Fic - I Know Thee, Stranger - Sherlock/John - PG-13
Title: I Know Thee, Stranger
Author: lotherington
Prompt: Here on the meme: Can we please get some archangel AU up in here? Sherlock is Michael, the archangel of fire and war. Mycroft is Uriel, the archangel of repentance. ‘Gabriel’ Lestrade is the messenger archangel. John is Raphael, the healer and protector. (I’ve shortened the prompt a lot so to get the full gist click the link. :))
Fandom: Sherlock
Characters/Pairing: Sherlock/John; Mycroft; Lestrade; Mike Stamford
Summary: ‘They’ve even accounted for dinosaurs, for goodness’ sake, and they were meant as a bit of a joke when we all got pissed that one afternoon.’ It’s 2010. Sherlock is bored. Mycroft is exasperated. Gabriel’s tired. Raphael’s missing.
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: ~4,750
Notes: Dear me, this was fun. It’s different to what I’ve been writing recently and it’s all a bit Good Omens, but I very much hope you enjoy it. Title is from Paradise Lost, book two: ‘I know thee, stranger, who thou art’. Despite being about archangels it's not really about religion at all, so if that isn't your thing but you like wing!fic, fear not.
Michael has taken to calling himself Sherlock these days. He lives in a flat in London and he watches the world and its people and it’s been thousands and thousands of years and he’s so very bored with it all.
***
Gabriel’s still Gabriel, but he tells people it’s Greg or George or Gary to avoid getting laughed at. He’s not bored, as such, just tired: tired and old and even now some of the stupid things the people want him to tell God surprise him.
***
Uriel is Mycroft when he’s on Earth, which is far more often than he would like. The millennia have made him bitter and sardonic and imperious - at least, more bitter and sardonic and imperious than he was in the first place. He tries to manipulate and order Sherlock to do the job he was designed for, but has very little success.
***
Raphael’s been missing for a very long time.
***
It is ten o’clock in the morning on a Tuesday in September. Mycroft appears at the door of Sherlock’s flat in North London. He knocks once, then twice, then a third time, and waits. Sherlock does not answer the door, or throw the key down as he sometimes does. Mycroft sighs and waits some more, until he grows tired, turns on his heel, and re-appears in Sherlock’s room, looming over Sherlock’s sleeping body in a way he’s been perfecting for thousands of years.
'Get up,' he orders the dark nest of curls that are just visible above the cheap duvet.
'Shan't.' Sherlock pulls the covers tighter around himself.
Mycroft glares and pokes the curve of Sherlock's bum through the duvet with the tip of his umbrella. 'Get up,' he shouts again as Sherlock twists away, grumbling and moaning about how that hurt, you fucker, and you'd better watch your puddings after this, lardarse. Rolling his eyes, Mycroft leans on his umbrella and waits until, surely enough, Sherlock turns over, blinking in the morning light, his wings a deep carmine red, spread out across his mattress.
'What?' Sherlock spits, his eyebrows drawn tight together, forcing his eyes into two narrow slits.
'I really think you ought to do something about the Middle East,' Mycroft says.
Sherlock grumbles, pulling a face. 'There's always something to be done about the Middle East or wherever bloody else,' he says. 'Dull.'
‘It’s your job,’ Mycroft says with a put-upon sigh and two raised eyebrows for Sherlock.
‘Yes, and it’s boring,’ Sherlock replies, throwing the covers back and jumping to his feet. ‘Besides,’ he says, pushing past Mycroft, bending to squint into his mirror, pulling his eyelids up and inspecting his corneas, ‘I need an assistant, and God only knows where Raphael’s pissed off to.’
***
It didn’t take long for humans to stop being impressed by angelic apparitions, booming speeches, fiery swords, enormous wings and the like. It fell to the angels to find other ways of exerting their influence, a task they managed well enough. Mycroft made himself an indispensable cog in the complicated machine of British politics, imposing order on Britain and the world from the corridors that ran deep below Whitehall with just as much ease as if he were doing it from his more natural seat at the gates of the underworld. Greg or George or Gary or Gabriel or whatever he was calling himself steadily worked his way up through the police force, trying to touch as many normal, human lives as he possibly could. His ambitions were of course admirable, but his job actually just meant that he spent six days out of seven dealing with some pretty rotten fragments of humanity in South London and had little time left to answer the cries of the rest of the humans. Sherlock, as is his wont, eschewed the notion of gaining power within some sort of institution and concentrated on becoming a master of manipulation, exploiting the information he could read from tiny details about people that anyone else would reject as insignificant. His power base was vast, impressive and transcended all barriers. However, these days, it only really got used for his own personal amusement, usually when he fancied a chinese or needed something delivering.
Mycroft seems to think that Raphael may have become a doctor at some point in the century, though none of them know for certain.
***
‘Is it at least interesting?’ Sherlock asks when he materialises at Gabriel’s side.
‘You tell me,’ Gabriel replies, gesturing to the body crumpled at the bottom of the stairs.
Sherlock runs down the stairs and swoops to look at the body - mixed-race female, mid-twenties - taking in the little details that everyone else always, always misses. He narrows his eyes and inhales deeply and lifts her hair, her hands, her head. Gabriel walks down the stairs and sits on a step near the bottom. He places his chin in his hands.
‘You could at least try, Michael,’ he says, very quietly.
Sherlock’s eyes snap up to Gabriel’s weary face. ‘Try and help the humans?’ he scoffs. ‘Waste of my time.’ He drops the dead woman’s hand and it falls with a thud to the carpeted floor. ‘Looks like a crime of passion, almost certainly had a lover of anywhere between one to three years but no more than that, clearly an argument gone awry, the partner will come crawling back soon enough--’
‘Why won’t you even try?’ Gabriel interrupts. ‘I keep getting it in the neck because you can’t be arsed. It’s alright for you; you don’t have nearly seven billion humans on your case asking why their brother’s gone to fight a war or why their husband’s left them or why their village has no water or why their child was attacked.’
Rolling his eyes, Sherlock stands up and peels his gloves off. ‘Yes, that’s right, poor old Gabriel, forever the bearer of bad tidings, forever the messenger about to be shot.’ He nods to the dead woman on the floor. ‘Do better, next time. This was not worth leaving my flat for.’
‘Can’t we just go to the Middle East and see?’ Greg pleads.
Sherlock smirks. ‘Goodbye, Gabriel,’ he says, and with a tilt of his head and a twist of his body, he is gone.
***
Sherlock rarely concerns himself with lesser beings but makes an exception for Mike Stamford, one of the few cherubs he is able to stand. Even then, he’s only really able to stand Mike because he lets Sherlock use his lab. Either way, it’s a win-win situation: Mike gets to tell people he’s friends with Michael - yes, that Michael, the Michael, and Sherlock has a fully-equipped laboratory at his disposal.
That morning, the landlord of Sherlock’s flat in Montague Street had given him notice to leave owing to the twelve dead rabbits stuffed into the fridge’s freezer drawer, the chemical burns on the lino in the bathroom and the vague smell of decomposition that lingers around the place now that Sherlock has been in residence for some time. Of course, Sherlock could have changed his landlord’s mind quicker than you can say archangel, but the task of finding a new place to live in meant at least a week of not being bored.
‘Where are you going to go? Are you going to find a flatmate?’ Mike asks eagerly after being told about the situation as Sherlock glares into a microscope.
Chuckling, Sherlock lifts his head. ‘And who’d want me for a flatmate?’ he jumps up from the stool he’d been perched on since nine o’clock and pulls his jacket on. ‘I’ll be back at lunch,’ he says. ‘Let me know if those microbes do anything out of the ordinary, Mike, won’t you?’
‘Yeah, course,’ Mike says, beaming.
Sherlock gives him a thin smile in return and twists round, papers fluttering to the floor as he disappears from sight.
***
That afternoon, Mike runs into John Watson.
That is to say, that afternoon, Mike runs into Raphael.
John knows what Mike is but Mike doesn’t know what John is; has never known, not even when they were at Barts together. Mike has absolutely no idea what he’s doing when he introduces an old mate of his, John Watson to Sherlock. He imagines he’s doing what he was put on earth to do: matching two lost souls in the hope that they’ll find themselves again and each other along the way, never mind that one’s an archangel and one is (he believes) a human. He thinks they’ll be good together, and he’s right.
Sherlock wants to use Mike’s phone. Mike lies and says it’s in his coat, a cunning plan to get John to offer his, to talk to Sherlock.
‘Here, use mine.’
Mike smirks.
John’s eyes meet Sherlock’s, their fingertips brush, and they both know.
There’s one long moment of silence as both of their eyes widen, as they both take a breath and decide what to do next.
John bolts for the door, his knuckles whitening around the handle of the walking stick he carries.
Sherlock throws himself after John; jumps up onto one of the tables and leaps off it. His flame-coloured wings burst through his shirt and suit jacket and he lands in front of the door, blocking John’s way.
‘Out the way, Michael,’ John mutters, his eyes downcast, shifty.
Sherlock spreads his wings wide and high enough to conceal the entire doorway.
‘Oh, don’t do this,’ John growls, the grey metal stick in his hand becoming a long wooden caduceus with a serpent curled round it. His huge blue wings break through his jumper and coat, a challenge.
Mike gapes.
‘Where - quite literally - on earth have you been?’ Sherlock hisses, having no interest in fighting, leaning in to peer at John’s face, into his ears, pulling his chin up and staring into his eyes.
John begins to turn, to will himself away, but Sherlock’s grip on him tightens.
‘Don’t make me fetch Uriel here,’ he murmurs.
John sighs. Nods once. Steps back, into the room. ‘I’ll stay.’
Sherlock folds his wings back, wills the tears in his clothes to mend.
‘Why have you been gone for so long?’
‘It’s... a long story.’ John’s wings shrink back too, the caduceus becoming a walking stick once again.
Sherlock smirks. ‘We’ve got a long time.’
***
To vastly oversimplify the matter, angels - particularly the higher-ups like Sherlock and John and Mycroft and Gabriel - are a bit like time lords. Being able to will themselves anywhere on Earth or Upstairs or in between the two, their methods of transportation are infinitely more sophisticated than a malfunctioning police box, and of course they don’t get involved with the humans so messily as that Doctor on the telly, but their overall detached viewpoint and regenerative capabilities make it a fair comparison.
Even though angels have the ability to change their appearance at will, they tend to get comfortable and settle with one look for longer than they really should. Their personality remains constant with each new skin they throw on, though the years and their experiences do much to alter the way they think and talk and act.
And so it was that despite having only been apart for sixty-five years out of six thousand, Michael and Raphael, Sherlock and John, were virtual strangers to each other.
***
Angelo isn’t aware that his restaurant is quite popular with most of the heavenly beings based in London. It could be something to do with the name. As they walk in to Angelo’s, Sherlock spots Metatron at the bar, who raises his glass of white wine in a toast when he catches sight of Sherlock. Fifteen minutes after being seated, Sherlock ducks behind his menu when Jophiel saunters in. Things are still a bit awkward between the two of them since that one wild night in Berlin in the 20s.
John orders food. Sherlock doesn’t.
‘You’ve changed, since I saw you last,’ John says as he shovels spaghetti into his mouth. Sherlock sits opposite him in the window seat, fingers laced together as he watches John eat.
‘Yes, well, it was 1945 when you saw me last,’ Sherlock says, fixing John with a scornful look before turning to gaze out of the window.
‘1945,’ John breathes. ‘I didn’t think it had been quite that long.’ He sips his wine. ‘Are you still pretending to be a scientist?’
‘There was no pretending about it, and no. I’m a consulting detective.’
The sounds of the restaurant fill the silence between the two of them for five minutes. Sherlock alternates between looking at the street outside and at John, who finishes his pasta with a satisfied sigh and sits back.
‘I’m surprised you didn’t find me before now, you know.’
Sherlock shrugs, flicks his gaze back to the window. ‘You didn’t want to be found.’
‘I’d had a rough few years,’ John says quietly, toying with the stem of his wine glass. ‘Seemed for every one of them I healed, ten more would be dead by the time I’d turned round.’
‘I rather had my hands full too, I recall.’
‘Yeah.’ John laughs. ‘Yeah, I think we all did.’
Sherlock turns back to John, shifting the full focus of his attention to the small, unassuming man in a jumper. ‘So you… what? Things got a bit sticky, so you upped and left for sixty-five years?’
‘It wasn’t like that, you know it wasn’t like that,’ John says, a frown appearing on his brow.
‘No, I don’t know, actually.’ Sherlock’s eyes flash as he glares at John. ‘I don’t know, Raphael, because this is the first I’ve seen of you since you said something about Japan, turned on your heel and left.’
John breathes out heavily through his nose. ‘So many of them died, Michael. So many of them died and hardly any of them deserved it and it was all because I hadn’t done my job.’
‘Yes, I forgot I’d been winning employee of the month since 1914,’ Sherlock snaps. ‘You weren’t the only one who failed.’
‘I was the only one who ran away though, right?’
‘Physically, yes.’
‘What do you mean?’ John sips his wine again.
‘I’ve just stopped caring.’
‘I see.’ John puts his glass back on the table. ‘And you find that easy, do you?’
Sherlock’s eyes narrow. His fingertips brush his lips as he speaks. ‘Very. Look at them all.’ He glares round at the restaurant, at the humans going about their business, having dinner, chatting with friends and lovers about nothing of any consequence. ‘They’re all so vacant.’
John looks at the people talking to one another, sees them smiling, laughing. He tilts his head and looks inside, sees a cancerous tumour lodged in the stomach of one of the humans, a sprained ankle, a broken heart. One has asthma, one is partially sighted, one suffers from arthritis. He aches to heal them all.
‘I never stopped caring,’ he says quietly as he wills the malignant tumour out of the woman’s stomach, catches it, surrounds it with blue light and crushes it in his fist. ‘I ran away because anything I did wasn’t ever enough. Are you telling me you just stopped trying?’
Sherlock glowers out of the window.
‘I thought better of you than that, Michael.’ John’s voice is quiet.
‘I thought better of you,’ Sherlock returns, still not looking at John. ‘Why haven’t you run away yet?’
There’s a silence that stretches on for a while. ‘I’ve been running for long enough.’
The waiter comes to take John’s plate away. John finishes his glass of wine and joins Sherlock in staring out of the window. Cars and taxis and buses heave past, the humans in their coats and scarves hurry home from work.
‘Where are you living, these days?’ Sherlock asks suddenly.
‘Finchley,’ John says. ‘Why?’
‘I’m going to look at a flat in Paddington this evening. Landlady owes me a favour, and it’s a nice little place, apparently. Fancy joining me?’
John frowns. ‘Are you asking me to move in with you?’
Sherlock shrugs. John laughs softly.
‘Alright, then,’ he says. ‘I’ll come and have a look round.’
***
In the grand scheme of things, sixty-five years isn’t a very long time at all.
It’s long enough, though.
Long enough for a lot of things to have changed.
***
There’s a case.
Gabriel treads wearily on the stairs up to 221b, his speech sounding as though it’s one long sigh.
‘Will you come?’
John shrinks further into the armchair, recognising the way Gabriel holds himself, the deep brown eyes that never change no matter how many times he alters his appearance. He goes unnoticed, for now, and breathes a sigh of relief.
Nearly an hour later, they’re at the door of the house where the dead woman has been been found, and Gabriel is looking John up and down.
‘Who’s this?’ he asks.
John tries to avoid eye contact and very nearly manages it but eventually his dark blue eyes meet Gabriel’s brown. After a pause, Gabriel nods in recognition.
‘Uh... John, Dr. John Watson,’ John mumbles for the benefit of the humans surrounding them. ‘Hi.’
‘In you go,’ Gabriel says with a jerk of his head.
‘Cheers.’ John’s grateful that there’s not a scene like there was with Michael, with Sherlock.
Gabriel nods again, slowly. He can’t quite hold back a smile.
***
Uriel pulls John into a car when Sherlock dashes off after a sudden epiphany to do with the dead woman.
John recognises Uriel’s sword for what it is when its embodiment looks at him from under her lashes in the back seat of the car, tapping away at the mobile in her lap. He even starts trying to put the moves on her before he remembers she’s just a bloody sword and the entire exercise would be fruitless.
Uriel’s leaning on an umbrella in an abandoned warehouse, looking as out of place as he always does on earth.
‘Returning to the fold, are we, Raphael?’ Uriel asks, raising one of his thin eyebrows.
‘John,’ John says, stopping in front of Uriel, holding onto the handle of his stick just a little tighter.
‘How nice and ordinary,’ Uriel says, barely containing a sneer. ‘Back for good or are you going to go tearing off round the world at the drop of a hat again?’
‘Back for a while. Don’t know about for good.’
Uriel laughs humourlessly. ‘I see,’ he says. He swings his umbrella up and slices it in an arc through the air, pointing the tip of it at John’s left shoulder. ‘When did you injure that wing?’
‘I could be wrong, but I think that’s none of your business,’ John says, his face tight.
Uriel laughs again. ‘I go by Mycroft, these days,’ he says. He turns and walks away from John, his umbrella swinging to and fro as he calls over his shoulder, ‘my car will take you where you want to go.’
***
At the end of the night, John shoots a man.
Sherlock and Gabriel cover it up, even if archangels aren’t exactly answerable to the laws of the land.
‘You killed a human,’ Sherlock says quietly as he and John stride away from the crime scene, Uriel and Gabriel watching their backs.
‘Yes,’ John replies, lifting his eyebrows. ‘Problem?’
‘You’re meant to heal them, not kill them.’ Sherlock’s eyes flash slightly when he turns to look at John.
‘He was on borrowed time anyway.’
‘In the sense that he had a brain tumour?’ Sherlock exclaims, stopping dead.
‘In the sense that he’d sold his soul,’ John replies, stopping as well, turning back to face Sherlock. ‘He wasn’t one of ours anymore. And if I recall, it did you a favour. Were you really going to take that pill? You fucking idiot.’
Sherlock blinks. ‘You’d never have killed one of them before. Back then.’
John shrugs. ‘He was fair game. Besides, you were in danger.’
‘Oh, I was not.’ Sherlock begins to walk again, hands shoved deep in his pockets.
‘He’d sold his soul, you have no idea what could have been in those pills. In all likelihood someone from Below had supplied that taxi driver with those... death capsules; they almost certainly wouldn’t have been of human origin. You were in danger. Could you really not see?’
Sherlock blinks again, a frown appearing on his brow.
‘Looks like I better move in with you after all. Fuck knows if you can still make toast without losing a finger or something.’
***
These days, Lucifer calls himself Jim Moriarty. He creeps his way into the workforce of the hospital that Sherlock and John and Mike frequent, and he waits.
***
Two months pass. John and Sherlock move in together and they solve crimes and eat takeaway and watch telly. John gets a job and whilst he’s very good at it, he’s a bit crap about turning up on time or staying for a full shift, when there are things far more exciting than the common cold going on outside the surgery walls.
Sherlock still, apparently, doesn’t care.
***
‘Afghanistan?’ Sherlock asks when he catches John in the bathroom with the door open, shirtless, his wings outstretched as he cleans his teeth at the sink.
‘Hm?’ John says, a goatee of toothpaste foam surrounding his mouth as he meets Sherlock’s eyes in the mirror.
‘Your wing.’ Sherlock nods at the bullet hole through it. ‘Afghanistan?’
‘Oh.’ John spits into the sink and rinses his mouth out. ‘Yeah.’
‘Can’t you heal it?’
‘I’ve tried,’ John replies shortly, beginning to fold his wings back before Sherlock reaches out and stops him, his hand tightening around John’s feathers.
‘You can’t fly, can you?’ Sherlock murmurs.
John presses his lips together and shakes his head.
‘How long?’
‘Six years,’ John says, his voice quiet.
Frowning, Sherlock dips down and brings his mouth close to the near-circular hole through John’s wing.
‘What are you doing?’ John demands, twisting his body to try and see. ‘Sherlock--’
‘Quiet,’ Sherlock says, ducking under John’s wing and frowning up at him. ‘I haven’t done this in a while.’ Sherlock closes his eyes and inhales deeply before breathing out over the wound, his lips just brushing John’s feathers.
Shuddering at the sensation, John grips the edge of the sink as Sherlock’s mouth continues to move over his wing, hot breath parting John’s feathers and warming him from within. ‘What... what are you... Sherlock, what are you--’
‘Look.’ Sherlock stands back, grinning smugly. John snaps his wing out and turns his back to the mirror to see, gaping when he registers that there’s no hole there; just an expanse of strong, blue feathers. ‘I mended it.’
‘How did you do that? You’re not a healer, you--’
Sherlock rolls his eyes. ‘I still have angel breath, John.’
‘Yeah.’ John smiles and shakes his head, still staring at his wing. ‘God, yeah, of course you do.’
***
There are five pips and far too many humans in harm’s way. There’s not enough sleep and not enough time and Sherlock does his level best not to care, because that won’t help at all, not in the slightest.
John cares, though. John cares and he reminds Sherlock about the humans at every turn - ‘these are actual, human lives, Sherlock’ - and the gravity of it all’s too deafeningly loud for words.
Sherlock wants to run away like John did all those years ago.
He doesn’t, though. He stays. He tries his best. He solves the case.
It’s just about good enough.
For now.
***
Sherlock’s wings cast a long shadow on the brick of 221, up on the roof. He and John sit side-by-side on the wall, legs dangling down towards the street below. A cab drives past occasionally. A couple walk arm-in-arm on the other side of the street, the man turning his neck to brush his lips across the woman’s forehead. She smiles up at him, and John smiles too as he watches.
It’s Christmas Eve.
Biting down on a cigarette, Sherlock wills a lighter into existence and flicks it once, twice, holding the flame to the end of the fag and puffing until it lights. He breathes in deeply.
John glances up at the stars above them, largely obscured by smoke and fog and pollution. There are a few that shine, though: the brightest, the best.
‘It hurts you, doesn’t it?’ John says quietly, flexing his wings, feeling the brisk night air running through them.
‘No.’ Sherlock frowns, taps his cigarette to flick the ash off. ‘No.’
‘Yes it does.’ John bounces his heel off the side of the huge house, kicks his foot out into the air in front of them. ‘It hurts that they’re human and weak and that they don’t understand. It hurts you that they’re so easily tempted to do wrong, to do horrible, awful things to one another--’
‘No. I’ve told you, I don’t care, I don’t care any--’
‘I can see it.’ John licks his lips and turns his body towards Sherlock, rests his hand over where Sherlock’s ancient, God-wrought heart beats in his chest. ‘I can see it hurts, in there.’
Sherlock sighs irritably, glares, inhales deeply from his cigarette.
‘I can’t take your pain away,’ John says, and it sounds as though he’s sad.
‘I know that,’ Sherlock spits, his eyes narrowing. ‘I just... I just want them to see that they’re no different to one another. What about that is so hard to grasp?’ He gesticulates violently with his cigarette as he talks, clutches at his hair. ‘They’ve understood nuclear physics, astrophysics, music, languages, computers, anything we’ve thrown at them, they’ve got it. They’ve even accounted for dinosaurs, for goodness’ sake, and they were meant as a bit of a joke when we all got pissed that one afternoon. They just don’t seem to understand that once you take everything away from them - their money, their institutions, their ideas - they’re all just flesh and blood and bone, all the sodding same.’ Sighing irritably, Sherlock flings his cigarette to the ground with far more force than is needed. ‘I’m just so tired of it all.’
It starts to rain.
Wordlessly, John shifts closer, snaps his wings out to their full span and brings the feathers up over their heads, sheltering them both from the drizzle.
‘I like how you’ve changed,’ John murmurs. ‘You were always a bit insufferable, before.’
Sherlock laughs shortly and looks away. ‘I do still care.’ His voice is very quiet.
John’s gaze doesn’t move from Sherlock’s face. ‘I know you do,’ he says. ‘Look at me.’
Sherlock turns. Rain drips from John’s primary feathers onto the back of Sherlock’s hand, but both angels pay no mind as they stare at each other.
‘You’re very different to how you used to be,’ Sherlock whispers, leaning in closer to John.
Their lips are almost brushing.
‘So are you,’ John breathes, licking his lips. He blinks for a long moment and when he opens his eyes, Sherlock’s lips are against his, slightly parted, warm and soft and lovely. It takes him a second but he kisses back, slides a hand up Sherlock’s neck to cup his jaw as they get lost in the gentle pressure of the kiss. John pushes his tongue into Sherlock’s mouth, brushes over one of Sherlock’s eyelids with the pad of his thumb. A shudder runs from Sherlock’s core to the tips of his wings and John pulls him in closer, closer still.
A car alarm sounds a few streets away and the buses moan and heave along on the main road.
Sherlock throws his arms across John’s shoulders and kisses harder, deeper, their breath coming short. John curls his fingers around Sherlock’s waist and Sherlock wraps his wings around them both, enveloping them in a small and secret world of their own. The brush of their feathers is electric.
They break apart for breath, both of them grinning.
‘Come on, angel,’ John says. His smile widens and his eyes sparkle and he pushes off the side of the building with his foot so that they’re both falling, tumbling through London sky until, laughing and laughing and laughing, John throws his wings wide and catches Sherlock by the wrist. ‘Where do you want to start?’
Author: lotherington
Prompt: Here on the meme: Can we please get some archangel AU up in here? Sherlock is Michael, the archangel of fire and war. Mycroft is Uriel, the archangel of repentance. ‘Gabriel’ Lestrade is the messenger archangel. John is Raphael, the healer and protector. (I’ve shortened the prompt a lot so to get the full gist click the link. :))
Fandom: Sherlock
Characters/Pairing: Sherlock/John; Mycroft; Lestrade; Mike Stamford
Summary: ‘They’ve even accounted for dinosaurs, for goodness’ sake, and they were meant as a bit of a joke when we all got pissed that one afternoon.’ It’s 2010. Sherlock is bored. Mycroft is exasperated. Gabriel’s tired. Raphael’s missing.
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: ~4,750
Notes: Dear me, this was fun. It’s different to what I’ve been writing recently and it’s all a bit Good Omens, but I very much hope you enjoy it. Title is from Paradise Lost, book two: ‘I know thee, stranger, who thou art’. Despite being about archangels it's not really about religion at all, so if that isn't your thing but you like wing!fic, fear not.
Michael has taken to calling himself Sherlock these days. He lives in a flat in London and he watches the world and its people and it’s been thousands and thousands of years and he’s so very bored with it all.
***
Gabriel’s still Gabriel, but he tells people it’s Greg or George or Gary to avoid getting laughed at. He’s not bored, as such, just tired: tired and old and even now some of the stupid things the people want him to tell God surprise him.
***
Uriel is Mycroft when he’s on Earth, which is far more often than he would like. The millennia have made him bitter and sardonic and imperious - at least, more bitter and sardonic and imperious than he was in the first place. He tries to manipulate and order Sherlock to do the job he was designed for, but has very little success.
***
Raphael’s been missing for a very long time.
***
It is ten o’clock in the morning on a Tuesday in September. Mycroft appears at the door of Sherlock’s flat in North London. He knocks once, then twice, then a third time, and waits. Sherlock does not answer the door, or throw the key down as he sometimes does. Mycroft sighs and waits some more, until he grows tired, turns on his heel, and re-appears in Sherlock’s room, looming over Sherlock’s sleeping body in a way he’s been perfecting for thousands of years.
'Get up,' he orders the dark nest of curls that are just visible above the cheap duvet.
'Shan't.' Sherlock pulls the covers tighter around himself.
Mycroft glares and pokes the curve of Sherlock's bum through the duvet with the tip of his umbrella. 'Get up,' he shouts again as Sherlock twists away, grumbling and moaning about how that hurt, you fucker, and you'd better watch your puddings after this, lardarse. Rolling his eyes, Mycroft leans on his umbrella and waits until, surely enough, Sherlock turns over, blinking in the morning light, his wings a deep carmine red, spread out across his mattress.
'What?' Sherlock spits, his eyebrows drawn tight together, forcing his eyes into two narrow slits.
'I really think you ought to do something about the Middle East,' Mycroft says.
Sherlock grumbles, pulling a face. 'There's always something to be done about the Middle East or wherever bloody else,' he says. 'Dull.'
‘It’s your job,’ Mycroft says with a put-upon sigh and two raised eyebrows for Sherlock.
‘Yes, and it’s boring,’ Sherlock replies, throwing the covers back and jumping to his feet. ‘Besides,’ he says, pushing past Mycroft, bending to squint into his mirror, pulling his eyelids up and inspecting his corneas, ‘I need an assistant, and God only knows where Raphael’s pissed off to.’
***
It didn’t take long for humans to stop being impressed by angelic apparitions, booming speeches, fiery swords, enormous wings and the like. It fell to the angels to find other ways of exerting their influence, a task they managed well enough. Mycroft made himself an indispensable cog in the complicated machine of British politics, imposing order on Britain and the world from the corridors that ran deep below Whitehall with just as much ease as if he were doing it from his more natural seat at the gates of the underworld. Greg or George or Gary or Gabriel or whatever he was calling himself steadily worked his way up through the police force, trying to touch as many normal, human lives as he possibly could. His ambitions were of course admirable, but his job actually just meant that he spent six days out of seven dealing with some pretty rotten fragments of humanity in South London and had little time left to answer the cries of the rest of the humans. Sherlock, as is his wont, eschewed the notion of gaining power within some sort of institution and concentrated on becoming a master of manipulation, exploiting the information he could read from tiny details about people that anyone else would reject as insignificant. His power base was vast, impressive and transcended all barriers. However, these days, it only really got used for his own personal amusement, usually when he fancied a chinese or needed something delivering.
Mycroft seems to think that Raphael may have become a doctor at some point in the century, though none of them know for certain.
***
‘Is it at least interesting?’ Sherlock asks when he materialises at Gabriel’s side.
‘You tell me,’ Gabriel replies, gesturing to the body crumpled at the bottom of the stairs.
Sherlock runs down the stairs and swoops to look at the body - mixed-race female, mid-twenties - taking in the little details that everyone else always, always misses. He narrows his eyes and inhales deeply and lifts her hair, her hands, her head. Gabriel walks down the stairs and sits on a step near the bottom. He places his chin in his hands.
‘You could at least try, Michael,’ he says, very quietly.
Sherlock’s eyes snap up to Gabriel’s weary face. ‘Try and help the humans?’ he scoffs. ‘Waste of my time.’ He drops the dead woman’s hand and it falls with a thud to the carpeted floor. ‘Looks like a crime of passion, almost certainly had a lover of anywhere between one to three years but no more than that, clearly an argument gone awry, the partner will come crawling back soon enough--’
‘Why won’t you even try?’ Gabriel interrupts. ‘I keep getting it in the neck because you can’t be arsed. It’s alright for you; you don’t have nearly seven billion humans on your case asking why their brother’s gone to fight a war or why their husband’s left them or why their village has no water or why their child was attacked.’
Rolling his eyes, Sherlock stands up and peels his gloves off. ‘Yes, that’s right, poor old Gabriel, forever the bearer of bad tidings, forever the messenger about to be shot.’ He nods to the dead woman on the floor. ‘Do better, next time. This was not worth leaving my flat for.’
‘Can’t we just go to the Middle East and see?’ Greg pleads.
Sherlock smirks. ‘Goodbye, Gabriel,’ he says, and with a tilt of his head and a twist of his body, he is gone.
***
Sherlock rarely concerns himself with lesser beings but makes an exception for Mike Stamford, one of the few cherubs he is able to stand. Even then, he’s only really able to stand Mike because he lets Sherlock use his lab. Either way, it’s a win-win situation: Mike gets to tell people he’s friends with Michael - yes, that Michael, the Michael, and Sherlock has a fully-equipped laboratory at his disposal.
That morning, the landlord of Sherlock’s flat in Montague Street had given him notice to leave owing to the twelve dead rabbits stuffed into the fridge’s freezer drawer, the chemical burns on the lino in the bathroom and the vague smell of decomposition that lingers around the place now that Sherlock has been in residence for some time. Of course, Sherlock could have changed his landlord’s mind quicker than you can say archangel, but the task of finding a new place to live in meant at least a week of not being bored.
‘Where are you going to go? Are you going to find a flatmate?’ Mike asks eagerly after being told about the situation as Sherlock glares into a microscope.
Chuckling, Sherlock lifts his head. ‘And who’d want me for a flatmate?’ he jumps up from the stool he’d been perched on since nine o’clock and pulls his jacket on. ‘I’ll be back at lunch,’ he says. ‘Let me know if those microbes do anything out of the ordinary, Mike, won’t you?’
‘Yeah, course,’ Mike says, beaming.
Sherlock gives him a thin smile in return and twists round, papers fluttering to the floor as he disappears from sight.
***
That afternoon, Mike runs into John Watson.
That is to say, that afternoon, Mike runs into Raphael.
John knows what Mike is but Mike doesn’t know what John is; has never known, not even when they were at Barts together. Mike has absolutely no idea what he’s doing when he introduces an old mate of his, John Watson to Sherlock. He imagines he’s doing what he was put on earth to do: matching two lost souls in the hope that they’ll find themselves again and each other along the way, never mind that one’s an archangel and one is (he believes) a human. He thinks they’ll be good together, and he’s right.
Sherlock wants to use Mike’s phone. Mike lies and says it’s in his coat, a cunning plan to get John to offer his, to talk to Sherlock.
‘Here, use mine.’
Mike smirks.
John’s eyes meet Sherlock’s, their fingertips brush, and they both know.
There’s one long moment of silence as both of their eyes widen, as they both take a breath and decide what to do next.
John bolts for the door, his knuckles whitening around the handle of the walking stick he carries.
Sherlock throws himself after John; jumps up onto one of the tables and leaps off it. His flame-coloured wings burst through his shirt and suit jacket and he lands in front of the door, blocking John’s way.
‘Out the way, Michael,’ John mutters, his eyes downcast, shifty.
Sherlock spreads his wings wide and high enough to conceal the entire doorway.
‘Oh, don’t do this,’ John growls, the grey metal stick in his hand becoming a long wooden caduceus with a serpent curled round it. His huge blue wings break through his jumper and coat, a challenge.
Mike gapes.
‘Where - quite literally - on earth have you been?’ Sherlock hisses, having no interest in fighting, leaning in to peer at John’s face, into his ears, pulling his chin up and staring into his eyes.
John begins to turn, to will himself away, but Sherlock’s grip on him tightens.
‘Don’t make me fetch Uriel here,’ he murmurs.
John sighs. Nods once. Steps back, into the room. ‘I’ll stay.’
Sherlock folds his wings back, wills the tears in his clothes to mend.
‘Why have you been gone for so long?’
‘It’s... a long story.’ John’s wings shrink back too, the caduceus becoming a walking stick once again.
Sherlock smirks. ‘We’ve got a long time.’
***
To vastly oversimplify the matter, angels - particularly the higher-ups like Sherlock and John and Mycroft and Gabriel - are a bit like time lords. Being able to will themselves anywhere on Earth or Upstairs or in between the two, their methods of transportation are infinitely more sophisticated than a malfunctioning police box, and of course they don’t get involved with the humans so messily as that Doctor on the telly, but their overall detached viewpoint and regenerative capabilities make it a fair comparison.
Even though angels have the ability to change their appearance at will, they tend to get comfortable and settle with one look for longer than they really should. Their personality remains constant with each new skin they throw on, though the years and their experiences do much to alter the way they think and talk and act.
And so it was that despite having only been apart for sixty-five years out of six thousand, Michael and Raphael, Sherlock and John, were virtual strangers to each other.
***
Angelo isn’t aware that his restaurant is quite popular with most of the heavenly beings based in London. It could be something to do with the name. As they walk in to Angelo’s, Sherlock spots Metatron at the bar, who raises his glass of white wine in a toast when he catches sight of Sherlock. Fifteen minutes after being seated, Sherlock ducks behind his menu when Jophiel saunters in. Things are still a bit awkward between the two of them since that one wild night in Berlin in the 20s.
John orders food. Sherlock doesn’t.
‘You’ve changed, since I saw you last,’ John says as he shovels spaghetti into his mouth. Sherlock sits opposite him in the window seat, fingers laced together as he watches John eat.
‘Yes, well, it was 1945 when you saw me last,’ Sherlock says, fixing John with a scornful look before turning to gaze out of the window.
‘1945,’ John breathes. ‘I didn’t think it had been quite that long.’ He sips his wine. ‘Are you still pretending to be a scientist?’
‘There was no pretending about it, and no. I’m a consulting detective.’
The sounds of the restaurant fill the silence between the two of them for five minutes. Sherlock alternates between looking at the street outside and at John, who finishes his pasta with a satisfied sigh and sits back.
‘I’m surprised you didn’t find me before now, you know.’
Sherlock shrugs, flicks his gaze back to the window. ‘You didn’t want to be found.’
‘I’d had a rough few years,’ John says quietly, toying with the stem of his wine glass. ‘Seemed for every one of them I healed, ten more would be dead by the time I’d turned round.’
‘I rather had my hands full too, I recall.’
‘Yeah.’ John laughs. ‘Yeah, I think we all did.’
Sherlock turns back to John, shifting the full focus of his attention to the small, unassuming man in a jumper. ‘So you… what? Things got a bit sticky, so you upped and left for sixty-five years?’
‘It wasn’t like that, you know it wasn’t like that,’ John says, a frown appearing on his brow.
‘No, I don’t know, actually.’ Sherlock’s eyes flash as he glares at John. ‘I don’t know, Raphael, because this is the first I’ve seen of you since you said something about Japan, turned on your heel and left.’
John breathes out heavily through his nose. ‘So many of them died, Michael. So many of them died and hardly any of them deserved it and it was all because I hadn’t done my job.’
‘Yes, I forgot I’d been winning employee of the month since 1914,’ Sherlock snaps. ‘You weren’t the only one who failed.’
‘I was the only one who ran away though, right?’
‘Physically, yes.’
‘What do you mean?’ John sips his wine again.
‘I’ve just stopped caring.’
‘I see.’ John puts his glass back on the table. ‘And you find that easy, do you?’
Sherlock’s eyes narrow. His fingertips brush his lips as he speaks. ‘Very. Look at them all.’ He glares round at the restaurant, at the humans going about their business, having dinner, chatting with friends and lovers about nothing of any consequence. ‘They’re all so vacant.’
John looks at the people talking to one another, sees them smiling, laughing. He tilts his head and looks inside, sees a cancerous tumour lodged in the stomach of one of the humans, a sprained ankle, a broken heart. One has asthma, one is partially sighted, one suffers from arthritis. He aches to heal them all.
‘I never stopped caring,’ he says quietly as he wills the malignant tumour out of the woman’s stomach, catches it, surrounds it with blue light and crushes it in his fist. ‘I ran away because anything I did wasn’t ever enough. Are you telling me you just stopped trying?’
Sherlock glowers out of the window.
‘I thought better of you than that, Michael.’ John’s voice is quiet.
‘I thought better of you,’ Sherlock returns, still not looking at John. ‘Why haven’t you run away yet?’
There’s a silence that stretches on for a while. ‘I’ve been running for long enough.’
The waiter comes to take John’s plate away. John finishes his glass of wine and joins Sherlock in staring out of the window. Cars and taxis and buses heave past, the humans in their coats and scarves hurry home from work.
‘Where are you living, these days?’ Sherlock asks suddenly.
‘Finchley,’ John says. ‘Why?’
‘I’m going to look at a flat in Paddington this evening. Landlady owes me a favour, and it’s a nice little place, apparently. Fancy joining me?’
John frowns. ‘Are you asking me to move in with you?’
Sherlock shrugs. John laughs softly.
‘Alright, then,’ he says. ‘I’ll come and have a look round.’
***
In the grand scheme of things, sixty-five years isn’t a very long time at all.
It’s long enough, though.
Long enough for a lot of things to have changed.
***
There’s a case.
Gabriel treads wearily on the stairs up to 221b, his speech sounding as though it’s one long sigh.
‘Will you come?’
John shrinks further into the armchair, recognising the way Gabriel holds himself, the deep brown eyes that never change no matter how many times he alters his appearance. He goes unnoticed, for now, and breathes a sigh of relief.
Nearly an hour later, they’re at the door of the house where the dead woman has been been found, and Gabriel is looking John up and down.
‘Who’s this?’ he asks.
John tries to avoid eye contact and very nearly manages it but eventually his dark blue eyes meet Gabriel’s brown. After a pause, Gabriel nods in recognition.
‘Uh... John, Dr. John Watson,’ John mumbles for the benefit of the humans surrounding them. ‘Hi.’
‘In you go,’ Gabriel says with a jerk of his head.
‘Cheers.’ John’s grateful that there’s not a scene like there was with Michael, with Sherlock.
Gabriel nods again, slowly. He can’t quite hold back a smile.
***
Uriel pulls John into a car when Sherlock dashes off after a sudden epiphany to do with the dead woman.
John recognises Uriel’s sword for what it is when its embodiment looks at him from under her lashes in the back seat of the car, tapping away at the mobile in her lap. He even starts trying to put the moves on her before he remembers she’s just a bloody sword and the entire exercise would be fruitless.
Uriel’s leaning on an umbrella in an abandoned warehouse, looking as out of place as he always does on earth.
‘Returning to the fold, are we, Raphael?’ Uriel asks, raising one of his thin eyebrows.
‘John,’ John says, stopping in front of Uriel, holding onto the handle of his stick just a little tighter.
‘How nice and ordinary,’ Uriel says, barely containing a sneer. ‘Back for good or are you going to go tearing off round the world at the drop of a hat again?’
‘Back for a while. Don’t know about for good.’
Uriel laughs humourlessly. ‘I see,’ he says. He swings his umbrella up and slices it in an arc through the air, pointing the tip of it at John’s left shoulder. ‘When did you injure that wing?’
‘I could be wrong, but I think that’s none of your business,’ John says, his face tight.
Uriel laughs again. ‘I go by Mycroft, these days,’ he says. He turns and walks away from John, his umbrella swinging to and fro as he calls over his shoulder, ‘my car will take you where you want to go.’
***
At the end of the night, John shoots a man.
Sherlock and Gabriel cover it up, even if archangels aren’t exactly answerable to the laws of the land.
‘You killed a human,’ Sherlock says quietly as he and John stride away from the crime scene, Uriel and Gabriel watching their backs.
‘Yes,’ John replies, lifting his eyebrows. ‘Problem?’
‘You’re meant to heal them, not kill them.’ Sherlock’s eyes flash slightly when he turns to look at John.
‘He was on borrowed time anyway.’
‘In the sense that he had a brain tumour?’ Sherlock exclaims, stopping dead.
‘In the sense that he’d sold his soul,’ John replies, stopping as well, turning back to face Sherlock. ‘He wasn’t one of ours anymore. And if I recall, it did you a favour. Were you really going to take that pill? You fucking idiot.’
Sherlock blinks. ‘You’d never have killed one of them before. Back then.’
John shrugs. ‘He was fair game. Besides, you were in danger.’
‘Oh, I was not.’ Sherlock begins to walk again, hands shoved deep in his pockets.
‘He’d sold his soul, you have no idea what could have been in those pills. In all likelihood someone from Below had supplied that taxi driver with those... death capsules; they almost certainly wouldn’t have been of human origin. You were in danger. Could you really not see?’
Sherlock blinks again, a frown appearing on his brow.
‘Looks like I better move in with you after all. Fuck knows if you can still make toast without losing a finger or something.’
***
These days, Lucifer calls himself Jim Moriarty. He creeps his way into the workforce of the hospital that Sherlock and John and Mike frequent, and he waits.
***
Two months pass. John and Sherlock move in together and they solve crimes and eat takeaway and watch telly. John gets a job and whilst he’s very good at it, he’s a bit crap about turning up on time or staying for a full shift, when there are things far more exciting than the common cold going on outside the surgery walls.
Sherlock still, apparently, doesn’t care.
***
‘Afghanistan?’ Sherlock asks when he catches John in the bathroom with the door open, shirtless, his wings outstretched as he cleans his teeth at the sink.
‘Hm?’ John says, a goatee of toothpaste foam surrounding his mouth as he meets Sherlock’s eyes in the mirror.
‘Your wing.’ Sherlock nods at the bullet hole through it. ‘Afghanistan?’
‘Oh.’ John spits into the sink and rinses his mouth out. ‘Yeah.’
‘Can’t you heal it?’
‘I’ve tried,’ John replies shortly, beginning to fold his wings back before Sherlock reaches out and stops him, his hand tightening around John’s feathers.
‘You can’t fly, can you?’ Sherlock murmurs.
John presses his lips together and shakes his head.
‘How long?’
‘Six years,’ John says, his voice quiet.
Frowning, Sherlock dips down and brings his mouth close to the near-circular hole through John’s wing.
‘What are you doing?’ John demands, twisting his body to try and see. ‘Sherlock--’
‘Quiet,’ Sherlock says, ducking under John’s wing and frowning up at him. ‘I haven’t done this in a while.’ Sherlock closes his eyes and inhales deeply before breathing out over the wound, his lips just brushing John’s feathers.
Shuddering at the sensation, John grips the edge of the sink as Sherlock’s mouth continues to move over his wing, hot breath parting John’s feathers and warming him from within. ‘What... what are you... Sherlock, what are you--’
‘Look.’ Sherlock stands back, grinning smugly. John snaps his wing out and turns his back to the mirror to see, gaping when he registers that there’s no hole there; just an expanse of strong, blue feathers. ‘I mended it.’
‘How did you do that? You’re not a healer, you--’
Sherlock rolls his eyes. ‘I still have angel breath, John.’
‘Yeah.’ John smiles and shakes his head, still staring at his wing. ‘God, yeah, of course you do.’
***
There are five pips and far too many humans in harm’s way. There’s not enough sleep and not enough time and Sherlock does his level best not to care, because that won’t help at all, not in the slightest.
John cares, though. John cares and he reminds Sherlock about the humans at every turn - ‘these are actual, human lives, Sherlock’ - and the gravity of it all’s too deafeningly loud for words.
Sherlock wants to run away like John did all those years ago.
He doesn’t, though. He stays. He tries his best. He solves the case.
It’s just about good enough.
For now.
***
Sherlock’s wings cast a long shadow on the brick of 221, up on the roof. He and John sit side-by-side on the wall, legs dangling down towards the street below. A cab drives past occasionally. A couple walk arm-in-arm on the other side of the street, the man turning his neck to brush his lips across the woman’s forehead. She smiles up at him, and John smiles too as he watches.
It’s Christmas Eve.
Biting down on a cigarette, Sherlock wills a lighter into existence and flicks it once, twice, holding the flame to the end of the fag and puffing until it lights. He breathes in deeply.
John glances up at the stars above them, largely obscured by smoke and fog and pollution. There are a few that shine, though: the brightest, the best.
‘It hurts you, doesn’t it?’ John says quietly, flexing his wings, feeling the brisk night air running through them.
‘No.’ Sherlock frowns, taps his cigarette to flick the ash off. ‘No.’
‘Yes it does.’ John bounces his heel off the side of the huge house, kicks his foot out into the air in front of them. ‘It hurts that they’re human and weak and that they don’t understand. It hurts you that they’re so easily tempted to do wrong, to do horrible, awful things to one another--’
‘No. I’ve told you, I don’t care, I don’t care any--’
‘I can see it.’ John licks his lips and turns his body towards Sherlock, rests his hand over where Sherlock’s ancient, God-wrought heart beats in his chest. ‘I can see it hurts, in there.’
Sherlock sighs irritably, glares, inhales deeply from his cigarette.
‘I can’t take your pain away,’ John says, and it sounds as though he’s sad.
‘I know that,’ Sherlock spits, his eyes narrowing. ‘I just... I just want them to see that they’re no different to one another. What about that is so hard to grasp?’ He gesticulates violently with his cigarette as he talks, clutches at his hair. ‘They’ve understood nuclear physics, astrophysics, music, languages, computers, anything we’ve thrown at them, they’ve got it. They’ve even accounted for dinosaurs, for goodness’ sake, and they were meant as a bit of a joke when we all got pissed that one afternoon. They just don’t seem to understand that once you take everything away from them - their money, their institutions, their ideas - they’re all just flesh and blood and bone, all the sodding same.’ Sighing irritably, Sherlock flings his cigarette to the ground with far more force than is needed. ‘I’m just so tired of it all.’
It starts to rain.
Wordlessly, John shifts closer, snaps his wings out to their full span and brings the feathers up over their heads, sheltering them both from the drizzle.
‘I like how you’ve changed,’ John murmurs. ‘You were always a bit insufferable, before.’
Sherlock laughs shortly and looks away. ‘I do still care.’ His voice is very quiet.
John’s gaze doesn’t move from Sherlock’s face. ‘I know you do,’ he says. ‘Look at me.’
Sherlock turns. Rain drips from John’s primary feathers onto the back of Sherlock’s hand, but both angels pay no mind as they stare at each other.
‘You’re very different to how you used to be,’ Sherlock whispers, leaning in closer to John.
Their lips are almost brushing.
‘So are you,’ John breathes, licking his lips. He blinks for a long moment and when he opens his eyes, Sherlock’s lips are against his, slightly parted, warm and soft and lovely. It takes him a second but he kisses back, slides a hand up Sherlock’s neck to cup his jaw as they get lost in the gentle pressure of the kiss. John pushes his tongue into Sherlock’s mouth, brushes over one of Sherlock’s eyelids with the pad of his thumb. A shudder runs from Sherlock’s core to the tips of his wings and John pulls him in closer, closer still.
A car alarm sounds a few streets away and the buses moan and heave along on the main road.
Sherlock throws his arms across John’s shoulders and kisses harder, deeper, their breath coming short. John curls his fingers around Sherlock’s waist and Sherlock wraps his wings around them both, enveloping them in a small and secret world of their own. The brush of their feathers is electric.
They break apart for breath, both of them grinning.
‘Come on, angel,’ John says. His smile widens and his eyes sparkle and he pushes off the side of the building with his foot so that they’re both falling, tumbling through London sky until, laughing and laughing and laughing, John throws his wings wide and catches Sherlock by the wrist. ‘Where do you want to start?’