MASTERPOST |
ZERO |
TWO |
THREE ONE (1/2)
John had nightmares often, mostly various memories from Afghanistan, hostage scenarios mixed with protecting civilians which morphed into operating in tall grass while shots were reverberating. If the dream ended badly, he'd awake with a cry and shake for a good time before failing to go back to sleep.
But sometimes the dreams were worse than that. Sometimes, he'd remember with horrible clarity the deaths of his friends, or would jump from one bizarre nightmare to another and watch as a field of swollen, rotting bodies came alive and the sun turned black and his sister appeared ahead of the ranks, her head the wrong way around and her laughing mouth full of blood and alcohol and tiny living things and she'd shriek and devour him until he woke screaming and insane.
Then there were the times where he'd remember his unit being ambushed, kept on the dirt road by IEDs, and how Moray fell flat on his face, and how John launched himself in the air and how he was met halfway and how they struggled in midair until bullets were directed up at them and John felt his wing fairly explode and thought a piece of his soul had been blown away and then didn't think anything anymore because he was falling.
When he woke up from that one, he always spent the first few seconds trying to figure out if he was still alive and breathing. Then he'd reach up and touch his trembling stump, feeling the tingling air where the rest of it should have been, felt it stronger than he could feel his heart beating. Always remembering the pain of the moment where everything was over, because he was weaker than gravity.
Then the grey peat that had become John's life went up in beautiful, birthing flames one morning, when he was trudging through Russell Park and ignoring the averted eyes that followed him. He walked past a bench, felt his stump twitch painfully, as if in warning.
"John? John Watson!"
Quite frankly, Dr John Watson, formerly Captain Watson of the Fifth Northumberland Fusiliers, would never have anticipated that a chance encounter with a fat, bland human who he'd all but forgotten -- their two disparate worlds making the other's existence irrelevant -- would ever prove to be his utter salvation.
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Sherlock Holmes bent over his work, vulture-like, with wings held tense and far from his body, as he loaded and emptied the pipette full of his new reagent of haemoglobin. Recently: in need of a flatmate, and thus would have to admit someone new into his circle (and that was full enough already thank you very much). His only hope for finding one was Mike Stamford, who could bring back just about anybody, and that, too, was irksome. If he could spend the rest of his days solitary, he'd be perfectly ha --
The door opened. Entering: Stamford, and another man. Angel. Cane. Limp. Ill at ease.
"Bit different from my day."
Oh, well this was interesting.
Sherlock's mind was good at supplying him observations automatically. Short, greying blond, late thirties. Recently in poor health, lost significant amounts of muscle while laid up. Tan despite it. Comment indicates training at Bart's. A doctor?
Sherlock couldn't glean more than that from a cursory glance, since most of his attention was taken up by the man's angelic appendages. Or, well, appendage singular, since the majority of the left wing was missing. The vestige didn't end cleanly; it was twisted, and looked like its bones had healed altogether improperly. Some of the feathers stood on end. It was a sharp contrast to the other wing, which was immaculately groomed and huge in size, definitely longer than he was tall when stretched its full extent (he’d say maybe seven or eight feet). Its feathers were the same colours as his hair, mostly dishwater with grey and brown and golden streaks. A lot of the wing's natural colour was hidden, though, by the large amounts of black tar dyeing it, along with some flecks of blood, too vibrant a colour still to be real liquid. The tar alone was not telling, but tar with blood -- well. That could only mean the man had led a violent life, which would explain the very obvious way that the loss of the wing was not a routine amputation. But how could a doctor be a killer?
Oh, stupid, of course. Stop staring at the wing (impressive though it was) and look at his hair. Obvious. He was an army doctor.
Ah, so that was what the sins of war did to a good strong soul: stain it with shades that couldn't be cleaned away. Apparently it was bad enough to warrant therapy and a psychosomatic limp; he was eager to discover why.
He didn't let himself stare any longer, though honestly he wanted to. He knew the man would have found the idea revolting, but Sherlock lamented the fact that crushed (or shot? impaled?) and amputated wings were not typically saved for scientific research purposes. It was a pity: he'd never seen a wing like that before. He'd have liked to inspect its lost twin.
He cleared his throat. He'd bet £15,000 in favour of his unwittingly scaring the man away.
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The man in the laboratory was a paradox. Tall, thin, pale, looking like he had somewhere terribly important and terribly posh to go back to once his foray into medicine was done, like he'd walked out of a Victorian romance novel. John had a number of choice descriptors for him (come on, he even looked like a complete git), but, of the man alone, the last one he would have thought of was "revolting". Upper-class twits had always rubbed him the wrong way at uni, but they didn't disgust him.
But John found himself keenly repelled by the man, the man who Stamford had warned was "messed up and insufferable and mad as a hatter, so don't get your hopes up"; John found himself staring at him with horrified fascination, as small children did at dead things in the road. The man was some sort of amalgam monster, half handsome and half horrific and --- John didn't know if he was an angel or not, but those "wings" were not right. There was something horrible and cold and unnatural about exposed metal and plastic, painted feathers; John shuddered, didn't want to imagine those things against his back or snaking tendrils into his body or using them to provide him shelter against wind and rain and sandstorms. The very thought of touching them was terrible. It was like contemplating eating rotted flesh from an angel's bones.
Scratch what he'd said before; the man was definitely not an angel. No angel would want anything to do with those monstrosities.
So, only human, then. Had the man stayed quiet, John might have pitied him.
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His name was Sherlock Holmes, and he was the strangest man John had ever met, not least because of the enormous metal contraptions attached to his spinal cord, or the fact that he'd gotten his landlady's husband killed and was still welcome in the flat for it.
First of all, of course, there was the fact that he seemed to know everything about John, more than John wanted anyone to know, more than John himself even wanted to know, immediately. John's first horrified thought was about stalkers and privacy damn it and preparatory background-checking, but...
...the website was a load of rubbish on its own, the ravings of a lunatic desperate for attention in the very depths of the internet, but when Sherlock sat still long enough to explain it all, it was brilliant. It was not rubbish. Not research, not stalking, but simple thinking -- brilliance. And it worked. John hadn't the faintest how he did it, but it worked regardless.
(In the midst of it all, John found he was intrigued enough to wonder what Sherlock really thought of John, who would never be anywhere near brilliant and was broken all over and was more bone-headed than brave. And John was lost in a wonderful moment where he thought that maybe the wings were one of the least interesting things about his new potential flatmate, as bizarre and hideous though they were. Nothing so amazing could be disgusting.)
The second strange thing about Sherlock was his job, or lack thereof. He'd said "consulting detective", yes, but that could mean anything. John supposed being mad and brilliant could eat up a lot of a bloke's time, so obviously a normal job would never cut it, but it seemed to John that Sherlock's alternative was simply antagonizing everybody at New Scotland Yard, which, entertaining though it was, hardly seemed productive.
(Besides, what was the fun in antagonizing them? They already hated him: John was observant enough in his own right, so one shouldn't have thought he'd missed the looks the Yarders gave Sherlock. They simply didn't seem to know what to do with the man, with half a mind to call him a monster or a machine instead, so they opted for keeping a wide berth and avoiding eye contact at all costs. John recognised those looks: those were the uncomfortable stances of people who saw John, one-winged, in the street; people were unsure of how to act around oddities. Coupled with the humans' confusion at his existence and the angels' disgust at his body, Sherlock's welcome was frigid and full of thorns.)
The third strange thing about Sherlock was that he seemed almost desperate for John to be around him, and yet had not given John any adequate reason to do anything or seemed to have any plan for using John's abilities to his advantage. It was almost as if he just wanted company, a thought which, frankly, was extremely hilarious.
(Or at least it would have been, if John weren't twice over a cripple and simmering after months of going wasted and not very much in the mood for a repeat of all of that, particularly not from a half-machine eccentric who just expected people to stand aside for him, even angels, for God’s sake.)
The fourth strange thing about Sherlock was the look on his face when he saw that tonight's victim was an angel, lying on her face and with wings twisted about her in a heap. He recovered quickly, and took to leaping, flapping, and hovering about the body as he observed and explained and discovered. He filled the whole room, filled the air and the attention and the space that occupied it all at once with his show of brilliance and a huge, energetic beat of his wings. Excitement was evident in every appendage, flesh and metal alike.
He was so excited that, in the end, he forgot that he'd even brought John with him.
The stairs were not kind, and neither was the cold January night air against his stump, or the walking upon his leg, or the feeling of being left behind to his own insecurities. He'd tried, he had -- this Sherlock was brilliant, and his existence was inscrutable, like a clock waiting for its steps and wheels to be navigated -- but here he was confused and lost and grounded again and he couldn't escape it. He went to the police car for help with every intention of walking back out the way he'd came, back out of this crazy man's life because it was clear not even he had any use for a one-winged angelic army doctor, anyway, and it'd be just plain pathetic if John stayed. He told the truth when she asked. He barely knew Sherlock, had only just met him, shouldn't have let the excitement lure him in.
"Well then, take my advice: stay away from that guy." Sergeant Donovan's wings were copper, and had long, strong primaries shot through with a bluish charcoal colour; they were neatly folded upon her back in a way that John's enormous ones (one) never would have.
"Why?"
She regarded him for a moment, as if wondering if he were being thick, or just polite. Then, she spoke. "You know why he's here? He's not paid or anything; he likes it. He gets off on it. The weirder the crime the more he gets off, and you know what?" Despite her smirk, she couldn't keep her wings still, couldn't keep them from constantly twitching in agitation, betraying everything. "One day just showing up won't be enough. One day we'll be standing around a body and Sherlock Holmes will be the one that put it there."
John's inhale was shaky. "Why would he do that?"
"Because he's a human, and a psychopathic one at that. What business would a human have with the police if he weren't trouble?” (Humans don't do that, they don't just help people, she implied). “I tell you, he made himself a pair of metal wings; I don't think there's anything he wouldn't do, even murder, if he got bored."
John had no response to her accusation, because, well... she certainly knew the man better than he did, and angels did not lie to each other; he ought to trust her judgement. And Sherlock was inexplicably wrong and creepy and John was still at a loss for what to make of him. A murderer, though?
John considered as he walked away from the scene, cane loud, loud, loud against the asphalt. The air was damp; he brought his wing closer in to his body, for warmth and comfort. Then, movement above. His eyes strayed to the sky, even as he cursed them for doing so, for their bloody longing.
There, on the rooftop: a full moon, somehow still clearly visible in a wet London sky, behind the chimneys. On them, standing there in dramatic silhouette: a man with wings outstretched, as if poised for flight. Light filtered through the sparse synthetic feathers, making the wings look like horrific black skeletons against the luminous night. Those feathers had no sense of what it was like to feel the wind whip through them.
John considered.
He couldn't help remembering what Sherlock had said about John's own wings, about the stains and flecks that marred the perfect goodness common to all angels. Few angels survived their lives with pristine wings, everyone was prey to folly; Donovan, with her immaculate ones, seemed a notable exception. Yet he knew that Sherlock was right to take notice at just how black John's soul had gone now that blood and death had clung to his hands.
With the same thought: he couldn't help realising that, if Sherlock did murder, no-one would know, because no mark of it would be left upon those inorganic, unnatural appendages. And of course Sherlock would never feel the weight of death upon his soul, since John was starting to doubt the man had one, human or otherwise, to repent with.
The silhouette turned away from the crime scene, facing away from his unknown observer below. Sherlock's wings were stretched to their extent, not as far as John's had gone but still impressive in their own right. Then, they trembled, and so did he, and he bent his knees.
John didn't breathe. An angel in flight was always a gorgeous thing to see.
But then he wasn't one, was he? Sherlock Holmes wasn't even human, he was a monster and yet he could fly and that wasn't fair in the slightest because it meant that, even had John been whole, he'd have been obsolete and that made him want to hit something.
John was going home.
But then, of course, he wasn't after all, and, well...
Something about threats and enemies and battlefields made his pulse sing and his wing twitch and spread wide, and John relished the look on the suited man's face as he saw himself dwarfed by John's massive display, and John didn't offer his hand for inspection or let himself be stared down because he was an angel and the other was only a human (who apparently did stalk him and maybe he should have been more worried about that) and John Watson was not afraid of humans. And he needn't be jealous of them, either.
Sherlock offered him danger, and that was the sweetest thing he could have ever provided.
John threw caution to the wind, refused what was probably a considerable amount of money because he was neither that sort of man nor that sort of angel, and got his gun on the way to Baker Street, because if he couldn't fly or operate or fight, at least he could still kill and maybe Sherlock would appreciate that because it was something.
Because Sherlock seemed to think he needed him.
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