Archive of Our Own

When John was just a kitten, six weeks old and still with all his milk teeth, he had seen his father get hit by a car. He hadn’t understood it at the time, what it meant to see a body go flying through the air and land with a thud, twitch once and then go still. His mother went over and yowled and yowled, and she even hissed like she did when Harry and John misbehaved, but his father gave no response.  She kneaded his father’s body with her paws, the way John and Harry did when asking for milk, but that John knew that grown-up cats sometimes did to each other. She had groomed him all over with her rough but loving tongue, but his father did not purr, did not move, did not even breathe. He would never move again.

John did not see his father again after that and soon he forgot, as cats tend to do. A cat can live his entire life never knowing his father, after all, so it did not bother him much. It wasn’t until he was older that he learned what happened to the cats that got hit by cars, what had eventually happened to his father: first the birds came, and the crows, and then the mice came, and the rats, and the bugs came, and the flies, and the flies laid eggs and the eggs hatched worms and soon there was a pile of fur and bones and nothing that was a cat anymore.

John avoided cars and was very careful when he crossed the street. And when he was outside John hunted them all: the birds and the mice, the rats and the flies, and when he caught them he killed them and so the cycle of life was complete.

That did not happen when Sherlock got hurt.

Cats always land on their feet, bodies twisting in mid-air to right themselves, and John had fallen off of high surfaces before, even injuring a leg once, but he had always been okay. But Sherlock had fallen so very, very far, and John had watched him, every muscle, his body twisting again and again through the air and despite this he did not land on his feet, he landed with a horrible, sickening wet sound that was like nothing John’s sensitive ears had ever heard.

When Sherlock fell there was so much blood, and he did not move no matter how John yowled, and he did not move when John kneaded him, the feel of him unusually soft and wet underneath John’s paws, and he did not purr or even breathe when John groomed his blood-matted fur.

The birds didn’t come, however. That was because Mrs. Hudson, who was John’s human, and Sherlock’s sometimes-human because Sherlock lived outside like a wild thing, picked Sherlock up very carefully and wrapped him in a blanket. She laid him gently into a box like he was going to sleep, still wearing the blue scarf she had knitted for him. Sherlock did not even move or make a fuss which was strange because even though he liked boxes, he never liked anybody to pick him up, unlike John who often asked for it.

When she put the cover on the box John yowled in protest and tried to bat her hands away, although he would never scratch her. Sherlock did not like being covered up. He always had to have a little bit of an opening, to escape.

Mrs. Hudson made a sad sound then, and she said a lot of sad-sounding soft words in her human language that John did not understand, catching only john and sherlock. Tears leaked from her eyes and John understood that that was a sad thing. John only knew that he wanted to curl up to Sherlock right that very moment, to groom him until he reluctantly purred and to share his warmth, but Sherlock was inside the box.

They took the box to the place with trees and grass and lots of birds to chase, which was part of John and Sherlock’s territory. Mrs. Hudson found a spot and she dug a hole in the ground with a sharp metal scoop like John sometimes saw her do when she put flowers inside. This time she put the box inside, and John couldn’t help but wonder, would Sherlock grow, too, come spring? Would he sprout like the bright flowers that they both liked to chew on, that drew the bees that Sherlock liked to chase?

But John knew that what had happened to Sherlock was like what had happened to his father, and there was a new feeling inside of him that was terrible, an emptiness that wasn’t hunger.

Mrs. Hudson put the dirt over the box and a stone by the dirt and she said sherlock and john again in her soft way,john several times over. She put a handful of freshly-picked flowers on the dirt with the juice still leaking from their stems. John chewed on them a little, but his heart wasn’t in it.

The empty feeling inside him seemed to grow, a gnawing feeling like being bitten by something, only it was inside, not out. It couldn’t be filled by food so he ate little, it couldn’t be chased away so he stopped hunting. The only time it eased a little was when he went to sleep on the patch of dirt by the stone, the sun warming his body and the warmth seeping down to the ground below.

Some time passes, the way time tends to do. And John could not forget, the way cats tend to do.

Sometimes when John sleeps his ears twitch and his legs twitch because in his sleep he is running. When he wakes his heart still flutters, beats rapid like the wings of a bird when it takes off from the ground in a burst of fear and feathers, and so he tears wild around his flat, room to room, corner to corner, trying to chase that which cannot be caught.

But then, one day, Sherlock comes back.

Sherlock comes home smelling funny, with dirt in his fur and looking hurt real bad. He looks like John’s father after getting hit by the car and there is still blood but it is dried on him now, matting his sleek fur down.

He has death-smell all over him, the smell of rot and carrion, of worms and meat left to spoil in the sun. John’s ears flatten instinctively, his fur rising and his tail going bushy with the threat. There is something off about Sherlock. Something very wrong.

John bares his teeth.

Sherlock’s eye is all wrong, it’s out, it’s out of place, it’s dangling, and his stomach is open with insides out like someone has scratched it wide open and yanked all the insides out with his teeth, like John had done to a rabbit once. And Sherlock moves wrong and he walks wrong and when he opens his mouth no meow or chirp comes out but rather a straining pain-sound, a pull-on-your-tail sound.

But underneath the death-smell there is still a Sherlock-smell. And around Sherlock’s neck is the blue scarf, and slowly, twitching, Sherlock raises his tail in greeting.

And John, despite everything, raises his tail back.

He very slowly approaches Sherlock, who does not move, does not even breathe. They touch noses. The death-smell is overwhelming and horrible, flooding John’s senses and he can taste it in the back of his throat. But up close, right up close, he can detect the Sherlock-smell beneath it, and, very faintly, their shared-home smell, the shared scent of a household, of two cats who have marked the same items, who own the same human, who curl up around each other in their soft bed. Family-smell.

John chirps a greeting to Sherlock. Sherlock makes the pain-sound back.

John begins to groom him, washing away grit and dried blood, dirt and death. Sherlock, reluctantly, begins to purr. It is an awful, gurgling wet sound like there is fluid caught in his throat. It is very, very wrong.

John purrs, too. He doesn’t care. His Sherlock has finally come home.