Work Text:
To Hold You To Me
“John,” Sherlock says, his lips numb, barely moving with the syllables.
John doesn’t say anything. He can’t.
He’s already gone, even before his body hits the ground.
That’s what the arrow was intended for, after all. It steals souls. It destroys with the simplest press of point through flesh.
It was meant for Sherlock.
This is Sherlock’s fight, after all. This is Sherlock’s duty: to find and stop these cultists before they break the world. Before they loose what should never be loosed; wake what should never be woken.
The only reason John is here is because of Sherlock.
Except John isn’t here.
The body bleeding out at Sherlock’s feet is empty. Oh, certainly the damage to the thorax is less than ideal, but the psychic damage—the spiritual—
Even if Sherlock stops the bleeding; sutures the wounds; coaxes the failing heart to continue; even then, he will not have John Watson anymore, because these people have taken him from Sherlock.
The snow covers slick ice, but Sherlock moves easily upon it. His nails are blue as he tilts John’s head, staring into empty blue eyes.
Kneeling by the body of the man who has given everything for him, Sherlock feels in John’s pocket.
He didn’t even draw his gun.
They destroyed him utterly, and John didn’t even take aim at them.
Didn’t want to hurt them.
Sherlock is not so kind.
They paused, these five people who think that the world is theirs. They paused, uncertain what to do now that their plan to destroy Sherlock has been foiled by the sacrifice of a different soul.
The words that Sherlock speaks rip bloody furrows in his tongue and lips. They stain the dark of night around him an impossible purple. That light collects around John’s gun, and every bullet that Sherlock fires knows a target.
Five shots.
Five deaths.
So much power filling the air.
Sherlock tilts his head back. There are thick clouds covering the stars, raining snow down upon him.
The stars are there anyway. They’re always there, just as the things that lurk behind the world are always there.
“Come on, then,” Sherlock rasps in a tongue that he should not know; in a tongue that breaks the world, but may just mend his heart. “Come and make me an offer.”
The thing that walks out of the thickening snowstorm could be human. It wants to look human. Sherlock can feel how very carefully it has crafted this human form; how like Frankenstein crafting his terrible monster from the most beautiful parts, it has chosen each feature.
This thing has never been human. It never could be human. It is a hole in all rationality; a dark well that reflects humanity back distorted, beloved, destroyed.
“Hello, Sherlock Holmes,” the creature purrs.
“Hello, Nyalarthotep,” Sherlock answers, for anything closer to this monster’s true name will destroy him utterly. “I want him back.”
Nyalarthotep stares at the bodies that the snow is starting to coat—at John, and at the five who never will matter, now. Who will be not even a footnote in history, because Sherlock intends to leave them here for the scavengers, assuming this monstrous god does not devour them.
“Five lives for you, and whatever pieces of my sanity and soul you are carving off now.” Blood drips lazily down Sherlock’s chin; paints thin trails of warmth down his frozen face as his tears become something other than salt water. Become burning trails of life, because that is what he wants to wrest from this encounter. “Surely a good price for what I ask.”
“Never start a bargain by offering all that is within your grasp.” Nyalarthotep steps forward, and his cold weight is suddenly flush with Sherlock.
Sherlock dislikes unexpected touch at the best of times. This is not the best of time, but still he grits his teeth; still he allows this.
“Or do you offer me more?” Nyalarthotep croons. “Will you build me shrines, Sherlock Holmes? Will you offer your talents into my service? Will you build me a better monster to wear, since you judge this form I have crafted so harshly?”
“I will destroy all record of you if you do not,” Sherlock replies, reaching out to grip Nyalarthotep’s black robe. Pain travels through his hand, striking deep into the core of him, but he doesn’t slacken his grip. “Take what power I can gift you here, or take the eradication of your centuries of effort. I offer you nothing more.”
“Oh, you poor, confused child.” Nyalarthotep sighs, taking a step back.
There is something warm in Nyalarthotep’s hand now. Something that steams as snow falls upon it.
Something that beats.
Sherlock draws in a gasping breath, suddenly aware of an aching emptiness at his core.
Nyalarthotep twists his hand, and the thing he holds no longer beats.
Sherlock drops to his knees, both hands pressed to his chest, blood in his mouth, his nose, his eyes; mercifully still in his lungs.
Nyalarthotep turns the new thing in his hand. Blood pulses from the inner curve of the kidney with each pulse of Sherlock’s heart in his chest. “Not your heart, I don’t think. I like that where it is. Instead I could take this. Take it forever, a piece of you, little unwilling priest, to live with me until this universe is forfeit. You have two, after all.”
“Kill me, then,” Sherlock grates. “Kill me, and gain nothing.”
Nyalarthotep paces around Sherlock, and when finally he turns again to face Sherlock, there is something else in his hand. Something soft, and wrinkled; grey, and bilobed; and Sherlock doesn’t want to know what it is, even though he already does. “This is what you truly fear me taking. This is what terrifies you: my hands upon your being.”
Nyalarthotep lifts the brain to his lips, and Sherlock screams as agony pierces straight through his head.
Through his being.
And then, as abruptly as it appeared, the pain vanishes.
Sherlock gasps in startled breath after startled breath, and stares across an infinite bridge of darkness towards twin red dwarf stars that watch him with curious puzzlement.
“I do not need you, Sherlock Holmes,” Nyalarthotep says with surprising gentleness. “I do not need any of your people; any of your worship. I am something you and yours could never imagine. Something whole unto itself. Something vast, but so curious about what being small means.”
“And in your vastness…” Sherlock chokes, blood spattering the snow in front of him. “In your completeness… can you find room… to be kind?”
Nyalarthotep draws in a long, lingering breath. He reaches out, swiping the blood and tears from Sherlock’s cheek and placing the liquid into his mouth. “Perhaps,” he whispers. “Perhaps, when the stars are right and the world tilted at just the right angle, I can do something that you would consider kind.”
He holds out his hand, his fingers slick with blood and tears and the dust between universes.
Sherlock pushes himself to his feet, though the world spins wildly around him.
Nyalarthotep matches his movement. “But I could just as easily be cruel.”
Sherlock understands, staring into eyes that have become nebula and supernova; alpha and omega; beginning and end.
This creature—for he fits Nyalarthotep just as poorly as any name—this creature cannot be cruel or kind. Not any more than a volcano can.
All this god-creature can do is fill vessels that he is given to fill.
Follow patterns that are writ large enough to catch his eye.
Well. There’s no point living in the world as it is.
Sherlock will just have to trust John will understand, and that if he doesn’t, he’ll at least think kindly on what Sherlock may have been trying to do.
Nyalarthotep holds his fingers out to Sherlock, and Sherlock takes them in his mouth. Swallows his own blood; his grief; his determination; and the curious wonder and cold curiosity of the living dark.
Stepping forward, Sherlock presses his lips to the swirling dark vortex that is Nyalarthotep’s mouth. He inhales power; exhales possibilities.
He—they—the power that is pattern, that is possibility not probability, turns to study the bodies that are arrayed around them.
The arrow that protrudes from one body. Such a clever little thing. Spirit is such a hard thing to define, let alone capture, but this wood manages to do so. They run their fingers over the wood, disrupting careful runes.
They gather what should never have been taken from them in the first place, and they hold it gently as they turn back to the body, hoping to make whole what should never have been broken in the first place.
***
John wakes with a strangled gasp, raising a hand to touch where the arrow struck his chest. They shot him on the wrong fucking side. If they were going to shoot him, they should have at least had the decency to shoot where he’s already scarred.
Someone whispers a word that isn’t a word, and John freezes.
“Sherlock?” he whispers, blinking until he can bring the man into focus.
Sherlock’s lips twitch into a small smile, but he doesn’t say anything else. His face is ghastly, blood trailing down from every single orifice, his skin pale.
Snow falls upon him, and doesn’t melt.
His fingers twitch, and John feels something tugging against his chest.
Shadow.
Sherlock is knitting John’s flesh together with shadow.
“Sherlock,” John says more strongly. “I need you back, my friend. I need you to listen to my voice, and come back with me.”
Sherlock tilts his head, and at his gesture the darkness dives back into John’s flesh, knitting together what the arrow tore asunder. Does he understand what John is saying?
John sits up gingerly, surprised at how little he hurts. It must be the cold. Snow is continuing to fall from the sky, creating a cold, silent space that feels eerie and unreal around them.
Perhaps that’s why it takes John so long to realize what surrounds them. The bodies have cooled off enough that the snow doesn’t melt, after all; that no steam curls up from them despite the fact that many are turning to ice sculptures.
Bodies.
Sherlock has taken apart bodies. John recognizes the shape of intestines; a femur; a ribcage; a head, the expression still so very human, a rictus of confusion rather than pain.
There’s a pattern to the way the bodies have been torn apart; to the way they’ve been arranged, surrounding John and Sherlock.
John does not want to know the pattern. He does not want to understand. He just wants to take Sherlock and get away from this place.
“Sherlock, please, let us come away.” John reaches for Sherlock.
Sherlock makes a sharp jerking motion, and the shadow tying his fingers to John’s injured shoulders vanishes.
Is it because John has asked three times? Or just because Sherlock has finished what he was doing?
Sherlock’s breath leaves him in a chill cloud, a sigh that seems to come from deep inside him. He raises bloody fingers to gently brush against John’s cheek… and topples forward into the snow.
John curses, using every profanity he learned in first medical school and then the army. He kneels by Sherlock, though his thigh protests violently, especially when his knee slips on the ice and he almost goes face-first onto Sherlock’s body.
Just unconscious. Hypothermic. Likely anemic, from the way his gums are pale. But John can feel the slight brush of air, can find a pulse if he tries.
John’s starting to shiver himself. There’s not much wind, thank whatever forces might actually be on their side; that’s likely the only reason he still has any body heat left. But the snow, the ice, the bitter winter—it wants to destroy them as surely as these cultists spread around them did.
He has to get Sherlock warm. Once he has them warm, he can focus on getting them out of here.
Grabbing Sherlock’s arm, John manages to stand and sling Sherlock across his back. First, he’ll find somewhere with no wind, and hopefully a minimum of snowfall. Then, he’ll need to get a fire going.
He seems to walk forever. He’s not sure he’s actually making any progress, but stopping is tantamount to accepting death, and so he keeps walking. Even when his feet try to go out from under him; even when his shivering becomes a constant, pained rattle in all his scars; still he walks.
He finds a copse of trees. He deposits Sherlock against a trunk as wide around as Sherlock’s abdomen, and begins gathering hopefully-dry sticks.
The first doesn’t want to start. Or perhaps it’s more fair to say that John’s hands don’t want to work. But finally, eventually, he manages to coax a spark into a flame, and a flame into a blaze.
The fire hurts, but it’s a familiar pain, one that John welcomes. Gathering Sherlock against him, John tries to rub feeling back into Sherlock’s limp hands.
How long does he sit there, rubbing and squeezing those limp, calloused, ink-stained hands? It could be minutes; it could be hours. Time doesn’t matter in the midst of the storm.
Finally Sherlock’s eyes open, and he sighs as though someone is dredging all the air from his lungs. “John…?”
“Here, Sherlock,” John promises.
“I know,” Sherlock says with a smile. “I always know when you’re here.”
“I’ll always be here for you,” John says, pressing his lips to Sherlock’s forehead.
“You will be,” Sherlock sighs, and words that John can’t translate slide from his lips.
John arranges Sherlock tighter against him. They have to survive the cold, and that means staying together. If they had a blanket… but he’s fine just holding Sherlock tight to him, here where the wind and the snow can’t get to them so easily.
Once the storm is done, they’ll find their way home.
Until then, they rest together in this empty space, holding firm against all the forces that want to destroy them.