[Sherlock (BBC)] "Bringing Out the Dead" (PG-13)
Author's Note: Written for Sherlock, Sherlock/John, immortal. Working on the supposition that Sherlock is an energy vampire (I like sanguinarians, but it seems like most modern vamps are sangs and I just wanted to give the spirit/emotional energy feeders some love.)
Dying was the easy part. It was simply another facet of the masque he was wearing for decades. It was getting back to life that was the hard part.
He had stayed in torpor the whole time that the doctors at St. Bart's had muddled over him. Easy enough: his injuries had put his mind and body into a wait state. Once he lay alone in the funeral director's work room -- a tidier name than 'an undertaker', as they were called in the Victorian era. Undertaking what? he had thought, the one time when he ended up in such a place. Bloody euphemisms. Because of the damage to his face and head, the funeral director had urged John and Mrs. Hudson to opt for a closed casket ceremony. That gave him a chance to make his escape from his own mortuary drawer in the night and switch out another body for his own -- let the funeral director figure out the cause of the apparent case of body snatching; he wouldn't think to check a coffin that was already closed.
His energy reserves were running low, which meant hiding out in places no one would think he would go and snatching what slips of energy he could from crowds and partygoers passing in the night, keeping his head low as he had so many times before when he had brushed death's curtain and not passed through.
Nothing would nourish him, though, like John's energy, that jumbled concoction of so many flavors: exasperation, confusion, concern, curiosity, even a hint of fondness and affection, the latter all the richer, since John hid it so well.
And now, as he watched from the shadows under the trees, at the two people who cared the most grieved over the place where they believed he lay, over a gravestone that marked the place where a stranger lay, he got a whiff of all that and more besides:
A hint of loss, of sorrow, of yet more exasperation, of denial.
And of love.
Dying was the easy part. It was simply another facet of the masque he was wearing for decades. It was getting back to life that was the hard part.
He had stayed in torpor the whole time that the doctors at St. Bart's had muddled over him. Easy enough: his injuries had put his mind and body into a wait state. Once he lay alone in the funeral director's work room -- a tidier name than 'an undertaker', as they were called in the Victorian era. Undertaking what? he had thought, the one time when he ended up in such a place. Bloody euphemisms. Because of the damage to his face and head, the funeral director had urged John and Mrs. Hudson to opt for a closed casket ceremony. That gave him a chance to make his escape from his own mortuary drawer in the night and switch out another body for his own -- let the funeral director figure out the cause of the apparent case of body snatching; he wouldn't think to check a coffin that was already closed.
His energy reserves were running low, which meant hiding out in places no one would think he would go and snatching what slips of energy he could from crowds and partygoers passing in the night, keeping his head low as he had so many times before when he had brushed death's curtain and not passed through.
Nothing would nourish him, though, like John's energy, that jumbled concoction of so many flavors: exasperation, confusion, concern, curiosity, even a hint of fondness and affection, the latter all the richer, since John hid it so well.
And now, as he watched from the shadows under the trees, at the two people who cared the most grieved over the place where they believed he lay, over a gravestone that marked the place where a stranger lay, he got a whiff of all that and more besides:
A hint of loss, of sorrow, of yet more exasperation, of denial.
And of love.