Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

There is a holiday, when John is 14. When he’s meant to be too old, too cool to care about this sort of stuff, when he tells everyone he wants to go to London or Newcastle or just anywhere that isn’t a shitty cottage in the rain somewhere in the South Downs.

The drive down is tense, the silence that of a war not yet started. (He’ll hear it, again and again, in a place called Afghanistan, but what they really meant was Hell.) At the moment, he only knows it’s a too long a journey in a too small car, and everyone involved is Not Talking; he doesn’t know the reason why yet.

Just that it stings his nerves and hurts his heart and he tells himself it doesn’t matter; he’s too old for it to matter.

The cottage is in the middle of nowhere, huddled against the offshore winds. Seabirds stitch patterns in the sky and Harry doesn’t look at anyone, doesn’t talk to anyone as they walk down the path.

On the edges of his hearing, the waves laugh. He’s never stayed near the sea before.

Harry slams her door with a noise like thunder, and the storm from it echoes all around the rest of their holiday.

Fourteen fractured days, the mirror glass of a happy family all cracked and distorted.

John tells himself he only has to survive the night. He’ll come to believe this lie later: everything will be alright if you can get through the night. It isn’t, it never is, because the night is full of monsters, but the day is full of loss, and what’s worse to live with, which one hurts the most? That’s why we go and play with our nightmares, after all.

Doors slam. The building trembles, or perhaps that’s John’s heart trembling; it’s always been a fragile thing, his courage, or so he believes.

He just has to make it through the night.

He shuts the bedroom door and sprawls on a single bed almost too short for him. Outside, the July air is thick as syrup, full of the scent of salt and flowers. He’ll feel the weight of a summer’s night like this again one day, and remember himself back here with the moonlight making bars across the quilt.

John Watson listens to the silence; tries to find himself in it. Instead, there is an argument about alcohol going on next door and he doesn’t know if he wants to stride in as an adult and tell them all to be quiet, or run in as the child he’d almost pushed away, and beg them to stop.

He spends most of the first three days alone. There are rocks to climb and beaches to explore; he’s a city boy at heart, but he likes to explore, to challenge himself. (‘You like playing with knives,’ Mycroft will say with a smile, years in the future, and John will say, ‘How did you know?’ And get ‘Because you like my brother,’ in reply. This is what John will remember then; barefoot on black rocks, scrambling across seaweed laid out like mourning flowers, down to the sea.)

He’s fascinated by the sea.

It seems to whisper of something he’s forgotten. Or never knew in the first place, perhaps.

There is a boy on the beach, that fourth morning. Break the holiday down into segments, cut the days off with a knife. Put them and the arguments and the silence behind you like dreams. That’s what he’s been doing.

But the boy is there on the fourth morning and that throws a break in his counting. A shape at the far end of his vision; an impression of red against blue and gold.

A banner. A challenge of new things, the flag of a country he didn’t know existed.

The boy is the most beautiful person he’s ever seen (will stay the most beautiful, even when he’s kissing Sherlock, even when he’s old; this memory is beauty gilded with novelty and none the worse for that) and doing nothing save standing by the cliffs, watching the sea.

John goes to him.

Mostly in the way of boys, still. Finding a stick to throw, stopping to look at a rock, running for a bit because he can. And a little in the way of lovers, all lovers: in hope.

They’re alive under a summer sky, the both of them. There are ten days left to cross off a holiday; an eternity beyond that.

‘What you up to?’ He asks once he draws close enough. The boy is shorter than John, older than John maybe. A hint of the stubble he keeps searching for, so he’ll have an excuse to shave more than once a week. Blond as well. Heavy set.

John lists the individual elements as though that will distract him from the truth.

Beautiful.

It’s half seven in the morning. The gulls are singing and John Watson is learning what beauty means.

‘Family are here on holiday. They’re boring,’ the boy says, and John agrees. Explains about his family as well.

The morning passes lightly. Mornings like that, first mornings, always do. They swim. They throw themselves at the cliffs, trusting in the immortality of youth. They laugh and their shadows are joined on the sand.

The sun marches overheard. Even here, the army reach out, reach back, for him. He talks about it and the boy talks about painting, and at lunchtime, they buy sandwiches and eat them in the shade, waiting for the future to start.

He will love, John realises in a heartbeat. That’s what the weird, heavy summer’s been telling him.

***

There is a holiday, afterwards. Mycroft calls it that, eyes flashing with threat, and John reads it plainly.

‘You will go away, John. I need some space to sort things, and that will be easier without you here.’

He wants to say something about ‘don’t touch the flat,’ but what does it matter? There’s nothing left in Baker Street for him. There is nothing left in the world for him.

He’s always been good at taking orders. (‘Can you live for me, John? Can you do that?’ is the one he can’t, but maybe Sherlock should have the decency to be alive and give his own bloody orders, instead of relying on a ghost in John’s head.) So he takes this one, and goes away.

Same tense silence on the journey. The arguing’s all done, the battle lost and won, and he doesn’t know how he knows that’s a Shakespeare line except his head’s full of all kinds of things now. Sherlock kept the monsters out, but now the monsters have free rein.

This time, there’s a house in Spain. He chose it, or Mycroft chose it for reasons he can’t remember. Cheap, maybe.

Southern Spain, at least. The sunlight glistening richly on fat grapes, the trees flickering with movement as lizards dart around the trunks. Endless, endless sand.

Of course it’d be sand at the end of the world. (Afghanistan is sand, blood-soaked and scattered with worse; grains of sand clinging to bones, to flesh; a heart decorated with it like a hand-made valentine, and John crouching under the gunfire, knowing it was too late for them all but searching anyway, searching for life.)

The sand creeps in the front door like grief.

He leaves the shutters open and finds it resting on his bed like a rug.

He tries to deal with it like a man, or how he imagines a man would deal with it. It’s new and it’s strange; a world without footprints or even a track.

(Grief is always like this; always new, always uncharted lands. How could it ever be anything else, because loss is the coin flip to love, and every lover writes a different song. Love in your own kingdom of joy; grieve in the shadows of it, forever and ever.)

John hasn’t learnt that bit, yet.

Mycroft pulls the strings, even here.

Food turns up at his door. The delivery driver on a scooter is a stain on the beauty of it all, the scent of two-stroke oil an affront.

He sees the delivery bags as a challenge, of course. Mycroft’s banner, challenging John to defy him.

John would fight it if he werewas alive; slam the food down, demand that he not be treated like this. Slam his own doors, hear the echo of his own voice yelling in the night.

But he’s not alive, not truly. How can you be alive afterwards, that’s the thing. Hollow, cut-glass emptiness, an outline of a man treading along a boy’s footsteps in the sand, and no Sherlock.

No Sherlock.

So he does as he’s told.

They don’t need words for this bit. Mycroft sends him food, sends a disapproving message one day when the recycling is full of more beer bottles than John can remember, sends him demands to stay alive, stay here, keep going.

He breaks things, instead of fighting.

Shatters whatever he can get his hands on (not the house, he’s not that selfish or far gone, just yet, but he buys things to tear apart, to ruin). With his hands, although he remembers Mycroft talking about knives and he shudders away from that thought, because there are so many things a knife can tear.

There is another delivery. Someone else who doesn’t have a name, and perhaps that’s fine, perhaps there’s only ever been one name that matters in his life. Sherlock Holmes and John Watson, until the world ends, and it’s already ended, so he doesn’t need them anymore.

A note from Mycroft, handwritten. Ink dripping like teardrops on the page.

‘If you must destroy things, Dr Watson, these items I’ve come by need to cease being findable.’

A jumble of things. Many have government seals on them. A few have stamps of royalty. He destroys them all as asked and rages at Sherlock as he does so.

It’s all lies, of course, what he says.

Lies spoken in anger to the sudden dark night, to the restless stream outside the garden that he uses to splash water over his stinging face. The drops catch in his beard, straggle down to wash his hands.

Time passes, because it must, and John endures because he’s been told to. He doesn’t answer Mycroft, and maybe that’s enough of an answer by itself.

The moon is larger than heartbreak, hanging low over the jet black mountains. He’s ten days in now. There isn’t an end date to this prison sentence, no marks to scratch on a wall. He does it anyway, black ink on white paper, and tries not to think about black hair tumbled on white pillowcases. About two shadows tangled up into one shape, gunfighter’s hands wrapped around violinist’s fingers.

‘I hate you, Sherlock.’

‘Stop fucking me about, Sherlock.’

‘I don’t love you, Sherlock.’

His voice fractures the silence. Disturbs a night bird into frantic flight, and the peaceful dark is broken.

It seems fitting. Why not break everything else? He screams at Sherlock, threatens him, begs-pleads-bargains-barters-begs and Sherlock of course doesn’t listen.

The note arrives in a case of water that should have been wine.

‘You will love him again, sometime. Stop drinking yourself to death out there.’

He curses Mycroft as he’d cursed them all in Afghanistan; words he knows and languages he doesn’t quite understand and every scrap of hatred he can throw at him.

Sherlock stays dead like the men had done.

Fourteen days. Longer than it took him to fall in love the first time; longer than it took for men to shoot and die and beg him in a country so far away in distance and so near in thoughts.

Fifteen days.

Sixteen.

The stars dance gleefully in the stream. He doesn’t slam the doors anymore; waking the dead seems impolite. He wonders if the sea is still laughing, somewhere, at the end of this stream and realises that laughter is for other people now.

**

The cab is quiet and on the wrong side of the road. Sherlock sprawls across the back seat, taking up too much of the leather-edged space and the whole of John’s universe. The driver is chatty, his English better than John’s Italian, but they both speak Russian, so they’re managing with that.

Venice sprawls out ahead of them. If he looks up - if he could look away from Sherlock, he’d see their ship, now one in a forest of others. Or Mycroft’s ship, perhaps; too many things with that man’s name on it and some of them aren’t countries or world leaders, but things that Sherlock needs and maybe, by extension, things that John needs.

The canals are quiet, still with the weight of tourists’ dreams. Their driver winds his way through them, through a square where pigeons explode upwards with a clatter of wings and tour groups part like water to let them through.

Unreal.

Sherlock, a warm weight against him, holds the universe together. Anchors John down into this reality; this fragment of a fairytale where a magic mirror let his dead loved one back into the world.

If he looks away too long, maybe this will fracture as well.

It’s been fifty-seven days.

He isn’t counting them down now, but up, a ‘please let me keep him’ litany of hours, voiced by a non-believer. But then, if there’s ever been anything worth praying for in his life, it’s Sherlock Holmes.

It’s almost evening. Perhaps if he can make it through this night, like he had through those other nights long ago, he can hold Sherlock for another day.

Let it be fifty-eight. As if that might be enough.

He isn’t sure how many days might be enough. A lifetime of them, at least.

The taxi cab is parking and John’s strength is ebbing with the end of the journey. It’s Sherlock who stirs, who pays the driver and grabs the bags, who looks like Sherlock and doesn’t act like him at all.

This time, no one slams the bedroom door. Sherlock closes it behind him, takes John’s hand in his.

Sherlock’s hands feel wrong now, the scar tissue and bruising across his fingers making them clumsy. John thinks he’ll learn to love this new feeling, eventually.

The light is soft. A pale whisper of an overhead light, the lack of any traffic outside beyond the gondolas on the canals means there’s nothing to filter into their third storey room.

‘I need a shower before dinner,’ Sherlock says- this new man with Sherlock’s face says- and John nods a parody of agreement.

‘I’ll wait here.’

He does. Collapses on the edge of the bed like a puppet with cut strings, like a consulting detective collapsing off of a building only… no, that happened and now it has still happened, but it doesn’t matter, Sherlock’s back so maybe it’s best to pretend it never happened…

Tries not to think.

Sherlock comes back barefoot, wet-haired. Another disguise, another phantom conjured out of John’s memories, except this is a persistent one that reaches over to touch John’s hand.

The fingertips feel like a sun flare.

‘I am sorry,’ and Sherlock makes it a statement. Proclaims it to John’s face, while holding eye contact, and maybe that’s enough to shatter the fairy story, because his Sherlock wouldn’t apologise, but this one does and the world doesn’t end a second time.

‘I am sorry, John. For everything.’

He believes it. (He believed so much, once upon a time: in love and fairness and righteousness, in the good guys winning and Harry getting healthy and in being able to stay friends with a kid he’d only just met; in the two strangers in a drawing he’d remembered for years. In ghosts, blood-stained sickly things born in Kandahar. In aliens, at least in theory. In love.)

Now, he only believes in Sherlock Holmes and, well…he’s not Peter Pan’s audience, full of hope and faith to keep Tinkerbell alive, but maybe he can manage the same trick.

Clapping would mix this spell up with a fantasy of one. He nods instead. ‘I know you are,’ instead of ‘I do believe,’ and the words fall into their room like petals, the death of something once beautiful but still loved.

‘I know you are, Sherlock. I don’t know if I can…’

There is no answer.

This holiday plays out as others might have, if they’d been given the chance of others. They eat dinner and bicker about the wine. Walk and walk and get lost and argue over who should have been navigating. Sherlock watches the cruise passengers come and go; amuses John by pointing out a thousand tiny signs of almost everything.

They eat pasta and watch glassblowing, which makes John twitchy because it’s a weapon, and he doesn’t think he’ll ever be calm around Sherlock and weapons ever again. Sherlock’s fascinated by it all and pokes his fingers towards the molten sunburst colours, laughing.

It takes him by surprise, this discovery that they can still laugh together. That Sherlock’s laughter sounds normal, instead of something born of the grave.

Three nights. Three nights with Sherlock in his bed, a challenge; his hair a warning flag for John to pull down. They don’t touch.

Normal people could ask questions.

John bites his questions down and dogs Sherlock’s heels. Sends messages back to his family, to Mycroft and Greg, or are they one and the same thing now? Stupid, pointless messages, a waste of breath and ink saying nothing more than ‘we’re alive,’ and getting nothing in return because no one wants to trouble them.

‘Sherlock,’ he says softly, and the other man turns to look at him.

‘Sherlock!’ he calls when he’s making coffee, and Sherlock appears by his side, a ghost clothed in not quite enough flesh, and not wearing his coat and hat for armour.

‘Sherlock?’ he asks, and Sherlock answers, again and again.

‘I’m here, John.’

‘I’m here.’

‘John.’

‘John.’

He’s forgotten what his name sounds like, spoken in love or otherwise. Sherlock’s insistence on using it seems to pull him back into the world, back into the ruins of their old life and the unmade track of what might be their new one.

He wonders about falling in love with the same person, a second time, and about Sherlock’s lips on his.

Chapter Text

The fifth day, John wanders inland. On his own, of course, and his shadow is a tall scribble pacing him across the chalk land of the Downs.

Chalk is old, he’d learnt that in school. Born of dead things, a hundred million creatures that were once as alive as him and now filtered up in white clouds around his boots.

The heavy silence lifts with each step he takes. He remembers the sound of waves and adds to it the calling of the birds, the droning conversation of the bees which rest on jewel-bright flowers, and wonders if anyone else is alive out here.

The boy is in his thoughts. Eight hours (eight hours for a teenager is a lifetime, do you remember how the hours snatch and drag and change you forever?)

No name.

You don’t need a name to fall in love, after all.

There’s a sudden openness to his thoughts. A forced awareness of something he’d tried to deny and now can’t.

There is a boy he likes.

John whispers the confession to himself, cracks the silence as if he’s opening a can of Coke. ‘I’m gay.’

(There’ll be other words for him in the future, more accurate ones. This one does for now; tentative and new and full of wonder and dread, like coming out always is, even if you’re the only one who hears it.)

Over a small stream, where the sky is hazed with midges. Along the creeping brow of the Downs, until he’s a thin silhouette against the skyline, and the wind whips through him, talking about growing up as it goes. Down into the lea of a hill, kicking his way through the tangle of old bushes marking out what used to be a garden, and clambering over the jagged walls of a former house.

More knives, John. More things to hurt yourself on even when you say you’re having fun.

The old building is full of ghosts, he finds. (He’ll get to know ghosts for real later: the ones that make him scream in the night, the ones that dog his footsteps during the day. Eventually, the one in his bed.) But in this building… the ghosts are small, insubstantial.

The scent of pipe tobacco in the air. A few missing stones by the fireplace, the nooks filled with ink bottles, their contents curdled to solidity and black as sadness. The remains of sheet music, phantoms of notes curled across damp pages.

Outside, the humped remains of beehives (he doesn’t know how he recognises them, when the bees are long turned feral, living in the dry stone walls rather than the slumped remains of their house: this John Watson has never yet owned beehives, never yet stood in the doorway of a cottage he owns. No matter, time will solve that problem like it does all the rest.)

He kneels and it is not in prayer - he hasn’t learnt those lines yet either, that simple one name prayer that will take up the rest of his life - but in wonder.

An adult’s curiosity cut through with a boy’s daydreams, and the picture folded up beneath a heap of old wooden stakes answers both of those longings.

He doesn’t think, then, of impossibilities. He only learnt yesterday that he can love, after all, and when something that strange and dreadful and marvellous comes into your life for the first time, what other miracles and wonders might trail in its wake?

So, John sees nothing impossible in the picture. Not in the age of it or the way it has survived outside. It just is, like the boy is, like the bomb will be, like Sherlock will be. Here is a fact of John Watson’s life, and he greets it with a smile.

Paper that feels more like a rag. (One day, he’ll handle parchment for a case and wonder why it reminds him of swallows curving across the sky, of bees, of being young and happy and staying somewhere outside of reality.)

An ink sketch, made by someone who was not an artist. Two men, somehow out of time, so he knows it’s not a recent drawing and doesn’t ask why it’s here. The rest of the drawing blemished with mould, with age, so that he can’t see the edges, but nothing else matters. Perhaps the faintest indication of a walking cane, maybe the curve of a hat; maybe it was meant to be swirling fog around the pair.

And love.

He doesn’t know that you can draw love, that you can capture it in a moment like this. (He’s not an artist, John Watson. Never will be, forgive him his blind spots.)

Two men like him.

The paper curls under his touch, oozes moisture. He can’t tell what their faces look like, aside from content. And old; he realises their hair is the white of the paper showing through the ink, the emptiness of lines left to show the fullness of life.

He places it back, halfway to a dream.

Takes a long and quiet farewell of the cottage and finds his way to the beach again, to the urgent roar of the waves and the unspoken hope of his heart.

The boy is there, nameless as the men were faceless. He waves to John. They run. They laugh. An old tale, old as the sea, older than even a forgotten cottage. New for the both of them.

‘What have you been doing?’ the boy asks, and John talks about the rocks, about balancing on the peaks. About the pheasant with garish feathers languishing by the corn, and the slender cat that had come to visit in the evening. About the planes storming overhead, a whisper of Army power out here on training.

He keeps the cottage for himself.

(He’s not sure it’s real, that’s the thing. Isn’t sure this is real, the blue eyes and the shadow dark hair, the sudden hot twist of his stomach in something that’s both desire and fear. He’s more familiar with nightmares than dreams, even at fourteen.)

The boy tastes of salt. Salt for a first kiss, salt for tears, for both of them together, for his first go at love.

**
He travels south in Spain until he finds himself on the hard rock plains, nothing to wear away or kick up under his feet. Solid, unchanging, unbreakable. Maybe if he stays here long enough, he’ll learn something from it.

Mycroft doesn’t know he’s leaving.

Mycroft, or one of his messengers, finds him three days later. He’s standing at the ruins of another house, this one high in the mountains in what used to be a village. The church bells wear a crown of rust and neglect; the bright wooden doors slump under the weight of their age, and the whole street is thick with memories that aren’t John’s to share.

He’s wondering who lived here, if he’ll ever be amongst the living himself again in future, when the man arrives.

Like a shadow, like the men who took notes to soldiers’ homes and told everyone the news they didn’t need put into words. Harbinger, black dog, the piper at the gates of dawn, the “fuck off and don’t bother me again” sense of dread, too much for John to cope with.

‘Go away and leave me alone,’ he states.

The man shrugs and places some water bottles by the gate. A woven cloth bag that makes John think of shrouds, although what does he ever think of now that isn’t a funeral? The bag rustles, and he can’t be bothered to look.

‘I can’t do that.’

‘I’m asking you to.’

A shrug. The man looks as anonymous as a January morning: cold, grey, nothing worth remembering or noticing. John’s eyes slide off of him.

He remembers how it was to love looking at someone.

‘You have to love, John.’

He takes the bag and the water indoors once it’s obvious the conversation will only continue if he stays there. Outside, the nondescript car eases away in a cloud of sand.

He drinks the first bottle of water out of boredom. It tastes better than the booze, but it doesn’t help anything.

**

In the bag, there’s a picture. There must be other stuff; it sits too heavy in his hand for the photograph to be the only thing, but what does the rest of it matter? The picture is as heavy as memory, all by itself.

He doesn’t remember it. (You never do remember all the little moments that make up a life, all the magic and the laughter. If you’re lucky, some of them are captured by other people, and if you’re luckier still, you might get those ones back someday.)

Is this luck?

It feels like betrayal, like heartbreak all over again, to have lost everything and then be given back a mimicry of it.

Sherlock’s alive in the photo. Beautifully, wonderfully alive. Sitting at the table at Baker Street, attention focussed down on his laptop. The harsh lightbulb gilding his black hair like a crown. Purple shirt, top button open. Coat flung over the back of the chair. Thinking, detecting, smiling, living.

John’s there too; of course he is. John who never would have left Sherlock’s side, but his eyes flick over the graven image of himself.

The rest of it fades away with tears. A bow. A smiley face. A sword with a plastic chicken on the hilt. A plate of biscuits. John’s medical books, newly purloined and rifled through with notes sticking out of the poison section.

Memories of what should have been a lifetime.

Three days, he spends with the photograph. Watching it change from dawn to sundown, through the dark watches of the night and the stars that hang low as if afraid of heights. Watching Sherlock’s face and the expression that never changes, the last expression he’ll ever get to see on his face.

‘It’s not fair,’ he tells the Sherlock in the picture. ‘We should have been like them.’

He can’t remember if he ever told Sherlock about the ink drawing, about the summer he was 14, and how the two men had had years. How they’d known what it was to watch each other’s hair turn grey, to find comfort in a familiar handhold when all the rest was changed; to add days and months and seasons to a tally that you never wanted to end.

‘We should have had that, Sherlock. Me and you.’

He messages Mycroft in the end. A surrender of a kind, as if he’d ever been able to fight against either of them.

‘Thank you for sending me the picture.’

“Thank you” is what a human would say, isn’t it? Not a ghost thing; ghosts are for vengeance and revenge and anger. So maybe that’s good.

‘What picture, John?’ Of course Mycroft texts with commas.

‘The one of him and me. Your minion left it with the water.’

‘I haven’t sent anyone after you since you went South, John. Greg said it was best for you to be alone and I agreed. I haven’t any pictures of you two anyway.’

The silence creeps back into the old building. John stares at his phone. Stares at the photo and at his own memories, trying to find a day and a time when this one might have been taken. Failing.

‘Did you know that I loved you?’ he asks, and this time it’s his own voice splintering, fracturing, falling away through time as though if he says it enough, he might be able to make Sherlock hear it in time.

A confession, to the dark and the strangeness. ‘Sherlock, I loved you.’

‘Sherlock, I love you,’ and perhaps that’s the truest bit of it, the crux of it. Let the rest of his life, the rest of his story spin out away from that one sentence, the heart stone and the North Star and the linchpin of his life.

‘Sherlock, I love you.’

**

St Mark’s Square and the stink of stagnant water and the bustle of the crowd. Someone tried to pickpocket John earlier; he’s not sure they’ve stopped running yet. Sherlock eating pizza from a cafe and pretending that he knows how to fit in here, in the realm of tourists and adventurers, in the world of the living.

John’s meant to be looking at things. That’s what people do on holiday, isn’t it?

History and… sightseeing and things. He’d even managed that in Afghanistan once or twice. Ignore the honeymooners in the crowd, ignore the man painting portraits, ignore everyone trying to sell them things and pretend that he, too, fits in here.

Sherlock catches his gaze for a moment. He’s doing that a lot lately, seeming to seek reassurance that John doesn’t know how to give him.

‘We could go somewhere else?’

John shakes his head, as if the place were important. As if it hadn’t been somewhere chosen mostly at random, mostly on a whim.

‘No, this is fine.’

‘I’m not good at holidays,’ Sherlock says, and there’s the flash of a smile. He remembers Sherlock smiling like that before, when everything was a puzzle and a game.

‘Think of it as a learning opportunity, then.’

‘Boring.’

They drink coffee and watch pigeons, as though they’re in Trafalgar Square. The oars on the gondolas creak like trees falling, and he can’t think about things falling, not with Sherlock there like it never happened.

Where do the dead go? he wants to ask. He saw enough of them that he ought to know. Perhaps if he knew that, he’d be able to find a way to speak to Sherlock, ask him how he’d been. What happened and what will happen now. But he’s John Watson, earthbound, nothing except the man who could carry a gun in his hands and then save a man’s life with the same hands a moment later, and he doesn’t get magic or wonder in his life; he’s learnt that now.

‘It was a trick,’ John says before he’s realised he’s going to say it. ‘You tricked me.’

Sherlock nods. His hair flaps across his face, across bruises and stubble that have no right to be there. John aches to tidy it away.

‘I did.’

He knows he ought to feel that’s an improvement, something of an acknowledgement. Instead, he thinks of things that had been real once and no longer were - the boy on the beach and the taste of salt in a kiss, the pictures, Sherlock’s hand in his.

‘I can’t.’

A nod in response. Again. Sherlock like a broken automaton, a robot, and that’s the first time he’s ever thought of his friend as something uncaring. The thought’s too large, too jagged to hold, and he gets to his feet. Turns away.

Sherlock stays.

John walks away.

A couple are clipping love locks to a bridge. He watches them and envies them.

He heads back to the hotel, tries to lose himself in the streets but he’s a city boy; he’s been finding his way across strange places all his life. It’s only everything else he needs a guide for.

The room is small, and there are no doors to slam. He’s older now; he can be like Harry if he wants, and there’s no Mycroft or man who wasn’t sent by Mycroft to bully him into not drinking.

It tastes like loss, like dreams fading at waking. Like he’ll never know the taste of salt again.

The picture is delivered to him. Addressed in writing he knows better than his own, a ballet of blue ink spreading across a brown paper envelope. The postcode is from the other end of the city, from three days ago. Before he’d found the words for his accusation.

This one is in pencil. His own face, but not. Softer, better looking, kinder. Looking straight out of the snowfall-crisp paper. How someone who loved him might draw him (lovers often lie, they say, and it’s true, no lover has ever seen true) if John Watson were the sort of man who was loved.

Sherlock against him, laughing. The scars captured well enough for accuracy; the pencil not shying away in horror from the mess of bruises.

Their joined hands resting on something John can’t make out; a book or a laptop, just the barest hint of a rectangular shape. Sherlock’s hand over his, their fingers laced together.

He remembers how that feels; remembers it like he remembers breathing and running and smiling, just as vital as all of those.

For a moment, he sees the picture on a timeline of years between the other two. Him and Sherlock as they are now, or could be in a few weeks time. Not old, like the nameless men in the South Downs. Not young, like the unknown photograph. A present, and a present form.

‘I love you,’ is scribbled at the bottom of it. Sherlock’s handwriting, above a different signature.

The sunset here is a pendant on a chain of buildings, dropping down into the river. He wanders down the shore and listens to it; the water sighs with regret about leaving the sea and whispers about the canals. He stands there until it’s dark and the canals are black ink stains across the city.

Sherlock comes walking through the night like a dream cast into flesh. He’s a black outline against ebony, against jet, and he seems to draw every bit of light in John Watson’s world.

‘How did you know where I was?’

A movement in the darkness that might be a shrug or might be the universe and time itself falling back into place.

‘I always know, John.’

Chapter Text

‘We’re going home early, John. Your sister…’ Hid Dad’s voice wavers.

‘Fuck you,’ he says, but he’s got some sense even now, John, and he says it in his mind, says it with every fibre of his being and shouting it at all three of them, and clamps his jaw until his teeth ache, until his jaw shivers.

He’ll be good at this in the future, this keeping silent. For now, it’s a scratchy thing, painful and raw with newness, but he manages it.

Two more days instead of seven, and seven days was enough to create a world, but two days is only a weekend and there’ll be school or at least homecoming after them. Forty -eight hours; he maps them out with hopes.

The beach again, on his own. Harry asks to come and he yells at her, at least. Tells her that she’s ruining everything, and means it.

The boy’s there, one morning. The second morning, the last morning. What does it matter? The details would have been the same if there were a hundred more of them.

A casual greeting, a pretence at things being unimportant. More scrambling over black rocks at low tide, all the knives of the future tearing at him. A cliff casting shadows out across the years, for two scared boys to fumble their way through what kissing is meant to be.

Call it a dream, call it magic.

John Watson’s fairly certain it happens, for what it’s worth.

And then up on the Downs again, a boy alone with a new secret, looking for an old secret.

The cottage is gone. The beehives are gone. The picture is gone.

He searches until late, until the swallows have clocked off and handed over control of the skies to one lone owl who hoots a surprised greeting to John as he tracks back across his territory. No piled up stones, no cluster of memories disguised as a home.

There’s time left, he tells himself. Twenty-seven hours before they leave.

The bedroom is too small. There’s another row going on outside, the same old script, and he realises now it always will be the same old script between them all. He’ll have to write a new one. (The gunfire, the bombs for the soundtrack - they come later, but he takes the first definitive step towards them today.)

Twenty-one hours left when he forces himself awake again. Last night’s orange juice is lukewarm on the table, the moon low enough to talk to as he stares out the window and into the unknown.

‘Are you up yet?’

The demand echoes through the room; too early, too early.

Or perhaps it’s too late.

‘We need to leave now,’ his dad says.

‘You said we were going this evening.’

‘Work, you know. Things… things changed.’

‘I had things to do here,’ he protests. Dragging his jeans on, smoothing down a t-shirt. There’s stubble on his face, and he’s not sure if he likes it.

‘Oh, this isn’t real life, John. It’s not important.’

He thinks of a kiss and a picture that wasn’t there and wonders if he’ll ever find anything else as important as those. (He won’t. Differently important, equally important, but not more so. They’ll guide his life, those two things.)

‘You need to have breakfast before we go. Harry’s sick, she won’t eat.’

‘Harry’s pissed, you mean,’ and it comes out meaner than he intended. ‘We’re going home because of her, aren’t we?’

They don’t say anything. None of them say anything.

His farewell is a hurried thing in the not quite dawn. The tide is still whispering away, talking of all kinds of things he’s only just starting to realise. The Downs are too far away to reach. The boy is a ghost, gone with the morning’s breeze.

The seagulls sing a dirge as they watch the car be loaded, and John wants to call back to them.

‘Cheer up, John. You’ve still got plenty of holiday left. Lots of things you can do in London. And besides, you didn’t even want to come down here, did you? Couldn’t have been much fun for you, out on your own every day.’

It’s a long drive back, another silent one. There’s a fragment of poetry stuck in his head, something about never living or never loving, and he can’t tease it clear. He thinks it might be in the past tense, but that’s wrong, because he is living, at least.

School comes in a blaze of regrets and longing, with September leaves stained cherry red and challenge cup gold; a shirt too big and a tie too tight. A planner to fill out and science formulas to learn, almost immediately. The rest of the summer hadn’t happened; a list of tasks and chores to do; a litany of things to do to defuse arguments, to keep the door from being slammed.

Strangers in new classes, all with names to learn, and anonymity isn’t an option here. He learns them like he learns everything else, learns the lessons like he’ll learn Sherlock’s one day.

This is the real world, he tells himself. The one that matters.

The crossed out days of summer get crossed out again. More heavily this time, in uniform checks and mock exam papers and work experience in a GP’s surgery. Black scribbles that remind him of an ink drawing that he doesn’t allow himself to think of.

There is another holiday when John Watson is 15. Harry doesn’t come. Nothing happens. The food is good and the sunshine is warm; he drinks more beer than he should for the first time in his life, talks with adults at the bar and screams like a kid on the rollercoasters he rides, and tells everyone he’s having a good time.

He is having a good time.

He’s glad to go home again, to find the place where he belongs, where there are no reminders of anything.

He kisses a girl in the pub and it doesn’t taste of salt at all.

He sees the picture in his dreams and wonders who they were, and never speaks of it at all.

He tells himself he doesn’t remember, that there was never a summer made half of magic and half of youth, and he almost believes it.

John Watson has always been good at lying, after all.

**

‘You need to come home,’ Mycroft tells him in a phone call. His voice is clipped, polished, a buffering of repair work over all the damage Sherlock did to it.

‘That man has nothing to do with me, and he found you. I couldn’t find you, John. Something’s wrong.’

‘You told me to stay out here as long as I liked,’ John protests. ‘And you might be the fucking government of the United Kingdom but you don’t fucking own me.’

(Sherlock owned me, he wants to say. Heart and soul, body and mind.)

‘Who do you think is making sure Mrs Hudson can pay her council tax?’

‘I don’t live there,’ John says. ‘Not anymore.’

‘In that case, come and get your stuff. Move it somewhere. I have more of my brother’s belongings that need somewhere safe to go, perhaps if it isn’t full of medical items, they can go into Baker Street.’

‘They’re his books as well. He used to have arguments with them, Mycroft. I’d come home and he’d be sitting there fighting with a book about the correct way to treat someone who’d been stabbed with an icicle or something.’

There’s a noise that, from another man, he would have called sadness. Distress. Loss. Maybe it’s a mirror sound, a hallucination of his own grief.

‘He had someone impaled with a narwhal tusk once,’ Mycroft says after a moment. His voice is brittle bright again, as fragile as the first frost. ‘He boasted about figuring out the murder weapon for days.’

‘I should… I should add that to the blog.’

‘Come back and I’ll write up what I remember of it for you. It was a long while before he met Greg, even. And bring me that picture you were left. I want to see it.’

‘Another week?’

‘John.’ He doesn’t think he’s ever heard Mycroft use his first name before today. He pronounces it as an order.

‘John. It’s been four months since you went down south. Come home.’

He tries to remember the crossed off days, the counting. Finds only blacked out diary entries in his memory; days within the pages torn out and thrown away, days where it wasn’t worth the living. If he’d had Sherlock’s mind palace, he could have torn the whole thing down instead.

‘Four months?’ he asks, but the phone’s gone dead. Outside, the autumn breeze whispers agreement. The stream is fuller, running faster now. The first rains must have fallen in the mountains, and somewhere in London, 14-year-olds will be living the last few days where they can still believe in magic, before school drags them back to the world.

John tries reaching out, finding an echo of himself. Any ideas of what he might have been doing for those days, weeks, months, aside from staring at the photograph. He remembers how the edges had got tatty under his constant handling; how his tears had blurred the colours, made holes in the ink like gunshot wounds.

Nothing else.

The cottage is tidy. He hasn’t broken anything. The garden is sparse and unharmed; the path down to the village is as new as if he’s never walked it before.

He thinks he should be frightened.

He isn’t.

Packing is easy; a soldier’s gift. Do something enough and it’ll become automatic, even in madness. (He thinks this must be madness, of a sort, and after all, love is a form of madness all its own.)

Clothes and memories in the same bag. That’s all he’s got, after all. Passport. Money.

The picture.

The picture that isn’t there, when he turns the one-bedroomed place upside down. He can feel the curve of the paper under his fingers, see the curl of Sherlock’s hair. Smell it, even, the faded dampness of tears and paper.

It isn’t there.

Mycroft is at the airport, making things happen and queues disappear. John’s hustled through to London; to walk slowly up Baker Street with someone he doesn’t know carrying his bag and Mycroft leading the way.

London cowers under the first touches of winter. The trees have been stripped of their leaves, a fallen banner of green spread across the pavements. Two men jogging, wearing woolly hats and gloves. A builder clutching a cup of tea, inhaling the steam.

John shivers at the contrast, at the idea of being so lost in time.

Inside, and Sherlock’s still not there.

Only… he is there and Mycroft knows it; Mrs Hudson knows it; John discovers it with a mouthful of swearing when he tries to find a coffee mug and finds a note taped underneath with a reminder to check how long different cups took to reach a drinkable temperature.

He cries, then.

Later, much later, Mycroft asks about the picture. About the man and the scooter.

John shrugs. ‘I was dead, Mycroft. I wasn’t paying attention to anything. I couldn’t find the picture when I left.’

‘It sounds like the sort of thing my brother would have loved. He always had a taste for fairy
stories when he was little, Sherlock did.’

Mycroft doesn’t mention it again. John doesn’t. He lets the real world suck him back in, finds his way back to work, to eating whatever Mrs Hudson has decided is good for a grieving man that week, to not telling Mycroft to fuck off the first time he asks for help on a case.

London edges towards Christmas. Dresses itself in red and green lights, covers up grief with music and hopelessness with frantic, forced jollity.

There’s a murder case, and he helps solve it.

Sometimes, at night, he thinks of the picture and tells Sherlock, again and again, ‘this wasn’t meant to happen. It was meant to be like that first picture, the one from the summer when I was a kid. That’s what we should have had, me and you.’

Sherlock doesn’t answer.

The picture from Spain arrives in the post one day in February, the next day that John’s been thinking about not going home again. About what it means to be not alive, to not live, and how easy it would be to do both.

Unsigned and unaddressed.

He holds it tight, and he lives, and that’s enough magic for now, he thinks.

**

Once, a long, long time ago, there was a summer when John Watson believed in magic. When he realised he would love.

Not so long ago, there was an autumn when he relied on magic to live. When he’d accepted that he’d loved and it had gone.

Now, he stands in Venice under a full moon and finds Sherlock’s hand in his. ‘I love you,’ he says.

‘I love you.’

Echoes and memories, of their past and maybe other pasts. Sherlock and John, love and lives alike.

They walk to the hotel in silence, hand in hand. The bridges clunk hollowly under their feet, the water eases past like days going by without mattering.

Sherlock looks different in the hotel room. Partly more like John’s memory of him and partly less; more the man he’s getting to know for the second first time.

He kisses the same though.

Salt, John thinks madly, and realises it’s both of their tears.

His hands are trembling on John’s belt. Lax on the buttons of his shirt and neither of them want to let go of the other, so it’s a slow and a clumsy thing. A dance where they’ve both forgotten half of the steps at least.

The bed is too small for the both of them like this, although the room is too large, and there’s no one around to slam doors.

John ends up standing, looking down at him. An exclamation mark of pale skin and dark hair against white sheets, the affront of the scars, the safe haven of a familiar smile.

‘John?’

It’s good to have his name back, to be anchored back into this world by it.

Sherlock’s mouth is warm, warm like memories he’s mostly locked away.

It’s an awkward thing, their love making. Too raw and too new, all the unspoken things between them a barrier that isn’t quite overcome by this old dance.

Too many hurts, of all kinds.

But pleasure too, shading into joy, into ecstasy-bliss-heaven-belonging and it’s all the sweeter afterwards, when John’s breathing hard and Sherlock’s curled against him, head resting on one shoulder.

He should get up and close the curtains, he thinks. But it’s only the moon and a few stray stars that could see in. Outside, the canal laps against the foundation of their building; inside, Sherlock is humming.

‘We should go home,’ Sherlock says, and John finds himself grinning. Agreeing.

‘Our flights are Monday.’

‘Friends in high places,’ and Sherlock checks the time. ‘Do you think brother mine would come through if we asked for tomorrow evening?’

‘He always has in the past,’ John replies, and tries to fight for one of the sheets. It’s a lost cause.

‘Properly home. Sort the flat out, get all my things back.’

‘Replace the experiments in the fridge and horrify everyone who thought they’d escaped the violin playing, you mean.’

‘That as well, yes,’ Sherlock grins. ‘My experiments have been rather curtailed of late.’

‘Thankfully.’

He’s not sure when Sherlock learnt that kissing can prevent lectures about human body parts in food storage areas, but he has, and he demonstrates it now. John lets him win this round.

He calls Mycroft when Sherlock’s asleep; doesn’t pretend he’s not pleased when Mycroft’s genuinely taken by surprise at being asked to change the tickets.

‘He wants to come home,’ John says as explanation. ‘I want to come home.’

‘I’ll make sure there’s a car,’ Mycroft replies after a moment of baffled silence. John will treasure that; he knows it already. One of the very few times he’s ever been able to surprise Mycroft.

‘Not a black limo again this time, you know what the parking’s like,’ John says as a parting shot and goes back to check on Sherlock again.

He wonders how long it’ll take before he stops worrying when he steps away; how long before he stops muddling Morpheus and Death when he sees Sherlock with his eyes closed. Forever probably and maybe that’ll be alright, whatever fragments of forever they can carve out for themselves.

‘I can feel you thinking,’ Sherlock mumbles. ‘Save it for the morning.’

It’s one of the easiest instructions he’s ever followed.

Sherlock’s watching him when he wakes up. Dark, intense eyes narrowed, hair scruffy. Mostly naked and entirely at home in John’s arms.

‘I died, you know.’

John blinks at that. Not at the suddenness of it; he’s long since got used to Sherlock’s tendency to speak as soon as he’s thought of something, but at the bluntness of the words.

‘Did Mycroft tell you that?’ Sherlock asks.

‘No.’ John knows Mycroft hasn’t mentioned it for the simple reason he’s been able to sleep since then, hasn’t been lost in a storm of panic at his worst nightmares having been confirmed.

‘They were not… always careful. Moriarty’s men. There was one occasion when they went rather too far, and… I died. I was dead for a while, John. I remember it distinctly.’

He wants to protest, to say ‘You’re not meant to be able to do that.’ Of course, if there’s anyone around who could find a way around death, it would be Sherlock Holmes. He can’t even manage to be surprised.

‘And?’

Sherlock’s staring at him now. ‘It wasn’t like what I thought. I saw you. Over and over again, I saw you. I think. You didn’t look like you in most of it. But it was you. And… I was there with you. Except here, wherever I was, I wasn’t. You were on your own.’

I was on my own, he thinks. More on my own than I ever knew it was possible to be. He rests a hand on Sherlock’s bare chest. Feels the strong, living rhythm of his heart.

‘And there were bees. That was strange. Everywhere I looked, there were bees. They seemed to like you. I spoke to them.’

He touches Sherlock’s jaw. The pulse running there, blood hot and steady as time.

‘I tried finding you. Again and again, I tried finding you. I could see you and I couldn’t find my way back.’ A pause. ‘In the end… in the end, I was yelling.’

‘Mycroft said-’

‘Mycroft says too much,’ and he brushes the thought away like a fly. ‘I was alive when I was yelling at him. I do know the difference. Mrs Hudson will probably have to put up with a few more broken nights’ sleep, I’m afraid though.

‘I was yelling when I was dead, that was the difference. At you, at all the times I could see myself with you. Over and over. That they had something I wasn’t allowed to have anymore.’

A strange afterlife, John thinks. Sherlock’s hands are chilled. The pulse in his wrist is so fragile, so precious.

‘Some of them heard me,’ Sherlock states. ‘They tried… the ones that were you and me. They tried to help us. They did things. And I came round on the floor coughing up blood and alive again and not very happy about it.’

John just looks at Sherlock for a moment. At the openness of his face, the acceptance and affection in every line of him. He thinks, if I had a home, it would look like you, and then realises that he does.

‘You came back. That’s all that matters.’

A quick, sharp nod. Black hair drifting around like a cloud. John wants to get his hands in it, to braid and twine it with every fragment of his soul so they’ll never be parted again.

‘I did.’

‘It doesn’t matter how,’ John lies. He knows, as he says it, that they’ll both think about this for the rest of their lives. Sherlock had liked fairy stories and John had liked dreams, and they’d both had to grow up and put them away. But they get a rest of their lives now, and maybe that’s enough.

‘I love you, Sherlock,’ and it’s an echo; they both say it at the same time.

‘I love you, Sherlock / John / Holmes / Watson,’ and he thinks, for a moment, that he hears a hundred other voices saying it with them. A hundred names in place of theirs, but meaning the same people, the same love. Him and Sherlock, over and over again, in places he doesn’t know and times he can’t imagine but always here, here with each other.

‘I’ll always love you.’

He pulls Sherlock against him, and shuts out all the rest of the worlds and times with a kiss.