Prompting Part XXIV
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IMPORTANT! Spoilers for aired episodes are now being allowed on this area of the meme, without warning. If you do not want to encounter spoilers, please prompt at our Spoiler-Free Prompt Post.
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Prompts from this post can be filled on the Overflow Post
IMPORTANT! Spoilers for aired episodes are now being allowed on this area of the meme, without warning. If you do not want to encounter spoilers, please prompt at our Spoiler-Free Prompt Post.
( Read more... )
After a few weeks he gets a job, at a different surgery on the other end of the Bakerloo line. The clinic in Lambeth is small and drab, but John needs to get out of the house. It’s too cloying, all the things he hadn’t said buzzing around him like so many flies. The flat stinks of things held back and John needs out.
The Tube is good. John can zone out, rock with the motion of the train and not be expected to engage with anything. It’s perhaps his favourite time of day, the commute. He stares at ads for Vodafone and the newest sensation on the shelves at Waterstone’s and doesn’t have to feel a thing about it.
Dealing with patients is easy. John slips into the costume of the reserved concerned medical professional and helps people. It’s not enough, and probably never will be. But it’ll do for now. At least when he stitches these people, these strangers up, he isn’t distracted by sheaves of pale skin revealed by rucked up clothing, or the press of an insistent pulse under his hand. He doesn’t have to literally force these patients to dammit, could you stay still for one second while I get this stitched?! and he therefore doesn’t feel the thump of a heartbeat beneath a graceful breastbone as he holds them in place. It wouldn’t have the same impact, anyway. There are no bright, glacial eyes watching him keenly, so there’s really no room to compare.
After six months of this, of avoiding Harry and Lestrade and anyone else whose gaze might soften at the sight of him, John wakes up one Tuesday appalled at his life. It’s not a special day, not any anniversary or milestone; the six month anniversary passed two days prior and John had purposefully let it pass without incident. He hadn’t gone to the grave, though perhaps he should have. It had been almost too much that first time, when he’d gone with Mrs. Hudson (the only person he permitted to turn a gentle expression on him). Besides, John hadn’t cried in months, and had no intention of breaking a streak he’d been rather hard-pressed to maintain.
But this Tuesday, ordinary day sandwiched between ordinary days, John awakes with every muscle in his body taut. It isn’t waking from a nightmare that makes him so, though those are frequent and John has yet to get used to them. It was one thing to wake with the taste of blood in his mouth, scrabbling at his eyes to rid them of phantom sand and clutching at his treacherous leg. No, since that day they’ve been radically different, and John knows he will never entirely purge them from his mind. It is a far different beast he grapples with now. There are falling bodies, always, and he always feels that impact on the sidewalk as though it were an impact on his own body. His mind fixates particularly closely on the slide of dark curls through a red pool as the body is turned over, supine. Nightly, he watches his best friend seep life onto the concrete until the whole world drowns in it and John never knows what to do.
He’d suffered through one of those the night before this Tuesday. It had woken him at three AM, shaking and keening out a broken version of his friend’s name. But he’d slept again, dreamless this time, and when he woke up it was with a profound distaste for this inaction. He is still sad, devastated, undone, but his nature is rebelling and a small, suspiciously baritone voice in the back of his mind chides him for his stagnation. You are more than this, it says. You’re letting him down.
So John gets out of bed and calls in sick. He dresses with more care than he has in months, makes tea and leaves the flat. When winter had set in, late this year, John had shamefacedly dug out his cane and had been relying on it ever since. He bypasses it this morning without a thought and goes down the stairs and out onto the slushy sidewalk on steady, sturdy legs.
John takes the Tube to St. James Park station and gazes back when people catch his eye. He exits onto Broadway and strides into the building opposite. Familiar faces gape at him, and he doesn’t blame them for that. He holds them accountable for a lot, but not for their shock at seeing him.
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John knocks and is answered with a familiar, weary “yeah, come”.
He opens the door. He has clearly interrupted a meeting, but evidently not a vastly important one. Donovan turns in her seat and goes stock still, eyes frozen on his face. John barely glances at her and focuses on the Detective Inspector.
Greg Lestrade looks like shit. His hair is a touch too long and it doesn’t suit him, and the smudges beneath his eyes match the shadow along his jawline. He’s lost weight. John looks at him and realizes he’s missed the man. They’d always got on, and John begins to wish he hadn’t severed all contact.
Lestrade is the only one who isn’t surprised. He looks at John a bit expectantly, but with patience behind his eyes. God, if patience were currency that man would be rich.
Now that he’s here, though, John isn’t actually sure what he came to say or do.
“Let me prove you wrong,” was what came out. Lestrade furrowed his brow and Donovan looked as though she was halfway between a scoff and a sob. Poor sod, he sees in her eyes, taken in by the freak, he believed it all. “Let me show you that what he did was real. I watched him do it for a year and a half and while I’m not him, I’m not blind, and he taught me how to look.” John’s breath catches in his throat, but then, he’s intimately used to that feeling now. “One case is all I’m asking for.” Let me start to fix what’s been broken.
Donovan has abandoned all pretences and looks furiously astonished. She stands and opens her mouth to speak. One look from Lestrade and her teeth click shut into a grimace.
Lestrade gazes at John for a long moment. He doesn’t smile, but he nods.
Something small clicks back into place in John’s chest, and he breathes easier.
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Not much of the snow has been disturbed. Mourning is best when it’s convenient, picturesque. Sherlock stamps his feet in the drift and breathes into his hands, wishing he’d remembered his gloves.
This was not a smart idea. Returning to Britain was a death wish at best, but when Sherlock had found a way to do so that coincided with a potentially significant date he’d bundled himself into an air freight container at the Ulaanbaatar airport. China hadn’t been pleasant, mostly, but Shan hadn’t been the only strut supporting The Black Lotus and with Mycroft’s help and finances, Sherlock put a significant dent in their doings. When they discovered who he was and what he was up to, though, they’d chased Sherlock from the country and he’d been meandering in Mongolia for over a month.
“I really shouldn’t even be proposing this, given I know you probably won’t listen when I tell you not to do it.” His brother’s voice over the phone was threadbare.
“Don’t be obtuse, Mycroft. It’s unbecoming. Of course I won’t listen.”
He couldn’t risk London. It was too well-observed, and John might spot him. Sherlock chose a place where he could watch John to his heart’s content without fear. The cemetery wasn’t under surveillance, Mycroft made sure of it. All Sherlock had to do was wait, and he’d be rewarded with at least a glimpse. Maybe that would ease the knot in his chest that seemed to grow larger and gnarl further with every day he spends away.
Sherlock checks his watch. It’s nearly three PM. Are there delays on the Tube? An emergency? Surely there must be, otherwise John would be here. John is a creature of habit, of patterns if nothing else and the six month anniversary would warrant a visit in his mind.
Sherlock waits, hunched under the tree with his hands in his pockets, smoking furiously and billowing the grey of cigarette after cigarette into the frigid air like a dragon.
Mrs. Hudson visits around three-thirty and leaves a sprig of holly sitting in an Erlenmeyer flask that she must have brought from the flat. Something clenches in Sherlock’s throat at the sight of her, a small purple speck against the snow, bent over with sobs that he can only just hear from his hiding place.
Where is John?
She leaves after a half hour, and Sherlock waits well into the dark hours for a man who doesn’t come.
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I'm really curious to see what you'll do with that case Lestrade has agreed to. I also really like that Sherlock's there, waiting for John but that John doesn't show. (Not for Sherlock, but it just goes to show that John's -more- than a creature of habit). And then poor Mrs. Hudson. It's nice to see how much she cares for Sherlock.
Can't wait to read more. :D
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