fic: you're in my head (you're in my heart); sh is not okay; mind triggers; spoilers up to s03e02
Title: You’re In My Head (You’re In My Heart)
Fandom: Sherlock BBC
Characters: Sherlock Holmes, Mentions of Ensemble
Spoilers: For Sherlock Season 3 Episode 1: The Empty Hearse
Warnings: Rated for torture and untreated mental illness. Mentions of past drug use and addiction. Also suicidal ideation. This is not a happy fic.
Rating: Adult
Summary: There’s a voice in Sherlock’s head, when he’s away from London. It sounds a lot like John. Sherlock wants to be disturbed by this, but really, at this point he’ll take what comfort he can get. He doesn’t really have a choice.
AN: This fandom is ruining my life. I hate this show. Have another fic to see how much I hate it. Sorry for the angst. I can’t quite find the sunshine in my withered soul.
Disclaimer: I own nothing except some of the happenings in this fic, and even then whether someone can own events or not is debatable. Title taken from ‘No Light’ by Florence+The Machine, which is a really shockingly appropriate song.
cross-posted @ AO3
The Fall + 1 Day
Mycroft gets him out of Barts in a non-descript car that is actually non-descript instead of being just darkly ominous and secretive looking. It’s a dark blue sedan, quite an old make, with scratches on the body and scuffed doors and a slightly dinged rear-view mirror. None of those marks are there by accident, Sherlock knows, but to the lay-person it just looks like a well-used car, a little worse for wear. It is driven by a man whose clearance is so high, that his fingerprints have been deleted from every single file in the country, except Mycroft’s own. Sherlock has met him at family dinners, before.
Everything is fine. It’s all fine. Sherlock pretends he can’t still feel John’s fingers pressing hard into his wrist, looking desperately for a pulse he will not find. He pretends he can’t still see John collapsing, like a puppet with the strings cut off. John will be fine. He’ll survive. Sherlock will ensure it.
The Fall + 1 Month
The first month away is unbearable. It’s agony. He’s not accustomed to the physical hardships of living on the road. He has done it before, of course, and for prolonged periods of time. But now his body is accustomed to at least one solid meal a day, and being forced into at least a couple of hours of sleep each night. Long gone are the days when he could stay awake and alert for 96 hours with only micro-naps in between. Now, his stomach rumbles every time he passes a street food-vendor, and he would actually sell blood for a good cup of tea.
More than the physical hardship, he is unaccustomed to solitude. It doesn’t make any sense at all, because he has been alone for a far longer time than he has - not. And still, he keeps turning around to check if John’s finally caught up with him. He never has.
The Fall + 3 Months
He kills his first man, three months in. For all his experience, he has never killed a man. It’s more messy than he’d have expected. He doesn’t know why; he’s seen plenty of dead bodies, and even more murder scenes. Blood is a part of his career. But he doesn’t think he’ll ever be able to forget the feel of hot fluid splashing over his clothes, his skin, his face. Faintly, as if from a distance, he wonders if this is what John had felt like in Afghanistan. Or if this was what he’d felt like when he’d knelt in Sherlock’s (fake) blood on the wet pavement, that day outside Barts Hospital.
He feels a little repulsed (at the mess, at himself, at everything that is touching him). John would tell him to keep calm and carry on. So he does.
The Fall + 6 Months
He loses a suspect. He’s furious. He returns to his tiny hostel room and trashes it. He regrets it, immediately. It’s a good thing there hadn’t been much to trash in the first place, and nothing that wasn’t easily fixable. They must have expected this sort of appalling behaviour. He tucks the corners of the bed-sheet over the pathetic excuse for a mattress, so it covers a tear in the fabric. He’s sure it’s suffered much worse, in this part of town.
He hasn’t lost a suspect in years. Not since he spent entire days as high as a kite, back in London. Before John, and before Lestrade. And even then, he’d had the sense to find them again. This time…
This time, he’d been distracted by something in the corner of his eye. Something impossible. He’d turned his head because someone had called his name, and no one in this hemisphere knew him by his name, his real name. He’d wasted precious moments in looking for the source of the impossible thing, and by the time he’d gathered his wits about him, the suspect had escaped. He hadn’t known he was being chased, of course, but he’d escaped all the same.
Being called by his real name had felt… like hot bath, or being wrapped in a thick duvet on a cold night. It had felt like a soothing balm on his chapped heart. He thinks it’s because no one has called him by his name in a long while now. And even if affection had been rarely associated with him, it had been solid, and grounding. He was Sherlock Holmes, for better or for worse.
But now, he’s not sure. Because if he were to fall over, no one would help Sherlock get up. They’d help James, or William, or on one memorable occasion, Moira. But they wouldn’t be helping Sherlock. If Sherlock went missing tomorrow, it would not be Sherlock, because Sherlock didn’t exist. Sherlock was dead. But he was alive. So he was not Sherlock, surely.
Being called Sherlock had been reassuring. It had gone a long way to confirming that he hadn’t, in fact, faded into thin air.
But the question remained. No one knew Sherlock was here. So who had called his name?
The Fall + 9 Months
He finds time for an internet café. He’s just come off his last kill. He washed his hands in a river near-by, but there’s still blood underneath his fingernails. It’s not a big deal. Sherlock hasn’t had time to go online for a while, and he feels disconnected from the rest of the world, on his own little mission through the darkest corners of the world.
He hasn’t dared to check his email, because he’s been worried about being traced. But the man with whom he shared a room, not three weeks prior, had taught him to clear his trail, in exchange for a lesson on how to distinguish between different types of ash.
(He’d waited patiently for someone to come by, to whom he could say, I told you so! But it hasn’t happened. At that moment in time, he’d have done anything for John to walk past him with a cup of tea, and yell at him as if everything was okay)
His inbox is empty, of course, because he’s dead. People don’t send dead men emails. But there’s one unread email in the folder where all of John’s emails were rerouted. It doesn’t have a title, but it’s definitely from John’s address, if not from John (his password was ridiculously easy to crack). There are three words in the body of the email.
I miss you.
That’s it. And it feels like Sherlock’s just been punched in the gut. He feels his eyes welling and it’s so embarrassing he hasn’t cried since he was ten and his cat died, and Mycroft told him that all lives were bound to end. His face is heating and he has to sign out of everything and clear his tracks before he can retreat to his dingy hostel room. People get out of the way because they must be seeing something on Sherlock’s face, that displays what he feels like on the inside.
John is thinking of him. John still remembers him. It’s more than he could have even hoped for, because he’d expected John to have moved on by now. Everyone else certainly has, he’s sure. He’s elated and devastated, because he can’t tell John that he misses him too.
That night, when he sleeps, the dreams that John’s beside him, stroking his hair as he sleeps. He keeps saying Sherlock’s name, and it’s enough. It’s enough.
The Fall + 12 Months
Sherlock’s forgotten the date. He thinks. He’s not sure what month it is, let alone what day. The hours blur together and the days are so dark that he hardly bothers distinguishing them from the nights. He’s chasing down one of Moriarty’s suppliers, a man who runs a drug empire so vast that every time a lieutenant is taken down, a bunch of police-men receive an award, clueless that the lynch-pin is still out there. Sherlock had made the mistake of watching a terrible crime drama the week before, and he kept thinking that John would have loved it. He can’t quite delete the terminology though, because he thinks John would have used it all the time.
He’s forgetting what John smells like. He buried his face in a stolen jumper, a week ago. It had smelled only like clean laundry, and nothing at all like John.
He doesn’t bother with flashiness, this time. He’s got better things to do, honestly. It’s an in-and-out operation, a quick murder. Nothing messy or ghastly. It takes just a single drop of poison into the sleeping man’s open mouth. People always forgot that in the end, even the biggest mafia overlord was human. Everyone slept.
He’s almost surprised at how easy it is, but he knows better than to say any such thing out loud, least of all because there’s no one there to hear him say it. Then it turns out that all the guards have been enjoying their employees discount on cocaine, and they’re sleeping like babies on the wooden floor, with little baggies in their hands and pockets, carelessly strewn across the floor.
He doesn’t know what hits him. He normally has much more self-control. But he knows that the addict never leaves once he’s there, and it’s almost ten minutes later, when he’s leaving the small enclave quietly, the way he came, that he realises he has a single bag of pure white powder in his right pocket.
He reaches his room and sits there, on the rickety chair, with the baggie on the table, staring at him. It’s a struggle, even though it is carried out in silence. There are many practical issues with this. Cocaine can almost always be tracked. A man so good at what he does would hardly have made it easy to make off with illicitly acquired illegal substances. He doesn’t remember whether he was careful to have taken his finger prints off everything, but he’s almost a hundred-per-cent sure that he did. It’s a habit now, and it will drive John crazy when he-if he gets back to London.
He’s not sure anymore.
The baggie stares back at him. It would be so easy. Just.
And then he hears John saying, in the back of his head, that he’s an idiot. It’s not the good kind either, not the teasing sort of insult. John genuinely means it. And he’s saying things in his head which Sherlock is sure he’s never said in real life (he would know; he has entire catalogues filled with John’s words). He’s also sure he’s not taken anything, not even cough syrup, in the past year.
But then John calls him a fucking idiot in his head again, and it’s a hundred times easier to flush the little bag down the communal bathroom, and not even taste a single grain.
The Reunion - 9 Months
It is nine months before he returns to London, but he doesn’t know it, then, when he falls sick.
He ends up in the rain, huddling in a barn in rural China, for a couple of hours. They’re He’s in the middle of nowhere, and the only thing near-by is a warehouse in which a massive child prostitution ring is run by Moran’s second-in-command. He won’t be, for much longer, because if everything goes according to plan, the place is going to blow sky-high the next morning, with no one the wiser. He’s got most of the information, and he’s just happy that it had happened at a time when the children weren’t around. John had He’d found out that they were bringing in some corrupt doctors in the village near-by, to check the children over for any venereal diseases. Sherlock felt sickened at the thought, but it helped his plan. And it would be better for the children in the long run, he hoped.
It goes off without a hitch, miraculously enough. Sherlock is used to his plans going tits up at the most inconvenient times. But it goes off without a hitch. And he passes out in the barn, listening to the rain hit the leaky tin roof, waiting for his morning wake-up call (the explosion). John would have laughed at that.
He dreams of the last time he was sick. John had taken a day off work, and he’d tended to Sherlock, who was unsurprisingly the worst patient ever. Not that John would have noticed, because with John touching his forehead at regular intervals and bringing him soup and salty crackers and hot-water bottles, Sherlock would have sat quietly through an amputation.
When he wakes up, he is cold, and wet, and shivering. It’s still dark, and the nearest place he can steal a car is at least an hour’s walk away. He’s stranded there, in the middle of nowhere, with no way to contact anyone, and no one to contact. If he dies here, he will be upset forever because it’s the least dramatic was to go. If Sherlock dies, he thinks, before passing out again, he’d want John by his side, and an explosion at his back. There should at least be a helicopter involved, or two. He makes a note to remind his brother.
When he wakes up, John is there. He’s talking to Sherlock in his doctor voice, explaining to him what’s wrong (Sherlock already knows, but John’s voice, John’s voice) and stroking his hair and sitting beside him. Sherlock doesn’t want him to go, but surely he has better things to be doing, and he says so. John smiles sadly at him and fades into nothing, right before his eyes.
Sherlock doesn’t have the energy to analyse it. He wishes he’d kept his mouth shut. An imaginary John is better than no John. He doesn’t start worrying about it until later. When he wakes up again, still dizzy and starving from his situation, John’s there. Sherlock smiles and wishes him a good morning.
The Reunion - 6 Months
John is a constant fixture, now. His voice is Sherlock’s constant companion, and if he’s lucky, he’ll see John in his favourite oatmeal coloured cable-knit jumper, through the corners of his eyes. His commentary is fantastic. He doesn’t remember John having been so witty, but he’s not going to question it. He still says all the important things. Like, ‘save that child’ or ‘don’t cause collateral damage’ or ‘giggling at life-threatening injuries is a bit not good, Sherlock’. Sometimes when Sherlock fucks up, John yells at him.
It’s good, because if John doesn’t yell at him, no one will. And he’ll never know that what he did was wrong. Objectively, he knows that this is insane, in all senses of the word. He is using his subconscious as a moral compass, but only when disguised as a man friend brother someone he hasn’t seen in almost two years. But he doesn’t care. John is his companion, whether John knows it or not. It’s keeping him sane.
(If this is sanity, he’s not sure what insanity is)
The Reunion - 3 Months
He finds out what insanity is when he receives a text message from Mycroft on a dinky phone which has survived a remarkable amount of abuse.
JW planning engagement.
It’s the first news he’s got from Mycroft in a while, and he wishes - he wishes that he’d not bothered turning on his phone. He doesn’t want to know. He doesn’t want- he’s lost. He’s lost the skirmish, the battle, the war, he’s lost. There’s no purpose, anymore.
There is nothing left to say.
The Reunion - 2 Weeks
He has become reckless, he thinks, as he is being strung up on a wall by his arms. A few months ago, he’d have avoided detection, but today he’s here, staring at his own bruised body. He’s rather pleased with his figure. He’s put on more muscle mass in the past few months than he ever managed in his entire life. Father would be proud. And Mycroft would be jealous, the fat bastard.
He doesn’t - he tries to not notice the first lash of the whip. It’s not too hard. He’s rather good at this now; the whole separating the mind and the body business. There’s a gentle hand in his hair and he recognizes it, because it is John, and Sherlock would know John if he were blind, deaf and comatose. He stands beside Sherlock silently (of course, he’s not fucking real) and when the whip comes down again, he flinches for Sherlock.
Sherlock is quiet. John doesn’t turn up much, anymore. Except to curse at him for being stupid, or when he’s in trouble. He thinks it’s going to be like this when he goes back to London, in the best case scenario, so he’d better get used to it.
It comes down again, and the heat starts. Sherlock knows the silence is psychological, but that game works both ways. He’s supposed to unnerve his prisoner, too. So he stays still (as much as he can) and quiet. John strokes his hair, patiently. It’s over-long. It needs to be cut, but he thinks John would like it. It’s hard to keep clean, but John would definitely like it.
It’s freezing cold outside, but he doesn’t feel it. The prison room must be cold too, because even the man whipping him is wearing a thick fur coat. Not only is it a poor sartorial choice (really, bear fur? How tasteless), but it’s very telling. Sherlock knows as well as anyone that whipping (whether with a whip or a riding crop) is an exhausting activity. He might find it easier, with new muscles, but it would be tiring all the same. If it was warmer, the man would have had to take off his coat. Instead it’s still on.
The whip lands on an already split patch of skin. The huff of breath escapes without his permission, and he’s never been lucky. The man, with ears like a hound, hears it, and he knows he’s one step closer to breaking Sherlock. It was boring before this, but now it’s actually dangerous.
John has, however, responded very poorly to the involuntary noise. He’s on his knees, in front of Sherlock, and stroking his hair frantically, kissing his bloodied and bruised face, and talking nonsense to him. He asks Sherlock to deduce, and he does, because he’s never been able to deny John anything.
Except the last request he ever made.
Don’t be dead.
Sherlock doesn’t think he’s going to manage that one. He’ll have to send apologies to John via Mycroft.
He can’t find the breath to speak. His entire chest feels like it’s collapsing and his arms are past the stage of burning - he can’t feel his fingertips, and that’s never a good sign. But he deduces out loud anyway. The man hears, and it works as a solid distraction. No one likes hearing about infidelity, least of all the person who was cuckolded.
The man leaves, post-haste, and Sherlock looks up. He sees Mycroft’s shoes, and it’s hilarious, all of a sudden. All of it’s so ridiculously funny; he can’t do anything but laugh. John would have understood. He would have laughed too, even though Sherlock’s not sure why.
Mycroft looks a little concerned, but mostly bored. Sherlock’s not very put-together, at the moment. He thanks John under his breath, and lets go. He doesn’t have the energy for Mycroft’s games. He doesn’t have the energy to see the panic flash across Mycroft’s face. It can wait. It’s not like there’s anyone waiting for him, back at home in London.
The Reunion + 2 Weeks
He is in bed, in Baker Street, and it’s like a dream come true. He’s had his first hot shower, and his first moment of disturbing culture-shock, when he logged on to the internet and didn’t know what to do. There was nothing on it. He had to leave the room, to wander the streets for a little while, and re-learn London. He doesn’t even bother anymore.
His time away has left him fundamentally altered, fine. He doesn’t care. Very few people remember him from before, which is as it was supposed to be. John is-
He sees more of John in his dreams than he does in real life. That’s not fine, but it’s not something he can change. He has learned to accept the inevitable, instead of railing against it like he used to. It’s a good habit, he thinks.
He wanders around London and meets up with several people whom he thinks would care to know that he’s still alive. He gets mobbed by several TV vans at some point, and he handles them admirably, if he does say so himself, with politeness and a calm demeanour, even when he wants to call them all idiots for missing the obvious.
People are a bit odd, but that’s only to be expected. Acquaintances who return from the dead are far from the norm. It’s better that they stay distant than - well. John’s made his feelings on the matter very clear.
Sherlock had actually quite enjoyed being beaten up by John, in some morbid sense. It had reminded him of the times when he was away, because John only ever turned up when Sherlock was being an idiot, or to comfort him. Being punched by John for faking his death was almost like both, because his presence was a comfort despite the physical pain, and because - because John had touched him.
Mycroft is worried, he knows. But he was never going to return from his travels, unscathed. They both knew this. The risks were calculated. That John might reject him had been taken into account. It was a consequence. Every action had one, even if it was delayed.
So he carries on doing what he does best (the only thing he knows how to do) and runs around London, risking his life to prove that he’s clever. Because if he’s not clever, he’s not anything. He still sees John, when he’s been stabbed or pushed into the river, or when he’s lying in hospital, drugged to the gills. But when he’s awake, and he’s sober and coherent, he misses john like a missing limb; his absence is a physical ache. Even the imaginary John doesn’t quite make up for it, but really, at this point, Sherlock will take what he can get.
He will take what scraps he can get, because he doesn't know what he would do without John. He doesn’t really have a choice.
Fandom: Sherlock BBC
Characters: Sherlock Holmes, Mentions of Ensemble
Spoilers: For Sherlock Season 3 Episode 1: The Empty Hearse
Warnings: Rated for torture and untreated mental illness. Mentions of past drug use and addiction. Also suicidal ideation. This is not a happy fic.
Rating: Adult
Summary: There’s a voice in Sherlock’s head, when he’s away from London. It sounds a lot like John. Sherlock wants to be disturbed by this, but really, at this point he’ll take what comfort he can get. He doesn’t really have a choice.
AN: This fandom is ruining my life. I hate this show. Have another fic to see how much I hate it. Sorry for the angst. I can’t quite find the sunshine in my withered soul.
Disclaimer: I own nothing except some of the happenings in this fic, and even then whether someone can own events or not is debatable. Title taken from ‘No Light’ by Florence+The Machine, which is a really shockingly appropriate song.
cross-posted @ AO3
The Fall + 1 Day
Mycroft gets him out of Barts in a non-descript car that is actually non-descript instead of being just darkly ominous and secretive looking. It’s a dark blue sedan, quite an old make, with scratches on the body and scuffed doors and a slightly dinged rear-view mirror. None of those marks are there by accident, Sherlock knows, but to the lay-person it just looks like a well-used car, a little worse for wear. It is driven by a man whose clearance is so high, that his fingerprints have been deleted from every single file in the country, except Mycroft’s own. Sherlock has met him at family dinners, before.
Everything is fine. It’s all fine. Sherlock pretends he can’t still feel John’s fingers pressing hard into his wrist, looking desperately for a pulse he will not find. He pretends he can’t still see John collapsing, like a puppet with the strings cut off. John will be fine. He’ll survive. Sherlock will ensure it.
The Fall + 1 Month
The first month away is unbearable. It’s agony. He’s not accustomed to the physical hardships of living on the road. He has done it before, of course, and for prolonged periods of time. But now his body is accustomed to at least one solid meal a day, and being forced into at least a couple of hours of sleep each night. Long gone are the days when he could stay awake and alert for 96 hours with only micro-naps in between. Now, his stomach rumbles every time he passes a street food-vendor, and he would actually sell blood for a good cup of tea.
More than the physical hardship, he is unaccustomed to solitude. It doesn’t make any sense at all, because he has been alone for a far longer time than he has - not. And still, he keeps turning around to check if John’s finally caught up with him. He never has.
The Fall + 3 Months
He kills his first man, three months in. For all his experience, he has never killed a man. It’s more messy than he’d have expected. He doesn’t know why; he’s seen plenty of dead bodies, and even more murder scenes. Blood is a part of his career. But he doesn’t think he’ll ever be able to forget the feel of hot fluid splashing over his clothes, his skin, his face. Faintly, as if from a distance, he wonders if this is what John had felt like in Afghanistan. Or if this was what he’d felt like when he’d knelt in Sherlock’s (fake) blood on the wet pavement, that day outside Barts Hospital.
He feels a little repulsed (at the mess, at himself, at everything that is touching him). John would tell him to keep calm and carry on. So he does.
The Fall + 6 Months
He loses a suspect. He’s furious. He returns to his tiny hostel room and trashes it. He regrets it, immediately. It’s a good thing there hadn’t been much to trash in the first place, and nothing that wasn’t easily fixable. They must have expected this sort of appalling behaviour. He tucks the corners of the bed-sheet over the pathetic excuse for a mattress, so it covers a tear in the fabric. He’s sure it’s suffered much worse, in this part of town.
He hasn’t lost a suspect in years. Not since he spent entire days as high as a kite, back in London. Before John, and before Lestrade. And even then, he’d had the sense to find them again. This time…
This time, he’d been distracted by something in the corner of his eye. Something impossible. He’d turned his head because someone had called his name, and no one in this hemisphere knew him by his name, his real name. He’d wasted precious moments in looking for the source of the impossible thing, and by the time he’d gathered his wits about him, the suspect had escaped. He hadn’t known he was being chased, of course, but he’d escaped all the same.
Being called by his real name had felt… like hot bath, or being wrapped in a thick duvet on a cold night. It had felt like a soothing balm on his chapped heart. He thinks it’s because no one has called him by his name in a long while now. And even if affection had been rarely associated with him, it had been solid, and grounding. He was Sherlock Holmes, for better or for worse.
But now, he’s not sure. Because if he were to fall over, no one would help Sherlock get up. They’d help James, or William, or on one memorable occasion, Moira. But they wouldn’t be helping Sherlock. If Sherlock went missing tomorrow, it would not be Sherlock, because Sherlock didn’t exist. Sherlock was dead. But he was alive. So he was not Sherlock, surely.
Being called Sherlock had been reassuring. It had gone a long way to confirming that he hadn’t, in fact, faded into thin air.
But the question remained. No one knew Sherlock was here. So who had called his name?
The Fall + 9 Months
He finds time for an internet café. He’s just come off his last kill. He washed his hands in a river near-by, but there’s still blood underneath his fingernails. It’s not a big deal. Sherlock hasn’t had time to go online for a while, and he feels disconnected from the rest of the world, on his own little mission through the darkest corners of the world.
He hasn’t dared to check his email, because he’s been worried about being traced. But the man with whom he shared a room, not three weeks prior, had taught him to clear his trail, in exchange for a lesson on how to distinguish between different types of ash.
(He’d waited patiently for someone to come by, to whom he could say, I told you so! But it hasn’t happened. At that moment in time, he’d have done anything for John to walk past him with a cup of tea, and yell at him as if everything was okay)
His inbox is empty, of course, because he’s dead. People don’t send dead men emails. But there’s one unread email in the folder where all of John’s emails were rerouted. It doesn’t have a title, but it’s definitely from John’s address, if not from John (his password was ridiculously easy to crack). There are three words in the body of the email.
I miss you.
That’s it. And it feels like Sherlock’s just been punched in the gut. He feels his eyes welling and it’s so embarrassing he hasn’t cried since he was ten and his cat died, and Mycroft told him that all lives were bound to end. His face is heating and he has to sign out of everything and clear his tracks before he can retreat to his dingy hostel room. People get out of the way because they must be seeing something on Sherlock’s face, that displays what he feels like on the inside.
John is thinking of him. John still remembers him. It’s more than he could have even hoped for, because he’d expected John to have moved on by now. Everyone else certainly has, he’s sure. He’s elated and devastated, because he can’t tell John that he misses him too.
That night, when he sleeps, the dreams that John’s beside him, stroking his hair as he sleeps. He keeps saying Sherlock’s name, and it’s enough. It’s enough.
The Fall + 12 Months
Sherlock’s forgotten the date. He thinks. He’s not sure what month it is, let alone what day. The hours blur together and the days are so dark that he hardly bothers distinguishing them from the nights. He’s chasing down one of Moriarty’s suppliers, a man who runs a drug empire so vast that every time a lieutenant is taken down, a bunch of police-men receive an award, clueless that the lynch-pin is still out there. Sherlock had made the mistake of watching a terrible crime drama the week before, and he kept thinking that John would have loved it. He can’t quite delete the terminology though, because he thinks John would have used it all the time.
He’s forgetting what John smells like. He buried his face in a stolen jumper, a week ago. It had smelled only like clean laundry, and nothing at all like John.
He doesn’t bother with flashiness, this time. He’s got better things to do, honestly. It’s an in-and-out operation, a quick murder. Nothing messy or ghastly. It takes just a single drop of poison into the sleeping man’s open mouth. People always forgot that in the end, even the biggest mafia overlord was human. Everyone slept.
He’s almost surprised at how easy it is, but he knows better than to say any such thing out loud, least of all because there’s no one there to hear him say it. Then it turns out that all the guards have been enjoying their employees discount on cocaine, and they’re sleeping like babies on the wooden floor, with little baggies in their hands and pockets, carelessly strewn across the floor.
He doesn’t know what hits him. He normally has much more self-control. But he knows that the addict never leaves once he’s there, and it’s almost ten minutes later, when he’s leaving the small enclave quietly, the way he came, that he realises he has a single bag of pure white powder in his right pocket.
He reaches his room and sits there, on the rickety chair, with the baggie on the table, staring at him. It’s a struggle, even though it is carried out in silence. There are many practical issues with this. Cocaine can almost always be tracked. A man so good at what he does would hardly have made it easy to make off with illicitly acquired illegal substances. He doesn’t remember whether he was careful to have taken his finger prints off everything, but he’s almost a hundred-per-cent sure that he did. It’s a habit now, and it will drive John crazy when he-if he gets back to London.
He’s not sure anymore.
The baggie stares back at him. It would be so easy. Just.
And then he hears John saying, in the back of his head, that he’s an idiot. It’s not the good kind either, not the teasing sort of insult. John genuinely means it. And he’s saying things in his head which Sherlock is sure he’s never said in real life (he would know; he has entire catalogues filled with John’s words). He’s also sure he’s not taken anything, not even cough syrup, in the past year.
But then John calls him a fucking idiot in his head again, and it’s a hundred times easier to flush the little bag down the communal bathroom, and not even taste a single grain.
The Reunion - 9 Months
It is nine months before he returns to London, but he doesn’t know it, then, when he falls sick.
He ends up in the rain, huddling in a barn in rural China, for a couple of hours. They’re He’s in the middle of nowhere, and the only thing near-by is a warehouse in which a massive child prostitution ring is run by Moran’s second-in-command. He won’t be, for much longer, because if everything goes according to plan, the place is going to blow sky-high the next morning, with no one the wiser. He’s got most of the information, and he’s just happy that it had happened at a time when the children weren’t around. John had He’d found out that they were bringing in some corrupt doctors in the village near-by, to check the children over for any venereal diseases. Sherlock felt sickened at the thought, but it helped his plan. And it would be better for the children in the long run, he hoped.
It goes off without a hitch, miraculously enough. Sherlock is used to his plans going tits up at the most inconvenient times. But it goes off without a hitch. And he passes out in the barn, listening to the rain hit the leaky tin roof, waiting for his morning wake-up call (the explosion). John would have laughed at that.
He dreams of the last time he was sick. John had taken a day off work, and he’d tended to Sherlock, who was unsurprisingly the worst patient ever. Not that John would have noticed, because with John touching his forehead at regular intervals and bringing him soup and salty crackers and hot-water bottles, Sherlock would have sat quietly through an amputation.
When he wakes up, he is cold, and wet, and shivering. It’s still dark, and the nearest place he can steal a car is at least an hour’s walk away. He’s stranded there, in the middle of nowhere, with no way to contact anyone, and no one to contact. If he dies here, he will be upset forever because it’s the least dramatic was to go. If Sherlock dies, he thinks, before passing out again, he’d want John by his side, and an explosion at his back. There should at least be a helicopter involved, or two. He makes a note to remind his brother.
When he wakes up, John is there. He’s talking to Sherlock in his doctor voice, explaining to him what’s wrong (Sherlock already knows, but John’s voice, John’s voice) and stroking his hair and sitting beside him. Sherlock doesn’t want him to go, but surely he has better things to be doing, and he says so. John smiles sadly at him and fades into nothing, right before his eyes.
Sherlock doesn’t have the energy to analyse it. He wishes he’d kept his mouth shut. An imaginary John is better than no John. He doesn’t start worrying about it until later. When he wakes up again, still dizzy and starving from his situation, John’s there. Sherlock smiles and wishes him a good morning.
The Reunion - 6 Months
John is a constant fixture, now. His voice is Sherlock’s constant companion, and if he’s lucky, he’ll see John in his favourite oatmeal coloured cable-knit jumper, through the corners of his eyes. His commentary is fantastic. He doesn’t remember John having been so witty, but he’s not going to question it. He still says all the important things. Like, ‘save that child’ or ‘don’t cause collateral damage’ or ‘giggling at life-threatening injuries is a bit not good, Sherlock’. Sometimes when Sherlock fucks up, John yells at him.
It’s good, because if John doesn’t yell at him, no one will. And he’ll never know that what he did was wrong. Objectively, he knows that this is insane, in all senses of the word. He is using his subconscious as a moral compass, but only when disguised as a man friend brother someone he hasn’t seen in almost two years. But he doesn’t care. John is his companion, whether John knows it or not. It’s keeping him sane.
(If this is sanity, he’s not sure what insanity is)
The Reunion - 3 Months
He finds out what insanity is when he receives a text message from Mycroft on a dinky phone which has survived a remarkable amount of abuse.
JW planning engagement.
It’s the first news he’s got from Mycroft in a while, and he wishes - he wishes that he’d not bothered turning on his phone. He doesn’t want to know. He doesn’t want- he’s lost. He’s lost the skirmish, the battle, the war, he’s lost. There’s no purpose, anymore.
There is nothing left to say.
The Reunion - 2 Weeks
He has become reckless, he thinks, as he is being strung up on a wall by his arms. A few months ago, he’d have avoided detection, but today he’s here, staring at his own bruised body. He’s rather pleased with his figure. He’s put on more muscle mass in the past few months than he ever managed in his entire life. Father would be proud. And Mycroft would be jealous, the fat bastard.
He doesn’t - he tries to not notice the first lash of the whip. It’s not too hard. He’s rather good at this now; the whole separating the mind and the body business. There’s a gentle hand in his hair and he recognizes it, because it is John, and Sherlock would know John if he were blind, deaf and comatose. He stands beside Sherlock silently (of course, he’s not fucking real) and when the whip comes down again, he flinches for Sherlock.
Sherlock is quiet. John doesn’t turn up much, anymore. Except to curse at him for being stupid, or when he’s in trouble. He thinks it’s going to be like this when he goes back to London, in the best case scenario, so he’d better get used to it.
It comes down again, and the heat starts. Sherlock knows the silence is psychological, but that game works both ways. He’s supposed to unnerve his prisoner, too. So he stays still (as much as he can) and quiet. John strokes his hair, patiently. It’s over-long. It needs to be cut, but he thinks John would like it. It’s hard to keep clean, but John would definitely like it.
It’s freezing cold outside, but he doesn’t feel it. The prison room must be cold too, because even the man whipping him is wearing a thick fur coat. Not only is it a poor sartorial choice (really, bear fur? How tasteless), but it’s very telling. Sherlock knows as well as anyone that whipping (whether with a whip or a riding crop) is an exhausting activity. He might find it easier, with new muscles, but it would be tiring all the same. If it was warmer, the man would have had to take off his coat. Instead it’s still on.
The whip lands on an already split patch of skin. The huff of breath escapes without his permission, and he’s never been lucky. The man, with ears like a hound, hears it, and he knows he’s one step closer to breaking Sherlock. It was boring before this, but now it’s actually dangerous.
John has, however, responded very poorly to the involuntary noise. He’s on his knees, in front of Sherlock, and stroking his hair frantically, kissing his bloodied and bruised face, and talking nonsense to him. He asks Sherlock to deduce, and he does, because he’s never been able to deny John anything.
Except the last request he ever made.
Don’t be dead.
Sherlock doesn’t think he’s going to manage that one. He’ll have to send apologies to John via Mycroft.
He can’t find the breath to speak. His entire chest feels like it’s collapsing and his arms are past the stage of burning - he can’t feel his fingertips, and that’s never a good sign. But he deduces out loud anyway. The man hears, and it works as a solid distraction. No one likes hearing about infidelity, least of all the person who was cuckolded.
The man leaves, post-haste, and Sherlock looks up. He sees Mycroft’s shoes, and it’s hilarious, all of a sudden. All of it’s so ridiculously funny; he can’t do anything but laugh. John would have understood. He would have laughed too, even though Sherlock’s not sure why.
Mycroft looks a little concerned, but mostly bored. Sherlock’s not very put-together, at the moment. He thanks John under his breath, and lets go. He doesn’t have the energy for Mycroft’s games. He doesn’t have the energy to see the panic flash across Mycroft’s face. It can wait. It’s not like there’s anyone waiting for him, back at home in London.
The Reunion + 2 Weeks
He is in bed, in Baker Street, and it’s like a dream come true. He’s had his first hot shower, and his first moment of disturbing culture-shock, when he logged on to the internet and didn’t know what to do. There was nothing on it. He had to leave the room, to wander the streets for a little while, and re-learn London. He doesn’t even bother anymore.
His time away has left him fundamentally altered, fine. He doesn’t care. Very few people remember him from before, which is as it was supposed to be. John is-
He sees more of John in his dreams than he does in real life. That’s not fine, but it’s not something he can change. He has learned to accept the inevitable, instead of railing against it like he used to. It’s a good habit, he thinks.
He wanders around London and meets up with several people whom he thinks would care to know that he’s still alive. He gets mobbed by several TV vans at some point, and he handles them admirably, if he does say so himself, with politeness and a calm demeanour, even when he wants to call them all idiots for missing the obvious.
People are a bit odd, but that’s only to be expected. Acquaintances who return from the dead are far from the norm. It’s better that they stay distant than - well. John’s made his feelings on the matter very clear.
Sherlock had actually quite enjoyed being beaten up by John, in some morbid sense. It had reminded him of the times when he was away, because John only ever turned up when Sherlock was being an idiot, or to comfort him. Being punched by John for faking his death was almost like both, because his presence was a comfort despite the physical pain, and because - because John had touched him.
Mycroft is worried, he knows. But he was never going to return from his travels, unscathed. They both knew this. The risks were calculated. That John might reject him had been taken into account. It was a consequence. Every action had one, even if it was delayed.
So he carries on doing what he does best (the only thing he knows how to do) and runs around London, risking his life to prove that he’s clever. Because if he’s not clever, he’s not anything. He still sees John, when he’s been stabbed or pushed into the river, or when he’s lying in hospital, drugged to the gills. But when he’s awake, and he’s sober and coherent, he misses john like a missing limb; his absence is a physical ache. Even the imaginary John doesn’t quite make up for it, but really, at this point, Sherlock will take what he can get.
He will take what scraps he can get, because he doesn't know what he would do without John. He doesn’t really have a choice.