invite me to the war [1/3]
Invite Me to the War
Things don’t always go according to plan. Sometimes Mycroft Holmes and John Watson get married, sometimes Jim Moriarty is the perfect man to bring home to mother, and three years remains an unprofessional amount of time to fake your death, Sherlock Holmes.
[John Watson/Mycroft Holmes, Sherlock Holmes/Jim Moriarty, Sherlock/John]
Let me come over, I can waste your time I’m bored, invite me to the war
Sherlock is somewhere very, very high. Beyond the mesopause? He wonders, as its very dark and the earth is so far beneath his feet. Except its hot, blindingly hot, and his skin feels like a tapestry on the mend with needles and pins holding every inch of it to his body. Hot like charged molecules, which means, oh, the thermosphere. I’m in the thermosphere.
“How high are you?”
Light erupts suddenly into his vision, his dark corner of the universe, like the sun going supernova. His skin feels like its on fire, like he’s re-entering the atmosphere, and he sweats like he’s melting. Jim stands in front of the picture window he drew the curtains from, mercifully blocking some of the light. “Sherlock, your eyes are fucking saucers, how high are you?”
“Over three hundred kilometers,” Sherlock says, looking around. Hand crafted oak table and chairs, a gaudy chandelier relic from the sixties that Sherlock will someday swing from or die trying, a half dozen curtained windows. The dining room. “Or at least I was.”
“Welcome back, then,” Jim says evenly. He’s clutching a large, opal envelope with his fingernails desperately trying to tear the paper. Sherlock can tell Jim is straddling a delicate balance of amusement and murderous rage. He waits for Jim to continue, seven suns waltzing behind silhouetted shoulders out the window.
“I won’t ask how he knew where to reach us,” Jim murmurs, sliding the envelope across the table to Sherlock. The paper is heavy, a few grades below cardboard. The seal is broken, Mycroft’s red, wax initials cut in half on either side of the seam. Curious, he thinks.
Out loud, Sherlock says, “Mycroft’s life depends on annoying me at any given moment, he can and will find me anywhere.” He pulls another thick sheet out from the envelope. Gold cursive on vellum, how boring.
“It’s a wedding invitation,” Jim says.
“Obviously,” Sherlock replies.
Jim’s voice graduates a pitch, his tone slightly malicious and insufferably sing-songy. “Guess who your brother is marrying.”
Sherlock doesn’t have to guess. The text inscribed, even before he reaches the names, is so predictable it was clearly chosen by someone outside the happy couple to be, someone lazy, someone too preoccupied (no doubt with drinking) to actually put effort into anything outside of an internet service, someone who is bitter because her own marriage failed; someone basic and undeniably Harry Watson.
“John,” he says, and it comes out weaker than it should. Lights and words stop spinning. He has crashed devastatingly into the earth.
“This is too good. Didn’t I kidnap him and strap a bomb to his chest once?” Jim asks fondly. “Maybe we can do that again for the bachelor party.”
***
It’s the time of day where Sherlock falls asleep after twelve hours on a mixture of stimulants and lysergic acid. He whispers good-nights to the hallucinations oscillating across the wall. There is a subtle sadness knowing they won’t be there when he wakes up, giggling and making the familiar strange.
The familiar. It used to have something to do with whatever was in that blasé envelope, his brother and a confidant and a messy flat, oceans away. Now it's a high ceiling, pre-furnished des res with a criminal mastermind. He’s stopped solving mysteries, and started inventing crime scenes.
It’s been so long since there has been a mystery to solve, not to leave behind. At first glance the wedding doesn’t seem like a puzzle at all, more like something almost bound to happen considering the circumstances in London when he left. Sherlock remembers, however, Mycroft was never very good at being obvious, and to a lesser extent neither was John. He’s curious, and they knew, they knew he would come. With one eye open, he opens a new text window on his phone.
RSVP for one plus guest. What the fuck are you doing? SH
The wedding is in one week. What terrible planning.
***
It strikes him over the Arctic Ocean that if he’s going to John Watson’s wedding, John Watson must know he’s alive. Something inside Sherlock shudders.
***
Sherlock only dreams about past events. Sometimes they let him re-examine valuable information, because he never forgets a thing but occasionally it takes a subconscious trigger. Sometimes those dreams can be involuntary, and he dreams about things that help him in no way whatsoever.
Mother reading a bed time story, him guessing the end by the second page and whinging, “mummy, you’re boring me to sleep with these children’s stories,” and her kissing him on the head and saying, “that’s entirely the point, my dear.”
The first time he did a line of cocaine and his immediate disdain for everyone around him magnified by a thousand, but his love for that disdain magnified even more and lights and lights and lights and lights.
John sitting on the couch with a crossword, biting the tip of his pen, tapping the first clue over and over. Sherlock feeding him the answers through conversation, subtly slipping words and anagrams and clues throughout the day until the puzzle is finished. John thanking him with a look, but saying another million things with a different gaze he also never mentioned.
Jim between sips of tea saying, “I’ve come to find you’re much more useful to me alive than dead. I was going to ruin you, you know. Let me tell you the story about how I was going to destroy you and your reputation and everything you love, and then I won’t even need to tell you why you should come with me and help me take over the world. It starts with your brother.”
Loose lips sink ships.
Sherlock wakes up to turbulence in a private jet. They’re right above where the Atlantic fades into the British Isles, he and Jim, sleeping and sipping whiskey respectively while the plane adjusts to descend. Jim smiles at him all teeth and wide eyes saying, “I love a bumpy ride.”
He’s not entirely sure Jim isn’t finished trying to ruin him.
***
The train takes just under two hours to North Norfolk. Jim takes conference calls and in between reads Sherlock the news. Death of a CEO, fall of a corporation, unraveling of an industry. They all sound vaguely familiar on paper. When Jim shows him pictures, Sherlock huffs. He killed that man, he framed that mistress, they staged that crime scene, they leaked those plans to half a dozen foreign governments. The news seems so boring without any of the details.
“One of these days I’ll buy you a small South American country with our winnings,” Jim sighs, and ducks to press a soft kiss on Sherlock’s forehead, pausing to breathe in his curls. Sherlock leans into it, eyes closed.
“What are we doing here,” he murmurs, “instead of some small South American country.”
“Ruining Mycroft’s wedding is about on par with toppling a dictator, I’d say,” Jim replies. Which is one-hundred-and-ten percent true, except Sherlock reminds himself it’s John’s wedding too (John of all people, why?). And then there’s that echo, deep down where his heart is supposed to be, resembling something akin to feelings and Sherlock pushes down and down and Jim laughs because he knows.
The station is a little crowded, the summer weather bringing families in. Its breezy outside, a welcome change from dry Los Angeles heat that Sherlock has suffered the past few years, and reminds him of childhood summers. He tastes the salt in the air, and gulps it down on top of rising vulnerability.
“Is that your mum over there?” Jim nods his head forward, through the turnstile. There’s a woman sticking out like a sore thumb in the summer. She seems small and frail, with a pale complexion she shares with her sons. Her hands are folded in front of her, patiently, and its clear as Jim’s gaze wanders up that she’s held and loved her boys enough for two people, been a homemaker, and that Sherlock and Mycroft inherited their steel, pointed looks, long legs, and hard hearts from the Holmes patriarch.
Sherlock gives a curt wave. “That’s her.”
He leans in for a kiss when they reach her, and Sherlock’s mum is completely unreadable, eyes half closed. She says, “Sherlock, this must be your young man. Mycroft has told me about you, a consulting criminal? Sounds exciting.”
“Jim,” Jim says, and he doesn’t use his last name because this isn’t some sort of power play. This is Jim trying to avoid saying, there are numerous times I tried to emotionally and physically annihilate both your son and as-of-tomorrow son-in-law and please never call me anyone’s “young man” ever again or you’ll find yourself without a tongue, because he knows she’s clever, she’s got her boys’ wit mapped in the lines on her face, and he knows she loves John, because has there ever been a Holmes that hasn’t loved John?
Jim kisses his mum on the cheek and Sherlock realizes, heaven forbid, he is trying to impress her.
Sherlock stops feeling vulnerable and starts feeling terrified when she smiles and purrs, “charmed, call me Emilie.”
***
John is fond of the Holmes’ manor out near the coast. Mycroft has often managed to make wherever they stay in London both stuffy and empty and claustrophobic. Out here he feels free, loves the way it always smells like a warm front coming in during the summer. Likes the way he can pull on a cardigan and drown in the breeze where the grassy knoll fades into sand. Sentimentality resonates here.
He closes his eyes, resting his head on his arms folded behind his head. He doesn’t dare fall asleep. John Watson dreams too, and frequently of the past. In truth, he’s uncomfortable disclosing how many nights out of the year he still dreams about Sherlock. They are the loneliest dreams he’s ever had.
A car engine is getting louder in the distance, and John opens an eye to see who it is. Guests are expected later in the day, as is Mycroft who had hastily returned to London when some South Korean diplomat started threatening war again. He recognizes it as Emilie, who left this morning with a peck on his cheek and not a word. As the car gets closer he sees the outline of two figures, two men, two guests for the wedding? It’s a small guest list, barely past a dozen, and for the life of him he can’t think of who she would have picked up from the station.
But then he really racks his brain and thinks no, thinks no no no no no, because his fiancé is the most brilliant man in Western Europe, but can be an idiot in matters of the heart. And maybe this isn’t real, maybe he fell asleep on the calm beach facing the sea, because if Sherlock is in that car, God forbid, if Jim is in that car then this isn't even a dream, it's a fucking nightmare.
Things don’t always go according to plan. Sometimes Mycroft Holmes and John Watson get married, sometimes Jim Moriarty is the perfect man to bring home to mother, and three years remains an unprofessional amount of time to fake your death, Sherlock Holmes.
[John Watson/Mycroft Holmes, Sherlock Holmes/Jim Moriarty, Sherlock/John]
Let me come over, I can waste your time I’m bored, invite me to the war
Sherlock is somewhere very, very high. Beyond the mesopause? He wonders, as its very dark and the earth is so far beneath his feet. Except its hot, blindingly hot, and his skin feels like a tapestry on the mend with needles and pins holding every inch of it to his body. Hot like charged molecules, which means, oh, the thermosphere. I’m in the thermosphere.
“How high are you?”
Light erupts suddenly into his vision, his dark corner of the universe, like the sun going supernova. His skin feels like its on fire, like he’s re-entering the atmosphere, and he sweats like he’s melting. Jim stands in front of the picture window he drew the curtains from, mercifully blocking some of the light. “Sherlock, your eyes are fucking saucers, how high are you?”
“Over three hundred kilometers,” Sherlock says, looking around. Hand crafted oak table and chairs, a gaudy chandelier relic from the sixties that Sherlock will someday swing from or die trying, a half dozen curtained windows. The dining room. “Or at least I was.”
“Welcome back, then,” Jim says evenly. He’s clutching a large, opal envelope with his fingernails desperately trying to tear the paper. Sherlock can tell Jim is straddling a delicate balance of amusement and murderous rage. He waits for Jim to continue, seven suns waltzing behind silhouetted shoulders out the window.
“I won’t ask how he knew where to reach us,” Jim murmurs, sliding the envelope across the table to Sherlock. The paper is heavy, a few grades below cardboard. The seal is broken, Mycroft’s red, wax initials cut in half on either side of the seam. Curious, he thinks.
Out loud, Sherlock says, “Mycroft’s life depends on annoying me at any given moment, he can and will find me anywhere.” He pulls another thick sheet out from the envelope. Gold cursive on vellum, how boring.
“It’s a wedding invitation,” Jim says.
“Obviously,” Sherlock replies.
Jim’s voice graduates a pitch, his tone slightly malicious and insufferably sing-songy. “Guess who your brother is marrying.”
Sherlock doesn’t have to guess. The text inscribed, even before he reaches the names, is so predictable it was clearly chosen by someone outside the happy couple to be, someone lazy, someone too preoccupied (no doubt with drinking) to actually put effort into anything outside of an internet service, someone who is bitter because her own marriage failed; someone basic and undeniably Harry Watson.
“John,” he says, and it comes out weaker than it should. Lights and words stop spinning. He has crashed devastatingly into the earth.
“This is too good. Didn’t I kidnap him and strap a bomb to his chest once?” Jim asks fondly. “Maybe we can do that again for the bachelor party.”
***
It’s the time of day where Sherlock falls asleep after twelve hours on a mixture of stimulants and lysergic acid. He whispers good-nights to the hallucinations oscillating across the wall. There is a subtle sadness knowing they won’t be there when he wakes up, giggling and making the familiar strange.
The familiar. It used to have something to do with whatever was in that blasé envelope, his brother and a confidant and a messy flat, oceans away. Now it's a high ceiling, pre-furnished des res with a criminal mastermind. He’s stopped solving mysteries, and started inventing crime scenes.
It’s been so long since there has been a mystery to solve, not to leave behind. At first glance the wedding doesn’t seem like a puzzle at all, more like something almost bound to happen considering the circumstances in London when he left. Sherlock remembers, however, Mycroft was never very good at being obvious, and to a lesser extent neither was John. He’s curious, and they knew, they knew he would come. With one eye open, he opens a new text window on his phone.
RSVP for one plus guest. What the fuck are you doing? SH
The wedding is in one week. What terrible planning.
***
It strikes him over the Arctic Ocean that if he’s going to John Watson’s wedding, John Watson must know he’s alive. Something inside Sherlock shudders.
***
Sherlock only dreams about past events. Sometimes they let him re-examine valuable information, because he never forgets a thing but occasionally it takes a subconscious trigger. Sometimes those dreams can be involuntary, and he dreams about things that help him in no way whatsoever.
Mother reading a bed time story, him guessing the end by the second page and whinging, “mummy, you’re boring me to sleep with these children’s stories,” and her kissing him on the head and saying, “that’s entirely the point, my dear.”
The first time he did a line of cocaine and his immediate disdain for everyone around him magnified by a thousand, but his love for that disdain magnified even more and lights and lights and lights and lights.
John sitting on the couch with a crossword, biting the tip of his pen, tapping the first clue over and over. Sherlock feeding him the answers through conversation, subtly slipping words and anagrams and clues throughout the day until the puzzle is finished. John thanking him with a look, but saying another million things with a different gaze he also never mentioned.
Jim between sips of tea saying, “I’ve come to find you’re much more useful to me alive than dead. I was going to ruin you, you know. Let me tell you the story about how I was going to destroy you and your reputation and everything you love, and then I won’t even need to tell you why you should come with me and help me take over the world. It starts with your brother.”
Loose lips sink ships.
Sherlock wakes up to turbulence in a private jet. They’re right above where the Atlantic fades into the British Isles, he and Jim, sleeping and sipping whiskey respectively while the plane adjusts to descend. Jim smiles at him all teeth and wide eyes saying, “I love a bumpy ride.”
He’s not entirely sure Jim isn’t finished trying to ruin him.
***
The train takes just under two hours to North Norfolk. Jim takes conference calls and in between reads Sherlock the news. Death of a CEO, fall of a corporation, unraveling of an industry. They all sound vaguely familiar on paper. When Jim shows him pictures, Sherlock huffs. He killed that man, he framed that mistress, they staged that crime scene, they leaked those plans to half a dozen foreign governments. The news seems so boring without any of the details.
“One of these days I’ll buy you a small South American country with our winnings,” Jim sighs, and ducks to press a soft kiss on Sherlock’s forehead, pausing to breathe in his curls. Sherlock leans into it, eyes closed.
“What are we doing here,” he murmurs, “instead of some small South American country.”
“Ruining Mycroft’s wedding is about on par with toppling a dictator, I’d say,” Jim replies. Which is one-hundred-and-ten percent true, except Sherlock reminds himself it’s John’s wedding too (John of all people, why?). And then there’s that echo, deep down where his heart is supposed to be, resembling something akin to feelings and Sherlock pushes down and down and Jim laughs because he knows.
The station is a little crowded, the summer weather bringing families in. Its breezy outside, a welcome change from dry Los Angeles heat that Sherlock has suffered the past few years, and reminds him of childhood summers. He tastes the salt in the air, and gulps it down on top of rising vulnerability.
“Is that your mum over there?” Jim nods his head forward, through the turnstile. There’s a woman sticking out like a sore thumb in the summer. She seems small and frail, with a pale complexion she shares with her sons. Her hands are folded in front of her, patiently, and its clear as Jim’s gaze wanders up that she’s held and loved her boys enough for two people, been a homemaker, and that Sherlock and Mycroft inherited their steel, pointed looks, long legs, and hard hearts from the Holmes patriarch.
Sherlock gives a curt wave. “That’s her.”
He leans in for a kiss when they reach her, and Sherlock’s mum is completely unreadable, eyes half closed. She says, “Sherlock, this must be your young man. Mycroft has told me about you, a consulting criminal? Sounds exciting.”
“Jim,” Jim says, and he doesn’t use his last name because this isn’t some sort of power play. This is Jim trying to avoid saying, there are numerous times I tried to emotionally and physically annihilate both your son and as-of-tomorrow son-in-law and please never call me anyone’s “young man” ever again or you’ll find yourself without a tongue, because he knows she’s clever, she’s got her boys’ wit mapped in the lines on her face, and he knows she loves John, because has there ever been a Holmes that hasn’t loved John?
Jim kisses his mum on the cheek and Sherlock realizes, heaven forbid, he is trying to impress her.
Sherlock stops feeling vulnerable and starts feeling terrified when she smiles and purrs, “charmed, call me Emilie.”
***
John is fond of the Holmes’ manor out near the coast. Mycroft has often managed to make wherever they stay in London both stuffy and empty and claustrophobic. Out here he feels free, loves the way it always smells like a warm front coming in during the summer. Likes the way he can pull on a cardigan and drown in the breeze where the grassy knoll fades into sand. Sentimentality resonates here.
He closes his eyes, resting his head on his arms folded behind his head. He doesn’t dare fall asleep. John Watson dreams too, and frequently of the past. In truth, he’s uncomfortable disclosing how many nights out of the year he still dreams about Sherlock. They are the loneliest dreams he’s ever had.
A car engine is getting louder in the distance, and John opens an eye to see who it is. Guests are expected later in the day, as is Mycroft who had hastily returned to London when some South Korean diplomat started threatening war again. He recognizes it as Emilie, who left this morning with a peck on his cheek and not a word. As the car gets closer he sees the outline of two figures, two men, two guests for the wedding? It’s a small guest list, barely past a dozen, and for the life of him he can’t think of who she would have picked up from the station.
But then he really racks his brain and thinks no, thinks no no no no no, because his fiancé is the most brilliant man in Western Europe, but can be an idiot in matters of the heart. And maybe this isn’t real, maybe he fell asleep on the calm beach facing the sea, because if Sherlock is in that car, God forbid, if Jim is in that car then this isn't even a dream, it's a fucking nightmare.