Sherlock BBC Fic: The Most Permanent Destination - Flying: Three (1/5)
MASTERPOST | ZERO | ONE | TWO (4/4)
THREE (1/5)
The future: inscrutable, as a matter of course. Unavoidable. Perhaps changeable, upon occasion, but unlikely since it's rather difficult to alter something that does not exist yet. The future: a mass of maybes and nothings, possible events that cannot possibly coalesce yet, time stretching out with each movement in the world a step upon the grand staircase. No skipping steps or turning back; the ascent builds upon itself. Filaments of possible realities, spinning out of every breath and space of time and movement of the eye, expanding to infinity like galaxies.
Ludicrous: sentimental. Poetic. Ridiculous. Boring.
Useless.
The future: waiting on the horizon, met in due course. Time will not speed up to meet it, anticipation will not clear the air of possibilities. No use in worrying about it.
Tense. Stop being tense, it's useless. Don't worry about it.
Sherlock was tense, thrumming: he wanted to take off, fly high, to shave off some of this nervous energy. A dearth of cases left him half-mad, crashing about the flat in a state, running off to Belarus with his lungs full of nothing, waiting to be filled with air and restore him to life; he hadn’t bothered interrogating, checking if the case was worth his attention. Idiot: he was letting his emotional state get to him, wasting time.
Time... the future. Was the future important? He had no idea. To himself: stop fucking being tense already, you're getting worked up over nothing. Cases will come, they always do. You'll breathe again, don't worry. Breathe again, fly again; was the air clearer at a higher elevation? He couldn't remember, he wasn't thinking about that at the time. Cursed himself for the omission: would mean now he'd never know. (Something was stopping him from trying again.)
The nicotine patches were put to good use and Sherlock wanted to soar again, clear air and thought and the excitement of brainwork in his veins. He needed a case. He was drowning in sand, in dirt: flung so low he was buried.
He spared a moment of profound sympathy for John Watson, who'd never fly again.
______________________________________________________________________________
John could not find it within him to spare Sherlock a moment's worth of sympathy.
Though, generally, wanton destruction of property is not a good way to get into anyone's good books, so John could be forgiven his low tolerance in this instance. Also, the sound of gunfire always set him on edge; he wasn't exactly inclined to take a head in the fridge and the disagreeable cage of gleaming joints and polymer feathers lying on the sofa with the utmost patience.
So when Sherlock sprung off of the sofa and leapt from the coffee table to John's chair in two groaning, scraping metal flaps (screeching metal like cutlery catching or nails on chalkboard or knives on whetstones; it made his teeth grind and neck-hairs snap to attention) and landed on all fours, feral-eyed, with none of his restless energy spent, John got up and walked right out.
As ever, threats to Sherlock's life brought him running back within minutes, managing to forget all of his grievances instantly as he helped a dazed and deafened Sherlock pick himself up off the glassy floor. Sherlock barely acknowledged his help, or his concern.
The next morning, he could hardly tell if Sherlock's "I'd be lost without my blogger" was sarcasm at his expense or not. He went with him to the Yard regardless. He followed, in spite of everything Sherlock had ever done.
John was starting to think he had a problem.
______________________________________________________________________________
"I'm not crying, I'm typing, and this stupid bitch is reading it out."
Oh, of course. It was finally happening. It occurred to Sherlock that even if the case had been gift-wrapped its arrival could not have been more touching. Maybe that was a bad thought.
Good way of discerning bad thoughts: John's reactions. John didn't seem to like Sherlock's lack of surprise, the fact that crying women were infinitely more tolerable if there were criminal elements lurking on the other side. (John could be peculiar at times; wore his heart on his sleeve, was an unpredictable variable, cared for the sick and wounded with his whole soul and could kill without blinking. Sherlock's impossible angel.)
He only hoped this case would prove as interesting as it seemed to promise. Why was John so jittery?
John didn't accompany him to the lab immediately; he wandered off to the canteen for coffee or something inane like that while Sherlock inspected the trainers. Inconvenient, he supposed, and irritating when John came back still worried and pacing, constantly fluttering his wing(s). Sherlock thought he deserved an award for not throwing John out for being distracting. Really, the things he did for the angel.
Sherlock was looking at mud samples in the microscope when John gave up on containing himself. Finally.
"So who do you suppose it was?"
"Hmm?"
"The woman on the phone -- the crying woman?"
Oh, for -- this was what was eating at him? "Oh, she doesn't matter, she's just a hostage." Really, John, can't you tell an unprofitable line of inquiry when you see one? "No lead there."
"For God's sake, I wasn't thinking about leads." John flapped again, still distressed.
What was he thinking about then? If not a lead, then how could her identity possibly aid in the -- oh, stupid, of course.
John was an idiot.
"Stop fretting, it's not going to help anyone. Or her."
"I'm not --" John stopped, sighed. He also stopped pacing. "Well, are they at least -- trying, trying to trace it? Trace the call?"
Sherlock scoffed. "Bomber's far too smart for that." He wouldn't deny a hint of approval in his voice. Then, his phone went. "Pass me my phone."
"And where is it?'
"Jacket."
John's reaction was immediate: he almost stepped back physically. "What? No."
"What if the case hinges upon it?"
"It's not my fault if you can't get your bloody phone out of your own pocket."
"I'm busy." Sherlock's voice was flat and allowed no room for protest. He'd gotten good at making it do that.
There was a moment where John forced himself to breathe regularly, and where his wing vacillated between extension, intended to intimidate, and being folded close to his body in a clipped way that screamed of the military. After some seconds, John chose the latter, sighed, straightened, and marched over to Sherlock's end of the table.
Sherlock pulled his wings away from John at the last minute, so that they didn't touch the irate angel, and it was a good move: John grabbed his shoulder and tugged his lapel so viciously that he'd probably have broken the feathers had they even insinuated that they might touch him. Sherlock did not want his feathers broken. (The idea that he moved for any other reason was ludicrous, of course. Obviously.)
He had no explanation for his hyper-fast speech, though. "The only mystery is this: why is my brother so determined to bore me when somebody else is being so delightfully interesting?"
"Can you at least try and remember there's a woman who might die? Just for a minute?"
"What for?" Honestly, what did John expect? Why wasn't Sherlock allowed to enjoy the work he did? Everyone thought that made him wrong. "There's hospitals out there -- this hospital -- full of people dying, Angel. Why not go and cry by their bedsides; what lot of good will it do them?"
John turned away then, seemed at a loss for a rebuttal; Sherlock told himself that he was perfectly glad of it. That meant he'd won. (Didn't it?)
He wouldn't admit to this if you asked him, but it occurred to him later that this pleased (disappointed? confusing?) emotional residue might have had some impact on his blithely missing all the important facts about skinny little human Jim, who breathed heavily on Sherlock's wings and got himself swatted in the face for it. He didn't even seem to mind having gotten hit, and Sherlock should have known it was suspicious. Humans usually hated treatment like that. (Sherlock would know.)
But Jim walked out already forgotten, and Sherlock must have been a sodding hypocrite to tease John for having missed the relevant data to be gleaned from Carl Powers's trainers, but then again Sherlock wasn't always exactly fair. As a child, he had never played by the rules.
He was more than happy to follow the rules of this game, however, because it was thrill-sweet to play.
______________________________________________________________________________
John's stump wouldn't stop hurting.
He didn't like medication, and he hated painkillers; didn't want to feel like one of the pill-popping old matrons who believed that the Devil could be absolved with a few white pellets and water. He didn't want to take anything for the discomfort, but he was starting to worry he might have to: it was only getting worse.
Sherlock was pacing Lestrade's office with wings hanging wide and raw and John's twisted left remnant seized up in pain. Sherlock was having fun. And John was watching, helpless.
Elegant, he said.
Elegant was a word for music: concertos, Sherlock's violin when he felt sane. It was a word for art: careful strokes, love and pain poured and mixed into colour; the lovely alternative to wing-tar, still as good a pigment but too black for radiance. Elegant was a word for beauty. (Not heartless metal.)
Elegant was not a word for attempted murder.
Lestrade watched Sherlock wander the room, asked the air for an explanation. And, oh, there, there it was: the reason. Sherlock's reason.
"Oh, I can't be the only person in the world who gets bored."
If Lestrade knew how to interpret wing mannerisms, he'd have noticed the way in which John's wing pulled in ever-tighter and his stump spasmed, and known the reason.
John thought of Sally Donovan.
______________________________________________________________________________
Sherlock thought for a moment, not for the first time, that having normal-looking wings (or even none at all, but he'd already tried that) might have afforded him more success when trying to coax information out of witnesses. Mrs Monkford didn't believe his (impressive) act for a second; it was good, then, that he had no intentions of ingratiating himself to her.
(He absolutely didn't care that John kept a careful five feet away from him after the deception.)
He swooped in and out of Janus Cars, in to the lab with his blood sample and oh, this was brilliant. Here were all the ingredients of a fine, fine crime: obviously someone clever was behind it all, someone big and brilliant and bored and Sherlock couldn't help but love the sound of the next call, drown out the human mouthpiece's snivelling and listen only to the sound of a criminal mastermind somewhere out there, courting him. Made for each other? Maybe nature had gotten something right, after all.
By the car: poor old Lestrade was left overwhelmed and John could hardly believe Sherlock's words; wind was stirring in the blue-tinged multi-storey car park with the force of Sherlock's excited wing-beats. His feet almost left the ground. Oh, be as horrified as you want, dear world, but Sherlock couldn't contain himself. This was wonderful.
"I am flying!" he cried, because there was no more apt a metaphor.
______________________________________________________________________________
John was furious.
He'd hoped, when he'd seen Sherlock's face during the call, that maybe whatever dark and wrought-iron place Sherlock kept his heart could be reached by the old woman's plaintive gasps. He'd hoped that the unsettled look on Sherlock's face went deeper than his skin and bones, that Sherlock could be moved at last to compassion. Sherlock threw himself into this case as he had done the others, and even enlisted John's help, and John hoped this meant the game would end soon: but as soon as they left the Princes' house it was clear Sherlock hadn't needed to send John on any errands at all, and was still doing whatever the hell he wanted, damn the lives and the law.
Sherlock burst into the Yard, handed Lestrade the folder and passed a hand over his synthetic (spotless, soulless) feathers, smoothing them down. Grooming for a job well done.
They had an hour left. Sherlock could have solved this eleven hours ago.
John asked anyway. "How long have you known?" He had no control over the indignant flap his wing gave as Sherlock answered.
And there it was, again: Sherlock was playing the game. Beneath the brilliance, there was nothing. The machine/monster didn't even have the grace to intimidate; his wings were still, folded neatly, completely at ease with himself and the world. He did not know shame.
John let him go past, into Lestrade's office. He didn't look at Sherlock's face again, not even when the hostage died. He didn't want to see blankness and metal there, too.
And after everything, John's stump was aching.
THREE (2/5)
THREE (1/5)
The future: inscrutable, as a matter of course. Unavoidable. Perhaps changeable, upon occasion, but unlikely since it's rather difficult to alter something that does not exist yet. The future: a mass of maybes and nothings, possible events that cannot possibly coalesce yet, time stretching out with each movement in the world a step upon the grand staircase. No skipping steps or turning back; the ascent builds upon itself. Filaments of possible realities, spinning out of every breath and space of time and movement of the eye, expanding to infinity like galaxies.
Ludicrous: sentimental. Poetic. Ridiculous. Boring.
Useless.
The future: waiting on the horizon, met in due course. Time will not speed up to meet it, anticipation will not clear the air of possibilities. No use in worrying about it.
Tense. Stop being tense, it's useless. Don't worry about it.
Sherlock was tense, thrumming: he wanted to take off, fly high, to shave off some of this nervous energy. A dearth of cases left him half-mad, crashing about the flat in a state, running off to Belarus with his lungs full of nothing, waiting to be filled with air and restore him to life; he hadn’t bothered interrogating, checking if the case was worth his attention. Idiot: he was letting his emotional state get to him, wasting time.
Time... the future. Was the future important? He had no idea. To himself: stop fucking being tense already, you're getting worked up over nothing. Cases will come, they always do. You'll breathe again, don't worry. Breathe again, fly again; was the air clearer at a higher elevation? He couldn't remember, he wasn't thinking about that at the time. Cursed himself for the omission: would mean now he'd never know. (Something was stopping him from trying again.)
The nicotine patches were put to good use and Sherlock wanted to soar again, clear air and thought and the excitement of brainwork in his veins. He needed a case. He was drowning in sand, in dirt: flung so low he was buried.
He spared a moment of profound sympathy for John Watson, who'd never fly again.
______________________________________________________________________________
John could not find it within him to spare Sherlock a moment's worth of sympathy.
Though, generally, wanton destruction of property is not a good way to get into anyone's good books, so John could be forgiven his low tolerance in this instance. Also, the sound of gunfire always set him on edge; he wasn't exactly inclined to take a head in the fridge and the disagreeable cage of gleaming joints and polymer feathers lying on the sofa with the utmost patience.
So when Sherlock sprung off of the sofa and leapt from the coffee table to John's chair in two groaning, scraping metal flaps (screeching metal like cutlery catching or nails on chalkboard or knives on whetstones; it made his teeth grind and neck-hairs snap to attention) and landed on all fours, feral-eyed, with none of his restless energy spent, John got up and walked right out.
As ever, threats to Sherlock's life brought him running back within minutes, managing to forget all of his grievances instantly as he helped a dazed and deafened Sherlock pick himself up off the glassy floor. Sherlock barely acknowledged his help, or his concern.
The next morning, he could hardly tell if Sherlock's "I'd be lost without my blogger" was sarcasm at his expense or not. He went with him to the Yard regardless. He followed, in spite of everything Sherlock had ever done.
John was starting to think he had a problem.
______________________________________________________________________________
"I'm not crying, I'm typing, and this stupid bitch is reading it out."
Oh, of course. It was finally happening. It occurred to Sherlock that even if the case had been gift-wrapped its arrival could not have been more touching. Maybe that was a bad thought.
Good way of discerning bad thoughts: John's reactions. John didn't seem to like Sherlock's lack of surprise, the fact that crying women were infinitely more tolerable if there were criminal elements lurking on the other side. (John could be peculiar at times; wore his heart on his sleeve, was an unpredictable variable, cared for the sick and wounded with his whole soul and could kill without blinking. Sherlock's impossible angel.)
He only hoped this case would prove as interesting as it seemed to promise. Why was John so jittery?
John didn't accompany him to the lab immediately; he wandered off to the canteen for coffee or something inane like that while Sherlock inspected the trainers. Inconvenient, he supposed, and irritating when John came back still worried and pacing, constantly fluttering his wing(s). Sherlock thought he deserved an award for not throwing John out for being distracting. Really, the things he did for the angel.
Sherlock was looking at mud samples in the microscope when John gave up on containing himself. Finally.
"So who do you suppose it was?"
"Hmm?"
"The woman on the phone -- the crying woman?"
Oh, for -- this was what was eating at him? "Oh, she doesn't matter, she's just a hostage." Really, John, can't you tell an unprofitable line of inquiry when you see one? "No lead there."
"For God's sake, I wasn't thinking about leads." John flapped again, still distressed.
What was he thinking about then? If not a lead, then how could her identity possibly aid in the -- oh, stupid, of course.
John was an idiot.
"Stop fretting, it's not going to help anyone. Or her."
"I'm not --" John stopped, sighed. He also stopped pacing. "Well, are they at least -- trying, trying to trace it? Trace the call?"
Sherlock scoffed. "Bomber's far too smart for that." He wouldn't deny a hint of approval in his voice. Then, his phone went. "Pass me my phone."
"And where is it?'
"Jacket."
John's reaction was immediate: he almost stepped back physically. "What? No."
"What if the case hinges upon it?"
"It's not my fault if you can't get your bloody phone out of your own pocket."
"I'm busy." Sherlock's voice was flat and allowed no room for protest. He'd gotten good at making it do that.
There was a moment where John forced himself to breathe regularly, and where his wing vacillated between extension, intended to intimidate, and being folded close to his body in a clipped way that screamed of the military. After some seconds, John chose the latter, sighed, straightened, and marched over to Sherlock's end of the table.
Sherlock pulled his wings away from John at the last minute, so that they didn't touch the irate angel, and it was a good move: John grabbed his shoulder and tugged his lapel so viciously that he'd probably have broken the feathers had they even insinuated that they might touch him. Sherlock did not want his feathers broken. (The idea that he moved for any other reason was ludicrous, of course. Obviously.)
He had no explanation for his hyper-fast speech, though. "The only mystery is this: why is my brother so determined to bore me when somebody else is being so delightfully interesting?"
"Can you at least try and remember there's a woman who might die? Just for a minute?"
"What for?" Honestly, what did John expect? Why wasn't Sherlock allowed to enjoy the work he did? Everyone thought that made him wrong. "There's hospitals out there -- this hospital -- full of people dying, Angel. Why not go and cry by their bedsides; what lot of good will it do them?"
John turned away then, seemed at a loss for a rebuttal; Sherlock told himself that he was perfectly glad of it. That meant he'd won. (Didn't it?)
He wouldn't admit to this if you asked him, but it occurred to him later that this pleased (disappointed? confusing?) emotional residue might have had some impact on his blithely missing all the important facts about skinny little human Jim, who breathed heavily on Sherlock's wings and got himself swatted in the face for it. He didn't even seem to mind having gotten hit, and Sherlock should have known it was suspicious. Humans usually hated treatment like that. (Sherlock would know.)
But Jim walked out already forgotten, and Sherlock must have been a sodding hypocrite to tease John for having missed the relevant data to be gleaned from Carl Powers's trainers, but then again Sherlock wasn't always exactly fair. As a child, he had never played by the rules.
He was more than happy to follow the rules of this game, however, because it was thrill-sweet to play.
______________________________________________________________________________
John's stump wouldn't stop hurting.
He didn't like medication, and he hated painkillers; didn't want to feel like one of the pill-popping old matrons who believed that the Devil could be absolved with a few white pellets and water. He didn't want to take anything for the discomfort, but he was starting to worry he might have to: it was only getting worse.
Sherlock was pacing Lestrade's office with wings hanging wide and raw and John's twisted left remnant seized up in pain. Sherlock was having fun. And John was watching, helpless.
Elegant, he said.
Elegant was a word for music: concertos, Sherlock's violin when he felt sane. It was a word for art: careful strokes, love and pain poured and mixed into colour; the lovely alternative to wing-tar, still as good a pigment but too black for radiance. Elegant was a word for beauty. (Not heartless metal.)
Elegant was not a word for attempted murder.
Lestrade watched Sherlock wander the room, asked the air for an explanation. And, oh, there, there it was: the reason. Sherlock's reason.
"Oh, I can't be the only person in the world who gets bored."
If Lestrade knew how to interpret wing mannerisms, he'd have noticed the way in which John's wing pulled in ever-tighter and his stump spasmed, and known the reason.
John thought of Sally Donovan.
______________________________________________________________________________
Sherlock thought for a moment, not for the first time, that having normal-looking wings (or even none at all, but he'd already tried that) might have afforded him more success when trying to coax information out of witnesses. Mrs Monkford didn't believe his (impressive) act for a second; it was good, then, that he had no intentions of ingratiating himself to her.
(He absolutely didn't care that John kept a careful five feet away from him after the deception.)
He swooped in and out of Janus Cars, in to the lab with his blood sample and oh, this was brilliant. Here were all the ingredients of a fine, fine crime: obviously someone clever was behind it all, someone big and brilliant and bored and Sherlock couldn't help but love the sound of the next call, drown out the human mouthpiece's snivelling and listen only to the sound of a criminal mastermind somewhere out there, courting him. Made for each other? Maybe nature had gotten something right, after all.
By the car: poor old Lestrade was left overwhelmed and John could hardly believe Sherlock's words; wind was stirring in the blue-tinged multi-storey car park with the force of Sherlock's excited wing-beats. His feet almost left the ground. Oh, be as horrified as you want, dear world, but Sherlock couldn't contain himself. This was wonderful.
"I am flying!" he cried, because there was no more apt a metaphor.
______________________________________________________________________________
John was furious.
He'd hoped, when he'd seen Sherlock's face during the call, that maybe whatever dark and wrought-iron place Sherlock kept his heart could be reached by the old woman's plaintive gasps. He'd hoped that the unsettled look on Sherlock's face went deeper than his skin and bones, that Sherlock could be moved at last to compassion. Sherlock threw himself into this case as he had done the others, and even enlisted John's help, and John hoped this meant the game would end soon: but as soon as they left the Princes' house it was clear Sherlock hadn't needed to send John on any errands at all, and was still doing whatever the hell he wanted, damn the lives and the law.
Sherlock burst into the Yard, handed Lestrade the folder and passed a hand over his synthetic (spotless, soulless) feathers, smoothing them down. Grooming for a job well done.
They had an hour left. Sherlock could have solved this eleven hours ago.
John asked anyway. "How long have you known?" He had no control over the indignant flap his wing gave as Sherlock answered.
And there it was, again: Sherlock was playing the game. Beneath the brilliance, there was nothing. The machine/monster didn't even have the grace to intimidate; his wings were still, folded neatly, completely at ease with himself and the world. He did not know shame.
John let him go past, into Lestrade's office. He didn't look at Sherlock's face again, not even when the hostage died. He didn't want to see blankness and metal there, too.
And after everything, John's stump was aching.
THREE (2/5)