sherlock - we move lightly
Feb. 14th, 2014 08:47 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
augustbirdTitle: we move lightly
Fandom: Sherlock
Rating: R
Word Count: 2,236
Characters/Pairing: John/Sherlock
Summary: For those willing to go through hell to save a loved one's soul. Post-Reichenbach.
Disclaimer: I don't own these characters.
Author's Note: Warning for mild gore. This was written for the johnlockchallenges exchange on tumblr for anathemagerminabunt. The prompt was "Death shall have no dominion," which lead me to draw from the entire poem by Dylan Thomas. It ended up relying more on literature than I expected--it might be a good idea to have an idea of Dante's Inferno (or just the nine circles of hell) in order to really understand this fic. It has not undergone any external editing since it's not very long.
“I’m sorry, Sherlock,” Mrs. Hudson says. She tries to touch him but he moves away.
“For how long?”
“Months now,” she says.
_____
Harry wordlessly lets him into her house. She doesn’t offer him anything to drink, just leads him straight to the basement where there are four boxes stacked in the corner.
“This is everything,” Sherlock says.
“Not one to keep much stuff, was he?” Harry says. She has a hand pressed to her mouth, sleeve pulled over her fingers. Her eyes are red but her voice is steady.
“And where is he buried?” Sherlock asks. His voice sounds like it’s coming from somebody else.
“It’s an empty coffin,” Harry says, “We never found him in the river.”
_____
“Will you watch over my body?” Sherlock asks.
“You shouldn’t,” Mycroft replies.
“Will you watch over my body?” Sherlock repeats.
Mycroft says nothing.
_____
Sage burns. His blood sinks deeper into sandstone and congeals on dark feathers.
Sherlock draws a circle on the ground.
_____
The sunlight comes in through the stained glass windows and throws puddles of colors against the worn stone floor. The minister paces back and forth from his pulpit, his voice echoing through the cavernous space of the cathedral. His white robes flare with brilliant color when he steps into a slant of light.
Sherlock is three years old. He watches the colors slide off white fabric, listens to the low drone of his voice. His mother stands up and they sing songs. Sherlock stays sitting and listens to them sing. He closes his eyes and feels very warm.
The singing grows quieter. There is an undertone of static rising from the stone floors, a sound that creeps into prominence. When he opens his eyes again, half the church is empty.
“Where did they go?” he demands.
His mother looks down at him. She is still singing but it’s different. It sounds sharp. The chorus is a dissonant congregation of voices all pitched in different keys.
The sun is setting. The shadows in the corners lengthen.
His mother is the last person left. She continues to sing but it sounds like screaming.
She’s gone.
Sherlock sits alone in the dark.
_____
John is naked on the bed. His legs are spread and his hand is on his cock, pumping slowly and shallowly so that Sherlock can barely see the head of his cock every time he pushes into his own fist. His eyes are clenched shut and he bites his lip to hold in the groans, his toes curling against the sheets.
Sherlock wants to crawl on to the bed on top of John. He wants to leave marks on John’s neck, kiss John and run his hands over every inch of John’s skin. He wants John to open his eyes, to watch his pupils expand with arousal and to know with absolute certainty that he was the one to tease the gasps from John’s mouth, to cause the shiver under his palms.
He doesn’t. He doesn’t move.
John starts to stroke faster, his back arching off the bed and his head tilting back to expose the line of his neck. Sherlock’s fingers clench and unclench. He stares, riveted.
John comes with a moan and a word on his lips. It’s the name of everyone John has ever met, collected into a single sound—everyone except Sherlock.
John opens his eyes and he looks at Sherlock. His expression is blank and it feels like John is looking through him rather than at him.
It’s the truth in reality as well as here: Sherlock can’t have him. He’s come to terms with this long ago.
“I don’t care,” Sherlock whispers and closes his eyes.
_____
His side aches from where he’s been pressed against the pavement. His mind is hazy. He thinks vaguely that he should feel euphoric but instead he just feels empty. He knows that there would be fresh track marks in the crook of his elbow if he bothered to look.
He wants to get up but his limbs won’t move. It takes all of his effort and several minutes to crawl a few feet away from the open sewer.
He vomits and half of it dribbles out of his mouth. It tastes sour and some of it pushes into the back of his nose. He makes an effort to sit up and spit it out but he’s too far gone.
He lies with his head on the cold ground and feebly swallows his own vomit. Where is the high? Where is the comfortable numbness?
His heart slows and his breathing shallows out. There is nobody coming.
_____
John loses his job. John breaks up with his girlfriend. John slowly stops seeing his friends.
John makes him tea and fetches his phone. He tucks his gun into his pocket and follows where Sherlock leads. He tells Sherlock how brilliant he is, and the words are like small pearls, rolled between his teeth. John’s bright smile, his eyes on Sherlock’s face.
Sherlock wants to touch him. Sherlock wants to cut out his heart and preserve it in a jar like the ancient Egyptians, wants to crawl into John’s skin and suture it shut so that John can never leave him. He wants to breathe the air John has exhaled, wants to collect the dust of every last skin cell John’s sloughed off.
There is a long thin chain that runs from the handcuff around John’s wrist to the handcuff around Sherlock’s. Every passing moment, the handcuff gets shorter by one link, until the bones of John’s wrist dig into Sherlock’s arm. Sherlock watches, delighted, as their skin fuses and John is slowly pulled in.
“Sherlock?” John asks. His voice is steady but he’s staring at his arm and his eyes are wide.
Sherlock takes John by the chin. His jaw unhinges and opens wide. He devours him whole.
Afterwards, he listens to the sound of his own breathing, tries not to choke on bone. There’s blood on his face, blood on his hands. Ugly.
John is dead. Or John is Sherlock.
It doesn’t matter because Sherlock was the one to get the most of John in the end.
_____
He’s thirteen and his family is falling apart. Mycroft has left for university and his mother is demanding a divorce. He has no friends to confide in.
At the time, he didn’t know what loneliness was. But now that he’s had John, he feels it all the more acutely.
He’s thirteen and his grandfather dies. He’s thirteen and his peers talk about him behind his back. He’s thirteen and they laugh when they think he can’t see them. He sees everything.
His mother moves to London. His father throws himself into his work. Sherlock sits alone in the mansion and draws circles into the dust on tabletops and shelves. Sherlock sits alone in the mansion after he’s doused the encyclopedias in petrol, after he lights a match and flicks it at the bookcase.
He laughs. The fire licks against his skin.
Half the house goes down in flames. Sherlock wishes it had taken him with it.
_____
He’s in a small room. The door is closed.
“You have to believe me,” Sherlock hears himself shouting through the door.
The small bed in the corner is white. The desk is white. The window has been painted over with white paint and muted sunlight comes in, bathing everything in a dim glow.
He wears a patient gown. There’s an IV needle in his arm. The room smells like antiseptic.
There’s a scrape at the lock. Sherlock steps back.
Two nurses enter. “Grab his arms,” one of them says.
“What—“
“Keep him still.”
Sherlock struggles but the other nurse has flushed something through the IV. He starts to feel drowsy.
“What are you—?” His voice slurs.
“Keep him still,” the nurse repeats. Then she shushes him, her lips very close to his ear.
“He’s quiet,” the other nurse says as he lowers Sherlock onto the bed.
They open the door. Sherlock watches them leave through his blurred vision.
_____
Sherlock has been waiting for this moment.
The woods in front of him are the same woods behind his childhood home. He has run down the winding pathway that takes him to the creek a hundred times in his youth. He shoves his hands into his pockets and starts forward.
“John!” he calls into the trees. His voice is lonely, cradled by the whisper of the wind.
It’s nearly winter. The trees bleed a dark sap, their leaves turning the color of dried blood.
“John!” he calls again.
“Sherlock,” someone says back, but it’s not John. One of the trees to his left starts to untwist with the wet sound of ripping flesh.
“Moriarty,” Sherlock says.
“Hello,” Moriarty says, his face pushing out of the trunk. His gums bleed onto his teeth when he smiles. “You’re a sight for sore eyes.”
Sherlock holds his ground and looks at the abomination Moriarty has become. Was this John’s fate too? To be bled dry with the changing of the seasons, forever rooted in one spot?
“You’re looking for your pet,” Moriarty says.
“Yes,” Sherlock replies evenly.
“Can you imagine?” Moriarty asks, and he opens his eyes. They’re hollow pits, eyes long decayed. “Do you think he looks like me?”
Sherlock turns away. Moriarty laughs.
“Don’t worry,” Moriarty says, and his smile pulls his cracked lips tight over his teeth. He bleeds. “He’s not here.”
Sherlock whirls around—but Moriarty has sunk back into the tree. The dark sap oozes. The wind sweeps past, breaking off leaves and scattering them to the ground.
His heart pounds fast in his chest.
_____
He’s on the rooftop.
John screams his name.
He falls, again and again.
_____
It’s cold. Sherlock’s breath mists the air in front of him. His shoes crunch against ice, faces of traitors twisted into grotesque expressions and peering up at him through the frozen floor.
He doesn’t look down, just keeps walking forward.
_____
“You’ve come a long way, friend,” Lucifer says.
“I’m looking for someone,” Sherlock says, his head bent.
“I know,” Lucifer says. He steps forward and Sherlock chances a look at him. He smiles at Sherlock. He has a beautiful face, dark eyes and dark hair with pale wings folded on his back.
“He came to me, though,” Lucifer says, “He came to me willingly and said he’d give me anything.”
“He’s not yours,” Sherlock says, “He’s not meant for you. You can’t keep him.”
“What a foolish little man,” Lucifer says, still smiling, “Trading his soul for someone I didn’t have.”
_____
John is barely breathing. His eyes are closed.
“Is he—?”
“He’s still alive,” Lucifer agrees.
Sherlock kneels by him and touches his eyelids. He touches his cheek, the line of his jaw, his hair.
“What do you want?”
Lucifer tilts his head. “What will you give me?”
“Anything.”
_____
John wakes with a gasp. The river pebbles dig into his back.
_____
Sherlock opens his eyes. He stares at the ceiling as his body comes back to him.
“You didn’t.” Mycroft’s voice.
Sherlock pushes himself up. He starts to rub away at the chalked circle.
“Sherlock,” Mycroft says sharply.
“What’s done is done,” Sherlock says and keeps his eyes on the floor.
_____
Mycroft drives. Sherlock looks out the window at the woods passing them by.
“Sherlock,” Mycroft starts.
“Let’s not fool ourselves,” Sherlock interrupts, “I would have ended up there all the same.”
_____
Sherlock spots John walking along the side of the road before Mycroft does. The car comes to a halt. John turns around at the crunch of tire on gravel. Sherlock opens the door.
“You,” John says.
Sherlock shuts the door. He thinks of how he must look: even thinner than John had known him, the fading bruise against his cheek. Cut on his palm, the smell of smoke in his hair.
“I thought—” John says, his breath catching, “You. I went—”
Sherlock steps forward. John meets him halfway. His arms wrap around Sherlock’s neck, his face pressed into Sherlock’s shoulder.
_____
Mycroft takes them back to London. He drops John off at his flat before taking Sherlock back to the hotel he’s staying at. He grabs Sherlock’s arm before Sherlock can leave.
“How long do you have?” Mycroft asks.
Sherlock looks back at him. He doesn’t say anything for a long while, and then: “Three years.”
Silence. Mycroft keeps his eyes on Sherlock’s face.
“There’s no loophole,” Sherlock adds.
Mycroft slowly lets him go. “You should tell him.”
Sherlock gets out of the car and closes the door. The car stalls for another few moments before it pulls back onto the street.
_____
Sherlock shaves.
He pretends not to see the shots of red subtly threading through his iris.
_____
John won’t know until he has to.
Fandom: Sherlock
Rating: R
Word Count: 2,236
Characters/Pairing: John/Sherlock
Summary: For those willing to go through hell to save a loved one's soul. Post-Reichenbach.
Disclaimer: I don't own these characters.
Author's Note: Warning for mild gore. This was written for the johnlockchallenges exchange on tumblr for anathemagerminabunt. The prompt was "Death shall have no dominion," which lead me to draw from the entire poem by Dylan Thomas. It ended up relying more on literature than I expected--it might be a good idea to have an idea of Dante's Inferno (or just the nine circles of hell) in order to really understand this fic. It has not undergone any external editing since it's not very long.
And death shall have no dominion.
No more may gulls cry at their ears
Or waves break loud on the seashores;
Where blew a flower may a flower no more
Lift its head to the blows of the rain;
Though they be mad and dead as nails,
Heads of the characters hammer through daisies;
Break in the sun till the sun breaks down,
And death shall have no dominion.
And Death Shall Have No Dominion by Dylan Thomas
“I’m sorry, Sherlock,” Mrs. Hudson says. She tries to touch him but he moves away.
“For how long?”
“Months now,” she says.
Harry wordlessly lets him into her house. She doesn’t offer him anything to drink, just leads him straight to the basement where there are four boxes stacked in the corner.
“This is everything,” Sherlock says.
“Not one to keep much stuff, was he?” Harry says. She has a hand pressed to her mouth, sleeve pulled over her fingers. Her eyes are red but her voice is steady.
“And where is he buried?” Sherlock asks. His voice sounds like it’s coming from somebody else.
“It’s an empty coffin,” Harry says, “We never found him in the river.”
“Will you watch over my body?” Sherlock asks.
“You shouldn’t,” Mycroft replies.
“Will you watch over my body?” Sherlock repeats.
Mycroft says nothing.
Sage burns. His blood sinks deeper into sandstone and congeals on dark feathers.
Sherlock draws a circle on the ground.
i.
The sunlight comes in through the stained glass windows and throws puddles of colors against the worn stone floor. The minister paces back and forth from his pulpit, his voice echoing through the cavernous space of the cathedral. His white robes flare with brilliant color when he steps into a slant of light.
Sherlock is three years old. He watches the colors slide off white fabric, listens to the low drone of his voice. His mother stands up and they sing songs. Sherlock stays sitting and listens to them sing. He closes his eyes and feels very warm.
The singing grows quieter. There is an undertone of static rising from the stone floors, a sound that creeps into prominence. When he opens his eyes again, half the church is empty.
“Where did they go?” he demands.
His mother looks down at him. She is still singing but it’s different. It sounds sharp. The chorus is a dissonant congregation of voices all pitched in different keys.
The sun is setting. The shadows in the corners lengthen.
His mother is the last person left. She continues to sing but it sounds like screaming.
She’s gone.
Sherlock sits alone in the dark.
ii.
John is naked on the bed. His legs are spread and his hand is on his cock, pumping slowly and shallowly so that Sherlock can barely see the head of his cock every time he pushes into his own fist. His eyes are clenched shut and he bites his lip to hold in the groans, his toes curling against the sheets.
Sherlock wants to crawl on to the bed on top of John. He wants to leave marks on John’s neck, kiss John and run his hands over every inch of John’s skin. He wants John to open his eyes, to watch his pupils expand with arousal and to know with absolute certainty that he was the one to tease the gasps from John’s mouth, to cause the shiver under his palms.
He doesn’t. He doesn’t move.
John starts to stroke faster, his back arching off the bed and his head tilting back to expose the line of his neck. Sherlock’s fingers clench and unclench. He stares, riveted.
John comes with a moan and a word on his lips. It’s the name of everyone John has ever met, collected into a single sound—everyone except Sherlock.
John opens his eyes and he looks at Sherlock. His expression is blank and it feels like John is looking through him rather than at him.
It’s the truth in reality as well as here: Sherlock can’t have him. He’s come to terms with this long ago.
“I don’t care,” Sherlock whispers and closes his eyes.
iii.
His side aches from where he’s been pressed against the pavement. His mind is hazy. He thinks vaguely that he should feel euphoric but instead he just feels empty. He knows that there would be fresh track marks in the crook of his elbow if he bothered to look.
He wants to get up but his limbs won’t move. It takes all of his effort and several minutes to crawl a few feet away from the open sewer.
He vomits and half of it dribbles out of his mouth. It tastes sour and some of it pushes into the back of his nose. He makes an effort to sit up and spit it out but he’s too far gone.
He lies with his head on the cold ground and feebly swallows his own vomit. Where is the high? Where is the comfortable numbness?
His heart slows and his breathing shallows out. There is nobody coming.
iv.
John loses his job. John breaks up with his girlfriend. John slowly stops seeing his friends.
John makes him tea and fetches his phone. He tucks his gun into his pocket and follows where Sherlock leads. He tells Sherlock how brilliant he is, and the words are like small pearls, rolled between his teeth. John’s bright smile, his eyes on Sherlock’s face.
Sherlock wants to touch him. Sherlock wants to cut out his heart and preserve it in a jar like the ancient Egyptians, wants to crawl into John’s skin and suture it shut so that John can never leave him. He wants to breathe the air John has exhaled, wants to collect the dust of every last skin cell John’s sloughed off.
There is a long thin chain that runs from the handcuff around John’s wrist to the handcuff around Sherlock’s. Every passing moment, the handcuff gets shorter by one link, until the bones of John’s wrist dig into Sherlock’s arm. Sherlock watches, delighted, as their skin fuses and John is slowly pulled in.
“Sherlock?” John asks. His voice is steady but he’s staring at his arm and his eyes are wide.
Sherlock takes John by the chin. His jaw unhinges and opens wide. He devours him whole.
Afterwards, he listens to the sound of his own breathing, tries not to choke on bone. There’s blood on his face, blood on his hands. Ugly.
John is dead. Or John is Sherlock.
It doesn’t matter because Sherlock was the one to get the most of John in the end.
v.
He’s thirteen and his family is falling apart. Mycroft has left for university and his mother is demanding a divorce. He has no friends to confide in.
At the time, he didn’t know what loneliness was. But now that he’s had John, he feels it all the more acutely.
He’s thirteen and his grandfather dies. He’s thirteen and his peers talk about him behind his back. He’s thirteen and they laugh when they think he can’t see them. He sees everything.
His mother moves to London. His father throws himself into his work. Sherlock sits alone in the mansion and draws circles into the dust on tabletops and shelves. Sherlock sits alone in the mansion after he’s doused the encyclopedias in petrol, after he lights a match and flicks it at the bookcase.
He laughs. The fire licks against his skin.
Half the house goes down in flames. Sherlock wishes it had taken him with it.
vi.
He’s in a small room. The door is closed.
“You have to believe me,” Sherlock hears himself shouting through the door.
The small bed in the corner is white. The desk is white. The window has been painted over with white paint and muted sunlight comes in, bathing everything in a dim glow.
He wears a patient gown. There’s an IV needle in his arm. The room smells like antiseptic.
There’s a scrape at the lock. Sherlock steps back.
Two nurses enter. “Grab his arms,” one of them says.
“What—“
“Keep him still.”
Sherlock struggles but the other nurse has flushed something through the IV. He starts to feel drowsy.
“What are you—?” His voice slurs.
“Keep him still,” the nurse repeats. Then she shushes him, her lips very close to his ear.
“He’s quiet,” the other nurse says as he lowers Sherlock onto the bed.
They open the door. Sherlock watches them leave through his blurred vision.
vii.
Sherlock has been waiting for this moment.
The woods in front of him are the same woods behind his childhood home. He has run down the winding pathway that takes him to the creek a hundred times in his youth. He shoves his hands into his pockets and starts forward.
“John!” he calls into the trees. His voice is lonely, cradled by the whisper of the wind.
It’s nearly winter. The trees bleed a dark sap, their leaves turning the color of dried blood.
“John!” he calls again.
“Sherlock,” someone says back, but it’s not John. One of the trees to his left starts to untwist with the wet sound of ripping flesh.
“Moriarty,” Sherlock says.
“Hello,” Moriarty says, his face pushing out of the trunk. His gums bleed onto his teeth when he smiles. “You’re a sight for sore eyes.”
Sherlock holds his ground and looks at the abomination Moriarty has become. Was this John’s fate too? To be bled dry with the changing of the seasons, forever rooted in one spot?
“You’re looking for your pet,” Moriarty says.
“Yes,” Sherlock replies evenly.
“Can you imagine?” Moriarty asks, and he opens his eyes. They’re hollow pits, eyes long decayed. “Do you think he looks like me?”
Sherlock turns away. Moriarty laughs.
“Don’t worry,” Moriarty says, and his smile pulls his cracked lips tight over his teeth. He bleeds. “He’s not here.”
Sherlock whirls around—but Moriarty has sunk back into the tree. The dark sap oozes. The wind sweeps past, breaking off leaves and scattering them to the ground.
His heart pounds fast in his chest.
viii.
He’s on the rooftop.
John screams his name.
He falls, again and again.
ix.
It’s cold. Sherlock’s breath mists the air in front of him. His shoes crunch against ice, faces of traitors twisted into grotesque expressions and peering up at him through the frozen floor.
He doesn’t look down, just keeps walking forward.
“You’ve come a long way, friend,” Lucifer says.
“I’m looking for someone,” Sherlock says, his head bent.
“I know,” Lucifer says. He steps forward and Sherlock chances a look at him. He smiles at Sherlock. He has a beautiful face, dark eyes and dark hair with pale wings folded on his back.
“He came to me, though,” Lucifer says, “He came to me willingly and said he’d give me anything.”
“He’s not yours,” Sherlock says, “He’s not meant for you. You can’t keep him.”
“What a foolish little man,” Lucifer says, still smiling, “Trading his soul for someone I didn’t have.”
John is barely breathing. His eyes are closed.
“Is he—?”
“He’s still alive,” Lucifer agrees.
Sherlock kneels by him and touches his eyelids. He touches his cheek, the line of his jaw, his hair.
“What do you want?”
Lucifer tilts his head. “What will you give me?”
“Anything.”
John wakes with a gasp. The river pebbles dig into his back.
Sherlock opens his eyes. He stares at the ceiling as his body comes back to him.
“You didn’t.” Mycroft’s voice.
Sherlock pushes himself up. He starts to rub away at the chalked circle.
“Sherlock,” Mycroft says sharply.
“What’s done is done,” Sherlock says and keeps his eyes on the floor.
Mycroft drives. Sherlock looks out the window at the woods passing them by.
“Sherlock,” Mycroft starts.
“Let’s not fool ourselves,” Sherlock interrupts, “I would have ended up there all the same.”
Sherlock spots John walking along the side of the road before Mycroft does. The car comes to a halt. John turns around at the crunch of tire on gravel. Sherlock opens the door.
“You,” John says.
Sherlock shuts the door. He thinks of how he must look: even thinner than John had known him, the fading bruise against his cheek. Cut on his palm, the smell of smoke in his hair.
“I thought—” John says, his breath catching, “You. I went—”
Sherlock steps forward. John meets him halfway. His arms wrap around Sherlock’s neck, his face pressed into Sherlock’s shoulder.
Mycroft takes them back to London. He drops John off at his flat before taking Sherlock back to the hotel he’s staying at. He grabs Sherlock’s arm before Sherlock can leave.
“How long do you have?” Mycroft asks.
Sherlock looks back at him. He doesn’t say anything for a long while, and then: “Three years.”
Silence. Mycroft keeps his eyes on Sherlock’s face.
“There’s no loophole,” Sherlock adds.
Mycroft slowly lets him go. “You should tell him.”
Sherlock gets out of the car and closes the door. The car stalls for another few moments before it pulls back onto the street.
Sherlock shaves.
He pretends not to see the shots of red subtly threading through his iris.
John won’t know until he has to.
