Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

i.

 

John Watson was born into a very tiny world. His parents, hardy borrowers in their own right, lived in the base of a grandfather clock until just before his birth—at which point his mum insisted on moving, on account of babies not being particularly fond of loud, abrupt clanging and twanging all hours of the day. She’d learnt that lesson the hard way with Harriett, who had howled at the deafening chimes until she made herself sick. Dreading another two years of the same, Mrs. Watson forged the expedition to procure new accommodations, but it seemed an impossible task. She inevitably found the space beneath the floorboards too drafty, the mouse hole in the pantry too dangerous, and even the abandoned sewing kit in the servant’s storage rooms a mite exposed.

“Well, we can hardly move upstairs,” Mr. Watson said. He was not inclined to be a risky borrower, seeing as how his favorite cousin had once been glimpsed by the Big People and mistaken for a rodent. Those were dark days indeed.

But Mrs. Watson would hear of nothing else. “It’s upstairs or the cellars,” she said, hands on both of her child-rounded hips. “The cellars would be cold, love, make no mistake about that. We’re better off going up the walls.”

“I hate going up the walls,” said Mr. Watson.

They packed their meager belongings: their dining table, a wooden spool with blue thread woven in thick braids about its center; the painstakingly crafted walnut chairs; all of the dried vegetables gathered from the kitchen raids, and sugar crystals besides, as big as little Harry’s face; the clothing Mrs. Watson had sewn so carefully with her own knobbed hands and scraps of thread and lint; the lace that had been her wedding gift. Other things were too large and had to be left behind, though it was hard for them, especially with the broken ladle that had been their marriage bed.

These things, they knotted together with bits of twine and began to haul up the space between the walls. The pulley system had afforded them with some access to the higher levels of the house for some time, but it was a long ride, and Mrs. Watson disliked the borrowers “up there.” Now, she imagined she’d have no choice but to get along with them. “Think themselves so splendid,” she grumbled to herself, cross-like. “Well, here’s mud in your eye! I suppose we’ll do our best to be neighborly. Might even be for the best. Yes,” she decided, “there aren’t many of us here, are there? Lonely big old place. Be good to have some friends.”

With a delighted shout, Harry threw their best button plate down into the dark below. Worries forgotten, Mrs. Watson snatched her ear.

Rooms were plentiful upstairs. They found a small but sturdy space beneath the floor—close to a heating vent, which felt blessedly warm in the harsh winters that left the bones of an old mansion aching and chilled. “It’ll have to do,” is what Mrs. Watson said, before collapsing in a sweating heap on one of their chairs.

It was here, nestled beneath Sherlock Holmes’ nursery, that John Watson was born. Neither knew of each other’s existence, of course, Sherlock Holmes being a quiet and easily distracted infant and John, well—his cries were swallowed by the creak of the mobile. A long moan of wind. Footsteps. Any noise at all.

 

ii.

 

Five years passed.

John, unlike most borrowers his age, wasn’t particularly interested in the Big People—or, as Harry liked to whisper, the “human beans.” Oh, he was certainly aware of their presence. He heard their voices drift down through the piping. He felt their shoes shake the foundations of his house. He thought they were awfully good at cooking, having tasted a few morsels of pastry from the kitchen raids his father and the older borrowers went on every week.

But the fascination others had with the beans seemed silly. Harry, especially—she liked to sneak out of their house and go running down the corridor, to Mr. Holmes’ study. “It has so many books,” she told John, freckles stark on her nose. “And there’s a fireplace, a gigantic one! It’s amazing! Billy Mantel lives up there, you know, and he says it makes a giant wall of death.”

John was a little borrower. That is, he was little even by borrower standards: stout, capable, but small of shoulder breadth and height. He wore Harry’s old jumpers, cable-knitted with stray bits of thread and yarn, each strand split three times in order to become manageable for his mum’s deft handiwork. There was nothing spectacular about John Watson, save for a steady gaze and hand. He thought a giant wall of death didn’t sound so amazing, really.

“I dunno,” he said.

“You’re just a baby still,” decided Harry. “You’ll get it when you’re older, John.”

He shrugged. Then he went to practice grinding up the sugars and herbs his mum kept in old corn-cob pipe heads beside the kitchen table. The task took a great deal of concentration, and he was startled when his mum smoothed his hair down with her fingers. “John,” she said with love, and a little sadness, “don’t you worry. You’ll find something wonderful yet, something bigger than yourself.”

 

iii.

 

She was right.

When he was nine in human-bean years, John discovered a mouse. This wasn’t exciting in itself—the mansion had dozens of them—but the mouse had been a busy, busy mouse. It had made a hole in the wall just barely the size of his head and shoulders.

“Off you go,” he told the mouse, burnishing the crossbow he’d fashioned from some fishing wire, rubber bands, and twigs. The tiny arrow glinted, its head the finest picture nail that John could find. (His mum said he was too young for such a weapon, but his father argued well about the rat infestation, the need for a trade and skill, and the fact that nothing had made John light up before like that crossbow had.)

Despite his love of the instrument, John didn’t want to hurt anything with it. He tried to nudge the mouse along; it went, skittering into some dark beyond.

He looked at the hole in the wall. The frailest beam of sunlight poured into the crawl space, and in it, he saw how pale his hands were, how perfectly formed. I wonder, John thought to himself. He crept toward the hole and peered around its ragged edges.

His eyes widened. The world suddenly expanded as easily as a paper bag ripped from corner to corner, and for the first time in his life, John Watson felt small.

 

iv.

 

“What’s wrong with you?” Harry asked him that night. She gnawed at a corner of barley, nose scrunching up.

John smiled and said nothing.

“Well, he’s found himself something secret,” said Mr. Watson, who knew the ways of little boys well. “Isn’t it obvious? Look at those cheeks. Bright as pearls.”

“Oh, a secret! You must tell us.”

“He won’t say a word,” Mrs. Watson told her daughter crossly. “And if you know best, you won’t ask him to. You have your own secrets, Harriet Watson, and I daresay you don’t want them being aired out with the laundry. Don’t pick your teeth, there’s a dear.”

John felt like he may never stop smiling. “I haven’t got one. A secret, I mean. I’m only just—very happy.”

Mr. Watson tapped the side of his nose and winked. “Of course you are,” he said with great cheer. The matter was dropped and never brought up again; likewise, John began to disappear for longer and longer hours at a time, but no one in the family asked questions (except Harry, and he was big enough now to put spider legs in her bed if she tried).

 

v.

 

John thought of it as His Room.

His Room could have filled thousands of borrower homes—it was vast, periwinkle blue, and every possible nook and cranny and corner was filled with something astonishing. There were books—many books, some crammed upside down onto shelves, others left open and without homes—and peculiar instruments made of metal and glass that could make things seem bigger than they actually were. There were two windows, the sills sagging from the weight of jam jars that had been washed clean and filled with odd specimens: strangely coloured bugs with bulbous eyes, beautiful bird-insects with spotted wings, slow-shifting monsters, flowers like John had never imagined, and once, a giant worm that turned into a silk bag overnight.

And what’s more, tubes that were taller than John, filled with bubbling waters or bright blue pigments or smoky residue. An entire table of these, and other round glasses, and a machine that could spark a flame to heat the solutions quickly. A dart board—riddled with holes, and a tempting target for John’s arrows—and maps, perhaps of the human beans’ world, though John couldn’t be sure. A rocking horse whose black marble eyes were the size of John’s head. Puzzles, some left abandoned in the middle of the carpet, though these often disappeared within days before being replaced with some new, more confusing mass of cardboard pictures.

A kite! He knew it was a kite because the kit box said so. It was a spectacular red bird thing with plastic wings.

John loved His Room. He could look at it for days and still find things that wanted looking at. The hole the mouse had made opened out onto a shelf overlooking His Room, and John could crawl out between two book spines (respectively, The Encyclopedia Britannica and Medicine in Modern Times: Discourses Delivered at a Meeting of the British Medical Association at Oxford) and sit there, legs dangling over the edge as he observed and marveled and dreamt. As night fell, he stood with great reluctance and tried to emboss His Room onto his mind, so that he might carry it with him to sleep.

When John left, he covered the hole painstakingly with a circle of pine wood covered in the same blue as the wallpaper; it could hardly attract the beans’ attention, he reasoned. They were quite blind for being so very large.

 

vi.

 

Sometimes at night, John dreamt of riding that kite as it floated out of the window and to greater, vaster places. He snuffled in his bed, living out all of the adventures he could have, the Big People he would see far below him like pinpricks or the size of his thumb when he held it out.

In those dreams, John always lost control of the kite. He woke with the plummet, hands grasping for red plastic, cold sweat dotted across his brow. He thought his heart made enough of a clamor to wake even the beans of the Holmes’ mansion, but it didn’t, and sleep clasped him near soon after.

 

vii.

 

It was only a matter of time before John encountered the Boy who slept in the very room John quietly enjoyed, noon to dusk. John was clever and somewhat observant; he knew a human bean lived in the room. It had a bed—the sheets often left in a tangled knot that would’ve made his mum cluck her tongue—and a child’s winter coat hanging from a hook on the door. Toys and books moved around. Sometimes John heard a voice shouting just before he moved the door to the hole aside, and he would retreat in disappointment from the danger of a possible sighting.

Nothing irked John more. After all, it was His Room, not some bean’s! Perhaps the bean had been given the room, but John was the one to find it. It was the understanding of borrowers that being given something wasn’t nearly as important as being the one to find it.

Soon, however, the irritation melted away like icing on fingertips. John was a practical borrower: these things did happen.

We can share the room a bit, can’t we? he thought. The bean can have it at night when he needs it, and I can have it during the day when there’s nothing else to do. That’s real fair of me. As long as he abides by those rules, I won’t put spider legs in his bed, though I think he might like spiders better than Harry.

 

vii.

 

The Boy abided by the plan extraordinarily well considering John never explained it to him. He spent little time there during daylight hours and John, pleased with His Room, gradually grew braver and braver. He decided to fasten some string to his arrow and fire it at the desk, so that he might slide down the string and walk amongst the sun-glittered jars and tubes and scorch marks there. Then, he could pull the nail out of the wood and climb up again before the Boy returned for sleep.

He was very careful. He made sure it was a day when the winter coat was gone and the floor sounded empty indeed. Before going, John kissed his mum soundly on the cheek and told her he’d be home for dinner: pea soup and some crumbs of cake.

He was delighted when the nail pierced the oak desk neatly, cleanly, securely. Then he tied the string to the bookend on his shelf and clasped tight, fingers hidden in his jumper sleeves to protect them from the sting. He slid—oh, that was a rush!—and saw His Room disappear into a blur of colour and light and periwinkle winks. The desk slammed into his knees with shocking force, sending John tumbling across its surface.

“Well, that hurt,” John said to himself, getting to his feet again.

And he stopped.

Oh, thought John, gazing up in all directions, mesmerized by the piercing warmth of the sun and the way the glass reflected it across the desk in playful fragments. He turned in a full circle, mouth open. In that moment, John felt his heart swell and burst apart in his chest, unable to withstand the beauty and curiousness of it all. His Room, from this vantage point, seemed more fascinating than ever.

He touched some glass with his fingertips, staring at the tiniest foggy imprint he left behind on it. He went from jar to jar, peering through leaves and twigs to see the jars’ inhabitants: bugs and lizards and oh god, was it an insect? A piece of wood? A piece of wood that moved when it saw him! John smashed his face against the glass and grinned so hard his cheeks hurt. If this was what was on the desk, the jars on the window sills would be a hundred—no, a thousand—times more brilliant.

There was a notebook on the desk, and John padded across its pages so that he could read the hasty scrawl, little better than his own. He could read some words, but not all of them, and the graphite smudged his feet. To avoid leaving footprints, he rubbed his toes across the paper to smear the marks.

“See what you make of that, then!” John said proudly. He sat on the eraser and tried to wipe his feet clean. His mum would ask questions if he tracked anything into their home.

It was at this point, as he was bent over his foot, that the door opened and the Boy swept into the room.

 

viii.

 

There will be a time, Mr. Watson told his son, when you’ll need to know how to hide. Remember, a borrower is quiet. Conscientious. And most importantly, inconspicuous! The last is the most important of all, John, because if we’re seen, that is the last time we’ll be seen by anything at all.

He tried not to breathe.

He tried not to move.

He pressed his hand tight over his mouth, crouched in the shadows of a stack of books on the desk—the only shelter in a glass prison he could find. Hot tears burned at his eyes and he blinked them away, knowing it was no use to cry. This was his mess. If he was seen, that was the end of it. John had to have some courage despite it and he was a Watson, from a long lineage of Watsons that braved garden sheds and libraries and pantry cupboards without fear.

The Boy dumped his coat on the floor and kicked a puzzle box impatiently to the side. He dropped something else and it made a sharp clanging noise. “I won’t do it!” the Boy fumed. “Enharmonic notes—how boring! It was supposed to be harder. Stupid woman.”

It was the closest John had ever seen a human bean—and though his mind was screaming to curl up into the smallest ball possible, he couldn’t help but peer around the edge of the books, only the tiniest bit, to see him.

Nobody told me they look like borrowers, only tall! He inched closer, the terror weakening at the Boy’s finely boned face: his mop of dark curls, his bright and angry eyes, the scowl. He watched the Boy take a seat on the bed with a huff. He watched the clumsy, jerky way he untied his shoes. John felt his own fingers twitch.

Perhaps if he simply stayed hidden, he—the nail!

John twisted his head in horror, looking at the nail still embedded in the desk and the string gently drifting down from the shelf. There was no way the Boy would miss that, not even if he were the most unobservant bean in all existence, not even if John were the luckiest, luckiest borrower to—

“Hello, what’s this?” The Boy stood and went over to the string. He narrowed his eyes at it. Twisted it up in his fist.

Then he let it go. He bent and stared at the nail in the wood.

Then he tried to tug it down. It didn’t go, though the bookend shifted. The Boy was far too small to reach. He craned his neck up.

John held his tears in again. I’ll never come back here, he thought. Not ever, not even if I live, not even if he fills this room with all of the kites and lizards it can take. I won’t ever come back.

The Boy pursed his lips, nostrils flaring. He said, in a very low voice, “Mycroft,” and then spun on his heels to leave the room.

 

ix.

 

The door was left hanging open. John didn’t care.

He didn’t know how much time he would have. It was entirely possible the Boy would return and see him, and that would be the end of John Watson, who should have been sensible enough not to do such stupid, stupid things. But he had to try.

He practically flew to the edge of the desk. Yanked the nail up out of the wood with all the strength he could muster. Swung out into open air, naked and vulnerable.

Climbed.

Climbed faster than he’d ever before. Muscles burning. Hiccups clouding up his throat. Panic making each handhold more difficult to grasp. His small hands, burnt by the string’s roughness. He climbed.

There was only enough time to untie the knot, a sob puncturing the silence in His Room, and gather his crossbow up. John replaced the circular door over the hole in the wall just as footsteps stomped back into it. He collapsed against the wall, made fists against his head, and listened in outright terror, unable to move, as the screaming began.

 

x.

 

“Where did it go?” the Boy demanded. “Mycroft! I know you did this!”

A new bean’s voice, cultured, exasperated. Young but not so young. “I don’t know what on earth you’re talking about.”

“The string! The weird little—whatever it was—and you were in my room. Don’t try to catch me with a lie. I’ll tell Mummy.”

“I wasn’t in your room, and you can tell her whatever you like. I have no idea what you’re talking about. As usual.”

The Boy stamped his foot twice, quaking the floor. “You can’t be in here. Not without my permission. You can’t be in here! I have experiments and things. You’ll mess them all up. You’ve already messed them up.”

“I wasn’t,” Mycroft said sharply, “and I haven’t.”

For a moment, the Boy didn’t seem to know what to say. “It’s not here anymore,” he said, sounding almost unnerved.

“What isn’t?”

“Get out.”

“Sherlock—”

“I said get out!” the Boy screamed, high tones pitched to the roof. Shuffled footsteps could be heard, and then the door slamming loudly in place, and then frantic searching. Books were rummages through, toys flung. The thudding sound of the Boy attempting to jump to the shelf on the wall echoed down the entire floor.

Then, silence.

 

xi.

 

The Boy had a name: Sherlock.

When the last of his tears had dried, and the fear with it, John wiped his face with his sleeves. He sniffled hard. It took a few minutes, but his knees wobbled and moved at last, freeing him from the crouch. He pressed his ear against the wall and listened for Sherlock, and it took a very long time to hear him.

John felt his eyes well once more. “Why are you crying?” he whispered, knowing there could be no answer. “Was it me?”

Sherlock did not cry for long. He did, however, begin to make sound of a different nature: low, haunting, beautiful. The notes were simple, even rudimentary. It was not a song John would ever know. But it filled His Room and all of the small places inside of him, even those places John hadn’t found yet. It was a hook; no force could have moved John from that door, plastered against it as close as he could get, face wet, body full, something caught.

When there was no sound at all, John eased the door back open. He looked down on Sherlock, curled up around his violin case as he slept, and did not move, not until Harry’s voice traveled up the wall, calling his name.

 

xii.

 

For many days, John didn’t return to His Room. Fall came into the house and crept into its tiny nooks, bringing about a chill that never quite touched the Holmes enough for them to turn on the heat. It was a chill that embraced the borrowers, however, putting blue in their cheeks and lips and fingernails. They huddled in big, knotted overcoats and the supple fabric of stockings stitched into shawls; they slept in piles on the floor, John tucked into his mum’s dress and his father gently petting Harry’s short, wild curls. Many nights, John listened to his family breathe in the quiet all around him and heard, in their softness, something like the strains of music that haunted him.

For Sherlock did haunt him, body and soul. Sometimes John imagined he heard crying in the walls, and though he knew it was his own treacherous guilt, he nevertheless ached for the phantoms of it. He was young, and he knew the kind of frustration and loneliness that could bring angry tears. More than this, John wanted nothing more than to look upon His Room again and all of its changes with the season’s turn. He wondered if the kite would still be there, waiting for someone to fly it. He wondered if the wooden bug had finished changing to oak.

“Forgive me for sounding the fool,” said Mrs. Watson as the cold worsened, “but I can’t wait ‘til winter comes. Can you imagine, once the Big People turn the warm on? We’ll be in our shifts and socks.”

“Hm,” said Mr. Watson.

I wonder if Sherlock is cold, thought John. He was sitting on the edge of his bed, his heel resting ever so light against the crossbow stored beneath it. He hadn’t taken the arrows out since that day. The one nail was stained with a chip of varnish from the desk.

At last, the heat did begin to blow loud next to their rooms; within a minute, the home was cozy, within two, a verifiable greenhouse. “Good heavens,” Mrs. Watson exclaimed, but John nuzzled his well-toasted fingers and decided to leave his mum to her new complaints. He climbed the inside of the wall opposite the insulation, all the way up to his little hidden mouse hole and the door he hadn’t touched since he last threw himself against it, stricken.

He hadn’t meant to go there, not in the least. Through the layers of plaster and board between them, John could hear Sherlock speaking in measured, thoughtful words—indecipherable to his ears—as if to himself. John sat against the wall and let the noise wash over him, tapping out the clearer syllables on his knees. He eventually came down without ever opening the door.

Bugger being a sensible borrower. He would do what must be done.

 

xiii.

 

He began to visit the door in the wall often. Sometimes Sherlock was in the room, muttering fiercely to himself, and John listened from behind the wall, all the while wondering what amazing experiment the human bean had on his desk at the moment. Other times, there was no one in the room, just as before, and John would crack open the door and peek through. He rarely sat on the edge of the shelf as he’d once done, fearing the exposure. It was a risky business, being a borrower.

To better hear Sherlock, he dug big fistfuls of paper and cardboard and insulation out of the wall, trying to thin the border between them. This proved mostly successful: if John pushed his ear against the scratchy surface left behind, he could make out distinct words, arguments with Mycroft (who often appeared in his little brother’s bedroom to cause some bedlam or another, or perhaps to reproach him for said bedlam), jaunty notes from the violin, music, like John had never discovered or ever would discover again. It got so that John had a red, irritated rash across his left ear and neck. “Sticking your head in places it ought not to be,” Mrs. Watson would despair, rubbing a sliver of soap crust against his cheek. “Really, John?”

John learnt many things about Sherlock Holmes by eavesdropping—and he didn’t know what to do with these things. He simply knew that he was the only one to know them.

He made a list for himself that he kept curled up under the cotton-ball mattress: the back of a water-damaged matchstick box upon which he used a fragment of chalk. There was a part of John, intensely private and confused, that was terrified of forgetting these things, these odd things he now knew or deduced. The list was short but all-encompassing. It was something he could take out in the middle of the night and breathe in, inhaling the scent of chalk and once-rain; in his hands, the list felt like a secret treasure. Like he had found Sherlock Holmes all by his own self.

 

John Watson’s List About Sherlock Holmes (Having Been Proofread Many Years Later, As He Always Kept It, Even Unto Baker Street)

 

1. Can play the violin and likes it better than he’ll tell anyone.

2. Thinks Knows that he is smarter than other beans.

3. Hates being told that he is wrong, and only cries then.

4. Forgets to let his jar-friends go. Sometimes they die.

5. Talks to himself.

6. He goes to a place called school and sometimes he comes home with his lip bloodied. Takes picture of his face and puts it in metal box with the others.

7. Only pretends to dump the tea out. Sometimes drinks it.

8. Hates the cat. It also bloodied him.

9. He likes to walk in circles and throw the rubber ball at things.

 

xiv.

 

“You’re about the age I was when my father taught me how to borrow,” Mr. Watson told his son near the end of the winter. He had pink in his cheeks from the apple core cider that had been stewed and bottled a few seasons ago, the kind of stuff John wasn’t allowed to taste or sniff. “What say you, John? Join us on our next kitchen raid?”

“All right,” said John. “I like the jams and biscuits.”

“I can tell. You’re putting it on, love,” Mrs. Watson told him, pinching her son’s middle. He made a face and pulled away. “Aren’t you scampering up and down the walls anymore?” she asked. “You need more exercise, you do.”

“Leave him be,” Mr. Watson said. “It’s good for a borrower to have a thick middle.”

John decided to leave the room in protest. He went and listened to Sherlock throw his rubber ball at the corners of the ceiling in rhythmic, monosyllabic thuds. Each contact shivered the wood around John; he lay on his back and closed his eyes and felt them, toes to head.

 

xv.

 

He learnt how to climb ropes quickly and somersault behind boxes. He learnt how to crowd his pack with supplies: makeshift pulleys and fish hooks and thread and arrows. In the kitchen raids, Mr. Watson demonstrated to his son the proper way to swipe stray droplets of currant jam from the half-screwed lid into their tiny cups and bowls. Then, how to collect fist-sized crumbs and ends. Then, how to fold a slice of the sweet peel of the sausage into their handkerchiefs. They took the most minute of things: peas, a leaf of spinach, potato shavings, barley, corn kernels, a cough drop.

“You only borrow what the Big People won’t miss,” said Mr. Watson. “If you take too much, they’ll notice. If they notice, they’ll look harder for us.”

“D’you know anyone that ever talked to a bean?” John asked him. “I mean, has anyone ever tried to be noticed?”

Mr. Watson looked at him. It was if he saw his son for the first time, standing awkwardly on the marble counter, pack crammed with foodstuffs, his brown eyes clear and steady and stouthearted. His mum had cut his hair too close to his head again, leaving his ears visible.

In all ways, Mr. Watson was not an unkind father; his affections were slow but never lacking. He put his arms around John now and said, “Your great gift is being unnoticeable. Use it. Hide in it. Burrow, until I never have a fear of losing you.”

 

xvi.

 

Ironically, those very words gave John the courage to open the door in the wall and walk to the shelf’s edge. He thought he’d learnt the lessons well; given time, he realized he would be a better sneaker and thief than his father. But there was only one room from which John wished to borrow, and it was not the kitchen, and it was not the study, and it was not the embroidery chest in Mrs. Holmes’ reading room.

Instead, John returned to His Room, which was much the same as he left it: vast and periwinkle and touched by Sherlock Holmes. He crept out from between the books on the shelf and looked upon the fray. He let himself feel how Sherlock lived in the room, wore on the room. Surely there was nothing better, he thought, than this? This—this belonging, as if he were something Sherlock wore out, too.

“I’m going to figure you out,” he said. “And we’re going to share until you realize we’re sharing. Otherwise it’s just not right. You’re a smart bean, aren’t you? Shouldn’t take you too long to catch on.”

With that, John borrowed the first thing he ever had from Sherlock’s room: a paperclip, twisted by Sherlock’s restless fingers and left on the floor.

 

xvii.

 

The following week, John borrowed one strand of yarn from Sherlock’s favorite scarf. The yarn was a cloud of blue fluff that John slept with, feeling proud.

Sherlock didn’t notice a thing. That was all right. John thought it was a little like a game that Sherlock would eventually realize they were playing together. Or maybe he wanted to be caught, like he’d said before. Or maybe all borrowers went through times such as these, he decided, because after all, John wasn’t so special. He was only John.

 

xviii.

 

The first two years, John borrowed many things: erasers, pencil tips, a coin, two stamps, several bits of paper, a twig from one of the jars, the glue from a book spine, a shoelace (oh, Sherlock did notice that one, though only to throw his shoe against the wall and profess that he was too old for Mycroft’s childish pranks), a microscope slide that fit neatly beneath John’s bed, buttons of all shapes and sizes, tea bag strings, marbles, puzzle pieces, a sticky note with Sherlock’s handwriting, the headlight from a model car that was never finished. All of these things, he found secret places to keep them.

Once, he borrowed a bone from the miniature skeleton of a bird that Sherlock had splayed across his desk. The bone weighed even less than John, though it towered above his head.

Sherlock searched beneath his desk and all across the floor. Finding nothing, he then sat at his desk and took several deep breaths, something stony and unhappy in his face. John felt so bad that he later returned the bone, and Sherlock accused his brother unfairly yet again. Sprawled out on his belly between the books on the shelf, John listened to their fight and wished he could put cupcake crumbs on Sherlock’s pillow. He was starting to suspect the bean wasn’t eating enough sugar.

Sometimes John read the books left open on the desk, making sure to leave the pages exactly as they were before he returned to the shelf. He did this again after the incident with the bone—he wanted to learn what it was he’d taken (the pelvic girdle). It was in this way that John eventually became interested in anatomy and physiology. He wished Sherlock was nearly so interested.

“You know,” he told his parents over dinner one evening, “I don’t think we’re very different from the Big People. I think inside, we’re a lot of the same, only smaller.”

Mrs. Watson took a wet washcloth to his cheek, scrubbing away the gravy. She huffed and said, “John Hamish Watson, you may have the insides of a bean, but you’re going to eat dinner like a borrower and chew with your mouth shut.”

 

xix.

 

Then there were days John took nothing at all. He’d sit in the shadow of the books, high above Sherlock’s head, and watch him from there. He liked very much to watch Sherlock, who was terribly observant in all things except for John. He never noticed John.

By this time, John was fourteen and less keen to be noticed. He had the most awful ears and hair. Even Harry said so, and she was worse.

As they both grew into gawky, knobby bodies, Sherlock talked to himself less. He would sit pouring over books in his bathrobe and socks, frowning. He had to be reminded by Mycroft that it was time to cut his hair. The bouts of rage and frustration grew more frequent, however, and John couldn’t breathe through the cutting oxygen in His Room when Sherlock was angry. There may as well have been no air at all.

After a particularly bad outburst, Mycroft began to give him “gifts,” the kind of gifts that Sherlock let his gaze slide over in an ungrateful fashion but would devour as soon as his brother left. “Maybe this will keep you busy,” Mycroft always said. Soon, scrawled notes covered the walls, along with ghastly pictures—images that haunted John’s dreams but made him intensely curious, as well—of dead bodies and wounds and bruises and men with fixed gazes. Flesh flayed over spinal cords, mouths stuffed with animal tails. Mycroft also gave Sherlock a sleek black cell phone that he began to carry with him, and there were days John’s fingers itched to touch its screen. He knew about cell phones now. He knew a lot of things other borrowers didn’t, thanks to Sherlock.

Even though Sherlock wasn’t speaking as often, John heard enough to understand that Sherlock was fixing problems. It kept him occupied and calm. When he wasn’t occupied and calm, the entire house knew of it, even the borrowers who normally had no business with the Big People. But the problems fed Sherlock and kept him full, fat in face, happy (or as near to happy as John had ever seen him).

“Extraordinary,” Sherlock might murmur, combing through a folder of papers John couldn’t read from his distance. Or maybe, “Ha! Wonderful. I can’t think of anything cleverer. No, that’s a lie—I can.”

Or even better: “Boring! How can they not have deduced the answer? The carbon monoxide poisoning is nothing but a smokescreen.”

John longed to understand what Sherlock was doing and how he did it. To him, the answers Sherlock plucked out of thin air were ones without known questions; it was as though he were reading every other page from a story. Nevertheless, it took the breath out of his lungs to watch. And though John knew Sherlock’s obsessions to be morbid, he could see the brilliance in him and hear the things he did not say whenever he grew bored of death and picked up the violin. He said many things—nicer things—without his voice.

 

xx.

 

John was sixteen when the Great Rat Infestation began.

Word came from downstairs: entire families ravaged, their homes left devastated and borrowers with nothing to bury but hats. Borrowers began to migrate upstairs to safety. But it was not a safety that would last.

The first of the killings was the Mantel family. John had imagined Harry would someday marry their eldest son, but it was not for him that she wept. The name she cried in her grief was that of the youngest daughter, Clara, a golden-fair girl who wanted to grow sweet greens. In good fortune, they did find Clara alive—curled and trembling inside the bristles of the chimney brush.

As Harry tried to cover all of her, cheeks damp, nightgowns stained with soot, John silently went to his bed. He took up the crossbow and all of the arrows. He tied a bit of blue yarn around his waist. There would be others gathering, soon.

And John Watson went to war.

 

xxi.

 

John had always gotten along famously with the mice, which were skittish and easily led to places where they wouldn’t cause trouble. Some borrowers even took them as very large pets, feeding them nibbles and riding on their backs; this was a practice that was frowned upon but too common to outlaw. Mice may destroy a home on accident to shred bedding and get into food bins, but the borrowers would, in fond exasperation, repair the damage and fortify the entrances to prevent future mistakes.

Rats, now. Rats were a borrower’s enemy.

They were much larger than mice and not as easily frightened. While some didn’t have a taste for borrower blood, others did, and still others caused accidental deaths in a frenzy of movement and size. It was considered a crisis when a house became infested with them. Entire communities had been known to vacate, risking the outside world over staunch vigilance and certain death. When John could barely toddle, his mum would sing to him a folksong that was meant to teach children about the dangers of such creatures. It went like this:

Be quiet, be thrifty
Be sneaky and witty
When shadows do come
From below, you must climb

Higher and higher
Though you may tire
But do not look into the eyes
That watch you, baby mine

Blunt snout and claw
Naked tail, squeaky call
The smell of the cellar
In where they’ll bury your bones

Years later, as John yanked an arrow thick with blood and fat from a rat’s hide, he remembered that song. “Seems a bit not good,” he told Mr. Watson, after explaining the memory to him. Then he pushed the rat onto its side with his boot and stared into its pink, glistening jaws caught and frozen in the death throws.

Mr. Watson wiped the grime from his face. A long pockmarked scar ran from cheek to shoulder that hadn’t been there a month before. “A bit,” he agreed. “But apt, isn’t it?”

 

xxii.

 

For nearly an entire year, John didn’t have the time to go to His Room. He didn’t hear or see Sherlock Holmes at all. Perhaps Sherlock could have helped them, and in the many years following the war, John bitterly wished he’d scrawled a note in graphite over the pages of a book on Sherlock’s desk.

It would have said: Rats in house. Kill them now and you can solve the most amazing mystery of all. Who am I?

All right, that was a little egotistical. Then again, John thought Sherlock liked a tish of drama in everything, anyway. He was nothing if not accommodating to Sherlock’s needs.

 

xxiii.

 

The Great Rat Infestation of John’s lifetime lasted nearly six months, which was about as long as it took before the Holmes family found the droppings and destroyed pantry items, called for an exterminator, and nearly poisoned the borrower communities. Fortunately, the borrowers had suffered through such “exterminations” before; they gathered in the attic and, in a group effort, opened the window. Perhaps if the mansion wasn’t so large, they said to each other, the Big People would have noticed sooner. Perhaps if they were more involved in the household affairs and not so odd. Of course, wishes were spider webs—the borrowers eventually returned to their homes and resumed their lives.

But for those six months, John Watson was in hell.

He killed many rats. Injured four times as many more. Mostly, he tried to take care of the other borrowers: fathers and uncles and hardy cousins, all who fell in battle or defending their families. John refused to leave them to a rat’s belly. He swept through the death traps—once dining room floors, bedrooms, wall crawl spaces, bath pipes—and did his best to recover and care for the injured. He used what he’d learnt from Sherlock’s books. Borrowers survived because of those skills, clumsy though they were. Others died. Just, not all of them.

It sounded very heroic. John didn’t feel heroic. He was seventeen and his heart was lodged like a stone in his throat. He did what had to be done. In a single day, he would have waited in some dark, listening for the skitter of claws on tile, knowing the monsters were approaching with their slick slide and huff. He would have shot his arrows at them, unflinching at the cold burst of fluid from a split eyeball, the hot splatter of black blood against his cheek. He would have watched neighborly borrowers die, some half-eaten, and tried to frantically recall if there were some textbook wisdom, something Sherlock had said, that could save them in those last minutes.

He was a very good shot. Not the sort of thing borrowers were normally proud of, but he was, that was that.

Two weeks before the extermination, John was cornered by three of the ugly monsters during a kitchen raid. He slid beneath one rat’s belly and stabbed up into its vulnerabilities, hoping to deter the others from engaging with him. It didn’t work. The rat squealed and squirmed on top of him, its bulk crushing and foul. When the weight disappeared, the other two rats were on him and John felt a horrible howl rise up in him, a pickled dread, and he punched and pushed and heaved—

Teeth sunk into his shoulder. John cried out and fell limp.

The rat would have ripped the heart out of him if given the opportunity, but Mr. Watson, at that moment, with all of his tiny but versatile strength, pushed the beans’ toaster off of the counter. It crashed to the linoleum, smashing a rat’s tail and startling the other. They hurried off to the pantry to where their secret holes were open, gaping maws to the underworld.

John was left bleeding. He remained conscious long enough to tell Mr. Watson what a wonderful, wonderful father he was, indeed. The very best—yes, the very best.

 

xxiv.

 

For a long stretch of time, John thought he might die, anyway. He was fevered. He barely recalled the journey to the attic or the long days waiting there, his brow peppered with sweat, crying out in his nightmares. The wound healed but slowly, painfully. The scars left behind became the curved smile of a rat on his shoulder; they festered, swelled pink, and in time gentled into ridged white specks.

And his leg, too—though John hadn’t injured it, he found himself impaired. The limp was impossible to explain but equally impossible to ignore. “You said it yourself,” said Harry, the first time she saw her brother hobbling across the floor, his lips a pale pursed line. “You said a lot of things inside of us are connected, so when you hurt one, you hurt all of it. Didn’t you say that?”

“I suppose,” said John. He sighed and felt very old. There was already some freckled gray in his hair, or at least that’s what his mum said whenever she fixed her fingers into it. “I’m going to need a crutch or cane.”

“Right, I’ll set you up. Clara has some toothpicks, you know? I bet I can make you something if I strip it down a bit.”

John nodded his thanks. He limped back to the bed and curled under his quilt, though he felt like he’d already slept too much. There wasn’t much to do, though, and he felt quite out of it all. Like everyone was moving around him and he was only smoke. Then there were the nights when he screamed.

They all pretended they weren’t bothered, but John knew he screamed. He thought Mrs. Watson would wake him, plump hand to his forehead, but perhaps John was too old for such things because she never did.

 

xxv.

 

Harry moved out to the base of the cabinet in the study so that she could be with Clara. It was the first time John realized that soon, he would be expected to leave and build a cozy nest of his own. That was what borrowers did: they grew up, left, and made new hiding places.

“Are you going to be happy?” John asked Harry, holding her hand. In the other, he grasped the top of his cane, a straight, no-nonsense sliver of wood that held his weight easily. He had practiced using it while he borrowed; it hung nicely from his pack. Sometimes John could even do tricks with it.

She kissed his cheek, face flushed from apple cider, the kind they could both now imbibe. “Don’t be thickheaded, John. Of course I’m going to be happy! Look at her, won’t you? Look at her. I’m going to be so happy.”

“You really love her,” said John. He hadn’t thought about love before now, not this kind: consuming, familiar strangers. A small bit of kindling in him woke and shivered to flame. It had a name. John should have been surprised at that name, but he wasn’t. It had only taken him a very long time to grow up and read its letters.

Harry gave him another kiss. Then, wrapping her arms around his neck, she gave him a third kiss, long and sweet and damp against his temple. “You must promise me that you’ll speak to me often,” she murmured there, as if imparting a dear secret. “Don’t just go away, John. But don’t just stay here, either.”

 

xxvi.

 

That night, John realized he missed Sherlock.

 

xxvii.

 

He went to him.

His Room had changed so much since John had last been there. It felt painfully different and new. He didn’t recognize the books, the photos on the wall—the last of the toys had been completely vanquished, leaving behind only chemist equipment and a cavernous orb of bone on the bedside table. “What have we here,” said John, in the instant before he realized it was a human bean’s skull.

Sherlock was at the desk, bruised eyes set far back into his head. He was texting in a passionate fury, his fingers a blur against the cell phone keypad. He was wearing a long woolen coat and a new scarf that was nevertheless as threadbare as his older one. It was strange garb to be wearing indoors, even for Sherlock, but he didn’t seem bothered.

John sat in his place between the books. The shelf had the faintest impression of his knees in the wood; he had knelt there so many times. He felt as if his chest were squeezing all of the things inside of him to fine, sifted grain. He watched Sherlock and there were many emotions brimming up from stomach to mouth: fondness, anger, tired amusement, disappointment, longing. He hated Sherlock for not even knowing what fate had befallen his family in the past year. It wasn’t fair that he remain untouched by the war. It wasn’t fair that John became left behind.

It wasn’t fair.

And yet—and yet, Sherlock had changed in the past year. He was thinner and his eyes glittered like the rats. His hands were jittery, impatient. When he finished texting, he threw his cell on the desk and pressed the bridge of his nose between his long, pale fingers. Didn’t move for a long time. Then he said in a low baritone to no one in particular, “This is going to be a very long night.”

Oh. John looked on him and ached.

I’m a bit in love with you, he thought. Not because you’re bloody brilliant, or pleasing to watch, or as alone as I am. Maybe there aren’t reasons. All I know is that wherever you go, you must take me with you. With that, he remained on the shelf the entirety of the night, sleeping as Sherlock slept, his nightmares too deep to call out from.

 

xxviii.

 

John spent many hours watching Sherlock as he recovered and found a certain balance in his life again. There was something engrossing about watching Sherlock at work at his desk—the scornful and hilarious expressions he made, the way he talked to thin air as if conjuring a mystery for an invisible audience. He was brilliant. He was more brilliant than John had given him credit for being. Of course, Sherlock knew he was brilliant and that was also why he was a pain in the arse and a fatheaded bully, too.

Oh, but John liked that. “It’d be worse,” he told himself, “if he were all perfect. God, who’d be able to stand someone that amazing if they never believed how good they were? The modesty would be more annoying.”

Well, perhaps. No, he had to get out of the habit of making excuses for Sherlock’s behavior. The bean was a loon.

He also liked watching Sherlock for Sherlock. The curls he always forgot to cut, the impassiveness of his jaw and cheekbones, his skinny nose. The way he moved and gestured suddenly, like making a cut in the air. When he slept, Sherlock rested on his back and stared up at the ceiling until sleep pulled him under, at which point he slept as the dead did: fitful, silent, unmoving.

“I’m becoming a very creepy borrower,” said John. “I should probably give you some peace. And now you’ve got me talking to myself, too. Right. Right then.” He knocked on his knees and sighed. “Well.”

Oh well. It wasn’t like John had anything better to do.

 

xxix.

 

(A bean. Of all of the inhabitants of the Holmes’ mansion, John Watson had to fall in love with a bloody bean. Of course. Wasn’t that lovely? He was the real loon here. Why hadn’t his parents tried to pull him away from his bad hobbies as a child? Why did he spend all that time borrowing from Sherlock? Maybe that was what he should do. He should borrow from Sherlock again. Maybe Sherlock would notice. Maybe—no, that was ridiculous. Worse, suicidal. The point was that John shouldn’t have been allowed to grow such a strange attachment to one of the Big People at a young age, as it appeared to have produced disastrous consequences. Had any other borrowers fallen in love with a bean before? Was this a normal phase of young adulthood? Was John wrong in his head? Had the war made a mash out of his brain? Surely if he waited long enough, the fixation he had with Sherlock Holmes, six feet taller than John on days of bad posture, would fade and blink out. Perhaps John needed to speak more to other borrowers instead of running off on his own. It could easily be a matter of cultural and social isolation. Look at Sherlock, he was a perfect example—if he spent more time with other beans, he would be normal and John would never have wanted to sit peaceful-like on his desk and listen to Sherlock spin his mad theories—

Oh, oh. But John did want that, very much.

Bugger. He spent entirely too long wishing to fit into Sherlock’s palm.)

 

The Conversation (Verbatim) John Heard While Eavesdropping That Changed Everything (Including Home Address)

 

“I suppose you’ve finished the Haddock case?” asked Mycroft, hovering at the threshold to Sherlock’s bedroom, chin up in the air and gaze calculating. He rarely entered anymore, as if respecting some invisible boundary strung across the doorway. Sherlock, gouging a wooden block with a set of different kinds of hunting knives (to study the different strokes, John assumed), didn’t bother to glance his way.

“Of course I’ve finished it. An imbecile could have solved the problem.”

“Oh?”

Sherlock set the wood block down and took a picture of the cleaved lines. “Haddock couldn’t have possibly killed his wife. He was a weak-spined coward with a great love of other women, but his wife frightened him. Not to the point of murder, of course. Look at his earnings and the balance in the bank: he’s been spending money on dating and wooing other girls, taking them to expensive dinners and shows. Look at his ring finger: no pale mark, so he takes it off whenever he goes out, which is often, at least three times a week.” He took a picture from another angle of the wooden block, voice droll and clipped. “My network tells me he’s been out with four separate women in the past few months; all of them resemble his wife in hair colour, posture, mannerisms, dress. This is both safe and stupid—safe because if he passes someone he knows, they are likely to assume she is either a friend or, indeed, his wife, and stupid because it is obviously more a matter of sentiment on his part, as he attempts to fill the role his wife never had with a more nurturing, gentle persona. It is because of his infidelity that his wife is dead, but no, Haddock did not murder her.”

When nothing else seemed forthcoming, Mycroft sighed. “And, Sherlock?”

Sherlock rolled his eyes. He took a file from his desk and threw it at Mycroft, uncaring when it landed a few feet out of range, papers fluttering out in midair. “Brent Alterwood. Some of Haddock’s women were also married. He saw them, grew jealous, and bid his time until he could shoot his own wife in an alleyway and pin it on her lover. Of course, he didn’t pay much attention, did he? He shot Haddock’s real wife instead on one of the few nights of the year they agreed to go out together. Mycroft, do give me real work instead of these disgusting soap operas.”

“You have proof?”

“It’s in the file. Don’t be stupid.”

Mycroft bent and began to gather the papers. He was quiet a while. Then he said, “I found the London classifieds in the foyer. Carelessness? Or are you attempting to goad me?”

“Neither. It’s my self-eviction notice. You will note that of all the options I circled, there is only one that is a viable candidate. I will meet with Mrs. Hudson tomorrow evening and see the flat for myself. I will be gone before the week is out.”

“You will not. You’ll let me arrange something with the office if you want so badly to see the city.”

“I am eighteen, dear brother, and I will choose my own accommodations,” said Sherlock, scathingly.

“You can’t. Think of poor Mummy. You haven’t even told her, have you?”

“Mummy gave me the advance. Now do shut up and keep your nose out of it.” Sherlock tossed the wooden block over his shoulder, ignoring its crash into the dresser. He smiled with too many teeth. “I hear Scotland Yard is full of idiots these days. I think I’ll offer my services now that I’m, as they say, a hop, skip, and jump away.”

For a few half-heartbeats, Mycroft stood in the door. He then turned and left, something unpleasant and resigned in the twist of his mouth, and Sherlock laughed in delight, fingers steepled before him. He spun in his chair a few times before settling and continued to work.

 

xxx.

 

John hadn’t been so upended since the war. The rat-tat-tat of his pulse was frantic, his breathing clipped. He had to grasp one of the book spines to stand, his weak leg nearly buckling at the attempt. There were forty, fifty-some rats on him, inside him, plying at his body until it gave into anxiety.

He’s leaving.

No. That couldn’t be true. Could it? Did beans leave, much like borrowers, to build holes and niches of their own? John should have been prepared for this contingency. He wasn’t. He panicked.

He can’t leave! Not without me. I’ll be—no, not without me.

But that was the ticket, wasn’t it? He could get inside one of the moving boxes, the violin case, a ripped hole in the pages between a book. There were plenty of places for a borrower to curl up into and stow away. He’d hide and he would go with Sherlock to London. Oh, oh god, is that really what he meant to do? No. Yes. For a bean who didn’t even know John existed? Yes.

Yes.

 

xxxi.

 

His mum gulped in big, whale-deep sobs. No amount of protest or soothing could contain her. The argument lasted long into the night. At some point, Harry crept into the home she’d left and she slapped John, right across the cheek. “I hope it stings,” she said, and then she cried and clung to him. “I didn’t mean you ought to go like this,” she said.

John felt helpless in the wake of their grief, poorly spent. He held Harry and looked over her bushy hair to the table, where his mum scrubbed her tears away until her nose was raw and red. Mr. Watson looked at his son and held his gaze; he nodded, only the once. He might have been thinking about a toaster, its corner ever-dented in from a spill in the kitchen. Or maybe he was thinking about John when he was much younger, with secrets, the same secrets.

“I’m sorry,” said John. “It’s only—I’m going to be so much happier. You see?”

They didn’t. But they let him go.

 

xxxii.

 

“But how will we know you’ve made it?” Mrs. Watson asked, face swollen from crying. She wrapped the last of the barley into a square bit of checkered linen and folded it, tying the top into a double knot. She gave it to John to put into his pack.

He tried to wedge the provisions in beside his clothes, the grappling hook (a bent paperclip and some thread), a list he’d made as a child, and some makeshift tools that would come in handy in creating his own home at this Baker Street. “I’ll send word,” John told her. “Somehow, you know? Watch the bins. If Sherlock writes to his mother, I’ll be sure to put a little something on the envelope. There are other ways. I’ll find them.”

“I’ll never see you again,” she whispered, dabbing at her eyes. This was the way of borrowers, but it was a hard one.

He kissed her cheek and pressed her wrinkled hand in his own. “Oh Mum,” he said. “You know, the winters here are hard. If this arrangement works out nice, maybe you and the rest could come to me? I could figure something out?”

“One doesn’t just figure something out to cross through the outside,” scoffed Mrs. Watson. But she appeared somewhat cheered; she gave him an emphatic hug. “I don’t know why, John, but if this is what will make you happy, I’ll not see you denied it. I’d move the skies for you, I really would.”

John wondered if he should express his own doubts—the conviction he had that this useless, pathetic volley across the countryside was nothing more than the whimsical impulse of a fathead in love—but in the end, he kept his peace. There were some things his mum didn’t need to hear. Instead, he put his cheek to her hair and hummed a song only children might know.

 

xxxiii.

 

Sherlock had begun to pack his things. Not all of his things, but those that mattered to him, such as his books and folders, the laptop, his violin, and some of the clothes in his wardrobe, which was left with folds of black holes in between the leftovers. He had mostly outgrown keeping things in jars, but he packed the chemistry equipment into boxes full of Styrofoam peanuts and, with something approaching tenderness, catalogued his slides of samples in a metal box. He spent long nights staring out of the window, eyes shuttered, fingers twitching nervously.

John kept a careful watch; he didn’t want to miss his opportunity to steal a ride. As it happened, Mycroft arranged for his brother’s moving items to be taken to the new flat before his departure, so that he might have something there already. Men came into His Room and began to take the boxes away while Sherlock was out. They stomped so hard that the floor of the Watson’s home quivered wall to wall.

“Well, this is it,” John told his family, quite bravely. He kissed his mum again and tucked his father in his arms like he was a book to keep close to the heart. Clapped him on the shoulder. His parents could hardly speak, but the desperation with which they grasped him said enough. And oh, John hated himself a little for putting it there.

Harry caught his ear and pinched it. Then she hugged him, arm looped over his neck like a hook. “Keep us posted,” she said.

“Promise.” John took one last look at his home, the little room he’d been born in, the pulleys that swayed in the dark between the walls. He felt a thrill of excitement crawl up the vertebrae of his spine, handhold by handhold. There were adventures and there were adventures, after all. The biggest was at his threshold.

He waited for the men to heft Sherlock’s chest up and away, and as they left the room, he shot a nail at one of the boxes on the desk. Years ago, he’d done much the same thing—the first time he met Sherlock and his mystery frustrated the little boy so much that he’d gone to tears. This would be the last, though. John slid down the string and landed on the folds of cardboard that hid gently packed chemistry equipment. Better than books—he was less likely to be squished in transit. Working under one of the flaps would be simple enough and then John could burrow into one of the tubes or the peanut fluff.

First, he had to pull the nail out and release it to Harry and the others to pull up. John yanked it out of the cardboard. He looked up at his family, huddled on the book shelf. Felt the gulf. Let go and stepped back. Then, into a sterilized darkness.

 

xxxiv.

 

For a long while, John waited, curled up inside of a beaker full of newspaper. It was warm, and black, and safe. He stroked the cool glass and its curve.

When the box was lifted, everything jolted. He felt like his bones had been rearranged in a spectacularly irregular order. He squeezed his eyes shut and clung to the newspaper, holding his breath until the jostling lessened and the movements became smoother. At this point, John heard voices he’d not heard before—other beans at work, bubbling pots of water in the kitchen—and the opening of the door.

I’m outside! he marveled. He couldn’t see it, but the air suddenly cleared in the musty box and there were bird noises, chirping and the like, from some distance. John suddenly wished he’d placed himself closer to the flaps, so that he might catch the scent of the flowers he knew lined the Holmes’ walkway.

A bean said, “Here we are. Couple more and then we’re done.”

“Lunch after?”

“So long’s there are chips.” The box was placed on something solid and everything shook again. John waited, and it passed more quickly this time. Then there was more waiting. By the time the truck fired up and the glass began quaking around him again, John was already fast asleep, having grown bored with the outside’s lack of surprises.

 

xxxv.

 

When John woke, the world was silent and still. He listened, and when he felt none of Sherlock’s electrifying presence, John nudged the Styrofoam peanuts out of the way and squeezed out of the box top. He looked around him. He felt himself smile.

“221B Baker Street,” he said, remembering the address Sherlock spoke of often in the past few days. “Hullo, beauty.”

She was beautiful: tall windows revealed a gray, cloudy London and the scent of distant rain made the air heavy. There was an ash-stained fireplace and empty bookshelves lined the walls. John’s box was sitting on an ugly chair, as mismatched as the other furniture strewn about the flat, and a desk had been set up with a lamp. What he could see of the kitchen was dismal and the wallpaper was hideous even by borrower standards—they had a mind to plaster all manners of stamps to their walls, you see—but the skull was already perched on the mantel, and it was home, John’s home, quiet and expectantly waiting all along for him to show up.

I’m going to live here with Sherlock, he thought. Unbidden, John felt laughter bubble up his esophagus. He let it go and filled the room with its tiny joy. He was going to live here, with Sherlock, and on Christmas he’d feel the fire’s warmth in the walls and listen to Sherlock play the violin, and it would be everything John needed.

“Well,” he said, “I’ve got a lot of work to do, eh?”

 

xxxvi.

 

By the time Sherlock whirled into the flat and started to make himself at home, John had already conquered 221B Baker Street.

He spent the first two nights sleeping safely in the skull—“Nice place you have here,” he said politely—because he’d always wanted to do that, really. The days, John used to explore the flat. With some luck, he found a cozy (and fortunately abandoned) borrower hole beneath the floorboards and plenty of empty space in the walls. The hole needed a complete rehaul, however, and John spent a few hours clearing out the sawdust and cobwebs twice the size of his entire body. There were some yellowing lace doilies in the kitchen; he dragged one back to the hole to use as a lovely if old-fashioned carpet. For a bed, he found a large matchbox, shucked its cover off, and filled the rectangle with a down mattress made from pigeon feathers left on the kitchen windowsill sewn up inside of the sleeve of an old shirt Sherlock would never miss. (John suspected he’d thrown it in with the other clothes as an accident—he hated that shirt.)

John borrowed a tea cup in one of the cupboards, feeling quite bold, and left it upside down in his home to use as a table. It was a very big table, but then, he had some very big projects.

There were chairs and a clothing rack and many other things left, but John gradually filled his hole over time, borrowing this or that until it felt, well, complete. It was a home that was created from Sherlock’s things, which was something both comforting and unnerving to John. He felt helplessly content, which in turn sometimes made him feel confused and despondent. No matter.

In between the walls, John fashioned a rudimentary pulley system that would carry him up and down, to and fro. He merely had to step on the button platform and pull the right piece of twine. He built it out of paper clips, a watch gear, two empty spools, some spring-wire from a mechanical pencil, and a good two percent of Sherlock’s favorite scarf. Getting around was marvelously easy.

Indeed, by the time Sherlock settled, John could traverse the entire flat in less than four minutes, front to back. He could jump the kitchen cupboards and slide down the icebox and scale the bookshelves. He could use his grappling hook and arrows to go from mantel to carpet, from window to desk. He knew the light tread of Mrs. Hudson, the landlady who baked and made the entire building smell like gingersnaps, and had enjoyed the view of the beans rushing around below the windows with their brightly coloured rainbow of umbrellas. And yet, it wasn’t right until Sherlock came.

The first night, Sherlock played Paganini Cantabile on the violin and filled every dimension of the flat with his pleasure. He swayed to the music in front of the window, a tiny smile hidden in the corner of his mouth, and John, tucked behind one of the trinkets on a bookcase, pressed his cheek to its surface and closed his eyes in that rare happiness. Such was the start of many similar evenings, he hoped, wherein they could both find a measure of peace.

 

xxxvii.

 

Well, peace was a relative term.

“Wrong!” shouted Sherlock, texting furiously. He paced the living area as he did so, curls a tumble from raking his fingers through them time after time. “Why won’t they listen to me? Have I not given them everything they need? Idiots!”

John tutted and caught his grappling hook onto one of the jam jars in the kitchen cupboards. He slid down the thread to the countertop. It was almost frightening, how much Sherlock didn’t observe his surroundings when he was buried in a case (or his own indignation). John had taken to wandering the flat at whim.

“Lestrade! Answer your phone, you flatfooted—”

“Yes, that’s it, yell at him some more,” muttered John, crumpling the foil over the little platter on the counter. He lifted it higher to get to the coffee cake hidden beneath, the latest in Mrs. Hudson’s attempts to put meat on Sherlock’s cheekbones. Oh, John reckoned he ought to feel poorly for stealing chunks of Sherlock’s treats, except that the genius had a habit of completely ignoring them until they fossilized. Ah. Yes, this smelled fantastic.

As he pulled a large crumble off of the square, John listened to Sherlock snarl insults into his cell phone (and wasn’t entirely sure anyone on the other end was listening). He put the piece of coffee cake in his pack. Then he pushed the coffee cake out in the middle of the counter, hoping it would catch Sherlock’s eye.

Sherlock did need to eat more, after all. And it was a waste of perfectly delicious cake.

 

xxxviii.

 

Sometimes Sherlock talked to the skull.

Most of the time, he used the skull as a sounding board for theories he had for a particular case. It was entertaining to hear Sherlock “duel” with a skull, and John’s favorite moments in any given week involved watching that brilliance war and clash until the answer came, illuminating Sherlock’s face. It was as if he were struck by some chance lightening; his eyes grew turbulent, his mouth wicked. Everything about Sherlock was sharp and unforgiving. It was also breathtaking.

John wished Sherlock would talk to him like that. Not that it was possible, of course. Kind of a pipe dream, really. But he liked to imagine he’d be better company than a cup of bone.

 

xxxix.

 

Then, there were days John’s roof shook and showered him with dust as Sherlock paced back and forth across the flat. “Bored, bored, bored!” he heard him bellow from above. “There is nothing interesting at all in the world!”

John felt badly for him on those days. He didn’t condone this murder talk, but it certainly brightened Sherlock up immediately, and so he often wished a case would fall into their laps to keep Sherlock busy.

(And he often wished, too, he could go with Sherlock when it came. John couldn’t imagine how it must feel, dashing across London, saving human beans, flying on the exhilaration, being so big. It was how he’d always imagined war would feel before it actually came, and then war wasn’t like that at all.)

 

xl.

 

Of course, the “bachelor” life Sherlock adopted was an adjustment. Especially the plastic baggie of human bean eyeballs John might find in the icebox, leering at him. Or the thumbs in the breadbox. Why the breadbox? He was flabbergasted and wished he could leave Sherlock notes demanding rhyme and reason to his madness.

Perhaps: These eyeballs are as large as my head and quite disturbing. Please stop contaminating my food source, Sherlock.

Also, there was the issue of Mycroft Holmes. Mycroft, who had apparently deemed his little brother’s impulse to live alone both fruitless and potentially disastrous, made John’s tiny life most impressively miserable. He’d come in while Sherlock was out to plant cameras and “bugs” (they were miniature microphones to John, but Sherlock seemed to coin a pet name for them) throughout the flat. John was wary of such technology. If caught on camera, he was doomed. He’d be the first borrower to expose the species! What an awful thought that was.

Fortunately, Sherlock was a paranoid private detective. He took pains to search the flat at least twice a week for such equipment, and his search was exhaustive, painstaking, and vicious in its final throes. He crushed the small bits of metal beneath his feet or took them out, presumably to hide them in various locations across the city—spiteful, yes, but it saved John a great deal of trouble. He couldn’t imagine being caught. It would ruin everything. Sherlock would—well, he’d probably put him in a jar.

 

xli.

 

As it happened, Sherlock did put him in a jar.

 

xlii.

 

It was all Mrs. Hudson’s fault.

Chocolate was a rare gift for borrowers of the Holmes’ mansion, partly because there was so little of it available in the kitchen and partly because it was one of those precious commodities the Big People paid attention to. When chunks were missing, havoc ensued. In fact, the last time John Watson had eaten a piece of chocolate, he’d been hardly more than seven and unable to articulate what an amazing experience the whole thing was. Even now, John sometimes dreamt of that piece of chocolate.

But Sherlock didn’t notice food; chocolate was no exception. So when Mrs. Hudson made some hot cocoa and left it on the counter, it often cooled and congealed. Sherlock would eventually rinse out the cup without having touched a drop.

John just couldn’t abide by this.

He waited until Sherlock was dozing on the sofa, muttering at the telly—challenging one of the hosts to use his brain, likely—and shot a nail in the underside of the cupboards. Climbed up to the counter. He made sure to stuff the nail and string back in his pack before clutching the side of the tea cup, all the way up on his tip toes, peering down into the chocolate swirls that had crusted on the top of the yet-warm liquid. I’m in paradise, John thought. I’m fighting the urge to swan dive in.

He eagerly took two scoops of the solidifying chocolate on the rim and put it into one of his collection jars. Then, unable to resist, he swept his finger into the liquid. He let the chocolate gather on his skin before putting the finger in his mouth and sucking on it. Oh. Oh, that’s bloody good.

The telly shut off in the living area. John hurriedly ducked behind the cup and noted that it was probably time to get back to his home. These unnecessary risks weren’t very healthy. He limped to the sink, hoping to catch his grappling hook over the faucet and rappel down.

But, Sherlock hadn’t cleaned up his latest experiment. John cried out in shock as his feet slipped out from under him and he toppled down into the sink. The impact knocked the breath straight out of him—and quite soon after, everything went dark.

 

xliii.

 

“Oh, fascinating. It’s waking up.”

John’s head hurt. In fact, every part of his body hurt from neck to heels. He groaned and turned on his side, burying his face into his arm to get it out of the light. Why was there light? His borrower hole was dark and comforting. His leg throbbed. The phantom pains acting up again? No, this pain was distinct, acute. He took a few deep breaths and squinted up at his surroundings.

Only to recoil in shock.

“It’s showing severe signs of disorientation and alarm,” said Sherlock, hunched over his knees on the floor. He was staring at a jar, which was on the coffee table, which contained a terrified borrower, and his gaze was nothing less than riveted. His mouth hung open a little, like he did when he was thinking very fast.

John looked around frantically. He was in—a jar? Yes. Some kind of bloody jar, what was the crazy bean thinking, and worse—no, so much worse, John, pay attention, pay attention now, because the fact of the matter was he had been worse than seen, he was caught, like a mouse in a trap, and it wouldn’t budge no matter how hard he pushed on it because—oh, right, there it was, a book laying on the top, very clever, Sherlock—he never wanted this, not really, even when he’d day dreamed about being noticed by Sherlock and chatting with him, John had never really wanted to be caught, it was different, this moment, he’d—

“Oh, do calm down,” said Sherlock. “I’m obviously not about to squash the most interesting thing I’ve ever encountered.”

“You put me in a jar!” shouted John, quite unable to help himself. “In a jar, Sherlock!”

Sherlock’s eyes widened. He seemed very taken aback by his own name. He looked around as if expecting someone else to show up and explain it, shook his head a few times, and then narrowed his gaze on John again. “And?”

He didn’t have an answer after that. John pressed his palm to his rapidly beating heart, wishing it’d shut up a moment so he could think. The terror made his hands clammy, made him feel sick. He looked up at Sherlock and it was the first time he thought of him as giant.

“Amazing,” Sherlock breathed. “It can’t be the cocaine. I’ve been clean for weeks. This is real. You’re a—what are you?”

“I’m—”

“No, let me.” Sherlock leaned in closer to the jar, reading every centimeter of John Watson as if it were written in verse. “Young male, identical in appearances to Homo sapiens save for the obvious discrepancy in height and size. Left-handed, and good with your hands—you’ve deft work with a needle but equally so with a weapon, and you’ve seen the combat to prove yourself. You live off of taking things from the homes of others, but you’re careful about it, taking only what’s needed. What’s more, you take things from me and you obviously know me by name, which indicates a long-term one-sided acquaintance,” he said the last word in three drawn syllables, “of which you ought to detail to me. You’re also not—ah, no, you’re not alone. There are others like you. You’re afraid for them, but not for yourself. Interesting.”

He’d never been the focus of Sherlock’s deductions. It was dizzying. Humiliating. And—brilliant, too.

They stared at each other.

John slowly sat down to take the pressure off of his bad leg. He took a few deep breaths. “Okay,” he said. “Explain to me how you got all that.”

 

xliv.

 

It was a difficult thing, preventing Sherlock Holmes from showing off. John knew this to be true from long years of observation, and at this very moment, he counted on that narcissism, so exasperating but equally so endearing. Sherlock frowned at him as if he’d guessed the nature of that diversion, but he plucked the bait out of John’s hands without pausing to check for its motives.

“Very well. I said you were left-handed; this is a rudimentary deduction. When you regained consciousness, you grasped your leg and reached out to touch the jar with your left hand. The sleeve on that arm is particularly ragged, as well.” Sherlock picked up a magnifying glass that had been left on the coffee table—John looked at it, knowing its contours well but never the glean of its focus—and peered at him. “The needlework—oh, but that is simple, this is a homespun jumper that has seen any number of accidents and you have painstakingly repaired the holes and snags, always with different colours of thread. The combat, now that is the more interesting.”

John tugged self-consciously at his jumper. “Yes, the—combat. How did you…?”

“Despite your fear, you show a steadiness and reserve that indicates you’ve been in the midst of danger before. Your hands—not a tremble. Callused. You’ve been wounded—you favor your leg as if you have been conscious of it for a long time—but wait, no, it isn’t the leg. It isn’t the leg, is it?” Sherlock’s face lit up. “A psychosomatic limp. Brilliant. Where was the actual wound? Torso, shoulder?”

“I—”

“More interesting, how did you come by such a wound? Don’t answer that. Yet. At your size, there could be any number of predators; this says nothing of the prevalence of violence between your own kind. Now, I said you lived off of taking things from flats and homes and such, and that’s a simple deduction. Your clothes are made from the fabrics of my clothes, your little backpack contains your gathering tools, and I am certain there isn’t a miniature manufacturing industry blossoming beneath our feet, so where, then, where do you get your creature comforts, your food, your handkerchiefs and blankets and playthings? You get them from us, you steal, but never enough that we’ll notice. I can see I’m right. It’s all over your face.”

“That’s probably the chocolate,” said John. The back of his head felt wet, as well, and smelled like tap water. He rubbed his skull. “How did you know about the—you know, the others? Not that there are necessarily others.”

“There must be,” Sherlock scoffed. “You can’t be the only one of your kind. Besides, you’re afraid of something. It’s not death.” He looked at him, eyes dark and sinking. “No. You aren’t afraid of death. Then what? Exposure? Of course, to fear exposure but not death, there must also be others.”

John couldn’t help himself. He blurted out, “That’s amazing.”

Sherlock seemed taken aback again. “What?”

“That. Just there. It’s amazing.”

A slight cock of the head, as if Sherlock suspected him of making fun. He frowned, opened his mouth as if to say something, and frowned again. “A man that could fit into a teacup thinks my deductions are amazing,” he muttered. “Ah. This must be what going mad feels like.”

 

xlv.

 

The fear that Sherlock referenced so blithely was starting to drain from John, leaving behind an almost buoyant feeling: surreal, safe. The glass jar was slippery with water droplets—either it had been washed out before holding John captive or he had brought in some dampness from the sink—and he had to balance himself with both hands to get to his feet. He stood, palm flat against the jar’s side to keep steady. It was frustrating, being unable to see Sherlock’s face properly. The glass distorted and made him seem false.

“Could you please let me out?” John asked.

“Hold a moment,” said Sherlock. He took out his mobile phone and snapped a picture of John; the flash nearly blinded him. “Yes. There.”

“Please don’t do that,” John said desperately. “I’m supposed to be a secret. If you tell anyone, it’s the end for me. For all of us.”

“You must be joking,” Sherlock told him. “I wouldn’t be so imbecilic as to take a tiny man into the Scotland Yard and parade him about. Can you imagine the far-reaching repercussions of revealing your existence? Mycroft would have you in two days. Perhaps two hours. No, absolutely not. First, I need data.”

“I’ll tell you. I’ll tell you anything you want to know. Only, let me out first. Give me something to drink, all right? And a piece of chocolate,” he added with a burst of confidence. “I’m bloody starving and you won’t eat it, anyway.”

Sherlock’s mouth twitched. He was smiling, a bit. “Beg your pardon,” he said, straightening and going to the stairs. John could hear his footsteps clomp up them and the bedroom door closing.

 

xlvi.

 

He listened to Sherlock pace. After a little while, he sat down again.

It culminated with a great shout: “Oh my god!”

John picked at his jumper in the ensuing silence. He waited a bit longer and soon, Sherlock’s bedroom door opened and footsteps descended the stairs and the bean whirled back into the room, burning with intensity.

Sherlock dropped into a crouch before the table, staring at him. “My god,” he said again, “you’re real. You have to be. You are.”

John twisted a sleeve in between his fingers. I remember that feeling, he thought. How the whole world spun around me when I realized you existed. That wasn’t what he said, of course. He said, though it likely sounded no better, “I’m real. I promise you. I’ll tell you all about it, but—I don’t really like being in a jar, Sherlock, no more than you would.”

“You won’t run.”

“Of course not. You’d hunt me down.”

“Naturally.” Sherlock lifted the book from the top of the jar and a rush of fresh, cold air swept into the enclosure. Relieved, John let his lungs take their fill of it. He wasn’t prepared for when Sherlock tipped the jar on its side, but the movement was slow and gentle, and John merely slid down to the side and mouth of the jar with only a smidgeon of upset. He toppled out on the coffee table’s surface, grooves as big as his hands beneath them.

“Did you leave so you could freak out?” John asked him, since it was fair play and all. Sherlock gave him a ruffled, perturbed face.

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

“You did,” said John with a wide grin. “Oh, I love that.”

“Chocolate,” Sherlock said, and he went to the kitchen, his shoulders set in an unyielding wall.

 

xlvii.

 

True to his word, Sherlock put a few chunks of chocolate on a small saucer that nevertheless could have served as John’s bed. Along with the chocolate, he broke a cracker into several pieces and added a dollop of mustard. This was not a kindness on Sherlock’s part, John knew, but more of an experiment, to discern what he might eat and what he would prefer to devour first. John let him store the data as he pleased, reaching first for the chocolate he had worked so hard and been exposed for.

“Oh, that’s good,” he mumbled, licking the last of the soft kernel of cocoa from his palm. “D’you have tea?”

“I have no idea what I would put it in,” said Sherlock.

“There’s a cup in my pack.”

Sherlock disappeared, and from the clattering in the kitchen, John could picture him trying (helplessly) to find the kettle and tea bags. He didn’t often make tea for himself. That was Mrs. Hudson’s hobby. While the kettle was on the stove, Sherlock came back and sat down on the sofa, putting his hands together in a slow, precise match. “What are you?” he asked.

“John.”

“Your name, not the answer to my question.”

“But still,” said John, “I think that’s a more appropriate first question. My name is John Hamish Watson. I’m a borrower. I used to live under your bedroom floor. Now I live here, with you, just the two of us.”

After that, he talked. He talked for a very long time indeed. He talked about borrowers and their code of conduct, how they’d lived so long alongside the Big People but knew they could never be caught, for that would be the end of all good things. He talked about the lessons his father had taught him and the kitchen raids; he talked about how to build a house with scraps, trinkets, the lost. He talked about an invisible network and the perils of the Outside. He talked about the mouse and the hole in the wall beside Sherlock’s shelf; he talked about His Room, and the kite he’d never flown on, and the first time Sherlock nearly caught him and put him in a jar, but didn’t. He talked about the things he had borrowed, the things he had wanted but didn’t borrow, and most of all, John talked about his love of medicines and anatomy—what he had learnt from Sherlock over the years. He could not speak of the war, or how Sherlock had captured him long before this with his arresting presence, but that was perhaps best. He talked long into the night, and by the time John’s voice grew hoarse and reedy, the fire had become a dying keen.

Sherlock listened, and in him, rooms began to open in his mind palace beneath the floorboards and in the walls, tiny rooms to store tiny things. He was rapt. The tea was entirely forgotten.

 

xlviii.

 

John rubbed his throat. “D’you have any questions?” he asked. He couldn’t see the clock up high on the mantle, but he imagined it must be nearing dawn. The dark was a little softer than before.

“A lifetime’s worth,” said Sherlock. He smiled. “But you’re close to exhaustion.”

“I could use a kip,” John admitted.

“I would like to examine your quarters.”

“I don’t know how. Well—maybe, there might be a way. But it’s very late—or early—Sherlock, and really, they’re my quarters, not some science experiment.” He saw Sherlock lean in to ruthlessly divulge him of that idea and raised a hand, shaking his head. “No means no. At least, right now. I need sleep.”

Sherlock fussed with the tassels on the sofa pillow. He said, “You might not come back. Perhaps I ought to keep you somewhere safe.”

“Don’t be silly. I’m right here. I’ve always been right here.”

Sherlock looked at him.

Unable to help himself, John smiled. He scratched his nose. “We could do lunch?”

That garnered a reaction. Sherlock blinked and barked a laugh. “Lunch,” he said, as if the word was foreign. “I don’t eat on a case.”

“You aren’t on a case.”

“Yes,” Sherlock told him, “I am.”

He stood, favoring his leg, and rummaged in his pack for the cane. He tried not to think about that—yes, I am—and concentrated on putting all his gear back in order. Sherlock had been careful not to break anything. “Then you can feed me. The last thing I need is another bump on the head from falling into the sink. You can ask me anything you want then. All right?”

“John,” said Sherlock, testing it out. “Yes. All right.”

Oh. “Yeah,” he said, and he thought about how they all said, if a borrower got caught by a bean, the fear would be paralyzing. How true. How true that was, and yet, how not at all correct.

 

xlix.

 

John curled up in his bed that night and fell asleep immediately. He didn’t think he would, but he did. There were four jars of chocolate in his pantry now. Sherlock had insisted on filling everything in John’s pack, and when John had left him, he’d been determined to hollow out the cupboards in an attempt to find something edible for the following day. Sherlock Holmes is trying to feed me like a mouse, thought John before sinking into dreams, and he laughed sleepily.

He had wild dreams: growing tall, even taller than buildings and trees. A glean of streaked fur in a sewer. A blue flower. Violin wire sliding beneath the carpet.

Upon waking, John let the coagulated edge of sleep carry him a bit further into the day, and in that drowsy haze, he wondered if Sherlock would let him stay. Perhaps he could even move from beneath the floor—perhaps he could have a cupboard or a shelf for himself. Perhaps this was the greatest thing that had ever happened to him.

 

l.

 

Or this could be the worst event of his miniature lifetime, destined to make him the source of all despair and wretchedness for borrowers everywhere.

John spent most of his morning feeling beyond stupid. The amazement had worn off after he’d woken up tangled in the blanket—something he could no longer pretend wasn’t Sherlock’s borrowed shirt sleeve, carrying the faint traces of tobacco ash—and realized he’d exposed his kind to the Big People and laughed about it. Oh god. Much worse, he had exposed them to the most curious human bean to ever be curious. He may as well have put them on the telly. Sherlock would be taking the next train back home to the mansion to flay open floorboards and walls, shout like a mad man into mouse holes, and find more specimens for interview. It wasn’t his fault; that was simply who Sherlock Holmes was, down to the last blood vessel.

Stricken with anxiety, John ate some chocolate. He still felt terrible afterward, of course, because it was Sherlock’s chocolate. Actually, now that he had spoken to Sherlock face to face (or something of the like, height difference be damned), John had the peculiar sensation of looking at his borrower home and, instead of seeing his things, being struck by how he had built a life from Sherlock’s. It felt depressing and shifty, and more than a little as though he was a lovesick idiot nurturing an unhealthy codependence.

“Now John,” he told himself, “this is our way. This is what the borrower does! Any borrower would’ve done the same, eh?”

He couldn’t possibly stay here. He needed to leave. There had to be another hole in the wall he could find, somewhere in Mrs. Hudson’s flat perhaps, or better yet, he could find his way back to the mansion. John wasn’t afraid of the Outside, after all. It was only a bigger place than he was used to. Anything would be better than this, where he’d be most assuredly putting his family and all of borrower kind in danger because he couldn’t balance on a sink edge properly. But even if he returned to the mansion, what then? Surely Sherlock would find him. Surely Sherlock would not rest until proof was in his hands again.

John stewed about this problem for a very long time. In fact, he made himself late to the lunch he promised Sherlock. It was only when he heard a series of knocks that grew progressively louder—and a few insistent booms of “John? John, where are you?”—that he realized Sherlock was walking around the flat, tapping on the walls, calling for him.

“You can’t be serious,” John said, and then he put his face in his hands and laughed. Of course. Of course that was what Sherlock would do. Oddly enough, this made John feel near spectacular, very much better on the whole, and he decided these were problems he’d fix as he came to them. It wasn’t very borrowerly to panic, after all.

 

li.

 

For lunch, Sherlock introduced John to the miracle of take-out pasta from a little restaurant named Angelo’s. The owner apparently believed himself indebted to Sherlock—“I only proved he wasn’t a murderer; he still went to prison,” Sherlock scoffed—and the food, which was more quality than John was accustomed to, came free. Sherlock opened the steaming boxes of broccoli chicken alfredo and penne pasta with pesto on the kitchen table, and then scooped a generous forkful of each onto a plate for John. John noted but didn’t voice that this kind of food was rare for Sherlock, as well, considering Sherlock seemed to live off of a diet of nicotine patches, tea, Tesco Express foodstuffs, and Chinese delivery. The pasta smelled delicious.

John had come prepared with his own silverware (family heirlooms—his great grandfather Theodore Watson had melted a dime in the Holmes’ fireplace and from the molten liquid, shaped delicate if crude forks and knives and spoons with etched Ws in the hilts). He felt distinctly awkward, dressed in what was obviously a jumper made from the scraps of one of Sherlock’s socks that had been shredded by the cat in secondary school. “It looks—very nice,” he said.

“It is adequate,” Sherlock dismissed. “I… am unsure, for beverages—”

“Water is fine,” John said hastily, taking from his pack a child’s play thimble. It made a perfectly sized cup that fit between his hands. He held it out to Sherlock. “Please.”

Sherlock took the thimble with an expression that was quite impossible to decipher. He stared at it for a moment, the caught bit of silver between his thumb and forefinger, and went to the sink to fill it.

 

liii.

 

John ate. Sherlock watched intently, elbows propped up and hands folded in an elegant knot before his chin. Every so often, he asked a question and John would pause in his sawing of the large egg noodles, contemplate an answer that wasn’t overly incriminating, and tell Sherlock all he wanted to know.

“This is very good,” said John, once he’d had his fill.

“Tell me about your normal diet. Do you have allergies, are there foods that borrowers avoid due to cultural reasons?”

“This is the oddest conversation I’ve ever had,” John said. “All right then. I don’t know any borrower to have ever been allergic to something, but for sure, we stayed as far away from marmite as we could. That stuff may as well be lethal, you know? Me, I’m a jam bloke.”

“How many borrowers are there?”

John felt overcome with an old, passed-down sadness. He looked at the fork in his hands, the shallow engraving of the W. “Not sure. No one is. There are a few families living in the mansion, but I haven’t seen any borrower since we came to London. Some of the older borrowers believe we’ve been all but wiped out. You hear stories, of course—once, when I was very young, a borrower stopped at the mansion while traveling in the Outside. He said there were others. Hundreds, he said.” John offered Sherlock a rueful smile. “Never was quite sure how much to believe, though.”

“I can’t believe I never noticed any of you,” muttered Sherlock, rankled. “I recall the string, of course, that you mentioned yesterday. I was so sure Mycroft was playing a confusing, childish trick on me.”

“I felt very bad about that.”

Sherlock gestured dismissively. “Tell me about your injury. Your real injury, not the psychosomatic limp you insist on perpetuating.”

“I don’t insist on anything,” protested John, but he didn’t take insult. He knew, just as well as Sherlock did now, that the limp was a product some defectiveness in his mind. There was a part of John that had held back information about the Great Rat Infestation the day before, and he thought, right up until Sherlock asked him about it, that he’d refuse to talk about the war today, as well. The war was fur and darkness; the war left scars on John’s body and in his nightmares. Some nights, John woke in his own sweat and was sure a rat’s teeth were closed around his throat.

But to his surprise, the words tumbled out without tripping over themselves. “I was trapped,” John said, touching his shoulder as if he could still feel the burn of the wound, “in the kitchen. In the war. With the rats. My dad,” he said, “he saved me.” And he said much more after that, watching Sherlock’s gaze and waiting for the blue to change colour. It never did.

 

liv.

 

When lunch was finished, they went to the living room and Sherlock turned on the telly. He curled up on the sofa and John perched on top of the backing, feeling very high and fantastic. Sherlock turned his head often to catch John from the corner of his eye, as though wary of his imminent disappearance from reality.

Sherlock had always been fond of running a rather rude (if hilarious) commentary on the shows he watched. For the first time, he had an audience he was aware of, and John, well—John was a very willing captive audience. Sometimes John felt self-conscious of his chuckles—Sherlock, beyond his commentary, was silent and watchful—but then he realized Sherlock simply didn’t want to drown out the sound of John’s laughter with his own.

Shortly after, Sherlock took a phone call that made him sit up ramrod straight. When he snapped the cell shut, he didn’t give John another look; instead, he hurriedly put on his shoes and ran for his coat. “Case,” he said tersely and was then gone.

This would become a boilerplate for many afternoons to come. Interrogation, food, telly, case. The food only lasted as long as the interrogation, and Sherlock’s more manic interest, did. John was all right with that. He quite liked Tesco Express cheese and bread, which for the first time could be pinched for sandwiches without concern for the human beans who might use the rest.

 

lv.

 

Life became very strange, and very wonderful.

“You can’t possibly prefer to spend all your time in the wall,” Sherlock said one gray-curtained Saturday, throwing his rubber ball at the wallpaper as if to emphasize its overall lack. Upon reflection, John had to admit it was the habit of a borrower; they were lurkers by nature, skittish of open spaces and daylight. He came out by appointment only: lunches, favorite television programs, for the violin.

“Ugh,” said Sherlock. “You have no imagination, John.”

So John began to venture out into the flat as he pleased, borrowing while Sherlock experimented on human saliva in the kitchen. He would ask Sherlock to take down medical texts from the bookshelves and lay them open on the sofa, so that John could read and turn the pages. Turning a page involved a great amount of work—paper was light but tall—and every so often, Sherlock would take a break from his work to impatiently flip it for John. A few weeks later, Sherlock put an iPad on the sofa with the instruction manual and an electronic library of all the books on pathology, pharmaceuticals, natural remedies, forensics, and anatomy that John could ever dream of. He merely had to press his hand against the screen to turn the “page,” and could even search for the information he was looking for.

He spent long hours like that, reading and marveling at the Big People and the depth of their research. There was nothing like this for borrowers—how helpful it would have been, in the war, if such information had been available. John regretted that most of his newfound information was relevant only to the beans, but he tried to make the most of it, writing down his own observations at night in his borrowers home, comparing and contrasting what he’d found to what he knew of his own physiology.

In the evenings, when the glowing screen of the iPad grew too bright to look at, John curled up in the sofa throw pillow and listened to Sherlock discuss his latest cases. He did this often, and John was fairly certain Sherlock wasn’t speaking to him—he rarely realized John was there at all. Still, it was time John considered spent together, and he felt his world grow bigger and bigger with each case, each story, each calculated leap in logic. Other nights, Sherlock played the violin and John watched the fire dance to the notes, casting long-armed shadows against the walls.

Getting around the flat became easier than ever. John, no longer afraid of being seen, left his tools where they were most useful. There was a perpetual rope from the top of the icebox to the floor; similarly, a long line of thread blew like a spider web from the bookshelf to the desk surface. Sherlock said he was being lazy.

 

lvi.

 

In time, perhaps Sherlock would have forgotten John Watson. He was, after all, very small. And in many ways, this was as much a gift as it was a curse, since Sherlock was a selfish bean and there was no room at all for beans other than himself in his world. But John was not a bean, and he was very small indeed, and so he fit quite neatly into some corner of that other-space, that Sherlock-space, that place where not even Sherlock’s nimble fingers could shoo him out of it.

Even so, Sherlock could have forgotten John. There were other things he forgot: eating, sleeping, conversing with his brother, questions from ignorant beans, the daily weather forecast, the workings of the solar system. In the scope of all that, what was John?

There would come a day when John would find out. But that day would never have come without a single twist in fate: that of a serial killer who, in a sea of pink, made a mistake. A careless, marvelous mistake.