(no subject)
Er. So I wrote fic. I'm not entirely sure how it happened. I was on Tumblr, forlorn over the last episode of Sherlock, then a realisation hit. Or should I say, a plot bunny bit. Two hours and three thousand words later this happened. I don't even know.
Title: Too Empty To Share
Author: elethoniel
Pairing(s): Implied Sherlock/John. Very brief John/OFC.
Rating: PG, only for a couple of swear words.
Words: 3,221 (I knew it was complete when I did a word count! :D)
Disclaimer: I own nothing. Sherlock and John belong to Mofftiss, the BBC, and ACD. This idea is also taken from a novel by Ceceila Ahern. That belongs to her beautiful brain. More notes at the end.
Warnings: Spoilers for The Reichenbach Fall! Also there is magical realism, angst, and a happy ending!
This is the first fic I've written in the Sherlock fandom, and the first I've written in years. Beta'd by myself, if there are any errors, please let me know :)
Summary: John finds himself in the place where the lost things go.
It happened one morning. He’d had a restless night. Dreams of Sherlock falling, of crashing into blood-red water, of shouts and shots from war, all tumbling together and creating his own hell. He’d woken at 4am, shivering, sweat clinging to his body. The dawn chorus started up outside. Having stumbled down stairs for a glass of water John realised he couldn’t stay there. Not like this. Not without him. So he went for a walk. The world was still sleeping, but the summer sun was making its desired ascent known; tendrils of light licked at the horizon and John drank in the dew-dropped air. His feet took him to Sherlock’s grave. To that shining black slab of stone etched with his best friend’s name. It wasn’t meant to be there. Sherlock wasn’t meant to die. Not like this. They were meant to go out in blazes of glory, bringing down criminals in their wake. That’s how John had always imagined it. Since he shot Jefferson Hope. That is how he saw them ending. But not like this. Not separately. Not with a whimper and a stuttered apology for all he had given. The only one in the world.
It is this that John thinks of. Not the endless chases, the bullets, the fear, the fun, the laughter. He thinks of how unjust it is. His own words ring in his ears ‘they always turn. And they will turn on you.’ He hadn’t known it would be like this. He still doesn’t like to think of it that way. Sherlock wasn’t a fraud. No one can fake that burning intellect. No one can fake that friendship. He walks on when he can no longer stand to stare at that insufficient plot of dirt. He doesn’t pay attention to where he is walking, he doesn’t care which neighbourhoods he finds himself in, and he doesn’t know how long he walks for. His limp growing worse with every step, but the pain serves to remind him what he has lost. As though he could ever forget. Eventually he stumbles across a garden. A small, cleanly kept area, with a circular pond in the middle, benches around the edges, outlined by bushes. The sun has crept over the horizon and is touching everything with gold. John likes this time of day best, he realises. When the world is still asleep (and even now, when he is in the heart of London, he can only hear the soft chirrups of birds and the gentle murmur of nature) just before the sun brings it all into focus. He can still pretend at this time of day.
He doesn’t know how long he sits in that garden, and if you were to ask him what he thought of, John wouldn’t be able to give you an adequate response. ‘Him,’ he would whisper, throat sore from keeping back the tears. When he finally rises the sun is high and bright in the sky, it is mid-summer and the city has begun to heat up. John sighs, pulling himself off the bench, and begins the long walk back to Baker Street. The path is narrow and overgrown. Slowly he realises this is not the way he came and when he turns to look back he can no longer see the garden. It is just a long winding trail. His brows furrow in confusion, thinking back over it. There was definitely only one entrance and exit. This must be it. John didn’t realise he’d lost track of himself so much. He carries on. Eventually the path begins to open up, there is vegetation all around him and the smell of bacon hangs in the air. Relief lightens his stomach and John walks on, now in a hurry to get back to the flat. What if…?
But London never appears. What John sees instead are wagons. Brightly coloured and beautifully decorated. Like the ones he used to see at fairs. His mother never let him near them. But once, when he and Harry had been left to wander around, they crept up to one. Their combined curiosity stronger than any fear of retribution. A middle-aged woman had been sitting on the steps, she offered them tea. They shyly declined, but stood still in hushed silence, and watched her weave a beautiful pattern. The mood was finally broken by John’s mother frantically calling them. They rushed off to find her, but John had never forgotten that woman, and his interest in the wagons had never waned. Now it appears he had stumbled across a whole platoon of them. Children were running around, dogs were barking, and everyone was laughing, chatting, enjoying the weather and the chance to be alive.
This was not the route John had taken. Now his senses were sharper he could see the signs of a month long habitation, if not more, so they couldn’t have just arrived. And he was certain he wasn’t so submerged in memories he wouldn’t have noticed them before. But there was no where to have taken a wrong turn. There were no other paths he could have chosen. Having nothing else to do, John walks on. He squares his shoulders, tilts his chin up fractionally, and falls back into the role of the soldier.
The first wagon he approaches is canary yellow. Two women are sitting outside, mugs of tea cupped in their hands, watching children play hide and seek in the surrounding woods. John stops just outside their circle and coughs. They look up, startled. The young one, with the auburn hair, jumps to her feet and rushes towards him.
‘Oh! You must be new here! Please, have a seat. You must be tired. Let me get you a drink.’ She pushes him into her abandoned chair, and John stares, bewildered, around him. A pat on his arm draws him back to himself.
‘You mustn’t worry about her; she gets a bit eager when someone new arrives.’ This lady was older - her mother? The soft smile and gentle eyes put him in memory of Mrs Hudson. John didn’t relax.
The younger woman appeared by his side, ‘here, have some tea. It’ll help with the shock.’
John was about to reply that he wasn’t in shock, he invaded Afghanistan, for god’s sake! It would take much more than this- Oh. That was when John realised the mug he was holding looked very much like one he had lost last year. He’d just assumed Sherlock had conducted an experiment on it and had thrown it away when it hadn’t yielded the results he desired. The unexpected reminder sent a sharp jolt through John and he had to suck in a breath just to stop himself from involuntarily calling out. Distracted by the memory, John turned the mug upside down. His had a chip in the bottom rim that Sherlock had, in very small letters, scrawled JW after an argument had escalated regarding the correct respect of other people’s property. Sherlock had written JW + SH on every item they co-owned, and then separately on their respective belongings. It was this barrage of memories that caused John to momentarily forget the scalding hot drink the mug contained.
He leapt up, cursing and clutching his burnt thigh. But none of that mattered. He hardly felt it. The moment before the hot tea hit his leg he saw it. In small writing, on the underside of the mug, scrunched in a chip, were the letters JW.
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It was some time later that John finally found time to be by himself. He was in a modest room that was set in a far larger building. There was a whole town here. John could barely believe that, but then wasn’t there a quote about that? ‘Show me three people and I will show you a society’? There were a great deal more than three people here. Wherever here was. It shouldn’t exist. Whatever it was. He still had Sherlock’s voice in his head saying ‘illogical’ whenever John thought about it too hard. John, it turns out, is very illogical. He didn’t believe Sherlock, in spite of all the evidence for it. And now, he was beginning to believe he was really here, despite all the evidence against it. His inner Sherlock took pity on him and recited ‘How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth?. John huffed out a breath of laughter that almost immediately turned into a choked off sob. This couldn’t be happening. He was lost. Literally lost. This is where all the lost things come, they told him. This is where they end up. Ever wondered where that odd sock went? Chances are it is here. Or will be here. Time doesn’t run quite right in this place. If you’re here then it’s usually for a reason.
When he asked how he could leave they all averted their eyes and shrugged their shoulders. One old woman walked up to him and laid her hand tentatively on his arm, she was blind, he realised.
‘You’ll be alright here. We look after our own,’ she said. John hadn’t been able to reply. He nodded and lifted the welcome bundle out of the arms of the young boy carrying it. He turned to his room and closed the door.
-+-+-
John didn’t know how long he spent there. After a few days (or what he assumed were blocks of twenty-four hours. There were no clocks. Soon it became apparent why) John left his room, intent on scoping out his surrounding area. There was a town hall (the place he was currently sleeping in - they had a wing for new arrivals), shops, restaurants, parks, and further out, houses and caravans. People were living here. It seemed a ridiculous realisation to have so late into his stay, but John never thought this was for the long run. People had whole lives here. John walked past couples, families. Surely they wouldn’t have all turned up here together? That didn’t happen, did it? He walked past a class taking place in the street. The teacher was talking about the history of Here. He couldn’t make sense of it. Eventually he wound up outside the yellow wagon. The door was open, just like before, but this time there was no one sitting outside.
John stood hesitantly on the first step, ‘hello?’ he called, not wanting to intrude, but needing to reach out.
The woman with the auburn hair appeared, ‘Oh! Hello! Didn’t think I’d be seeing you again. How’s the leg?’
It took John a while to realise she was asking about the burn instead of the limp. He shut his eyes for a moment and lets the lump in his throat pass. Sherlock wouldn’t have needed to ask. Opening them he saw the woman looking at him sadly. ‘Would you like to come in?’ She asked him softly, stepping aside.
John nodded and climbed up the stairs and into her home.
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After that he returns there nearly every day. She’s called Lorraine. She doesn’t have children, they were her neighbours; she just looks out for them occasionally. She’s 31 years old and she used to work in retail. But, to be honest, she doesn’t talk much - not about herself anyway. She listens, mostly. John talks and talks and talks. He talks so much more than he would have at home. He tells her about his life. About Harry, and medical school, and the army, and the wound. He tells her about bumping into Mike Stamford. And he tells her about Sherlock Holmes. Eventually she asks why he’s here.
Lorraine looks thoughtful. Her soft blue eyes gazing far away when she talks, ‘Everyone knows. Really, if they think about it. They can’t live out there; they can’t function in that society. So they end up here, for good or bad. Most people like it. The few that have left have never returned. But maybe that just means they’ve found their way back and can’t revisit. Their time with us is over. Most people find happiness here, or at least a certain amount of contentment. They build new lives. But, some people can’t forget so easily, they’re the ones who need us the most. They’re the ones who can never find their way back. So. What brought you here?’
Her voice is gentle and her eyes are kind. John knows he should love her. He does, in a small corner of his heart. But he is too full of sorrow to contemplate happiness; it would feel like betrayal. He clutches his mug tighter, the one with his hidden initials, though the tea has long since cooled.
‘He,’ John begins, his voice breaking. After swallowing he starts again, ‘that is, Sherlock. He. Well. He… he died.’ He whispers it, not willing to say it any louder. It can’t be true if he doesn’t acknowledge it.
Lorraine’s face turns down at the edges in sympathy; her eyebrows and mouth almost parallel. ‘Oh. John.’ She pulls his hand from his mug and grips it. She doesn’t mention how it shakes.
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After three weeks, he makes a plan. At least he thinks its three weeks. It’s difficult to tell. Some days are as long and hot as the summer; some are as cold and short as the winter, and others are like everything else in between. If he were to measure time by seasons alone, he would have been there years already. He could not count on days, for some were only a few short hours long. So he counted when he woke. He counted using how many times he saw Lorraine. He counted how long it had been since he’d seen Sherlock. But that last one was unreliable. His mind was liable to trick him. Some days it felt like only yesterday they were laughing with adrenaline and a job well done; on others it was all he could do to hold back the tears and attempt to massage the pain from his damn leg.
But he finally has a goal. He sets about putting it into action. As far as plans go it’s not the best. It consists of walking as far away as he can until he re-emerges in the real world. He doesn’t tell Lorraine, and the first day doesn’t go well. He walks in a circle, ending up back outside the Town Hall. He growls in frustration. The second day he starts from Lorraine’s wagon, and walks for hours. This is it, he thinks. This is it! His limp pains him less and his walking speeds up. But then, in the distance something yellow appears. He tries to keep the disappointment out of his heart.
The third day he tells Lorraine. She closes her eyes when she hears, and nods.
‘I thought you might,’ she says softly, sadness lacing her voice.
John says nothing, just grabs her hand and squeezes before leaving. He returns within the hour.
‘GODDAMMIT!’ He shouts. Louder than he has been in this place before. Lorraine flinches slightly, but John doesn’t see. She doesn’t know this John Watson. This isn’t the broken man who spilt tea over himself all those months ago (Lorraine counts days differently to John. Neither knows who is right). John closes his eyes and breathes out through his nose. He squares his shoulders and takes off in a different direction. This time he returns the following morning, and this time he lets out an unintelligible yell.
He is slumped on the steps to Lorraine’s wagon, she’s inside making him breakfast, and he is thinking about giving up. Maybe it’s time to stop this. Maybe it’s time to heal. Maybe it’s time to believe. John looks at his hands and thinks of Sherlock. A farewell montage. He thinks of the chases, the wounds, the giggles (at a crime scene, no less). He thinks of the rare moments Sherlock let him in, of the rarer quiet nights at home in Baker Street when Sherlock was neither on a case, nor raving at the bit for one. He thinks of his friend, his best friend, the man who saved him from himself. John closes his eyes and when he opens them his left hand is no longer shaking.
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Weeks pass and John moves into Lorraine’s home. They share their life and bed, but John doesn’t think it goes any further than that. Maybe one day, at the moment he is still taking every moment as it comes. He is grieving. Ella would be so proud. John is sitting in bed and Lorraine is pottering around. She’s wearing one of his shirts. John thinks he could get used to this.
A few days later John is out, walking the fringes of the town, when he hears it. Laughter. A proper laugh, a happy one. But it sends cold shivers down his spine. There is no defining feature, and no similarity to what John remembers. But he knows. He knows it with the clarity that only comes once sanity has been abandoned. It is Moriarty. And suddenly John can’t breathe. He is running. Running as fast as he can. He doesn’t care where he is running to, but by god he will get there alive. Through woods, past rivers, over fields he runs. He vaults a fence, a feat only fear has enabled him to accomplish. He runs down a dark path, trees hanging overhead. It gets colder and colder. He doesn’t know how long he’s been running for, nor why he is still running, he only knows that he must. He must run. He clears the path and it opens out into a park. He doesn’t recognise any of his surroundings, but he is barely paying attention. He runs past people huddled under umbrellas. He realises it’s raining. Then he runs past a group of people listening to somebody rant. Even on a day like this. John shakes his head in disbelief, only in London.
He stops dead.
John looks back. Speaker’s Corner. He looks around. Hyde Park. Does that mean? Is it…? The urgency in his chest begins again, clawing at him to run, for fuck’s sake, just fucking RUN! So he does. His chest is burning, his legs aching, but this is the first time since- no. Don’t think. Just run. His feet carry him past well known haunts. Past take away restaurants and pubs. Past beautiful big, red London buses. Past painfully busy shops, banks, and embassies. His feet pounding the hard pavement; the fear in his chest giving away to a tentative hope. He rounds the corner and there. There it is. 221. John sighs and starts to jog over, before he’s taken two steps he stops again. A tall man has walked hesitantly up to the door.
John’s heart abandons his body.
The coat and hair may be different, but John would recognise that stance anywhere. He’s unaware of the noise he makes when he crumples. The other man hears, though. He turns, and there, yes. Darkness flutters at the edge of his awareness, his lungs relax, and his world rights itself once more. The last thing John Watson sees before he faints is Sherlock Holmes running towards him.
The End.
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Notes: The idea of this was shamelessly stolen from Cecelia Ahern’s A Place Called Here (if you’ve not read it, I urge you to. It’s beautiful), which just seemed to fit so perfectly with what I imagined John’s frame of mind to be. I’ll be honest; I’ve not read it for a long time. So I can’t say how much I have taken from this story. Just the idea, I hope! If you were wondering; the laugh IS Moriarty’s. John heard it because the last person that knew Moriarty’s real laugh (his genuinely happy one!) had forgotten it. So it ended up with all of the lost things.
If you’re worried about Lorraine, in my head canon John writes a note to her and gives it to Harry; the most forgetful person he knows. She loses it and eventually it finds its way to Lorraine. She figured as much. She’s happy for him :)
I stole a few quotes from BBC and ACD canon. I hope you spotted them!
The title comes from this quote by Mark Danielewski:
Who has never killed an hour? Not casually or without thought, but carefully: a premeditated murder of minutes. The violence comes from a combination of giving up, not caring, and a resignation that getting past it is all you can hope to accomplish. So you kill the hour. You do not work, you do not read, you do not daydream. If you sleep it is not because you need to sleep. And when at last it is over, there is no evidence: no weapon, no blood, and no body. The only clue might be the shadows beneath your eyes or a terribly thin line near the corner of your mouth indicating something has been suffered, that in the privacy of your life you have lost something and the loss is too empty to share.
The quote John was thinking of is by Stephen King. It runs: Show me a man or a woman alone and I'll show you a saint. Give me two and they'll fall in love. Give me three and they'll invent the charming thing we call 'society'. Give me four and they'll build a pyramid. Give me five and they'll make one an outcast. Give me six and they'll reinvent prejudice. Give me seven and in seven years they'll reinvent warfare. Man may have been made in the image of God, but human society was made in the image of His opposite number, and is always trying to get back home.
Title: Too Empty To Share
Author: elethoniel
Pairing(s): Implied Sherlock/John. Very brief John/OFC.
Rating: PG, only for a couple of swear words.
Words: 3,221 (I knew it was complete when I did a word count! :D)
Disclaimer: I own nothing. Sherlock and John belong to Mofftiss, the BBC, and ACD. This idea is also taken from a novel by Ceceila Ahern. That belongs to her beautiful brain. More notes at the end.
Warnings: Spoilers for The Reichenbach Fall! Also there is magical realism, angst, and a happy ending!
This is the first fic I've written in the Sherlock fandom, and the first I've written in years. Beta'd by myself, if there are any errors, please let me know :)
Summary: John finds himself in the place where the lost things go.
It happened one morning. He’d had a restless night. Dreams of Sherlock falling, of crashing into blood-red water, of shouts and shots from war, all tumbling together and creating his own hell. He’d woken at 4am, shivering, sweat clinging to his body. The dawn chorus started up outside. Having stumbled down stairs for a glass of water John realised he couldn’t stay there. Not like this. Not without him. So he went for a walk. The world was still sleeping, but the summer sun was making its desired ascent known; tendrils of light licked at the horizon and John drank in the dew-dropped air. His feet took him to Sherlock’s grave. To that shining black slab of stone etched with his best friend’s name. It wasn’t meant to be there. Sherlock wasn’t meant to die. Not like this. They were meant to go out in blazes of glory, bringing down criminals in their wake. That’s how John had always imagined it. Since he shot Jefferson Hope. That is how he saw them ending. But not like this. Not separately. Not with a whimper and a stuttered apology for all he had given. The only one in the world.
It is this that John thinks of. Not the endless chases, the bullets, the fear, the fun, the laughter. He thinks of how unjust it is. His own words ring in his ears ‘they always turn. And they will turn on you.’ He hadn’t known it would be like this. He still doesn’t like to think of it that way. Sherlock wasn’t a fraud. No one can fake that burning intellect. No one can fake that friendship. He walks on when he can no longer stand to stare at that insufficient plot of dirt. He doesn’t pay attention to where he is walking, he doesn’t care which neighbourhoods he finds himself in, and he doesn’t know how long he walks for. His limp growing worse with every step, but the pain serves to remind him what he has lost. As though he could ever forget. Eventually he stumbles across a garden. A small, cleanly kept area, with a circular pond in the middle, benches around the edges, outlined by bushes. The sun has crept over the horizon and is touching everything with gold. John likes this time of day best, he realises. When the world is still asleep (and even now, when he is in the heart of London, he can only hear the soft chirrups of birds and the gentle murmur of nature) just before the sun brings it all into focus. He can still pretend at this time of day.
He doesn’t know how long he sits in that garden, and if you were to ask him what he thought of, John wouldn’t be able to give you an adequate response. ‘Him,’ he would whisper, throat sore from keeping back the tears. When he finally rises the sun is high and bright in the sky, it is mid-summer and the city has begun to heat up. John sighs, pulling himself off the bench, and begins the long walk back to Baker Street. The path is narrow and overgrown. Slowly he realises this is not the way he came and when he turns to look back he can no longer see the garden. It is just a long winding trail. His brows furrow in confusion, thinking back over it. There was definitely only one entrance and exit. This must be it. John didn’t realise he’d lost track of himself so much. He carries on. Eventually the path begins to open up, there is vegetation all around him and the smell of bacon hangs in the air. Relief lightens his stomach and John walks on, now in a hurry to get back to the flat. What if…?
But London never appears. What John sees instead are wagons. Brightly coloured and beautifully decorated. Like the ones he used to see at fairs. His mother never let him near them. But once, when he and Harry had been left to wander around, they crept up to one. Their combined curiosity stronger than any fear of retribution. A middle-aged woman had been sitting on the steps, she offered them tea. They shyly declined, but stood still in hushed silence, and watched her weave a beautiful pattern. The mood was finally broken by John’s mother frantically calling them. They rushed off to find her, but John had never forgotten that woman, and his interest in the wagons had never waned. Now it appears he had stumbled across a whole platoon of them. Children were running around, dogs were barking, and everyone was laughing, chatting, enjoying the weather and the chance to be alive.
This was not the route John had taken. Now his senses were sharper he could see the signs of a month long habitation, if not more, so they couldn’t have just arrived. And he was certain he wasn’t so submerged in memories he wouldn’t have noticed them before. But there was no where to have taken a wrong turn. There were no other paths he could have chosen. Having nothing else to do, John walks on. He squares his shoulders, tilts his chin up fractionally, and falls back into the role of the soldier.
The first wagon he approaches is canary yellow. Two women are sitting outside, mugs of tea cupped in their hands, watching children play hide and seek in the surrounding woods. John stops just outside their circle and coughs. They look up, startled. The young one, with the auburn hair, jumps to her feet and rushes towards him.
‘Oh! You must be new here! Please, have a seat. You must be tired. Let me get you a drink.’ She pushes him into her abandoned chair, and John stares, bewildered, around him. A pat on his arm draws him back to himself.
‘You mustn’t worry about her; she gets a bit eager when someone new arrives.’ This lady was older - her mother? The soft smile and gentle eyes put him in memory of Mrs Hudson. John didn’t relax.
The younger woman appeared by his side, ‘here, have some tea. It’ll help with the shock.’
John was about to reply that he wasn’t in shock, he invaded Afghanistan, for god’s sake! It would take much more than this- Oh. That was when John realised the mug he was holding looked very much like one he had lost last year. He’d just assumed Sherlock had conducted an experiment on it and had thrown it away when it hadn’t yielded the results he desired. The unexpected reminder sent a sharp jolt through John and he had to suck in a breath just to stop himself from involuntarily calling out. Distracted by the memory, John turned the mug upside down. His had a chip in the bottom rim that Sherlock had, in very small letters, scrawled JW after an argument had escalated regarding the correct respect of other people’s property. Sherlock had written JW + SH on every item they co-owned, and then separately on their respective belongings. It was this barrage of memories that caused John to momentarily forget the scalding hot drink the mug contained.
He leapt up, cursing and clutching his burnt thigh. But none of that mattered. He hardly felt it. The moment before the hot tea hit his leg he saw it. In small writing, on the underside of the mug, scrunched in a chip, were the letters JW.
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It was some time later that John finally found time to be by himself. He was in a modest room that was set in a far larger building. There was a whole town here. John could barely believe that, but then wasn’t there a quote about that? ‘Show me three people and I will show you a society’? There were a great deal more than three people here. Wherever here was. It shouldn’t exist. Whatever it was. He still had Sherlock’s voice in his head saying ‘illogical’ whenever John thought about it too hard. John, it turns out, is very illogical. He didn’t believe Sherlock, in spite of all the evidence for it. And now, he was beginning to believe he was really here, despite all the evidence against it. His inner Sherlock took pity on him and recited ‘How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth?. John huffed out a breath of laughter that almost immediately turned into a choked off sob. This couldn’t be happening. He was lost. Literally lost. This is where all the lost things come, they told him. This is where they end up. Ever wondered where that odd sock went? Chances are it is here. Or will be here. Time doesn’t run quite right in this place. If you’re here then it’s usually for a reason.
When he asked how he could leave they all averted their eyes and shrugged their shoulders. One old woman walked up to him and laid her hand tentatively on his arm, she was blind, he realised.
‘You’ll be alright here. We look after our own,’ she said. John hadn’t been able to reply. He nodded and lifted the welcome bundle out of the arms of the young boy carrying it. He turned to his room and closed the door.
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John didn’t know how long he spent there. After a few days (or what he assumed were blocks of twenty-four hours. There were no clocks. Soon it became apparent why) John left his room, intent on scoping out his surrounding area. There was a town hall (the place he was currently sleeping in - they had a wing for new arrivals), shops, restaurants, parks, and further out, houses and caravans. People were living here. It seemed a ridiculous realisation to have so late into his stay, but John never thought this was for the long run. People had whole lives here. John walked past couples, families. Surely they wouldn’t have all turned up here together? That didn’t happen, did it? He walked past a class taking place in the street. The teacher was talking about the history of Here. He couldn’t make sense of it. Eventually he wound up outside the yellow wagon. The door was open, just like before, but this time there was no one sitting outside.
John stood hesitantly on the first step, ‘hello?’ he called, not wanting to intrude, but needing to reach out.
The woman with the auburn hair appeared, ‘Oh! Hello! Didn’t think I’d be seeing you again. How’s the leg?’
It took John a while to realise she was asking about the burn instead of the limp. He shut his eyes for a moment and lets the lump in his throat pass. Sherlock wouldn’t have needed to ask. Opening them he saw the woman looking at him sadly. ‘Would you like to come in?’ She asked him softly, stepping aside.
John nodded and climbed up the stairs and into her home.
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After that he returns there nearly every day. She’s called Lorraine. She doesn’t have children, they were her neighbours; she just looks out for them occasionally. She’s 31 years old and she used to work in retail. But, to be honest, she doesn’t talk much - not about herself anyway. She listens, mostly. John talks and talks and talks. He talks so much more than he would have at home. He tells her about his life. About Harry, and medical school, and the army, and the wound. He tells her about bumping into Mike Stamford. And he tells her about Sherlock Holmes. Eventually she asks why he’s here.
Lorraine looks thoughtful. Her soft blue eyes gazing far away when she talks, ‘Everyone knows. Really, if they think about it. They can’t live out there; they can’t function in that society. So they end up here, for good or bad. Most people like it. The few that have left have never returned. But maybe that just means they’ve found their way back and can’t revisit. Their time with us is over. Most people find happiness here, or at least a certain amount of contentment. They build new lives. But, some people can’t forget so easily, they’re the ones who need us the most. They’re the ones who can never find their way back. So. What brought you here?’
Her voice is gentle and her eyes are kind. John knows he should love her. He does, in a small corner of his heart. But he is too full of sorrow to contemplate happiness; it would feel like betrayal. He clutches his mug tighter, the one with his hidden initials, though the tea has long since cooled.
‘He,’ John begins, his voice breaking. After swallowing he starts again, ‘that is, Sherlock. He. Well. He… he died.’ He whispers it, not willing to say it any louder. It can’t be true if he doesn’t acknowledge it.
Lorraine’s face turns down at the edges in sympathy; her eyebrows and mouth almost parallel. ‘Oh. John.’ She pulls his hand from his mug and grips it. She doesn’t mention how it shakes.
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After three weeks, he makes a plan. At least he thinks its three weeks. It’s difficult to tell. Some days are as long and hot as the summer; some are as cold and short as the winter, and others are like everything else in between. If he were to measure time by seasons alone, he would have been there years already. He could not count on days, for some were only a few short hours long. So he counted when he woke. He counted using how many times he saw Lorraine. He counted how long it had been since he’d seen Sherlock. But that last one was unreliable. His mind was liable to trick him. Some days it felt like only yesterday they were laughing with adrenaline and a job well done; on others it was all he could do to hold back the tears and attempt to massage the pain from his damn leg.
But he finally has a goal. He sets about putting it into action. As far as plans go it’s not the best. It consists of walking as far away as he can until he re-emerges in the real world. He doesn’t tell Lorraine, and the first day doesn’t go well. He walks in a circle, ending up back outside the Town Hall. He growls in frustration. The second day he starts from Lorraine’s wagon, and walks for hours. This is it, he thinks. This is it! His limp pains him less and his walking speeds up. But then, in the distance something yellow appears. He tries to keep the disappointment out of his heart.
The third day he tells Lorraine. She closes her eyes when she hears, and nods.
‘I thought you might,’ she says softly, sadness lacing her voice.
John says nothing, just grabs her hand and squeezes before leaving. He returns within the hour.
‘GODDAMMIT!’ He shouts. Louder than he has been in this place before. Lorraine flinches slightly, but John doesn’t see. She doesn’t know this John Watson. This isn’t the broken man who spilt tea over himself all those months ago (Lorraine counts days differently to John. Neither knows who is right). John closes his eyes and breathes out through his nose. He squares his shoulders and takes off in a different direction. This time he returns the following morning, and this time he lets out an unintelligible yell.
He is slumped on the steps to Lorraine’s wagon, she’s inside making him breakfast, and he is thinking about giving up. Maybe it’s time to stop this. Maybe it’s time to heal. Maybe it’s time to believe. John looks at his hands and thinks of Sherlock. A farewell montage. He thinks of the chases, the wounds, the giggles (at a crime scene, no less). He thinks of the rare moments Sherlock let him in, of the rarer quiet nights at home in Baker Street when Sherlock was neither on a case, nor raving at the bit for one. He thinks of his friend, his best friend, the man who saved him from himself. John closes his eyes and when he opens them his left hand is no longer shaking.
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Weeks pass and John moves into Lorraine’s home. They share their life and bed, but John doesn’t think it goes any further than that. Maybe one day, at the moment he is still taking every moment as it comes. He is grieving. Ella would be so proud. John is sitting in bed and Lorraine is pottering around. She’s wearing one of his shirts. John thinks he could get used to this.
A few days later John is out, walking the fringes of the town, when he hears it. Laughter. A proper laugh, a happy one. But it sends cold shivers down his spine. There is no defining feature, and no similarity to what John remembers. But he knows. He knows it with the clarity that only comes once sanity has been abandoned. It is Moriarty. And suddenly John can’t breathe. He is running. Running as fast as he can. He doesn’t care where he is running to, but by god he will get there alive. Through woods, past rivers, over fields he runs. He vaults a fence, a feat only fear has enabled him to accomplish. He runs down a dark path, trees hanging overhead. It gets colder and colder. He doesn’t know how long he’s been running for, nor why he is still running, he only knows that he must. He must run. He clears the path and it opens out into a park. He doesn’t recognise any of his surroundings, but he is barely paying attention. He runs past people huddled under umbrellas. He realises it’s raining. Then he runs past a group of people listening to somebody rant. Even on a day like this. John shakes his head in disbelief, only in London.
He stops dead.
John looks back. Speaker’s Corner. He looks around. Hyde Park. Does that mean? Is it…? The urgency in his chest begins again, clawing at him to run, for fuck’s sake, just fucking RUN! So he does. His chest is burning, his legs aching, but this is the first time since- no. Don’t think. Just run. His feet carry him past well known haunts. Past take away restaurants and pubs. Past beautiful big, red London buses. Past painfully busy shops, banks, and embassies. His feet pounding the hard pavement; the fear in his chest giving away to a tentative hope. He rounds the corner and there. There it is. 221. John sighs and starts to jog over, before he’s taken two steps he stops again. A tall man has walked hesitantly up to the door.
John’s heart abandons his body.
The coat and hair may be different, but John would recognise that stance anywhere. He’s unaware of the noise he makes when he crumples. The other man hears, though. He turns, and there, yes. Darkness flutters at the edge of his awareness, his lungs relax, and his world rights itself once more. The last thing John Watson sees before he faints is Sherlock Holmes running towards him.
The End.
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Notes: The idea of this was shamelessly stolen from Cecelia Ahern’s A Place Called Here (if you’ve not read it, I urge you to. It’s beautiful), which just seemed to fit so perfectly with what I imagined John’s frame of mind to be. I’ll be honest; I’ve not read it for a long time. So I can’t say how much I have taken from this story. Just the idea, I hope! If you were wondering; the laugh IS Moriarty’s. John heard it because the last person that knew Moriarty’s real laugh (his genuinely happy one!) had forgotten it. So it ended up with all of the lost things.
If you’re worried about Lorraine, in my head canon John writes a note to her and gives it to Harry; the most forgetful person he knows. She loses it and eventually it finds its way to Lorraine. She figured as much. She’s happy for him :)
I stole a few quotes from BBC and ACD canon. I hope you spotted them!
The title comes from this quote by Mark Danielewski:
Who has never killed an hour? Not casually or without thought, but carefully: a premeditated murder of minutes. The violence comes from a combination of giving up, not caring, and a resignation that getting past it is all you can hope to accomplish. So you kill the hour. You do not work, you do not read, you do not daydream. If you sleep it is not because you need to sleep. And when at last it is over, there is no evidence: no weapon, no blood, and no body. The only clue might be the shadows beneath your eyes or a terribly thin line near the corner of your mouth indicating something has been suffered, that in the privacy of your life you have lost something and the loss is too empty to share.
The quote John was thinking of is by Stephen King. It runs: Show me a man or a woman alone and I'll show you a saint. Give me two and they'll fall in love. Give me three and they'll invent the charming thing we call 'society'. Give me four and they'll build a pyramid. Give me five and they'll make one an outcast. Give me six and they'll reinvent prejudice. Give me seven and in seven years they'll reinvent warfare. Man may have been made in the image of God, but human society was made in the image of His opposite number, and is always trying to get back home.