[fic] the grand tour of europe | sherlock/john
Leaving this here now, because tonight M and I have:
I love this early New Year's Eve tradition we've got going. So:
the grand tour of europe.
Sherlock/John.
6,500words.
PG-13. No specific warnings; mentions of murder and disease.
Sherlock belongs to the Beeb, Moffat, and Gatiss; originally ACD's; I make no money with this.
Summary: In the afternoon of May 20th, 2015, Sherlock Holmes starts down the steps of the British Museum and walks neatly into the arms of a dead man. Reversed!Reichenbach, based off of the ACD!canon storyline - no spoilers for S2.
notes: many thanks are due to ningen_demonai for providing the Best Feedback and highlighting all the awkward bits for me to stare at and wonder how on earth I'm going to fix them; to sevenswells for prodding severely at my notions of what photography is and what it isn't (and so ensuring me three days of should-I-shouldn't-I dilemma, I love you too), as well as agreeing to look this over in the first place; to fireblazie for being her usual best, kind, encouraging self every time I need her to be.
Also HOLY SHIT, IT'S DONE. I started working on this months ago, and have been trying to finish it off and on ever since, never quite believing I'd do it. I really wanted to post it before S2 began, though; it'll be confirmed AU just a few weeks from now.
For the record, the "Birlstone" case for which Lestrade asks Sherlock's help in this is lifted from The Valley Of Fear; the mention of a tiger trap and Sebastian Moran are references to The Empty House.
Lastly, part of this storyline relies heavily around the concept of the magic lantern, which is, broadly speaking, one of the ancestors of the cinema; in effect, it has been described as an early form of a slide projector. It was essentially a metal or wooden box, with on one end a source of light, and on the other a succession of painted or photographed pictures on glass or paper slides, which the light stretched out across the wall opposite. This page provides a handy and concise enough summary of their use; the one Sherlock imagines in this would be the electric arc lodge lantern.
we contain within ourselves every lost moment of our lives. it is necessary to be made aware that they are lost before we can regain them.
- marcel proust.
i really don't know what i love you means.
i think it means, don't leave me here alone.
- neil gaiman.
In the afternoon of May 20th, 2015, Sherlock Holmes starts down the steps of the British Museum and walks neatly into the arms of a dead man.
John Watson is wearing a green pullover and a pair of faded jeans, comfortable and solidly unremarkable dark shoes. John Watson is carrying a duffel bag over his uninjured shoulder, resting fingers upon the straps, looping in the metal buckles; his skin is tanned, more so than before, his hair sun-streaked - longer around the temples. John Watson will be thirty-eight in a matter of six weeks, and the crinkles around his eyes draw whiter lines into his skin. Two years and eleven months ago, John Watson toppled over a cliff and into a waterfall in Switzerland.
(Among the many records Scotland Yard keeps of that case, there is a manila folder embossed in his name, which contains his Army file and old photographs, and on the front page an angry red stamp, declaring him
DECEASED
and once, seven months after the memorial service and the empty casket and the purple wreath from St Bart's, Sherlock snuck in at night and wrote underneath in a spindly dark scrawl with all due honours.)
"Oh," John says. And then, "Oh."
He says, "Hello."
Sherlock thinks, Hello.
He thinks, You've been in India, and Brazil, and Austria, that's in your shoes and the crease between your left thumb and index, there's cheap ink there, you've been writing - you're holding yourself without need for a cane so you've been under stressful conditions for the best part of your time away, and you came home on the 3:02 plane not two hours ago, there's airport beer on your collar from lunch. You bought that watch in an antiques' shop in Vienna with money you didn't have and that pullover suits you perfectly but is much too hot for May, so you were someplace colder than London but not too far up north, Amsterdam, maybe, they never found your body. I had them drag that waterfall as best they could and they never did find your body. You were dead before you hit the water. There was blood on the rocks where you bashed your head in, and this is the first you've come back to London. I would have known.
But he asks how Rio was, and John laughs, odd and a little charming and as awed as ever.
John Watson died with his head bashed in at the Reichenbach Falls, in Switzerland, at six thirty-two in the morning on the fifteenth of June, 2012. This was a rough estimate - in the plane back to London it was all Sherlock could do to construct a hundred probability trees on the flying company's dreadful paper napkins. He calculated impact and angle and cranium width, the last time he'd looked at his watch and the exact minute the early sun poured over them that morning; the length of their discussion with Jim; the indefinite second when John's foot slid on wet rock and the entirety of his body slipped sideways.
He deleted Jim's escape from the falls, dismissed it as unimportant - he kept only the slide of a shuddery railing under his hands, the number of times his shoes caught on the edge of the steps, kept each of the twenty minutes it took him to reach the bottom of the fall, ticking jittery in his ribcage. He made diagrams for John's skull bashed in, accounted for the severity of the blow, the amount of blood found upon the stones, washed a soft, clear red.
He estimated the exact moment when John's cognitive system shut down and his brain ceased working. He created three-dimensional projections of the collision proper, and surmised the proportions of the cranium bones' sweet curve inward, the precise manner in which they shifted and gave.
Committed them to memory.
One evening, six months after the cabbie incident and three months after the pool and twenty before he died, John had found him sprawled on the parquet, amidst sixty pictures on slick photography paper. John had made tea, and had joined him afterwards, legs askew, with the side of his head obligingly tilted on his hand.
"Where has the living-room floor gone?" John had asked, eyes crinkling. "Is this you going into photography courses? It's kind of terrifying. They do look rather nice, though," he'd said, tracing the edges of them with idle, work-tired fingers.
"They're amateur," Sherlock had snorted, not without interest, and then glanced up briefly, a boyish, curious look sweeping from underneath his lashes. "You've done photography before."
"Me and Harry used to take pictures, yeah, when we were kids," John had sighed. "We made them into those boxes, magic lanterns, with panels. Those were good, when we were alone at night, we told each other stories. The real fancy ones are all metal and wood, stained glass, beautiful projections. Le morte d'Arthur, the grand tour of Europe - you'd like them. We used to colour our pictures in crayon." They had been almost face to face like this, John twisted onto his side, noses nearly touching, bodies neatly aligned on the carpet. He'd fanned the photographs over it, a stern, strange expression creasing the bridge of his nose. "Why'd you take these?"
"Mmn. Case," which hadn't entirely been a lie.
"Ah. Should have known, shouldn't I? I'll get us some dinner, let you think over 'em, could do with some miso soup right now."
Sherlock, rolling onto his back, had considered him upside down as John had straightened up and retreated into the kitchen - had thought John, ten years old and in a beige jumper, fiddling with scissors and pictures and magic lanterns - and had laughed abruptly. It had come out in sound, which was - strange. Unusual. Interesting.
"What, what?" John had leant in the doorway, arms crossed, incredulous, looking vaguely fond. "What's gotten into you, you lunatic - Christ, you've gone mad. Madder. Hey, no, don't. Don't tell me, you're probably thinking of something gory and electric right now, I don't want to know. Look at you."
No. Something better, Sherlock had thought, giddy, giggling into the carpet threads.
Three days after the memorial service, coming home damp and trembling from a hot, feverish summer shower, Sherlock made a systematic hunt for everything left of John in the flat. He picked out every item of laundry, stripped the bedsheets, gathered the books, laptop, shoes, journals, Army uniform, Army medals, Army photos, phone, sketchbook, three pens, two lamps, jacket, toothbrush, reading glasses, jumpers thrown over the back of John's chair like afterthoughts from before Switzerland, forgotten in the packing. Carried it all down to the fireplace in 221C and made a bonfire.
(It was that or drawing chalk imprints around each and every one of them, Exhibit A, Exhibit B, Exhibit C, Exhibit D, the entire flat a crime scene of its own, what an engaging thought. John's body present in absentia. It would be nice. This was nicer.)
He had thought sometimes it would be interesting, would be very lovely, to burn the house down to its foundations - hear it crackle and spit in red luxury. But the aftermath would be tedious. It would be an inconvenience to find proper lodgings again. So he stayed, to make sure the fire did not spread. He stood against the door, hands pocketed, watching.
Fire was interesting. This was another experiment - he had designed a chemical accelerant to purge away the smoke excess, and his assessment of its outcome tugged gently at his heartstrings; but this time there was nothing entirely cleansing about the process, about watching the grinning figures in John's pictures shrivel and tear, the wires and connections in John's laptop crackle and sizzle as the welding melted. 221C filled with smoke, smelling sweet.
It would seep into the walls, into the cracks of the parquet. Smoke, everywhere. It was a futilely romanticized notion, he thought, but on the days when boredom gnawed at his brain cells, he would come down. The rooms would smell like John.
He does like photography.
It isn't so much for the artistic value of it, which is subjective, and as such well worth an experimentation on good days but ultimately impaired; but it is rather fascinating, how caught the picture can be. It's everything his brain accomplishes on a daily basis, except better: the scene is fixed, suspended, every colour and shape as it was, unchanged and impeded by little more than the subjectivity of its owner. It is a unique morsel of time that he may choose to keep or throw away, as he wishes. Beauty is a surplus benefit; it is neither important nor necessary, but aesthetically rather pleasing.
Mycroft had given him a camera for his seventh birthday, a heavy lovely black thing, and he'd spent the remaining half of his winter vacation snapping pictures of windowframes: the frost had made the glass creak and shudder, and white clouds of saturation formed when he'd blown on it, hot, stepped back quickly. His hands had been smaller; the camera had been heavy in his arms. He'd stayed in the darkroom as the pictures developed, had watched the colours emerge under the red light, and come out with his clothes smelling of chemicals.
He'd covered their flat all over with them, once. One from every street corner in London, stapled to the walls and the ceiling and the carpet, pieces of night and day caught on slick paper, where he could watch, surmise, categorize. He'd had London in his living-room for a very precise six hours, and that had been gorgeous, hadn't it been gorgeous. One lovely afternoon.
John had come home from his Monday shift's late hours and stared. He'd said, "What," said, "Oh my god," and then fallen quite silent. Made them tea. Climbed up on the sofa beside Sherlock and tangled their knees together.
Sherlock picked up smoking again three weeks after Switzerland. It was a marvelous thing, the slow unfurling of smoke - delicately down into his lungs - there was a jittery feeling in his bones, an overheated smog crawling about his brain. He burned down thirty cigarettes a day for a fortnight, and then found himself huddled in the windowseat one night at two in the morning, tapping cigarette ash in the one mug of John's he'd missed for the bonfire.
Baker Street spread out, sprawling, hateful in every well-known detail. He had guessed out the history of every piece and object in his living-room, its past owners and the price it was sold, and all the whens and the wheres and the whys of each, and it was abject, this amount of knowledge, this tragicomic familiarity, piling and clogging and shutting out every new trail of thought.
He was slow like this, ensconced, understimulated. The kitchen was blazing, stark yellow light spilling in at the borders. Lestrade had called in last afternoon, had demanded help with the apparent murder of one Jack Douglas of Birlstone, Sussex, and Sherlock's thinking process had gone along the lines of
Sussex is hardly in Lestrade's jurisdiction, so he either went in as a favour to someone or a special treatment to a younger investigator - of course, MacDonald, transferred there two years ago, felt out of his depth and called in the former superior officer from London
and then
Google results: Jack Douglas, American, amassed a small fortune there, came to England ten years ago, happily married, no children
and then
found by friend of the family residing in the house last evening, shot in the face, but why didn't the wife insist on seeing the body, why -
He'd climbed up on the windowseat three hours earlier with cigarettes enough for a small army and a brain in shambles. Hypothesis after hypothesis went scrambled, useless. There wasn't enough room to think, not enough memory to collect data; every thought caught on another and led into muddled speculation, ludicrous theories each canceling one another, and it was hideous, wasn't it? The practicalities of grief. He was even hungry.
Everything was so quiet, this time of night. Everything was quiet in his brain.
Tomorrow, yes. Tomorrow, he thought, drawing out on the last of his cigarette. Tomorrow he'd buy a new suit that would look exactly like every other one he owned, and swap back to nicotine patches, maybe, and go down to the Yard to endure Sally's sneering and Lestrade's sighs and the Met's utter incompetence in every single matter of importance. He would be polite to Mrs. Hudson, might even buy her some herbal soothers, and be obnoxious to Mycroft for as long as his inevitable daily visit may last; he would forget to buy milk and then forget to care. Tomorrow he would clear out the harddrive, delete every useless piece of information component to the last two years, make a grand spring-cleaning of everything he'd ever learnt and ever taught himself, and then he would go to Sussex and find who did or did not kill Jack Douglas of Birlstone. Tomorrow. Yes.
"You can't."
"I could."
"Bet you couldn't, though."
Angelo's again. The house to stilted conversation and salmon fettucini. John had been sitting in a dark grey jumper that fit him perfectly and a warm, slightly incredulous smile, watching Sherlock from the corner of his eyes. "Nah. 's the trick of fortune-tellers, or mediums, or whichever, and they've been ransacking through your stuff before they tell you all about your past sins. You're brilliant. I get that."
"I am," Sherlock had agreed. "And I can."
"Okay. Okay. What year?"
"You tell me."
John had watched him for a moment, head tilted. He'd looked very nice like this, looked very warm, absently toying with a piece of bread, forgoing his dinner in favour of watching Sherlock. Made him preen. Sherlock preened very charmingly indeed.
"University, then. Bright young thing, Mike says. You're getting eight questions beforehand."
"I don't need eight questions."
"You do if you have to guess every single detail. Music I listened to, class schedule, colour of the scarf my girlfriend got me in '98. Every little thing, like a photograph."
Sherlock had felt irritation careen off his face smoothly. Not so subtly. Oh yes, photography. He did like it. John's university years, bright and fine in his brain, in sharp, vivid colour, shaped around pub evenings and rugby matches. It was everything Sherlock had never done except to please Seb, or Victor - or anyone who hadn't known that he preferred his evenings in the chemistry labs, with a mountain of books and a quite literal skeleton in the closet. He didn't need eight questions, he'd never needed eight questions in his life, but John had been looking at him over the compulsory Angelo candle, looking deprecating and amused all at once, which was a trait Sherlock hadn't ever seen before, on anyone. Ever. Ever. The twining of emotions into something remarkably fond in his face - not before John, who wore jumpers on war-tired shoulders and an agreeable look on his face, and kept waiting for the next amazing thing.
Sherlock was very, very amazing.
"Five questions."
John had cocked his head, had licked his lips, and then had started laughing, silently, a fuzzy military thing gone quietly hysterical in a pair of jeans. He'd spread his hands, and Sherlock had wanted to take them from him and read them, their lines and creases, the softness between the index and the thumb.
"Alright," he'd said. "Alright, genius. Deduce away."
You lived mostly on-campus, with a roommate, and he had you try pot twice before you decided it wasn't for you and stopped smoking altogether. You wore jeans, two of which still fit you today because Army training and Afghanistan thinned you out for five years. You went out for nights at the pub and got sloshed every other weekend, and sometimes hit it off with someone or shared a cab home, because the girls liked you and the boys liked you more. You had a circle of few close friends, none of which you've seen since, and a larger one of relatively friendly acquaintances, like Mike, who was actually quite fit then, I saw your pictures.
Music, then. Punk bands and Queen and bits of the Rolling Stones, David Bowie in '95 and you never looked back. Two of your girlfriends were called Mary, which made things awkward. For you, not for them. You worked thirty-one hours straight twice a week, but you didn't fall asleep at your desk then. You didn't even have a desk - internship, St Bart's. Too much to do to sleep properly. The scarf was blue, by the way, to match your eyes, though it didn't.
John Watson, aged 22, lying belly-down on a dorm bed with socked feet and a medical journal. Sherlock had snapped a picture of it, had filed it away. The scene had been clear in his mind then and remains so now, an onslaught of colour and touches, the duvet on John's bed and the slant of John's lamp; it had been very nearly staggering. Sherlock had grinned, wide and pleased, and on the other side of the table the John who'd had twelve more years' worth of wrinkles on his face and a jumper like a cream puff and a shoulder that had once been through an explosion had grinned back, saying very silently and clearly, what's gotten into you again.
You did, Sherlock had thought, curiously sentimental for all of five seconds. Sliced under my skin.
On the train home from a case in Edinburgh, in late December 2014, Sherlock Holmes built a magic lantern.
It was quite a fantastical lantern, the proportions of which had never been matched before, a size of which John would have been proud, all panels neatly aligned, flush and coloured. Lit inside. Pictures on slippery paper and drawings in crayon, precisely divided: before John, during John - (after John). Sherlock made space for it inside his brain, and let it blaze like a strobe light.
He liked trains quite a bit. In the six hours it took him to return to London, Sherlock imagined backlit panels and coloured paper cut into shapes and figures, blue-eyed knights, dragons with starched Westwood jackets. (Le morte d'Arthur, the grand tour of Europe, John'd said - you'd like them.) He tapped his fingers upon the armrest, one fist pressed to his mouth, thinking.
This was before John, then: the acrid smells of chemicals in the darkroom and his own boyish silhouette like a black imprint against a sharply-defined wall; it was not a picture he'd ever taken, but one of Mycroft's, who liked to give cameras to his younger brother.
And this was John. During John. An Italian restaurant somewhere in London, one of the very first evenings they had had. This was what he would remember, then, of his best friend: John's beige jumper, immense enough to hide worlds and explosions and ridiculous Army jokes, and two glasses of bad wine between the two of them, and London blue and gold behind him. It was not any precise evening, nothing that had truly occurred just once - it was the amalgam of many restaurant outings. This particular combination had never existed, possibly. It became a metaphor for John, every little thing that was right and good about the man.
After John, then. It was the drive back to Baker Street from Victoria, Mycroft's car, two days after Switzerland. To this day Sherlock did not remember stepping inside, did not remember the cocaine coursing his veins, his nerves strung tight, his voice high and soft. He had been weak as a kitten, and had trembled against his seat for half an hour.
"You have work to do," Mycroft had said, steely, kind, and Sherlock had nodded, eyes shut fast.
It was growing dark out, the railway's lights shuddering to life as they trickled past. The panels were changing, the lantern spinning quietly in Sherlock's mind. It became 221C and smoking, leisurely, sitting against the chimney piece, when his latest case was not enough for him to function on. He'd only resorted to this four times, to date. Magnificent experiences. Almost worth losing John.
(No. Rewind. Rewind.)
Jim Moriarty celebrated the winter holidays by introducing an entirely novel chemical disease into every blood reserve in every hospital in London. Thirteen thoroughly unrelated people had massive strokes in a matter of three hours. The newspapers took fire, talked of serpents and dragons in the blood, which was ridiculous but excellent publicity, and London took to panic as smoothly as a whale to water. Sherlock could feel it panicking. That was clever. Oh, that was clever.
For a glorious two weeks he was a child in an opera house. There were dragons in London and the hospitals were quarantined, until the chemicals were dealt with and the blood reserves investigated. He spent six days stalking the streets and let his nights bleed into Scotland yard offices, sprawled over maps of town, making mathematical adjustments, calculating angles, probabilities, coordinates. St Bart's was cordoned off to strangers, but he could smuggle himself in, if he so wanted. It was the possibilities that were dizzying, a taste of adoration for the state of chaos.
"He's a fucking nutjob," Lestrade told him succinctly.
He was growing greyer in the hair, eyes rapid and harrowed. Tapped his fingers sharply on the rim of his cup, in his office, Sherlock perched on the corner of his desk like a long bird in a black coat. "I get all the secrecy and governmental hush, I do, but this bloke's a bloody bastard. D'you know, I visited that clinic three streets away, yesterday, for interrogation of the sick and all that bollocks, and there was this kid -"
Sherlock thought of making tiger traps.
He deserted Baker Street, which was more home now than anyplace ever had been, or anyone who wasn't dead and at the bottom of a waterfall, and he made a nest of himself and a laptop and a dozen blankets in a hotel room. He subsisted on Chinese takeaway and distasteful coffee when he remembered it; he made a magnificent trap, narrowing possibilities and locations until he had a clear sight of his objective. Possibly Jim wanted him to know; possibly he had let himself go, had thought Sherlock had, after John's death. He was bright as day, online, on the maps Sherlock built, leaving trails behind him like crumbs of bread.
They had one single communication, which went along the lines of
text received;
received at: 11:56 pm.
I think you're beginning to be my new BFF!
xoxo
and
text sent;
sent at: 00:03 am.
Who was the first?
SH
and
text received;
received at: 00:12 am.
Seb was, but he's gone chasing after a little dog in central Asia. We're going to have so much fun together, darling.
Sebastian Moran. Colonel, medalled twice, standard officer, well-respected. Officially on permanent leave. Sherlock turned his phone off.
He made a magnificent trap out of London - the city spread out in great maps, burrowed at the foot of his hotel bed - arranged contacts and rendezvouses until he had Jim exactly where he wanted him, cajoling. A cure would be found for the chemicals; it may already be. London would return to its dormant state.
He wanted Jim, though, wanted him in an empty house with sixty policeman swarming onto him with clear, polished shields, wanted him riddled with red sniper lights, dancing across the Westwood. He used every government contact, every unofficial debt, every legal loophole at his disposition, hid himself behind a hundred names, to make sure he had him, snared him in fast and proper. He weaved a stretched nexus of chains and reactions around the bowels of Moriarty's organization. When he stepped back outside it was already March. 2015. Happy New Year.
"Holy fucking hell," Anderson said, when he walked into Scotland Yard, and then, "Holy fucking crap. Sally. Sally."
"We thought you were dead," Lestrade informed him later, still a little wide-eyed and skittish despite the fact that Sherlock had been sitting in his office for all of two hours now, and he ought to process the situation, not dead, wrong conclusion, moving on. "We thought - fucking hell, Sherlock. It's been months, and. I thought. Thought you'd took off and died, made a bloody arse of yourself being heroic and gotten blown up. Again."
Sherlock shook his head, once. He had a tiger trap under his fingertips, in the palms of his hands - felt it crooning under his skin, at the edge of his throat - and he spread it in wide, coloured charts on Lestrade's desk, speaking fast until he saw the DI's eyes grow wide and soft in understanding.
Once, in Cambridge, he'd dissected a corpse.
It had been a very good corpse. It had had its head and its arms and its feet still attached, and Sherlock had cut it up one fine June morning, had probed at its lungs, its esophagus, the dark spaces between its ribs. Had counted them. Had not cut out its heart, because it had been so much more interesting to watch it, there, among its tangle of veins and arteries, all of them essential and branching out into threes. No longer beating, and brown. Linked to every limb and member extremity, a tight network. He'd opened up its arm, the skin first then the muscles, bicep, triceps, the bones like the structure of a machine, a stronghold. Same with the leg, the thigh first then the foreleg, then the calf, the nerve endings in every toe.
He'd slithered up the throat, slicing it like a slow parting mouth, then had dipped backwards and found the spine, every round bump of the vertebras knocking gently against his knuckles. Had slipped back up, changed his gloves, found the liver. He had returned to the lungs, the trachea, thinking this is where the air comes through, nitrogen and oxygen and CO2, pulled in from the nose and the mouth, down and filling the lungs, contraction, release, eject the CO2 back into the ambient air. Repeat. And again.
He had wondered what it would be like to open a living body, to see it beating, pulsing, filling with air.
They had never found John's body. Sherlock regretted that, perhaps for better reasons than the expected; he could have found his way inside the Swiss clinic they'd have taken him to for the autopsy, could have charmed his way into doing it for them. It would have been easy. And then.
He supposed it was a way of coping much like any other, cutting open one's dead - friend. Flatmate. Partner. Yes, that. Dipping inside and finding what made John, whatever was inside him that had made him so very different from all the rest of them; had he had blue blood, or green, or a golden liver, had there been something special about this man? something remarkable underneath his skin, where things had exploded, once. Well-hidden. He would have found it, too.
Moriarty died with dragons in his blood, yowling as the poison coursed his veins and every one of his men fell around him like hacked hay; and Sherlock wasn't the one who pulled the trigger but he did tell Sally who to shoot, did watch her take a breath in, hold it, the rifle in her hands making a soft, snapping noise on the exhale. It made a cheerful little hole between Jim's eyes. He was howling, and on fire, which was possibly the way he'd always intended to go, he must be so angry. It was the single greatest moment of Sherlock's life, and for a second he was merely. Standing. Buzzing. That was delightful.
Lestrade grabbed his arm, hauled him over to the Yard for a deposition while they grappled with the last few resilient members of Moriarty's guard. The night was soaked with the coloured flood of police car lights, revolving, and the fierce flashes of cameras; London passed by in great stains on the car's windowpanes.
Sitting on a hard-edged plastic chair in the fluorescent corridors of the Met, looking incongruous in his dark coat and scarf, Sherlock bought a cup of tasteless coffee (caffeine; important) and thought, triumphantly, This is the final proof. He was on withdrawal of two years and nearly eleven months since Switzerland and John, of John being dead with his head bashed in and his thorax smashed and his lungs full of water. Sherlock had tried, too, to reproduce John's high-pitched giggle on radio wavelengths and the exact outline of his fingerprints on plastic pads and the exact shade of his eyes, blue, very, in his pipettes and beakers. But John hadn't come back, and Moriarty was very dead, too, possibly over in the morgue over at St Bart's now, on Molly's dissecting table, she would like that. It would be a treat for her, getting to see the architecture of the man she'd fallen for - inside. Sherlock had never got to, after all.
And John. Wasn't going to be coming back. This was Sherlock's final conclusion, then, the sweet relief of rationality and facts sweeping over his damn mind and every wish for a miracle it'd put in without his consent, every cold pit in his chest in the morning, smoothing over They never found a body, the extraordinary doubts. I don't need John Watson, after all. Two years and very nearly eleven months. Also infatuation is horrible, never do that again. A one-case experiment.
Six days later, he started down the steps of the British Museum and walked neatly into the arms of a dead man.
"Oh," said John. "Hello."
Sherlock thought, hello.
They go to the Natural History Museum and look at dinosaurs.
John is thinner, like this. It isn't difficult to notice, although he moves in a way to hide it; the light is orange through the huge windows, splashing his pullover like a great dark stain against his chest, sticking to his hipbones. All traces of the slight middle-age chubbiness from before Switzerland are entirely gone, which is deplorable, as Sherlock liked it. Didn't eat much, then. He needs a jumper.
The dinosaurs are quite ridiculously dead, gigantic skeletons of Jim's dragons, and Sherlock is thinking of fourteen and a half ways of adding Mycroft to their ranks. The sadly regretted. He'd getting old, after all; no one would care.
"You're not killing Mycroft," John informs him. "I quite like Mycroft. He's skeevy as hell, and he has a very strange umbrella fetish I really don't want to be thinking about, but he did give me money to buy myself croissants while I was stranded in Paris. You're not killing anyone. Or anything, actually. That includes me, by the way, I don't enjoy being dead much - inconvenience, death. Can't even sleep at home." He cracks a smile, crooks his head back to look at him. "You're still not shouting. Why aren't you angry? I expected a lot of yelling."
"I'm going into shock," Sherlock murmurs, truthfully enough. He suspects he'll have a need for an orange blanket sometime in the near future. "Imagining the look on Lestrade's face when he sees you turn up."
John laughs, sharp and brief like the scratch of a match, and Sherlock focuses on it, shuts out everything else. John, standing at the foot of the staircase, under the outstretched wing of a long-dead pterodactyl, laughing at him. And he doesn't remember anything like this, it's never happened before, with John, so it's entirely new. How extraordinary.
"God, I know. It'll be amazing. If you don't take pictures so we can laugh at it in ten years I will put laxatives in your tea."
"I bought a camera while you were away," Sherlock tells him, and John smiles a trifle sadly at him, eyes crinkling.
"Tenner says Anderson faints dead," he says.
"They thought I was dead for three months," Sherlock says off-handedly, blood beating rapidly against his throat at the thought of the expression this will elicit on John's face, the smooth flicker of interest at the very peculiarity of Sherlock's entire existence. Yes, that one. That one, exactly.
"Oh. Did they, really?" John blinks at him, uncomprehending for a moment, waiting for Sherlock to open that brilliant mouth of his and make sense of the world.
Sherlock opens his mouth. Breathes in. And does exactly that.
"You killed Moran."
"I did," John says brightly. "We spent a fortnight in a motel in Prague, all happy breakfast by day and assassination attempts at night, it was fantastic. You'd have hated it."
John looks strange in the lights of the cabs; looks strange in London, as though the countries he'd travelled through have settled thin and fine across the skin of his nape, of his wrists, of his shoulders. He moves like a photograph that's not been taken yet, a movie in fragments, sharp bright splinters slotting together with tentative uncertainty. For a brief, startling minute, Sherlock longs for a camera; he wants to piece apart the colours of John's body, movements-expressions-attitude, an extraordinary trinity spread out on slick, shiny paper. He wants to make sense of this moment. London lighting up like a theatre stage makes it impossible to decode, though - everything has been painted over.
John was a writer, is a writer, and talks of the last three years with content familiarity, describes Brazil and Vienna in fierce bursts of possessiveness, the dismal winter he spent half lost in Irkutsk, chilled to the bone, the long plains of America, the caravan he lived with for three months before he started west, reached the sea. John speaks in synonyms and analogies and metaphors, portraits of the people he met, chronicles of train stations and airport terminals. They become flushed, enormous, rapt with incredible colour. Sherlock swallows it all like radio code, and lets it rest hot and heavy in his stomach.
Four hours later, he wakes up gasping in his living room armchair, panting sharp, wet breaths against it, mouth open. He is - disoriented, for a second, yearning for a cigarette with an intensity that startles him, sets his heart beating loose in his chest, bursting and close. It is dark in the flat, eleven o'clock at night, and something ugly happens in his thoracic cage then, twisting his stomach into low knots.
"Sherlock?"
John. John. He's silhouetted off in the door to the kitchen, braced against flaming light. Sherlock, regrouping badly, heaving for air, thinks with a hard shudder of the weight of his skull bashed in, the smart crack of his ribcage spilling open, lungs and bowels and blood all over the rocks. John is framed in electric light; it draws a thick, black line around him, encloses him in a dark outline and brash colours - he looks like a character in a children's book, the clean-cut panel of a magic lantern.
"Are you all right?"
"You're still alive," Sherlock remarks, drawing long, shaky legs to his chest.
"I - yes. Yeah," John agrees, and, moving forward, becomes tangible again. He perches on the armrest of Sherlock's chair, one knee pressed to his, warm and calming. He spreads his hand, slow, across the rise of his friend's shoulder, across the hot skin where his throat meets his neck. "I didn't fall back dead while you were sleeping it off, yeah."
"You," Sherlock says, and creases his eyes shut, trembling, but it is important that John understand this, understand it with his bones and his lungs, the structure of the machine. He would engrave it on his spinal cord, if he could. - "You died, John. You died, I saw it, you, there was blood. And. You were dead for three years."
"I came back," John says softly, but presses three fingers - one for each year - to the line of Sherlock's hair and the softer skin of his nape. He slinks his fingertips fleetingly under the collar of his shirt; a rapid staccato rhythm, that sounds like i'm-so-rry. Says, "I'm making tea."
This is nonsensical.
But John is moving again, returning to the kitchen, and Sherlock - Sherlock does the following, this time. He follows on unsteady, coltish legs, stumbling against the doorframe and catching there, and watches John pick up the water-filled kettle to put it on the stove. There is some stilted movement to his shoulder now - to the way it twists to reach for mugs in the cupboard, the afterimage of a vague grimace on John's face. And this is familiar; he finds the details again.
They have experienced time travel, Sherlock thinks. Language has undergone a transformation. Past tenses have smoothed back into present, John is, John has, John says, 2012 and 2015 one breath apart. John makes tea. John is a physical weight in the kitchen, displacing air. John has stepped from Reichenbach into London with Austrian green pullovers and Brazilian jeans, his hair bleached pale, an older, tender crease to the left of his mouth. He is a fantastical beast in the kitchen, still a character out of a book.
Time travel, then, because Sherlock does not remember last week, doesn't remember last month, lying low in a nondescript hotel room, days bleeding together, and before that an amalgam of cases and murders and petty domestic violence, smoking in 221C, Edinburgh. He touches a hand at John's hip, where coarse fabric scrapes his palm.
The kettle whistles sharp, and John reacts to it in time - pulls it away, switches off the gas, pours. He presses one mug in Sherlock's hand; the sides of it are warm against his fingers. Startling, like the look on John's face. Like John's face.
"I want," Sherlock says, thinks, I need a camera.
He wants pictures of every inch, skin and bone and blood and inside, wants to get John naked in their kitchen and photograph every particle of his body, his irises, the pads of his toes, his hair brushing his face, his breath in the cold, his tongue. Slick pieces of photography paper, a catalogue of them. A patchwork. If Sherlock were to put them side by side he'd want them to make John up again. Reinvent him again, in case he disappears. He'd build John up again with photography.
Instead, he says, "I never kissed you in our kitchen."
"You never kissed me at all, you sad sod," John says, sharp, but pleased. He'll taste like tea, later. Like Europe too.
"I made a magic lantern," Sherlock recalls. "Not a real one, a fake one. In my head. It was - good. For a while."
"I wrote a lot." John ducks his head, flattens one hand across the hair at the back of his neck. He looks embarrassed for a fleeting second. "I wanted, I. I needed to find the right words, what I'd get to say to you, if you didn't punch me in the face and slam the door on me. You didn't, though." He grins at Sherlock for a moment, boyish. "God, I missed you."
"Those words, then."
"Those too. Among others. I'd throw in please forgive me if I thought it would do any good."
"Not yet," Sherlock allows. "Tomorrow. Tomorrow, maybe. We'll talk about it."
"Okay." John exhales, slow and deep. "Okay. I can work with that. I could work with - if you told me to go away now I probably would - I'd come back later, if you wanted."
Sherlock stares at him, slightly appalled, conscious of the hypothetical. "No," he says, "I - no."
"Figured that much," John mutters, looking quite at home. Close-up, there is a splashing scar across his left temple, white and smooth. "I don't want to - I love it here, you know? I love this kitchen, and I love the flat, and - god, that's your violin on the mantle there, I haven't seen it in three years. I haven't even been upstairs yet. And I, you haven't thrown my favorite brand of tea out, and you kept my mug, and. I love this place," he says, looking horrified. "I just. I love it, Sherlock. Being here."
"Good," Sherlock murmurs. "Stay, then."
He wakes up once more that night, three o' clock in the morning; the flat seems turned into a darkroom, red heat spread out across the walls from the side lamp. He is lying on the sofa between John's thighs, the back of his head resting in the furrow between John's hip and leg, and John's back is bowed as he leans over him. He's keeping Sherlock's camera between his hands. Sherlock blinks back slowly, which draws a shaky, sharp breath out of John.
"What are you doing," he asks, throat raspy. His lungs are buttery-soft.
John pulls the camera away, smiles, and frames Sherlock's face between his hands. "Immortalizing you," he says. "Don't move."
.end.
- the Downton Abbey Christmas Special;
- a Granada SH marathon because she's only seen the first two seasons and none of Hardwicke, which is outrageous;
- probably lots of cheap wine.
I love this early New Year's Eve tradition we've got going. So:
the grand tour of europe.
Sherlock/John.
6,500words.
PG-13. No specific warnings; mentions of murder and disease.
Sherlock belongs to the Beeb, Moffat, and Gatiss; originally ACD's; I make no money with this.
Summary: In the afternoon of May 20th, 2015, Sherlock Holmes starts down the steps of the British Museum and walks neatly into the arms of a dead man. Reversed!Reichenbach, based off of the ACD!canon storyline - no spoilers for S2.
notes: many thanks are due to ningen_demonai for providing the Best Feedback and highlighting all the awkward bits for me to stare at and wonder how on earth I'm going to fix them; to sevenswells for prodding severely at my notions of what photography is and what it isn't (and so ensuring me three days of should-I-shouldn't-I dilemma, I love you too), as well as agreeing to look this over in the first place; to fireblazie for being her usual best, kind, encouraging self every time I need her to be.
Also HOLY SHIT, IT'S DONE. I started working on this months ago, and have been trying to finish it off and on ever since, never quite believing I'd do it. I really wanted to post it before S2 began, though; it'll be confirmed AU just a few weeks from now.
For the record, the "Birlstone" case for which Lestrade asks Sherlock's help in this is lifted from The Valley Of Fear; the mention of a tiger trap and Sebastian Moran are references to The Empty House.
Lastly, part of this storyline relies heavily around the concept of the magic lantern, which is, broadly speaking, one of the ancestors of the cinema; in effect, it has been described as an early form of a slide projector. It was essentially a metal or wooden box, with on one end a source of light, and on the other a succession of painted or photographed pictures on glass or paper slides, which the light stretched out across the wall opposite. This page provides a handy and concise enough summary of their use; the one Sherlock imagines in this would be the electric arc lodge lantern.
we contain within ourselves every lost moment of our lives. it is necessary to be made aware that they are lost before we can regain them.
- marcel proust.
i really don't know what i love you means.
i think it means, don't leave me here alone.
- neil gaiman.
In the afternoon of May 20th, 2015, Sherlock Holmes starts down the steps of the British Museum and walks neatly into the arms of a dead man.
John Watson is wearing a green pullover and a pair of faded jeans, comfortable and solidly unremarkable dark shoes. John Watson is carrying a duffel bag over his uninjured shoulder, resting fingers upon the straps, looping in the metal buckles; his skin is tanned, more so than before, his hair sun-streaked - longer around the temples. John Watson will be thirty-eight in a matter of six weeks, and the crinkles around his eyes draw whiter lines into his skin. Two years and eleven months ago, John Watson toppled over a cliff and into a waterfall in Switzerland.
(Among the many records Scotland Yard keeps of that case, there is a manila folder embossed in his name, which contains his Army file and old photographs, and on the front page an angry red stamp, declaring him
DECEASED
and once, seven months after the memorial service and the empty casket and the purple wreath from St Bart's, Sherlock snuck in at night and wrote underneath in a spindly dark scrawl with all due honours.)
"Oh," John says. And then, "Oh."
He says, "Hello."
Sherlock thinks, Hello.
He thinks, You've been in India, and Brazil, and Austria, that's in your shoes and the crease between your left thumb and index, there's cheap ink there, you've been writing - you're holding yourself without need for a cane so you've been under stressful conditions for the best part of your time away, and you came home on the 3:02 plane not two hours ago, there's airport beer on your collar from lunch. You bought that watch in an antiques' shop in Vienna with money you didn't have and that pullover suits you perfectly but is much too hot for May, so you were someplace colder than London but not too far up north, Amsterdam, maybe, they never found your body. I had them drag that waterfall as best they could and they never did find your body. You were dead before you hit the water. There was blood on the rocks where you bashed your head in, and this is the first you've come back to London. I would have known.
But he asks how Rio was, and John laughs, odd and a little charming and as awed as ever.
John Watson died with his head bashed in at the Reichenbach Falls, in Switzerland, at six thirty-two in the morning on the fifteenth of June, 2012. This was a rough estimate - in the plane back to London it was all Sherlock could do to construct a hundred probability trees on the flying company's dreadful paper napkins. He calculated impact and angle and cranium width, the last time he'd looked at his watch and the exact minute the early sun poured over them that morning; the length of their discussion with Jim; the indefinite second when John's foot slid on wet rock and the entirety of his body slipped sideways.
He deleted Jim's escape from the falls, dismissed it as unimportant - he kept only the slide of a shuddery railing under his hands, the number of times his shoes caught on the edge of the steps, kept each of the twenty minutes it took him to reach the bottom of the fall, ticking jittery in his ribcage. He made diagrams for John's skull bashed in, accounted for the severity of the blow, the amount of blood found upon the stones, washed a soft, clear red.
He estimated the exact moment when John's cognitive system shut down and his brain ceased working. He created three-dimensional projections of the collision proper, and surmised the proportions of the cranium bones' sweet curve inward, the precise manner in which they shifted and gave.
Committed them to memory.
One evening, six months after the cabbie incident and three months after the pool and twenty before he died, John had found him sprawled on the parquet, amidst sixty pictures on slick photography paper. John had made tea, and had joined him afterwards, legs askew, with the side of his head obligingly tilted on his hand.
"Where has the living-room floor gone?" John had asked, eyes crinkling. "Is this you going into photography courses? It's kind of terrifying. They do look rather nice, though," he'd said, tracing the edges of them with idle, work-tired fingers.
"They're amateur," Sherlock had snorted, not without interest, and then glanced up briefly, a boyish, curious look sweeping from underneath his lashes. "You've done photography before."
"Me and Harry used to take pictures, yeah, when we were kids," John had sighed. "We made them into those boxes, magic lanterns, with panels. Those were good, when we were alone at night, we told each other stories. The real fancy ones are all metal and wood, stained glass, beautiful projections. Le morte d'Arthur, the grand tour of Europe - you'd like them. We used to colour our pictures in crayon." They had been almost face to face like this, John twisted onto his side, noses nearly touching, bodies neatly aligned on the carpet. He'd fanned the photographs over it, a stern, strange expression creasing the bridge of his nose. "Why'd you take these?"
"Mmn. Case," which hadn't entirely been a lie.
"Ah. Should have known, shouldn't I? I'll get us some dinner, let you think over 'em, could do with some miso soup right now."
Sherlock, rolling onto his back, had considered him upside down as John had straightened up and retreated into the kitchen - had thought John, ten years old and in a beige jumper, fiddling with scissors and pictures and magic lanterns - and had laughed abruptly. It had come out in sound, which was - strange. Unusual. Interesting.
"What, what?" John had leant in the doorway, arms crossed, incredulous, looking vaguely fond. "What's gotten into you, you lunatic - Christ, you've gone mad. Madder. Hey, no, don't. Don't tell me, you're probably thinking of something gory and electric right now, I don't want to know. Look at you."
No. Something better, Sherlock had thought, giddy, giggling into the carpet threads.
Three days after the memorial service, coming home damp and trembling from a hot, feverish summer shower, Sherlock made a systematic hunt for everything left of John in the flat. He picked out every item of laundry, stripped the bedsheets, gathered the books, laptop, shoes, journals, Army uniform, Army medals, Army photos, phone, sketchbook, three pens, two lamps, jacket, toothbrush, reading glasses, jumpers thrown over the back of John's chair like afterthoughts from before Switzerland, forgotten in the packing. Carried it all down to the fireplace in 221C and made a bonfire.
(It was that or drawing chalk imprints around each and every one of them, Exhibit A, Exhibit B, Exhibit C, Exhibit D, the entire flat a crime scene of its own, what an engaging thought. John's body present in absentia. It would be nice. This was nicer.)
He had thought sometimes it would be interesting, would be very lovely, to burn the house down to its foundations - hear it crackle and spit in red luxury. But the aftermath would be tedious. It would be an inconvenience to find proper lodgings again. So he stayed, to make sure the fire did not spread. He stood against the door, hands pocketed, watching.
Fire was interesting. This was another experiment - he had designed a chemical accelerant to purge away the smoke excess, and his assessment of its outcome tugged gently at his heartstrings; but this time there was nothing entirely cleansing about the process, about watching the grinning figures in John's pictures shrivel and tear, the wires and connections in John's laptop crackle and sizzle as the welding melted. 221C filled with smoke, smelling sweet.
It would seep into the walls, into the cracks of the parquet. Smoke, everywhere. It was a futilely romanticized notion, he thought, but on the days when boredom gnawed at his brain cells, he would come down. The rooms would smell like John.
He does like photography.
It isn't so much for the artistic value of it, which is subjective, and as such well worth an experimentation on good days but ultimately impaired; but it is rather fascinating, how caught the picture can be. It's everything his brain accomplishes on a daily basis, except better: the scene is fixed, suspended, every colour and shape as it was, unchanged and impeded by little more than the subjectivity of its owner. It is a unique morsel of time that he may choose to keep or throw away, as he wishes. Beauty is a surplus benefit; it is neither important nor necessary, but aesthetically rather pleasing.
Mycroft had given him a camera for his seventh birthday, a heavy lovely black thing, and he'd spent the remaining half of his winter vacation snapping pictures of windowframes: the frost had made the glass creak and shudder, and white clouds of saturation formed when he'd blown on it, hot, stepped back quickly. His hands had been smaller; the camera had been heavy in his arms. He'd stayed in the darkroom as the pictures developed, had watched the colours emerge under the red light, and come out with his clothes smelling of chemicals.
He'd covered their flat all over with them, once. One from every street corner in London, stapled to the walls and the ceiling and the carpet, pieces of night and day caught on slick paper, where he could watch, surmise, categorize. He'd had London in his living-room for a very precise six hours, and that had been gorgeous, hadn't it been gorgeous. One lovely afternoon.
John had come home from his Monday shift's late hours and stared. He'd said, "What," said, "Oh my god," and then fallen quite silent. Made them tea. Climbed up on the sofa beside Sherlock and tangled their knees together.
Sherlock picked up smoking again three weeks after Switzerland. It was a marvelous thing, the slow unfurling of smoke - delicately down into his lungs - there was a jittery feeling in his bones, an overheated smog crawling about his brain. He burned down thirty cigarettes a day for a fortnight, and then found himself huddled in the windowseat one night at two in the morning, tapping cigarette ash in the one mug of John's he'd missed for the bonfire.
Baker Street spread out, sprawling, hateful in every well-known detail. He had guessed out the history of every piece and object in his living-room, its past owners and the price it was sold, and all the whens and the wheres and the whys of each, and it was abject, this amount of knowledge, this tragicomic familiarity, piling and clogging and shutting out every new trail of thought.
He was slow like this, ensconced, understimulated. The kitchen was blazing, stark yellow light spilling in at the borders. Lestrade had called in last afternoon, had demanded help with the apparent murder of one Jack Douglas of Birlstone, Sussex, and Sherlock's thinking process had gone along the lines of
Sussex is hardly in Lestrade's jurisdiction, so he either went in as a favour to someone or a special treatment to a younger investigator - of course, MacDonald, transferred there two years ago, felt out of his depth and called in the former superior officer from London
and then
Google results: Jack Douglas, American, amassed a small fortune there, came to England ten years ago, happily married, no children
and then
found by friend of the family residing in the house last evening, shot in the face, but why didn't the wife insist on seeing the body, why -
He'd climbed up on the windowseat three hours earlier with cigarettes enough for a small army and a brain in shambles. Hypothesis after hypothesis went scrambled, useless. There wasn't enough room to think, not enough memory to collect data; every thought caught on another and led into muddled speculation, ludicrous theories each canceling one another, and it was hideous, wasn't it? The practicalities of grief. He was even hungry.
Everything was so quiet, this time of night. Everything was quiet in his brain.
Tomorrow, yes. Tomorrow, he thought, drawing out on the last of his cigarette. Tomorrow he'd buy a new suit that would look exactly like every other one he owned, and swap back to nicotine patches, maybe, and go down to the Yard to endure Sally's sneering and Lestrade's sighs and the Met's utter incompetence in every single matter of importance. He would be polite to Mrs. Hudson, might even buy her some herbal soothers, and be obnoxious to Mycroft for as long as his inevitable daily visit may last; he would forget to buy milk and then forget to care. Tomorrow he would clear out the harddrive, delete every useless piece of information component to the last two years, make a grand spring-cleaning of everything he'd ever learnt and ever taught himself, and then he would go to Sussex and find who did or did not kill Jack Douglas of Birlstone. Tomorrow. Yes.
"You can't."
"I could."
"Bet you couldn't, though."
Angelo's again. The house to stilted conversation and salmon fettucini. John had been sitting in a dark grey jumper that fit him perfectly and a warm, slightly incredulous smile, watching Sherlock from the corner of his eyes. "Nah. 's the trick of fortune-tellers, or mediums, or whichever, and they've been ransacking through your stuff before they tell you all about your past sins. You're brilliant. I get that."
"I am," Sherlock had agreed. "And I can."
"Okay. Okay. What year?"
"You tell me."
John had watched him for a moment, head tilted. He'd looked very nice like this, looked very warm, absently toying with a piece of bread, forgoing his dinner in favour of watching Sherlock. Made him preen. Sherlock preened very charmingly indeed.
"University, then. Bright young thing, Mike says. You're getting eight questions beforehand."
"I don't need eight questions."
"You do if you have to guess every single detail. Music I listened to, class schedule, colour of the scarf my girlfriend got me in '98. Every little thing, like a photograph."
Sherlock had felt irritation careen off his face smoothly. Not so subtly. Oh yes, photography. He did like it. John's university years, bright and fine in his brain, in sharp, vivid colour, shaped around pub evenings and rugby matches. It was everything Sherlock had never done except to please Seb, or Victor - or anyone who hadn't known that he preferred his evenings in the chemistry labs, with a mountain of books and a quite literal skeleton in the closet. He didn't need eight questions, he'd never needed eight questions in his life, but John had been looking at him over the compulsory Angelo candle, looking deprecating and amused all at once, which was a trait Sherlock hadn't ever seen before, on anyone. Ever. Ever. The twining of emotions into something remarkably fond in his face - not before John, who wore jumpers on war-tired shoulders and an agreeable look on his face, and kept waiting for the next amazing thing.
Sherlock was very, very amazing.
"Five questions."
John had cocked his head, had licked his lips, and then had started laughing, silently, a fuzzy military thing gone quietly hysterical in a pair of jeans. He'd spread his hands, and Sherlock had wanted to take them from him and read them, their lines and creases, the softness between the index and the thumb.
"Alright," he'd said. "Alright, genius. Deduce away."
You lived mostly on-campus, with a roommate, and he had you try pot twice before you decided it wasn't for you and stopped smoking altogether. You wore jeans, two of which still fit you today because Army training and Afghanistan thinned you out for five years. You went out for nights at the pub and got sloshed every other weekend, and sometimes hit it off with someone or shared a cab home, because the girls liked you and the boys liked you more. You had a circle of few close friends, none of which you've seen since, and a larger one of relatively friendly acquaintances, like Mike, who was actually quite fit then, I saw your pictures.
Music, then. Punk bands and Queen and bits of the Rolling Stones, David Bowie in '95 and you never looked back. Two of your girlfriends were called Mary, which made things awkward. For you, not for them. You worked thirty-one hours straight twice a week, but you didn't fall asleep at your desk then. You didn't even have a desk - internship, St Bart's. Too much to do to sleep properly. The scarf was blue, by the way, to match your eyes, though it didn't.
John Watson, aged 22, lying belly-down on a dorm bed with socked feet and a medical journal. Sherlock had snapped a picture of it, had filed it away. The scene had been clear in his mind then and remains so now, an onslaught of colour and touches, the duvet on John's bed and the slant of John's lamp; it had been very nearly staggering. Sherlock had grinned, wide and pleased, and on the other side of the table the John who'd had twelve more years' worth of wrinkles on his face and a jumper like a cream puff and a shoulder that had once been through an explosion had grinned back, saying very silently and clearly, what's gotten into you again.
You did, Sherlock had thought, curiously sentimental for all of five seconds. Sliced under my skin.
On the train home from a case in Edinburgh, in late December 2014, Sherlock Holmes built a magic lantern.
It was quite a fantastical lantern, the proportions of which had never been matched before, a size of which John would have been proud, all panels neatly aligned, flush and coloured. Lit inside. Pictures on slippery paper and drawings in crayon, precisely divided: before John, during John - (after John). Sherlock made space for it inside his brain, and let it blaze like a strobe light.
He liked trains quite a bit. In the six hours it took him to return to London, Sherlock imagined backlit panels and coloured paper cut into shapes and figures, blue-eyed knights, dragons with starched Westwood jackets. (Le morte d'Arthur, the grand tour of Europe, John'd said - you'd like them.) He tapped his fingers upon the armrest, one fist pressed to his mouth, thinking.
This was before John, then: the acrid smells of chemicals in the darkroom and his own boyish silhouette like a black imprint against a sharply-defined wall; it was not a picture he'd ever taken, but one of Mycroft's, who liked to give cameras to his younger brother.
And this was John. During John. An Italian restaurant somewhere in London, one of the very first evenings they had had. This was what he would remember, then, of his best friend: John's beige jumper, immense enough to hide worlds and explosions and ridiculous Army jokes, and two glasses of bad wine between the two of them, and London blue and gold behind him. It was not any precise evening, nothing that had truly occurred just once - it was the amalgam of many restaurant outings. This particular combination had never existed, possibly. It became a metaphor for John, every little thing that was right and good about the man.
After John, then. It was the drive back to Baker Street from Victoria, Mycroft's car, two days after Switzerland. To this day Sherlock did not remember stepping inside, did not remember the cocaine coursing his veins, his nerves strung tight, his voice high and soft. He had been weak as a kitten, and had trembled against his seat for half an hour.
"You have work to do," Mycroft had said, steely, kind, and Sherlock had nodded, eyes shut fast.
It was growing dark out, the railway's lights shuddering to life as they trickled past. The panels were changing, the lantern spinning quietly in Sherlock's mind. It became 221C and smoking, leisurely, sitting against the chimney piece, when his latest case was not enough for him to function on. He'd only resorted to this four times, to date. Magnificent experiences. Almost worth losing John.
(No. Rewind. Rewind.)
Jim Moriarty celebrated the winter holidays by introducing an entirely novel chemical disease into every blood reserve in every hospital in London. Thirteen thoroughly unrelated people had massive strokes in a matter of three hours. The newspapers took fire, talked of serpents and dragons in the blood, which was ridiculous but excellent publicity, and London took to panic as smoothly as a whale to water. Sherlock could feel it panicking. That was clever. Oh, that was clever.
For a glorious two weeks he was a child in an opera house. There were dragons in London and the hospitals were quarantined, until the chemicals were dealt with and the blood reserves investigated. He spent six days stalking the streets and let his nights bleed into Scotland yard offices, sprawled over maps of town, making mathematical adjustments, calculating angles, probabilities, coordinates. St Bart's was cordoned off to strangers, but he could smuggle himself in, if he so wanted. It was the possibilities that were dizzying, a taste of adoration for the state of chaos.
"He's a fucking nutjob," Lestrade told him succinctly.
He was growing greyer in the hair, eyes rapid and harrowed. Tapped his fingers sharply on the rim of his cup, in his office, Sherlock perched on the corner of his desk like a long bird in a black coat. "I get all the secrecy and governmental hush, I do, but this bloke's a bloody bastard. D'you know, I visited that clinic three streets away, yesterday, for interrogation of the sick and all that bollocks, and there was this kid -"
Sherlock thought of making tiger traps.
He deserted Baker Street, which was more home now than anyplace ever had been, or anyone who wasn't dead and at the bottom of a waterfall, and he made a nest of himself and a laptop and a dozen blankets in a hotel room. He subsisted on Chinese takeaway and distasteful coffee when he remembered it; he made a magnificent trap, narrowing possibilities and locations until he had a clear sight of his objective. Possibly Jim wanted him to know; possibly he had let himself go, had thought Sherlock had, after John's death. He was bright as day, online, on the maps Sherlock built, leaving trails behind him like crumbs of bread.
They had one single communication, which went along the lines of
text received;
received at: 11:56 pm.
I think you're beginning to be my new BFF!
xoxo
and
text sent;
sent at: 00:03 am.
Who was the first?
SH
and
text received;
received at: 00:12 am.
Seb was, but he's gone chasing after a little dog in central Asia. We're going to have so much fun together, darling.
Sebastian Moran. Colonel, medalled twice, standard officer, well-respected. Officially on permanent leave. Sherlock turned his phone off.
He made a magnificent trap out of London - the city spread out in great maps, burrowed at the foot of his hotel bed - arranged contacts and rendezvouses until he had Jim exactly where he wanted him, cajoling. A cure would be found for the chemicals; it may already be. London would return to its dormant state.
He wanted Jim, though, wanted him in an empty house with sixty policeman swarming onto him with clear, polished shields, wanted him riddled with red sniper lights, dancing across the Westwood. He used every government contact, every unofficial debt, every legal loophole at his disposition, hid himself behind a hundred names, to make sure he had him, snared him in fast and proper. He weaved a stretched nexus of chains and reactions around the bowels of Moriarty's organization. When he stepped back outside it was already March. 2015. Happy New Year.
"Holy fucking hell," Anderson said, when he walked into Scotland Yard, and then, "Holy fucking crap. Sally. Sally."
"We thought you were dead," Lestrade informed him later, still a little wide-eyed and skittish despite the fact that Sherlock had been sitting in his office for all of two hours now, and he ought to process the situation, not dead, wrong conclusion, moving on. "We thought - fucking hell, Sherlock. It's been months, and. I thought. Thought you'd took off and died, made a bloody arse of yourself being heroic and gotten blown up. Again."
Sherlock shook his head, once. He had a tiger trap under his fingertips, in the palms of his hands - felt it crooning under his skin, at the edge of his throat - and he spread it in wide, coloured charts on Lestrade's desk, speaking fast until he saw the DI's eyes grow wide and soft in understanding.
Once, in Cambridge, he'd dissected a corpse.
It had been a very good corpse. It had had its head and its arms and its feet still attached, and Sherlock had cut it up one fine June morning, had probed at its lungs, its esophagus, the dark spaces between its ribs. Had counted them. Had not cut out its heart, because it had been so much more interesting to watch it, there, among its tangle of veins and arteries, all of them essential and branching out into threes. No longer beating, and brown. Linked to every limb and member extremity, a tight network. He'd opened up its arm, the skin first then the muscles, bicep, triceps, the bones like the structure of a machine, a stronghold. Same with the leg, the thigh first then the foreleg, then the calf, the nerve endings in every toe.
He'd slithered up the throat, slicing it like a slow parting mouth, then had dipped backwards and found the spine, every round bump of the vertebras knocking gently against his knuckles. Had slipped back up, changed his gloves, found the liver. He had returned to the lungs, the trachea, thinking this is where the air comes through, nitrogen and oxygen and CO2, pulled in from the nose and the mouth, down and filling the lungs, contraction, release, eject the CO2 back into the ambient air. Repeat. And again.
He had wondered what it would be like to open a living body, to see it beating, pulsing, filling with air.
They had never found John's body. Sherlock regretted that, perhaps for better reasons than the expected; he could have found his way inside the Swiss clinic they'd have taken him to for the autopsy, could have charmed his way into doing it for them. It would have been easy. And then.
He supposed it was a way of coping much like any other, cutting open one's dead - friend. Flatmate. Partner. Yes, that. Dipping inside and finding what made John, whatever was inside him that had made him so very different from all the rest of them; had he had blue blood, or green, or a golden liver, had there been something special about this man? something remarkable underneath his skin, where things had exploded, once. Well-hidden. He would have found it, too.
Moriarty died with dragons in his blood, yowling as the poison coursed his veins and every one of his men fell around him like hacked hay; and Sherlock wasn't the one who pulled the trigger but he did tell Sally who to shoot, did watch her take a breath in, hold it, the rifle in her hands making a soft, snapping noise on the exhale. It made a cheerful little hole between Jim's eyes. He was howling, and on fire, which was possibly the way he'd always intended to go, he must be so angry. It was the single greatest moment of Sherlock's life, and for a second he was merely. Standing. Buzzing. That was delightful.
Lestrade grabbed his arm, hauled him over to the Yard for a deposition while they grappled with the last few resilient members of Moriarty's guard. The night was soaked with the coloured flood of police car lights, revolving, and the fierce flashes of cameras; London passed by in great stains on the car's windowpanes.
Sitting on a hard-edged plastic chair in the fluorescent corridors of the Met, looking incongruous in his dark coat and scarf, Sherlock bought a cup of tasteless coffee (caffeine; important) and thought, triumphantly, This is the final proof. He was on withdrawal of two years and nearly eleven months since Switzerland and John, of John being dead with his head bashed in and his thorax smashed and his lungs full of water. Sherlock had tried, too, to reproduce John's high-pitched giggle on radio wavelengths and the exact outline of his fingerprints on plastic pads and the exact shade of his eyes, blue, very, in his pipettes and beakers. But John hadn't come back, and Moriarty was very dead, too, possibly over in the morgue over at St Bart's now, on Molly's dissecting table, she would like that. It would be a treat for her, getting to see the architecture of the man she'd fallen for - inside. Sherlock had never got to, after all.
And John. Wasn't going to be coming back. This was Sherlock's final conclusion, then, the sweet relief of rationality and facts sweeping over his damn mind and every wish for a miracle it'd put in without his consent, every cold pit in his chest in the morning, smoothing over They never found a body, the extraordinary doubts. I don't need John Watson, after all. Two years and very nearly eleven months. Also infatuation is horrible, never do that again. A one-case experiment.
Six days later, he started down the steps of the British Museum and walked neatly into the arms of a dead man.
"Oh," said John. "Hello."
Sherlock thought, hello.
They go to the Natural History Museum and look at dinosaurs.
John is thinner, like this. It isn't difficult to notice, although he moves in a way to hide it; the light is orange through the huge windows, splashing his pullover like a great dark stain against his chest, sticking to his hipbones. All traces of the slight middle-age chubbiness from before Switzerland are entirely gone, which is deplorable, as Sherlock liked it. Didn't eat much, then. He needs a jumper.
The dinosaurs are quite ridiculously dead, gigantic skeletons of Jim's dragons, and Sherlock is thinking of fourteen and a half ways of adding Mycroft to their ranks. The sadly regretted. He'd getting old, after all; no one would care.
"You're not killing Mycroft," John informs him. "I quite like Mycroft. He's skeevy as hell, and he has a very strange umbrella fetish I really don't want to be thinking about, but he did give me money to buy myself croissants while I was stranded in Paris. You're not killing anyone. Or anything, actually. That includes me, by the way, I don't enjoy being dead much - inconvenience, death. Can't even sleep at home." He cracks a smile, crooks his head back to look at him. "You're still not shouting. Why aren't you angry? I expected a lot of yelling."
"I'm going into shock," Sherlock murmurs, truthfully enough. He suspects he'll have a need for an orange blanket sometime in the near future. "Imagining the look on Lestrade's face when he sees you turn up."
John laughs, sharp and brief like the scratch of a match, and Sherlock focuses on it, shuts out everything else. John, standing at the foot of the staircase, under the outstretched wing of a long-dead pterodactyl, laughing at him. And he doesn't remember anything like this, it's never happened before, with John, so it's entirely new. How extraordinary.
"God, I know. It'll be amazing. If you don't take pictures so we can laugh at it in ten years I will put laxatives in your tea."
"I bought a camera while you were away," Sherlock tells him, and John smiles a trifle sadly at him, eyes crinkling.
"Tenner says Anderson faints dead," he says.
"They thought I was dead for three months," Sherlock says off-handedly, blood beating rapidly against his throat at the thought of the expression this will elicit on John's face, the smooth flicker of interest at the very peculiarity of Sherlock's entire existence. Yes, that one. That one, exactly.
"Oh. Did they, really?" John blinks at him, uncomprehending for a moment, waiting for Sherlock to open that brilliant mouth of his and make sense of the world.
Sherlock opens his mouth. Breathes in. And does exactly that.
"You killed Moran."
"I did," John says brightly. "We spent a fortnight in a motel in Prague, all happy breakfast by day and assassination attempts at night, it was fantastic. You'd have hated it."
John looks strange in the lights of the cabs; looks strange in London, as though the countries he'd travelled through have settled thin and fine across the skin of his nape, of his wrists, of his shoulders. He moves like a photograph that's not been taken yet, a movie in fragments, sharp bright splinters slotting together with tentative uncertainty. For a brief, startling minute, Sherlock longs for a camera; he wants to piece apart the colours of John's body, movements-expressions-attitude, an extraordinary trinity spread out on slick, shiny paper. He wants to make sense of this moment. London lighting up like a theatre stage makes it impossible to decode, though - everything has been painted over.
John was a writer, is a writer, and talks of the last three years with content familiarity, describes Brazil and Vienna in fierce bursts of possessiveness, the dismal winter he spent half lost in Irkutsk, chilled to the bone, the long plains of America, the caravan he lived with for three months before he started west, reached the sea. John speaks in synonyms and analogies and metaphors, portraits of the people he met, chronicles of train stations and airport terminals. They become flushed, enormous, rapt with incredible colour. Sherlock swallows it all like radio code, and lets it rest hot and heavy in his stomach.
Four hours later, he wakes up gasping in his living room armchair, panting sharp, wet breaths against it, mouth open. He is - disoriented, for a second, yearning for a cigarette with an intensity that startles him, sets his heart beating loose in his chest, bursting and close. It is dark in the flat, eleven o'clock at night, and something ugly happens in his thoracic cage then, twisting his stomach into low knots.
"Sherlock?"
John. John. He's silhouetted off in the door to the kitchen, braced against flaming light. Sherlock, regrouping badly, heaving for air, thinks with a hard shudder of the weight of his skull bashed in, the smart crack of his ribcage spilling open, lungs and bowels and blood all over the rocks. John is framed in electric light; it draws a thick, black line around him, encloses him in a dark outline and brash colours - he looks like a character in a children's book, the clean-cut panel of a magic lantern.
"Are you all right?"
"You're still alive," Sherlock remarks, drawing long, shaky legs to his chest.
"I - yes. Yeah," John agrees, and, moving forward, becomes tangible again. He perches on the armrest of Sherlock's chair, one knee pressed to his, warm and calming. He spreads his hand, slow, across the rise of his friend's shoulder, across the hot skin where his throat meets his neck. "I didn't fall back dead while you were sleeping it off, yeah."
"You," Sherlock says, and creases his eyes shut, trembling, but it is important that John understand this, understand it with his bones and his lungs, the structure of the machine. He would engrave it on his spinal cord, if he could. - "You died, John. You died, I saw it, you, there was blood. And. You were dead for three years."
"I came back," John says softly, but presses three fingers - one for each year - to the line of Sherlock's hair and the softer skin of his nape. He slinks his fingertips fleetingly under the collar of his shirt; a rapid staccato rhythm, that sounds like i'm-so-rry. Says, "I'm making tea."
This is nonsensical.
But John is moving again, returning to the kitchen, and Sherlock - Sherlock does the following, this time. He follows on unsteady, coltish legs, stumbling against the doorframe and catching there, and watches John pick up the water-filled kettle to put it on the stove. There is some stilted movement to his shoulder now - to the way it twists to reach for mugs in the cupboard, the afterimage of a vague grimace on John's face. And this is familiar; he finds the details again.
They have experienced time travel, Sherlock thinks. Language has undergone a transformation. Past tenses have smoothed back into present, John is, John has, John says, 2012 and 2015 one breath apart. John makes tea. John is a physical weight in the kitchen, displacing air. John has stepped from Reichenbach into London with Austrian green pullovers and Brazilian jeans, his hair bleached pale, an older, tender crease to the left of his mouth. He is a fantastical beast in the kitchen, still a character out of a book.
Time travel, then, because Sherlock does not remember last week, doesn't remember last month, lying low in a nondescript hotel room, days bleeding together, and before that an amalgam of cases and murders and petty domestic violence, smoking in 221C, Edinburgh. He touches a hand at John's hip, where coarse fabric scrapes his palm.
The kettle whistles sharp, and John reacts to it in time - pulls it away, switches off the gas, pours. He presses one mug in Sherlock's hand; the sides of it are warm against his fingers. Startling, like the look on John's face. Like John's face.
"I want," Sherlock says, thinks, I need a camera.
He wants pictures of every inch, skin and bone and blood and inside, wants to get John naked in their kitchen and photograph every particle of his body, his irises, the pads of his toes, his hair brushing his face, his breath in the cold, his tongue. Slick pieces of photography paper, a catalogue of them. A patchwork. If Sherlock were to put them side by side he'd want them to make John up again. Reinvent him again, in case he disappears. He'd build John up again with photography.
Instead, he says, "I never kissed you in our kitchen."
"You never kissed me at all, you sad sod," John says, sharp, but pleased. He'll taste like tea, later. Like Europe too.
"I made a magic lantern," Sherlock recalls. "Not a real one, a fake one. In my head. It was - good. For a while."
"I wrote a lot." John ducks his head, flattens one hand across the hair at the back of his neck. He looks embarrassed for a fleeting second. "I wanted, I. I needed to find the right words, what I'd get to say to you, if you didn't punch me in the face and slam the door on me. You didn't, though." He grins at Sherlock for a moment, boyish. "God, I missed you."
"Those words, then."
"Those too. Among others. I'd throw in please forgive me if I thought it would do any good."
"Not yet," Sherlock allows. "Tomorrow. Tomorrow, maybe. We'll talk about it."
"Okay." John exhales, slow and deep. "Okay. I can work with that. I could work with - if you told me to go away now I probably would - I'd come back later, if you wanted."
Sherlock stares at him, slightly appalled, conscious of the hypothetical. "No," he says, "I - no."
"Figured that much," John mutters, looking quite at home. Close-up, there is a splashing scar across his left temple, white and smooth. "I don't want to - I love it here, you know? I love this kitchen, and I love the flat, and - god, that's your violin on the mantle there, I haven't seen it in three years. I haven't even been upstairs yet. And I, you haven't thrown my favorite brand of tea out, and you kept my mug, and. I love this place," he says, looking horrified. "I just. I love it, Sherlock. Being here."
"Good," Sherlock murmurs. "Stay, then."
He wakes up once more that night, three o' clock in the morning; the flat seems turned into a darkroom, red heat spread out across the walls from the side lamp. He is lying on the sofa between John's thighs, the back of his head resting in the furrow between John's hip and leg, and John's back is bowed as he leans over him. He's keeping Sherlock's camera between his hands. Sherlock blinks back slowly, which draws a shaky, sharp breath out of John.
"What are you doing," he asks, throat raspy. His lungs are buttery-soft.
John pulls the camera away, smiles, and frames Sherlock's face between his hands. "Immortalizing you," he says. "Don't move."
.end.