Sherlock Fic: The Ties That Bleed (1/2 wtf)
Yeah, okay, why not. This is tehomet's fic. I wrote it for her and stuff. And she says it's good and I should post it, so I'm kind of just tossing it out here. Plus, this way she can read it without all the html tags. So. Enjoy?
Title: The Ties That Bleed
Rating: R
Word Count: ~11700
Characters/Pairings: John/Sherlock (or, Sherlock/John/Madness), Mycroft/Anthea/Anthea/Anthea/Anthea
Warnings: Reichenbach, suicidal thoughts and themes, violence, soulbonding dubcon, insanity, angst, AU-ish worldbuilding, swearing, and the fact this is a soulbonded Reichenbach fic. This fic is brutal, and rough in a rough drafty kind of way too. Also, abrupt ending because...that's where this particular story ends.
Summary: John Watson has been bonded by blood to Sherlock Holmes. Until the day Sherlock dies, they will be tied together. Until the day Sherlock dies, John can't.
“Oh, sometimes you just think about shooting yourself in the head,” Mrs. Holmes says enthusiastically. “I know right after my husband died I kept thinking about doing it. You can always still feel them. For God’s sake, I buried him with my own two hands - not a lick of help with grave digging, my boys - and I keep wondering when I’ll stop feeling his heartbeat.”
John isn’t quite sure why it’s so reassuring to hear a sixty-year-old woman who is the equivalent of his mother-in-law pleasantly shout out her suicidal tendencies, but it is. “God, it’s never going to go away?”
Mrs. Holmes puts a hand on his shoulder. “Do you honestly want it to?”
John can remember a time when he was all alone in his head and heart and thought it was completely normal. He remembers a time when Mycroft Holmes was just an unsettlingly omniscient man whose presence turned Sherlock into even more of a five-year-old than he usually was. He remembers when Sherlock was just a fascinating flatmate bordering on friend, and Lestrade was just a detective inspector, and the world was just starting to get interesting.
John remembers a time when he’d had his own soul.
“Not really,” he says, and sighs. He can still feel Sherlock, sitting in the back of his head with his arms crossed and looking at John with that expectant well? expression in his eyes.
Mrs. Holmes nods, satisfied. “Now, did I ever tell you about the time Abby and I chased a ruby necklace around New Orleans and nearly got eaten by alligators?”
---
John would like to think that the story started when he exploded, but he knows better than that. Or at least Mycroft knows better than that and John trusts Mycroft to know better than him. Either way, it didn’t start with the bomb and the rusty bit of piping. It started when Sherlock Holmes was ten years old and curious.
Wendy Harper was an ugly little girl in every single way. Her lips were smeared with an enormous birthmark; her hair was a tangled mass of angry brown. She’d been teased and tormented since she started school, and it turned her into a cruel child. Wendy Harper had wanted to hurt someone, and Sherlock was a convenient target three years younger whose walk home from school passed right in front of her house.
Or at least he had seemed a convenient target.
When a blood lord reaches a certain age, they are given a knife. John has been told the age varies based on the ‘purity’ of the bloodline. Mycroft and Sherlock earned their bonding knives when they were seven. The average age is thirteen.
Sherlock had three years of familiarity with his very own knife when little Wendy Harper attacked. The problem was, those three years had really taught him only one use for the knife.
Mycroft found him. He never said where or how, but the expression on the older Holmes’ face had kept John from asking. What he’d heard was enough: there’d been a hole in a young unconscious Sherlock’s hand, and a hole in Wendy Harper’s hand, and Wendy Harper had been screaming and writhing in pain. When Mycroft had touched Sherlock, Wendy passed out.
They said her death was a true tragedy, a meaningless death from a horrible accident in the garden.
They said Sherlock’s emotional distance was just something he’d been born with, that his absent empathy was because he was a sociopath and it was something entirely Sherlock.
Mycroft’s eyes had told John another story entirely.
---
These days, John finds himself sleeping in Sherlock’s bed more than his own. It doesn’t smell like him anymore, but the sheets were his, the room was his, and his clothes still hang in the closet.
Everyone tells him to find another flatmate - and then amend their words to find another flat after he meets their eyes - but they all know he won’t. They can see it in the way he walks at a pace to match absent longer legs and still uses half the sink to brush his teeth and finds himself boiling twice the necessary amount of water. Sometimes he even pulls out two cups.
John will never move or try to find another flatmate, because sometimes he can almost feel Sherlock. He feels like he could just slide into Sherlock’s side of their soul and it’d actually be his friend and not the shade that looks and acts and talks exactly like John remembers.
It fades, Mrs. Holmes had told him, her hands wrapped around his. It took years for my husband’s shade to vanish enough to really move on. They can drive you mad, so be sure to remember it’s not really them. She had smiled at him, then. It had been that strange, not quite sad smile that actually made John pay attention. You can indulge sometimes, but I nearly died chasing after my Abby’s shade. He’s a memory. A beautiful memory. But that’s all.
He remembers how Sherlock held his toothbrush like a violin bow and played his teeth clean with long notes and the occasional staccato movements. He remembers how Sherlock smelled right after a shower, and how he took his tea differently depending on the temperature, and the excited half-skip he’d develop between steps on a good case.
It fades, Mrs. Holmes tells him, again and again and again.
Mycroft never does.
---
John’s involvement in the world of blood lords didn’t begin until he died. Naturally, he wasn’t awake to see what happened, but he was aware of a few things. He was aware of darkness, and then a piercing burning light, and then terror and such pain that John had felt he was dying all over again, and then, a heartbeat. Warmth. The kind of absolute contentment that made John certain he was in heaven.
What really happened was Sherlock had driven a sharp rusty piece of metal piping through their hands in a desperate post-pool-explosion bid for John’s life and broken just about every bonding taboo there is in the process. Not that Sherlock had ever really cared for propriety, but it was bad enough to bond someone without consent once; twice made him seem like a serial soul rapist. The way the last bond had been severed had left small pieces of Sherlock missing, and a second bond had forced John to fill up those little bits, just as it forced some (well, a lot) of Sherlock’s blood and life into John’s more than a little corpse-like body.
It hadn’t been anything near perfect. Bonding knives are given at an early age to absorb more of the holder and ensure the bond is smooth and doesn’t cause any extreme discomfort for the bonded after the ceremony. John hadn’t known what was going on or what he was in for, and Sherlock didn’t know it would work before John’s final heartbeat, and it ended with Sherlock unconscious for three days.
John hadn’t slept nonstop for those three days. He’d slept for thirty-six hours naked and squished under an equally naked Sherlock, and then woken up to see Mycroft Holmes looking at him.
“Ah, you're awake. Good morning,” Mycroft had said with that somewhat terrifying half-smile of his. “I trust you've slept well?”
“Not really, no, but thank you for asking,” John replied, and had wondered for a moment why Sherlock was still asleep. He’d decided to take the 'naked' and 'on top of me' parts into consideration when he wasn't talking to one of the most dangerous men in the world. “Sorry, but I have no idea what's going on.”
“I assumed you wouldn’t, since you were mostly dead when it started,” Mycroft had said, pulling a small brown journal out of his breast pocket. “It falls to me to explain things, as Sherlock will be unconscious for at least another day. A basic explanation will have to do for now.” He didn't even bother looking at John, simply flipping a page in his journal. “You have been bonded by blood to Sherlock Holmes. Until the day he dies, you will be tied together. Until the day he dies, you cannot.”
John stared at him.
“Yes, really,” Mycroft said.
John tried to process the words he was fairly sure he’d heard come out of Mycroft’s mouth, but no, it wasn’t really working. “You mean to say that-”
“Yes,” Mycroft had said, and closed his journal, tucking it back into its place inside his jacket. “I’ll send my assistant by to explain your side of the situation more efficiently. For now, I need you to stay where you are.”
John's face fell. “I can't at least put pants on?”
“Of course not. I had them removed for a reason,” Mycroft had said, and pulled a needle out of the same pocket his journal was in, plunging it into the portion of John’s arm that wasn't covered by Sherlock.
“You must be joking,” John had tried to shout, but his words had only turned into a slur and a very pleasant darkness as he drifted back to sleep.
---
Lestrade is always a welcome sight. He never pushes John towards the mysterious ‘acceptance’ stage of grief that everyone seems so keen on. It probably has something to do with the fact Lestrade actually understands what it’s like to lose a spouse - that, and he’d seen the early days of John and Sherlock’s bond. He didn’t understand the bond, but Lestrade could be trusted to always try.
“Listen, John,” Lestrade says halfway into a very pleasant evening of drinking and talking about things as inconsequential as possible. “I hate to ask this, but is there any way I could ask for your help on a case?”
John finishes his pint faster than he really should. “I’m not going into a dead man’s mind, Lestrade.” It was hard enough when Sherlock was alive, and then Sherlock could help him find his way back out. He doesn’t like the idea of being trapped inside a dead pseudo-sociopathic genius’ mind again.
Lestrade flounders for a moment, trapped between indignation and apologies. “That’s not what I meant,” he finally says. “We have a bond on record with one of our more charming murderers, and she won’t talk. I don’t presume to think I know everything about the Holmes family, but I do know Sherlock made someone bark like a dog for nine hours after the man made him angry.”
John can’t help but grin. “Such an idiot.”
Lestrade smiles at the memory, shaking his head at the absurdity of leading a barking Lord Wittenham to lock-up.
“I’d be happy to help, but I don’t know how effective I’ll be,” John admits. “I’m technically Underlord, but I don’t know if there’s some special technique to it or something.”
“I have no idea what an Underlord is, but I’d appreciate even an attempt,” Lestrade says honestly. “Would you be available tomorrow around nine in the morning?”
“I’ll be there,” John says, and wonders how the hell he’s supposed to explain this to Mycroft - Overlord of the Blood - without making it sound like he just wanted to boss someone around to make Lestrade happy.
---
On the surface, being bonded sounds like the greatest deal on the planet. For the bonded individual, not only are you unkillable (save complete explosion of your body into tiny bits), you can also share consciousness with your bonder and, in John’s case, use Sherlock’s status as Underlord of the Blood, also known as the second son of the previous Overlord, to bend the will of other blood lords. Which, in Sherlock’s case, was everyone but Mycroft. Which was a serious concern for every single member of the Blood.
The bonding of Doctor John Watson was actually one of the most notable events of the year, even though it was done with a rusty jagged pipe and was so shoddily done that for the first week being out of physical contact with Sherlock hurt so much that John ended up screaming and passing out. It was amazingly embarrassing to constantly be touching.
For example, the time Mrs. Hudson wandered in and John was stuck holding Sherlock’s hand while he tried to not be aggravated at having to dissect one-handed and John tried not to be aggravated at having to cook one-handed as they shuffled awkwardly around the kitchen. It’d been entirely platonic, but Mrs. Hudson had taken one look at their death-grip on each other’s hand and said, “Oh, boys,” and run over to hug Sherlock so hard that he narrowly avoided stabbing her with a scalpel.
Awkward.
Or the time that Lestrade had come over to give them a case since Sherlock wasn’t answering his (rather urgent) texts and found out he wasn’t answering because he was sprawled over a journal-reading John and completely catatonic, to the point he was drooling on John’s arm and clutching at him like a favorite teddy bear. John had explained the situation, of course, and Lestrade had amazed him by neither laughing out loud nor trying to tell John that it was perfectly okay for them to be together and he didn’t need to make up excuses. He’d just said, “Best of luck with that.”
They like Lestrade.
And of course there was the inevitable showering awkwardness. The removal of clothes was already being carefully coordinated to keep them both touching bare skin at all times and, while awkward, was doable and it was becoming strangely normal-seeming to have fingers sliding along his skin as he dressed and undressed, but showering was extended nakedness. At first they tried taking turns with one in the shower and the other outside, hands held across the shower curtain, but water went everywhere and really, there was no avoiding it. Their tiny shower became communal, and John hated how his body reacted to hands on his naked skin in the shower, but if he ignored it Sherlock ignored it. It was unbearably awkward, but it only lasted for a couple weeks, thank God, and then they didn’t talk about it. Awkwardly.
But, hands down, the winner for most awkward moment had been actually going to the crime scene. Holding hands. And Sherlock occasionally trying to talk with his hands and yanking John around hard enough to make his shoulder hurt so much that Sherlock felt it, which meant they were both in pain. And holding hands. In front of Donovan and Anderson and just about the entire Yard. The situation had ended with them both fighting a psychosomatic limp and the disapproval of just about everyone, Lestrade acting as escort or not.
“I want this off,” John had snapped as soon as they’d closed their front door. “No more bond. No more hand-holding and spooning and hugging and-”
“You’d rather die, then?” Sherlock asked, scorn lacing the words. “Do the opinions of incompetent police really matter more than your life?”
“They aren’t the problem, Sherlock,” John had snapped back. “The problem is that I’m going to be trapped with you, bound to you, until the day I die! I like being my own person, Sherlock. I’m not a touching kind of person, and I’m not going to just let you throw me around, and-”
“Give it time, John,” Sherlock said, and frowned. “The bond will adapt, and then you can be as much of an individual as you want.”
“I can feel you in my head,” John shouted. He knew this was just the postponed freak-out, he knew he wasn’t even being all that rational, but here he was screaming at Sherlock and they were still holding hands. “It’s like I’m not even me anymore, I’m some offshoot of you!”
Sherlock didn’t respond. He just tugged John onto the couch and wrapped his arms around him.
“This isn’t helping me enjoy this,” John said icily.
“But it’s keeping you alive,” Sherlock said, completely unrepentant. “I’d rather have you alive and hating me than dead.”
Selfish bastard, John thought, but didn’t say it aloud. He was too busy hating how wonderfully at peace he’d felt since he exploded.
---
Three years without Sherlock seems like nothing sometimes, more like three hours since he died, but at other times it feels more like thirty years. Signing Dr. John H. Watson, BUL on the visitor’s sheet is one of those times. If Lestrade notices the extra care he takes on the H today, he doesn’t mention it.
Meeting Edith Woodley is like meeting any other higher-level bonded for John. They see him, small and unassuming in a simple brown jumper with his once again ever-present cane, and they can feel his bond. It will take them a while to actually test how strong it is, simply because of their superiority complex and an ingrained bad habit of underestimating him.
John has learned a preemptive strike is the best tactic. “Perhaps you’d like to take a seat?”
Edith is standing with her chin held high and arms crossed in the visitor’s room, looking down her button-like nose at him. “If you really think you have some sway over me, you’ve got another thing coming. My Ron was second son of the Earl of-”
“Sit down,” John says blandly as he situates himself as comfortable as possible on a hard bench, and Edith immediately finds herself obeying with her ass planted firmly on the concrete floor. “My name is John Holmes Watson, and I have some questions for you.”
And that always gets their attention. It also gets Lestrade hiding a grin behind his hand. John feels he probably deserves a good laugh; he can tell Edith’s one of the more irritating bond-inheritors.
“You can sit somewhere other than the floor,” John comments, and gets no satisfaction from the angry flush that burns across her cheeks. “Now. Did you kill Ronald Adair? All evidence points to yes, and I’m inclined to agree that you’re guilty, but I always like a good honest answer.”
Edith swallows. “I would never have killed Ron. It’d be like taking all the joy out of the world, no matter how badly I wanted to strangle him sometimes. We started to hate each other after all that time together constantly, but I’d never kill him.” She sighs. “We should have waited a bit longer before the ritual, but he was so honest. That’s rare these days, you know.”
“I do,” John says, and Edith’s shoulders relax a little. “How’s his shade treating you?”
Edith frowns. “Shade?”
“The bit of Ron that’s still in your head,” John explains. “Violent deaths can be the worst on the inheritor, sometimes even driving people mad. I can help a bit if he gets to be too much.”
“There’s nothing left of him,” Edith says, looking at John like he’s mentally unstable. “There’s just emptiness.”
John knows there’s always a shade. Even the lowest levels of blood lords leave one behind, even if it only lasts a few months. Ronald Adair should last a minimum of two years. He leans forward, looking her in the eye. “What happened to him, Edith? I know you don’t want to feel it again, but I need you to tell me what happened to Ron. I can help you get there, but-”
interest/longing slams into his mind.
Someone’s shaking John.
interest/SHOCK/fury-at-someone-not-John/panicpanicpanic/longing, and it’s gone, he’s gone, and Lestrade is shaking him and shouting his name.
“Sherlock,” John gasps, because it was him, it was him, he’s alive alive alive he has to be and John won’t be haunted and alone so very alone anymore-
Lestrade has him by the shoulders, and looks genuinely scared. “John, he’s dead. Don’t lose yourself. Not again.”
He could slip into Sherlock’s side of the bond, he could see what he felt, see Sherlock-
Lestrade shakes him again. “There’s a woman who needs you right now, and he doesn’t, John. He doesn’t.” Edith Woodley, the woman who doesn’t even have a shade left. It helps him ground himself.
This has happened before. It’s the reason Lestrade rarely asks for his help; cases always bring Sherlock forward. Even dead, Sherlock loves a good mystery. And he just has to be one of those ever-lingering shades, doesn’t he? Always interfering, always making John suicidal and insane and so lonely that sometimes he wants to find Sherlock’s corpse just so he can punch it in the face.
fuck off, he snarls at the shade. He never wanted this anyway.
When he’s finally lucid enough to pay attention to the real world, he sees that Edith looks absolutely terrified. “If that’s a shade, I don’t want one.”
“That’s a Holmes shade. They’re irritating even when they’re dead,” John mutters, so resentful he could happily settle for punching Mycroft. “I’m sorry about that. Now, what did it feel like when Ron died?”
Edith stares at him in horror, but answers. She has to, after all. “It felt like something cut half my soul out,” she says, which isn’t right. The bonded gets the whole soul when the blood lord dies, not just their half of it. “It felt like something slashed and cauterized that half out and consumed it.”
Well shit, John thinks, because apparently Moriarty isn’t quite as dead as they’d thought.
---
Moriarty wasn’t (isn’t?) a blood lord.
The Blood had always been an open secret to the world, really, even if the public had seen it more like some secret society instead of the remnants of an ancient ritual. John doesn’t doubt for a moment that Jim Moriarty had known exactly who and what Sherlock (and Mycroft) had been even when he started playing his games. He also doesn’t doubt for a moment that when Sherlock bonded John, he had no idea what Jim Moriarty was capable of.
They’d had eleven months to believe that Moriarty had actually died. Oh, they hadn’t actually believed it, but they had eleven months to pretend they did. Eleven months to adapt to the bond and solve cases without worrying if Moriarty was pulling the criminal’s strings. They were the most aggravating and happy months of John’s life, full of narrowly avoiding getting killed and narrowly avoiding trying to kill Sherlock.
He did get shot in the neck by a murderous calendar-maker and pass out for five days instead of dying, which was an illuminating experience that John never wants to have ever again. Being ‘unkillable’ (never ‘immortal’ because you can always age to death or maybe explode, as John knows from experience) doesn’t mean you get to avoid the pain. Apparently getting that lack of pain from a life-threatening injury they’d had when John exploded took a brand new bond that he and Sherlock didn’t have any more. It didn’t help the situation that Sherlock got to feel John’s body knit itself back together right along with him.
But, aside from the near-death and cuddling a hell of a lot more than ever before, things had been beautifully normal. Well, normal for them. There were still toes in the fridge and teeth on the counter and a knife through the unopened mail on the mantle and Jamaican cat burglars and angry cat-fetishists and their bitchy (and more than likely abused in horrible, horrible ways) pets to deal with, but John liked it that way. It was never boring, even if Sherlock thought it was.
And then, after eleven months, the first severed pair was found. One had died from seemingly natural causes, probably a heart attack, and the other had shot himself in the head. Suicides after a bonded partner died are comparatively common, but there hadn’t been anything left in the bonder. Not even a shade of her was left.
It was the one and only time John ever saw Sherlock vomit at a crime scene. He’d made it into the attached bath, but there was little consolation in that for a man who got excited when the victims were mutilated in interesting ways.
It was also the one and only time John ever saw Sherlock call (actually call) Mycroft to a crime scene.
By this time John had shut the bathroom door and had curled himself around a shocked Sherlock as they sat on the floor. They didn’t even bother to separate when Mycroft lurched into the bathroom and vomited in the sink, his assistant (one of the identicals today) politely ushering the police away from their own crime scene.
“And you couldn’t just tell me?” Mycroft asked icily after his own reaction to the absolute nothing that was left, wiping his mouth with a handkerchief and clenching his umbrella so tight his knuckles were bone white.
“You wouldn’t believe me,” Sherlock said. “I can’t feel anything. It’s like something ate their soul.”
“Her side of the soul, yes,” Mycroft said, glancing at the bodies for a moment before turning away again. “The rest vanished when her bonded killed himself.” He took a deep breath. “You believe he-”
“Of course I do,” Sherlock snapped, and extricated himself from John’s loose grip. “Do you know how is the question.”
“Go home and stay there, with John, for thirty-six hours,” he said, and moved away from the door just fast enough to avoid Sherlock’s sudden move forward. He grabbed John’s hand and was already walking out the door.
“You swore you wouldn’t do this to me,” Sherlock snapped over his shoulder as they kept walking. John wouldn’t have been able to stop even if Sherlock hadn’t had a death grip on his hand. When the Overlord delivers a command, it’s obeyed. “Mycroft! Stop this!”
Mycroft had paid for their taxi and walked back inside without even glancing back, and Sherlock hadn’t said a word to John for the next day and a half. Instead, he was in constant contact - hugging, leaning, holding, touching. When he reached the level of trying to share a shower like they’d had to in the first few days, John had shoved him into his chair, sat in his own, put his feet in Sherlock’s lap so he’d stop panicking about lack of physical contact, and simply said, “what’s going on.”
“I don’t want to lose you,” Sherlock said, and glared. “Don’t you dare go into my mind.”
“I wasn’t going to,” John said honestly, and wiggled his toes to give Sherlock something else to concentrate on for at least a moment. He hates going into Sherlock’s mind anyway. “I think there’s something else going on other than you getting clingy because of a de-bonded pair of corpses, and I want to know if there’s anything I can do to help.”
Sherlock watched him for a long moment. Observed him. “What would you do if I died?”
John was frozen for a moment, and then the anger came. “That’d better be one of those whimsical ‘what if aliens invaded’ questions, Sherlock.”
He waved John’s anger away like cobwebs in the air. “The case, John, the case. It’s the same situation. What would you do if I died? Would you really shoot yourself in the head, or would you try to hunt down whoever killed me?”
“Our blood lord died of natural causes,” John pointed out.
“Induced natural causes,” Sherlock corrected. “A side-effect of losing the bond could very easily be shock so intense that it led to a heart attack. Remember, you’re technically sucking out my soul, after all.”
John glared at him. “Well, that’s a lovely way of putting it.” He considered pointing out it wasn’t John’s idea and the whole thing was more like Sherlock forced his soul down John’s throat, but now probably wasn’t the time.
“It’s honest,” Sherlock said easily. “Now, there I am, dead on the floor of unnatural causes. The bond is gone. What do you do?”
“Try to resuscitate you,” John answered.
Sherlock rolled his eyes. “I’m beheaded on the floor, then. What do you do?”
“Still try to resuscitate you,” John answered. “And then when I finally figure out sewing your head back on won’t do any good I’d call someone, probably Lestrade, to come watch your body while I went out and tried to catch whoever killed you.” Sherlock simply nodded, a hand settling awkwardly on John’s ankle. “What would you do if it was me dead on the floor?”
Sherlock’s answer was to hold up his left hand with its splintered white circle of a scar in his palm. “I’d be just as dead as you,” he said, and sounded almost smug about it.
---
John doesn’t know where Mycroft lives, or his phone number, or his assistant’s phone number, or any way to magically summon him.
Sherlock knows all those things, though.
“This is a bad idea,” Lestrade tells him. They’re in his office, the blinds closed and Donovan loitering pointedly around the door in case someone needs to be told Lestrade is busy. “You could try something else first and you know it.”
Lestrade isn’t an idiot. John knows that Lestrade isn’t mentioning the shade’s interference earlier just because he thinks it’d be rude. He also doesn’t doubt that Lestrade knows the shade’s interference is the reason John’s jumping at the opportunity. “If I slip in with an actual goal it’s a lot easier. I’ve done it before and gotten out just fine.”
“You never come out of this ‘just fine,’ John,” Lestrade says, but doesn’t push his objections any further than that. Instead, he checks his watch. “How long should I let you go?”
John sighs. He tries to calm his nerves. “Three minutes, I suppose.”
Lestrade nods, and John doesn’t waste any time. He closes his eyes, and nudges his mind towards the side of their soul that was (is?) Sherlock, and
it’s always their flat when he opens his eyes, and he’s sitting in his chair and it only takes a moment or two, it only takes a moment or two until
“What the hell are you doing here, John?” Sherlock snaps from the newly-occupied couch, glaring at him. “You’re just-”
“I know you’re dead, I’m here because I need to talk to Mycroft as soon as possible and you know how to get in touch with him without waiting for a mysterious black car and ringing payphones,” John says, glaring right back. “If you’d bothered to tell me how to do that before you died, we wouldn’t be in this situation, would we?”
“Oh, I see we’re in a lovely mood tonight,” Sherlock says, and scowls. “Why do you need him, anyway?”
“Moriarty isn’t as dead as we thought, apparently,” John says. “Another severed bond, but the bonded survived because they hated each other just enough for it to not be the end of the world. Now, isn’t that something that seems like a Mycroft-related problem?”
Sherlock watches him for a moment, and then nods, and
his fingers are dialing a number he can’t see, and his own voice is saying three years and you still wear that same dreadful jacket, Lestrade? and then John is himself again. Lestrade looks absolutely baffled and a little bit horrified, and John’s call goes through.
“Who is this?” a very displeased Mycroft asks.
“It’s John,” he answers. “I didn’t have time to wait for you so I-”
“That was a very stupid thing to do, John,” Mycroft says. “I hope this is actually urgent.”
“There’s another severed bond murder, and I only know one person who can do that,” John says.
Mycroft makes a humming noise that could be agreement. It could also be irritation. They seem to go hand-in-hand, when Sherlock’s involved. “A car will be there soon,” he says, and hangs up.
John stares at the phone for a minute, trying to figure out what exactly Mycroft is doing.
“Was that worth risking insanity, then?” Lestrade asks after the 13-seconds-long conversation.
John glares at him, and waits for the car.
---
He can remember the moment things changed. More specifically, John can pinpoint the exact moment Sherlock realized he was going to go do the stupidest thing of his entire life and go off to kill Moriarty, knowing he’d die right along with the madman.
It had been the fourth pair of bodies that did it. Mycroft had banned them from actually seeing the severed bond cases two crime scenes ago, but Lestrade kept them in on it anyway. The fourth pair hadn’t been an old bond, or a weak bond. It had been a two year old bond that had been severed so precisely that the bonded woman had been shot through the head, and the blood lord was a raving mess who had already lost herself, tearing her hair out in bloody clumps and, according to Lestrade, still giving her wife CPR even though the woman had been dead for at least seven hours.
Sherlock had watched her rock her dead wife back and forth, and then looked at John for a moment. It was for a tiny moment, barely more than a glance, but for Sherlock to glance away from a crime scene for anything, let alone to check on a man whose presence and well-being he could feel down to his soul, meant something.
At the time, he’d thought it was just a way to assure himself that the bond wasn’t lying and John was still standing in the corner. A sign of nerves, maybe. Not a sign of coming to his final solution for the problem of Jim Moriarty.
That night, Sherlock had curled around him in bed and held him tight enough to almost hurt, grip tight enough on his mind that they didn’t dream. They spent the night with their eyes wide open, even though Sherlock’s didn’t seem to see anything at all.
At some point, John had fallen asleep. When he woke, Sherlock was sitting in a chair next to the bed, watching him. It wasn’t observation. It was that rare indulgence where Sherlock just let his mind take in information and didn’t process it beyond this exists.
“This wouldn’t be a problem if I’d just let you die,” Sherlock had muttered, his focus returning. “Even easier if I’d never met you.”
“Good morning to you too,” John replied amicably, doing his best to ignore the words and the thundercloud that was Sherlock’s side of the bond as he rolled his way out of bed. “Tea?”
In a heartbeat, Sherlock was back to observation. John wasn’t sure what kind of conclusion Sherlock was coming to, but he rarely was, so he stuck to routine. He went into the kitchen and put the kettle on.
Sherlock sighed from the doorway, scowling at John for a moment before handing him a paper and pen and saying, “Sign this.”
John was used to the unexpected coming from Sherlock. The marriage license in his hand was more unexpected than usual. Sherlock had already signed it, the witness had already signed it, Mycroft had already signed it (necessary blood lord addendum), and all it needed was John’s signature. And it was dated for over seven months ago.
John looked at the paper for a good long while. “Are you asking me to marry you?”
“We’re already married, John,” Sherlock said, still twitchy but more composed than when John had woken up. “We’re just finishing up the legal documentation.”
John laughed uneasily, looking up from the paper to see Sherlock’s steady stare. “I don’t think this is how marriage works, Sherlock. There’s supposed to be-”
“Supposed to be what?” Sherlock snapped. “We live together. We rely on each other. We take each other for granted. We share a soul. What’s so problematic?”
He had swallowed, and even now John still regrets his reaction. “But you’re supposed to love each other.” When John had noticed the way Sherlock’s hands snapped into fists, he had thought it was annoyance. “Romantically, I mean. You’re supposed to be in love, not just love each other. And -”
“Stop talking,” Sherlock said. He didn’t shout. Now, John wishes he had, but instead Sherlock had gone cold and dark and precise, like a knife sliding in for the kill. “You really don’t understand, do you? I didn’t do this to just make things easier, and I didn’t just jump into this, and I knew exactly what I was doing that night at the pool. An Underlord doesn’t just skip into something like this in a bit of post-explosion shock, John.”
John had just stood there, watching, pen held loosely in one hand, and apparently that was what did it. Sherlock snapped, and his hands grabbed onto John’s head, a palm against each cheek, and Sherlock said, “For fuck’s sake, understand,” and
-the pool is destroyed, and Sherlock doesn’t know how the hell he managed to survive for a few seconds, until he sees John Watson’s bleeding burnt and broken body lying on top of him, and Sherlock doesn’t scream but it’s a near thing when he sees John actually try to smile at him while Sherlock can see the wreck that is his back, and John is going to die. John is going to die, and that can’t happen, he can’t let it, god no he can’t he hasn’t cared about anyone since that part of him was ripped out of him right along with an angry little girl named Wendy Harper and their disgusting fear-laced bond that makes his skin crawl just thinking about it, but he cares now, god he cares, and John, and John-
It’s easy enough to find something sharp. It’s hard to bring himself to roll John onto his back, and John doesn’t scream because John is dying, John is bleeding and broken and Sherlock doesn’t let himself think. He grabs something that will work, and grabs onto John’s hand and presses a kiss to what’s left of it (an old tradition, so very old, and he never understood it until now), and raises the sharp rusty bit of piping before stabbing it through both of their hands and he can feel Mycroft shouting in his head, can feel the entirety of the Blood raging at him because this is wrong of him, this is a type of rape so deep and horrific that Mycroft has killed people for doing it, but he doesn’t apologize, because the only person he’d apologize to is John and he wouldn’t be alive to kill Sherlock for this if he didn’t let his own blood sneak into John’s, didn’t shove John’s soul out and shove Sherlock’s into the crevices left just as John’s blood filled in the holes in Sherlock, and before he passes out he wraps himself around John and can feel him healing, and that’s all that matters. John can come home, John is home, John is everything everything everything, and yes, he feels their heartbeat-
and
“You’re very lucky, Sherlock,” Mycroft says when he wakes up and god John is there and he is breathing and asleep and that’s all that matters now. Sherlock doesn’t even look over at his brother. “If he’d outright objected instead of just been confused, I’d have been obligated to kill you, you realize.”
“Of course I realize,” Sherlock mumbles into John’s neck. And he doesn’t care. He just wants to spend the rest of his life right here with John and never have to move. He can hear Mycroft’s sigh - it’s the ‘why am I even bothering right now’ sigh - before he stands up from his chair and heads out the door.
“Do try to keep him happy, at least,” Mycroft says quietly from the doorway, and if Sherlock hadn’t already been drifting back towards sleep he would have thrown something at his brother for even suggesting he would do otherwise-
and
-he holds John tight as his skin stitches itself back together, ignoring the dead man twenty feet away from them in favor of clinging to John because John is his soul and John is his everything and John isn’t going to die but he’s always going to be risking himself isn’t he, always going to be getting in harm’s way, bonded’s job or not, and god Sherlock doesn’t know if he can do this, if he can watch anything dangerous come near John, let alone a legitimate threat, and he doesn’t want John to die, not without him-
and when John came out of Sherlock’s mind, the other man was gone and the water was boiling. He ignored it in favor of signing the paper with a still-shaking hand. He signed himself into a new name, turned Hamish into Holmes. Sherlock had been living with the middle name of Watson for over half a year, according to this. He’d been married to limbo and just waiting for John to catch on, all because John Watson had been too stupid to even think Sherlock had some emotional reason behind bonding him.
Please come home, John texted, but Sherlock never will.
Three hours after getting married, Mycroft will walk in. John will be a widower within five hours of his much-postponed marriage.
Seven hours after getting married, John will realize Sherlock brought it up to ensure his will that hands everything over to John is iron-clad.
Eleven hours after getting married, John will slip into Sherlock’s side of their soul and meet his viciously perfect shade for the first time.
Sixteen hours after getting married, John will be insane.
---
(to 2/2)
Title: The Ties That Bleed
Rating: R
Word Count: ~11700
Characters/Pairings: John/Sherlock (or, Sherlock/John/Madness), Mycroft/Anthea/Anthea/Anthea/Anthea
Warnings: Reichenbach, suicidal thoughts and themes, violence, soulbonding dubcon, insanity, angst, AU-ish worldbuilding, swearing, and the fact this is a soulbonded Reichenbach fic. This fic is brutal, and rough in a rough drafty kind of way too. Also, abrupt ending because...that's where this particular story ends.
Summary: John Watson has been bonded by blood to Sherlock Holmes. Until the day Sherlock dies, they will be tied together. Until the day Sherlock dies, John can't.
“Oh, sometimes you just think about shooting yourself in the head,” Mrs. Holmes says enthusiastically. “I know right after my husband died I kept thinking about doing it. You can always still feel them. For God’s sake, I buried him with my own two hands - not a lick of help with grave digging, my boys - and I keep wondering when I’ll stop feeling his heartbeat.”
John isn’t quite sure why it’s so reassuring to hear a sixty-year-old woman who is the equivalent of his mother-in-law pleasantly shout out her suicidal tendencies, but it is. “God, it’s never going to go away?”
Mrs. Holmes puts a hand on his shoulder. “Do you honestly want it to?”
John can remember a time when he was all alone in his head and heart and thought it was completely normal. He remembers a time when Mycroft Holmes was just an unsettlingly omniscient man whose presence turned Sherlock into even more of a five-year-old than he usually was. He remembers when Sherlock was just a fascinating flatmate bordering on friend, and Lestrade was just a detective inspector, and the world was just starting to get interesting.
John remembers a time when he’d had his own soul.
“Not really,” he says, and sighs. He can still feel Sherlock, sitting in the back of his head with his arms crossed and looking at John with that expectant well? expression in his eyes.
Mrs. Holmes nods, satisfied. “Now, did I ever tell you about the time Abby and I chased a ruby necklace around New Orleans and nearly got eaten by alligators?”
---
John would like to think that the story started when he exploded, but he knows better than that. Or at least Mycroft knows better than that and John trusts Mycroft to know better than him. Either way, it didn’t start with the bomb and the rusty bit of piping. It started when Sherlock Holmes was ten years old and curious.
Wendy Harper was an ugly little girl in every single way. Her lips were smeared with an enormous birthmark; her hair was a tangled mass of angry brown. She’d been teased and tormented since she started school, and it turned her into a cruel child. Wendy Harper had wanted to hurt someone, and Sherlock was a convenient target three years younger whose walk home from school passed right in front of her house.
Or at least he had seemed a convenient target.
When a blood lord reaches a certain age, they are given a knife. John has been told the age varies based on the ‘purity’ of the bloodline. Mycroft and Sherlock earned their bonding knives when they were seven. The average age is thirteen.
Sherlock had three years of familiarity with his very own knife when little Wendy Harper attacked. The problem was, those three years had really taught him only one use for the knife.
Mycroft found him. He never said where or how, but the expression on the older Holmes’ face had kept John from asking. What he’d heard was enough: there’d been a hole in a young unconscious Sherlock’s hand, and a hole in Wendy Harper’s hand, and Wendy Harper had been screaming and writhing in pain. When Mycroft had touched Sherlock, Wendy passed out.
They said her death was a true tragedy, a meaningless death from a horrible accident in the garden.
They said Sherlock’s emotional distance was just something he’d been born with, that his absent empathy was because he was a sociopath and it was something entirely Sherlock.
Mycroft’s eyes had told John another story entirely.
---
These days, John finds himself sleeping in Sherlock’s bed more than his own. It doesn’t smell like him anymore, but the sheets were his, the room was his, and his clothes still hang in the closet.
Everyone tells him to find another flatmate - and then amend their words to find another flat after he meets their eyes - but they all know he won’t. They can see it in the way he walks at a pace to match absent longer legs and still uses half the sink to brush his teeth and finds himself boiling twice the necessary amount of water. Sometimes he even pulls out two cups.
John will never move or try to find another flatmate, because sometimes he can almost feel Sherlock. He feels like he could just slide into Sherlock’s side of their soul and it’d actually be his friend and not the shade that looks and acts and talks exactly like John remembers.
It fades, Mrs. Holmes had told him, her hands wrapped around his. It took years for my husband’s shade to vanish enough to really move on. They can drive you mad, so be sure to remember it’s not really them. She had smiled at him, then. It had been that strange, not quite sad smile that actually made John pay attention. You can indulge sometimes, but I nearly died chasing after my Abby’s shade. He’s a memory. A beautiful memory. But that’s all.
He remembers how Sherlock held his toothbrush like a violin bow and played his teeth clean with long notes and the occasional staccato movements. He remembers how Sherlock smelled right after a shower, and how he took his tea differently depending on the temperature, and the excited half-skip he’d develop between steps on a good case.
It fades, Mrs. Holmes tells him, again and again and again.
Mycroft never does.
---
John’s involvement in the world of blood lords didn’t begin until he died. Naturally, he wasn’t awake to see what happened, but he was aware of a few things. He was aware of darkness, and then a piercing burning light, and then terror and such pain that John had felt he was dying all over again, and then, a heartbeat. Warmth. The kind of absolute contentment that made John certain he was in heaven.
What really happened was Sherlock had driven a sharp rusty piece of metal piping through their hands in a desperate post-pool-explosion bid for John’s life and broken just about every bonding taboo there is in the process. Not that Sherlock had ever really cared for propriety, but it was bad enough to bond someone without consent once; twice made him seem like a serial soul rapist. The way the last bond had been severed had left small pieces of Sherlock missing, and a second bond had forced John to fill up those little bits, just as it forced some (well, a lot) of Sherlock’s blood and life into John’s more than a little corpse-like body.
It hadn’t been anything near perfect. Bonding knives are given at an early age to absorb more of the holder and ensure the bond is smooth and doesn’t cause any extreme discomfort for the bonded after the ceremony. John hadn’t known what was going on or what he was in for, and Sherlock didn’t know it would work before John’s final heartbeat, and it ended with Sherlock unconscious for three days.
John hadn’t slept nonstop for those three days. He’d slept for thirty-six hours naked and squished under an equally naked Sherlock, and then woken up to see Mycroft Holmes looking at him.
“Ah, you're awake. Good morning,” Mycroft had said with that somewhat terrifying half-smile of his. “I trust you've slept well?”
“Not really, no, but thank you for asking,” John replied, and had wondered for a moment why Sherlock was still asleep. He’d decided to take the 'naked' and 'on top of me' parts into consideration when he wasn't talking to one of the most dangerous men in the world. “Sorry, but I have no idea what's going on.”
“I assumed you wouldn’t, since you were mostly dead when it started,” Mycroft had said, pulling a small brown journal out of his breast pocket. “It falls to me to explain things, as Sherlock will be unconscious for at least another day. A basic explanation will have to do for now.” He didn't even bother looking at John, simply flipping a page in his journal. “You have been bonded by blood to Sherlock Holmes. Until the day he dies, you will be tied together. Until the day he dies, you cannot.”
John stared at him.
“Yes, really,” Mycroft said.
John tried to process the words he was fairly sure he’d heard come out of Mycroft’s mouth, but no, it wasn’t really working. “You mean to say that-”
“Yes,” Mycroft had said, and closed his journal, tucking it back into its place inside his jacket. “I’ll send my assistant by to explain your side of the situation more efficiently. For now, I need you to stay where you are.”
John's face fell. “I can't at least put pants on?”
“Of course not. I had them removed for a reason,” Mycroft had said, and pulled a needle out of the same pocket his journal was in, plunging it into the portion of John’s arm that wasn't covered by Sherlock.
“You must be joking,” John had tried to shout, but his words had only turned into a slur and a very pleasant darkness as he drifted back to sleep.
---
Lestrade is always a welcome sight. He never pushes John towards the mysterious ‘acceptance’ stage of grief that everyone seems so keen on. It probably has something to do with the fact Lestrade actually understands what it’s like to lose a spouse - that, and he’d seen the early days of John and Sherlock’s bond. He didn’t understand the bond, but Lestrade could be trusted to always try.
“Listen, John,” Lestrade says halfway into a very pleasant evening of drinking and talking about things as inconsequential as possible. “I hate to ask this, but is there any way I could ask for your help on a case?”
John finishes his pint faster than he really should. “I’m not going into a dead man’s mind, Lestrade.” It was hard enough when Sherlock was alive, and then Sherlock could help him find his way back out. He doesn’t like the idea of being trapped inside a dead pseudo-sociopathic genius’ mind again.
Lestrade flounders for a moment, trapped between indignation and apologies. “That’s not what I meant,” he finally says. “We have a bond on record with one of our more charming murderers, and she won’t talk. I don’t presume to think I know everything about the Holmes family, but I do know Sherlock made someone bark like a dog for nine hours after the man made him angry.”
John can’t help but grin. “Such an idiot.”
Lestrade smiles at the memory, shaking his head at the absurdity of leading a barking Lord Wittenham to lock-up.
“I’d be happy to help, but I don’t know how effective I’ll be,” John admits. “I’m technically Underlord, but I don’t know if there’s some special technique to it or something.”
“I have no idea what an Underlord is, but I’d appreciate even an attempt,” Lestrade says honestly. “Would you be available tomorrow around nine in the morning?”
“I’ll be there,” John says, and wonders how the hell he’s supposed to explain this to Mycroft - Overlord of the Blood - without making it sound like he just wanted to boss someone around to make Lestrade happy.
---
On the surface, being bonded sounds like the greatest deal on the planet. For the bonded individual, not only are you unkillable (save complete explosion of your body into tiny bits), you can also share consciousness with your bonder and, in John’s case, use Sherlock’s status as Underlord of the Blood, also known as the second son of the previous Overlord, to bend the will of other blood lords. Which, in Sherlock’s case, was everyone but Mycroft. Which was a serious concern for every single member of the Blood.
The bonding of Doctor John Watson was actually one of the most notable events of the year, even though it was done with a rusty jagged pipe and was so shoddily done that for the first week being out of physical contact with Sherlock hurt so much that John ended up screaming and passing out. It was amazingly embarrassing to constantly be touching.
For example, the time Mrs. Hudson wandered in and John was stuck holding Sherlock’s hand while he tried to not be aggravated at having to dissect one-handed and John tried not to be aggravated at having to cook one-handed as they shuffled awkwardly around the kitchen. It’d been entirely platonic, but Mrs. Hudson had taken one look at their death-grip on each other’s hand and said, “Oh, boys,” and run over to hug Sherlock so hard that he narrowly avoided stabbing her with a scalpel.
Awkward.
Or the time that Lestrade had come over to give them a case since Sherlock wasn’t answering his (rather urgent) texts and found out he wasn’t answering because he was sprawled over a journal-reading John and completely catatonic, to the point he was drooling on John’s arm and clutching at him like a favorite teddy bear. John had explained the situation, of course, and Lestrade had amazed him by neither laughing out loud nor trying to tell John that it was perfectly okay for them to be together and he didn’t need to make up excuses. He’d just said, “Best of luck with that.”
They like Lestrade.
And of course there was the inevitable showering awkwardness. The removal of clothes was already being carefully coordinated to keep them both touching bare skin at all times and, while awkward, was doable and it was becoming strangely normal-seeming to have fingers sliding along his skin as he dressed and undressed, but showering was extended nakedness. At first they tried taking turns with one in the shower and the other outside, hands held across the shower curtain, but water went everywhere and really, there was no avoiding it. Their tiny shower became communal, and John hated how his body reacted to hands on his naked skin in the shower, but if he ignored it Sherlock ignored it. It was unbearably awkward, but it only lasted for a couple weeks, thank God, and then they didn’t talk about it. Awkwardly.
But, hands down, the winner for most awkward moment had been actually going to the crime scene. Holding hands. And Sherlock occasionally trying to talk with his hands and yanking John around hard enough to make his shoulder hurt so much that Sherlock felt it, which meant they were both in pain. And holding hands. In front of Donovan and Anderson and just about the entire Yard. The situation had ended with them both fighting a psychosomatic limp and the disapproval of just about everyone, Lestrade acting as escort or not.
“I want this off,” John had snapped as soon as they’d closed their front door. “No more bond. No more hand-holding and spooning and hugging and-”
“You’d rather die, then?” Sherlock asked, scorn lacing the words. “Do the opinions of incompetent police really matter more than your life?”
“They aren’t the problem, Sherlock,” John had snapped back. “The problem is that I’m going to be trapped with you, bound to you, until the day I die! I like being my own person, Sherlock. I’m not a touching kind of person, and I’m not going to just let you throw me around, and-”
“Give it time, John,” Sherlock said, and frowned. “The bond will adapt, and then you can be as much of an individual as you want.”
“I can feel you in my head,” John shouted. He knew this was just the postponed freak-out, he knew he wasn’t even being all that rational, but here he was screaming at Sherlock and they were still holding hands. “It’s like I’m not even me anymore, I’m some offshoot of you!”
Sherlock didn’t respond. He just tugged John onto the couch and wrapped his arms around him.
“This isn’t helping me enjoy this,” John said icily.
“But it’s keeping you alive,” Sherlock said, completely unrepentant. “I’d rather have you alive and hating me than dead.”
Selfish bastard, John thought, but didn’t say it aloud. He was too busy hating how wonderfully at peace he’d felt since he exploded.
---
Three years without Sherlock seems like nothing sometimes, more like three hours since he died, but at other times it feels more like thirty years. Signing Dr. John H. Watson, BUL on the visitor’s sheet is one of those times. If Lestrade notices the extra care he takes on the H today, he doesn’t mention it.
Meeting Edith Woodley is like meeting any other higher-level bonded for John. They see him, small and unassuming in a simple brown jumper with his once again ever-present cane, and they can feel his bond. It will take them a while to actually test how strong it is, simply because of their superiority complex and an ingrained bad habit of underestimating him.
John has learned a preemptive strike is the best tactic. “Perhaps you’d like to take a seat?”
Edith is standing with her chin held high and arms crossed in the visitor’s room, looking down her button-like nose at him. “If you really think you have some sway over me, you’ve got another thing coming. My Ron was second son of the Earl of-”
“Sit down,” John says blandly as he situates himself as comfortable as possible on a hard bench, and Edith immediately finds herself obeying with her ass planted firmly on the concrete floor. “My name is John Holmes Watson, and I have some questions for you.”
And that always gets their attention. It also gets Lestrade hiding a grin behind his hand. John feels he probably deserves a good laugh; he can tell Edith’s one of the more irritating bond-inheritors.
“You can sit somewhere other than the floor,” John comments, and gets no satisfaction from the angry flush that burns across her cheeks. “Now. Did you kill Ronald Adair? All evidence points to yes, and I’m inclined to agree that you’re guilty, but I always like a good honest answer.”
Edith swallows. “I would never have killed Ron. It’d be like taking all the joy out of the world, no matter how badly I wanted to strangle him sometimes. We started to hate each other after all that time together constantly, but I’d never kill him.” She sighs. “We should have waited a bit longer before the ritual, but he was so honest. That’s rare these days, you know.”
“I do,” John says, and Edith’s shoulders relax a little. “How’s his shade treating you?”
Edith frowns. “Shade?”
“The bit of Ron that’s still in your head,” John explains. “Violent deaths can be the worst on the inheritor, sometimes even driving people mad. I can help a bit if he gets to be too much.”
“There’s nothing left of him,” Edith says, looking at John like he’s mentally unstable. “There’s just emptiness.”
John knows there’s always a shade. Even the lowest levels of blood lords leave one behind, even if it only lasts a few months. Ronald Adair should last a minimum of two years. He leans forward, looking her in the eye. “What happened to him, Edith? I know you don’t want to feel it again, but I need you to tell me what happened to Ron. I can help you get there, but-”
interest/longing slams into his mind.
Someone’s shaking John.
interest/SHOCK/fury-at-someone-not-John/panicpanicpanic/longing, and it’s gone, he’s gone, and Lestrade is shaking him and shouting his name.
“Sherlock,” John gasps, because it was him, it was him, he’s alive alive alive he has to be and John won’t be haunted and alone so very alone anymore-
Lestrade has him by the shoulders, and looks genuinely scared. “John, he’s dead. Don’t lose yourself. Not again.”
He could slip into Sherlock’s side of the bond, he could see what he felt, see Sherlock-
Lestrade shakes him again. “There’s a woman who needs you right now, and he doesn’t, John. He doesn’t.” Edith Woodley, the woman who doesn’t even have a shade left. It helps him ground himself.
This has happened before. It’s the reason Lestrade rarely asks for his help; cases always bring Sherlock forward. Even dead, Sherlock loves a good mystery. And he just has to be one of those ever-lingering shades, doesn’t he? Always interfering, always making John suicidal and insane and so lonely that sometimes he wants to find Sherlock’s corpse just so he can punch it in the face.
fuck off, he snarls at the shade. He never wanted this anyway.
When he’s finally lucid enough to pay attention to the real world, he sees that Edith looks absolutely terrified. “If that’s a shade, I don’t want one.”
“That’s a Holmes shade. They’re irritating even when they’re dead,” John mutters, so resentful he could happily settle for punching Mycroft. “I’m sorry about that. Now, what did it feel like when Ron died?”
Edith stares at him in horror, but answers. She has to, after all. “It felt like something cut half my soul out,” she says, which isn’t right. The bonded gets the whole soul when the blood lord dies, not just their half of it. “It felt like something slashed and cauterized that half out and consumed it.”
Well shit, John thinks, because apparently Moriarty isn’t quite as dead as they’d thought.
---
Moriarty wasn’t (isn’t?) a blood lord.
The Blood had always been an open secret to the world, really, even if the public had seen it more like some secret society instead of the remnants of an ancient ritual. John doesn’t doubt for a moment that Jim Moriarty had known exactly who and what Sherlock (and Mycroft) had been even when he started playing his games. He also doesn’t doubt for a moment that when Sherlock bonded John, he had no idea what Jim Moriarty was capable of.
They’d had eleven months to believe that Moriarty had actually died. Oh, they hadn’t actually believed it, but they had eleven months to pretend they did. Eleven months to adapt to the bond and solve cases without worrying if Moriarty was pulling the criminal’s strings. They were the most aggravating and happy months of John’s life, full of narrowly avoiding getting killed and narrowly avoiding trying to kill Sherlock.
He did get shot in the neck by a murderous calendar-maker and pass out for five days instead of dying, which was an illuminating experience that John never wants to have ever again. Being ‘unkillable’ (never ‘immortal’ because you can always age to death or maybe explode, as John knows from experience) doesn’t mean you get to avoid the pain. Apparently getting that lack of pain from a life-threatening injury they’d had when John exploded took a brand new bond that he and Sherlock didn’t have any more. It didn’t help the situation that Sherlock got to feel John’s body knit itself back together right along with him.
But, aside from the near-death and cuddling a hell of a lot more than ever before, things had been beautifully normal. Well, normal for them. There were still toes in the fridge and teeth on the counter and a knife through the unopened mail on the mantle and Jamaican cat burglars and angry cat-fetishists and their bitchy (and more than likely abused in horrible, horrible ways) pets to deal with, but John liked it that way. It was never boring, even if Sherlock thought it was.
And then, after eleven months, the first severed pair was found. One had died from seemingly natural causes, probably a heart attack, and the other had shot himself in the head. Suicides after a bonded partner died are comparatively common, but there hadn’t been anything left in the bonder. Not even a shade of her was left.
It was the one and only time John ever saw Sherlock vomit at a crime scene. He’d made it into the attached bath, but there was little consolation in that for a man who got excited when the victims were mutilated in interesting ways.
It was also the one and only time John ever saw Sherlock call (actually call) Mycroft to a crime scene.
By this time John had shut the bathroom door and had curled himself around a shocked Sherlock as they sat on the floor. They didn’t even bother to separate when Mycroft lurched into the bathroom and vomited in the sink, his assistant (one of the identicals today) politely ushering the police away from their own crime scene.
“And you couldn’t just tell me?” Mycroft asked icily after his own reaction to the absolute nothing that was left, wiping his mouth with a handkerchief and clenching his umbrella so tight his knuckles were bone white.
“You wouldn’t believe me,” Sherlock said. “I can’t feel anything. It’s like something ate their soul.”
“Her side of the soul, yes,” Mycroft said, glancing at the bodies for a moment before turning away again. “The rest vanished when her bonded killed himself.” He took a deep breath. “You believe he-”
“Of course I do,” Sherlock snapped, and extricated himself from John’s loose grip. “Do you know how is the question.”
“Go home and stay there, with John, for thirty-six hours,” he said, and moved away from the door just fast enough to avoid Sherlock’s sudden move forward. He grabbed John’s hand and was already walking out the door.
“You swore you wouldn’t do this to me,” Sherlock snapped over his shoulder as they kept walking. John wouldn’t have been able to stop even if Sherlock hadn’t had a death grip on his hand. When the Overlord delivers a command, it’s obeyed. “Mycroft! Stop this!”
Mycroft had paid for their taxi and walked back inside without even glancing back, and Sherlock hadn’t said a word to John for the next day and a half. Instead, he was in constant contact - hugging, leaning, holding, touching. When he reached the level of trying to share a shower like they’d had to in the first few days, John had shoved him into his chair, sat in his own, put his feet in Sherlock’s lap so he’d stop panicking about lack of physical contact, and simply said, “what’s going on.”
“I don’t want to lose you,” Sherlock said, and glared. “Don’t you dare go into my mind.”
“I wasn’t going to,” John said honestly, and wiggled his toes to give Sherlock something else to concentrate on for at least a moment. He hates going into Sherlock’s mind anyway. “I think there’s something else going on other than you getting clingy because of a de-bonded pair of corpses, and I want to know if there’s anything I can do to help.”
Sherlock watched him for a long moment. Observed him. “What would you do if I died?”
John was frozen for a moment, and then the anger came. “That’d better be one of those whimsical ‘what if aliens invaded’ questions, Sherlock.”
He waved John’s anger away like cobwebs in the air. “The case, John, the case. It’s the same situation. What would you do if I died? Would you really shoot yourself in the head, or would you try to hunt down whoever killed me?”
“Our blood lord died of natural causes,” John pointed out.
“Induced natural causes,” Sherlock corrected. “A side-effect of losing the bond could very easily be shock so intense that it led to a heart attack. Remember, you’re technically sucking out my soul, after all.”
John glared at him. “Well, that’s a lovely way of putting it.” He considered pointing out it wasn’t John’s idea and the whole thing was more like Sherlock forced his soul down John’s throat, but now probably wasn’t the time.
“It’s honest,” Sherlock said easily. “Now, there I am, dead on the floor of unnatural causes. The bond is gone. What do you do?”
“Try to resuscitate you,” John answered.
Sherlock rolled his eyes. “I’m beheaded on the floor, then. What do you do?”
“Still try to resuscitate you,” John answered. “And then when I finally figure out sewing your head back on won’t do any good I’d call someone, probably Lestrade, to come watch your body while I went out and tried to catch whoever killed you.” Sherlock simply nodded, a hand settling awkwardly on John’s ankle. “What would you do if it was me dead on the floor?”
Sherlock’s answer was to hold up his left hand with its splintered white circle of a scar in his palm. “I’d be just as dead as you,” he said, and sounded almost smug about it.
---
John doesn’t know where Mycroft lives, or his phone number, or his assistant’s phone number, or any way to magically summon him.
Sherlock knows all those things, though.
“This is a bad idea,” Lestrade tells him. They’re in his office, the blinds closed and Donovan loitering pointedly around the door in case someone needs to be told Lestrade is busy. “You could try something else first and you know it.”
Lestrade isn’t an idiot. John knows that Lestrade isn’t mentioning the shade’s interference earlier just because he thinks it’d be rude. He also doesn’t doubt that Lestrade knows the shade’s interference is the reason John’s jumping at the opportunity. “If I slip in with an actual goal it’s a lot easier. I’ve done it before and gotten out just fine.”
“You never come out of this ‘just fine,’ John,” Lestrade says, but doesn’t push his objections any further than that. Instead, he checks his watch. “How long should I let you go?”
John sighs. He tries to calm his nerves. “Three minutes, I suppose.”
Lestrade nods, and John doesn’t waste any time. He closes his eyes, and nudges his mind towards the side of their soul that was (is?) Sherlock, and
it’s always their flat when he opens his eyes, and he’s sitting in his chair and it only takes a moment or two, it only takes a moment or two until
“What the hell are you doing here, John?” Sherlock snaps from the newly-occupied couch, glaring at him. “You’re just-”
“I know you’re dead, I’m here because I need to talk to Mycroft as soon as possible and you know how to get in touch with him without waiting for a mysterious black car and ringing payphones,” John says, glaring right back. “If you’d bothered to tell me how to do that before you died, we wouldn’t be in this situation, would we?”
“Oh, I see we’re in a lovely mood tonight,” Sherlock says, and scowls. “Why do you need him, anyway?”
“Moriarty isn’t as dead as we thought, apparently,” John says. “Another severed bond, but the bonded survived because they hated each other just enough for it to not be the end of the world. Now, isn’t that something that seems like a Mycroft-related problem?”
Sherlock watches him for a moment, and then nods, and
his fingers are dialing a number he can’t see, and his own voice is saying three years and you still wear that same dreadful jacket, Lestrade? and then John is himself again. Lestrade looks absolutely baffled and a little bit horrified, and John’s call goes through.
“Who is this?” a very displeased Mycroft asks.
“It’s John,” he answers. “I didn’t have time to wait for you so I-”
“That was a very stupid thing to do, John,” Mycroft says. “I hope this is actually urgent.”
“There’s another severed bond murder, and I only know one person who can do that,” John says.
Mycroft makes a humming noise that could be agreement. It could also be irritation. They seem to go hand-in-hand, when Sherlock’s involved. “A car will be there soon,” he says, and hangs up.
John stares at the phone for a minute, trying to figure out what exactly Mycroft is doing.
“Was that worth risking insanity, then?” Lestrade asks after the 13-seconds-long conversation.
John glares at him, and waits for the car.
---
He can remember the moment things changed. More specifically, John can pinpoint the exact moment Sherlock realized he was going to go do the stupidest thing of his entire life and go off to kill Moriarty, knowing he’d die right along with the madman.
It had been the fourth pair of bodies that did it. Mycroft had banned them from actually seeing the severed bond cases two crime scenes ago, but Lestrade kept them in on it anyway. The fourth pair hadn’t been an old bond, or a weak bond. It had been a two year old bond that had been severed so precisely that the bonded woman had been shot through the head, and the blood lord was a raving mess who had already lost herself, tearing her hair out in bloody clumps and, according to Lestrade, still giving her wife CPR even though the woman had been dead for at least seven hours.
Sherlock had watched her rock her dead wife back and forth, and then looked at John for a moment. It was for a tiny moment, barely more than a glance, but for Sherlock to glance away from a crime scene for anything, let alone to check on a man whose presence and well-being he could feel down to his soul, meant something.
At the time, he’d thought it was just a way to assure himself that the bond wasn’t lying and John was still standing in the corner. A sign of nerves, maybe. Not a sign of coming to his final solution for the problem of Jim Moriarty.
That night, Sherlock had curled around him in bed and held him tight enough to almost hurt, grip tight enough on his mind that they didn’t dream. They spent the night with their eyes wide open, even though Sherlock’s didn’t seem to see anything at all.
At some point, John had fallen asleep. When he woke, Sherlock was sitting in a chair next to the bed, watching him. It wasn’t observation. It was that rare indulgence where Sherlock just let his mind take in information and didn’t process it beyond this exists.
“This wouldn’t be a problem if I’d just let you die,” Sherlock had muttered, his focus returning. “Even easier if I’d never met you.”
“Good morning to you too,” John replied amicably, doing his best to ignore the words and the thundercloud that was Sherlock’s side of the bond as he rolled his way out of bed. “Tea?”
In a heartbeat, Sherlock was back to observation. John wasn’t sure what kind of conclusion Sherlock was coming to, but he rarely was, so he stuck to routine. He went into the kitchen and put the kettle on.
Sherlock sighed from the doorway, scowling at John for a moment before handing him a paper and pen and saying, “Sign this.”
John was used to the unexpected coming from Sherlock. The marriage license in his hand was more unexpected than usual. Sherlock had already signed it, the witness had already signed it, Mycroft had already signed it (necessary blood lord addendum), and all it needed was John’s signature. And it was dated for over seven months ago.
John looked at the paper for a good long while. “Are you asking me to marry you?”
“We’re already married, John,” Sherlock said, still twitchy but more composed than when John had woken up. “We’re just finishing up the legal documentation.”
John laughed uneasily, looking up from the paper to see Sherlock’s steady stare. “I don’t think this is how marriage works, Sherlock. There’s supposed to be-”
“Supposed to be what?” Sherlock snapped. “We live together. We rely on each other. We take each other for granted. We share a soul. What’s so problematic?”
He had swallowed, and even now John still regrets his reaction. “But you’re supposed to love each other.” When John had noticed the way Sherlock’s hands snapped into fists, he had thought it was annoyance. “Romantically, I mean. You’re supposed to be in love, not just love each other. And -”
“Stop talking,” Sherlock said. He didn’t shout. Now, John wishes he had, but instead Sherlock had gone cold and dark and precise, like a knife sliding in for the kill. “You really don’t understand, do you? I didn’t do this to just make things easier, and I didn’t just jump into this, and I knew exactly what I was doing that night at the pool. An Underlord doesn’t just skip into something like this in a bit of post-explosion shock, John.”
John had just stood there, watching, pen held loosely in one hand, and apparently that was what did it. Sherlock snapped, and his hands grabbed onto John’s head, a palm against each cheek, and Sherlock said, “For fuck’s sake, understand,” and
-the pool is destroyed, and Sherlock doesn’t know how the hell he managed to survive for a few seconds, until he sees John Watson’s bleeding burnt and broken body lying on top of him, and Sherlock doesn’t scream but it’s a near thing when he sees John actually try to smile at him while Sherlock can see the wreck that is his back, and John is going to die. John is going to die, and that can’t happen, he can’t let it, god no he can’t he hasn’t cared about anyone since that part of him was ripped out of him right along with an angry little girl named Wendy Harper and their disgusting fear-laced bond that makes his skin crawl just thinking about it, but he cares now, god he cares, and John, and John-
It’s easy enough to find something sharp. It’s hard to bring himself to roll John onto his back, and John doesn’t scream because John is dying, John is bleeding and broken and Sherlock doesn’t let himself think. He grabs something that will work, and grabs onto John’s hand and presses a kiss to what’s left of it (an old tradition, so very old, and he never understood it until now), and raises the sharp rusty bit of piping before stabbing it through both of their hands and he can feel Mycroft shouting in his head, can feel the entirety of the Blood raging at him because this is wrong of him, this is a type of rape so deep and horrific that Mycroft has killed people for doing it, but he doesn’t apologize, because the only person he’d apologize to is John and he wouldn’t be alive to kill Sherlock for this if he didn’t let his own blood sneak into John’s, didn’t shove John’s soul out and shove Sherlock’s into the crevices left just as John’s blood filled in the holes in Sherlock, and before he passes out he wraps himself around John and can feel him healing, and that’s all that matters. John can come home, John is home, John is everything everything everything, and yes, he feels their heartbeat-
and
“You’re very lucky, Sherlock,” Mycroft says when he wakes up and god John is there and he is breathing and asleep and that’s all that matters now. Sherlock doesn’t even look over at his brother. “If he’d outright objected instead of just been confused, I’d have been obligated to kill you, you realize.”
“Of course I realize,” Sherlock mumbles into John’s neck. And he doesn’t care. He just wants to spend the rest of his life right here with John and never have to move. He can hear Mycroft’s sigh - it’s the ‘why am I even bothering right now’ sigh - before he stands up from his chair and heads out the door.
“Do try to keep him happy, at least,” Mycroft says quietly from the doorway, and if Sherlock hadn’t already been drifting back towards sleep he would have thrown something at his brother for even suggesting he would do otherwise-
and
-he holds John tight as his skin stitches itself back together, ignoring the dead man twenty feet away from them in favor of clinging to John because John is his soul and John is his everything and John isn’t going to die but he’s always going to be risking himself isn’t he, always going to be getting in harm’s way, bonded’s job or not, and god Sherlock doesn’t know if he can do this, if he can watch anything dangerous come near John, let alone a legitimate threat, and he doesn’t want John to die, not without him-
and when John came out of Sherlock’s mind, the other man was gone and the water was boiling. He ignored it in favor of signing the paper with a still-shaking hand. He signed himself into a new name, turned Hamish into Holmes. Sherlock had been living with the middle name of Watson for over half a year, according to this. He’d been married to limbo and just waiting for John to catch on, all because John Watson had been too stupid to even think Sherlock had some emotional reason behind bonding him.
Please come home, John texted, but Sherlock never will.
Three hours after getting married, Mycroft will walk in. John will be a widower within five hours of his much-postponed marriage.
Seven hours after getting married, John will realize Sherlock brought it up to ensure his will that hands everything over to John is iron-clad.
Eleven hours after getting married, John will slip into Sherlock’s side of their soul and meet his viciously perfect shade for the first time.
Sixteen hours after getting married, John will be insane.
---
(to 2/2)