Fic: Another Life to Live
Title:Another Life to Live
Rating: R
Warnings: Child abuse, language
Summary: It was almost as if he had died, to look into the eyes of a three year old Sherlock and know that they no longer shared a past, that the memories lived on only in himself. But what if this time could be better? What if this time he could protect him?
The unseasonably warm wind took the napkin from beneath the crumbling remains of Gregory Lestrade’s scone and sent it dancing into the lush green grass. With a grunt he levered himself off the stone wall and caught it under the heel of his boot before it could make a clandestine flight and he would be sent embarrassingly chasing after it or be the tourist, and worse, English, prick who littered. His tea soaked into the dirt at the base of the stone wall where he had kicked it, turning the ground a slow deep brown with every gush.
Harry, with a smirk of infuriating superiority placed her fingers against her own napkin as she removed the temporary paperweight of her take-away tea to her mouth.
In the middle of the dirt road Lestrade stood for a moment, enjoying the ocean breeze coming from the cliffs they were supposed to be visiting. He plucked the napkin between two fingers, glaring at its crumpled white surface and wondered if there was an isolated moment where this had become inevitability. He had accepted his life years ago, he had been ready if not content to be the hard London D.I. with the ex-wife and two nieces whom he never saw. The cliché stereotype of the cop who lived alone and had all his hair turn grey far too early because he never learned to balance work and family in a way that kept people not only alive, but happy.
At what moment had he become ‘Uncle Lestrade’ who goes on family holidays to the Irish countryside?
Maybe the cake at that first dinner with the words ‘Welcome Home’ scripted in frosting had been an indicator, although significantly past the point of no return.
Lestrade turned away from Harry with her smug tea superiority and the cliffs that rose up behind her, green and rolling hills decorated with abandoned rock formations and ‘fairy houses’.
Across the dirt road and off into the tall grass and mud his boys were climbing a roughhewn fence that had seen better decades, legs swinging over the top rung, antagonizing an oddly rapt group cows.
Group? Herd? Clones were more like it. How did two boys get thirty odd cows to stare at them like that, all in a row along the fence? It was unnerving. That many huge brown eyes blinking at them.
Sherlock let out a peel of laughter and teetered on his perch as if the idea of falling had never occurred to him.
Johns giggle was softer but it carried across the road just the same. Lestrade watched Sherlock’s black curls bounce against his cheeks and neck as he turned to John.
They fed off each other, laughter feeding laughter, ideas feeding ideas.
John touched the back of Sherlock’s hand and together they began mooing enthusiastically, their bovine minions blinking at them and then, one at a time, like a trickle turning into a waterfall, they all started mooing. Thirty cows and two boys mooing at the top of their lungs into the Irish countryside.
Lestrade thrust the crumpled napkin into his pocket and trudged through the grass and mud, lifting a still mooing Sherlock into his arms and up onto his shoulders. Lord Commander of the World. Today bovine, tomorrow mankind.
How did he even do that? Was it possible to start a revolt using brainwashed cows? No, probably not, but best not to tempt fate with these things.
Lestrade waited as John thrust out a hand and patted the closest cow on the snout a bit too gingerly, and extracted himself from the fence.
Lestrade marched past Harry and her unspilled tea with Sherlock threading his fingers into his short more-grey-than-brown hair and holding on, John jumping over the small rocks that made the pathway to the cliffs, running ahead and then waiting for them with his blinding smile.
If Mycroft wanted to make his conference calls in the bed and breakfast they had ‘acquired’ or create a dictatorship or plan the bloody fall of Rome then that was fine, he could miss the spilled tea and escaped napkins and the chorus of frantic mooing still echoing up the hillside. But he was not waiting around for Sherlock to start a bovine rebellion just because Mycroft was too busy to keep his promises.
He was not going to sit and watch their faces darken as the hours ticked past and they realized that they had been bumped to the bottom of the list.
They were his now, after a fashion. And he was a Detective Inspector and honorary uncle, more than qualified to watch two children.
Still. He was glad when Harry stood up to follow them, pushing her sunglasses into her hair. And if he slowed his pace for Mrs. Hudson to catch up with her purse filled with ‘emergency supplies’ from the little café and at least three more of the blueberry scones that Sherlock had picked out earlier, well, that was only polite wasn’t it?
He felt the cold prickly anger in his chest loosen and turn into something oddly familiar and wrap itself around his lungs.
The walk was short, even with Sherlock on his shoulders, tapping on his head and pointing in the direction he wanted to go in, because obviously ten feet to the left was far, far more interesting than say, the other side of the path.
Their original plan had been to go to the Cliffs of Moher because John had picked it out and unlike the other places they had chosen was not in an active war zone or a 12 hour flight from home but Mycroft had found something ‘more Sherlock friendly’.
Meaning that somehow he had found the same view with none of the tourists.
Except of course, themselves. Mrs. Hudson with her pink camera hanging from her purse and John with the smudge of sunscreen on his cheek.
When they got to the top Sherlock wriggled impatiently and when not immediately set down like the proper lord of the universe should be, he began to climb down on his own, arms and legs everywhere as he half fell and half slid into Lestrade’s arms to be lowered to the ground. A cheeky smile was his thanks as Sherlock took off towards the edge and really, Mycroft could not have found a place with a railing?
The remains of what might have at one point been a stone church patterned the ground, the most intact only rising a few feet from the grass.
Sherlock jumped as he past the rocks, darting a look over the wall to see if it merited slowing down. It didn’t.
Lestrade on the other hand found it a perfect place to slow down. He sat down on the time worn shelf of rocks, it was not too far from the edge of the cliffs, maybe twenty feet. He could feel the ocean breeze and watch the place where the ground disappeared and looking miles away and alarmingly close, the crush of blue that honestly looked fake.
Harry lingered uncomfortably for a moment, hands twisting her blond hair anxiously as the boys stopped scant feet from the edge.
“-shouldn’t we?”
Mrs. Hudson sat down next to him with an exaggerated sigh of exhaustion and a hand fanning herself even as the light breeze ruffled her collar.
Lestrade stifled a smile and stalwartly waited until the older woman had begun fiddling with her camera to roll his eyes pointedly at Harry.
Mrs. Hudson had been the first one to the top, hiking up her skirts and powering past the others once she had her things in order and tucked under arm. She was quite the actress.
In fact Lestrade had found himself wondering not for the first time since really getting to know her how many times she had put him off Sherlock’s trail.
‘Looking for Sherlock dearie? You know that boy, disappeared without a word! Haven’t seen him in ages!’
‘Lost him too have you? Well when you find him you tell that young man that he is not to put those in the blender, he will know what you mean, it just isn’t proper!’
Probably listening at the top of the stairs the whole time, the bastard.
Lestrade found himself shaking his head to clear the thought, a smile miraculously, hopelessly, on his face.
Harry had devolved to shifting her weight from foot to foot, chewing her bottom lip and watching the two boys as if at any moment they might decide ‘why not?’ and jump. Hell of a game of walk the plank, that.
“I am just going to-”
“He is afraid of heights love.” Mrs. Hudson cried out with a ‘Ha!’ as she finally found the settings she wanted on her camera. She stood and made her way spryly over the ruins to where the boys were standing, holding hands against a surreal backdrop of black rock, dark blue ocean and bright blue sky. Lestrade didn’t like it. It made his boys look unreal too. Like you might blink and then-
“Sherlock.” Lestrade told her when her face pinched into what made confusion look painful. “He hates heights- always has.” He winced at the unusually bitter taste and hollow ring of the words. He covered the reaction by pulling his coat closer around himself.
He had thought that if he tacked on the last bit they could overlook the fact that nothing about Sherlock seemed to come without a horror story attached to it. As if the great Sherlock Holmes could fear anything without cause.
Of course he had just stuck his foot in it. Nothing says ‘holiday away’ like bringing up child abuse.
Harry pretended not to notice the dense ringing silence that he had inflicted upon them.
“But in the stories John told me, Sherlock was jumping on roof tops, over alleyways like some overgrown bird of prey.”
“Yeah, adult Sherlock did that. Of course adult Sherlock also thought that the need for sleep and food were a sign of weakness. Hell, that is probably why he did it, just to prove that he could.”
It was the first time they had ever spoken about the past together. It was strange, but this was the first time they had ever acknowledged that Sherlock and John had ever been more than children to them.
Harry swished her tea with the shake of her wrist, judging the weight of it and then with a completely casual gesture handed it to him and sat down close beside him. He took the cup and took a swig of the too-milky, warm drink, the kind of sip where you realize just how cold your mouth is when the liquid warms it, and with equal casualness handed it back.
“John should be afraid of heights.” She wasn’t watching him but her smile was for his benefit, to make the words warm and friendly rather than cold and factual. “I never figured out why he wasn’t.”
By the cliffs Mrs. Hudson was standing ten feet off from the boys, where Sherlock had yelled at her to stop, had put up his little hand up with his delicate fingers spread wide and shaking and asked her to not come any closer. And even though the wind was pushing them inland Sherlock was holding onto John like it might blow him away, an arm wrapped around his middle, hand curled into his jacket. He bounced on his heels and whenever Mrs. Hudson played with her camera he chanced a quick involuntary look at the cliffs beyond as if they might have crept in closer behind them.
John was holding on tight too, but when he glanced away it was not at the cliffs.
“So what do you think?” Harry asked without preamble as she placed the drink on the rocks between them with only a nod at the boys holding tight onto each other, as if she were carrying on with a conversation they had been in the middle of and had just been interrupted. “You saw them together every day.”
“Not every day; and I hardly think crime scenes are the place for romance, or at least for finding out about them without Sherlock being the one to tell us. But do I think they were together?” He picked up the drink and let the warmth seep into his fingers. “They were hardly ever apart. We had bets going on at headquarters. Everything from when they would come out to when John would finally have had enough and leave him.”
Harry rolled her eyes but she was smiling the way John used to when Sherlock had done something only slightly ‘not good’ and he had turned to look at John a half a second later with wide imploring eyes and innocent confusion to make sure everything was still okay. The smile John got when he Sherlock looked at him like he was the one real thing in the universe. “You didn’t answer my question.”
Busted. Harry was more like her brother than people credited her with. They both had a way of sweeping through the bullshit while still come off so understated. She would have made a good cop.
“You didn’t know Sherlock before John. Even the bad times, even the really messed up stuff, it is nothing compared to the way he used to be.”
At the cliffs edge Mrs. Hudson had backed off to a safer distance and Sherlock was edging closer to the side. It was all rock at the edge, safe as you could be while suspended hundreds of feet in the air. He could do it. He could look over the edge, and he would, he would make himself. But he had to be alone.
He had to be alone of course, because alone there is no one there to push you off.
Lestrade almost wished he didn’t know that.
Sherlock lay down on his belly and peered over the edge once everyone else was away, the toe of his shoes curling into the ground and fingers white and bloodless around the edge of the rock. He looked back over his shoulder and with trembling fingers held out a hand to John.
Lestrade shook away the memory of Sherlock and focused on the warmth in his hand, his eyes resting on the edge of the horizon and two little boys. A sigh preluded his words, bits of conversations he had had a thousand times since Sherlock Holmes and John Watson had disappeared.
“Before John showed up out of the blue and fit into place like he was meant to be there Sherlock was… he was like a child. He was mad and brilliant but nothing, I mean nothing, mattered to him. Just to get him to act human I had to use false drugs busts, it was not enough to call him, I had to show up and drag him out of bed and see if he was still alive. Huge grandiose productions just to make him look at things like they mattered.”
Harrys face was a mask. Blank and unreadable. She would have made a great cop. He took another sip of Harry’s tea and let his eyes go to the horizon, drawing out the silence.
Below the horizon John took a careful step forward, pausing to see if it was too much.
Sherlock’s hand stopped shaking.
“Before John I believed that one day I would get to a crime scene and Sherlock Holmes would be the body I was standing over. That one day his luck would run out.”
Harry took the drink from him and together they watched as John reached out for Sherlock, bending because he did not want to get too close. And then Sherlock said something that the wind carried away and John lay down next to him, their sides pressed together, peering over the edge where there was nothing beneath them but air.
“I didn’t bet in any of the pools.” He told her at last, it got him a smile. “They were my friends. They made each other alive in a way most people never even dream of being, and there is no doubt that John was his moral compass. I don’t know if they were together but I hoped like hell they were. If they couldn’t manage it what hope is there for the rest of us?”
She nodded and he could not tell if she was disappointed or if it had been exactly what she thought he might say.
“He was your brother.”
He winced when the words escaped and he had no way to call them back and force them into submission.
‘Was’ because nothing saying ‘holiday away’ like reminding you that you no longer have the one person you always thought you would.
She laughed. “No- you’re right. It’s okay.” She nodded to the edge of the world where the two boys were letting pebbles fall from their fingertips into the abyss, their laughter like the ghost of an echo, thin as the sunlight on their skin. “He has more now than I ever gave him.”
The laughter faded from her face and she pressed the cup back into his hands with a weight heavier than a simple drink, and then, surprisingly, punched him in the shoulder.
“Besides, they have the right idea not putting too much stock in blood relations. We make our family where we find it.”
She gestured back at the boys with her hand blithely even as a red blush crept into her cheeks and ears, as if she not just claimed him as a member of her family.
Huh.
So that’s what it was. That niggling feeling that had flickered at the base of his spine all day, waking up to Sherlock sitting on his pillows and a handful of god-knows-what alarmingly close to his hair, the half-awake breakfast sitting down between John and Harry and not having to mutter a word of ‘hello’ to either. A shared cup of tea in the Irish countryside. That something so familiar and a million miles away.
He had forgotten what it was like to be part of a family.
He didn’t expect Harry to say more. She was too good an investigator to give something away freely, wasn’t the overly emotional talking type either. The arm she punched ached sweetly, not pain, but a touch that lingers.
“John would never have told me if he was with Sherlock. We weren’t close- in the end. It was hard for me to approve of him. He was still my baby brother and here he was letting some lunatic drag him into danger and he certainly didn’t approve of me...” She tucked her hand under her chin as she watched them. “John was different too you know, after Sherlock. It was like- it was like part of my brother never came home after Afghanistan and then Sherlock found it again.”
He had known as much. John’s first blog entries. ‘Nothing ever happens to me.’
He would have let silence fall between them, natural and easy in a way that it had not been with his own sister since they were young enough to share a room.
“They loved each other.” The voice preceded the large purse that was dropped heavily onto the stone wall beside them. Mrs. Hudson let out a deep breath, still clutching her camera in her hand as it chirped merrily at her with each picture she reviewed.
He had not even heard her coming. Lestrade took a long glance at the unassuming woman he had seen countless times before without ever really observing. He was glad she was on their side, whatever side that may be.
“But that’s not what we are guessing is it?” She settled herself beside Harry and showed her the tiny image on her screen. “We already knew that, it went without question didn’t it? Of course they loved each other. Still do, and that’s what matters now isn’t it? Not what they were before.” She took the camera back.
“Oh look.”
Down the hill Mycroft was making his way up holding the two warm looking jackets the boys had shucked before the day had even begun. A warm feeling, oddly like joy, filled Lestrade as Mycroft closer and it became obvious that he was holding the same damn take-out tea cup, crushed and empty in his hands, the remnants splashed on his pant leg and seeping into the dirt somewhere down the path or at the feet of an escaped brainwashed bovine.
Harry laughed and held out her cup. “Want a sip?”
“Do you trust me?”
“Yes.”
“Close your eyes.”
The ocean disappeared. The sky. Only the sound of the birds and the wind and the solid feel of the rock, gritty and real beneath him remained.
Hands warm and small and welcoming - soft- and not at all like forcing him took his arms.
The feeling of the ground beneath him disappeared slowly. Not lying down or sitting. Two points of solid beneath his feet and the wind and the sound of birds and warm arms wrapping tight around him and a body against his back and a voice in his ear warm and close and solid and -
“Open your eyes Sherlock.”
-John
Like flying
Sherlock counted their breaths.
Mycroft across the room, barely more than a darkened shape hidden beneath the mass of thick, hand crocheted blankets. Average 16 respirations per minute, in sleep, now, 12.
And John, less than a foot away, sharing the same blankets, the same heat, his face a play of shadow and light because even though it’s late and the lights are off and the world is asleep outside the moon is out and John is starlight. Average 20 breaths per minute, not including laughing, John laughs all the time for him and that reminds him of starlight too. But now he takes in 14 breaths per minute, 14 times that he is close enough for Sherlock to watch the rise and the fall of his chest, 14 times that he can feel the air from Johns lungs warm his fingertips that are reached out and so close and not touching.
John is wearing his jimjams, the long ones that seem to cover every inch of him. John says that it’s nice, that…it’s like a hug all night long. But if that’s what he wanted Sherlock would have held him. He wouldn’t have minded.
John is curled on his side facing him and beneath his eyelids he is watching a dream, something Sherlock cannot see. It is easy to reach between them, they are so close the sheets do not even dip between their bodies, he rests his fingertips over Johns heart. Light. Barely a touch at all. But he is warm, and his chest is rising and falling and there is a heartbeat just beneath his fingertips now and John is sleeping so deeply that he won’t wake up so Sherlock lays his whole hand on his chest and splays his fingers as wide as he can so he can cover as much of his heart as possible.
John, whose face is starlight and who is so loved that even his jimjams hold him close, smiles in his sleep.
Sherlock never wants the sun to rise. He never wants to spend a single night of his life not knowing the way John breathes or the feel of his heart beneath his fingertips. He never wants to forget the way his breath feels warm on his fingers and intimate as a kiss.
But he has to let go.
His hand is cold and empty without John’s heart inches away but he has to move it so he does. He covers Johns lips with a single finger and he can’t help but think ‘soft’ but he pushes the thought away as his brown eyes blink open and after a pause, after two heartbeats Sherlock has not felt but knows happened, the lips curve.
The moment is gone and lost forever and they will never be in this place asleep together again but sacrifices have to be made.
John is smiling against his fingers and it is slow and warm and sleepy looking and he doesn’t care at all that Sherlock woke him.
John is good like that. He never complains and he almost always wakes just like this. Like he is genuinely happy to see him, even when it is two in the morning and he should be sleep. Even if any other person in the world would have let him sleep.
Sherlock takes his hand back and presses a finger to his own lips, it’s unnecessary, John knows how to be silent and untraceable, he would never give them away. But there is a thrill in the obvious gesture, in shushing themselves, like the beginning of a secret yet to be told. It folds over them as they lay in John’s starlight, watching each other from a breath away, waiting as the last vestiges of sleep are swallowed in secrets yet to be made.
The blankets fall away and the cold is bracing and how could anyone be asleep now and still be alive? How could anyone stand not being here, teetering on the edge of normal and adventure? How could people breathe when they do not have a John looking at them like that?
The floorboards don’t squeak and Sherlock already has his backpack with the dinosaurs packed so all he has to do is shrug it onto his shoulders and lay a hand on Johns shoulder, turning him away from the door that squeaks in the bottom hinge.
They cannot wake Mycroft.
The window when he opens it is silent and easy and the excitement that started with the press of a finger is there, wrapping around his heart and filling him as he sits on the edge and swings his leg over the side.
John looks as him with wide eyes and then Sherlock thinks ‘trust me’.
And John does. The look fades and before Sherlock is fully out the window John is there climbing down after him.
They run the moment they hit the ground. Bare feet sinking into dark grass, the hems of their pants darkening with dew. Their breathes catch as they run not over the path they took in the day but up the hillside through fields of fairy houses and lambs and each breath is drawn into their chests and is exquisitely cold and deep and tingling with how alive they feel with familiar stars twinkling overhead in the black velvet sky.
And as they run their hands catch and hold and their fingers tangle and lock.
By the time they reach the cliffs and it feels like the end of the world because there is no way the ground can simply stop and fall John is laughing as much as he is breathing. Sherlock can’t count his breaths like this and his mind stutters as it reaches out for it but it is alright.
They sink to the ground.
Sherlock needs this to be special. Tonight they have to be alive in a way that no one else ever is. They have to overcome the slipping moments of holidays away and smiles that die and are forgotten and going to work and school and the way you can miss the passage of years in the blink of an eye.
He needs to make a memory that lasts an eternity.
In a way that only ever exist when they are together. In a way he hopes no one else can ever be.
Because Sherlock can do this. He can give John this.
This moment needs to burn into Johns mind and be so perfect that it hurts and gnaws at him every time he thinks about it.
He needs-
Sherlock crawls to the edge and lets his feet dangle off the side of the world and he is terrified.
His heart is racing so fast that if John reached out with his fingertips the way Sherlock had and pressed them to his chest, to his heart, he might cry out in alarm. Think he was dying.
He would almost be right.
Half of it, the way his heart is speeding in a way that makes him slow his own breaths before it becomes panic, is that he cannot look away from where the ocean blends into the sky and the starlight blends with the white of the moon and makes the water shimmer and dance and that the wind is cool here but not harsh, like it is brand new, just beginning, curling and forming over the dark blue reaching out in an impossible forever in front of them and it is so much data and not enough at all and there should be so much more-
And part of it is because John has not said a word.
Because he is a warm presence at his side that needs to be there forever. Needs to be surgically attached, because without him everything stops making sense. Because he needs John to be there the way his body needs air in its lungs, because he fits the way chemistry fits into all of the dark crevices of his mind and makes things real, because he is to his heart the way his violin is to thought, interchangeable, synonyms.
And he has not said a word.
John doesn’t shiver but his skin is cooling and his bare feet are swinging over the void and still damp and stuck with dark grass. Sherlock pulls the backpack off and lets it fall behind him because everything this close to the edge makes him feel like he is falling. Like everything has a potential to fall away here and be lost forever.
He is careful with the zip and even takes his hand back from John because it is worth it to take the blanket, stolen from Nana’s purse, and wrap it around John’s shoulders, to tuck it around him and have John look at him like that.
Like he has done something brilliant when he is starlight and he has no idea.
Please. Sherlock thinks and it is irrational and he doesn’t care. Please.
He needs this moment to permeate John, to seep into every pour, into every dark place and every smile that has yet to be.
Because John has promised ‘yes’ and ‘I do’ and ‘forever’ and he wears his ring around his neck and tells him that it doesn’t matter that they are not brothers and he understands everything that matters that goes on in Sherlock’s brain, everything that no one else ever could.
But he doesn’t know.
He doesn’t know that he is made of starlight. That everything he does, every thought that goes through his mind is good in a way Sherlock will never be. Because he knows when people hurt, and he knows what is ‘not good’ and what is ‘right’ and he doesn’t need to think about it at all, like it is natural and innate; and sometimes Sherlock doesn’t even know that he is wrong until he hurts someone.
John doesn’t know that the world will love him. That friends will be easy for him, that hearts will break for him. That he is so good that he will have no choice but to break himself for the people he loves.
He sits here and smiles at Sherlock like he holds the world in his hands just because Sherlock wrapped him in their blanket at the edge of the world and he has no idea that Sherlock will break him.
Even if he doesn’t mean to.
Even if it is the last thing in the world he ever wants to do.
Because Sherlock knows that he is not good; and it is not the after effects of a nightmare or biased or self deluding. It is fact. The way he knows that that the sun will rise and steal this moment and that time will fade the colours of this impossible night into grey memory; and that John is good in a way that can not be helped, a good so deep that it is rooted in his bones and flows through his blood and is as much a part of him as his laughter or his hugs or his smile.
This is the way Sherlock knows that he is not good, the way he knows night will turn to day. Whatever else he may be, whatever he may want to be, he is not good the way John is.
John is on the side of the angels.
But he is not an angel.
John does not know this yet; that he is perfect and that every time he does something right and Sherlock does something not good for the whole of their lives it will take John further away from him, it will make him better and more than Sherlock can hope to be.
And eventually, when John finally understands that he is good and is surrounded by people who adore him, people who would be good for him, he might regret saying ‘forever’, and ‘I do’ and ‘I promise’ to someone like Sherlock.
And John might not want to be his anymore.
And he will forget that they had ever been this. So close that Johns tears are the silent sob in Sherlock’s chest, that his victories are Sherlock’s proudest moments.
So he needs this. He needs to create the perfect memory.
A gift.
Something for John to hold onto when Sherlock is being brutal and hurting him because he doesn’t always know better. For when John realizes that Sherlock always be in a debt of good that he will not repay.
So when John finally knows, when he understands that he can do better than Sherlock, when everyone else is nice and sweet and adoring him without effort and they are all good and simple, John will remember this, which is not good but it will be beautiful; and maybe not regret that he belongs to Sherlock. Maybe he will still think ‘forever’ and be content.
For now John is happy, he is smiling like nothing could ever be as brilliant as this. He untucks the blanket from around his side and curls it around Sherlock, pushing over so that their bodies are pressed close from shoulder down to where their feet hang naked over the abyss.
Sherlock tries not to flinch.
He feels like he is falling.
Worse.
He feels like John is about to fall.
He wants to grab him and pull until they can no longer see the edge. He wants to collapse in the grass and feel the dirt all around him and John’s heart safe under his palm.
Johns hand is on his cheek and it brushes over his skin as if he is something precious and rare that exists behind the glass in museums. His arm wraps around Sherlock’s shoulders tight and the blanket encases them completely dark and soft and warm.
He knows what this is costing Sherlock. And that is the point.
John thinks it is because he is being brave, but he isn’t.
He is sitting on the edge of the world because he wants John to remember that this is how far he would go for him.
He would risk falling off the edge of the world.
He would fall, for him.
John still has not said a word.
Sherlock does not break their silence.
They should be in bed. They should be asleep. Safe and unconscious and warm and being utterly forgettable.
But Johns silence is not uncomfortable. It feels like- It feels like John is reaching into his chest and cupping Sherlock’s heart in his hands and he is warm in a way nothing else is, in a way that never burns.
And John is wearing his ring around his neck. John is thinking ‘perfect’ and ‘forever’ and ‘I promise’ and even ‘I could never leave you’.
But John is sweet and good and of course he thinks like that, he is John.
He thinks everyone is as intrinsically good.
And he doesn’t even know that he is magnificent.
Which is ridiculous because he is Sherlock’s moral compass and his heart and the starlight falls on his blond hair in a way that should drown him out but it doesn’t at all, it makes him shine. And he has no idea that sitting on the edge of the world where the wind is new and fresh and cold and the water sparkles in the moonlight like liquid diamonds that he is the most beautiful thing Sherlock has ever seen.
John kicks out his bare feet over the abyss and smiles indulgently at them, the thrill of sharp adrenalin piercing Sherlock at the sight, but it is over quickly. John is pulling his legs back over solid ground and pushing his heels into the rock, forcing himself away from the cliff, the orange blanket is sweeping off his shoulders and tumbling dark orange to the ground.
Sherlock closes his eyes. It is too much motion too close to the edge. He is terrif-
Arms wrap around his chest from behind, they fold over the blanket and a cheek presses against the back of his neck and he is being pulled.
They collapse into the sea of grass yards away from the edge. John tumbles onto his back and folds himself back into the blanket, back into his place against and half on top of Sherlock. So tangled that their limbs are undistinguishable; so close that when John’s body moves with breath Sherlock can feel blond hair whisper against his cheek.
Sherlock can feel the beat of his heart.
John does not say anything.
It is just one more thing Sherlock owes him.
A/N: Fellow Sherlockians! Lend me your ears! (All permanent donations will be left in the care of the vegetable drawer at 221B. For science.)
I am going on a mini hiatus…actually come to think of it, I am following Holmes in his Great Hiatus " I spent some months in research into the coal-tar derivatives, which I conducted in a laboratory at Montpellier, in the south of France." Ok, well, maybe without the coal-tar. I trust he has that covered. I will be writing…just not with access to a computer.
I know it is a shameless plug but if you need perhaps just a bit more to read during the hiatus… this is honestly the one piece of completed work I cannot believe came out of me. It is my baby. Ignore the description; I handle seemingly odd plot devices well :)
http://archiveofourown.org/works/188447/chapters/277114
Much love, type to you all soon,
Rating: R
Warnings: Child abuse, language
Summary: It was almost as if he had died, to look into the eyes of a three year old Sherlock and know that they no longer shared a past, that the memories lived on only in himself. But what if this time could be better? What if this time he could protect him?
The unseasonably warm wind took the napkin from beneath the crumbling remains of Gregory Lestrade’s scone and sent it dancing into the lush green grass. With a grunt he levered himself off the stone wall and caught it under the heel of his boot before it could make a clandestine flight and he would be sent embarrassingly chasing after it or be the tourist, and worse, English, prick who littered. His tea soaked into the dirt at the base of the stone wall where he had kicked it, turning the ground a slow deep brown with every gush.
Harry, with a smirk of infuriating superiority placed her fingers against her own napkin as she removed the temporary paperweight of her take-away tea to her mouth.
In the middle of the dirt road Lestrade stood for a moment, enjoying the ocean breeze coming from the cliffs they were supposed to be visiting. He plucked the napkin between two fingers, glaring at its crumpled white surface and wondered if there was an isolated moment where this had become inevitability. He had accepted his life years ago, he had been ready if not content to be the hard London D.I. with the ex-wife and two nieces whom he never saw. The cliché stereotype of the cop who lived alone and had all his hair turn grey far too early because he never learned to balance work and family in a way that kept people not only alive, but happy.
At what moment had he become ‘Uncle Lestrade’ who goes on family holidays to the Irish countryside?
Maybe the cake at that first dinner with the words ‘Welcome Home’ scripted in frosting had been an indicator, although significantly past the point of no return.
Lestrade turned away from Harry with her smug tea superiority and the cliffs that rose up behind her, green and rolling hills decorated with abandoned rock formations and ‘fairy houses’.
Across the dirt road and off into the tall grass and mud his boys were climbing a roughhewn fence that had seen better decades, legs swinging over the top rung, antagonizing an oddly rapt group cows.
Group? Herd? Clones were more like it. How did two boys get thirty odd cows to stare at them like that, all in a row along the fence? It was unnerving. That many huge brown eyes blinking at them.
Sherlock let out a peel of laughter and teetered on his perch as if the idea of falling had never occurred to him.
Johns giggle was softer but it carried across the road just the same. Lestrade watched Sherlock’s black curls bounce against his cheeks and neck as he turned to John.
They fed off each other, laughter feeding laughter, ideas feeding ideas.
John touched the back of Sherlock’s hand and together they began mooing enthusiastically, their bovine minions blinking at them and then, one at a time, like a trickle turning into a waterfall, they all started mooing. Thirty cows and two boys mooing at the top of their lungs into the Irish countryside.
Lestrade thrust the crumpled napkin into his pocket and trudged through the grass and mud, lifting a still mooing Sherlock into his arms and up onto his shoulders. Lord Commander of the World. Today bovine, tomorrow mankind.
How did he even do that? Was it possible to start a revolt using brainwashed cows? No, probably not, but best not to tempt fate with these things.
Lestrade waited as John thrust out a hand and patted the closest cow on the snout a bit too gingerly, and extracted himself from the fence.
Lestrade marched past Harry and her unspilled tea with Sherlock threading his fingers into his short more-grey-than-brown hair and holding on, John jumping over the small rocks that made the pathway to the cliffs, running ahead and then waiting for them with his blinding smile.
If Mycroft wanted to make his conference calls in the bed and breakfast they had ‘acquired’ or create a dictatorship or plan the bloody fall of Rome then that was fine, he could miss the spilled tea and escaped napkins and the chorus of frantic mooing still echoing up the hillside. But he was not waiting around for Sherlock to start a bovine rebellion just because Mycroft was too busy to keep his promises.
He was not going to sit and watch their faces darken as the hours ticked past and they realized that they had been bumped to the bottom of the list.
They were his now, after a fashion. And he was a Detective Inspector and honorary uncle, more than qualified to watch two children.
Still. He was glad when Harry stood up to follow them, pushing her sunglasses into her hair. And if he slowed his pace for Mrs. Hudson to catch up with her purse filled with ‘emergency supplies’ from the little café and at least three more of the blueberry scones that Sherlock had picked out earlier, well, that was only polite wasn’t it?
He felt the cold prickly anger in his chest loosen and turn into something oddly familiar and wrap itself around his lungs.
The walk was short, even with Sherlock on his shoulders, tapping on his head and pointing in the direction he wanted to go in, because obviously ten feet to the left was far, far more interesting than say, the other side of the path.
Their original plan had been to go to the Cliffs of Moher because John had picked it out and unlike the other places they had chosen was not in an active war zone or a 12 hour flight from home but Mycroft had found something ‘more Sherlock friendly’.
Meaning that somehow he had found the same view with none of the tourists.
Except of course, themselves. Mrs. Hudson with her pink camera hanging from her purse and John with the smudge of sunscreen on his cheek.
When they got to the top Sherlock wriggled impatiently and when not immediately set down like the proper lord of the universe should be, he began to climb down on his own, arms and legs everywhere as he half fell and half slid into Lestrade’s arms to be lowered to the ground. A cheeky smile was his thanks as Sherlock took off towards the edge and really, Mycroft could not have found a place with a railing?
The remains of what might have at one point been a stone church patterned the ground, the most intact only rising a few feet from the grass.
Sherlock jumped as he past the rocks, darting a look over the wall to see if it merited slowing down. It didn’t.
Lestrade on the other hand found it a perfect place to slow down. He sat down on the time worn shelf of rocks, it was not too far from the edge of the cliffs, maybe twenty feet. He could feel the ocean breeze and watch the place where the ground disappeared and looking miles away and alarmingly close, the crush of blue that honestly looked fake.
Harry lingered uncomfortably for a moment, hands twisting her blond hair anxiously as the boys stopped scant feet from the edge.
“-shouldn’t we?”
Mrs. Hudson sat down next to him with an exaggerated sigh of exhaustion and a hand fanning herself even as the light breeze ruffled her collar.
Lestrade stifled a smile and stalwartly waited until the older woman had begun fiddling with her camera to roll his eyes pointedly at Harry.
Mrs. Hudson had been the first one to the top, hiking up her skirts and powering past the others once she had her things in order and tucked under arm. She was quite the actress.
In fact Lestrade had found himself wondering not for the first time since really getting to know her how many times she had put him off Sherlock’s trail.
‘Looking for Sherlock dearie? You know that boy, disappeared without a word! Haven’t seen him in ages!’
‘Lost him too have you? Well when you find him you tell that young man that he is not to put those in the blender, he will know what you mean, it just isn’t proper!’
Probably listening at the top of the stairs the whole time, the bastard.
Lestrade found himself shaking his head to clear the thought, a smile miraculously, hopelessly, on his face.
Harry had devolved to shifting her weight from foot to foot, chewing her bottom lip and watching the two boys as if at any moment they might decide ‘why not?’ and jump. Hell of a game of walk the plank, that.
“I am just going to-”
“He is afraid of heights love.” Mrs. Hudson cried out with a ‘Ha!’ as she finally found the settings she wanted on her camera. She stood and made her way spryly over the ruins to where the boys were standing, holding hands against a surreal backdrop of black rock, dark blue ocean and bright blue sky. Lestrade didn’t like it. It made his boys look unreal too. Like you might blink and then-
“Sherlock.” Lestrade told her when her face pinched into what made confusion look painful. “He hates heights- always has.” He winced at the unusually bitter taste and hollow ring of the words. He covered the reaction by pulling his coat closer around himself.
He had thought that if he tacked on the last bit they could overlook the fact that nothing about Sherlock seemed to come without a horror story attached to it. As if the great Sherlock Holmes could fear anything without cause.
Of course he had just stuck his foot in it. Nothing says ‘holiday away’ like bringing up child abuse.
Harry pretended not to notice the dense ringing silence that he had inflicted upon them.
“But in the stories John told me, Sherlock was jumping on roof tops, over alleyways like some overgrown bird of prey.”
“Yeah, adult Sherlock did that. Of course adult Sherlock also thought that the need for sleep and food were a sign of weakness. Hell, that is probably why he did it, just to prove that he could.”
It was the first time they had ever spoken about the past together. It was strange, but this was the first time they had ever acknowledged that Sherlock and John had ever been more than children to them.
Harry swished her tea with the shake of her wrist, judging the weight of it and then with a completely casual gesture handed it to him and sat down close beside him. He took the cup and took a swig of the too-milky, warm drink, the kind of sip where you realize just how cold your mouth is when the liquid warms it, and with equal casualness handed it back.
“John should be afraid of heights.” She wasn’t watching him but her smile was for his benefit, to make the words warm and friendly rather than cold and factual. “I never figured out why he wasn’t.”
By the cliffs Mrs. Hudson was standing ten feet off from the boys, where Sherlock had yelled at her to stop, had put up his little hand up with his delicate fingers spread wide and shaking and asked her to not come any closer. And even though the wind was pushing them inland Sherlock was holding onto John like it might blow him away, an arm wrapped around his middle, hand curled into his jacket. He bounced on his heels and whenever Mrs. Hudson played with her camera he chanced a quick involuntary look at the cliffs beyond as if they might have crept in closer behind them.
John was holding on tight too, but when he glanced away it was not at the cliffs.
“So what do you think?” Harry asked without preamble as she placed the drink on the rocks between them with only a nod at the boys holding tight onto each other, as if she were carrying on with a conversation they had been in the middle of and had just been interrupted. “You saw them together every day.”
“Not every day; and I hardly think crime scenes are the place for romance, or at least for finding out about them without Sherlock being the one to tell us. But do I think they were together?” He picked up the drink and let the warmth seep into his fingers. “They were hardly ever apart. We had bets going on at headquarters. Everything from when they would come out to when John would finally have had enough and leave him.”
Harry rolled her eyes but she was smiling the way John used to when Sherlock had done something only slightly ‘not good’ and he had turned to look at John a half a second later with wide imploring eyes and innocent confusion to make sure everything was still okay. The smile John got when he Sherlock looked at him like he was the one real thing in the universe. “You didn’t answer my question.”
Busted. Harry was more like her brother than people credited her with. They both had a way of sweeping through the bullshit while still come off so understated. She would have made a good cop.
“You didn’t know Sherlock before John. Even the bad times, even the really messed up stuff, it is nothing compared to the way he used to be.”
At the cliffs edge Mrs. Hudson had backed off to a safer distance and Sherlock was edging closer to the side. It was all rock at the edge, safe as you could be while suspended hundreds of feet in the air. He could do it. He could look over the edge, and he would, he would make himself. But he had to be alone.
He had to be alone of course, because alone there is no one there to push you off.
Lestrade almost wished he didn’t know that.
Sherlock lay down on his belly and peered over the edge once everyone else was away, the toe of his shoes curling into the ground and fingers white and bloodless around the edge of the rock. He looked back over his shoulder and with trembling fingers held out a hand to John.
Lestrade shook away the memory of Sherlock and focused on the warmth in his hand, his eyes resting on the edge of the horizon and two little boys. A sigh preluded his words, bits of conversations he had had a thousand times since Sherlock Holmes and John Watson had disappeared.
“Before John showed up out of the blue and fit into place like he was meant to be there Sherlock was… he was like a child. He was mad and brilliant but nothing, I mean nothing, mattered to him. Just to get him to act human I had to use false drugs busts, it was not enough to call him, I had to show up and drag him out of bed and see if he was still alive. Huge grandiose productions just to make him look at things like they mattered.”
Harrys face was a mask. Blank and unreadable. She would have made a great cop. He took another sip of Harry’s tea and let his eyes go to the horizon, drawing out the silence.
Below the horizon John took a careful step forward, pausing to see if it was too much.
Sherlock’s hand stopped shaking.
“Before John I believed that one day I would get to a crime scene and Sherlock Holmes would be the body I was standing over. That one day his luck would run out.”
Harry took the drink from him and together they watched as John reached out for Sherlock, bending because he did not want to get too close. And then Sherlock said something that the wind carried away and John lay down next to him, their sides pressed together, peering over the edge where there was nothing beneath them but air.
“I didn’t bet in any of the pools.” He told her at last, it got him a smile. “They were my friends. They made each other alive in a way most people never even dream of being, and there is no doubt that John was his moral compass. I don’t know if they were together but I hoped like hell they were. If they couldn’t manage it what hope is there for the rest of us?”
She nodded and he could not tell if she was disappointed or if it had been exactly what she thought he might say.
“He was your brother.”
He winced when the words escaped and he had no way to call them back and force them into submission.
‘Was’ because nothing saying ‘holiday away’ like reminding you that you no longer have the one person you always thought you would.
She laughed. “No- you’re right. It’s okay.” She nodded to the edge of the world where the two boys were letting pebbles fall from their fingertips into the abyss, their laughter like the ghost of an echo, thin as the sunlight on their skin. “He has more now than I ever gave him.”
The laughter faded from her face and she pressed the cup back into his hands with a weight heavier than a simple drink, and then, surprisingly, punched him in the shoulder.
“Besides, they have the right idea not putting too much stock in blood relations. We make our family where we find it.”
She gestured back at the boys with her hand blithely even as a red blush crept into her cheeks and ears, as if she not just claimed him as a member of her family.
Huh.
So that’s what it was. That niggling feeling that had flickered at the base of his spine all day, waking up to Sherlock sitting on his pillows and a handful of god-knows-what alarmingly close to his hair, the half-awake breakfast sitting down between John and Harry and not having to mutter a word of ‘hello’ to either. A shared cup of tea in the Irish countryside. That something so familiar and a million miles away.
He had forgotten what it was like to be part of a family.
He didn’t expect Harry to say more. She was too good an investigator to give something away freely, wasn’t the overly emotional talking type either. The arm she punched ached sweetly, not pain, but a touch that lingers.
“John would never have told me if he was with Sherlock. We weren’t close- in the end. It was hard for me to approve of him. He was still my baby brother and here he was letting some lunatic drag him into danger and he certainly didn’t approve of me...” She tucked her hand under her chin as she watched them. “John was different too you know, after Sherlock. It was like- it was like part of my brother never came home after Afghanistan and then Sherlock found it again.”
He had known as much. John’s first blog entries. ‘Nothing ever happens to me.’
He would have let silence fall between them, natural and easy in a way that it had not been with his own sister since they were young enough to share a room.
“They loved each other.” The voice preceded the large purse that was dropped heavily onto the stone wall beside them. Mrs. Hudson let out a deep breath, still clutching her camera in her hand as it chirped merrily at her with each picture she reviewed.
He had not even heard her coming. Lestrade took a long glance at the unassuming woman he had seen countless times before without ever really observing. He was glad she was on their side, whatever side that may be.
“But that’s not what we are guessing is it?” She settled herself beside Harry and showed her the tiny image on her screen. “We already knew that, it went without question didn’t it? Of course they loved each other. Still do, and that’s what matters now isn’t it? Not what they were before.” She took the camera back.
“Oh look.”
Down the hill Mycroft was making his way up holding the two warm looking jackets the boys had shucked before the day had even begun. A warm feeling, oddly like joy, filled Lestrade as Mycroft closer and it became obvious that he was holding the same damn take-out tea cup, crushed and empty in his hands, the remnants splashed on his pant leg and seeping into the dirt somewhere down the path or at the feet of an escaped brainwashed bovine.
Harry laughed and held out her cup. “Want a sip?”
“Do you trust me?”
“Yes.”
“Close your eyes.”
The ocean disappeared. The sky. Only the sound of the birds and the wind and the solid feel of the rock, gritty and real beneath him remained.
Hands warm and small and welcoming - soft- and not at all like forcing him took his arms.
The feeling of the ground beneath him disappeared slowly. Not lying down or sitting. Two points of solid beneath his feet and the wind and the sound of birds and warm arms wrapping tight around him and a body against his back and a voice in his ear warm and close and solid and -
“Open your eyes Sherlock.”
-John
Like flying
Sherlock counted their breaths.
Mycroft across the room, barely more than a darkened shape hidden beneath the mass of thick, hand crocheted blankets. Average 16 respirations per minute, in sleep, now, 12.
And John, less than a foot away, sharing the same blankets, the same heat, his face a play of shadow and light because even though it’s late and the lights are off and the world is asleep outside the moon is out and John is starlight. Average 20 breaths per minute, not including laughing, John laughs all the time for him and that reminds him of starlight too. But now he takes in 14 breaths per minute, 14 times that he is close enough for Sherlock to watch the rise and the fall of his chest, 14 times that he can feel the air from Johns lungs warm his fingertips that are reached out and so close and not touching.
John is wearing his jimjams, the long ones that seem to cover every inch of him. John says that it’s nice, that…it’s like a hug all night long. But if that’s what he wanted Sherlock would have held him. He wouldn’t have minded.
John is curled on his side facing him and beneath his eyelids he is watching a dream, something Sherlock cannot see. It is easy to reach between them, they are so close the sheets do not even dip between their bodies, he rests his fingertips over Johns heart. Light. Barely a touch at all. But he is warm, and his chest is rising and falling and there is a heartbeat just beneath his fingertips now and John is sleeping so deeply that he won’t wake up so Sherlock lays his whole hand on his chest and splays his fingers as wide as he can so he can cover as much of his heart as possible.
John, whose face is starlight and who is so loved that even his jimjams hold him close, smiles in his sleep.
Sherlock never wants the sun to rise. He never wants to spend a single night of his life not knowing the way John breathes or the feel of his heart beneath his fingertips. He never wants to forget the way his breath feels warm on his fingers and intimate as a kiss.
But he has to let go.
His hand is cold and empty without John’s heart inches away but he has to move it so he does. He covers Johns lips with a single finger and he can’t help but think ‘soft’ but he pushes the thought away as his brown eyes blink open and after a pause, after two heartbeats Sherlock has not felt but knows happened, the lips curve.
The moment is gone and lost forever and they will never be in this place asleep together again but sacrifices have to be made.
John is smiling against his fingers and it is slow and warm and sleepy looking and he doesn’t care at all that Sherlock woke him.
John is good like that. He never complains and he almost always wakes just like this. Like he is genuinely happy to see him, even when it is two in the morning and he should be sleep. Even if any other person in the world would have let him sleep.
Sherlock takes his hand back and presses a finger to his own lips, it’s unnecessary, John knows how to be silent and untraceable, he would never give them away. But there is a thrill in the obvious gesture, in shushing themselves, like the beginning of a secret yet to be told. It folds over them as they lay in John’s starlight, watching each other from a breath away, waiting as the last vestiges of sleep are swallowed in secrets yet to be made.
The blankets fall away and the cold is bracing and how could anyone be asleep now and still be alive? How could anyone stand not being here, teetering on the edge of normal and adventure? How could people breathe when they do not have a John looking at them like that?
The floorboards don’t squeak and Sherlock already has his backpack with the dinosaurs packed so all he has to do is shrug it onto his shoulders and lay a hand on Johns shoulder, turning him away from the door that squeaks in the bottom hinge.
They cannot wake Mycroft.
The window when he opens it is silent and easy and the excitement that started with the press of a finger is there, wrapping around his heart and filling him as he sits on the edge and swings his leg over the side.
John looks as him with wide eyes and then Sherlock thinks ‘trust me’.
And John does. The look fades and before Sherlock is fully out the window John is there climbing down after him.
They run the moment they hit the ground. Bare feet sinking into dark grass, the hems of their pants darkening with dew. Their breathes catch as they run not over the path they took in the day but up the hillside through fields of fairy houses and lambs and each breath is drawn into their chests and is exquisitely cold and deep and tingling with how alive they feel with familiar stars twinkling overhead in the black velvet sky.
And as they run their hands catch and hold and their fingers tangle and lock.
By the time they reach the cliffs and it feels like the end of the world because there is no way the ground can simply stop and fall John is laughing as much as he is breathing. Sherlock can’t count his breaths like this and his mind stutters as it reaches out for it but it is alright.
They sink to the ground.
Sherlock needs this to be special. Tonight they have to be alive in a way that no one else ever is. They have to overcome the slipping moments of holidays away and smiles that die and are forgotten and going to work and school and the way you can miss the passage of years in the blink of an eye.
He needs to make a memory that lasts an eternity.
In a way that only ever exist when they are together. In a way he hopes no one else can ever be.
Because Sherlock can do this. He can give John this.
This moment needs to burn into Johns mind and be so perfect that it hurts and gnaws at him every time he thinks about it.
He needs-
Sherlock crawls to the edge and lets his feet dangle off the side of the world and he is terrified.
His heart is racing so fast that if John reached out with his fingertips the way Sherlock had and pressed them to his chest, to his heart, he might cry out in alarm. Think he was dying.
He would almost be right.
Half of it, the way his heart is speeding in a way that makes him slow his own breaths before it becomes panic, is that he cannot look away from where the ocean blends into the sky and the starlight blends with the white of the moon and makes the water shimmer and dance and that the wind is cool here but not harsh, like it is brand new, just beginning, curling and forming over the dark blue reaching out in an impossible forever in front of them and it is so much data and not enough at all and there should be so much more-
And part of it is because John has not said a word.
Because he is a warm presence at his side that needs to be there forever. Needs to be surgically attached, because without him everything stops making sense. Because he needs John to be there the way his body needs air in its lungs, because he fits the way chemistry fits into all of the dark crevices of his mind and makes things real, because he is to his heart the way his violin is to thought, interchangeable, synonyms.
And he has not said a word.
John doesn’t shiver but his skin is cooling and his bare feet are swinging over the void and still damp and stuck with dark grass. Sherlock pulls the backpack off and lets it fall behind him because everything this close to the edge makes him feel like he is falling. Like everything has a potential to fall away here and be lost forever.
He is careful with the zip and even takes his hand back from John because it is worth it to take the blanket, stolen from Nana’s purse, and wrap it around John’s shoulders, to tuck it around him and have John look at him like that.
Like he has done something brilliant when he is starlight and he has no idea.
Please. Sherlock thinks and it is irrational and he doesn’t care. Please.
He needs this moment to permeate John, to seep into every pour, into every dark place and every smile that has yet to be.
Because John has promised ‘yes’ and ‘I do’ and ‘forever’ and he wears his ring around his neck and tells him that it doesn’t matter that they are not brothers and he understands everything that matters that goes on in Sherlock’s brain, everything that no one else ever could.
But he doesn’t know.
He doesn’t know that he is made of starlight. That everything he does, every thought that goes through his mind is good in a way Sherlock will never be. Because he knows when people hurt, and he knows what is ‘not good’ and what is ‘right’ and he doesn’t need to think about it at all, like it is natural and innate; and sometimes Sherlock doesn’t even know that he is wrong until he hurts someone.
John doesn’t know that the world will love him. That friends will be easy for him, that hearts will break for him. That he is so good that he will have no choice but to break himself for the people he loves.
He sits here and smiles at Sherlock like he holds the world in his hands just because Sherlock wrapped him in their blanket at the edge of the world and he has no idea that Sherlock will break him.
Even if he doesn’t mean to.
Even if it is the last thing in the world he ever wants to do.
Because Sherlock knows that he is not good; and it is not the after effects of a nightmare or biased or self deluding. It is fact. The way he knows that that the sun will rise and steal this moment and that time will fade the colours of this impossible night into grey memory; and that John is good in a way that can not be helped, a good so deep that it is rooted in his bones and flows through his blood and is as much a part of him as his laughter or his hugs or his smile.
This is the way Sherlock knows that he is not good, the way he knows night will turn to day. Whatever else he may be, whatever he may want to be, he is not good the way John is.
John is on the side of the angels.
But he is not an angel.
John does not know this yet; that he is perfect and that every time he does something right and Sherlock does something not good for the whole of their lives it will take John further away from him, it will make him better and more than Sherlock can hope to be.
And eventually, when John finally understands that he is good and is surrounded by people who adore him, people who would be good for him, he might regret saying ‘forever’, and ‘I do’ and ‘I promise’ to someone like Sherlock.
And John might not want to be his anymore.
And he will forget that they had ever been this. So close that Johns tears are the silent sob in Sherlock’s chest, that his victories are Sherlock’s proudest moments.
So he needs this. He needs to create the perfect memory.
A gift.
Something for John to hold onto when Sherlock is being brutal and hurting him because he doesn’t always know better. For when John realizes that Sherlock always be in a debt of good that he will not repay.
So when John finally knows, when he understands that he can do better than Sherlock, when everyone else is nice and sweet and adoring him without effort and they are all good and simple, John will remember this, which is not good but it will be beautiful; and maybe not regret that he belongs to Sherlock. Maybe he will still think ‘forever’ and be content.
For now John is happy, he is smiling like nothing could ever be as brilliant as this. He untucks the blanket from around his side and curls it around Sherlock, pushing over so that their bodies are pressed close from shoulder down to where their feet hang naked over the abyss.
Sherlock tries not to flinch.
He feels like he is falling.
Worse.
He feels like John is about to fall.
He wants to grab him and pull until they can no longer see the edge. He wants to collapse in the grass and feel the dirt all around him and John’s heart safe under his palm.
Johns hand is on his cheek and it brushes over his skin as if he is something precious and rare that exists behind the glass in museums. His arm wraps around Sherlock’s shoulders tight and the blanket encases them completely dark and soft and warm.
He knows what this is costing Sherlock. And that is the point.
John thinks it is because he is being brave, but he isn’t.
He is sitting on the edge of the world because he wants John to remember that this is how far he would go for him.
He would risk falling off the edge of the world.
He would fall, for him.
John still has not said a word.
Sherlock does not break their silence.
They should be in bed. They should be asleep. Safe and unconscious and warm and being utterly forgettable.
But Johns silence is not uncomfortable. It feels like- It feels like John is reaching into his chest and cupping Sherlock’s heart in his hands and he is warm in a way nothing else is, in a way that never burns.
And John is wearing his ring around his neck. John is thinking ‘perfect’ and ‘forever’ and ‘I promise’ and even ‘I could never leave you’.
But John is sweet and good and of course he thinks like that, he is John.
He thinks everyone is as intrinsically good.
And he doesn’t even know that he is magnificent.
Which is ridiculous because he is Sherlock’s moral compass and his heart and the starlight falls on his blond hair in a way that should drown him out but it doesn’t at all, it makes him shine. And he has no idea that sitting on the edge of the world where the wind is new and fresh and cold and the water sparkles in the moonlight like liquid diamonds that he is the most beautiful thing Sherlock has ever seen.
John kicks out his bare feet over the abyss and smiles indulgently at them, the thrill of sharp adrenalin piercing Sherlock at the sight, but it is over quickly. John is pulling his legs back over solid ground and pushing his heels into the rock, forcing himself away from the cliff, the orange blanket is sweeping off his shoulders and tumbling dark orange to the ground.
Sherlock closes his eyes. It is too much motion too close to the edge. He is terrif-
Arms wrap around his chest from behind, they fold over the blanket and a cheek presses against the back of his neck and he is being pulled.
They collapse into the sea of grass yards away from the edge. John tumbles onto his back and folds himself back into the blanket, back into his place against and half on top of Sherlock. So tangled that their limbs are undistinguishable; so close that when John’s body moves with breath Sherlock can feel blond hair whisper against his cheek.
Sherlock can feel the beat of his heart.
John does not say anything.
It is just one more thing Sherlock owes him.
A/N: Fellow Sherlockians! Lend me your ears! (All permanent donations will be left in the care of the vegetable drawer at 221B. For science.)
I am going on a mini hiatus…actually come to think of it, I am following Holmes in his Great Hiatus " I spent some months in research into the coal-tar derivatives, which I conducted in a laboratory at Montpellier, in the south of France." Ok, well, maybe without the coal-tar. I trust he has that covered. I will be writing…just not with access to a computer.
I know it is a shameless plug but if you need perhaps just a bit more to read during the hiatus… this is honestly the one piece of completed work I cannot believe came out of me. It is my baby. Ignore the description; I handle seemingly odd plot devices well :)
http://archiveofourown.org/works/188447/chapters/277114
Much love, type to you all soon,