FIC: The Illusion of Free Will (1/?)
Title: The Illusion of Free Will 1/?
Characters/Pairings: Sherlock/John
Rating: PG-13 (NC-17 overall)
Warnings/Spoilers: Bastardising of canon dialogue at times?
Notes: Time Traveler's Wife fusion that I've had kicking around since last year when I was doing Big Bang and my cheerleader expressed an interest in time travel. Posting in the hope that it'll get me to finish this!
Summary: 29th January 2010 (John is 32, Sherlock is 29).
This was always going to happen; they were always going to meet. It’s happening, it’s happened, and it will happen the same way, every single time. If Sherlock cared much for romance, he might say there was something poetic about that. As it is, he just tends towards determinism since meeting John and simply accepts it for what it is.
Disclaimer: This is the bit where they make me say I don't own anything. Sherlock is the property of the BBC, Steven Moffat, Mark Gatiss and, of course, the one and only Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. The Time Traveler's Wife belongs to Audrey Niffenegger.
On AO3
29th January 2010 (John is 32)
It’s the first bit of sunshine London has seen in a typically arduous, dreary January. John walks through the park on this particular morning for no other reason than because he woke up, opened his curtains, and saw something besides grey outside his window. It was worth commemorating with a walk, if nothing else.
The first month of the new decade has passed much like any other January - New Year’s resolutions have long been forgotten in the monotony of day-to-day life after the needless excess and excitement of Christmas.
John didn’t make a New Year’s resolution. Ella hadn’t liked it when he told her that in one of their therapy sessions, he could tell by the amount of words she scrawled down in her notebook, eyebrows furrowed. Always those same joined-up, round, looping letters like a teenage girl’s handwriting. It was somehow incongruous, John thought, such juvenile writing in a woman who strived to maintain such a professional, unflappable demeanour.
Not making plans for the future, she wrote.
John had to smile at that one. It was hard to make plans for the future with problems like John’s. Hard to walk into the job he’d been trained for with a psychosomatic limp, a tremor in his dominant hand, and a penchant for time travelling when put under stress.
Future, past, present. The words alone can make him smile now, a sharp, bitter thing.
“Nothing happens to me,” he told her.
It was a lie though. She’d never believe the truth.
“John! John Watson!”
Mike Stamford’s booming voice breaks him out of his thoughts and chases him down the path. Much though he wants to, John can’t escape. Not with a limp and a cane, that ‘third footstep’ he tries so hard to ignore. He jabs the end of the cane a little too forcefully against the ground when he has to stop, and the jolt travels all the way up his arm. The pain is worth it; he feels a bit better as he turns around to greet the man holding out his hand to him.
“Stamford, Mike Stamford. We were at Bart’s together.”
“Yes,” John says, giving a tight smile and extending his free hand for a brief shake. “Sorry, yes. Mike. Hello.”
Mike takes in his reservation and grins. “Yeah, I know, I got fat.”
John could not have been thinking anything more different to that, but he recognises the self-consciousness for what it is. He knows a pre-emptive strike when he sees one. “No…” he begins.
Mike glances at his occupied hand, leaning on the cane.
“I heard you were abroad somewhere getting shot at,” Mike says, his wince of sympathy making John’s knuckles turn white around the cane’s handle. “What happened?”
It’s too glorious an opening to let slide. John goes for the kill. “I got shot.”
The look on Mike Stamford’s face is priceless.
----
The Criterion café’s coffee is sublime. John sips slowly, savouring each mouthful, and the pleasure it brings is almost enough to drown out the annoyance that is this rotund version of a former friend and classmate sat next to him on a park bench. A reminder of his past and all that he’s lost.
John is aware he’s being a bastard. Stamford is a decent, sound bloke and John always liked him well enough. But Stamford has a wife and two kids, a sedentary lifestyle that’s enabled him to get fat and he’s teaching. John meanwhile is crippled, lonely, and miserable at the age of thirty-two. He can’t pursue his dreams, hold down a job, or keep a steady girlfriend because of his condition. He’s in no mood for reminiscing or socialising.
He nods and laughs in appropriate places though - on the surface, he is perfectly polite and apparently engaged in the conversation. He’s not that much of a bastard that he can’t be civil. Not yet anyway.
He has to focus more when Mike starts asking him questions. “What about you? Just staying in town until you get yourself sorted?”
John shakes his head. “I can’t afford to stay in London on an army pension, not without getting a job.”
“Ah, but there are plenty of jobs in London and I can’t see you going anywhere else.” Mike playfully nudges his left arm and John wants to scream. “That’s not the John Watson I know.”
“I am not the John Watson you-” John takes a few deep breaths, shifts his coffee cup to his right hand and clenches his left hand against his thigh where it’s started to tingle. Not here, he thinks, not now.
He calms down and the tingling passes. He’s not going to travel. John exhales, a slight quiver to the long breath.
Mike is watching his actions with a thoughtful look. “You’re a strange one, John.”
“If you only knew,” he replies with a grin.
“Couldn’t you, I don’t know, get a flatshare or something?”
“I’d still have trouble with the money side of things without a job, Mike. Besides,” John’s grin turns rueful, “who’d want me for a flatmate?”
Mike seems amused. “You know, you’re the second person to say that to me today.”
John blinks, considering. There’s a faint sense of being set up that comes from his well-meaning mother’s many attempts at arranging dates for him with girls he knew from school. Well, he thinks, bring it on. He’s got nothing to lose. “Who was the first?”
----
29th January 2010 (Sherlock is 29, John is 32)
Sherlock is not working off tension, or aggression, or any of those other silly things Molly had accused him of. He is conducting an experiment, a pertinent experiment into the bruise pattern that forms after flogging a corpse for half an hour. His personal feelings have nothing to do with it. Molly would bring feelings into it, considering how prominently she displays hers.
He doesn’t necessarily mean to be cruel to her, but her advances are unfortunately as advantageous as they are unwelcome. He knows John would disapprove of how shamelessly he uses her, but John is not here. And Sherlock’s conscience has been John himself since he was just eight years old.
His mouth curves into a smile as he remembers John forcing him to give Cook’s cat back. He’d protested violently - stomping and ranting, the works. Until John had threatened not to visit again, that is. Then he had raced off to return the creature to its rightful owner, chagrined but unharmed, and he had even apologised. Not sincerely, of course, but that was by-the-by.
The smile sours as he remembers another example of John Watson’s unwavering moral principles and restraint. He shifts uncomfortably at the memory of throwing himself at a man nearly twenty years his senior when he was just eighteen himself. The embarrassment of that spectacular blunder will never leave him, he’s quite certain.
He then recalls his earlier thought that Molly’s advances were unwelcome and, out of some misplaced sense of camaraderie, offers her a small, conciliatory twitch of his lips when she brings him the tea he asked for. The look she gives him in return is that of a rabbit in the headlights and suggests that he has just grown a second head before her, rather than smiled. Well, Sherlock thinks, he won’t try that again.
The tea she makes is dreadful, besides.
He lets it go cold and then asks her to bring him coffee instead next time before going to sit at the microscope to analyse some of the samples he brought with him from the O’Donaghue case.
----
“Bit different from my day,” Sherlock hears the tail-end of the quiet remark when two men walk into the lab. One of them is Stamford - he recognises the bumbling gait and laboured breathing. The other man, the one who’d made the remark, is walking unsteadily with a cane. The voice is familiar, it sounds just like… Sherlock stops the thought before it can form. Twice in one day is not healthy for him, he knows from experience.
Stamford is about to answer the other man, he’s just beginning his reply when Sherlock talks over him. “Mike, can I borrow your phone?” he asks without glancing up from the microscope.
“What happened to yours?” Mike asks in return. He’s already searching through his jacket pockets for his phone, going by the rustling noises of his clothes. “Not left it in a cadaver again, have you?”
“That error was Miss Hooper’s, not mine.”
She had taken his phone off the desk while he had been busy with something or other last month in an effort to program her number in. A marvellous bit of subterfuge, one that hadn’t escaped his notice, naturally, but he was entertained by her boldness in the attempt. He can tolerate her when she’s bold. It’s the timidity he can’t stand.
And the occasional bouts of anxiety-induced clumsiness - God only knows how she managed to mislay his phone in a fifty-one year old white male.
Sherlock looks up as he finishes his sentence and the ‘mine’ fades on his tongue, coming out strangled and thin. The text he wants to send to Lestrade is pushed to the back of his mind, the bulk of his thoughts now occupied with memories and conflicting emotions.
“John,” he says faintly because, for that precise second of time, Sherlock Holmes can’t actually think of anything else to say. There would be few at Scotland Yard who would believe him capable of being rendered speechless, but this was enough of a shock to do it.
His brain reboots after that disconcerting moment, and he’s taking in the colour of John’s hair, his complexion, the lines in his face, approximate height and weight. He’s young, Sherlock realises, as young as he’s ever seen him.
But he’s holding a cane. Sherlock frowns at it. He’s never seen John with a cane, not even at his oldest at almost forty.
The limp is psychosomatic, he reads that instantly. There is nothing wrong with John’s leg; it’s most likely a phantom injury, displaced from some other, real wound. Left shoulder, probably.
The most unforeseen realisation is that there is no spark of recognition in John’s eyes. No warmth, no depth of loyalty and devotion that he’d come to crave, to hoard and jealously guard, to store and to take out and examine and put back, safe and sound.
This John isn’t his John.
As if to prove the conclusion he’s just reached, John asks mildly: “Do I know you?”
Of course, this is their first meeting. Their timelines have converged, just as John said they would when they last met in Cambridge.
Sherlock clears his throat, looks down the microscope again, and turns the wheels for something to do with his hands. His fingers slip, sweat-slick against the plastic and metal. His heart is pounding; his body is acting against his will. That ridiculous, childish affection he’s harboured for so many years causing his autonomic nervous system to flare up. Sentiment.
Sherlock feels horribly exposed, though he rationally knows it would take someone with his own intellect and skill for observation to detect the change in him.
“No,” he says. “My… my mistake,” he hears Stamford splutter in the background. Curse the man, can’t he just go away? “I thought you were someone I used to know.” Sherlock looks up again and gives a shrug, aiming for casual, unconcerned.
John’s eyebrows draw together - he’s either heard that one before, or he just saw through it - and Sherlock realises he hasn’t covered as well as he’d thought. Damn. He really must stop underestimating John’s intelligence.
“I’ve got a phone you can use,” John says, walking towards him and holding Sherlock’s gaze as he approaches. He does know, Sherlock can see it in his eyes.
It’s like a game, he thinks, this pretence: Sherlock knows who John is; John knows Sherlock knows and so on and so forth. The only oblivious one here is Stamford. If they could just get him to leave…
“Mike, I think you left your phone downstairs after we came in,” John says, eyes never leaving Sherlock’s face, roving back and forth like he’s doing his own version of Sherlock’s keen assessment.
Mike clicks his fingers. “Of course, when I stopped at Ricky’s desk. Be back in a minute. You two should keep getting to know each other. John, this is-”
“Sherlock Holmes,” he interrupts smoothly, and Mike rolls his eyes and leaves with a creak of the lab door before it bangs shut behind him.
As he reaches Sherlock, John hands him the phone and Sherlock takes it, deliberately brushing his fingers against John’s as he does. Little to no reaction from John. He doesn’t know why he expected any differently.
He gleans what he can from the phone, and holds it out for John to take back.
“Don’t need it now,” he says.
John accepts his phone with a shrug. “John Watson. But you already knew that. You know about me, don’t you? You know about my... my condition.”
Sherlock nods back in concession and stands up to be level with John. Or rather, more level. He’s been taller than John since he was fifteen.
He doesn’t answer verbally though, so John takes it upon himself to keep talking. “Tell me I didn’t show up naked in your home or garden at some point,” he says, letting out a short, nervous laugh.
“Actually, you did,” Sherlock says, his deadpan answer a counterpoint to John’s flippant tone. “At several points, in fact.”
John’s eyebrows lift and Sherlock smirks.
“Who are you?” John asks. “And who are you to me?”
“Both good questions, though the first answer is subjective and depends on who you ask, and the second I can only guess at. At this moment in time the answer is, I suppose, nothing. Not yet, anyway.”
“I’ll take a subjective and no doubt biased answer to the first and that guess at the second then.”
Sherlock feels a small, inexplicable surge of fondness in his chest. Eight years of separation is much too long, he really can’t let that happen again.
“I’m a consulting detective - the only one in the world, I invented the job. And, as such, I hate guesswork.”
“You’re a detective and you never guess?”
“I observe, and from that I make logical steps to a conclusion. Deductive reasoning.”
“I’d call that guesswork.”
“You would.”
They look at each other for a moment, and then John laughs suddenly. Sherlock joins him, and it’s somewhat surreal to be laughing with John like this, here and now, when he’s done so a hundred times before as a child. This is different - new and fragile.
“You’re ahead of me,” John says after the laughter has subsided. “You know me, but I don’t know you at all. What’s a consulting detective anyway? Like a private detective?”
“No. I’m a consultant, so that means when the police are out of their depth - which is always - they come to me.”
“The police don’t consult amateurs.”
Sherlock gives him a withering glare and opens his mouth, intent on proving himself. Amateurs, indeed. He couldn’t resist the opportunity to show off under normal circumstances, let alone when speaking to a John who hasn’t met him before and doesn’t know what he can do yet. It’s about more than just proving himself, he realises. He wants to impress John.
He watches as he reels off his deductions, catching the way John drops his head down to look at his affected leg when Sherlock speaks about it, shifting his feet. He’s uncomfortable at having the limp brought up. It’s not going to be a problem for long; Sherlock is already plotting how to get rid of it based on that intermittent tremor in John’s left hand.
“So you were right,” he says after he’s finished his speech. “The police don’t consult amateurs. Now that we’ve got that out of the way, come look at a flat with me.”
Eight years. Sherlock decides he can blame the way he just blurted out that offer on the eight years of time he’s spent apart from any version of John, going over and over the details of all their previous meetings, the subtle hints and clues John had given him. The incomplete picture they painted.
“Sorry, but how could you possibly know I’m after a flat?”
“Mike brought you here to meet me because I told him this morning that I must be a difficult man to find a flatmate for. You’ve just returned from military service, no doubt looking for a more permanent residence than whatever hovel they’ve placed you in. We both may not know exactly who you are to me, but flatmates seems like a good start. It would make sense, from what I do know of you.”
“And what’s that? How did you know about Afghanistan?”
A lot of his knowledge about John has come from Mycroft (such as the fact that John had been invalided home from Afghanistan rather than Iraq or somewhere else) and from John’s frequent visits to him in the past, but he’s still made deductions today to fill the gaps. He also picked up on things he didn’t even mention to John, such as the occupation John has been pursuing since he can’t be a doctor now (low-paid technician jobs - dull), the reason for the termination of his most recent employment, and (disappointingly) that John has a date tonight.
He could run through all his lines of deduction, but he isn’t going to do that yet. He knows exactly what to say here; he’s waited for this moment to echo the words John has stubbornly repeated to him so many times before when Sherlock has asked for details about the future.
Sherlock leans in to murmur in John’s ear: “Now, that would be telling.”
The door to the lab opens and Sherlock realises just how close together they’re standing. Too close for prospective flatmates, too close even for good friends. Which they’re not.
As he told John, they’re not anything yet.
“Oh God,” comes the frantic voice, “I’m so sorry- oh God, I didn’t mean to- I’m sorry.”
Sherlock groans softly. It’s Molly.
He looks over to where she’s dithering on the doorstep, the mug of coffee in her hand likely to be spilled all down herself if she whirls around and scurries off the way he can see she’s dying to.
Her eyes are darting between them, mouth open in disbelief. Sherlock corrects his earlier thought: he and John are standing too close for prospective flatmates or good friends because they’re standing as close as lovers might.
It could make her less amenable to him, but he hopes the sight of them together puts a stop to her infatuation, her awkward flirtation and her attempts to make herself attractive to him.
She’s wrong in thinking he hasn’t noticed her, of course he has. He notices everything.
Sherlock’s eyes run carefully, almost languidly over John’s features. A well-remembered, but ever-changing face: the same kind eyes with the underlying steel, the firm jawline (always, always set as if in some sort of grim determination). Same nose, mouth, ears. Symmetrical, for the most part.
John’s face is as perfectly ordinary as it is remarkable.
It’s not entirely Molly’s fault, Sherlock thinks charitably. It’s just a fact of life that no one has ever held his attention the way John Watson does.
“Ah, Molly,” he says, acknowledging her presence so she can’t slip away as if no one had seen her.
John cringes at the words and steps back, obviously also aware that their previous positions relative to each other were overly familiar to say the least.
“Your coffee,” she whispers, making the bare minimum of steps required to reach one of the desks so she can set the mug down and then hasten from the room again, leaving both men staring after her.
“She’s in love with you,” John observes a moment after the door closes.
“Very astute.”
John tilts his head to one side to consider him. “But you feel nothing for her?”
“I…” Sherlock struggles to find the words. Another person might say ‘I’m taken’, but as far as Sherlock is concerned, that phrase it trite, and while it may be true, it’s far from accurate.
He ends up saying: “She’s not the one I want.”
John’s eyes are bright, that particular intelligence he has for people and feelings that Sherlock doesn’t possess anywhere near as much of fairly shines from him, and Sherlock fears he’s given himself away for a moment.
Then John huffs a laugh. “I know that feeling,” he says, and brings a hand down on Sherlock’s shoulder as if they were the oldest of chums.
Sherlock’s smile is strained as he replies: “Indeed.”
An awkward pause follows, broken by John clapping his hands together. “So, this flat…”
Back on solid ground, Sherlock sighs in relief. He can talk about the flat.
“A nice little place in central London I’ve got my eye on. Don’t worry about how we’ll be able to afford it; I know you’re not working currently. The landlady is going to give me a discount anyway-” Sherlock stops, frowning as he thinks about something. “Do you enjoy the violin?”
“Sorry?” John looks baffled by the non-sequitur.
“I play the violin, particularly when I’m thinking, and sometimes I don’t speak for days on end. I hope that wouldn’t bother you too much. Potential flatmates really should know the worst about each other.”
John laughs. “I don’t have a job, and I time travel when I get over-emotional or stressed. Sometimes when I don’t, too. You really think playing the violin and not talking makes you the bad flatmate here?”
Sherlock thinks about the fridge-freezer he intends to install in 221B Baker Street so that he can use it to store the (highly illegal) samples he takes from Bart’s morgue.
“Definitely.”
----
“Okay, you’ve got questions,” Sherlock says as they sit awkwardly (on John’s part, anyway, Sherlock has been looking at his phone and texting - answering four messages from Lestrade that he’d ignored since meeting John) in the cab on the way to Baker Street.
John squares his shoulders against the seat, sits up straighter. “Yeah, how do you know me?”
“We met in the grounds of my childhood home when I was six years old. You knew enough about me that I believed you when you said you were from the future. After that, you visited me several times at various ages, right up until I was at university. I last saw you when I was twenty-one, and you told me we’d meet in the present in eight years time. And now here you are.”
“So everything you said about me at Bart’s, a future version of me told you all that?”
Sherlock smirks. John would like that - Sherlock’s brilliant deductions reduced to nothing more than something he’d already been informed of.
“You barely told me anything in our acquaintance,” he says. “I figured things out each time I met you, of course, but even if I hadn’t, I could still observe all the necessary facts on meeting you today.”
He steers John through his deductions - the tan line, haircut and stance that said served in the military; John’s first comment to Stamford leading him to army doctor; the nature of John’s limp that could only be psychosomatic, thus requiring him to have a therapist; the phone’s engraving and scratches around the charging port that pointed to an estranged, alcoholic brother with marital troubles.
John looks enthralled throughout and Sherlock, prideful creature that he is, has to hold back a smile.
“That was…” John trails off, shaking his head. “I mean, wow, that was really something.”
“You really think so?”
“Of course it was, it was amazing! I’ve never heard anything like it.”
Sherlock blinks a few times and looks back out the window, away from John’s admiring expression. It’s too much, it’s been eight years and he’s forgotten how good it feels to have John’s attention, his praise.
“That’s not what people normally-”
“Hang on,” John cuts him off, brow furrowed. “How did you know it was Afghanistan? I might have served in Iraq.”
There’s a momentary lurch in Sherlock’s chest. He can’t say that he tasked his brother with finding John. Even with his lack of care for social niceties, he knows that it would be considered weird and obsessive.
“A lucky guess,” he lies smoothly. “You were right - I do guess from time to time.”
John huffs a laugh, apparently appeased by that, and Baker Street comes into view as the cab turns a corner.
Sherlock is all but vibrating with excitement as he bounds out of the cab and knocks on the front door sharply, turning and throwing money at the cabbie when he remembers.
Behind him, John carefully eases himself out of the car, wincing as he puts his cane out ahead to steady himself.
Sherlock glowers, hating the metal stick already. He reassures himself that John will be rid of it soon. He’s never seen John with a cane or much of a limp and he knows John didn’t meet him as a child before he met John as an adult, so that would suggest that he must be the one to fix it. Danger and adrenaline will do it. He’ll bring the battlefield back into John’s life and, as ever, John will more than exceed to the challenge.
The door to number 221 opens to reveal Mrs Hudson, who instantly opens her arms to him.
“Sherlock,” she says, a fond sort of grumble as he leans down to embrace her. “And is this your young man?”
Sherlock steps back, watching John’s imitation of a goldfish at her phrasing with amusement, and holds out an arm as he introduces John: “Mrs Hudson, Doctor John Watson.”
They’re going to get on famously, Sherlock can see it already as they greet each other. Her overwhelming need to mother will extend from him to his new (new?) friend and flatmate, especially once she learns he was injured in the war.
“Come in,” she says, and Sherlock jogs up the stairs ahead.
“Don’t mind if we do.”
He stands still at the top outside the door to 221B, waiting for John to pick his way up the steps. There’s a faint look of shame in his eyes when he sees Sherlock has paused with a hand on the door and a raised eyebrow at the limp he’s already labelled as fake, all in John’s head.
Sherlock opens the door and feels a light tremor in his chest as he takes in the sitting room. This one, he thinks, it has to be this one. John has to love it, he just has to. Sherlock can’t picture them anywhere else. It’s sentimental of him, he knows that, but he’s irrevocably attached to 221B Baker Street already. The first time he walked in he just knew it was a place he and John could share. He was prepared to move in alone and wait, but John has arrived at precisely the right time. Like he always does.
It’s still odd, to have John beside him like this. Not from the future, another place and time, not about to disappear at a moment’s notice. He can scarcely believe it. John really didn’t lie to him, all those years ago.
“Oh, this could be very nice,” John says, and Sherlock’s head turns towards him at once as he steps inside the flat and looks around. “Very nice, indeed.”
Sherlock looks around too, smiling and indulging the fancy that says he and John are looking at the room through the same eyes and thinking the same thing: home.
“Yes,” he says, pleased that John likes it, relieved that John likes it. “Yes, I really think so, I think you’ll like it here.”
“Soon as we get all this rubbish cleaned out,” John says, as Sherlock says at the same time: “So I went straight ahead and moved in.”
“Oh,” they each say when they realise.
“So this is all…” John breaks off awkwardly as Sherlock whirls around the flat, moving books and files, making a feeble attempt at tidying.
“Well, obviously I can straighten things up…” Sherlock says, flustered and almost stammering. Why is he flustered because of the mess? He’s reminded of John’s second visit to his room at university, the one he prepared and cleaned up for specifically, knowing it was to be their last meeting for some time. He takes a sheaf of unopened letters across to the mantelpiece and stabs a knife through them to keep them in place. “…a bit.”
John points to the mantelpiece with his cane. “That’s a skull.”
“Yes,” Sherlock says, glancing at it. It would probably scare John off if he labelled it as a ‘friend’, so he doesn’t. Best to keep some things back. They’ve only just met.
Mrs Hudson bustles into the room then, already doing a better job of tidying as she picks up a dirty cup and saucer on her way. “What do you think then, Doctor Watson?”
Sherlock begins to take off his coat and scarf to occupy himself. This is getting ridiculous; he’s like his teenage self again, desperate to impress John and to not earn his disapproval. He’s above this now. He should be above this now.
“There’s another bedroom upstairs,” she continues, “If you’ll be needing two bedrooms.”
Sherlock is proud of the way his hands don’t falter as he strips off his coat, even as his ears strain to pick up John’s response to her loaded question. Dotty old bat, he thinks. Although he can understand her assumption. Sherlock has shown no interest in any living soul in all the time he’s known her, now he’s suddenly brought a strange man home. A man he must look abnormally attentive to.
Can she tell? Sherlock wonders. She’s a perceptive old girl, far cleverer than that dotty old bat surface would suggest. Braver too.
She catches Sherlock’s eye and winks. Oh, she knows.
“Of course we’ll be needing two,” John says, confused and indignant.
Mrs Hudson looks back to John then, luckily. It means she misses Sherlock’s blink that lasts a second too long to be anything other than a sign of his disappointment - not so much in John’s answer, but in his dismissive tone.
It’s irrational to be disappointed. This John doesn’t know him, not like the John he’s familiar with. This John doesn’t care for him, or know how much Sherlock cares for him in return. He mustn’t get mixed up like this. The Work comes first for him now, it needs to stay that way. He can’t afford to get distracted.
“Oh, you boys don’t have to hide it from me. I can see Sherlock’s fond of you.”
Sherlock glares at her, teeth gritted, but she’s babbling something about the men next door and heading off towards the kitchen. Sherlock saw them once - gay, committed, irrelevant. Not obviously a threat, or Mycroft would have prevented him moving in to Baker Street. The whole street’s background checks must have been flawless.
“Sherlock,” comes a despairing voice. “The mess you’ve made!”
Sherlock ignores her in favour of observing John. He doesn’t look like that ‘fond’ comment has affected him or his opinion of Sherlock. He probably just let the whole exchange go over his head, dismissing Mrs Hudson as a silly old woman making outdated assumptions about two men living together. As he continues to watch, John plumps a cushion and settles into the armchair opposite the one Sherlock favours. Typical John: his mirror whether he knows it or not.
“We met when you were just six then?” John says, going back to their conversation in the cab. “Christ. And how many times after that?”
“I kept a journal,” Sherlock walks over to one of the boxes he hasn’t unpacked yet, taking a leather-bound book from inside it. “You gave me a list of dates so I’d know where to meet you, when to bring clothes.”
He hands the book to John who sets his cane at his side to take it with a mild expression of suppressed curiosity.
It’s a tense moment, watching John flip through this record of his early life. He hasn’t ever written what happened or any embarrassing (and disturbing, at that age) feelings in the journal, it’s not a diary, but his measurements are all in there. John’s height and weight are normal variables to take down, he thinks, but the others - the number of freckles on John’s back, the number of lines around his eyes when he smiles, the length of his smile, resting heart rate, handspan - perhaps they reveal more about him than they do about John.
It was silly of him to write them down in the first place. He should have encoded them, or scored them out before letting John see the book. He keeps all the measurements in his head anyway with all his other data about John, all the unquantifiable things like the sound of his surprised laugh, the texture of the different colour tones in his hair, the softness and warmth of his mouth…
“More than I expected,” John says abruptly.
Sherlock swallows, realising that John is referring to the volume of visits in the journal and not echoing the thought chasing itself around Sherlock’s mind. More than I expected. “Yes.”
“You must know me well,” John says without looking up, still occasionally turning pages. “It must be hard for you now when I don’t know you at all.”
It is, of course it is, but he can’t let it show. He needs to regain control of himself, for God’s sake. “As I said, you told me very little over the years. I don’t know you as well as you might think.”
“Still, you’re used to me, and I’m not the same. I’m practically a stranger.”
Sherlock’s fingers flex at his sides when John looks up at him with that same open, expressive face he’s so familiar with.
“There are similarities.” He’s practically itching to take out his phone, pick something up. Anything he could use as a barrier between them and the honesty John is demanding.
“Are you sure you want me to move in?”
“Certain. You told me we’d be flatmates, so it hardly matters anyway. That’s what happens.”
John frowns, thumb and forefinger releasing the page he’d been holding, half-turned. “That implies a lack of free will.”
Free will again. The thing John had tried so hard to give him an illusion of with his careful silences, his cut-off sentences. He needn’t have bothered. This was always going to happen; they were always going to meet. It’s happening, it’s happened, and it will happen the same way, every single time.
If Sherlock cared much for romance, he might say there was something poetic about that. As it is, he just tends towards determinism since meeting John and simply accepts it for what it is.
“You still believe in free will?”
“I’d like to, yeah.”
Sherlock shrugs. “Exercise it then. Do you want to move in or not?”
His traitorous heart races as he waits for John’s decision.
“I can’t afford to,” John says eventually. “I don’t have a job.”
“I know. Can’t be a doctor if you’re going to disappear in the middle of an appointment, or in the middle of open-heart surgery. That’s not what I asked; I said do you want to move in?”
John meets his gaze steadily and inclines his head, just a little. “Yes,” he says.
It’s music to Sherlock’s ears, his heart rate slowing again. John wants to stay. “Why?”
John looks taken aback at the question. His eyebrows lower as he thinks about it. “It’s a nice place,” he says.
Is that it? John likes the flat? He’d been hoping for a reason involving himself, but perhaps that was too much to ask at this early stage.
“And you’re interesting,” John continues. “I don’t think I’d get bored here.”
Sherlock smiles. “No, you never will.”
His smile is reflected back at him, spreading hesitantly across John’s face. “But I’d need a job.”
“Boring,” Sherlock sighs, managing to flop with no small amount of elegance into the chair opposite John, tired of looming over him now he knows John wants to live with him at Baker Street.
“I doubt consulting detectives get paid enough to cover the rent for a nice place in central London by themselves.”
“I told you Mrs Hudson was offering me a discount, she owes me a favour. A few years back, her husband got himself sentenced to death in Florida. I was able to help out.”
John’s eyebrows rise. “You stopped her husband being executed?”
The grin Sherlock flashes him shows a wide array of his teeth. “Oh no, I ensured it.”
John shakes his head, clearly stifling a laugh. He always did enjoy black humour, Sherlock remembers. He lets his own laugh escape and John lets out a snort then too.
“You’ll find a job,” Sherlock says when their mirth settles. “Annoyingly. In the meantime, I assure you I’ve no lack of private clients, often willing to pay exorbitant sums of money to find out if their spouses are cheating. Their cases are hardly worth getting out of bed for, but they are a source of income, should it become necessary.”
“I can’t live here off money you’ve earned without contributing,” John says, clearly affronted at the very idea.
“Assist me on my cases then.” Sherlock leans forward in his chair intently and watches John’s reaction to the offer.
He’d always hoped for this, ever since he first deduced that John was a doctor when he had fledgling dreams of being a detective who was able to pick and choose his own cases. Now that he consults for New Scotland Yard mainly, a medical man would prove invaluable to him when Anderson was being difficult or just plain incompetent and obstructive as usual. He’d brushed off many an insult from that loathsome little man with the mere thought of it sustaining him: John would see the things you’re missing.
There’s a small, unacknowledged part of him that was also sustained by the thought of John accompanying him to crime scenes because it would mean rubbing him in their faces, showing him off. Assistant, friend, and (one day, possibly, if he hasn’t read everything wrong) lover.
John would be the one thing they all thought he could never have: a lasting relationship with another human being. Granted, he’s never wanted that with any other human being, but John’s always been the exception.
“I’m no detective,” John says.
“But you’re a doctor. Are you any good?”
John bristles at the question and draws himself up slightly in the chair, “Very good,” he assures.
Sherlock smirks. A self-confident John is his favourite kind of John. “So you’ll have seen a lot of injuries then, violent deaths. Bit of trouble too, I bet.”
He sees the apprehension dawn in John’s eyes before they shutter somewhat, guarded, as he quietly answers: “Of course, yes. Enough for a lifetime. Far too much.”
He says that, but Sherlock saw anticipation flicker along with the apprehension. He knows John, even if he’s not sussed out everything about him yet. “Want to see some more?”
John’s mouth is tight, his jaw firm. His expression looks more like a smile to Sherlock than John’s actual smile, at least in this context. He relaxes, knowing what John’s answer will be.
“Oh God, yes.”
----
29th January 2010 (John is 32)
John looks around the bedsit, even more starkly empty now he’s packed his meagre belongings into two bags, the only important items in them being his laptop, and the Browning L9A1 that he really isn’t meant to have.
His phone buzzes in the pocket of his jeans, bringing him out of his navel-gazing, and he drops one of the bags to take it out and read the message. It buzzes again as he unlocks it and finds two texts, one from Sherlock, and one from Miranda.
Thumb hovering over the inbox indecisively, he taps to read Sherlock’s first.
Avoid black cars on your way back. Cabs fine - SH
John stares at the cryptic message, wondering again if he’s doing the right thing moving in with such an eccentric man. His other option is to stay here though - grey, simple, small. He doesn’t want this life; he wants the hints that Sherlock has offered, crime scenes and detective stories. He’s always had a weak spot for detective stories.
It’ll be hell on his condition, by the sounds of it. His therapist would not approve of John putting himself in stressful situations, especially if she knew the effect they had on him. A time travelling former soldier with probable PTSD, she’d have a bloody field day.
He told Ella that nothing happens to him, but since he was invalided home, since he was discharged from Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Birmingham, quite a few unusual things have happened to him. The first time it happened, he had been sitting at his new desk, new laptop open and all but grinding his teeth as he tried to think of something to write for this damn project Ella gave him that wouldn’t lead to him being sectioned.
‘Nothing’ was a better blog entry than ‘when I was shot I woke up bleeding on an old man’s carpet in a house a million miles away from Afghanistan and I have no idea how.’
‘Nothing’ was certainly better than that. As he had sat there frustrated though, a pins and needles feeling began in his left hand and he frowned, remembering a similar feeling overriding even the pain of his shoulder as he lay on the warm sand in Afghanistan thinking ‘please God, let me live.’
After he came back to England, when he had plenty of time to think about it all in the hospital, he put the tingling down to nerve damage. The bullet struck him close to his brachial plexus, after all. But there was no lasting sensory or motor loss in his arm or hand, just a tremor that didn’t even have a physiological basis.
His elbow wasn’t leaning against anything as he sat at the computer this time; there was no compression of his ulnar nerve.
Before he had time to think about it further, he wasn’t in his room any longer. He was outside Bart’s Hospital, staggering to one side to be violently sick over what was apparently one of the ambulance bays. Once he emptied the contents of his stomach, he realised that he was stark naked in a hospital car park. He was tempted to label it as a dream (although his dreams tended more towards showing up naked in lectures at university rather than outside one of the hospitals he trained in) when a cyclist rushed past him, almost knocking him down.
The cyclist didn’t look back, and John watched the cyclist actually go on to knock another man down a few yards away from him. John started running as soon as he saw the man’s head hit the ground, forgetting his bizarre circumstances, his churning stomach and even his nudity as his medical instincts took over.
When he reached the man, he took in the man’s black jacket, a detached thought floating through his head (that’s just like my jacket) even as he recognised the man’s face as his own.
He was looking down at himself.
It had to be a dream. The tingling started up in his left hand again and then he was back in his room, lying on the floor by the bed, still naked, with the clothes he had been wearing sat crumpled on the desk chair he previously occupied.
He had to admit: unless he had started sleep-stripping, that hadn’t been a dream.
It happened twice more after that. The second time, John found himself spending ten minutes hiding behind a headstone in an unfamiliar graveyard, certain no relatives of his could be buried there. The third time, he visited an empty meadow for two hours, ducking for cover behind a tree when he heard a boy’s voice calling out in the distance, asking for his ‘croft’, whatever that might be.
He only really got the idea that it might be time travel after he was visited by an older version of himself. That future-John came to him a week ago and told him to be patient because something good was coming his way. John had scoffed, turned over in bed, and told the apparition to fuck off.
The other John had done just that, but not before walking across to the present-John and kicking him in the shin.
“I’m real,” he said. “I’m you in the future, so I’m perfectly qualified to tell you this: don’t be an idiot.”
And then he’d dissolved before John’s very eyes. That was when John started googling time travel.
Nothing like it had ever happened before Afghanistan, before his shoulder. John looks at it like epilepsy: the tingling in his left hand and the panicky rising sensation of queasiness he gets before a jump are like an aura before a grand mal seizure. He wonders if the trauma of getting shot shook something loose in his brain. He had to smile when he first thought about it and remembered that the temporal lobe is the most epileptogenic region of the brain.
He still wonders sometimes if he shouldn’t tell someone, see a doctor. But he is a doctor, and he knows no one can help him. This isn’t a condition out of a medical textbook. This is something hush-hush, something to do with the government, maybe. He dematerialised in front of his fellow soldiers after being shot, just faded out of their view for five minutes before coming back just as suddenly. But none of them ever said anything; it didn’t go into any reports. John was invalided home as if it hadn’t happened, as if all that had happened was a bullet passing through his shoulder.
The only thing out of the ordinary was the man in the suit who spoke to him in the field hospital in Camp Bastion. John remembers his oily politician’s voice well, the upper-class English accent that spoke in riddles to John as he lay feverish and barely recovering, only half hearing the man, let alone understanding. The phrase he remembers best was something about ‘the necessity of discretion’. John remembers the scent of the man’s cologne better, his creaseless suit, and the umbrella he carried that was beyond out of place in a desert country.
There was definitely some sort of cover-up, but John doesn’t care as long as he’s left alone now. He won’t ever tell a doctor because he won’t let himself be experimented on. He knows he would be.
John shakes his head and opens the text from Miranda. Shit, he’d forgotten about her.
We still on for tonight? Xx
The date had been looked on favourably by Ella. An attempt at normalcy, engaging with the world again, adjusting to civilian life.
John doesn’t want to go. Sure, he’d like to have sex again at some point, seeing as it’s been slow-going since he returned from Afghanistan with a fucked-up shoulder, leg and life, but the idea of sitting through an evening of conversation isn’t the most appealing prospect. Not when he knows it’s never going to go anywhere. She’d probably run a mile if he started in on his wacky time travel and conspiracy theories.
More than anything, he wants to settle in at Baker Street. He wants to put his sheets on the bed in that upstairs room, put his laptop on the desk, his gun in the drawer. He wants to hear more about what a future version of him and a past version of Sherlock actually did together during all those meetings. He couldn’t tell from the journal, the entries were just dates and observations about him, albeit pretty weird ones at times. Number of teeth, really? He can tell from the chemistry equipment taking up half the kitchen that Sherlock is a man of science, but the measurements and data in the journal are random and idiosyncratic. Sherlock seems odd, but not random, and John wants to ask what it all means.
He wants to hear more about Sherlock’s previous cases, his methods of deduction. He wants to ask about what he’s working on currently. He just wants to know more about Sherlock.
It’s crazy, he met the man this morning and he’s near obsessed with him already.
John feels an uncomfortable squirming sensation in his stomach as he thinks it. Obsessed. It’s not the right word, it’s not like that. He’s not gay. Sherlock is interesting, not attractive. That’s all. He’s just… interesting.
Hi M. Yeah, we’re still on. Meeting at seven, right?
The reply is almost instant. Yep. Looking forward to it! Xx
There’ll be time to ask Sherlock questions after his date, he thinks, and hauls his bags out of the room, shutting the door behind him without looking back.
Characters/Pairings: Sherlock/John
Rating: PG-13 (NC-17 overall)
Warnings/Spoilers: Bastardising of canon dialogue at times?
Notes: Time Traveler's Wife fusion that I've had kicking around since last year when I was doing Big Bang and my cheerleader expressed an interest in time travel. Posting in the hope that it'll get me to finish this!
Summary: 29th January 2010 (John is 32, Sherlock is 29).
This was always going to happen; they were always going to meet. It’s happening, it’s happened, and it will happen the same way, every single time. If Sherlock cared much for romance, he might say there was something poetic about that. As it is, he just tends towards determinism since meeting John and simply accepts it for what it is.
Disclaimer: This is the bit where they make me say I don't own anything. Sherlock is the property of the BBC, Steven Moffat, Mark Gatiss and, of course, the one and only Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. The Time Traveler's Wife belongs to Audrey Niffenegger.
On AO3
29th January 2010 (John is 32)
It’s the first bit of sunshine London has seen in a typically arduous, dreary January. John walks through the park on this particular morning for no other reason than because he woke up, opened his curtains, and saw something besides grey outside his window. It was worth commemorating with a walk, if nothing else.
The first month of the new decade has passed much like any other January - New Year’s resolutions have long been forgotten in the monotony of day-to-day life after the needless excess and excitement of Christmas.
John didn’t make a New Year’s resolution. Ella hadn’t liked it when he told her that in one of their therapy sessions, he could tell by the amount of words she scrawled down in her notebook, eyebrows furrowed. Always those same joined-up, round, looping letters like a teenage girl’s handwriting. It was somehow incongruous, John thought, such juvenile writing in a woman who strived to maintain such a professional, unflappable demeanour.
Not making plans for the future, she wrote.
John had to smile at that one. It was hard to make plans for the future with problems like John’s. Hard to walk into the job he’d been trained for with a psychosomatic limp, a tremor in his dominant hand, and a penchant for time travelling when put under stress.
Future, past, present. The words alone can make him smile now, a sharp, bitter thing.
“Nothing happens to me,” he told her.
It was a lie though. She’d never believe the truth.
“John! John Watson!”
Mike Stamford’s booming voice breaks him out of his thoughts and chases him down the path. Much though he wants to, John can’t escape. Not with a limp and a cane, that ‘third footstep’ he tries so hard to ignore. He jabs the end of the cane a little too forcefully against the ground when he has to stop, and the jolt travels all the way up his arm. The pain is worth it; he feels a bit better as he turns around to greet the man holding out his hand to him.
“Stamford, Mike Stamford. We were at Bart’s together.”
“Yes,” John says, giving a tight smile and extending his free hand for a brief shake. “Sorry, yes. Mike. Hello.”
Mike takes in his reservation and grins. “Yeah, I know, I got fat.”
John could not have been thinking anything more different to that, but he recognises the self-consciousness for what it is. He knows a pre-emptive strike when he sees one. “No…” he begins.
Mike glances at his occupied hand, leaning on the cane.
“I heard you were abroad somewhere getting shot at,” Mike says, his wince of sympathy making John’s knuckles turn white around the cane’s handle. “What happened?”
It’s too glorious an opening to let slide. John goes for the kill. “I got shot.”
The look on Mike Stamford’s face is priceless.
----
The Criterion café’s coffee is sublime. John sips slowly, savouring each mouthful, and the pleasure it brings is almost enough to drown out the annoyance that is this rotund version of a former friend and classmate sat next to him on a park bench. A reminder of his past and all that he’s lost.
John is aware he’s being a bastard. Stamford is a decent, sound bloke and John always liked him well enough. But Stamford has a wife and two kids, a sedentary lifestyle that’s enabled him to get fat and he’s teaching. John meanwhile is crippled, lonely, and miserable at the age of thirty-two. He can’t pursue his dreams, hold down a job, or keep a steady girlfriend because of his condition. He’s in no mood for reminiscing or socialising.
He nods and laughs in appropriate places though - on the surface, he is perfectly polite and apparently engaged in the conversation. He’s not that much of a bastard that he can’t be civil. Not yet anyway.
He has to focus more when Mike starts asking him questions. “What about you? Just staying in town until you get yourself sorted?”
John shakes his head. “I can’t afford to stay in London on an army pension, not without getting a job.”
“Ah, but there are plenty of jobs in London and I can’t see you going anywhere else.” Mike playfully nudges his left arm and John wants to scream. “That’s not the John Watson I know.”
“I am not the John Watson you-” John takes a few deep breaths, shifts his coffee cup to his right hand and clenches his left hand against his thigh where it’s started to tingle. Not here, he thinks, not now.
He calms down and the tingling passes. He’s not going to travel. John exhales, a slight quiver to the long breath.
Mike is watching his actions with a thoughtful look. “You’re a strange one, John.”
“If you only knew,” he replies with a grin.
“Couldn’t you, I don’t know, get a flatshare or something?”
“I’d still have trouble with the money side of things without a job, Mike. Besides,” John’s grin turns rueful, “who’d want me for a flatmate?”
Mike seems amused. “You know, you’re the second person to say that to me today.”
John blinks, considering. There’s a faint sense of being set up that comes from his well-meaning mother’s many attempts at arranging dates for him with girls he knew from school. Well, he thinks, bring it on. He’s got nothing to lose. “Who was the first?”
----
29th January 2010 (Sherlock is 29, John is 32)
Sherlock is not working off tension, or aggression, or any of those other silly things Molly had accused him of. He is conducting an experiment, a pertinent experiment into the bruise pattern that forms after flogging a corpse for half an hour. His personal feelings have nothing to do with it. Molly would bring feelings into it, considering how prominently she displays hers.
He doesn’t necessarily mean to be cruel to her, but her advances are unfortunately as advantageous as they are unwelcome. He knows John would disapprove of how shamelessly he uses her, but John is not here. And Sherlock’s conscience has been John himself since he was just eight years old.
His mouth curves into a smile as he remembers John forcing him to give Cook’s cat back. He’d protested violently - stomping and ranting, the works. Until John had threatened not to visit again, that is. Then he had raced off to return the creature to its rightful owner, chagrined but unharmed, and he had even apologised. Not sincerely, of course, but that was by-the-by.
The smile sours as he remembers another example of John Watson’s unwavering moral principles and restraint. He shifts uncomfortably at the memory of throwing himself at a man nearly twenty years his senior when he was just eighteen himself. The embarrassment of that spectacular blunder will never leave him, he’s quite certain.
He then recalls his earlier thought that Molly’s advances were unwelcome and, out of some misplaced sense of camaraderie, offers her a small, conciliatory twitch of his lips when she brings him the tea he asked for. The look she gives him in return is that of a rabbit in the headlights and suggests that he has just grown a second head before her, rather than smiled. Well, Sherlock thinks, he won’t try that again.
The tea she makes is dreadful, besides.
He lets it go cold and then asks her to bring him coffee instead next time before going to sit at the microscope to analyse some of the samples he brought with him from the O’Donaghue case.
----
“Bit different from my day,” Sherlock hears the tail-end of the quiet remark when two men walk into the lab. One of them is Stamford - he recognises the bumbling gait and laboured breathing. The other man, the one who’d made the remark, is walking unsteadily with a cane. The voice is familiar, it sounds just like… Sherlock stops the thought before it can form. Twice in one day is not healthy for him, he knows from experience.
Stamford is about to answer the other man, he’s just beginning his reply when Sherlock talks over him. “Mike, can I borrow your phone?” he asks without glancing up from the microscope.
“What happened to yours?” Mike asks in return. He’s already searching through his jacket pockets for his phone, going by the rustling noises of his clothes. “Not left it in a cadaver again, have you?”
“That error was Miss Hooper’s, not mine.”
She had taken his phone off the desk while he had been busy with something or other last month in an effort to program her number in. A marvellous bit of subterfuge, one that hadn’t escaped his notice, naturally, but he was entertained by her boldness in the attempt. He can tolerate her when she’s bold. It’s the timidity he can’t stand.
And the occasional bouts of anxiety-induced clumsiness - God only knows how she managed to mislay his phone in a fifty-one year old white male.
Sherlock looks up as he finishes his sentence and the ‘mine’ fades on his tongue, coming out strangled and thin. The text he wants to send to Lestrade is pushed to the back of his mind, the bulk of his thoughts now occupied with memories and conflicting emotions.
“John,” he says faintly because, for that precise second of time, Sherlock Holmes can’t actually think of anything else to say. There would be few at Scotland Yard who would believe him capable of being rendered speechless, but this was enough of a shock to do it.
His brain reboots after that disconcerting moment, and he’s taking in the colour of John’s hair, his complexion, the lines in his face, approximate height and weight. He’s young, Sherlock realises, as young as he’s ever seen him.
But he’s holding a cane. Sherlock frowns at it. He’s never seen John with a cane, not even at his oldest at almost forty.
The limp is psychosomatic, he reads that instantly. There is nothing wrong with John’s leg; it’s most likely a phantom injury, displaced from some other, real wound. Left shoulder, probably.
The most unforeseen realisation is that there is no spark of recognition in John’s eyes. No warmth, no depth of loyalty and devotion that he’d come to crave, to hoard and jealously guard, to store and to take out and examine and put back, safe and sound.
This John isn’t his John.
As if to prove the conclusion he’s just reached, John asks mildly: “Do I know you?”
Of course, this is their first meeting. Their timelines have converged, just as John said they would when they last met in Cambridge.
Sherlock clears his throat, looks down the microscope again, and turns the wheels for something to do with his hands. His fingers slip, sweat-slick against the plastic and metal. His heart is pounding; his body is acting against his will. That ridiculous, childish affection he’s harboured for so many years causing his autonomic nervous system to flare up. Sentiment.
Sherlock feels horribly exposed, though he rationally knows it would take someone with his own intellect and skill for observation to detect the change in him.
“No,” he says. “My… my mistake,” he hears Stamford splutter in the background. Curse the man, can’t he just go away? “I thought you were someone I used to know.” Sherlock looks up again and gives a shrug, aiming for casual, unconcerned.
John’s eyebrows draw together - he’s either heard that one before, or he just saw through it - and Sherlock realises he hasn’t covered as well as he’d thought. Damn. He really must stop underestimating John’s intelligence.
“I’ve got a phone you can use,” John says, walking towards him and holding Sherlock’s gaze as he approaches. He does know, Sherlock can see it in his eyes.
It’s like a game, he thinks, this pretence: Sherlock knows who John is; John knows Sherlock knows and so on and so forth. The only oblivious one here is Stamford. If they could just get him to leave…
“Mike, I think you left your phone downstairs after we came in,” John says, eyes never leaving Sherlock’s face, roving back and forth like he’s doing his own version of Sherlock’s keen assessment.
Mike clicks his fingers. “Of course, when I stopped at Ricky’s desk. Be back in a minute. You two should keep getting to know each other. John, this is-”
“Sherlock Holmes,” he interrupts smoothly, and Mike rolls his eyes and leaves with a creak of the lab door before it bangs shut behind him.
As he reaches Sherlock, John hands him the phone and Sherlock takes it, deliberately brushing his fingers against John’s as he does. Little to no reaction from John. He doesn’t know why he expected any differently.
He gleans what he can from the phone, and holds it out for John to take back.
“Don’t need it now,” he says.
John accepts his phone with a shrug. “John Watson. But you already knew that. You know about me, don’t you? You know about my... my condition.”
Sherlock nods back in concession and stands up to be level with John. Or rather, more level. He’s been taller than John since he was fifteen.
He doesn’t answer verbally though, so John takes it upon himself to keep talking. “Tell me I didn’t show up naked in your home or garden at some point,” he says, letting out a short, nervous laugh.
“Actually, you did,” Sherlock says, his deadpan answer a counterpoint to John’s flippant tone. “At several points, in fact.”
John’s eyebrows lift and Sherlock smirks.
“Who are you?” John asks. “And who are you to me?”
“Both good questions, though the first answer is subjective and depends on who you ask, and the second I can only guess at. At this moment in time the answer is, I suppose, nothing. Not yet, anyway.”
“I’ll take a subjective and no doubt biased answer to the first and that guess at the second then.”
Sherlock feels a small, inexplicable surge of fondness in his chest. Eight years of separation is much too long, he really can’t let that happen again.
“I’m a consulting detective - the only one in the world, I invented the job. And, as such, I hate guesswork.”
“You’re a detective and you never guess?”
“I observe, and from that I make logical steps to a conclusion. Deductive reasoning.”
“I’d call that guesswork.”
“You would.”
They look at each other for a moment, and then John laughs suddenly. Sherlock joins him, and it’s somewhat surreal to be laughing with John like this, here and now, when he’s done so a hundred times before as a child. This is different - new and fragile.
“You’re ahead of me,” John says after the laughter has subsided. “You know me, but I don’t know you at all. What’s a consulting detective anyway? Like a private detective?”
“No. I’m a consultant, so that means when the police are out of their depth - which is always - they come to me.”
“The police don’t consult amateurs.”
Sherlock gives him a withering glare and opens his mouth, intent on proving himself. Amateurs, indeed. He couldn’t resist the opportunity to show off under normal circumstances, let alone when speaking to a John who hasn’t met him before and doesn’t know what he can do yet. It’s about more than just proving himself, he realises. He wants to impress John.
He watches as he reels off his deductions, catching the way John drops his head down to look at his affected leg when Sherlock speaks about it, shifting his feet. He’s uncomfortable at having the limp brought up. It’s not going to be a problem for long; Sherlock is already plotting how to get rid of it based on that intermittent tremor in John’s left hand.
“So you were right,” he says after he’s finished his speech. “The police don’t consult amateurs. Now that we’ve got that out of the way, come look at a flat with me.”
Eight years. Sherlock decides he can blame the way he just blurted out that offer on the eight years of time he’s spent apart from any version of John, going over and over the details of all their previous meetings, the subtle hints and clues John had given him. The incomplete picture they painted.
“Sorry, but how could you possibly know I’m after a flat?”
“Mike brought you here to meet me because I told him this morning that I must be a difficult man to find a flatmate for. You’ve just returned from military service, no doubt looking for a more permanent residence than whatever hovel they’ve placed you in. We both may not know exactly who you are to me, but flatmates seems like a good start. It would make sense, from what I do know of you.”
“And what’s that? How did you know about Afghanistan?”
A lot of his knowledge about John has come from Mycroft (such as the fact that John had been invalided home from Afghanistan rather than Iraq or somewhere else) and from John’s frequent visits to him in the past, but he’s still made deductions today to fill the gaps. He also picked up on things he didn’t even mention to John, such as the occupation John has been pursuing since he can’t be a doctor now (low-paid technician jobs - dull), the reason for the termination of his most recent employment, and (disappointingly) that John has a date tonight.
He could run through all his lines of deduction, but he isn’t going to do that yet. He knows exactly what to say here; he’s waited for this moment to echo the words John has stubbornly repeated to him so many times before when Sherlock has asked for details about the future.
Sherlock leans in to murmur in John’s ear: “Now, that would be telling.”
The door to the lab opens and Sherlock realises just how close together they’re standing. Too close for prospective flatmates, too close even for good friends. Which they’re not.
As he told John, they’re not anything yet.
“Oh God,” comes the frantic voice, “I’m so sorry- oh God, I didn’t mean to- I’m sorry.”
Sherlock groans softly. It’s Molly.
He looks over to where she’s dithering on the doorstep, the mug of coffee in her hand likely to be spilled all down herself if she whirls around and scurries off the way he can see she’s dying to.
Her eyes are darting between them, mouth open in disbelief. Sherlock corrects his earlier thought: he and John are standing too close for prospective flatmates or good friends because they’re standing as close as lovers might.
It could make her less amenable to him, but he hopes the sight of them together puts a stop to her infatuation, her awkward flirtation and her attempts to make herself attractive to him.
She’s wrong in thinking he hasn’t noticed her, of course he has. He notices everything.
Sherlock’s eyes run carefully, almost languidly over John’s features. A well-remembered, but ever-changing face: the same kind eyes with the underlying steel, the firm jawline (always, always set as if in some sort of grim determination). Same nose, mouth, ears. Symmetrical, for the most part.
John’s face is as perfectly ordinary as it is remarkable.
It’s not entirely Molly’s fault, Sherlock thinks charitably. It’s just a fact of life that no one has ever held his attention the way John Watson does.
“Ah, Molly,” he says, acknowledging her presence so she can’t slip away as if no one had seen her.
John cringes at the words and steps back, obviously also aware that their previous positions relative to each other were overly familiar to say the least.
“Your coffee,” she whispers, making the bare minimum of steps required to reach one of the desks so she can set the mug down and then hasten from the room again, leaving both men staring after her.
“She’s in love with you,” John observes a moment after the door closes.
“Very astute.”
John tilts his head to one side to consider him. “But you feel nothing for her?”
“I…” Sherlock struggles to find the words. Another person might say ‘I’m taken’, but as far as Sherlock is concerned, that phrase it trite, and while it may be true, it’s far from accurate.
He ends up saying: “She’s not the one I want.”
John’s eyes are bright, that particular intelligence he has for people and feelings that Sherlock doesn’t possess anywhere near as much of fairly shines from him, and Sherlock fears he’s given himself away for a moment.
Then John huffs a laugh. “I know that feeling,” he says, and brings a hand down on Sherlock’s shoulder as if they were the oldest of chums.
Sherlock’s smile is strained as he replies: “Indeed.”
An awkward pause follows, broken by John clapping his hands together. “So, this flat…”
Back on solid ground, Sherlock sighs in relief. He can talk about the flat.
“A nice little place in central London I’ve got my eye on. Don’t worry about how we’ll be able to afford it; I know you’re not working currently. The landlady is going to give me a discount anyway-” Sherlock stops, frowning as he thinks about something. “Do you enjoy the violin?”
“Sorry?” John looks baffled by the non-sequitur.
“I play the violin, particularly when I’m thinking, and sometimes I don’t speak for days on end. I hope that wouldn’t bother you too much. Potential flatmates really should know the worst about each other.”
John laughs. “I don’t have a job, and I time travel when I get over-emotional or stressed. Sometimes when I don’t, too. You really think playing the violin and not talking makes you the bad flatmate here?”
Sherlock thinks about the fridge-freezer he intends to install in 221B Baker Street so that he can use it to store the (highly illegal) samples he takes from Bart’s morgue.
“Definitely.”
----
“Okay, you’ve got questions,” Sherlock says as they sit awkwardly (on John’s part, anyway, Sherlock has been looking at his phone and texting - answering four messages from Lestrade that he’d ignored since meeting John) in the cab on the way to Baker Street.
John squares his shoulders against the seat, sits up straighter. “Yeah, how do you know me?”
“We met in the grounds of my childhood home when I was six years old. You knew enough about me that I believed you when you said you were from the future. After that, you visited me several times at various ages, right up until I was at university. I last saw you when I was twenty-one, and you told me we’d meet in the present in eight years time. And now here you are.”
“So everything you said about me at Bart’s, a future version of me told you all that?”
Sherlock smirks. John would like that - Sherlock’s brilliant deductions reduced to nothing more than something he’d already been informed of.
“You barely told me anything in our acquaintance,” he says. “I figured things out each time I met you, of course, but even if I hadn’t, I could still observe all the necessary facts on meeting you today.”
He steers John through his deductions - the tan line, haircut and stance that said served in the military; John’s first comment to Stamford leading him to army doctor; the nature of John’s limp that could only be psychosomatic, thus requiring him to have a therapist; the phone’s engraving and scratches around the charging port that pointed to an estranged, alcoholic brother with marital troubles.
John looks enthralled throughout and Sherlock, prideful creature that he is, has to hold back a smile.
“That was…” John trails off, shaking his head. “I mean, wow, that was really something.”
“You really think so?”
“Of course it was, it was amazing! I’ve never heard anything like it.”
Sherlock blinks a few times and looks back out the window, away from John’s admiring expression. It’s too much, it’s been eight years and he’s forgotten how good it feels to have John’s attention, his praise.
“That’s not what people normally-”
“Hang on,” John cuts him off, brow furrowed. “How did you know it was Afghanistan? I might have served in Iraq.”
There’s a momentary lurch in Sherlock’s chest. He can’t say that he tasked his brother with finding John. Even with his lack of care for social niceties, he knows that it would be considered weird and obsessive.
“A lucky guess,” he lies smoothly. “You were right - I do guess from time to time.”
John huffs a laugh, apparently appeased by that, and Baker Street comes into view as the cab turns a corner.
Sherlock is all but vibrating with excitement as he bounds out of the cab and knocks on the front door sharply, turning and throwing money at the cabbie when he remembers.
Behind him, John carefully eases himself out of the car, wincing as he puts his cane out ahead to steady himself.
Sherlock glowers, hating the metal stick already. He reassures himself that John will be rid of it soon. He’s never seen John with a cane or much of a limp and he knows John didn’t meet him as a child before he met John as an adult, so that would suggest that he must be the one to fix it. Danger and adrenaline will do it. He’ll bring the battlefield back into John’s life and, as ever, John will more than exceed to the challenge.
The door to number 221 opens to reveal Mrs Hudson, who instantly opens her arms to him.
“Sherlock,” she says, a fond sort of grumble as he leans down to embrace her. “And is this your young man?”
Sherlock steps back, watching John’s imitation of a goldfish at her phrasing with amusement, and holds out an arm as he introduces John: “Mrs Hudson, Doctor John Watson.”
They’re going to get on famously, Sherlock can see it already as they greet each other. Her overwhelming need to mother will extend from him to his new (new?) friend and flatmate, especially once she learns he was injured in the war.
“Come in,” she says, and Sherlock jogs up the stairs ahead.
“Don’t mind if we do.”
He stands still at the top outside the door to 221B, waiting for John to pick his way up the steps. There’s a faint look of shame in his eyes when he sees Sherlock has paused with a hand on the door and a raised eyebrow at the limp he’s already labelled as fake, all in John’s head.
Sherlock opens the door and feels a light tremor in his chest as he takes in the sitting room. This one, he thinks, it has to be this one. John has to love it, he just has to. Sherlock can’t picture them anywhere else. It’s sentimental of him, he knows that, but he’s irrevocably attached to 221B Baker Street already. The first time he walked in he just knew it was a place he and John could share. He was prepared to move in alone and wait, but John has arrived at precisely the right time. Like he always does.
It’s still odd, to have John beside him like this. Not from the future, another place and time, not about to disappear at a moment’s notice. He can scarcely believe it. John really didn’t lie to him, all those years ago.
“Oh, this could be very nice,” John says, and Sherlock’s head turns towards him at once as he steps inside the flat and looks around. “Very nice, indeed.”
Sherlock looks around too, smiling and indulging the fancy that says he and John are looking at the room through the same eyes and thinking the same thing: home.
“Yes,” he says, pleased that John likes it, relieved that John likes it. “Yes, I really think so, I think you’ll like it here.”
“Soon as we get all this rubbish cleaned out,” John says, as Sherlock says at the same time: “So I went straight ahead and moved in.”
“Oh,” they each say when they realise.
“So this is all…” John breaks off awkwardly as Sherlock whirls around the flat, moving books and files, making a feeble attempt at tidying.
“Well, obviously I can straighten things up…” Sherlock says, flustered and almost stammering. Why is he flustered because of the mess? He’s reminded of John’s second visit to his room at university, the one he prepared and cleaned up for specifically, knowing it was to be their last meeting for some time. He takes a sheaf of unopened letters across to the mantelpiece and stabs a knife through them to keep them in place. “…a bit.”
John points to the mantelpiece with his cane. “That’s a skull.”
“Yes,” Sherlock says, glancing at it. It would probably scare John off if he labelled it as a ‘friend’, so he doesn’t. Best to keep some things back. They’ve only just met.
Mrs Hudson bustles into the room then, already doing a better job of tidying as she picks up a dirty cup and saucer on her way. “What do you think then, Doctor Watson?”
Sherlock begins to take off his coat and scarf to occupy himself. This is getting ridiculous; he’s like his teenage self again, desperate to impress John and to not earn his disapproval. He’s above this now. He should be above this now.
“There’s another bedroom upstairs,” she continues, “If you’ll be needing two bedrooms.”
Sherlock is proud of the way his hands don’t falter as he strips off his coat, even as his ears strain to pick up John’s response to her loaded question. Dotty old bat, he thinks. Although he can understand her assumption. Sherlock has shown no interest in any living soul in all the time he’s known her, now he’s suddenly brought a strange man home. A man he must look abnormally attentive to.
Can she tell? Sherlock wonders. She’s a perceptive old girl, far cleverer than that dotty old bat surface would suggest. Braver too.
She catches Sherlock’s eye and winks. Oh, she knows.
“Of course we’ll be needing two,” John says, confused and indignant.
Mrs Hudson looks back to John then, luckily. It means she misses Sherlock’s blink that lasts a second too long to be anything other than a sign of his disappointment - not so much in John’s answer, but in his dismissive tone.
It’s irrational to be disappointed. This John doesn’t know him, not like the John he’s familiar with. This John doesn’t care for him, or know how much Sherlock cares for him in return. He mustn’t get mixed up like this. The Work comes first for him now, it needs to stay that way. He can’t afford to get distracted.
“Oh, you boys don’t have to hide it from me. I can see Sherlock’s fond of you.”
Sherlock glares at her, teeth gritted, but she’s babbling something about the men next door and heading off towards the kitchen. Sherlock saw them once - gay, committed, irrelevant. Not obviously a threat, or Mycroft would have prevented him moving in to Baker Street. The whole street’s background checks must have been flawless.
“Sherlock,” comes a despairing voice. “The mess you’ve made!”
Sherlock ignores her in favour of observing John. He doesn’t look like that ‘fond’ comment has affected him or his opinion of Sherlock. He probably just let the whole exchange go over his head, dismissing Mrs Hudson as a silly old woman making outdated assumptions about two men living together. As he continues to watch, John plumps a cushion and settles into the armchair opposite the one Sherlock favours. Typical John: his mirror whether he knows it or not.
“We met when you were just six then?” John says, going back to their conversation in the cab. “Christ. And how many times after that?”
“I kept a journal,” Sherlock walks over to one of the boxes he hasn’t unpacked yet, taking a leather-bound book from inside it. “You gave me a list of dates so I’d know where to meet you, when to bring clothes.”
He hands the book to John who sets his cane at his side to take it with a mild expression of suppressed curiosity.
It’s a tense moment, watching John flip through this record of his early life. He hasn’t ever written what happened or any embarrassing (and disturbing, at that age) feelings in the journal, it’s not a diary, but his measurements are all in there. John’s height and weight are normal variables to take down, he thinks, but the others - the number of freckles on John’s back, the number of lines around his eyes when he smiles, the length of his smile, resting heart rate, handspan - perhaps they reveal more about him than they do about John.
It was silly of him to write them down in the first place. He should have encoded them, or scored them out before letting John see the book. He keeps all the measurements in his head anyway with all his other data about John, all the unquantifiable things like the sound of his surprised laugh, the texture of the different colour tones in his hair, the softness and warmth of his mouth…
“More than I expected,” John says abruptly.
Sherlock swallows, realising that John is referring to the volume of visits in the journal and not echoing the thought chasing itself around Sherlock’s mind. More than I expected. “Yes.”
“You must know me well,” John says without looking up, still occasionally turning pages. “It must be hard for you now when I don’t know you at all.”
It is, of course it is, but he can’t let it show. He needs to regain control of himself, for God’s sake. “As I said, you told me very little over the years. I don’t know you as well as you might think.”
“Still, you’re used to me, and I’m not the same. I’m practically a stranger.”
Sherlock’s fingers flex at his sides when John looks up at him with that same open, expressive face he’s so familiar with.
“There are similarities.” He’s practically itching to take out his phone, pick something up. Anything he could use as a barrier between them and the honesty John is demanding.
“Are you sure you want me to move in?”
“Certain. You told me we’d be flatmates, so it hardly matters anyway. That’s what happens.”
John frowns, thumb and forefinger releasing the page he’d been holding, half-turned. “That implies a lack of free will.”
Free will again. The thing John had tried so hard to give him an illusion of with his careful silences, his cut-off sentences. He needn’t have bothered. This was always going to happen; they were always going to meet. It’s happening, it’s happened, and it will happen the same way, every single time.
If Sherlock cared much for romance, he might say there was something poetic about that. As it is, he just tends towards determinism since meeting John and simply accepts it for what it is.
“You still believe in free will?”
“I’d like to, yeah.”
Sherlock shrugs. “Exercise it then. Do you want to move in or not?”
His traitorous heart races as he waits for John’s decision.
“I can’t afford to,” John says eventually. “I don’t have a job.”
“I know. Can’t be a doctor if you’re going to disappear in the middle of an appointment, or in the middle of open-heart surgery. That’s not what I asked; I said do you want to move in?”
John meets his gaze steadily and inclines his head, just a little. “Yes,” he says.
It’s music to Sherlock’s ears, his heart rate slowing again. John wants to stay. “Why?”
John looks taken aback at the question. His eyebrows lower as he thinks about it. “It’s a nice place,” he says.
Is that it? John likes the flat? He’d been hoping for a reason involving himself, but perhaps that was too much to ask at this early stage.
“And you’re interesting,” John continues. “I don’t think I’d get bored here.”
Sherlock smiles. “No, you never will.”
His smile is reflected back at him, spreading hesitantly across John’s face. “But I’d need a job.”
“Boring,” Sherlock sighs, managing to flop with no small amount of elegance into the chair opposite John, tired of looming over him now he knows John wants to live with him at Baker Street.
“I doubt consulting detectives get paid enough to cover the rent for a nice place in central London by themselves.”
“I told you Mrs Hudson was offering me a discount, she owes me a favour. A few years back, her husband got himself sentenced to death in Florida. I was able to help out.”
John’s eyebrows rise. “You stopped her husband being executed?”
The grin Sherlock flashes him shows a wide array of his teeth. “Oh no, I ensured it.”
John shakes his head, clearly stifling a laugh. He always did enjoy black humour, Sherlock remembers. He lets his own laugh escape and John lets out a snort then too.
“You’ll find a job,” Sherlock says when their mirth settles. “Annoyingly. In the meantime, I assure you I’ve no lack of private clients, often willing to pay exorbitant sums of money to find out if their spouses are cheating. Their cases are hardly worth getting out of bed for, but they are a source of income, should it become necessary.”
“I can’t live here off money you’ve earned without contributing,” John says, clearly affronted at the very idea.
“Assist me on my cases then.” Sherlock leans forward in his chair intently and watches John’s reaction to the offer.
He’d always hoped for this, ever since he first deduced that John was a doctor when he had fledgling dreams of being a detective who was able to pick and choose his own cases. Now that he consults for New Scotland Yard mainly, a medical man would prove invaluable to him when Anderson was being difficult or just plain incompetent and obstructive as usual. He’d brushed off many an insult from that loathsome little man with the mere thought of it sustaining him: John would see the things you’re missing.
There’s a small, unacknowledged part of him that was also sustained by the thought of John accompanying him to crime scenes because it would mean rubbing him in their faces, showing him off. Assistant, friend, and (one day, possibly, if he hasn’t read everything wrong) lover.
John would be the one thing they all thought he could never have: a lasting relationship with another human being. Granted, he’s never wanted that with any other human being, but John’s always been the exception.
“I’m no detective,” John says.
“But you’re a doctor. Are you any good?”
John bristles at the question and draws himself up slightly in the chair, “Very good,” he assures.
Sherlock smirks. A self-confident John is his favourite kind of John. “So you’ll have seen a lot of injuries then, violent deaths. Bit of trouble too, I bet.”
He sees the apprehension dawn in John’s eyes before they shutter somewhat, guarded, as he quietly answers: “Of course, yes. Enough for a lifetime. Far too much.”
He says that, but Sherlock saw anticipation flicker along with the apprehension. He knows John, even if he’s not sussed out everything about him yet. “Want to see some more?”
John’s mouth is tight, his jaw firm. His expression looks more like a smile to Sherlock than John’s actual smile, at least in this context. He relaxes, knowing what John’s answer will be.
“Oh God, yes.”
----
29th January 2010 (John is 32)
John looks around the bedsit, even more starkly empty now he’s packed his meagre belongings into two bags, the only important items in them being his laptop, and the Browning L9A1 that he really isn’t meant to have.
His phone buzzes in the pocket of his jeans, bringing him out of his navel-gazing, and he drops one of the bags to take it out and read the message. It buzzes again as he unlocks it and finds two texts, one from Sherlock, and one from Miranda.
Thumb hovering over the inbox indecisively, he taps to read Sherlock’s first.
Avoid black cars on your way back. Cabs fine - SH
John stares at the cryptic message, wondering again if he’s doing the right thing moving in with such an eccentric man. His other option is to stay here though - grey, simple, small. He doesn’t want this life; he wants the hints that Sherlock has offered, crime scenes and detective stories. He’s always had a weak spot for detective stories.
It’ll be hell on his condition, by the sounds of it. His therapist would not approve of John putting himself in stressful situations, especially if she knew the effect they had on him. A time travelling former soldier with probable PTSD, she’d have a bloody field day.
He told Ella that nothing happens to him, but since he was invalided home, since he was discharged from Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Birmingham, quite a few unusual things have happened to him. The first time it happened, he had been sitting at his new desk, new laptop open and all but grinding his teeth as he tried to think of something to write for this damn project Ella gave him that wouldn’t lead to him being sectioned.
‘Nothing’ was a better blog entry than ‘when I was shot I woke up bleeding on an old man’s carpet in a house a million miles away from Afghanistan and I have no idea how.’
‘Nothing’ was certainly better than that. As he had sat there frustrated though, a pins and needles feeling began in his left hand and he frowned, remembering a similar feeling overriding even the pain of his shoulder as he lay on the warm sand in Afghanistan thinking ‘please God, let me live.’
After he came back to England, when he had plenty of time to think about it all in the hospital, he put the tingling down to nerve damage. The bullet struck him close to his brachial plexus, after all. But there was no lasting sensory or motor loss in his arm or hand, just a tremor that didn’t even have a physiological basis.
His elbow wasn’t leaning against anything as he sat at the computer this time; there was no compression of his ulnar nerve.
Before he had time to think about it further, he wasn’t in his room any longer. He was outside Bart’s Hospital, staggering to one side to be violently sick over what was apparently one of the ambulance bays. Once he emptied the contents of his stomach, he realised that he was stark naked in a hospital car park. He was tempted to label it as a dream (although his dreams tended more towards showing up naked in lectures at university rather than outside one of the hospitals he trained in) when a cyclist rushed past him, almost knocking him down.
The cyclist didn’t look back, and John watched the cyclist actually go on to knock another man down a few yards away from him. John started running as soon as he saw the man’s head hit the ground, forgetting his bizarre circumstances, his churning stomach and even his nudity as his medical instincts took over.
When he reached the man, he took in the man’s black jacket, a detached thought floating through his head (that’s just like my jacket) even as he recognised the man’s face as his own.
He was looking down at himself.
It had to be a dream. The tingling started up in his left hand again and then he was back in his room, lying on the floor by the bed, still naked, with the clothes he had been wearing sat crumpled on the desk chair he previously occupied.
He had to admit: unless he had started sleep-stripping, that hadn’t been a dream.
It happened twice more after that. The second time, John found himself spending ten minutes hiding behind a headstone in an unfamiliar graveyard, certain no relatives of his could be buried there. The third time, he visited an empty meadow for two hours, ducking for cover behind a tree when he heard a boy’s voice calling out in the distance, asking for his ‘croft’, whatever that might be.
He only really got the idea that it might be time travel after he was visited by an older version of himself. That future-John came to him a week ago and told him to be patient because something good was coming his way. John had scoffed, turned over in bed, and told the apparition to fuck off.
The other John had done just that, but not before walking across to the present-John and kicking him in the shin.
“I’m real,” he said. “I’m you in the future, so I’m perfectly qualified to tell you this: don’t be an idiot.”
And then he’d dissolved before John’s very eyes. That was when John started googling time travel.
Nothing like it had ever happened before Afghanistan, before his shoulder. John looks at it like epilepsy: the tingling in his left hand and the panicky rising sensation of queasiness he gets before a jump are like an aura before a grand mal seizure. He wonders if the trauma of getting shot shook something loose in his brain. He had to smile when he first thought about it and remembered that the temporal lobe is the most epileptogenic region of the brain.
He still wonders sometimes if he shouldn’t tell someone, see a doctor. But he is a doctor, and he knows no one can help him. This isn’t a condition out of a medical textbook. This is something hush-hush, something to do with the government, maybe. He dematerialised in front of his fellow soldiers after being shot, just faded out of their view for five minutes before coming back just as suddenly. But none of them ever said anything; it didn’t go into any reports. John was invalided home as if it hadn’t happened, as if all that had happened was a bullet passing through his shoulder.
The only thing out of the ordinary was the man in the suit who spoke to him in the field hospital in Camp Bastion. John remembers his oily politician’s voice well, the upper-class English accent that spoke in riddles to John as he lay feverish and barely recovering, only half hearing the man, let alone understanding. The phrase he remembers best was something about ‘the necessity of discretion’. John remembers the scent of the man’s cologne better, his creaseless suit, and the umbrella he carried that was beyond out of place in a desert country.
There was definitely some sort of cover-up, but John doesn’t care as long as he’s left alone now. He won’t ever tell a doctor because he won’t let himself be experimented on. He knows he would be.
John shakes his head and opens the text from Miranda. Shit, he’d forgotten about her.
We still on for tonight? Xx
The date had been looked on favourably by Ella. An attempt at normalcy, engaging with the world again, adjusting to civilian life.
John doesn’t want to go. Sure, he’d like to have sex again at some point, seeing as it’s been slow-going since he returned from Afghanistan with a fucked-up shoulder, leg and life, but the idea of sitting through an evening of conversation isn’t the most appealing prospect. Not when he knows it’s never going to go anywhere. She’d probably run a mile if he started in on his wacky time travel and conspiracy theories.
More than anything, he wants to settle in at Baker Street. He wants to put his sheets on the bed in that upstairs room, put his laptop on the desk, his gun in the drawer. He wants to hear more about what a future version of him and a past version of Sherlock actually did together during all those meetings. He couldn’t tell from the journal, the entries were just dates and observations about him, albeit pretty weird ones at times. Number of teeth, really? He can tell from the chemistry equipment taking up half the kitchen that Sherlock is a man of science, but the measurements and data in the journal are random and idiosyncratic. Sherlock seems odd, but not random, and John wants to ask what it all means.
He wants to hear more about Sherlock’s previous cases, his methods of deduction. He wants to ask about what he’s working on currently. He just wants to know more about Sherlock.
It’s crazy, he met the man this morning and he’s near obsessed with him already.
John feels an uncomfortable squirming sensation in his stomach as he thinks it. Obsessed. It’s not the right word, it’s not like that. He’s not gay. Sherlock is interesting, not attractive. That’s all. He’s just… interesting.
Hi M. Yeah, we’re still on. Meeting at seven, right?
The reply is almost instant. Yep. Looking forward to it! Xx
There’ll be time to ask Sherlock questions after his date, he thinks, and hauls his bags out of the room, shutting the door behind him without looking back.