Other People (1/2)
Title: Other People (1/2)
Rating: NC-17
Genre: Slash. H/C.
Word Count: ~9400
Warnings: Vague depictions of violence. PORN
Summary: Return fic. It’s a long road from the afterlife back to John Watson.
A/N: I owe scarletjedi my first born for betaing this. ETA: I have removed the false warning about the Supernatural episode spoilers...I have clearly been having a busy weekend. :P
Deep down, everyone thinks they are extraordinary. Everyone has secrets. Everyone fears discovery. It is not so much a truth of human nature as it is a condition of it. The human mind is defined by its knowledge of its self, and by its ability to project and infer the thoughts of other minds. The very fear that makes people believe they are the exception is what defines them as common.
By virtue of this truth, the real difference between Sherlock and other people was not that he was a genius. Or that he was cold-hearted (if indeed he was). Or that he sometimes kept human viscera in his fridge. Or even that he was the only consulting detective in the world.
The difference between Sherlock and other people was that Sherlock was ordinary and he knew it. If he was more intelligent or more observant than his neighbors or his family or all of Scotland yard, it was only because he happened to fall ahead of the average on a curve of certain qualities. In his basic makeup, in his humanness, Sherlock was no more noteworthy than the next lump of slowly decomposing flesh on the planet. Sherlock had secrets he kept and measures he took to keep his secrets safe and even the details of his secrets were banal and cliché and boring.
If there was any practical distinction between Sherlock and the so-called ‘average man’, it was that Sherlock was an exceptional liar and always had been. He’d used that ability convince everyone that he was Sherlock Holmes the detective. Sherlock Holmes the sociopath. Sherlock Holmes the man without a heart. He’d used it to convince a lot of people of a lot of things.
At the apex of his career, he convinced a madman that he was the devil. It was a moment he could look back on with pride indeed: the soft eyes of a psychopath smiling up at him, the red mouth weeping-and then the splatter of blood and bone and tissue. Bang, he’d thought and his chest had been pounding. His ears had been ringing. You’re dead.
And that was his last convincing lie. Stand on a rooftop and mix in bits of the truth (people would swallow it easier that way, mix in the truth with the lie). Sherlock Holmes was a fraud. Sherlock Holmes was a liar. Tell your best friend you wrote your life like a mystery novel and then jump from the roof, the sound of the bullet still echoing in your ears. Bang.
Sherlock Holmes was dead.
Sherlock could fool anyone. It wasn’t hard. People were always willing to be deceived.
The trick was believing it yourself.
***
Sherlock spent half of his afterlife in France as a man without a name. After the dive and the fall and the harrowing ordeal of listening to John pleading his name while he was wheeled away on a gurney Sherlock just didn’t have the will to find other people to lie to. His body was broken (dislocated shoulder, fractured scapula, torn patella tendon, concussion) and he was homesick.
One of Sherlock’s secrets was that he’d never had a home until John Watson.
Moriarty was dead but Sherlock couldn’t go back to John, back home, until Moriarty’s people were dead too.
So he lay in bed most days and let himself heal. When summer came he opened the window and listened to the sound of people speaking his grandmother’s language in the street. And sometimes the sun would come in, or the rain. He didn’t bother to stop either. He welcomed them, driving and warm or whispering and cool across his skin. A reminder that the last lie was only that, and he was still alive. He would turn on his side to stare out the window, wonder what kind of weather London was having.
Eventually, on some mornings, he started going out again. He didn’t do much. He took walks and re-educated himself in the pedestrian art of grocery runs. Other mornings it seemed like nothing could be worth the effort it took to peel the sheets off the sweat on his skin. On those days it would take him an hour, sometimes longer, just to move between the bed and the bathroom.
It would take him that long to talk himself into getting the hell up. Closing his eyes, he would imagine his mother standing in the doorway, smiling and calling him pet names.
Time for the “little sir” to wake up. Will my scholar be eating breakfast this morning?
(No to both. He hadn’t slept well. Up late reading, toying with father’s chemistry set, writing hateful notes in the margins of the poetry his teachers made him learn.)
Out of bed anyway, darling.
(Yes. Alright.)
Sherlock kept a low profile. . He kept his face out of the photographs of tourists and the eyes of security cameras. He began collecting newspapers, scanning them first for John’s name, and then scouring them through for hints of the spider’s web. The important articles (never about actual crime, Moriarty’s people were too clever for that, but usually the secondary side effects dominoing up from the underground) he clipped out and kept in between the pages of unimportant books: Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la Prison, L'âge de raison, En attendant Godot.
Sherlock checked the blog periodically (everyday, twice a day, heart in his mouth) and waited. It was like standing blindfolded before a firing line that never fired. Silence for months. He had waited a year before the final story appeared. Before the story finally appeared. Then, at two o’clock in the morning as winter began, while Sherlock was stretched out on his mattress, he saw the light cast from the screen of his laptop shift across the floor as the page updated itself and a new entry appeared. He smacked his knee off the wall rolling over to grab the computer.
The Reichenbach Fall.
Sherlock pulled the computer into his lap and leaned his back against the wall. He turned off his bedside lamp and pulled all the shades closed. He sat in the dark and read all about John Watson’s anger and his disbelief and his broken heart. And, in a tiny one room flat in Paris, Sherlock Holmes (who had never really been Sherlock Holmes anyway, but just a young man pretending he was a storybook character) bent over his keyboard and covered his mouth so that no one would hear the sound of his tears through the thin walls.
The next day he left Paris and went further abroad. He went to Dengfeng and to Budapest. He spoke with strangers and learned new things. In the southern province of Taiwan he met an old man who kept bees and stayed there for three weeks. He learned how to hunt in Sweden. He spent a good deal of time in Bucharest, thinking about devils.
***
Everyone wants to be seen. It’s part of the human desire for validation. Here I am, I matter. Look at how extraordinary I can be. People scurry through all the minutes of their lives and imagine that they are doing ordinary things in amazing new ways. People are really all the same.
For John, that was a comforting thought. John didn’t want recognition anymore. He was sick of people pointing him out in cafés or sending him emails, or calling on Mrs. Hudson and asking after “The blogger of Sherlock Holmes.” They always had the same, idiotic questions. Do you miss him? Did you ever suspect? How does it feel to know you were lied to for so long?
No comment. John Watson knew a thing or damn two about lies. For instance, if you don’t feed them they die. And he wasn’t going to feed this…this thing unleashed by Moriarty. Although he couldn’t starve it, not alone, he sure as fuck wasn’t going to play along.
John was just an ordinary bloke. He was a guy that went drinking with his buddies and prayed for weekends.
And if there was anything else to John, anything deeper or darker or grander, no one needed to know about it.
Certainly not him.
***
By the time Sherlock returned to London he’d nearly forgotten how to be Sherlock Holmes. He was just sick of being dead while John was alive and tired of walking the world while John was in England. It had been two years and nine months since they’d buried him. And it was still not safe for him to return.
Certain men had long memories, and for a dead man, Moriarty had longer arms yet.
But Sherlock was worn out. And he wanted to be at home. And the time was coming. The rumors were that certain pawns were scattering, and the newspapers showed signs that certain plans were changing. Moriarty’s guns were picking themselves up and moving on.
Sherlock didn’t wait. He moved. He began the game, flying like a shadow out of Bucharest on a midnight flight to England. His fingers tapping as he waited in line at the arrival gate at Heathrow, Sherlock counted to three.
A man in Russia. A woman in India. And a monster who’d stayed in London.
Sherlock only came back to find the threads, but when his feet hit the streets he knew he couldn’t leave again without seeing John. Sherlock Holmes could have, perhaps, but Sherlock Holmes was a different man (a dead man, for that matter) and Sherlock wasn’t a sociopath or a machine or any of the other absurd things he’d wanted to be for so long.
Sherlock waited for dusk and walked down John’s street.
John owned a small house now. He’d established himself as a respectable medical man with an eccentric past and a hobby that involved consulting for the police on homicides. He was living on his own (the personal blog he’d set up for his friends and family hadn’t mentioned anything about a girlfriend. There were no saccharine love metaphors lacing the posts.) and he was still alone. Let him still be alone.
The house looked exactly like a house should look. There was a pointless little stonewall and a rock garden in the back yard. A bird feeder jammed in the grass and flowerboxes in the windows (though there were no flowers, just one little black jumping spider making her home). Sherlock passed by slowly, hands in his pockets and back hunched to hide his height. The kitchen light was on and John was inside, watching the kettle boil while he brushed his teeth.
There was only one cup on the counter.
Sherlock stopped and pretended he was watching the sparrows at the feeder, relief pounding in his chest. He’d spent three years without a friend because he couldn’t risk discovery, hiding and running before anyone could think to chase, waiting for the right opportunity to arise. Three years praying to a God he didn’t believe in that John was the sort of man who would wait for a miracle he knew was never going to come. Every step between China and Hungary and Taiwan, Sherlock had been hoping that John was still the kind of man who only needed one cup for tea.
And there he was. Still wearing the same sweaters. Still keeping enough PG Tips in the house to caffeinate an army. Still just as broken as he’d been the day he lost everything.
Inside the house John moved out of the frame of the window. Sherlock forced his legs to move again. The streetlights were coming on. You’ve seen him. Let it go.
There’s a game to be played.
And he didn’t have a choice. He could win, or he could stay lost forever.
Sherlock found a place to hole up while he went looking for the footsteps to Russia.
***
Sherlock did play the game. He picked up the rules and the moves as if he’d never left off. He stepped through London just as easily as he ever had, fingers looking for the right strings, ears listening for the right names. But every night he ended up back at the same place.
Sherlock liked walking. Though “wandering” was perhaps a better word. He liked that a person who wandered enough could wander anywhere and still be reasonably sure of where he was going.
One of Sherlock’s secrets was that the more he wandered, the more he realized all his roads led to John.
One night he passed the house and saw six empty beer bottles on the living room coffee table. The television was still on but the couch was empty and all the lights were out.
Sherlock happened to know (because he knew John) that there was a spare key to the backdoor hidden beneath the ceramic frog in the garden. And Sherlock knew from past experience that John slept heavy as mountains after drinking. And Sherlock knew that if he died in Russia there would never be another chance.
So he let himself in.
The house smelled like tea and the living room smelled faintly of gun oil. The hallway, Sherlock was surprised to find, smelled of lavender vanilla (surprised until he passed the bathroom and saw Mrs. Hudson’s favorite brand of air-freshener was the source of the smell. And there where other signs too, around the house, that she’d been checking in on John). The bedroom smelled like laundry.
And John was inside, snoring like a rusted canon. He’d kicked off his jeans (discarded, flat legs in a running gesture on the rug) and was sleeping in a t-shirt and rumpled boxers. The blankets were bunched and tangled underneath him because he’d fallen asleep before covering himself. John was sprawled diagonally across the mattress, face buried in his pillow, the lines of his spine and shoulder blades clearly defined by the dim light.
Sherlock stood in the doorway with the glow of the hall nightlight behind him. If John woke up he wouldn’t see anything but a dark shape, just a faceless voyeur slipping away.
Sherlock stayed for a few minutes, watching John dream. He crossed his arms tightly across his chest and leaned against the doorframe, fighting back the impulse to enter. He wanted to kneel at John’s side and brush a hand across his forehead, bend down and whisper “hello” in his ear. Or wake him up and say “goodbye”. Properly this time. No magic tricks or cheats.
Another secret of Sherlock’s was that part of his lie was true, he really didn’t have a heart. Not anymore. He used to, years ago. But it had since been taken from him, yanked right out of his chest, actually, by John Watson. Who kept it in the pocket of his dressing gown and the under the soft belly of his tongue and in the palm of his hand, and Sherlock didn’t think he was ever going to get it back.
Which was maudlin and over-used and unbearably ordinary. But it was the truth.
John inhaled with a sound like a rising wind and stirred, turning onto his side so that the light from the open door fell directly on his face.
Sherlock should have left right then. But the shadows made John’s face look thin and his eyelashes look long. They accented the line of his neck and the light hair on his arms. John sniffed and opened his eyes.
Sherlock’s pulse thumped in his ears. He slipped silently down the hall and out the door.
The next day he slipped silently out of London.
Another truth is that we have no real say over some of the secrets we keep. Which is why we keep them secret. Because we have no power to change them. And because they often have the power to change us instead.
***
There was a ghost in John’s house (it had followed him from Baker Street).
He might have tried to blame it on one too many lunches with Mrs. Hudson, listening her bang on about mediums and tarot cards, but his skin had been itching all afternoon. He found himself getting up during every advert to draw the blinds aside and peer down the street, as if he expected someone to be walking down it. He kept turning around in his seat to check the empty corners, as if he expected someone to be standing there. His leg burned and cramped as it hadn’t in years and more than once he thought he heard his mobile buzzing (only to find that the battery was dead when he went to check it).
There was only one person who had any reason to be haunting John now.
Around nine, John gave up on reality and broke out the beer. He sat on his sofa with the telly on and began swimming the road to false oblivion. Whenever a stray thought or the shape of Sherlock’s name clouded his vision he turned up the volume a little bit more and leaned closer to the screen to drown it out. When that didn’t work he stopped drinking the beer like beer and started drinking it like water. It was a jolly good thing he didn’t live in a flat anymore.
By the time he abandoned the living room Colin Firth was screaming his soft sweet nothings at Elizabeth Bennett and John was floating in apathy. He struggled with the remote for silence and then wobbled down the hall to his bedroom. All the lights were out, except for the nightlight in the hall, because John never bothered to turn that off. He kicked off his pants and crawled to his mattress, planning to turn into a stone until morning. Or let the river darkness drown him, he didn’t much care. He wanted to sink. And be still. And know nothing.
But somehow sleep eluded him. And instead of sinking he tossed around on the surface, and a memory of sand made the back of his knees itch like crazy. He rocked between confusing dreams of Afghanistan and the Grimpen minefield and fuzzy moments of near lucidity, waking up for noises that hadn’t happened. John would force himself to lie still and then wake again flailing, in a panic, snapping his head around to check his open closet and the doorway for ghosts.
Until at last he opened his eyes to see the last flicker of a shadow retreating down the hallway.
John froze. He had been reeling all night, but now the river settled, and he was focused. John sat up slowly and listened. He wished he could also stop the racket of his heart, drumming in his ears and making certainty impossible. John stared at the wall and strained, waiting for the sound of the door, or even a window squeaking shut.
One tiny creak, it might have been a footstep or the house settling, but not another sound outside of himself.
He jumped out of bed and stumbled across the floor. He had to catch himself on the wavering doorframe. The river was tossing again and the entire room rolled with it. John gripped the wood molding and took deep, steadying breaths.
He thought he could smell aftershave.
John lurched into the hallway, (“Sh-”) and looked down the narrow tunnel to the rest of his empty house.
He did an unsteady circuit, palms trailing against the walls and the furniture, and found nothing. Not a stray button on the floor or a picture frame out of place.
John didn’t bother to make it back to his bed. He sat down in the hall where the phantom scent lingered and put his head between his knees. He closed his eyes and dug his toes into the carpet and waited for his mind to stop playing games with him.
They said smell was the sense linked most to memory. John inhaled and felt the chill in Sherlock’s fingers and the bite of the handcuffs. He could smell the laundry scent of Sherlock’s coat and the dull tang of blood. The slight must of ash and cold sidewalk.
Then the interruption of other perfumes and colognes, rough hands pulling him away. Flashing lights.
I was so alone. And I owe you so much.
Come back, goddamn you.
***
Russia was cold.
Russia was big.
And it was a dangerous place to get wet. A terrible place to take a swim. Worse place to fall into a river.
Place that cold; water that deep, you might get stuck under the ice and drown. They might not find your body ‘till June when the thaw finally came. They might never find you at all if you sank deep enough. If your bones froze solid.
And if you were an invisible man, the kind of man without a face or a real name or people to go home to, it might be that no one would ever even know to go looking.
The maid probably had a fright though, Sherlock thought idly as he stuck his frozen hands in his pockets. Dead men tell no tales. But their suitcases…the kind of souvenirs they took with them, the kind of utensils they packed, the photographs they kept, those things were a clear biography.
It was massively out of his way, but Sherlock went back to London before continuing to India. He only spent one night, but he had to see what kind of ripples were making their way through the underground. It was imperative he make sure none of those ripples where washing John Watson’s name around.
***
The next time John was much more careful. When the shadow from the hallway fell across his face he surfaced deliberately from the tedium of his nightmares. He didn’t move and he didn’t make a sound. He kept his breathing deep and even, opened his eyes slowly.
The figure in his doorway was tall and dark and faceless. But John’s heart didn’t even skip. Thin sloped shoulders, un-kept halo of hair and the wings of a high collar. John would have recognized the bastard’s silhouette anywhere. He wasn’t surprised. He’d known.
And some desperate, sadistic part of him had been waiting for it. John had never been a superstitious man, but there was always time to learn.
***
India was hot. India was loud. And Sherlock was looking for a silent woman.
In Jaipur, said the whispers. She’s in Jaipur. In Jaipur where so many of the woman were silent anyway. That’s where she was.
Clever.
***
“How much did you have to drink last night?” Harry’s asked while John put the dishes away. Her voice was tinny and distant through John’s crap speakerphone. His mobile was sitting on the counter top. But, he considered, it could just as easily be someplace else. Like the yard or the bin. Or the bottom of a river.
“How much did you have to drink?” Harry asked him. He ignored the question.
“Do you believe in Heaven?” he asked instead, standing on this tiptoes to shove a mixing bowl onto the top shelf of his cupboard. Harry was quiet for a minute and John could hear her thinking through all the things she thought she couldn’t say: Are you ever going to get over him? Have you been to see your shrink? Are you okay?
“I don’t know,” she answered after a minute. “Never gave it much thought.”
Neither had he. In fact, for most of his life John had treated religion like conversations about his bowel movements. They embarrassed him and unless they were causing him hospitalization or worse they didn’t bear thinking or speaking about. But belief was different. Belief was not religion and it was important.
“Don’t they teach you that kind of tosh at your meetings?” he asked. “I’ve read the books. There’s a whole step about accepting a higher power.”
Recently, John had been running out of things to believe in. And he was starting to wonder if it wasn’t better to believe a pretty lie than a terrible truth. He didn’t even care if that made him a coward. It was a stigma he was willing to wear, if it meant he could start sleeping again at night.
“Sort of. But it doesn’t have to be God. It could be anything. A government. A country. Sod’s Law.”
“Mycroft,” John muttered.
“What?”
“Nothing. What do you believe?” Do you believe my best friend was really a fraud? He didn’t ask that.
“I believe that Margaret Thatcher is a six foot lizard in a person suit and I believe in Hell,” answered Harry.
“Why hell?”
“Because I’ve been there.”
And people said John was the egomaniac. Kids dying in civil wars and countries imploding under their own economies until it was so bad the rats had nothing to eat and Harry Watson, failed marriage-functioning alcoholic, had been to hell.
“Why do you ask?” Harry pressed. John tried to scoop up a handful of clean butter knives and fumbled them all over the floor. They crashed and scattered. He swore and bent over to pick them up.
“I think I’m being haunted,” he said. He dumped the knives back into the sink.
“Well that’s not too surprising, I guess,” said Harry. “Life like yours.”
***
India was hot.
India was loud.
And the mosquitoes were really a problem for foreigners. You had to be careful you had all your inoculations; you had to know the ground rules. Don’t drink the water. Don’t eat the restaurant food (it’s washed with the water). A place like Jaipur you had to be careful, it was such a bustling, deafening place.
The kind of place where, so many people shouting, so many travelers getting sick, the panicked cries of a silent woman might go overlooked. In Jaipur, where things like Malaria and Yellow Fever weren’t just associated with dates in history books, there might not be anyone listening closely enough to hear the word “poison” dripping off a woman’s fevered lips. And even if they did, they would probably write it off as delirium anyway.
Or simply not care.
Sherlock didn’t stick around to find out what they did with the unclaimed bodies of women with no passports.
***
Yeah, John had a secret.
It wasn’t a very good secret in that he was fairly certain that everyone who knew him or had met him for longer than twenty seconds together knew about it, but it was still something he never said out loud.
Let it first be known that John was not secretly gay. He really did like women. They were soft and sweet and they smelled nice. However, the fact that by some cruel twist of fate the person John loved most in the world did not come standard with hair that smelled of strawberry vanilla or a decent pair of breasts was a mere inconvenience and not a deal breaker. What had broken the deal, what had broken everything, had been the idiot jumping from the roof of a seven-story building, killing himself and leaving John behind.
The real secret wasn’t that John had been in love with another man. It was that, thanks to Sherlock, he was still in love and it was with a goddamn memory and John knew bloody fucking well that he was never going to fall in love again. And all those whispers he gave to other people, those little touches and brushes, didn’t mean a thing. They were steps to a dance he couldn’t even hear the music to anymore.
Part Two