Other People (2/2)
Part One
London was elegant.
London was tangled.
And it was a place built for lies. The sort of place where demons were confused with angels and ordinary people were confused with demons. The sort of place where you didn’t need morality, just a charming smile, a good story, and people would trust you.
Colonel Sebastian Moran was not a hard man to find. He was in the phone book. He was in the news.
A war hero, a philanthropist; he’d made his name three years ago after posthumously clearing the name of Richard Brook for good. Not that there had been any actual legal weight behind the trial (it had been nothing more than a gaudy, commercialized ritual televised to give a bored country a martyr to cry over). Moran had been the defense. He’d presented the evidence on national television before a real judge.
“Because fairy tales aren’t real,” Moran had concluded over the broadcast, fingers resting on his notes as he stared into a television camera, “but evil men are. And their lies are real. And the lives they ruin are real. But even the best lies, the lies we might want to believe, can’t destroy the truth. And the truth is a matter of public record in this case. Richard Brook was a storyteller. So was Sherlock Holmes.” A tawdry pause. “I’ll let you decide who told the real story.”
A “jury” of texting viewers had, almost unanimously, acquitted Richard Brook of the charge of being Moriarty.
Moran was small news now. He had stepped out of the spotlight, but his name had been made. A few small exclusives in the Metro now and then (‘Moran has Rapist Condemned’, ‘Children’s Shelter Saved’) kept him in the back of the public mind. He was safe in the subconscious hearts of London.
If there were deaths or disappearances, they could never be linked to Moran. The young psychiatrist found swinging from a bridge was depressed. Her girlfriend, found raving about broken eyeglasses and missing files, was psychotic. She must have lost her mind out of grief. The fire in Brentwood, three burned alive, was a tragic accident. The missing Carbuncle, a mystery.
London was the perfect bed for a man like Moran. He was untouchable, because in the London he’d built Sherlock Holmes could never touch him. If he’d been alive, Holmes could never have gotten close.
But maybe his ghost could.
***
John wasn’t stupid enough to think that he might be the one guy who would get to live a happily-ever-almost. He was a doctor and he’d been a soldier. There was such a thing a delayed PTSD and maybe there was even such a thing as ghosts. He was screwed either way. He’d never fancied himself the type to have a psychotic breakdown, but then no one ever does and half of those who do never believe they’re having one anyway. John was willing to believe it, he was willing to believe something, the problem was telling which was real, the madness or the ghost.
And there was always a chance both were real.
He was loosing more sleep than ever.
John slept with the bedroom door wide open. He lay awake every night, turned on his side and staring at the empty, open space of the doorway. He just waited. And wanted. And sometimes wondered, without much conviction, if it wouldn’t be better to have an exorcism done? Mrs. Hudson would know a guy and even if it didn’t bring John peace it would at least bring him some silence.
The digital clock on his night stand crunched through the minutes, chewed them slowly to pieces and spat them back out as little red lines and numbers. John was dozing off at last (with the time burned on the back of his eyelids) when a rustle and a sigh made his eyes snap back open.
The ghost was there. Tall and graceful, leaning against the doorframe. The dark shape, tonight, looked hunch and exhausted. John made no effort to hide his stare and the ghost made no attempt to run away.
John couldn’t see the eyes, but he could feel them, running over his aging body and his belly. His bare legs and arms. The shadows on his face.
Then there was a sound from the other side. John’s heart froze in his chest, and his muscles contracted in a rush of adrenaline. He clutched the bed sheets.
Throat tight, John waited. As he’d always done.
At length there were words: “I want to come home,” said the voice of the ghost. He sounded exactly like Sherlock, only sadder. It just a whisper, so soft it might have been spoken from the far side of bulletproofed glass or a thick, heavy curtain. John swallowed and forced his fingers to relax.
“Then come home,” he said and his heart began to beat again. But he must have blinked, or been dreaming, because like that the ghost was gone.
***
On his last night impersonating a dead man, Sherlock dressed himself all in black and wrapped his favorite scarf around his neck. He stopped before donning his coat and looked at himself in the mirror of his hotel room, running his fingers over the soft cotton that hid his windpipe and his vulnerability. If tied properly the scarf was also just long enough to swing from. Its fibers might even be strong enough to hold a twitching, gallows body.
How many years had he been wearing it?
For one more night then.
He tucked John’s revolver in his pocket (it had taken him ten full minutes to find it last night, and he could only hope that John wouldn’t notice its absence until Sherlock could return it). He straightened his shoulders. He stuck out his chin and looked down his nose at his reflection.
Not good enough. He still only looked like Sherlock. There was something too soft in his eyes and around his mouth.
“John,” he whispered and rubbed his eyes.
Sherlock was out of practice. Dressing one’s self up as a sociopath was not like riding a bike. It required concentration and conviction and Sherlock was exhausted. It had to begin in his bones, with his foundations. That was the basis of all good lies. Belief.
He had to believe he was Sherlock Holmes, or nearly believe it anyway. But he wasn’t, and never had been.
You got close though.
And look at the places it had taken him. How much good it had done?
Moriarty is dead. You killed him.
And then I killed Sherlock Holmes, so who was left now?
Whoever it was, he was running out of time. Sherlock drew the curtains and turned off the light. He left the room dark and sterile.
Though the layout of the streets never changed, London was the sort of city that writhed at night. Graffiti, stolen street signs, suddenly empty or boarded up windows creating gaps like knocked out teeth. People lived in London as though it was a metropolis instead of the belly of a snake but Sherlock knew better. He walked close enough to the walls to stay hidden and close enough to the lamps to be safe from the other hidden things.
Down into the rotting neighborhoods and back up again to the white and glass buildings with a gun in his pocket. The stars were hidden behind the light pollution. Sherlock walked with a changing pace, racking his mind, searching desperately for purchase and a mask to put on. By the time he reached the houses of the rich men (defined not by their souls or their shades of gray, but by the figures in their bank accounts) he’d come to the conclusion that, actually, it didn’t matter who’s face he wore.
Sherlock didn’t really plan on a face-to-face confrontation. He hadn’t come to be a hero.
***
John sat on his couch drinking coffee (the tea wasn’t strong enough) and thinking. He leaned forward, head hanging down. On the floor, between his feet, was an empty shoebox. He stared into it like it was a crystal ball.
His gun had been in there. It was gone now.
John wasn’t being haunted. He wasn’t losing his mind. He’d been made a victim-somehow, again-by the one person he’d convinced himself he could trust. One last lie for his benefit, and he’d been completely taken in.
John wasn’t the sort of person to waste time trying to re-evaluate the last three years of his life. Nothing good could come of that, just more things to hold against the bastard. But he didn’t appreciate having his decisions made for him. And, like anyone, John really didn’t like being made into a fool.
But then, this was nothing less than he’d asked for. He’d begged Sherlock for a miracle. It was only now, having gotten his wish, that John was realizing what the implications of the miracle were.
Sherlock had been willing to leave him in the dark, for three years. He’d been capable of it. And it meant that Sherlock didn’t need John after all. It meant-well it meant a goddamn lot of things and none of them were okay.
Of course John was pissed. Anyone half in possession of their sanity would be pissed.
But John’s traitorous, love-sick alter ego (the blogger, the idiot he’d been back then) was also buzzing with excitement and relief. And, pissed as he was, John was sucking air into his lungs and pushing it out again, effortlessly. And for the first time in three years it didn’t feel like he was trying to pull oxygen out of an atmosphere of water.
***
Sherlock was long gone by the time the police arrived. He was on the streets and walking, following any one of them, all of them, it didn’t matter, just walking and walking, hands in his pockets, until he got back to John Watson.
***
At two fifty three a.m. John’s back door open and closed, letting in a wisp of night air. His teacup was empty except for the last black swills of his coffee. John looked up into the blank screen of his tv and saw Sherlock walk into his living room.
He looked, God, he looked like a bloody ghost. He was white and skinny and he walked like he was afraid he might fall through the floor.
Sherlock met John’s eyes through the television screen and took his hands out of his pockets.
John had planned a thousand words in the last few hours for this moment. A few of them were soft and sweet, but most of them were hard and angry. All of them evaporated. His mouth was full of rocks and desert air.
Well, one word was left, but he didn’t have the courage to say it. There was still that chance that he would look down into the shoebox and the gun would be there after all. And when he looked back up Sherlock would fade back into the wall and be nothing more than the shadow of a coat rack. So John swallowed and curled his fingers over his knees and silently mouth Sherlock’s name.
His own name bounced back to him, a sharp and solid sound that broke the distance between them in half.
“John.”
Sherlock crossed them room and John turned around, rising onto his knees and bracing himself against the back of the couch. The couch itself almost went over, rocked back with his weight, but Sherlock was there and he braced it against his hips and caught John by the shoulders, holding him up. John could tell by the pinch in Sherlock’s forehead that he’d had things he was going to say too. But there was no time. There was too much time.
Three, o’four in the morning, according to the clock on the wall. John reached up and grabbed Sherlock’s face, chilled with the wind and pale with fatigue, to pull him down. Still three, o’four when Sherlock stopped, lips a butterfly’s beat away from John’s, and, sliding his hands up John’s arms to his neck, said: “I’m not what you think I am.”
Three, o’five when John crashed into him, heedless of the warning, all his bitterness and his anger forgotten because Sherlock was in his house and in his life and he needed that first kiss like it was oxygen and he was still drowning.
John held Sherlock still, maybe for an instant, maybe for a lifetime, until everything slotted into place and the scent of nighttime and gun powder and Sherlock’s favorite shampoo filled John’s lungs and he could form a thought at last: It’s him.
Sherlock inhaled, his palm sweeping up to cradle the back of John’s skull. And though his face was cold his lips were warm. Sherlock brushed careful touches and gentle hands over John’s shoulders and face and John, despite all the times he’d sworn to himself he would never follow the fucker anywhere again, ran his thumbs over Sherlock’s cheekbones and allowed himself to be guided. When Sherlock swayed a little further forward, John bowed his back and gave those inches without a fight. And when Sherlock tipped John’s face to the left with a knuckle under his chin, John allowed it, opening his mouth to Sherlock’s question-less tongue.
They kissed, slow and kind, two despairing individuals suddenly caught in a patient explanation. And after some long moments of tasting and breathing and clutching, Sherlock’s words caught up with John.
I’m not what you think I am.
John pulled away with a lush press of his mouth to Sherlock’s and dropped his forehead to Sherlock’s chest. He could feel the steady hammering of the heart within the ribcage, the unsteady gulping of two lungs.
“You’re not dead,” John mumbled. He wrapped his arms around Sherlock’s torso and fisted his hands in Sherlock’s back and gave up on things like pride and self-control. It was three o’goddam-clock in the fucking morning and he was supposed to be furious. Instead he was choking down the panic rising suddenly from the bottom of his stomach. “Not dead,” he whispered. He didn’t even care how pathetic it sounded. “Not dead.”
Sherlock’s arms tightened around him. A mouth in his hair, at the crown of his head.
“John,” he rasped. “I…I lied because-”John couldn’t stop the hysterical giggle that bubbled out of him, stopping Sherlock’s words. It was ridiculous that Sherlock would think John needed an explanation. That now, after three years, John would even bother to give a shit about excuses if he could. As if Sherlock hadn’t always been the one thing, in all of John’s crazy, insane, unbalanced existence, that made perfect sense. He raised his head from the last safe place on earth and saw over Sherlock’s shoulder that the clock still said three o’five. Not thirty seconds had gone by. He looked up at Sherlock.
“And who do you think I am?” John asked, trying not to grin like an idiot because it was inappropriate. Sherlock frowned.
“What?”
No time, no time, and things they needed to be making up for.
“I’m not stupid Sherlock.” John was shoving Sherlock’s coat from his shoulder. It crumpled to the ground. John pulled the scarf away and kissed Sherlock’s exposed neck. “I’m a doctor. I can google.” He was pulling on Sherlock’s shirt out of his trousers and working his way through the buttons from the top to the bottom. Sherlock’s throat was at eye level and John watched the ripple of a swallow move through his skin. “You think I couldn’t tell the difference between a sociopath and a frightened young man?”
Irritation flashed through Sherlock’s eyes.
“For someone who isn’t stupid you certainly do an excellent impression of an imbecile,” he snapped. It only made John smile and Sherlock didn’t do anything to stop the wandering of John’s hands. It was too late for Sherlock to try and scare John away now.
He slipped his palm up Sherlock’s bare chest and rose with it to say against Sherlock’s lips: “And for someone who thinks he isn’t really Sherlock Holmes you sure do act a lot like him.” John kissed him. Sherlock’s hands came back up to John’s face. He sucked John’s bottom lip into his mouth, ran his tongue along its inside, and let it go again. The wounded anger had left his face, replaced by confusion.
“If you knew,” he asked, gray eyes searching John’s face like it was a roadmap to the answer, “If you knew I wasn’t really-”
John smiled. “A higher functioning arsehole?”
“why did you never-”
“Call you out on it? Punch you in the stupid face and then snog you silly?”
Sherlock shrugged. John sat back on his heels.
“I figured a genius like you must have his reasons,” he answered seriously. Did they really have time for this? Was it really necessary? “I don’t know what happened to you before we met but I know what happened to me.” Bullets and sand. “I’ve got big, scary secrets of my own, Sherlock. I’ve got shit that scares me so bad I’ve wet the bed. I know all about lying for self-preservation and lying to other people just so you can keep lying to yourself.”
Sherlock was leaning over the back of the couch, working John’s tee over his head. His pupils were blown wide as bullet holes. John lifted his arms and cooperated, for a moment his vision was obscured, but when he could see again Sherlock was close, staring at John’s mouth.
“Oh,” was all he said.
John needed Sherlock to be on his side of the couch right away, but somehow that relocation seemed like some impossible brain-teaser. John shucked his trousers himself and lay down with his head on the armrest.
“Come here,” he said. Sherlock was the genius, let him figure it out.
Sherlock walked around the couch-oh right-and knelt with his knees on either side of John’s thighs.
“I’m out of practice,” he murmured, questing fingers trailing down John’s chest and stomach. John closed his eyes and inhaled.
Three o’nine. They were probably almost out of time. What time?
Sherlock’s hand trailed lower, fingers tracing over John’s erection.
“So am I,” John gasped. He gripped the cushions under his back and beside his head. “Sherlock.”
Sherlock bent down and sucked a bruise into John’s collarbone, working his hand beneath the fabric of John’s boxers.
Three ten.
“I’m sorry, John.” Sherlock whispered and wrapped his hand around John’s cock, squeezing gently. He shifted forward and stole the moan right out of John’s mouth, scooping it out with his tongue and out of practice my ass. John couldn’t even remember what Sherlock was apologizing for.
Three ten.
Sherlock’s hand twisted and the friction was perfect. John let go of the couch to hold onto Sherlock arms instead.
John remembered dimly that Sherlock was apologizing for leaving John to mourn alone for three years. For or depriving them both of all this the first time around. For coming back at all and being the kind of man who needed second chances.
“Oh please,” John breathed. “Like they weren’t the worst three years of your life too.”
Sherlock’s mouth, against John’s lips, tilted up on one side into a crooked smile.
Three eleven
Why am I counting?
***
If they had really been Sherlock Holmes and John Watson this first reunion would have gone very differently. Because Sherlock Holmes was a heartless machine who worked with statistics and necessary evils and didn’t see the point of helpless remorse and John Watson was an altruistic humanist with a quick temper and a quicker fist. Sherlock Holmes would have walked through the back door and said “Hello, John.” And John Watson would have risen calmly from the couch and decked Sherlock Holmes in the face. He wouldn’t have bothered to avoid anything and Holmes’ welcome home would have been a broken nose.
Sherlock Holmes and John Watson would have stood in the kitchen, with a pile of bloody paper towels on the counter and a boiling kettle, while Holmes explained what had happened and Watson explained what should have happened in a perfect, fair world.
They would have bickered. Hollered. And then fallen silently back into their partnership. And three years of separation would have been bridged in thirty minutes.
Sherlock and John were not these people. They were other people. Not storybook archetypes, but two men who’d been heart-sick and then heart broken and now they had to spend the rest of their lives patching up all the mistakes between them. The lives of Sherlock and John were much more complicated than the stories of Holmes and Watson.
Instead of coming back together as two men remade, they were struggling back together as two burn victims crawling out of opposite sides of the same fire. And instead of finding their first breaths of fresh air, they were grateful to choke down even the ash and the smoke. Instead of safe and painless at last, they were feeling the slow regrowth of the nerves in their skin, and it hurt like hell.
John’s mouth tasted like mint, and coffee. His chest tasted faintly of soap and cotton.
The sounds he made tasted like warm honey.
Sherlock hadn’t been lying, it had been years since he’d touched another person with the intention of giving pleasure. However, he had a better than basic understanding of the human anatomy and a full stock of sharp memories of a post coital John coming through the door to pull from. He pushed John’s boxers down to his knees to give himself more room to work and he dug his teeth into the places he’d observed to have faint bruises when John came home fro a successful date.
He measured his pace by the urgency of John’s incoherent muttering. It was obvious that words like Jesus, and fuck, were good signs. And the cadence of Sherlock’s name seemed to be the equivalent of please and don’t stop.
The motions were all easy enough, John arching his back and writhing below him, Sherlock stroked and pulled on John’s cock, ran his knuckle along the underside of John’s testicles. John bucked and held on to Sherlock like he was hanging over a high edge.
“John,” Sherlock heard himself whisper. And he realized that some part of him must have been Sherlock Holmes after all, because the thing he meant to say turned into “Look at me.” John did, mouth open and eyes wide, sweat starting to shine on his chest.
“I know,” John mumbled around a groan and Sherlock had to shut his eyes for a moment to keep himself together. Because John, slowly coming apart, shivering and naked, John who should have been furious and wallowing in betrayal, was lying on his back and trusting Sherlock to break him into bits and was still listening closely enough to hear what was actually being said. What Sherlock couldn’t bring himself to say. And then John, John, a man no less selfish than his neighbors and used infinitely more poorly by those who should know better, still took the time to say I know. Still had the kindness and the courage and the presence of mind to mean: I love you too.
On the day Sherlock was buried, John had asked him for a miracle. But in the end, John brought the miracle.
You were the best man, and the most human…
“Oh,” John was whispering, his thumbs rubbing circles on Sherlock’s arms through his shirt sleeves. Despite the immediacy of John’s voice and the intoxicating feeling of John’s body, Sherlock found himself strung like a wire between two moments. John, struggling for air here on the couch, and John struggling for words in the cemetery.
…no one will ever convince me that you told me a lie.
Not, Sherlock realized, out of blind loyalty. But because he known the real lies already.
John had known all along. John had always known.
Chest heaving, legs trembling, still looking into Sherlock’s eyes like he was waiting for permission, John gasped, “God,” and “Sherlock” like they were one word. Sherlock leaned close, tightened the hold of his fist and the rhythm of his jerks.
I owe you so much. John’s plea or Sherlock’s promise?
“I’m here,” Sherlock said. And John broke eye contact, threw his head back, and came with a cry.
A few moments later, Sherlock still half lost in the revelation of his own idiocy, John smiled with his entire face and slipped lower on the couch, hoisting Sherlock’s hips forward. Sherlock wobbled and caught himself on the headrest.
“John,” he started to ask, but then John’s mouth, wet and hot as hell, was mouthing Sherlock’s cock through his trousers.
John dug Sherlock’s erection out and sucked it down. Suddenly, whatever Sherlock had been thinking so deeply about didn’t seem so important. He threaded his fingers in John’s hair and lost track of his own tongue in favor of cataloging the path of John’s.
John swirled his tongue around the head of Sherlock’s erection and circled his hand around the base. He pulled until Sherlock, panting, toppled gratefully over the edge after him.
Sherlock collapsed, exhausted and at the end of his tether. The room spun but John’s hands on his hips were steading.
“Up,” John laughed. “You weigh a ton.” Sherlock pushed himself to the other side of the couch on shaking arms so John could sit up. A brief look of consternation passed over John’s face and he asked, “Are you staying?”
“I’d like to,” Sherlock answered. His voice was hoarse.
“Tea?” John asked.
“Please.”
They wandered, half dressed (or in John’s case stark naked) into the kitchen and boiled a kettle. And then they had the conversation Sherlock Holmes and John Watson would have finished forty minutes ago. And they bickered, but didn’t holler, and Sherlock didn’t quite make it all the way through his explanation. He lost the thread between India and his last return to London.
“What happened to Moran?” John asked when the narrative fell apart.
“He’s dead.”
“His bullet had my name on it?” John asked. Sherlock nodded. “How’d you kill him?”
“I shot him in his sleep.” said Sherlock.
“Mmm,” said John. “I’m strangely okay with that.”
At five o’ two they stumbled to John’s bedroom together and slept on the one-man mattress in a tangle. They dozed right through the morning and into the afternoon until the sound of John’s mobile buzzing itself off the nightstand woke them up. John grumble a string a ludicrous threats into Sherlock’s shoulder and slumped over him to pick it up.
“What?” he snapped.
Sherlock sighed while John frowned and listened to the voice on the other end, ran his hands down John’s ribs and up his back. Back down again and a little lower. He craned his neck to mouth at John’s shoulder.
John, grinning, swatted him away. And then pulling away and rolling out bed, he handed Sherlock the phone.
“It’s Lestrade,” he said with a dangerous glint in his eye. “They found that famous lawyer dead in his bed.” Sherlock took the phone slowly. “I think he wants your opinion.”
Sherlock looked down at the string of numbers on the display that did, indeed, belong to Inspector Lestrade.
“Suicide,” said Sherlock distantly, automatically, because he knew he hadn’t left any loose ends. “How did he know-”
“That you’re alive?” John asked. He was padding to the hallway, his hair a charming combination of well-slept and jolly-well-fucked. He stopped at the doorway to look over his shoulder and wrinkled his nose in the same way he’d always done when he was trying not to laugh. “Sherlock Holmes, the famous detective, is back in London?” he mocked. “Word gets around.” John vanished around the corner but his voice came drifting back. “It was probably that gossipy blogger of his that let it slip. I’m taking a shower.”
***
The last of Sherlock’s secrets was that he didn’t want to have any secrets. Not anymore.
And maybe, that he was pathetically and hopelessly in love with John. Of course, if even John had known it all along then there was a chance it had never been a secret, but rather, scribbled across his face. Graffitied along the faded track marks on his arms. Painted in swaths across the background of his insults and carved into the black stone that bore his name.
Whispered and written like the final pages of some painfully obvious mystery novel.
The one you had only just begun when you figured out the ending. Page one. Paragraph one. First line.
It is with a heavy heart that I take up my pen to write these the last words in which I shall ever record the singular gifts by which my friend Mr. Sherlock Holmes was distinguished.