and i'm sorry for us, the dinosaurs roam the earth, the sky turns green where i end and you begin
It's snowing when Sherlock Holmes first sets foot back on English soil, the imprint of the worn sole of a ratty sneaker (more worn on the ball of the foot from running and climbing, heels not entirely pristine, lots of walking, too much walking) pressed into the soft clay of the shipyard the only mark of his passing. Those who knew him once would never guess that such a mark might belong to him. They might be so sentimental as to think that it shouldn't, that Sherlock Holmes ought only walk in shoes of fine and supple leather.
Sherlock himself knows better. He knows that he's as much himself in these shoes, in these jeans, in the sweatshirt he wears with the hood pulled up to cover cropped hair, as he ever was in any of those things. Or that he would be, anyway, had it not been for a dark side-street in a Beijing hutongr in which the shadows had had teeth. If not for how he'd been left half-dead and curled up under a pile of discarded tarps and lumber, useless and immobilised first by the venom coursing through what was left in his veins and then by the sickness, nothing but the smell of piss and the occasional curious stray for company as the fever ravaged him. He remembers little of it. Agony and the shifting of bones, wild hallucinations, the taste and sensation of rat's fur in his mouth (little eviscerated body in the morning sun, hardly recognisable, and dried blood flaking on Sherlock's chin) and waking up, finally waking up, so very hungry.
So much had changed since then, and so little of it outwardly visible. He still looks himself, leaner and more predatory only because he's gone hungry and wandered for so long. Paler, but he'd travelled primarily by night even before the fever. The rest hides, even the teeth, nestled in his upper jaw until he needs them, like a serpent's fangs.
Sherlock hides too, padding across the shipyard with silence and swiftness to which even he is unaccustomed. The scent of something warm and human and living reaches him and he presses back into the shadows, swallowing an eager mouthful of saliva. At first all he hears is the soft pattering of wet, heavy snowflakes all around him before yes, footsteps, security guard, must be. There'll be more, too, the closer it gets to dawn. Best Sherlock leaves before then.
He's nothing, nothing but wind, an insubstantial creature hoving his way through rows of shipping containers piled storeys high, nothing but a flash of tapetum lucidum. A cat. A scavenger.
Something animal, anyway, something not human... isn't he? Even Sherlock isn't certain, but then he'd never made a terribly good human in the first place. It itches at him though, claws relentlessly at the edges of his consciousness, and all the more so now. He's been long away. Long away, but some things haven't changed. Coming back is still coming home. There's still a cruel man he means to ruin, tooth and claw if need be, and a good man he means to see.
Sherlock wants his life back. He wants it desperately, though he knows how much of a risk it is now, with the Hunger. With the way sunlight stings his eyes and makes him weep, blisters his skin viciously. With the flash of his eyes in the dark. How long could that stay hidden?
He's thought about it. If everything went back to how it used to be it would only take a bit of manoeuvring to make it work. He and John would drift along as they always had done, walls carefully constructed between them, layers of distinction settled and safe and comfortable. Unaware of how those distances might breed their own brands of closeness until the outside intervenes. Happy, or something like it.
What, though, what might possibly be as it used to be? The coward in Sherlock is a greater well of inertia than he ever lets on, and the coward says stay away. Says not to risk it, not to risk hurting him when the Hunger grows, not to risk being hurt when he, or others, inevitably find out. Deal with Moran and move on again, let them live as they have been living. It's kinder. Isn't it?
It might be, it might well, but his curiosity is a juggernaut force fed by anger, fed by the conviction he's been cheated, fed by homesickness and so many other impossibly tangled-up things, too many threads of often conflicting emotions for Sherlock to parse.
And so he'll go, go just to look, just to see, to decide. Today he'll sleep where he can find shelter from the sun and tonight he'll slip into the city the way he slipped onto English soil, sharp and vicious and envenomed, ready, perhaps, to begin to negotiate the barbed process of going home.