[Fanfic] East of the Sun and- [part 2/2]
Title: East of the Sun and-
Fandom: Sherlock BBC
Author: plalligator
Character(s)/Pairing(s): Sherlock/John
Rating/Warnings: Still PG-13, folks.
Notes: Deanon from sherlockbbc_fic for this prompt.
Continued from Part 1.
::
ab origine (from the source)
Each night from then on, as they lie in Sherlock’s bed basking in the warmth and the fading aftershocks of pleasure, John will murmur a goodnight and slide out from under the sheets as he gives a gentle tug to Sherlock’s damp hair or presses a kiss to his mouth. And he will leave Sherlock’s room and go to his own, and Sherlock can hear the click of the lock as it fastens behind him.
In the daytime, in the normal course of their lives, John is affectionate. Not one inch less ready to kill for-or die for-Sherlock, but more at ease than Sherlock has ever seen him. He’s happy with what he has.
::
Sherlock works it out easily. The way John leaves Sherlock’s bed for his own, the way he talked the one and only time they ventured to have a conversation about it, the way he never sleeps in front of anyone, never sleeps in the daytime. The way he flatly forbid Sherlock to enter his room. And the way he retreats into that same room early every evening-normally a few minutes before sundown-and doesn’t emerge until morning.
Well. Sherlock works out something, at least, even if he’s not entirely sure what it is.
He means to leave it alone, he really does. But everything strange about John is gathering and pulling together, gaining mass and density. It’s acquiring a gravity of its own that inexorably draws Sherlock in. It preys on the part of him that’s spent a lifetime analyzing, deducing, laying people’s secrets bare with a single word. The part of him that must know the answer to any challenge he encounters.
He can find out. John will never know.
::
It’s nighttime. Nearly midnight, just to be sure. John’s door is locked, but really. What kind of challenge is a lock? It takes barely a minute to pick.
He turns the handle gently and steps inside.
The first thing he notices is the utter lack of anything. It’s devoid of personal effects. There’s the laptop and the gun, but nothing else. There are no photos, not of Harry Watson or John’s college friends or John’s army friends or anyone else. Other than ”Harry Watson-from Clara xxx,” there’s nothing to indicate that John even has a family.
The second thing he notices is John, sprawled out on the bed. It certainly does look like he’s asleep, and Sherlock is about to leave it at that and make his exit, when he realizes something.
John isn’t breathing.
Sherlock rushes over to the bed, fumbles at John’s neck for the pulse. There isn’t one, and the skin is very cold, and very smooth, and very hard.
And that’s when he sees it. It’s like something moving beneath John’s skin. A flickering, dim sort of light. And-
-and he can see through John’s skin. It’s just barely translucent enough, and he bends down to look and sees not bones and veins and arteries and organs and muscle tissue but something else. Wires and strands of wool and what looks like fragments of a clock, little cogs and wheels and springs, and pieces of a computer’s motherboard and pieces of a gun. Pages and pages of paper covered in sprawling script. Chunks of stone. Bullets. And throughout it all, winding lazily like a river, glimmering in the strange half-light, is sand.
It’s more like a strange, grotesque sculpture than a man, and there are no identifiers to that it’s John at all, except for the faint outline of skin and features, molded over the rest of the miscellany like cloudy wax.
He jerks back from the bed, nearly stumbling over his own feet, his heart pounding fast.
”No wonder John hid,” he thinks, distantly, and hesitantly approaches again, placing his hand at the pulse point for the second time. It still feels cold to Sherlock’s touch, and stays that way for maybe ten seconds without sign of a heartbeat. Then there is a surge of warmth through his fingers, and he snatches them away and watches as translucent skin turns opaque and back to its proper color, scars and wrinkles fade back in, and John’s chest begins to rise and fall.
::
ex voto (from the vow)
John opens his eyes.
The first thing he sees is that it is not morning.
The second thing he sees is Sherlock.
::
John’s eyes open, dart about the room for a second, and fix on Sherlock.
And then in one flurry of movement, he leaps from the bed, seizing Sherlock’s shoulders with the grip of a vise.
”What have you done?” he snarls, so genuinely and terrifyingly angry that Sherlock has to suppress the desire to flinch, “Sherlock, can’t you leave well enough alone? You-you weren’t supposed to see!” His hands are trembling in their fierce grip on Sherlock’s shoulders.
“John-”
The fury drops from John’s voice, leaving a horrible forced calm in its place. He sighs.
“If you’d only waited it would have been fine-” this last word dips dangerously close to fury again. “-but you had to know, didn’t you, Sherlock?”
Sherlock is rapidly losing the thread of the conversation, his mind is whirring rapidly, trying to figure out what’s going on. Everything’s just spinning, and whirling, and spiraling out of control so fast he can’t even register anymore. It’s the rare feeling he gets when something’s gone horribly, terribly wrong and he can’t fix it.
John lets go of Sherlock’s shoulders and brings his hands up to Sherlock’s face, fumbling blindly; skating over the bridge of Sherlock’s nose and brushing his eyes, the broad plane of his forehead. John leans in and presses his lips to Sherlock’s and when he speaks Sherlock can feel every movement.
“I have to go now.”
“Don’t. I won’t let you.”
John barks a short laugh.
“It’s not my choice. It’s like a summons, Sherlock. I have to obey. Because you’ve seen, I can’t stay. I have to go.”
“No!” He sees the face in front of him begin to shift, to lose its resemblance to John and start to become the man-shaped collection of miscellany from before. There’s a tremendous crack, and the window slams open, letting a gust of cold night air through the room. Sand trickles through his fingers, and he grasps at it in a futile effort to hold on to something.
“John-tell me-tell me how to get you back! There has to be some way, there must be, I don’t care what it is-”
John’s voice sounds as if it is coming from a very, very long way away.
“East of the sun. That’s your hint. That’s the only thing I can give you, Sherlock. East of the sun and west of the moon. Figure it out if you can.” And then, sounding very sad, he says something that sounds a lot like “above you,” and Sherlock reflexively looks up, sand swirling in stinging clouds around him.
The last he sees of John is scraps of sand and paper and string blowing away in the wind.
::
ab imo pectore (from the bottom of my heart)
“East of the sun and west of the moon,” he repeats, numbly. “Above you. Above you. Oh. Oh-”
“-that wasn’t what he said. What he he said was-”
“I love you. Oh. Oh no. No. No.”
::
ab aeterno (from the eternal)
As for what happened after that, perhaps it is better to take a step back from the story for a while. After all, this part is not so very much about the Sherlock Holmes and John Watson of lore, but a tale from the point of view of grief-stricken, frantic man who is not only utterly bewildered but also facing the possibility of losing the first thing that’s mattered to him in a very long time. Told from the view of that man, the story might look very different indeed.
Sherlock Holmes is indeed the stuff of legend, but not all legends will bend to suit his whim. A few must play out in their own course, in their own time, and sometimes in the most unlikely ways.
Because of one story, another came to life.
::
In that time after John Watson left, Sherlock’s life boiled down to stark essentials, stripped of any excess details and flourishes.
In every spare moment, he puzzled over the words that John had left him with, and searched everywhere for a clue to their meaning. The only thing that he could find was an old fairy tale, which was no help as to where John might be. Even seeing what he had seen, he drew the line at castles and trolls and various golden artifacts. There was no denying that the reference seemed apt, in a roundabout way.
He did discover that there were any number of John Watsons in Britain-it’s not exactly an uncommon name-but none who were in the military and then discharged. There were no records of any Watson family with children by the names of John and Harriet.
And then he abandoned any pretense at trying to solve cases and lost himself in the conundrum of where John had gone. The only difference was that with that particular puzzle, every wrong deduction and every incorrect assumption hurt.
But Sherlock is nothing if not stubborn, and on this more than anything he would not yield. His mind bent itself to the task without protest, a single blinding spotlight focused on the problem, searching out the one key that will unlock it.
::
It came the day he realizes that “east of the sun and west of the moon” might not be a place.
It might be a time.
The sun rises in the east every day. It travels over the sky and sets in the west.
The moon rises in the east every evening. It travels across the sky during the night and sets in the west.
When the sun sets in the west, the moon is rising in the east, and they face opposite each other. It’s at that time when anyone in the world can each the place east of the sun and west of the moon, because at that time it’s right in between the sun and the moon.
From there on, Sherlock figured it out almost easily. If that phrase was meant to clue him in about the time, he knew then that the place must be something that he would be able to discover on his own.
And he did discover it, in the most unexpected of places. But it fit.
After all, what else is a morgue but the place people are lost to? For the most part, when people enter there, they are lost to anyone who had cared about them, lost even to their own life, and are no longer anything but a corpse.
He knew he must search the morgue, and he went then to the person who could help him do that.
What he asked for is to be let into the morgue before sunset-unsupervised. Lestrade refused outright, at first. Sherlock asked again. Lestrade refused yet again. Sherlock asked a third time. This time, Lestrade agreed. On one condition-Sherlock must solve a case for him first.
Sherlock solved the case, and that very night he went to the morgue. He found John there, in a body bag in a room down a hallway that was not there before. It was John, too, exactly as Sherlock had seen him that night: an assemblage of junk all shot through with sand. Sherlock touched his face, felt the marble-like smoothness of skin that wasn’t quite there. But John did not wake.
::
The next day, Sherlock went back to Lestrade and asked once more to be able to spend another night in the morgue. Lestrade agreed, on the grounds that Sherlock once again solve a case first.
Sherlock did so, and went back to the morgue once more. John did not wake this time either.
::
He asked Lestrade a third time. This time, Lestrade asked what he was doing, not fully expecting an honest answer. What Sherlock said then was:
“It’s John. He’s in there.”
To which Lestrade, startled, confused, concerned, replied:
“What-how do you know? Can you-identify him?”
To which Sherlock merely looked contemplative, and refused to answer. Lestrade, this time, agreed to let Sherlock into the morgue without asking anything of him first.
::
As the sun and the moon hung counterweight to each other on their opposite horizons, Sherlock strode through the darkened, empty rooms that smelled of disinfectant, down the hallway that wasn’t there before, and into the room where John lay.
He placed a hand on John’s forehead, and spoke.
“I alone can see who you are. I alone can name you. You are John Watson. Now. Wake up.”
::
a caelo usque ad centrum (from the sky to the center)
John wakes up. Or, at least, he feels like he has, but he knows that can’t possibly be right. For the first time in his life, he must be dreaming. Just like-here a pang of deep, cutting regret-when he first awoke, except these are not memories of the past he never had. These can be nothing than memories of the future he will never have.
What he sees this time is Sherlock’s face, but-changed. Where previously skin had been stretched taut and smooth over the bony frame of his cheeks and jaw, there are creases, wrinkles. There are lines fanning out at the corners of his eyes, and his dark hair is streaked with grey at the temples.
“...John? John!” The voice is slightly different, too. It’s too hoarse, as if its owner hasn’t spoken much lately. He sounds very tired, John thinks. Or-no-yes. He does sound tired, but the sound of it is buried under the concern, the desperation, the exhilaration in his voice. It’s pure, bare emotion, open and unashamed; so very unlike Sherlock’s normal cold way of speaking that it makes John want to cry.
There are a thousand questions he could ask right now; a thousand things he could say or do all stretched out in front of him like pathways, bright and open.
He must be dreaming. But.
“Sherlock?” He croaks, and Sherlock’s eyes light up. He says it again, just for the sheer pleasure of it. “Sherlock.” Fierce joy at life, at living, sweeps through him in a warm wave, and he reaches up to touch any part of Sherlock he can reach like he can’t believe his luck. But Sherlock is warm and real under his hands, leaning into his touch, that John can’t think of doing anything but pushing himself upright so he can wrap himself around Sherlock as tightly as possibly and never, ever let go.
If only he could just save this moment in complete and excruciating detail so he would never, ever forget anything about it. The smell of chemicals, eye-watering and nose-burning, the chill in the air, the fabric of Sherlock’s suit bunched between his fingers, the way Sherlock’s breath ghosts against John’s forehead, the feel of long-dead nerves and synapses firing to life again beneath his skin.
He’s so glad, so overwhelmingly happy and content in that moment that it takes his breath away.
::
It’s only afterward, as they’re walking back-back home-through the streets of London that John thinks to ask about the peculiar way Sherlock seems to have aged overnight.
“Hmm? What do you mean, what happened to my face?” Sherlocks says absently, his eyes darting back and forth as if he’s trying to observe everything at once. But his gaze always does return to John’s face, his hands, his body.
“Your hair is greying and you have wrinkles, Sherlock. That’s what I mean. Is it a disguise?”
Sherlock slows his pace, shooting John a peculiar look.
“No. It’s not a disguise. Time happened, John. Just time.”
At first John can’t process the implications of this. Then his brain catches up.
“What-Sherlock!” Sherlock stops walking, and turns. “How long was I-how long has it been?”
Sherlock shrugs.
“I don’t really know.” At John’s disbelieving look, he sighs. “I really don’t. After a while, I stopped keeping track. It was too...hard. It doesn’t really matter. It’s just time. Though Lestrade was rather displeased. You disappeared, you see, and then I stopped solving cases. Most irritating for him. Though he and Mycroft did finally give up trying to ‘talk sense into me’ after the first year or two. Well, for the most part,” he amends. “I think Lestrade was rather angry with me when I showed up at his office after all this time. He made me help out with a case before he would let me into the morgue. Probably trying to stall me. Hoping I’d get distracted.”
John gets as far as an incredulous “stopped solving-” and finds he can’t continue.
Sherlock simply looks at him.
“John. I wasn’t about to let you die, or disappear,” he says, in a tone that suggests this should be obvious. “How long it took is irrelevant. We still have more than enough time.”
After a minute, John slowly resumes walking.
“That’s good, because it was really your fault in the first place, you know,” he says, quietly. He certainly doesn’t expect acknowledgement of this fact from Sherlock. That would be too much to hope for.
“I know. I’ve known.”
There is a long, long silence.
“Sherlock-thanks.”
“Come on, John. Come home.”
::
Sherlock starts taking cases again, much to Lestrade’s mixed relief and exasperation. He drags John out at all hours to look at corpses and evidence and to berate suspects. That’s all right, though, because no matter how dark outside it is, John doesn’t feel even a hint of the horrible cold sluggishness. They inevitably end up chasing criminals all over London, and fall into bed together. Afterward, they fall asleep in the same bed, and John breathes and sleeps like any other human being.
They have flaming rows over Sherlock’s inability to understand why it’s bad to have body parts in the fridge. They eat lots of take-out and watch lots of bad telly. John gets a job again and Sherlock sulks-but not for very long.
But mostly, they solve cases. That is, after all, what they do; Sherlock Holmes the consulting detective and Dr. John Watson, formerly supernatural construct, currently retired army doctor and recorder of tales. That is what they do.
But those are stories for another time.
::
Fandom: Sherlock BBC
Author: plalligator
Character(s)/Pairing(s): Sherlock/John
Rating/Warnings: Still PG-13, folks.
Notes: Deanon from sherlockbbc_fic for this prompt.
Continued from Part 1.
::
ab origine (from the source)
Each night from then on, as they lie in Sherlock’s bed basking in the warmth and the fading aftershocks of pleasure, John will murmur a goodnight and slide out from under the sheets as he gives a gentle tug to Sherlock’s damp hair or presses a kiss to his mouth. And he will leave Sherlock’s room and go to his own, and Sherlock can hear the click of the lock as it fastens behind him.
In the daytime, in the normal course of their lives, John is affectionate. Not one inch less ready to kill for-or die for-Sherlock, but more at ease than Sherlock has ever seen him. He’s happy with what he has.
::
Sherlock works it out easily. The way John leaves Sherlock’s bed for his own, the way he talked the one and only time they ventured to have a conversation about it, the way he never sleeps in front of anyone, never sleeps in the daytime. The way he flatly forbid Sherlock to enter his room. And the way he retreats into that same room early every evening-normally a few minutes before sundown-and doesn’t emerge until morning.
Well. Sherlock works out something, at least, even if he’s not entirely sure what it is.
He means to leave it alone, he really does. But everything strange about John is gathering and pulling together, gaining mass and density. It’s acquiring a gravity of its own that inexorably draws Sherlock in. It preys on the part of him that’s spent a lifetime analyzing, deducing, laying people’s secrets bare with a single word. The part of him that must know the answer to any challenge he encounters.
He can find out. John will never know.
::
It’s nighttime. Nearly midnight, just to be sure. John’s door is locked, but really. What kind of challenge is a lock? It takes barely a minute to pick.
He turns the handle gently and steps inside.
The first thing he notices is the utter lack of anything. It’s devoid of personal effects. There’s the laptop and the gun, but nothing else. There are no photos, not of Harry Watson or John’s college friends or John’s army friends or anyone else. Other than ”Harry Watson-from Clara xxx,” there’s nothing to indicate that John even has a family.
The second thing he notices is John, sprawled out on the bed. It certainly does look like he’s asleep, and Sherlock is about to leave it at that and make his exit, when he realizes something.
John isn’t breathing.
Sherlock rushes over to the bed, fumbles at John’s neck for the pulse. There isn’t one, and the skin is very cold, and very smooth, and very hard.
And that’s when he sees it. It’s like something moving beneath John’s skin. A flickering, dim sort of light. And-
-and he can see through John’s skin. It’s just barely translucent enough, and he bends down to look and sees not bones and veins and arteries and organs and muscle tissue but something else. Wires and strands of wool and what looks like fragments of a clock, little cogs and wheels and springs, and pieces of a computer’s motherboard and pieces of a gun. Pages and pages of paper covered in sprawling script. Chunks of stone. Bullets. And throughout it all, winding lazily like a river, glimmering in the strange half-light, is sand.
It’s more like a strange, grotesque sculpture than a man, and there are no identifiers to that it’s John at all, except for the faint outline of skin and features, molded over the rest of the miscellany like cloudy wax.
He jerks back from the bed, nearly stumbling over his own feet, his heart pounding fast.
”No wonder John hid,” he thinks, distantly, and hesitantly approaches again, placing his hand at the pulse point for the second time. It still feels cold to Sherlock’s touch, and stays that way for maybe ten seconds without sign of a heartbeat. Then there is a surge of warmth through his fingers, and he snatches them away and watches as translucent skin turns opaque and back to its proper color, scars and wrinkles fade back in, and John’s chest begins to rise and fall.
::
ex voto (from the vow)
John opens his eyes.
The first thing he sees is that it is not morning.
The second thing he sees is Sherlock.
::
John’s eyes open, dart about the room for a second, and fix on Sherlock.
And then in one flurry of movement, he leaps from the bed, seizing Sherlock’s shoulders with the grip of a vise.
”What have you done?” he snarls, so genuinely and terrifyingly angry that Sherlock has to suppress the desire to flinch, “Sherlock, can’t you leave well enough alone? You-you weren’t supposed to see!” His hands are trembling in their fierce grip on Sherlock’s shoulders.
“John-”
The fury drops from John’s voice, leaving a horrible forced calm in its place. He sighs.
“If you’d only waited it would have been fine-” this last word dips dangerously close to fury again. “-but you had to know, didn’t you, Sherlock?”
Sherlock is rapidly losing the thread of the conversation, his mind is whirring rapidly, trying to figure out what’s going on. Everything’s just spinning, and whirling, and spiraling out of control so fast he can’t even register anymore. It’s the rare feeling he gets when something’s gone horribly, terribly wrong and he can’t fix it.
John lets go of Sherlock’s shoulders and brings his hands up to Sherlock’s face, fumbling blindly; skating over the bridge of Sherlock’s nose and brushing his eyes, the broad plane of his forehead. John leans in and presses his lips to Sherlock’s and when he speaks Sherlock can feel every movement.
“I have to go now.”
“Don’t. I won’t let you.”
John barks a short laugh.
“It’s not my choice. It’s like a summons, Sherlock. I have to obey. Because you’ve seen, I can’t stay. I have to go.”
“No!” He sees the face in front of him begin to shift, to lose its resemblance to John and start to become the man-shaped collection of miscellany from before. There’s a tremendous crack, and the window slams open, letting a gust of cold night air through the room. Sand trickles through his fingers, and he grasps at it in a futile effort to hold on to something.
“John-tell me-tell me how to get you back! There has to be some way, there must be, I don’t care what it is-”
John’s voice sounds as if it is coming from a very, very long way away.
“East of the sun. That’s your hint. That’s the only thing I can give you, Sherlock. East of the sun and west of the moon. Figure it out if you can.” And then, sounding very sad, he says something that sounds a lot like “above you,” and Sherlock reflexively looks up, sand swirling in stinging clouds around him.
The last he sees of John is scraps of sand and paper and string blowing away in the wind.
::
ab imo pectore (from the bottom of my heart)
“East of the sun and west of the moon,” he repeats, numbly. “Above you. Above you. Oh. Oh-”
“-that wasn’t what he said. What he he said was-”
“I love you. Oh. Oh no. No. No.”
::
ab aeterno (from the eternal)
As for what happened after that, perhaps it is better to take a step back from the story for a while. After all, this part is not so very much about the Sherlock Holmes and John Watson of lore, but a tale from the point of view of grief-stricken, frantic man who is not only utterly bewildered but also facing the possibility of losing the first thing that’s mattered to him in a very long time. Told from the view of that man, the story might look very different indeed.
Sherlock Holmes is indeed the stuff of legend, but not all legends will bend to suit his whim. A few must play out in their own course, in their own time, and sometimes in the most unlikely ways.
Because of one story, another came to life.
::
In that time after John Watson left, Sherlock’s life boiled down to stark essentials, stripped of any excess details and flourishes.
In every spare moment, he puzzled over the words that John had left him with, and searched everywhere for a clue to their meaning. The only thing that he could find was an old fairy tale, which was no help as to where John might be. Even seeing what he had seen, he drew the line at castles and trolls and various golden artifacts. There was no denying that the reference seemed apt, in a roundabout way.
He did discover that there were any number of John Watsons in Britain-it’s not exactly an uncommon name-but none who were in the military and then discharged. There were no records of any Watson family with children by the names of John and Harriet.
And then he abandoned any pretense at trying to solve cases and lost himself in the conundrum of where John had gone. The only difference was that with that particular puzzle, every wrong deduction and every incorrect assumption hurt.
But Sherlock is nothing if not stubborn, and on this more than anything he would not yield. His mind bent itself to the task without protest, a single blinding spotlight focused on the problem, searching out the one key that will unlock it.
::
It came the day he realizes that “east of the sun and west of the moon” might not be a place.
It might be a time.
The sun rises in the east every day. It travels over the sky and sets in the west.
The moon rises in the east every evening. It travels across the sky during the night and sets in the west.
When the sun sets in the west, the moon is rising in the east, and they face opposite each other. It’s at that time when anyone in the world can each the place east of the sun and west of the moon, because at that time it’s right in between the sun and the moon.
From there on, Sherlock figured it out almost easily. If that phrase was meant to clue him in about the time, he knew then that the place must be something that he would be able to discover on his own.
And he did discover it, in the most unexpected of places. But it fit.
After all, what else is a morgue but the place people are lost to? For the most part, when people enter there, they are lost to anyone who had cared about them, lost even to their own life, and are no longer anything but a corpse.
He knew he must search the morgue, and he went then to the person who could help him do that.
What he asked for is to be let into the morgue before sunset-unsupervised. Lestrade refused outright, at first. Sherlock asked again. Lestrade refused yet again. Sherlock asked a third time. This time, Lestrade agreed. On one condition-Sherlock must solve a case for him first.
Sherlock solved the case, and that very night he went to the morgue. He found John there, in a body bag in a room down a hallway that was not there before. It was John, too, exactly as Sherlock had seen him that night: an assemblage of junk all shot through with sand. Sherlock touched his face, felt the marble-like smoothness of skin that wasn’t quite there. But John did not wake.
::
The next day, Sherlock went back to Lestrade and asked once more to be able to spend another night in the morgue. Lestrade agreed, on the grounds that Sherlock once again solve a case first.
Sherlock did so, and went back to the morgue once more. John did not wake this time either.
::
He asked Lestrade a third time. This time, Lestrade asked what he was doing, not fully expecting an honest answer. What Sherlock said then was:
“It’s John. He’s in there.”
To which Lestrade, startled, confused, concerned, replied:
“What-how do you know? Can you-identify him?”
To which Sherlock merely looked contemplative, and refused to answer. Lestrade, this time, agreed to let Sherlock into the morgue without asking anything of him first.
::
As the sun and the moon hung counterweight to each other on their opposite horizons, Sherlock strode through the darkened, empty rooms that smelled of disinfectant, down the hallway that wasn’t there before, and into the room where John lay.
He placed a hand on John’s forehead, and spoke.
“I alone can see who you are. I alone can name you. You are John Watson. Now. Wake up.”
::
a caelo usque ad centrum (from the sky to the center)
John wakes up. Or, at least, he feels like he has, but he knows that can’t possibly be right. For the first time in his life, he must be dreaming. Just like-here a pang of deep, cutting regret-when he first awoke, except these are not memories of the past he never had. These can be nothing than memories of the future he will never have.
What he sees this time is Sherlock’s face, but-changed. Where previously skin had been stretched taut and smooth over the bony frame of his cheeks and jaw, there are creases, wrinkles. There are lines fanning out at the corners of his eyes, and his dark hair is streaked with grey at the temples.
“...John? John!” The voice is slightly different, too. It’s too hoarse, as if its owner hasn’t spoken much lately. He sounds very tired, John thinks. Or-no-yes. He does sound tired, but the sound of it is buried under the concern, the desperation, the exhilaration in his voice. It’s pure, bare emotion, open and unashamed; so very unlike Sherlock’s normal cold way of speaking that it makes John want to cry.
There are a thousand questions he could ask right now; a thousand things he could say or do all stretched out in front of him like pathways, bright and open.
He must be dreaming. But.
“Sherlock?” He croaks, and Sherlock’s eyes light up. He says it again, just for the sheer pleasure of it. “Sherlock.” Fierce joy at life, at living, sweeps through him in a warm wave, and he reaches up to touch any part of Sherlock he can reach like he can’t believe his luck. But Sherlock is warm and real under his hands, leaning into his touch, that John can’t think of doing anything but pushing himself upright so he can wrap himself around Sherlock as tightly as possibly and never, ever let go.
If only he could just save this moment in complete and excruciating detail so he would never, ever forget anything about it. The smell of chemicals, eye-watering and nose-burning, the chill in the air, the fabric of Sherlock’s suit bunched between his fingers, the way Sherlock’s breath ghosts against John’s forehead, the feel of long-dead nerves and synapses firing to life again beneath his skin.
He’s so glad, so overwhelmingly happy and content in that moment that it takes his breath away.
::
It’s only afterward, as they’re walking back-back home-through the streets of London that John thinks to ask about the peculiar way Sherlock seems to have aged overnight.
“Hmm? What do you mean, what happened to my face?” Sherlocks says absently, his eyes darting back and forth as if he’s trying to observe everything at once. But his gaze always does return to John’s face, his hands, his body.
“Your hair is greying and you have wrinkles, Sherlock. That’s what I mean. Is it a disguise?”
Sherlock slows his pace, shooting John a peculiar look.
“No. It’s not a disguise. Time happened, John. Just time.”
At first John can’t process the implications of this. Then his brain catches up.
“What-Sherlock!” Sherlock stops walking, and turns. “How long was I-how long has it been?”
Sherlock shrugs.
“I don’t really know.” At John’s disbelieving look, he sighs. “I really don’t. After a while, I stopped keeping track. It was too...hard. It doesn’t really matter. It’s just time. Though Lestrade was rather displeased. You disappeared, you see, and then I stopped solving cases. Most irritating for him. Though he and Mycroft did finally give up trying to ‘talk sense into me’ after the first year or two. Well, for the most part,” he amends. “I think Lestrade was rather angry with me when I showed up at his office after all this time. He made me help out with a case before he would let me into the morgue. Probably trying to stall me. Hoping I’d get distracted.”
John gets as far as an incredulous “stopped solving-” and finds he can’t continue.
Sherlock simply looks at him.
“John. I wasn’t about to let you die, or disappear,” he says, in a tone that suggests this should be obvious. “How long it took is irrelevant. We still have more than enough time.”
After a minute, John slowly resumes walking.
“That’s good, because it was really your fault in the first place, you know,” he says, quietly. He certainly doesn’t expect acknowledgement of this fact from Sherlock. That would be too much to hope for.
“I know. I’ve known.”
There is a long, long silence.
“Sherlock-thanks.”
“Come on, John. Come home.”
::
Sherlock starts taking cases again, much to Lestrade’s mixed relief and exasperation. He drags John out at all hours to look at corpses and evidence and to berate suspects. That’s all right, though, because no matter how dark outside it is, John doesn’t feel even a hint of the horrible cold sluggishness. They inevitably end up chasing criminals all over London, and fall into bed together. Afterward, they fall asleep in the same bed, and John breathes and sleeps like any other human being.
They have flaming rows over Sherlock’s inability to understand why it’s bad to have body parts in the fridge. They eat lots of take-out and watch lots of bad telly. John gets a job again and Sherlock sulks-but not for very long.
But mostly, they solve cases. That is, after all, what they do; Sherlock Holmes the consulting detective and Dr. John Watson, formerly supernatural construct, currently retired army doctor and recorder of tales. That is what they do.
But those are stories for another time.
::