Fill: Human For A While, 4b/?
anonymous
June 18 2011, 15:05:19 UTC
Night seemed a long time away. Too many hours to spend daydreaming and remembering and longing to be naked with Sherlock in his arms again.
John groaned and buried his face in the sofa cushions, giving up the battle with exhaustion.
Must show Sherlock that picture, he thought, as his eyelids began to droop.
“Where did you get that?” Sherlock's voice was harsh.
“It was in one of Hector's books,” John said. “I thought at first it was you, till I saw the date. Do you know who it is?”
“It's my grandfather.” Sherlock looked as if he might be about to be sick. “I never knew him. But I've seen - other images of him.”
“There's a quotation on the back, but I don't know what it means,” John said, showing him.
Sherlock gave a cry and dropped to his knees, burying his face in his hands.
“Sherlock. Sherlock, please, what is it?” John knelt beside him and put a tentative hand on his shoulder.
“Not here,” Sherlock moaned, “it wasn't here, I'd have known.”
“What wasn't?” John asked. His stomach was knotted with dread.
“There's - a feeling you get in the places where it's happened,” Sherlock said. “It gets into the walls.”
“What are you talking about?”
Sherlock raised his head and stared at John, as if he couldn't believe anyone could be so stupid.
“Captivity,” he spat. “Your kind imprisoning mine.”
That couldn't really mean what John thought it meant, could it? He wondered if he was going mad, or if Sherlock was. Maybe they both were.
Hector's voice echoed in John's head: If a woman wanted to call a Selkie to her, she must cry seven tears into the sea.
“Summoned by tears,” he said, wonderingly.
“Finally,” Sherlock said, his voice tight with rage.
“Are you saying Hector - did that to your grandfather?”
“He called him!” Sherlock burst out. “Called him and kept him. Trapped him.”
And lost him, John thought, the way I'm going to lose you now.
He remembered his despair that night on the slipway, lying there crying into the sea -
“I called you, didn't I?” he said, stricken. “That's what you meant about the usual way.”
Sherlock said, so quiet John could hardly hear him, “I wanted you to. The first time I saw you -”
“Wasn't that the first time?”
Sherlock's face flushed, and John had a sudden image of the seal in the water, that lithe strong dark body he'd watched diving and surfacing, showing off, day after day.
“Oh, this is crazy,” he said helplessly.
“It was the only way I could see you,” Sherlock said. “I couldn't come here in the light.”
“I wanted to see you too,” John said. “Every hour of every day.”
Sherlock groaned and hauled him close for a long desperate kiss, pressing against him as if he wanted to break through the wall of John's skin and disappear inside him. John tasted blood, his own or Sherlock's, he wasn't sure. He clung to Sherlock with all his strength, letting his weight pull both of them to the floor.
Fill: Human For A While, 4c/?
anonymous
June 18 2011, 15:06:50 UTC
No finesse to it this time: they clutched and grabbed at each other, needy, frantic, trying to blot out what had happened. Sherlock was all bones, bruising and hard, slamming against him as John groaned and gasped for breath. He gripped tighter as Sherlock thrust, though his knee was hurting and his shoulder was screaming in protest.
Words kept forming in his mind: the last time, it can't be the last time, I can't bear it, if I have to give you up I'll die... He buried his face in Sherlock's neck, crying out and coming apart, shaken by the force of it.
Sherlock's movements grew more urgent, till he stilled, going taut all over, and came with a long wailing cry, clasping John so tight he thought his ribs would break. He kissed John's eyes, wet and stinging with salt and sweat, and held him as if he'd never let him go. Neither of them spoke for a long time.
John lay breathing Sherlock in, trying to lock the memory of his scent, his skin, away where he couldn't lose it, but knowing it was useless. It would fade from his mind, like the sound of Sherlock's voice, like the contours of his face, like the feel of Sherlock's body against his. It would come too soon, the time when he couldn't remember Sherlock any more, not properly. And then there'd be no point in anything any more.
“Don't you dare think like that,” Sherlock said, in a growl that made John's hair stand on end.
How did he know?
“Oh come on, it's obvious,” Sherlock said impatiently. “It's written all over you.”
“If you know,” John said, “then you know why.”
“You don't understand, do you?” Sherlock said, sounding as if it was being forced out of him. “I can't be parted from you either.”
John felt weak with relief, then caught off balance by a sudden wave of anger.
“So when were you going to tell me what you really are? Or weren't you?”
“You wouldn't have believed me, would you?” Sherlock said unsteadily. “You'd have thought I was mad, or making things up.”
“Maybe,” John said, knowing it was true.
“We'll find a way,” Sherlock said. “We have to. Not here, but somewhere.”
He pushed his hands into John's hair and drew him close again.
They were gentler this time, careful and tender, vividly aware of each other's fragility. Slow, deep kisses and prolonged caresses; an act of reassurance, an unspoken promise, till the hunger overtook them again, pushing them out of themselves.
What the word meant: Ecstasy. Standing outside the self. The hidden meaning inside the skin of all those myths, those stories of transformation.
But the skin of this story was also the truth, and the truth was a hard one. What everyone knew: what all the stories and ballads told you. The love between a selkie and a human never had a happy ending.
Had never had one yet.
Who were they, to think they could change the rules?
Re: Fill: Human For A While, 4c/?
anonymous
June 18 2011, 15:58:08 UTC
Thank you so much - I am so happy to have found this prompt, because I'm loving writing this. I'm delighted you think the mixture is believable and that you like the story.
Re: Fill: Human For A While, 4c/?
anonymous
June 26 2011, 23:34:04 UTC
Human For A While
Part Five: Sherlock
Too many watchers, so close to home: he'd always known he couldn't escape their surveillance forever. His luck had run out at last; the storm broke over his head.
His brother tried to order him not to go back there again, which was frankly absurd. As if Sherlock was going to do what he said.
When that didn't work, he claimed Sherlock had broken the rules in going to John in the first place. Said there was no record of a summoning.
“Then your records are wrong,” Sherlock snapped. Trust Mycroft to make a mess of things.
His mother was just as upset and angry as he'd feared: “This man's family nearly destroyed yours, Sherlock; don't you care about that at all?”
Always talking about the history. Why did everyone behave as if the only things that could happen were the ones that had happened before?
If Mycroft's records were anything to go by, history couldn't be trusted anyway. Probably all of it was equally distorted: centuries of carelessness, prejudice and assumptions.
And if the history was wrong, maybe the rules were too. Maybe there was a way to escape them. Or rewrite them.
There had to be a way. Not here, but somewhere.
When Sherlock impulsively said he'd go with him to London, John looked so happy it took his breath away, then kissed Sherlock as if he was trying to crush the life out of him.
After that it was too late to back out, even if he'd wanted to.
A long way from the sea, and the thought of that made Sherlock breathless in a different way, feeling imagined walls closing in on him. He tried to tell himself the distance would help; too close and he'd be constantly drawn back.
Maybe they'd be safe in the city. Plenty of places they could hide.
He knew his way around London by now; the city had been his refuge from the breeding-grounds in autumn and winter, year after year. Escaping the monotonous cycle of courtship and reproduction, the weight of expectation that dragged him down. His family's obsession with lineage and heredity, the duty of perpetuating your kind. He didn't want any part of it.
He liked the anonymity of crowds: wave after wave of people passing through the city and none of them his. There were watchers here, too, but the security cameras seemed blessedly impersonal.
The disguise he wore made it easy to slip away from these strangers, even from those who thought they knew him. Better than a cloak of invisibility: they saw a drug addict and never looked beyond the label. If he wasn't around, they just assumed he was out of his skull somewhere, or maybe trying to get clean.
The city's mysteries and riddles pleased him, suited him. He'd explored its hidden alleyways and secret places, tracing forgotten paths and boundaries long since blurred to near-invisibility. Buried streets and lost rivers, read about but seldom or never seen.
There were other mysteries there, too, if you knew where to look or how to invite them. Puzzles and games for a mind that rebelled at stagnation. Too easy to satisfy him for long, but he always hoped for something better, harder, a challenge to test him to the limits, an opponent worthy of him.
He'd played in that world alone, and always on his own terms. It felt strange, revisiting it now with someone by his side.
^^^^Fill: Human For a While, 5a/?^^^^; this part 5b/?
anonymous
June 26 2011, 23:37:31 UTC
He wanted to be with John, more than anything in the world. Wanted the daylight hours as well as the dark, wanted people to look at him and envy him. He's with me. What he knew already was enough to make anyone proud to call this man their own: loyal and brave, a healer and a warrior. A man who had seen the world, but who looked at Sherlock as if he was the most amazing thing that had ever been since before the world was made. It was intoxicating, that look. He wanted to make it happen again and again, in bed and out of it. Wanted it to burn into him, till he was imprinted with John's gaze, an invisible legend stamped on his skin like the marks of John's mouth and his hands.
But John was working, and the hours passed too slowly when he was away. Sherlock had never lived like this in the city before, day after day without respite. Even this far south, the long summer days made him feel stretched out beyond bearing, longing to disappear beneath the waves.
The first time Sherlock bolted, he was gone forty-eight hours. John didn't need to tell him he'd counted every one of them; it was written all over him.
Seeing John like that, bleached with pain and exhaustion, hurt him in ways he couldn't explain. He'd never felt like that before. But then he'd never felt those other things before either. The intensity of passion that lifted him so far outside himself he was scared he'd never get back again. The longing that felt like a string tied tight around his heart and pulling, pulling right through his body and out of it, all the way to John's. As strong as the pull of being too long away from the sea, the one that forced him to run, not stopping to tell John where or why or even to say he was going.
“You can't do this to me,” John said. His fists were clenched by his side; Sherlock could feel the tamped-down violence coming off him in waves.
“I'm sorry,” he said, the word still unfamiliar in his mouth.
“Christ, Sherlock, I thought you were dead. Do you have any idea what that was like?”
A flash of it, yes, but his mind wouldn't hold the thought, too big, too overwhelming, making him feel he was falling apart.
“Promise me you won't disappear again,” John said fiercely.
He couldn't promise. He tried to explain, but it was no good. John didn't understand why he couldn't risk making a promise he knew he wouldn't be able to keep.
They took these things more lightly, Sherlock thought. Even if you ended up breaking a promise, they still expected you to make it. Like marriage. The promise itself was a necessary sign, and the failure to make it was an injury.
Fill: Human For a While, 5c/?
anonymous
June 26 2011, 23:38:56 UTC
This quarrel was much worse than the one about the old man. It burnt till there was nothing left but ash, till Sherlock was almost ready to beg for forgiveness. He'd never begged for anything in his life, but he couldn't bear John's cold anger, his withdrawal into silence.
Get out of here, the voices urged him. Run while you still can.
He'd bolted again, a second time and a third, struggling to resist till he couldn't hold out any longer, desperate with longing and fear. And each time it was worse: the agony of being apart from John, even for a single night, and the bitterness and anger between them when he returned.
He couldn't talk about where he'd been, or why he had to go. The words stuck in his throat: I'm sorry, I didn't mean to hurt you, I never mean to hurt you but I keep doing it and I'll always keep doing it and this is why they said it wouldn't work, I can't stay and I can't go and I'm being torn in two.
The fourth time, scrabbling in disbelief and panic, he found the hiding-place empty.
John had been there before him. The skin was gone.
John groaned and buried his face in the sofa cushions, giving up the battle with exhaustion.
Must show Sherlock that picture, he thought, as his eyelids began to droop.
“Where did you get that?” Sherlock's voice was harsh.
“It was in one of Hector's books,” John said. “I thought at first it was you, till I saw the date. Do you know who it is?”
“It's my grandfather.” Sherlock looked as if he might be about to be sick. “I never knew him. But I've seen - other images of him.”
“There's a quotation on the back, but I don't know what it means,” John said, showing him.
Sherlock gave a cry and dropped to his knees, burying his face in his hands.
“Sherlock. Sherlock, please, what is it?” John knelt beside him and put a tentative hand on his shoulder.
“Not here,” Sherlock moaned, “it wasn't here, I'd have known.”
“What wasn't?” John asked. His stomach was knotted with dread.
“There's - a feeling you get in the places where it's happened,” Sherlock said. “It gets into the walls.”
“What are you talking about?”
Sherlock raised his head and stared at John, as if he couldn't believe anyone could be so stupid.
“Captivity,” he spat. “Your kind imprisoning mine.”
That couldn't really mean what John thought it meant, could it? He wondered if he was going mad, or if Sherlock was. Maybe they both were.
Hector's voice echoed in John's head: If a woman wanted to call a Selkie to her, she must cry seven tears into the sea.
“Summoned by tears,” he said, wonderingly.
“Finally,” Sherlock said, his voice tight with rage.
“Are you saying Hector - did that to your grandfather?”
“He called him!” Sherlock burst out. “Called him and kept him. Trapped him.”
And lost him, John thought, the way I'm going to lose you now.
He remembered his despair that night on the slipway, lying there crying into the sea -
“I called you, didn't I?” he said, stricken. “That's what you meant about the usual way.”
Sherlock said, so quiet John could hardly hear him, “I wanted you to. The first time I saw you -”
“Wasn't that the first time?”
Sherlock's face flushed, and John had a sudden image of the seal in the water, that lithe strong dark body he'd watched diving and surfacing, showing off, day after day.
“Oh, this is crazy,” he said helplessly.
“It was the only way I could see you,” Sherlock said. “I couldn't come here in the light.”
“I wanted to see you too,” John said. “Every hour of every day.”
Sherlock groaned and hauled him close for a long desperate kiss, pressing against him as if he wanted to break through the wall of John's skin and disappear inside him. John tasted blood, his own or Sherlock's, he wasn't sure. He clung to Sherlock with all his strength, letting his weight pull both of them to the floor.
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Words kept forming in his mind: the last time, it can't be the last time, I can't bear it, if I have to give you up I'll die... He buried his face in Sherlock's neck, crying out and coming apart, shaken by the force of it.
Sherlock's movements grew more urgent, till he stilled, going taut all over, and came with a long wailing cry, clasping John so tight he thought his ribs would break. He kissed John's eyes, wet and stinging with salt and sweat, and held him as if he'd never let him go. Neither of them spoke for a long time.
John lay breathing Sherlock in, trying to lock the memory of his scent, his skin, away where he couldn't lose it, but knowing it was useless. It would fade from his mind, like the sound of Sherlock's voice, like the contours of his face, like the feel of Sherlock's body against his. It would come too soon, the time when he couldn't remember Sherlock any more, not properly. And then there'd be no point in anything any more.
“Don't you dare think like that,” Sherlock said, in a growl that made John's hair stand on end.
How did he know?
“Oh come on, it's obvious,” Sherlock said impatiently. “It's written all over you.”
“If you know,” John said, “then you know why.”
“You don't understand, do you?” Sherlock said, sounding as if it was being forced out of him. “I can't be parted from you either.”
John felt weak with relief, then caught off balance by a sudden wave of anger.
“So when were you going to tell me what you really are? Or weren't you?”
“You wouldn't have believed me, would you?” Sherlock said unsteadily. “You'd have thought I was mad, or making things up.”
“Maybe,” John said, knowing it was true.
“We'll find a way,” Sherlock said. “We have to. Not here, but somewhere.”
He pushed his hands into John's hair and drew him close again.
They were gentler this time, careful and tender, vividly aware of each other's fragility. Slow, deep kisses and prolonged caresses; an act of reassurance, an unspoken promise, till the hunger overtook them again, pushing them out of themselves.
What the word meant: Ecstasy. Standing outside the self. The hidden meaning inside the skin of all those myths, those stories of transformation.
But the skin of this story was also the truth, and the truth was a hard one. What everyone knew: what all the stories and ballads told you. The love between a selkie and a human never had a happy ending.
Had never had one yet.
Who were they, to think they could change the rules?
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Anon, you are going to crush my soul, and I'm going to encourage you every step of the way with tears streaming down my face.
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Part Five: Sherlock
Too many watchers, so close to home: he'd always known he couldn't escape their surveillance forever. His luck had run out at last; the storm broke over his head.
His brother tried to order him not to go back there again, which was frankly absurd. As if Sherlock was going to do what he said.
When that didn't work, he claimed Sherlock had broken the rules in going to John in the first place. Said there was no record of a summoning.
“Then your records are wrong,” Sherlock snapped. Trust Mycroft to make a mess of things.
His mother was just as upset and angry as he'd feared: “This man's family nearly destroyed yours, Sherlock; don't you care about that at all?”
Always talking about the history. Why did everyone behave as if the only things that could happen were the ones that had happened before?
If Mycroft's records were anything to go by, history couldn't be trusted anyway. Probably all of it was equally distorted: centuries of carelessness, prejudice and assumptions.
And if the history was wrong, maybe the rules were too. Maybe there was a way to escape them. Or rewrite them.
There had to be a way. Not here, but somewhere.
When Sherlock impulsively said he'd go with him to London, John looked so happy it took his breath away, then kissed Sherlock as if he was trying to crush the life out of him.
After that it was too late to back out, even if he'd wanted to.
A long way from the sea, and the thought of that made Sherlock breathless in a different way, feeling imagined walls closing in on him. He tried to tell himself the distance would help; too close and he'd be constantly drawn back.
Maybe they'd be safe in the city. Plenty of places they could hide.
He knew his way around London by now; the city had been his refuge from the breeding-grounds in autumn and winter, year after year. Escaping the monotonous cycle of courtship and reproduction, the weight of expectation that dragged him down. His family's obsession with lineage and heredity, the duty of perpetuating your kind. He didn't want any part of it.
He liked the anonymity of crowds: wave after wave of people passing through the city and none of them his. There were watchers here, too, but the security cameras seemed blessedly impersonal.
The disguise he wore made it easy to slip away from these strangers, even from those who thought they knew him. Better than a cloak of invisibility: they saw a drug addict and never looked beyond the label. If he wasn't around, they just assumed he was out of his skull somewhere, or maybe trying to get clean.
The city's mysteries and riddles pleased him, suited him. He'd explored its hidden alleyways and secret places, tracing forgotten paths and boundaries long since blurred to near-invisibility. Buried streets and lost rivers, read about but seldom or never seen.
There were other mysteries there, too, if you knew where to look or how to invite them. Puzzles and games for a mind that rebelled at stagnation. Too easy to satisfy him for long, but he always hoped for something better, harder, a challenge to test him to the limits, an opponent worthy of him.
He'd played in that world alone, and always on his own terms. It felt strange, revisiting it now with someone by his side.
~*~*~*
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But John was working, and the hours passed too slowly when he was away. Sherlock had never lived like this in the city before, day after day without respite. Even this far south, the long summer days made him feel stretched out beyond bearing, longing to disappear beneath the waves.
The first time Sherlock bolted, he was gone forty-eight hours. John didn't need to tell him he'd counted every one of them; it was written all over him.
Seeing John like that, bleached with pain and exhaustion, hurt him in ways he couldn't explain. He'd never felt like that before. But then he'd never felt those other things before either. The intensity of passion that lifted him so far outside himself he was scared he'd never get back again. The longing that felt like a string tied tight around his heart and pulling, pulling right through his body and out of it, all the way to John's. As strong as the pull of being too long away from the sea, the one that forced him to run, not stopping to tell John where or why or even to say he was going.
“You can't do this to me,” John said. His fists were clenched by his side; Sherlock could feel the tamped-down violence coming off him in waves.
“I'm sorry,” he said, the word still unfamiliar in his mouth.
“Christ, Sherlock, I thought you were dead. Do you have any idea what that was like?”
A flash of it, yes, but his mind wouldn't hold the thought, too big, too overwhelming, making him feel he was falling apart.
“Promise me you won't disappear again,” John said fiercely.
He couldn't promise. He tried to explain, but it was no good. John didn't understand why he couldn't risk making a promise he knew he wouldn't be able to keep.
They took these things more lightly, Sherlock thought. Even if you ended up breaking a promise, they still expected you to make it. Like marriage. The promise itself was a necessary sign, and the failure to make it was an injury.
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Get out of here, the voices urged him. Run while you still can.
He'd bolted again, a second time and a third, struggling to resist till he couldn't hold out any longer, desperate with longing and fear. And each time it was worse: the agony of being apart from John, even for a single night, and the bitterness and anger between them when he returned.
He couldn't talk about where he'd been, or why he had to go. The words stuck in his throat: I'm sorry, I didn't mean to hurt you, I never mean to hurt you but I keep doing it and I'll always keep doing it and this is why they said it wouldn't work, I can't stay and I can't go and I'm being torn in two.
The fourth time, scrabbling in disbelief and panic, he found the hiding-place empty.
John had been there before him. The skin was gone.
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Mycroft says "Pacific unstem," which seems about right
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