Fic: Prelude to a Greater Fall
Title: Prelude to a Greater Fall
Work Count: ~5,050
Genre: slash, fluff, angst. Flangst, if you will.
Pairings: John/Sherlock
Rating: PG 13
Warnings: Potty language, spoilers for The Fall, excessive parallelism.
Summary: John Watson tells a lie, believable because all the rest is true.
A/N: Scarletjedi is a bamfy beta baby. She made this MILES better than it was. What follows is my humble attempt at some fluff.
Found among the papers of the late Dr. John H .Watson-2064
It was stupid of me. If I had only phrased it differently, used different words, he never would have noticed. But I had, for some reason, fooled myself into thinking that Sherlock would overlook the detail, or credit it as a mistake by his romantic, idiotic blogger.
Her eyes were colorless with the rain at the window behind her. Was what I wrote. It was a lie, of course, but not the first time I’d embellished for the sake lending a dramatic element to our cases. I published the story. I went about my life.
Sherlock had been irritable and irritating for days. He spent every morning pouring over the newspapers and every afternoon brooding on the sofa. Every evening he vanished for an hour and came back, giggling, with his pupils dilated, one sleeve incorrectly buttoned at the cuff. I had expected nothing less than the worst abuse when he finally mustered the energy to read my latest attempt at his biography.
I had expected the worst, but the truth is I couldn’t have known what the worst entailed. It never occurred to me until that day how often Sherlock must curb himself to spare the people around him. He was disagreeable and blunt and insulting on an everyday basis. But he could tell everything about a person at a glance, put together their whole life history in a couple of sentences. It was only common sense that he could take a person apart in the same way. And not just injure their pride or break their heart, but really dismantle them; just shift one stone to get the whole structure crumbling down.
He cracked the screen of his lap top dashing it to the floor. The crash startled me and I looked up from the telly.
“You’re sentimentalism is disgusting, John,” he snarled. For a moment I stared at him without comprehension. It hadn’t been a particularly sentimental story compared to others I’d written. “If you wanted me to know you should have left a rose on my pillow, or something equally pathetic but private, instead of publishing it for the entire world to read.”
The blood drained from my face.
Behind his silhouette was the demented yellow smile on the wall with the bullet holes blasted through it. Between us, scattered across the floor like dried leaves, were his papers, his books, and the bow to his violin. He was composed. He was winter. He was Sherlock.
I had no avenue for retaliation. Retreat was my only option. I pushed myself up from my armchair with shaking arms to get away. A streak of unexpected pain, followed by a dull, deep ache, went up my leg and pooled in my knee and hip. I stumbled and had to grab the edge of the fireplace to keep myself upright. Pyschosomatic, I thought pitifully. I didn’t bother trying to hide it.
My cane was there, leaned up in the corner beside the fireplace where it had been for months. Covered in dust. I shifted my weight and my leg shuddered. I reached out and my hand trembled. Intermittently. I picked up my cane and propped it up at my side. It was just a hollow piece of metal with rubber ends. But it was sturdy, reliable, even if it wasn’t made to look nice. Like me? My leg refused to hold my weight and I had to hobble to the door, grabbing my coat from the back of the chair on my way.
I didn’t need the cane. I knew I didn’t need it. But I was so scrambled and displaced I couldn’t seem to remember why. I thumped out into the hallway clenching my fingers around it.
There were rocks in my stomach. Snakes in my chest.
I took the stairs slowly, one at a time. Good leg. Cane. Bag leg. Good leg. Cane. Wince.
Some people defined themselves by the things they’d accomplished in their lives, or by the places they’d been. But I wasn’t a soldier anymore and Afghanistan had been hell. I certainly wasn’t much of a doctor, running off at the drop of a hat to chase mad criminals around. I was a piss poor brother, Harry and I hadn’t talked in months. I wasn’t even much of a writer, people read the blog for the content not the literary genius of the thing. But I was, or had thought I was, John Watson, the one and only friend of Sherlock Holmes. And I resided at 221 B Baker Street.
Sentimental. Unshakable?
Disgusting.
xxx
I walked along the Thames. There were street performers, underdressed for the cold weather. I passed by them with a sneer of my own. A violinist and a mock-up gypsy dancer, swaying her hips, stretching her purposefully underfed stomach. A group of young men tumbling over each other, jumping on each other, standing on their hands. Absurd and pointless feats of youthful physique designed to make a man in his thirties with a metal cane and a bullet wound feel like he was already at the end of his life. I moved on slowly.
Good leg. Cane. Bad leg. Good leg. Cane. Pain.
Except I had two good legs, really. It was other bits of me that were broken.
I found an unoccupied stretched of wall and sat down heavily. The white painted railing along the river blocked my view of the water and the buildings across the way. So I stared at the ground, passed my cane back and forth in my chilled hands. London was windy as usual, colder than it might have been considering the season. I closed my eyes. I forced myself to breath in steadying, deep, draughts.
In war you learn quickly what a waste of time it is to lie to yourself. You watch young men get their limbs and heads blown off by IED’s. You listen to the kid the nurse is holding down is call you a shithead and a fucking coward in Spanish and you wonder how it’s possible, it being 2009, that your request for more Ketamine and Nitrus still hasn’t been filled. You know that it’s only dumb luck that’s kept you from getting a bullet or a piece of shrapnel in your ass so far. If you’ve always secretly had a wish to be tied up and buggered with pieces of fruit or hung upside down while a fat man sings you Wagner you stop questioning it and start thinking of ways to get it done before your number is up.
And war makes you believe in love. A lot of soldiers get themselves engaged before they’re deployed. Kids, mostly. They’re eighteen and nineteen, but they’re not looking for romance, they just need to know someone is waiting for them to come home. They need a reason not to be a hero. If your fiancé is a few pounds on the wrong side of curvy or he clips his toenails in bed you stop giving a damn and you know you’re in love, because you have to be. Because people are shooting at you and blowing up your friends.
And when you make it back to civilization. When they finally pull your bollocks out of the desert and sew you up and stick you back in London, the heat and the gritty sand and the smell of gun oil are all you can think about. You walk down the street, or drive down the road, and you’re looking for that ungainly lump in the sand where something’s been buried. You’re listening for the yelling to start or for distant conversation. You walk around a corner in the bloody supermarket looking for that flash of white and tan and your heart jumps out of your chest when a toddler comes running around the corner. And there, in the middle of the teeming, dirty, crowded city, you remember that fruit is for eating, no one likes Wagner not even you, and true love is a fairytale. Then you take a split second to pause and watch the city just happen around you, and you realize that the thing that separates people isn’t race or belief or their opinions on American Foreign Policy, it’s the fact that some of them will live to see tomorrow and some of them won’t.
That’s the power of war. It makes you a believer and it makes you honest at the same time. It’s real life that’s the crap hole. Real life that’s full of pessimists and reasons to hate. In war, you’ll share your cup with anyone.
When you walk with Sherlock Holmes you see the battlefield.
I had been telling myself all kinds of truths in bed every night.
I was in love with the insensitive tosser, for one thing. What an embarrassing thing to admit, eh? Even to a scrap piece of paper. But like I said, that’s the power of war. I wonder often if life isn’t more real this way, with gunfire in the distance, with the tickle of unrealistic expectations in the back of your mind (expectations like: I will live to a ripe old age, I will marry, I will be happy). I’d never wasted time with Sherlock, fooling myself with fantasies of being his boyfriend or his husband. Oh I’d thought about fucking him, or letting him fuck me. I’d taken careful notice of how sensitive his fingers are. Watched him when he’s wasn’t watching me. But I didn’t need him down on one knee, or holding my hand in the supermarket. I just wanted him as he was. He didn’t have to love me; it would be enough if he would let me love him.
A week ago Sherlock took the case of a woman named Mary Morstan. She was a very beautiful woman, strong willed, brave. If she’d come into my life a year before, two years…but I knew my readers would appreciate a little bit of romance.
She had blue eyes. She came to us on the third sunniest day of the year. She told us the whole story from the doorway, one hand on the wood frame, brown suede gloves covering her long fingers. Her voice shook and her gaze flickered constantly around the room. I was not even there when she told her story. I was out at the library, photocopying lease agreements and painstakingly putting together the final details of another case.
Her eyes were colorless with the rain at the window behind her.
Sherlock stood at the window and recounted Mary’s story for me the next morning. He was resting against the sill, his gray eyes never waving from my face, speaking in a fluid, even tone. The rain, which had begun in the night, was tapping and streaking the glass behind him.
It took Sherlock twelve hours to solve her case. I wrote the conclusion thus:
At the end she stood in the doorway and thanked us both warmly. Her eyes shone with the moisture of the unhappy news, but her face was relaxed and at peace.
“It is good to know the truth,” she said. Then she nodded showed herself out.
“What a brave and beautiful girl,” I said. No response was forthcoming. I turned and found that Sherlock had already thrown himself into his armchair and was staring at the fire, his hands steepled before him in that posture which is so characteristic to him. He sighed and tipped his head back, closing his eyes. I knew he wouldn’t say another word for hours.
The sound of the door closing downstairs stirred me from my reverie. She had left. I dashed down the stairs. Mary stopped and looked at me in surprise when I came bursting out onto the street like a madman.
“Dr. Watson!” she exclaimed.
“John,” I insisted, stuffing my hands into my pockets . I approached her with the question on my lips and suddenly found myself with a throat-full of nerves. (Which, the reader will grant, is not my custom. I am not generally shy with women.) “I was just wondering if you might have a free evening this week,” I managed. “I-I’d like to take you out for dinner.”
She smiled at me. And the sunlight showed her dimples and made her eyes sparkle.
“I do like Italian,” she said.
And so ended the case of Ms. Mary Morstan. As far as the great and general public might be concerned.
A clever reader will have already notice, of course, that if only twelve hours passed between Sherlock recounting the story for my sake and Sherlock solving the case there was no possible way the sun could have been shining on Mary’s face. It would have been dark outside. Growing late into the night, in fact.
Mary thanked us warmly and left, her umbrella in her hand because it was still pouring. She was brave and she was beautiful, but I said nothing of the kind. I hardly thought it. I was exhausted and sore, and my clothes were still damp and my head was ringing with hunger. I went into the kitchen and made two cups of tea and some sandwiches.
I don’t know if Mary likes Italian or not. I don’t know what she thought of my little bizarre embellishment, if anything. But Sherlock likes Italian, when he is in a mood to eat out (or in a mood to eat at all), and he had been very clear about what he thought of my revisions.
Disgusting. Why? Because I hadn’t given a second thought to the beautiful Mary Morstan? Because I hadn’t bothered to run after her? Because he knew and I knew that I was already exactly where I was meant to be? Because I had written that Mary had gray eyes when she had blue, and that it had been raining the day of her arrival and had known full well that the world would read I fell for Mary Morstan and Sherlock would read I’ve loved you since the beginning.
I sighed-smelled the musk of the Thames, the trash and grit of the concrete walkway-Why did I write it? To appease my readers. To amuse myself. No, I hadn’t even really believed he would overlook it. I wrote it to put something into the widening silence between us. I wrote it as a petulant gesture to force his hand, because of course he had deduced my mind. There were a thousand clues in our everyday lives and I was simply tired of watching him ignore them. I couldn’t be the madman rushing out the door after a woman because I was the madman waiting up nights when he went reeling off into the darkness of the damned city alone, and the least he could do was acknowledge it.
I had expected derision. A lecture. But his anger, I hadn’t expected that.
I hoisted my cane into my hand and pushed myself to my feet without its support. My leg felt weak. I locked my knee, forced it hold my weight. The water was gray and gold in the fading light, it looked like boiling sand. I swung my cane, and convinced myself it was a casual accessory. I tapped it against the stone of the wall, whisked it over my shoulder, and smiled at the sunset.
Then I gritted my teeth and limped back home.
xxx
The windows of Baker Street were dark when I arrived.
I had half expected the flat to be empty. Sherlock, in the midst of his dark moods, would sometimes wander the streets of London at night. But the door was unlocked at the top of the steps (Walking so slowly I had the chance to count them. There were seventeen). When I pushed through it I found the room was occupied after all. Sherlock was a long dark shadow spilled across the couch with languid grace. His hands were swaying and he was humming softly. He coughed a short, hysterical giggle as I shut the door behind me. The sound put a cold dread in the pit of my stomach.
A yellow glow from the streetlights outside illuminated the shapes of the furniture, the mess of Sherlock’s papers, the books strewn across the floor, and something small and glinting on the coffee table. I tossed my cane away and stepped carefully over the mess to Sherlock. I crouched down by the low table and picked up the syringe and the glass vial carefully. They were laid out beside each other on a black sued pouch that was unrolled on the table. Both were empty.
“Shit,” I hissed and put the horrible things back down. I pulled myself onto the cushion beside Sherlock. His eyes glinted up brightly at me like the glass of the syringe when he rolled over. I put my fingers to his neck, warm against the chill I retained from the outdoors. His pulse was hammering.
Sherlock smiled with his teeth.
“Hello darling,” he laughed. His long fingers tripped across the back of my hand. I ignored the barb and took hold of his face to open one of his eyes with my thumb and forefinger. The pupil was wide and caught the light of the streetlamp. A stimulant then.
“What did you take?” I asked. His smile faded and he frowned at me, dark eyes flashing over my face like he was reading a map.
“Cocaine,” he said. “A seven percent solution.” The smile flashed back, keen, cruel, designed to fit perfectly between my ribs. “It won’t kill me.” He was trying to get me angry again. It was working. I let go of him.
“Not today anyway,” I growled. I picked up the vial and the syringe and took both of them with me into the kitchen. I gave a seconds vicious consideration to feeding both of them to the garbage disposal but decided in the end that flying glass wasn’t really what I needed at the moment and chucked them into the bin instead. Then I stood in the kitchen with my arms crossed over my chest and just concentrated on our ugly table, counting its innumerable and mysterious scars, trying to push down the sour taste of fury in my mouth. The kettle had been boiled some time ago and sat lukewarm on the counter. Someone had left the fridge open an inch. I pushed it closed.
Sherlock began to hum again. It was a piece of classical music that I recognized but couldn’t put a name to. His velvety voice rose and fell, flawlessly on key, eerie in our otherwise silent flat. Or almost silent. Someone had knocked the skull on its side and his mouth was wide open in a scream.
La dedee da, de dap dat dah: “Spring”, from The Four Seasons, Vivaldi.
I very nearly flipped the table over. I settled for slamming my fists against it instead, sending the pepper spinning onto its side and rolling onto the floor with a clatter. I marched across the room and set the skull to rights.
La dedee da dat.
“Why do you do this?” I shouted, spinning around to face my placid flat mate.
Vivaldi stuttered and stopped.
“Why do you always have to push it?” I wanted more things to fix or something to throw.
Sherlock heaved a heavy sigh from his dark corner. How inconvenient I must have been for him. Making him abandon his misanthropy and pretenses with my stubborn questions. Always bringing home my own insecurities and forcing him to recognize that he had some of his own.
“When I suggested this alliance I was looking for a partner and a flat mate, John. I wasn’t looking for a friend.”
“Well that’s just tough luck, isn’t it?” I snarled and then all anger went out of me. I was tired of arguing and tired of pretending, and maybe in the morning we could start our charade again but at the moment, for that moment, I was just sick and exhausted. “Because a friend is what you got,” I finished wearily.
Sherlock looked at me from the couch, his face cast into profile by the dirty light from the window. He said nothing.
I felt my insides deflating. There wasn’t much left keeping me upright. My leg was still in agony and my eyes were heavy. I cleared my throat.
“I’m going to bed,” I told him. And then I walked out and climbed the stairs to my bedroom.
I shut the door behind me and drew the blinds. Then I pulled my clothes off. They were constricting and I couldn’t seem to get rid of them quickly enough. I yanked my sweater and my tee off together. Kicked my pants away with the belt still threaded through them. My room was cold and I was shaking.
I crawled into my bed and curled up under the chilled sheets, tucked the duvet under my chin like I was six years old and frightened of the noises in the night. And since there was no one to fool, since I was at war, I didn’t hesitate with the admission: I am afraid. Because I was. The desert had been a bright place even at night, every chirp and crash was identifiable; here, in this city, the alleys and causeways, the walls themselves, were all made up of indistinct noises.
It was three in the morning when I woke up again. The mattress shifted as Sherlock sat down. He was a tall blob in the dark somewhere near the vicinity of my knees. I felt Sherlock’s hand take his weight through the blanket just beside my thigh. He leaned over me.
“It was a stupid thing to do,” he said softly. Softly, but with the same derision he always retained for my emotional shortcomings. I would have snapped at him, I was tired still and annoyed at being roused, but he took another breath and said, in a different voice entirely: “This won’t last.” He moved again and lay down on his back. His arm pressed up against my shoulder. “Sooner or later someone will get you, or get me. Sooner or later I won’t come back, John. And what will you have then?” He turned his head and his words brushed across my temple, “Some dramatic stories and a broken heart.”
I took a moment to sort through all the things I was probably supposed to be saying.
Not everyone can decide what to feel, Sherlock. Who would choose this kind of torture? Shut the fuck up. You’re a right jolly ass.
“Yeah, well.” I sighed eventually. Hardly poetry. But then I’m not a poet, I’m a biographer.
“It’s a dangerous part to play, the one and only friend of Sherlock Holmes,” he said.
“I’ll take my chances, I guess,” I said back and then I rolled away. If all he was getting at was-John you’re an idiot-then there was no reason for the conversation to continue. He would be the death of me. And I knew it. And that was enough.
I thought he would leave then. But he surprised me. His hand found my shoulder and stayed there.
“So will I,” he whispered. “But I can’t play for more than that. I can’t afford…when we lose…”
The breath left my chest. I realized he wasn’t calling me an idiot at all. I realized he wasn’t disgusted with my sentimentalism but angry that I’d put myself in danger by making a public confession. I rolled over and our bodies pressed snuggly together. He was propped up on one elbow, I let my head fall back on his forearm.
“You’re a paragon of optimism, has anyone ever told you?” I croaked.
“You’re a writer. You should have known better.”
“You’re a genius. You should have known better.”
He was silent. He was still.
He knew something, I realized. This black mood wasn’t about a lack of stimulation at all. It was about something else. That was why his reaction had been so compounded. It explained the cigarettes and the cocaine and nasty comments. Sherlock was a terrible looser. What loss was he expecting? Why react so furiously to a public statement of my regard? Why push me away?
I was suddenly overcome with the sickening horror that I was lying in bed with corpse. That Sherlock was dead already, that I had been too late. I could smell the thick dust of Afghanistan and the sour acid of heat soaked bandages. I was beside a lad who’d gone in the night, and though the morning was already stifling, his body was cold.
I kicked the blankets away and grabbed at Sherlock. He accepted my grasping hands passively.
He was warm. His chest stuttered under my palms. At his throat his pulse fluttered, steady. I crouched over my flatmate and cupped his jawline. I was all out of epiphanies.
“What do you know?” I demanded.
Not a word. I shuffled closer.
“Look, I know we do this thing where we live together and work together and pretend we aren’t in love and that’s fine, okay? I can manage. One and only friend of Sherlock Holmes, whatever. But I won’t be the one left behind.”
Nothing.
“Sherlock.”
It has been observed by countless, and better, writers than I that the middle of the night has some special influence on the psyche of even the most reasonable person. And even at my best I have hardly ever been considered reasonable. I have a temper. Countless bad habits. I try to be pragmatic, at least. But sitting there in nothing but my knickers, sleep deprived and draped in shadows and misgivings, with the cold draft working its way through the window, I couldn’t stop the panic that rose in my chest. The insuppressible sensation of impending, unavoidable disaster clawing up my spine.
Sherlock’s hands brushed through my hair and aided, rather than banished, the tremor working its way through me. He pulled me down until my forehead was pressed to his cheek.
“I follow you,” I hissed. I was terrified. “When the time comes, I’m coming after you.”
And he finally spoke. He said the very thing I’d been dreading, using the gentle voice one uses on the bereaved to say something that has been said a thousand times before. He said it knowing full well that it was what I needed to hear. That if I didn’t hear it then, I never would, and whatever came later would destroy me entirely. It was his way of absolving me, of relieving me of the guilt and the responsibility.
“When the time comes you won’t even know it until I’m gone.” He spoke it to the skin behind my ear. There won’t be anything you could have done.
I pulled my knees more firmly underneath me. Tears, embarrassingly, inescapably, were creeping into my eyes. Sherlock ran his hands over my back and my neck. He turned his face so that his nose bumped against mine.
In Afghanistan I had loathed the smell of cigarettes. The lads smoked them outside medical tent. The brothers and friends who were waiting or the kids with relatively minors wounds-a bullet in the thigh, a broken foot-and I would walk into a cloud of the stuff as I came out, hands not yet dry from scrubbing the latex and blood away. “I’m sorry,” I would say, choking down the poison in the air. And then I would stand quietly by while they screamed and cried, or sat in shocked silence, smoking.
I breathed the hint of it off of Sherlock’s breath like it was fresh rain.
“Promise me you’ll say goodbye,” I choked.
Slowly, Sherlock tipped his chin up until his mouth, a pressure like a firm, heartfelt handshake, was against mine. The kiss was full and warm. His long fingers kept my head in place while his lips moved, while I gripped his lapels, until he was finished saying what he needed to.
“Goodbye,” he whispered when he pulled back. And then he held me as I came apart. Strong arms and a strong body, keeping all of my pieces together.
I must have fallen asleep. When I came to the sun was up and the bed was empty and I had been tucked carefully beneath the blanket. My first impression was of disbelief. My second was of relief. And my third was panic.
I bashed my shin against the bedframe scrambling for my pants. I tripped down the stairs, the haze of some dream still clearing from my eyes, and twisted my ankle. A headache was hammering at my temple. My chest was full of unsynchronized drums. I couldn’t believe that he was gone already. I couldn’t believe I had let him go.
I burst into the sitting room and nearly killed myself not stepping on a violin.
Sherlock was sitting at the kitchen table reading the paper. A steaming cup of tea at his elbow. He spared me a brief glance and indicated the kettle with a sweep of his hand. I picked my way around the books and papers at a limp and washed a cup from the sink. The water was piping hot. I jammed some bread in the toaster.
“How do you find the immoral masses of London today?” I asked as I sat across from him. My calf brushed his crossed feet.
“Dull,” he answered easily. “It seems criminal man has lost all his enterprise and originality.” He looked down absently and leaned over to pick the pepper shaker off the ground.
So this is what we are. I thought.
Two men at war. The consulting detective and his one and only friend. The first. The last.
It was common sense, in the end. The biographer must always outlive the hero.
Although, being honest with myself, I’m not his friend. I’m a bloody madman. I’m his partner and his flatmate and the other bloke in the foxhole. And I’m the idiot waiting up, always waiting up, when he goes reeling off on his own into the darkness of the damned city.
fin