Fic: Babel
Title: Babel
Word Count: 1,305
Genre: Angst, Gen.
Rating: PG 13 (language)
Warnings: Spoilers for The Fall.
Summary: One week after losing his best friend, John Watson lost his words.
A/N: A few sundry references to The Empty House. Written because every time I see a revision of this story I think 'John Watson could so TO have kept the secret'. And that counts double for Martin Freeman's Watson. Unbetaed. So the mistakes are all mine.
John Watson was a man accustomed to losing.
He lost at cards. Lost at chess. He’d lost patients on the table and socks in the laundry. He’d been lost, hopelessly, in a number of places including the Battersea Library. He’d lost in love. Lost his mind. And while he hadn’t technically lost a war, from his end it hadn’t exactly looked like winning either.
John Watson had lost arguments with chip and pin machines and races with walking dogs (because of the limp, you understand). He’d seen most of Lost (gave up after the polar bear) and he’d skipped most of Paradise Lost. He’d lost the sister he’d once known to alcohol. The kid he’d once been to pragmatism. He’d lost his keys. His purpose. His dreams.
In a true Vonnegut fashion, John Watson often lost track of time (“came unstuck” if you’ve read the book). He lost bets. He’d been told, more than once and mostly by women to, “Get lost.” And he’d been assured by a primary school teacher that: “…there is nothing lost, that may be found, if sought.”
John Watson lost his patience at least once a day.
He’d lost so much in his life that he’d thought himself quite immune to it. Some of them had been big things, after all and by thirty he’d considered himself a graceful loser; a man of reason and poise and a realistic (if not optimistic) view of the world.
Then John Watson lost his best friend.
Sherlock Holmes, arms stretched wide like some kind of dark seabird, sailed off of a rooftop and scattered his brains across the pavement. Just like that. Like knocking a glass from the table with your elbow and moving too slow to catch it.
One week later Mycroft had called. “It was his last adventure,” he’d said, voice dead on the other end “you should write it.” So John had gone to his new apartment (it was almost empty-his things were all still at Baker Street and he didn’t have the nerve to go back) and sat in front of his computer and thought, Fuck it. I’ve got nothing left to lose.
He’d been wrong. But then, that was another thing John Watson was accustomed to.
When he’d stretched his fingers over the keyboard and looked up from beneath his heavy eyelids to the coarse, blank white of the screen, his words had all tumbled and scattered away. They spilled from his reach and rolled under the desk and into the darkest corners, slipped through the cracks into the floor. They left him like a flock of startled sparrows.
Not a word since that day. He was a man of silence. He didn’t speak, or write, or whisper. He’d gone right from his empty apartment to his therapist and waited until she could squeeze him in. And then he’d sat, frozen for a full five minutes, sinking further and further into the ridiculous chair she provided for her clients, trying to figure out how to communicate his problem. When she’d finally broken down and asked him, rather impatiently, what was wrong, he’d opened his mouth, and closed it, and gripped his throat in frustration. He flapped his hands at her like flightless wings and used them to cover up his face. It took ten minutes to make her understand.
“Perhaps you believe that if you write it, it will be real,” she’d mused. “Perhaps, subconsciously, you believe he’s still alive.” He’d gone home as wordless as he’d arrived and more weighed down than ever. They resumed their regular appointments and she assured him he could always call her in an emergency. John had made it clear with his face what poor consolation a phone call was to a man who couldn’t speak.
Now she was talking to him again, it was Tuesday. He’d lost the thread of the conversation minutes ago. Let it trickle away like a broken spider web in a breeze. It was incredible, how much harder it was to focus on other peoples’ words when you knew the interaction was destined to be one-sided.
“You need to talk about it or you’ll never heal,” she was saying. John Watson shook his head.
“Try,” she pushed. As if he hadn’t been trying for seven days. As if he didn’t wake up every morning and sit for hours with his lap top or with a pen and paper, with those bloody alphabet refrigerator magnets.
John opened his mouth anyway, an empty cave would have made more sound, and shoved from the back of his throat. A tiny croak, barely a hiccup, bounced into his mouth. He turned to the pen clutched in his hand and positioned it over the yellow notepad she’d given him. But the pen just sat there like the needle on a broken seismograph. Nothing. He was a record that wouldn’t play.
The frustration burned at the corners of his eyes. He blinked them and turned his face to the window, twisting his lips to hide his expression of desperation. He’d never felt so helpless. He was claustrophobic in his own body. He heard a sigh from the other side of the room and the creak of the leather as his therapist sat back in her chair.
“I’ll wait,” she told him gently. The way she always told him.
They passed the session in silence again.
At the end of the hour John walked back to his empty apartment (not home, home was Baker Street and it was more empty yet for all that it was packed with objects and memories) with his hands in his pockets.
Three feet from his door step an old bookseller with a bent back bumped roughly into him. John was nearly knocked to his ass and the other man crashed to the ground. A tower of books scattered across the pavement. John didn’t bother trying to say “I’m sorry,” but knelt down to help the stranger pick up his things. The bookseller snatched the books back and pushed John away.
“Idiot,” he snarled before hobbling off, his rescued tombs clutched in his long arms. John watched him vanish into the crowd and didn’t even feel the sting of the insult.
When he turned to his door he found one book had been left behind, overlooked in the chaos. He turned to call to the bookseller but the bookseller was gone. The book was heavy, bound in black. Battered. John turned it over and stared down in numb disbelief because the odds of the coincidence were…astronomical. It was The Astronomy Encyclopedia, by Sir Patrick Moore. He opened the cover.
For your next forged masterpiece, -JW. Inscribed in his own handwriting beside the copyright.
John slammed himself safe inside his apartment and stood just inside the door with shaking hands. He’d known that Mrs. Hudson had been considering donating Sherlock’s books, but it was beyond improbable, it was impossible, that this copy should end up in the arms of that bookseller, to be accidentally forgotten on this sidewalk, on John’s own street, outside John’s own door.
When you eliminated the impossible…
He flipped to V in the index. Cut his finger open finding the right page.
The Van Buren Supernova:
And beneath it. A familiar scrawl spidering across the page. John Watson lost his balance and toppled to his knees with a thump. His mouth moved soundlessly over the words as he read them.
I’m dead. You’re in danger as long as you believe otherwise. They won’t believe it until you do.
Tell the world what you saw.
-SH
P.S. Lose this.
The words were fresh. Written with a fountain pen. He dragged his thumb through the H and a streak of black, like a comet tail, followed.
“I’m gonna kill him,” he heard his own voice say.
fin