Fic for winter_hermit: Rags of Light
Title: Rags of Light
Recipient: winter_hermit
Author: fleetwood_mouse
Characters/Pairings: John Watson/Sherlock Holmes, Harry Watson
Verse: BBC
Rating: Teen
Warnings/Notes: magical realism, bamf!John, kidlock, mild descriptions of injuries, natural death of an animal, friends to lovers, title shamelessly stolen from a Leonard Cohen song
Summary: It was outside the ordinary, to be sure, but John had always been able to rely on his strange ability to heal. Until Sherlock, that was.
“The limp’s really bad when you walk, but you don’t ask for a chair when you stand, like you’ve forgotten about it, so it’s at least partly psychosomatic. That suggests the original circumstances of the injury were probably traumatic-wounded in action, then. Wounded in action, suntan-Afghanistan, or Iraq.”
“Amazing,” John had said. Outside the cab, the streets of London went whizzing by in a barrage of lights faster even than this stream of words, than darting quicksilver eyes.
Amazing, he’d said. And it had been, it really had, and that’s why he hadn’t bothered to correct the little details. They were too unbelievable to begin with, and this man was frankly too remarkable for it to matter anyway. And, for that matter, so was John’s story.
=======
But growing up in London, he might never have known at all. The city's concrete streets gave him few opportunities for the chance encounters, for the tiny creatures clinging to blades of grass and leaves and twigs. It was only at his grandparents’ house in the country that he first started to see.
He was catching frogs with Harry and she was stronger than he-she was the older one and that made her bolder, more confident, more reckless. She was less inclined toward this kind of thing, though. It was harder for her to sit still and wait, allow herself to fade until she became part of the scenery and could lure the frogs into the palm of her hand. She would never really be good at that, and so Johnny caught one for her, even though he was the younger one, even though he was the baby, and he smiled at her triumphantly.
Harry squealed in excitement and put out her hands. When John tried to hand her the frog, though, it squirmed and, she was too keyed up, too eager and all John could hear was her gigging. Then, she cried out and the frog dropped limply down into the grass limply and she stared down in horror.
Johnny stared too. The creature looked so sad and pitiful and afraid, trying to hop away from them on its ruined legs but getting nowhere. Johnny had no real grasp of death back then, hadn’t really understood what it meant when Mummy tried to explain why they couldn’t see Auntie Mary anymore, but something about the frog’s helpless kicks, he did recognise and it made him despair, for the first time in his six short years. Harry started to cry.
“Oi,” Johnny said, and it surprised him to hear his voice aloud. And something in his chest... moved; some other authority came forward and Johnny stepped aside, taking with him his childish fear and uncertainty and confusion.
The frog stopped trying to escape. It looked up at him calmly as he took it in his hands. Harry, too, had stopped moving, stopped her crying and was just watching him, staring as placidly and open-mouthed as she did at the telly, perfectly still.
The frog should have felt slick and cold against his skin, but all Johnny could feel was a sort of staticky warmth that began to spread outward from the palms of his hands, growing stronger by the second. His knee bent without his permission, and he felt a strange tickle crawl up his calf-a shock of pain, and his leg nearly went out from under him.
“Ouch,” he said, and it was his little boy voice again and for a second, he marvelled at how far away he sounded, but then just like that, it was gone, whatever it was, and he was Johnny Hamish Watson again.
“Give him here. We’ll make them race!” Harry said, and Johnny almost jumped because that was the same thing she had said only a moment ago. She looked impatient now, too, acting normal-like she didn’t remember, like she hadn’t seen.
He opened his mouth but nothing came out because what could he say? Nothing that wouldn’t result in her calling him a dummy (don’t you know anything Johnny, don’t you know that’s not real, only a baby would believe that), and he couldn’t argue with her that it had been real, had to have been since they’d both seen it, because she was two whole years older than he and she’d even started learning proper maths at school while he sometimes still had to count on his fingers.
“Come on!” cried Harry impatiently, and Johnny swallowed hard and tamped it all down, the memory, the strange feeling of otherness, the words that wouldn’t come.
“All right,” he said, and held out his hands. This time, she was very careful when she took the frog from him, gentle and slow, and he almost wondered if she didn’t remember after all.
And Harry’s frog won the race, bounding and leaping on his strong legs across their makeshift finish line. Even after they went back to London, Johnny never forgot what had happened there, but he never mentioned it to Harry either. Not even the next year when he found her searching his closet for secret panels, knocking on walls and floors, and made him swear that if he went to Narnia or somewhere like it, he had to bring her too.
=======
After that, it was all little things-bugs and mice mostly, and once a goldfish-but he didn’t meet many animals in the grey city. Maybe some of the boys at school-the bigger, crueler ones-would have been different about it, would have made opportunities to practice, but Johnny was gentle and he didn’t take things apart to put them back together, not even appliances like Charlie Patterson did.
And besides, he didn’t really think about it that often. There was school to worry about, and football and then rugby, and anyway, it wasn’t exactly if he remembered it most of the time. If someone showed him a mouse caught in a trap, then yes, that same otherness would well up again, slow at first and then all at once, and if he took it in his hands, next would come that same heat, that same answering pain. And just like Harry, nobody ever seemed to see, and when it was over and he was back to being just Johnny, the memory would retreat to some foggy place until he needed it again. Until then, however, he would just be a normal boy, pulling Harry’s pigtails ‘til she screamed and reading under his covers with a torch when he was supposed to be asleep.
=======
The first time that he saw something dead, he was in Regent’s Park with Harry after school. They’d been feeding the ducks with the remains of a bag of crisps, but when those were gone, Harry went to sit underneath a tree and write in her diary. She was mad for diaries that year, and she kept several, which she exchanged with her friends at school, but John had long ago learned that they couldn’t be less interesting.
Their mum would be there to pick them up soon, so Johnny decided to find somewhere to amuse himself for the last half hour or so. He’d stay close enough that they could find him easily and he wouldn’t get scolded. Harry wasn’t much fun to play with anymore, so he’d gotten good at entertaining himself.
He’d hardly gotten anywhere at all when he noticed it: a normal, grey pigeon, lying motionless on the grass. There were birds like it all over London (he was sure there had to be a hundred at least) and he had always liked trying to catch them, but no matter how fast Mum said he was getting at football practice, their wings always won out over his short legs. This was a fascinating chance to examine one up close.
He knelt down beside the bird on the wet grass, enthralled by how still it was, so different to the body of a live bird or a stuffed animal. He felt an odd sense of stillness in his own chest as well-not quite fear or foreboding, but some dormant instinct recognising that this was death, that he should hold his breath because the world’s balance was fragile and impossible to predict.
Completely absorbed, Johnny reached down to pick up the bird. He was nervous, but it didn’t look scary or dirty, and he was surprised at the way it felt in his hands. He’d held a bird before, his friend Vincent’s budgie, but this felt different. The feathers were cold, and the little bones seemed harder, closer to the skin than he remembered.
He pinched the tip of its wing between his fingers and finned it out to its full wingspan. It was strange to move another creature like this, to experience no resistance beyond simple physics, to explore the way muscles moved when there was no spirit behind them.
A queer feeling began to come over him then, an odd, floating sense of potential, like the tension of the handlebars of his bicycle at the top of the hill. He remembered with a thick, visceral intensity that day of catching frogs with Harriet - the wet smell of the creek, the rich earth beneath his feet, the sunburst spreading tiny capillaries throughout his body as he took the frog in his hands.
It was no different, really, to marking his height against the wall, or passing a football with his friends, backing further away each time. It was exploring the limits of his potential, pushing boundaries to find out what his place was in the world. It was easy. It felt natural. It wasn't even a choice, really. He just started.
At first there was nothing, then a small twinge, a tingling-barely there, almost like it was asking permission. Johnny just watched from the sidelines as it took over, and he began to realise, with a wave of giddy, incredulous triumph, that it was happening.
I'm doing it, he thought feverishly, I'm actually-
Then it slammed into him like a thunderclap, flattening his ribs with its gripping and twisting and whirling. The air in his lungs was filthy and rank, rising like great arms of smoke to clutch at his windpipe. He started to cough, racking his chest to clear his airway but it did no good- even the clean air of Regent's Park was thick with the putrid purple stench that he had no way to name.
No, he thought, no no no, and his lips began to form the word in an endless mantra but whether he managed to summon up any sound, he could only guess.
Then it came on like a great blow to the side of his head, and the force of it echoed in his ears as he swayed sideways, not sure whether his feet would anchor him to the ground, knowing full well that he could be set to careen off into some fearsome abyss. He wanted to dig his fingers into the green grass and tether himself to the earth but he couldn't seem to get hold of them and control their movement, and everything was so cold and so loud.
"No!" he shrieked, and the inhuman effort of it ripped his lips apart like tectonic plates, and the bird tumbled lifeless and grey from his grasp. He could still taste the smoke as well as his own blood and a thousand other things that filled him with a blinding, pounding numbness, and he collapsed in on himself, chest burning and heaving but breathing air again.
Johnny knew he was too big to cry but by the time his mum found him, he was choking on his sobs, tears painting white streaks through the dirt and snot on his face. She gathered him up into her lap and he didn't even fight it as she began to stroke his hair and call him her baby, her love, and ask him what on earth had happened. She looked down at the bird lying in the grass in front of him, and she went still for one terrifying moment, where Johnny wasn’t sure what scared him more: that she wouldn’t see this either, or that she’d think he’d been the one to put it there.
But she was his mother and she knew him and she loved him and thank God, she understood almost immediately that her son was only trying to put it back together.
“Oh Johnny,” she said, kissing his hair, wiping his face. “My poor, sweet boy.” He buried his face in the softness of her chest, breathed in the familiar smell and tried to will the cold and the fear away.
She made his favourite spaghetti for dinner, even though he didn't manage to eat anything, not even the Battenberg for afters. But he did fall asleep quickly that night, with no dreams and just black, black, black until he woke. And he was already feeling better the next morning at the breakfast table, where she asked him if he’d ever thought he might want to be a doctor.
=======
He wondered for a while if it might get stronger with practice but he never really seemed to progress far beyond his initial limits. And while he never tried to cross that boundary again, he gradually managed to learn some of the other limits.
There was Malley, for example, who became Harry’s cat after John found him crouched in the road. He had been hit by a car and was hurt too badly to even protest when John knelt down beside him and took his broken spine between his two hands. The sharpness of the answering pain as the cat’s spine tried to knit itself back together was a burning shock like John had never felt before, and it doubled him over but a moment later, there was squirming warmth under his hands, moving and mewling, and he carried Malley home wrapped in his jumper. The cat seemed none the worse for the wear, but John’s bruises lasted for days.
He learned to change his clothes quickly, praying all the while that no knock would come before he could get his shirt settled over his head and tucked in. But even once the bursts of sunset colours began to fade from his skin, if he twisted like a snake in front of the full-length mirror in his parents’ room, he could see a the beginnings of a scar marking the path of the break, straight and true update his spine. Bruises and scrapes could be explained away by rugby, but Johnny knew that he could hardly expect more major injuries to remain secret.
And when Malley got old, Johnny hadn’t been able to do anything for him either. Harry was in her first year of uni by then, and Malley was slowing, more and more every day. Certainly that would mean fewer tortured, terrified mice and cockroaches for John to hone his skills on, but his heart ached to think that this shaggy, purring presence that had often slept at the foot of his bed would soon disappear from their lives.
Harry moved Malley’s bed to her room to be with him all the time. He had once slept wherever the spirit took him, but now he seemed to accept that his last days would be spent beside Harry’s bed, being handfed morsels of his favourite tinned tuna when he had any appetite at all.
John waited until Harry was out at a friend’s house, guaranteed not to be back for several hours (honestly, he had no idea what she could possibly have in common with airheaded Donna Horne, but it was basically fact that she’d be gone for hours and come back with her head in a cloud). Then, he took the opportunity to slip into her room and crouch beside Malley’s bed, contemplating running his hands over his fur, steeling himself for the bumpy matted clumps and bones now sticking through his thin hide.
Like he had so many times before, John reached out to stroke but even as his fingers carded through Malley’s fur, he could feel that he was still himself; nothing moved him aside, nothing came forward to guide his movements. He squeezed his eye shut and tensed his muscles; he gritted his teeth and pushed and willed, but nothing.
Defeated, he let his hands go slack on Malley’s shabby coat. Malley looked up at him listlessly and mewed, and John’s heart tripled in weight in his chest. He scratched him under his chin and fed him a bit of cheese, which Malley ate gratefully, and John understood that there was nothing he could do but try to keep him comfortable. There was a natural order to things and he had to respect it, at least to some extent.
=======
The reason why remained unexplained, but John came to understand its limits and learned to abide by its rule of quid pro quo. These things meant that he couldn’t rely on his power all the time, but still, he liked the idea of becoming a doctor. Even as he struggled through his organic chemistry class in uni, he was sure that he had chosen the right path. He'd have wanted to be a doctor even if he hadn’t been able to heal the way he could-the instinct, the desire to step forward and help was part of him, and he had no doubt that what he was meant to do was to ease suffering, in whatever way he could.
And all that aside, it was great to be away at uni. Uni meant a lot of things-not just that he could study subjects that were useful, that he could use in a significant way, but it also meant pints with his mates after class, life without a curfew, and finally being able to establish an identity for himself outside the shadow cast by the lady-killer Harry-not-Harriet Watson.
Or it did until Mum died, anyway, all of a sudden. A shame, an accident, a tragedy, as his relatives all told him after the funeral as they got progressively drunker. But to John, what it really was simple-a rainy night, a drunk, a faulty set of brakes-and preventable, or it would have been if he had only been home.
At least it was quick; she can’t have felt anything, they said as if that would comfort him, and it just made him want to scream because it couldn’t be true-there would have been time, there would have if he had only been there. John knows in his heart that he could have saved her.
And with Mum went the money-not that there was so much to begin with, but worse once Father lost his job because the only thing he could seem to commit to day after day was trying to drink up whatever was left. Soon enough, Harry began to do the same, and when John learned that the military would be willing to sponsor his studies in exchange for a few years of service, it was barely even a choice.
=======
The second assignment, years later, was a choice, though-in the sense that it was voluntary, anyway. The reasons behind it were much the same as his original enlistment, though there was even less keeping him in London these days.
Even at the surgery, he'd never felt much temptation to use his power. From time to time, there would be a situation where he felt that he could, if he wanted to, where something thrummed through his veins and darkened the edges of his vision, but he always chose to fight the urge and it would soon recede.
It helped to keep a level head about the whole thing. Rationally, John knew that it wouldn't help anyone if he suddenly collapsed from whatever illness or injury the patient had come in with, and miraculous recoveries attracted a lot of attention and left the surgery with confusing paperwork, so it was easy to leave it up to the natural order of things.
This was doubly true in the war when he found himself treating combat wounds and there was simply too much suffering for him to think about taking it all on himself. Also, to be honest, he didn't want to consider what might happen if he tried to heal an amputation, which was one of the most common injuries they dealt with.
So that was why he hadn’t actually done it for years when he found himself in the caravan. The blast was staggering-before he even heard it, John felt its force, a barrelling wall of heat and strength. It took a few blazing, interminable seconds for the thunder to reach his ears, and then they rang until he was as deaf as a bell.
The explosion knocked them back, but then they were on their feet soon enough, vaulting over the side of their jeep to survey the wreckage of the leading truck. It didn’t look like there could be any survivors, but John had seen a lot of things on the battlefield, terrible things mostly but also enough miracles that he could pray that it was not all just glossy eyes and slack limbs and blood dribbling arrhythmically over grey, cooling skin.
It wasn’t long before he heard a groan from the mound of debris, and then he was digging away like some kind of mole, but he found his man, with blood pooling wetly in the creases of his fatigues, with a deep gash in his thigh cut by the windshield glass, breath coming in ragged gasps. John pushed back his helmet to check his airway and it was Timothy Cooper, red hair matted down with sweat, grey eyes wild and roaming.
John barely knew Timothy, to tell the truth, but he knew him enough to recognise him as a good man. During a raid, John had seen Timothy stop a group of soldiers from pissing on the Quran, and he’d also seen him step up to keep his subordinates in line around women and children, even if it hadn’t made him popular. Maybe those were such little things, such incredibly insignificant gestures among all the pain they were causing every day, but fuck if it hadn’t been the right thing to do.
John knew that he had a wife back home, just like the doomed ones always did in the movies; he’d seen pictures and she was young and pregnant and she beamed at the camera like the man on the other side of it was her source of light. And John would have done anything for he and Harry to have had a father like that, a man who knew what was the right thing to do. He bent over Timothy’s still form without any clear idea what he was doing, but then he found himself yanking that shard of glass upward and clear out.
The femoral artery might have been severed, but there was too much blood to say for sure. Timothy was groaning and burbling, though John couldn’t hear him because he had already moved aside and let the other presence take over. His hands, which if they belonged to anyone else would be impotently trying to staunch the flow of salty hot blood, were succeeding and growing warmer, almost vibrating with the power flowing through him. Timothy gasped, and then John’s leg did go out from under him, and he started to pitch forward, balancing himself in a pool of drying blood and clumping sand.
It couldn’t be a second later that the ambush came, and odds were that John would have ended up flat on the ground anyway, even if it hadn’t been that moment that he took a round to his left shoulder. The bullets kicked up sand around him, and as his head lolled sideways and the world went grey, he felt long-fingered hands-Timothy, whole, alive, bewildered-ghosting over his clothing, checking his pulse, and then, incongruously, he thought of his father and of Harry, alone in her new cramped apartment, the both of them too stubborn to apologise and love each other again, drinking themselves into identical stupors on either side of a Christmas Eve.
When he woke up in hospital, pumped full of numbing drugs, he reached through the fog to move his leg, to kick it like he had in swimming lessons, and when he felt the muscle jerk and cramp in painful protest, he smiled and let himself drift away again.
=======
So Sherlock wasn’t wrong when he said that the circumstances of the injury were traumatic, but he hadn’t really got it quite right either. It was interesting to have a secret from this mad genius, this glowing supernova of a man, and John couldn’t help but wonder how long he could keep it up.
He’d heard Sherlock’s thoughts on the improbable versus the impossible, but somehow he couldn’t quite bring himself to believe that all of this could be deduced or even theorised, much less believed. Part of the reason he stuck around was to see how long he can pull it off. And the rest of the reason, well, by the time John got that one figured out, he was already in too deep to leave and save himself the heartache. And besides, with the life Sherlock lived, he might need John someday and so John stayed.
It wasn’t long before that day came. It was nothing like John would have expected, though; just a wannabe gangster who managed to grab Sherlock by the lapels of that great show-off of a coat, and who was strong enough and quick enough to crash that brilliant head through a picture window, dangling him there four storeys up, stopping John’s heart.
He didn’t feel his feet as they carried him up the last few steps, nor his lungs burning like dusty sands, but by the time he reached the top, Sherlock had fought his snarling way back to this side of the windowpane and knocked the small time criminal senseless on his back, and thank God for that because that wasn’t the way things are supposed to go. Nobody so minor, so short-sighted and insignificant, was going to be the one to take out the great Sherlock Holmes.
But there was blood staining his collar and running down his neck, before John could get to him, he was on his knees and gasping, eyes turned blindly upward and mouth gaping open like a fish. John fell to his knees beside him, nearly dissolving with relief as his fear and the heart-pounding terror were replaced by that other presence, and his hands confidently sought out the ragged wound, damming the river of red that was worth more to him than anything else in the world.
Sherlock grabbed John’s wrists and went still, except for the pulse that John could see hammering away in his throat, and John felt a burning rip, felt his own skin beginning to tear like the seams of a cheap jacket and then his blood begins to flow, slow and steady, nothing like the gushing river which had almost felled his friend.
And just like that, Sherlock was moving again, eyes alight with the wonder of discovery, of understanding.
“Of course,” he gasped, fingers curling blindly in the sleeves of John’s jumper. “The arowana. The tanks, the... John!” And then he was on his feet and running, and John was charging after him, one hand pressed to the gash in his throat.
“Bastard,” John heaved, drawing his gun as he rounded the corner. Trust Sherlock to lose John’s miracle in the theatrics of his own genius revelation.
“John!” cried Sherlock, maddeningly just out of sight. “John, hurry up!”
John cursed again but he could feel himself smiling.
=======
He had saved lives before. He had saved Sherlock’s life before. He knew his limits, but this shouldn’t have been one of them.
Recently, he’d found himself remembering it more often-the window glass, the spike of fear, Sherlock’s flashing eyes. Each time, the memory took on a more desperate quality. Each detail became an item on a checklist, one more piece of proof that he had done it before, that he had the power to do it. He ran through them over and over in his mind, as if by collecting sufficient evidence, he could appeal and rewrite that day as it should have been.
On that morning at St. Bart’s, what had been different? Why hadn’t he been enough? Why had he failed Sherlock?
John wanted to throw these questions at Ella’s feet and demand an explanation, implore her to talk for once and put her degree to use puzzling this out for him. But she wasn’t his unraveler of riddles-she didn’t have any answers for him. And how could John rely on her now, now that he’d had his psychosomatic limp cured over dinner, his psyche rolled out and untangled like a skein of yarn? Therapy was ruined for him, as was normal human interaction, all because of Sherlock, who probably wouldn’t even have believed a lick of his story anyway.
But even if there had been someone for him to talk to, it wasn’t exactly the kind of riddle that lent itself to discussion. The premise was too unbelievable to begin with, and his story would inevitably be written off as grief-induced wish fulfilment, survivor’s guilt, or other emotional trauma.
Mostly, he tried to work it out for himself, though it didn’t seem to be leading him anywhere. He recognised that his deductive reasoning skills were woefully inadequate but that didn’t stopped him being frustrated when it didn’t seem to make any logical sense. Bad injuries, near fatal injuries: those he could handle, if at an expense to his own health. And he could heal human beings just as well as animals; Timothy had proved that. And death? The evidence suggested it was within his power, albeit for an even steeper price.
Here, though, John knew he would not have hesitated to pay that price. The thought didn’t come out of some vague sense of altruism or a soldier’s duty to queen and country; Sherlock Holmes had been a man the world had needed-a great mind and a great man and, against all odds, a good man. There was no one like him in the world and John doubted that there ever would be. He wouldn’t have needed even a moment to decide to make the trade. While he had watched from his place on the street below, fear and bile rising slowly in his throat, he had kept his panic at bay because he had known that whatever happened, he could fix it. John would rather have faced the fear and the putrid smoke and whatever lay beyond it than stand helplessly by, watching his only true friend bleeding out on the cold pavement.
And yet that was exactly what had happened. He had dragged himself to his feet so that he could fall to his knees beside Sherlock again, and he had taken that limp hand in his own and... nothing. No thrumming light, no warmth, none of that otherworldly calm. It had been the kind of helplessness he had only experienced in dreams, something he had always taken for granted being snatched away irrevocably.
No matter how he looked at it, it just didn’t make sense. But so little of his life with Sherlock had, and so John knew that logically, ultimately, he’d have to accept that he wasn’t going to get any answers, that it had just been a senseless tragedy and an erratic, unstable man. So he gave up and he knew not to wait for answers, and he wasn’t holding out for resolution anymore, hadn’t been for a long time.
Neither did he expect to come home to Baker Street eleven months after the fact and find Sherlock waiting for him, sipping tea in his armchair like always, and curls twitching in the breeze from the window he had jimmied open.
Sherlock rose from the chair as John entered, and his lips were moving, but John couldn’t quite get a handle on what happened next. There was a fog over his brain, similar to the one he felt he’d been living under for the past year, but heavier, denser, hotter, and he could feel himself moving, he could see Sherlock on the floor, and he was marvelling at his heaving chest, the pain in his hand, the red-hot burning in his eyes.
Sherlock touched his split lip, moved his hand upward and his fingers came away bloody. He didn’t look surprised or even angry at what John had done-he must have expected it, then, must have been one step ahead here just as he was all of the time.
And that should have made John angry, but Sherlock’s eyes were open and seeing, and there was blood on his face again but he was real and alive and breathing, and maybe a little thin but all the same looking up at John and waiting for him to react.
His nose was probably broken, John thought (and for a second, he heard the faintest echo of Irene’s words), and that was less than Sherlock deserved for all the pain he had caused, but also so much worse because Sherlock also deserved a friend, deserved the part of John that loved him and mourned him and not the shell of solitary pain that he’d receded into. John knelt down beside him on the rug, and with Sherlock knocked flat on his arse, they were about the same height. That felt strange, but no stranger, he supposed, than trying to figure out what words to say to this corpse who was now blinking up at him, silver eyes studying his own blood on John’s knuckles.
Corpse was inaccurate, though, because Sherlock wasn’t dead now, had never been and that was why... that was the reason behind all these months of suffering, of berating himself for being unable to see that his friend was troubled, for failing to stop it, for not being able to save him or fix him or...
John started to open his mouth but was stopped by a swelling in his chest, an otherness that clouded him out with its authority. He saw his hands, already growing warmer, moving toward Sherlock’s face and then, as if the moment could be any more surreal, Sherlock’s chin tilted up and John saw his breath catch, his eyelids flutter. It was almost enough to make John laugh because Sherlock, even Sherlock, had no idea-how could anyone? Sherlock was missing the most crucial piece of data and so he had read this as the only other thing it could be: a kiss.
And what was more, a kiss was an outcome he had considered, apparently, and judged worthy of pursuit. The warmth was spreading throughout John’s body now, strong enough that he wondered if he might not start glowing, and Sherlock’s face was frozen in a mask of hope, bated breath and parted lips, turned upward to meet him. And then, almost imperceptibly, the presence began to fade but there remained a swelling in John’s chest that felt like something else entirely.
Sherlock blinked, startled out of his trance. There was a strange feeling in John’s sinuses; he popped his ears experimentally, then rubbed his hand over his nose until he heard the cartilage move.
“Ouch,” he said, but it wasn’t exactly pain, just the discomfort of a joint settling back into place.
Sherlock was staring up at him with an almost satirical expression of bewilderment. He raised one hand to his face to touch his nose-still bloodied but once again straight, aquiline, his-and his eyes filled with wondering disbelief.
“How did you-?” he stuttered out, blinking. “But... how on earth...”
That time, John did laugh, because that was his line. Sherlock looked up at him in confusion, and John had wondered before how it might feel to be the one to dazzle, just for once. Now, though all he could think of was how Sherlock’s face had looked just a moment ago, the desire and hope in his eyes before John healed him, when he thought John was about to kiss him It was mind-blowing to imagine that Sherlock would want this from him, from anyone, but John knew what he had seen-with the shock of witnessing this extraordinary thing John was capable of, for once, Sherlock had been unable to hide his reaction.
John leaned forward again-closer this time-and took Sherlock’s face gently in his hands, moving slowly to close the distance between them. There would be no mistaking his intentions this time, he thought.
Sure enough, Sherlock’s eyes were wide and God, John had missed that expression, that look of revelation and understanding, the wide eyes, the shocked mouth, and he leaned forward to claim it, to with his own mouth. He kissed Sherlock's lips further apart, stealing the sharp intake of breath usually reserved for distinctively trampled patches of grass or forty-odd types of tobacco ash, and Sherlock was stunned into stillness for a moment, but soon, he was kissing John back eagerly and with an almost manic attentiveness, a dedication to learning John's mouth as thoroughly as he already knew everything else on his hard drive. It was overwhelming to be on the receiving end of these attentions, but in John's experience, Sherlock was never anything short of overwhelming, and so John grabbed him by the shoulders and held his twitchy, manic energy in place to kiss him hard.
"Bastard," said a hoarse voice, and it took John a full two seconds to recognise it as his own. But by that point, he was already talking again, losing his words in Sherlock's mouth. "God, you fucking bastard." He bit Sherlock's lower lip, thinking it wasn't quite hard enough to hurt but the small, strangled noise Sherlock made was somewhat inconclusive. Then, a hard kiss on either side of that sarcastic, insufferable, miraculous mouth. "You utter fucking prick, Sherlock, how-"
"John." Sherlock breathed his name like speech was an afterthought and kissed him brokenly, desperately, like a levee breaking, and John could almost feel the way his name had soothed Sherlock's parched throat, sliding down like the first drink of water in these interminable eleven months.
His fingers dug into the nape of John's neck and his ruined shoulder, dragging him closer and tighter. This had to be the most frustrating miracle of John's life-he'd never have imagined he could be so angry at someone for turning out to be alive-and he wanted to impress every prayer, every moment of doubt onto Sherlock's body, to cover him with his grief and his loneliness and offer up his need in a burnt offering. It felt like he was choking on his heart, and as Sherlock's lips dragged against his, he felt the pressure of teeth, the pounding of Sherlock's pulse under his fingers. Something in the faltering rhythm of Sherlock's breathing, the staccato desperation of his movements smacked to John of a fantasy, a long-imagined ream deposited suddenly into his lap, and his pulse quickened to think that Sherlock had needed him too, desired him, desired this.
He took Sherlock by his hips and tugged him forward. Sherlock was quick to comply, falling willingly, absently into place straddling John's knees, long legs slotting naturally against either of John's thighs.
"John," he said again, and there was something so sad, so desperate in his husky voice that John wanted to kiss out of him, and he did his best, touching his tongue to Sherlock's for a sudden shock of electricity that dropped down to the pit of his stomach. He pulled Sherlock insistently closer, closer, until Sherlock had to choose between overbalancing and just sitting in John's lap, bodies flush together.
The feeling had been mounting so slowly that John didn't even notice, but with Sherlock this close, it rose like a wave in its urgency and Sherlock, ever vigilant, ever anticipating, pulled back to break off the kiss. He rested his head against John's forehead, a steady pressure, and John heard him gasping for a second before he let out a shaky sigh that John felt on his tingling lips.
John drew in a deep breath of his own. "You're hurt," he said when he felt he could trust his voice. It sounded thick and oddly wrong to his ears. He kept his eyes shut tightly, clenching his hands into fists where they rested on Sherlock's hips, closing them around the heat that he hadn't felt growing. "Your ribs? I can't tell, but you're injured, aren't you?"
"Shh," murmured Sherlock against John's philtrum, mouth dipping down for another kiss. "Mmm."
"But you are," John protested. He could feel it-whatever he called it, he could feel it, and the effort of holding that presence back was starting to make his legs shake, tremors he could feel would take over his whole body.
"Irrelevant," murmured Sherlock, licking the L sound into John's mouth. "It's only transport. It can wait."
John would have laughed at the blatant hypocrisy, the self-serving circular logic that Sherlock had honed to an art form, but he wasn't sure he was himself anymore. This mess of emotions was starting to recede into the distance, and the throbbing of his cock in his trousers was fading into the incessant pulsing of light through his veins.
He couldn't give over to it, though, knowing so little. Who could say how serious an injury Sherlock would ignore? And while John would gladly give his life for his friend if necessary, it would be idiotic to take on broken ribs and internal bleeding and God knew what else when he could simply drag Sherlock to the A&E.
"Hospital," he said into Sherlock's kiss, and when he felt Sherlock's fingertips creeping down his spine and back up his sides, the sensation didn't really register. "Let me take you."
"Can't." Sherlock's voice was blunt, matter of fact. "Not safe to go out yet, not for a few more days."
"Then why are you-?"
"I should think that was rather obvious, John," Sherlock said in his ear, and whatever part of John Watson was still holding on shivered at the sound.
"Sherlock," he said through gritted teeth, eyes still closed. "I can help you. Just tell me."
The struggle must have been evident in his voice because he felt Sherlock pull away. His splayed legs were still bracketing John's but without their torsos pressed so tightly together, This made it easier for John to think, easier to control himself, so he opened his eyes to see Sherlock leaning back to rest against the front of the sofa, regarding him with mingled annoyance and belonging. John hadn't believed anyone would ever look at him like that again.
"My ribs are bruised," said Sherlock. "Maybe fractured, but unlikely. There's no need to fuss." He spoke like things were just as they'd always been, like John was at him to eat or sleep or talk about his feelings, but then a look of confusion came over his face and he raised his hand to his nose again, fingers testing, massaging, refusing to believe.
"But how did..." he began, prodding the laugh lines on either side of his upper lip. "What on earth did you...?"
This time, John did laugh. "Oh no no," he said. "I don't think so. You first." He raised his eyebrows at his friend. The light was just a gentle throbbing in his chest now, an unfamiliar timbre in his voice.
Sherlock narrowed his eyes. "'Me first?'" he said disdainfully.
"You first," John repeated. "I'm not saying a word 'til I've heard your story.” It had always fascinated him to listen to Sherlock explain, to hear the leaps of logic made plain to any ear, and this was a question like none before. It might have been interesting to reverse their roles, to, for once, be the one to walk Sherlock step by step through an explanation he'd never have imagined, but John was the one who'd been wronged, John was the one who deserved an explanation. He'd be damned if he was going to give Sherlock the satisfaction. Or not right away, at least.
"I'm sorry, but that's just how it is," John told him. "It's what I deserve."
Sherlock scoffed. "Deserve?"
"Yes, deserve," John said. "Sherlock, you let me think you were dead for nearly-"
Had that been a scoff before? John must have forgotten the depth of disdain and indignation Sherlock could summon up. "Honestly John, you can't possibly have believed..."
John glared and tapped his foot against Sherlock's thigh in a warning.
Sherlock gave a disgusted sigh. "The clues I left?" He craned his neck forward, scrutinising John like a bloody fingerprint. "The book, the apple, the... surely you must have realised..." His shoulders gave a violent jolt and his eyes widened. "Nothing?!"
John shrugged and scratched his nose. "Sherlock, when someone dies... you take it on faith that that's what really happened. You grieve, you’re sad, but you try to move on. Not everybody goes looking for the most complicated explanation.
Sherlock sighed again and looked down at his legs. John had forgotten this too-how it felt to fail to meet Sherlock's unbelievably high expectations, how Sherlock never seemed to manage to adjust them to the point where the rest of the world could follow.
"Oh, I'm sorry," John said, not really trying to keep the bitterness out of his voice. "I'm sorry that I couldn't manage to keep up with you when you refused to tell me anything and kept running off-"
"No, no, it's not that." Sherlock's voice was strangely soft were usually he would have been berating John for being wrong. "The clues were a long shot-I recognised that from the beginning. Anything even remotely intuitive and I'd have risked compromising your safety, which was the whole point of the thing, and so I was forced to be subtle."
"My safety?" said John "What are you talking about?"
"The clues are all well and good; I knew it was possible you'd miss them." Sherlock might as well not even have heard John. "Likely, even. But I didn't expect..." His voice trailed off and he paused, unsure how to continue. "Didn't you...?"
John wiggled his toes against Sherlock's thigh. Sherlock looked down and back up again. "Didn't I what?"
Sherlock took a deep breath in through his nose. "You seemed convinced," he said slowly, "that I wasn't a fraud."
There was a long pause where he didn't meet John's eyes. John realised he must be expected to make the jump from there.
"Uh, yeah, I..." he said. "Of course I believed in you. How could I not?"
"Yes,” said Sherlock. “Until I jumped." His eyebrows raised as his lips popped the P sound.
Something twisted in John's chest. "I, no. Sherlock, I believed in you." His voice wavered, but he swallowed and pressed on. "I always did. You, you can't have thought..."
Sherlock was still avoiding his eyes. A muscle in his throat fluttered. There was a subtle twitch in his jaw too fast for John to make any sense of. "Well, I-with the limited data available to me, it was the only logical theory."
"Limited data?" John was surprised at the joy he heard in his voice. Who'd have thought he'd hear those words again? Who'd have thought it would be so lovely?
Sherlock's eyes narrowed and his lips pursed. He thought he was being laughed at. He licked his lips and began to protest. "It's hardly-"
"Hey," said John. "Hey." He leaned forward and took Sherlock's long wrists in his hands. Sherlock started and met his gaze; John held it with resolve. "Always," he said. "I always believed you were the real thing."
Sherlock took in a deep breath, and if it was somewhat shaky, John never would have dreamed of mentioning it. "That..." he said. "That's... good."
John felt his mouth twitch at the corners. "It is good." he said. "I'm good."
Sherlock's nose twitched. John wondered if it was a laugh. It looked like one, but Sherlock's fingers were beginning to rub circles on his wrist in a rhythm that suggested he was anything but relaxed. John adjusted his grip and tugged him closer-not too close; he had to be careful to keep well away from his injuries. Sherlock submitted to his affection, but dropped his face to avoid eye contact.
"I'm good," John said to Sherlock's curls, "but I can't say I'm very smart. I could never make much sense of why you'd done it." His throat was tight, but he forced the words out. He'd been given his second chance, he’d gotten his miracle, and he wasn't going to let it slip away just to find himself talking to a tombstone again. "That's why you need to tell me what happened. You need to go first."
Sherlock lifted his head and regarded John with some suspicion. "I don’t need to do anything. You, however, need to tell me," he said measuredly, "what you've done to my nose."
“Your nose?” asked John. It seemed the perfect opportunity to break the tension, so he swooped in to press a kiss to Sherlock's chin, the corner of his mouth, ultimately to the feature in question. “I broke your nose,” he said, “and then I fixed it. Now you tell me.” He grinned cheekily into Sherlock’s face.
Sherlock gave a frustrated sigh. “John...” he began.
“‘John’ nothing,” said John, and Sherlock looked exasperated. “It’s only fair, Sherlock; I’ve been wondering for at least ten seconds longer than you have.”
“Ten seconds?” asked Sherlock.
“At least,” John confirmed. Sherlock sighed again and interlaced his fingers with John’s, turning John’s hand in his, studying the lines and the angles. John couldn’t help but stare at him in wonder for a moment, the way the light glanced off his skin, the undeniable way he moved and twisted and sulked. His friend was alive.
“How about this...” said John. “I’ll give you a deal.” Sherlock was studying John’s palm intensely, tracing the scar he’d got at nineteen, trying to slice a frozen sausage into rounds. “If you really want, I’ll do it. I’ll tell you first.” Sherlock bent John’s little finger back a bit, just shy of the point of pain, testing an old rugby injury he had intuited somehow. “But if you go first...” John let his voice trail off. Sherlock couldn’t hide that his interest was piqued now. His eyes drifted upward to catch John’s, silently prompting him to continue. John said nothing.
“If I go first...” Sherlock repeated.
“If you ask me to,” said John, “I’ll tell you first. But if you go first, Sherlock,” John took Sherlock’s hand and held it between both of his, drawing it close to his body. “If you go first, I’ll show you.”
Sherlock gave a sigh to end all sighs and flopped dramatically back against the sofa. He lay limp against the footrest, eyes turned toward the ceiling, calculation playing out across his features. He ran a hand idly over the fabric of the sofa and let it drop to his own lap as his frustration whooshed quietly outward in one breath.
“You win,” he admitted, and John couldn’t suppress a smile. He knew he could count on Sherlock’s curiosity to work for his advantage. “Where do you want me to start?”
John leaned in and kissed him once more-softly, this time, without the desperation, the pain, the relief. This was an affirmation, a promise, an oasis. This was a beginning.
“Start at the beginning,” he said.
Recipient: winter_hermit
Author: fleetwood_mouse
Characters/Pairings: John Watson/Sherlock Holmes, Harry Watson
Verse: BBC
Rating: Teen
Warnings/Notes: magical realism, bamf!John, kidlock, mild descriptions of injuries, natural death of an animal, friends to lovers, title shamelessly stolen from a Leonard Cohen song
Summary: It was outside the ordinary, to be sure, but John had always been able to rely on his strange ability to heal. Until Sherlock, that was.
“The limp’s really bad when you walk, but you don’t ask for a chair when you stand, like you’ve forgotten about it, so it’s at least partly psychosomatic. That suggests the original circumstances of the injury were probably traumatic-wounded in action, then. Wounded in action, suntan-Afghanistan, or Iraq.”
“Amazing,” John had said. Outside the cab, the streets of London went whizzing by in a barrage of lights faster even than this stream of words, than darting quicksilver eyes.
Amazing, he’d said. And it had been, it really had, and that’s why he hadn’t bothered to correct the little details. They were too unbelievable to begin with, and this man was frankly too remarkable for it to matter anyway. And, for that matter, so was John’s story.
=======
But growing up in London, he might never have known at all. The city's concrete streets gave him few opportunities for the chance encounters, for the tiny creatures clinging to blades of grass and leaves and twigs. It was only at his grandparents’ house in the country that he first started to see.
He was catching frogs with Harry and she was stronger than he-she was the older one and that made her bolder, more confident, more reckless. She was less inclined toward this kind of thing, though. It was harder for her to sit still and wait, allow herself to fade until she became part of the scenery and could lure the frogs into the palm of her hand. She would never really be good at that, and so Johnny caught one for her, even though he was the younger one, even though he was the baby, and he smiled at her triumphantly.
Harry squealed in excitement and put out her hands. When John tried to hand her the frog, though, it squirmed and, she was too keyed up, too eager and all John could hear was her gigging. Then, she cried out and the frog dropped limply down into the grass limply and she stared down in horror.
Johnny stared too. The creature looked so sad and pitiful and afraid, trying to hop away from them on its ruined legs but getting nowhere. Johnny had no real grasp of death back then, hadn’t really understood what it meant when Mummy tried to explain why they couldn’t see Auntie Mary anymore, but something about the frog’s helpless kicks, he did recognise and it made him despair, for the first time in his six short years. Harry started to cry.
“Oi,” Johnny said, and it surprised him to hear his voice aloud. And something in his chest... moved; some other authority came forward and Johnny stepped aside, taking with him his childish fear and uncertainty and confusion.
The frog stopped trying to escape. It looked up at him calmly as he took it in his hands. Harry, too, had stopped moving, stopped her crying and was just watching him, staring as placidly and open-mouthed as she did at the telly, perfectly still.
The frog should have felt slick and cold against his skin, but all Johnny could feel was a sort of staticky warmth that began to spread outward from the palms of his hands, growing stronger by the second. His knee bent without his permission, and he felt a strange tickle crawl up his calf-a shock of pain, and his leg nearly went out from under him.
“Ouch,” he said, and it was his little boy voice again and for a second, he marvelled at how far away he sounded, but then just like that, it was gone, whatever it was, and he was Johnny Hamish Watson again.
“Give him here. We’ll make them race!” Harry said, and Johnny almost jumped because that was the same thing she had said only a moment ago. She looked impatient now, too, acting normal-like she didn’t remember, like she hadn’t seen.
He opened his mouth but nothing came out because what could he say? Nothing that wouldn’t result in her calling him a dummy (don’t you know anything Johnny, don’t you know that’s not real, only a baby would believe that), and he couldn’t argue with her that it had been real, had to have been since they’d both seen it, because she was two whole years older than he and she’d even started learning proper maths at school while he sometimes still had to count on his fingers.
“Come on!” cried Harry impatiently, and Johnny swallowed hard and tamped it all down, the memory, the strange feeling of otherness, the words that wouldn’t come.
“All right,” he said, and held out his hands. This time, she was very careful when she took the frog from him, gentle and slow, and he almost wondered if she didn’t remember after all.
And Harry’s frog won the race, bounding and leaping on his strong legs across their makeshift finish line. Even after they went back to London, Johnny never forgot what had happened there, but he never mentioned it to Harry either. Not even the next year when he found her searching his closet for secret panels, knocking on walls and floors, and made him swear that if he went to Narnia or somewhere like it, he had to bring her too.
=======
After that, it was all little things-bugs and mice mostly, and once a goldfish-but he didn’t meet many animals in the grey city. Maybe some of the boys at school-the bigger, crueler ones-would have been different about it, would have made opportunities to practice, but Johnny was gentle and he didn’t take things apart to put them back together, not even appliances like Charlie Patterson did.
And besides, he didn’t really think about it that often. There was school to worry about, and football and then rugby, and anyway, it wasn’t exactly if he remembered it most of the time. If someone showed him a mouse caught in a trap, then yes, that same otherness would well up again, slow at first and then all at once, and if he took it in his hands, next would come that same heat, that same answering pain. And just like Harry, nobody ever seemed to see, and when it was over and he was back to being just Johnny, the memory would retreat to some foggy place until he needed it again. Until then, however, he would just be a normal boy, pulling Harry’s pigtails ‘til she screamed and reading under his covers with a torch when he was supposed to be asleep.
=======
The first time that he saw something dead, he was in Regent’s Park with Harry after school. They’d been feeding the ducks with the remains of a bag of crisps, but when those were gone, Harry went to sit underneath a tree and write in her diary. She was mad for diaries that year, and she kept several, which she exchanged with her friends at school, but John had long ago learned that they couldn’t be less interesting.
Their mum would be there to pick them up soon, so Johnny decided to find somewhere to amuse himself for the last half hour or so. He’d stay close enough that they could find him easily and he wouldn’t get scolded. Harry wasn’t much fun to play with anymore, so he’d gotten good at entertaining himself.
He’d hardly gotten anywhere at all when he noticed it: a normal, grey pigeon, lying motionless on the grass. There were birds like it all over London (he was sure there had to be a hundred at least) and he had always liked trying to catch them, but no matter how fast Mum said he was getting at football practice, their wings always won out over his short legs. This was a fascinating chance to examine one up close.
He knelt down beside the bird on the wet grass, enthralled by how still it was, so different to the body of a live bird or a stuffed animal. He felt an odd sense of stillness in his own chest as well-not quite fear or foreboding, but some dormant instinct recognising that this was death, that he should hold his breath because the world’s balance was fragile and impossible to predict.
Completely absorbed, Johnny reached down to pick up the bird. He was nervous, but it didn’t look scary or dirty, and he was surprised at the way it felt in his hands. He’d held a bird before, his friend Vincent’s budgie, but this felt different. The feathers were cold, and the little bones seemed harder, closer to the skin than he remembered.
He pinched the tip of its wing between his fingers and finned it out to its full wingspan. It was strange to move another creature like this, to experience no resistance beyond simple physics, to explore the way muscles moved when there was no spirit behind them.
A queer feeling began to come over him then, an odd, floating sense of potential, like the tension of the handlebars of his bicycle at the top of the hill. He remembered with a thick, visceral intensity that day of catching frogs with Harriet - the wet smell of the creek, the rich earth beneath his feet, the sunburst spreading tiny capillaries throughout his body as he took the frog in his hands.
It was no different, really, to marking his height against the wall, or passing a football with his friends, backing further away each time. It was exploring the limits of his potential, pushing boundaries to find out what his place was in the world. It was easy. It felt natural. It wasn't even a choice, really. He just started.
At first there was nothing, then a small twinge, a tingling-barely there, almost like it was asking permission. Johnny just watched from the sidelines as it took over, and he began to realise, with a wave of giddy, incredulous triumph, that it was happening.
I'm doing it, he thought feverishly, I'm actually-
Then it slammed into him like a thunderclap, flattening his ribs with its gripping and twisting and whirling. The air in his lungs was filthy and rank, rising like great arms of smoke to clutch at his windpipe. He started to cough, racking his chest to clear his airway but it did no good- even the clean air of Regent's Park was thick with the putrid purple stench that he had no way to name.
No, he thought, no no no, and his lips began to form the word in an endless mantra but whether he managed to summon up any sound, he could only guess.
Then it came on like a great blow to the side of his head, and the force of it echoed in his ears as he swayed sideways, not sure whether his feet would anchor him to the ground, knowing full well that he could be set to careen off into some fearsome abyss. He wanted to dig his fingers into the green grass and tether himself to the earth but he couldn't seem to get hold of them and control their movement, and everything was so cold and so loud.
"No!" he shrieked, and the inhuman effort of it ripped his lips apart like tectonic plates, and the bird tumbled lifeless and grey from his grasp. He could still taste the smoke as well as his own blood and a thousand other things that filled him with a blinding, pounding numbness, and he collapsed in on himself, chest burning and heaving but breathing air again.
Johnny knew he was too big to cry but by the time his mum found him, he was choking on his sobs, tears painting white streaks through the dirt and snot on his face. She gathered him up into her lap and he didn't even fight it as she began to stroke his hair and call him her baby, her love, and ask him what on earth had happened. She looked down at the bird lying in the grass in front of him, and she went still for one terrifying moment, where Johnny wasn’t sure what scared him more: that she wouldn’t see this either, or that she’d think he’d been the one to put it there.
But she was his mother and she knew him and she loved him and thank God, she understood almost immediately that her son was only trying to put it back together.
“Oh Johnny,” she said, kissing his hair, wiping his face. “My poor, sweet boy.” He buried his face in the softness of her chest, breathed in the familiar smell and tried to will the cold and the fear away.
She made his favourite spaghetti for dinner, even though he didn't manage to eat anything, not even the Battenberg for afters. But he did fall asleep quickly that night, with no dreams and just black, black, black until he woke. And he was already feeling better the next morning at the breakfast table, where she asked him if he’d ever thought he might want to be a doctor.
=======
He wondered for a while if it might get stronger with practice but he never really seemed to progress far beyond his initial limits. And while he never tried to cross that boundary again, he gradually managed to learn some of the other limits.
There was Malley, for example, who became Harry’s cat after John found him crouched in the road. He had been hit by a car and was hurt too badly to even protest when John knelt down beside him and took his broken spine between his two hands. The sharpness of the answering pain as the cat’s spine tried to knit itself back together was a burning shock like John had never felt before, and it doubled him over but a moment later, there was squirming warmth under his hands, moving and mewling, and he carried Malley home wrapped in his jumper. The cat seemed none the worse for the wear, but John’s bruises lasted for days.
He learned to change his clothes quickly, praying all the while that no knock would come before he could get his shirt settled over his head and tucked in. But even once the bursts of sunset colours began to fade from his skin, if he twisted like a snake in front of the full-length mirror in his parents’ room, he could see a the beginnings of a scar marking the path of the break, straight and true update his spine. Bruises and scrapes could be explained away by rugby, but Johnny knew that he could hardly expect more major injuries to remain secret.
And when Malley got old, Johnny hadn’t been able to do anything for him either. Harry was in her first year of uni by then, and Malley was slowing, more and more every day. Certainly that would mean fewer tortured, terrified mice and cockroaches for John to hone his skills on, but his heart ached to think that this shaggy, purring presence that had often slept at the foot of his bed would soon disappear from their lives.
Harry moved Malley’s bed to her room to be with him all the time. He had once slept wherever the spirit took him, but now he seemed to accept that his last days would be spent beside Harry’s bed, being handfed morsels of his favourite tinned tuna when he had any appetite at all.
John waited until Harry was out at a friend’s house, guaranteed not to be back for several hours (honestly, he had no idea what she could possibly have in common with airheaded Donna Horne, but it was basically fact that she’d be gone for hours and come back with her head in a cloud). Then, he took the opportunity to slip into her room and crouch beside Malley’s bed, contemplating running his hands over his fur, steeling himself for the bumpy matted clumps and bones now sticking through his thin hide.
Like he had so many times before, John reached out to stroke but even as his fingers carded through Malley’s fur, he could feel that he was still himself; nothing moved him aside, nothing came forward to guide his movements. He squeezed his eye shut and tensed his muscles; he gritted his teeth and pushed and willed, but nothing.
Defeated, he let his hands go slack on Malley’s shabby coat. Malley looked up at him listlessly and mewed, and John’s heart tripled in weight in his chest. He scratched him under his chin and fed him a bit of cheese, which Malley ate gratefully, and John understood that there was nothing he could do but try to keep him comfortable. There was a natural order to things and he had to respect it, at least to some extent.
=======
The reason why remained unexplained, but John came to understand its limits and learned to abide by its rule of quid pro quo. These things meant that he couldn’t rely on his power all the time, but still, he liked the idea of becoming a doctor. Even as he struggled through his organic chemistry class in uni, he was sure that he had chosen the right path. He'd have wanted to be a doctor even if he hadn’t been able to heal the way he could-the instinct, the desire to step forward and help was part of him, and he had no doubt that what he was meant to do was to ease suffering, in whatever way he could.
And all that aside, it was great to be away at uni. Uni meant a lot of things-not just that he could study subjects that were useful, that he could use in a significant way, but it also meant pints with his mates after class, life without a curfew, and finally being able to establish an identity for himself outside the shadow cast by the lady-killer Harry-not-Harriet Watson.
Or it did until Mum died, anyway, all of a sudden. A shame, an accident, a tragedy, as his relatives all told him after the funeral as they got progressively drunker. But to John, what it really was simple-a rainy night, a drunk, a faulty set of brakes-and preventable, or it would have been if he had only been home.
At least it was quick; she can’t have felt anything, they said as if that would comfort him, and it just made him want to scream because it couldn’t be true-there would have been time, there would have if he had only been there. John knows in his heart that he could have saved her.
And with Mum went the money-not that there was so much to begin with, but worse once Father lost his job because the only thing he could seem to commit to day after day was trying to drink up whatever was left. Soon enough, Harry began to do the same, and when John learned that the military would be willing to sponsor his studies in exchange for a few years of service, it was barely even a choice.
=======
The second assignment, years later, was a choice, though-in the sense that it was voluntary, anyway. The reasons behind it were much the same as his original enlistment, though there was even less keeping him in London these days.
Even at the surgery, he'd never felt much temptation to use his power. From time to time, there would be a situation where he felt that he could, if he wanted to, where something thrummed through his veins and darkened the edges of his vision, but he always chose to fight the urge and it would soon recede.
It helped to keep a level head about the whole thing. Rationally, John knew that it wouldn't help anyone if he suddenly collapsed from whatever illness or injury the patient had come in with, and miraculous recoveries attracted a lot of attention and left the surgery with confusing paperwork, so it was easy to leave it up to the natural order of things.
This was doubly true in the war when he found himself treating combat wounds and there was simply too much suffering for him to think about taking it all on himself. Also, to be honest, he didn't want to consider what might happen if he tried to heal an amputation, which was one of the most common injuries they dealt with.
So that was why he hadn’t actually done it for years when he found himself in the caravan. The blast was staggering-before he even heard it, John felt its force, a barrelling wall of heat and strength. It took a few blazing, interminable seconds for the thunder to reach his ears, and then they rang until he was as deaf as a bell.
The explosion knocked them back, but then they were on their feet soon enough, vaulting over the side of their jeep to survey the wreckage of the leading truck. It didn’t look like there could be any survivors, but John had seen a lot of things on the battlefield, terrible things mostly but also enough miracles that he could pray that it was not all just glossy eyes and slack limbs and blood dribbling arrhythmically over grey, cooling skin.
It wasn’t long before he heard a groan from the mound of debris, and then he was digging away like some kind of mole, but he found his man, with blood pooling wetly in the creases of his fatigues, with a deep gash in his thigh cut by the windshield glass, breath coming in ragged gasps. John pushed back his helmet to check his airway and it was Timothy Cooper, red hair matted down with sweat, grey eyes wild and roaming.
John barely knew Timothy, to tell the truth, but he knew him enough to recognise him as a good man. During a raid, John had seen Timothy stop a group of soldiers from pissing on the Quran, and he’d also seen him step up to keep his subordinates in line around women and children, even if it hadn’t made him popular. Maybe those were such little things, such incredibly insignificant gestures among all the pain they were causing every day, but fuck if it hadn’t been the right thing to do.
John knew that he had a wife back home, just like the doomed ones always did in the movies; he’d seen pictures and she was young and pregnant and she beamed at the camera like the man on the other side of it was her source of light. And John would have done anything for he and Harry to have had a father like that, a man who knew what was the right thing to do. He bent over Timothy’s still form without any clear idea what he was doing, but then he found himself yanking that shard of glass upward and clear out.
The femoral artery might have been severed, but there was too much blood to say for sure. Timothy was groaning and burbling, though John couldn’t hear him because he had already moved aside and let the other presence take over. His hands, which if they belonged to anyone else would be impotently trying to staunch the flow of salty hot blood, were succeeding and growing warmer, almost vibrating with the power flowing through him. Timothy gasped, and then John’s leg did go out from under him, and he started to pitch forward, balancing himself in a pool of drying blood and clumping sand.
It couldn’t be a second later that the ambush came, and odds were that John would have ended up flat on the ground anyway, even if it hadn’t been that moment that he took a round to his left shoulder. The bullets kicked up sand around him, and as his head lolled sideways and the world went grey, he felt long-fingered hands-Timothy, whole, alive, bewildered-ghosting over his clothing, checking his pulse, and then, incongruously, he thought of his father and of Harry, alone in her new cramped apartment, the both of them too stubborn to apologise and love each other again, drinking themselves into identical stupors on either side of a Christmas Eve.
When he woke up in hospital, pumped full of numbing drugs, he reached through the fog to move his leg, to kick it like he had in swimming lessons, and when he felt the muscle jerk and cramp in painful protest, he smiled and let himself drift away again.
=======
So Sherlock wasn’t wrong when he said that the circumstances of the injury were traumatic, but he hadn’t really got it quite right either. It was interesting to have a secret from this mad genius, this glowing supernova of a man, and John couldn’t help but wonder how long he could keep it up.
He’d heard Sherlock’s thoughts on the improbable versus the impossible, but somehow he couldn’t quite bring himself to believe that all of this could be deduced or even theorised, much less believed. Part of the reason he stuck around was to see how long he can pull it off. And the rest of the reason, well, by the time John got that one figured out, he was already in too deep to leave and save himself the heartache. And besides, with the life Sherlock lived, he might need John someday and so John stayed.
It wasn’t long before that day came. It was nothing like John would have expected, though; just a wannabe gangster who managed to grab Sherlock by the lapels of that great show-off of a coat, and who was strong enough and quick enough to crash that brilliant head through a picture window, dangling him there four storeys up, stopping John’s heart.
He didn’t feel his feet as they carried him up the last few steps, nor his lungs burning like dusty sands, but by the time he reached the top, Sherlock had fought his snarling way back to this side of the windowpane and knocked the small time criminal senseless on his back, and thank God for that because that wasn’t the way things are supposed to go. Nobody so minor, so short-sighted and insignificant, was going to be the one to take out the great Sherlock Holmes.
But there was blood staining his collar and running down his neck, before John could get to him, he was on his knees and gasping, eyes turned blindly upward and mouth gaping open like a fish. John fell to his knees beside him, nearly dissolving with relief as his fear and the heart-pounding terror were replaced by that other presence, and his hands confidently sought out the ragged wound, damming the river of red that was worth more to him than anything else in the world.
Sherlock grabbed John’s wrists and went still, except for the pulse that John could see hammering away in his throat, and John felt a burning rip, felt his own skin beginning to tear like the seams of a cheap jacket and then his blood begins to flow, slow and steady, nothing like the gushing river which had almost felled his friend.
And just like that, Sherlock was moving again, eyes alight with the wonder of discovery, of understanding.
“Of course,” he gasped, fingers curling blindly in the sleeves of John’s jumper. “The arowana. The tanks, the... John!” And then he was on his feet and running, and John was charging after him, one hand pressed to the gash in his throat.
“Bastard,” John heaved, drawing his gun as he rounded the corner. Trust Sherlock to lose John’s miracle in the theatrics of his own genius revelation.
“John!” cried Sherlock, maddeningly just out of sight. “John, hurry up!”
John cursed again but he could feel himself smiling.
=======
He had saved lives before. He had saved Sherlock’s life before. He knew his limits, but this shouldn’t have been one of them.
Recently, he’d found himself remembering it more often-the window glass, the spike of fear, Sherlock’s flashing eyes. Each time, the memory took on a more desperate quality. Each detail became an item on a checklist, one more piece of proof that he had done it before, that he had the power to do it. He ran through them over and over in his mind, as if by collecting sufficient evidence, he could appeal and rewrite that day as it should have been.
On that morning at St. Bart’s, what had been different? Why hadn’t he been enough? Why had he failed Sherlock?
John wanted to throw these questions at Ella’s feet and demand an explanation, implore her to talk for once and put her degree to use puzzling this out for him. But she wasn’t his unraveler of riddles-she didn’t have any answers for him. And how could John rely on her now, now that he’d had his psychosomatic limp cured over dinner, his psyche rolled out and untangled like a skein of yarn? Therapy was ruined for him, as was normal human interaction, all because of Sherlock, who probably wouldn’t even have believed a lick of his story anyway.
But even if there had been someone for him to talk to, it wasn’t exactly the kind of riddle that lent itself to discussion. The premise was too unbelievable to begin with, and his story would inevitably be written off as grief-induced wish fulfilment, survivor’s guilt, or other emotional trauma.
Mostly, he tried to work it out for himself, though it didn’t seem to be leading him anywhere. He recognised that his deductive reasoning skills were woefully inadequate but that didn’t stopped him being frustrated when it didn’t seem to make any logical sense. Bad injuries, near fatal injuries: those he could handle, if at an expense to his own health. And he could heal human beings just as well as animals; Timothy had proved that. And death? The evidence suggested it was within his power, albeit for an even steeper price.
Here, though, John knew he would not have hesitated to pay that price. The thought didn’t come out of some vague sense of altruism or a soldier’s duty to queen and country; Sherlock Holmes had been a man the world had needed-a great mind and a great man and, against all odds, a good man. There was no one like him in the world and John doubted that there ever would be. He wouldn’t have needed even a moment to decide to make the trade. While he had watched from his place on the street below, fear and bile rising slowly in his throat, he had kept his panic at bay because he had known that whatever happened, he could fix it. John would rather have faced the fear and the putrid smoke and whatever lay beyond it than stand helplessly by, watching his only true friend bleeding out on the cold pavement.
And yet that was exactly what had happened. He had dragged himself to his feet so that he could fall to his knees beside Sherlock again, and he had taken that limp hand in his own and... nothing. No thrumming light, no warmth, none of that otherworldly calm. It had been the kind of helplessness he had only experienced in dreams, something he had always taken for granted being snatched away irrevocably.
No matter how he looked at it, it just didn’t make sense. But so little of his life with Sherlock had, and so John knew that logically, ultimately, he’d have to accept that he wasn’t going to get any answers, that it had just been a senseless tragedy and an erratic, unstable man. So he gave up and he knew not to wait for answers, and he wasn’t holding out for resolution anymore, hadn’t been for a long time.
Neither did he expect to come home to Baker Street eleven months after the fact and find Sherlock waiting for him, sipping tea in his armchair like always, and curls twitching in the breeze from the window he had jimmied open.
Sherlock rose from the chair as John entered, and his lips were moving, but John couldn’t quite get a handle on what happened next. There was a fog over his brain, similar to the one he felt he’d been living under for the past year, but heavier, denser, hotter, and he could feel himself moving, he could see Sherlock on the floor, and he was marvelling at his heaving chest, the pain in his hand, the red-hot burning in his eyes.
Sherlock touched his split lip, moved his hand upward and his fingers came away bloody. He didn’t look surprised or even angry at what John had done-he must have expected it, then, must have been one step ahead here just as he was all of the time.
And that should have made John angry, but Sherlock’s eyes were open and seeing, and there was blood on his face again but he was real and alive and breathing, and maybe a little thin but all the same looking up at John and waiting for him to react.
His nose was probably broken, John thought (and for a second, he heard the faintest echo of Irene’s words), and that was less than Sherlock deserved for all the pain he had caused, but also so much worse because Sherlock also deserved a friend, deserved the part of John that loved him and mourned him and not the shell of solitary pain that he’d receded into. John knelt down beside him on the rug, and with Sherlock knocked flat on his arse, they were about the same height. That felt strange, but no stranger, he supposed, than trying to figure out what words to say to this corpse who was now blinking up at him, silver eyes studying his own blood on John’s knuckles.
Corpse was inaccurate, though, because Sherlock wasn’t dead now, had never been and that was why... that was the reason behind all these months of suffering, of berating himself for being unable to see that his friend was troubled, for failing to stop it, for not being able to save him or fix him or...
John started to open his mouth but was stopped by a swelling in his chest, an otherness that clouded him out with its authority. He saw his hands, already growing warmer, moving toward Sherlock’s face and then, as if the moment could be any more surreal, Sherlock’s chin tilted up and John saw his breath catch, his eyelids flutter. It was almost enough to make John laugh because Sherlock, even Sherlock, had no idea-how could anyone? Sherlock was missing the most crucial piece of data and so he had read this as the only other thing it could be: a kiss.
And what was more, a kiss was an outcome he had considered, apparently, and judged worthy of pursuit. The warmth was spreading throughout John’s body now, strong enough that he wondered if he might not start glowing, and Sherlock’s face was frozen in a mask of hope, bated breath and parted lips, turned upward to meet him. And then, almost imperceptibly, the presence began to fade but there remained a swelling in John’s chest that felt like something else entirely.
Sherlock blinked, startled out of his trance. There was a strange feeling in John’s sinuses; he popped his ears experimentally, then rubbed his hand over his nose until he heard the cartilage move.
“Ouch,” he said, but it wasn’t exactly pain, just the discomfort of a joint settling back into place.
Sherlock was staring up at him with an almost satirical expression of bewilderment. He raised one hand to his face to touch his nose-still bloodied but once again straight, aquiline, his-and his eyes filled with wondering disbelief.
“How did you-?” he stuttered out, blinking. “But... how on earth...”
That time, John did laugh, because that was his line. Sherlock looked up at him in confusion, and John had wondered before how it might feel to be the one to dazzle, just for once. Now, though all he could think of was how Sherlock’s face had looked just a moment ago, the desire and hope in his eyes before John healed him, when he thought John was about to kiss him It was mind-blowing to imagine that Sherlock would want this from him, from anyone, but John knew what he had seen-with the shock of witnessing this extraordinary thing John was capable of, for once, Sherlock had been unable to hide his reaction.
John leaned forward again-closer this time-and took Sherlock’s face gently in his hands, moving slowly to close the distance between them. There would be no mistaking his intentions this time, he thought.
Sure enough, Sherlock’s eyes were wide and God, John had missed that expression, that look of revelation and understanding, the wide eyes, the shocked mouth, and he leaned forward to claim it, to with his own mouth. He kissed Sherlock's lips further apart, stealing the sharp intake of breath usually reserved for distinctively trampled patches of grass or forty-odd types of tobacco ash, and Sherlock was stunned into stillness for a moment, but soon, he was kissing John back eagerly and with an almost manic attentiveness, a dedication to learning John's mouth as thoroughly as he already knew everything else on his hard drive. It was overwhelming to be on the receiving end of these attentions, but in John's experience, Sherlock was never anything short of overwhelming, and so John grabbed him by the shoulders and held his twitchy, manic energy in place to kiss him hard.
"Bastard," said a hoarse voice, and it took John a full two seconds to recognise it as his own. But by that point, he was already talking again, losing his words in Sherlock's mouth. "God, you fucking bastard." He bit Sherlock's lower lip, thinking it wasn't quite hard enough to hurt but the small, strangled noise Sherlock made was somewhat inconclusive. Then, a hard kiss on either side of that sarcastic, insufferable, miraculous mouth. "You utter fucking prick, Sherlock, how-"
"John." Sherlock breathed his name like speech was an afterthought and kissed him brokenly, desperately, like a levee breaking, and John could almost feel the way his name had soothed Sherlock's parched throat, sliding down like the first drink of water in these interminable eleven months.
His fingers dug into the nape of John's neck and his ruined shoulder, dragging him closer and tighter. This had to be the most frustrating miracle of John's life-he'd never have imagined he could be so angry at someone for turning out to be alive-and he wanted to impress every prayer, every moment of doubt onto Sherlock's body, to cover him with his grief and his loneliness and offer up his need in a burnt offering. It felt like he was choking on his heart, and as Sherlock's lips dragged against his, he felt the pressure of teeth, the pounding of Sherlock's pulse under his fingers. Something in the faltering rhythm of Sherlock's breathing, the staccato desperation of his movements smacked to John of a fantasy, a long-imagined ream deposited suddenly into his lap, and his pulse quickened to think that Sherlock had needed him too, desired him, desired this.
He took Sherlock by his hips and tugged him forward. Sherlock was quick to comply, falling willingly, absently into place straddling John's knees, long legs slotting naturally against either of John's thighs.
"John," he said again, and there was something so sad, so desperate in his husky voice that John wanted to kiss out of him, and he did his best, touching his tongue to Sherlock's for a sudden shock of electricity that dropped down to the pit of his stomach. He pulled Sherlock insistently closer, closer, until Sherlock had to choose between overbalancing and just sitting in John's lap, bodies flush together.
The feeling had been mounting so slowly that John didn't even notice, but with Sherlock this close, it rose like a wave in its urgency and Sherlock, ever vigilant, ever anticipating, pulled back to break off the kiss. He rested his head against John's forehead, a steady pressure, and John heard him gasping for a second before he let out a shaky sigh that John felt on his tingling lips.
John drew in a deep breath of his own. "You're hurt," he said when he felt he could trust his voice. It sounded thick and oddly wrong to his ears. He kept his eyes shut tightly, clenching his hands into fists where they rested on Sherlock's hips, closing them around the heat that he hadn't felt growing. "Your ribs? I can't tell, but you're injured, aren't you?"
"Shh," murmured Sherlock against John's philtrum, mouth dipping down for another kiss. "Mmm."
"But you are," John protested. He could feel it-whatever he called it, he could feel it, and the effort of holding that presence back was starting to make his legs shake, tremors he could feel would take over his whole body.
"Irrelevant," murmured Sherlock, licking the L sound into John's mouth. "It's only transport. It can wait."
John would have laughed at the blatant hypocrisy, the self-serving circular logic that Sherlock had honed to an art form, but he wasn't sure he was himself anymore. This mess of emotions was starting to recede into the distance, and the throbbing of his cock in his trousers was fading into the incessant pulsing of light through his veins.
He couldn't give over to it, though, knowing so little. Who could say how serious an injury Sherlock would ignore? And while John would gladly give his life for his friend if necessary, it would be idiotic to take on broken ribs and internal bleeding and God knew what else when he could simply drag Sherlock to the A&E.
"Hospital," he said into Sherlock's kiss, and when he felt Sherlock's fingertips creeping down his spine and back up his sides, the sensation didn't really register. "Let me take you."
"Can't." Sherlock's voice was blunt, matter of fact. "Not safe to go out yet, not for a few more days."
"Then why are you-?"
"I should think that was rather obvious, John," Sherlock said in his ear, and whatever part of John Watson was still holding on shivered at the sound.
"Sherlock," he said through gritted teeth, eyes still closed. "I can help you. Just tell me."
The struggle must have been evident in his voice because he felt Sherlock pull away. His splayed legs were still bracketing John's but without their torsos pressed so tightly together, This made it easier for John to think, easier to control himself, so he opened his eyes to see Sherlock leaning back to rest against the front of the sofa, regarding him with mingled annoyance and belonging. John hadn't believed anyone would ever look at him like that again.
"My ribs are bruised," said Sherlock. "Maybe fractured, but unlikely. There's no need to fuss." He spoke like things were just as they'd always been, like John was at him to eat or sleep or talk about his feelings, but then a look of confusion came over his face and he raised his hand to his nose again, fingers testing, massaging, refusing to believe.
"But how did..." he began, prodding the laugh lines on either side of his upper lip. "What on earth did you...?"
This time, John did laugh. "Oh no no," he said. "I don't think so. You first." He raised his eyebrows at his friend. The light was just a gentle throbbing in his chest now, an unfamiliar timbre in his voice.
Sherlock narrowed his eyes. "'Me first?'" he said disdainfully.
"You first," John repeated. "I'm not saying a word 'til I've heard your story.” It had always fascinated him to listen to Sherlock explain, to hear the leaps of logic made plain to any ear, and this was a question like none before. It might have been interesting to reverse their roles, to, for once, be the one to walk Sherlock step by step through an explanation he'd never have imagined, but John was the one who'd been wronged, John was the one who deserved an explanation. He'd be damned if he was going to give Sherlock the satisfaction. Or not right away, at least.
"I'm sorry, but that's just how it is," John told him. "It's what I deserve."
Sherlock scoffed. "Deserve?"
"Yes, deserve," John said. "Sherlock, you let me think you were dead for nearly-"
Had that been a scoff before? John must have forgotten the depth of disdain and indignation Sherlock could summon up. "Honestly John, you can't possibly have believed..."
John glared and tapped his foot against Sherlock's thigh in a warning.
Sherlock gave a disgusted sigh. "The clues I left?" He craned his neck forward, scrutinising John like a bloody fingerprint. "The book, the apple, the... surely you must have realised..." His shoulders gave a violent jolt and his eyes widened. "Nothing?!"
John shrugged and scratched his nose. "Sherlock, when someone dies... you take it on faith that that's what really happened. You grieve, you’re sad, but you try to move on. Not everybody goes looking for the most complicated explanation.
Sherlock sighed again and looked down at his legs. John had forgotten this too-how it felt to fail to meet Sherlock's unbelievably high expectations, how Sherlock never seemed to manage to adjust them to the point where the rest of the world could follow.
"Oh, I'm sorry," John said, not really trying to keep the bitterness out of his voice. "I'm sorry that I couldn't manage to keep up with you when you refused to tell me anything and kept running off-"
"No, no, it's not that." Sherlock's voice was strangely soft were usually he would have been berating John for being wrong. "The clues were a long shot-I recognised that from the beginning. Anything even remotely intuitive and I'd have risked compromising your safety, which was the whole point of the thing, and so I was forced to be subtle."
"My safety?" said John "What are you talking about?"
"The clues are all well and good; I knew it was possible you'd miss them." Sherlock might as well not even have heard John. "Likely, even. But I didn't expect..." His voice trailed off and he paused, unsure how to continue. "Didn't you...?"
John wiggled his toes against Sherlock's thigh. Sherlock looked down and back up again. "Didn't I what?"
Sherlock took a deep breath in through his nose. "You seemed convinced," he said slowly, "that I wasn't a fraud."
There was a long pause where he didn't meet John's eyes. John realised he must be expected to make the jump from there.
"Uh, yeah, I..." he said. "Of course I believed in you. How could I not?"
"Yes,” said Sherlock. “Until I jumped." His eyebrows raised as his lips popped the P sound.
Something twisted in John's chest. "I, no. Sherlock, I believed in you." His voice wavered, but he swallowed and pressed on. "I always did. You, you can't have thought..."
Sherlock was still avoiding his eyes. A muscle in his throat fluttered. There was a subtle twitch in his jaw too fast for John to make any sense of. "Well, I-with the limited data available to me, it was the only logical theory."
"Limited data?" John was surprised at the joy he heard in his voice. Who'd have thought he'd hear those words again? Who'd have thought it would be so lovely?
Sherlock's eyes narrowed and his lips pursed. He thought he was being laughed at. He licked his lips and began to protest. "It's hardly-"
"Hey," said John. "Hey." He leaned forward and took Sherlock's long wrists in his hands. Sherlock started and met his gaze; John held it with resolve. "Always," he said. "I always believed you were the real thing."
Sherlock took in a deep breath, and if it was somewhat shaky, John never would have dreamed of mentioning it. "That..." he said. "That's... good."
John felt his mouth twitch at the corners. "It is good." he said. "I'm good."
Sherlock's nose twitched. John wondered if it was a laugh. It looked like one, but Sherlock's fingers were beginning to rub circles on his wrist in a rhythm that suggested he was anything but relaxed. John adjusted his grip and tugged him closer-not too close; he had to be careful to keep well away from his injuries. Sherlock submitted to his affection, but dropped his face to avoid eye contact.
"I'm good," John said to Sherlock's curls, "but I can't say I'm very smart. I could never make much sense of why you'd done it." His throat was tight, but he forced the words out. He'd been given his second chance, he’d gotten his miracle, and he wasn't going to let it slip away just to find himself talking to a tombstone again. "That's why you need to tell me what happened. You need to go first."
Sherlock lifted his head and regarded John with some suspicion. "I don’t need to do anything. You, however, need to tell me," he said measuredly, "what you've done to my nose."
“Your nose?” asked John. It seemed the perfect opportunity to break the tension, so he swooped in to press a kiss to Sherlock's chin, the corner of his mouth, ultimately to the feature in question. “I broke your nose,” he said, “and then I fixed it. Now you tell me.” He grinned cheekily into Sherlock’s face.
Sherlock gave a frustrated sigh. “John...” he began.
“‘John’ nothing,” said John, and Sherlock looked exasperated. “It’s only fair, Sherlock; I’ve been wondering for at least ten seconds longer than you have.”
“Ten seconds?” asked Sherlock.
“At least,” John confirmed. Sherlock sighed again and interlaced his fingers with John’s, turning John’s hand in his, studying the lines and the angles. John couldn’t help but stare at him in wonder for a moment, the way the light glanced off his skin, the undeniable way he moved and twisted and sulked. His friend was alive.
“How about this...” said John. “I’ll give you a deal.” Sherlock was studying John’s palm intensely, tracing the scar he’d got at nineteen, trying to slice a frozen sausage into rounds. “If you really want, I’ll do it. I’ll tell you first.” Sherlock bent John’s little finger back a bit, just shy of the point of pain, testing an old rugby injury he had intuited somehow. “But if you go first...” John let his voice trail off. Sherlock couldn’t hide that his interest was piqued now. His eyes drifted upward to catch John’s, silently prompting him to continue. John said nothing.
“If I go first...” Sherlock repeated.
“If you ask me to,” said John, “I’ll tell you first. But if you go first, Sherlock,” John took Sherlock’s hand and held it between both of his, drawing it close to his body. “If you go first, I’ll show you.”
Sherlock gave a sigh to end all sighs and flopped dramatically back against the sofa. He lay limp against the footrest, eyes turned toward the ceiling, calculation playing out across his features. He ran a hand idly over the fabric of the sofa and let it drop to his own lap as his frustration whooshed quietly outward in one breath.
“You win,” he admitted, and John couldn’t suppress a smile. He knew he could count on Sherlock’s curiosity to work for his advantage. “Where do you want me to start?”
John leaned in and kissed him once more-softly, this time, without the desperation, the pain, the relief. This was an affirmation, a promise, an oasis. This was a beginning.
“Start at the beginning,” he said.