Fic: Trope Bingo 3, Sherlock (TV)
Right, so. If you don't already get this about me, I am exactly the kind of person who pulls up the trope "Tentacles" on their bingo card, and right off the bat starts thinking, how can I make this really weird? Because Tentacles, as a fanfiction trope, clearly is not weird enough on its own.
And right about now you're probably realizing that I chose the BBC Sherlock universe, for a tentacle fic.
Yeah, I'll just give you a moment with that.
....
Okay, and yes, there are some Author's Notes at the end in case you don't follow what's happening here. I'd be kinda curious to know if anyone thinks I should include them for posting to AO3 or someplace, or if the thing is actually more interesting as a bizarrely random cypher.
Title: The Pearl Diver (Trope Bingo 3)
Sherlock (TV)
John Watson
Rated for mature language
(Post-Reichenbach, spoilers for basically everything)
The Pearl Diver
So once again, his world is a loop of B-roll filmstrip, interiors lit in blurred tungsten, and daylight always grey and damp. The same black cabs passing, the same buses rumbling from the stop, the unchanging cadence of his steps on the same pavement.
Things appear to move, but nothing ever goes anywhere. Things move around him, and he moves past things, and sometimes there are mugs with tea he doesn't taste, and sometimes there's his desk at the surgery, and white pages with black words in lines he sees but doesn't read. There are conversations, where people talk, and he probably talks, and maybe it all makes sense to someone, but nothing registers, nothing stays; his mind is a clear flat glass and all that touches it is water that trickles and beads and evaporates, leaving no trace.
That's it for the world on the surface, or as close to the surface as he gets. And in the times he happens to look deeper....
Deeper is cold, and a flat white sky, face to the asphalt and head still ringing from the blow, and he pushes himself up and Sherlock falls, and he tries to walk and Sherlock falls, and he closes his eyes and Sherlock falls, and Sherlock falls. Deeper is looking up to that roof ledge and his breath frozen to stone in his chest and cracking, and he used to think his nightmares were bad but nothing, nothing ever could have readied him for this.
He tries not to look deeper. Better a repeating loop of grey and tasteless tea and the endless turn of cab wheels on streets going noplace. It's enough to be getting on with. And Getting On is what John Watson does, has done, could maybe do again if he could recall the trick of it.
Sometimes there is a suspicion, lingering off at the side of his mind, at the edge of the buffering grey. That perhaps what's standing between him and Getting On, is the miracle. The one he asked for in the cemetery. The one that isn't coming.
But then there are nights. The nights he comes to the pool. When he puts out the light, and lays atop his mattress, and prays nothing, nothing, nothing, and if his prayers are heard, he quietly sinks into the dark. And then....
It's the pool where Carl Powers died. Where John walked out in a Semtex vest with the voice of a devil in his ear, feeding him his lines. Where for that first smothering moment Sherlock Holmes looked at John Watson, and they were exactly the same: helpless. Blindsided. Alone.
Now the pool is a dream, of course he knows that, but still he stands with trembling knees, at the concrete edge. Shadows and wavelets, and steam floating over the bluest blue water. It's the blue that gives it away; in what passes for real life nowadays, all the colour is gone.
Whether he shakes from fear or from hope standing there, he may never know.
Just in case, he says, "This. Is a trick."
"A magic trick," agrees the voice of a ghost, soft as the lapping of the water. "Fancy a swim, John?"
He shivers, eyes on the water, don't look up, don't look away. "Looks cold."
"It is," promises his ghost. That voice, oh he's missed it, smoke and darkness and knowing, always knowing. "Could be dangerous."
John's heart tries to explode in the vacuum of his chest, Christ that hurts, but he holds on and breathes through it and pries up one corner of a smile, because Sherlock knows, the mad bastard always knew just where to find him. Snag him and reel him in.
"Right, you mind telling me what we're after, here?" Not that he expects Sherlock to make it clear, not this soon in the game, he just wants his ghost to keep talking.
"I need you to dive, John. Need you to fetch me something." Insouciant, half-distracted, the voice of borrowed phones, appropriated laptops, the bathrobe and the nicotine patches, severed feet in the fridge, and John has to swallow, squeeze his swelling eyes tight for a second before he can say his part. Because it is a part, it's their script, this was theirs and he can't bear to deviate.
"Something in this pool. At the bottom, no doubt?"
"Well of course at the bottom, where else would it be? Vital evidence, it won't just be bobbing around in plain sight, that would be--"
"Yes, fine, Sherlock, made your point," John puts in, raising a hand. It could be frightening how easily it all comes back to him, but it isn't. It really, really isn't.
"So just. Jump right in, is that the plan?"
"By all means, at your leisure, John." If this ghost has eyes, he is definitely rolling them.
It's not an unpleasant idea, that he could still annoy Sherlock, wherever he is now. Not an idea John plans on sharing with his therapist anytime soon, but not at all bad regardless.
Looking down, he notices his clothes for the first time. Heavy tan jumper, jeans and leather shoes. He wouldn't want to wear all this in a real pool, wonders if it's relevant, here.
"Something the matter?"
Can people die, if they drown in dreams? He's a doctor, seems he should know this.
**
Nausea, vertigo, disturbed conscious state. Cerebral infarction, diplopia, mental anguish. Just a few of the symptoms of decompression sickness. All of them common to other diagnostic criteria as well.
There are mornings he puts the kettle on, with one eye closed to fight the dizziness, hunching over the phantom pain in his gut. Once he had a psychosomatic limp, now apparently it's the psychosomatic bends. But generally by the time he steps out into the featureless repeat of every yesterday, it's subsided; he is glass and everything else is water, and he decides it's not a terrible price to pay.
**
"If I jump in. Dive. Will you still...." Water so blue and so deep. Up here, it looks like a pool. But he's been to war, he knows about ambushes. Once he's in, it could become anything. Once he's in, it will be too late for second guessing.
"Will I what, John?"
The pool lights warp and beckon and the ghost voice feels less distant than before. But he won't look. Not back toward the lockers, not up to the balcony where all those snipers once hid. To look might be a breach of faith. If he looks and sees nothing, this might all disappear.
"Will I still hear you?" he says. Hearing how exposed he sounds. Knowing Sherlock hears it too. "When I go in there."
"You will hear me. And you must do exactly as I say. Can you do that, for me?"
He could have done that, and so much more, had Sherlock only asked. "Yes, of course, that's all I needed to know."
And with that, he takes a breath, then a deeper one, and flings himself in. Straight down, for the bottom of the pool.
**
Bradycardia, arterial blood pressure increase, reduction in blood flow to the limbs. These are mechanisms of the mammalian dive reflex, an automatic phenomenon studied by physicians and researchers for over a century, and lately experienced firsthand by Dr. John H. Watson, in his dreams.
The water is colder than an indoor pool has any business being. And, as he ought to have noticed before he dove in, it isn't chlorinated. It's salt. Cold and briny as the deep blue ocean, as he plummets down. The pressure on his ears sharpens to pain, and he reaches up to pinch his nose, and clear his Eustachian tubes. The left ear pops, then the right, and he's passing fourteen feet, eighteen, kicking his legs now for twenty.
He can't make out the bottom yet. But Sherlock had fallen sixty feet, off the roof of St. Bart's.
**
Life is supposed to go on. As a doctor, as a soldier, as a man keeping appointments with a therapist, John is expected to know this. But the only times he's ever prayed to God to let him live, there was a firefight, there was an open bullet wound in his shoulder, there were laser sights quivering on his chest, there was a gigantic mutant hound stalking him in a darkened laboratory (or so he was convinced at the time). And the life he prayed for was never the quiet chair by the fire, or evening pints down the local with the lads, or heading off to the shops for more bread, or putting cards on the mantle at Christmas.
Those are all things people do in the course of living, all the inevitable minor business that makes up days in this world. But when John had prayed to live, he had always prayed for that moment: there in the chaos, in the hammering adrenaline, in the crack of gunfire, or the deceptive stillness of a standoff.
Let me not go out from this, let me make it through, let me still be here when the dust settles. It was a distinction that most people missed. Sherlock had been so fond of pointing out that most people were idiots.
And now there are all these woolly hand-me-down days, all the same. He shaves the face he sees in the mirror, he crosses the road when the beacon changes. He opens the mail, he brings home milk, he runs his socks through the wash. Maybe to someone who'd never known any better, this would look like life.
But what it really is, is a Dead Man's float. Not even treading water.
**
Past forty feet his lungs are starting to burn, and something touches him. Out of the dark glacial blue, comes a nudge and a brush against his skin.
He starts and realizes he's naked, or as good as. Shirtless and barefoot for certain, and very conscious of himself exposed in these heavy depths, fading to a darkness his sight can't penetrate.
"It's all right, keep going. Won't be long, now." The voice is right at his ear, and John wants to ask, was that you, did you touch me? He can't, of course, too busy holding his breath; an increasing challenge.
He kicks his legs, ignores the fleeting brush across the sole of his foot, and swims down. There is something in this water with him, but the cold no longer troubles him at all.
**
Symptoms of nitrogen narcosis: decline in spatial function, altered perception of thermal discomfort, impairment in complex reasoning, euphoria, disorientation.
**
There is a day he finds himself standing in an aisle at Tesco, staring at the shelves. It's possible he's been here awhile.
The labels, on the tinned meat. They're blue.
**
"Haven't you found it yet?" says Sherlock, in his ear.
He's scraping the bottom with his fingers, his lungs want to either collapse or burst into fire, his throat fighting to suck in air.
But whatever he's supposed to find, he's not seeing it. There's nothing but hard black asphalt down here. Something drags at his naked elbow, something with both muscle and intent. There's another lingering stroke across the back of his bare knee. Eel? Water snake?
"You don't notice." Sherlock's patience inevitably is wearing thin. "You see, but you don't observe."
Fine, so what is he supposed to observe? This is just the asphalt in the street, where he struck his head when he was shoved over. When he'd struggled up, staggering blind, because he had to reach Sherlock, Sherlock had fallen, he'd fallen forever and then his body struck pavement, crumpled; a sound that jolted John out of other dreams screaming, the sound that turned everything grey.
Have you any idea how blank, how very weary the world is without you, he wants to ask. Do you know that in the absence of you, nothing happens? When Sherlock Holmes ended, so did colours, and the sun, and the taste of tea, and words meaning things. Did you ever anticipate that? Did the thought ever occur, in that ridiculous matchless brain of yours, that this might be the outcome?
"You have to find it, John. I can't show you, this time. I cannot do it for you." The voice is softer, maybe the tiniest bit contrite.
What is he supposed to find down here? Find some kind of end to this, to all the same days he keeps waking up to? Find out how to drown, in his sleep?
"No, think, this cannot be beyond you," insists Sherlock. "What do people find, at the bottom of the water? What do people leave, that others come for? It's deadly, it's dark and it's cold down here, what would be worth that?"
Oh. Of course.
"Treasure." The word escapes in fat glossy bubbles from his mouth, the breath he took before he dove, gone for the surface before he can think to snatch it back.
But it's all right now. It's all fine. He knows, and in the terrible thrill of knowing, he can see it. A flawless white pearl, almost the size of his head, right in reach of his hand.
Under his fingers it's cold and impeccably smooth. In the crook of his arm, it's heavy. The way a body becomes heavy, when the life has drained out of it; cold and unutterably still. Beautiful, in a certain final, closed, finished way.
"Don't rest on dull assumptions, John. Would you think a body has nothing more to tell, just because it can't speak?" chides Sherlock, just before the water begins to roil.
**
John doesn't return to Sherlock's grave, primarily because he has nothing at all different to say. Sometimes that means angry stubbornness, hell if he's going to repeat himself to that arrogant wanker; sometimes it means that Sherlock would be bored hearing the same information again, and Sherlock bored was nigh on excruciating for everyone. But just as often, John knows that if he went and faced that inscrutable dark granite headstone again, he would still request the miracle, against all reason.
Sure, miracles aren't about reason. S'why they call them that. Problem is, wanting them tends to throw off the equilibrium of Getting On, or whatever state exists in place of that, and John's walking a dodgy enough tightrope as it is.
He doesn't mention the dream, not to anyone, not even a hint. Won't even leave his bed with it fresh in his mind, just in case some clue of it slips out and betrays him.
It's not so much that people wouldn't understand. It's having to watch them try to. He is actually aware, thank you, that all along this bled-out muffled hospital curtain surrounding his existence, there are people who care. Who want to do something, want to listen, want to give him some form of warmth, or connectedness, all those simple human things on the next rung up from basic subsistence.
He isn't entirely divorced from these exchanges, as it is. When they occur, he's able to participate, up to a certain point. But where it stops for him, where his boundary sits, is at words like trust issues. Those labels people too often seem to need to sort things with, neat little categories which amount to fuck-all if you bother to get in close and look, really look, at each thing being labeled.
Yes, he has a recurring dream of his dead flatmate talking him down into a pool. And you can't offer a thing like that up to a caring individual, and not expect them to try and dissect it. But dissection would never explain it, accepted common wisdom doesn't begin to have the forensic tools to interpret what Sherlock has done to John's head. Possibly no wisdom on earth could do it.
The average onlooker might call it something like Bargaining, or Lingering Abandonment, or Fear of Moving On. Because people often need to put the names of things they know, onto things they can't name. And John would only end up furious and exhausted with it, because those people don't see, they don't think, they can't truly be bothered to stop all their meaningless busy foolishness, and turn their entire focus on what's right before them.
Sherlock would've known how to look, he could have pulled it all apart and made it an entire elegant whole; that's what he did, that's how he saw, setting a benchmark that the rest of the world is forever doomed to fall short of. And John doesn't exactly enjoy being reminded of that, either.
But really, all that matters to him, is that he can still hear Sherlock speak. Whether that's a gift or a curse, or a symptom or a stage, he doesn't want it examined or meddled with in any way. It's his. It is the thing that makes him able to look at his empty numb hands, and his faded husk of a life, and be something approaching functional.
**
The water surges all around him, and in the foaming turbulence he sees a dark sinuous shape cutting through. He doesn't waste time identifying it further, he just kicks off from the bottom of the pool with the pearl clutched hard against his ribs and fights toward the surface.
It seems a hopelessly long way up, but having retrieved what Sherlock sent him for, John is entirely set on at least getting it up out of the pool. Not because he has any particular need of a monstrous huge pearl; he hasn't even the remotest idea what Sherlock wanted it for. The man asked him for it, he's giving John a second chance to do something for him, and that is all that's important.
Though whatever is in this pool with him could turn out to be a problem. It seems he's awakened it, which isn't entirely surprising, though it might've been nice to know there was potentially an enormous sea monster down here.
"I need you to hang onto it. It is of utmost importance that you keep it with you," puts in Sherlock, again not surprising. And now John just knows he's about to do one of those ridiculous impossible things he somehow always ended up doing, just because Sherlock required it. Running down city streets without a limp. Nosing around top-secret military bases. Climbing rail fences to evade the police whilst handcuffed to his lunatic flatmate. Standing absolutely still and watching his best, his most fiercely dear friend say goodbye and step off a sixty-foot rooftop.
It's a second chance. How can he possibly refuse?
Even when the tumult increases, and he can feel the things in the water hurling against him, grabbing at his legs, attempting to knock him off-course. Even when a huge scaly head bearing silvery razor teeth and one black unblinking eye comes in perilously close, he only swims harder, up, up, through water now thick with fins and long whipping tails.
He can't see the water's surface. He hasn't breathed in much too long. This isn't actually looking good. If he had some kind of weapon, if he had--
"Don't lose it now," Sherlock urges, now sounding about as desperate as John feels. "Tuck it away and keep it safe. Please."
--and there is a scalpel in his hand. Not much for a weapon, but now that he's holding it, John completely understands what he must do. It's his only choice, and was quite likely the point of this whole endeavor.
He can't imagine it's going to be pleasant. But this fits, this feels right, and for reasons he isn't particularly keen to examine, he feels no need to protest.
He stops struggling against the water and everything in it, looks down and sets the blade of the scalpel to the center of his bare chest, right at the suprasternal notch.
"This better be enough to suit you," he warns Sherlock, though he hasn't any air. "Because it's all I've got."
**
There comes an afternoon when the monotony of the daily footage is broken, by the sight of someone's dark red coat. John only catches a glimpse of it, leaving the Tube station; a scrap of colour the exact shade of blood spilling into water.
It's like a flashback in reverse; right there, just for the briefest of minutes, the fog lifts. The station is crowded, noisy, he's breathing that distinctive odour of mildewed concrete and ancient city grime, and for the first time in God knows how long, John feels like something more than an empty chalk outline on a wall. He feels full of his pulse and his breath, and an extra secret salvaged thing stuck deep in his own chest.
Before long, it slips away from him. He's back out in the evening air, and tired, and probably needs to stop off and buy toothpaste or something. Nothing important, just the grey settling in again.
But then there comes another day; he's in his kitchenette, pouring tea into his new mug. He'd bought it because of the shade of blue, he'd wanted to see some colour at home once in awhile. So he's watching his tea steep in this marine blue mug, and the silence is ticking over as it does, as it has been, all this time, essentially unbroken.
And he thinks of the sugar in the pantry. The one time Sherlock ever bothered to make him a drink, it had been coffee, sugared to within an inch of its life.
He doesn't know why this should come to him now, but it's like that moment he saw the blue meat tins at Tesco, and when the colour red came back to him down in the Tube station. And once again he feels it, that extra weight in his chest, shifting ever so slightly against his heart and lungs. Just enough to make itself known.
Two spoonfuls of sugar go in his tea, and objectively it's awful, but that really isn't the point.
John can taste his tea.
**
Over the days and weeks to come, when he sits in private and ponders his dreams, it occurs to John that he's made himself a chest for a dead man's treasure. Occasionally he wonders if Sherlock would've wanted him to unravel it all like a puzzle; the pool, the pearl, the monsters in the deep. But then he decides such a pursuit will probably make him actually insane, and he's better off simply being the repository for it all.
It's a sort of compromise, he decides. He gets the occasional glimpse of colour in the world, how things smell, how they taste. Snatches of conversations he can remember, here and there. And he gets to keep remembering Sherlock's voice, exactly as he used to hear it. The hissing impatience, the drawl of agonizing boredom, the shy glimmers of dry wit, and the stark precise architecture of deduction.
Although John himself is frequently absent nowadays, what he finds is that all is not entirely lost, thanks to one last, small remainder of a life saved inside him.
And all he has to do to reach it, is lie very quiet. Close his eyes. Take a deep breath, and dive.
*****
Author's Notes:
There's an excellent chance that if you're an anime/manga fan, you already know this. (Or could even fill in my knowledge some, which would be totally cool). But what seems to be generally suspected as the origin of the Hentai Tentacle Genre, is this fantastically unsettling print by Hokusai, c.1814, known as (Warning, A Bit Not Worksafe) The Dream of the Fisherman's Wife.
The first thing I thought when I got the Tentacle prompt, was to see what I could find out about the story in that print, who this Fisherman's Wife might have been, if there was some specific legend being referenced there. A little web-digging led me to about a jillion references to a paper by scholar Danielle Talerico, who posits that the print may actually have context in the work of Utagawa Toyokuni, who depicted the old legend of the famous pearl diver Ame Tamatori.
Long story short, Tamatori dove down to the Dragon King's lair to retrieve a priceless Imperial treasure, a pearl stolen by the dragon in some other fable. Naturally the denizens of the deep caught on and came after her, so she cut open her chest and stuck the pearl inside, which is so massively badass but then also killed her at some point. Apparently after she escaped, which pleased the Imperial court rather a lot.
Anyway, even in synopsis the story makes such a great image, I had to run with it.
(The tentacles are actually still in my story, incidentally. You just have to close your eyes to find them.)
And right about now you're probably realizing that I chose the BBC Sherlock universe, for a tentacle fic.
Yeah, I'll just give you a moment with that.
....
Okay, and yes, there are some Author's Notes at the end in case you don't follow what's happening here. I'd be kinda curious to know if anyone thinks I should include them for posting to AO3 or someplace, or if the thing is actually more interesting as a bizarrely random cypher.
Title: The Pearl Diver (Trope Bingo 3)
Sherlock (TV)
John Watson
Rated for mature language
(Post-Reichenbach, spoilers for basically everything)
The Pearl Diver
So once again, his world is a loop of B-roll filmstrip, interiors lit in blurred tungsten, and daylight always grey and damp. The same black cabs passing, the same buses rumbling from the stop, the unchanging cadence of his steps on the same pavement.
Things appear to move, but nothing ever goes anywhere. Things move around him, and he moves past things, and sometimes there are mugs with tea he doesn't taste, and sometimes there's his desk at the surgery, and white pages with black words in lines he sees but doesn't read. There are conversations, where people talk, and he probably talks, and maybe it all makes sense to someone, but nothing registers, nothing stays; his mind is a clear flat glass and all that touches it is water that trickles and beads and evaporates, leaving no trace.
That's it for the world on the surface, or as close to the surface as he gets. And in the times he happens to look deeper....
Deeper is cold, and a flat white sky, face to the asphalt and head still ringing from the blow, and he pushes himself up and Sherlock falls, and he tries to walk and Sherlock falls, and he closes his eyes and Sherlock falls, and Sherlock falls. Deeper is looking up to that roof ledge and his breath frozen to stone in his chest and cracking, and he used to think his nightmares were bad but nothing, nothing ever could have readied him for this.
He tries not to look deeper. Better a repeating loop of grey and tasteless tea and the endless turn of cab wheels on streets going noplace. It's enough to be getting on with. And Getting On is what John Watson does, has done, could maybe do again if he could recall the trick of it.
Sometimes there is a suspicion, lingering off at the side of his mind, at the edge of the buffering grey. That perhaps what's standing between him and Getting On, is the miracle. The one he asked for in the cemetery. The one that isn't coming.
But then there are nights. The nights he comes to the pool. When he puts out the light, and lays atop his mattress, and prays nothing, nothing, nothing, and if his prayers are heard, he quietly sinks into the dark. And then....
It's the pool where Carl Powers died. Where John walked out in a Semtex vest with the voice of a devil in his ear, feeding him his lines. Where for that first smothering moment Sherlock Holmes looked at John Watson, and they were exactly the same: helpless. Blindsided. Alone.
Now the pool is a dream, of course he knows that, but still he stands with trembling knees, at the concrete edge. Shadows and wavelets, and steam floating over the bluest blue water. It's the blue that gives it away; in what passes for real life nowadays, all the colour is gone.
Whether he shakes from fear or from hope standing there, he may never know.
Just in case, he says, "This. Is a trick."
"A magic trick," agrees the voice of a ghost, soft as the lapping of the water. "Fancy a swim, John?"
He shivers, eyes on the water, don't look up, don't look away. "Looks cold."
"It is," promises his ghost. That voice, oh he's missed it, smoke and darkness and knowing, always knowing. "Could be dangerous."
John's heart tries to explode in the vacuum of his chest, Christ that hurts, but he holds on and breathes through it and pries up one corner of a smile, because Sherlock knows, the mad bastard always knew just where to find him. Snag him and reel him in.
"Right, you mind telling me what we're after, here?" Not that he expects Sherlock to make it clear, not this soon in the game, he just wants his ghost to keep talking.
"I need you to dive, John. Need you to fetch me something." Insouciant, half-distracted, the voice of borrowed phones, appropriated laptops, the bathrobe and the nicotine patches, severed feet in the fridge, and John has to swallow, squeeze his swelling eyes tight for a second before he can say his part. Because it is a part, it's their script, this was theirs and he can't bear to deviate.
"Something in this pool. At the bottom, no doubt?"
"Well of course at the bottom, where else would it be? Vital evidence, it won't just be bobbing around in plain sight, that would be--"
"Yes, fine, Sherlock, made your point," John puts in, raising a hand. It could be frightening how easily it all comes back to him, but it isn't. It really, really isn't.
"So just. Jump right in, is that the plan?"
"By all means, at your leisure, John." If this ghost has eyes, he is definitely rolling them.
It's not an unpleasant idea, that he could still annoy Sherlock, wherever he is now. Not an idea John plans on sharing with his therapist anytime soon, but not at all bad regardless.
Looking down, he notices his clothes for the first time. Heavy tan jumper, jeans and leather shoes. He wouldn't want to wear all this in a real pool, wonders if it's relevant, here.
"Something the matter?"
Can people die, if they drown in dreams? He's a doctor, seems he should know this.
**
Nausea, vertigo, disturbed conscious state. Cerebral infarction, diplopia, mental anguish. Just a few of the symptoms of decompression sickness. All of them common to other diagnostic criteria as well.
There are mornings he puts the kettle on, with one eye closed to fight the dizziness, hunching over the phantom pain in his gut. Once he had a psychosomatic limp, now apparently it's the psychosomatic bends. But generally by the time he steps out into the featureless repeat of every yesterday, it's subsided; he is glass and everything else is water, and he decides it's not a terrible price to pay.
**
"If I jump in. Dive. Will you still...." Water so blue and so deep. Up here, it looks like a pool. But he's been to war, he knows about ambushes. Once he's in, it could become anything. Once he's in, it will be too late for second guessing.
"Will I what, John?"
The pool lights warp and beckon and the ghost voice feels less distant than before. But he won't look. Not back toward the lockers, not up to the balcony where all those snipers once hid. To look might be a breach of faith. If he looks and sees nothing, this might all disappear.
"Will I still hear you?" he says. Hearing how exposed he sounds. Knowing Sherlock hears it too. "When I go in there."
"You will hear me. And you must do exactly as I say. Can you do that, for me?"
He could have done that, and so much more, had Sherlock only asked. "Yes, of course, that's all I needed to know."
And with that, he takes a breath, then a deeper one, and flings himself in. Straight down, for the bottom of the pool.
**
Bradycardia, arterial blood pressure increase, reduction in blood flow to the limbs. These are mechanisms of the mammalian dive reflex, an automatic phenomenon studied by physicians and researchers for over a century, and lately experienced firsthand by Dr. John H. Watson, in his dreams.
The water is colder than an indoor pool has any business being. And, as he ought to have noticed before he dove in, it isn't chlorinated. It's salt. Cold and briny as the deep blue ocean, as he plummets down. The pressure on his ears sharpens to pain, and he reaches up to pinch his nose, and clear his Eustachian tubes. The left ear pops, then the right, and he's passing fourteen feet, eighteen, kicking his legs now for twenty.
He can't make out the bottom yet. But Sherlock had fallen sixty feet, off the roof of St. Bart's.
**
Life is supposed to go on. As a doctor, as a soldier, as a man keeping appointments with a therapist, John is expected to know this. But the only times he's ever prayed to God to let him live, there was a firefight, there was an open bullet wound in his shoulder, there were laser sights quivering on his chest, there was a gigantic mutant hound stalking him in a darkened laboratory (or so he was convinced at the time). And the life he prayed for was never the quiet chair by the fire, or evening pints down the local with the lads, or heading off to the shops for more bread, or putting cards on the mantle at Christmas.
Those are all things people do in the course of living, all the inevitable minor business that makes up days in this world. But when John had prayed to live, he had always prayed for that moment: there in the chaos, in the hammering adrenaline, in the crack of gunfire, or the deceptive stillness of a standoff.
Let me not go out from this, let me make it through, let me still be here when the dust settles. It was a distinction that most people missed. Sherlock had been so fond of pointing out that most people were idiots.
And now there are all these woolly hand-me-down days, all the same. He shaves the face he sees in the mirror, he crosses the road when the beacon changes. He opens the mail, he brings home milk, he runs his socks through the wash. Maybe to someone who'd never known any better, this would look like life.
But what it really is, is a Dead Man's float. Not even treading water.
**
Past forty feet his lungs are starting to burn, and something touches him. Out of the dark glacial blue, comes a nudge and a brush against his skin.
He starts and realizes he's naked, or as good as. Shirtless and barefoot for certain, and very conscious of himself exposed in these heavy depths, fading to a darkness his sight can't penetrate.
"It's all right, keep going. Won't be long, now." The voice is right at his ear, and John wants to ask, was that you, did you touch me? He can't, of course, too busy holding his breath; an increasing challenge.
He kicks his legs, ignores the fleeting brush across the sole of his foot, and swims down. There is something in this water with him, but the cold no longer troubles him at all.
**
Symptoms of nitrogen narcosis: decline in spatial function, altered perception of thermal discomfort, impairment in complex reasoning, euphoria, disorientation.
**
There is a day he finds himself standing in an aisle at Tesco, staring at the shelves. It's possible he's been here awhile.
The labels, on the tinned meat. They're blue.
**
"Haven't you found it yet?" says Sherlock, in his ear.
He's scraping the bottom with his fingers, his lungs want to either collapse or burst into fire, his throat fighting to suck in air.
But whatever he's supposed to find, he's not seeing it. There's nothing but hard black asphalt down here. Something drags at his naked elbow, something with both muscle and intent. There's another lingering stroke across the back of his bare knee. Eel? Water snake?
"You don't notice." Sherlock's patience inevitably is wearing thin. "You see, but you don't observe."
Fine, so what is he supposed to observe? This is just the asphalt in the street, where he struck his head when he was shoved over. When he'd struggled up, staggering blind, because he had to reach Sherlock, Sherlock had fallen, he'd fallen forever and then his body struck pavement, crumpled; a sound that jolted John out of other dreams screaming, the sound that turned everything grey.
Have you any idea how blank, how very weary the world is without you, he wants to ask. Do you know that in the absence of you, nothing happens? When Sherlock Holmes ended, so did colours, and the sun, and the taste of tea, and words meaning things. Did you ever anticipate that? Did the thought ever occur, in that ridiculous matchless brain of yours, that this might be the outcome?
"You have to find it, John. I can't show you, this time. I cannot do it for you." The voice is softer, maybe the tiniest bit contrite.
What is he supposed to find down here? Find some kind of end to this, to all the same days he keeps waking up to? Find out how to drown, in his sleep?
"No, think, this cannot be beyond you," insists Sherlock. "What do people find, at the bottom of the water? What do people leave, that others come for? It's deadly, it's dark and it's cold down here, what would be worth that?"
Oh. Of course.
"Treasure." The word escapes in fat glossy bubbles from his mouth, the breath he took before he dove, gone for the surface before he can think to snatch it back.
But it's all right now. It's all fine. He knows, and in the terrible thrill of knowing, he can see it. A flawless white pearl, almost the size of his head, right in reach of his hand.
Under his fingers it's cold and impeccably smooth. In the crook of his arm, it's heavy. The way a body becomes heavy, when the life has drained out of it; cold and unutterably still. Beautiful, in a certain final, closed, finished way.
"Don't rest on dull assumptions, John. Would you think a body has nothing more to tell, just because it can't speak?" chides Sherlock, just before the water begins to roil.
**
John doesn't return to Sherlock's grave, primarily because he has nothing at all different to say. Sometimes that means angry stubbornness, hell if he's going to repeat himself to that arrogant wanker; sometimes it means that Sherlock would be bored hearing the same information again, and Sherlock bored was nigh on excruciating for everyone. But just as often, John knows that if he went and faced that inscrutable dark granite headstone again, he would still request the miracle, against all reason.
Sure, miracles aren't about reason. S'why they call them that. Problem is, wanting them tends to throw off the equilibrium of Getting On, or whatever state exists in place of that, and John's walking a dodgy enough tightrope as it is.
He doesn't mention the dream, not to anyone, not even a hint. Won't even leave his bed with it fresh in his mind, just in case some clue of it slips out and betrays him.
It's not so much that people wouldn't understand. It's having to watch them try to. He is actually aware, thank you, that all along this bled-out muffled hospital curtain surrounding his existence, there are people who care. Who want to do something, want to listen, want to give him some form of warmth, or connectedness, all those simple human things on the next rung up from basic subsistence.
He isn't entirely divorced from these exchanges, as it is. When they occur, he's able to participate, up to a certain point. But where it stops for him, where his boundary sits, is at words like trust issues. Those labels people too often seem to need to sort things with, neat little categories which amount to fuck-all if you bother to get in close and look, really look, at each thing being labeled.
Yes, he has a recurring dream of his dead flatmate talking him down into a pool. And you can't offer a thing like that up to a caring individual, and not expect them to try and dissect it. But dissection would never explain it, accepted common wisdom doesn't begin to have the forensic tools to interpret what Sherlock has done to John's head. Possibly no wisdom on earth could do it.
The average onlooker might call it something like Bargaining, or Lingering Abandonment, or Fear of Moving On. Because people often need to put the names of things they know, onto things they can't name. And John would only end up furious and exhausted with it, because those people don't see, they don't think, they can't truly be bothered to stop all their meaningless busy foolishness, and turn their entire focus on what's right before them.
Sherlock would've known how to look, he could have pulled it all apart and made it an entire elegant whole; that's what he did, that's how he saw, setting a benchmark that the rest of the world is forever doomed to fall short of. And John doesn't exactly enjoy being reminded of that, either.
But really, all that matters to him, is that he can still hear Sherlock speak. Whether that's a gift or a curse, or a symptom or a stage, he doesn't want it examined or meddled with in any way. It's his. It is the thing that makes him able to look at his empty numb hands, and his faded husk of a life, and be something approaching functional.
**
The water surges all around him, and in the foaming turbulence he sees a dark sinuous shape cutting through. He doesn't waste time identifying it further, he just kicks off from the bottom of the pool with the pearl clutched hard against his ribs and fights toward the surface.
It seems a hopelessly long way up, but having retrieved what Sherlock sent him for, John is entirely set on at least getting it up out of the pool. Not because he has any particular need of a monstrous huge pearl; he hasn't even the remotest idea what Sherlock wanted it for. The man asked him for it, he's giving John a second chance to do something for him, and that is all that's important.
Though whatever is in this pool with him could turn out to be a problem. It seems he's awakened it, which isn't entirely surprising, though it might've been nice to know there was potentially an enormous sea monster down here.
"I need you to hang onto it. It is of utmost importance that you keep it with you," puts in Sherlock, again not surprising. And now John just knows he's about to do one of those ridiculous impossible things he somehow always ended up doing, just because Sherlock required it. Running down city streets without a limp. Nosing around top-secret military bases. Climbing rail fences to evade the police whilst handcuffed to his lunatic flatmate. Standing absolutely still and watching his best, his most fiercely dear friend say goodbye and step off a sixty-foot rooftop.
It's a second chance. How can he possibly refuse?
Even when the tumult increases, and he can feel the things in the water hurling against him, grabbing at his legs, attempting to knock him off-course. Even when a huge scaly head bearing silvery razor teeth and one black unblinking eye comes in perilously close, he only swims harder, up, up, through water now thick with fins and long whipping tails.
He can't see the water's surface. He hasn't breathed in much too long. This isn't actually looking good. If he had some kind of weapon, if he had--
"Don't lose it now," Sherlock urges, now sounding about as desperate as John feels. "Tuck it away and keep it safe. Please."
--and there is a scalpel in his hand. Not much for a weapon, but now that he's holding it, John completely understands what he must do. It's his only choice, and was quite likely the point of this whole endeavor.
He can't imagine it's going to be pleasant. But this fits, this feels right, and for reasons he isn't particularly keen to examine, he feels no need to protest.
He stops struggling against the water and everything in it, looks down and sets the blade of the scalpel to the center of his bare chest, right at the suprasternal notch.
"This better be enough to suit you," he warns Sherlock, though he hasn't any air. "Because it's all I've got."
**
There comes an afternoon when the monotony of the daily footage is broken, by the sight of someone's dark red coat. John only catches a glimpse of it, leaving the Tube station; a scrap of colour the exact shade of blood spilling into water.
It's like a flashback in reverse; right there, just for the briefest of minutes, the fog lifts. The station is crowded, noisy, he's breathing that distinctive odour of mildewed concrete and ancient city grime, and for the first time in God knows how long, John feels like something more than an empty chalk outline on a wall. He feels full of his pulse and his breath, and an extra secret salvaged thing stuck deep in his own chest.
Before long, it slips away from him. He's back out in the evening air, and tired, and probably needs to stop off and buy toothpaste or something. Nothing important, just the grey settling in again.
But then there comes another day; he's in his kitchenette, pouring tea into his new mug. He'd bought it because of the shade of blue, he'd wanted to see some colour at home once in awhile. So he's watching his tea steep in this marine blue mug, and the silence is ticking over as it does, as it has been, all this time, essentially unbroken.
And he thinks of the sugar in the pantry. The one time Sherlock ever bothered to make him a drink, it had been coffee, sugared to within an inch of its life.
He doesn't know why this should come to him now, but it's like that moment he saw the blue meat tins at Tesco, and when the colour red came back to him down in the Tube station. And once again he feels it, that extra weight in his chest, shifting ever so slightly against his heart and lungs. Just enough to make itself known.
Two spoonfuls of sugar go in his tea, and objectively it's awful, but that really isn't the point.
John can taste his tea.
**
Over the days and weeks to come, when he sits in private and ponders his dreams, it occurs to John that he's made himself a chest for a dead man's treasure. Occasionally he wonders if Sherlock would've wanted him to unravel it all like a puzzle; the pool, the pearl, the monsters in the deep. But then he decides such a pursuit will probably make him actually insane, and he's better off simply being the repository for it all.
It's a sort of compromise, he decides. He gets the occasional glimpse of colour in the world, how things smell, how they taste. Snatches of conversations he can remember, here and there. And he gets to keep remembering Sherlock's voice, exactly as he used to hear it. The hissing impatience, the drawl of agonizing boredom, the shy glimmers of dry wit, and the stark precise architecture of deduction.
Although John himself is frequently absent nowadays, what he finds is that all is not entirely lost, thanks to one last, small remainder of a life saved inside him.
And all he has to do to reach it, is lie very quiet. Close his eyes. Take a deep breath, and dive.
*****
Author's Notes:
There's an excellent chance that if you're an anime/manga fan, you already know this. (Or could even fill in my knowledge some, which would be totally cool). But what seems to be generally suspected as the origin of the Hentai Tentacle Genre, is this fantastically unsettling print by Hokusai, c.1814, known as (Warning, A Bit Not Worksafe) The Dream of the Fisherman's Wife.
The first thing I thought when I got the Tentacle prompt, was to see what I could find out about the story in that print, who this Fisherman's Wife might have been, if there was some specific legend being referenced there. A little web-digging led me to about a jillion references to a paper by scholar Danielle Talerico, who posits that the print may actually have context in the work of Utagawa Toyokuni, who depicted the old legend of the famous pearl diver Ame Tamatori.
Long story short, Tamatori dove down to the Dragon King's lair to retrieve a priceless Imperial treasure, a pearl stolen by the dragon in some other fable. Naturally the denizens of the deep caught on and came after her, so she cut open her chest and stuck the pearl inside, which is so massively badass but then also killed her at some point. Apparently after she escaped, which pleased the Imperial court rather a lot.
Anyway, even in synopsis the story makes such a great image, I had to run with it.
(The tentacles are actually still in my story, incidentally. You just have to close your eyes to find them.)