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Driving rain, air heavy with pollution. Timid sunlight, serpentine streets.
John Watson pushes himself to be another nobody amongst many, in a London that he knows he’ll eventually recognise as his home. He walks through its parks with his back too straight and he tries to pass unnoticed, to be just one more.
(Still, he feels as useless as a piece of old furniture, rotting in the corner. Exhaustion had sunk into him in Afghanistan, but these days, his hand shakes and the pain in his leg is so intense that sometimes he stops breathing for minutes at a time.
Who can he trust when his own mind can’t tell a real wound from a fake?
He’s always tired these days, to be honest. In the war, there were times when he’d have a moment of rest and he could be still - the collar of his fatigues rigid with his sweat and the sand rough between his fingers, looking forward as if reality had no bearing on him.
Now, he spends hours staring at a fixed point on the wall, as if it could answer him, as if it could look back.
***
It’s not long before he runs into an old friend, though it does take a moment for John to recognise him. As they talk, John begins to realise that conversation must be an acquired skill, one that can wither with disuse.
His friend introduces him to the man in the laboratory, the man with the unusual features and overly pale, penetrating eyes. The man says “army doctor” after looking at him for maybe fifteen seconds.
John blinks, and his lungs fill with new air.
Maybe - just maybe (though he can’t be completely sure), there’s something in his throat that begins to take form when that complete stranger gives him directions to the new flat, like someone who’s just hopped off the pages of an adventure novel - that might be the moment when John comes back to life.
***
“So, how do you make a living?”
“I’m an actor.”
Makes sense, John thinks. Something about Sherlock shouts that he could be anyone he wants at will. That if he just put in the effort, he could play any character in the universe.
He seems like he’s part of a select group whose stories will survive the passing of time, staying the same or changing to suit the time and place (stories that evolve in the mouths of others as they are told; respected or loathed, loved or feared). The ones that are never forgotten.
Nobody’s ever written so much as a line about him, and yet Sherlock Holmes already feels like a legend.
And, as it happens, John likes to write.
***
They live like fugitives, no permanent residence. The change is drastic enough to be welcome.
“Speed up.”
They run through cobblestone streets, hoping to lose themselves inside the night time fog, effective as smoke and mirrors in the hands of a skilled wizard. The suburbs can be useful, just like their residents.
***
“I want the human race to be able to rule itself again. Our fates shouldn’t be governed by these creatures. If you want to call me a Restorationist, demonise me and try to track me down to organise a public hanging, well, go ahead.”
They are sitting in front of the heat of the fire, pins and needles racing through their muscles and settling comfortably in.
John speaks with an expression of tranquillity, of one who has seen horror up close. His shoulder has finally stopped hurting, but his leg still gives him trouble. Sherlock knows this because of the non-uniform way he distributes his weight. The pain may not be real, it may lack a physical cause, but it tortures him night and day.
Yet somehow, he never falls behind when he’s running after Sherlock.
***
“You’re a doctor, John, and I fear you’ve not only healed men. Certainly you’ve healed stomachs disfigured by shrapnel, but you’ve also had to stitch up organs with unpronounceable names, because that’s what your profession requires of you. And although you may suffer an intermittent tremor in your left hand, I’m willing to assume that in front of a possible patient, your pulse would be perfectly stable.”
John breathes, eyes fixed on the dark London street on the other side of the window. If he had his cane, he’d be twisting it in his hands, just to keep busy, but he keeps forgetting it in the entrance of the room he’s renting. And Sherlock is right. Despite the fact that John has just met him, he’s fairly certain that Sherlock’s deductions are rarely off the mark.
(And John is fascinated by those deductions, by the way Sherlock observes. He sees straight through the curtains of people’s lives, the passage of time, and human motivation, until he arrives at the facts. John has never experienced anything like it.)
Their political views are almost identical, too. And it’s not just that: there’s something about Sherlock that smells like danger, something that makes John seriously consider how difficult it would be to deny him anything (within the bounds of reason) if he only just asked.
Before he speaks, he turns so that John can see his face, his strange features and overabundance of angles and his colourless grey eyes.
“I have the feeling that we’re not talking about patients here.”
As Sherlock may have already observed, honesty is a trait that defines John Watson. He gestures to indicate how meaningless it would to pursue that train of thought.
“Minor difference. You should probably move in tomorrow.”
They both know that the only possible answer, and not just to this, is yes.
***
It’s just as easy to fool a Royal as any human being – you don’t need any great powers of deduction to see that. The temptation of fresh meat, this naïve way people talk, as if innocence is what makes the prince of Bohemia follow them, impatiently, to that cheap guesthouse in Shoreditch.
Finding the face on that repugnant body is as natural a thing as breathing, and that says a lot about Sherlock’s talents.
***
John is waiting for him there, with his knives.
Sherlock leans against the door and observes the grotesque spectacle, this creature that human intellect could never begin to comprehend, with its torso forced open, suffering there on the floor. The long incisions (into what must be the equivalent of the human thoracic cavity) reveal ribs with serrated edges. The room is dark, but he can see that John is up to his forearms in entrails, staining his skin different shades of green and bilious yellow.
It really would stand out in the light of day.
Through it all, Sherlock smokes, filling the room up with fumes. He smokes tirelessly until his lips are dry and he feels like his veins are full of poison. He’d be lying if he said he didn’t enjoy it, despite the cruelty of the procedure.
He observes the innate talent of John’s precise movements, how he is on his knees on the floor but doesn’t seem to feel even the slightest twinge of pain, his leg not daring to object. The air smells putrid and it’s almost too much to bear, but it doesn’t seem to bother John.
Sherlock has already noted that the doctor is more than used to working under pressure, but now more than ever, it is evident that it is how he works best.
When John has finished extracting its hearts, the body stops moving and the room falls silent, free of the sounds of its inhuman suffocation and the scraping of its extremities across the carpeted floor. The only sound is the doctor’s breathing, which Sherlock’s ears filter out in favour of the pulse that roars in his veins, the adrenaline coursing through his system.
Sherlock can’t help but smile, one of those smiles that reaches all the way to his eyes and transforms his expression almost completely. He empties the ash from his pipe into the chimney in one movement.
“Excellent work.”
***
Of course it is. But royalty or no, blood is still blood, and there’s too much for John’s tastes.
***
Afterwards, John rises without difficulty and makes his way to the wash basin in the corner of the room. It’s completely dark, but he catches sight of his reflection in the water, illuminated by the red light streaming in through the window.
They’re far from the pale light of the moon, which now only exists in the oldest books, the ones that cause trouble if found hidden beneath your mattress, the ones that the authorities order to be burned.
He scrubs his arms with a warm flannel until the water changes colour. In an unsolicited act of kindness, Sherlock draws near to replace it and pours him more from a nearby pitcher so that he can scrape out the filth accumulated under his nails. All of Sherlock’s attention is concentrated on him, and it should be overwhelming, but instead John finds that his chest is filled with a sense of peace.
It’s unsettling, this lack of guilt. He takes care washing the curves of his scalpels and returns them to their place in his bag.
He’ll have to burn the shirt he was wearing. It would be impossible to get these stains out.
***
Sherlock’s fingers sink into the still-warm breast of the cadaver like an artist’s brushes into paint, his features composed and curls hiding his eyes, stained orange by the light. He repeats this process a few times, tracing the letters R-A-C-H-E on the nondescript yellow wallpaper. Next to the lifeless body, it can be read as a signature, or maybe as a warning.
The price of vengeance must be claimed in blood.
***
There are nightmares, dreams of things that no human mind could begin to describe. Things that are fundamentally illogical, better wrapped up in the darkness of mystery than thrust upon a group of soldiers in the heat of battle.
His shoulder hurts and his leg aches. In his first days back in London, he suffers violent, delirious fevers. After several weeks in hospital and batteries of tests, they conclude that his leg is a lost cause. John is partially convinced that being exposed to those monsters has a lot to do with it.
The saying might go “Time heals all wounds,” but there are many nights John has woken up in a disaster of bedclothes, with his eyes stinging and throat closed so that it hurts to swallow. Sometimes, he thinks he can hear the echoes of the indecipherable language of the Old Ones.
He wishes he hadn’t cried out; he doesn’t live alone anymore.
But considering the way the rest of them come back (the sickening sound of straightjackets being buttoned, the shouts that resonate through the corridors and follow them even into sleep), John can’t say that he feels entirely unlucky.
***
Sherlock fills his pipe methodically. The whole length of him is stretched along the sofa, still dressed but with his feet bare and pale against the leather. The air is filled with the intense, stinging odour of black tobacco, and John knits his brows as he crosses the room in search of the kettle, stashed away in the kitchen between flasks and jars filled with bits of flesh of dubious origin in varying states of decomposition. Before lighting it, he looks inside, just in case.
“You smoke too much.”
“If there was a faster way of absorbing nicotine, I’d do that.”
Without thinking, John makes two cups by habit, and he sets one on the low table in front of the sofa. He sits and blows on the steam rising up from his.
“A pair of detectives is following us. Well, just one detective; the other is a military man, though he’s well trained. They’ve been to see the queen.”
Maybe the most appropriate tone for this statement would have been alarm, or worry, but John can only hear impatience, and the deep sense of excitement the chase seems to produce in Sherlock. On his face is a smile of satisfaction that appears rarely, only when the game is sufficiently complex.
Only when it’s really getting fun.
***
His hand is shaking again today.
He’s lying in his uncomfortable bed with his eyes trained on it, as if he could intimidate it into stopping. The sound of footsteps on the creaky wood of the floor below make him check that his scalpel is indeed stashed beneath the pillow, gleaming and well sharpened.
His revolver’s nearby as well.
Going by the theatre times, it has to be Sherlock – there’s no doubt – but one can never be too careful these days.
Tonight’s play is in three acts. Actually, one of the pieces is from John’s own hands, written on his typewriter (whose keys make a horrible racket and are always too cold, regardless of the season). It’s something to satisfy the Queen-loving masses, and the various Royals who are in the habit of attending these productions in search of entertainment, in search of prey in the darkest parts of London.
It’s almost fun, to show that kind of devotion in such a convincing form. Sherlock has told him repeatedly that he is completely incapable of lying, that his face is an open book. But paper is different, he supposes; paper can lie but still be honest in the messages hidden between its lines, in the codes that can only be found by those who bother to look. Or, at least the paper in his stories can.
Sherlock has come up with a few new special effects, after three nights of blowing things up in the kitchen and opening the windows two at a time to keep from being drowned in the harmful fumes. Just the usual.
John’s gotten used to seeing him transform into a different person every night, watching from the farthest seats that the stalls have to offer. Like his deductions, Sherlock is magnificent. Afterwards, in the bustle of the dressing room, as he takes off his make-up in front of the dirty and poorly lit mirrors, John tells him so without sparing a detail.
(He clearly thinks that John doesn’t notice, but Sherlock receives the praise like he’s never been complimented in his life, his face a mixture of surprise and poorly hidden satisfaction.)
There is a knock on the door, which opens without waiting for an answer.
“I knew you wouldn’t be sleeping,” says Sherlock, stepping over the threshold, and it’s almost like he’s asking permission. His latent energy is evident in all the muscles of his body, in the coat that covers him with as much drama as a magician’s cape. “They loved your story. The detective did too.”
John’s body feels heavy, and he doesn’t want to move from his place on the bed.
“That’s great.”
There must be something in his voice that stops Sherlock in his tracks, though John can’t say what it might be. Now he can feel Sherlock’s eyes piercing him like a pair of fishhooks.
“It’s time to go ahead with the plan. Rest while you can.”
That Sherlock wouldn’t notice the tremor is too much to ask. John raises his hand to motion him away and it continues shaking like a leaf.
Sherlock draws toward the edge of the bed, his shadow falling to hide John’s face. He looks like he wants to come closer, but doubts himself. It’s strange to see him doubt, an anomaly among all his perfectly composed actions.
No, John reminds himself, they don’t do these kinds of things (these “sentimental” things), and he allows his hand to fall back to the bed. Sherlock seems to awake from a trance, and when he looks back at John, he gestures at a point above his own shoulder.
“I’ll be down below.”
***
Once John has almost dropped off from pure exhaustion, with his eyelids drawing closed as if they weighed tonnes, a hand covers his as if its presence alone could stop the shaking.
It can’t be anyone else, and that’s why his reflex to disembowel whoever has snuck into his bed is completely absent, and that scares John. He feels breath on his neck, silent but warm, the weight of an arm moving above his belt to get closer to him. Sherlock’s curls tickle the nape of his neck.
His wrist spasms like it’s going to shake apart, but he sleeps like he hasn’t in years.
***
The next day, Sherlock gives one of his Irregulars a letter for the detective, signed “Sherry Vernet.” Sherlock didn’t bother to give John this name when they first met, though John couldn’t say why.
That night, while patrols run tirelessly through the streets, they’re waiting for their chance to slip out of a place that is best described as a dark dump. It’s located above a restaurant that seems a bit less than reputable, but has an excellent view of the street in the front. The proprietor has a thick Italian accent and seems to feel some kind of debt towards Sherlock, like so many other people in these seedy parts of town.
When they come in, there’s a sealed envelope waiting for them on the only table in the room. Sherlock, with victory still pounding in his bloodstream, removes one of his gloves to appreciate the texture of the paper under his fingers, relishing the elegant calligraphy in the curves of “S. Holmes and Dr. J. Watson.”
“Is it from Mycroft?” asks John, unbuttoning his jacket.
“Who else?” Sherlock’s scowl says it loud and clear.
Sherlock opens the letter, and after scanning it quickly, deposits it in the middle of the table. Watching the way the flames begin to consume the paper from one corner, reducing it to ash within seconds, John manages to catch something that looks like, “Come home.”
“He’s worried, Sherlock.”
Sherlock’s expression hardens, turning severe at the sound of John’s words.
“This is just another one of his games. Sometimes I think you forget that he works for the government. Mycroft is always on the side with better odds, John. He won’t have it any other way.”
This is one of the few times that Sherlock has admitted how unlikely it is that they’ll be able to change things. But history books show that many revolutions have seemed unlikely at first, or so John likes to think.
(If there’s bitterness in Sherlock’s voice, if in the old embers of deception there lies a greasy layer of contempt, John is too much of a gentleman to comment on it.)
“You forget that he’s helped us before.”
Mycroft likes to keep the pressure on; that much is true.
“Against my will. Although I suppose that there are a few things I should be grateful for.’
When they open the wardrobe in the corner, they find a suitcase packed with their respective belongings and, resting just above it, the small black case where Sherlock keeps his violin.
***
John takes off his shoes as he listens to the dissonant scales that Sherlock’s fingers drag from the instrument, shifting languidly from string to string. Beneath it all, he can hear the sounds of the horse-drawn carriages through the paved floor, a drunk singing at the top of his voice as he staggers past.
The tension beneath his fingertips is familiar to Sherlock, the elastic hardness a comforting pressure. For a moment, it’s almost like being back at the flat, his mind far away but his fingers in constant motion.
He lays the violin down on his knee.
“Come to bed with me, John.”
Sherlock’s voice isn’t as moderated or flat as he would have liked; it starts off strong and fades when he finds himself breathless. Without his permission, a shiver seeps down John’s spinal column.
Sherlock sits down beside John soundlessly, far enough away not to pressure him, to be ready to back off without trouble if John says no.
He doesn’t realise that he’s staring at the nape of his neck (the smooth skin he can just barely see between his fair hair and the neckline of his shirt) until John turns to look at him. There’s something in his eyes, brown from afar but blue if you’d just take the trouble to look, that Sherlock can’t quite name.
“That would be very illegal.”
***
“Slow down.”
Sherlock nods with his lips fixed to the skin of John’s inner thigh, curls eddying with sweat. He has two fingers in him up to the first knuckle, moving in tight circles. All the while he’s humming a melody that John recognises distantly, and the vibration seems to climb all the way down to his toes. It’s rare to see Sherlock so calm, so focussed.
The speed doesn’t seem to worry him. John squeezes his eyes shut and runs his fingers over Sherlock’s nape and his black hair, humid at its roots, trapping his fingers like vines.
This is not the time to feel uncertain, thinks Sherlock. He’s never done this before, but it’s sex, simple and carnal, and it’s not going to be a problem.
And it’s not - not at all. When he can move three of his fingers easily enough and John’s breathing turns heavy, he rises up to kiss his forehead, acting on some unknown impulse. He moves downwards to John’s closed eyelids, the blonde lashes casting odd shadows in the half-light, and arrives at his lips. He holds him down with one hand to get closer, thumb against his cheek, warm to the touch.
This is illogical; it makes no sense. Sherlock’s hands move down again, completely beyond his control, as if they’ve acquired free will; they ghost over John’s ribs and nipples, lungs expanding beneath bone, and stop below the belt.
“Should we...?”
John’s the one who says it, but it comes out muffled because Sherlock goes on kissing the wet corner of his mouth. He opens his eyes again and catches sight of John’s shoulder, the circle of red tissue and its uneven edges.
John feels the impulse to tell him everything, but he decides not to. Sherlock can read his scar as if the words were tattooed on his skin, laying it out for him step by step.
Something steals John’s breath when Sherlock’s fingertips pass over it, infinitely careful. He feels the blood rise to the surface, to the boundaries of his epidermis, as if it were trying to boil its way out of his body.
“We should.”
***
He can’t stop looking. In the low light of the oil lamps, John’s features are transformed: his eyes close and his brow knits, a stifled moan escapes his lips, swollen from kissing.
He almost doesn’t register the moment when this itch gives over to pleasure, when they’re fit perfectly together, and John tells him to go faster. He comes with his hand on his cock and Sherlock’s name burnt into his throat.
Sherlock can’t help but follow, so deep and hot that it’s almost obscene, surprised by the pleasure of the spasms running through John’s body.
A moment later, John lets his head fall to Sherlock’s neck, the skin as soft as he’d imagined, with his legs trembling and still wrapped around his hips.
***
“Will we see them again?”
“Hmm?”
They’re still in bed, but sunlight is starting to trickle through the curtains. It’s a bad idea to delay their departure, but John doesn’t mind if they spend a bit longer here, with Sherlock clinging to his back and the sheets guarding them from the cold.
What they’ve done, what they’ve become - it doesn’t change anything and it changes everything. It’s a mark on both their records, like a wound made up of punctures, yielding one after another to the pressure. A mark printed on their skin, carved into their bones.
“Moriarty.”
The name seems to shake Sherlock out of it all.
“It’s unavoidable, John.”
Though his voice is raspy with sleep, John can’t help but laugh a bit - the same inappropriate giggle that threatens to overtake them both when they pass unnoticed through highly suspicious situations.
“We probably ought to avoid it, though.”
Sherlock rests his chin on John’s shoulder and lets himself laugh as well. To be so well matched…
***
Before they leave London, they spend five more minutes in bed.