Fic: The World on His Wrist - 5/6 (BBC Sherlock)
Title: The World on His Wrist
Rating: PG13
Wordcount: 6.8k, this part, 31.6k overall
Betas: vyctori and fogbutton
Disclaimer: Do not own.
Summary: First, he is shot in Afghanistan. Second, he wakes to a phone call in Chelmsford, Essex. Third is pain, fourth is normalcy, fifth is agony and sixth is confusion. By the eighth, he's lost track. (John-centric AU)
prologue - part one - Part Two - Part Three - Part Four - Part Five - Part Six - Epilogue
He keeps soaking the bandage on his hand with other people’s blood. It’s not sanitary and it worries him a bit, checking on his cut each time he unwinds the fabric from his hand.
The cut impairs him more than it harms, but an impaired doctor is harmful on his own. His hand doesn’t shake, he knows his shoulder is smooth skin over unbroken bone and undamaged muscle, but that’s still not enough. It’s not going to be enough, not here, not now, not like this, but it won’t make him panic either.
John does what he always does.
He makes do.
Chelmsford is an ill fit after the bloody days. His body follows the habits of his mind, assumes military bearing without military training. These hands have never held a gun and yet they’re still meant to be his hands.
He doesn’t speak Dari, he’s never set foot in the Middle East, and his body has never known true agony. He’s lost patients, but he’s never killed. He loves London, but he’s never tried to live there.
Whoever he’s meant to be here, it’s not John Watson.
He falls asleep as soon as he can that night, thinking, Sherlock. Sherlock.
There exists a very good reason that Derek is so resistant to conflict. It’s because he’s such crap at resolving it.
Fortunately, somewhere between his mother, his sister and now Sherlock, John has become something of an expert.
John makes his breakfast quietly, sits at his own side of the table. He does not put his plate on Derek’s newspaper, nor his mug. He becomes quiet, unobtrusive.
When Derek finishes with a section, folding it back up and setting it aside, John asks, “Can I...?” He doesn’t quite reach, merely gestures.
Derek hands it to him.
They both read.
Derek hands him the next section as well.
John’s not after the business section, but he reads anyway.
They are friends again.
The matter with the old woman isn’t so simple. John may not know who the old woman was (is), but he does know where she died (will die). He knows which flats are primed to explode, to collapse in a tumble of blood and concrete.
John tries not to think about blood and concrete. Or explosions. Or dust.
It’s possible he should go back to therapy, but that will have to wait.
He spends the entire day thinking about it. His shift at the surgery under Dr. Cooper is a short one and the remainder of his time is spent trying to get hold of the mobile numbers or email addresses of the flat residents. Them, at least, he can get out. Maybe. It takes him ages, much too long, and once he has them, he doesn’t have the next step of the plan. He can’t do this, can’t risk it.
But then he thinks: they’re going to die anyway.
Warning, gas leak?
No, that’s the bomber’s strategy. If John helps to disguise the explosion as a gas leak, that’s little help and one hell of a tip-off to their bomber.
What John needs is a way to get everyone out of the flats. He needs to evacuate the building before the explosion. He has three hours left to think. Calling or emailing would reveal his number and IP address to the police. A payphone or library is far too public when Mycroft may be watching behind any CCTV camera, but John can’t let that possibility stop him. There are innocent people in the balance.
When he realizes what he has to do, it’s absurdly simple.
First, John goes to the flats.
Second, he uses Sherlock’s new-neighbour-forgot-my-keys trick to be buzzed into the building.
Third, he trips over his own feet, slaps his hand onto the fire alarm and ducks out of the building, feigning embarrassment in the hunch of his shoulders and the duck of his head.
In no great hurry, people start to come out, all looking more cross than concerned.
The building explodes.
John has no proper reason for being there, but fortunately, no one asks that question. No one wants to interrupt a man performing chest compressions.
“Derek?” John asks into his mobile.
“Yep?” Derek answers, stretching the syllable.
“I know it’s a bit late,” John says, “but I need to ask a favour.”
“Yes?” Derek asks, stretching this syllable to even greater lengths.
“I need a change of clothes. Just jeans and a shirt. Nothing I need a belt for, I lost my belt. Oh, and a jacket.”
“Did a woman just throw you out of her flat?”
“No,” John says, “I am not naked.”
“Well, I assumed you had your pants and shoes. You’re too calm for a man without pants and shoes.”
“I have those, yes. If you can’t come down, I’ll manage, I just wanted to ask.”
“No, it’s fine,” Derek says. “Where are you?”
He gives the address, includes directions from the tube.
“But you don’t work at the hospital.”
“I work in emergencies,” John says, which is probably the truest thing he’s said all day.
“John, that gas explosion-”
“I’m fine. The flats collapsed inward, not outward, they were old, you know how they collapse down on each other-”
“Oh my god.”
“I’m fine. Really, I’m fine. I was passing by, had to help, and it went from there. I’m fine.”
Derek takes some reassuring, but John does eventually get his change of clothes.
Derek makes him tea and tries to talk with him. It shouldn’t be possible for a thoughtful, generous librarian to be more annoying than a moody consulting detective, but there it is. For all Derek is willing to listen, it’s beyond him to understand.
Sherlock would have made tea, left it somewhere near John and then walked away, leaving John to decide if this meant it was for him. Once he had, Sherlock would have come back, nibbling on a Hobnob, and dunked his biscuit into John’s cuppa, getting crumbs everywhere and leaving mush among the dregs. John would have been irritated, mildly, before Sherlock said something droll and ridiculous. They might smile, then, for an instant, and move on.
As melodramatic as the man is, his gestures are small. Temporary without being fragile. Not glass, but folded paper, tiny figurines to be unfolded and tucked away flat after admiring. To be studied in quiet moments, each crease and every fold, and wondered at, knowing their complex shapes to be forever lost. Not a black lotus heralding death, not a flower, nothing so delicate.
Paper cranes, John finds himself thinking. Paper cranes in black and blue and grey. Hung on a string, suspended in flight, suggesting the sweeping movements of long fingers, the flow and flick of pale wrists.
John drinks his tea and admits to himself, just a little, that he’s in over his head.
He wakes with his cheek on a striped blue-and-white pillow. He’s shivering, his window broken.
Baker Street.
Sherlock.
Digging through his closet, he puts on a dark shirt, pulls on the tan jumper, the one he’d worn the first time he’d killed a man in London. His heart beats against the top button of his shirt, threatening to rise or fall, and John walks the fine line between swallowing it down or coughing it out. He may yet choke, but he doubts it.
Downstairs, Sherlock is already dressed, or possibly still dressed. No, different shirt today. Blue, almost like his eyes. His gaze aimed through their blank and silent telly, he has the pink mobile on the arm of his chair. He’s distant, unresponsive. His steepled fingers rest against his lips.
John makes and eats brekkie. Instead of noting buttered toast and jam, his mouth reports the taste of army food, the well-known, little-liked flavours he experiences twice or so each week. He has no problem stomaching it.
Plate into the sink, empty cup atop it, and John refuses to hesitate. Now is not the time for action, but neither is it the time for inaction. Everything is normal. Nothing has changed. Nothing is different.
Picking up the remote, he turns on the telly. News station, yes, currently an advert. Watching for it, he sees Sherlock blink.
John hands him the remote and sits.
Sherlock shifts, crossing his legs. The remote on one arm of the chair, the mobile on the other, it’s clear where Sherlock’s focus is fixed, is bent. The mobile has yet to ring.
They wait for the news hour to begin.
He lets the familiar sounds of the BBC wash over him, listens to the familiar voice of a familiar newscaster, and sees a familiar sight. It looks different, sunlit on telly the day after. Collapsed but calm. No airborne concrete. The dust has settled and John tries not to think about the rest of it. The toast sits poorly now, the lingering taste of strawberry jam turned cloying and thick.
“...ripped through several floors, killing twelve people-”
“Old block of flats,” John notes a second time in as many days, mind distant, voice soft. He glances to Sherlock, the man unmoving. How many people? Of those he’d brought out to the street, how many of those people were in this dozen?
“-is said to have been caused by a faulty gas main.”
“He certainly gets about,” John sighs. He’d been there, smelled the air. Seen it. What a blatant lie.
“Well, obviously I lost that round.” Sherlock clicks the telly to another station. “Although technically, I did solve the case.”
Lost that round, John thinks. Lost that round. His hand falls from his cheek as he looks to his flatmate.
Sherlock goes on. Explains. Does what he does best. He fixates. His eyes remain distant, his voice soft. His left hand gestures, held aloft, pointing here and there, his palm bidding John to be silent.
“So, people come to him wanting their crimes fixed up,” John asks anyway, “like booking a holiday?”
Sherlock’s hand curls shut. He goes away again and John’s trained eye knows this is farther than before. “Novel,” Sherlock whispers and John’s stomach clenches in all the wrong ways at the feeling behind the word.
Admiration.
It is. This look that John has never seen before, that’s what this is. He looks away, makes a noise to keep from speaking.
Because John can still feel it. The heat. The sound of it. Nothing like Afghanistan, no, nowhere near as bad, but in London. In his London. Flying debris and screaming civilians and a man’s chest cracking under the heel of John’s palm, a man who’d coughed blood into John’s mouth with the breath that might have saved him. John had endured long waits with the practised patience of a soldier, after, had undergone the tests to clear him. He’d lost his belt to a woman who would likely lose her lower leg, that scrap of metal piping more like a bullet than debris as it ripped through her calf. His belt turned bloody tourniquet as her shocked face ran with tears.
She’d kept asking, “Where’s my daughter?”
John had said, “I’m sure she’s all right, I need you to keep pulling this closed, stay with me, look at me. For your daughter’s sake, look at me.”
He watches Kenny Prince’s houseboy on the telly, a murderer on such a small scale. He focuses on that, on that obsessively clean kitchen, and there. There.
John’s calm again.
He risks looking back to Sherlock. Sherlock, who isn’t looking at the phone, who isn’t watching it or studying it, but hungering. “Taking his time this time.” His voice is low, all frustration and impatience. John refuses to call it need, refuses to look any longer.
He pulls the conversation to the side, as much as he can. Sherlock cares about the Powers case. If Sherlock cares about anything, he must care about that. But that’s it, then, isn’t it? This connection is old, between Sherlock and the bomber. Unknowingly then, knowingly now, Sherlock has been after this killer his entire life.
Small wonder there’s nothing else in his head. John thinks, you never do forget your first, do you? And everything within him tries, tries so desperately, to rebel.
John controls himself. He’s good at that. “So why’s he doing this, then?” he asks. “Playing this game with you. Do you think he wants to be caught?” If the bomber wanted to show off his brilliance, he’s found his perfect audience, his perfect, enraptured audience.
Sherlock’s not even looking at him anymore. Palms apart and fingertips touching, as always, before his lips, Sherlock says, “I think he wants to be distracted.” As if this is logical. Understandable.
As if those people aren’t dead.
If the sound John makes is anything like a laugh, even the bitterest of laughs, it’s mere coincidence. “I hope you’ll be very happy together,” he says, and stands, and turns away. Walks away begging to be numb.
He’s almost in the kitchen before Sherlock asks, “Sorry, what?”
Sherlock hadn’t heard him. The man who notices everything hadn’t heard him.
“There are lives at stake, Sherlock,” he comes close to yelling, turning back to him, always turning back to him, going back to him, damn that man, damn him. The name pulls free of his throat roughly, strangely, the opposite of choking. “Actual human lives!”
Sherlock doesn’t move, doesn’t blink.
“Just-just so I know,” John demands, “do you care about that at all?”
“Will caring about them help save them?”
“Nope.”
“Then I’ll continue not to make that mistake.”
“And you find that easy, do you?”
“Yes, very,” Sherlock snaps. His eyebrows furrow, his first change of expression. “Is that news to you?”
“N- No.” The false start hurts his throat, the lining of his oesophagus aching.
Sherlock stares at him, into him, through him. He lifts his chin. “I’ve disappointed you,” he says without inflection, without connection, without anything at all.
“That’s good, that’s a good deduction, yeah,” John tells him.
“Don’t make people into heroes, John. Heroes don’t exist and if they did, I wouldn’t be one of them.” Irritation now, under his voice. Under his voice but not under his skin, not like the bomber, not like that mass-murdering man.
As soon as John thinks it, the mobile beeps.
Just like that, the argument finishes. John vanishes. Sherlock’s entire attention bends to the mobile. “Excellent.” He snatches it up, looks at the newest image with more intensity than John has ever known him to direct at a living person, and John can’t watch this.
“A view of the Thames,” Sherlock says, and rattles on. John hears, can’t help but hear what Sherlock tells him to do, but he can choose not to look. He can choose not to move. He can go on standing here, hands pressed into the back of his armchair, feeling the coarseness of the blanket draped across it. He’ll stare down at it as long as he likes.
Hero worship. That was it, that was all.
Gone now.
Good riddance to it.
“Oh, you’re angry with me, so you won’t help,” Sherlock goads him, and there John goes, looking at him again. Watching the madman on his mobile, his own mobile this time, not that accursed pink monstrosity. “Not much cop, this caring lark.”
It’s not a lark.
It’s not an option.
There’s a lump in John’s throat. He’s not sure what it’s made of, but he swallows it down all the same.
Sociopath.
He knows what the word means. No remorse, little restraint, lots of lying and one hell of an ego. Callous and charming and manipulative as hell. They control and dominate, never thinking they might be wrong. It’s what Donovan warns him at every opportunity: sociopaths do not have friends. They have dupes. They look for willing targets.
Maybe she’s right. Maybe Sherlock is what he claims to be. It’s fully possible that expecting Sherlock to care about other people is as foolish as expecting Derek to produce his own insulin. It’s in Sherlock’s wiring, not in the software, and even if it weren’t, there is nothing John can do to give that man an update.
But last night. It was only last night, for Sherlock. Was that fake? All of it? Every piece of it, from eat your veg to if it will help, Sherlock trying to throw out the head that is still in their fridge, was that nothing more than manipulation?
Lost without his blogger.
Laughable.
True, partially, in some ways, but laughable all the same.
John thinks of the Sherlock without him, that madman in another London, and everything John’s done for him. Emailing the pink lady and anonymous calls to the police. Sneaking into the museum twice, once to test and once to kill. The circus. Sherlock thrown to his knees, a blade at his throat.
Asking, calmly, fearlessly, for the life of Soo Lin Yao. Handing over nine million pounds and almost his own life in the process, unflinching.
Following John outside, after, and a hesitant word of thanks by the road. Almost a question. As if John were something beyond comprehension, this small, simple man trying to save a man trying to save a woman.
They’re the same person, this Sherlock and that. More or less, or close enough. They could be. They ought to be.
John doesn’t know what to think.
They climb into the cab.
Whatever mood they’re projecting, it’s enough to keep the cabbie from chitchat, from any sort of intrusion into their uncomfortable silence. It stretches and grows, elongating past all reason. Minutes are not this long, seconds not so agonizing.
“How did you sleep?”
John’s heart stumbles. It’ll stand back up in a minute. Brush off the dust, an organ more of bruise than blood.
“How are you one person?” John demands. “I mean, really, what the buggery fuck goes on in your head?”
The silence that follows is worse than the first.
“Are those serious questions?” Sherlock asks this the same way he’d inquired after John’s sleep, with a probing curiosity that John knows better than to call concern. He wants to know better.
“Yes. Yes, Sherlock, those are serious questions.”
“You find my actions contradictory.”
“One word for it.”
“The wrong one.”
John stares out the window. It’s the only safe place to look.
“Do you really want to know?” Sherlock asks.
He won’t look at him. He’s learned that lesson. “Know what?”
“What the buggery fuck goes on in my head,” Sherlock says simply, milk mild. The tone is enough to surprise John into breaking that fragile promise to himself, to bring his eyes to that ever-watching gaze.
John nods.
“In the last eleven minutes of this cab ride, we have passed thirteen sets of stoplights and stopped at seven of them. On the left hand side, there have been nine dogs. On the right, four. Between the fifth dog and the eighth stoplight, the cabbie sneezed - allergies, not a cold. You realized you hadn’t said ‘bless you’ before stoplight nine and finished feeling awkward over it by stoplight ten. We’ve passed fourteen tour buses, been passed by nine and have been in front of that one there for the past six minutes.”
The great ruddy list goes on and on, Sherlock speeding through his words faster than the cabbie through traffic. Sherlock speaks faster and faster still, nothing like the clear monologue of explanation he’d treated John to during their first cab ride. He swerves and turns, leaps and backtracks through a disordered jumble. Annoyance and sarcasm flit out as he gestures, punctuate his unending ramble without providing even the semblance of order. It’s rubbish bins and red hats; cars listed by make and year and colour; pedestrians, couples, families, single figures comprising quickly passed crowds; restaurants, the signs, the dishes, the prices. Sherlock’s eyes flick back and forth from window to window, the sweeping motions of his hands unable to follow such a speed.
John listens, and listens, and listens, and he thinks Sherlock might list all of London before he’s finished.
“-and you’re still paying attention, how are you still paying attention?” Sherlock’s eyes narrow, fix on him.
“Why are you paying attention to rubbish bins?” John counters.
“I’m not,” Sherlock snaps. “They’re there, I see them, and it wastes so much space, don’t you see that?” His chest rises and falls rapidly, his scarf the blue fluttering breast of some chased and weary bird. “No,” he corrects himself. “You do see, you just don’t observe. It’s like you’re blind, even when it’s all there. You block it out with drivel.”
“Is that really what it’s like?” John asks. “In your head, all the time.”
“Not with the work,” Sherlock says, looking away from John at last.
“Is that why you don’t care?”
“Why should I?” Sherlock’s gaze snaps back to his face. “You’ve admitted it won’t help, so why should I? Twelve people I know next to nothing about, who knew nothing about me, why should I care?”
“She died trying to help you,” John says.
“I told her not to.”
“I know. But all the same.”
Sherlock looks at his own knees. His mouth twists, souring his profile. “There’s only so much space, John.”
“I know,” John tells him.
“You don’t know.” Dismissive, a huff and a roll of the eyes.
John folds his hands, forearms pressed against his knees. He bends his back and turns his head, talking to the door handle. “Sometimes you can’t keep track,” he says. “Even if you can’t, you have to fake it, because otherwise, there’s no point. There’s too much to process, but you have to live with it anyway. As long as you don’t have to think about what you’re thinking about, you cope. That’s why the cases. The experiments, the wall, all of it, and then you have to exclude everything else. You don’t know how to focus, otherwise. Your brain doesn’t rot with boredom, it eats itself.”
He looks down at his shoes, brown between the black of his jacket. A second of that, a moment only. He fakes a smile and looks to the man beside him. “How’d I do this time?”
The back of Sherlock’s head makes no reply, his face turned away. The reflection in the window isn’t much, but it doesn’t need to be.
“Let me guess,” John says. “This is where you tell me to piss off.”
Sherlock laughs, laughs again in surprise at the sound. His eyes return to view, flicking to John’s face. “You did miss everything of substance.”
“I’m sure I did.”
“Of course you did.”
“I don’t know why you bother with me,” John concurs. “Couldn’t deduce it if I tried.”
“I’m sure you couldn’t.”
“Yeah, well, that’s why you’re the clever one.”
There’s an unidentified body which Sherlock names within five minutes. There’s a painting and an assassin, a trip beneath a bridge, and yet more abuse to John’s poor bank account as the taxi costs mount. He speaks to two bereaved women, climbs into another cab, and will never stop marvelling at the strange feats Sherlock pulls.
His pulse is racing even before Sherlock presses his gun into his hand.
The Golem flings him off and, for one desperate moment, John nearly loses consciousness, head cracked against the floor. He staggers up, lunges forward, and his arms around the Golem’s wind pipe have to be faster than the Golem’s hands on Sherlock’s throat, they have to be.
He clings, climbing and strangling at once, but the Golem shakes him off once more. John exhales before he hits the ground, lands without any wind left to be knocked out of him. He lands hard all the same, hard on his back, on his shoulder, arm wrenched with the Golem’s throw. His head hits the floor a second time. The projector light is in his eyes, so much noise flooding his ears. Gunshots, there are gunshots.
John flops onto his stomach, crawls, and he sees Sherlock punch the floor as the wall supernovas behind him. He lets himself collapse, arm half-numb and not numb enough. The floor is better beneath his cheek than it is against the back of his head, but that’s a slight improvement, negligible. His arm is beneath him. He’d rather have it cut off.
Under the music and narration, he hears movement, hears a voice low in pitch and higher in volume. Fingers touch his lips without warning. John jerks away only to groan.
The fingertips vanish. “Where are you hurt? Tell me.” Urgent and low, into his ear, those dark curls a phantom brush against his cheek.
“Shoulder,” John gasps. “Bloody thing.”
No phantom touch now, no illusion, Sherlock’s hair against his cheek, his nose, Sherlock’s ear above John’s lips. “You’re bleeding?”
“I’m swearing,” John corrects.
“Oh good,” Sherlock says.
John starts giggling. It hurts that damn much, it’s giggle or cry. Sherlock is too close not to see the one for the other, but John will laugh all the same. “Get me off the floor,” he begs, hiccupping through the words.
Sherlock does, partially. Enough. He’s gentle, so careful, as if he knows John might break. Of course he knows.
When John finally stops giggling, stops shaking, there are tears on his face, but at least Sherlock can’t see. The show has played itself to its finish and now the planetarium ceiling is a pretence of sky, an artificial shine of stars, linked and labelled into constellations.
“John?” Sherlock asks into the quiet, into his ear. The man has no idea, cannot possibly have any idea of what he’s done, the intimacy of tucking John up in the capital V of his endless legs. There’s sense in it, Sherlock turning himself into a chair, keeping John upright and gently restrained, but now John may never move again.
“Gun,” John requests, biting the syllable through his pain.
Sherlock presses it into his hand, his right hand, the one with fingers he can still control.
John grips it hard and sighs.
“Better?” Right arm returning to press across John’s stomach, securing him upright, spine nestled against Sherlock’s ribs.
He nods. Swallows. “Let go,” he says.
Because Sherlock does this, Sherlock keeps on doing this, turning himself into a chasm for John to fall into, and until John hits the bottom, he always thinks he’s flying.
“Are you sure you’re all right?” Sherlock asks. The only piece of him that moves is his chest against John’s back. He’s staggeringly warm.
John’s eyes close against the false sky above them. “Oh, now he cares. Wondered when you’d grow a heart. Great timing on that one, Sherlock, really.”
“Zero multiplied by twelve is still zero, John.”
“I do know my basic maths, thanks.”
“I didn’t know those people,” Sherlock continues, his low rumble undercutting John’s interruption. “If they were alive, I wouldn’t care about them. You wouldn’t either, not on an individual basis.”
“There’s a dead woman behind the podium over there,” John says. “How do you feel about that?”
“Frustrated. You?”
John thinks about it. “Frustrated,” he agrees. “Regretful. Bit useless.”
There’s no consolation from Sherlock, no words of sympathy or false wisdom. No reminder that neither doctors nor soldiers can prevent all death, no telling him what he already knows. There’s only light breath against the side of his face, a strong arm across his stomach. John’s pulse pounds in his shoulder, tingles into his fingers. The vascular system is the body’s designated route for bleeding, only that.
“Are you all right?” Sherlock asks.
“I can handle it.”
“That wasn’t the question.”
“I don’t even know what all right means anymore,” John admits, “but I can handle it.”
“I’m going to dig the bullets out of the wall before I call Lestrade,” Sherlock tells him. “I didn’t hit any of the seats, so it’s likely no one will notice.”
“Even if they do, we hardly know anything about it.”
“Anything at all,” Sherlock agrees, letting go at last. He stands and helps John do the same.
The only explosion that morning is a referenced supernova. Mycroft keeps texting him, filling up an absurd proportion of his mobile’s inbox. John doesn’t risk a nap while Sherlock and Lestrade take the museum director back to New Scotland Yard, instead taking a shower and changing his clothes before heading off to inspect train tracks.
He keeps his gun on him.
Sherlock comes to fetch him, makes it clear he’s already solved the case. John ought to feel more annoyed than he does, being directed here and there by both Holmes brothers to discover what the two must already know. Instead, it’s something else in his chest, something no less sharp for its smooth ease down his throat and across his heart, the ache whiskey-warm. It’s a bit like his shoulder, the pain of Sherlock’s pressing hands and biting tongue, a temporary treatment before the pounding heat of John’s shower.
They do a spot of breaking and entering, some threatening, and that’s the missile defence plans recovered. John hands his gun to Sherlock and makes it to the surgery in time for his afternoon shift. He keeps his mobile on vibrate, waiting for a text about the next pip, but it seems they’ve already completed the challenge of the day with the painting this morning. There ought to be nothing more until tomorrow.
Coming home, John notes the familiar scent of disinfectant. He checks the fridge while Sherlock yells at their telly. The head is gone.
They keep their coats on as night falls, sharp air slipping through the coverings over their broken windows. John asks the important questions for his coming days in digital London, learns how to tell when a house is unoccupied or a door easy for entry. Sherlock’s responses are quick, not dismissive. They shiver in their flat together as John pecks his way through emails. John approaches his forty-hour limit, knows it’s time to sleep or be useless tomorrow, and if his room weren’t absolutely freezing, he’d go to bed here and now.
“I won’t be in for tea,” he says, closing his laptop and getting up, getting the circulation going again. “I’m going to Sarah’s.” At Sherlock’s vague gesture, John adds, “There’s still some of that risotto left in the fridge.”
Sherlock makes a noise of approval and John says, more or less as a reminder to himself, “Milk, we need milk.” He’ll pick it up on his way back in the morning.
“I’ll get some.”
John turns around in the doorway, fighting down a laugh. “Really?”
“Really.”
He-
What?
“And some beans, then?” John asks, pressing his luck.
“Mm,” Sherlock confirms, eyes still on the telly.
Wide-eyed and bewildered, John leaves the flat.
He should probably break up with Sarah. The timing is awkward, though. They’ve got a date scheduled for tomorrow night - the case ought to be finished by tomorrow night - and she’s letting him kip on her sofa. She offered at the surgery today when he’d mentioned the broken windows and the chill of the flat.
Very little kissing, so far, between the two of them. It’s been nice, what little they’ve had, though neither of them has pressed for more. They’ve flirted about it, joked. They’ve looked down that path without more than a step or two toward it.
It’s nothing like that night in Chelmsford, near strangers close to public indecency. Dark curls in the streetlight, the rasp of stubble leaving his lips tingling. The disappointment back in his flat, this tall, gorgeous man who was only Jake. A bloke who knows what affection looks like, who would buy milk and beans without prompting, who would never remove a severed head from a fridge at John’s request.
He should really break up with Sarah.
Walking out of the tube station, lost in thought, he never sees the car coming.
The little bastard is all maniacal giggles and John wants to claw his laughing face off. John had felt sorry for him, for poor Jim from IT, flamboyant and awkward, flinging himself at Sherlock for all to see, desperate for an ounce of Sherlock’s attention.
Somewhere between the murders and the destruction, between breaking into Mrs. Hudson’s home and abducting John off the street, all sympathies are destroyed without a trace. The hostages, the explosions, the unrelenting, deadly fixation on Sherlock: for all of this, Jim Moriarty must die.
His hands cuffed to the back of the front passenger’s seat, there’s nothing John can do at the moment. Moriarty knows, has ensured it, but he gloats rather than taunt.
“I wasn’t sure, you know,” Moriarty tells him, his feigned modesty worse than any arrogance. “The flatmate or the landlady, which would it be? I just couldn’t make up my mind. The landlady would have been so much simpler. So much less fuss, fewer black eyes all around.”
“I’ve a few more to give out, if you’d like one.” His knuckles aren’t so scraped that he’d turn down the opportunity.
Moriarty laughs, this high tittering giggle, all affectation. “So feisty! Is that what he sees in you? His little yipping dog,” the man mocks, a Chihuahua baiting a terrier.
John’s jaw clenches. Remains that way.
“Do you think he’ll regret never fucking you?” Moriarty asks. He wrinkles his nose, pulling a face in disgust. “I’d love it if he did, but it doesn’t seem terribly likely, does it? After your little cuddle at the planetarium, I’d say he’s had more than enough of you.”
John has never seen more blatant jealousy. He holds onto that with both hands. This man wants Sherlock, desperately, and he wants him alive.
“If you kill me, he’ll never want you.”
Moriarty stares at him, then laughs and laughs and laughs. He convulses with it, cackling like some sort of storybook evil queen. Moriarty laughs until he laughs himself out, sighing to a finish, languid and relaxed where he reclines against the leather seat.
“Oh, no,” Moriarty sighs with amusement. “Oh, no no no no.” He leans forward, elbows on his knees, chin cupped between his palms, fingers curled against his cheeks. He smiles, so terribly, terribly pleased. “You’re so stupid. Look at you, all brave. Trying to make me see reason. I’m the one who sees it, not you, you stupid thing.”
Moriarty folds his arms across his knees and grins his widest.
“Once I kill you, he’ll never stop following me again.”
“Go on, Johnny, put on the vest.”
“No.”
“Maybe you’re blinded by the red lights in your face, but those are guns pointed at your head. Put on the vest.”
“No.”
“I would prefer not to kill you just yet. I do need you to walk, but you have arms. How about a shoulder wound on the right, some nice symmetry?”
John says nothing.
“Or - oh well! - I could kill you here and now. And then I could go all the long way to Baker Street and pick up nice old Mrs. Hudson. I’m sure she’s already taken her evening soother, she’ll be no trouble at all.”
John puts on the vest.
There’s a coat to hide the vest, gloves to hide the scrapes on his knuckles. There’s a voice in his ear and explosives on his chest.
Tomorrow, or the next day, or the day after that, he’ll wake up and save Mrs. Hudson from this.
He’s not sure how, or how well, but he will.
Sherlock walks into the pool, calling out, calling for Moriarty, there of his own volition.
John walks out, silent, controlled and compelled.
Sherlock sees him. Freezes, hand raised and outstretched, holding something suspiciously small.
“Evening,” John echoes. Voice stolen, he has his eyes, has Sherlock’s eyes on his. He blinks, fast and slow and fast. SOS, Sherlock. Look, don’t listen. Look and run. Just run. Leave him and go.
But Sherlock doesn’t see, doesn’t move. He’s stunned and silent, a shocked statue.
“This is a turn-up, isn’t it, Sherlock?” Moriarty dictates and John repeats.
“John.” Winded, hurt, moving at last. Toward John, not away. “What the hell...?”
John’s voice breaks while Moriarty snickers into his ear, feeding him words and bidding him to open the coat. The red light returns to his chest and as John speaks, he thinks: memorize this. See the angle, find the sniper. Here is Sherlock, where did Sherlock enter. There is Moriarty, he was in that hallway, that one there. John was caught, was transported, was arranged like so.
Memorize. Learn everything, everything, so that even when he dies, he won’t be stopped. He harbours no illusions about leaving this room alive, but if he learns, if he can do this right, he can kill another man with Moriarty’s face.
It’s not death John’s facing, not true death, maybe, and even if he is, that doesn’t matter. It’s Sherlock that matters. It’s letting Moriarty take his flatmate, his madman, John’s madman and making run him to death, puzzle by puzzle, one explosion at a time. Sherlock wouldn’t hold back, wouldn’t hesitate, would never stop throwing himself at that wall no matter the injury sustained.
If John’s going to leave this life, he’ll take Moriarty with him.
He waits for his chance, for any chance. He endures the conversation, the banter, holding still and silent. He can hear, just barely, Moriarty’s footsteps over the sound of lapping water. Moriarty draws even with him. Moriarty walks in front of him, practically offering his back as he throws the missile defence plans into the pool. John grabs him.
“Sherlock, run!” he yells, aloud at last, arm around Moriarty’s throat. Right arm, his left arm still weak from the Golem. He’s strong enough all the same, has to be. He’s strong enough to let Sherlock go, if only the man would run.
Sherlock never gets the chance.
A distant thought, barely heard through the rushing in his ears: so that’s where the second sniper is. Sherlock stands here, the sniper must stand there, up and back.
Moriarty baits and taunts and, ultimately, walks away.
Gun in hand and strapped with explosives, they stand there, waiting.
The door clicks shut.
Sherlock looks at him, eyes flicking from chest to face before he drops the gun and lunges to him. “All right? Are you all right?” Unzipping, unclipping, knee against the tile, a man of frantic motion.
“Yeah- Yeah, I’m fine. I’m fine,” and Sherlock rips coat and vest both from him, “Sherlock- Sherlock!”, and flings them away, the explosives sliding across tile toward the deep end.
“Jesus,” John gasps, and pants, “Oh Christ,” and falls, stumbling to the floor. Without the vest, his body feels too light. He’s drifting away, shaking.
Sherlock hasn’t finished yet, frantic, still frantic. John speaks to him, listens to a flustered, wandering thank-you. He knows this thank-you, has heard it before, if never quite so strongly, so shaken.
“I’m glad no one saw that,” John jokes, trying to calm him before Sherlock shoots himself in the head.
“Mm?” Leaning down, peering at him. Absolute focus, absolute.
“You ripping my clothes off in a darkened swimming pool. People might talk.”
“People do little else,” Sherlock says, and smiles, and John’s heart leaps in his chest.
It falls when he looks down, eye caught by a flicker of light. The angle’s different, the angle’s wrong, which means more than two, “Oh,” of course there are more than two. As Moriarty bursts back in, John realizes there must have been an entire other car, a truck full of these snipers and their rifles.
The snipers are across the pool, they’re above the shallow end, they’re above the deep end, and John knows he’s the one who’s going to die. He’s always been the one. Sherlock’s alive and John is alive and Moriarty would like one of those things not to be true. He’s still playing with Sherlock, playing even now, he’ll never stop, and when Sherlock looks to John, John nods, because they can all go down together, henchmen, mastermind and all.
Sherlock turns and aims John’s gun, and John tackles him as he fires.
He twists in midair, in mid-moment, his body before Sherlock’s, his body before the bomb.
Water hurts like concrete, a solid slap as they land, as he lands, a blow to the left shoulder. Water strikes his face as the pain strikes his nerves. There’s a terrible roar as his hearing fails and the last thing John feels before it ends is Sherlock’s thin frame, shielded in his arms.
He wakes up in Essex, clutching a pillow, unable to breathe. Essex, where people go when they die.
Sherlock, he thinks.
Sherlock.
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Rating: PG13
Wordcount: 6.8k, this part, 31.6k overall
Betas: vyctori and fogbutton
Disclaimer: Do not own.
Summary: First, he is shot in Afghanistan. Second, he wakes to a phone call in Chelmsford, Essex. Third is pain, fourth is normalcy, fifth is agony and sixth is confusion. By the eighth, he's lost track. (John-centric AU)
prologue - part one - Part Two - Part Three - Part Four - Part Five - Part Six - Epilogue
He keeps soaking the bandage on his hand with other people’s blood. It’s not sanitary and it worries him a bit, checking on his cut each time he unwinds the fabric from his hand.
The cut impairs him more than it harms, but an impaired doctor is harmful on his own. His hand doesn’t shake, he knows his shoulder is smooth skin over unbroken bone and undamaged muscle, but that’s still not enough. It’s not going to be enough, not here, not now, not like this, but it won’t make him panic either.
John does what he always does.
He makes do.
Chelmsford is an ill fit after the bloody days. His body follows the habits of his mind, assumes military bearing without military training. These hands have never held a gun and yet they’re still meant to be his hands.
He doesn’t speak Dari, he’s never set foot in the Middle East, and his body has never known true agony. He’s lost patients, but he’s never killed. He loves London, but he’s never tried to live there.
Whoever he’s meant to be here, it’s not John Watson.
He falls asleep as soon as he can that night, thinking, Sherlock. Sherlock.
There exists a very good reason that Derek is so resistant to conflict. It’s because he’s such crap at resolving it.
Fortunately, somewhere between his mother, his sister and now Sherlock, John has become something of an expert.
John makes his breakfast quietly, sits at his own side of the table. He does not put his plate on Derek’s newspaper, nor his mug. He becomes quiet, unobtrusive.
When Derek finishes with a section, folding it back up and setting it aside, John asks, “Can I...?” He doesn’t quite reach, merely gestures.
Derek hands it to him.
They both read.
Derek hands him the next section as well.
John’s not after the business section, but he reads anyway.
They are friends again.
The matter with the old woman isn’t so simple. John may not know who the old woman was (is), but he does know where she died (will die). He knows which flats are primed to explode, to collapse in a tumble of blood and concrete.
John tries not to think about blood and concrete. Or explosions. Or dust.
It’s possible he should go back to therapy, but that will have to wait.
He spends the entire day thinking about it. His shift at the surgery under Dr. Cooper is a short one and the remainder of his time is spent trying to get hold of the mobile numbers or email addresses of the flat residents. Them, at least, he can get out. Maybe. It takes him ages, much too long, and once he has them, he doesn’t have the next step of the plan. He can’t do this, can’t risk it.
But then he thinks: they’re going to die anyway.
Warning, gas leak?
No, that’s the bomber’s strategy. If John helps to disguise the explosion as a gas leak, that’s little help and one hell of a tip-off to their bomber.
What John needs is a way to get everyone out of the flats. He needs to evacuate the building before the explosion. He has three hours left to think. Calling or emailing would reveal his number and IP address to the police. A payphone or library is far too public when Mycroft may be watching behind any CCTV camera, but John can’t let that possibility stop him. There are innocent people in the balance.
When he realizes what he has to do, it’s absurdly simple.
First, John goes to the flats.
Second, he uses Sherlock’s new-neighbour-forgot-my-keys trick to be buzzed into the building.
Third, he trips over his own feet, slaps his hand onto the fire alarm and ducks out of the building, feigning embarrassment in the hunch of his shoulders and the duck of his head.
In no great hurry, people start to come out, all looking more cross than concerned.
The building explodes.
John has no proper reason for being there, but fortunately, no one asks that question. No one wants to interrupt a man performing chest compressions.
“Derek?” John asks into his mobile.
“Yep?” Derek answers, stretching the syllable.
“I know it’s a bit late,” John says, “but I need to ask a favour.”
“Yes?” Derek asks, stretching this syllable to even greater lengths.
“I need a change of clothes. Just jeans and a shirt. Nothing I need a belt for, I lost my belt. Oh, and a jacket.”
“Did a woman just throw you out of her flat?”
“No,” John says, “I am not naked.”
“Well, I assumed you had your pants and shoes. You’re too calm for a man without pants and shoes.”
“I have those, yes. If you can’t come down, I’ll manage, I just wanted to ask.”
“No, it’s fine,” Derek says. “Where are you?”
He gives the address, includes directions from the tube.
“But you don’t work at the hospital.”
“I work in emergencies,” John says, which is probably the truest thing he’s said all day.
“John, that gas explosion-”
“I’m fine. The flats collapsed inward, not outward, they were old, you know how they collapse down on each other-”
“Oh my god.”
“I’m fine. Really, I’m fine. I was passing by, had to help, and it went from there. I’m fine.”
Derek takes some reassuring, but John does eventually get his change of clothes.
Derek makes him tea and tries to talk with him. It shouldn’t be possible for a thoughtful, generous librarian to be more annoying than a moody consulting detective, but there it is. For all Derek is willing to listen, it’s beyond him to understand.
Sherlock would have made tea, left it somewhere near John and then walked away, leaving John to decide if this meant it was for him. Once he had, Sherlock would have come back, nibbling on a Hobnob, and dunked his biscuit into John’s cuppa, getting crumbs everywhere and leaving mush among the dregs. John would have been irritated, mildly, before Sherlock said something droll and ridiculous. They might smile, then, for an instant, and move on.
As melodramatic as the man is, his gestures are small. Temporary without being fragile. Not glass, but folded paper, tiny figurines to be unfolded and tucked away flat after admiring. To be studied in quiet moments, each crease and every fold, and wondered at, knowing their complex shapes to be forever lost. Not a black lotus heralding death, not a flower, nothing so delicate.
Paper cranes, John finds himself thinking. Paper cranes in black and blue and grey. Hung on a string, suspended in flight, suggesting the sweeping movements of long fingers, the flow and flick of pale wrists.
John drinks his tea and admits to himself, just a little, that he’s in over his head.
He wakes with his cheek on a striped blue-and-white pillow. He’s shivering, his window broken.
Baker Street.
Sherlock.
Digging through his closet, he puts on a dark shirt, pulls on the tan jumper, the one he’d worn the first time he’d killed a man in London. His heart beats against the top button of his shirt, threatening to rise or fall, and John walks the fine line between swallowing it down or coughing it out. He may yet choke, but he doubts it.
Downstairs, Sherlock is already dressed, or possibly still dressed. No, different shirt today. Blue, almost like his eyes. His gaze aimed through their blank and silent telly, he has the pink mobile on the arm of his chair. He’s distant, unresponsive. His steepled fingers rest against his lips.
John makes and eats brekkie. Instead of noting buttered toast and jam, his mouth reports the taste of army food, the well-known, little-liked flavours he experiences twice or so each week. He has no problem stomaching it.
Plate into the sink, empty cup atop it, and John refuses to hesitate. Now is not the time for action, but neither is it the time for inaction. Everything is normal. Nothing has changed. Nothing is different.
Picking up the remote, he turns on the telly. News station, yes, currently an advert. Watching for it, he sees Sherlock blink.
John hands him the remote and sits.
Sherlock shifts, crossing his legs. The remote on one arm of the chair, the mobile on the other, it’s clear where Sherlock’s focus is fixed, is bent. The mobile has yet to ring.
They wait for the news hour to begin.
He lets the familiar sounds of the BBC wash over him, listens to the familiar voice of a familiar newscaster, and sees a familiar sight. It looks different, sunlit on telly the day after. Collapsed but calm. No airborne concrete. The dust has settled and John tries not to think about the rest of it. The toast sits poorly now, the lingering taste of strawberry jam turned cloying and thick.
“...ripped through several floors, killing twelve people-”
“Old block of flats,” John notes a second time in as many days, mind distant, voice soft. He glances to Sherlock, the man unmoving. How many people? Of those he’d brought out to the street, how many of those people were in this dozen?
“-is said to have been caused by a faulty gas main.”
“He certainly gets about,” John sighs. He’d been there, smelled the air. Seen it. What a blatant lie.
“Well, obviously I lost that round.” Sherlock clicks the telly to another station. “Although technically, I did solve the case.”
Lost that round, John thinks. Lost that round. His hand falls from his cheek as he looks to his flatmate.
Sherlock goes on. Explains. Does what he does best. He fixates. His eyes remain distant, his voice soft. His left hand gestures, held aloft, pointing here and there, his palm bidding John to be silent.
“So, people come to him wanting their crimes fixed up,” John asks anyway, “like booking a holiday?”
Sherlock’s hand curls shut. He goes away again and John’s trained eye knows this is farther than before. “Novel,” Sherlock whispers and John’s stomach clenches in all the wrong ways at the feeling behind the word.
Admiration.
It is. This look that John has never seen before, that’s what this is. He looks away, makes a noise to keep from speaking.
Because John can still feel it. The heat. The sound of it. Nothing like Afghanistan, no, nowhere near as bad, but in London. In his London. Flying debris and screaming civilians and a man’s chest cracking under the heel of John’s palm, a man who’d coughed blood into John’s mouth with the breath that might have saved him. John had endured long waits with the practised patience of a soldier, after, had undergone the tests to clear him. He’d lost his belt to a woman who would likely lose her lower leg, that scrap of metal piping more like a bullet than debris as it ripped through her calf. His belt turned bloody tourniquet as her shocked face ran with tears.
She’d kept asking, “Where’s my daughter?”
John had said, “I’m sure she’s all right, I need you to keep pulling this closed, stay with me, look at me. For your daughter’s sake, look at me.”
He watches Kenny Prince’s houseboy on the telly, a murderer on such a small scale. He focuses on that, on that obsessively clean kitchen, and there. There.
John’s calm again.
He risks looking back to Sherlock. Sherlock, who isn’t looking at the phone, who isn’t watching it or studying it, but hungering. “Taking his time this time.” His voice is low, all frustration and impatience. John refuses to call it need, refuses to look any longer.
He pulls the conversation to the side, as much as he can. Sherlock cares about the Powers case. If Sherlock cares about anything, he must care about that. But that’s it, then, isn’t it? This connection is old, between Sherlock and the bomber. Unknowingly then, knowingly now, Sherlock has been after this killer his entire life.
Small wonder there’s nothing else in his head. John thinks, you never do forget your first, do you? And everything within him tries, tries so desperately, to rebel.
John controls himself. He’s good at that. “So why’s he doing this, then?” he asks. “Playing this game with you. Do you think he wants to be caught?” If the bomber wanted to show off his brilliance, he’s found his perfect audience, his perfect, enraptured audience.
Sherlock’s not even looking at him anymore. Palms apart and fingertips touching, as always, before his lips, Sherlock says, “I think he wants to be distracted.” As if this is logical. Understandable.
As if those people aren’t dead.
If the sound John makes is anything like a laugh, even the bitterest of laughs, it’s mere coincidence. “I hope you’ll be very happy together,” he says, and stands, and turns away. Walks away begging to be numb.
He’s almost in the kitchen before Sherlock asks, “Sorry, what?”
Sherlock hadn’t heard him. The man who notices everything hadn’t heard him.
“There are lives at stake, Sherlock,” he comes close to yelling, turning back to him, always turning back to him, going back to him, damn that man, damn him. The name pulls free of his throat roughly, strangely, the opposite of choking. “Actual human lives!”
Sherlock doesn’t move, doesn’t blink.
“Just-just so I know,” John demands, “do you care about that at all?”
“Will caring about them help save them?”
“Nope.”
“Then I’ll continue not to make that mistake.”
“And you find that easy, do you?”
“Yes, very,” Sherlock snaps. His eyebrows furrow, his first change of expression. “Is that news to you?”
“N- No.” The false start hurts his throat, the lining of his oesophagus aching.
Sherlock stares at him, into him, through him. He lifts his chin. “I’ve disappointed you,” he says without inflection, without connection, without anything at all.
“That’s good, that’s a good deduction, yeah,” John tells him.
“Don’t make people into heroes, John. Heroes don’t exist and if they did, I wouldn’t be one of them.” Irritation now, under his voice. Under his voice but not under his skin, not like the bomber, not like that mass-murdering man.
As soon as John thinks it, the mobile beeps.
Just like that, the argument finishes. John vanishes. Sherlock’s entire attention bends to the mobile. “Excellent.” He snatches it up, looks at the newest image with more intensity than John has ever known him to direct at a living person, and John can’t watch this.
“A view of the Thames,” Sherlock says, and rattles on. John hears, can’t help but hear what Sherlock tells him to do, but he can choose not to look. He can choose not to move. He can go on standing here, hands pressed into the back of his armchair, feeling the coarseness of the blanket draped across it. He’ll stare down at it as long as he likes.
Hero worship. That was it, that was all.
Gone now.
Good riddance to it.
“Oh, you’re angry with me, so you won’t help,” Sherlock goads him, and there John goes, looking at him again. Watching the madman on his mobile, his own mobile this time, not that accursed pink monstrosity. “Not much cop, this caring lark.”
It’s not a lark.
It’s not an option.
There’s a lump in John’s throat. He’s not sure what it’s made of, but he swallows it down all the same.
Sociopath.
He knows what the word means. No remorse, little restraint, lots of lying and one hell of an ego. Callous and charming and manipulative as hell. They control and dominate, never thinking they might be wrong. It’s what Donovan warns him at every opportunity: sociopaths do not have friends. They have dupes. They look for willing targets.
Maybe she’s right. Maybe Sherlock is what he claims to be. It’s fully possible that expecting Sherlock to care about other people is as foolish as expecting Derek to produce his own insulin. It’s in Sherlock’s wiring, not in the software, and even if it weren’t, there is nothing John can do to give that man an update.
But last night. It was only last night, for Sherlock. Was that fake? All of it? Every piece of it, from eat your veg to if it will help, Sherlock trying to throw out the head that is still in their fridge, was that nothing more than manipulation?
Lost without his blogger.
Laughable.
True, partially, in some ways, but laughable all the same.
John thinks of the Sherlock without him, that madman in another London, and everything John’s done for him. Emailing the pink lady and anonymous calls to the police. Sneaking into the museum twice, once to test and once to kill. The circus. Sherlock thrown to his knees, a blade at his throat.
Asking, calmly, fearlessly, for the life of Soo Lin Yao. Handing over nine million pounds and almost his own life in the process, unflinching.
Following John outside, after, and a hesitant word of thanks by the road. Almost a question. As if John were something beyond comprehension, this small, simple man trying to save a man trying to save a woman.
They’re the same person, this Sherlock and that. More or less, or close enough. They could be. They ought to be.
John doesn’t know what to think.
They climb into the cab.
Whatever mood they’re projecting, it’s enough to keep the cabbie from chitchat, from any sort of intrusion into their uncomfortable silence. It stretches and grows, elongating past all reason. Minutes are not this long, seconds not so agonizing.
“How did you sleep?”
John’s heart stumbles. It’ll stand back up in a minute. Brush off the dust, an organ more of bruise than blood.
“How are you one person?” John demands. “I mean, really, what the buggery fuck goes on in your head?”
The silence that follows is worse than the first.
“Are those serious questions?” Sherlock asks this the same way he’d inquired after John’s sleep, with a probing curiosity that John knows better than to call concern. He wants to know better.
“Yes. Yes, Sherlock, those are serious questions.”
“You find my actions contradictory.”
“One word for it.”
“The wrong one.”
John stares out the window. It’s the only safe place to look.
“Do you really want to know?” Sherlock asks.
He won’t look at him. He’s learned that lesson. “Know what?”
“What the buggery fuck goes on in my head,” Sherlock says simply, milk mild. The tone is enough to surprise John into breaking that fragile promise to himself, to bring his eyes to that ever-watching gaze.
John nods.
“In the last eleven minutes of this cab ride, we have passed thirteen sets of stoplights and stopped at seven of them. On the left hand side, there have been nine dogs. On the right, four. Between the fifth dog and the eighth stoplight, the cabbie sneezed - allergies, not a cold. You realized you hadn’t said ‘bless you’ before stoplight nine and finished feeling awkward over it by stoplight ten. We’ve passed fourteen tour buses, been passed by nine and have been in front of that one there for the past six minutes.”
The great ruddy list goes on and on, Sherlock speeding through his words faster than the cabbie through traffic. Sherlock speaks faster and faster still, nothing like the clear monologue of explanation he’d treated John to during their first cab ride. He swerves and turns, leaps and backtracks through a disordered jumble. Annoyance and sarcasm flit out as he gestures, punctuate his unending ramble without providing even the semblance of order. It’s rubbish bins and red hats; cars listed by make and year and colour; pedestrians, couples, families, single figures comprising quickly passed crowds; restaurants, the signs, the dishes, the prices. Sherlock’s eyes flick back and forth from window to window, the sweeping motions of his hands unable to follow such a speed.
John listens, and listens, and listens, and he thinks Sherlock might list all of London before he’s finished.
“-and you’re still paying attention, how are you still paying attention?” Sherlock’s eyes narrow, fix on him.
“Why are you paying attention to rubbish bins?” John counters.
“I’m not,” Sherlock snaps. “They’re there, I see them, and it wastes so much space, don’t you see that?” His chest rises and falls rapidly, his scarf the blue fluttering breast of some chased and weary bird. “No,” he corrects himself. “You do see, you just don’t observe. It’s like you’re blind, even when it’s all there. You block it out with drivel.”
“Is that really what it’s like?” John asks. “In your head, all the time.”
“Not with the work,” Sherlock says, looking away from John at last.
“Is that why you don’t care?”
“Why should I?” Sherlock’s gaze snaps back to his face. “You’ve admitted it won’t help, so why should I? Twelve people I know next to nothing about, who knew nothing about me, why should I care?”
“She died trying to help you,” John says.
“I told her not to.”
“I know. But all the same.”
Sherlock looks at his own knees. His mouth twists, souring his profile. “There’s only so much space, John.”
“I know,” John tells him.
“You don’t know.” Dismissive, a huff and a roll of the eyes.
John folds his hands, forearms pressed against his knees. He bends his back and turns his head, talking to the door handle. “Sometimes you can’t keep track,” he says. “Even if you can’t, you have to fake it, because otherwise, there’s no point. There’s too much to process, but you have to live with it anyway. As long as you don’t have to think about what you’re thinking about, you cope. That’s why the cases. The experiments, the wall, all of it, and then you have to exclude everything else. You don’t know how to focus, otherwise. Your brain doesn’t rot with boredom, it eats itself.”
He looks down at his shoes, brown between the black of his jacket. A second of that, a moment only. He fakes a smile and looks to the man beside him. “How’d I do this time?”
The back of Sherlock’s head makes no reply, his face turned away. The reflection in the window isn’t much, but it doesn’t need to be.
“Let me guess,” John says. “This is where you tell me to piss off.”
Sherlock laughs, laughs again in surprise at the sound. His eyes return to view, flicking to John’s face. “You did miss everything of substance.”
“I’m sure I did.”
“Of course you did.”
“I don’t know why you bother with me,” John concurs. “Couldn’t deduce it if I tried.”
“I’m sure you couldn’t.”
“Yeah, well, that’s why you’re the clever one.”
There’s an unidentified body which Sherlock names within five minutes. There’s a painting and an assassin, a trip beneath a bridge, and yet more abuse to John’s poor bank account as the taxi costs mount. He speaks to two bereaved women, climbs into another cab, and will never stop marvelling at the strange feats Sherlock pulls.
His pulse is racing even before Sherlock presses his gun into his hand.
The Golem flings him off and, for one desperate moment, John nearly loses consciousness, head cracked against the floor. He staggers up, lunges forward, and his arms around the Golem’s wind pipe have to be faster than the Golem’s hands on Sherlock’s throat, they have to be.
He clings, climbing and strangling at once, but the Golem shakes him off once more. John exhales before he hits the ground, lands without any wind left to be knocked out of him. He lands hard all the same, hard on his back, on his shoulder, arm wrenched with the Golem’s throw. His head hits the floor a second time. The projector light is in his eyes, so much noise flooding his ears. Gunshots, there are gunshots.
John flops onto his stomach, crawls, and he sees Sherlock punch the floor as the wall supernovas behind him. He lets himself collapse, arm half-numb and not numb enough. The floor is better beneath his cheek than it is against the back of his head, but that’s a slight improvement, negligible. His arm is beneath him. He’d rather have it cut off.
Under the music and narration, he hears movement, hears a voice low in pitch and higher in volume. Fingers touch his lips without warning. John jerks away only to groan.
The fingertips vanish. “Where are you hurt? Tell me.” Urgent and low, into his ear, those dark curls a phantom brush against his cheek.
“Shoulder,” John gasps. “Bloody thing.”
No phantom touch now, no illusion, Sherlock’s hair against his cheek, his nose, Sherlock’s ear above John’s lips. “You’re bleeding?”
“I’m swearing,” John corrects.
“Oh good,” Sherlock says.
John starts giggling. It hurts that damn much, it’s giggle or cry. Sherlock is too close not to see the one for the other, but John will laugh all the same. “Get me off the floor,” he begs, hiccupping through the words.
Sherlock does, partially. Enough. He’s gentle, so careful, as if he knows John might break. Of course he knows.
When John finally stops giggling, stops shaking, there are tears on his face, but at least Sherlock can’t see. The show has played itself to its finish and now the planetarium ceiling is a pretence of sky, an artificial shine of stars, linked and labelled into constellations.
“John?” Sherlock asks into the quiet, into his ear. The man has no idea, cannot possibly have any idea of what he’s done, the intimacy of tucking John up in the capital V of his endless legs. There’s sense in it, Sherlock turning himself into a chair, keeping John upright and gently restrained, but now John may never move again.
“Gun,” John requests, biting the syllable through his pain.
Sherlock presses it into his hand, his right hand, the one with fingers he can still control.
John grips it hard and sighs.
“Better?” Right arm returning to press across John’s stomach, securing him upright, spine nestled against Sherlock’s ribs.
He nods. Swallows. “Let go,” he says.
Because Sherlock does this, Sherlock keeps on doing this, turning himself into a chasm for John to fall into, and until John hits the bottom, he always thinks he’s flying.
“Are you sure you’re all right?” Sherlock asks. The only piece of him that moves is his chest against John’s back. He’s staggeringly warm.
John’s eyes close against the false sky above them. “Oh, now he cares. Wondered when you’d grow a heart. Great timing on that one, Sherlock, really.”
“Zero multiplied by twelve is still zero, John.”
“I do know my basic maths, thanks.”
“I didn’t know those people,” Sherlock continues, his low rumble undercutting John’s interruption. “If they were alive, I wouldn’t care about them. You wouldn’t either, not on an individual basis.”
“There’s a dead woman behind the podium over there,” John says. “How do you feel about that?”
“Frustrated. You?”
John thinks about it. “Frustrated,” he agrees. “Regretful. Bit useless.”
There’s no consolation from Sherlock, no words of sympathy or false wisdom. No reminder that neither doctors nor soldiers can prevent all death, no telling him what he already knows. There’s only light breath against the side of his face, a strong arm across his stomach. John’s pulse pounds in his shoulder, tingles into his fingers. The vascular system is the body’s designated route for bleeding, only that.
“Are you all right?” Sherlock asks.
“I can handle it.”
“That wasn’t the question.”
“I don’t even know what all right means anymore,” John admits, “but I can handle it.”
“I’m going to dig the bullets out of the wall before I call Lestrade,” Sherlock tells him. “I didn’t hit any of the seats, so it’s likely no one will notice.”
“Even if they do, we hardly know anything about it.”
“Anything at all,” Sherlock agrees, letting go at last. He stands and helps John do the same.
The only explosion that morning is a referenced supernova. Mycroft keeps texting him, filling up an absurd proportion of his mobile’s inbox. John doesn’t risk a nap while Sherlock and Lestrade take the museum director back to New Scotland Yard, instead taking a shower and changing his clothes before heading off to inspect train tracks.
He keeps his gun on him.
Sherlock comes to fetch him, makes it clear he’s already solved the case. John ought to feel more annoyed than he does, being directed here and there by both Holmes brothers to discover what the two must already know. Instead, it’s something else in his chest, something no less sharp for its smooth ease down his throat and across his heart, the ache whiskey-warm. It’s a bit like his shoulder, the pain of Sherlock’s pressing hands and biting tongue, a temporary treatment before the pounding heat of John’s shower.
They do a spot of breaking and entering, some threatening, and that’s the missile defence plans recovered. John hands his gun to Sherlock and makes it to the surgery in time for his afternoon shift. He keeps his mobile on vibrate, waiting for a text about the next pip, but it seems they’ve already completed the challenge of the day with the painting this morning. There ought to be nothing more until tomorrow.
Coming home, John notes the familiar scent of disinfectant. He checks the fridge while Sherlock yells at their telly. The head is gone.
They keep their coats on as night falls, sharp air slipping through the coverings over their broken windows. John asks the important questions for his coming days in digital London, learns how to tell when a house is unoccupied or a door easy for entry. Sherlock’s responses are quick, not dismissive. They shiver in their flat together as John pecks his way through emails. John approaches his forty-hour limit, knows it’s time to sleep or be useless tomorrow, and if his room weren’t absolutely freezing, he’d go to bed here and now.
“I won’t be in for tea,” he says, closing his laptop and getting up, getting the circulation going again. “I’m going to Sarah’s.” At Sherlock’s vague gesture, John adds, “There’s still some of that risotto left in the fridge.”
Sherlock makes a noise of approval and John says, more or less as a reminder to himself, “Milk, we need milk.” He’ll pick it up on his way back in the morning.
“I’ll get some.”
John turns around in the doorway, fighting down a laugh. “Really?”
“Really.”
He-
What?
“And some beans, then?” John asks, pressing his luck.
“Mm,” Sherlock confirms, eyes still on the telly.
Wide-eyed and bewildered, John leaves the flat.
He should probably break up with Sarah. The timing is awkward, though. They’ve got a date scheduled for tomorrow night - the case ought to be finished by tomorrow night - and she’s letting him kip on her sofa. She offered at the surgery today when he’d mentioned the broken windows and the chill of the flat.
Very little kissing, so far, between the two of them. It’s been nice, what little they’ve had, though neither of them has pressed for more. They’ve flirted about it, joked. They’ve looked down that path without more than a step or two toward it.
It’s nothing like that night in Chelmsford, near strangers close to public indecency. Dark curls in the streetlight, the rasp of stubble leaving his lips tingling. The disappointment back in his flat, this tall, gorgeous man who was only Jake. A bloke who knows what affection looks like, who would buy milk and beans without prompting, who would never remove a severed head from a fridge at John’s request.
He should really break up with Sarah.
Walking out of the tube station, lost in thought, he never sees the car coming.
The little bastard is all maniacal giggles and John wants to claw his laughing face off. John had felt sorry for him, for poor Jim from IT, flamboyant and awkward, flinging himself at Sherlock for all to see, desperate for an ounce of Sherlock’s attention.
Somewhere between the murders and the destruction, between breaking into Mrs. Hudson’s home and abducting John off the street, all sympathies are destroyed without a trace. The hostages, the explosions, the unrelenting, deadly fixation on Sherlock: for all of this, Jim Moriarty must die.
His hands cuffed to the back of the front passenger’s seat, there’s nothing John can do at the moment. Moriarty knows, has ensured it, but he gloats rather than taunt.
“I wasn’t sure, you know,” Moriarty tells him, his feigned modesty worse than any arrogance. “The flatmate or the landlady, which would it be? I just couldn’t make up my mind. The landlady would have been so much simpler. So much less fuss, fewer black eyes all around.”
“I’ve a few more to give out, if you’d like one.” His knuckles aren’t so scraped that he’d turn down the opportunity.
Moriarty laughs, this high tittering giggle, all affectation. “So feisty! Is that what he sees in you? His little yipping dog,” the man mocks, a Chihuahua baiting a terrier.
John’s jaw clenches. Remains that way.
“Do you think he’ll regret never fucking you?” Moriarty asks. He wrinkles his nose, pulling a face in disgust. “I’d love it if he did, but it doesn’t seem terribly likely, does it? After your little cuddle at the planetarium, I’d say he’s had more than enough of you.”
John has never seen more blatant jealousy. He holds onto that with both hands. This man wants Sherlock, desperately, and he wants him alive.
“If you kill me, he’ll never want you.”
Moriarty stares at him, then laughs and laughs and laughs. He convulses with it, cackling like some sort of storybook evil queen. Moriarty laughs until he laughs himself out, sighing to a finish, languid and relaxed where he reclines against the leather seat.
“Oh, no,” Moriarty sighs with amusement. “Oh, no no no no.” He leans forward, elbows on his knees, chin cupped between his palms, fingers curled against his cheeks. He smiles, so terribly, terribly pleased. “You’re so stupid. Look at you, all brave. Trying to make me see reason. I’m the one who sees it, not you, you stupid thing.”
Moriarty folds his arms across his knees and grins his widest.
“Once I kill you, he’ll never stop following me again.”
“Go on, Johnny, put on the vest.”
“No.”
“Maybe you’re blinded by the red lights in your face, but those are guns pointed at your head. Put on the vest.”
“No.”
“I would prefer not to kill you just yet. I do need you to walk, but you have arms. How about a shoulder wound on the right, some nice symmetry?”
John says nothing.
“Or - oh well! - I could kill you here and now. And then I could go all the long way to Baker Street and pick up nice old Mrs. Hudson. I’m sure she’s already taken her evening soother, she’ll be no trouble at all.”
John puts on the vest.
There’s a coat to hide the vest, gloves to hide the scrapes on his knuckles. There’s a voice in his ear and explosives on his chest.
Tomorrow, or the next day, or the day after that, he’ll wake up and save Mrs. Hudson from this.
He’s not sure how, or how well, but he will.
Sherlock walks into the pool, calling out, calling for Moriarty, there of his own volition.
John walks out, silent, controlled and compelled.
Sherlock sees him. Freezes, hand raised and outstretched, holding something suspiciously small.
“Evening,” John echoes. Voice stolen, he has his eyes, has Sherlock’s eyes on his. He blinks, fast and slow and fast. SOS, Sherlock. Look, don’t listen. Look and run. Just run. Leave him and go.
But Sherlock doesn’t see, doesn’t move. He’s stunned and silent, a shocked statue.
“This is a turn-up, isn’t it, Sherlock?” Moriarty dictates and John repeats.
“John.” Winded, hurt, moving at last. Toward John, not away. “What the hell...?”
John’s voice breaks while Moriarty snickers into his ear, feeding him words and bidding him to open the coat. The red light returns to his chest and as John speaks, he thinks: memorize this. See the angle, find the sniper. Here is Sherlock, where did Sherlock enter. There is Moriarty, he was in that hallway, that one there. John was caught, was transported, was arranged like so.
Memorize. Learn everything, everything, so that even when he dies, he won’t be stopped. He harbours no illusions about leaving this room alive, but if he learns, if he can do this right, he can kill another man with Moriarty’s face.
It’s not death John’s facing, not true death, maybe, and even if he is, that doesn’t matter. It’s Sherlock that matters. It’s letting Moriarty take his flatmate, his madman, John’s madman and making run him to death, puzzle by puzzle, one explosion at a time. Sherlock wouldn’t hold back, wouldn’t hesitate, would never stop throwing himself at that wall no matter the injury sustained.
If John’s going to leave this life, he’ll take Moriarty with him.
He waits for his chance, for any chance. He endures the conversation, the banter, holding still and silent. He can hear, just barely, Moriarty’s footsteps over the sound of lapping water. Moriarty draws even with him. Moriarty walks in front of him, practically offering his back as he throws the missile defence plans into the pool. John grabs him.
“Sherlock, run!” he yells, aloud at last, arm around Moriarty’s throat. Right arm, his left arm still weak from the Golem. He’s strong enough all the same, has to be. He’s strong enough to let Sherlock go, if only the man would run.
Sherlock never gets the chance.
A distant thought, barely heard through the rushing in his ears: so that’s where the second sniper is. Sherlock stands here, the sniper must stand there, up and back.
Moriarty baits and taunts and, ultimately, walks away.
Gun in hand and strapped with explosives, they stand there, waiting.
The door clicks shut.
Sherlock looks at him, eyes flicking from chest to face before he drops the gun and lunges to him. “All right? Are you all right?” Unzipping, unclipping, knee against the tile, a man of frantic motion.
“Yeah- Yeah, I’m fine. I’m fine,” and Sherlock rips coat and vest both from him, “Sherlock- Sherlock!”, and flings them away, the explosives sliding across tile toward the deep end.
“Jesus,” John gasps, and pants, “Oh Christ,” and falls, stumbling to the floor. Without the vest, his body feels too light. He’s drifting away, shaking.
Sherlock hasn’t finished yet, frantic, still frantic. John speaks to him, listens to a flustered, wandering thank-you. He knows this thank-you, has heard it before, if never quite so strongly, so shaken.
“I’m glad no one saw that,” John jokes, trying to calm him before Sherlock shoots himself in the head.
“Mm?” Leaning down, peering at him. Absolute focus, absolute.
“You ripping my clothes off in a darkened swimming pool. People might talk.”
“People do little else,” Sherlock says, and smiles, and John’s heart leaps in his chest.
It falls when he looks down, eye caught by a flicker of light. The angle’s different, the angle’s wrong, which means more than two, “Oh,” of course there are more than two. As Moriarty bursts back in, John realizes there must have been an entire other car, a truck full of these snipers and their rifles.
The snipers are across the pool, they’re above the shallow end, they’re above the deep end, and John knows he’s the one who’s going to die. He’s always been the one. Sherlock’s alive and John is alive and Moriarty would like one of those things not to be true. He’s still playing with Sherlock, playing even now, he’ll never stop, and when Sherlock looks to John, John nods, because they can all go down together, henchmen, mastermind and all.
Sherlock turns and aims John’s gun, and John tackles him as he fires.
He twists in midair, in mid-moment, his body before Sherlock’s, his body before the bomb.
Water hurts like concrete, a solid slap as they land, as he lands, a blow to the left shoulder. Water strikes his face as the pain strikes his nerves. There’s a terrible roar as his hearing fails and the last thing John feels before it ends is Sherlock’s thin frame, shielded in his arms.
He wakes up in Essex, clutching a pillow, unable to breathe. Essex, where people go when they die.
Sherlock, he thinks.
Sherlock.
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