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“Mother, you’re not telling him those stories again, are you?”
“He needs to know his heritage, Lucy.” Lucy scoffed, said a perfunctory goodnight to her son, and left the room, realizing a fight she could not win.
“Why doesn’t Mummy like it when you tell me stories?”
“Oh, my dear boy, it’s so very complicated. I think it’s because she’s angry at me because she no longer believes in the stories as she once did.”
“Why doesn’t she just believe again?
She smiled, soft and weary. “If only it were that easy. You cannot simply choose to believe or not believe in something – it doesn’t come from only your head, it also comes from your heart. It took me a while to learn that.”
“Well, I will never stop believing in Narnia.” She kissed his forehead, tucked the covers around him (he wriggled a bit so they weren’t as neat or constricting), and settled into the armchair next to the bed.
“Now, where were we?”
“Start at the beginning again, please! The bombs and the old house!”
Grandmother smiled indulgently. “Well. During the blitz, four children –”
“Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy!”
“that’s right. Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy were sent away from the bombs to a rambling country house inhabited only by and old professor and his housekeeper. In this house, they found a wardrobe.”
++
Turning the pages of his newspaper, John sighed and shifted in the worn armchair.
“I agree, John, the government is being incredibly tiresome about the defense bill.” John only rolled his eyes; Sherlock was gratified to see how accustomed to his habit of commenting on John’s non-vocal responses to the news John had become. Sherlock, seated on the sofa with his feet up on the coffee table, idly clicked through emails on his – well, John’s – laptop. Having just wrapped up a case yesterday, Sherlock was not yet feeling the immense crush of boredom and could tell by John’s comfortable slouch and unconscious half-smile that he was quite enjoying their rare domestic morning. Sherlock had even allowed John to convince him to eat a full breakfast – eggs and toast and all – earlier.
Sherlock’s phone rang with the rumbling, apocalyptic tones of Beethoven’s fifth. Sherlock pointedly ignored it, and John rolled his eyes, recognizing the overly dramatic ringtone Sherlock had chosen for his brother. Mycroft did not give up easily, however, and the phone continued to ring as he called back half a dozen times. Finally, Sherlock snatched the phone up and answered with a rough “What?!” Annoyed at Mycroft’s damnable insistence, he did not at first give the call his full attention. Mycroft’s words, brusque and terse, snapped him back into himself. He ended the call with a curt, “Yes, I understand. If you must. Fine,” before dropping the phone and drawing a shaky breath. He felt John’s eyes on him, tentative and searching. Sherlock saved himself from questions by stating, in a carefully controlled tone, “My grandmother has died.”
“Oh, god, Sherlock. I’m so sorry.” John didn’t hesitate to move from his armchair to sit next to Sherlock on the sofa and put one arm around his shoulders. The gesture was awkward but somehow comforting; Sherlock leaned into his body and inhaled in the way one does to keep from crying.
“I…we…that is…I was very close to her. As a child, I felt. Well, my mother was distant. Grandmother Susan was the only one who made me feel…loved. Accepted.” His whole body felt smaller, as if he were collapsing into himself, reverting to childhood. John’s hand stroked his shoulder in comforting circles. “Mycroft said she left me a particular bequest in her will and a letter explaining it. He’ll be here momentarily to drop it off.” As he spoke, a knock downstairs announced the man’s arrival.
Sherlock stood, straightening his suit and clearing his throat; he would not give his brother the satisfaction of a show of mourning. Logically, he knew grief was something to be shared by family members, experienced together in some pathetic demonstrate of catharsis. Mycroft had rarely shown anything other than polite disdain for Grandmother Susan, however, and did not deserve to see Sherlock’s pain.
Mycroft stepped into the flat, his face arranged into an appropriately sombre and grave mask. “Terribly sad. She was a dear old woman.” He said it like he didn’t know her personally, like she was just the sweet granny of an acquaintance, and Sherlock clenched his fists once, quickly, to control his irritation.
Mycroft handed his brother an envelope – creamy white, thick paper, Sherlock’s name written in neat, efficient black script on the front. Sherlock examined it, not deducing but remembering. For one quiet moment, his fingers felt the weight of the paper, lingering on the handwriting, before he turned it over, opened it, and withdrew a single folded sheet. He read silently; if John and Mycroft had expected to be an audience they were disappointed. Although, Sherlock surmised, given that the envelope wasn’t sealed, Mycroft doubtless already knew the contents.
++
My dearest Sherlock,
By now Mycroft will have read my will and you will know that, beyond some pieces of jewelry your mother always admired and some art I know Mycroft cared for, I have left to you, my grandson, the remainder of my worldly belongings. The money of course is not much now – she had early on put much of her inherited fortune into trusts for first his mother then Mycroft and himself – but with it comes the house. You more than anyone loved that house – your mother always despised its moldering histories and Mycroft, I know, finds it too ancient and too remote. You may do with it as you wish – I know it is too large for one person, have felt so for many years, but perhaps, now that you’ve found someone to share your adventures – Sherlock studiously avoided looking at John – you’ll sometime want to settle down. If you do choose to sell it, there is only one thing to be removed – to be saved – and I trust you completely to do so. Keep believing, my dear boy.
Affectionately,
Your grandmother, Susan Pevensie Hillman
Sherlock found himself nodding in agreement as he read. The house he had grown up in was all angles and glass, its shiny, gleaming surfaces wiped clean every day by a team of maids, its furniture cold and stiff. As an adult, he could appreciate its modern beauty and the harmonious balance in its clean lines, but as a child he much preferred the grand, rambling country house where his grandmother lived. There was so much to explore and understand; every scratch on the floor and stain on the wall told a story. Whenever he tired of dashing about, investigating each and every age-old mark on the bones of the old house and pestering his grandmother to tell him their details (many preceded her time there, naturally, but she tells him about the carpet Edmund ripped with a particularly ungraceful stumble during a fencing match using two rusted ceremonial swords pried from the wall and a faded stain near the floorboards of the back staircase, a remnant of a cup of cocoa (ersatz – rationing, you know) spilled by Lucy), he would crawl into the wardrobe. Tucked into a corner with ancient furs draped around his shoulders, Sherlock would sit still and tell himself the stories. Stories of a different world, a world with different rules and powers, where new and different things were possible.
He spent every summer at the rambling house and every night she would tell him a bit about the world in which she was a queen. Hunts for the white stag, state meetings with centaurs, elves, and woodsprites, cups of tea with Mr. and Mrs. Beaver, swimming with merpeople and battling against hags and minotaurs. He asks her over and over if it’s true and she responds, “oh, yes. Quite true.” He’s never known her to lie, not to him, so it must be true.
He was eleven when Mycroft pulled open the door of the wardrobe and scoffed to find him curled in the corner. “You can’t possibly still believe all that rot about Narnia.” He said the word with the same sort of scorn he used when describing juvenile pranks pulled by his imbecile classmates, with a disgust reserved for mentioning promising politicians ruining their careers with petty scandals. Mycroft – this was his last summer to visit Grandmother as it will turn out – was eighteen and at uni and had no time for the insignificant pleasures and foibles of average people. “Not only is it just absurd – talking animals, really – but it’s a physical impossibility, another world appearing in the back of a wardrobe. Honestly, Sherlock.”
Sherlock followed him down to lunch but thought about all the things now common previously unheard of: DNA, fingerprints, black holes, microchips. He would quote Hamlet at Mycroft if he weren’t quite sure Mycroft would simply quote more of the Bard back; he had already deleted the rest of the plays he’d read. (Hamlet only got to stay because of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. He’d quite enjoyed the absurdist wordplay). He vowed never to talk to Mycroft about Narnia again; not until he had proof, at least.
++
Pine needles tickled his nose and through the dense crush of branches he could see a warm light. He pushed through, arriving in front of a tall iron lamppost, ivy curling around its pole, the flame flickering but strong. The forest was hushed yet full of more noise than he had thought possible in nature: the rustle of leaves and chirps of birds, whispers and sighs and giggles that seem to come from the very woods themselves. He might have been the only human there in centuries. He couldn’t wait to dash off, to explore.
Out of the corner of his eye he saw a flash of golden fur.
++
John told him about the solar system, about things far too vast for the comprehension of a tiny human mind. Somewhere in the back of his mind he knew it all along and John’s words brought it back to him – endless hours searching for all the things mankind didn’t yet know, all the things no one had yet seen or proven. Somewhere along the line, he had deleted them and stopped talking about Narnia.
He began to think about other unknowable things: paradoxes and loyalty and doctors with guns.
++
“Tell me about her. I mean, if you like.”
“Well, I’d. Yes, I’d like that very much.” Sherlock was almost surprised by his own admission. “Grandmother Susan – we always called her that, I think it was a formality insisted upon by my mother – was, well, rather extraordinary. As a child she and her three siblings were evacuated during the Blitz to the home of an old professor in the country. They had many adventures during that time and become very close with Professor Kirke.” He paused here. The stories – were they stories? – weren’t something you just told. They were fragile little creatures, held together by little more than Sherlock’s own admittedly failing belief. They stayed in his mind, pure and untouched, unanalyzed and therefore still true; if stated, if said out loud, all the holes and the impossibilities and the flawed logic of what he knew to be frankly unbelievable stories would become evident. (Unbelievable? But he had lived them. Hadn’t he?) Best to just continue and to hope John did not notice any omissions.
“She trained as a nurse when she was of age, although the war was nearly over by then. Although she, by her own admission, had never cared much for school, I always found her to be a most logical and pragmatic person.” Sherlock’s smiled, thinking of the way she had cautioned him to think through the small decisions of his life, drawing reasonable conclusions from analysis of facts. If Mycroft had (begrudgingly) guided him through the process of deduction of external clues, Grandmother Susan had helped him learn to apply his deductions to make decisions. Her moral code of right and wrong had had little to do with afterworldly redemption and everything to do with human justice.
“In pictures from that time, she seems happy. Always laughing, smiling, dancing and flirting with handsome soldiers. She was beautiful.” His voice holds a note of awe. “Even as an old woman she had grace and poise and lovely delicate features, but as a young woman she was stunning. She told me herself about her many flirtations and I have no doubt many more were infatuated at a distance. She did fall in love and marry – my grandfather – but I always got the feeling that she never fully invested herself into her marriage. Not that she didn’t love him, just that she stayed independent and she refused to allow her identity to be subsumed into his. He died when I was just a child but I somehow always knew that he worshiped her, that he loved her far more than she loved him.”
“That’s probably not uncommon in your family.” John seemed to blush at his own words, as if regretting them the moment they slipped out. “I just mean that you – I mean you and Mycroft and probably the rest of your family although god knows I absolutely do not need to meet them to find out – that you all are quite extraordinary. I don’t know how us lesser mortals are expected to keep up.”
Sherlock felt the familiar warmth that spread through his body each time John complimented him. “I don’t expect you to keep up. And yet, you still seem to,” he mused, almost to himself. John looked away, but the corner of his lip quirked up in pleasure. Sherlock willed himself not to look at John’s mouth, not to think about feeling the movements of the muscles with his tongue as John smiled. He cleared his throat and continued.
“But her marriage was later. Like I said, she worked as a nurse until the end of the war and then spent a few years travelling – away from rations and reconstruction. However, a few years after the war ended, most of her family – her parents, her brothers and sister, her cousin – were all killed in a train accident.” Caught up in the story, John gasped.
“My god. What a terrible thing to go through as a girl.”
“Indeed. She was only twenty-one and she mourned them deeply. She and her siblings, Peter, Edmund, and Lucy, were very close. My mother is named after Lucy, who was just a teenager when she died. When Grandmother told me of this time, she talked of feeling lost and of knowing for the first time, despite the war and the bombs, what a cruel, arbitrary place the world was. She told me that for a while she threw herself into parties, drinking and flirting and I’m quite certain, although she never said, into affairs and maybe drugs. She certainly mixed with the right crowd for it – boys just off the high of war, American GIs with money in their pockets, girls dying to prolong the sense of freedom and independence the war had provided.
“A few months after the crash, she received a letter. Professor Kirke had passed away and in his will, written before the crash, he had left his house, land, possessions and a small fortune to the Pevensie children to share. As the only surviving Pevensie, Susan inherited it all, just as I now have. I spent my childhood summers with her, at that house.”
++
The crown pinched his head and the sword hung heavy in his hand. He raised it and a cheer went up; deafening, it contained cries and roars and whinnies and squawks – the sounds of his kingdom. To war then. To battle and bloodshed. To righteousness and good souls lost in pursuit of a good cause. His armies stood at the base of the castle, shadowed by its towers. Ready to follow him and fight. Ready to follow him and fall. He shifted uneasily in his armour and worried about loyalty. Behind him stood his advisors, wise men and beasts all. He wore the crest of Aslan, flew the flag of Cair Paravel, felt love for his people and defended his lands, and yet he felt something missing. He belonged, but was not quite home.
++
Stretched out on the sofa, Sherlock flipped through the channels impatiently, eyes closed. John’s footsteps on the stairs – more hesitant than usual, he had only just woken and at four in the morning all the lights were off – distracted him and he paused on a station replaying the evening sport scores. The door creaked open. John sneezed.
“Photic sneeze reflex, fascinating. Only affects about a third of the population. Thought to be caused by stimulation to the ophthalmic branch of the trigeminal nerve. John, do you think I could test –”
“No. God, no, absolutely not.” The rejection was said in good humour; Sherlock filed that away as a maybe and began to plan ways to expose John to unexpected bright lights.
“What are you doing up at this hour?” Sherlock disregarded the question with a lazy wave of his hand. He expected John to complain about the noise then return to bed, perhaps making a quick cup of herbal tea first. He was surprised, therefore, when John lifted Sherlock’s legs and sat on the couch next to him. John settled Sherlock’s feet in his lap, one hand on his bare ankle and the other arm stretched along the back of the couch. Sherlock returned to violently pressing the channel up button.
“How can you even tell what’s on at that speed?”
“I don’t need to stop to tell that it’s all pedestrian anyway.” John snorted a laugh.
“Why bother, then?”
Because it’s far noisier in my mind. “Oh, something to do.” The cavalier tone did not fool John.
“Need a bit of distraction, then? C’mon, give it here.” He gestured toward Sherlock’s hand and Sherlock passed over the remote. “Now, let’s see.” John said, pulling up the guide. “Ah ha! Always something worthwhile on the movie channels.” It was something with elves and wizards and strange little men with hairy feet; Sherlock watched it through half-closed eyes, willing himself to think about the exhaustion of marching days over snow-covered mountains. John’s thumb traced soothing circles on the bone of his ankle.
When he woke the credits were rolling and John was slouched over, half-tucked between Sherlock’s legs and the back of the sofa. He snored slightly. Sherlock disentangled himself, brought John’s legs up so that he was more fully horizontal, then, after a moment of deliberation, laid back on the couch next to John, one arm tucked under his neck, John’s head against his chest, their legs parallel, only just touching. He modulated his breathing to sync with John’s and slowly willed himself back to sleep.
It felt like home.
++
She’d told him that believing took your mind and your heart; he wasn’t sure what that meant for him. When their family cat had died when he was thirteen, he had asked his mother if he could keep it for dissection. She gaped at him then snapped, “God, Sherlock. Don’t be so heartless.”
++
John woke first; his slight start of panic at the momentarily unfamiliar surroundings jolted Sherlock awake. Sherlock could feel John shift and assess his position. There was no panic in John’s voice when he said, “Morning, Sherlock,” breath hot through Sherlock’s tee shirt. Sherlock’s hand rested on John’s shoulder and he slowly, experimentally, slid it down further and around John’s back, pulling him fractionally closer. John curled in and looked up at Sherlock with a sleepy grin. “This is unusual.” Sherlock’s hand stiffened and stilled. “But nice.” Ah.
John yawned against his chest as Sherlock’s hand stroked his upper back gently. They stayed like that for another few minutes; Sherlock was fully awake but John continued to comfortably doze. Much too soon, John began to roll his shoulders, stretching the stiffness out of them. Sherlock’s hand fell away as John sat up, rubbing his hair and blinking sleepily. He yawned, then leaned down and quickly – swift enough that Sherlock did not see it coming – kissed him on the lips. A dry, closed mouth press of lips. He pulled back and stood and Sherlock’s mind reeled too quickly for him to follow.
“Will you eat this morning?” John called from the kitchen. “If you don’t have anything on, a nice lazy day on the couch might be nice.” Usually, Sherlock could think of nothing less nice but he already missed John’s body, warm and comfortable, next to his.
They were only halfway through their bacon and eggs when Mrs. Hudson let Lestrade in. Sherlock dashed off to dress, John following suit after swallowing a few more bites, and they were off.
Their day took them on a chase culminating in an abandoned theatre in Soho. They fell out of the cab at Baker Street at half-past midnight, giddy with adrenaline. Inside the hallway they both shrugged out of their coats and had begun up the stairwell when John grabbed Sherlock’s wrist. Sherlock turned and John, standing on his toes – he was on a lower step, after all – pressed their lips together, gently again, undemanding, but sure. There was no hesitation on John’s part, only a question. With a swipe of his tongue and touch of his hand, Sherlock answered.
Ah, he thought, so this is what it is like to believe.
++
Sherlock bounded up the stairs two at a time, John at his heels. He ran down a corridor, turning corners, passing countless closed doors, before stopping at the far end of one dark hallway. With an excited, almost childlike smile at John, he pushed open the door and together they entered the room. Sun flickered in through curtainless windows, dust motes, disturbed by the new presence, dancing in the rays. The room was completely empty except for a tall wooden wardrobe against one wall. Into the surface of the door was carved an elaborate tree, abundant with leaves and heavy fruit. The wood shone as if polished only that morning. Sherlock ran his fingers reverentially over the carving before turning the key and slowly opening the door. The smell of fur and mothballs assaulted John’s nose; the wardrobe was full of coats that hadn’t been in style for at least a century. Sherlock gently stroked a soft mink, his eyes closed and a soft smile on his lips.
After a moment, he turned to John and took his hand. He pulled him to the floor where they sat crosslegged, facing each other, like young boys in a secret club. “John, I think it’s time I told you the story of this house.” He began in a comfortable way which suggested he knew the story not as his own but through many retellings over the years. “During the blitz, four children were sent away from the bombs to a rambling country house inhabited only by an old professor and his housekeeper. In this house, they found a wardrobe.”
Epilogue:
The house, as it turns out, is a bit too much even for two, but they don’t mind. When John’s limp returns, not psychosomatic this time, Sherlock begins to think maybe it’s time to make it more than a holiday home. He sets up a lab in the vast formal dining room, revelling in the space, and a row of beehives in the back garden.
John writes up stories, not only cases gone by but now also the wondrous tales of Narnia. Sherlock’s not sure when or how John convinced him but in the evenings he narrates bit by bit as John (laboriously as ever) types away.
They sleep next door to the room with the wardrobe and if sometimes Sherlock wakes, hearing the distant rustle of leaves and soft singing in reedy, earthy voices, only John knows.