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London, adrift. Streets undulating in the storm, waves of concrete lapping up over the pavement. His shoes are wet.
Tall grasses, hard to see through. The certain scent of blood and dirt on London street corners. You’re not haunted by the war, Doctor Watson. You miss it. Sherlock jumps and doesn’t take a breath. Doesn’t cry out.
The dying always cry out.
The dead don’t.
Move across the pavement like an ocean, swimming but not swimming, moving but not knowing how. Doesn’t matter. His body on the pavement. His body in a heap made of his coat. His body in a heap in a pile in a puddle, his body, wet: blood.
It’s fake, though, and he knows it. He knows it. If he could just take Sherlock’s pulse, Sherlock would have to stop pretending.
The pale column of Sherlock’s neck like bone stripped clean, eyes staring, unseeing, curls weighed down by the heaviness of claret and honey. By the gravity, the importance of this moment. Take his pulse. At the neck. Blue scarf in the way. At the neck. Collar of the coat in the way. At the neck. His hands are hard to move.
They’re wet. Everything is wet and he is drowning.
If he gets there, if he gets to Sherlock’s neck and finds it cold, finds it empty, if his hands get to Sherlock’s neck and finds the eternal nothing Sherlock wanted for this moment, everything will be over.
He lifts his hands and they’re like granite and steel and glass, full of shards and rock, but he lifts them anyway and pushes through the fog and the ocean and the distance and tries to find Sherlock’s pulse at his neck.
*
Hands, scrabbling. Fingernails at his neck. The hands are coming.
Concrete and dirt and cold and pain (the hands will close around his throat). Arms strung up and attached to the walls (he can’t sleep) (if he loses his footing he’ll asphyxiate) (like Christ on the cross) (please God) and the delirium already setting in. Sweating, bleeding (the clotting itches) but they’re careful not to break any (important) bones (so he’ll live) (so he’ll talk). The hands strangle (only ever strangle) (the air in his lungs burns afterward) and threaten unconsciousness (if he loses his footing he’ll asphyxiate) and he fears them above anything else (he feels them at his neck) (they are coming).
He needs to survive (he needs air) so he needs to calm down (he has to stay calm) (can’t panic) (panic makes it worse). He needs to breathe evenly so that when the hands arrive he has a breath still in his lungs to hold on to. He needs to stay relaxed so the hands don’t have anything to fight against (damage to a minimum) (preserve tendons, protect against bruising).
He needs to calm down (he needs John).
(Late night takeaway and John’s laugh as he delivers the punch line; maroon cardigan over plaid shirt (he always liked that cardigan) (it’s just a tiny bit see through) (thinks John wears it on purpose to catch him looking). Fire lit in the grate (John knelt and built it), stars lit in the sky (John reached and strung them) and lying back against the sofa, lying back and letting the food settle, legs akimbo (almost touching) (they could be touching) (they never touched). John laughs even though the corners of his eyes are tired and he twitches his hands, longing to reach across the (ever-shrinking) space to John’s hands (he doesn’t reach) (he could have though) (he needs to survive so he can reach) and imagining touching them (them touching back)).
Gasping (he needs air) (he needs John).
The hands reach through the space of his breath and find him (they’re warm) (they’re touching) (they’re wrong) (he needs to survive).
(He moves.)
*
His pulse at the neck. Find his pulse at the neck.
He struggles against the silty water tangling around his legs and stretches out his arm, his fingers, seeking, praying, please, God, let him live. Fumbling over knobs of spine, along limp muscles. Pressing into the vulnerable places. Pressing into the secrets Sherlock keeps.
But Sherlock is moving, slipping out from under his hands, out with the tide, and he can’t find the pulse, the beat, the rhythm, the life, and then Sherlock is gone.
Panic burns in his breath: it’s not right, something’s not right. He’s always allowed to try. He needs to be able to try.
John clambers forward, elbows and knees and belly dragging against the sheets as he tries to follow in Sherlock’s wake. The plea builds in his chest, hammering down his bones into his searching hands: a chance, just one chance, to find the pulse in his neck before it sinks beneath the surface, before it’s lost forever. Reach. Just reach.
Gravity shifts.
Half-falling, half-stumbling, feet unsteady on cold floorboards, following some phantom sound Sherlock is making in the distance. In the distance, and yet right under his hands. A sound like a whimper, kitten-soft and confused, edged with pain and with fear.
There are never any sounds on the pavement and something is wrong.
John’s eyes are already open, but suddenly he can see.
*
Unshackled (and yet not free) and he falls (he fell in front of John) (he’s still falling). The room closes in around him, cornering him in, so he hunches down and waits (waits for John) (John isn’t coming), crouched, spine overexposed and kidneys unprotected, thighs burning under his weight, feet freezing against the floors. Trying to steady his balance. Trying to steady his breath (he needs to breathe) (he needs to survive) (he needs to do this for John).
(He died for John.) (He would do it again.) (He’s doing it right now.)
(This time, John won’t have to watch.)
The hands go still.
*
John comes into waking like falling back into himself.
For one long, precarious moment, he doesn’t know if he’s just woken up or fallen into some deeper nightmare. He doesn’t recognise himself. He doesn’t know how he got here: on his feet in the blue dark of the night, hands reaching, scraping, searching for a pulse in Sherlock’s neck.
Sherlock.
John stumbles back, rips his hands away like Sherlock is on fire, or maybe like John is, because it’s John’s hands on Sherlock’s skin and Sherlock huddled in the darkest corner of their bedroom, all bare feet and thin pyjamas, trying to get away, trying to protect himself, teeth bared against the whimper in his throat as it tries to become a scream.
His scars stand out in stark vivid white against his spine, against the shadows, as though the nightmare illuminates them from within.
“Oh god, Sherlock,” John manages, the words only half-formed as he pants, chest heaving, trying to breathe, trying to find his footing, the shock of his own dream still pressing in from all the edges. “Sherlock.”
He wants to drag Sherlock up, wants to take him by the arms and shake him awake, but he did this, he did this, his hands on Sherlock’s neck transforming through a dreamscape into the weapons and horrors that other long-ago hands have been. He did this, so instead John falls back, missing the edge of the bed and going down to one knee, hard. Calls Sherlock’s name again, and again, too loud for the quiet of the dark, not loudly enough to be heard over the noise of Sherlock’s terror.
The empty spaces in John’s fists ache, fury and misery and the stale desperation of hopelessness.
John presses his fist against his own chest, against his own furious heartbeat, and begs until his voice cracks. “Please, Sherlock, wake up, Sherlock, please, Sherlock, wake up.”
*
(Sherlock.)
He breathes (John) (John’s voice) (John’s plea from the pavement) and the hands dissolve around his neck. (Sherlock, please.) His fingers shake in his fringe; he’s cold with sweat and pricking with gooseflesh. Legs cramping, ribs shuddering, cheeks wet, he tries to think (he needs to think), to remember the last question (to remember where the guards are), to get out (to get back to John). (Sherlock, wake up.)
He needs to survive (the dead don’t wake). He needs to live (John thinks he is dead) (John watched him die).
(Sherlock), “Please wake up.” John’s voice from inside his head (always inside his head), John’s voice from outside it. It echoes in his ears as though John is right behind him. (Is John here?) (He wanted John not to be here.) (He wanted John to be safe.)
“Wake up, Sherlock. Sherlock. Sherlock.”
John. His tongue is thick and solid in his mouth, cemented with thirst. He tries again. John. John. “John.”
“Oh, my god, yes, come on, Sherlock, come on, come back to me now. Come back.”
Come back (he wanted to) (he didn’t know if he would) (he hoped). John urges him home, somewhere behind him, somewhere inside him, his voice like a lighthouse in the dark of Sherlock’s mind, and Sherlock searches, lifts his head to follow the sound, and he’s half-turned to look over his shoulder before he realises he can look, before he realises he can see.
He can see.
The glow of the window around the edge of the curtains: London. Wardrobe, wallpaper, bedframe, nightstand, lamp, floorboards, everything nebulous in the indigo shadow of night, two a.m. Maybe three. The faraway click of the furnace coming on: three.
And John.
John, face shining, eyes wide and anxious, the neck of his white vest stretched and damp with sweat and fear, hand reaching but still somehow withdrawn, as if he can’t stop himself but he’s trying to. His mouth moves; his eyes glisten. “Sherlock. Are you with me?”
Sherlock is with him, and it’s almost worse because he’s here, he’s home, he has been for the last four years, but he’s always still a little left behind, too. Some part of him will always be shackled in that dripping basement. Still haunted, still terrorised, still unable to believe that he is free.
His thighs finally give out from under him, half relief and half shame, and he collapses back into the corner, trapped between the wall and the dresser, curls into himself, covers his face with his hands and tries not to cry.
*
Sherlock cries.
This isn’t the first time John has had to sit across from Sherlock and watch him fall apart, unable to move forward, too cautious to reach out for him, and John is furious and heartbroken and sick with it, with this time and every previous time and every time still yet to come, with all the unfair helplessness and rage that he can forget about when it’s over but only until it happens again.
“You’re okay,” he says, again and again, trying to make them both believe it. His hands tremble in the space between them. “You’re okay, you’re home, Sherlock, it’s okay. Breathe. Come on, breathe.”
He’s desperate to pull Sherlock to him, to hold him and rock him until their hearts and lungs sync in soothing affirmation, but he knows he can’t, he can’t, and maybe that’s the worst part: the memories he wants to protect Sherlock from are the very ones that force the distance between them. Sherlock’s dreams bring his tormentors back to life, and John can’t fight them, can’t force them away.
He can only become them: terror, personified.
He has become them before, and he knows, he knows, no matter how much he loves Sherlock, no matter how soft and gentle he is in their waking hours, he will become them again.
John squeezes his eyes shut against the burn of fresh tears; his voice cracks over the next words. “Breathe, Sherlock. Breathe.”
Sherlock’s breath stutters begrudgingly into his lungs. Behind his hands, he makes a noise that sounds like it’s maybe intended to be a question.
“I’m okay,” John tells him, even though Sherlock will be able to hear the fist in his mouth and the sorrow in his bones. “I came out of it pretty fast.”
There’s a pause, and then Sherlock shakes his head. “S’not your fault,” he gasps out. “John. Not your fault.”
John smiles, and the hot sear behind his eyelids wells up again. “I need to stop doing this to you, Sherlock.” His throat closes around his voice. “It’s killing me to do this to you. Maybe it would be better, if I. If I.”
He doesn’t finish, and the bedroom is preternaturally quiet in the wake of the half-finished thought; even the nighttime hum of London seems to have subsided. It’s just John, and Sherlock, and a couple of syncopated breaths, and all the space in the universe shoved in between them.
Then there’s a nudge along John’s ankle; he sniffs, wipes his eyes, forces himself to look up. Sherlock looks back with wobbly mouth and red-rimmed eyes. His foot is resting alongside John’s. “Stay,” he manages. His chest shudders. “Please. With me.”
John looks at him, at their bare feet pressed together, white and vulnerable in the dark. He nods. “Yeah. I’m here.”
*
John stays.
John stays, and waits, shivering on the floorboards, his own nightmare still vivid in the stiffness of his shoulders and the tremor in his hands that he tries to hide under fists. John stays, steadfast soldier and silent safeguard, and Sherlock loves him, and loves him, and wishes he were strong enough to let him go.
Instead he shifts his foot against John’s again, stretches out his leg to reach up John’s calf. They’re both cold in that way that makes the other feel warm.
John stays.
“I’m always trying to get back to you,” Sherlock chokes into the silence. He can’t look John in the face; there is still a pair of moonlit tracks smeared on his cheeks that Sherlock can’t bear to see. They don’t usually talk about the dreams. “I just want to. To get back to you.” He shouldn’t say this. He shouldn’t guilt John into staying with him. “I don’t mean—you can—you don’t have to do this.”
A hundred and one lifetimes pass in the pause. Sherlock breathes and doesn’t look at John and breathes and waits.
“Can you stand it?” John asks quietly. “Waking up with me like this?”
Their legs slip against one another; Sherlock twists his hands in front of his mouth. He wants to reach, but his palms are still sweaty with uncertain adrenalin. “I don’t want to wake up like this without you.”
“You might not wake up like this at all, without me.”
“John.” Sherlock shifts, allows one hand to reach from the haven of the corner. Two fingers on John’s bony ankle. “If it makes you miserable, you can leave.”
One of John’s hands comes to rest on his own knee: only the length of his shin separates their fingertips. “I’m not miserable, I’m scared,” he admits. “I’m afraid we’ll be trapped in these nightmares forever. But I’m not…I’m not more afraid than I am in love with you.”
“I don’t want you to be afraid at all.”
John bows his head, looks away into the shadows. “I don’t think it works that way.”
*
Sherlock lingers in the corner as the minutes slip by, a wounded animal too cautious of comfort. The silence is heavy with the conversation they aren’t having.
John still wishes he could take Sherlock’s pulse. To feel it, rabbit-fast and vibrant against his fingertips, angry and throbbing with the will to survive. To feel it as it calms and steadies and evens, as the fear and panic dissolves out of his bloodstream: visceral proof that Sherlock is okay.
Instead he waits. He’ll always wait for Sherlock.
“What do you dream about?” Sherlock asks. It would sound absent-minded if it weren’t so careful. His two fingers on John’s ankle tap, then settle.
“Saving you,” John says. “Sometimes I manage it.” Sometimes I don’t goes unsaid.
Across the space, Sherlock is still too small, too tucked into himself, but he’s stopped trembling. “I dream that, sometimes. Saving you.”
“Sometimes I dream that you save me.” Something tender and tentative splits the corners of John’s mouth. “Those are the better nights.”
They fall back into silence; somewhere in London, the clock strikes four. John waits. Sherlock watches him, and John waits.
And then finally, slowly, impossibly, impossibly slowly, Sherlock unfurls from the corner. He moves warily, uncertainly, like he’s not sure he trusts himself to keep his balance, and every hesitance cracks across John’s ribs, but Sherlock moves.
Not all determination is fearless, John thinks, watching Sherlock pick his way across the space. Not all courage is big and dramatic and fierce. Sometimes it’s just this: small, and fragile, and hoping for a place to land.
John can give him that.
*
Sherlock practically falls into his lap once he’s close enough, weak in the elbows with the sleep-interrupted salt smell of John. He gives a startled huff but pulls Sherlock down, pulls him close, and Sherlock tucks his face into John’s neck.
They’re stiff, the both of them, and cold, but John wraps his arms around Sherlock like he’s holding all the bits and pieces of him together, and it doesn’t matter.
“I love you,” Sherlock mumbles into John’s skin. He’s suddenly exhausted. “I want you to only have good nights.”
“I know,” John whispers, mouth pressed to Sherlock’s temple. “And I want to stop giving you nightmares. And I’m trying, Sherlock, but that’s all I can do. I can’t make any promises.”
Sherlock hums disapprovingly and digs his nose a little deeper into the thrum of John’s pulse in his neck. “Promise to wake up with me.”
John sighs, but his pulse slows in the next beat, hushing back to his usual resting rate. Sherlock thinks he can feel John’s heart against his own, pressed together in their chests, and he sinks closer to it.
The view of the night is different here, gathered against John: softer, warmer, more lapis lazuli than ocean black. It reminds Sherlock of the nights when the dark is beautiful.
Two of John’s fingers are on his wrist.
After a long, long moment, long enough that Sherlock had begun to wonder whether John had fallen back to sleep, John shifts, nudges his nose against Sherlock’s cheek until he can gentle a kiss against the corner of Sherlock’s mouth. “Okay,” John says. Another kiss; Sherlock reaches to kiss him back. “I can do that. We can do that, together. I promise.”
“It won’t be perfect,” Sherlock warns.
“No,” John agrees quietly. “But it will be enough.”
*