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There are universes in which they are not broken. In which they have not bled and scarred, in which they have not hurt each other in countless small moments and larger, unforgivable ones. In which they are innocent.
Stay exactly where you are. It’s a trick. Just a magic trick.
This is not that universe.
—
It’s the silhouette John sees first, a smudgy shadow cast over the dim wall. A dramatic hem flaring out, a coat collar turned up against the banality of the world. The light is amber—he’d stolen that lamp, the one Sherlock had used during his three a.m. manias when sleep was elusive and solutions so unbearably close and light too bright—and John finds that it suits him fine in his new flat. Difficult to see by, maybe, but that’s the point, isn’t it. And in the fickle light, the achingly familiar lines of the Belstaff are cast midnight blue over the walls.
It’s not as though the whiskey hasn’t tricked him before. So when he sees the acute angle of a coat collar projected on the wall in front of him, John only grips the glass a bit tighter, swirls the liquor restlessly, and takes another sip.
There is a gun in his nightstand. His subconscious mind is seeing Sherlock’s silhouette in shadows. The line drawn between the two points is hazy, illogical, and fairly confident. Sherlock would be appalled at his deductive reasoning, even if he understood the underlying sentiment.
And then the shadow hesitates—can a shadow hesitate, if it hasn’t moved?—and maudlin thoughts are replaced by instinct. Danger. Intruder. Adrenaline sparks like dry ice through his veins for a bare moment before apathy (and whiskey, he’s fairly certain) weigh his veins back down, and he settles more comfortably into his armchair. Black leather. Dull. He’d prefer to bleed out over his scarlet armchair in Baker Street.
He doesn’t move.
“Hello?” John says instead, polite and only a little slurred. “Anyone there?”
The shadow sprawls over the wall in unmoving curls—god, Sherlock’s curls, he remembered just how much he’d worked to tame them and just how unruly they were first thing in the morning, he’d wondered how they would look after—no. Can’t go there. The shadow is still, if new. The whisky bottle is half-empty, when it had been full that afternoon. There’s a deduction to be made there, the likes of which even John can pick up on. And yet.
“Come on,” he coaxes. “Even if you’re here to kill me, at least that means I haven’t been talking to a wall.”
The slightest hint of an inhale sounds from behind him, and John smiles, pleased. “Got you. What else do I have to say? That I wouldn’t mind if you were?” He laughs lowly. “I wouldn’t, you know. Murders are far more interesting than suicides, someone once told me. Though he doesn’t get a say, given—well.”
He tracks the tense movements of the shadow. The shoulder pulls back; the head dips down.
“Shall I say more, then? Fine. I’ve a gun in my dresser. Not supposed to have it, obviously. I’d be a bit worried telling you this, but you’ve broken into my flat. I think I can assume you won’t tell the authorities. Now, where was I? The gun. Right. You ought to be glad it isn’t in my hand, you might be thinking—but you don’t need to be, because if it was—”
“John.”
He flicks the voice away with a slight twist of his wrist, upsetting the amber liquid in the glass. “Always interrupting me, aren’t you. Right. You wouldn’t need to be worried, if that was the case. Was what I was going to say.” The shadow expands, the unknown figure moving closer. “Interpret that how you like.”
“It’s not that difficult a leap,” the voice says after a pause. The sound of it, a deep baritone, strikes John as somehow familiar, but the hand reaching over his back for the glass distracts him.
“Get your own,” he protests as the glass is plucked nimbly out of his hands. The figure is still behind him.
“No, thank you.”
John’s hand feels empty without the weight of the glass. Digging his fingernails into his palm, he notes that the unknown person is actually interacting with him. Perhaps they don’t mean to kill him, after all. “Who are you, then?”
The hesitation is palpable but short-lived; footsteps sound like gunfire against the bare hardwood floor. Strangely, it makes John think that the man is going to his own execution. He closes his eyes to heighten the anticipation.
He’s drank more than he’s realized, possibly. And at least this way, if he is to be murdered, he’ll be able to meet Sherlock in—well, probably the deepest depths of hell, he has no illusions—and tell him with a blase smile that he’s no idea who murdered him. One final disappointment, he’d like to think, but who was he kidding—more than likely it would be a treat.
The voice interrupts his thoughts. “Hello, John.”
John opens his eyes to find—Sherlock Holmes. Haggard, slightly bruised, and with an unfamiliar expression of penitence written in the lines of his face, but alive. Alive .
He shakes his head reflexively. “No. You can’t—you can’t be. You aren’t. I saw you—”
“I am.”
“But I saw—”
“I told you it was a magic trick.” Sherlock stands tall against the dingy flat. The whiskey paints him in broad strokes: the mahogany tangle of his curls, the pale skin, the grand sweep of his coat. He’d always loved that coat; thought it reminiscent of the night sky in Afghanistan what with the sheer radiance of light and brilliance.
“That’s not—” John collects himself, still dumbstruck, and shakes his head again. “No. You killed yourself. You made me watch.”
“I had to.” And this answer, softer than the others, breaks John. He stands up, ignoring the dull sensation of the whiskey, and takes a reckless step forward.
“How could you. How could you do that to us. To me.” Swallows down the anger and sorrow that simmer deep in his gut. “How could you—”
“I didn’t want—” Sherlock starts to answer, but John’s hands grasp his collar and shove, hard, before he can finish.
They crash ignominiously onto the floor in a tangle of limbs, John’s hips straddling Sherlock’s. “You don’t—” John says thickly, one hand still pulling at Sherlock’s collar as the other grasps his wrist tightly, too tight, searching for a pulse that hadn’t been there so many months before. “You—Sherlock, you—”
Beneath him, Sherlock swallows, the very corner of his mouth trembling. It’s not a look that John has ever seen on his face, and he stills instantly. “Sherlock?”
“Say it again,” Sherlock says—commands, really, but he looks so desperate that John can’t help but oblige. He’s never been able to do otherwise. “What do you—oh. Sherlock?”
The breath shudders out of Sherlock’s chest in shaky pulses. His eyes, those undefinable celadon eyes, are focused on John’s, and something in them makes John want to cry. They’re so clear. So broken. “Yes,” Sherlock answers. “Please.”
And it’s ridiculous, all of it: John straddling Sherlock’s hips and clutching his wrist and half a second from punching him, really, and Sherlock staring up at him with such vulnerability. But he says it again. “Sherlock,” he says, and watches the man beneath him shudder. “Sherlock,” he says, and Sherlock’s eyes close. When they open, a tear is caught in his lashes. “Sherlock.”
How long has it been since he’s heard his real name? And John understands, despite the whiskey haze, that Sherlock’s road has not been so very dissimilar to his own, that Sherlock has had to do terrible things and has contemplated far worse, and that he has been alone. Maybe even more so than John.
His pulse thunders under John’s fingertips. It feels as though a flash flood is rising under the fragile skin.
Anger still curls in his belly. But he says “Sherlock” and “Sherlock” and “Sherlock” once more, and he watches the man beneath him break apart, and when he too falls apart, letting his tears soak into the turned-up collar of Sherlock’s coat, it feels natural. As though they are breaking apart along the same fault lines.
—
There are universes in which they are whole. Not many.
But in this one, they share each other’s cracks, and maybe that’s enough.