the sleeper instead.
“He didn’t make it, I see.” Sherlock checked the EEG readings. “Was that one of yours?”
“Don’t bother about him. He’s nobody,” Mycroft said dismissively, drawing the curtain back. To his relief, Sherlock nodded, mind clearly elsewhere, perhaps already elaborating the details of his next experiment. He got hold of his phone and began to scroll through missed calls and unread messages. He didn’t even look back as he walked out of the room.
Mycroft waited for the door to click shut. From the corridor, he could briefly hear the waning echo of Sherlock’s voice, murmuring something about a lack of signal in this damned underground building, and then it trailed off and Sherlock was gone.
“Thank you, Mr. Watson.” Mycroft allowed himself one sad smile. “I’m glad I wasn’t mistaken choosing you.” The body didn’t stir, the face of the sleeping man didn’t move. Mycroft reached for the call button to summon the medical staff. A physician was required to administer the lethal dose of barbiturates and to fill out the death certificate. The mind was already lost, no need to maintain the body.
The door banged open. Sherlock stood in the doorway, the knuckles of his fingers white where he clutched his phone. He stared at Mycroft with wide eyes.
“You meant it literally. When you said he was nobody.” Sherlock strolled closer.
“John Watson alias Nobody, sixteen illegal heists, secretly married to his team member, Shadowed after her death, Interpol top five after the Scott case...” he muttered rapidly, nearly stumbling over his words.
Sherlock looked at his phone as if seeing it for the first time, then back at the sleeper. “My phone had no signal...” he said under his breath. His eyes drank in the lines of Watson’s face. “I remember him.”
Mycroft sighed. He would have preferred not to get his brother involved with the unpleasant part of this. “When I suspected that you were unable to tell dream from reality, I hired him. He was supposed to remind you of your totem.”
“To get close to me...” Sherlock whispered. His gaze was turned inwards; he was replaying the events of his dream. “I wouldn’t have got out if not for him. And then I... used him and threw him away.” He shivered.
Mycroft was surprised when he heard an emotion in his brother’s voice and grew almost alarmed when he identified it: it was self-reproach.
“Do you ever wonder if there’s something wrong with us?”
Mycroft looked up. He really needed to sound firm for what he was about to say. “All lives end. Extractors don’t form attachments. You’ve said that to me many times. Alone protects you.”
Sherlock shook his head. “Friends protect people.” His voice was small and almost surprised, as if he couldn’t quite wrap his mind around the concept and yet he wasn’t able to deny the truth in it.
“That doesn’t sound like you, brother.”
There was softness in Sherlock’s eyes Mycroft was sure he never saw before. The words of John Watson from their first meeting, his warning against the Inception, rang in Mycroft’s ears: ‘You never know what will come out of it...’ An indefinite fear nagged at the back of his mind.What exactly did John Watson incept in my brother’s head?
“Don’t,” Sherlock snapped when he saw Mycroft reaching to unplug and pack away the DreamShare unit. Warily, Mycroft pulled his hand back. With some tact and gentle approach, he could maneuver Sherlock out of this...
“I’m sorry, Sherlock, but he’s lost. You know better than anyone-”
Sherlock stared him down. “I could bring him back.”
Then he averted his gaze and added, a bit guiltily: “I experimented with deep levels. I found a drug that-”
“An untested substance, for one thing, and this is not just a deep level, do you really think I would let you risk your life? Only to prove that you could, that you’re clever?”
“He saved my life,” Sherlock stressed out the word, but Mycroft was well prepared for this sort of argument.
“Don’t make him into a hero. He was doing it for a generous reward!”
“Well, he’s not going to enjoy his prize now, is he?” Sherlock spat out, sneering with more animosity that Mycroft ever thought he was able to provoke.
“Stop wasting time, every minute matters now. With the time dilatation...” Sherlock began programming a new heist on Watson’s unit. Mycroft watched it with growing desperation.
“Why, Sherlock? Why risk your life for a complete stranger?”
Sherlock gave him a ‘Do you hear yourself?’ look. “Ask John when he wakes. Because that’s what he did for me.”
***
The gravel crunched beneath his feet as he climbed up the path cut into the cliffs. The chill of the early morning hour biting at the skin under his eyes as he flushed from the exercise. The cliffs faced westward and the little gravel beach beneath them must have been a lovely sun-bathing spot in the long summer afternoons. The beach, the rocky wall and the path zigzagging upwards were blanketed with bluish shadow, all colours hushed two shades to the blue from their natural brightness, all sounds sleepy and shivering with cold.
When he reached the top, a disconnected but distinctly clear memory rose to the surface of his consciousness - the way the Reaper sharpens his scythe: with silk, with cobwebs, with streaming light of the rising sun.
He could feel the caress of the light, flowing over the landscape in waves of pink and orange, the warmth still weak so early in the spring yet already promising, and he breathed in the air laden with warmth and a strong tang of salt. The sky was high and empty, and the opal grey on the horizon bled through countless shades of still stronger colour into the bright cerulean of the zenith.
Sherlock Holmes turned up the collar of his coat and drew in a deep breath. His next steps followed the path toward a small, greyish-white cottage in the distance, snuggled to the green of the downs like a rabbit, sleeping in the grass. His long strides were eating up the good mile of the path quickly and soon the bottoms of his trouser legs were wet with the dew on the grass, where the shadow of the looming house prevented the sun from drinking it up.
The building was ancient and solid, with walls of stone and a slate roof; broad dining room windows looked across the expanse of downs toward the sea. Everything was quiet here. Long stone wall led away from the southern side of the house; a couple of wayward cherry branches crawled over its top - the leaves yet sparse but the white blossoms in full bloom. Sherlock smiled when he saw a solitary bee, still drowsy with cold, making a sloppy line for the feast.
A small gate let him into the garden, well-kept and ready for this season’s cultivation. The air was warmer here, the wall sheltering the place from the sea breeze, and just a bit tinged with the sweet fragrance of cherries. Another bee circled his head and disappeared into the trees.
“Well, I’ll be damned,” a raspy voice from behind said, catching with a slight wheeze on every vowel, “never woulda thought of the bees.”
Sherlock turned around to find an old man curled up in an even older chair propped against the garden wall to get the best of the morning sun, an enormous tartan quilt wrapped around him like a tortoise shell. Only a nearly bald head and a pair of wrinkled hands wrapped round a cuppa peeped out of the folds of the heavy fabric. One of the hands let go of the steaming mug to wave an errant bee farther off from the weak smell of tea.
“Soddin’ bees. I hate’em.” The old man chewed on the words spitefully. “Never had’em. What are they doin’ here anyway?” He squinted at Sherlock as if he couldn’t see him properly. He can’t, Sherlock realised; with the sun behind my back and in his eyes all he sees is a dark silhouette outlined with sparks.
“They came with me,” he answered softly. They were his addition to this dream.
“Nonsense,” the old man shook his head slowly from side to side. Sherlock watched his hands tighten their grip on the mug, tendons standing out sharply under the papery skin, joint cartilages bulky and stiff with age. “Ghosts don’t bring anythin’ in here.”
“John.” Sherlock came closer, crouching down in front of the chair so that his face was level with the man’s eyes. He searched them for the signs of recognition.
“I’d have those dreams,” John whispered, his gaze resting on some distant spot, unfocused. “It all made sense there. I’ve been an invalided Army doctor and I had the most ridiculous flatmate. We’ve been solving criminal cases together and...it all just clicked. I was happy.”
He sighed and shoved one hand under the quilt to rub at his shoulder. “Then we met an Irish wanker who made him to jump off a building to save my life. He did it...and I was left alone. It all went kind of downhill from there. Well, he wasn’t scaring off my girlfriends anymore. I met Mary, married her and we moved in here. And I was happy again. She died last year...” John looked around and frowned at Sherlock as if it surprised him to find him there.
“I owed her this,” he said with painful force. “She deserved a life, she wanted a life with me... I had to dream it. I had to.”
Sherlock took in the feel of the place, its ethereal beauty, the whitewashed nostalgia of it, and saw it for what it was: an atonement. John had spent years in the Limbo building a shrine to appease the Shadow of his own guilt.
“Not the best of dreams, but a good one,” John added, after a while of silence filled with sadness. “Better than the ones with your ghost coming back and telling me it was all a fake.”
Sherlock moved a bit closer, now he was within reach. “You know I’m no ghost, John. You could always tell, couldn’t you? The difference between the original and the reflection... between the voice and the echo. You could.”
“Between a person and a personification, yeah,” John nodded, eyes half-closed.
“Do I feel like a Shadow, John?”
Sherlock waited for a reply so long that he almost started to worry that John has dozed off the way old people do, succumbing to the slumber mid-sentence. But no, John was still looking at him with a slight frown in the crinkles around the eyes full of washed-out blue. It was a look one could give a Rubik’s cube that has eluded all attempts at setting it straight for years.
“No,” he said at last, slowly. Some of the firmness that was missing before found its way back into his voice. “If anything, I should think that I would be yours.”
Sherlock covered the fingers wrapped around the mug with his hand; they felt like old currant roots, knotty and dry. “You would be,” he admitted, looking down. “If I didn’t come back, you would become my Shadow.”
The fingers began to shake. Sherlock looked up to find John laughing; soundless, skittering bouts of breath escaping him and turning quickly into a fit of cough.
“Yeah,” John managed at last, wiping the corners of his eyes, “and you would hate that. Not being able to work.”
“That’s not why I came back and you know it,” Sherlock leaned forward, seeking John’s eyes and holding them with all the convincingness he could muster. They, somehow, became younger with every word.
“Tell me, Sherlock,” John licked his lips with some difficulty, “what kind of a Shadow would I make? Would I be the guilt that you’ve sent a man to death?”
The forced carelessness in his voice was too brittle not to break and Sherlock could hear the underlying anxiety, bubbling up through the cracks. John was waiting for an answer, and Sherlock could tell that the one John offered to him wasn’t the one he wanted to hear. The old Sherlock, the one before all this business with Moriarty, wasn’t a scrupulous man. An unpreventable death wouldn’t haunt him in the slightest...
But he wasn’t the same man any longer.
“No,” he said with certainty. “You would be the Shadow of my regret that I didn’t recognise I had a friend until it was too late.”
John just sat there for a while, nodding to himself; short, repeated movements of his head. It wasn’t bald any more; and every second the grey in the hair was diminishing, giving way to sandy blond. His eyes roamed through the garden. Then he cleared his throat.
“Well, your brother’s going to hate me for this.”
Sherlock blinked and in the next second he burst in a fit of giggles, helpless not to join John’s unabashed laughter, genuine and strong and completely irresistible.
“Right.” The situation where Mycroft would be shouting blue murder at John for compromising Sherlock’s career as a side effect to the saving of his life was actually rather disturbingly likely to happen. Sherlock sniggered once more and rose to his feet. The movement roused one of the bees that were crawling on the sun-warmed wall and John almost fell off his chair, hands flailing around his head, the now cold tea splashing all over Sherlock’s front and the mug landing in the grass with a muffled thump.
“I hate when they fly so near by my face!” John shouted and batted away the hands that came to steady him and help him to his feet. Not that Sherlock was of so much use as a support right then; nearly doubling over with laughter and attempting to wipe the tea from his coat at the same time.
“Imagine I always wanted to keep bees when I retire.” Sherlock returned the scowl on John’s face with a beam of his own. “You know what they say? The bees don’t like smoke.”
Sherlock dug deep in his pocket and took out an old pipe. “Here, John, have a smoke. It’s time to go.”
John eyed the pipe mistrustfully. “This is how you got in here? I knew it wasn’t tobacco...”
Sherlock nodded. “It’s a drug. You have it already in your system; I administered it intravenously before I went for the heist. But we need to convince your mind that you’ve taken it. Smoke, John. It will make you sleep. I’ll be there when you wake.” He struck a match and lit up the substance inside the pipe; the smell wasn’t entirely unpleasant.
“You better be,” John mumbled, huffing out a cloud of smoke in the direction of the nearest bee, just in case. The drug was acting quickly and he leaned against the wall, head lolling to the side to rest on Sherlock’s shoulder. The last thing he registered was Sherlock extricating the pipe from his numb fingers, taking a deep drag for himself.
He didn’t see the slender figure of his dead wife stepping through the door into the garden; he was already asleep when she looked at him with a fond, fleeting smile before she locked eyes with Sherlock.
“So, Mr. Holmes, have you come to snatch him from me again?” she asked lightly, as young as Sherlock remembered her, however vaguely.
“He was never yours to keep,” he said.
“That’s true,” she sighed. “And I am long gone, anyway. He just needed to let me go.”
She turned her face to the sun, eyes closed, already translucent as she faded away. “Take care of him.”
Sherlock tightened the hold of his arm around John where he supported him: “I will.”
***
“You know, you could always become the consulting detective.”
Sherlock looked up from his notes on the revised edition of the Science of Extraction. John stood in the doorway to the kitchen, nursing a cup of tea. No sugar, no honey; his dislike of sweetness was consistent.
“You think that anyone would take me seriously?” Sherlock snorted. It was true he didn’t go out for ‘field research’ anymore; stating that the Navigator was the biggest challenge there was and that nothing held quite the same appeal after that.
Neither did John. The only dreams he entered these days were his own, at night-time, and somehow, they always led him to a small mound of earth under a cherry tree in a sunny garden. Sometimes, he brought flowers. His shoulder didn’t ache in those dreams; they were happy ones.
John blinked back to reality and shrugged. “You could start with the Vermeer. You can prove now that it’s a fake. Although, how could anyone who knows you believe that you solved a case using your knowledge of astronomy is beyond me...” John caught the pen thrown at him and grinned.
“But who would listen to me?” Sherlock complained.
“There is an officer named Lestrade at New Scotland Yard, actually,” John pointed out. “Your dream was accurate to the point. I don’t know if he’ll turn out to be the stoical sufferer he was in the dream but if you could at least try not to drive him round the bend all the time, I’m sure he’d let you on the cases.”
“Mycroft could pull some strings-” Sherlock was stopped half-sentence, as the pen took the return journey through the air. “Don’t you even think of asking your brother for another favour. We already owe him a huge one for clearing my record.”
“But only if you’d investigate with me,” Sherlock stipulated. “I’d need, you know, the outside perspective.”
“All right, your Brilliance,” John laughed. “I know you’d be lost without your Shadow.”