Ghosts (Sherlock/John, 1/2, PG-13)
So I wrote this... A week and a half ago, I think? for the kink meme, while I was procrastinating. Somehow procrastination often results in me indulging in my sadism and putting John through all kinds of hell. I'M SORRY, JOHN. And I'm sorry, readers. I've cleaned the whole thing up a bit, but I'm not quite sure if I like it.
As for the next Fabric update - I am so sorry it's taken this long. I have a string of deadlines tomorrow, but it looks as though I'm going to be meeting all of them more or less comfortably; the chapter is written and at my beta, so as soon as I get it back, I should be able to edit it and put it up fairly quickly. This is not getting abandoned, don't worry. 80% of the final four chapters is written. Meanwhile, have this.
KINK MEME FILL NUMBER FIVE: Ghosts
Full prompt: "tl;dr: John becomes an alcoholic after the Fall. He spends every night in a bar, drinking and telling stories. One night Sherlock is there and he suffers through John's reminiscences. But some time later he finishes with his hunt after Moriarty's men and comes back to rescue John from drinking himself to death."
Original fill here.
Pairing: Sherlock/John
Rating: PG-13
Word count: ~10,000
Summary: It's not that Sherlock believes in in vino veritas. It's that he believes in John.
Notes: I seem incapable of filling kink meme prompts without doing crazy POV switches. Hm. Also, I did some research on alcohol withdrawal, but nothing actually extensive, so I hope I handled it somewhat correctly. Feel free to correct me on anything.
Warnings: explicit references to substance abuse and withdrawal, violence
Ghosts
It's not even past midnight, and here he is.
When John holds it up to the light, the whisky changes colour. It was amber before; now, level with his eye, it's almost dark brown, a swirl of liquid tawny, of the colour that stuck to his fingers when he was 12 and he and Harry collected wax from the one incongruous pine tree their grandfather had managed to grow in his patch of pretend-to-be-Italy English back garden.
He brings it to his mouth and it's gone. It's gone, the thought that connects it to Sherlock; holding Sherlock to the light, he changed, his eyes most of all - blue, he guesses now (because really he can't tell anymore if his memories are all real, if some of them haven't been idealised), but so often a particular kind of silver, a trembling kind of quicksilver as his eyes flicked to and fro, seeing things that no one else did. The whisky disappears down his throat without the sting the first mouthful did - and then the connection to Sherlock breaks, because Sherlock never stopped hurting to think about. John was never desensitised to Sherlock, in the end.
“I'm telling you,” he says, his mouth curling around the sounds, and it sounds as though he's still able to get them across in the form he meant them, which is good because the man sitting next to him, holding a Corona beer, actually seems to be listening, “he was fucking brilliant.”
“Yeah, sounds like it, mate,” the bloke says, easily. John can pick up that there's a bit of pity in the words. He swallows another mouthful of whisky; the other man's treat. John prefers pints, but this is faster, and God, when did that become something that was a point in favour of anything?
“He could look at people,” he finds himself saying, looking closely at the man next to him - a mess of beard and broad chest and shoulders, and a small smile that he can't read right now, “and tell you everything you never even knew about yourself.”
“Yeah,” the bloke agrees. “I read about 'im. In the papers.”
John presses his eyes closed, his hand bringing up the glass without a conscious thought. The burn is easing, his tongue is coming unstuck. “The papers,” he manages, “are shit.”
The bloke's eyes are round and brown. Wrong. Wrong. It's a familiar voice that says it in his head, through the haze, through the fog, and it only makes his hand tighten on his glass. The bloke looks a bit sorry. Not drunk, then, the part of John that's still functioning whispers. A bit of Sherlock that he's tried to make his own; reading people. He can't, mostly, but this time: this man is still able to process that Sherlock Holmes killed himself, and John Watson was there to watch. The silence stretches, and John even manages to understand, a little, because who in their right minds would know anything to say to that? Sorry you had to watch? Or maybe Sorry you were such a crap friend you never even knew what he was thinking of, must have been thinking of for months, to do that? To throw himself off a roof, and to call you, first? If the man were to say that he'd kill him. There's no question. And they both know it.
“Well, mate,” his drinking partner (too short too wide too brown-eyed too straight-haired) says, “it was great talking to you.” And he's gone.
John still has some whisky left, and it swirls too many colours at him, too many nuances, when it's really nothing more than memories liquidified; the death of memories, the let me tuck you in, you'll forget of it hidden in its innocent depths of colour. John scowls at his glass, then slams it back, the faint tingling in his throat an unpleasant reminder that his body still exists.
*
“- and then he ran across the - mmmuseum without a shecond... thought, and he alm-almost got shot, the fucking bastard - and I couldn't... couldn't help -” and there's a hand on his elbow, a look of half-amusement, of half-pity.
“You should stop drinking, mate,” someone's telling him, someone with a ginger beard.
“But he could - he could have died,” he counters, weakly.
“He didn't,” someone says, not with a ginger beard.
There's a silence. A silence that doesn't exist in pubs. People put their drinks down, pick them up. People chat each other up, there's rejection, there's yeah let's go shag, there's the sweat and tears and beer that mixes, that ends up in particles between the peanuts that he's trying to eat.
“He did,” John whispers, and no one hears but him, though some of it bleeds into the silence.
“Can someone call him a cab?” Ginger Beard is saying, balancing a rather impressive pint, himself, so John says: “Can someone get me the pint that you're having?”
The group that's gathered around him starts to leave; there's some shoulder claps, there's some words, and none of it registers. Least of all the pity.
The bartender is leaning over him. “Watson,” he says, because they know each other that way, know each other by their last names, and it's all a bit too much like the war, so he jerks. “Are you all right?”
“Perfect,” John says, wondering where that word came from.
“You should go home,” the bartender says, and he's too soft, he's not angular enough, he's not the right shade of pale, so it makes no impression.
“Yeah,” John agrees, then finds himself stumbling across the pub to the other side, where people sit curled together in love and hate and half-fights.
“You mind?” he says, is even clear-headed enough to note the way the words slur together.
The other occupant of the table is leaning away into shadow, and he can't focus on him; there are long gloved fingers curled around a glass of red wine. John finds himself staring at the redness against the black shine of the leather gloves.
He gets an obvious shrug in response, the outline of shoulders lifting and falling; whatever, it filters through, and he stumbles into a chair.
“Sorry,” he says then, not even sure why, or what he's doing there. The other figure offers nothing, but, still focused on the glass of wine, John sees the leathered fingers tightening. “I'm not... ushually like thish,” he manages, presses a hand against the pounding point of pulse between his eyes. There's an insane need to apologise, like an acid burn inside his gut, and anyone will do, anyone with a heart that's still beating, that's not rotting into earth.
The silence from the other side of the table is so obvious he even picks it up, through the swirl of wood and scents that is the pub, and he thinks for a second God, I'm fucking pissed.
“Guess you don't... don't care about strangers in pubs,” he slurs, then stifles a hiccough.
His table partner raises a hand; for an impossible, incongruous second, John thinks he's going to punch him. But it's a sign to the bartender; the universal sign for “pints”, a pinky finger lifted, looking a bit ridiculous in the heavy black glove.
“All right,” John groans, “thanksh.” And he feels like he could love this person, who feels his immediate need, his want, his defiled desires. He's not that far gone that he can't appreciate it.
“I used to be all right,” he says, tongue too slow to keep up with the sounds, after the first swig of the new bottle the bartender put in front of him. He didn't miss the eyebrow raised at the stranger, and he didn't miss the half-shrug in response. “Have you -” he hiccoughs again, and the other figure, becoming more sharply lined in the dark that plays against the light, too-bright in John's eyes (and the stranger is this: dark coat dark hair hunched shoulders) seems to wince, “heard... ov him?”
The response is strangely pitched, as though it's a rehearsed answer. “Who?”
“Sh-Sherlock Holmesh,” John says, then spends a moment cursing himself, because being able to say Sherlock's name is new, and it shouldn't be here, it shouldn't be like this, defiled in that way, his tongue catching against his teeth. But it's gone again, that feeling, so soon, because there's nothing left now to mock him for it, no one there to mock him for thinking a name of all things has meaning.
There's a whisper of leather as the hands entwine themselves with each other. “No,” the other person responds, a whisper, barely audible, almost leaning into the light, exposing the tip of a nose, almost translucent, it seems.
“He'sh,” John begins, then has to re-begin, and that's why everything is wrong: “He wash... my - best friend,” and those words make the journey from his synapses to his tongue, because they're all he thinks, now.
“Really,” the man offers, entwined hands resting where his mouth presumably is, too dark to make out. He sounds out of breath.
“Really,” John says emphatically, because if he says it enough, it might be true to Sherlock, even across that boundary, across that frontier of smoke. “Best - best man I've ever mmmet.”
Silence.
“He knew... everything - when we met,” John continues, to cross across that depth of nothing. “What I - was, who...”
“He must've got something wrong.” It's a low murmur, and it takes a moment before the words register. There is a bend of body, and a fraction more of a face in the light, long, black-leathered fingers resting against a peculiar chin, before that small stretch of skin is withdrawn and his drinking buddy leans back in his chair. John closes his eyes. Knows he is already too far gone to stop the fantasy from continuing. The light is still too bright in his eyes to catch any sight of anything else; there is the faint outline of a hoodie pulled down over where eyes presumably are. A burst of reality: a hoodie. In a pub. In London. In the world of the living. Get a grip, Watson..
He shakes his head, upsetting his stomach a bit with the movement. “Yeah, but... nothing that - mattered,” he says, and then takes a swig of his bottle to mask how he has to press his eyes closed to fight the onslaught of tears, unexpected, their path eased by the alcohol. “He,” he begins, feeling the stories flipping over themselves inside them, their words so familiar now, so familiar he can even speak them like he is now, “he saw through everything. Drew people out. Baited them. Brilliant.”
Silence.
“Never felt... Never felt mmore alive,” he manages, then has to stop, has to stop never felt more alive than when I could listen to him, never felt more alive than when I was running after him, never felt more alive than when he looked at me and he seemed to be interested in who I was, what I was because his breath is playing hide and seek in his lungs, and there a is a burn deep inside of him, and nothing stops, and nothing is all right.
But then he still can't help himself: “He sholved mmurder cases - just by looking at the crime scene. Knew - knew all about mmmotivations,” he has to stop to gather himself, “just by putting himself in... shomeone's poshition. He... Fuck.” He sloshes beer onto himself; wet, sticky, cold, and it's a bit of a wake-up call, and a go-to-bed-call at the same time, because God, what is he doing?
Silence.
“I was going,” John says, unable to stop it, “to... kill myshelf, before I mmmet him. I would have... if he hadn't...”
The stranger is a shift of shadows, a jerk of concealed body, and what is he doing here, exactly?
“He was... washn't ffake,” John spits, and it's what echoes through his dreams, this final bit of sanity, of insanity, of obsession that remains through the haze, through the swirl of pub and smoke and whisky and the way the gloved fingers are long and slender.
“Are you - okay?” John asks, blinking, because he's not sure it's his eyes, if it's the gauze of reality flickering before him, layer upon layer of mediated meaning - is the black-gloved hand holding the glass of wine really trembling so much there is wine spilling over its edge, leaving shiny trails of wetness over the dull gleam of the leather of the gloves, or is he just really far gone, now?
“Yes,” is the gruff response, too-low, too-fast.
“Buy me another,” John says.
“I'd rather not,” is the response, tight, almost a growl, low, and for a moment it almost... but he cuts himself off, still able to do that, at least, because he knows where this ends, and even if he looks for pain nowadays, pain to pierce through his indecision, his apathy, this is too raw.
“Okay,” he breathes, pressing his eyes closed, not unwilling to let it go, this time. There's a part of him that's still fighting this, even though it loses every single day.
He drains the last of his beer. “What'sh... What'sh yer name?” he slurs. As if it matters. As if names have meaning.
“Ted,” is the response.
And then, silence.
“Buy me another,” John repeats, the feeling of it being okay fading as soon as it came, and Ted is silent, a stretch of person in the dark that radiates all of the words he's not saying. “Okay, fine,” John slurs, “I'mmm just a... annoying drunk, anyway.”
And stumbling, he gets to his feet, fingers curled so tightly around the neck of his beer bottle he can feel the glass resisting, feels its struggle between holding itself and shattering into fragments, shards; to mirror some of the people it cuts, even when it's intact.
“You should have - known him,” he stutters, because it's still true, even in this mix of colours and the scent of old beer; everyone should have known Sherlock, though no one could have, and in the end even he couldn't do it, he wasn't special enough, he never saw, he never knew, he never thought about it. Never imagined that this could happen. Never tried to think of ways to stop it. He said: you machine, and then left, and left, and left, and in his dreams he does it over and over again - friends protect people, and then leaving, leaving, leaving, before Sherlock might have said something to him, maybe, in that space where John should have been - the way Sherlock often spoke to him while he wasn't there, and if he tries to think of what, maybe, Sherlock told him then, he can't do anything but open his eyes until they're so air-dried tears have no chance anymore, and head over to the pub.
“Yeah,” is the response, a puff of breath, a strange agreement.
John leaves him to it with a salute with the almost-broken beer bottle.
*
The bartender calls John a taxi, and from his expression Sherlock can tell it's not the first time. John is draped half over the bar, still hanging onto his beer, and his mouth is moving - though Sherlock doesn't think it's words he's saying, because he's good at lip reading and this amounts to nothing, almost nothing; maybe it's worth it to ignore that John's mouth is regularly shaping his name amidst nonsense sounds, the only points of meaning in a sea of nothingness.
Sherlock looks at the wine in his glass, and wonders why it is he came here; a strange urge, an unquenchable thirst to drink in the sight of London again? Why this pub? Why go to Baker Street and hide, trying to suss out if John was still living there? Why the rush of - almost - euphoria when it turned out he was? Why follow him here? Why the clench in his gut when he realised where John was going?
Why talk to him at all?
It was never going to yield results and yet he couldn't control it.
There is something burning in his chest and it's not the wine. And he can't... he can't parse it, he can't catalogue it; John, who he knows struggles with alcohol, has a strange hatred towards it born mostly out of its hold over Harry - now hanging onto a tender bartender's elbow, being transferred like a package to a cabbie, who looks unconcerned. This isn't John, and it isn't right, and there's more wrong in the world than even he had thought, if John Watson is reduced to this, and he presses his gloves, wet with wine, into his eyes to get the words like a whisper out of his brain - it's because of you.
*
And if he works a little faster after that, if he lingers a little less, he tells himself it's because there are all the reasons in the world to want to get this over with; and he's not wrong.
It's also not wrong that he dreams of John at night, of that thin mouth, rubbed raw with alcohol, with a tongue that came to lick at his lips in a habit that was suddenly sloppy, not subdued, and of words falling from alcohol-soaked lips, he wash my best friend.
It's not that Sherlock believes in in vino veritas.
It's that he believes in John, and it's that he already knew that he was, really, that he was John's best friend, though he never realised it before, though the past ten months have made it all the more clearer, and have driven home how much the sentiment is reciprocated. When he takes to bed he dreams of John; both of them - the John that sits in their couch with his robe on, inquiring after the health of the hanged dummy dangling from the ceiling, and the John sitting across him, beer a dark spot across his shirt, hair long and looking more grey than sandy in the terrible light of the pub, telling him you should have known him.
He can't help it, sometimes; sometimes he thinks: you shouldn't have known me, because maybe John wouldn't have been that way, then, maybe he would've been another perfectly functioning soul with complexities of his own in a perfectly functioning city with complexities of its own.
Yet, I would have killed myself, before I met him is another part of reality now, and he can't undo it, and that means he has to come back.
*
And when it's over, he waits another day, immobile, in the underground room he's renting in Rome, sitting for hours, trying to get loose from himself, trying to unstick himself from the knowledge that there's nothing keeping him here. Trying to unstick himself from his body, that's still spun so tight, so horribly tense, so ready to run at the first sign of danger.
There will be danger where he's going.
He calls Mycroft after 24 hours, when the final flies in Moriarty's web are growing stiff and cold somewhere, and knows that within 2 hours, Mycroft will have him home.
It's four in the afternoon when he arrives in London, and he hopes, he hopes, he hopes...
He hopes that there's still something of John left.
*
John is still fairly sober; Mrs. Hudson takes his bottles away whenever she comes to clean, and often cries a little at him, for him, hurting for the both of them, taking on the brunt of mourning Sherlock with a clear mind. He's only been at the pub for twenty minutes, so he's still more or less sober - he doesn't dare to keep anything else but a couple of pints in the fridge at the flat.
Sherlock still has his old key (refuses to think of that as sentiment rather than practicality), and has gone to Baker Street first, letting himself into the hallway like a ghost, and while he was there he tried not to feel like there was an apology he should make to the house, as though he's failed it. As though he should have let it know that he was coming back, so it could have prepared. He didn't want Mrs. Hudson to hear him - he can't do that, not yet, he can't face her yet, John has to come first, because John does come first - and there was also the very real sense that he couldn't be there, shouldn't be there. This is what he tore himself loose from, and John still lives there, which is something Sherlock didn't expect; John has grown around what used to be Sherlock's space, and he's painfully aware of how hard it must have been for John to return to 221B on his own. It's one of those things that has only become completely clear to him in stages (a bit like it only became clear after a while how utterly, completely he's done all of this for John) - Molly's stunted letters, Mycroft's short texts, revealing more to Sherlock than they ever would to anyone else, and the growing, huge, horrible knowledge that John wasn't moving on, was mourning him, and was slipping totally out of his own control.
The familiarity of 221B was too much for a bit, and he leaned against the banister until he managed to get something, he doesn't know what, under control again. And then didn't quite understand; it was just a place, just a house. Still the creak of the stairs underfoot made him wince.
He knocked on the upstairs door; there was no response, and in spite of himself he pushed the door open - not unexpectedly, the flat was empty. He stood for a long while, trying to process the details leaping out at him (dust two weeks old washing-up too small for two weeks John only eats every other day smiley face is papered over clumsily John couldn't face it violin case half-hidden under coffee table dust-free John wipes it down regularly but doesn't keep it in plain sight new couch maybe damaged maybe John got rid of it because of sentiment), that speak of a John-without-Sherlock, a John-trying-to-live-here.
To the pub then. He scowls at the living room, as though it is responsible somehow.
And slips away again, good at disappearing, not as good at reappearing, sternly forcing himself not to linger around Mrs. Hudson's door, where he can hear the faint murmur of daytime radio.
He beats his way down to John's pub, the one where he almost gave himself away, where he almost reached out to shake John to awareness, to stop doing this to yourself - turning over in his head what he's about to do; approach a man who's been steadily slipping further into addiction (and God, how he knows what that does, how it distorts everything, every sense of identity, of connectedness), a man who thinks he's dead. Not for the first time there is a flicker of doubt about what he did, about if it was right, about if he couldn't have handled it better - and that's so intolerable he stops for a moment, allows London's stream of passersby flowing past him to restore a sense of normality, to make him feel less like a ghost.
Lingering in front of the door of the pub, trying to peer in through windows designed to keep dysfunctionality in and sunlight out, he wonders for a moment if there's maybe an etiquette to coming back to life that he's disregarding now. If there is a way that would generally be considered proper after the certainly generally regarded improper action of faking one's own death. Does it involve texting a warning? John, I'm alive. Does it involve apologising? John, I really am sorry I had to do this. Does it involve asking to be let into someone's life again, a life that has undoubtedly gone on to grow, because life puts out roots and hangs on, and expands in different directions? John, do you want to see me? Does it involve letting the other person choose the time, the place, the way they allow themselves to be seen? John, tell me where you want to meet and I'll be there.
But John is at the bar, ordering his second lager, and as the door swings to a hesitant close behind Sherlock he can read in John's shoulders that he's considering whisky, already, only held back by the pressures of the hour, that grow flimsier with every passing day. Soon John won't care that it's four in the afternoon; for now, he still does, a little.
John is at the bar and there is no proper way to act. There is no way to act at all, there is only a way to be, and that is Sherlock Holmes, who was John Watson's best friend in a stretch of time that is now faint and glowing both, as though lying beyond some fogged-up window - a stretch of time in which Sherlock Holmes had no idea what that meant, those words, best friend, and even less so what they covered, what reality they spanned. He thinks he knows it now and there is no way to act, there is only you were mine, too, and you will be again, and I will fight for you now in another way than all of the ones that I've tried already.
And he's sure it would not be regarded generally as proper - but that's a thought that slips away and doesn't return, because there is nothing that counts anymore in that moment except the way John's head drops down after his first swig, defeat an almost visible cloud around him - but he goes up to where John is sitting, heart doing an odd impression of an explosion, of trying to leave his body, and says to him (and yes, it's not fair, that that should be the first words, but nothing is, really, and John is sitting there, and none of it's fair): “You are going to stop that right now.”
The moment between the words and John taking note of them is long, and empty, and strangely quiet. And when John does respond, it's not a response, because it's just a hand coming back to wave the words away, as though that can clear the alcohol-saturated air between them, the distinct feel of time stretching itself and snapping back like a rubber.
“John,” Sherlock says.
And this time, there is a tensing of muscles; Sherlock can trace it in John's shoulders, can almost see the words forming themselves in his mind, falling over each other: that voice.
And when he turns around, he does it slowly, as though for him, too, the pub air is oppressive and heavy and clings to him, and there are waves of things that try to keep him in place, to keep him as he is, to keep this moment away.
John Watson, coloured in grey-scales, lips wet and sticky and ashamed with afternoon beer, locks eyes with Sherlock Holmes, last seen with blood running from crack in his head to cracks in the pavement, with life distractedly flowing away without a sense of direction.
“God,” John says.
And it hits home to Sherlock that there was really no way for him to prepare for this moment, though he has been doing just that since the second he came to with the rush of air still echoing in his ear and pain almost a protective blanket over him - and Molly had her hands on his skull, feeling over the ridges and cracks and trying to find which of them were there before and which weren't, and there was fresh wetness on his cheeks and he chose to believe it was blood instead of her tears or maybe even his own.
Sherlock tried to imagine it; he'd prepared for John having a heart attack when he realises who it is he's looking at - and he knows it's not entirely fair, this, this coming up without warning, this overpowering, but nothing is fair, and time is something that he's come to cherish more than he did. He'd prepared for shouting, for hitting, for running away, for saying no, for temporary paralysis, for a need for reanimation.
What he hadn't prepared for is John looking at him for long seconds that strangely read to him as completely breathless, as though everyone else in the world can feel the weight of them, too, and then looking back at his pint. Life resumes at the breaking of the look, the clink of glasses, the bartender's subdued interest in them from behind his bar as he steadily washes pints.
“John,” he says again, and his voice genuinely sounds like it belongs to someone else.
John's head drops down again.
“John,” Sherlock repeats, tells the back of John's head, because this can't be real, this can't be true.
“Leave me alone,” John says, passing a hand over his brow.
Sherlock feels caught between planes of reality, shades of existence; feels exactly like the ghost John thinks he is.
“John, it's me,” he croaks.
“You're not real,” John says, and he sounds different; different than what Sherlock remembers, and also different than what he heard in the pub when John was drunk and didn't know who Sherlock was. It sounds like it's been rehearsed, this - a quiet accusation to an appartition, someone who can't be hurt, and a soft reminder to himself, who can. Something clenches in Sherlock as he realises that John must have had him appear like this quite often, to have this lack of response.
He comes to stand next to John at the bar, closing his fingers around the edge of it - sticky with spilt beer, scratchy with the rough scribbles of phone numbers jotted down - and tries to remember that John's wrong, that he is, he isn't, he isn't dead.
“I'm real,” he says, manages even to sound balanced and normal, and, well, real - then uncurls his fingers from the support of the bar, and wraps his hand around the top half of John's pint, where John's fingers aren't, where foam sticks against the warming glass. He tugs the drink out of John's grasp without encountering resistance. He tries to suppress the trembling of his fingers between which the traiterous liquid licks up the sides of the glass. “Stop it,” he says to John. It can refer to many things and he's referring to all of them.
And something seems to click into place inside John, and the next thing Sherlock knows is that John has half-fallen of his bar stool, knocking it over - he hangs onto the side of the bar as the stool clangs to silence between them. Sherlock is aware of the now-unconcealed gaze of curiosity burning into him from the barman.
“Wha-” John manages to say, and his eyes widen even further as he looks at Sherlock, really looks, for the first time. “You're -” and then language gets lost somewhere between his brain and his mouth, he only gapes for a moment.
“I -” Sherlock begins to say, but he's cut short as John surges forward and there is the first, incredible press of physical contact between them in twenty months and 4 days, John's hand reaching up to grab his collar, hanging onto it as though he can't keep himself up, his hands pushing warm and alive into Sherlock's throat.
“Sherlock,” John is saying, and instinctively Sherlock puts an arm around him to keep him up, because John is swaying against him, and Sherlock is surprised he can still hear his name over the rush of blood in his ears, his heart doing its own version of stalling and re-starting, trying to catch up to time slowing down.
But then John jerks away, and his face is crumpling into lines - new ones, ones that he didn't have before - track lines of alcohol and anger and tears, and he pushes against Sherlock again, but this time to get him away; and John Watson is strong, and Sherlock Holmes is defenseless in this moment, in which he can't process most of the things lunging at him with the speed of light, and Sherlock stumbles back.
“You - you -” John says, and then his body snaps back, lines tightening, military form, muscles leaping to attention. “You bastard,” he says, and his face is twisted into something ugly, something that's new, that Sherlock has never seen before.
He's prepared for the punch and for its strength, because he knows John's anger is physical, and he knows what John's punches feel like; but he couldn't have prepared for the fact that it feels like his stomach is falling out of him, like the floor is crumbling beneath him - and because he can't see it coming, not really, because his eyes seem to struggle to catch all of the details pressing themselves in on him and John's fist is there before he can register its appraoch, he half-falls under the impact, clanking painfully into the bar stool behind him. John is a looming presence over him.
“Watson,” the barman shouts, and someone is pulling John away. “What the fuck crawled up your arse? Startin' fights at four in the afternoon!”
Sherlock manages to scrabble to an upright position on his knees, his fingers attaching themselves automatically to the growing pain across his cheek and lips, slipping into the trickle of blood pooling in the corner of his mouth, and he looks up at John, who now looks flabbergasted, as though he doesn't understand what he just did. He aggressively shrugs off the hands restraining him, points a finger - miraculously steady - at Sherlock and says: “Don't follow me.” He stalks off, and in the silence that follows the door swings closed slowly, and the man who pulled John away offers Sherlock a hand. He takes it, because he can't think of anything else to do, and allows himself to be pulled to his feet.
“You all right, mate?” the man asks, and he's a normal functioning person with complexities of his own, and there is no one Sherlock needs to talk to less, so he just nods, and avoids eye contact.
“What was that all about?” the barman asks him, frowning - then, he narrows his eyes at Sherlock. “Wait, aren't you that bloke -” he begins, before surprise blooms across his face. “You are,” he says.
Sherlock scowls at him, trying to regain some control over what seems to be a pit of bottomless gravity in his gut. He straightens, winces at the stabs of metallic blood on his tongue as he feels around in his mouth.
“He got you good,” the bartender says, still wide-eyed.
“Yes, thank you,” Sherlock snaps, then spins around to go after John.
“He told you not to follow him,” the barman calls after him.
Sherlock ignores him, simply thinks he also told me to not be dead, and he knows which he's more likely to listen to right now.
*
For a moment he was afraid John would go to a different pub and continue drinking, but the door to 221B is standing slightly open, and Sherlock can read John just slammed it behind him without taking the care the lock needs to close completely. Something twitches in him as he remembers that John used to nag him over that, over leaving the door open whenever he was seized by a sudden insight that drove him out onto the street, because in silent moments John seemed to recall that it wasn't always all right, the way the two of them craved and followed danger, and he seemed to care about keeping their home a sanctuary in a way that never really occurred to Sherlock.
Mrs. Hudson opens her door when he's inside the hall, and she's pale and her eyes are red-rimmed. John has told her, probably incoherently, probably shouting.
“I'm sorry,” is the first thing Sherlock says to her, for different reasons, and she melts towards him, sniffling into his chest, frail old-lady hands coming up to tangle in his lapels. He hugs her back, a bit awkwardly, almost having forgotten how to do it.
“You terrible, terrible, terrible man,” she hiccoughs.
“I know,” he says, and wonders for a moment at how the words have to fight to make it up his throat. “Mrs. Hudson,” he begins, and she pulls back immediately.
“Of course,” she says, and steps away from the stairs, giving him the space to step onto the first one, which he does.
He turns towards her, seized by a sudden desire to look at her a bit more, towering over her even more generously.
“I will -” he begins, and she sniffs, mouth twisting, a spot of anger beginning to show through her tears.
“Get up there and talk to him, or you're not welcome here anymore,” she says, and there is a small bite in her words, and more affection still. He knows she means it.
*
John is standing in the kitchen, supporting himself on his hands on the table top, the rest of him collapsed, head dunked, shoulders faltering lines of jumper and human.
Sherlock approaches cautiously, a hand hovering in front of him, and stops when it's almost on John's shoulder. He's reaching out, but can't bring himself to bridge the gap.
“What is wrong with you?” John asks, and his voice is constricted, pulled taut over a surface of things straining to break through.
“Do you want a list?” Sherlock responds tensely, surprised at the sound of his own voice and how it's also twisting around all of the things he wants to say. He pushes forward, and his hand lands on John's shoulder.
John twists away from the touch, and whips around. His face is set in tight lines, and there is water under his eyes, the blue of his eyes blurring into the dark bruise-coloured bags under his eyes.
“Why can't you just...” John bites, then leaves the sentence hanging.
“I can't,” Sherlock responds, because if John is still John and he hopes that he is, John was about to say listen to me for once and leave me alone.
John closes his eyes and presses the palms of his hands into them for good measure, to fortify the barriers between them even further.
Sherlock knows he has to say it. But it's more than that because he's honestly never felt it this strongly, and it has never felt more necessary, less of a deceit, more of an offering up of himself. “John, I'm sorry,” he says.
“Nice to see you still have some grasp of social conduct,” John says, weirdly calm, from behind the screen of his hands.
“I mean it,” Sherlock says, and his throat feels like a desert.
John takes his hands away. His cheeks are smeared with wetness. He's strangely shiny in the buzz of the kitchen lamp - he's changed it a couple of times (impossible to tell how many, not enough data) since Sherlock went away, but the voltage isn't quite right, and now it sounds as though there are bees living in their kitchen. John's kitchen. Their kitchen. John's kitchen.
“Fuck you,” John spits, hands curling into fists. “Fuck you,” he repeats.
“If it helps -” Sherlock begins.
John cuts him off, half-shouting: “It won't help! Don't say anything that you think will help, or so help me God, I will -”
“If it helps,” Sherlock persists, heart hammering, “I did it all for you.”
John gapes at him for a moment. “God, you bastard!” he shouts, and he moves almost as though to hit Sherlock again, but he reins himself in, and instead claps his arms around himself, as though he needs the extra support. Long moments pass.
“I need a drink,” John finally says, and in his eyes, when he flicks them to Sherlock's, there is defiance, and I fucking dare you.
Sherlock goes over to the fridge and looks into it. There's three bottles of beer.
“We are going to drink this,” he tells John, handing one over, “and that's it.”
John bares his teeth. “You've no right,” he hisses.
“No,” Sherlock admits, and finding it not hard at all, “but that's never stopped me from doing anything.” He sounds a lot more steady than he feels, and he wonders if John can tell, if John can read him - John was never as good at it as Sherlock was, but in the final months he seemed to have developed his own idiosyncratic way of poking through some of Sherlock's moods, gathering things from uncertain data like stance, and pitch of voice, and number of words... But there is time between them now, and alcohol, and death. And life.
And it's Sherlock who pops the caps on the bottles and clinks his bottle to John's and takes the first gulp, wincing slightly at the bitter taste he's never really enjoyed.
“Well, go on then,” he says to John, whose fingers around the neck of his bottle are tight, blotted red and white, as though bone is shining through the translucency of skin.
“Wanker,” John spats.
“Yes,” Sherlock agrees, and tips his bottle back again.
“Think you can just - that you can just -” John sputters, then snaps his mouth shut. Sherlock can see his pulse leaping in his neck even from the more than an arm's length of distance between them. John is furious. He's beyond screaming. He's losing track of the words he could scream.
“Yes,” Sherlock says again, unable to stop himself from slipping further into this dangerous zone, “I'm doing it, aren't I?”
John slams his bottle down on the table so powerfully there is a crack of glass, and a rush of frothy beer that splashes onto the floor, and an unexpected brightness of blood in John's palm. He stares at it, and so does Sherlock. It's a deep cut.
“You need to -” Sherlock begins, is cut off by John's snapped: “You need to shut it.”
“- clean that up, or it'll infect,” Sherlock finishes.
John grabs at Sherlock's throat with his bloodied hand, and there's the smear of sticky warmth between the first skin-on-skin contact they have that's not knuckles cracking against jawbone.
“I'm a doctor,” John says, incongruously, out of rhythm with everything.
“You are,” Sherlock nods, leaning into the firm, half-painful grasp of John's slippery fingers.
“I know when something will infect,” John hisses.
“You do,” Sherlock agrees, voice going a bit unsteadier with John's controlled pressure on his windpipe.
There's a long moment of increasing pressure - increasing pressure of everything, of John's tightening fingers, of Sherlock's lungs, of their eyes locking, of the air straining with the words that are lost.
John lets him go, steps backwards, slips a bit in the puddle of spilled beer, and presses his hands against his forehead. When he removes them, there's the jumbled impression of the lines in his palm in blood. Sherlock gulps at the sight of it.
“Fuck you,” John says, almost conversationally, then disappears into the bathroom to take care of the cut.
Sherlock looks down at his half-empty bottle and at the yellow spill of beer on the floorboards. The light buzzes, undisturbed.
*
Sherlock has opened the final bottle of beer and put it on the table for John. His own is almost empty. When he runs his fingers over his own throat, they come up red with John's blood.
“You can't stay here,” John says when he comes out of the bathroom, hand bandaged. He's washed his face without care; there's still blood at the roots of his hair and on the bridge of his nose. “I don't want you to.”
Sherlock motions to the bottle with his own. John bares his teeth. “Think you're being funny?” he asks, teeth clenched.
“Oh, yes,” Sherlock says, “this is my idea of a joke. Didn't you know?”
“What does it say,” John breathes, almost too softly for Sherlock to hear, “that I don't actually know that that's not true.”
The silence stretches. John's chest is heaving. Sherlock doesn't know what he's saying, really, but John hasn't punched him again, and he's still standing here, though he can't be sure that's a good thing.
“Drink it,” Sherlock finally says, and is surprised at the heat building up behind his eyes, because this is such a strange moment to cry, really; in the washed-out light that ticks and zooms, with so much distance between them, with John trembling in anger. He blinks, fast, two three four times.
He knows how much it feels like defeat to John to close his fingers around the bottle, and bring it up to his lips.
But John isn't the same anymore, though he's not wholly lost, maybe, not yet, or is that just wishful thinking, it can't be because Sherlock doesn't do wishful thinking, but it's true that John's eyes as he takes the first gulp aren't trained on Sherlock, and then that's just another part of reality, something that he can't undo.
---
Part 2.
As for the next Fabric update - I am so sorry it's taken this long. I have a string of deadlines tomorrow, but it looks as though I'm going to be meeting all of them more or less comfortably; the chapter is written and at my beta, so as soon as I get it back, I should be able to edit it and put it up fairly quickly. This is not getting abandoned, don't worry. 80% of the final four chapters is written. Meanwhile, have this.
KINK MEME FILL NUMBER FIVE: Ghosts
Full prompt: "tl;dr: John becomes an alcoholic after the Fall. He spends every night in a bar, drinking and telling stories. One night Sherlock is there and he suffers through John's reminiscences. But some time later he finishes with his hunt after Moriarty's men and comes back to rescue John from drinking himself to death."
Original fill here.
Pairing: Sherlock/John
Rating: PG-13
Word count: ~10,000
Summary: It's not that Sherlock believes in in vino veritas. It's that he believes in John.
Notes: I seem incapable of filling kink meme prompts without doing crazy POV switches. Hm. Also, I did some research on alcohol withdrawal, but nothing actually extensive, so I hope I handled it somewhat correctly. Feel free to correct me on anything.
Warnings: explicit references to substance abuse and withdrawal, violence
Ghosts
It's not even past midnight, and here he is.
When John holds it up to the light, the whisky changes colour. It was amber before; now, level with his eye, it's almost dark brown, a swirl of liquid tawny, of the colour that stuck to his fingers when he was 12 and he and Harry collected wax from the one incongruous pine tree their grandfather had managed to grow in his patch of pretend-to-be-Italy English back garden.
He brings it to his mouth and it's gone. It's gone, the thought that connects it to Sherlock; holding Sherlock to the light, he changed, his eyes most of all - blue, he guesses now (because really he can't tell anymore if his memories are all real, if some of them haven't been idealised), but so often a particular kind of silver, a trembling kind of quicksilver as his eyes flicked to and fro, seeing things that no one else did. The whisky disappears down his throat without the sting the first mouthful did - and then the connection to Sherlock breaks, because Sherlock never stopped hurting to think about. John was never desensitised to Sherlock, in the end.
“I'm telling you,” he says, his mouth curling around the sounds, and it sounds as though he's still able to get them across in the form he meant them, which is good because the man sitting next to him, holding a Corona beer, actually seems to be listening, “he was fucking brilliant.”
“Yeah, sounds like it, mate,” the bloke says, easily. John can pick up that there's a bit of pity in the words. He swallows another mouthful of whisky; the other man's treat. John prefers pints, but this is faster, and God, when did that become something that was a point in favour of anything?
“He could look at people,” he finds himself saying, looking closely at the man next to him - a mess of beard and broad chest and shoulders, and a small smile that he can't read right now, “and tell you everything you never even knew about yourself.”
“Yeah,” the bloke agrees. “I read about 'im. In the papers.”
John presses his eyes closed, his hand bringing up the glass without a conscious thought. The burn is easing, his tongue is coming unstuck. “The papers,” he manages, “are shit.”
The bloke's eyes are round and brown. Wrong. Wrong. It's a familiar voice that says it in his head, through the haze, through the fog, and it only makes his hand tighten on his glass. The bloke looks a bit sorry. Not drunk, then, the part of John that's still functioning whispers. A bit of Sherlock that he's tried to make his own; reading people. He can't, mostly, but this time: this man is still able to process that Sherlock Holmes killed himself, and John Watson was there to watch. The silence stretches, and John even manages to understand, a little, because who in their right minds would know anything to say to that? Sorry you had to watch? Or maybe Sorry you were such a crap friend you never even knew what he was thinking of, must have been thinking of for months, to do that? To throw himself off a roof, and to call you, first? If the man were to say that he'd kill him. There's no question. And they both know it.
“Well, mate,” his drinking partner (too short too wide too brown-eyed too straight-haired) says, “it was great talking to you.” And he's gone.
John still has some whisky left, and it swirls too many colours at him, too many nuances, when it's really nothing more than memories liquidified; the death of memories, the let me tuck you in, you'll forget of it hidden in its innocent depths of colour. John scowls at his glass, then slams it back, the faint tingling in his throat an unpleasant reminder that his body still exists.
*
“- and then he ran across the - mmmuseum without a shecond... thought, and he alm-almost got shot, the fucking bastard - and I couldn't... couldn't help -” and there's a hand on his elbow, a look of half-amusement, of half-pity.
“You should stop drinking, mate,” someone's telling him, someone with a ginger beard.
“But he could - he could have died,” he counters, weakly.
“He didn't,” someone says, not with a ginger beard.
There's a silence. A silence that doesn't exist in pubs. People put their drinks down, pick them up. People chat each other up, there's rejection, there's yeah let's go shag, there's the sweat and tears and beer that mixes, that ends up in particles between the peanuts that he's trying to eat.
“He did,” John whispers, and no one hears but him, though some of it bleeds into the silence.
“Can someone call him a cab?” Ginger Beard is saying, balancing a rather impressive pint, himself, so John says: “Can someone get me the pint that you're having?”
The group that's gathered around him starts to leave; there's some shoulder claps, there's some words, and none of it registers. Least of all the pity.
The bartender is leaning over him. “Watson,” he says, because they know each other that way, know each other by their last names, and it's all a bit too much like the war, so he jerks. “Are you all right?”
“Perfect,” John says, wondering where that word came from.
“You should go home,” the bartender says, and he's too soft, he's not angular enough, he's not the right shade of pale, so it makes no impression.
“Yeah,” John agrees, then finds himself stumbling across the pub to the other side, where people sit curled together in love and hate and half-fights.
“You mind?” he says, is even clear-headed enough to note the way the words slur together.
The other occupant of the table is leaning away into shadow, and he can't focus on him; there are long gloved fingers curled around a glass of red wine. John finds himself staring at the redness against the black shine of the leather gloves.
He gets an obvious shrug in response, the outline of shoulders lifting and falling; whatever, it filters through, and he stumbles into a chair.
“Sorry,” he says then, not even sure why, or what he's doing there. The other figure offers nothing, but, still focused on the glass of wine, John sees the leathered fingers tightening. “I'm not... ushually like thish,” he manages, presses a hand against the pounding point of pulse between his eyes. There's an insane need to apologise, like an acid burn inside his gut, and anyone will do, anyone with a heart that's still beating, that's not rotting into earth.
The silence from the other side of the table is so obvious he even picks it up, through the swirl of wood and scents that is the pub, and he thinks for a second God, I'm fucking pissed.
“Guess you don't... don't care about strangers in pubs,” he slurs, then stifles a hiccough.
His table partner raises a hand; for an impossible, incongruous second, John thinks he's going to punch him. But it's a sign to the bartender; the universal sign for “pints”, a pinky finger lifted, looking a bit ridiculous in the heavy black glove.
“All right,” John groans, “thanksh.” And he feels like he could love this person, who feels his immediate need, his want, his defiled desires. He's not that far gone that he can't appreciate it.
“I used to be all right,” he says, tongue too slow to keep up with the sounds, after the first swig of the new bottle the bartender put in front of him. He didn't miss the eyebrow raised at the stranger, and he didn't miss the half-shrug in response. “Have you -” he hiccoughs again, and the other figure, becoming more sharply lined in the dark that plays against the light, too-bright in John's eyes (and the stranger is this: dark coat dark hair hunched shoulders) seems to wince, “heard... ov him?”
The response is strangely pitched, as though it's a rehearsed answer. “Who?”
“Sh-Sherlock Holmesh,” John says, then spends a moment cursing himself, because being able to say Sherlock's name is new, and it shouldn't be here, it shouldn't be like this, defiled in that way, his tongue catching against his teeth. But it's gone again, that feeling, so soon, because there's nothing left now to mock him for it, no one there to mock him for thinking a name of all things has meaning.
There's a whisper of leather as the hands entwine themselves with each other. “No,” the other person responds, a whisper, barely audible, almost leaning into the light, exposing the tip of a nose, almost translucent, it seems.
“He'sh,” John begins, then has to re-begin, and that's why everything is wrong: “He wash... my - best friend,” and those words make the journey from his synapses to his tongue, because they're all he thinks, now.
“Really,” the man offers, entwined hands resting where his mouth presumably is, too dark to make out. He sounds out of breath.
“Really,” John says emphatically, because if he says it enough, it might be true to Sherlock, even across that boundary, across that frontier of smoke. “Best - best man I've ever mmmet.”
Silence.
“He knew... everything - when we met,” John continues, to cross across that depth of nothing. “What I - was, who...”
“He must've got something wrong.” It's a low murmur, and it takes a moment before the words register. There is a bend of body, and a fraction more of a face in the light, long, black-leathered fingers resting against a peculiar chin, before that small stretch of skin is withdrawn and his drinking buddy leans back in his chair. John closes his eyes. Knows he is already too far gone to stop the fantasy from continuing. The light is still too bright in his eyes to catch any sight of anything else; there is the faint outline of a hoodie pulled down over where eyes presumably are. A burst of reality: a hoodie. In a pub. In London. In the world of the living. Get a grip, Watson..
He shakes his head, upsetting his stomach a bit with the movement. “Yeah, but... nothing that - mattered,” he says, and then takes a swig of his bottle to mask how he has to press his eyes closed to fight the onslaught of tears, unexpected, their path eased by the alcohol. “He,” he begins, feeling the stories flipping over themselves inside them, their words so familiar now, so familiar he can even speak them like he is now, “he saw through everything. Drew people out. Baited them. Brilliant.”
Silence.
“Never felt... Never felt mmore alive,” he manages, then has to stop, has to stop never felt more alive than when I could listen to him, never felt more alive than when I was running after him, never felt more alive than when he looked at me and he seemed to be interested in who I was, what I was because his breath is playing hide and seek in his lungs, and there a is a burn deep inside of him, and nothing stops, and nothing is all right.
But then he still can't help himself: “He sholved mmurder cases - just by looking at the crime scene. Knew - knew all about mmmotivations,” he has to stop to gather himself, “just by putting himself in... shomeone's poshition. He... Fuck.” He sloshes beer onto himself; wet, sticky, cold, and it's a bit of a wake-up call, and a go-to-bed-call at the same time, because God, what is he doing?
Silence.
“I was going,” John says, unable to stop it, “to... kill myshelf, before I mmmet him. I would have... if he hadn't...”
The stranger is a shift of shadows, a jerk of concealed body, and what is he doing here, exactly?
“He was... washn't ffake,” John spits, and it's what echoes through his dreams, this final bit of sanity, of insanity, of obsession that remains through the haze, through the swirl of pub and smoke and whisky and the way the gloved fingers are long and slender.
“Are you - okay?” John asks, blinking, because he's not sure it's his eyes, if it's the gauze of reality flickering before him, layer upon layer of mediated meaning - is the black-gloved hand holding the glass of wine really trembling so much there is wine spilling over its edge, leaving shiny trails of wetness over the dull gleam of the leather of the gloves, or is he just really far gone, now?
“Yes,” is the gruff response, too-low, too-fast.
“Buy me another,” John says.
“I'd rather not,” is the response, tight, almost a growl, low, and for a moment it almost... but he cuts himself off, still able to do that, at least, because he knows where this ends, and even if he looks for pain nowadays, pain to pierce through his indecision, his apathy, this is too raw.
“Okay,” he breathes, pressing his eyes closed, not unwilling to let it go, this time. There's a part of him that's still fighting this, even though it loses every single day.
He drains the last of his beer. “What'sh... What'sh yer name?” he slurs. As if it matters. As if names have meaning.
“Ted,” is the response.
And then, silence.
“Buy me another,” John repeats, the feeling of it being okay fading as soon as it came, and Ted is silent, a stretch of person in the dark that radiates all of the words he's not saying. “Okay, fine,” John slurs, “I'mmm just a... annoying drunk, anyway.”
And stumbling, he gets to his feet, fingers curled so tightly around the neck of his beer bottle he can feel the glass resisting, feels its struggle between holding itself and shattering into fragments, shards; to mirror some of the people it cuts, even when it's intact.
“You should have - known him,” he stutters, because it's still true, even in this mix of colours and the scent of old beer; everyone should have known Sherlock, though no one could have, and in the end even he couldn't do it, he wasn't special enough, he never saw, he never knew, he never thought about it. Never imagined that this could happen. Never tried to think of ways to stop it. He said: you machine, and then left, and left, and left, and in his dreams he does it over and over again - friends protect people, and then leaving, leaving, leaving, before Sherlock might have said something to him, maybe, in that space where John should have been - the way Sherlock often spoke to him while he wasn't there, and if he tries to think of what, maybe, Sherlock told him then, he can't do anything but open his eyes until they're so air-dried tears have no chance anymore, and head over to the pub.
“Yeah,” is the response, a puff of breath, a strange agreement.
John leaves him to it with a salute with the almost-broken beer bottle.
*
The bartender calls John a taxi, and from his expression Sherlock can tell it's not the first time. John is draped half over the bar, still hanging onto his beer, and his mouth is moving - though Sherlock doesn't think it's words he's saying, because he's good at lip reading and this amounts to nothing, almost nothing; maybe it's worth it to ignore that John's mouth is regularly shaping his name amidst nonsense sounds, the only points of meaning in a sea of nothingness.
Sherlock looks at the wine in his glass, and wonders why it is he came here; a strange urge, an unquenchable thirst to drink in the sight of London again? Why this pub? Why go to Baker Street and hide, trying to suss out if John was still living there? Why the rush of - almost - euphoria when it turned out he was? Why follow him here? Why the clench in his gut when he realised where John was going?
Why talk to him at all?
It was never going to yield results and yet he couldn't control it.
There is something burning in his chest and it's not the wine. And he can't... he can't parse it, he can't catalogue it; John, who he knows struggles with alcohol, has a strange hatred towards it born mostly out of its hold over Harry - now hanging onto a tender bartender's elbow, being transferred like a package to a cabbie, who looks unconcerned. This isn't John, and it isn't right, and there's more wrong in the world than even he had thought, if John Watson is reduced to this, and he presses his gloves, wet with wine, into his eyes to get the words like a whisper out of his brain - it's because of you.
*
And if he works a little faster after that, if he lingers a little less, he tells himself it's because there are all the reasons in the world to want to get this over with; and he's not wrong.
It's also not wrong that he dreams of John at night, of that thin mouth, rubbed raw with alcohol, with a tongue that came to lick at his lips in a habit that was suddenly sloppy, not subdued, and of words falling from alcohol-soaked lips, he wash my best friend.
It's not that Sherlock believes in in vino veritas.
It's that he believes in John, and it's that he already knew that he was, really, that he was John's best friend, though he never realised it before, though the past ten months have made it all the more clearer, and have driven home how much the sentiment is reciprocated. When he takes to bed he dreams of John; both of them - the John that sits in their couch with his robe on, inquiring after the health of the hanged dummy dangling from the ceiling, and the John sitting across him, beer a dark spot across his shirt, hair long and looking more grey than sandy in the terrible light of the pub, telling him you should have known him.
He can't help it, sometimes; sometimes he thinks: you shouldn't have known me, because maybe John wouldn't have been that way, then, maybe he would've been another perfectly functioning soul with complexities of his own in a perfectly functioning city with complexities of its own.
Yet, I would have killed myself, before I met him is another part of reality now, and he can't undo it, and that means he has to come back.
*
And when it's over, he waits another day, immobile, in the underground room he's renting in Rome, sitting for hours, trying to get loose from himself, trying to unstick himself from the knowledge that there's nothing keeping him here. Trying to unstick himself from his body, that's still spun so tight, so horribly tense, so ready to run at the first sign of danger.
There will be danger where he's going.
He calls Mycroft after 24 hours, when the final flies in Moriarty's web are growing stiff and cold somewhere, and knows that within 2 hours, Mycroft will have him home.
It's four in the afternoon when he arrives in London, and he hopes, he hopes, he hopes...
He hopes that there's still something of John left.
*
John is still fairly sober; Mrs. Hudson takes his bottles away whenever she comes to clean, and often cries a little at him, for him, hurting for the both of them, taking on the brunt of mourning Sherlock with a clear mind. He's only been at the pub for twenty minutes, so he's still more or less sober - he doesn't dare to keep anything else but a couple of pints in the fridge at the flat.
Sherlock still has his old key (refuses to think of that as sentiment rather than practicality), and has gone to Baker Street first, letting himself into the hallway like a ghost, and while he was there he tried not to feel like there was an apology he should make to the house, as though he's failed it. As though he should have let it know that he was coming back, so it could have prepared. He didn't want Mrs. Hudson to hear him - he can't do that, not yet, he can't face her yet, John has to come first, because John does come first - and there was also the very real sense that he couldn't be there, shouldn't be there. This is what he tore himself loose from, and John still lives there, which is something Sherlock didn't expect; John has grown around what used to be Sherlock's space, and he's painfully aware of how hard it must have been for John to return to 221B on his own. It's one of those things that has only become completely clear to him in stages (a bit like it only became clear after a while how utterly, completely he's done all of this for John) - Molly's stunted letters, Mycroft's short texts, revealing more to Sherlock than they ever would to anyone else, and the growing, huge, horrible knowledge that John wasn't moving on, was mourning him, and was slipping totally out of his own control.
The familiarity of 221B was too much for a bit, and he leaned against the banister until he managed to get something, he doesn't know what, under control again. And then didn't quite understand; it was just a place, just a house. Still the creak of the stairs underfoot made him wince.
He knocked on the upstairs door; there was no response, and in spite of himself he pushed the door open - not unexpectedly, the flat was empty. He stood for a long while, trying to process the details leaping out at him (dust two weeks old washing-up too small for two weeks John only eats every other day smiley face is papered over clumsily John couldn't face it violin case half-hidden under coffee table dust-free John wipes it down regularly but doesn't keep it in plain sight new couch maybe damaged maybe John got rid of it because of sentiment), that speak of a John-without-Sherlock, a John-trying-to-live-here.
To the pub then. He scowls at the living room, as though it is responsible somehow.
And slips away again, good at disappearing, not as good at reappearing, sternly forcing himself not to linger around Mrs. Hudson's door, where he can hear the faint murmur of daytime radio.
He beats his way down to John's pub, the one where he almost gave himself away, where he almost reached out to shake John to awareness, to stop doing this to yourself - turning over in his head what he's about to do; approach a man who's been steadily slipping further into addiction (and God, how he knows what that does, how it distorts everything, every sense of identity, of connectedness), a man who thinks he's dead. Not for the first time there is a flicker of doubt about what he did, about if it was right, about if he couldn't have handled it better - and that's so intolerable he stops for a moment, allows London's stream of passersby flowing past him to restore a sense of normality, to make him feel less like a ghost.
Lingering in front of the door of the pub, trying to peer in through windows designed to keep dysfunctionality in and sunlight out, he wonders for a moment if there's maybe an etiquette to coming back to life that he's disregarding now. If there is a way that would generally be considered proper after the certainly generally regarded improper action of faking one's own death. Does it involve texting a warning? John, I'm alive. Does it involve apologising? John, I really am sorry I had to do this. Does it involve asking to be let into someone's life again, a life that has undoubtedly gone on to grow, because life puts out roots and hangs on, and expands in different directions? John, do you want to see me? Does it involve letting the other person choose the time, the place, the way they allow themselves to be seen? John, tell me where you want to meet and I'll be there.
But John is at the bar, ordering his second lager, and as the door swings to a hesitant close behind Sherlock he can read in John's shoulders that he's considering whisky, already, only held back by the pressures of the hour, that grow flimsier with every passing day. Soon John won't care that it's four in the afternoon; for now, he still does, a little.
John is at the bar and there is no proper way to act. There is no way to act at all, there is only a way to be, and that is Sherlock Holmes, who was John Watson's best friend in a stretch of time that is now faint and glowing both, as though lying beyond some fogged-up window - a stretch of time in which Sherlock Holmes had no idea what that meant, those words, best friend, and even less so what they covered, what reality they spanned. He thinks he knows it now and there is no way to act, there is only you were mine, too, and you will be again, and I will fight for you now in another way than all of the ones that I've tried already.
And he's sure it would not be regarded generally as proper - but that's a thought that slips away and doesn't return, because there is nothing that counts anymore in that moment except the way John's head drops down after his first swig, defeat an almost visible cloud around him - but he goes up to where John is sitting, heart doing an odd impression of an explosion, of trying to leave his body, and says to him (and yes, it's not fair, that that should be the first words, but nothing is, really, and John is sitting there, and none of it's fair): “You are going to stop that right now.”
The moment between the words and John taking note of them is long, and empty, and strangely quiet. And when John does respond, it's not a response, because it's just a hand coming back to wave the words away, as though that can clear the alcohol-saturated air between them, the distinct feel of time stretching itself and snapping back like a rubber.
“John,” Sherlock says.
And this time, there is a tensing of muscles; Sherlock can trace it in John's shoulders, can almost see the words forming themselves in his mind, falling over each other: that voice.
And when he turns around, he does it slowly, as though for him, too, the pub air is oppressive and heavy and clings to him, and there are waves of things that try to keep him in place, to keep him as he is, to keep this moment away.
John Watson, coloured in grey-scales, lips wet and sticky and ashamed with afternoon beer, locks eyes with Sherlock Holmes, last seen with blood running from crack in his head to cracks in the pavement, with life distractedly flowing away without a sense of direction.
“God,” John says.
And it hits home to Sherlock that there was really no way for him to prepare for this moment, though he has been doing just that since the second he came to with the rush of air still echoing in his ear and pain almost a protective blanket over him - and Molly had her hands on his skull, feeling over the ridges and cracks and trying to find which of them were there before and which weren't, and there was fresh wetness on his cheeks and he chose to believe it was blood instead of her tears or maybe even his own.
Sherlock tried to imagine it; he'd prepared for John having a heart attack when he realises who it is he's looking at - and he knows it's not entirely fair, this, this coming up without warning, this overpowering, but nothing is fair, and time is something that he's come to cherish more than he did. He'd prepared for shouting, for hitting, for running away, for saying no, for temporary paralysis, for a need for reanimation.
What he hadn't prepared for is John looking at him for long seconds that strangely read to him as completely breathless, as though everyone else in the world can feel the weight of them, too, and then looking back at his pint. Life resumes at the breaking of the look, the clink of glasses, the bartender's subdued interest in them from behind his bar as he steadily washes pints.
“John,” he says again, and his voice genuinely sounds like it belongs to someone else.
John's head drops down again.
“John,” Sherlock repeats, tells the back of John's head, because this can't be real, this can't be true.
“Leave me alone,” John says, passing a hand over his brow.
Sherlock feels caught between planes of reality, shades of existence; feels exactly like the ghost John thinks he is.
“John, it's me,” he croaks.
“You're not real,” John says, and he sounds different; different than what Sherlock remembers, and also different than what he heard in the pub when John was drunk and didn't know who Sherlock was. It sounds like it's been rehearsed, this - a quiet accusation to an appartition, someone who can't be hurt, and a soft reminder to himself, who can. Something clenches in Sherlock as he realises that John must have had him appear like this quite often, to have this lack of response.
He comes to stand next to John at the bar, closing his fingers around the edge of it - sticky with spilt beer, scratchy with the rough scribbles of phone numbers jotted down - and tries to remember that John's wrong, that he is, he isn't, he isn't dead.
“I'm real,” he says, manages even to sound balanced and normal, and, well, real - then uncurls his fingers from the support of the bar, and wraps his hand around the top half of John's pint, where John's fingers aren't, where foam sticks against the warming glass. He tugs the drink out of John's grasp without encountering resistance. He tries to suppress the trembling of his fingers between which the traiterous liquid licks up the sides of the glass. “Stop it,” he says to John. It can refer to many things and he's referring to all of them.
And something seems to click into place inside John, and the next thing Sherlock knows is that John has half-fallen of his bar stool, knocking it over - he hangs onto the side of the bar as the stool clangs to silence between them. Sherlock is aware of the now-unconcealed gaze of curiosity burning into him from the barman.
“Wha-” John manages to say, and his eyes widen even further as he looks at Sherlock, really looks, for the first time. “You're -” and then language gets lost somewhere between his brain and his mouth, he only gapes for a moment.
“I -” Sherlock begins to say, but he's cut short as John surges forward and there is the first, incredible press of physical contact between them in twenty months and 4 days, John's hand reaching up to grab his collar, hanging onto it as though he can't keep himself up, his hands pushing warm and alive into Sherlock's throat.
“Sherlock,” John is saying, and instinctively Sherlock puts an arm around him to keep him up, because John is swaying against him, and Sherlock is surprised he can still hear his name over the rush of blood in his ears, his heart doing its own version of stalling and re-starting, trying to catch up to time slowing down.
But then John jerks away, and his face is crumpling into lines - new ones, ones that he didn't have before - track lines of alcohol and anger and tears, and he pushes against Sherlock again, but this time to get him away; and John Watson is strong, and Sherlock Holmes is defenseless in this moment, in which he can't process most of the things lunging at him with the speed of light, and Sherlock stumbles back.
“You - you -” John says, and then his body snaps back, lines tightening, military form, muscles leaping to attention. “You bastard,” he says, and his face is twisted into something ugly, something that's new, that Sherlock has never seen before.
He's prepared for the punch and for its strength, because he knows John's anger is physical, and he knows what John's punches feel like; but he couldn't have prepared for the fact that it feels like his stomach is falling out of him, like the floor is crumbling beneath him - and because he can't see it coming, not really, because his eyes seem to struggle to catch all of the details pressing themselves in on him and John's fist is there before he can register its appraoch, he half-falls under the impact, clanking painfully into the bar stool behind him. John is a looming presence over him.
“Watson,” the barman shouts, and someone is pulling John away. “What the fuck crawled up your arse? Startin' fights at four in the afternoon!”
Sherlock manages to scrabble to an upright position on his knees, his fingers attaching themselves automatically to the growing pain across his cheek and lips, slipping into the trickle of blood pooling in the corner of his mouth, and he looks up at John, who now looks flabbergasted, as though he doesn't understand what he just did. He aggressively shrugs off the hands restraining him, points a finger - miraculously steady - at Sherlock and says: “Don't follow me.” He stalks off, and in the silence that follows the door swings closed slowly, and the man who pulled John away offers Sherlock a hand. He takes it, because he can't think of anything else to do, and allows himself to be pulled to his feet.
“You all right, mate?” the man asks, and he's a normal functioning person with complexities of his own, and there is no one Sherlock needs to talk to less, so he just nods, and avoids eye contact.
“What was that all about?” the barman asks him, frowning - then, he narrows his eyes at Sherlock. “Wait, aren't you that bloke -” he begins, before surprise blooms across his face. “You are,” he says.
Sherlock scowls at him, trying to regain some control over what seems to be a pit of bottomless gravity in his gut. He straightens, winces at the stabs of metallic blood on his tongue as he feels around in his mouth.
“He got you good,” the bartender says, still wide-eyed.
“Yes, thank you,” Sherlock snaps, then spins around to go after John.
“He told you not to follow him,” the barman calls after him.
Sherlock ignores him, simply thinks he also told me to not be dead, and he knows which he's more likely to listen to right now.
*
For a moment he was afraid John would go to a different pub and continue drinking, but the door to 221B is standing slightly open, and Sherlock can read John just slammed it behind him without taking the care the lock needs to close completely. Something twitches in him as he remembers that John used to nag him over that, over leaving the door open whenever he was seized by a sudden insight that drove him out onto the street, because in silent moments John seemed to recall that it wasn't always all right, the way the two of them craved and followed danger, and he seemed to care about keeping their home a sanctuary in a way that never really occurred to Sherlock.
Mrs. Hudson opens her door when he's inside the hall, and she's pale and her eyes are red-rimmed. John has told her, probably incoherently, probably shouting.
“I'm sorry,” is the first thing Sherlock says to her, for different reasons, and she melts towards him, sniffling into his chest, frail old-lady hands coming up to tangle in his lapels. He hugs her back, a bit awkwardly, almost having forgotten how to do it.
“You terrible, terrible, terrible man,” she hiccoughs.
“I know,” he says, and wonders for a moment at how the words have to fight to make it up his throat. “Mrs. Hudson,” he begins, and she pulls back immediately.
“Of course,” she says, and steps away from the stairs, giving him the space to step onto the first one, which he does.
He turns towards her, seized by a sudden desire to look at her a bit more, towering over her even more generously.
“I will -” he begins, and she sniffs, mouth twisting, a spot of anger beginning to show through her tears.
“Get up there and talk to him, or you're not welcome here anymore,” she says, and there is a small bite in her words, and more affection still. He knows she means it.
*
John is standing in the kitchen, supporting himself on his hands on the table top, the rest of him collapsed, head dunked, shoulders faltering lines of jumper and human.
Sherlock approaches cautiously, a hand hovering in front of him, and stops when it's almost on John's shoulder. He's reaching out, but can't bring himself to bridge the gap.
“What is wrong with you?” John asks, and his voice is constricted, pulled taut over a surface of things straining to break through.
“Do you want a list?” Sherlock responds tensely, surprised at the sound of his own voice and how it's also twisting around all of the things he wants to say. He pushes forward, and his hand lands on John's shoulder.
John twists away from the touch, and whips around. His face is set in tight lines, and there is water under his eyes, the blue of his eyes blurring into the dark bruise-coloured bags under his eyes.
“Why can't you just...” John bites, then leaves the sentence hanging.
“I can't,” Sherlock responds, because if John is still John and he hopes that he is, John was about to say listen to me for once and leave me alone.
John closes his eyes and presses the palms of his hands into them for good measure, to fortify the barriers between them even further.
Sherlock knows he has to say it. But it's more than that because he's honestly never felt it this strongly, and it has never felt more necessary, less of a deceit, more of an offering up of himself. “John, I'm sorry,” he says.
“Nice to see you still have some grasp of social conduct,” John says, weirdly calm, from behind the screen of his hands.
“I mean it,” Sherlock says, and his throat feels like a desert.
John takes his hands away. His cheeks are smeared with wetness. He's strangely shiny in the buzz of the kitchen lamp - he's changed it a couple of times (impossible to tell how many, not enough data) since Sherlock went away, but the voltage isn't quite right, and now it sounds as though there are bees living in their kitchen. John's kitchen. Their kitchen. John's kitchen.
“Fuck you,” John spits, hands curling into fists. “Fuck you,” he repeats.
“If it helps -” Sherlock begins.
John cuts him off, half-shouting: “It won't help! Don't say anything that you think will help, or so help me God, I will -”
“If it helps,” Sherlock persists, heart hammering, “I did it all for you.”
John gapes at him for a moment. “God, you bastard!” he shouts, and he moves almost as though to hit Sherlock again, but he reins himself in, and instead claps his arms around himself, as though he needs the extra support. Long moments pass.
“I need a drink,” John finally says, and in his eyes, when he flicks them to Sherlock's, there is defiance, and I fucking dare you.
Sherlock goes over to the fridge and looks into it. There's three bottles of beer.
“We are going to drink this,” he tells John, handing one over, “and that's it.”
John bares his teeth. “You've no right,” he hisses.
“No,” Sherlock admits, and finding it not hard at all, “but that's never stopped me from doing anything.” He sounds a lot more steady than he feels, and he wonders if John can tell, if John can read him - John was never as good at it as Sherlock was, but in the final months he seemed to have developed his own idiosyncratic way of poking through some of Sherlock's moods, gathering things from uncertain data like stance, and pitch of voice, and number of words... But there is time between them now, and alcohol, and death. And life.
And it's Sherlock who pops the caps on the bottles and clinks his bottle to John's and takes the first gulp, wincing slightly at the bitter taste he's never really enjoyed.
“Well, go on then,” he says to John, whose fingers around the neck of his bottle are tight, blotted red and white, as though bone is shining through the translucency of skin.
“Wanker,” John spats.
“Yes,” Sherlock agrees, and tips his bottle back again.
“Think you can just - that you can just -” John sputters, then snaps his mouth shut. Sherlock can see his pulse leaping in his neck even from the more than an arm's length of distance between them. John is furious. He's beyond screaming. He's losing track of the words he could scream.
“Yes,” Sherlock says again, unable to stop himself from slipping further into this dangerous zone, “I'm doing it, aren't I?”
John slams his bottle down on the table so powerfully there is a crack of glass, and a rush of frothy beer that splashes onto the floor, and an unexpected brightness of blood in John's palm. He stares at it, and so does Sherlock. It's a deep cut.
“You need to -” Sherlock begins, is cut off by John's snapped: “You need to shut it.”
“- clean that up, or it'll infect,” Sherlock finishes.
John grabs at Sherlock's throat with his bloodied hand, and there's the smear of sticky warmth between the first skin-on-skin contact they have that's not knuckles cracking against jawbone.
“I'm a doctor,” John says, incongruously, out of rhythm with everything.
“You are,” Sherlock nods, leaning into the firm, half-painful grasp of John's slippery fingers.
“I know when something will infect,” John hisses.
“You do,” Sherlock agrees, voice going a bit unsteadier with John's controlled pressure on his windpipe.
There's a long moment of increasing pressure - increasing pressure of everything, of John's tightening fingers, of Sherlock's lungs, of their eyes locking, of the air straining with the words that are lost.
John lets him go, steps backwards, slips a bit in the puddle of spilled beer, and presses his hands against his forehead. When he removes them, there's the jumbled impression of the lines in his palm in blood. Sherlock gulps at the sight of it.
“Fuck you,” John says, almost conversationally, then disappears into the bathroom to take care of the cut.
Sherlock looks down at his half-empty bottle and at the yellow spill of beer on the floorboards. The light buzzes, undisturbed.
*
Sherlock has opened the final bottle of beer and put it on the table for John. His own is almost empty. When he runs his fingers over his own throat, they come up red with John's blood.
“You can't stay here,” John says when he comes out of the bathroom, hand bandaged. He's washed his face without care; there's still blood at the roots of his hair and on the bridge of his nose. “I don't want you to.”
Sherlock motions to the bottle with his own. John bares his teeth. “Think you're being funny?” he asks, teeth clenched.
“Oh, yes,” Sherlock says, “this is my idea of a joke. Didn't you know?”
“What does it say,” John breathes, almost too softly for Sherlock to hear, “that I don't actually know that that's not true.”
The silence stretches. John's chest is heaving. Sherlock doesn't know what he's saying, really, but John hasn't punched him again, and he's still standing here, though he can't be sure that's a good thing.
“Drink it,” Sherlock finally says, and is surprised at the heat building up behind his eyes, because this is such a strange moment to cry, really; in the washed-out light that ticks and zooms, with so much distance between them, with John trembling in anger. He blinks, fast, two three four times.
He knows how much it feels like defeat to John to close his fingers around the bottle, and bring it up to his lips.
But John isn't the same anymore, though he's not wholly lost, maybe, not yet, or is that just wishful thinking, it can't be because Sherlock doesn't do wishful thinking, but it's true that John's eyes as he takes the first gulp aren't trained on Sherlock, and then that's just another part of reality, something that he can't undo.
---
Part 2.