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ravenI have spent my long weekend alternatively avoiding the jubilee brouhaha, having violent migraine-and-anxiety, and writing this. On the whole it hasn't been that bad.
This is a story about a murder, someone being shot (see warnings below), and about flavours of romance, but mostly, it's about cities, people and how they become each other. Nothing at all like something I would write, then.forthwritten and ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
shimgray improved a first draft of this; troyswann greatly improved a second! Thank you all three very much.
fic:: and the rivers shall give up their dead
by Raven
10,000w, Sherlock (BBC), John, Sherlock, and Mary Morstan. John is shot; Sherlock is searching; the rivers of London endure.
warnings: (skip) John is shot, and there is some more violence offscreen, and the emotional consequences of that. Please let me know if you would like further detail.
A large, perfectly-formed drop of water lands on the back of John's neck. He feels it progress all the way down, under the cotton of his T-shirt into the small of his back. "Urgh."
"Shut up, John," Sherlock murmurs. "Nathan Garrideb…"
"Ridiculous name." John wonders why they're whispering. Even if they weren't entirely alone here in this grimy, dank, green-slimed hell of a Soho basement, there's that low hollow cacophony of echoes to cover their voices. London, John thinks, is both above and below: the grey October evening at street-level above and the dripping water carrying down to the sewers and built-over tenements and tunnels down into the artesian wells and foundations. Layer upon layer, down and down.
"Nathan Garrideb never goes out. That's the key to it. He never leaves this house. So if this long-lost brother of his has finally got… hush."
John isn't speaking, isn't moving, his right hand paused on the way to his coat pocket.
"Sherlock Holmes," comes the voice out of the darkness, and through the miasma of spores and low light, a figure emerges. They hear the sound of feet kicking through the last traces of floodwater on the floor, they see the torchlight gleam in the puddles. "And his blogger! Well, boys, we're beat."
"Really," Sherlock breathes, stepping forwards. John's at his heels, moving with more caution. Other figures are dimly visible behind now, seemingly risen from the tunnels below.
"Oh, yes," says the man in the shadow, raises his gun and fires.
The shot is indescribably loud in that enclosed space, ringing and echoing and reverberating and jarring all around John's skull, so the blossoming of fire in his leg goes unnoticed for a very brief, blessed moment, and then he's on the ground in the muck, the water slopping unpleasantly up to the level of his mouth and nose.
It's strange, he thinks, blurrily, how wet it all sounds: the splashing in the silt and murk, the damp half-crunch of bone.
*
"Next of kin, Mr. Watson." It's a quick staccato voice somewhere near his left ear. John was dreaming: there was water in the dream, and an awful sensation of being sucked down by the ground beneath him; there was also warmth, as though someone were holding him. A quick assessment yields the fact he's lying on scratchy clean sheets. They aren't warm, but they're not damp.
"Doctor," he gets out. "And – he's, he's here." Surely, John thinks, if he has been admitted to Barts – and it must be Barts, it smells like Barts, all top notes of disinfectant and base notes of pine – then Sherlock is here too, somewhere.
"Your next of kin is here, Dr. Watson," says the staccato voice. From the sound of her John pictures her clearly, a woman in grim starched blue, the obligatory upside-down pocket watch.
And then the curtains are pulled back, another voice is saying, "John, they called me, I came as fast as I could, John…"
"Oh, look," John says, very slowly, "I actually did get shot in the leg" – and Harry bursts into tears.
*
There's morphine involved, he's unsurprised to learn. Being admitted at the hospital that he works for, at least nominally, has the downside of another set of colleagues who've not so much seen him naked as cut him out of his clothes and sluiced off the blood and green slime, but it turns out his attending registrar is a woman he only knows by sight. It could be worse. Dr. Francis, says her name-badge. "Call me Carmen," says her voice from behind the curtain.
Nurses surround him. Molly visits at some point, he thinks. Lestrade comes to take a statement from him. Harry yells, calls him a moron and a fucking idiot and a total shit, and kisses his forehead, and brings him cups of water. "You're lucky to be alive, John," Lestrade tells him briskly, when he's sat down with his pen.
"I can't make a statement," John says. "I missed it."
Lestrade doesn't seem to be listening. "If the guy had aimed a little higher, it would have been your heart."
"That's always true," John says, a little confused. "It's always a close call, being shot."
Lestrade regards him with an unreadable expression. "Feel better, John," he says, after a while. "I'll be back."
"There were drugs," Harry tells him, helping him drink from the cup. "Masses of them, in that basement, hidden away. Garrideb was in the way, that was why they got rid of him. Sherlock was right. And there was…"
"Sherlock," John begins, rolling over damply, "Sherlock, where…"
But she's gone, the sky is darker behind the muslin curtains and John thinks he might have fallen asleep in the middle. Pain; morphine. He's gone for a while, adrift.
*
Early in the morning, John wakes up to sun. The light feathers in along the edges of the window and he can hear the sounds of lunch being served, people muttering about the virtues of shepherd's pie as opposed to moussaka. Saturday food, he thinks, and sits up in bed, slowly, letting his body acclimatise to the movement. When he went down to the basement with Sherlock, wearing his steel toe-capped boots and packing his illegally-held gun, it was Thursday night.
Slowly, he reaches out towards his leg. It wasn't a flesh wound, but it wasn't going to kill him. It hurts but he can move it: only pain, then, he thinks, only healing.
"Welcome back." There's a smile in that voice, and John turns his head.
"Dr. Francis."
"Please, call me Carmen." She sits down beside her bed, elegantly straight-backed despite the horrible orange vinyl chair. John has a great deal of experience of this situation from the other side. "What…"
"You were shot in the leg and by all accounts you were very lucky. It was almost what you might call a graze. The bullet passed through, so you've got an exit wound, but everything's cleaned up and healing. In time and with some physical therapy you'll be right as rain."
John nods. It's what he thought.
"Feeling better?" she asks.
"Yes," John decides, giving it all due consideration. "Much better. Can I…"
"Self-discharge? Please don't, Doctor." She's giving him a knowing smile. "Give it time, please. At least until the sun is entirely up. Try not to forget that you've been shot."
"I'm hardly likely to," John murmurs.
"Quite." Dr. Francis is fixing him with a particular stare that John distrusts. She glances down at her clipboard, then looks up. "Dr. Watson, it says here that you have been previously diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. Following…"
"Having been shot, yes," John starts, but she waves him away.
"I merely mention it, without necessarily…"
"I manage it," John says. "I have my own methods of managing it."
"Doesn't everyone?" Another knowing smile. "Just humour me, Doctor." She writes something on her prescription pad and hands it to him. John folds it up and doesn't look at it, defiantly; that doesn't disturb her smile.
"Look after yourself, John," she says, gently, and leaves him be, for a time.
In the afternoon, Harry brings him some clothes, helps him get into them, and he wants to tell her he's fed up of being fussed over; he has some crutches on loan that he can discard for his cane later, and he's written down when he has to turn up for his physical therapy appointments. But she wouldn't listen, anyway, and when she calls for a taxi and rides in it with him back to 221B, he's suddenly tired out and grateful. She gets him settled on the sofa and has a word with Mrs Hudson before she leaves, and the comfortable surroundings of the flat are a relief.
*
Sherlock's not home. John hobbles around the flat until he finds a pizza delivery menu and orders something with pepperoni that Sherlock would have hated. He eats it slowly, watching a documentary about phone tapping on BBC1, and is startled by the appearance of Sherlock, hair standing on end and smelling faintly of chlorine, and subsequent disappearance into the bathroom behind a slammed door.
"Hi," John says, to thin air.
"What's that, dear?" Mrs. Hudson asks. She's come up to take back some sellotape Sherlock borrowed. "Are you going to eat that?"
John shrugs and waves a hand. "Help yourself."
Before she starts off down the stairs with her sellotape and pizza slice, though, he can't help himself. "Mrs. Hudson, I don't suppose you know why Sherlock's avoiding me, do you?"
"I wouldn't know anything about that, dear."
She's gone, and John regrets not giving her the whole box to take down with her. He reaches for a crutch and limps over to the kitchen for his painkillers. While he's standing there, running water from the tap into a glass, he hears the bathroom door open and then the sound of Sherlock disappearing into his own room. John sighs. He's about to go back over to the sofa when he remembers the window is still open and will probably let the rain in overnight. As he's closing it, a pigeon flutters past in the murk beyond the glass. "Don't suppose you know, either?" he asks it, and groans at himself. "Someone ought to know," he tells the empty air in the room. "Something happened in that bloody basement and Lestrade thinks it'll help to take a statement from me."
Later he'll think it's the opiates that are making him talk to himself. He's half-gone into sleep before he manages to swing his legs up onto the sofa. He dreams of white, sylph-like figures dancing, intertwining, merging, swallowed by a rising tide. He's sleeping so deeply that waking up to cool air against his face is an almost nauseating transition, undercut by distant, atonal music drifting in from somewhere. The window, he thinks, hand coming up to his face, but he closed that.
"I opened it again."
John opens his eyes and doesn't ask how Sherlock knew what he was thinking. The quality of the light in the room hasn't changed, so he can't have been lying here for too long, but nevertheless, Sherlock seems to have been settled in an armchair for some time, long legs drawn up under him, his violin under his chin. As John watches he begins playing again, a quiet mournful air that John doesn't recognise. The rhythm seems familiar, though, and he remembers the dream: the balletic figures, swaying, swaying.
"You should go to bed," Sherlock says, abruptly.
John nods. Sherlock raises his bow and picks up where he left off, and John starts the long, tiring process of getting up. Suddenly, there's a squawk of strings: a missed note. Then the sound of Sherlock's teeth coming firmly together with exasperation. John looks more carefully and notices the white gauze on Sherlock's left hand, coming untied but clearly a professional job.
John thinks about opening his mouth to ask, Sherlock, what happened in that basement? But he doesn't. He goes to his room, leaning on one crutch, and sits carefully down on his bed. Something rustles as he does, and he pulls a screwed-up piece of paper from his back pocket, the crumpled prescription.
He opens it to the dotted line. Where the name of the drug ought to be printed, she's written in block capitals "LOOK AFTER YOURSELF", and, smaller: "10mg daily".
He laughs, and lays himself down to sleep.
*
Lestrade comes round the next morning. Sherlock's gone out again and John isn't feeling well. His next set of dreams were just as vivid but much more familiar, battlefields in bright light, and he woke in the morning with a sensation of anxiety uncoiling within him like a snake. He's trying to keep it at bay by pottering, putting his papers in order, staring at an empty WordPress window, ostentatiously tidying away Sherlock's latest mess. It helps and it doesn't.
"How're you feeling?" Lestrade asks, curiously, as he gets his own tea, working his way around the mess in the flat without seeming to see it.
"Like shit." John pulls a hand through his hair. "Can we get on with this so I can go back to feeling like shit, please?"
Lestrade only takes a moment before he goes on. He's in the Met, John decides; he's seen PTSD before. "Yeah, well, I think you remember I wanted to get a statement from you." He pauses. "Do you remember? You were a bit away with the fairies."
John actually smiles. "Yes, I remember. I don't know if I told you then, but honestly, I can't tell you a thing, I got knocked out straight off. You should get a statement from Sherlock. Or the guy in the shadows, whoever he was."
"Christ." Lestrade's looking at him with something approaching shock. "You don't know, do you?"
"Know what?" John stares at him.
"I thought for sure Sherlock must have told you. I didn't think…"
"Told me what, for fuck's sake?" John's getting irritated, leaning forward in some ridiculous attempt to read Lestrade's mind.
"Evans," Lestrade says. "The bloke, the ringleader. Sherlock was right, there was something in that damn basement they were after. Ten kilos of methamphetamine, well wrapped up against all that water, and all the kit to start up a lab down there."
John whistles and leans back in his chair. "But there was something else," he says after a pause.
Lestrade's looking at him strangely. "Sherlock did tell you."
John shakes his head. "No. But I don't see him, he's out all the time. He's looking for something and I don't know what."
Lestrade nods, slowly. "Yeah, well. He told us – how he knew I dunno, I couldn't see anything, but then our lot from forensics went down and said the same thing. There was a body in the basement. Hadn't been there long, not more than an hour or so, and the marks showed it'd been dragged off."
"How?" John asks. "We were right there, even if it was pretty dark. I mean, we would have seen someone dragging away a corpse. They would have had to get it past us to the stairs."
"Right." Lestrade nods. "Sherlock told us there would be a trapdoor into the pipes below. Guess what."
"He was right." John leans back in his chair and thinks about that. "Why not have a go at the guy, then?" he asks. "Evans? Presumably you've got him in a cell somewhere?"
Lestrade looks at him with that unreadable expression once more. "Evans isn't talking to anyone, John. After he shot you Sherlock tried to beat him to death with the closest thing to hand. My men, they pulled him off before he quite got to killing the guy, but the trial date's indefinitely postponed."
John takes a moment to breathe, in and out, in and out, steady as the rain on the window. "What was the nearest thing to hand?"
Lestrade sighs. "It was a fire extinguisher, John. Are you happy for me to record you for your statement, or would you rather draft it?"
John presses play on the little device, and Lestrade says: "State your name for the record."
*
Last week, before Nathan Garrideb and his long-lost brother, John finally got around to doing something he'd meant to do for a while and went to join the local library. The librarian was pretty, with sweetness in her eyes and the lines of her face, and he enjoyed talking to her. She'd asked him if he were new to the area, and he'd told her the truth, a little of it. By the time he took back his driving licence, utility bill and brand new library card, they'd arranged to meet again, in a little Indian restaurant not far from Baker Street. A Thursday evening, so it wouldn't be too busy.
Now, staring at the mirror, John considers cancelling. But 221B seems all gloom to him this evening, with the rain still streaking down the windows, and Sherlock closeted away with a gigantic pinboard he got from somewhere, covered in torn maps and labels that say things like "Westbourne" and "Wandle". A muffled thump from the room next door makes up his mind. Grabbing his coat, phone and keys, he makes his way slowly down the stairs. He thinks about a taxi, but decides he can just about trust his crutches in the rain.
Mary's there when he arrives at the restaurant, her smile as bright as he remembers. "John! Over here! My God, what happened to you?"
"It's a long story," he tells her as he sits down in the seat opposite her, propping the crutches up against the wall. He thinks he'll be all right with just the cane in the next day or two. Looking around him, he's glad the restaurant is as quiet as they'd predicted. "I could tell it to you, if you like, but I actually can't remember a lot of it."
Mary smiles, and passes him his menu. "Sounds very dramatic."
"It was." John lays it down. "I always seem to have the same thing when I come in here. Butter chicken and chapattis. How about you?"
"Similar. Aloo saag." She lays her own menu down. "You're that John Watson, aren't you? The one who gets in the papers sometimes? I thought I recognised you the other day, but it's a common name and I didn't quite like to ask."
John laughs. "Yes, I do live with Sherlock Holmes, the world's only consulting detective, and he is the reason I'm walking around like Tiny Tim. Well, it's not his fault, entirely, but let's blame him anyway."
She's smiling again as the waiter takes their order. "What do you really do, then?"
He smiles back, knowing exactly what she means. "I'm an army doctor. I was wandering around doing not much of anything when I met Sherlock, though. I'm hoping to go back to civilian practice at some point. And you?"
"Not much of a detective, are you?" She laughs. "Considering where you met me."
Sometimes it happens that way: something inside his head subconsciously chews over data, turning it over and over in echo of Sherlock's methods, but his conscious mind needs to work on it, to give roots to the fruit of information. "You had your coat on to leave," he says, slowly, "but it was the middle of the day. It's a part-time job."
"I'm a historian," she says, smiling at him. "Doesn't quite pay the bills, so I do Wednesdays and Thursdays at the library."
"What's your area?" he asks.
"London," she says, a little dreamily. "Actually, I'm writing a book about disused Underground stations."
"Oh." John's surprised, for some reason; he'd heard "historian" in her bright, bird-like voice and pictured Regency romances or the wives of Henry VIII. He privately berates himself for sexist thinking. "What about them?"
"How they got to be that way, mostly. It's fascinating stuff. All these places, these tunnels and layers, hidden hundreds of metres below our feet. And old. Baker Street station, for example. It's so ordinary-looking. But it's one of the oldest stations on the Underground. It's been in continuous operation for a hundred and fifty years. It's older than the phonograph and the Suez Canal and The Origin of Species. I love London because it's full of these massive human wonders, these things that people, they just don't stop to look at. People don't look at the world around them, I don't understand it, I've never understood it."
John leans back in his chair, taking in the animation in her face, her hands moving, and smiles. She pauses, her face starting to turn pink.
"Sorry," she says, quickly. "Sorry, I, er, I get like that sometimes. Sorry."
"I liked it," John says, still smiling. "You, ah, you remind me of someone."
"Oh?" She's still pink, but looking more wicked than embarrassed, now.
"Yes," John says. Surprising himself, he reaches out over the table and takes her hand. She doesn't pull away, grinning at him and holding on even when the waiter comes over to cough discreetly and wave the dessert menu.
"My sister's a writer," John says after a while. "Not a historian, though. She writes novels."
"Oh, really? Would I have heard of her?"
"Probably not, unless you enjoy lesbian steampunk alien invasion." John laughs at the expression on Mary's face. "It's in the family, although not the steampunk alien bits, mind you. Our mother is a writer, too."
"And you," Mary says, gently. "I've read your blog."
Strangely, it's the first time John has made that connection between himself and his family, and the thought gives him a warm, clear happiness.
They do consider dessert, but nothing jumps out at either of them, and despite Mary, despite the overwhelming urge he has to stay here much, much longer and get to know her better, John is becoming a little too aware of his own breathing, of the other people around them, of the sense of the world closing in. They get the bill and John pays it over Mary's protests; he says, meaning it, that she can pay next time. And then all the rituals of dinner are over and they're where they started, facing each other across a small space.
"Are you all right?" Mary asks, as he takes a deep breath and places a hand on the edge of the table.
"I'm all right," he tells her, "but I should be getting back. Will you pass me the other crutch?"
She does, their hands brushing again in the process, and they walk out of the restaurant together, in the same direction until the first turn. "It was good to see you again," he says, and means that too. She kisses him on the lips before she sets off down the side-street, and she doesn't look back.
Sherlock is on the sofa when John comes in, surrounded by an oasis of clear space further surrounded by clutter. He lifts his violin as John enters, plays a few bars of something wistful. His eyes are bright. John smiles and limps to his room.
*
The next day mostly consists of physical therapy and John reading the broadsheets cover to cover. By evening he's got fed up, rolled them into a giant ball and thrown them into a corner. Sherlock appears around six, alight with some inner fire. John looks up at the sight of him, surprised; time has slipped by without his quite knowing where it went, and the short daylight has long since drained away from the windows. There's a moment of strangeness: this is the first time, John realises, that they have sat opposite each other, making eye contact, since the night in the basement.
Sherlock seems to come to some sort of conclusion in that brief moment. "Can you go out?"
He gestures impatiently at the view of the street outside. John's not sure if he's indicating the rain, the general clammy chill creeping in from the edge of the window frame, or the quiet streets it allows. There's hardly a single pedestrian out there, and only occasional traffic slicing wetly through the cambered puddles.
John considers. "Yes."
"Then come on." He's bouncing as he picks up his coat and scarf. More sedately, John follows, leaning on his cane.
Out in the street, Sherlock sets out firmly in the direction of the Tube station, and John is surprised they're going far enough for public transport. The rain has an iron permanence about it, and he's relieved to step into the bright lights of the ticket hall at Baker Street. He needs money on his Oyster card, and Sherlock waits for him, still visibly bouncing on the balls of his feet.
"Where are we going?" John murmurs above the whir of the escalator, one step above Sherlock so he's on a level to whisper in his ear.
Sherlock looks at him, wicked and fey. "You can stop them up and forget about them," he whispers, the tunnel lights flickering like shutter-boxes over his face. "You can lose the map and wipe their names out of mind."
"Don't tell me," John says, shrugging, but he follows.
They get out at Farringdon and start walking, the rain driving horizontal in the wind, now, and for a moment John worries that they're going to Barts, that this is some strange kind of intervention, and then relaxes: Sherlock hasn't watched enough television in his life to think of such a thing, and even if he had, Sherlock trusts John with himself.
Down Charterhouse Street, in front of Smithfield Market, Sherlock draws to an abrupt halt. Rain is beating down on windows, building up in the surfaces of drains and gratings. In one fluid movement, Sherlock's on the ground, head propped up on his elbows, water instantly soaking into his coat.
"Sherlock," John begins, and gives in before he's started. Moving slowly, he sits down on the ground beside Sherlock, ignoring the ache from his leg, ignoring the soaking chill. The City has emptied for the evening; John is grateful for the total desertion. They sit there next to a drain cover, wet mad Englishmen out in the pouring rain.
"Wipe their names out of mind," Sherlock murmurs, very softly. "Listen."
At first John hears nothing but the rain and far-off sirens, blurring into distance. It takes him a few moments to recognise the new sound, the deep rumble as though some great force is working its way though the ground beneath his feet.
"In the end," Sherlock says, and John wonders what it is he's quoting, "where a river has been, a river will always be."
John breathes in. "A river? But, the Thames, that's never…"
Sherlock shakes his head. "The River Fleet. You may have heard of the street that was named after it and the industry that was named after that."
"Underground," John murmurs, wonderingly.
"For nearly all of its length," Sherlock informs him. "Highgate to Blackfriars, buried beneath us all."
John nods, and wants to ask, for a moment, what this has to do with a missing corpse, and why Sherlock brought him here at all, but all at once he's too tired. They're both as drenched as they could possibly be; they sit there in their silence and listen to the river.
After a while, Sherlock helps John up, and they walk back to Farringdon, slowly. John is anxious and exhausted and the rain sounds like a conch shell held to his ear, like the blood forced through the culverts and encasement of his own body.
*
"I saw something today," Mary tells him cheerily, "that made me think of you."
"What was that?" John asks, balancing the phone between his shoulder and his ear while he tries to open a new carton of orange juice with both hands. It nearly ends in disaster. He thinks better of it and sets down the carton.
"A poster at the British Library. I'll send you a link to the image, but the text was 'Satan was a lesbian!!!' with three exclamation points."
John snorts, suddenly thankful he isn't drinking from a glass of orange juice at this moment. "I do not write lesbian pulp sci-fi. I merely chase a half-demented consulting detective around London. Much more normal."
"I'd like to meet him someday," Mary says, unperturbed. "Anyway, while I was there I saw they're having an exhibition at the Library from the end of next week. Late opening - do you want to come with me?"
"What's it about?" John asks.
"People and places," Mary says. "And fiction, and how it fits together. To be honest I'm not entirely sure, but I think it might be interesting and there's always a possibility it'll be useful for the book."
John nods, forgetting she can't see him. "I'll come," he says after a moment. He's not sure it's his sort of thing, but he enjoys her company enough to put up with most things. And it's far enough in the future, he realises, that he might be doing better around large groups of people by then. Today a watery sun slipped out from the clouds for a few hours in the morning, and it could have been pathetic fallacy but John found he could go out and return his library books, pick up milk and bread, stop to say hello to the people in the restaurant below. He slept better last night.
"Great, I'll text you," Mary says, happily. "How are you? What are you up to?"
"Waiting for Sherlock to come home, mostly," John says, looking around the eerily-empty flat. Sherlock is on some sort of creepy efficiency drive that has led to the clear space around the sofa getting bigger and bigger until it's almost touching the walls, now. John isn't quite sure what to make of it. On the wall is the big map of London Sherlock has been working on all week: the street map overlaid by the Underground map, each station a coloured dot meticulously stuck on and threaded together with its neighbours, and on top of that, the stripes of blue string, twisted around pins that shift and alter as Sherlock covers more ground. Water flows downhill, John thinks tiredly; if nothing else is true, the rivers will flow into the sea, which means, perhaps, that no matter how long it takes, Sherlock will eventually come home.
"Sounds delightful." Mary chuckles. "I should go. Speak soon, John."
When she's gone, he lays down the phone, gives up on orange juice entirely and goes to settle himself on the sofa. He's been there for a few minutes, leafing through yesterday's Guardian, when the door opens and Sherlock comes in. His eyes narrow at the sight of John, and he seems about to go off to his room when he thinks better of it and sits on the sofa next to him. As usual, he's not quite in concordance with the lines of John's personal space.
"Are you all right?" John asks, after Sherlock has been sitting there for several minutes. "Where have you been all day?"
"Cemeteries." Sherlock leans back against the sofa cushions, pressed up against John with a hand on his forehead. "West Norwood. Kensal Green. Graves and water. And the flowers. Why do people do that?"
"Basic human sentiment, some nonsense like that." John leans back in his turn, surprised by the warmth of Sherlock's body. They settle into the back of the sofa, a little awkwardly, because Sherlock is still wearing his big overcoat, but comfortably. For the first time in a while John is properly calm, and that calm mixed with tiredness mixed with the last of his opiate prescription means he dozes off easily. He's not sure how long they're there, Sherlock sitting up straight against the cushions with John drifting beside him.
"Sherlock," he murmurs very quietly after a while, "where…"
"I'm making tea, John." That must be Sherlock's way of asking if he wants some, points out the part of John's brain that's now wide awake, which is also the part that notices Sherlock is now in the kitchen rummaging in cupboards for mugs. It's the other part, the dazed, lazy hindbrain, that's bereft of warmth, and remembers in evaporating detail the feeling of Sherlock's body against his.
*
Harry's made a sale. "A serialised story, if you can believe it," she tells John happily over the phone. "I had no idea people still did that. Do people still do that? Isn't it all improbably Dickensian? But the point of it is I have an advance, John. An actual, honest-to-God advance. Come and have lunch with me."
John isn't sure when it started being possible for he and Harry to talk for whole minutes at a time without shouting at each other, but he approves of it. They arrange to meet in a café somewhere on Gower Street which John chiefly recalls for its chocolate spinach cake. It's faintly green on the plate, but tastes delicious.
"Much like," he says out loud, "things that come out of our fridge."
Harry chuckles, and tells him about the book. "So, aliens invade."
John laughs. "Of course they do."
"And it turns out while they seem all benevolent gentle let-us-share-our-technology types, they're actually evil slug-like things who want to take over the world. Shut up, John, I never pretended to Anna Karenina. So they do. And people hide out in caves and things, and they keep the knowledge of humanity alive, sort of like word of mouth, and they live close together in these caves…"
"Why do they do that?" John asks. "If they're trying to stay out of sight of the evil mind-control alien things."
Harry considers. "They just do," she says after a moment. "I suppose it's because people can't live apart, really. Well, some people can live in remote cottages in the countryside, I suppose, but people congregate, especially when they're trying to remember who they are."
John sighs, and thinks not for the first time that if Harry really were the sort of writer who produced nothing but tentacles, alien invasions and chisel-jawed heroes to order, as she occasionally pretends to be, she wouldn't have started looking for her inspiration at the base of the bottle. John is smart, practical and methodical; intelligence with sharp edges he leaves to his sister and Sherlock.
"How are you doing, John?" she asks after a moment, sipping her coffee.
"All right," he says. "I'm doing all right. I'll have the cane for a while, yet. But it was a good night's work – did you know they found a meth lab down there?"
Harry nods. "I got some of the sense of it when you were in hospital. What happened to Nathan Garrideb's long-lost brother?"
"He's still long-lost. Poor bloke," John says, realising this for the first time. "It was all a hoax. I mean, they found the meth lab, but God, it must have been a disappointment to him. No other Garridebs."
Harry nods. "You haven't blogged about it yet."
"I will soon," John says, wondering as he says it if it's true. Ordinarily he writes up blog posts as Sherlock's cases wind down, but there's a sense of incompletion about this one, something that hasn't yet been said.
"Sherlock's in love with you," Harry says, as John takes a drink of water. That, he thinks, is a sign of her malicious sense of comic timing, and wonders if this was the point of this lunch, after all, and nothing to do with mind-controlling slugs.
Instead of spraying water everywhere, he puts the glass down and says, "I know." He's concentrating on his breathing again: in, out, in, out, rhythmic as rain.
"Does he know, though?" Harry asks, picking the last of his cake off his plate. It's a habit that drove him mad when they were children.
"I think he's processing it," John says. "I think that's it. I think he's working through it all. How do you know?"
"It was the way he came to see you, or didn't come to see you," Harry says, softly. "He came far enough to see you but not for you to see him. He, he lingered. I'm pretty sure I know what hopelessly-in-love-with-straight-person looks like. I ought to."
"Harry." John breathes in and out again. "I am not. I mean I am not the same as you, but who is, for fuck's sake, everyone comes at this differently and you know that, so I don't know why you…." He stops at the sight of her smile. "Because you enjoy winding me up, Christ."
"God, you're adorable when you're being self-righteously indignant." Harry's smile has real affection in it. "What the hell are you doing about it, John?"
John lets out a breath. "I'm just going on," he says after a while, thinking about how Sherlock still isn't talking to him, not properly, and dragging him through the rain after underground rivers is a very Sherlock thing to do, but there's still that sense of something missing between them now, a constant discord. "Like I always do."
"Yes," Harry says, touching his arm gently. "Like you do. Do you love him, John?"
John shrugs, helplessly, and takes a bite of her sandwich. She lets him.
*
"So," John says very quietly, "tell me about the disused Underground stations of London."
Mary chuckles and stirs beside him, her small hand running delicately along his spine, round to the hollow at the base of his collarbones, then tapping his nose. "If this is your notion of pillow talk, John, it's very peculiar."
John laughs. "So's all of this. So's everything." He waves a hand, an expansive gesture that takes in the whole space. Mary's bedroom would be stark and insipid, florals and Ikea beech, if it weren't for the books and notepads on every surface, and the huge, station-quality Tube map on the wall, hand-amended in purple marker pen.
"Good peculiar or bad peculiar?" She sounds really worried, and John quickly leans back, his hands threading through her hair. He kisses her and it's sweet and easy.
"Good peculiar," he says. "Thank you for taking me out tonight."
"Thank you for coming back with me."
It's a little awkward, but John finds he doesn't mind. One thing living with Sherlock for so long has taught him is how, sometimes, to ask the world to change for him, rather than the other way around. Sherlock breezes through life without regard for gravity or social graces, and in his wake John at least has learned to remember that quite recently he got shot.
Mary said, "Of course we can move carefully around your leg, don't be ridiculous. Although I do quite want to have sex with you, if you don’t mind."
John is feeling quite delighted with everything at the moment.
"Do you really want to know about them?" Mary asks after a while, sounding disbelieving that anyone ever could.
"Yes," John says, stretching luxuriously so the sheets wrap around him. It's a warm night for November, a mugginess in the air beneath the rain.
"There are lots of them," Mary says, still sounding tentative. "Some of them have been disused for seventy years or more – one, Bull and Bush, wasn't even opened. There's another one, Down Street, which was closed for low usage levels and reopened ten years later as a kind of safer version of the Cabinet War Rooms. Churchill liked it down there, it was the only place you couldn't hear the bombings." She's warming up now, her voice lifting with enthusiasm. "At one point the location of the station was so secret the surface access was limited to emergencies only. If you wanted to leave, you clambered onto the platform and flagged down a train. Imagine that: standing there in the pitch dark, hoping to be seen."
John shivers deliciously, as though this is a campfire story. He finds it very easy to picture the station down below, the curved and dripping walls, and he's been surprised by that all evening, the ease with which the city comes to life in his mind. The exhibition was about literary expression or some such thing, but it was also about the real stone, bricks and mortar of the world he knows, and he saw traces of himself, Sherlock, and of all the city's facets he tries, in his own small way, to reflect. Until now, he hasn't believed he and Mary and Harry have very much in common.
"I suppose we'll end up down there some time," he says thoughtfully. "For a case, I mean. It's inevitable."
"I read your blog," Mary says. "I look forward to it."
There's a pause, then, during which neither of them moves. John is just wondering whether he's imagining it, or something has changed – whether tension has threaded itself into the space between them – when Mary says, "You and Sherlock."
"Yes," John says, warily.
"You're close."
John opens his mouth to say all sorts of things, but settles, finally, on, "Yes, we are, that's true."
"It comes across in what you write," she says honestly, "and when you talk about him, and just…" She trails off, her eyes steady on him. "I thought I would ask, now. I'd rather you be honest, whatever…"
John opens his mouth to say there's nothing between us and finds it’s a lie.
He says, "Mary, it's hard, Sherlock and me, and everything – it's hard to explain."
For a moment he's wondering if it's worth it. He'll have to introduce her to Sherlock, let her see for herself whatever it is that exists between them, and he'll have to learn, himself, what's causing the current discord. He'll have to explain the PTSD at some point, too. He will have to invite her and incorporate her into the structure of his life, which it seems to him is becoming as multiply complex as the city beneath his feet, threaded through by tunnels, caverns, lost rivers and full of gaps and weaknesses, but still holding him up, in the sunlight, after everything.
"Try," she tells him, as definitive as Sherlock can be.
John looks up at the art deco pattern on the wall, the Harry Beck design with Mary's hand-lettered annotations, and thinks about maps: how to draw them, and how to follow them on.
"When I came back from Afghanistan I needed a flatmate," he says, and pauses, and her hand finds his, warm and soft. "It began with that."
*
The body emerges exactly where Sherlock said it would, at the outlet of the Tyburn Stream at Vauxhall Bridge. Two of the uniformed police stand there for hours on a wet afternoon in the last week of November, and Lestrade calls in after the sludgy half-decomposed corpse has been regurgitated, positively identified and hauled off to the coroner.
"Prescott, that's the name," Lestrade says, lying on the couch at 221B in the attitude of a man at the end of a job well-done. "He and Evans were in together, of course, till the wedge came between them. Funny how a little thing like appearing as a witness for the prosecution can damage a friendship. When Evans got out, it seems his first priority was going back for the meth and his second was, ah, settling a score."
"Speaking of which," John asks, without turning away from the fridge where he's looking for an apple, "how is he?"
John can feel Lestrade's eyes on his back. "He'll live."
"Tyburn," Sherlock says, suddenly. John goes back to his armchair, past Sherlock staring intently of his map of the rivers. "It would be."
"Yes, well, anyway," Lestrade says impatiently, "thought you'd want to know. I am now going home for spaghetti and Strictly. Can I ask you not to beat anyone to death before morning? Thank you. Goodnight."
He sweeps out.
"Such a hysterical little man," Sherlock comments, lazily, and John rolls his eyes. "I had a clear defence of provocation."
"Yes," John says, "and Mycroft would probably raise very polite hell if they actually did haul you up on charges, and he's a murderer and drug dealer without any grieving relatives, so. But…"
"But what?"
"Oh, nothing." But John can't leave it at that; he can't go on like this. At some point, he will have to sit before the blank page and work out for himself what happened here. John gets up, looking through the window at the driving rain, and makes a decision. "We're going out. Come on."
"No, we're not," Sherlock says, looking at the rain. "Where would we be going?"
"Out," John insists, and knows it'll come out all right if he stands his ground. In the end Sherlock follows him, as John knew he would – he so rarely does anything that truly surprises Sherlock that he can't resist going along to see what happens. John takes his coat and his cane but not his phone, and drags Sherlock down to the Tube station, down past the late-night shoppers, shift workers and flickering adverts on the escalators.
"This is a Bakerloo line service calling at all stations to Elephant and Castle," says the automated voice on the train. Stepping up, John is suddenly aware of the platform beneath him, worn smooth by the passage of millions of feet. Forty minutes later they're on the South Bank, walking alongside the river, the tugboats drifting on the water with tiny fog lights shining through the murk. There are no stars.
*
John has been on the London Eye before, but not for years, and Sherlock never has. It's a wet, windy evening, so there's no one around when they roll up, pay their money and step on to the pod. As John hoped, they're the only people in there, and the noise of the outside world entirely fades away as the door closes. It will take half an hour to make a full circuit of the wheel and although they've begun to climb, their movement is almost imperceptibly smooth, and the fog smudges the details of the city, laid out on its riverbanks below them.
When John turns away from the view, Sherlock is lying sprawled full-length on the wooden bench at the centre of the capsule, looking at the ceiling. "All right," he says. "What are we doing here?"
John takes a moment to answer.
"Well?" Sherlock's hands are on his hips even though he's lying down.
"Sherlock," John says, hesitantly, and then it turns out the direct approach is easiest. "You nearly beat a man to death with a fire extinguisher. Why did you do that?"
"He'd just shot you." Sherlock looks at him, clear-eyed, confused by John's confusion.
"That's not an answer." John paces, switching his cane from hand to hand. "All right. Let's try again. You've spent the week tidying the flat, which you've never done before. Why?"
Sherlock doesn't answer at all.
"Right." John looks down, then up back at Sherlock. "Should've known you wouldn't make this easy for me."
For a few more minutes, he goes on pacing, following the curve of the glass. The layers of fog are sloughing away from them now, the clarity of the night sky a little closer. He thought the freedom from distraction would open Sherlock up: it's detail that absorbs him, not the blur of the city and its big picture. John's not sure if it's working.
"You and me," John says at last. "Everyone, my mother included, makes certain assumptions about you and me. And you know, I've thought about it." He regards Sherlock appraisingly. Sherlock is sitting on the floor, leaning against the tiny bench, staring at his own feet.
"Assumptions," Sherlock says, in the tone of voice he reserves for speaking of other people.
John inclines his head. "I've thought about it. Try it the old-fashioned way: try a glass of wine on a chilly evening, try a kiss, see if we'd end up in bed. It would be nice to wake up next to someone, Sherlock. I haven't, at least on a regular basis, for a long time.
"But you don't want that from me."
Sherlock looks up, then down. "John…"
"No, you don't." John puts his head in his hands for a moment. "I know you don't. And yet…."
For a moment he can't say it. He did his foundation years at a district general up in West Lancs, and he remembers general medicine, he remembers Saturday nights after pub closing. There were never any real weapons; it was always horrible little flick-knives and blokes who'd been glassed and his hands coming away blood.
"Evans," John says at last. "You… I heard what you did to him."
Sherlock just looks at him.
They're rising clearly now, the curve of their flight visible in the way the horizon falls away below. John comes to sit next to Sherlock. "And here's the thing," he says. "I thought it was new. I thought that something had changed. But if you just need your flatmate and your blogger, and that's what you've had all this time, then why…"
"I thought you were dead, John!"
The violence of it seems to startle them both; John jerks back and Sherlock draws in as if away from himself. He's hunched up, holding his knees as the city stretches enormous around them.
Very slowly and very carefully, John moves closer to him. "Is that why you've been cleaning?" And then, as it comes clear: "The violin. Your violin. You haven't been playing it around me, you've been playing it to me."
"I fail to see the distinction."
"Like hell you don't." John sighs and closes his eyes for a moment. "So you got me shot. Well done. So did my former employer. Did you really think I was going to leave on account of it?"
"It's illogical," Sherlock murmurs, without looking at him, "to stay in a situation which leads to your being injured, and exacerbation of your mental health issues…"
"Fuck," John says, because for the moment he can't think of anything else. "Well, fuck you, Sherlock Holmes."
Sherlock is looking at him with a quality of desperation in his gaze, and John sighs. "It's not your decision," he says after a while. "You can't just decide it makes sense for you to drive me away. Which, by the way, you're doing an absolutely shit job of. Or are you trying to convince me you're perfectly safe to live with, you clean and you play the violin? Do you even know?"
Sherlock looks at him, mute. This must be, John thinks wryly, the only conversation they've ever had where he's done most of the talking.
"Okay," he says. "First of all, I don’t enjoy being shot and I'd like it if it didn't happen any more. Second of all, I…" He stops, and goes on. "I am frightened of what you did to Evans, Sherlock. I don't understand why you did it."
Suddenly, Sherlock stands up. The coiled energy is back in his movements, the mastery of the world around him firmly in place. "Yes, you do," he says.
John breathes in, sits still and luminous beneath Sherlock's focused attention.
"Yes," John says, and then the fight goes out of them both. Sherlock slumps back to the floor, leaning against the bench with his long legs pulled up, and John makes a small, thoughtful decision. Slowly and carefully, he puts an arm around Sherlock, and rests his head on his shoulder. He's careful, because this is the part that is new – though now he's remembering through this particular lens, he's thinking all at once of the one or two or twelve times he's leaned against Sherlock on the sofa or Sherlock has taken his hand and pulled him onwards – and he's careful, because this is Sherlock, who is precious to him.
John breathes out and knows in his conscious mind, in his bones and in the sinew holding him together, that he's loved.
For a few minutes they're still rising, not yet at the highest point of the wheel. The Thames is the colour of steel and half-hidden by mist. Westminster Abbey, Big Ben, the buses on the bridge, the tug boats on the river, they all look like children's toys.
Sherlock has almost relaxed completely when something evidently occurs to him, tension snapping back into him like wire. "You have a girlfriend. You've come home in the evenings with your clothes…"
"No need to tell me how you deduced it," John murmurs lazily, "especially when you could just have asked. Mary, her name is. Mary." And when this is followed by silence: "Do you care, Sherlock?"
Sherlock looks at him. "Of course not."
"Didn't think so," John murmurs into his shoulder. "She's lovely, Sherlock. You'll be nice to her."
There's the edge of an order in that last statement. Surprisingly, Sherlock laughs, and now they have stopped moving relative to the rest of the world, describing the top of the wheel in a rise becoming fall.
"Do you care?" Sherlock asks. "Aren't you supposed to be jealous or monogamous or something?"
From the sound of that half-articulated whine, this is Sherlock finding the rest of humanity its most deeply impenetrable.
John nods, slowly, and relaxes into the admission. "She is lovely, Sherlock. I like her a lot; I may fall for her in time. But there has been, and will be, you. You are just" – he waves a hand around – "who I am. That's all. You're a part of me."
"Oh," says Sherlock, simply, and this, John realises, is what Sherlock is like just after he's been told something he didn't know.
John leans over and kisses the top of Sherlock's head. They're falling now, back into the mists and the city, back into London below.
*
You might be asked at some point in a pub quiz, how many rivers are there in London? For heaven's sake, don’t say 'one'. Not that you would. After this you'll remember the Fleet and the Tyburn, and the Lea and the Brent and the Wandle, and there's an awful lot of you who'd sooner die than forget Stamford Brook.
But there are so many others: Effra, Westbourne, Neckinger, Peck. We live on a city chiselled out by water. My sister, Harry, the real writer in the family, reminds me of the "lower rivers", Acheron, Phlegethon and Styx. I'm no poet. But in some sense, there's a tragedy here: nothing's really changed. Nathan Garrideb still doesn't know where the brother he lost as a child is, or if he's even still alive. Sherlock is keeping his map of underground London, just in case we ever run into another case where someone dumps a body in the sewer system and we have to wait and see where it comes out. Even the meth lab is still in place, with the authorities waiting for it all to dry out a little before they go down there and start hefting things out. And me, I can walk again, and go out and go on, but these things, as always, take time.
John pauses and looks up. Sherlock is sleeping on the couch, violin on the floor next to his trailing hand. John gets up to put the violin somewhere where it won't be trodden on, then returns to his laptop. Sunlight filters watery and hopeful through the flat; Mary will be here in an hour.
My sister writes about aliens; my girlfriend writes about things that happened a long, long time ago. I never wrote a word that I hadn't referenced with PubMed before I was thirty years old.
He deletes the last paragraph, then reinstates it. Sherlock looks up and says, "John…"
"Yes, I am here," John says, acerbically. "You dropped off half an hour ago when I was in the middle of telling you about my day. In mid-sentence, as well. Shut up and go back to sleep."
Sherlock grins and puts his head back down.
But I have been writing about the city I live in, about Sherlock, about the way it all comes together. It's history and science fiction and comedy and tragedy and civil engineering all combined, I think. It's the truth, which is always something.
"John," Sherlock says, clearly, as though he hasn't just this moment risen from sleep. "You're going out tonight."
"I'll come back," John says, and that seems to satisfy Sherlock; he puts his head down and over a minute, his breathing slows and deepens. He's a heavy sleeper. John saves the draft and gets up, goes to the window. The fresh winter air floods the room, crisp and cool. It brings with it the scents of the city – petrol, rainwater, food cooking below – and John stands there for a few moments, breathing, letting it in.
He adds one line before he goes out to meet Mary - If you need a mystery solving, Sherlock and I live at 221B Baker Street, London, NW1 6XE – and picks up his cane, his coat, and his phone before he heads out into the perfect, sunlit evening.
He leaves behind his keys; Sherlock will let him in.
end.
notes:
-Everything in this story is true, other than the bits that patently aren't. However, the then-Metropolitan Baker Street station was opened to the public in 1863, four years after the first publication of On The Origin of Species. That said in this universe Baker Street probably doesn't have rows of little tiles with some dude in a deerstalker on them, so perhaps a little artistic licence can be forgiven.
-Sherlock is quoting Thrones, Dominations, by Dorothy L. Sayers and Jill Paton Walsh; Harry is quoting "Rising Damp" by U.A. Fanthorpe, whichforthwritten introduced me to after reading a first draft of this story. It's a beautiful poem; thank you.
-Obviously this story is based on The Adventure of the Three Garridebs, but as its central mystery can be solved by Google, I have altered it a little to suit my purposes.
This is a story about a murder, someone being shot (see warnings below), and about flavours of romance, but mostly, it's about cities, people and how they become each other. Nothing at all like something I would write, then.
forthwritten and shimgray improved a first draft of this; troyswann greatly improved a second! Thank you all three very much. fic:: and the rivers shall give up their dead
by Raven
10,000w, Sherlock (BBC), John, Sherlock, and Mary Morstan. John is shot; Sherlock is searching; the rivers of London endure.
warnings: (skip) John is shot, and there is some more violence offscreen, and the emotional consequences of that. Please let me know if you would like further detail.
A large, perfectly-formed drop of water lands on the back of John's neck. He feels it progress all the way down, under the cotton of his T-shirt into the small of his back. "Urgh."
"Shut up, John," Sherlock murmurs. "Nathan Garrideb…"
"Ridiculous name." John wonders why they're whispering. Even if they weren't entirely alone here in this grimy, dank, green-slimed hell of a Soho basement, there's that low hollow cacophony of echoes to cover their voices. London, John thinks, is both above and below: the grey October evening at street-level above and the dripping water carrying down to the sewers and built-over tenements and tunnels down into the artesian wells and foundations. Layer upon layer, down and down.
"Nathan Garrideb never goes out. That's the key to it. He never leaves this house. So if this long-lost brother of his has finally got… hush."
John isn't speaking, isn't moving, his right hand paused on the way to his coat pocket.
"Sherlock Holmes," comes the voice out of the darkness, and through the miasma of spores and low light, a figure emerges. They hear the sound of feet kicking through the last traces of floodwater on the floor, they see the torchlight gleam in the puddles. "And his blogger! Well, boys, we're beat."
"Really," Sherlock breathes, stepping forwards. John's at his heels, moving with more caution. Other figures are dimly visible behind now, seemingly risen from the tunnels below.
"Oh, yes," says the man in the shadow, raises his gun and fires.
The shot is indescribably loud in that enclosed space, ringing and echoing and reverberating and jarring all around John's skull, so the blossoming of fire in his leg goes unnoticed for a very brief, blessed moment, and then he's on the ground in the muck, the water slopping unpleasantly up to the level of his mouth and nose.
It's strange, he thinks, blurrily, how wet it all sounds: the splashing in the silt and murk, the damp half-crunch of bone.
"Next of kin, Mr. Watson." It's a quick staccato voice somewhere near his left ear. John was dreaming: there was water in the dream, and an awful sensation of being sucked down by the ground beneath him; there was also warmth, as though someone were holding him. A quick assessment yields the fact he's lying on scratchy clean sheets. They aren't warm, but they're not damp.
"Doctor," he gets out. "And – he's, he's here." Surely, John thinks, if he has been admitted to Barts – and it must be Barts, it smells like Barts, all top notes of disinfectant and base notes of pine – then Sherlock is here too, somewhere.
"Your next of kin is here, Dr. Watson," says the staccato voice. From the sound of her John pictures her clearly, a woman in grim starched blue, the obligatory upside-down pocket watch.
And then the curtains are pulled back, another voice is saying, "John, they called me, I came as fast as I could, John…"
"Oh, look," John says, very slowly, "I actually did get shot in the leg" – and Harry bursts into tears.
There's morphine involved, he's unsurprised to learn. Being admitted at the hospital that he works for, at least nominally, has the downside of another set of colleagues who've not so much seen him naked as cut him out of his clothes and sluiced off the blood and green slime, but it turns out his attending registrar is a woman he only knows by sight. It could be worse. Dr. Francis, says her name-badge. "Call me Carmen," says her voice from behind the curtain.
Nurses surround him. Molly visits at some point, he thinks. Lestrade comes to take a statement from him. Harry yells, calls him a moron and a fucking idiot and a total shit, and kisses his forehead, and brings him cups of water. "You're lucky to be alive, John," Lestrade tells him briskly, when he's sat down with his pen.
"I can't make a statement," John says. "I missed it."
Lestrade doesn't seem to be listening. "If the guy had aimed a little higher, it would have been your heart."
"That's always true," John says, a little confused. "It's always a close call, being shot."
Lestrade regards him with an unreadable expression. "Feel better, John," he says, after a while. "I'll be back."
"There were drugs," Harry tells him, helping him drink from the cup. "Masses of them, in that basement, hidden away. Garrideb was in the way, that was why they got rid of him. Sherlock was right. And there was…"
"Sherlock," John begins, rolling over damply, "Sherlock, where…"
But she's gone, the sky is darker behind the muslin curtains and John thinks he might have fallen asleep in the middle. Pain; morphine. He's gone for a while, adrift.
Early in the morning, John wakes up to sun. The light feathers in along the edges of the window and he can hear the sounds of lunch being served, people muttering about the virtues of shepherd's pie as opposed to moussaka. Saturday food, he thinks, and sits up in bed, slowly, letting his body acclimatise to the movement. When he went down to the basement with Sherlock, wearing his steel toe-capped boots and packing his illegally-held gun, it was Thursday night.
Slowly, he reaches out towards his leg. It wasn't a flesh wound, but it wasn't going to kill him. It hurts but he can move it: only pain, then, he thinks, only healing.
"Welcome back." There's a smile in that voice, and John turns his head.
"Dr. Francis."
"Please, call me Carmen." She sits down beside her bed, elegantly straight-backed despite the horrible orange vinyl chair. John has a great deal of experience of this situation from the other side. "What…"
"You were shot in the leg and by all accounts you were very lucky. It was almost what you might call a graze. The bullet passed through, so you've got an exit wound, but everything's cleaned up and healing. In time and with some physical therapy you'll be right as rain."
John nods. It's what he thought.
"Feeling better?" she asks.
"Yes," John decides, giving it all due consideration. "Much better. Can I…"
"Self-discharge? Please don't, Doctor." She's giving him a knowing smile. "Give it time, please. At least until the sun is entirely up. Try not to forget that you've been shot."
"I'm hardly likely to," John murmurs.
"Quite." Dr. Francis is fixing him with a particular stare that John distrusts. She glances down at her clipboard, then looks up. "Dr. Watson, it says here that you have been previously diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. Following…"
"Having been shot, yes," John starts, but she waves him away.
"I merely mention it, without necessarily…"
"I manage it," John says. "I have my own methods of managing it."
"Doesn't everyone?" Another knowing smile. "Just humour me, Doctor." She writes something on her prescription pad and hands it to him. John folds it up and doesn't look at it, defiantly; that doesn't disturb her smile.
"Look after yourself, John," she says, gently, and leaves him be, for a time.
In the afternoon, Harry brings him some clothes, helps him get into them, and he wants to tell her he's fed up of being fussed over; he has some crutches on loan that he can discard for his cane later, and he's written down when he has to turn up for his physical therapy appointments. But she wouldn't listen, anyway, and when she calls for a taxi and rides in it with him back to 221B, he's suddenly tired out and grateful. She gets him settled on the sofa and has a word with Mrs Hudson before she leaves, and the comfortable surroundings of the flat are a relief.
Sherlock's not home. John hobbles around the flat until he finds a pizza delivery menu and orders something with pepperoni that Sherlock would have hated. He eats it slowly, watching a documentary about phone tapping on BBC1, and is startled by the appearance of Sherlock, hair standing on end and smelling faintly of chlorine, and subsequent disappearance into the bathroom behind a slammed door.
"Hi," John says, to thin air.
"What's that, dear?" Mrs. Hudson asks. She's come up to take back some sellotape Sherlock borrowed. "Are you going to eat that?"
John shrugs and waves a hand. "Help yourself."
Before she starts off down the stairs with her sellotape and pizza slice, though, he can't help himself. "Mrs. Hudson, I don't suppose you know why Sherlock's avoiding me, do you?"
"I wouldn't know anything about that, dear."
She's gone, and John regrets not giving her the whole box to take down with her. He reaches for a crutch and limps over to the kitchen for his painkillers. While he's standing there, running water from the tap into a glass, he hears the bathroom door open and then the sound of Sherlock disappearing into his own room. John sighs. He's about to go back over to the sofa when he remembers the window is still open and will probably let the rain in overnight. As he's closing it, a pigeon flutters past in the murk beyond the glass. "Don't suppose you know, either?" he asks it, and groans at himself. "Someone ought to know," he tells the empty air in the room. "Something happened in that bloody basement and Lestrade thinks it'll help to take a statement from me."
Later he'll think it's the opiates that are making him talk to himself. He's half-gone into sleep before he manages to swing his legs up onto the sofa. He dreams of white, sylph-like figures dancing, intertwining, merging, swallowed by a rising tide. He's sleeping so deeply that waking up to cool air against his face is an almost nauseating transition, undercut by distant, atonal music drifting in from somewhere. The window, he thinks, hand coming up to his face, but he closed that.
"I opened it again."
John opens his eyes and doesn't ask how Sherlock knew what he was thinking. The quality of the light in the room hasn't changed, so he can't have been lying here for too long, but nevertheless, Sherlock seems to have been settled in an armchair for some time, long legs drawn up under him, his violin under his chin. As John watches he begins playing again, a quiet mournful air that John doesn't recognise. The rhythm seems familiar, though, and he remembers the dream: the balletic figures, swaying, swaying.
"You should go to bed," Sherlock says, abruptly.
John nods. Sherlock raises his bow and picks up where he left off, and John starts the long, tiring process of getting up. Suddenly, there's a squawk of strings: a missed note. Then the sound of Sherlock's teeth coming firmly together with exasperation. John looks more carefully and notices the white gauze on Sherlock's left hand, coming untied but clearly a professional job.
John thinks about opening his mouth to ask, Sherlock, what happened in that basement? But he doesn't. He goes to his room, leaning on one crutch, and sits carefully down on his bed. Something rustles as he does, and he pulls a screwed-up piece of paper from his back pocket, the crumpled prescription.
He opens it to the dotted line. Where the name of the drug ought to be printed, she's written in block capitals "LOOK AFTER YOURSELF", and, smaller: "10mg daily".
He laughs, and lays himself down to sleep.
Lestrade comes round the next morning. Sherlock's gone out again and John isn't feeling well. His next set of dreams were just as vivid but much more familiar, battlefields in bright light, and he woke in the morning with a sensation of anxiety uncoiling within him like a snake. He's trying to keep it at bay by pottering, putting his papers in order, staring at an empty WordPress window, ostentatiously tidying away Sherlock's latest mess. It helps and it doesn't.
"How're you feeling?" Lestrade asks, curiously, as he gets his own tea, working his way around the mess in the flat without seeming to see it.
"Like shit." John pulls a hand through his hair. "Can we get on with this so I can go back to feeling like shit, please?"
Lestrade only takes a moment before he goes on. He's in the Met, John decides; he's seen PTSD before. "Yeah, well, I think you remember I wanted to get a statement from you." He pauses. "Do you remember? You were a bit away with the fairies."
John actually smiles. "Yes, I remember. I don't know if I told you then, but honestly, I can't tell you a thing, I got knocked out straight off. You should get a statement from Sherlock. Or the guy in the shadows, whoever he was."
"Christ." Lestrade's looking at him with something approaching shock. "You don't know, do you?"
"Know what?" John stares at him.
"I thought for sure Sherlock must have told you. I didn't think…"
"Told me what, for fuck's sake?" John's getting irritated, leaning forward in some ridiculous attempt to read Lestrade's mind.
"Evans," Lestrade says. "The bloke, the ringleader. Sherlock was right, there was something in that damn basement they were after. Ten kilos of methamphetamine, well wrapped up against all that water, and all the kit to start up a lab down there."
John whistles and leans back in his chair. "But there was something else," he says after a pause.
Lestrade's looking at him strangely. "Sherlock did tell you."
John shakes his head. "No. But I don't see him, he's out all the time. He's looking for something and I don't know what."
Lestrade nods, slowly. "Yeah, well. He told us – how he knew I dunno, I couldn't see anything, but then our lot from forensics went down and said the same thing. There was a body in the basement. Hadn't been there long, not more than an hour or so, and the marks showed it'd been dragged off."
"How?" John asks. "We were right there, even if it was pretty dark. I mean, we would have seen someone dragging away a corpse. They would have had to get it past us to the stairs."
"Right." Lestrade nods. "Sherlock told us there would be a trapdoor into the pipes below. Guess what."
"He was right." John leans back in his chair and thinks about that. "Why not have a go at the guy, then?" he asks. "Evans? Presumably you've got him in a cell somewhere?"
Lestrade looks at him with that unreadable expression once more. "Evans isn't talking to anyone, John. After he shot you Sherlock tried to beat him to death with the closest thing to hand. My men, they pulled him off before he quite got to killing the guy, but the trial date's indefinitely postponed."
John takes a moment to breathe, in and out, in and out, steady as the rain on the window. "What was the nearest thing to hand?"
Lestrade sighs. "It was a fire extinguisher, John. Are you happy for me to record you for your statement, or would you rather draft it?"
John presses play on the little device, and Lestrade says: "State your name for the record."
Last week, before Nathan Garrideb and his long-lost brother, John finally got around to doing something he'd meant to do for a while and went to join the local library. The librarian was pretty, with sweetness in her eyes and the lines of her face, and he enjoyed talking to her. She'd asked him if he were new to the area, and he'd told her the truth, a little of it. By the time he took back his driving licence, utility bill and brand new library card, they'd arranged to meet again, in a little Indian restaurant not far from Baker Street. A Thursday evening, so it wouldn't be too busy.
Now, staring at the mirror, John considers cancelling. But 221B seems all gloom to him this evening, with the rain still streaking down the windows, and Sherlock closeted away with a gigantic pinboard he got from somewhere, covered in torn maps and labels that say things like "Westbourne" and "Wandle". A muffled thump from the room next door makes up his mind. Grabbing his coat, phone and keys, he makes his way slowly down the stairs. He thinks about a taxi, but decides he can just about trust his crutches in the rain.
Mary's there when he arrives at the restaurant, her smile as bright as he remembers. "John! Over here! My God, what happened to you?"
"It's a long story," he tells her as he sits down in the seat opposite her, propping the crutches up against the wall. He thinks he'll be all right with just the cane in the next day or two. Looking around him, he's glad the restaurant is as quiet as they'd predicted. "I could tell it to you, if you like, but I actually can't remember a lot of it."
Mary smiles, and passes him his menu. "Sounds very dramatic."
"It was." John lays it down. "I always seem to have the same thing when I come in here. Butter chicken and chapattis. How about you?"
"Similar. Aloo saag." She lays her own menu down. "You're that John Watson, aren't you? The one who gets in the papers sometimes? I thought I recognised you the other day, but it's a common name and I didn't quite like to ask."
John laughs. "Yes, I do live with Sherlock Holmes, the world's only consulting detective, and he is the reason I'm walking around like Tiny Tim. Well, it's not his fault, entirely, but let's blame him anyway."
She's smiling again as the waiter takes their order. "What do you really do, then?"
He smiles back, knowing exactly what she means. "I'm an army doctor. I was wandering around doing not much of anything when I met Sherlock, though. I'm hoping to go back to civilian practice at some point. And you?"
"Not much of a detective, are you?" She laughs. "Considering where you met me."
Sometimes it happens that way: something inside his head subconsciously chews over data, turning it over and over in echo of Sherlock's methods, but his conscious mind needs to work on it, to give roots to the fruit of information. "You had your coat on to leave," he says, slowly, "but it was the middle of the day. It's a part-time job."
"I'm a historian," she says, smiling at him. "Doesn't quite pay the bills, so I do Wednesdays and Thursdays at the library."
"What's your area?" he asks.
"London," she says, a little dreamily. "Actually, I'm writing a book about disused Underground stations."
"Oh." John's surprised, for some reason; he'd heard "historian" in her bright, bird-like voice and pictured Regency romances or the wives of Henry VIII. He privately berates himself for sexist thinking. "What about them?"
"How they got to be that way, mostly. It's fascinating stuff. All these places, these tunnels and layers, hidden hundreds of metres below our feet. And old. Baker Street station, for example. It's so ordinary-looking. But it's one of the oldest stations on the Underground. It's been in continuous operation for a hundred and fifty years. It's older than the phonograph and the Suez Canal and The Origin of Species. I love London because it's full of these massive human wonders, these things that people, they just don't stop to look at. People don't look at the world around them, I don't understand it, I've never understood it."
John leans back in his chair, taking in the animation in her face, her hands moving, and smiles. She pauses, her face starting to turn pink.
"Sorry," she says, quickly. "Sorry, I, er, I get like that sometimes. Sorry."
"I liked it," John says, still smiling. "You, ah, you remind me of someone."
"Oh?" She's still pink, but looking more wicked than embarrassed, now.
"Yes," John says. Surprising himself, he reaches out over the table and takes her hand. She doesn't pull away, grinning at him and holding on even when the waiter comes over to cough discreetly and wave the dessert menu.
"My sister's a writer," John says after a while. "Not a historian, though. She writes novels."
"Oh, really? Would I have heard of her?"
"Probably not, unless you enjoy lesbian steampunk alien invasion." John laughs at the expression on Mary's face. "It's in the family, although not the steampunk alien bits, mind you. Our mother is a writer, too."
"And you," Mary says, gently. "I've read your blog."
Strangely, it's the first time John has made that connection between himself and his family, and the thought gives him a warm, clear happiness.
They do consider dessert, but nothing jumps out at either of them, and despite Mary, despite the overwhelming urge he has to stay here much, much longer and get to know her better, John is becoming a little too aware of his own breathing, of the other people around them, of the sense of the world closing in. They get the bill and John pays it over Mary's protests; he says, meaning it, that she can pay next time. And then all the rituals of dinner are over and they're where they started, facing each other across a small space.
"Are you all right?" Mary asks, as he takes a deep breath and places a hand on the edge of the table.
"I'm all right," he tells her, "but I should be getting back. Will you pass me the other crutch?"
She does, their hands brushing again in the process, and they walk out of the restaurant together, in the same direction until the first turn. "It was good to see you again," he says, and means that too. She kisses him on the lips before she sets off down the side-street, and she doesn't look back.
Sherlock is on the sofa when John comes in, surrounded by an oasis of clear space further surrounded by clutter. He lifts his violin as John enters, plays a few bars of something wistful. His eyes are bright. John smiles and limps to his room.
The next day mostly consists of physical therapy and John reading the broadsheets cover to cover. By evening he's got fed up, rolled them into a giant ball and thrown them into a corner. Sherlock appears around six, alight with some inner fire. John looks up at the sight of him, surprised; time has slipped by without his quite knowing where it went, and the short daylight has long since drained away from the windows. There's a moment of strangeness: this is the first time, John realises, that they have sat opposite each other, making eye contact, since the night in the basement.
Sherlock seems to come to some sort of conclusion in that brief moment. "Can you go out?"
He gestures impatiently at the view of the street outside. John's not sure if he's indicating the rain, the general clammy chill creeping in from the edge of the window frame, or the quiet streets it allows. There's hardly a single pedestrian out there, and only occasional traffic slicing wetly through the cambered puddles.
John considers. "Yes."
"Then come on." He's bouncing as he picks up his coat and scarf. More sedately, John follows, leaning on his cane.
Out in the street, Sherlock sets out firmly in the direction of the Tube station, and John is surprised they're going far enough for public transport. The rain has an iron permanence about it, and he's relieved to step into the bright lights of the ticket hall at Baker Street. He needs money on his Oyster card, and Sherlock waits for him, still visibly bouncing on the balls of his feet.
"Where are we going?" John murmurs above the whir of the escalator, one step above Sherlock so he's on a level to whisper in his ear.
Sherlock looks at him, wicked and fey. "You can stop them up and forget about them," he whispers, the tunnel lights flickering like shutter-boxes over his face. "You can lose the map and wipe their names out of mind."
"Don't tell me," John says, shrugging, but he follows.
They get out at Farringdon and start walking, the rain driving horizontal in the wind, now, and for a moment John worries that they're going to Barts, that this is some strange kind of intervention, and then relaxes: Sherlock hasn't watched enough television in his life to think of such a thing, and even if he had, Sherlock trusts John with himself.
Down Charterhouse Street, in front of Smithfield Market, Sherlock draws to an abrupt halt. Rain is beating down on windows, building up in the surfaces of drains and gratings. In one fluid movement, Sherlock's on the ground, head propped up on his elbows, water instantly soaking into his coat.
"Sherlock," John begins, and gives in before he's started. Moving slowly, he sits down on the ground beside Sherlock, ignoring the ache from his leg, ignoring the soaking chill. The City has emptied for the evening; John is grateful for the total desertion. They sit there next to a drain cover, wet mad Englishmen out in the pouring rain.
"Wipe their names out of mind," Sherlock murmurs, very softly. "Listen."
At first John hears nothing but the rain and far-off sirens, blurring into distance. It takes him a few moments to recognise the new sound, the deep rumble as though some great force is working its way though the ground beneath his feet.
"In the end," Sherlock says, and John wonders what it is he's quoting, "where a river has been, a river will always be."
John breathes in. "A river? But, the Thames, that's never…"
Sherlock shakes his head. "The River Fleet. You may have heard of the street that was named after it and the industry that was named after that."
"Underground," John murmurs, wonderingly.
"For nearly all of its length," Sherlock informs him. "Highgate to Blackfriars, buried beneath us all."
John nods, and wants to ask, for a moment, what this has to do with a missing corpse, and why Sherlock brought him here at all, but all at once he's too tired. They're both as drenched as they could possibly be; they sit there in their silence and listen to the river.
After a while, Sherlock helps John up, and they walk back to Farringdon, slowly. John is anxious and exhausted and the rain sounds like a conch shell held to his ear, like the blood forced through the culverts and encasement of his own body.
"I saw something today," Mary tells him cheerily, "that made me think of you."
"What was that?" John asks, balancing the phone between his shoulder and his ear while he tries to open a new carton of orange juice with both hands. It nearly ends in disaster. He thinks better of it and sets down the carton.
"A poster at the British Library. I'll send you a link to the image, but the text was 'Satan was a lesbian!!!' with three exclamation points."
John snorts, suddenly thankful he isn't drinking from a glass of orange juice at this moment. "I do not write lesbian pulp sci-fi. I merely chase a half-demented consulting detective around London. Much more normal."
"I'd like to meet him someday," Mary says, unperturbed. "Anyway, while I was there I saw they're having an exhibition at the Library from the end of next week. Late opening - do you want to come with me?"
"What's it about?" John asks.
"People and places," Mary says. "And fiction, and how it fits together. To be honest I'm not entirely sure, but I think it might be interesting and there's always a possibility it'll be useful for the book."
John nods, forgetting she can't see him. "I'll come," he says after a moment. He's not sure it's his sort of thing, but he enjoys her company enough to put up with most things. And it's far enough in the future, he realises, that he might be doing better around large groups of people by then. Today a watery sun slipped out from the clouds for a few hours in the morning, and it could have been pathetic fallacy but John found he could go out and return his library books, pick up milk and bread, stop to say hello to the people in the restaurant below. He slept better last night.
"Great, I'll text you," Mary says, happily. "How are you? What are you up to?"
"Waiting for Sherlock to come home, mostly," John says, looking around the eerily-empty flat. Sherlock is on some sort of creepy efficiency drive that has led to the clear space around the sofa getting bigger and bigger until it's almost touching the walls, now. John isn't quite sure what to make of it. On the wall is the big map of London Sherlock has been working on all week: the street map overlaid by the Underground map, each station a coloured dot meticulously stuck on and threaded together with its neighbours, and on top of that, the stripes of blue string, twisted around pins that shift and alter as Sherlock covers more ground. Water flows downhill, John thinks tiredly; if nothing else is true, the rivers will flow into the sea, which means, perhaps, that no matter how long it takes, Sherlock will eventually come home.
"Sounds delightful." Mary chuckles. "I should go. Speak soon, John."
When she's gone, he lays down the phone, gives up on orange juice entirely and goes to settle himself on the sofa. He's been there for a few minutes, leafing through yesterday's Guardian, when the door opens and Sherlock comes in. His eyes narrow at the sight of John, and he seems about to go off to his room when he thinks better of it and sits on the sofa next to him. As usual, he's not quite in concordance with the lines of John's personal space.
"Are you all right?" John asks, after Sherlock has been sitting there for several minutes. "Where have you been all day?"
"Cemeteries." Sherlock leans back against the sofa cushions, pressed up against John with a hand on his forehead. "West Norwood. Kensal Green. Graves and water. And the flowers. Why do people do that?"
"Basic human sentiment, some nonsense like that." John leans back in his turn, surprised by the warmth of Sherlock's body. They settle into the back of the sofa, a little awkwardly, because Sherlock is still wearing his big overcoat, but comfortably. For the first time in a while John is properly calm, and that calm mixed with tiredness mixed with the last of his opiate prescription means he dozes off easily. He's not sure how long they're there, Sherlock sitting up straight against the cushions with John drifting beside him.
"Sherlock," he murmurs very quietly after a while, "where…"
"I'm making tea, John." That must be Sherlock's way of asking if he wants some, points out the part of John's brain that's now wide awake, which is also the part that notices Sherlock is now in the kitchen rummaging in cupboards for mugs. It's the other part, the dazed, lazy hindbrain, that's bereft of warmth, and remembers in evaporating detail the feeling of Sherlock's body against his.
Harry's made a sale. "A serialised story, if you can believe it," she tells John happily over the phone. "I had no idea people still did that. Do people still do that? Isn't it all improbably Dickensian? But the point of it is I have an advance, John. An actual, honest-to-God advance. Come and have lunch with me."
John isn't sure when it started being possible for he and Harry to talk for whole minutes at a time without shouting at each other, but he approves of it. They arrange to meet in a café somewhere on Gower Street which John chiefly recalls for its chocolate spinach cake. It's faintly green on the plate, but tastes delicious.
"Much like," he says out loud, "things that come out of our fridge."
Harry chuckles, and tells him about the book. "So, aliens invade."
John laughs. "Of course they do."
"And it turns out while they seem all benevolent gentle let-us-share-our-technology types, they're actually evil slug-like things who want to take over the world. Shut up, John, I never pretended to Anna Karenina. So they do. And people hide out in caves and things, and they keep the knowledge of humanity alive, sort of like word of mouth, and they live close together in these caves…"
"Why do they do that?" John asks. "If they're trying to stay out of sight of the evil mind-control alien things."
Harry considers. "They just do," she says after a moment. "I suppose it's because people can't live apart, really. Well, some people can live in remote cottages in the countryside, I suppose, but people congregate, especially when they're trying to remember who they are."
John sighs, and thinks not for the first time that if Harry really were the sort of writer who produced nothing but tentacles, alien invasions and chisel-jawed heroes to order, as she occasionally pretends to be, she wouldn't have started looking for her inspiration at the base of the bottle. John is smart, practical and methodical; intelligence with sharp edges he leaves to his sister and Sherlock.
"How are you doing, John?" she asks after a moment, sipping her coffee.
"All right," he says. "I'm doing all right. I'll have the cane for a while, yet. But it was a good night's work – did you know they found a meth lab down there?"
Harry nods. "I got some of the sense of it when you were in hospital. What happened to Nathan Garrideb's long-lost brother?"
"He's still long-lost. Poor bloke," John says, realising this for the first time. "It was all a hoax. I mean, they found the meth lab, but God, it must have been a disappointment to him. No other Garridebs."
Harry nods. "You haven't blogged about it yet."
"I will soon," John says, wondering as he says it if it's true. Ordinarily he writes up blog posts as Sherlock's cases wind down, but there's a sense of incompletion about this one, something that hasn't yet been said.
"Sherlock's in love with you," Harry says, as John takes a drink of water. That, he thinks, is a sign of her malicious sense of comic timing, and wonders if this was the point of this lunch, after all, and nothing to do with mind-controlling slugs.
Instead of spraying water everywhere, he puts the glass down and says, "I know." He's concentrating on his breathing again: in, out, in, out, rhythmic as rain.
"Does he know, though?" Harry asks, picking the last of his cake off his plate. It's a habit that drove him mad when they were children.
"I think he's processing it," John says. "I think that's it. I think he's working through it all. How do you know?"
"It was the way he came to see you, or didn't come to see you," Harry says, softly. "He came far enough to see you but not for you to see him. He, he lingered. I'm pretty sure I know what hopelessly-in-love-with-straight-person looks like. I ought to."
"Harry." John breathes in and out again. "I am not. I mean I am not the same as you, but who is, for fuck's sake, everyone comes at this differently and you know that, so I don't know why you…." He stops at the sight of her smile. "Because you enjoy winding me up, Christ."
"God, you're adorable when you're being self-righteously indignant." Harry's smile has real affection in it. "What the hell are you doing about it, John?"
John lets out a breath. "I'm just going on," he says after a while, thinking about how Sherlock still isn't talking to him, not properly, and dragging him through the rain after underground rivers is a very Sherlock thing to do, but there's still that sense of something missing between them now, a constant discord. "Like I always do."
"Yes," Harry says, touching his arm gently. "Like you do. Do you love him, John?"
John shrugs, helplessly, and takes a bite of her sandwich. She lets him.
"So," John says very quietly, "tell me about the disused Underground stations of London."
Mary chuckles and stirs beside him, her small hand running delicately along his spine, round to the hollow at the base of his collarbones, then tapping his nose. "If this is your notion of pillow talk, John, it's very peculiar."
John laughs. "So's all of this. So's everything." He waves a hand, an expansive gesture that takes in the whole space. Mary's bedroom would be stark and insipid, florals and Ikea beech, if it weren't for the books and notepads on every surface, and the huge, station-quality Tube map on the wall, hand-amended in purple marker pen.
"Good peculiar or bad peculiar?" She sounds really worried, and John quickly leans back, his hands threading through her hair. He kisses her and it's sweet and easy.
"Good peculiar," he says. "Thank you for taking me out tonight."
"Thank you for coming back with me."
It's a little awkward, but John finds he doesn't mind. One thing living with Sherlock for so long has taught him is how, sometimes, to ask the world to change for him, rather than the other way around. Sherlock breezes through life without regard for gravity or social graces, and in his wake John at least has learned to remember that quite recently he got shot.
Mary said, "Of course we can move carefully around your leg, don't be ridiculous. Although I do quite want to have sex with you, if you don’t mind."
John is feeling quite delighted with everything at the moment.
"Do you really want to know about them?" Mary asks after a while, sounding disbelieving that anyone ever could.
"Yes," John says, stretching luxuriously so the sheets wrap around him. It's a warm night for November, a mugginess in the air beneath the rain.
"There are lots of them," Mary says, still sounding tentative. "Some of them have been disused for seventy years or more – one, Bull and Bush, wasn't even opened. There's another one, Down Street, which was closed for low usage levels and reopened ten years later as a kind of safer version of the Cabinet War Rooms. Churchill liked it down there, it was the only place you couldn't hear the bombings." She's warming up now, her voice lifting with enthusiasm. "At one point the location of the station was so secret the surface access was limited to emergencies only. If you wanted to leave, you clambered onto the platform and flagged down a train. Imagine that: standing there in the pitch dark, hoping to be seen."
John shivers deliciously, as though this is a campfire story. He finds it very easy to picture the station down below, the curved and dripping walls, and he's been surprised by that all evening, the ease with which the city comes to life in his mind. The exhibition was about literary expression or some such thing, but it was also about the real stone, bricks and mortar of the world he knows, and he saw traces of himself, Sherlock, and of all the city's facets he tries, in his own small way, to reflect. Until now, he hasn't believed he and Mary and Harry have very much in common.
"I suppose we'll end up down there some time," he says thoughtfully. "For a case, I mean. It's inevitable."
"I read your blog," Mary says. "I look forward to it."
There's a pause, then, during which neither of them moves. John is just wondering whether he's imagining it, or something has changed – whether tension has threaded itself into the space between them – when Mary says, "You and Sherlock."
"Yes," John says, warily.
"You're close."
John opens his mouth to say all sorts of things, but settles, finally, on, "Yes, we are, that's true."
"It comes across in what you write," she says honestly, "and when you talk about him, and just…" She trails off, her eyes steady on him. "I thought I would ask, now. I'd rather you be honest, whatever…"
John opens his mouth to say there's nothing between us and finds it’s a lie.
He says, "Mary, it's hard, Sherlock and me, and everything – it's hard to explain."
For a moment he's wondering if it's worth it. He'll have to introduce her to Sherlock, let her see for herself whatever it is that exists between them, and he'll have to learn, himself, what's causing the current discord. He'll have to explain the PTSD at some point, too. He will have to invite her and incorporate her into the structure of his life, which it seems to him is becoming as multiply complex as the city beneath his feet, threaded through by tunnels, caverns, lost rivers and full of gaps and weaknesses, but still holding him up, in the sunlight, after everything.
"Try," she tells him, as definitive as Sherlock can be.
John looks up at the art deco pattern on the wall, the Harry Beck design with Mary's hand-lettered annotations, and thinks about maps: how to draw them, and how to follow them on.
"When I came back from Afghanistan I needed a flatmate," he says, and pauses, and her hand finds his, warm and soft. "It began with that."
The body emerges exactly where Sherlock said it would, at the outlet of the Tyburn Stream at Vauxhall Bridge. Two of the uniformed police stand there for hours on a wet afternoon in the last week of November, and Lestrade calls in after the sludgy half-decomposed corpse has been regurgitated, positively identified and hauled off to the coroner.
"Prescott, that's the name," Lestrade says, lying on the couch at 221B in the attitude of a man at the end of a job well-done. "He and Evans were in together, of course, till the wedge came between them. Funny how a little thing like appearing as a witness for the prosecution can damage a friendship. When Evans got out, it seems his first priority was going back for the meth and his second was, ah, settling a score."
"Speaking of which," John asks, without turning away from the fridge where he's looking for an apple, "how is he?"
John can feel Lestrade's eyes on his back. "He'll live."
"Tyburn," Sherlock says, suddenly. John goes back to his armchair, past Sherlock staring intently of his map of the rivers. "It would be."
"Yes, well, anyway," Lestrade says impatiently, "thought you'd want to know. I am now going home for spaghetti and Strictly. Can I ask you not to beat anyone to death before morning? Thank you. Goodnight."
He sweeps out.
"Such a hysterical little man," Sherlock comments, lazily, and John rolls his eyes. "I had a clear defence of provocation."
"Yes," John says, "and Mycroft would probably raise very polite hell if they actually did haul you up on charges, and he's a murderer and drug dealer without any grieving relatives, so. But…"
"But what?"
"Oh, nothing." But John can't leave it at that; he can't go on like this. At some point, he will have to sit before the blank page and work out for himself what happened here. John gets up, looking through the window at the driving rain, and makes a decision. "We're going out. Come on."
"No, we're not," Sherlock says, looking at the rain. "Where would we be going?"
"Out," John insists, and knows it'll come out all right if he stands his ground. In the end Sherlock follows him, as John knew he would – he so rarely does anything that truly surprises Sherlock that he can't resist going along to see what happens. John takes his coat and his cane but not his phone, and drags Sherlock down to the Tube station, down past the late-night shoppers, shift workers and flickering adverts on the escalators.
"This is a Bakerloo line service calling at all stations to Elephant and Castle," says the automated voice on the train. Stepping up, John is suddenly aware of the platform beneath him, worn smooth by the passage of millions of feet. Forty minutes later they're on the South Bank, walking alongside the river, the tugboats drifting on the water with tiny fog lights shining through the murk. There are no stars.
John has been on the London Eye before, but not for years, and Sherlock never has. It's a wet, windy evening, so there's no one around when they roll up, pay their money and step on to the pod. As John hoped, they're the only people in there, and the noise of the outside world entirely fades away as the door closes. It will take half an hour to make a full circuit of the wheel and although they've begun to climb, their movement is almost imperceptibly smooth, and the fog smudges the details of the city, laid out on its riverbanks below them.
When John turns away from the view, Sherlock is lying sprawled full-length on the wooden bench at the centre of the capsule, looking at the ceiling. "All right," he says. "What are we doing here?"
John takes a moment to answer.
"Well?" Sherlock's hands are on his hips even though he's lying down.
"Sherlock," John says, hesitantly, and then it turns out the direct approach is easiest. "You nearly beat a man to death with a fire extinguisher. Why did you do that?"
"He'd just shot you." Sherlock looks at him, clear-eyed, confused by John's confusion.
"That's not an answer." John paces, switching his cane from hand to hand. "All right. Let's try again. You've spent the week tidying the flat, which you've never done before. Why?"
Sherlock doesn't answer at all.
"Right." John looks down, then up back at Sherlock. "Should've known you wouldn't make this easy for me."
For a few more minutes, he goes on pacing, following the curve of the glass. The layers of fog are sloughing away from them now, the clarity of the night sky a little closer. He thought the freedom from distraction would open Sherlock up: it's detail that absorbs him, not the blur of the city and its big picture. John's not sure if it's working.
"You and me," John says at last. "Everyone, my mother included, makes certain assumptions about you and me. And you know, I've thought about it." He regards Sherlock appraisingly. Sherlock is sitting on the floor, leaning against the tiny bench, staring at his own feet.
"Assumptions," Sherlock says, in the tone of voice he reserves for speaking of other people.
John inclines his head. "I've thought about it. Try it the old-fashioned way: try a glass of wine on a chilly evening, try a kiss, see if we'd end up in bed. It would be nice to wake up next to someone, Sherlock. I haven't, at least on a regular basis, for a long time.
"But you don't want that from me."
Sherlock looks up, then down. "John…"
"No, you don't." John puts his head in his hands for a moment. "I know you don't. And yet…."
For a moment he can't say it. He did his foundation years at a district general up in West Lancs, and he remembers general medicine, he remembers Saturday nights after pub closing. There were never any real weapons; it was always horrible little flick-knives and blokes who'd been glassed and his hands coming away blood.
"Evans," John says at last. "You… I heard what you did to him."
Sherlock just looks at him.
They're rising clearly now, the curve of their flight visible in the way the horizon falls away below. John comes to sit next to Sherlock. "And here's the thing," he says. "I thought it was new. I thought that something had changed. But if you just need your flatmate and your blogger, and that's what you've had all this time, then why…"
"I thought you were dead, John!"
The violence of it seems to startle them both; John jerks back and Sherlock draws in as if away from himself. He's hunched up, holding his knees as the city stretches enormous around them.
Very slowly and very carefully, John moves closer to him. "Is that why you've been cleaning?" And then, as it comes clear: "The violin. Your violin. You haven't been playing it around me, you've been playing it to me."
"I fail to see the distinction."
"Like hell you don't." John sighs and closes his eyes for a moment. "So you got me shot. Well done. So did my former employer. Did you really think I was going to leave on account of it?"
"It's illogical," Sherlock murmurs, without looking at him, "to stay in a situation which leads to your being injured, and exacerbation of your mental health issues…"
"Fuck," John says, because for the moment he can't think of anything else. "Well, fuck you, Sherlock Holmes."
Sherlock is looking at him with a quality of desperation in his gaze, and John sighs. "It's not your decision," he says after a while. "You can't just decide it makes sense for you to drive me away. Which, by the way, you're doing an absolutely shit job of. Or are you trying to convince me you're perfectly safe to live with, you clean and you play the violin? Do you even know?"
Sherlock looks at him, mute. This must be, John thinks wryly, the only conversation they've ever had where he's done most of the talking.
"Okay," he says. "First of all, I don’t enjoy being shot and I'd like it if it didn't happen any more. Second of all, I…" He stops, and goes on. "I am frightened of what you did to Evans, Sherlock. I don't understand why you did it."
Suddenly, Sherlock stands up. The coiled energy is back in his movements, the mastery of the world around him firmly in place. "Yes, you do," he says.
John breathes in, sits still and luminous beneath Sherlock's focused attention.
"Yes," John says, and then the fight goes out of them both. Sherlock slumps back to the floor, leaning against the bench with his long legs pulled up, and John makes a small, thoughtful decision. Slowly and carefully, he puts an arm around Sherlock, and rests his head on his shoulder. He's careful, because this is the part that is new – though now he's remembering through this particular lens, he's thinking all at once of the one or two or twelve times he's leaned against Sherlock on the sofa or Sherlock has taken his hand and pulled him onwards – and he's careful, because this is Sherlock, who is precious to him.
John breathes out and knows in his conscious mind, in his bones and in the sinew holding him together, that he's loved.
For a few minutes they're still rising, not yet at the highest point of the wheel. The Thames is the colour of steel and half-hidden by mist. Westminster Abbey, Big Ben, the buses on the bridge, the tug boats on the river, they all look like children's toys.
Sherlock has almost relaxed completely when something evidently occurs to him, tension snapping back into him like wire. "You have a girlfriend. You've come home in the evenings with your clothes…"
"No need to tell me how you deduced it," John murmurs lazily, "especially when you could just have asked. Mary, her name is. Mary." And when this is followed by silence: "Do you care, Sherlock?"
Sherlock looks at him. "Of course not."
"Didn't think so," John murmurs into his shoulder. "She's lovely, Sherlock. You'll be nice to her."
There's the edge of an order in that last statement. Surprisingly, Sherlock laughs, and now they have stopped moving relative to the rest of the world, describing the top of the wheel in a rise becoming fall.
"Do you care?" Sherlock asks. "Aren't you supposed to be jealous or monogamous or something?"
From the sound of that half-articulated whine, this is Sherlock finding the rest of humanity its most deeply impenetrable.
John nods, slowly, and relaxes into the admission. "She is lovely, Sherlock. I like her a lot; I may fall for her in time. But there has been, and will be, you. You are just" – he waves a hand around – "who I am. That's all. You're a part of me."
"Oh," says Sherlock, simply, and this, John realises, is what Sherlock is like just after he's been told something he didn't know.
John leans over and kisses the top of Sherlock's head. They're falling now, back into the mists and the city, back into London below.
You might be asked at some point in a pub quiz, how many rivers are there in London? For heaven's sake, don’t say 'one'. Not that you would. After this you'll remember the Fleet and the Tyburn, and the Lea and the Brent and the Wandle, and there's an awful lot of you who'd sooner die than forget Stamford Brook.
But there are so many others: Effra, Westbourne, Neckinger, Peck. We live on a city chiselled out by water. My sister, Harry, the real writer in the family, reminds me of the "lower rivers", Acheron, Phlegethon and Styx. I'm no poet. But in some sense, there's a tragedy here: nothing's really changed. Nathan Garrideb still doesn't know where the brother he lost as a child is, or if he's even still alive. Sherlock is keeping his map of underground London, just in case we ever run into another case where someone dumps a body in the sewer system and we have to wait and see where it comes out. Even the meth lab is still in place, with the authorities waiting for it all to dry out a little before they go down there and start hefting things out. And me, I can walk again, and go out and go on, but these things, as always, take time.
John pauses and looks up. Sherlock is sleeping on the couch, violin on the floor next to his trailing hand. John gets up to put the violin somewhere where it won't be trodden on, then returns to his laptop. Sunlight filters watery and hopeful through the flat; Mary will be here in an hour.
My sister writes about aliens; my girlfriend writes about things that happened a long, long time ago. I never wrote a word that I hadn't referenced with PubMed before I was thirty years old.
He deletes the last paragraph, then reinstates it. Sherlock looks up and says, "John…"
"Yes, I am here," John says, acerbically. "You dropped off half an hour ago when I was in the middle of telling you about my day. In mid-sentence, as well. Shut up and go back to sleep."
Sherlock grins and puts his head back down.
But I have been writing about the city I live in, about Sherlock, about the way it all comes together. It's history and science fiction and comedy and tragedy and civil engineering all combined, I think. It's the truth, which is always something.
"John," Sherlock says, clearly, as though he hasn't just this moment risen from sleep. "You're going out tonight."
"I'll come back," John says, and that seems to satisfy Sherlock; he puts his head down and over a minute, his breathing slows and deepens. He's a heavy sleeper. John saves the draft and gets up, goes to the window. The fresh winter air floods the room, crisp and cool. It brings with it the scents of the city – petrol, rainwater, food cooking below – and John stands there for a few moments, breathing, letting it in.
He adds one line before he goes out to meet Mary - If you need a mystery solving, Sherlock and I live at 221B Baker Street, London, NW1 6XE – and picks up his cane, his coat, and his phone before he heads out into the perfect, sunlit evening.
He leaves behind his keys; Sherlock will let him in.
end.
notes:
-Everything in this story is true, other than the bits that patently aren't. However, the then-Metropolitan Baker Street station was opened to the public in 1863, four years after the first publication of On The Origin of Species. That said in this universe Baker Street probably doesn't have rows of little tiles with some dude in a deerstalker on them, so perhaps a little artistic licence can be forgiven.
-Sherlock is quoting Thrones, Dominations, by Dorothy L. Sayers and Jill Paton Walsh; Harry is quoting "Rising Damp" by U.A. Fanthorpe, which
forthwritten introduced me to after reading a first draft of this story. It's a beautiful poem; thank you.-Obviously this story is based on The Adventure of the Three Garridebs, but as its central mystery can be solved by Google, I have altered it a little to suit my purposes.
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no subject
on 2012-06-05 09:47 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2012-06-08 08:17 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2012-06-06 05:11 am (UTC)no subject
on 2012-06-08 08:17 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2012-06-06 07:26 am (UTC)no subject
on 2012-06-08 08:17 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2012-06-07 02:03 am (UTC)no subject
on 2012-06-08 08:18 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2012-06-11 12:44 am (UTC)Sometimes a story sneaks up on you. I was only planning to read the first paragraphs, to see if this was something worth saving for when I had a few moments, but I was drawn in by the language and couldn't pause to remember I had other plans for the hour.
I really admire your characterizations. John and Sherlock feel like adults, with the more complicated nuances of trying to negotiate a relationship that adulthood brings. The comfortable acceptance of Mary into John's life, without setting her up at odds with Sherlock for John's attention, was far more interesting than the more common fannon competition. I ached for John when he acknowledges to himself that starting a relationship with Mary would require telling her about the PTSD and the complexities of his life.
I have lots more I want to say, but I really do have to start dinner now. Perhaps after I get the time to read this again.
no subject
on 2012-06-11 09:02 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2012-06-12 10:00 pm (UTC)Anyway, this was so lovely. Your writing is evocative and lyrical as usual, I wouldn't have thought such a style could work in this fandom...But it did! You are that talented.
Your characterisation is flawless as well, your John and Sherlock are deliciously complex and mature. ♥
no subject
on 2012-06-16 11:25 am (UTC)no subject
on 2012-07-18 03:22 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2012-06-05 08:53 pm (UTC)"cambered": I'm puttering around the kitchen (avoiding the graaaading) saying "cambered puddles" and "culverts and encasement of his own body." I think I said before, but I can't remember (much graaaading sloughs words out of my head before I've had a chance to get them situated), that I love the permeability of John, especially when he's tired, and how even his attempts to keep the world from overwhelming him are figured as an internal thrumming of rain.
And I love how sudden and uncanny Sherlock is, both familiar and just... not. How do you do that? Whatever that is, that skill, put it in a bottle and sell it for millions.
Okay, enough following you around cooing. Doesn't mean I'm not still cooing, though, ftr.
no subject
on 2012-06-09 12:16 am (UTC)no subject
on 2012-06-05 11:35 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2012-06-08 08:34 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2012-06-06 12:07 am (UTC)no subject
on 2012-06-08 08:34 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2012-06-06 12:58 am (UTC)no subject
on 2012-06-08 08:33 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2012-06-06 02:30 am (UTC)no subject
on 2012-06-06 05:38 pm (UTC)(would you indulge my curiosity? I've seen you about this fandom, but did you at one point write a story where Frasier and Niles Crane were demon hunters and I had an epic nerdgasm at you? If this means nothing I'm terribly sorry.)
(no subject)
Posted byno subject
on 2012-06-06 02:30 am (UTC)no subject
on 2012-06-08 08:33 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2012-06-06 02:59 am (UTC)This is very fine writing. Thank you.
no subject
on 2012-06-08 08:26 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2012-06-06 07:47 am (UTC)no subject
on 2012-06-08 08:26 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2012-06-06 08:57 am (UTC)no subject
on 2012-06-06 05:37 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2012-06-06 09:08 am (UTC)no subject
on 2012-06-08 08:25 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2012-06-06 12:54 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2012-06-08 08:24 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2012-06-06 02:49 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2012-06-08 08:24 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2012-06-06 09:42 pm (UTC)I am going to read this a hundred times.
no subject
on 2012-06-08 08:23 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2012-06-07 03:58 am (UTC)no subject
on 2012-06-08 08:23 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2012-06-07 10:19 pm (UTC)The delicacy with which you unravel the John-Sherlock bond is really quite breathtaking, and I bless you for treating them like adults -- difficult, inarticulate and dysfunctional though they may be. John's quiet "I know" in response to Harry is the pivot point of the whole story. Of course he knows, and has probably known for a long time; it's only Sherlock's half-murdering someone on his behalf that makes it necessary to speak of it. I like the directness with which you resolve that in the scene on the Eye (and how much still remains unsaid between the lines).
One final note: I truly love the way you handle Mary here. While she's naturally curious (and maybe a bit concerned) about Sherlock and John's relationship, she's not framed as an obstacle to it, nor as competition. She absolutely makes sense as someone who would attract John and even do well with him. (And I'm a historian, so I love that you give her a non-stereotypical form of geekery, one that even Sherlock may grudgingly appreciate.)
no subject
on 2012-06-08 08:23 pm (UTC)and the rivers shall give up their dead
on 2012-06-08 09:02 am (UTC)http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/lifestyle/going-underground-discovering-londons-social-and-cultural-life-6372623.html
sx
Re: and the rivers shall give up their dead
on 2012-06-08 08:20 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2012-06-09 03:50 pm (UTC)Thank you, for writing and sharing.
no subject
on 2012-06-10 09:25 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2012-06-16 02:13 am (UTC)no subject
on 2012-06-16 11:10 am (UTC)