the year that never was. [Sherlock/John]
Title: the year that never was
Pairing: Sherlock/John
Rating: PG-13
Words: 2614
Summary: An originally unnamed fill for this prompt. One morning John wakes up to find London empty except for him and Sherlock. (There may or may not be a not-so-subtle reference in the title.)
Also translated into Russian here by kinoksana and Chinese here by violinclarinet. Also available as a podfic by livealittle090.
i.
John's first thought after waking up is that he's still dreaming. The silence permeating the room is almost unearthly; no hum of traffic from outside, no broken murmurs of conversation or sounds of television bleeding through the walls from next door. Just silence and his own breathing, so he closes his eyes and tries waking up again.
After a while it occurs to him that he's as awake as he's going to be, and that a silent house with one Sherlock Holmes in it is rarely a good thing, so he gets up and heads downstairs.
The man in question is sitting in the living room with both their laptops open and muttering something about data, can't have data without network while the buzz of static from the television fills the background. John gets himself a cup of tea (since when was everything in their kitchen so loud) and starts flicking through the channels in search of the news.
He finds none. Every channel is just static in slightly different tones. “Sherlock,” he says.
“I know.”
John goes to the window, open to let the warm August air in. There's no sign of movement outside.
“I need your phone. There's no signal on mine.”
“Bedroom,” John replies absently and listens to Sherlock's footsteps (loud loud loud) moving around the house.
“What time is it, anyway?” he asks when Sherlock returns. “It's so quiet, I thought it was early morning, but--”
“Half past ten,” Sherlock says, tapping John's phone and then glaring at it as if it had somehow offended him. He puts it down with a resigned sigh and looks at John. “We need to find someone.”
After clothes and a brush of teeth they're standing outside Mrs Hudson's door. There's no answer to the knock nor any other sounds from inside the flat, but Sherlock picks the lock with dexterity that gives John reason to wonder if he's done it before.
“She could've just gone out,” he says.
“Maybe,” Sherlock admits and pushes the door open.
The house is empty. So are the streets. After spending several fruitless minutes looking for a cab, they descend the stairs to the Tube only to find it just as desolate as the above. The timetables announce the arrival and departure of one train after another, but the only sound they hear is the echo of their own footsteps in the vast underground halls.
The walk to Scotland Yard is an almost silent business apart from John's occasional half-hearted calls of hello, anyone here? Sherlock says nothing.
Once done with searching Scotland Yard (no signs of intelligent life, as usual, John wants to say, but the joke falls flat before it reaches his lips) they head to Westminster Palace. They muck about the entrance with John calling out for someone's - anyone's - attention, until Sherlock grows tired of waiting and, in a split second when John's not looking, grabs a loose stone from the ground and chucks it at one of the windows. It shatters with a deafening crash and John nearly jumps out of his skin.
“Sherlock, are you crazy? We need to get out of here--” but Sherlock won't budge, and after seconds pass by with no reaction and the reverberations of the crash begin to die down, it becomes obvious there's no one in to notice.
“We need a car,” Sherlock says, so they get one - you mean steal, says John, and there's reason to doubt as to whether its previous owner exists any more, says Sherlock.
They take the A23 southwards and keep on driving; past Brixton, past Norbury, and cross into West Sussex by sundown. The road is completely empty all the way, but John still stays within the speed limits out of habit. Nobody is there to honk at them when they pull to a stop in the middle of the road and get out of the car.
All around them are rolling expanses of green and emptiness and slowly gathering dusk. The last of the sun blinks out and paints the horizon a deep, rotting orange. They wait in silence until finally one of them says, “look,” and reaches out, and one of them says, “let's go home.”
ii.
They stay in London after that, for reasons neither of them can quite explain. Maybe it's the instinct of a lost child - if you lose your way, just sit still and stay where you are, and someone will come and find you.
The last of the gas runs out near the end of the first month, and soon after that the electricity finally cuts off. Their laptops and phones, useless and without connection though they were, use up their batteries and fall dark and silent, and Sherlock gathers their remnants on the sofa as if in mourning.
John walks on the streets outside and is struck by how small the world feels. It's as if there's nothing else left any more than London - or this empty set of it, anyway - and the rest of the world is just white mist.
iii.
John is emptying and replacing the barrels for collecting rainwater when he catches Sherlock sneaking through the back yards to the neighbours' and yells at him. (“It's not housebreaking if nobody owns it,” the brilliant moron yells back and slips inside before John can find anything to throw at him.) They need all the water they can get, and the English autumn offers plenty of opportunities to supplement their storage of bottled water.
It storms again that afternoon, and they stand huddled together under John's umbrella, listening to the roar of raindrops against stretched nylon until the noise becomes too much. John ducks away from underneath the umbrella and raises his face towards the sky, feeling the drops tap against his closed eyelids. Sherlock, after a moment's stunned staring, follows his example, and the roar of the rain dulls to a steady hiss all around them.
They're both soaked to the skin within minutes, but it's rather nice, actually, in a clean and fresh kind of way.
(And when Sherlock later kisses the last drops of rain from the hollow of John's throat, well, that's nice as well.)
iv.
They spend a good week hauling air-tight stoves across the city to the flat to compensate for the dead heating. They're already used to using portable stoves for cooking, and the damp cold of 221C makes for a veritable icebox when the temperature outside drops to zero. They hoard all the necessary effects they can into the joined living room and kitchen and leave the rest of the building unheated. It's crowded, true, but better tight and warm than open and cold.
A few days before winter truly sets in, they go down to Mrs Hudson's. For once John does not protest, because this isn't stealing, this is... remembrance. Done out of respect.
They search the flat and evaluate the items they find; hand-knitted scarves and socks, trinkets and souvenirs from holidays long past, a wedding portrait with her late husband. (There are no photos of the three of them, why did they never take photos?) Eventually they settle on a single framed picture of her, looking younger than either of them can remember, but it'll do.
It goes next to the skull, because friends stick together.
v.
Overnight the city is coated in soft whiteness and it's snow in London.
The doctor in John says that they can't afford for either of them to fall ill, but the rest of him says that Sherlock is going to get a handful of snow down the collar for that snowball in the face.
And there are snow angels in Piccadilly Circus and mutant snowmen keeping guard at Buckingham Palace and a number of other anomalies littering a twin path of footprints in the snow.
And John can hardly believe how dark the city is even with the Frost Moon lighting up the sky.
vi.
Happy 35th, John whispers.
The wind rattles the windowpanes and creates snowdrifts on the streets, but inside they move together until the sound of skin on skin drowns out the winter gale and everything turns to white noise.
vii.
Sometimes Sherlock hears John crying in the night; quiet, shuddering sobs that travel through his whole body.
I had a dream I woke up and you were gone too, John moans before Sherlock can say I know, because he has seen it too, has felt the same bone-deep fear and panic and cold cold loneliness of the dreams.
Don't ever go away.
I promise.
Double promise.
I promise.
Triple promise.
I promise.
They lie together, finding comfort in their shared heat, and fill their cocoon of blankets with promises.
viii.
Sherlock has dedicated a corner of the room for gathering data. It's a process he started on the very first week, when they still had electricity, but after the first month or so the progress began to dwindle, and now he adds bits of memory to it only to later erase them, deeming them inaccurate, and rearranges the pieces around.
Do you remember, John, the exact shape of her brooch? I'm sure if I only could-- How about the way he looked at his watch, the motions of his wrist? It could be important.
And so on. He's determined to solve the case of the disappearances, but whether to somehow bring them back or for the sheer intellectual challenge, John isn't sure. He isn't even sure if there is a case to begin with.
Was there a crime? If so, who are the victims: those who disappeared without a trace, or the two of them who were left behind?
ix.
The melting snow reveals cracks in the sidewalks that weren't there before, and soon there are sprigs pushing up from the wet ground beneath.
Sherlock has been crawling up the walls for the past few weeks and being even more reckless than usual, and is finally paying for it by wheezing and sniffling in a heap on the sofa while John runs down to the chemist's. Apart from the flocks of birds of all sizes (is it just his imagination or are they multiplying? Or have they always been there and he never noticed them for all the people?) the streets are empty like a ghost town, and John tries to sing something to fill the silence. He misses a few notes by a long shot and feels embarrassed even though there's no one to hear.
Upon his return, the figure hovering on the steps of 221 looks as pale as a ghost and ready to topple over at any moment, and John curses under his breath.
“Sure, never mind the doctor's orders, you probably know best--” he fumes once he's across the street, but before he can steer Sherlock inside, the man grabs his shoulders in a death grip that makes John wince.
“I woke up,” Sherlock says, well, wheezes more like.
John raises his eyebrows. “So I see.”
Sherlock's fingers tighten just so. “No,” he growls, eyes pale and fever-bright. “I woke up and you weren't there.”
There's a red flush over Sherlock's cheekbones, reaching the tip of his nose and the corners of his eyes, and John feels all anger drain away when he understands.
“I'm sorry,” he breathes, and Sherlock's grip loosens a fraction, letting John lean closer. “I promise.”
x.
They remove the heating stoves and halfway dismantle the cocoon of blankets in the sitting room, but only halfway. Neither of them will ever let the other sleep or wake up alone any more, so on those rare occasions when Sherlock's mind lets his body sleep, they curl up together on John's bed and wait until they're ready to be awake once more.
And when, more often that not, Sherlock is too busy to sleep, John camps out on the sofa with an army of blankets while Sherlock goes about his business, sometimes reading, sometimes experimenting, sometimes playing the violin, but always within an arm's reach on the first sign of wakefulness.
xi.
“No.” John sets his foot down. “You're not breaking into Buckingham Palace.”
The Palace Garden is starting to resemble more a moor than a real garden with the grass reaching halfway up his shin. In the periphery John can see a wary family of foxes lurking about, and in his immediate vicinity he can see Sherlock trying to frown and pout at the same time, a rather unbecoming expression to be honest.
“Why not?” he asks. “The alarms aren't working.”
“Not the point.” John can't believe he's arguing about this. “You just... don't.”
Sherlock stares at him, tilts his head, narrows his eyes just so, then gives a self-satisfied twist of his lips. “Ah, yes, you. Always for the Queen and country,” he murmurs.
“No Queen,” John says, without realising. “Not any more.” And again it hits him, that everyone, everyone, is just gone. Doesn't matter if you're a cabbie or a minister or the Queen, all gone just the same.
Except them. John would ask what makes them so special, if he wasn't sure that Sherlock would get awfully smug about it.
xii.
Sherlock filches a bottle of wine for his birthday, but John can't bring himself to complain. The day is pretty grey and drab altogether, and the wind over London Bridge tugs at his jacket, but John's starting to feel warmer when they approach the bottom of the bottle.
“You're not throwing that into the Thames,” he warns when Sherlock raises the empty bottle, but a tipsy Sherlock operates on reverse psychology and down it goes.
“All right, then,” John grins. “Don't you dare kiss me, you awful, awful man.”
& xiii.
John's first thought after waking up is that the world is ending. The noise permeates every nook of the room; the walls groan and creak, the air outside is alive with screeches, and the whole house seems to shake with the force of the cacophony.
His second thought is that he's alone, and he stumbles out of bed. “Sherlock?” he calls out, and his voice is so loud loud loud in his ears but still almost covered by all this noise. It grows louder and louder as he moves down the stairs and explodes around him when he bursts into the living room.
Sherlock is standing by the open windows, as if mesmerised by the view and not the least bit bothered by the din. John reaches out for him, and as he does he looks outside and sees -
People. Cars. Life.
His fingers squeeze Sherlock's hand in a way that must border on painful, but Sherlock says nothing, and in return John pretends not to notice the silent tears sliding down Sherlock's cheeks.
Nobody notices that they've lost a year. It's as if nothing ever happened (why is your phone off, I've been calling you, there's a dead couple with a missing child in Brixton--) and after a while it all starts to feel more and more like a distant dream.
He turns forty again, and Harry gets him a bottle of wine and tells him to stop looking at her like that, God, John, it's been over six months. Life goes on.
Only in their dreams do they remember snow angels in Piccadilly and the darkness of the deserted city under the winter full moon.
Pairing: Sherlock/John
Rating: PG-13
Words: 2614
Summary: An originally unnamed fill for this prompt. One morning John wakes up to find London empty except for him and Sherlock. (There may or may not be a not-so-subtle reference in the title.)
Also translated into Russian here by kinoksana and Chinese here by violinclarinet. Also available as a podfic by livealittle090.
i.
John's first thought after waking up is that he's still dreaming. The silence permeating the room is almost unearthly; no hum of traffic from outside, no broken murmurs of conversation or sounds of television bleeding through the walls from next door. Just silence and his own breathing, so he closes his eyes and tries waking up again.
After a while it occurs to him that he's as awake as he's going to be, and that a silent house with one Sherlock Holmes in it is rarely a good thing, so he gets up and heads downstairs.
The man in question is sitting in the living room with both their laptops open and muttering something about data, can't have data without network while the buzz of static from the television fills the background. John gets himself a cup of tea (since when was everything in their kitchen so loud) and starts flicking through the channels in search of the news.
He finds none. Every channel is just static in slightly different tones. “Sherlock,” he says.
“I know.”
John goes to the window, open to let the warm August air in. There's no sign of movement outside.
“I need your phone. There's no signal on mine.”
“Bedroom,” John replies absently and listens to Sherlock's footsteps (loud loud loud) moving around the house.
“What time is it, anyway?” he asks when Sherlock returns. “It's so quiet, I thought it was early morning, but--”
“Half past ten,” Sherlock says, tapping John's phone and then glaring at it as if it had somehow offended him. He puts it down with a resigned sigh and looks at John. “We need to find someone.”
After clothes and a brush of teeth they're standing outside Mrs Hudson's door. There's no answer to the knock nor any other sounds from inside the flat, but Sherlock picks the lock with dexterity that gives John reason to wonder if he's done it before.
“She could've just gone out,” he says.
“Maybe,” Sherlock admits and pushes the door open.
The house is empty. So are the streets. After spending several fruitless minutes looking for a cab, they descend the stairs to the Tube only to find it just as desolate as the above. The timetables announce the arrival and departure of one train after another, but the only sound they hear is the echo of their own footsteps in the vast underground halls.
The walk to Scotland Yard is an almost silent business apart from John's occasional half-hearted calls of hello, anyone here? Sherlock says nothing.
Once done with searching Scotland Yard (no signs of intelligent life, as usual, John wants to say, but the joke falls flat before it reaches his lips) they head to Westminster Palace. They muck about the entrance with John calling out for someone's - anyone's - attention, until Sherlock grows tired of waiting and, in a split second when John's not looking, grabs a loose stone from the ground and chucks it at one of the windows. It shatters with a deafening crash and John nearly jumps out of his skin.
“Sherlock, are you crazy? We need to get out of here--” but Sherlock won't budge, and after seconds pass by with no reaction and the reverberations of the crash begin to die down, it becomes obvious there's no one in to notice.
“We need a car,” Sherlock says, so they get one - you mean steal, says John, and there's reason to doubt as to whether its previous owner exists any more, says Sherlock.
They take the A23 southwards and keep on driving; past Brixton, past Norbury, and cross into West Sussex by sundown. The road is completely empty all the way, but John still stays within the speed limits out of habit. Nobody is there to honk at them when they pull to a stop in the middle of the road and get out of the car.
All around them are rolling expanses of green and emptiness and slowly gathering dusk. The last of the sun blinks out and paints the horizon a deep, rotting orange. They wait in silence until finally one of them says, “look,” and reaches out, and one of them says, “let's go home.”
ii.
They stay in London after that, for reasons neither of them can quite explain. Maybe it's the instinct of a lost child - if you lose your way, just sit still and stay where you are, and someone will come and find you.
The last of the gas runs out near the end of the first month, and soon after that the electricity finally cuts off. Their laptops and phones, useless and without connection though they were, use up their batteries and fall dark and silent, and Sherlock gathers their remnants on the sofa as if in mourning.
John walks on the streets outside and is struck by how small the world feels. It's as if there's nothing else left any more than London - or this empty set of it, anyway - and the rest of the world is just white mist.
iii.
John is emptying and replacing the barrels for collecting rainwater when he catches Sherlock sneaking through the back yards to the neighbours' and yells at him. (“It's not housebreaking if nobody owns it,” the brilliant moron yells back and slips inside before John can find anything to throw at him.) They need all the water they can get, and the English autumn offers plenty of opportunities to supplement their storage of bottled water.
It storms again that afternoon, and they stand huddled together under John's umbrella, listening to the roar of raindrops against stretched nylon until the noise becomes too much. John ducks away from underneath the umbrella and raises his face towards the sky, feeling the drops tap against his closed eyelids. Sherlock, after a moment's stunned staring, follows his example, and the roar of the rain dulls to a steady hiss all around them.
They're both soaked to the skin within minutes, but it's rather nice, actually, in a clean and fresh kind of way.
(And when Sherlock later kisses the last drops of rain from the hollow of John's throat, well, that's nice as well.)
iv.
They spend a good week hauling air-tight stoves across the city to the flat to compensate for the dead heating. They're already used to using portable stoves for cooking, and the damp cold of 221C makes for a veritable icebox when the temperature outside drops to zero. They hoard all the necessary effects they can into the joined living room and kitchen and leave the rest of the building unheated. It's crowded, true, but better tight and warm than open and cold.
A few days before winter truly sets in, they go down to Mrs Hudson's. For once John does not protest, because this isn't stealing, this is... remembrance. Done out of respect.
They search the flat and evaluate the items they find; hand-knitted scarves and socks, trinkets and souvenirs from holidays long past, a wedding portrait with her late husband. (There are no photos of the three of them, why did they never take photos?) Eventually they settle on a single framed picture of her, looking younger than either of them can remember, but it'll do.
It goes next to the skull, because friends stick together.
v.
Overnight the city is coated in soft whiteness and it's snow in London.
The doctor in John says that they can't afford for either of them to fall ill, but the rest of him says that Sherlock is going to get a handful of snow down the collar for that snowball in the face.
And there are snow angels in Piccadilly Circus and mutant snowmen keeping guard at Buckingham Palace and a number of other anomalies littering a twin path of footprints in the snow.
And John can hardly believe how dark the city is even with the Frost Moon lighting up the sky.
vi.
Happy 35th, John whispers.
The wind rattles the windowpanes and creates snowdrifts on the streets, but inside they move together until the sound of skin on skin drowns out the winter gale and everything turns to white noise.
vii.
Sometimes Sherlock hears John crying in the night; quiet, shuddering sobs that travel through his whole body.
I had a dream I woke up and you were gone too, John moans before Sherlock can say I know, because he has seen it too, has felt the same bone-deep fear and panic and cold cold loneliness of the dreams.
Don't ever go away.
I promise.
Double promise.
I promise.
Triple promise.
I promise.
They lie together, finding comfort in their shared heat, and fill their cocoon of blankets with promises.
viii.
Sherlock has dedicated a corner of the room for gathering data. It's a process he started on the very first week, when they still had electricity, but after the first month or so the progress began to dwindle, and now he adds bits of memory to it only to later erase them, deeming them inaccurate, and rearranges the pieces around.
Do you remember, John, the exact shape of her brooch? I'm sure if I only could-- How about the way he looked at his watch, the motions of his wrist? It could be important.
And so on. He's determined to solve the case of the disappearances, but whether to somehow bring them back or for the sheer intellectual challenge, John isn't sure. He isn't even sure if there is a case to begin with.
Was there a crime? If so, who are the victims: those who disappeared without a trace, or the two of them who were left behind?
ix.
The melting snow reveals cracks in the sidewalks that weren't there before, and soon there are sprigs pushing up from the wet ground beneath.
Sherlock has been crawling up the walls for the past few weeks and being even more reckless than usual, and is finally paying for it by wheezing and sniffling in a heap on the sofa while John runs down to the chemist's. Apart from the flocks of birds of all sizes (is it just his imagination or are they multiplying? Or have they always been there and he never noticed them for all the people?) the streets are empty like a ghost town, and John tries to sing something to fill the silence. He misses a few notes by a long shot and feels embarrassed even though there's no one to hear.
Upon his return, the figure hovering on the steps of 221 looks as pale as a ghost and ready to topple over at any moment, and John curses under his breath.
“Sure, never mind the doctor's orders, you probably know best--” he fumes once he's across the street, but before he can steer Sherlock inside, the man grabs his shoulders in a death grip that makes John wince.
“I woke up,” Sherlock says, well, wheezes more like.
John raises his eyebrows. “So I see.”
Sherlock's fingers tighten just so. “No,” he growls, eyes pale and fever-bright. “I woke up and you weren't there.”
There's a red flush over Sherlock's cheekbones, reaching the tip of his nose and the corners of his eyes, and John feels all anger drain away when he understands.
“I'm sorry,” he breathes, and Sherlock's grip loosens a fraction, letting John lean closer. “I promise.”
x.
They remove the heating stoves and halfway dismantle the cocoon of blankets in the sitting room, but only halfway. Neither of them will ever let the other sleep or wake up alone any more, so on those rare occasions when Sherlock's mind lets his body sleep, they curl up together on John's bed and wait until they're ready to be awake once more.
And when, more often that not, Sherlock is too busy to sleep, John camps out on the sofa with an army of blankets while Sherlock goes about his business, sometimes reading, sometimes experimenting, sometimes playing the violin, but always within an arm's reach on the first sign of wakefulness.
xi.
“No.” John sets his foot down. “You're not breaking into Buckingham Palace.”
The Palace Garden is starting to resemble more a moor than a real garden with the grass reaching halfway up his shin. In the periphery John can see a wary family of foxes lurking about, and in his immediate vicinity he can see Sherlock trying to frown and pout at the same time, a rather unbecoming expression to be honest.
“Why not?” he asks. “The alarms aren't working.”
“Not the point.” John can't believe he's arguing about this. “You just... don't.”
Sherlock stares at him, tilts his head, narrows his eyes just so, then gives a self-satisfied twist of his lips. “Ah, yes, you. Always for the Queen and country,” he murmurs.
“No Queen,” John says, without realising. “Not any more.” And again it hits him, that everyone, everyone, is just gone. Doesn't matter if you're a cabbie or a minister or the Queen, all gone just the same.
Except them. John would ask what makes them so special, if he wasn't sure that Sherlock would get awfully smug about it.
xii.
Sherlock filches a bottle of wine for his birthday, but John can't bring himself to complain. The day is pretty grey and drab altogether, and the wind over London Bridge tugs at his jacket, but John's starting to feel warmer when they approach the bottom of the bottle.
“You're not throwing that into the Thames,” he warns when Sherlock raises the empty bottle, but a tipsy Sherlock operates on reverse psychology and down it goes.
“All right, then,” John grins. “Don't you dare kiss me, you awful, awful man.”
& xiii.
John's first thought after waking up is that the world is ending. The noise permeates every nook of the room; the walls groan and creak, the air outside is alive with screeches, and the whole house seems to shake with the force of the cacophony.
His second thought is that he's alone, and he stumbles out of bed. “Sherlock?” he calls out, and his voice is so loud loud loud in his ears but still almost covered by all this noise. It grows louder and louder as he moves down the stairs and explodes around him when he bursts into the living room.
Sherlock is standing by the open windows, as if mesmerised by the view and not the least bit bothered by the din. John reaches out for him, and as he does he looks outside and sees -
People. Cars. Life.
His fingers squeeze Sherlock's hand in a way that must border on painful, but Sherlock says nothing, and in return John pretends not to notice the silent tears sliding down Sherlock's cheeks.
Nobody notices that they've lost a year. It's as if nothing ever happened (why is your phone off, I've been calling you, there's a dead couple with a missing child in Brixton--) and after a while it all starts to feel more and more like a distant dream.
He turns forty again, and Harry gets him a bottle of wine and tells him to stop looking at her like that, God, John, it's been over six months. Life goes on.
Only in their dreams do they remember snow angels in Piccadilly and the darkness of the deserted city under the winter full moon.