trans_9 | The Inevitable [closed to Kerrigan]

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The Inevitable [closed to Kerrigan]

Good God, he needed a cigarette. Between the world being destroyed and all his friends besides John possibly dying along with it (or the entire thing being a total lie), John punching him and storming off, the talking ponies, the random superhero bringing up his cocaine addiction, and arguing with a space elf over (ugh!) politics and clandestine rebellions...actually, forget one cigarette. He needed a whole carton. Strike that, maybe a truck full.

Reaching into his many coat pockets on an instinctual search for cigarettes he knew weren't there, he found that a pack actually was there. And so was his lighter.

Maybe there was a God. Maybe there was a merciful God, or at the very least, maybe the ship really was as benevolent and merciful as she tried to make herself out to be and decided to smile upon him by snatching up a box of cigarettes with his belongings.

...Probably not, but this at least still was a fine bit of serendipity. Sherlock would take it.

Leaning into the doorway of a building in what he didn't realize was another blind spot in the city, he lit up his first post-end-of-the-universe cigarette and took a long drag from it. To be honest, it wasn't really enough, and like it always did when he least wanted it to, old cravings crawled up in the back of his skull and demanded something stronger.

"Not now."

No, not now, though the way he closed his eyes as he leaned against the door of the building and let out a lungful of smoke, would have made it clear to anyone looking that he was a fair bit more overwhelmed than he could even admit to himself.

It seemed that for now, however, he could be content with causing himself harm with only one cigarette at a time.

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"I mean, look it at. Completely soaked and I doubt there's a dry cleaners on an alien space ship. Even if there was one, it's already drying."

He was talking about his blood-soaked Belstaff coat, which was very visible on one of the bedside tables. Their world dying? Not being sure their friends and loved ones were alive? Nope. The coat.

"It's ruined."

Edited 2012-04-17 09:18 (UTC)

"Oh," John said. "Of course. Right."

Yes, now he was one-hundred percent sure, this was definitely Sherlock Holmes. He shook his head and patted the ankle.

"It gave its life honorably," he continued. "We'll have a funeral for it. You can do the speech, and we can find a girl to weep daintily into the casket."

"Tragically struck down in its prime..."

Now the corner of his mouth was doing that thing it did, where he was trying to keep a straight face, but he couldn't, he just couldn't by sheer virtue of John being nearby.

Edited 2012-04-17 10:24 (UTC)

"I'm sure it died as it lived," John said somewhat thickly, unable to resist a snicker. "Billowing about like an over-dramatic raincloud..."

He scrubbed a hand over his face again and was surprised when he pulled it away damp. It really had been a day. He swallowed hard and turned his face slightly more away from Sherlock until he could reign himself in again.

The half-smile faded and Sherlock sat up, gingerly, careful to not make himself dizzy again. He wasn't sure how to handle this. He didn't want to keep apologizing when it was very much not in his nature to be that apologetic and when right now, it seemed that John needed normalcy, needed him to act like himself, needed the old familiarity back.

So he opted for silence instead, hesitating at first, but reaching out his hand and resting it gently, reassuringly, on John's shoulder.

John stilled when he felt Sherlock's hand through his coat and plantsuit, hesitating at the apex of the shaky breath he'd been sucking into his lungs. Then he slowly let it loose, focusing off into the middle distance. He repeated the cycle again. Then, part way through the third time, the breath came out carrying words.

"Screw it."

He turned around and hauled Sherlock forward into an uncomfortably tight hug. Not as tight as he wanted to hug him, but after all, Sherlock was technically recovering from being stabbed.

It was okay that he didn't hug Sherlock as tightly as he wanted to--because Sherlock hugged back with enough force that John was hugging him that tightly anyway. There were no more apologies, there was no more careful, enculturated emotional restraint. There was only open fondness and unfettered affection.

The end of the world seemed as good a time as any to stop caring altogether too much whether or not they'd be seen hugging by anyone.

"I promise, John. I won't--"

He wouldn't put him through something like that again. Couldn't. Not after seeing how it affected him the first time. Not when he'd gone from being so uncaring and cold that he hadn't had a friend in the world to being drawn to his own grave to take in the grief and pain of another human being--and to just see his friend's face even when he couldn't be seen. Not when his efforts to convince John he was losing nothing of worth hadn't worked.

"He was my best friend and I'll always believe in him."

"I won't."

Edited 2012-04-19 07:58 (UTC)

The part of John that was still angry -- because it was still there, it was almost always there -- wanted to say "too right you won't", but what he said instead was, "Good." It was muffled against Sherlock's shoulder, but it was probably easy enough to deduce that Sherlock could have done it in his sleep.

The death of a friend, the violent death of a friend, wasn't something that John had been unfamiliar with before Sherlock. He'd been an army doctor, he'd had friends bleed out in his arms while he struggled to patch them closed. Comrades he'd swapped filthy jokes with in the morning had died on his table in the afternoon. John and death had been more than nodding acquaintances long before he'd ever met Sherlock.

But Sherlock was the first one he'd ever gotten back. ("First", hah. With what everyone here had lost, he could only hope Sherlock was the first.) He hadn't realized how much of himself he'd invested in their shared mad enterprise until Sherlock was gone, and now Sherlock was back and they were in the middle of a war much bigger than London, much bigger than Afghanistan. Did he really want to go back to how it had been before, risk having his life shattered for a third time?

He snorted. Stupid question, like he even wanted the choice.

It was several long moments more before John moved to disengage from the hug. Sherlock was surprisingly strong, for all of his skinny limbs and having been recently stabbed.

"You know," he began, "I'm really glad you're not actually dead."

"Yes, I'd noticed. Terribly obvious," Sherlock said after John disengaged, releasing him and slowly easing himself back onto the medbay bed, now looking much more relaxed than he had before the hug.

The part he'd been more concerned about than John being glad he was alive was whether or not John could forgive him, which was entirely unrelated.

John wiped at his streaming eyes again, barking a laugh. "Right, yes, 'obvious'. I'll try to come up with something more entertaining next time."

He glanced around the Medbay and made a mental note that they ought to bring in some stools or chairs, something so that visitors had a place to sit while they were waiting on a patient.

"Please do. I've dealt with a relative dearth of entertaining conversation lately."

What with the being cut off from every person he knew in the world and all that for the last three months and not being able to talk to anyone for long on the off chance they might recognize him and blow his cover.

Edited 2012-04-25 08:22 (UTC)

John snorted, rolling his eyes and gently thumping his fist against the table.

"...How far along were you?" he asked quietly after a moment. "In hunting down Moriarty and getting your life back?"

Because the idea that Sherlock hadn't been doing something along those lines was completely ridiculous.

"Difficult to say. I was trying to dismantle Moriarty's entire network--or at least defang it, and given the size and complexity of it, it was a rather substantial undertaking, as you can imagine. One that was made even more difficult by the lack of resources I had at my disposal because of my situation. Travel was difficult, though I was still in England most of the time because quite a few of the threads met there. I couldn't use my usual contacts or I might have been discovered to be alive, no access to my homeless network unless I pretended to be another member of the homeless for the same reasons, no disguises, only a few paltry emergency funds I'd stashed away under various aliases, most of my false IDs were in the flat, which I couldn't go anywhere near, and no access to a proper laboratory. At one point, I had to break into a university to make use of a remotely serviceable microscope."

It'd been risky enough going to the graveyard to see John.

"I couldn't even keep most of the evidence I found or spread it out anywhere to have a proper look at it because I had to stay mobile, so I had to keep it all up here."

He tapped his temple.

"Fortunately, the weather hadn't started to turn yet. Before this."

John might have been able to figure out from those words that he'd spent a great deal of time sleeping outside.

His voice went a little quiet, "Perhaps even more fortunately, I did have some assistance at times."

John might have been able to figure out from those words that someone had known he was alive.

"Couldn't help that you were trying to hide from his network while you were taking it apart," John said, unhappy that he couldn't have been doing something to help instead of sitting around feeling miserable. Though he supposed that Sherlock running interference probably explained why Moriarty hadn't come after him with a proper murder attempt. Not that John could have done much, with Sherlock's name disgraced and "Jim Moriarty" having been wiped out in favor of sodding Richard Brook, but Moriarty hadn't gotten to where he was by leaving witnesses behind.

Probably.

He hissed between his teeth at the all-but-admission to Sherlock sleeping outside, then frowned in confusion when Sherlock said that he had help. Were Sherlock literally anyone else, he'd have thought that he was talking about his brother; but Sherlock and Mycroft hadn't gotten along even before Mycroft traded information about Sherlock to Moriarty and then let him loose to wreck havoc on Sherlock's name. So it probably wasn't Mycroft. And it wasn't Mrs. Hudson either, her grief had been perfectly genuine as far as John could tell, and Sherlock probably couldn't risk going anywhere near Baker Street. He went over the short list of people he knew Sherlock knew, but dismissed them all based on their relationships with Sherlock and how they'd reacted to his death.

"If they'd realized it was me doing it, taking the network apart, they would have followed through and killed you, Mrs. Hudson, and Lestrade. Those were Moriarty's standing orders and many arms of his organization weren't even aware of what really happened on the roof of Bart's. They'd never communicated directly with him, after all, and had no idea what he even looked like. He had made sure that his body had been collected from the roof and disposed of so that no one went prodding around the life and death of 'Richard Brook.'"

Of course, the lack of body meant John didn't know he was dead, did he. Sherlock's eyes darted over to John. "He shot himself, you know."

Which had been his most bewildering move of all, but in some ways it wasn't, because of how utterly screwed it had left Sherlock.

"He'd made it so there was no way to undo it all, no way to prove Richard Brook was a lie, no means to find the code to call off the snipers. Maybe if I'd had more time I could have, but even as you stood in front of the hospital, there was a sniper trained on you, lining up his shot. If I hadn't..."

His own imagination in regards to gruesome injuries shut down that line of thought. He could, after all, imagine exactly what John's head would have looked like if it had been hit by the sniper's bullet, how his body would have probably fallen, even what sort of splatter pattern it would have made on the ground.

"Killing himself was the final nail in the coffin, the best way for him to make sure Jim Moriarty ceased to exist and the fiction he created had entirely supplanted the truth."

As he looked at John, the expression on his face was the closest Sherlock's got to sympathetic, the one he made when he understood someone was having emotions, even if he didn't understand the feelings behind them. In his way, he could respect that sometimes, respect hurt, respect pain, respect loss. Like he had on Christmas, with apologizing to Molly, like he had when John had broken up with Sarah and he'd walked out and bought his favorite beer.

It wasn't the same as understanding them and the cause of them completely, but John knew better than anyone else that he wasn't heartless, not entirely.

"I imagine that must have been what was most bewildering to you. If his body had been up there with me, my own motives would have been far more transparent, it would have been obvious that he had some sort of leverage forcing me to jump. I knew he wouldn't leave that evidence after I'd gone, and in the end what was best for you was you believing the fiction. That's why I tried to convince you I was really a fraud and why I made you watch. Truly believing I was dead would have kept you safe, and believing his story would have kept you safer, would have kept you completely out of the cross-hairs while I dismantled his network."

It felt good to finally explain himself. Finally.

"I knew that's what he would have wanted in the end, after all. Moriarty. My death, my life and reputation ruined, and everyone who I'd remotely--everyone I knew believing his lies."

But John hadn't.

Moriarty was dead. Killed himself to force Sherlock to jump off the roof. John let that penny rattle around in his brain, knocking trains of thought askew and finally landing on a metaphorical response-trigger.

"Huh," John said. "Well, had I known he was dead, I wouldn't have been quite as convinced that we were."

He'd been torn between grief and unbearable anticipation of the other shoe dropping. At one point, he'd even sent a drunken, swear-filled email to Richard Brook's email address, culminating in the demand that he just get on with it; and then nearly chucked his laptop at the wall at the out-of-office auto-reply.

John took a deep breath and let it out slowly, licking his lips. "There was absolutely nothing you could have said to make me believe that you were a fraud. Nothing. I lived with you for more than a year, I saw you solve cases that you couldn't have set up and put into motion. Hell, I met your brother, and you knew all those things about my sister when we met except that you thought she was my brother." He chuckled bitterly. "Moriarty's story was full of holes if you thought about it, but what did it matter if they did? You were already dead."

Sherlock's expression in response to that was oddly blank, but more in a way that suggested he didn't know what he was feeling rather than feeling nothing.

The loyalty there, for him, was something he didn't quite understand.

He hadn't understood it with another friend of his eithre.

"You still haven't asked who helped me," he commented mildly. "Unless you've already deduced it."

John snorted and made a face. "I've been trying, but haven't had any luck. It wasn't me, obviously, and it wasn't Mycroft, and it definitely wasn't Mrs. Hudson because I don't think she could lie to me like that." He sighed. "I don't know who it could be. But I guess that it'd have to be someone Moriarty wouldn't think to have put a watch on before he met you on the roof."

Right? It sounded right to him. But John had no idea who Sherlock interacted with that he trusted that Moriarty wouldn't have thought of too. That would be why Moriarty had threatened John to ensure Sherlock's behavior rather than the other way around.

The clue was two words.

"Autopsy report."

John blinked a couple times, furrowing his brow and trying to remember if he'd ever actually seen the autopsy report. He really didn't remember a lot from up to about thirty-six hours after Sherlock had jumped.

Autopsy report, autopsy report...

He might need a few more moments to put it together.

He could tell what John was thinking because he knew how John thought.

"It has nothing to do with what was in it, John. It's that it existed at all."

Who wrote it, John? Who did his autopsy?

"I never realized it, you know," he went on quietly, and there was a touch of something almost mournful in his voice.

He knew she was smitten--he'd used it on occasion to manipulate her into getting what he wanted--but he'd always dismissed her attention as shallow, based on his looks, and mired in the desperation of a young woman almost past her prime who was desperate for a relationship.

How wrong he'd been. How completely, utterly, magnificently wrong he'd been for once.

"I thought you were my first friend," he said, an odd look on his face, "but it appears I was mistaken. I had one, I just...hadn't noticed."

There was a pause.

"It's always something."

Admittedly, missing the fact that Molly Hooper truly, genuinely cared about him was a bit more significant than missing that John's brother was a sister.

Edited 2012-06-03 01:24 (UTC)

"Oh, of course!" John said. Of course, Sherlock hadn't really died, but someone had to have filled out a death certificate saying that he had. And it couldn't have been someone high up on the food chain, because the more people that knew that Sherlock wasn't really dead, the more people who could leak the information. And he'd been right outside of Bart's...

"Molly?" He ran a hand over his hair. "But she--"

No, that made sense too -- it made more sense than her actually believing that he'd been a fraud, after all the help she'd been when they'd been running from the police.

...Now he really feels bad for having slammed the door in her face when she'd come to see him after the funeral.

"She saved my life, John." A pause. "Well, no, I saved my own life with my arrangements, but I wouldn't have been able to do it without her help. She was instrumental to my plans."

"I'm sure," John said, shifting his weight and rubbing the back of his neck. "...Did Mycroft know?"

"Of course not."

That one should have been fairly obvious.

"Do you really think I'd tell him but not you?"

Don't be ridiculous, John.

"Was he miserable? Do tell me he was miserable. I hope he was miserable."

There was quite a bit of bitterness in his voice.

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nerves_of_steel - 2012-06-14 10:29 (UTC) - Expand

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