FIC: The Illusion of Free Will (2/?)
Title: The Illusion of Free Will 2/?
Characters/Pairings: Sherlock/John
Rating: PG-13 (NC-17 overall)
Warnings/Spoilers: Bastardising of canon dialogue at times?
Summary: 10th July 1987 (John is 36, Sherlock is 6).
“I’m John, like I said. I’m a time traveller, Sherlock. We’re…” John hesitates and winces as he does - Sherlock will jump on that pause, no doubt. “You and me are best friends in the future.”
“You and I,” Sherlock says at once. John has to laugh at having his grammar corrected by a child who can’t be more than six years old, and he really has to giggle at the fact that the child is Sherlock who still does the same at age thirty-three. “And you’re lying. Time travel isn’t real.”
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
10th July 1987 (John is 36, Sherlock is 6)
The first difference is the sun beating down on him from on high as he lies in the long grass. High enough to probably be midday sun, in fact. It was almost midnight when he left London, when he left Sherlock sleeping soundly - the familiar, even breathing to his right, a steady resting heartbeat beneath his hand, dark curls flattened on one side against the pillow - a welcome change from Sherlock’s usual case-related insomnia. John hadn’t let the stress of their latest case catch up with him until after Sherlock had drifted off, a release of bottled-up anxiety that had him disappearing from their bed and their timeline.
He hopes Sherlock slept through it.
He hopes to be back before Sherlock can wake and realise he’s missing.
The sunshine is warm against his bare skin, and John takes a moment to bask, stretching his arms up and curling his toes. Since he started travelling, he’s become adept at telling the time without a watch and the month without a calendar, and it’s always nice to arrive in Sherlock’s wildflower meadow in summer. As he sits up, he takes in the sea of green, white, yellow and purple. He smiles and closes his eyes, inhaling the multitude of sweet scents, listening to the low drone of bees flitting between the brightly coloured flowers. He’s passed many an hour here with Sherlock picking out the various flora and fauna, giving them their Latin names and looking to John for approval (readily given, as always).
Besides the weather and the surroundings, the other benefit of travelling here in the middle of summer is that Sherlock is hopefully around and not at school. Waiting for him to arrive home from school was fine up until he went away to Eton when he was thirteen. After that, John had to rely on Sherlock being able to get back to Hindhead during term time to see him on the dates he’d dictated to Sherlock at some point, the ones written in his careful child’s handwriting on the first two pages of the leather-bound journal John knows so well. He didn’t condone the truancy, but he could never stop Sherlock when he’d made up his mind about something, and if the journal specified the meadow as the meeting place and not Eton, then Sherlock would be coming home even if it meant sneaking out and acquiring transport. The resourcefulness Sherlock has isn’t something he learned in adulthood.
John stands up and looks around. No sign of Sherlock or the basket of clothes that usually rests against the largest sycamore tree at the east-facing edge of the meadow. He sighs, wondering how long he’ll have to wait this time, and then he hears the distinctive snap of a twig behind him.
Sherlock has told him many times that Mycroft never comes out to the meadow (“it’s my place, John.”), but he’s still wary enough to duck back down into the relative cover offered by the tall grass and flowers. It would be pretty fucking awful to have Mycroft stumbling upon him out here, naked as the day he was born. Mycroft certainly wouldn’t be as accommodating as Sherlock, if the word ‘accommodating’ can ever be applied to Sherlock. If anything, Mycroft would probably have him arrested for trespassing and indecent exposure. Mycroft in the present wants to have him arrested for those things.
“Oh, you’ve heard me now,” the high, clear voice of a child calls out to him. “Don’t keep pretending you haven’t, Mycroft. What are you doing out here?”
It’s Sherlock, of course. Hiding in the trees that make up the borders of the meadow, the woodland boundary between the field and the gardens of the main house.
“It’s not Mycroft,” John calls back. “It’s me. It’s John.”
“Am I meant to know who that is?”
The little boy in shorts and a plain blue t-shirt who steps out from the trees with arms folded across his chest in defiance looks impossibly young and John realises that this must be Sherlock’s first time meeting him.
“You wouldn’t know me if we haven’t met before,” John says. Looking down at himself, he’s suddenly grateful that he went back to sitting down in the grass. “I don’t suppose you have a-”
The end of John’s question dies on his lips. There’s no reason for Sherlock to have anything with him that John could possibly cover himself with. Well, that’s embarrassing.
“Have a what?” Sherlock asks, curious despite himself. “Who are you?”
“I’m John, like I said. I’m a time traveller, Sherlock. We’re…” John hesitates and winces as he does - Sherlock will jump on that pause, no doubt. “You and me are best friends in the future.”
“You and I,” Sherlock says at once. John has to laugh at having his grammar corrected by a child who can’t be more than six years old, and he really has to giggle at the fact that the child is Sherlock who still does the same at age thirty-three. “And you’re lying. Time travel isn’t real.”
Sherlock, despite his narrowed eyes and the certainty in his words, is walking further into the clearing towards him. Did no one teach him not to talk to strangers?
“Oh really? Then how do I know that you have a big brother named Mycroft, and your grandmother likes you to call her grand-mére because she’s French?”
Sherlock shrugs. “Maybe you’re Mycroft’s friend.”
“Definitely not.” John pulls a face and Sherlock smiles before quickly exchanging it for a scowl. John’s heart seems to thud with unbearable fondness for a few beats. Jabs at Mycroft are always the best way to bond with Sherlock. “Okay then,” John continues, “how do I know that your favourite flower in this meadow full of flowers is the bee orchid?”
Sherlock’s eyebrows draw together. “I never told anyone that.”
“I know.”
“And you said we’re best friends?” Sherlock asks sceptically.
“Yep. So I know all about you, because best friends tell each other everything.”
That last statement could not be further from the truth. One hundred per cent honesty isn’t feasible in any relationship, let alone one that involves Sherlock Holmes.
“What’s the name of my school, then?”
John smiles. He knew Sherlock would want to test him. “You go to St. Edmunds, but you’re not boarding there.”
“And why am I not boarding?”
“Because…” John trails off, trying to think of a tactful way to put it. “Because you don’t get on all that well with the other boys. Particularly Harvey Barrington-Smith,” he adds. The name-dropping will lend more credibility to what he’s saying - Sherlock never told anyone but him about the bullying.
Sherlock’s school days are not something he’ll go on to remember with affection. Even when he wasn’t actively bullied he was always ostracised from his peers for his above-average intellect and far below-average social skills. He did himself no favours, of course. Like the time he burnt sulphur in a science class and a few of his classmates had to go to the nurse with breathing difficulties. When he told John about it during a visit, Sherlock claimed that the sulphur wasn’t properly labelled and he was merely trying to conduct a boring flame test on calcium, but John knows better. Sherlock was too good a chemist at age eleven to mistake yellow sulphur for silvery calcium.
There’s a frown on Sherlock’s face and John can tell he’s torn. On the one hand, he’s six years old and he wants to believe in fantastic things like time travel when the evidence is put in front of him like John is doing now. On the other, he’s an exceptionally gifted six year old who decried the existence of both Father Christmas and the Tooth Fairy the instant they were proposed to him.
John knows it will take him disappearing before Sherlock’s very eyes to convince him that John might be telling the truth. He’d know that even if Sherlock himself hadn’t told him so.
Sherlock is walking towards him again, coming into the meadow fully now. His frown deepens when he gets close enough to see John properly.
“Why don’t you have any clothes on?” he asks.
John draws his knees up to his chest and hugs them. “When I time travel, I only get to take my body. If I could take my clothes, I’d take anything that was touching me, which wouldn’t be good because then I might leave something from the future in the past. Don’t you think it would be bad if I took a-” John thinks for a moment about an era-specific object that Sherlock would know. He had been going to say ‘laptop’ as an example, but Sherlock would just look at him blankly. “-a car back to the time when they were just inventing the wheel? Or if I was touching a person, I could leave them in a time they’re not from. This way, that can’t happen.”
He’s had this discussion with the adult version of Sherlock a few times, even though Sherlock petulantly hates the logistics of John’s peculiar talent. John had thought that Sherlock would be fascinated by it and wouldn’t tire of trying to sort through all the ins and outs of time travel and, while that’s true of him as a child, in their present he’s just frustrated by the constant paradoxes and the lack of logic to it.
For instance, John never has and probably never will visit the Victorians, or the Romans. He’s never travelled back before his own birth and he isn’t sure how far forward he’s travelled, or even if he’s travelled forward at all. He only knows he’s travelled back in time because, since meeting Sherlock, he always meets younger versions of him. On the occasions when he travelled before meeting Sherlock, he was never able to work out what the date was before he returned to the present. God knows where it was that he went when he was shot, he can barely remember that time anyway.
John always tends to explain this all away by saying that Sherlock is like some sort of a temporal magnet for him, but that only ever gets a derisive snort from Sherlock in the present. John understands the mockery; there’s no scientific reason that he should be so drawn to places where Sherlock has been - the meadow, Eton, Cambridge. But there’s no reason that John should be time travelling in the first place. Sometimes, there are things that just defy explanation.
“Like us,” Sherlock will say when he’s in a relatively good mood.
“Like us,” John will agree.
John shakes off the thoughts and turns his mind back to the time he is inhabiting. Six year old Sherlock is considering John’s answer.
“I guess that makes sense,” he says at last, when he decides he’s considered for long enough. “But this could still all be a dream. Or a trick of Mycroft’s.”
“I thought you were going to say that. So here’s the solution: I’m going to come back here in nine days on the nineteenth of July, and I’ll be younger than I am now, so I won’t remember meeting you today. Before I do come back though, your mother’s maid is going to resign and leave the house. I couldn’t know that if I’m not from the future, so if she’s still here when you see me again, then you’ll know I’m a liar.”
Sherlock squints at him, obviously trying to work through all of that. “Ellen would never leave,” he says and he doesn’t sound sure, as if he doesn’t think he’ll be proved wrong (and nor should he, Ellen was perfectly happy in her job before she learned that her father was sick and moved back to Chester to be closer to him), but he doesn’t want John to be proved wrong either.
“We’ll see then, won’t we? The nineteenth, Sherlock, don’t forget. And if you could bring some of your dad’s clothes out for me on that day, that would be great.”
“I can do that, but I want something in return.”
John laughs at how typically Sherlock that is, and that’s when a faint tingle begins in his left hand.
“What do you want?”
Sherlock looks down and shuffles his feet. “Can I take some measurements when you come back to see if you’re really different? Like your height and weight.”
At this point, he’s quite used to Sherlock’s attempts to explain and quantify him. Height and weight are perhaps the most normal ways of Sherlock trying to wrap his scientific brain around him before Sherlock will branch out into more arbitrary things.
“That’s fine with me,” he says. “Now, if you need any further proof that I’m telling you the truth, then watch this.”
Sherlock looks at him piercingly. “Nothing’s happening,” he says after thirty seconds of silent, focused observation. Sherlock isn’t patient at any age, it seems.
“Keep watching.”
He’s developing the familiar rising sensation to accompany the tingling. It won’t be long.
“I am watching.”
“Keep-”
And with that, John disappears from the meadow, leaving an astonished Sherlock in his wake.
----
30th January 2010 (Sherlock is 29, John is 32)
On their first official day as flatmates, John comes back mid-afternoon, clearly after having sex the night before (same clothes he left in, never came home last night after his date, grinning like the proverbial cat with a canary), and declares himself absolutely knackered when he walks in before going up to his room for a nap.
Sherlock ensconces himself in his own bedroom, slamming the door because he can and then playing the violin loudly to help him think. It just so happens that it might also prevent John from sleeping.
It’s petty, he knows. It’s completely juvenile, but he warned John about this. He’s not an easy man to live with at the best of times. There is no knock at the door or a yelling voice asking him to stop though. Sherlock has no idea what that means.
He stops thinking about whatever woman John was with last night (blonde, curvaceous, stupid, polite, and undoubtedly Sherlock’s opposite in every other possible way) around three o’clock, transitioning from some frenzied Paganini into a Bach Partita as he thinks about the three recent serial suicides. One more and he’ll step in beyond his mass texts to show up the Met in front of the media. Lestrade is wrong, but that’s his default state half the time.
At around five, when it starts to get dark, he ventures cautiously into the living room to find John sat on the sofa, bent over the paper spread out on his lap, pen in hand. Sherlock falters for a moment before he gets close enough to read the words upside-down. John is circling potential jobs, not flats. Tedious, but bearable.
John looks up at his arrival, a broad smile on his face. He drops his pen into the fold of the newspaper and claps slowly, still beaming. “Wow,” he says. “That was some performance this afternoon. You didn’t include the fact that you were good when you listed playing the violin as one of your off-putting attributes as a flatmate.”
And you didn’t include philandering, Sherlock thinks. Somewhat harshly, he supposes. If Mycroft could see him now, he’d be smirking like he was in a room filled with desserts, the greedy bastard. It’s only a matter of time before the inevitable visit, but if Mycroft wants to give out lectures about envy and lust, he’d better prepare for a very barbed one in return about gluttony and sloth. Pride can of course be ascribed to them both in more than healthy measures, so whatever lectures may pass between them, not a single word shall be heeded nor any behaviours altered.
The Holmes brothers’ enduring stalemate.
Bloody Mycroft, Sherlock thinks hatefully.
“Thank you,” he replies when he remembers his manners and John’s admiring expression. That look is a far better thing to dwell on than thoughts of his brother. Compliments are useless in the scheme of things, really, but there’s that troublesome pride of his again. He can feel the tips of his ears turning just slightly pink with pleasure. Ridiculous.
He hears the car pull up outside before he sees the flashing lights. Red and blue - police. He gravitates towards the window, instantly intent on what might be happening. Lestrade gets out of the car as he watches through the curtain.
“There’s been a fourth,” Sherlock says, more to himself that to John, whom he has quite forgotten about (who is watching his sudden change in demeanour with baffled interest). “Something different this time…”
“A fourth? Sorry, what?”
Lestrade bounds up the stairs, two at a time, and enters the room. He looks worse than he did at the press conference. Tired and stressed. Two pounds dropped since Sherlock last saw him, perhaps three.
“Where?” he asks immediately, not giving Lestrade a chance to speak.
“Brixton, Lauriston Gardens.”
“What’s new about this one?” he presses. “You wouldn’t have come to get me if there wasn’t something different.”
John is looking between them, confused. Sherlock doesn’t have time to bring him up to speed just yet, and he won’t be distracted from this. Ordinary brains, honestly, how do they function?
“You know how they never leave notes?” Lestrade inclines his head. “This one did.”
Oh, that is interesting. That’s very interesting. He needs to see that note for himself, but who’s going to butcher the evidence with their ineptitude today? He’s already got his assistant primed and ready at the very least if it’s as bad as he fears. “Who’s on forensics?”
“It’s Anderson.”
It’s as bad as he fears. It can’t get any worse, in fact. He grimaces just hearing the name. “Anderson won’t work with me.”
“Well, he won’t be your assistant!”
“I need an assistant,” Sherlock insists, and then pointedly looks at John who is looking (gaping) currently at Lestrade. “And I’ve got one right here. John?”
John blinks and turns his head. “Sorry, but what?”
“Crime scene,” Sherlock almost taps his foot in impatience at having to explain himself. “Are you coming? Violent death, the kind of thing we talked about yesterday.”
Lestrade is now looking between the two of them much the same way John had been doing with him and Lestrade a moment ago. “Hang on, John? Not the John Watson, surely?”
The John Watson? Really, Lestrade is going to bring this up now?
“Oh, please,” Sherlock says. “There’s a crime scene to get to before Anderson can irrevocably damage it, do you really want to waste time on introductions? Detective Inspector Lestrade, Doctor John Watson. John, Lestrade. Are we done here?”
“What do you mean, the John Watson?” is John’s painfully predictable next question.
“This can wait until later,” Sherlock says, glaring daggers at Lestrade for even daring to open his mouth about this.
Lestrade must read the danger signs in his expression because he backs off considerably, hands up in surrender. “All right. So you’ll come?”
“Not in a police car, I’ll be right behind.”
Perhaps I should get used to saying ‘we’ now, he thinks when Lestrade leaves with a nod and a thank you.
He waits a few seconds before he lets his excitement show through, pivoting on the spot, fists raised and shaking as he leaps through the air. “Brilliant!”
Four serial suicides and now a note. John by his side and Anderson is going to be there to see it. It’s Christmas.
He just doesn’t say the part about John aloud.
----
19th July 1987 (John is 35, Sherlock is 6)
“Oh, it’s you again.”
John isn’t quite expecting that one. The little boy sat in the grass - cross-legged, overlarge book balanced on his knees - looks to be about the youngest he’s seen Sherlock. Which leads him to the conclusion that an older version of himself must have visited before this. Fucking time travel.
Sherlock is... Sherlock is almost cute at this age, John has to admit. Pale, slightly chubby limbs poke out of his polo shirt and khaki shorts. His untamed curls are just this side of too-long and frame his pale, slightly chubby face.
He’s almost cute. There’s that familiar cold stare fixed on his features. John shivers at the sight of it, wondering if there was any age at which Sherlock didn’t have that look. He must have been the world’s most disconcerting baby.
Actually, that title probably went to Mycroft. He suspects the elder Holmes brother’s first word must have been something demanding and/or horrifying. He already knows Sherlock’s first word was ‘Mycroft’ when he was just ten months old, which is possibly the least horrifying thing about Sherlock in general. Mycroft had seemed amused to tell that tale, but doggedly refused to emulate the lisp Sherlock must have had, the one John has heard himself at various points. There’s just no way Sherlock pronounced an ‘r’ sound correctly at that age, however remarkable he might be.
John sits up, slightly wobbly from his jump in time still. “Hello, Sherlock.”
“John,” is the wary answer. Too wary. This Sherlock hasn't met him many times.
“I don’t suppose-”
John is cut off by Sherlock pointing at a wicker basket by the tree, immersed in his book again. Clothes. Brilliant. He flashes Sherlock a quick grin, but he’s worrying: just how young did he get to Sherlock with that list of dates of when he was going to show up naked in his back garden?
In the basket he finds a smart shirt and trousers. Better fit than he’s used to. Sherlock’s father’s, perhaps, going by the year he’s estimated it to be. Mr Holmes isn’t as broad as Mycroft, making his wardrobe the superior option for John, but there are no clothes belonging to him left in the house after 1988, so over the years John has invariably been swamped in shirts that are too big or left holding up his trousers if Sherlock deletes the fact that he needs a belt.
When he's dressed, he turns back to Sherlock. “What are you, five? Six?”
He always tries the year younger than the one he truly thinks it is first - he knows it pisses Sherlock off.
Sure enough, it earns him a glare. John tries and fails to hide his smile.
“Six and a half,” Sherlock says.
John drops his smile and nods solemnly to show he understands the importance of the half. “I see, yes, my mistake.”
Sherlock seems appeased by that. That’s the Sherlock he knows; he does so love people acknowledging their own stupidity.
“How long’s it been since I last saw you?”
“Nine days,” Sherlock answers promptly. “Just like you said it would be. I wonder if that means you’re real or not then. You coming back, I mean. I’ve no use for an imaginary friend.”
John smiles again and shakes his head. Six and a half, bloody hell. His grasp of language alone marks him as extraordinary.
“I’m real,” John promises. “What did I tell you before?”
“You said mummy’s maid would quit and she did. You also said you knew me in the future and we were best friends there. I don’t have friends.”
John can’t help but wince at that turn of phrase. Still hurts, just a bit. It reminds him of how painfully young Sherlock is too, for all that he can talk like an adult. “Well, you have me.”
Sherlock merely gives him that unnerving stare. John knows he’s being scanned in the same way older-Sherlock would, only this Sherlock doesn’t quite have the same breadth of knowledge and experience to be able to make any full deductions on him.
“Last time,” Sherlock says, “you said that you wouldn’t remember our meeting when you came back because you’d be younger. You do look different. Do you mind if I take some measurements? You told me that you wouldn’t.”
“Do what you like.”
He was expecting this. He’s never been overly fussed by his height or weight or all the other variables Sherlock has wanted to measure over the years. He’s never been the type to be self-conscious, even before the army knocked all such compunctions out of him.
He spies the scales behind Sherlock, a tape measure coiled neatly on top next to two pencils. Sherlock produces a notebook, apparently from within the pages of whatever massive chemistry textbook he’s been reading and takes down John’s weight from the scales after they manage to find a roughly flat bit of land to put them on.
Next, Sherlock gets John to lie down in the grass, marks out two lines with the pencils - placing one at the top of his head, one at his heels - and then makes John get up to hold the tape measure at one pencil while he darts across to the other to check the distance.
Using his marker and the tape measure, John reads off: “One hundred and sixty-nine centimetres. Or five feet, six and a half inches.”
He does know his own height and, unlike his weight, it doesn't change, but the joke gets him a shy, hard-won smile, and John feels absurdly pleased.
“Sherlock!” a female voice calls from off in the distance. It’s Sherlock’s mother.
Sherlock glowers and then looks apologetically at John. “I have to go,” he says. “Will you just… disappear if I’m not around?”
“No," John replies with a gentle smile, "I’ll be here for a little while yet, probably, until it’s time for me to go back to see you in the future again.”
“Will you be coming back here?”
John nods. He’s memorised the list from Sherlock’s journal, so he knows that if this is their second meeting, their next meeting will be when Sherlock is seven.
“Do you have a list of all the dates when I come to see you?” he asks.
Sherlock shakes his head, but he looks like he’s trying not to look too thrilled at John’s words. “You’ll be back a lot? Tell me when.”
“I’ll give the list to you when I come back sometime,” John promises, “but you won’t see me for a little while now, not until next year.”
Sherlock’s face falls and John feels awful. A year is a long time to a child.
“Why not-”
“Sherlock!” The shout is louder this time, more insistent.
“I really have to go.” Sherlock says, his shoulders slumping, mouth a displeased downward curve.
“I know, but I’ll see you soon. Just you wait and see.”
The waiting, however much he wants to spare Sherlock the pain of it, is unavoidable for them both. This is just the hand they’ve been dealt, John thinks as he watches Sherlock run back across the meadow towards the house. He looks back once, just to see whether John has disappeared, probably. John waves to him with a grin.
When he loses sight of Sherlock, John flops down into the grass to begin his own wait until he finds himself back with Sherlock at Baker Street where he belongs.
----
30th January 2010 (John is 32, Sherlock is 29)
John gets into the black car because he’s pissed off. After a quiet cab ride with Sherlock to a crime scene, the man seemed more concerned with scoring points off the lead forensic officer and the sharp-tongued DS than he was about the pink woman’s untimely death. He was fantastic, of course, all his observations and deductions were just beyond brilliant.
Then he left John behind.
He said he wanted John to assist him. How can he do that if Sherlock swans off without him?
At least the aforementioned sharp-tongued DS was willing to tell him where to get a cab. She was more than willing to tell him all about Sherlock being a psychopath and likely candidate for a serial killer.
John can’t see it. Yes, Sherlock is evidently very, very strange. He’s somewhat callous, speaking of fun with a woman lying dead at their feet, swooping around in a giddy haze of excitement at the end there when he realised… whatever it was that he realised about pink, John couldn’t follow.
Sherlock has got issues with his priorities, certainly. And he’s a bastard for leaving John behind when they arrived in a cab together.
He’s not a psychopath though. It’s clear that Sherlock feels affection for the kindly old landlady in Baker Street and, if John isn’t mistaken, for him as well. They have a history together, he just isn’t privy to it. He doesn’t know Sherlock yet, not properly, but he can tell already that he’s something of an anomaly for Sherlock. Ditching him at a crime scene aside, Sherlock seems to want to keep him around for some reason.
And John wants to stick around, but right now? He’s pissed off, and he’s on edge because he’s just answered a payphone in a phonebox and found he was the intended recipient. The intended target. He’s been threatened by an oddly familiar voice, but it’s more of an act of defiance than surrender when he climbs awkwardly into the car that pulls up alongside the phonebox.
Sherlock told him yesterday to avoid black cars but he never said why, so John’s going to get in and he’s going to find out why.
The end of the journey finds him in an abandoned warehouse, of all places. It’s awfully unoriginal, the perfect location for a clandestine meeting. He’s almost glad to be out of the car though after the stony, condescending silence from the stunning girl who calls herself Anthea and types faster on her phone than he could ever hope to.
As he exits the car, planting his feet and cane on the slippery floor, he gets his first look at the man he’s been brought to like a lamb to slaughter.
He recognises him.
“Have a seat, John.”
That same posh voice, that same posh suit. The very same out-of-place umbrella that the man now gestures at a chair with. It’s the government man from the field hospital in Camp Bastion.
“It’s you,” John says, for lack of anything better or less cliché to say.
“Indeed,” the man shifts his grip on the umbrella, bows his head slightly. “I wondered if you’d remember, you were on a rather high dose of-”
“Who are you?”
The man looks taken aback at being interrupted mid-sentence before his composure returns in a split-second. “Merely an interested party. The leg must be hurting you, sit down.”
John clenches his fingers tighter around the handle of his cane. “I don’t want to sit down. Interested in what?”
“In you,” the man says smoothly, as though this were a perfectly normal thing to say, “and your connection to Sherlock Holmes.”
“I don’t have one.” He can hardly say that he’s a time traveller who has apparently visited Sherlock several times in the past now, can he? Even if he didn’t deeply, instinctively distrust this man already. “I barely know him, I met him…” John pauses and thinks about it. Christ, has he really only known Sherlock one day? “…yesterday.”
He’s done for, isn’t he?
The man makes a ‘hmm’ noise. Thoughtful? Amused? Knowing? John can’t get a read on him. “And since yesterday you’ve moved in with him and now you’re solving crimes together. All very cosy and domestic. All very unlike Sherlock.”
“What can I say? I must be special.”
The man smiles, but it doesn’t reach his eyes. “Yes, I know about your condition, Doctor Watson.”
A text alert breaks the tense silence as John stares at the man, wondering what he can possibly say back. ‘What condition?’ maybe? Pleading ignorance seems like his best bet, even if he doubts it will get him far.
He pulls out the phone and reads the message. It’s Sherlock.
Baker Street.
Come at once if convenient.
SH
Convenient is not the word he would use for this situation.
“Don’t worry,” the man continues as John looks at the phone screen. “I assure you that your secret is quite safe with me. But you ought to know that I’m aware of your habit of jumping through timelines to places you have no business being.”
John puts his phone away and looks up at the man again, his previous bland, pleasant smile replaced by a sternly furrowed brow.
“How?” he asks.
“I have ways and means. Now, I also happen to know you’ve moved into…” The man reaches into his inner jacket pocket, drawing out a slim black notebook. He opens it to a seemingly random page and peers at it. “…Two hundred and twenty-one bee Baker Street without a job or any financial means to support you. I’d be happy to pay you an obscenely large amount of money to move out. I can even establish you in a much nicer flat, one without experiments all over the place and violins at all hours.”
One without Sherlock. It shouldn’t be unthinkable already, but it is.
“I could probably even organise a suitable job for you, one where they won’t mind or question the odd disappearance or two.”
“No.”
The man smiles, mouth closed and pinched. “I see. Another offer then: what about a meaningful sum of money on a regular basis while you live at Baker Street to pay your way?”
“In exchange for?”
“A journal. Perhaps you’ve seen it already, it’s a large book, leather-bound-”
“No.”
He’s talking about Sherlock’s journal with the dates of John’s visits to him. Not going to happen. Esoteric entries or not, it’s still Sherlock’s journal and thus private. Besides, there’s no way John’s going to steal it from under his nose to give to this man he knows nothing about. This man who wants it for God knows what.
There’s no way he could steal it from under Sherlock’s nose anyway, he’d know straight away from a bit of dust on John’s collar or something.
The man taps the point of his umbrella against the floor twice, nodding. “Fascinating. Truly. A final offer, then. I could pay you for information. Nothing indiscreet, nothing you’d feel uncomfortable with. Just tell me what he’s up to.”
“Why?”
“I worry about him,” the man’s voice creaks with false sincerity. “Constantly.”
“And you want to pay me to move out. What are you, a jealous ex?”
The man’s mouth twitches with distaste. “Nothing like that, I can assure you. But we do have what you might call a… difficult relationship. So if you take me up on my offer, I would naturally like you to keep that between us.”
John’s phone chimes again.
Sherlock again.
If inconvenient, come anyway.
SH
Another text follows it:
He’s got to you, hasn’t he?
Don’t listen to a word he says.
SH
John smiles and puts the phone back into his pocket. “No,” he says.
“I haven’t mentioned a figure-”
“Don’t bother.”
John won’t spy on Sherlock. He won’t spy on or for anyone.
The man laughs, a brief, hollow thing. “I see. Soldiers are famed for their loyalty, are they not? Sherlock would approve of such a quality in the company he keeps.”
“It’s not that. I’m just not interested.”
The man says nothing for a short period, watching John closely. Then he takes out the notebook again, gesturing to a page. “‘Trust issues’ it says here.”
John frowns and swallows hard. He recognises that phrase. He read it upside down less than a week ago in his therapist’s office, that round, youthful handwriting.
“Can it be that you’ve decided to trust Sherlock Holmes of all people?”
He doesn’t, not yet. But he trusts him a damn sight more than he does this slick, patronising man. There were so many entries in that journal of Sherlock’s. He’s going to come to know Sherlock Holmes, in the present and the past because there’s something that ties them together. Something that apparently drags him through time to where Sherlock is. He trusts in that.
“We’re done here,” he says.
He turns to walk away but the man calls out to him. “You think stress is a factor in your time travelling, don’t you? You think it’s a bizarre manifestation of post-traumatic stress disorder. I can tell from your left hand that stress might be a factor, but not that particular kind.”
John stops dead, turning back to face him. “My what?”
“Show me,” the man says, nodding at him.
The man is calm, he’s in his element as he leans nonchalantly onto his umbrella, a blunt counterpoint to John leaning heavily on his cane, his feet planted firm and steady against the ground as he jerks up his left hand, holding it by his face with a challenge in his eyes.
He’s waiting for the man to come to him. The man obliges, reaching out for John’s hand with his own.
“Don’t,” John says, pulling away.
Mockery is laced all through the man’s response to that: the tilt of his head, his raised eyebrows and pursed lips.
John lowers his hand, lets the man take it and examine it with his own long fingers.
“Remarkable. Did you know you have an intermittent tremor of your left hand, Doctor Watson?”
Despite himself, John nods. And it’s always his left hand that tingles in warning before he travels. The tremor is just another reason he can’t go back into medicine. A doctor needs to have steady hands. God, he wishes this man would stop using his title.
“Your therapist thinks it’s caused by post-traumatic stress disorder. Your tremor, not the time travel. You haven’t told her about that, of course. She thinks you’re haunted by memories of your military service.”
John holds himself taut as he listens, jaw tight and a muscle jumping there, his eyes fixed ahead and not meeting the man’s knowing stare. “Who the hell are you?” he finally has to ask, letting some of his anger show through. “How could you know that?”
“You ought to fire her,” the man says, voice low and convincing. “She’s completely incompetent if she's got you this wrong. You’re under stress right now and your hand is perfectly steady. You’re not travelling. You see, you’re not haunted by your memories of the war, Doctor Watson. You’ve been missing the danger and the excitement. Between Sherlock and the time travel though... I'd say you have it back.”
The man walks away, twirling his umbrella in a circle around his arm as he goes. “We’ll be seeing each other again very soon, John.”
John watches him go for a moment, trying to process the events of the meeting, and hears his phone chime in his pocket.
Yet another text from Sherlock.
Escape by distracting him with the promise of sweets.
Then come to Baker Street.
Could be dangerous.
SH
John laughs at the very idea of plying that man with sweets, putting his phone away and then stretching his left hand out in front of himself. He looks down on it with satisfaction.
Completely still, no tremor.
Characters/Pairings: Sherlock/John
Rating: PG-13 (NC-17 overall)
Warnings/Spoilers: Bastardising of canon dialogue at times?
Summary: 10th July 1987 (John is 36, Sherlock is 6).
“I’m John, like I said. I’m a time traveller, Sherlock. We’re…” John hesitates and winces as he does - Sherlock will jump on that pause, no doubt. “You and me are best friends in the future.”
“You and I,” Sherlock says at once. John has to laugh at having his grammar corrected by a child who can’t be more than six years old, and he really has to giggle at the fact that the child is Sherlock who still does the same at age thirty-three. “And you’re lying. Time travel isn’t real.”
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
10th July 1987 (John is 36, Sherlock is 6)
The first difference is the sun beating down on him from on high as he lies in the long grass. High enough to probably be midday sun, in fact. It was almost midnight when he left London, when he left Sherlock sleeping soundly - the familiar, even breathing to his right, a steady resting heartbeat beneath his hand, dark curls flattened on one side against the pillow - a welcome change from Sherlock’s usual case-related insomnia. John hadn’t let the stress of their latest case catch up with him until after Sherlock had drifted off, a release of bottled-up anxiety that had him disappearing from their bed and their timeline.
He hopes Sherlock slept through it.
He hopes to be back before Sherlock can wake and realise he’s missing.
The sunshine is warm against his bare skin, and John takes a moment to bask, stretching his arms up and curling his toes. Since he started travelling, he’s become adept at telling the time without a watch and the month without a calendar, and it’s always nice to arrive in Sherlock’s wildflower meadow in summer. As he sits up, he takes in the sea of green, white, yellow and purple. He smiles and closes his eyes, inhaling the multitude of sweet scents, listening to the low drone of bees flitting between the brightly coloured flowers. He’s passed many an hour here with Sherlock picking out the various flora and fauna, giving them their Latin names and looking to John for approval (readily given, as always).
Besides the weather and the surroundings, the other benefit of travelling here in the middle of summer is that Sherlock is hopefully around and not at school. Waiting for him to arrive home from school was fine up until he went away to Eton when he was thirteen. After that, John had to rely on Sherlock being able to get back to Hindhead during term time to see him on the dates he’d dictated to Sherlock at some point, the ones written in his careful child’s handwriting on the first two pages of the leather-bound journal John knows so well. He didn’t condone the truancy, but he could never stop Sherlock when he’d made up his mind about something, and if the journal specified the meadow as the meeting place and not Eton, then Sherlock would be coming home even if it meant sneaking out and acquiring transport. The resourcefulness Sherlock has isn’t something he learned in adulthood.
John stands up and looks around. No sign of Sherlock or the basket of clothes that usually rests against the largest sycamore tree at the east-facing edge of the meadow. He sighs, wondering how long he’ll have to wait this time, and then he hears the distinctive snap of a twig behind him.
Sherlock has told him many times that Mycroft never comes out to the meadow (“it’s my place, John.”), but he’s still wary enough to duck back down into the relative cover offered by the tall grass and flowers. It would be pretty fucking awful to have Mycroft stumbling upon him out here, naked as the day he was born. Mycroft certainly wouldn’t be as accommodating as Sherlock, if the word ‘accommodating’ can ever be applied to Sherlock. If anything, Mycroft would probably have him arrested for trespassing and indecent exposure. Mycroft in the present wants to have him arrested for those things.
“Oh, you’ve heard me now,” the high, clear voice of a child calls out to him. “Don’t keep pretending you haven’t, Mycroft. What are you doing out here?”
It’s Sherlock, of course. Hiding in the trees that make up the borders of the meadow, the woodland boundary between the field and the gardens of the main house.
“It’s not Mycroft,” John calls back. “It’s me. It’s John.”
“Am I meant to know who that is?”
The little boy in shorts and a plain blue t-shirt who steps out from the trees with arms folded across his chest in defiance looks impossibly young and John realises that this must be Sherlock’s first time meeting him.
“You wouldn’t know me if we haven’t met before,” John says. Looking down at himself, he’s suddenly grateful that he went back to sitting down in the grass. “I don’t suppose you have a-”
The end of John’s question dies on his lips. There’s no reason for Sherlock to have anything with him that John could possibly cover himself with. Well, that’s embarrassing.
“Have a what?” Sherlock asks, curious despite himself. “Who are you?”
“I’m John, like I said. I’m a time traveller, Sherlock. We’re…” John hesitates and winces as he does - Sherlock will jump on that pause, no doubt. “You and me are best friends in the future.”
“You and I,” Sherlock says at once. John has to laugh at having his grammar corrected by a child who can’t be more than six years old, and he really has to giggle at the fact that the child is Sherlock who still does the same at age thirty-three. “And you’re lying. Time travel isn’t real.”
Sherlock, despite his narrowed eyes and the certainty in his words, is walking further into the clearing towards him. Did no one teach him not to talk to strangers?
“Oh really? Then how do I know that you have a big brother named Mycroft, and your grandmother likes you to call her grand-mére because she’s French?”
Sherlock shrugs. “Maybe you’re Mycroft’s friend.”
“Definitely not.” John pulls a face and Sherlock smiles before quickly exchanging it for a scowl. John’s heart seems to thud with unbearable fondness for a few beats. Jabs at Mycroft are always the best way to bond with Sherlock. “Okay then,” John continues, “how do I know that your favourite flower in this meadow full of flowers is the bee orchid?”
Sherlock’s eyebrows draw together. “I never told anyone that.”
“I know.”
“And you said we’re best friends?” Sherlock asks sceptically.
“Yep. So I know all about you, because best friends tell each other everything.”
That last statement could not be further from the truth. One hundred per cent honesty isn’t feasible in any relationship, let alone one that involves Sherlock Holmes.
“What’s the name of my school, then?”
John smiles. He knew Sherlock would want to test him. “You go to St. Edmunds, but you’re not boarding there.”
“And why am I not boarding?”
“Because…” John trails off, trying to think of a tactful way to put it. “Because you don’t get on all that well with the other boys. Particularly Harvey Barrington-Smith,” he adds. The name-dropping will lend more credibility to what he’s saying - Sherlock never told anyone but him about the bullying.
Sherlock’s school days are not something he’ll go on to remember with affection. Even when he wasn’t actively bullied he was always ostracised from his peers for his above-average intellect and far below-average social skills. He did himself no favours, of course. Like the time he burnt sulphur in a science class and a few of his classmates had to go to the nurse with breathing difficulties. When he told John about it during a visit, Sherlock claimed that the sulphur wasn’t properly labelled and he was merely trying to conduct a boring flame test on calcium, but John knows better. Sherlock was too good a chemist at age eleven to mistake yellow sulphur for silvery calcium.
There’s a frown on Sherlock’s face and John can tell he’s torn. On the one hand, he’s six years old and he wants to believe in fantastic things like time travel when the evidence is put in front of him like John is doing now. On the other, he’s an exceptionally gifted six year old who decried the existence of both Father Christmas and the Tooth Fairy the instant they were proposed to him.
John knows it will take him disappearing before Sherlock’s very eyes to convince him that John might be telling the truth. He’d know that even if Sherlock himself hadn’t told him so.
Sherlock is walking towards him again, coming into the meadow fully now. His frown deepens when he gets close enough to see John properly.
“Why don’t you have any clothes on?” he asks.
John draws his knees up to his chest and hugs them. “When I time travel, I only get to take my body. If I could take my clothes, I’d take anything that was touching me, which wouldn’t be good because then I might leave something from the future in the past. Don’t you think it would be bad if I took a-” John thinks for a moment about an era-specific object that Sherlock would know. He had been going to say ‘laptop’ as an example, but Sherlock would just look at him blankly. “-a car back to the time when they were just inventing the wheel? Or if I was touching a person, I could leave them in a time they’re not from. This way, that can’t happen.”
He’s had this discussion with the adult version of Sherlock a few times, even though Sherlock petulantly hates the logistics of John’s peculiar talent. John had thought that Sherlock would be fascinated by it and wouldn’t tire of trying to sort through all the ins and outs of time travel and, while that’s true of him as a child, in their present he’s just frustrated by the constant paradoxes and the lack of logic to it.
For instance, John never has and probably never will visit the Victorians, or the Romans. He’s never travelled back before his own birth and he isn’t sure how far forward he’s travelled, or even if he’s travelled forward at all. He only knows he’s travelled back in time because, since meeting Sherlock, he always meets younger versions of him. On the occasions when he travelled before meeting Sherlock, he was never able to work out what the date was before he returned to the present. God knows where it was that he went when he was shot, he can barely remember that time anyway.
John always tends to explain this all away by saying that Sherlock is like some sort of a temporal magnet for him, but that only ever gets a derisive snort from Sherlock in the present. John understands the mockery; there’s no scientific reason that he should be so drawn to places where Sherlock has been - the meadow, Eton, Cambridge. But there’s no reason that John should be time travelling in the first place. Sometimes, there are things that just defy explanation.
“Like us,” Sherlock will say when he’s in a relatively good mood.
“Like us,” John will agree.
John shakes off the thoughts and turns his mind back to the time he is inhabiting. Six year old Sherlock is considering John’s answer.
“I guess that makes sense,” he says at last, when he decides he’s considered for long enough. “But this could still all be a dream. Or a trick of Mycroft’s.”
“I thought you were going to say that. So here’s the solution: I’m going to come back here in nine days on the nineteenth of July, and I’ll be younger than I am now, so I won’t remember meeting you today. Before I do come back though, your mother’s maid is going to resign and leave the house. I couldn’t know that if I’m not from the future, so if she’s still here when you see me again, then you’ll know I’m a liar.”
Sherlock squints at him, obviously trying to work through all of that. “Ellen would never leave,” he says and he doesn’t sound sure, as if he doesn’t think he’ll be proved wrong (and nor should he, Ellen was perfectly happy in her job before she learned that her father was sick and moved back to Chester to be closer to him), but he doesn’t want John to be proved wrong either.
“We’ll see then, won’t we? The nineteenth, Sherlock, don’t forget. And if you could bring some of your dad’s clothes out for me on that day, that would be great.”
“I can do that, but I want something in return.”
John laughs at how typically Sherlock that is, and that’s when a faint tingle begins in his left hand.
“What do you want?”
Sherlock looks down and shuffles his feet. “Can I take some measurements when you come back to see if you’re really different? Like your height and weight.”
At this point, he’s quite used to Sherlock’s attempts to explain and quantify him. Height and weight are perhaps the most normal ways of Sherlock trying to wrap his scientific brain around him before Sherlock will branch out into more arbitrary things.
“That’s fine with me,” he says. “Now, if you need any further proof that I’m telling you the truth, then watch this.”
Sherlock looks at him piercingly. “Nothing’s happening,” he says after thirty seconds of silent, focused observation. Sherlock isn’t patient at any age, it seems.
“Keep watching.”
He’s developing the familiar rising sensation to accompany the tingling. It won’t be long.
“I am watching.”
“Keep-”
And with that, John disappears from the meadow, leaving an astonished Sherlock in his wake.
----
30th January 2010 (Sherlock is 29, John is 32)
On their first official day as flatmates, John comes back mid-afternoon, clearly after having sex the night before (same clothes he left in, never came home last night after his date, grinning like the proverbial cat with a canary), and declares himself absolutely knackered when he walks in before going up to his room for a nap.
Sherlock ensconces himself in his own bedroom, slamming the door because he can and then playing the violin loudly to help him think. It just so happens that it might also prevent John from sleeping.
It’s petty, he knows. It’s completely juvenile, but he warned John about this. He’s not an easy man to live with at the best of times. There is no knock at the door or a yelling voice asking him to stop though. Sherlock has no idea what that means.
He stops thinking about whatever woman John was with last night (blonde, curvaceous, stupid, polite, and undoubtedly Sherlock’s opposite in every other possible way) around three o’clock, transitioning from some frenzied Paganini into a Bach Partita as he thinks about the three recent serial suicides. One more and he’ll step in beyond his mass texts to show up the Met in front of the media. Lestrade is wrong, but that’s his default state half the time.
At around five, when it starts to get dark, he ventures cautiously into the living room to find John sat on the sofa, bent over the paper spread out on his lap, pen in hand. Sherlock falters for a moment before he gets close enough to read the words upside-down. John is circling potential jobs, not flats. Tedious, but bearable.
John looks up at his arrival, a broad smile on his face. He drops his pen into the fold of the newspaper and claps slowly, still beaming. “Wow,” he says. “That was some performance this afternoon. You didn’t include the fact that you were good when you listed playing the violin as one of your off-putting attributes as a flatmate.”
And you didn’t include philandering, Sherlock thinks. Somewhat harshly, he supposes. If Mycroft could see him now, he’d be smirking like he was in a room filled with desserts, the greedy bastard. It’s only a matter of time before the inevitable visit, but if Mycroft wants to give out lectures about envy and lust, he’d better prepare for a very barbed one in return about gluttony and sloth. Pride can of course be ascribed to them both in more than healthy measures, so whatever lectures may pass between them, not a single word shall be heeded nor any behaviours altered.
The Holmes brothers’ enduring stalemate.
Bloody Mycroft, Sherlock thinks hatefully.
“Thank you,” he replies when he remembers his manners and John’s admiring expression. That look is a far better thing to dwell on than thoughts of his brother. Compliments are useless in the scheme of things, really, but there’s that troublesome pride of his again. He can feel the tips of his ears turning just slightly pink with pleasure. Ridiculous.
He hears the car pull up outside before he sees the flashing lights. Red and blue - police. He gravitates towards the window, instantly intent on what might be happening. Lestrade gets out of the car as he watches through the curtain.
“There’s been a fourth,” Sherlock says, more to himself that to John, whom he has quite forgotten about (who is watching his sudden change in demeanour with baffled interest). “Something different this time…”
“A fourth? Sorry, what?”
Lestrade bounds up the stairs, two at a time, and enters the room. He looks worse than he did at the press conference. Tired and stressed. Two pounds dropped since Sherlock last saw him, perhaps three.
“Where?” he asks immediately, not giving Lestrade a chance to speak.
“Brixton, Lauriston Gardens.”
“What’s new about this one?” he presses. “You wouldn’t have come to get me if there wasn’t something different.”
John is looking between them, confused. Sherlock doesn’t have time to bring him up to speed just yet, and he won’t be distracted from this. Ordinary brains, honestly, how do they function?
“You know how they never leave notes?” Lestrade inclines his head. “This one did.”
Oh, that is interesting. That’s very interesting. He needs to see that note for himself, but who’s going to butcher the evidence with their ineptitude today? He’s already got his assistant primed and ready at the very least if it’s as bad as he fears. “Who’s on forensics?”
“It’s Anderson.”
It’s as bad as he fears. It can’t get any worse, in fact. He grimaces just hearing the name. “Anderson won’t work with me.”
“Well, he won’t be your assistant!”
“I need an assistant,” Sherlock insists, and then pointedly looks at John who is looking (gaping) currently at Lestrade. “And I’ve got one right here. John?”
John blinks and turns his head. “Sorry, but what?”
“Crime scene,” Sherlock almost taps his foot in impatience at having to explain himself. “Are you coming? Violent death, the kind of thing we talked about yesterday.”
Lestrade is now looking between the two of them much the same way John had been doing with him and Lestrade a moment ago. “Hang on, John? Not the John Watson, surely?”
The John Watson? Really, Lestrade is going to bring this up now?
“Oh, please,” Sherlock says. “There’s a crime scene to get to before Anderson can irrevocably damage it, do you really want to waste time on introductions? Detective Inspector Lestrade, Doctor John Watson. John, Lestrade. Are we done here?”
“What do you mean, the John Watson?” is John’s painfully predictable next question.
“This can wait until later,” Sherlock says, glaring daggers at Lestrade for even daring to open his mouth about this.
Lestrade must read the danger signs in his expression because he backs off considerably, hands up in surrender. “All right. So you’ll come?”
“Not in a police car, I’ll be right behind.”
Perhaps I should get used to saying ‘we’ now, he thinks when Lestrade leaves with a nod and a thank you.
He waits a few seconds before he lets his excitement show through, pivoting on the spot, fists raised and shaking as he leaps through the air. “Brilliant!”
Four serial suicides and now a note. John by his side and Anderson is going to be there to see it. It’s Christmas.
He just doesn’t say the part about John aloud.
----
19th July 1987 (John is 35, Sherlock is 6)
“Oh, it’s you again.”
John isn’t quite expecting that one. The little boy sat in the grass - cross-legged, overlarge book balanced on his knees - looks to be about the youngest he’s seen Sherlock. Which leads him to the conclusion that an older version of himself must have visited before this. Fucking time travel.
Sherlock is... Sherlock is almost cute at this age, John has to admit. Pale, slightly chubby limbs poke out of his polo shirt and khaki shorts. His untamed curls are just this side of too-long and frame his pale, slightly chubby face.
He’s almost cute. There’s that familiar cold stare fixed on his features. John shivers at the sight of it, wondering if there was any age at which Sherlock didn’t have that look. He must have been the world’s most disconcerting baby.
Actually, that title probably went to Mycroft. He suspects the elder Holmes brother’s first word must have been something demanding and/or horrifying. He already knows Sherlock’s first word was ‘Mycroft’ when he was just ten months old, which is possibly the least horrifying thing about Sherlock in general. Mycroft had seemed amused to tell that tale, but doggedly refused to emulate the lisp Sherlock must have had, the one John has heard himself at various points. There’s just no way Sherlock pronounced an ‘r’ sound correctly at that age, however remarkable he might be.
John sits up, slightly wobbly from his jump in time still. “Hello, Sherlock.”
“John,” is the wary answer. Too wary. This Sherlock hasn't met him many times.
“I don’t suppose-”
John is cut off by Sherlock pointing at a wicker basket by the tree, immersed in his book again. Clothes. Brilliant. He flashes Sherlock a quick grin, but he’s worrying: just how young did he get to Sherlock with that list of dates of when he was going to show up naked in his back garden?
In the basket he finds a smart shirt and trousers. Better fit than he’s used to. Sherlock’s father’s, perhaps, going by the year he’s estimated it to be. Mr Holmes isn’t as broad as Mycroft, making his wardrobe the superior option for John, but there are no clothes belonging to him left in the house after 1988, so over the years John has invariably been swamped in shirts that are too big or left holding up his trousers if Sherlock deletes the fact that he needs a belt.
When he's dressed, he turns back to Sherlock. “What are you, five? Six?”
He always tries the year younger than the one he truly thinks it is first - he knows it pisses Sherlock off.
Sure enough, it earns him a glare. John tries and fails to hide his smile.
“Six and a half,” Sherlock says.
John drops his smile and nods solemnly to show he understands the importance of the half. “I see, yes, my mistake.”
Sherlock seems appeased by that. That’s the Sherlock he knows; he does so love people acknowledging their own stupidity.
“How long’s it been since I last saw you?”
“Nine days,” Sherlock answers promptly. “Just like you said it would be. I wonder if that means you’re real or not then. You coming back, I mean. I’ve no use for an imaginary friend.”
John smiles again and shakes his head. Six and a half, bloody hell. His grasp of language alone marks him as extraordinary.
“I’m real,” John promises. “What did I tell you before?”
“You said mummy’s maid would quit and she did. You also said you knew me in the future and we were best friends there. I don’t have friends.”
John can’t help but wince at that turn of phrase. Still hurts, just a bit. It reminds him of how painfully young Sherlock is too, for all that he can talk like an adult. “Well, you have me.”
Sherlock merely gives him that unnerving stare. John knows he’s being scanned in the same way older-Sherlock would, only this Sherlock doesn’t quite have the same breadth of knowledge and experience to be able to make any full deductions on him.
“Last time,” Sherlock says, “you said that you wouldn’t remember our meeting when you came back because you’d be younger. You do look different. Do you mind if I take some measurements? You told me that you wouldn’t.”
“Do what you like.”
He was expecting this. He’s never been overly fussed by his height or weight or all the other variables Sherlock has wanted to measure over the years. He’s never been the type to be self-conscious, even before the army knocked all such compunctions out of him.
He spies the scales behind Sherlock, a tape measure coiled neatly on top next to two pencils. Sherlock produces a notebook, apparently from within the pages of whatever massive chemistry textbook he’s been reading and takes down John’s weight from the scales after they manage to find a roughly flat bit of land to put them on.
Next, Sherlock gets John to lie down in the grass, marks out two lines with the pencils - placing one at the top of his head, one at his heels - and then makes John get up to hold the tape measure at one pencil while he darts across to the other to check the distance.
Using his marker and the tape measure, John reads off: “One hundred and sixty-nine centimetres. Or five feet, six and a half inches.”
He does know his own height and, unlike his weight, it doesn't change, but the joke gets him a shy, hard-won smile, and John feels absurdly pleased.
“Sherlock!” a female voice calls from off in the distance. It’s Sherlock’s mother.
Sherlock glowers and then looks apologetically at John. “I have to go,” he says. “Will you just… disappear if I’m not around?”
“No," John replies with a gentle smile, "I’ll be here for a little while yet, probably, until it’s time for me to go back to see you in the future again.”
“Will you be coming back here?”
John nods. He’s memorised the list from Sherlock’s journal, so he knows that if this is their second meeting, their next meeting will be when Sherlock is seven.
“Do you have a list of all the dates when I come to see you?” he asks.
Sherlock shakes his head, but he looks like he’s trying not to look too thrilled at John’s words. “You’ll be back a lot? Tell me when.”
“I’ll give the list to you when I come back sometime,” John promises, “but you won’t see me for a little while now, not until next year.”
Sherlock’s face falls and John feels awful. A year is a long time to a child.
“Why not-”
“Sherlock!” The shout is louder this time, more insistent.
“I really have to go.” Sherlock says, his shoulders slumping, mouth a displeased downward curve.
“I know, but I’ll see you soon. Just you wait and see.”
The waiting, however much he wants to spare Sherlock the pain of it, is unavoidable for them both. This is just the hand they’ve been dealt, John thinks as he watches Sherlock run back across the meadow towards the house. He looks back once, just to see whether John has disappeared, probably. John waves to him with a grin.
When he loses sight of Sherlock, John flops down into the grass to begin his own wait until he finds himself back with Sherlock at Baker Street where he belongs.
----
30th January 2010 (John is 32, Sherlock is 29)
John gets into the black car because he’s pissed off. After a quiet cab ride with Sherlock to a crime scene, the man seemed more concerned with scoring points off the lead forensic officer and the sharp-tongued DS than he was about the pink woman’s untimely death. He was fantastic, of course, all his observations and deductions were just beyond brilliant.
Then he left John behind.
He said he wanted John to assist him. How can he do that if Sherlock swans off without him?
At least the aforementioned sharp-tongued DS was willing to tell him where to get a cab. She was more than willing to tell him all about Sherlock being a psychopath and likely candidate for a serial killer.
John can’t see it. Yes, Sherlock is evidently very, very strange. He’s somewhat callous, speaking of fun with a woman lying dead at their feet, swooping around in a giddy haze of excitement at the end there when he realised… whatever it was that he realised about pink, John couldn’t follow.
Sherlock has got issues with his priorities, certainly. And he’s a bastard for leaving John behind when they arrived in a cab together.
He’s not a psychopath though. It’s clear that Sherlock feels affection for the kindly old landlady in Baker Street and, if John isn’t mistaken, for him as well. They have a history together, he just isn’t privy to it. He doesn’t know Sherlock yet, not properly, but he can tell already that he’s something of an anomaly for Sherlock. Ditching him at a crime scene aside, Sherlock seems to want to keep him around for some reason.
And John wants to stick around, but right now? He’s pissed off, and he’s on edge because he’s just answered a payphone in a phonebox and found he was the intended recipient. The intended target. He’s been threatened by an oddly familiar voice, but it’s more of an act of defiance than surrender when he climbs awkwardly into the car that pulls up alongside the phonebox.
Sherlock told him yesterday to avoid black cars but he never said why, so John’s going to get in and he’s going to find out why.
The end of the journey finds him in an abandoned warehouse, of all places. It’s awfully unoriginal, the perfect location for a clandestine meeting. He’s almost glad to be out of the car though after the stony, condescending silence from the stunning girl who calls herself Anthea and types faster on her phone than he could ever hope to.
As he exits the car, planting his feet and cane on the slippery floor, he gets his first look at the man he’s been brought to like a lamb to slaughter.
He recognises him.
“Have a seat, John.”
That same posh voice, that same posh suit. The very same out-of-place umbrella that the man now gestures at a chair with. It’s the government man from the field hospital in Camp Bastion.
“It’s you,” John says, for lack of anything better or less cliché to say.
“Indeed,” the man shifts his grip on the umbrella, bows his head slightly. “I wondered if you’d remember, you were on a rather high dose of-”
“Who are you?”
The man looks taken aback at being interrupted mid-sentence before his composure returns in a split-second. “Merely an interested party. The leg must be hurting you, sit down.”
John clenches his fingers tighter around the handle of his cane. “I don’t want to sit down. Interested in what?”
“In you,” the man says smoothly, as though this were a perfectly normal thing to say, “and your connection to Sherlock Holmes.”
“I don’t have one.” He can hardly say that he’s a time traveller who has apparently visited Sherlock several times in the past now, can he? Even if he didn’t deeply, instinctively distrust this man already. “I barely know him, I met him…” John pauses and thinks about it. Christ, has he really only known Sherlock one day? “…yesterday.”
He’s done for, isn’t he?
The man makes a ‘hmm’ noise. Thoughtful? Amused? Knowing? John can’t get a read on him. “And since yesterday you’ve moved in with him and now you’re solving crimes together. All very cosy and domestic. All very unlike Sherlock.”
“What can I say? I must be special.”
The man smiles, but it doesn’t reach his eyes. “Yes, I know about your condition, Doctor Watson.”
A text alert breaks the tense silence as John stares at the man, wondering what he can possibly say back. ‘What condition?’ maybe? Pleading ignorance seems like his best bet, even if he doubts it will get him far.
He pulls out the phone and reads the message. It’s Sherlock.
Baker Street.
Come at once if convenient.
SH
Convenient is not the word he would use for this situation.
“Don’t worry,” the man continues as John looks at the phone screen. “I assure you that your secret is quite safe with me. But you ought to know that I’m aware of your habit of jumping through timelines to places you have no business being.”
John puts his phone away and looks up at the man again, his previous bland, pleasant smile replaced by a sternly furrowed brow.
“How?” he asks.
“I have ways and means. Now, I also happen to know you’ve moved into…” The man reaches into his inner jacket pocket, drawing out a slim black notebook. He opens it to a seemingly random page and peers at it. “…Two hundred and twenty-one bee Baker Street without a job or any financial means to support you. I’d be happy to pay you an obscenely large amount of money to move out. I can even establish you in a much nicer flat, one without experiments all over the place and violins at all hours.”
One without Sherlock. It shouldn’t be unthinkable already, but it is.
“I could probably even organise a suitable job for you, one where they won’t mind or question the odd disappearance or two.”
“No.”
The man smiles, mouth closed and pinched. “I see. Another offer then: what about a meaningful sum of money on a regular basis while you live at Baker Street to pay your way?”
“In exchange for?”
“A journal. Perhaps you’ve seen it already, it’s a large book, leather-bound-”
“No.”
He’s talking about Sherlock’s journal with the dates of John’s visits to him. Not going to happen. Esoteric entries or not, it’s still Sherlock’s journal and thus private. Besides, there’s no way John’s going to steal it from under his nose to give to this man he knows nothing about. This man who wants it for God knows what.
There’s no way he could steal it from under Sherlock’s nose anyway, he’d know straight away from a bit of dust on John’s collar or something.
The man taps the point of his umbrella against the floor twice, nodding. “Fascinating. Truly. A final offer, then. I could pay you for information. Nothing indiscreet, nothing you’d feel uncomfortable with. Just tell me what he’s up to.”
“Why?”
“I worry about him,” the man’s voice creaks with false sincerity. “Constantly.”
“And you want to pay me to move out. What are you, a jealous ex?”
The man’s mouth twitches with distaste. “Nothing like that, I can assure you. But we do have what you might call a… difficult relationship. So if you take me up on my offer, I would naturally like you to keep that between us.”
John’s phone chimes again.
Sherlock again.
If inconvenient, come anyway.
SH
Another text follows it:
He’s got to you, hasn’t he?
Don’t listen to a word he says.
SH
John smiles and puts the phone back into his pocket. “No,” he says.
“I haven’t mentioned a figure-”
“Don’t bother.”
John won’t spy on Sherlock. He won’t spy on or for anyone.
The man laughs, a brief, hollow thing. “I see. Soldiers are famed for their loyalty, are they not? Sherlock would approve of such a quality in the company he keeps.”
“It’s not that. I’m just not interested.”
The man says nothing for a short period, watching John closely. Then he takes out the notebook again, gesturing to a page. “‘Trust issues’ it says here.”
John frowns and swallows hard. He recognises that phrase. He read it upside down less than a week ago in his therapist’s office, that round, youthful handwriting.
“Can it be that you’ve decided to trust Sherlock Holmes of all people?”
He doesn’t, not yet. But he trusts him a damn sight more than he does this slick, patronising man. There were so many entries in that journal of Sherlock’s. He’s going to come to know Sherlock Holmes, in the present and the past because there’s something that ties them together. Something that apparently drags him through time to where Sherlock is. He trusts in that.
“We’re done here,” he says.
He turns to walk away but the man calls out to him. “You think stress is a factor in your time travelling, don’t you? You think it’s a bizarre manifestation of post-traumatic stress disorder. I can tell from your left hand that stress might be a factor, but not that particular kind.”
John stops dead, turning back to face him. “My what?”
“Show me,” the man says, nodding at him.
The man is calm, he’s in his element as he leans nonchalantly onto his umbrella, a blunt counterpoint to John leaning heavily on his cane, his feet planted firm and steady against the ground as he jerks up his left hand, holding it by his face with a challenge in his eyes.
He’s waiting for the man to come to him. The man obliges, reaching out for John’s hand with his own.
“Don’t,” John says, pulling away.
Mockery is laced all through the man’s response to that: the tilt of his head, his raised eyebrows and pursed lips.
John lowers his hand, lets the man take it and examine it with his own long fingers.
“Remarkable. Did you know you have an intermittent tremor of your left hand, Doctor Watson?”
Despite himself, John nods. And it’s always his left hand that tingles in warning before he travels. The tremor is just another reason he can’t go back into medicine. A doctor needs to have steady hands. God, he wishes this man would stop using his title.
“Your therapist thinks it’s caused by post-traumatic stress disorder. Your tremor, not the time travel. You haven’t told her about that, of course. She thinks you’re haunted by memories of your military service.”
John holds himself taut as he listens, jaw tight and a muscle jumping there, his eyes fixed ahead and not meeting the man’s knowing stare. “Who the hell are you?” he finally has to ask, letting some of his anger show through. “How could you know that?”
“You ought to fire her,” the man says, voice low and convincing. “She’s completely incompetent if she's got you this wrong. You’re under stress right now and your hand is perfectly steady. You’re not travelling. You see, you’re not haunted by your memories of the war, Doctor Watson. You’ve been missing the danger and the excitement. Between Sherlock and the time travel though... I'd say you have it back.”
The man walks away, twirling his umbrella in a circle around his arm as he goes. “We’ll be seeing each other again very soon, John.”
John watches him go for a moment, trying to process the events of the meeting, and hears his phone chime in his pocket.
Yet another text from Sherlock.
Escape by distracting him with the promise of sweets.
Then come to Baker Street.
Could be dangerous.
SH
John laughs at the very idea of plying that man with sweets, putting his phone away and then stretching his left hand out in front of himself. He looks down on it with satisfaction.
Completely still, no tremor.