Fic: Gone to Feed the Roses (Elegant and Curled) (2/4)
Title: Gone to Feed the Roses (Elegant and Curled)
Rating: PG-13
Pairing: Sherlock/John
Word Count: 5,746
Summary: John Watson is no one's weeping widow, and he knows that it's not impossible to cheat death. Spoilers for 2.03 - The Reichenbach Fall; Warnings for Suicidal Ideation.
Disclaimer: I own nothing but the plot. Title credit to Edna St. Vincent Millay.
Author's Notes: This was a long time in coming, and it's only here now because of the talents of the incomparable sangueuk and the encouragement of weepingnaiad, togoboldly, na_shao, and savetomorrow.
Previous: Part One
Gone to Feed the Roses (Elegant and Curled)
Part Two
But the thing is, you see: John Watson's not an idiot. He can see the signs.
John Watson knows the difference between the improbable and the impossible. He can see inside the space between hope and despair. And John Watson knows when the Game's been won, or lost-when it's over either way-and when there are still moves left to be made before the finish.
John Watson is the kind of man you call when you’re in over your head, when you need something, someone to turn the tide. He’s the man who can keep a level head, a steady hand; the man who holds the ace that brings the house of cards tumbling down. John Watson is the kind of man who you bring in to close the match, to level the playing field.
To win the goddamned war.
_______________________________
It’s likely best to start the story where it rightfully began. John Watson doesn’t much like making assumptions, doesn’t appreciate it being taken for granted that everybody’s on the same page. That everyone understands, and sees the truth buried in among the trifle and the fluff.
So, yes. John Watson believes in starting with beginnings.
When he was in Afghanistan, John befriended a local: a new father barely past twenty with an easy smile and a quick wit. They took a mutual liking to one another, for reasons John still can’t quite fathom, though it’s a recurring theme in his life, isn’t it-finding friends in the most unlikely of souls. There was nothing quantitative to be gained from the connection, though, and John was grateful for it: that calm place in a perpetual storm, out there-the little joys, the minor distractions of friendship, trading words from both their native languages, swapping favours for home-cooked meals from the man’s young wife. It kept him grounded, kept him just this side of sane: holding the baby until he drooled into John’s DPM jacket, trading home-cooked khameerbob for a Yorkie bar from his Rat-Pack, learning how to form his mouth around the unfamiliar diphthongs of a new tongue.
On the whole, he processes his deployment as largely a study in poles, dichotomous experiences of action and monotony, and it all blurs together for the most part: heat and gunfire and the breeze in the sand, his ID tags searing the skin of his chest in the night. But he remembers the raid-recalls that one particular incursion as if it happened yesterday, were happening right now: remembers taking fire from the insurgents at dusk, remembers the feel of his footfalls on unsteady ground and the sting, the graze of a bullet that couldn’t be said to draw blood so much as bead it, single drops shaking free as John ran, returned fire, dotted the ground with red as he pursued, lined the shot, fired. Again and again and again.
When it was over, John looked for his friend, sought out the family: the veiled wife, the young son. He found the wife sobbing, he found the son crying, inconsolable where he was clutched to her chest. And John remembers the pull, the clench in his gut when he saw that blank stare, the pale skin, blood soaked hair clumped at the temple, caked in dirt; John remembers when he realised the simple truth: he’d never learned the man’s name.
_______________________________
But that’s the way it goes, isn’t it? Men die, widows are made, and the war goes on. John never expected anything less.
What John doesn’t quite expect is to be taken captive ten days later.
He’s not entirely sure if they even want information from him, if they’re planning to interrogate him, or if they’re just putting him through hell for their own twisted amusement. He gets beaten, bloodied; he’s got too many bruises, broken bones to match-the lacerations are getting infected, and he’s rancid with his own dried vomit down the front of what’s left, what’s not been torn or taken of his uniform. He cries out when he can; his throat gets raw quick and he’s feverish, delusional maybe.
They stick him in solitude when he gets bad enough, when he causes enough trouble-sensory deprivation’s actually almost a relief with the way his body’s shaking, the way the marrow in his bones is drying up and rattling, the haze over his pupils a frost that makes any light scatter, psychedelic and confused. He’s a right mess, and he’s only just close enough to consciousness to recognise that fact; his pulse is weak and erratic, that vital muscle trembling at awkward intervals in rhythms he can’t follow through the fog, and he’s lost blood, it’s the desert and he’s freezing, and John knows what’s coming, he’s not a fool.
So when he sees the light flood his universe, take control and drive pins through the soft-spots in his skull, he’s sure that it’s an illusion, a hallucination. He recognises the silhouette that cuts through his failing vision as it approaches, seen as if through broken glass. It’s his friend, the man he’d seen dead at his wife’s feet, who’d left his crying son: a vision, resurrected. Impossible.
It’s getting hard, now, really fucking difficult: it’s getting hard to breathe.
They’ve traded words, phrases, but even if he’d possessed his full mental faculties, John wouldn’t have been able to grasp the terms, the soft mutterings that the man, the ghost before him utters. He wouldn’t understand the meaning behind the whispers, soft and careful as the man kneels, takes John’s pulse beneath the jaw (almost, not quite-close enough to how John had shown him, months ago) and draws him up, smoothes his hair away from his face and stares, searching in John’s eyes for something, and John cannot focus, can’t think, but the spectre sees enough, it seems. He draws back, reaches behind him, fishes for something, and John exhales with some effort. The end’s getting close, he’s sure of it.
It has to be close, now; he’s losing grip, he can’t keep hold.
His friend, his own personal phantom: John sees his motions in fractured bits, speckled in with bouts of blackness. He sees the apparition dipping the tip of his index finger into a jar, something clear coating his skin, vaguely iridescent. He leans over and grasps John’s chin, urges John’s lips open and slides his finger, forces the liquid onto the tip of John’s tongue, down against his bottom gums, across the backs of his teeth once his jaw unclenches and gives up, opens for this small gift, this first drink in days: almost nonexistent and yet perfect, bitter and smooth and unthinkably cold, like nitrogen and dead hearts of stars.
“Kha ishtya walare,” his friend says softly. John doesn’t know what those words mean, but he remembers them: smiles and the scent of boiling water and spice. He runs his tongue across his lips, traces the contours of his own mouth and swallows, pants openly like it took all the effort in the world to manage just that, and fuck all, but it nearly did. He’s slipping.
“Da,” John makes the movement, shapes the word but there aren’t any sounds. His throat is on fire, his vocal cords stiff and tight, already surrendered, and he tries, he tries and his eyes slip closed, forfeit; he moves his lips and hopes it’s just that his hearing’s abandoned him for the moment, that the words still come when they’re meaningless, when it doesn’t matter at all. “ D-da ceh sh-shi day?”
Darmal, comes the answer from the silence, the sluice of his own blood forcing its way, stubborn through drying veins, and John knows that word, the way it bursts forth from the ether like a supernova: medicine.
John wonders what kind of medicine could help him now, here in this cave. John wonders what kind of medicine could sound so sad in his straining ears.
John knows the kind of medicine he’s hoping for; the kind he’s been praying to an absent God to receive for days, now; for weeks.
John begins to shake in earnest, and he can’t stop it; he coughs, his lungs rebelling and contorting, skinned from the inside, the tissue flaking off and searing, acid in his chest.
“Qaraar, qaraar,” comes the voice, the hands on his body easing him, restraining him, keeping him close to the ground but John’s losing feeling, losing himself: everything is distant and he watches from afar until the watching, the seeing is lost irretrievably and he can’t even mind it, can’t even regret. The sound of his heartbeat in his ears is deafening, maddening, and there’s something wrong with the rhythm, the cadence; more wrong than it’s been yet, and he knows this, but not why-his mind’s too hazy, his neurones firing languidly at best.
In the end-in the heart-wrenching end, there’s neither darkness nor silence. In the end, there’s no fade into nothingness that ushers him out.
There’s an explosion, there’s fire in his chest and a shout in no voice or language he’s ever known-something elemental, a cry from the universe that rattles in his limbs before he goes limp; that lets his heart shake out the last of its fears before it lies dormant, relieved.
It’s all that, and then static. Sameness. Nothing.
The eye and the end of a storm.
John can’t bring himself to mind.
_______________________________
In stringing the clues together and following the scent, John finds that the real truth of the matter is that most people are very easily bought.
There’s an unintelligible map on the wall that, when read, points south, and only John can read it. So he goes north, steals away and finds himself an old country coroner who looks about ready to drop on his own examination table, if John’s being honest. He doesn’t offer much by way of details, mostly just issues instructions, gives orders with the authority of his rank and the soft, persuasive edges he’s honed for years at sickbeds, the kind that make people want to follow through.
He gives an address, a time-four hours off-asks for the body to be found and retrieved, to be left alone in the morgue and kept safe. He asks for the death certificate to be signed per usual, records of a cremation that will not take place to be filed, and no questions to be answered after the fact, should any curious bystanders start poking about.
John slides more money across the table than he makes in a month, and swallows hard, stands firm, and waits for his heart to stop jackhammering at his ribs because no matter how sure he is, no matter how much faith he still has in that godforsaken bastard Sherlock Holmes, this is madness. This is unconscionable and indefensible and just plain absurd. This is invading Afghanistan and running after unwitting Angelenos and dodging the Met and shooting subpar cabbies and giggling at crime scenes and Semtex and hallucinations and sugared-tea hounds and breadcrumbs, and-
This is by far the most sane thing John’s ever done.
The coroner looks him over and shrugs, takes his payments and slips it into his breast pocket, lets the seams of his threadbare shirt strain at his chest with the banknotes, and John nods. He doesn’t trust the man, doesn’t exactly distrust him either. It’s not a gamble, he thinks, that the man will do as he’s asked for the crucial bits of this harebrained idea: John’s fairly confident he’ll be pronounced dead and on his way to the continent within twelve hours, if he’s lucky, and “fairly confident” is actually a fairly good place to be for him, these days.
It’s afterwards that he fears for, but after isn’t quite so important, really.
John just needs enough time to disappear, needs to make it hard enough to figure his plan and follow the leads, difficult enough for even Mycroft to deduce through whichever means he’s deployed to keep tabs on John these days. John just needs enough time to get away, to get to the only place that the clues point toward, the only place that feels right in his gut and the centre of his chest, the place that pulls and makes him think that maybe, maybe, because Sherlock spoke the language sometimes, muttered to himself, to slides beneath his microscope or his rosin as he primed his bow, and John remembers the timbre of that voice, lets it send a shiver up his spine for the barest instant before he nods, and leaves, and knows that it won’t matter as long as he can get away because once it’s done, once he’s gone, once he’s found what he’s looking for and set things to rights, he’ll figure out the rest as he goes.
They’ll figure out the rest, like they always did.
So he goes to the address, and he sits in a chair that smells of rot and stagnation, and he takes out the extract, the poison, the nectar of a plant treated careful, so innocent, shimmering in the lamplight from the street through the dust-caked windowpanes. He breathes, and he prays, once again, one more time-please God, let me live-because he’s got a job to do, a case to solve, and there’s a man out there who is in need of him; who John knows, without question, that he-John Hamish Watson-needs in turn. Rather fiercely.
So, in the end, it’s far easier to fake his own death than John could ever have dreamed.
He swallows the liquid, the darmal, and revels in the slide of it down his throat before the colours dim and he’s lost.
_______________________________
It’s only after the dust settles that John really stops to observe the things he’d only barely seen, only partially processed through trembling fingers and tear-clouded eyes.
John washes his hands raw once he comes around, once he thinks enough to wash anything, to get up from the sofa and move. He washes his hands to get the traces of blood off, to make them warm, to make them feel something other than the numb, ice-coldness of that wrist, that still skin beneath his fingertips where blood no longer pumped, where John couldn’t time the seconds, the endless moments passing by the beat of that violent, vibrant heart. His own flesh is livid, red from the heat of the water, but he still feels frigid, can’t rinse away the touch of that chill.
Algor mortis, when it all starts to coalesce, is the first clue.
_______________________________
After he confronts the elder Holmes, after he relieves some of the building pressure in his chest and allows himself that small, transient space to start parsing what it is he truly thinks about the man, about this amalgam of global power and shadow governance personified and balanced on a brolly-once the ether starts to clear and there’s an identifiable aim to the task of breathing once again, John makes a point of popping into the Diogenes Club at least twice a week. The absurdity of the tradition is a refuge for him, now; 221B is quiet because it’s bereft, because there’s been loss, but this place is quiet by choice. There’s something empowering in that sense of agency, that capacity to defy the order of things, the inevitable.
And John needs to feel empowered, now. He needs to know that what he holds in his hands and turns over in his mind aren’t just the last gasps of a desperate soul, inconsequential scraps that he’s betting the last of his sanity on. He needs to know that it’s more than wishful thinking when his heart beats harder, shows more life than he’s seen in weeks when he sets the pieces side by side and they come together, almost magnetic. He needs to know this, all these not-random bits; he needs to know that they’re parts of a whole: the only whole that seems to matter, anymore.
But that’s not the only reason he stops in.
Mycroft really only nods at him in passing, like he’s not at all surprised to see him, but then Mycroft rarely seems to be surprised at anything. John wonders if he suspects, if he approves, or if he’s just that unflappable; just that keen on tracking John’s footpaths through the CCTV feeds.
Not that John can really judge anymore, because Mycroft’s not the only one watching, the only one gathering data from the sidelines. John’s picked up a trick or two from the Brothers Holmes, as it so happens, and he’s a crack-shot if the RAMC ever spat one out. His eyes are sharp as daggers. Unveiling.
And those lethal-dagger eyes of his: they tend to focus, surreptitiously, on the typeface emblazoned on the papers Mycroft unfolds to the centre, to a few pages aft. Never the first pages. Always the back.
And it’s not just The Post, see, or even The Times. Mycroft reads more than just the London papers. But it’s not merely a smattering of foreign press, either, not just a random survey: not just Córdoban publications or Belorussian business weeklies. They’re from everywhere. Nowhere. They’re in languages John’s never seen before, that don’t even look legible now and again. They’re minutiae. They’re wildly significant.
Belarus. England. Argentina.
Then Taloussanomat. Finnish.
And NewsDay. From Zimbabwe. The Georgian rezonansi. Shabab Yemeni.
It’s part-whim, part-intuition, and partly a maddening, untenable belief that the universe adds up in the end, sometimes, a faith that he can’t seem to kill: it’s all of these things and none of them and more that lead him to look more closely at the papers, the stacks that land on the doorstep every morning and start recognising lines, logos; to start matching images behind his eyes to print in black and white and start looking for something more instrumental than simple crimes, more earth-shattering than mere illegality.
Something that could change the world and shock even the deadest hearts back into beating.
And he doesn’t have to concentrate to see the signs, to maximise his visual memory or whatnot. The suggestion that the average human memory on visual matters is only sixty-something percent accurate is absolute rubbish, John knows; doesn’t count for a bloody thing when it comes to things that really matter, because John sees some things, some unseeable, heart-rending, world-crushing things with one-hundred percent clarity in his nightmares, his waking dreams. He knows.
And he sees, too-sees with a sudden perfect clarity in the newsprint, on the paper: this is the lynchpin, the opening gambit.
John had accepted the challenge long before he’d even seen the board.
He assumed that Sherlock had them all delivered, had received the papers for some reason apart from the Fall, the End: John’s had quite the ample bit of time to ponder what happened, how it all peaked and shattered, and he doesn’t think that Sherlock knew it was coming, not for certain, not so far in advance. He knew the potential was there, and perhaps he moved the pieces to protect what he could, but too many pawns were sacrificed for it to have been a real, solid plan. It was makeshift. It was cobblestone, shaky: riddled with holes.
John wonders, now, if he’d have been able to pick any of it apart if Sherlock’d actually had the time, the foresight, the unthinkable cognisance of his own finitude, his own unshirkable mortality: he wonders if he’d have been able to figure it out, to so much as suspect in the end, if he’d been up against the true extent of that improbable genius, that deft and dexterous mind.
But he doesn’t waste much time with the wondering. He’s wasted enough time as it is.
Because it’s obvious, when the data is in front of him, when he pieces that were always there rearrange and reveal something new. Because it’s a sequence. Alphabetical, geographical, intricate, subtle. There is a sequence.
If John’s learned anything from this business, from any of it, it’s that there’s rarely a sequence in this world that doesn’t mean something.
And John knows he’s only seeing the first layer, the idiot’s sign. There’s more. There has to be.
And because they were Sherlock’s-because they were delivered to a Mr. Sherlock Holmes and John couldn’t bear to part with so much as the anaemic, soulless typeface spelling out that name, that perfect, painful, infuriating name belonging to the sort of man who could swap the poles of the globe and turn everything on its head like it was made to be that way, like the rush of your blood in the wrong direction and the shift of gravity and the extra pressure lingering in your chest, the lightheadedness, the disorientation-like it’s all fine, because you were upside-down anyway, before a madman grabbed you and sent you racing back to rights.
Because they belonged to Sherlock, by rights, John never tossed any of the papers. Not a single one.
John knows where to go to start drawing back those layers, and he’s taken gross anatomy. John can peel back the epidermis, the dermis, can slice through the subcutis down to the veins, the arterial pathways so as to reveal the heart.
Here, and now: John will reveal the heart.
_______________________________
In the desert, he wakes up, and he knows. He knows before anyone else tells him.
This isn’t death. This isn’t heaven, or hell. It’s calm. Quiet. Hot. Rough. There’s sand in the wind. There’s the smell of mud, of green, of bogs and stagnant water, rancid thrush on the gusts that catch his sweat-soaked hair.
This is the same goddamned nightmare, the same casting of the die in every moment before a bullet came to break him and his time would finally be up. This is more of the same.
John sighs, and doesn’t know whether or not to be grateful.
_______________________________
In the morgue, in a strange town where the air taste different, settles wrong inside his lungs, he wakes up, alone; naked beneath a sheet. He blinks. He breathes. He grins.
John gets dressed, tucks his gun into the waist of his jeans, and he doesn’t look back.
_______________________________
Like clockwork-like a madman breathing soot and grasping desperate at the very end of everything, John goes through the papers. All of them. He orders each publication and reorders them and reads them front to back more times than he can count. None of it makes sense, really, but he begins to pick up on things, little aberrations, works on figuring and pondering and parsing out the inexplicable.
He wonders if he’s lost it, if he’s gone off his rocker, more times than is likely acceptable by any generally-accepted standards of normality, but he left “normal” behind when he took the room and moved in to 221B, didn’t he? And he isn’t about to start looking back now.
So he pushes onward, tries to make some sense of it all, keeps looking for inroads when he reaches a dead end, and he makes himself remember, forces himself to focus on the fact that that day, that fateful fucking day when he’d watched his best friend fall and felt his heart stop and searched for a pulse that couldn’t be found, he fixates on the simple fact that those fingers, curled up like that: it was as if they’d been dead for hours, like they’d been still for far too long.
Rigor mortis is the second clue.
_______________________________
Bone structure, coupled with the fact that John had always observed better than people gave him credit for: that’s the third clue
Because John did observe, and he observed Sherlock better than any being in the whole sodding cosmos-living or dead or a bit of both, even, if there’s a need to get technical.
John figures, though, that something so obvious would speak all on its own.
And John can blame a lot of things on wishful thinking, desperation; on being a little bit heartbroken and a little bit soul-sick. He can maybe blame the coolness, the stiffness on shock.
But there’s an angle, there’s a way that light plays off of those goddamned cheekbones that John would know anywhere; a way that liquid, regardless of its viscosity, traces the planes of that face: raindrops and water from showers, mild corrosives from experiments gone awry, falsified tears to coerce witnesses and suspects alike. And the blood on that face spilled in all the wrong ways.
Those cheekbones weren’t Sherlock’s. And John would fucking know.
_______________________________
John doesn’t remember much of being shot, to be honest. He’ll throw vague recollections out to the doctors, to the therapists who try to tell him how he’s feeling and what he’s fit to do, but the god’s-honest truth is that the impact, the injury-the process of being invalided home and deemed obsolete-is mostly a blur. The human mind’s a tricky thing, though. It doesn’t like to grasp at the thoughts that make it numb, or worse, that sear within the gyri and the sulci; that burn inside the folds of grey.
It’s not important to remember the bullet, really; John’s perspective had changed after captivity, after seeing the light and the dark and the dark and the light, after leaving and coming back. He’d faced death and fooled the enemy and fooled himself, and made a strange sort of peace with what lies beyond in those moments. The bullet didn’t matter so much after he’d swallowed the liquid that ended everything just to start it all again.
And that liquid, that elixir; he remembers that like a beacon in the dark, the shine of it, the taste and texture, the burn, and before he can attach the memory, the colour to some wild, boundless, depthless eyes, he remembers it because it wasn’t just darmal, it was nectar and ambrosia, it was curses and the selling of souls; it was tears and blessings and gifts and loss-Romeo and Juliet, the mystical, impossible thing that mimics ends where none exist, that fakes and cheats the Great Equaliser, the Grim Reaper himself.
His friend-Ghairat, he learns: brave as his name, and that’s another thing he won’t forget: the man who saved him and damned him and fed him poison to keep his soul- Ghairat is there when he wakes, smiles at him, eases him back to his bearings as he shakes lassitude and quietus from his aching, broken limbs; waits for it to lift from his mind before he asks questions, before he even tries to process the inconceivable.
But Ghairat is patient, lets John prod at him a bit, lets John try to puzzle out his existence despite John’s memories of Ghairat’s corpse. He shows John the shoots, the leaves of the plant that the extract comes from, that iridescent solution: native to this place alone and hidden, feared and revered-it’s a secret passed down bloodlines and kept in the shadows of trees, in the hollows of the mountains themselves, writ in the rock where the roots take hold, where they thrive in the dark. He hears the stories, myths of miracles, accidents of early medicine and tribal pharmacology, tales of resurrection and deceit and the thwarting of enemies, the close calls and of living to fight another day by feigning demise. He learns how death can be a matter of perspective, sometimes, a matter of one moment to the next, and that if a head is pressed to the chest in silence, a shrewd ear can parse the difference, but no other.
A ruthless, incredible magic trick, if John ever saw one.
It’s Sherlock’s words that rekindle the memory, and really, once he coaxes meaning from each of the clues; once the truth emerges from the pieces and the parts, John doesn’t have to ponder the hows. Only the whens, and the wheres. He doesn’t quite understand the chemistry of it, and perhaps it’s reckless, as a physician, as a responsible human being, maybe, to risk it all to chance, to take the plunge and trust in the unknown things of this world, the mysteries in the night, but John doesn’t care. He knows the truth, has known forever now and he can’t believe he’d forgotten, let his mind go numb for so long with needless, endless, leaden-loving grief.
Because John knows that it’s not impossible to cheat death.
And once you’ve ruled out the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be true.
Must be.
And it wasn't just the trauma, or the impact, or the light. The cheekbones wearing red weren’t sharp enough. The colour of those sightless eyes didn’t match quite right. The >feel of him was far too stiff. The body was much too cold.
So John doesn’t waste time, doesn’t spend much energy thinking on the how, once he’s made up his mind to believe. The when takes too long for his comfort-too long for his sanity and the tightness between his ribs; and the where is simply as far away as he can get. He makes his plan, and takes his leave, and sends the devil his regards in the doing.
The why of it all, of course, was never in doubt to begin with.
_______________________________
The train affords him more anonymity than flying would, these days especially. He books a seat on the first Eurostar out of St Pancras, and he feels guilty for pickpocketing the coroner, for using the old man’s bank card for the ticket, but there are worse things he could have done; worse things he has done, to be sure-that he may yet do when he gets to where he’s going: when he finds the part of himself that’s been missing for far too long and slips it back into place-once he sees how well it fits, how worn its become while it was away.
There are worse things he’ll do, if he’s not whole upon returning. Much worse.
He slipped an extra fifty quid into the man’s desk drawer before he left, either way; he hopes that’ll do.
The chair he’s in is uncomfortable, and the food he buys is unsatisfying (as train meals always are). It settles like ice, like lead in his stomach so he doesn’t finish it; can only stare out the window at the darkness as they pass beneath the Channel, thinking of possibilities and desperation and what if he’s wrong, and what if there’s nothing, and what if Sherlock’s really buried where his grave hits the ground, and what of all the words he hasn’t said, hasn’t owned amidst the few he’s been able to grind out to that burnished headstone-what of the unthinkable, the probable, the believable and the rational and Jesus, Jesus, he can’t.
John thinks of words, the last words. Their last words, said face to face or over a phone line, and the syllables taste sour on John’s tongue either way.
Fuck, but John can’t be wrong.
Because... because yes, yes: friends protect people.
But love really is the most vicious of all motivators; it does more than just protect.
Love consumes. Love obscures. Love open doors and lifts curtains and lets in the light so you can see. Love drives and grips and won’t let go. Love will strangle you, throttle you, cut off the circulation and close off all the air if you don’t keep watch, if you don’t recognise the power that it holds.
Love will kill-even its own self-in order to save the beloved.
Love takes all prisoners, love levels all barriers, love ravages walls and hearts and souls alike. Love doesn’t just protect, it turns out.
Love does something else, entirely.
The only trace John leaves when he departs is the shape of his cheek, damp against the glass of the window at his seat.
Next: Part Three
Rating: PG-13
Pairing: Sherlock/John
Word Count: 5,746
Summary: John Watson is no one's weeping widow, and he knows that it's not impossible to cheat death. Spoilers for 2.03 - The Reichenbach Fall; Warnings for Suicidal Ideation.
Disclaimer: I own nothing but the plot. Title credit to Edna St. Vincent Millay.
Author's Notes: This was a long time in coming, and it's only here now because of the talents of the incomparable sangueuk and the encouragement of weepingnaiad, togoboldly, na_shao, and savetomorrow.
Previous: Part One
Gone to Feed the Roses (Elegant and Curled)
Part Two
But the thing is, you see: John Watson's not an idiot. He can see the signs.
John Watson knows the difference between the improbable and the impossible. He can see inside the space between hope and despair. And John Watson knows when the Game's been won, or lost-when it's over either way-and when there are still moves left to be made before the finish.
John Watson is the kind of man you call when you’re in over your head, when you need something, someone to turn the tide. He’s the man who can keep a level head, a steady hand; the man who holds the ace that brings the house of cards tumbling down. John Watson is the kind of man who you bring in to close the match, to level the playing field.
To win the goddamned war.
_______________________________
It’s likely best to start the story where it rightfully began. John Watson doesn’t much like making assumptions, doesn’t appreciate it being taken for granted that everybody’s on the same page. That everyone understands, and sees the truth buried in among the trifle and the fluff.
So, yes. John Watson believes in starting with beginnings.
When he was in Afghanistan, John befriended a local: a new father barely past twenty with an easy smile and a quick wit. They took a mutual liking to one another, for reasons John still can’t quite fathom, though it’s a recurring theme in his life, isn’t it-finding friends in the most unlikely of souls. There was nothing quantitative to be gained from the connection, though, and John was grateful for it: that calm place in a perpetual storm, out there-the little joys, the minor distractions of friendship, trading words from both their native languages, swapping favours for home-cooked meals from the man’s young wife. It kept him grounded, kept him just this side of sane: holding the baby until he drooled into John’s DPM jacket, trading home-cooked khameerbob for a Yorkie bar from his Rat-Pack, learning how to form his mouth around the unfamiliar diphthongs of a new tongue.
On the whole, he processes his deployment as largely a study in poles, dichotomous experiences of action and monotony, and it all blurs together for the most part: heat and gunfire and the breeze in the sand, his ID tags searing the skin of his chest in the night. But he remembers the raid-recalls that one particular incursion as if it happened yesterday, were happening right now: remembers taking fire from the insurgents at dusk, remembers the feel of his footfalls on unsteady ground and the sting, the graze of a bullet that couldn’t be said to draw blood so much as bead it, single drops shaking free as John ran, returned fire, dotted the ground with red as he pursued, lined the shot, fired. Again and again and again.
When it was over, John looked for his friend, sought out the family: the veiled wife, the young son. He found the wife sobbing, he found the son crying, inconsolable where he was clutched to her chest. And John remembers the pull, the clench in his gut when he saw that blank stare, the pale skin, blood soaked hair clumped at the temple, caked in dirt; John remembers when he realised the simple truth: he’d never learned the man’s name.
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But that’s the way it goes, isn’t it? Men die, widows are made, and the war goes on. John never expected anything less.
What John doesn’t quite expect is to be taken captive ten days later.
He’s not entirely sure if they even want information from him, if they’re planning to interrogate him, or if they’re just putting him through hell for their own twisted amusement. He gets beaten, bloodied; he’s got too many bruises, broken bones to match-the lacerations are getting infected, and he’s rancid with his own dried vomit down the front of what’s left, what’s not been torn or taken of his uniform. He cries out when he can; his throat gets raw quick and he’s feverish, delusional maybe.
They stick him in solitude when he gets bad enough, when he causes enough trouble-sensory deprivation’s actually almost a relief with the way his body’s shaking, the way the marrow in his bones is drying up and rattling, the haze over his pupils a frost that makes any light scatter, psychedelic and confused. He’s a right mess, and he’s only just close enough to consciousness to recognise that fact; his pulse is weak and erratic, that vital muscle trembling at awkward intervals in rhythms he can’t follow through the fog, and he’s lost blood, it’s the desert and he’s freezing, and John knows what’s coming, he’s not a fool.
So when he sees the light flood his universe, take control and drive pins through the soft-spots in his skull, he’s sure that it’s an illusion, a hallucination. He recognises the silhouette that cuts through his failing vision as it approaches, seen as if through broken glass. It’s his friend, the man he’d seen dead at his wife’s feet, who’d left his crying son: a vision, resurrected. Impossible.
It’s getting hard, now, really fucking difficult: it’s getting hard to breathe.
They’ve traded words, phrases, but even if he’d possessed his full mental faculties, John wouldn’t have been able to grasp the terms, the soft mutterings that the man, the ghost before him utters. He wouldn’t understand the meaning behind the whispers, soft and careful as the man kneels, takes John’s pulse beneath the jaw (almost, not quite-close enough to how John had shown him, months ago) and draws him up, smoothes his hair away from his face and stares, searching in John’s eyes for something, and John cannot focus, can’t think, but the spectre sees enough, it seems. He draws back, reaches behind him, fishes for something, and John exhales with some effort. The end’s getting close, he’s sure of it.
It has to be close, now; he’s losing grip, he can’t keep hold.
His friend, his own personal phantom: John sees his motions in fractured bits, speckled in with bouts of blackness. He sees the apparition dipping the tip of his index finger into a jar, something clear coating his skin, vaguely iridescent. He leans over and grasps John’s chin, urges John’s lips open and slides his finger, forces the liquid onto the tip of John’s tongue, down against his bottom gums, across the backs of his teeth once his jaw unclenches and gives up, opens for this small gift, this first drink in days: almost nonexistent and yet perfect, bitter and smooth and unthinkably cold, like nitrogen and dead hearts of stars.
“Kha ishtya walare,” his friend says softly. John doesn’t know what those words mean, but he remembers them: smiles and the scent of boiling water and spice. He runs his tongue across his lips, traces the contours of his own mouth and swallows, pants openly like it took all the effort in the world to manage just that, and fuck all, but it nearly did. He’s slipping.
“Da,” John makes the movement, shapes the word but there aren’t any sounds. His throat is on fire, his vocal cords stiff and tight, already surrendered, and he tries, he tries and his eyes slip closed, forfeit; he moves his lips and hopes it’s just that his hearing’s abandoned him for the moment, that the words still come when they’re meaningless, when it doesn’t matter at all. “ D-da ceh sh-shi day?”
Darmal, comes the answer from the silence, the sluice of his own blood forcing its way, stubborn through drying veins, and John knows that word, the way it bursts forth from the ether like a supernova: medicine.
John wonders what kind of medicine could help him now, here in this cave. John wonders what kind of medicine could sound so sad in his straining ears.
John knows the kind of medicine he’s hoping for; the kind he’s been praying to an absent God to receive for days, now; for weeks.
John begins to shake in earnest, and he can’t stop it; he coughs, his lungs rebelling and contorting, skinned from the inside, the tissue flaking off and searing, acid in his chest.
“Qaraar, qaraar,” comes the voice, the hands on his body easing him, restraining him, keeping him close to the ground but John’s losing feeling, losing himself: everything is distant and he watches from afar until the watching, the seeing is lost irretrievably and he can’t even mind it, can’t even regret. The sound of his heartbeat in his ears is deafening, maddening, and there’s something wrong with the rhythm, the cadence; more wrong than it’s been yet, and he knows this, but not why-his mind’s too hazy, his neurones firing languidly at best.
In the end-in the heart-wrenching end, there’s neither darkness nor silence. In the end, there’s no fade into nothingness that ushers him out.
There’s an explosion, there’s fire in his chest and a shout in no voice or language he’s ever known-something elemental, a cry from the universe that rattles in his limbs before he goes limp; that lets his heart shake out the last of its fears before it lies dormant, relieved.
It’s all that, and then static. Sameness. Nothing.
The eye and the end of a storm.
John can’t bring himself to mind.
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In stringing the clues together and following the scent, John finds that the real truth of the matter is that most people are very easily bought.
There’s an unintelligible map on the wall that, when read, points south, and only John can read it. So he goes north, steals away and finds himself an old country coroner who looks about ready to drop on his own examination table, if John’s being honest. He doesn’t offer much by way of details, mostly just issues instructions, gives orders with the authority of his rank and the soft, persuasive edges he’s honed for years at sickbeds, the kind that make people want to follow through.
He gives an address, a time-four hours off-asks for the body to be found and retrieved, to be left alone in the morgue and kept safe. He asks for the death certificate to be signed per usual, records of a cremation that will not take place to be filed, and no questions to be answered after the fact, should any curious bystanders start poking about.
John slides more money across the table than he makes in a month, and swallows hard, stands firm, and waits for his heart to stop jackhammering at his ribs because no matter how sure he is, no matter how much faith he still has in that godforsaken bastard Sherlock Holmes, this is madness. This is unconscionable and indefensible and just plain absurd. This is invading Afghanistan and running after unwitting Angelenos and dodging the Met and shooting subpar cabbies and giggling at crime scenes and Semtex and hallucinations and sugared-tea hounds and breadcrumbs, and-
This is by far the most sane thing John’s ever done.
The coroner looks him over and shrugs, takes his payments and slips it into his breast pocket, lets the seams of his threadbare shirt strain at his chest with the banknotes, and John nods. He doesn’t trust the man, doesn’t exactly distrust him either. It’s not a gamble, he thinks, that the man will do as he’s asked for the crucial bits of this harebrained idea: John’s fairly confident he’ll be pronounced dead and on his way to the continent within twelve hours, if he’s lucky, and “fairly confident” is actually a fairly good place to be for him, these days.
It’s afterwards that he fears for, but after isn’t quite so important, really.
John just needs enough time to disappear, needs to make it hard enough to figure his plan and follow the leads, difficult enough for even Mycroft to deduce through whichever means he’s deployed to keep tabs on John these days. John just needs enough time to get away, to get to the only place that the clues point toward, the only place that feels right in his gut and the centre of his chest, the place that pulls and makes him think that maybe, maybe, because Sherlock spoke the language sometimes, muttered to himself, to slides beneath his microscope or his rosin as he primed his bow, and John remembers the timbre of that voice, lets it send a shiver up his spine for the barest instant before he nods, and leaves, and knows that it won’t matter as long as he can get away because once it’s done, once he’s gone, once he’s found what he’s looking for and set things to rights, he’ll figure out the rest as he goes.
They’ll figure out the rest, like they always did.
So he goes to the address, and he sits in a chair that smells of rot and stagnation, and he takes out the extract, the poison, the nectar of a plant treated careful, so innocent, shimmering in the lamplight from the street through the dust-caked windowpanes. He breathes, and he prays, once again, one more time-please God, let me live-because he’s got a job to do, a case to solve, and there’s a man out there who is in need of him; who John knows, without question, that he-John Hamish Watson-needs in turn. Rather fiercely.
So, in the end, it’s far easier to fake his own death than John could ever have dreamed.
He swallows the liquid, the darmal, and revels in the slide of it down his throat before the colours dim and he’s lost.
_______________________________
It’s only after the dust settles that John really stops to observe the things he’d only barely seen, only partially processed through trembling fingers and tear-clouded eyes.
John washes his hands raw once he comes around, once he thinks enough to wash anything, to get up from the sofa and move. He washes his hands to get the traces of blood off, to make them warm, to make them feel something other than the numb, ice-coldness of that wrist, that still skin beneath his fingertips where blood no longer pumped, where John couldn’t time the seconds, the endless moments passing by the beat of that violent, vibrant heart. His own flesh is livid, red from the heat of the water, but he still feels frigid, can’t rinse away the touch of that chill.
Algor mortis, when it all starts to coalesce, is the first clue.
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After he confronts the elder Holmes, after he relieves some of the building pressure in his chest and allows himself that small, transient space to start parsing what it is he truly thinks about the man, about this amalgam of global power and shadow governance personified and balanced on a brolly-once the ether starts to clear and there’s an identifiable aim to the task of breathing once again, John makes a point of popping into the Diogenes Club at least twice a week. The absurdity of the tradition is a refuge for him, now; 221B is quiet because it’s bereft, because there’s been loss, but this place is quiet by choice. There’s something empowering in that sense of agency, that capacity to defy the order of things, the inevitable.
And John needs to feel empowered, now. He needs to know that what he holds in his hands and turns over in his mind aren’t just the last gasps of a desperate soul, inconsequential scraps that he’s betting the last of his sanity on. He needs to know that it’s more than wishful thinking when his heart beats harder, shows more life than he’s seen in weeks when he sets the pieces side by side and they come together, almost magnetic. He needs to know this, all these not-random bits; he needs to know that they’re parts of a whole: the only whole that seems to matter, anymore.
But that’s not the only reason he stops in.
Mycroft really only nods at him in passing, like he’s not at all surprised to see him, but then Mycroft rarely seems to be surprised at anything. John wonders if he suspects, if he approves, or if he’s just that unflappable; just that keen on tracking John’s footpaths through the CCTV feeds.
Not that John can really judge anymore, because Mycroft’s not the only one watching, the only one gathering data from the sidelines. John’s picked up a trick or two from the Brothers Holmes, as it so happens, and he’s a crack-shot if the RAMC ever spat one out. His eyes are sharp as daggers. Unveiling.
And those lethal-dagger eyes of his: they tend to focus, surreptitiously, on the typeface emblazoned on the papers Mycroft unfolds to the centre, to a few pages aft. Never the first pages. Always the back.
And it’s not just The Post, see, or even The Times. Mycroft reads more than just the London papers. But it’s not merely a smattering of foreign press, either, not just a random survey: not just Córdoban publications or Belorussian business weeklies. They’re from everywhere. Nowhere. They’re in languages John’s never seen before, that don’t even look legible now and again. They’re minutiae. They’re wildly significant.
Belarus. England. Argentina.
Then Taloussanomat. Finnish.
And NewsDay. From Zimbabwe. The Georgian rezonansi. Shabab Yemeni.
It’s part-whim, part-intuition, and partly a maddening, untenable belief that the universe adds up in the end, sometimes, a faith that he can’t seem to kill: it’s all of these things and none of them and more that lead him to look more closely at the papers, the stacks that land on the doorstep every morning and start recognising lines, logos; to start matching images behind his eyes to print in black and white and start looking for something more instrumental than simple crimes, more earth-shattering than mere illegality.
Something that could change the world and shock even the deadest hearts back into beating.
And he doesn’t have to concentrate to see the signs, to maximise his visual memory or whatnot. The suggestion that the average human memory on visual matters is only sixty-something percent accurate is absolute rubbish, John knows; doesn’t count for a bloody thing when it comes to things that really matter, because John sees some things, some unseeable, heart-rending, world-crushing things with one-hundred percent clarity in his nightmares, his waking dreams. He knows.
And he sees, too-sees with a sudden perfect clarity in the newsprint, on the paper: this is the lynchpin, the opening gambit.
John had accepted the challenge long before he’d even seen the board.
He assumed that Sherlock had them all delivered, had received the papers for some reason apart from the Fall, the End: John’s had quite the ample bit of time to ponder what happened, how it all peaked and shattered, and he doesn’t think that Sherlock knew it was coming, not for certain, not so far in advance. He knew the potential was there, and perhaps he moved the pieces to protect what he could, but too many pawns were sacrificed for it to have been a real, solid plan. It was makeshift. It was cobblestone, shaky: riddled with holes.
John wonders, now, if he’d have been able to pick any of it apart if Sherlock’d actually had the time, the foresight, the unthinkable cognisance of his own finitude, his own unshirkable mortality: he wonders if he’d have been able to figure it out, to so much as suspect in the end, if he’d been up against the true extent of that improbable genius, that deft and dexterous mind.
But he doesn’t waste much time with the wondering. He’s wasted enough time as it is.
Because it’s obvious, when the data is in front of him, when he pieces that were always there rearrange and reveal something new. Because it’s a sequence. Alphabetical, geographical, intricate, subtle. There is a sequence.
If John’s learned anything from this business, from any of it, it’s that there’s rarely a sequence in this world that doesn’t mean something.
And John knows he’s only seeing the first layer, the idiot’s sign. There’s more. There has to be.
And because they were Sherlock’s-because they were delivered to a Mr. Sherlock Holmes and John couldn’t bear to part with so much as the anaemic, soulless typeface spelling out that name, that perfect, painful, infuriating name belonging to the sort of man who could swap the poles of the globe and turn everything on its head like it was made to be that way, like the rush of your blood in the wrong direction and the shift of gravity and the extra pressure lingering in your chest, the lightheadedness, the disorientation-like it’s all fine, because you were upside-down anyway, before a madman grabbed you and sent you racing back to rights.
Because they belonged to Sherlock, by rights, John never tossed any of the papers. Not a single one.
John knows where to go to start drawing back those layers, and he’s taken gross anatomy. John can peel back the epidermis, the dermis, can slice through the subcutis down to the veins, the arterial pathways so as to reveal the heart.
Here, and now: John will reveal the heart.
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In the desert, he wakes up, and he knows. He knows before anyone else tells him.
This isn’t death. This isn’t heaven, or hell. It’s calm. Quiet. Hot. Rough. There’s sand in the wind. There’s the smell of mud, of green, of bogs and stagnant water, rancid thrush on the gusts that catch his sweat-soaked hair.
This is the same goddamned nightmare, the same casting of the die in every moment before a bullet came to break him and his time would finally be up. This is more of the same.
John sighs, and doesn’t know whether or not to be grateful.
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In the morgue, in a strange town where the air taste different, settles wrong inside his lungs, he wakes up, alone; naked beneath a sheet. He blinks. He breathes. He grins.
John gets dressed, tucks his gun into the waist of his jeans, and he doesn’t look back.
_______________________________
Like clockwork-like a madman breathing soot and grasping desperate at the very end of everything, John goes through the papers. All of them. He orders each publication and reorders them and reads them front to back more times than he can count. None of it makes sense, really, but he begins to pick up on things, little aberrations, works on figuring and pondering and parsing out the inexplicable.
He wonders if he’s lost it, if he’s gone off his rocker, more times than is likely acceptable by any generally-accepted standards of normality, but he left “normal” behind when he took the room and moved in to 221B, didn’t he? And he isn’t about to start looking back now.
So he pushes onward, tries to make some sense of it all, keeps looking for inroads when he reaches a dead end, and he makes himself remember, forces himself to focus on the fact that that day, that fateful fucking day when he’d watched his best friend fall and felt his heart stop and searched for a pulse that couldn’t be found, he fixates on the simple fact that those fingers, curled up like that: it was as if they’d been dead for hours, like they’d been still for far too long.
Rigor mortis is the second clue.
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Bone structure, coupled with the fact that John had always observed better than people gave him credit for: that’s the third clue
Because John did observe, and he observed Sherlock better than any being in the whole sodding cosmos-living or dead or a bit of both, even, if there’s a need to get technical.
John figures, though, that something so obvious would speak all on its own.
And John can blame a lot of things on wishful thinking, desperation; on being a little bit heartbroken and a little bit soul-sick. He can maybe blame the coolness, the stiffness on shock.
But there’s an angle, there’s a way that light plays off of those goddamned cheekbones that John would know anywhere; a way that liquid, regardless of its viscosity, traces the planes of that face: raindrops and water from showers, mild corrosives from experiments gone awry, falsified tears to coerce witnesses and suspects alike. And the blood on that face spilled in all the wrong ways.
Those cheekbones weren’t Sherlock’s. And John would fucking know.
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John doesn’t remember much of being shot, to be honest. He’ll throw vague recollections out to the doctors, to the therapists who try to tell him how he’s feeling and what he’s fit to do, but the god’s-honest truth is that the impact, the injury-the process of being invalided home and deemed obsolete-is mostly a blur. The human mind’s a tricky thing, though. It doesn’t like to grasp at the thoughts that make it numb, or worse, that sear within the gyri and the sulci; that burn inside the folds of grey.
It’s not important to remember the bullet, really; John’s perspective had changed after captivity, after seeing the light and the dark and the dark and the light, after leaving and coming back. He’d faced death and fooled the enemy and fooled himself, and made a strange sort of peace with what lies beyond in those moments. The bullet didn’t matter so much after he’d swallowed the liquid that ended everything just to start it all again.
And that liquid, that elixir; he remembers that like a beacon in the dark, the shine of it, the taste and texture, the burn, and before he can attach the memory, the colour to some wild, boundless, depthless eyes, he remembers it because it wasn’t just darmal, it was nectar and ambrosia, it was curses and the selling of souls; it was tears and blessings and gifts and loss-Romeo and Juliet, the mystical, impossible thing that mimics ends where none exist, that fakes and cheats the Great Equaliser, the Grim Reaper himself.
His friend-Ghairat, he learns: brave as his name, and that’s another thing he won’t forget: the man who saved him and damned him and fed him poison to keep his soul- Ghairat is there when he wakes, smiles at him, eases him back to his bearings as he shakes lassitude and quietus from his aching, broken limbs; waits for it to lift from his mind before he asks questions, before he even tries to process the inconceivable.
But Ghairat is patient, lets John prod at him a bit, lets John try to puzzle out his existence despite John’s memories of Ghairat’s corpse. He shows John the shoots, the leaves of the plant that the extract comes from, that iridescent solution: native to this place alone and hidden, feared and revered-it’s a secret passed down bloodlines and kept in the shadows of trees, in the hollows of the mountains themselves, writ in the rock where the roots take hold, where they thrive in the dark. He hears the stories, myths of miracles, accidents of early medicine and tribal pharmacology, tales of resurrection and deceit and the thwarting of enemies, the close calls and of living to fight another day by feigning demise. He learns how death can be a matter of perspective, sometimes, a matter of one moment to the next, and that if a head is pressed to the chest in silence, a shrewd ear can parse the difference, but no other.
A ruthless, incredible magic trick, if John ever saw one.
It’s Sherlock’s words that rekindle the memory, and really, once he coaxes meaning from each of the clues; once the truth emerges from the pieces and the parts, John doesn’t have to ponder the hows. Only the whens, and the wheres. He doesn’t quite understand the chemistry of it, and perhaps it’s reckless, as a physician, as a responsible human being, maybe, to risk it all to chance, to take the plunge and trust in the unknown things of this world, the mysteries in the night, but John doesn’t care. He knows the truth, has known forever now and he can’t believe he’d forgotten, let his mind go numb for so long with needless, endless, leaden-loving grief.
Because John knows that it’s not impossible to cheat death.
And once you’ve ruled out the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be true.
Must be.
And it wasn't just the trauma, or the impact, or the light. The cheekbones wearing red weren’t sharp enough. The colour of those sightless eyes didn’t match quite right. The >feel of him was far too stiff. The body was much too cold.
So John doesn’t waste time, doesn’t spend much energy thinking on the how, once he’s made up his mind to believe. The when takes too long for his comfort-too long for his sanity and the tightness between his ribs; and the where is simply as far away as he can get. He makes his plan, and takes his leave, and sends the devil his regards in the doing.
The why of it all, of course, was never in doubt to begin with.
_______________________________
The train affords him more anonymity than flying would, these days especially. He books a seat on the first Eurostar out of St Pancras, and he feels guilty for pickpocketing the coroner, for using the old man’s bank card for the ticket, but there are worse things he could have done; worse things he has done, to be sure-that he may yet do when he gets to where he’s going: when he finds the part of himself that’s been missing for far too long and slips it back into place-once he sees how well it fits, how worn its become while it was away.
There are worse things he’ll do, if he’s not whole upon returning. Much worse.
He slipped an extra fifty quid into the man’s desk drawer before he left, either way; he hopes that’ll do.
The chair he’s in is uncomfortable, and the food he buys is unsatisfying (as train meals always are). It settles like ice, like lead in his stomach so he doesn’t finish it; can only stare out the window at the darkness as they pass beneath the Channel, thinking of possibilities and desperation and what if he’s wrong, and what if there’s nothing, and what if Sherlock’s really buried where his grave hits the ground, and what of all the words he hasn’t said, hasn’t owned amidst the few he’s been able to grind out to that burnished headstone-what of the unthinkable, the probable, the believable and the rational and Jesus, Jesus, he can’t.
John thinks of words, the last words. Their last words, said face to face or over a phone line, and the syllables taste sour on John’s tongue either way.
Fuck, but John can’t be wrong.
Because... because yes, yes: friends protect people.
But love really is the most vicious of all motivators; it does more than just protect.
Love consumes. Love obscures. Love open doors and lifts curtains and lets in the light so you can see. Love drives and grips and won’t let go. Love will strangle you, throttle you, cut off the circulation and close off all the air if you don’t keep watch, if you don’t recognise the power that it holds.
Love will kill-even its own self-in order to save the beloved.
Love takes all prisoners, love levels all barriers, love ravages walls and hearts and souls alike. Love doesn’t just protect, it turns out.
Love does something else, entirely.
The only trace John leaves when he departs is the shape of his cheek, damp against the glass of the window at his seat.
Next: Part Three