FIC: Here Be Dragons (9/?)
Title: Here Be Dragons (9/?)
Author: WinterofourDiscontent
Beta by LaReineNoire, themegaloo, and rosamund
Company while I write at the coffeeshop by stupid_drawings
Characters/Pairings: John/Sherlock preslash
Rating: PG-13
Word count: 1600 for this part, currently 11000+ overall with more to come
Warnings: canon-typical violence
Disclaimer: Sherlock is not mine, Arthur is everyone's
Summary: From this fic prompt in the kinkmeme: Sherlock is an irritating and bored version of Merlin. John is a dubious, reincarnated Arthur who wants to pretend he's not a complete BAMF.
A/N:
Originally posted anonymously in the kinkmeme, now de-anoned, cleaned up and slightly edited to make more sense overall. Finally putting that minor in Medieval/Renaissance Studies to good questionable use.
I feel I should mention this, because it’s come up a few times in comments: This story is not a Sherlock/(BBC)Merlin crossover, it is a Sherlock-based Arthurian Legend AU, and is thus likely to disappoint any readers looking for (BBC)Merlin-based characterizations. In terms of Arthurian sources, John is probably closer to T. H. White’s Arthur and Sherlock to Sir Thomas Malory’s Merlin than anyone else, but the characterizations are primarily based directly on Sherlock and my own weird headcanon.
Chapter One
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine on AO3 or below this
***
Jack Cade:
Now is Mortimer lord of this city. And here, sitting
upon London-stone, I charge and command that, of the
city's cost, the pissing-conduit run nothing but
claret wine this first year of our reign. And now
henceforward it shall be treason for any that calls
me other than Lord Mortimer.
- William Shakespeare; History of Henry VI, Part II, Act 4, Scene 6
***
John had duly reported his lost wallet (military ID, £22 in cash, bank card, Oyster card, various receipts and bits of paper) to the military, then the bank, then the police. It was possible, he supposed, that it had just fallen out during the fight and that someone would return it. Possible, but unlikely.
He wasn’t by nature a cynical person, but it was hard not to feel a bit ‘no good deed goes unpunished’ about the whole thing. Then again, the same could be said about his military service, so he just stopped that entire train of thought and reminded himself that he hadn’t lost anything of real value, given the option he wouldn’t have done anything differently, and it was all fine. It even gave him something to mention to his therapist that week, though he very carefully didn’t mention anything about the fight he’d got into beforehand. Unfortunately, John had a feeling Dr. Thompson (Please, John, call me Ella) knew he’d left parts out of his story; she’d given him the disapproving look he was getting used to receiving from her and had scribbled something in her notepad.
John kept taking walks, though. It was still the only form of entertainment he could really afford, and even he knew that sitting around in his dreary little bedsit with only an illegal firearm for company was likely to have a bad end.
Today he’d got as far as the edge of the City. Tomorrow, perhaps, he would visit the British Museum-- he hadn’t been there in twenty years. They had a room full of mummies that had alternately terrified and fascinated him as a kid, one of them looking as though he’d been screaming when they wrapped him up.
He wondered how much the museum was likely to have changed and how often they dusted the mummies (and how did one dust mummies) when he once again heard a commotion nearby. Proving that contrary to his primary school reports, he was indeed a slow learner, John was once again off like a shot to see what the fuss was about.
A small crowd of people had gathered around a businessman collapsed on the pavement, though unlike the last time they seemed composed of gawkers and concerned citizens. A woman kneeling next to the man was ineffectually trying to do… something to help him, but didn’t seem to have any idea of what that should be, beyond unbuttoning his coat and waving her arms about.
“I can’t tell if he’s breathing!” she practically yelled into her mobile.
As though a switch had gone off in his head, John suddenly felt completely at ease.
“Out of the way,” he barked at some of the onlookers directly in front of him. “I’m a doctor.”
He made his way over quickly, then knelt down next to the man to check his pulse and pupils.
“Henry just collapsed. Just… fell over.”
“That the ambulance service?” he asked the woman. She nodded.
“You stay on the line with them, alright?” he consciously gentled his tone. “Make sure they know where to come.”
Everything around him faded into blurry insignificance as he turned his attention to his patient and began administering CPR. External sounds became muted as Stayin’ Alive played loudly in his head, providing the necessary rhythm for the chest compressions.
He stayed that way, in a strange bubble of calm/adrenaline push/breathe quiet/pulse until the paramedics arrived to load the man and his wife into the ambulance.
John very carefully stood up again, bracing himself with his cane and waving away the one or two people who offered assistance. As the crowd dispersed and the adrenaline faded, he found himself almost angry at the various sincere and awkward compliments he’d received from the departing bystanders. He hadn’t done anything that bloody special-- anyone could give CPR. There had probably been at least a few people in the crowd who’d been trained to at one point or another, who’d been too scared to try.
He could feel his leg about to give out from the unexpected exertion, and made his way to the nearest vertical surface. John fished his mobile out of his pocket, hoping he could at least look as though he was nonchalantly leaning against the wall and texting instead of trying rather hard not to collapse.
He tried to open it one handed, but it slipped instead, making an unpleasant noise as it hit the pavement. John winced, hoping he hadn’t broken the stupid thing. He could hardly let it lie there, but bending down again to get it filled him with dread.
Sod it. He bent down slowly at the knees, feeling like an old man, picked up the mobile and shoved it in his pocket. He reached his right hand out, grabbing onto an ornamental grate in the wall for support as he stood back up.
As his hand made contact with the grate, everything flashed white, then golden.
He heard a thudding in his head, more regular than his heartbeat; a steady thump thump thump a bit like a metronome or a clock chiming the hour. It expanded, it filled his chest and kept growing, kept beating, until his whole body was at the mercy of the strange sensation in an odd parody of the cardio-pulmonary respiration he’d just performed on someone else.
If he could think, he’d think he was having a heart attack.
If he could think.
There were flashes that might have almost been images if they’d stayed put long enough for his brain to make sense of them. (Later, thinking on it, one of them might possibly have resembled Stonehenge just a bit. Inasmuch as a blurry group of greyish-greenish blobs could be said to resemble anything.)
Then, abruptly, everything normalized again, and he was just a middle-aged ex-soldier with a limp and an empty blog, leaning against a brick wall next to a sports shop in Cannon Street.
Christ, he really was in bad shape, if he was having heart palpitations and vision issues.
Oddly, though, he felt better than he had in ages. His head felt clear, the aches in his body had vanished, and he felt as though he had energy enough to walk to Wales and back.
He would definitely not be mentioning any of this to Dr. Thompson at their next session.
***
Yeoman Warder Randall Walters was leading his third tour of the day, and was thus allowing his mind to wander freely about while, to all intents and purposes, his body was fully involved in regaling a crowd of tourists with a degree of overacting straight out of Victorian melodrama.
“...Legend has it that if the ravens were to leave the Tower, the Tower and England itself Would. Then. Fall. So by the royal decree of King Charles the Second, six ravens are to be kept at the Tower at all times, their wing feathers clipped, Ladies and Gentlemen, to prevent them…”
As if in response to an unseen cue, the ravens suddenly began croaking, a simultaneous initial hoarse cry that then split into a cacophony of voices as each bird tried to make itself heard above the others. Ignoring the visitors and the Beefeater, they moved into a rough circle on the green, continuing to hold an animated discussion amongst themselves.
Deciding that there was no immediate danger to either his tour group or the ravens, and thus, this was the Ravenmaster’s problem, not his, Yeoman Warder Walters mentally forwarded past the rest of the raven-related section of his speech and turned back to his tour group.
“We’ll now head over to Tower Green, where a number of illustrious personages who fell afoul of the Crown experienced an untimely end on the chopping block.”
***
Once Sherlock made his way past the last of the crime scene tape, he was unsurprised to discover a black car waiting at the kerb directly in front of him.
He opened the door and all but flung himself onto the seat opposite Mycroft.
“Bedivere felt it too. Though of course he’s no idea what it means.”
Mycroft looked smug. More smug than usual. The smug git. “Of course.”
“The Tower? Westminster Abbey? Where, Mycroft?”
“The London Stone is the most likely.”
“The… of course. Tell me for once your bloody surveillance cameras have come in handy.”
“Despite what you and Banksy may believe, the CCTV system is hardly omnipresent. And for some reason, an almost forgotten historical curiousity was not deemed a priority when the cameras were put in place.”
Sherlock snorted. “All this time, you secretly running the country, and you’ve managed to miss him?”
“We both know you’d have been rather disappointed if I’d found him for you.”
Sherlock remained silent, which they both knew was its own kind of answer.
Mycroft continued. “I have, however, taken the liberty of having the footage reviewed for any other personages who may have reacted to the Knell.”
Sherlock turned to stare out the window. Intellectually, he knew that finding more knights and historical whatnots was important, but compared to finding his… his Arthur, he really couldn’t bring himself to care. They were just means to an end.
“You do realise that If Lestrade is still in ignorance of his former identity, it is quite likely that Arthur himself remembers nothing of his past, even now.”
Sherlock crossed his arms. “I’m not an idiot, Mycroft, I have accounted for that possibility.”
Mycroft tilted his head and looked up at Sherlock, a steady gaze that managed to convey doubt, skepticism, concern, and what Sherlock resolutely refused to interpret as fondness.
“One further thing to consider, Sherlock… if we know he’s back,” Mycroft paused so briefly that anyone other than Sherlock would have missed it, “others may as well. Things are waking up, and not all of them are our allies.”
The car finally rolled to a stop, and Sherlock bolted out onto Cannon Street before he could be forced to endure one more second of lecturing.
“Sherlock, please don’t slam the…”
Sherlock slammed the car door shut behind him.
Arthur was back. The game was on.
***
A/N: Learn CPR, kids. You could save a life.
(And yes, they do actually teach you to time the compressions to the beat of Stayin’ Alive.)
Chapter Ten
Author: WinterofourDiscontent
Beta by LaReineNoire, themegaloo, and rosamund
Company while I write at the coffeeshop by stupid_drawings
Characters/Pairings: John/Sherlock preslash
Rating: PG-13
Word count: 1600 for this part, currently 11000+ overall with more to come
Warnings: canon-typical violence
Disclaimer: Sherlock is not mine, Arthur is everyone's
Summary: From this fic prompt in the kinkmeme: Sherlock is an irritating and bored version of Merlin. John is a dubious, reincarnated Arthur who wants to pretend he's not a complete BAMF.
A/N:
Originally posted anonymously in the kinkmeme, now de-anoned, cleaned up and slightly edited to make more sense overall. Finally putting that minor in Medieval/Renaissance Studies to good questionable use.
I feel I should mention this, because it’s come up a few times in comments: This story is not a Sherlock/(BBC)Merlin crossover, it is a Sherlock-based Arthurian Legend AU, and is thus likely to disappoint any readers looking for (BBC)Merlin-based characterizations. In terms of Arthurian sources, John is probably closer to T. H. White’s Arthur and Sherlock to Sir Thomas Malory’s Merlin than anyone else, but the characterizations are primarily based directly on Sherlock and my own weird headcanon.
Chapter One
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine on AO3 or below this
***
Jack Cade:
Now is Mortimer lord of this city. And here, sitting
upon London-stone, I charge and command that, of the
city's cost, the pissing-conduit run nothing but
claret wine this first year of our reign. And now
henceforward it shall be treason for any that calls
me other than Lord Mortimer.
- William Shakespeare; History of Henry VI, Part II, Act 4, Scene 6
***
John had duly reported his lost wallet (military ID, £22 in cash, bank card, Oyster card, various receipts and bits of paper) to the military, then the bank, then the police. It was possible, he supposed, that it had just fallen out during the fight and that someone would return it. Possible, but unlikely.
He wasn’t by nature a cynical person, but it was hard not to feel a bit ‘no good deed goes unpunished’ about the whole thing. Then again, the same could be said about his military service, so he just stopped that entire train of thought and reminded himself that he hadn’t lost anything of real value, given the option he wouldn’t have done anything differently, and it was all fine. It even gave him something to mention to his therapist that week, though he very carefully didn’t mention anything about the fight he’d got into beforehand. Unfortunately, John had a feeling Dr. Thompson (Please, John, call me Ella) knew he’d left parts out of his story; she’d given him the disapproving look he was getting used to receiving from her and had scribbled something in her notepad.
John kept taking walks, though. It was still the only form of entertainment he could really afford, and even he knew that sitting around in his dreary little bedsit with only an illegal firearm for company was likely to have a bad end.
Today he’d got as far as the edge of the City. Tomorrow, perhaps, he would visit the British Museum-- he hadn’t been there in twenty years. They had a room full of mummies that had alternately terrified and fascinated him as a kid, one of them looking as though he’d been screaming when they wrapped him up.
He wondered how much the museum was likely to have changed and how often they dusted the mummies (and how did one dust mummies) when he once again heard a commotion nearby. Proving that contrary to his primary school reports, he was indeed a slow learner, John was once again off like a shot to see what the fuss was about.
A small crowd of people had gathered around a businessman collapsed on the pavement, though unlike the last time they seemed composed of gawkers and concerned citizens. A woman kneeling next to the man was ineffectually trying to do… something to help him, but didn’t seem to have any idea of what that should be, beyond unbuttoning his coat and waving her arms about.
“I can’t tell if he’s breathing!” she practically yelled into her mobile.
As though a switch had gone off in his head, John suddenly felt completely at ease.
“Out of the way,” he barked at some of the onlookers directly in front of him. “I’m a doctor.”
He made his way over quickly, then knelt down next to the man to check his pulse and pupils.
“Henry just collapsed. Just… fell over.”
“That the ambulance service?” he asked the woman. She nodded.
“You stay on the line with them, alright?” he consciously gentled his tone. “Make sure they know where to come.”
Everything around him faded into blurry insignificance as he turned his attention to his patient and began administering CPR. External sounds became muted as Stayin’ Alive played loudly in his head, providing the necessary rhythm for the chest compressions.
He stayed that way, in a strange bubble of calm/adrenaline push/breathe quiet/pulse until the paramedics arrived to load the man and his wife into the ambulance.
John very carefully stood up again, bracing himself with his cane and waving away the one or two people who offered assistance. As the crowd dispersed and the adrenaline faded, he found himself almost angry at the various sincere and awkward compliments he’d received from the departing bystanders. He hadn’t done anything that bloody special-- anyone could give CPR. There had probably been at least a few people in the crowd who’d been trained to at one point or another, who’d been too scared to try.
He could feel his leg about to give out from the unexpected exertion, and made his way to the nearest vertical surface. John fished his mobile out of his pocket, hoping he could at least look as though he was nonchalantly leaning against the wall and texting instead of trying rather hard not to collapse.
He tried to open it one handed, but it slipped instead, making an unpleasant noise as it hit the pavement. John winced, hoping he hadn’t broken the stupid thing. He could hardly let it lie there, but bending down again to get it filled him with dread.
Sod it. He bent down slowly at the knees, feeling like an old man, picked up the mobile and shoved it in his pocket. He reached his right hand out, grabbing onto an ornamental grate in the wall for support as he stood back up.
As his hand made contact with the grate, everything flashed white, then golden.
He heard a thudding in his head, more regular than his heartbeat; a steady thump thump thump a bit like a metronome or a clock chiming the hour. It expanded, it filled his chest and kept growing, kept beating, until his whole body was at the mercy of the strange sensation in an odd parody of the cardio-pulmonary respiration he’d just performed on someone else.
If he could think, he’d think he was having a heart attack.
If he could think.
There were flashes that might have almost been images if they’d stayed put long enough for his brain to make sense of them. (Later, thinking on it, one of them might possibly have resembled Stonehenge just a bit. Inasmuch as a blurry group of greyish-greenish blobs could be said to resemble anything.)
Then, abruptly, everything normalized again, and he was just a middle-aged ex-soldier with a limp and an empty blog, leaning against a brick wall next to a sports shop in Cannon Street.
Christ, he really was in bad shape, if he was having heart palpitations and vision issues.
Oddly, though, he felt better than he had in ages. His head felt clear, the aches in his body had vanished, and he felt as though he had energy enough to walk to Wales and back.
He would definitely not be mentioning any of this to Dr. Thompson at their next session.
***
Yeoman Warder Randall Walters was leading his third tour of the day, and was thus allowing his mind to wander freely about while, to all intents and purposes, his body was fully involved in regaling a crowd of tourists with a degree of overacting straight out of Victorian melodrama.
“...Legend has it that if the ravens were to leave the Tower, the Tower and England itself Would. Then. Fall. So by the royal decree of King Charles the Second, six ravens are to be kept at the Tower at all times, their wing feathers clipped, Ladies and Gentlemen, to prevent them…”
As if in response to an unseen cue, the ravens suddenly began croaking, a simultaneous initial hoarse cry that then split into a cacophony of voices as each bird tried to make itself heard above the others. Ignoring the visitors and the Beefeater, they moved into a rough circle on the green, continuing to hold an animated discussion amongst themselves.
Deciding that there was no immediate danger to either his tour group or the ravens, and thus, this was the Ravenmaster’s problem, not his, Yeoman Warder Walters mentally forwarded past the rest of the raven-related section of his speech and turned back to his tour group.
“We’ll now head over to Tower Green, where a number of illustrious personages who fell afoul of the Crown experienced an untimely end on the chopping block.”
***
Once Sherlock made his way past the last of the crime scene tape, he was unsurprised to discover a black car waiting at the kerb directly in front of him.
He opened the door and all but flung himself onto the seat opposite Mycroft.
“Bedivere felt it too. Though of course he’s no idea what it means.”
Mycroft looked smug. More smug than usual. The smug git. “Of course.”
“The Tower? Westminster Abbey? Where, Mycroft?”
“The London Stone is the most likely.”
“The… of course. Tell me for once your bloody surveillance cameras have come in handy.”
“Despite what you and Banksy may believe, the CCTV system is hardly omnipresent. And for some reason, an almost forgotten historical curiousity was not deemed a priority when the cameras were put in place.”
Sherlock snorted. “All this time, you secretly running the country, and you’ve managed to miss him?”
“We both know you’d have been rather disappointed if I’d found him for you.”
Sherlock remained silent, which they both knew was its own kind of answer.
Mycroft continued. “I have, however, taken the liberty of having the footage reviewed for any other personages who may have reacted to the Knell.”
Sherlock turned to stare out the window. Intellectually, he knew that finding more knights and historical whatnots was important, but compared to finding his… his Arthur, he really couldn’t bring himself to care. They were just means to an end.
“You do realise that If Lestrade is still in ignorance of his former identity, it is quite likely that Arthur himself remembers nothing of his past, even now.”
Sherlock crossed his arms. “I’m not an idiot, Mycroft, I have accounted for that possibility.”
Mycroft tilted his head and looked up at Sherlock, a steady gaze that managed to convey doubt, skepticism, concern, and what Sherlock resolutely refused to interpret as fondness.
“One further thing to consider, Sherlock… if we know he’s back,” Mycroft paused so briefly that anyone other than Sherlock would have missed it, “others may as well. Things are waking up, and not all of them are our allies.”
The car finally rolled to a stop, and Sherlock bolted out onto Cannon Street before he could be forced to endure one more second of lecturing.
“Sherlock, please don’t slam the…”
Sherlock slammed the car door shut behind him.
Arthur was back. The game was on.
***
A/N: Learn CPR, kids. You could save a life.
(And yes, they do actually teach you to time the compressions to the beat of Stayin’ Alive.)
Chapter Ten