lelek
in
ficbylelek
FIC: stitches and scars
Title: stitches and scars
Fandom: Sherlock (BBC)
Ship: Sherlock/John
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 5,239
Warnings: Implied violence, mild drug use, angst.
Summary: In the wake of the Fall, everything changed (you once had a dream of a man...).
Notes: [Written for the sherlockrebang] Endless thanks and credit to calamitybreak for the amazing fanmix behind this story. The italicized text at the beginning and end are pulled directly from the track listing, and some sections of the fic are meant to mirror the listing, so definitely make sure you don't skip the mix. I also used a line from the poem "Antigonish" by Hughes Mearns towards the end. And finally, thanks to my friend A, who isn't on LJ, for the eleventh hour rescue beta. ♥
you once had a dream of a man
he was scarred and he was broken and he was
so beautiful
A
It wasn't so difficult, being dead. Not once he got the hang of it, and Sherlock had always been very good at getting the hang of things.
He hadn't meant to watch John mourn him in the cemetery. He'd told himself that going was the wrong thing to do, but he'd found himself there, anyway, just out of sight. Just close enough to see him, which wasn't really close at all. And the hurt had hit him like a wave, stronger than he'd expected, leaving a strange tightness in his chest, right behind his sternum where it couldn't escape. The sort of pain that would cool into a ball of ice somewhere deep inside him and settle in forever.
It wasn't enough, that glimpse, but it was all he could allow himself to have. The sum of his feelings belonged to John, and that time was dead (like Sherlock was dead), so he hid them in a folder, deep in the hard drive of his mind, shrugged his shoulders, and walked away.
Mycroft was right about one thing: caring was not an advantage.
B
Time passed strangely, after Sherlock was gone. Minutes ticked by like years and then suddenly it was three days later and John wasn't sure where those minutes had gone. He'd taken to dividing everything into two categories: Sherlock and After-Sherlock (the time before Sherlock didn't seem to matter much anymore). And it was stupid and pointless and painful, but he also didn't know what else to do.
There was a hole in his chest where Sherlock had been, and he had a horrible, sickening feeling that nothing and no one would ever be good enough to fill it.
For God's sake, they'd just been friends. He'd said it so many times. Not his date, not his boyfriend, just his best mate. No matter what the Irene Adlers of the world had to say when he'd assured them once again that he and Sherlock weren't a couple (yes, you are), he'd never wanted more than what they had.
He hadn't. Not really.
1A
Sherlock had always been drawn to France. It was his grandmother's country and somewhere inside him he was still that gangly child captivated by her stories, whispered to him in Parisian French. Those stories were the first code he ever unraveled, as he got a little older and realized that the wolves she spoke of were people, and worked out the real reason why she would never go home.
He'd refused to speak for a month after she died and it was almost a tribute to her that, in the wake of Moriarty, he wouldn't be broken. It didn't matter that he wanted to be back at Baker Street, drinking tea and solving crimes. His grandmother had taught him that there would always be wolves in the world and he'd be damned before he let a single one them lay a hand on John. Or Mrs Hudson, or Lestrade, or anyone of the others, because he may not have been a hero, but he wasn't a villain, either. It was Moriarty's gift to him, in the end.
Five weeks into his stay in Paris, renting a tiny room under the name Vernet, he'd taken up smoking properly again, the nicotine patches long gone. It helped him think and there was no one around anymore to fret over his choices. His health had never been much of a priority to him, as long as his mind was taken care of.
"Monsieur?"
Sherlock looked up from the copy of Le Monde that had been left behind on the cafe table, snubbing out his cigarette. He'd read the daily papers religiously since leaving London, looking for anything that would help him stay one step ahead. He answered in French, "What do you want?"
"Would you like more coffee?" The server held up the pot in her left hand and Sherlock took in her badly chipped manicure and the tiny band of pale skin around the fourth finger. Recently broken engagement, going by the width of the ring. Messy, no motivation to maintain her nails. Perhaps even a defiant refusal to do so. People did things like that.
He observed, deduced, and said simply, "Yes."
As he watched her pour, he wondered if John would have been proud of him. Everyone had always been so keen on encouraging him to act less like himself, for the sake of getting along. Nothing like a swan-dive off a building to instill a bit of restraint.
He decided not to think about John. John was a distraction and he needed to keep his focus. Paris was just the beginning, somewhere to stop and strategize and determine the state of things. Lighting another cigarette, he admitted to himself that the prognosis was grim.
As long as he was dead, everyone was safe. But he didn't want to be dead, so that was only a temporary solution. He was a genius, imaginative and resourceful in ways normal people couldn't have even begun to fathom, but he was one man alone. Even if he ran forever, sooner or later he'd be found out. Everyone made a mistake in the end, even Sherlock Holmes.
Moriarty was gone, the memory of his final move lingering on the back of Sherlock's tongue with the bitter tang of defeat. But his network remained and, once Sherlock was discovered, they would see to it that their master's instructions were carried out. They had to be eliminated, then. Slowly and one by one, if that was what it took, like demolishing a building by hand. He could do it, he knew he could, but it would be a long, agonizing process.
The cigarette was only half-finished, but he ground it out sharply and stood. He'd wasted too much time already. The sooner he acted, the sooner he could return home to everything he'd left behind.
He didn't know what he'd say or do once he got there, but that was another problem for another day. If he didn't move, he'd never even get to try.
1B
Deafening silence. It was one of those overused literary phrases that John had never found very meaningful before, but Sherlock's absence changed that. If he felt like being honest, which he sometimes did, it changed everything. But he knew most people didn't react quite that strongly to the loss of a friend, so he tried to keep that part of it to himself. He didn't want to worry anyone, not when they already looked at him like he was going to fall to pieces any minute.
The Met didn't have any reason to call him anymore, but Greg did sometimes because that's what friends were for. They went to the pub for a pint or two and talked about normal things, like normal blokes. John was always thankful to get out for a few hours, but normal didn't fit him right anymore, like trying to squeeze into a suit he'd outgrown, and pretending for too long made his skin itch.
"It's okay to miss him," Greg said one Friday night, apropos of nothing. Five minutes ago, they'd been talking about football.
John looked down into his pint for a few seconds, then back up because he still wasn't a coward. "I know."
"I miss him, too," he went on, which was when John realized that this wasn't about him at all. "It's mad, isn't it? All those times I wished I could just get him out of my hair for five goddamn minutes and, now that he's gone, I miss him. Even if he… well, you know."
Everyone was very careful with what they said around John, who steadfastly held his ground when it came to the question of whether or not Sherlock Holmes had been a fake. John knew the truth, no matter what the evidence pointed to. He was sure his remaining friends and acquaintances thought he was just delusional with grief, but that was something they could respect, so they left him alone. It had put up some walls, or maybe just reinforced walls that were already there, but John could deal with that.
He nodded. "Sherlock is… was a force of nature. Can't help but miss him, can you? It's like living in a place where it's windy all the time, then the wind stops suddenly forever and you don't know what to make of the quiet."
John didn't tell Greg that he heard hushed whispers every time he went to sleep. Not quite identifiable, and certainly in his head because he wasn't quite that far gone yet, but it could only have been Sherlock. Or a figment of his imagination that he wanted to be Sherlock. He just wished he could make out the words.
Greg, two and a half pints in, nodded like he'd said something profound. "That's it, that's it exactly. Even though he was the most annoying sod to ever walk the earth, we were all used to him being around. It's too quiet now."
"Yeah," John agreed, finishing his beer. "It is."
2A
It had been ninety-seven days, five hours, and sixteen minutes.
Sherlock's brain kept the time, reliable as an atomic clock, the seconds ticking away in the back of his mind. Accuracy had never felt so hateful as it did from a darkened room in a run-down Romanian hotel.
Sherlock was used to everything being easy, but taking down Moriarty's network was hard in a way he'd never experienced before. He could outthink them, think circles around them in his sleep, but he was finding more and more that there was a sharp difference between knowing what to do and actually having the strength to do it.
There was a list in his head of all the people who had to die, organized neatly alongside boxes waiting to be checked. He'd killed two so far. One had been simple, in a suburb of Berlin, and the other had almost killed him first, in an alley of Cluj-Napoca. Such slow progress might have frustrated him once, but men who hid more than they fought couldn't really afford to be proud. Every death brought him one step closer to John and that was enough. It had to be enough.
(Ninety-seven days, five hours, and twenty minutes.)
He had a bit of space just then, a few hours to rest before moving on to the next target. He lay on the hotel room floor, twirling a syringe in his hands, and he could almost see the frown on John's face as he did so. He could almost hear him, stern and exasperated and fond all at once.
Sherlock, no.
"Yes," he murmured, forgetting for a moment that it was just him and an empty room in a country he'd never even wanted to visit in the first place. He apologized anyway, like it mattered, "Sorry."
He got silence for his trouble, but if he tried very, very hard, for just a moment he could feel the ghost of John's fingers through his hair.
(Ninety-seven days, five hours, and twenty-three minutes.)
2B
Even though John hadn't lived at Baker Street since Sherlock was… lost (it still hurt in an impossible way to even think about what had really happened), he found himself getting up in the morning, six days out of seven, expecting to walk into the same wreck of a sitting room, where he'd have to sidestep Sherlock's experiments to get to the toast and tea.
It wasn't healthy, he knew that, but he found himself extremely, irrationally resistant to so much as the idea of letting go. His therapist would have had a field day with it, if he wanted to take it to her, but he hadn't been to see her in weeks. He knew what she'd say: it's natural to want to hold onto the past, but you need to accept that he's gone and never coming back.
But he kept waking in the night to the sound of a violin, frozen in his bed with the total certainty that everyone was wrong and nothing was really what it seemed. There'd been something there, in Sherlock's voice, when he'd spoken to John from the roof. Something John wasn't quite ready to make sense of.
It's a trick. It's just a magic trick.
He couldn't let go. Not yet.
3A
Sherlock was beginning to wonder if this was what going mad felt like.
It didn't matter what city he was in, or what country, he was beginning to see John everywhere. He was in every cafe, on every train, at the corner of every street. Sherlock knew it was never really John, that his army doctor was safely back in England where he belonged, but there was always that split second of doubt when he was sure it was. That split second when he watched, and waited, and irrationally hoped that the person who wasn't John, but might have been, would turn and realize that Sherlock was right there behind him.
It was a horrid thing, hope.
But Sherlock was making progress; he'd taken down his third and fourth targets in Italy, the fifth in Argentina. The list was shrinking finally, bringing him, little by little, closer to home.
(One hundred and sixty-two days, and eleven minutes.)
There was a sixth in Buenos Aires, but word had gone out some number of weeks ago that someone was picking Moriarty's network off one by one, and this time they were ready. So Sherlock was laying low in an empty hotel room, two floors up from the one he'd rented under yet another borrowed name (he'd taken on so many he'd almost lost track of them all), sitting in the dark alone. The wolves would come looking for him soon. It was inconceivable that not a one of them would think to search the hotel and he was too tired to even try to be brave. They'd find him, or they wouldn't, but he wasn't going to go looking for them first. Not that night.
He closed his eyes, and let himself think about John, and waited.
3B
As the months crawled on, John tried to get out more frequently. It was what his therapist had always advised and, as much as he hated to admit it, she'd been right about that much at least. It helped him to get out of his dull, sterile flat for a while. Out into a world that had seemed so much more colorful before, but was still able to distract him a bit, now and then.
He'd found a pocket magnifying glass one day, identical to the one Sherlock had always carried. It had been lying on the floor outside the door to his flat, like someone had left it for him, and, unable to shake off the peculiar sensation of something being slightly out of joint, he'd picked it up. It felt like he had a piece of the past with him after that, like Sherlock was still there all the time, so he kept it. Just one more thing to keep to himself in the never-ending game of reassuring everyone that he was fine, and he found that he enjoyed little challenges like that when he happened to run into someone he knew.
Greg's smiles came easier than they had a few months earlier, when they met for their weekly pint. John was genuinely glad to see it - he'd never wanted anyone else to be miserable like he was.
"You still think about him a lot, then?" Greg asked, trying to keep his tone light and gentle and almost getting there. It was kind of funny how everyone seemed to avoid saying Sherlock's name. Or maybe they only did that around John.
John shrugged and sipped his beer. "Not as much as I used to. Back when it first happened, it was like I never stopped thinking about him, every minute of every day. Now it's more like every second or third minute."
Greg frowned, managing to look worried and understanding at the same time. "Well, you two were… you know, I don't even know what you were, but it was something. Something big. More than most people ever have. Never really understood it, myself, but he was different around you. Better. More human."
No, you don't understand, John thought, a bit madly. I loved him. I loved him and I didn't figure it out until he was gone and it was too late to tell him.
He couldn't say it. Sherlock would have known just by looking at him, or maybe he wouldn't have. Emotions had never been his strength.
"Yeah," he said instead, and it wasn't enough, but better that than nothing.
Greg's expression was hard to read. John thought he saw some disappointment. "It's been, what, about six months now?"
One hundred and ninety-four days, exactly, but John didn't say that either. Unlike Sherlock, he knew when to keep his mouth shut and he didn't want to worry Greg any more than he already had. "About that, yeah. Doesn't feel like it, though."
"No, it doesn't. More for you than any of the rest of us, I'd imagine." He tossed back his pint and then said, more energetically, "Another round? Looks like the football's finally getting good."
John smiled. Distractions ultimately did about as much good as a plaster over a bullet wound, when he was back in his flat alone, but it meant something that Greg kept trying.
"That sounds great." He finished his beer, too. "Ta."
4A
In softer moments, sitting on a train or waiting for a flight, Sherlock liked to imagine that John would be happy to see him. He liked to think that what he'd done, what he'd been forced to do, wouldn't have ruined everything. He liked to think that John would forgive him quickly and things would go back to how they'd been before.
He knew it wouldn't be that simple. Human emotions never were and, anyway, John didn't even know he existed anymore. As far as John was concerned, Sherlock was dead and gone, never to return. But he would know again, someday when everything was finished, and until that day came Sherlock just had to keep breathing.
In and out. Repeat. It was such a simple rhythm, no trick to it at all.
Sherlock told himself frequently that John needed not to exist to him, either. It was better if John didn't exist. If he didn't exist, Sherlock had nothing to think about but the next name on his mental list.
(If he didn't exist, Sherlock had no reason to think about anything at all.)
None of it mattered but the work. It was the same as it had ever been in London, just with much higher stakes. He reminded himself, almost daily, that it was the sort of challenge he'd always wanted. He'd survived Buenos Aires with only a graze to his left shoulder, leaving the sixth target, a tiny woman who had been much stronger than she looked, dead in his wake as he moved on to Bolivia to find the seventh. And then there were only three to go.
Something had happened to him, though, as he raced across the globe on a half-crazed hunt for people who most of the time seemed to exist solely as names on a list he carried in his head. It was something that he'd always thought happened to other people, never himself, because Holmes men were of a separate breed and didn't experience life like everyone else.
He was afraid.
He'd never been so afraid before and he never wanted to be again. Fear was worse than hope by far and, when he wasn't too preoccupied by fear and hope and a myriad of other hateful things, he was amused by the fact that it was the very act of leaving John that had taught him to appreciate all the feelings his army doctor had insisted he'd had all along.
It had been two hundred and forty-five days, eleven hours, and three minutes, and he was still too far from home.
4B
Some days were better than others. Some days, John got up in the morning and didn't even hesitate as he made tea for one in an empty flat that had never even seen such a man as Sherlock Holmes. Some days, he went to work, ordinary nine-to-five, and only let himself think about Sherlock once. Some days, he was almost okay with the idea that Sherlock was dead. Some days he could almost forget all the things they'd almost had.
It always stopped at almost, but he'd taken a pragmatic approach to the disaster that had become his life and chose to see "almost" as improvement. It was good enough, most of the time.
Some days, however, were as bad as ever. Some days, he remembered everything, with the force of an oncoming train, and his knees buckled under the weight of all the might-have-beens. The place they'd never managed to reach, but should have because it would have been right. It shouldn't have been possible to remember things that had never happened (Sherlock's hands, and breath, and arms), but impossible things had somehow bled over into his reality and he didn't even question it anymore.
The little magnifying glass had disappeared one day. A cool, blustery Wednesday. He'd thought he'd left the thing sitting on the kitchen counter, but he must have put it in his pocket and dropped it somewhere instead because, when he got home from the clinic that night, it was gone. He hadn't seen it since, but as time went on he found that he had other things to worry about and he pretended he didn't miss carrying around that little reminder of a different time.
There was a man in his dreams and sometimes, in the early hours of the morning when it felt like John would never sleep again, he wondered if he was even real. But he had to have been real because John knew him. He knew him to be a man who had lived and breathed. A man who had disappeared one normal day when the sun was shining.
He wondered if he was finally going mad. Sometimes he wasn't quite sure whether or not he already had. And sometimes he didn't really care, either way.
5A
Every breath Sherlock took felt like both a blessing and a curse. He needed to keep breathing, because he needed to keep going and fighting (for John, always for John), but there were times when he was so tired he just wanted to give it up and let the ghost of Moriarty win once and for all. John and the others would be just as safe, and he'd finally be able to rest.
It hurt, getting up and moving on all the time, everything about it hurt, and it had been three hundred and fifty-three days, twenty hours, and forty-two minutes since he'd seen anything good in the world, which was far too long for anyone, even Sherlock Holmes.
There was a ball of ice nestled in the pit of his stomach. He'd carried it with him since the day he'd watched John say goodbye to him in the cemetery and it got a little colder all the time. He liked to imagine that it would melt when he finally got to see John again, if John managed to forgive him for everything he'd done wrong. If John weren't married to someone else and living a safe, happy, boring life with no room left for Sherlock and adventure.
Sherlock had no idea what John was doing in England. It wasn't his place to know and, anyway, he suspected that knowing would have been the end of him. He knew John lived because he'd taken steps to ensure that he would be notified if that ceased to be the case, but beyond that he'd kept himself in the dark. It was better to dream of John when there was time, and forget him when there wasn't, and leave certainty for after. For the first time in Sherlock's life, ignorance had proven to be an advantage.
There was only one man left standing between him and homecoming. The very last target on a list that had taken longer than he'd anticipated to complete. He'd overestimated himself and underestimated some of his opponents. Not all of them, because some of them had proven weak and truly stupid, but a few had been a challenge (a woman in Buenos Aires, a man in Cluj-Napoca, another woman in a place deep in the heart of Mexico with a name he'd never learned). The fight had nearly killed him, more than once, and he had scars to show for it.
He wondered if John would want to see them, when he got home.
"You're him, then?" The man was English and Sherlock wanted to laugh at the neatness of it. Ending where he'd begun. "You're the bloke's been killing everyone?"
"I'm he," Sherlock confirmed. It felt strange to speak his mother tongue again, after so much time away, like trying on an old shirt that had shrunk a bit in the wash. "And you're last."
That got him a smile, arrogant and annoying. "Saved the best for last, did you?"
"No." Sherlock shook his head. "Your surname begins with Z, that's all."
Looking back on it later, Sherlock would not be able to describe exactly what happened from there. It felt like one moment they were talking, almost like normal people who weren't out to kill each other, and the next moment the man was dead at his feet. It was the prospect of home, perhaps, of seeing John, that overcame him and ended the fight so quickly, with so little mess. He didn't know, even as he stood there, gasping for breath and exhilarated by success.
It didn't matter. He'd finally done what he'd set out to do and all that was left was to sleep a bit, dreaming of a man who was scarred and broken and perfect, and then find his way back to him.
(Three hundred and fifty-three days, twenty-one hours.)
5B
John felt like he never stopped running anymore, running away from his life and running towards Sherlock, who'd been dead for a year and still held just as much power over him as ever.
It wasn't fair, that a dead man could continue to overwhelm him, but John was too tired to resent it. It wasn't forgiveness, not exactly, because he wasn't sure if he'd ever be able to forgive Sherlock for killing himself (it got a little easier to think the words, every time he tried), but it was its own sort of acceptance. Yet another case of "good enough" that he'd learned to make the best of.
John was very, very good at working with what he had.
But it was hard still, sometimes, when he'd be sure for just a moment that the man on the corner, or in the passing cab, or getting off the tube, was him. And every time, he'd rush to catch up, only to find that the man who might have been Sherlock, but wasn't, was gone and John was there alone. It felt like chasing ghosts and he hated it because it was just another way he was surely driving himself mad.
(Yesterday, upon the stair, I met a man who wasn't there…)
He was better at being alone, though, and that was something. He hadn't been on a date since before everything had gone to hell, but he didn't mind it because he couldn't imagine giving himself to someone when he was still so broken. He wasn't ready for that sort of thing. But every once in a while, when his dreams had been nice and not too upsetting, he let himself hope that someday, with luck, he would be.
And then maybe, just maybe, he'd be able to live, rather than just go on existing.
6A
London was both the same as ever and startlingly different, but Sherlock was in love again from the moment he left the airport. England smelled different from everywhere else in the world, it smelled like home, and as he stared out the window of a proper black London cab he felt like he wanted to laugh and cry at once.
Mycroft was expecting him, and he knew that was a conversation he wouldn't be able to delay indefinitely, but it wasn't important. Nothing was important, except finding John. He still didn't know what he'd say when he got there, but he couldn't wait any longer, not when he was finally so close. London itself was only half of his homecoming; everything would be right with the world as soon as he heard John's voice again.
John was living alone in an ordinary flat on an ordinary street, number 32, and it was bland and at odds with everything they'd been and had together. But that was fine because it meant Sherlock hadn't been replaced. It meant John hadn't even tried and the sheer joy of knowing that was almost enough to make up for all those months of fear and grief.
He stared at the door for a long time (one minute and thirty-four seconds), still and cold with a different sort of nerves, before he could bring himself to reach for the knob.
John was standing at the kitchen counter, with his back to Sherlock, holding something in his hands. Sherlock stared at him and waited. In a moment he'd call out John's name and John would turn. John would turn to look at him. John would turn.
"John."
6B
The magnifying glass was back, sitting on the counter like it had never disappeared at all. It was the same one, there was no mistaking it, and John stared at it for a several minutes, not sure how he felt about seeing the thing again. He'd been so sure he'd lost it somewhere, so he'd put it out of his mind, that little piece of plastic that felt so much like holding a piece of the past, captured forever outside of time.
He'd just picked it up again when the door opened.
"John."
He turned around and his eyes met Sherlock's easily. It was a reflex, natural as breathing, as though all those months of bitter grief had suddenly been compressed into mere hours spent apart.
All he could do was stare, timelessness cradled in his hands.
you once had a dream of a man
he was gorgeous and he was real and he
hurt so much
Fandom: Sherlock (BBC)
Ship: Sherlock/John
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 5,239
Warnings: Implied violence, mild drug use, angst.
Summary: In the wake of the Fall, everything changed (you once had a dream of a man...).
Notes: [Written for the sherlockrebang] Endless thanks and credit to calamitybreak for the amazing fanmix behind this story. The italicized text at the beginning and end are pulled directly from the track listing, and some sections of the fic are meant to mirror the listing, so definitely make sure you don't skip the mix. I also used a line from the poem "Antigonish" by Hughes Mearns towards the end. And finally, thanks to my friend A, who isn't on LJ, for the eleventh hour rescue beta. ♥
you once had a dream of a man
he was scarred and he was broken and he was
so beautiful
A
It wasn't so difficult, being dead. Not once he got the hang of it, and Sherlock had always been very good at getting the hang of things.
He hadn't meant to watch John mourn him in the cemetery. He'd told himself that going was the wrong thing to do, but he'd found himself there, anyway, just out of sight. Just close enough to see him, which wasn't really close at all. And the hurt had hit him like a wave, stronger than he'd expected, leaving a strange tightness in his chest, right behind his sternum where it couldn't escape. The sort of pain that would cool into a ball of ice somewhere deep inside him and settle in forever.
It wasn't enough, that glimpse, but it was all he could allow himself to have. The sum of his feelings belonged to John, and that time was dead (like Sherlock was dead), so he hid them in a folder, deep in the hard drive of his mind, shrugged his shoulders, and walked away.
Mycroft was right about one thing: caring was not an advantage.
B
Time passed strangely, after Sherlock was gone. Minutes ticked by like years and then suddenly it was three days later and John wasn't sure where those minutes had gone. He'd taken to dividing everything into two categories: Sherlock and After-Sherlock (the time before Sherlock didn't seem to matter much anymore). And it was stupid and pointless and painful, but he also didn't know what else to do.
There was a hole in his chest where Sherlock had been, and he had a horrible, sickening feeling that nothing and no one would ever be good enough to fill it.
For God's sake, they'd just been friends. He'd said it so many times. Not his date, not his boyfriend, just his best mate. No matter what the Irene Adlers of the world had to say when he'd assured them once again that he and Sherlock weren't a couple (yes, you are), he'd never wanted more than what they had.
He hadn't. Not really.
1A
Sherlock had always been drawn to France. It was his grandmother's country and somewhere inside him he was still that gangly child captivated by her stories, whispered to him in Parisian French. Those stories were the first code he ever unraveled, as he got a little older and realized that the wolves she spoke of were people, and worked out the real reason why she would never go home.
He'd refused to speak for a month after she died and it was almost a tribute to her that, in the wake of Moriarty, he wouldn't be broken. It didn't matter that he wanted to be back at Baker Street, drinking tea and solving crimes. His grandmother had taught him that there would always be wolves in the world and he'd be damned before he let a single one them lay a hand on John. Or Mrs Hudson, or Lestrade, or anyone of the others, because he may not have been a hero, but he wasn't a villain, either. It was Moriarty's gift to him, in the end.
Five weeks into his stay in Paris, renting a tiny room under the name Vernet, he'd taken up smoking properly again, the nicotine patches long gone. It helped him think and there was no one around anymore to fret over his choices. His health had never been much of a priority to him, as long as his mind was taken care of.
"Monsieur?"
Sherlock looked up from the copy of Le Monde that had been left behind on the cafe table, snubbing out his cigarette. He'd read the daily papers religiously since leaving London, looking for anything that would help him stay one step ahead. He answered in French, "What do you want?"
"Would you like more coffee?" The server held up the pot in her left hand and Sherlock took in her badly chipped manicure and the tiny band of pale skin around the fourth finger. Recently broken engagement, going by the width of the ring. Messy, no motivation to maintain her nails. Perhaps even a defiant refusal to do so. People did things like that.
He observed, deduced, and said simply, "Yes."
As he watched her pour, he wondered if John would have been proud of him. Everyone had always been so keen on encouraging him to act less like himself, for the sake of getting along. Nothing like a swan-dive off a building to instill a bit of restraint.
He decided not to think about John. John was a distraction and he needed to keep his focus. Paris was just the beginning, somewhere to stop and strategize and determine the state of things. Lighting another cigarette, he admitted to himself that the prognosis was grim.
As long as he was dead, everyone was safe. But he didn't want to be dead, so that was only a temporary solution. He was a genius, imaginative and resourceful in ways normal people couldn't have even begun to fathom, but he was one man alone. Even if he ran forever, sooner or later he'd be found out. Everyone made a mistake in the end, even Sherlock Holmes.
Moriarty was gone, the memory of his final move lingering on the back of Sherlock's tongue with the bitter tang of defeat. But his network remained and, once Sherlock was discovered, they would see to it that their master's instructions were carried out. They had to be eliminated, then. Slowly and one by one, if that was what it took, like demolishing a building by hand. He could do it, he knew he could, but it would be a long, agonizing process.
The cigarette was only half-finished, but he ground it out sharply and stood. He'd wasted too much time already. The sooner he acted, the sooner he could return home to everything he'd left behind.
He didn't know what he'd say or do once he got there, but that was another problem for another day. If he didn't move, he'd never even get to try.
1B
Deafening silence. It was one of those overused literary phrases that John had never found very meaningful before, but Sherlock's absence changed that. If he felt like being honest, which he sometimes did, it changed everything. But he knew most people didn't react quite that strongly to the loss of a friend, so he tried to keep that part of it to himself. He didn't want to worry anyone, not when they already looked at him like he was going to fall to pieces any minute.
The Met didn't have any reason to call him anymore, but Greg did sometimes because that's what friends were for. They went to the pub for a pint or two and talked about normal things, like normal blokes. John was always thankful to get out for a few hours, but normal didn't fit him right anymore, like trying to squeeze into a suit he'd outgrown, and pretending for too long made his skin itch.
"It's okay to miss him," Greg said one Friday night, apropos of nothing. Five minutes ago, they'd been talking about football.
John looked down into his pint for a few seconds, then back up because he still wasn't a coward. "I know."
"I miss him, too," he went on, which was when John realized that this wasn't about him at all. "It's mad, isn't it? All those times I wished I could just get him out of my hair for five goddamn minutes and, now that he's gone, I miss him. Even if he… well, you know."
Everyone was very careful with what they said around John, who steadfastly held his ground when it came to the question of whether or not Sherlock Holmes had been a fake. John knew the truth, no matter what the evidence pointed to. He was sure his remaining friends and acquaintances thought he was just delusional with grief, but that was something they could respect, so they left him alone. It had put up some walls, or maybe just reinforced walls that were already there, but John could deal with that.
He nodded. "Sherlock is… was a force of nature. Can't help but miss him, can you? It's like living in a place where it's windy all the time, then the wind stops suddenly forever and you don't know what to make of the quiet."
John didn't tell Greg that he heard hushed whispers every time he went to sleep. Not quite identifiable, and certainly in his head because he wasn't quite that far gone yet, but it could only have been Sherlock. Or a figment of his imagination that he wanted to be Sherlock. He just wished he could make out the words.
Greg, two and a half pints in, nodded like he'd said something profound. "That's it, that's it exactly. Even though he was the most annoying sod to ever walk the earth, we were all used to him being around. It's too quiet now."
"Yeah," John agreed, finishing his beer. "It is."
2A
It had been ninety-seven days, five hours, and sixteen minutes.
Sherlock's brain kept the time, reliable as an atomic clock, the seconds ticking away in the back of his mind. Accuracy had never felt so hateful as it did from a darkened room in a run-down Romanian hotel.
Sherlock was used to everything being easy, but taking down Moriarty's network was hard in a way he'd never experienced before. He could outthink them, think circles around them in his sleep, but he was finding more and more that there was a sharp difference between knowing what to do and actually having the strength to do it.
There was a list in his head of all the people who had to die, organized neatly alongside boxes waiting to be checked. He'd killed two so far. One had been simple, in a suburb of Berlin, and the other had almost killed him first, in an alley of Cluj-Napoca. Such slow progress might have frustrated him once, but men who hid more than they fought couldn't really afford to be proud. Every death brought him one step closer to John and that was enough. It had to be enough.
(Ninety-seven days, five hours, and twenty minutes.)
He had a bit of space just then, a few hours to rest before moving on to the next target. He lay on the hotel room floor, twirling a syringe in his hands, and he could almost see the frown on John's face as he did so. He could almost hear him, stern and exasperated and fond all at once.
Sherlock, no.
"Yes," he murmured, forgetting for a moment that it was just him and an empty room in a country he'd never even wanted to visit in the first place. He apologized anyway, like it mattered, "Sorry."
He got silence for his trouble, but if he tried very, very hard, for just a moment he could feel the ghost of John's fingers through his hair.
(Ninety-seven days, five hours, and twenty-three minutes.)
2B
Even though John hadn't lived at Baker Street since Sherlock was… lost (it still hurt in an impossible way to even think about what had really happened), he found himself getting up in the morning, six days out of seven, expecting to walk into the same wreck of a sitting room, where he'd have to sidestep Sherlock's experiments to get to the toast and tea.
It wasn't healthy, he knew that, but he found himself extremely, irrationally resistant to so much as the idea of letting go. His therapist would have had a field day with it, if he wanted to take it to her, but he hadn't been to see her in weeks. He knew what she'd say: it's natural to want to hold onto the past, but you need to accept that he's gone and never coming back.
But he kept waking in the night to the sound of a violin, frozen in his bed with the total certainty that everyone was wrong and nothing was really what it seemed. There'd been something there, in Sherlock's voice, when he'd spoken to John from the roof. Something John wasn't quite ready to make sense of.
It's a trick. It's just a magic trick.
He couldn't let go. Not yet.
3A
Sherlock was beginning to wonder if this was what going mad felt like.
It didn't matter what city he was in, or what country, he was beginning to see John everywhere. He was in every cafe, on every train, at the corner of every street. Sherlock knew it was never really John, that his army doctor was safely back in England where he belonged, but there was always that split second of doubt when he was sure it was. That split second when he watched, and waited, and irrationally hoped that the person who wasn't John, but might have been, would turn and realize that Sherlock was right there behind him.
It was a horrid thing, hope.
But Sherlock was making progress; he'd taken down his third and fourth targets in Italy, the fifth in Argentina. The list was shrinking finally, bringing him, little by little, closer to home.
(One hundred and sixty-two days, and eleven minutes.)
There was a sixth in Buenos Aires, but word had gone out some number of weeks ago that someone was picking Moriarty's network off one by one, and this time they were ready. So Sherlock was laying low in an empty hotel room, two floors up from the one he'd rented under yet another borrowed name (he'd taken on so many he'd almost lost track of them all), sitting in the dark alone. The wolves would come looking for him soon. It was inconceivable that not a one of them would think to search the hotel and he was too tired to even try to be brave. They'd find him, or they wouldn't, but he wasn't going to go looking for them first. Not that night.
He closed his eyes, and let himself think about John, and waited.
3B
As the months crawled on, John tried to get out more frequently. It was what his therapist had always advised and, as much as he hated to admit it, she'd been right about that much at least. It helped him to get out of his dull, sterile flat for a while. Out into a world that had seemed so much more colorful before, but was still able to distract him a bit, now and then.
He'd found a pocket magnifying glass one day, identical to the one Sherlock had always carried. It had been lying on the floor outside the door to his flat, like someone had left it for him, and, unable to shake off the peculiar sensation of something being slightly out of joint, he'd picked it up. It felt like he had a piece of the past with him after that, like Sherlock was still there all the time, so he kept it. Just one more thing to keep to himself in the never-ending game of reassuring everyone that he was fine, and he found that he enjoyed little challenges like that when he happened to run into someone he knew.
Greg's smiles came easier than they had a few months earlier, when they met for their weekly pint. John was genuinely glad to see it - he'd never wanted anyone else to be miserable like he was.
"You still think about him a lot, then?" Greg asked, trying to keep his tone light and gentle and almost getting there. It was kind of funny how everyone seemed to avoid saying Sherlock's name. Or maybe they only did that around John.
John shrugged and sipped his beer. "Not as much as I used to. Back when it first happened, it was like I never stopped thinking about him, every minute of every day. Now it's more like every second or third minute."
Greg frowned, managing to look worried and understanding at the same time. "Well, you two were… you know, I don't even know what you were, but it was something. Something big. More than most people ever have. Never really understood it, myself, but he was different around you. Better. More human."
No, you don't understand, John thought, a bit madly. I loved him. I loved him and I didn't figure it out until he was gone and it was too late to tell him.
He couldn't say it. Sherlock would have known just by looking at him, or maybe he wouldn't have. Emotions had never been his strength.
"Yeah," he said instead, and it wasn't enough, but better that than nothing.
Greg's expression was hard to read. John thought he saw some disappointment. "It's been, what, about six months now?"
One hundred and ninety-four days, exactly, but John didn't say that either. Unlike Sherlock, he knew when to keep his mouth shut and he didn't want to worry Greg any more than he already had. "About that, yeah. Doesn't feel like it, though."
"No, it doesn't. More for you than any of the rest of us, I'd imagine." He tossed back his pint and then said, more energetically, "Another round? Looks like the football's finally getting good."
John smiled. Distractions ultimately did about as much good as a plaster over a bullet wound, when he was back in his flat alone, but it meant something that Greg kept trying.
"That sounds great." He finished his beer, too. "Ta."
4A
In softer moments, sitting on a train or waiting for a flight, Sherlock liked to imagine that John would be happy to see him. He liked to think that what he'd done, what he'd been forced to do, wouldn't have ruined everything. He liked to think that John would forgive him quickly and things would go back to how they'd been before.
He knew it wouldn't be that simple. Human emotions never were and, anyway, John didn't even know he existed anymore. As far as John was concerned, Sherlock was dead and gone, never to return. But he would know again, someday when everything was finished, and until that day came Sherlock just had to keep breathing.
In and out. Repeat. It was such a simple rhythm, no trick to it at all.
Sherlock told himself frequently that John needed not to exist to him, either. It was better if John didn't exist. If he didn't exist, Sherlock had nothing to think about but the next name on his mental list.
(If he didn't exist, Sherlock had no reason to think about anything at all.)
None of it mattered but the work. It was the same as it had ever been in London, just with much higher stakes. He reminded himself, almost daily, that it was the sort of challenge he'd always wanted. He'd survived Buenos Aires with only a graze to his left shoulder, leaving the sixth target, a tiny woman who had been much stronger than she looked, dead in his wake as he moved on to Bolivia to find the seventh. And then there were only three to go.
Something had happened to him, though, as he raced across the globe on a half-crazed hunt for people who most of the time seemed to exist solely as names on a list he carried in his head. It was something that he'd always thought happened to other people, never himself, because Holmes men were of a separate breed and didn't experience life like everyone else.
He was afraid.
He'd never been so afraid before and he never wanted to be again. Fear was worse than hope by far and, when he wasn't too preoccupied by fear and hope and a myriad of other hateful things, he was amused by the fact that it was the very act of leaving John that had taught him to appreciate all the feelings his army doctor had insisted he'd had all along.
It had been two hundred and forty-five days, eleven hours, and three minutes, and he was still too far from home.
4B
Some days were better than others. Some days, John got up in the morning and didn't even hesitate as he made tea for one in an empty flat that had never even seen such a man as Sherlock Holmes. Some days, he went to work, ordinary nine-to-five, and only let himself think about Sherlock once. Some days, he was almost okay with the idea that Sherlock was dead. Some days he could almost forget all the things they'd almost had.
It always stopped at almost, but he'd taken a pragmatic approach to the disaster that had become his life and chose to see "almost" as improvement. It was good enough, most of the time.
Some days, however, were as bad as ever. Some days, he remembered everything, with the force of an oncoming train, and his knees buckled under the weight of all the might-have-beens. The place they'd never managed to reach, but should have because it would have been right. It shouldn't have been possible to remember things that had never happened (Sherlock's hands, and breath, and arms), but impossible things had somehow bled over into his reality and he didn't even question it anymore.
The little magnifying glass had disappeared one day. A cool, blustery Wednesday. He'd thought he'd left the thing sitting on the kitchen counter, but he must have put it in his pocket and dropped it somewhere instead because, when he got home from the clinic that night, it was gone. He hadn't seen it since, but as time went on he found that he had other things to worry about and he pretended he didn't miss carrying around that little reminder of a different time.
There was a man in his dreams and sometimes, in the early hours of the morning when it felt like John would never sleep again, he wondered if he was even real. But he had to have been real because John knew him. He knew him to be a man who had lived and breathed. A man who had disappeared one normal day when the sun was shining.
He wondered if he was finally going mad. Sometimes he wasn't quite sure whether or not he already had. And sometimes he didn't really care, either way.
5A
Every breath Sherlock took felt like both a blessing and a curse. He needed to keep breathing, because he needed to keep going and fighting (for John, always for John), but there were times when he was so tired he just wanted to give it up and let the ghost of Moriarty win once and for all. John and the others would be just as safe, and he'd finally be able to rest.
It hurt, getting up and moving on all the time, everything about it hurt, and it had been three hundred and fifty-three days, twenty hours, and forty-two minutes since he'd seen anything good in the world, which was far too long for anyone, even Sherlock Holmes.
There was a ball of ice nestled in the pit of his stomach. He'd carried it with him since the day he'd watched John say goodbye to him in the cemetery and it got a little colder all the time. He liked to imagine that it would melt when he finally got to see John again, if John managed to forgive him for everything he'd done wrong. If John weren't married to someone else and living a safe, happy, boring life with no room left for Sherlock and adventure.
Sherlock had no idea what John was doing in England. It wasn't his place to know and, anyway, he suspected that knowing would have been the end of him. He knew John lived because he'd taken steps to ensure that he would be notified if that ceased to be the case, but beyond that he'd kept himself in the dark. It was better to dream of John when there was time, and forget him when there wasn't, and leave certainty for after. For the first time in Sherlock's life, ignorance had proven to be an advantage.
There was only one man left standing between him and homecoming. The very last target on a list that had taken longer than he'd anticipated to complete. He'd overestimated himself and underestimated some of his opponents. Not all of them, because some of them had proven weak and truly stupid, but a few had been a challenge (a woman in Buenos Aires, a man in Cluj-Napoca, another woman in a place deep in the heart of Mexico with a name he'd never learned). The fight had nearly killed him, more than once, and he had scars to show for it.
He wondered if John would want to see them, when he got home.
"You're him, then?" The man was English and Sherlock wanted to laugh at the neatness of it. Ending where he'd begun. "You're the bloke's been killing everyone?"
"I'm he," Sherlock confirmed. It felt strange to speak his mother tongue again, after so much time away, like trying on an old shirt that had shrunk a bit in the wash. "And you're last."
That got him a smile, arrogant and annoying. "Saved the best for last, did you?"
"No." Sherlock shook his head. "Your surname begins with Z, that's all."
Looking back on it later, Sherlock would not be able to describe exactly what happened from there. It felt like one moment they were talking, almost like normal people who weren't out to kill each other, and the next moment the man was dead at his feet. It was the prospect of home, perhaps, of seeing John, that overcame him and ended the fight so quickly, with so little mess. He didn't know, even as he stood there, gasping for breath and exhilarated by success.
It didn't matter. He'd finally done what he'd set out to do and all that was left was to sleep a bit, dreaming of a man who was scarred and broken and perfect, and then find his way back to him.
(Three hundred and fifty-three days, twenty-one hours.)
5B
John felt like he never stopped running anymore, running away from his life and running towards Sherlock, who'd been dead for a year and still held just as much power over him as ever.
It wasn't fair, that a dead man could continue to overwhelm him, but John was too tired to resent it. It wasn't forgiveness, not exactly, because he wasn't sure if he'd ever be able to forgive Sherlock for killing himself (it got a little easier to think the words, every time he tried), but it was its own sort of acceptance. Yet another case of "good enough" that he'd learned to make the best of.
John was very, very good at working with what he had.
But it was hard still, sometimes, when he'd be sure for just a moment that the man on the corner, or in the passing cab, or getting off the tube, was him. And every time, he'd rush to catch up, only to find that the man who might have been Sherlock, but wasn't, was gone and John was there alone. It felt like chasing ghosts and he hated it because it was just another way he was surely driving himself mad.
(Yesterday, upon the stair, I met a man who wasn't there…)
He was better at being alone, though, and that was something. He hadn't been on a date since before everything had gone to hell, but he didn't mind it because he couldn't imagine giving himself to someone when he was still so broken. He wasn't ready for that sort of thing. But every once in a while, when his dreams had been nice and not too upsetting, he let himself hope that someday, with luck, he would be.
And then maybe, just maybe, he'd be able to live, rather than just go on existing.
6A
London was both the same as ever and startlingly different, but Sherlock was in love again from the moment he left the airport. England smelled different from everywhere else in the world, it smelled like home, and as he stared out the window of a proper black London cab he felt like he wanted to laugh and cry at once.
Mycroft was expecting him, and he knew that was a conversation he wouldn't be able to delay indefinitely, but it wasn't important. Nothing was important, except finding John. He still didn't know what he'd say when he got there, but he couldn't wait any longer, not when he was finally so close. London itself was only half of his homecoming; everything would be right with the world as soon as he heard John's voice again.
John was living alone in an ordinary flat on an ordinary street, number 32, and it was bland and at odds with everything they'd been and had together. But that was fine because it meant Sherlock hadn't been replaced. It meant John hadn't even tried and the sheer joy of knowing that was almost enough to make up for all those months of fear and grief.
He stared at the door for a long time (one minute and thirty-four seconds), still and cold with a different sort of nerves, before he could bring himself to reach for the knob.
John was standing at the kitchen counter, with his back to Sherlock, holding something in his hands. Sherlock stared at him and waited. In a moment he'd call out John's name and John would turn. John would turn to look at him. John would turn.
"John."
6B
The magnifying glass was back, sitting on the counter like it had never disappeared at all. It was the same one, there was no mistaking it, and John stared at it for a several minutes, not sure how he felt about seeing the thing again. He'd been so sure he'd lost it somewhere, so he'd put it out of his mind, that little piece of plastic that felt so much like holding a piece of the past, captured forever outside of time.
He'd just picked it up again when the door opened.
"John."
He turned around and his eyes met Sherlock's easily. It was a reflex, natural as breathing, as though all those months of bitter grief had suddenly been compressed into mere hours spent apart.
All he could do was stare, timelessness cradled in his hands.
you once had a dream of a man
he was gorgeous and he was real and he
hurt so much