Sherlock BBC Fic: The Most Permanent Destination - Flying: Two (1/4)
MASTERPOST | ZERO | ONE (2/2) | THREE
TWO (1/4)
John brought his meagre possessions over to their flat the next day, and spent a few hours moving in properly. The whole time, Sherlock watched him from the corner of his eye, trying and failing to divine his soul by the stains on his sleeves. He wanted to understand, before he let John leave (as John would, eventually). John was simple and utterly unfathomable, and Sherlock liked him. He didn't like people often. He liked the idea of living with someone likeable and interesting.
In time, they fell into something of a pattern, born of the tentative tolerance traditionally fostered by new flatmates. John complained about a lot of things and Sherlock ignored him as long as he could, they went to a few crime-scenes together, they managed to have profitable and easy conversations on a semi-regular basis. Sherlock had no high hopes of it lasting long, but so far, as flatmates went, this was good. This was quite good.
After three weeks: John asked if Sherlock had built the wings entirely on his own. Sherlock hadn't expected so upfront a question so quickly, and John's expression was odd when he asked, but Sherlock did give him an answer. Yes, he said, and I'm proud of them.
Seems justified, John said with a nod, and left it at that.
Until: John asked if they had nerve endings. Sherlock told him No, they don't, but they have sensors that register whether or not they're about to hit something. Here, touch --
"No!"
Sherlock blinked, and said nothing.
In light of that, he ought to have never breathed a word of flight. The day he did, it went badly: he realised that the look on John's face was not one he'd wanted to see again, at least not for a while. He made beans on toast for John that night; John recognized it as a huge accomplishment, and accepted it as an apology.
Sherlock had the distinct impression that John assumed it was merely a token. He wondered why.
______________________________________________________________________________
John was still trying to get used to the variety of people that orbited around Sherlock; most of them from the Yard. Despite their almost universal loathing of Sherlock, the angels were all polite to John; Sergeant Donovan was the only one who would ever lose the civility and turn frustrated and aggressive upon occasion. He wasn't especially bothered; she had every right to be unsettled and disgusted by Sherlock and incredulous of John's continued contact with him.
(Quite honestly, he was incredulous of his continued contact with Sherlock, too; had he been in Donovan's place, he was sure he'd have had the same reaction. But were he in Donovan's place he'd be a different man, and he was so thoroughly damaged that he wasn't even sure he was angel enough to be called such anymore.)
Most of the rest, though, were humans, and seemed largely indifferent to the moral implications of Sherlock's existence (humans tended to be) though of course still thought him a git; they were exceedingly nice to John, perhaps to somehow compensate for how horrible they were sure Sherlock was to him. They kept out of Sherlock's way, for the most part; the exception to that rule seemed to be the forensic specialist, Anderson, who had no qualms about openly antagonizing Sherlock, despite how thoroughly Sherlock intimidated him. (Sherlock intimidated almost everyone. He didn't intimidate John, or Donovan.)
Of other humans: DI Lestrade was the sort of man John'd enjoy a pint with; smart, very hardworking, and a genuinely nice bloke. John applauded the man's ability to rise, wingless, through the ranks of the Yard and never turn bitter. He had proven himself a very good cop and a worthy officer; he had the respect of his subordinates, but still relied upon his two angels, Sherlock and Donovan, heavily, and deferred to them often. (It would take John time to realise how wrong-headed that arrangement was.) He seemed to have a wary, almost reluctant fondness for Sherlock, both borne of history and of the type of horrified admiration that Sherlock always inspired.
Molly Hooper, the young forensic pathologist who'd appeared so briefly that first time John had met Sherlock, was a human too. John had only talked to her two times since then, but she seemed a perfectly sweet and intelligent person; why on earth she was so taken with Sherlock was anyone's guess. (One time John had caught her staring at Sherlock as he dissected a corpse half-eaten by acid and rats; John had followed her gaze, to the hunched back and terrible wings of the man, and wondered she saw in him that wasn’t twisted and cold.)
Mrs Hudson was also a human, and was probably the only of Sherlock's acquaintances who genuinely liked him for who he was. When he'd first met her on 221 Baker Street's doorstep, John had paled when he saw her embrace -- touch -- Sherlock without the slightest hesitation, because it had never even occurred to him that touching Sherlock was possible (who'd want to?). He thought maybe it was just a matter of getting used to the bastard, but he didn't think that was ever going to really happen; Sherlock seemed to love finding new and horrible ways of surprising him at every turn.
(Most of the time, if he were honest, he could hardly stand the man, and his frustration at himself for it just came out as thorny remarks to Sherlock, remarks that drew Sherlock's wings close to his body with a snap; the gesture almost set John off again because, damn it, it was far too normal to see on an unnatural body and he didn't want to contemplate it because it was wrong.)
He still wasn't sure why he was staying, but he was. If he thought long and hard about it, and ignored Sherlock's peculiarities and abnormalities (deformities?), he thought maybe it was just because he liked Sherlock, in a backward way. So he forced himself to be tolerant, with mixed results.
One area of dismal failure: always having to be the one to run errands and carry things, regardless of how his body was holding up, irked him endlessly. He always made this known in the hope of change, despite the complete fruitlessness of the enterprise. (Perhaps it said something of how low a standard John held Sherlock's sense of decency that he was far less annoyed at the pilfering of his laptop.) Infinitely harder to discuss: finances. They were his own damn fault.
Then Sherlock announced that the bank awaited and, suddenly, John was not only thrown into a new mystery, but into a different world; or, rather, the world he'd just come from, back to where there were only angels and humans and no in-betweens.
The world where Sherlock had but to flap his appendages as he stepped off the escalator to make everyone in the vicinity stop and stare and hope dearly that he had a good reason to be there.
______________________________________________________________________________
Wilkes burst out into laughter before he'd even come all the way into the room.
"Sherlock Holmes! Is that you?"
"Sebastian." Sherlock extended a hand.
Wilkes paid the hand no notice. "Good lord, Sherlock, what have you done to yourself, buddy? Always knew you were a nutter, but this..." Wilkes looked him up and down, and then smiled. "Jesus. Lot happens in eight years, I reckon, eh?"
"Indeed." Sherlock's tone dared him to say more. He cleared his throat; his wings flapped minutely. "This is my friend, John Watson."
"'Friend'?"
"Colleague!"
Wilkes smirked, laughed; they shook hands."Right... so some things don't change," he commented to John, not quite low enough that Sherlock could miss it. John tried to keep his discomfort out of his face. Sherlock did better; but then, he was Sherlock.
Wilkes grinned at them as they sat down: the cripple and the experiment, they probably were, and would seem an unlikely appropriate pair. John noted that Wilkes didn't seem all that put off by Sherlock at all; his first acerbic thought was that Wilkes didn't want to be a hypocrite, giving how thickly the layers and layers of pungent tar between the banker's grey feathers lay and how they stuck to the feathers, pulling them apart and together like unwashed hair. (It was vile. John wondered at what point he'd become so capable of hating people instantly.)
Even sorely embarrassed, Sherlock was ever Sherlock, and he held his wings very still and wide as he reminded Wilkes of his recent travels.
"Right, you're doing that thing. We were at uni together -- and this guy here had a trick he used to do --"
"It's... not a trick."
"-- he could look at you and tell you your whole life's story."
"Yes, I've seen him do it." John looked over at Sherlock when he said it.
"Put the wind up everybody, we hated him. You'd come down to breakfast in the formal hall and this freak'd know you'd been shagging the previous night!"
John frowned.
Sherlock had already given looking imposing up as a bad job, and brought his wings right back to hang around his body in a clearly defensive gesture. "I simply observed," he insisted.
Sherlock's posture did not escape Wilkes, and Wilkes grinned with all of his teeth; his own feathers twitched, and John could swear that the tar on them was still viscous enough to flick off in droplets and ooze over the secondaries; he tried not to look at them too closely. He listened, instead, to the sound of Wilkes deliberately provoking Sherlock, and then to Sherlock having one over him, and found that he hadn't the slightest inclination to side with Wilkes on this one, no matter the starkness of Sherlock's peculiarities.
He was farther still on Sherlock's side than even Sherlock was when it came to cases, and a case came to them disguised as the art installation put up by an apparent ghost with some spray-paint, and a grudge against portraiture.
______________________________________________________________________________
"I don't need an incentive, Sebastian," Sherlock said. I do this because I want to, he didn't add, because he didn't need to. So you can take your stupid prejudices and shove them somewhere discreet and poorly-lit, thank you.
What did you expect, John? he didn't ask, either, though he probably should have.
______________________________________________________________________________
Bodies had a habit of turning up in prodigious places; or, rather, bodies had a habit of turning up, and if one asked Sherlock he'd be quite glad at their fortuitous appearances. Others, not so much.
John had not been best pleased at being left behind whilst Sherlock flapped around the balconies; it hardly seemed like a problem worth getting upset over. (It wasn't even a proper flight; John could have certainly made that jump on foot if he'd wanted but it seemed more about the principle of the thing) It didn't matter now: there was a body and John had the good sense to pay it its due attention.
Said corpse: Edward Van Coon, deskhead for Hong Kong branch of Shad-Sanderson. Human (significant?), mid-thirties and fit; conclusion: areas of damp from sweat therefore caused by profound stress and not by mere physical exertion. (What was he afraid of?) Left-handed, bullet in right temple. (Two guns total.) Only recently returned to London. Foreign object in mouth (paper?) indicates, once again, presence of additional person. Stress, murder, code; ergo, graffiti: threat.
John made one of his wry jokes, and Sherlock found he liked when John did that and wondered if he should laugh -- but then, of course, their fun was cut short by a red-faced sergeant with a death-glare and soft brown-and-white wings; they were reminiscent of those of a small, sharp-eyed bird-of-prey's. The sergeant demanded the evidence bag by way of greeting.
Sherlock extended a hand, but he hardly knew why he did anymore; this new sergeant, like the rest of the planet, refused to acknowledge it. The sergeant's wings flicked and spread, an obvious show of power.
"And it's not Sergeant, it's Detective Inspector. Dimmock."
Good god, if they were letting angels like this be DIs (recent promotion; still getting used to having control in a crime-scene and constantly felt the need to defend it), then the Yard's future looked bleak; no wonder they needed Sherlock's help so badly. Like the rest of the idiots, he bought the suicide angle because it was easy. Everyone always likes easy explanations, don't they?
Well, everyone except Sherlock. But that was what made Sherlock special.
The DI seemed to swell with indignation, wings still tense and wide; he was dredging that tiny little brain of his for some evidence against Sherlock's explanations. "But if his door was locked from the inside, how did the killer get in?"
"Good! You're finally asking the right questions." Sherlock swept out of the room, leaving Dimmock red-faced and sputtering.
Dimmock got his revenge in due time; Sherlock braced himself for more of Sebastian's laughter, which never came, when the latter got a message all but proving Sherlock wrong. (Wrong was wrong; he didn't like wrong. Didn't like the way John always looked at him like he was, even when he wasn't. Why did it bother him?)
Sebastian had no patience for a murder investigation, or the truth: "I hired you to do a job; don't get sidetracked." Then the banker brushed him off, left, with an ease that snapped Sherlock's wings inward and made his teeth grind almost against his will; he wanted to glance in the mirror to make sure he was still himself, or at least how he was supposed to be. John was staring after Sebastian, a new expression on his face.
Then, John looked back at Sherlock, directly at him, with something important in his larynx that slipped through with his speech: "I thought all bankers were supposed to be heartless bastards."
Sherlock had no idea how to respond to that, so he didn't. But he couldn't have ignored the tone even if he'd wanted to.
TWO (2/4)
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TWO (1/4)
John brought his meagre possessions over to their flat the next day, and spent a few hours moving in properly. The whole time, Sherlock watched him from the corner of his eye, trying and failing to divine his soul by the stains on his sleeves. He wanted to understand, before he let John leave (as John would, eventually). John was simple and utterly unfathomable, and Sherlock liked him. He didn't like people often. He liked the idea of living with someone likeable and interesting.
In time, they fell into something of a pattern, born of the tentative tolerance traditionally fostered by new flatmates. John complained about a lot of things and Sherlock ignored him as long as he could, they went to a few crime-scenes together, they managed to have profitable and easy conversations on a semi-regular basis. Sherlock had no high hopes of it lasting long, but so far, as flatmates went, this was good. This was quite good.
After three weeks: John asked if Sherlock had built the wings entirely on his own. Sherlock hadn't expected so upfront a question so quickly, and John's expression was odd when he asked, but Sherlock did give him an answer. Yes, he said, and I'm proud of them.
Seems justified, John said with a nod, and left it at that.
Until: John asked if they had nerve endings. Sherlock told him No, they don't, but they have sensors that register whether or not they're about to hit something. Here, touch --
"No!"
Sherlock blinked, and said nothing.
In light of that, he ought to have never breathed a word of flight. The day he did, it went badly: he realised that the look on John's face was not one he'd wanted to see again, at least not for a while. He made beans on toast for John that night; John recognized it as a huge accomplishment, and accepted it as an apology.
Sherlock had the distinct impression that John assumed it was merely a token. He wondered why.
______________________________________________________________________________
John was still trying to get used to the variety of people that orbited around Sherlock; most of them from the Yard. Despite their almost universal loathing of Sherlock, the angels were all polite to John; Sergeant Donovan was the only one who would ever lose the civility and turn frustrated and aggressive upon occasion. He wasn't especially bothered; she had every right to be unsettled and disgusted by Sherlock and incredulous of John's continued contact with him.
(Quite honestly, he was incredulous of his continued contact with Sherlock, too; had he been in Donovan's place, he was sure he'd have had the same reaction. But were he in Donovan's place he'd be a different man, and he was so thoroughly damaged that he wasn't even sure he was angel enough to be called such anymore.)
Most of the rest, though, were humans, and seemed largely indifferent to the moral implications of Sherlock's existence (humans tended to be) though of course still thought him a git; they were exceedingly nice to John, perhaps to somehow compensate for how horrible they were sure Sherlock was to him. They kept out of Sherlock's way, for the most part; the exception to that rule seemed to be the forensic specialist, Anderson, who had no qualms about openly antagonizing Sherlock, despite how thoroughly Sherlock intimidated him. (Sherlock intimidated almost everyone. He didn't intimidate John, or Donovan.)
Of other humans: DI Lestrade was the sort of man John'd enjoy a pint with; smart, very hardworking, and a genuinely nice bloke. John applauded the man's ability to rise, wingless, through the ranks of the Yard and never turn bitter. He had proven himself a very good cop and a worthy officer; he had the respect of his subordinates, but still relied upon his two angels, Sherlock and Donovan, heavily, and deferred to them often. (It would take John time to realise how wrong-headed that arrangement was.) He seemed to have a wary, almost reluctant fondness for Sherlock, both borne of history and of the type of horrified admiration that Sherlock always inspired.
Molly Hooper, the young forensic pathologist who'd appeared so briefly that first time John had met Sherlock, was a human too. John had only talked to her two times since then, but she seemed a perfectly sweet and intelligent person; why on earth she was so taken with Sherlock was anyone's guess. (One time John had caught her staring at Sherlock as he dissected a corpse half-eaten by acid and rats; John had followed her gaze, to the hunched back and terrible wings of the man, and wondered she saw in him that wasn’t twisted and cold.)
Mrs Hudson was also a human, and was probably the only of Sherlock's acquaintances who genuinely liked him for who he was. When he'd first met her on 221 Baker Street's doorstep, John had paled when he saw her embrace -- touch -- Sherlock without the slightest hesitation, because it had never even occurred to him that touching Sherlock was possible (who'd want to?). He thought maybe it was just a matter of getting used to the bastard, but he didn't think that was ever going to really happen; Sherlock seemed to love finding new and horrible ways of surprising him at every turn.
(Most of the time, if he were honest, he could hardly stand the man, and his frustration at himself for it just came out as thorny remarks to Sherlock, remarks that drew Sherlock's wings close to his body with a snap; the gesture almost set John off again because, damn it, it was far too normal to see on an unnatural body and he didn't want to contemplate it because it was wrong.)
He still wasn't sure why he was staying, but he was. If he thought long and hard about it, and ignored Sherlock's peculiarities and abnormalities (deformities?), he thought maybe it was just because he liked Sherlock, in a backward way. So he forced himself to be tolerant, with mixed results.
One area of dismal failure: always having to be the one to run errands and carry things, regardless of how his body was holding up, irked him endlessly. He always made this known in the hope of change, despite the complete fruitlessness of the enterprise. (Perhaps it said something of how low a standard John held Sherlock's sense of decency that he was far less annoyed at the pilfering of his laptop.) Infinitely harder to discuss: finances. They were his own damn fault.
Then Sherlock announced that the bank awaited and, suddenly, John was not only thrown into a new mystery, but into a different world; or, rather, the world he'd just come from, back to where there were only angels and humans and no in-betweens.
The world where Sherlock had but to flap his appendages as he stepped off the escalator to make everyone in the vicinity stop and stare and hope dearly that he had a good reason to be there.
______________________________________________________________________________
Wilkes burst out into laughter before he'd even come all the way into the room.
"Sherlock Holmes! Is that you?"
"Sebastian." Sherlock extended a hand.
Wilkes paid the hand no notice. "Good lord, Sherlock, what have you done to yourself, buddy? Always knew you were a nutter, but this..." Wilkes looked him up and down, and then smiled. "Jesus. Lot happens in eight years, I reckon, eh?"
"Indeed." Sherlock's tone dared him to say more. He cleared his throat; his wings flapped minutely. "This is my friend, John Watson."
"'Friend'?"
"Colleague!"
Wilkes smirked, laughed; they shook hands."Right... so some things don't change," he commented to John, not quite low enough that Sherlock could miss it. John tried to keep his discomfort out of his face. Sherlock did better; but then, he was Sherlock.
Wilkes grinned at them as they sat down: the cripple and the experiment, they probably were, and would seem an unlikely appropriate pair. John noted that Wilkes didn't seem all that put off by Sherlock at all; his first acerbic thought was that Wilkes didn't want to be a hypocrite, giving how thickly the layers and layers of pungent tar between the banker's grey feathers lay and how they stuck to the feathers, pulling them apart and together like unwashed hair. (It was vile. John wondered at what point he'd become so capable of hating people instantly.)
Even sorely embarrassed, Sherlock was ever Sherlock, and he held his wings very still and wide as he reminded Wilkes of his recent travels.
"Right, you're doing that thing. We were at uni together -- and this guy here had a trick he used to do --"
"It's... not a trick."
"-- he could look at you and tell you your whole life's story."
"Yes, I've seen him do it." John looked over at Sherlock when he said it.
"Put the wind up everybody, we hated him. You'd come down to breakfast in the formal hall and this freak'd know you'd been shagging the previous night!"
John frowned.
Sherlock had already given looking imposing up as a bad job, and brought his wings right back to hang around his body in a clearly defensive gesture. "I simply observed," he insisted.
Sherlock's posture did not escape Wilkes, and Wilkes grinned with all of his teeth; his own feathers twitched, and John could swear that the tar on them was still viscous enough to flick off in droplets and ooze over the secondaries; he tried not to look at them too closely. He listened, instead, to the sound of Wilkes deliberately provoking Sherlock, and then to Sherlock having one over him, and found that he hadn't the slightest inclination to side with Wilkes on this one, no matter the starkness of Sherlock's peculiarities.
He was farther still on Sherlock's side than even Sherlock was when it came to cases, and a case came to them disguised as the art installation put up by an apparent ghost with some spray-paint, and a grudge against portraiture.
______________________________________________________________________________
"I don't need an incentive, Sebastian," Sherlock said. I do this because I want to, he didn't add, because he didn't need to. So you can take your stupid prejudices and shove them somewhere discreet and poorly-lit, thank you.
What did you expect, John? he didn't ask, either, though he probably should have.
______________________________________________________________________________
Bodies had a habit of turning up in prodigious places; or, rather, bodies had a habit of turning up, and if one asked Sherlock he'd be quite glad at their fortuitous appearances. Others, not so much.
John had not been best pleased at being left behind whilst Sherlock flapped around the balconies; it hardly seemed like a problem worth getting upset over. (It wasn't even a proper flight; John could have certainly made that jump on foot if he'd wanted but it seemed more about the principle of the thing) It didn't matter now: there was a body and John had the good sense to pay it its due attention.
Said corpse: Edward Van Coon, deskhead for Hong Kong branch of Shad-Sanderson. Human (significant?), mid-thirties and fit; conclusion: areas of damp from sweat therefore caused by profound stress and not by mere physical exertion. (What was he afraid of?) Left-handed, bullet in right temple. (Two guns total.) Only recently returned to London. Foreign object in mouth (paper?) indicates, once again, presence of additional person. Stress, murder, code; ergo, graffiti: threat.
John made one of his wry jokes, and Sherlock found he liked when John did that and wondered if he should laugh -- but then, of course, their fun was cut short by a red-faced sergeant with a death-glare and soft brown-and-white wings; they were reminiscent of those of a small, sharp-eyed bird-of-prey's. The sergeant demanded the evidence bag by way of greeting.
Sherlock extended a hand, but he hardly knew why he did anymore; this new sergeant, like the rest of the planet, refused to acknowledge it. The sergeant's wings flicked and spread, an obvious show of power.
"And it's not Sergeant, it's Detective Inspector. Dimmock."
Good god, if they were letting angels like this be DIs (recent promotion; still getting used to having control in a crime-scene and constantly felt the need to defend it), then the Yard's future looked bleak; no wonder they needed Sherlock's help so badly. Like the rest of the idiots, he bought the suicide angle because it was easy. Everyone always likes easy explanations, don't they?
Well, everyone except Sherlock. But that was what made Sherlock special.
The DI seemed to swell with indignation, wings still tense and wide; he was dredging that tiny little brain of his for some evidence against Sherlock's explanations. "But if his door was locked from the inside, how did the killer get in?"
"Good! You're finally asking the right questions." Sherlock swept out of the room, leaving Dimmock red-faced and sputtering.
Dimmock got his revenge in due time; Sherlock braced himself for more of Sebastian's laughter, which never came, when the latter got a message all but proving Sherlock wrong. (Wrong was wrong; he didn't like wrong. Didn't like the way John always looked at him like he was, even when he wasn't. Why did it bother him?)
Sebastian had no patience for a murder investigation, or the truth: "I hired you to do a job; don't get sidetracked." Then the banker brushed him off, left, with an ease that snapped Sherlock's wings inward and made his teeth grind almost against his will; he wanted to glance in the mirror to make sure he was still himself, or at least how he was supposed to be. John was staring after Sebastian, a new expression on his face.
Then, John looked back at Sherlock, directly at him, with something important in his larynx that slipped through with his speech: "I thought all bankers were supposed to be heartless bastards."
Sherlock had no idea how to respond to that, so he didn't. But he couldn't have ignored the tone even if he'd wanted to.
TWO (2/4)
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