Fic for verdant_fire: The Last of the Honey Bees
Title: The Last of the Honey Bees
Recipient: verdant_fire
Author: what_alchemy
Beta: jouissant
Fandom: BBC Sherlock
Characters/Pairings: Sherlock/John
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Choose not to warn
Word Count:: 2000
Summary: When we’re all space dust… when all of this is gone? My molecules will find yours.
The last of the honey bees dies on an ordinary Thursday afternoon.
There is no honey with which to attempt to revive it, but Sherlock knows that the solitude would have been crueler than the long sleep.
When he looks up, the sky is a deep, brilliant red he can no longer consider beautiful.
Sherlock digs a little hole in what used to be the garden, and he buries the bee there.
He’s gone soft in his old age.
Sherlock comes in from the windless heat to find John creaking and huffing as he pulls on his shoes.
“Ah,” Sherlock says, and John looks up. “Who is it this time?”
“The Agudas down on Orange Blossom.”
“And you have to go all the way into town for this?”
“Can we not have this fight today please, Sherlock? I’m tired, and I have to do this.”
“But that’s just it, isn’t it? Any slack-jawed imbecile with two brain cells to rub together can confirm a couple of suicides. They don’t need a retired doctor so far into his dotage that a trip down the lane winds him.”
John yanks on his laces with great force, and then Sherlock is treated to a lined scowl and John’s shining bald pate bobbing about right in front of his nose.
“You know I’m the only one left who can sign the papers, Sherlock-“
“To hell with the papers! To hell with the bloody bureaucracy and the protocols! What good is it all now?”
“…never met someone so ungenerous in my entire life-”
“Who the hell is left to care if all your bloody Is are dotted and Ts are crossed? Who’s goddamn well left, John?”
John rocks back on his heels, and Sherlock discovers that his own chest is heaving. John looks him in the eye and says, “Me.”
There is a closed notebook on John’s desk. He had left it out instead of squirrelling it away under the bed where he locks all his other notebooks in a trunk.
Not that it’s ever kept Sherlock out.
There is a closed notebook on John’s desk, and Sherlock’s hands itch.
In the notebook are the names of all the dead John’s signed away.
Hundreds.
Thousands.
Perhaps John’s mind is slowing as surely as his body is.
Perhaps the thought bears Sherlock down into his favoured recliner, tea gone cold at the side table.
Perhaps he spends the rest of the afternoon staring out the window into that howling abyss they call the sky.
“Have you just been lounging about all day, you lazy sod?”
“I’m thinking, John.”
“Well, go think in the direction of the bloody sweeping for once, will you?”
“John.”
John smells of cooling sweat and stale laundry. John smells of all the decades they’ve spent being whatever it is they are to each other. Just under his ear, John smells of the bed he shares with Sherlock.
“Sherlock.” Softer, gentler. A hand in Sherlock’s hair. “Love, what’s wrong?”
Oh, nothing, nothing, nothing new.
It wouldn’t take much.
An empty syringe.
An air pocket.
It’s not really his style, is the thing.
Leaving John.
In the morning, the tap’s dry and the rain basins are empty. John looks at Sherlock with defeat in his eyes, but he smiles anyway.
“I suppose the bright side is we won’t be going through tea withdrawal for very long.”
Sherlock can’t help it: he laughs and laughs.
They spend the day in bed, where Sherlock sets to memory, again, the exact shade of John’s eyes. The expansion and contraction of each iris. How like the ocean in winter they are.
John kisses him, his lips withered and dry, and Sherlock wonders how it got so late.
Sherlock wakes to find he is alone in bed, and he’s kicked all the sheets away. He is naked and sticky with sweat. He wipes it from his eyes and levers himself off the mattress with a groan.
John is in the sitting room wearing a battered t-shirt and cotton underwear. He is packing bean rations and expired granola bars into a backpack with exaggerated care. A towel. Hats. The last dregs of a bottle of sunblock. Aloe. He glances up when Sherlock pauses in the jamb to watch him.
“Put your pants on,” he says, slinging a pair of briefs at him. “We’re going home.”
They go collecting petrol from the cars of their dead neighbours.
There is more than enough for a leisurely trip to London and back. Or a one-way to Edinburgh. But they take only what they need for a ride two hours north, in case there are others who find themselves restless, gazing at a distant horizon.
Sherlock drives, and John toggles the buttons in search of a functioning radio station.
He gets naught but static.
They pass the stooped ruin of a man on the side of A267. He looks like the husk of an ear of corn, set to flame. He doesn’t even attempt to flag them down. Smoke limns the illusory line where sky meets road, and John tells Sherlock to keep going.
“What would you change?” John asks. “Of all your choices, or all your circumstances. Any one thing.”
Sherlock thinks about it. Showing the neighbourhood boys his moth collection. Showing Sebastian Wilkes his body, his ill-used heart. Showing that very first dealer his pale, unblemished arm. Showing Moriarty his mind. Showing John his swan diving technique.
Sherlock blinks, and the sky ahead is fading into orange. There are bursts of yellow. Licks of white. Creeping blue. Smoke like blossoming tumours.
Sherlock thinks about it again. Thinks about the happiness he’s been able to carve out of this, his battered, misshapen gnarl of a life. Thinks about the man who posed the question.
“Nothing,” Sherlock says.
The one thing he thinks could improve the whole lot is the one thing they’ve run out of by now.
It’s all right, this.
All the windows rolled down. The Citroen hurtling past what’s left of England at a shocking speed. No one to tut at Sherlock’s nudity. John’s hand reaching over the gear shift to rest on the little paunch of Sherlock’s belly. White noise. Knotted knuckles. A life well-lived. Love.
There is a great deal to complain about, but at the moment, Sherlock can’t fathom any of it.
Sherlock would like to hear it one last time.
“Do you ever wish…”
“No,” John says.
“You don’t know what I was going to say.”
“Oh yes I do. I bloody well know that look, after forty-odd.”
“John.”
A sigh, as if he’s put upon. As if there’s anything better to do in this moment, in this tiny scrap of time they’ve been granted.
“Sherlock, I’ve never wished there were anyone at my side but you, just as you are. Is that enough for your ego, or do you need me to compliment your knob now?”
Said knob twitches with a quiet optimism, but Sherlock only tilts a smile at the grumpy old sod in the passenger’s seat.
“Mm, maybe later,” he says, and John huffs, lays his head back, watches Sherlock drive with dimming eyes.
They’ve almost reached the cinders of London when John hands Sherlock a sandwich bag half-full of peanuts.
“Please,” he says.
“They’ll only make me thirsty,” Sherlock says.
“Protein, love,” John says. “Electrolytes. Don’t be difficult.”
John is asking him for strength. John is asking him to stay.
Sherlock pops his mouth open. John grumbles, but feeds him the peanuts anyway, one by one.
There are trains stopped on their tracks. Abandoned cars. Crumbling buildings, shattered windows, toppled street lamps.
Nothing green grows.
Parliament still stands. Without windows and marred by graffiti, it stands.
For all the good it does.
They stop once, to give a woman carrying a child what’s left of their food. She says nothing, but pops a can of beans and pushes her fingers in. She swipes at the child’s mouth with the mess, over and over. The child lies limp and blue in her arms.
“Come on, Sherlock,” John says.
Sherlock shifts the gears into first, eases up on the clutch.
People lie in curls on the grounds of Buckingham Palace, the gates and safeguards long since demolished. From the street, Sherlock can’t tell if they’re dead or alive. Are they shaking with hunger, or are their empty skins merely being buffeted about by the lick of encroaching flame?
John takes his hand.
All the streets glitter with shards of broken glass.
“There it is,” John says.
Sherlock parks on the pavement in front of Speedy’s.
He leaves the keys in the car.
Fifteen years have done little to change the space of 221B. It’s been looted, and what furniture remains is gutted, stuffing bursting from gouges like a public disembowelment. Birds’ nests, long vacated, line the rafters, and the ancient, desiccated waste of vermin litter the floor. But it’s still there: the skeleton of the life they built. Its bones and sinew. Its breath.
They push a tortured sofa up to the window. John eases onto it with a groan. Sherlock gets to his hands and knees to feel for the loose floorboard.
“I wish you still had your violin,” John says.
Sherlock has nothing to say to that. The violin, like so much, became kindling long ago.
A floorboard creaks up.
“Aha!”
“Lord, here we go.”
Sherlock pries it open to reveal a dusty cigar box. He swipes a hand over the cover and shakes the dust off.
“Jesus, Sherlock.”
“Let me have this one thing, John.”
“Oh, as if I’ve never let you have anything in your whole life,” John says. “I’ve deprived you for decades, I know.”
Sherlock ignores him in favour of the single dry cigarette lying all pathetic and forlorn in the box.
“Oh, you beauty,” Sherlock says. Johns scoffs. “Come to me.”
“You’re ridiculous,” John says, but so fondly.
Sherlock sets the cigarette between his lips. It’s stale and horrible. He smiles.
There comes a great snap and crash. Distant explosions. Unnameable colours streak the sky. The temperature creeps upward.
And in what’s left of 221B Baker Street, Sherlock Holmes and John Watson have nothing left to sweat out.
Sherlock settles his back against the armrest and stretches his legs out along the length of the sofa. He spreads his thighs to make room for John. There’s a shuffle while they make sure not to crush each other’s delicate bits. Their skins stick together. John lays his cheek in the sparse grey hair between Sherlock’s pectorals. They both face the window. Sherlock lets his fingers trail along John’s back. Papery and soft. Dry. He matches his heartbeat to John’s.
Regent’s Park is on fire.
John’s body tightens around Sherlock’s.
“Sherlock.”
“Hm.”
“Where do you think it all goes? At the end?”
“Define ‘it,’ John, really.” The cigarette muffles his speech, but in his mouth it remains.
“Love. Hate. The experience of being a person in the world.”
“Nowhere, I suppose.”
“No, but it does. It will. Matter is neither created nor destroyed.”
“Feelings aren’t matter, John, my God.”
“No, but they have weight. They make star trails. They breathe, surely as the dinosaurs, the dodo, us.”
“You’re an addled old man.”
“When we’re all space dust… when all of this is gone? My molecules will find yours.”
“Sentiment.”
“Always,” John says. “But you knew that.”
The ground shakes, and Sherlock’s vision swims. He gasps for breath. When he closes his eyes, stars burst behind his lids.
“John?”
“I’m here, love.”
“If one thing could endure. If there were one thing.”
“Yes.”
“It would be this.”
Sherlock smoothes his hand over the bony ridges of John’s skull. John raises his head to look Sherlock in the eye. He’s gone past red and straight into a bloodless grey. Sherlock traces the dear lines of his face.
“You know?” John says. “I’m not even afraid.”
A roll of thunder. The crack of catastrophic flame.
At the end of the cigarette, embers.
End
Recipient: verdant_fire
Author: what_alchemy
Beta: jouissant
Fandom: BBC Sherlock
Characters/Pairings: Sherlock/John
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Choose not to warn
Word Count:: 2000
Summary: When we’re all space dust… when all of this is gone? My molecules will find yours.
The last of the honey bees dies on an ordinary Thursday afternoon.
There is no honey with which to attempt to revive it, but Sherlock knows that the solitude would have been crueler than the long sleep.
When he looks up, the sky is a deep, brilliant red he can no longer consider beautiful.
Sherlock digs a little hole in what used to be the garden, and he buries the bee there.
He’s gone soft in his old age.
Sherlock comes in from the windless heat to find John creaking and huffing as he pulls on his shoes.
“Ah,” Sherlock says, and John looks up. “Who is it this time?”
“The Agudas down on Orange Blossom.”
“And you have to go all the way into town for this?”
“Can we not have this fight today please, Sherlock? I’m tired, and I have to do this.”
“But that’s just it, isn’t it? Any slack-jawed imbecile with two brain cells to rub together can confirm a couple of suicides. They don’t need a retired doctor so far into his dotage that a trip down the lane winds him.”
John yanks on his laces with great force, and then Sherlock is treated to a lined scowl and John’s shining bald pate bobbing about right in front of his nose.
“You know I’m the only one left who can sign the papers, Sherlock-“
“To hell with the papers! To hell with the bloody bureaucracy and the protocols! What good is it all now?”
“…never met someone so ungenerous in my entire life-”
“Who the hell is left to care if all your bloody Is are dotted and Ts are crossed? Who’s goddamn well left, John?”
John rocks back on his heels, and Sherlock discovers that his own chest is heaving. John looks him in the eye and says, “Me.”
There is a closed notebook on John’s desk. He had left it out instead of squirrelling it away under the bed where he locks all his other notebooks in a trunk.
Not that it’s ever kept Sherlock out.
There is a closed notebook on John’s desk, and Sherlock’s hands itch.
In the notebook are the names of all the dead John’s signed away.
Hundreds.
Thousands.
Perhaps John’s mind is slowing as surely as his body is.
Perhaps the thought bears Sherlock down into his favoured recliner, tea gone cold at the side table.
Perhaps he spends the rest of the afternoon staring out the window into that howling abyss they call the sky.
“Have you just been lounging about all day, you lazy sod?”
“I’m thinking, John.”
“Well, go think in the direction of the bloody sweeping for once, will you?”
“John.”
John smells of cooling sweat and stale laundry. John smells of all the decades they’ve spent being whatever it is they are to each other. Just under his ear, John smells of the bed he shares with Sherlock.
“Sherlock.” Softer, gentler. A hand in Sherlock’s hair. “Love, what’s wrong?”
Oh, nothing, nothing, nothing new.
It wouldn’t take much.
An empty syringe.
An air pocket.
It’s not really his style, is the thing.
Leaving John.
In the morning, the tap’s dry and the rain basins are empty. John looks at Sherlock with defeat in his eyes, but he smiles anyway.
“I suppose the bright side is we won’t be going through tea withdrawal for very long.”
Sherlock can’t help it: he laughs and laughs.
They spend the day in bed, where Sherlock sets to memory, again, the exact shade of John’s eyes. The expansion and contraction of each iris. How like the ocean in winter they are.
John kisses him, his lips withered and dry, and Sherlock wonders how it got so late.
Sherlock wakes to find he is alone in bed, and he’s kicked all the sheets away. He is naked and sticky with sweat. He wipes it from his eyes and levers himself off the mattress with a groan.
John is in the sitting room wearing a battered t-shirt and cotton underwear. He is packing bean rations and expired granola bars into a backpack with exaggerated care. A towel. Hats. The last dregs of a bottle of sunblock. Aloe. He glances up when Sherlock pauses in the jamb to watch him.
“Put your pants on,” he says, slinging a pair of briefs at him. “We’re going home.”
They go collecting petrol from the cars of their dead neighbours.
There is more than enough for a leisurely trip to London and back. Or a one-way to Edinburgh. But they take only what they need for a ride two hours north, in case there are others who find themselves restless, gazing at a distant horizon.
Sherlock drives, and John toggles the buttons in search of a functioning radio station.
He gets naught but static.
They pass the stooped ruin of a man on the side of A267. He looks like the husk of an ear of corn, set to flame. He doesn’t even attempt to flag them down. Smoke limns the illusory line where sky meets road, and John tells Sherlock to keep going.
“What would you change?” John asks. “Of all your choices, or all your circumstances. Any one thing.”
Sherlock thinks about it. Showing the neighbourhood boys his moth collection. Showing Sebastian Wilkes his body, his ill-used heart. Showing that very first dealer his pale, unblemished arm. Showing Moriarty his mind. Showing John his swan diving technique.
Sherlock blinks, and the sky ahead is fading into orange. There are bursts of yellow. Licks of white. Creeping blue. Smoke like blossoming tumours.
Sherlock thinks about it again. Thinks about the happiness he’s been able to carve out of this, his battered, misshapen gnarl of a life. Thinks about the man who posed the question.
“Nothing,” Sherlock says.
The one thing he thinks could improve the whole lot is the one thing they’ve run out of by now.
It’s all right, this.
All the windows rolled down. The Citroen hurtling past what’s left of England at a shocking speed. No one to tut at Sherlock’s nudity. John’s hand reaching over the gear shift to rest on the little paunch of Sherlock’s belly. White noise. Knotted knuckles. A life well-lived. Love.
There is a great deal to complain about, but at the moment, Sherlock can’t fathom any of it.
Sherlock would like to hear it one last time.
“Do you ever wish…”
“No,” John says.
“You don’t know what I was going to say.”
“Oh yes I do. I bloody well know that look, after forty-odd.”
“John.”
A sigh, as if he’s put upon. As if there’s anything better to do in this moment, in this tiny scrap of time they’ve been granted.
“Sherlock, I’ve never wished there were anyone at my side but you, just as you are. Is that enough for your ego, or do you need me to compliment your knob now?”
Said knob twitches with a quiet optimism, but Sherlock only tilts a smile at the grumpy old sod in the passenger’s seat.
“Mm, maybe later,” he says, and John huffs, lays his head back, watches Sherlock drive with dimming eyes.
They’ve almost reached the cinders of London when John hands Sherlock a sandwich bag half-full of peanuts.
“Please,” he says.
“They’ll only make me thirsty,” Sherlock says.
“Protein, love,” John says. “Electrolytes. Don’t be difficult.”
John is asking him for strength. John is asking him to stay.
Sherlock pops his mouth open. John grumbles, but feeds him the peanuts anyway, one by one.
There are trains stopped on their tracks. Abandoned cars. Crumbling buildings, shattered windows, toppled street lamps.
Nothing green grows.
Parliament still stands. Without windows and marred by graffiti, it stands.
For all the good it does.
They stop once, to give a woman carrying a child what’s left of their food. She says nothing, but pops a can of beans and pushes her fingers in. She swipes at the child’s mouth with the mess, over and over. The child lies limp and blue in her arms.
“Come on, Sherlock,” John says.
Sherlock shifts the gears into first, eases up on the clutch.
People lie in curls on the grounds of Buckingham Palace, the gates and safeguards long since demolished. From the street, Sherlock can’t tell if they’re dead or alive. Are they shaking with hunger, or are their empty skins merely being buffeted about by the lick of encroaching flame?
John takes his hand.
All the streets glitter with shards of broken glass.
“There it is,” John says.
Sherlock parks on the pavement in front of Speedy’s.
He leaves the keys in the car.
Fifteen years have done little to change the space of 221B. It’s been looted, and what furniture remains is gutted, stuffing bursting from gouges like a public disembowelment. Birds’ nests, long vacated, line the rafters, and the ancient, desiccated waste of vermin litter the floor. But it’s still there: the skeleton of the life they built. Its bones and sinew. Its breath.
They push a tortured sofa up to the window. John eases onto it with a groan. Sherlock gets to his hands and knees to feel for the loose floorboard.
“I wish you still had your violin,” John says.
Sherlock has nothing to say to that. The violin, like so much, became kindling long ago.
A floorboard creaks up.
“Aha!”
“Lord, here we go.”
Sherlock pries it open to reveal a dusty cigar box. He swipes a hand over the cover and shakes the dust off.
“Jesus, Sherlock.”
“Let me have this one thing, John.”
“Oh, as if I’ve never let you have anything in your whole life,” John says. “I’ve deprived you for decades, I know.”
Sherlock ignores him in favour of the single dry cigarette lying all pathetic and forlorn in the box.
“Oh, you beauty,” Sherlock says. Johns scoffs. “Come to me.”
“You’re ridiculous,” John says, but so fondly.
Sherlock sets the cigarette between his lips. It’s stale and horrible. He smiles.
There comes a great snap and crash. Distant explosions. Unnameable colours streak the sky. The temperature creeps upward.
And in what’s left of 221B Baker Street, Sherlock Holmes and John Watson have nothing left to sweat out.
Sherlock settles his back against the armrest and stretches his legs out along the length of the sofa. He spreads his thighs to make room for John. There’s a shuffle while they make sure not to crush each other’s delicate bits. Their skins stick together. John lays his cheek in the sparse grey hair between Sherlock’s pectorals. They both face the window. Sherlock lets his fingers trail along John’s back. Papery and soft. Dry. He matches his heartbeat to John’s.
Regent’s Park is on fire.
John’s body tightens around Sherlock’s.
“Sherlock.”
“Hm.”
“Where do you think it all goes? At the end?”
“Define ‘it,’ John, really.” The cigarette muffles his speech, but in his mouth it remains.
“Love. Hate. The experience of being a person in the world.”
“Nowhere, I suppose.”
“No, but it does. It will. Matter is neither created nor destroyed.”
“Feelings aren’t matter, John, my God.”
“No, but they have weight. They make star trails. They breathe, surely as the dinosaurs, the dodo, us.”
“You’re an addled old man.”
“When we’re all space dust… when all of this is gone? My molecules will find yours.”
“Sentiment.”
“Always,” John says. “But you knew that.”
The ground shakes, and Sherlock’s vision swims. He gasps for breath. When he closes his eyes, stars burst behind his lids.
“John?”
“I’m here, love.”
“If one thing could endure. If there were one thing.”
“Yes.”
“It would be this.”
Sherlock smoothes his hand over the bony ridges of John’s skull. John raises his head to look Sherlock in the eye. He’s gone past red and straight into a bloodless grey. Sherlock traces the dear lines of his face.
“You know?” John says. “I’m not even afraid.”
A roll of thunder. The crack of catastrophic flame.
At the end of the cigarette, embers.
End