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Disclaimer: no affiliation, no profit, no disrespect meant, etc. etc.
Pairings: Tagged as Johnlock because that relationship is at the heart of this story, but you will also find hints/mentions of John/Mary, John/Irene, and Sherlock/Irene.
Notes: This was written BEFORE SERIES THREE, and therefore has nothing at all to do with anything. The Mary here is not Amanda Abbington's Mary Morstan. Also, this is my first time posting using copy-paste (apparently doesn't support Apple files?) so I apologize if the formatting is wonky.
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The first time, John assumes they're just doing what people do—the only thing that can be done in the face of it all—falling into each other, mashing teeth and skin and limbs together, writhing and gnashing senselessly against that brutal, howling hurt, the great hole opened up between them, the abyss yawning for a fistful of earth.
It's something that happens at funerals, he thinks, even though London's erstwhile favourite detective doesn't get anything approaching a proper one. But it's an established fact, isn't it, that people do, that they go seeking it out like some life-affirming talisman—that no matter how heavy the numbness in your chest, other organs are willing to step up and take over the weeping and heaving and rending of clothes, to be so loud and so harsh that when it's over you have something like peace.
And they're not friends—nowhere close—but they're tied together, bound by some elastic that's snapped and left them reeling and flailing to cope, tumbling haphazardly against each other's bodies, blood-hot and ravenous for any thought at all besides that name, besides the utter futility and misery of their failure. It's comfort, of a sort, it's grief, it's a one-time thing and it's fine.
That's what John thinks the first time.
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The second time is a bit harder to justify. The wound is still raw—John still snags on his grief sometimes, and stumbles, still trips over his feet and his tongue and fights a wide berth around the name and the evening news and all his old haunts—but it isn't the gaping void that it once was, the edge on which his weak knees teetered. He sees light in the spaces around it, spaces where people are living their lives, the someones marrying their everyones, dancing and trip trip trapping through the day after day after day.
He sees them and recognises, in numb and dusty pastels, that he's meant to be there, too. And then there's Irene, the Woman, like some dropped touchstone from his previous life, and she burns so much brighter than the rest of it.
His stomach twists in knots when she catches his eye across the pub and the shock resonates through him in a cold flush. He leaves the rest of his meal untouched, the smells of grease and brown sauce thick in his nostrils, and crosses the room to leave with her.
You're supposed to be dead, he wants to say, and funny how he'd never thought to mention it the first time. Of all the imbecilic...
"Look at us both," she says to him, afterwards. Her voice is soft and low, and looking is the last thing John wants to do. His closed eyes burn holes into the ceiling, and then the back of his wrist as he presses it hard enough to see stars. Nebulae and gas giants and milky haze, all to vanish away as soon as he stops applying pressure.
He realises that he is holding his breath; he lets it out, frayed and uneven.
As if she means to be comforting, Irene presses one hand to his bicep—carefully not his bad shoulder—and strokes, her other soothing aimlessly across his ribs.
"We never did," she says. "He and I."
She doesn't sound any more false than she had last time when, as he gripped her hips and rolled her over for round two, she'd gasped in a deep breath and whispered, "God, just like him," and made a face John didn't recognize and bit him on the collarbone, just above his scar.
He doesn't know what to believe.
Or, that's what he'd be thinking if she was anyone else, but she wasn't—she most decidedly wasn't—and John knows that being lied to is probably the best thing he could have gotten out of this, any of this.
He rolls out of bed and finds his pants, his trousers, trips into them. His shirt, he finds draped across that one hideous chair that has somehow becomes part of every dingy hotel room in the world. He feels Irene's eyes on him and he squares his shoulders and he does not look up.
She rolls over in bed and the cotton sheets rustle like silk, like a 1500 quid cape of dark wool, and John still does not look up.
So then it's "Goodbye, Doctor," and there it is, that note of coquetry that makes everything sound illicit, every name calligraphic in deep, rich ink.
"Right," says John, and does not look back, only turns the doorknob in his sweaty palm, which he wipes on his denims as the lock clicks into place behind him.
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The time after that is the time with the contacts and the unbearable guilt, and John decides that it's the last time, and it is. He can't forget that feeling and it's not the heated, tingling guilt of snogging a mate's ex in some deserted car park—it's a seething, roiling wave that knocks his feet from under him and leaves him banking side to side. He knows what he's doing and it's not going to make him happy and for once, he's not too weak to stop.
Sherlock's been dead for over a year by now, and that doesn't make it any less painful or wrong, and it's definitely no less of a terrible idea, but John is quicker to give in. He knows there's no point in kidding himself. By now he's learned that he's going to do it anyway.
He closes his eyes, though, as if it makes any difference—her slim hips between his hands, the fragile bird bones of her shoulders, her noises that ring in his silence—it's all familiar now. Her hair may be different and her face changed, but he knows her, knows this. That slash of a red mouth and the things she says with it.
He's managing to keep them shut tight, clinging to the black behind his lids, but then she makes a noise like she's dying, and he judders out of it, blinks her into focus and his eyes meet pale skin stormy celadon and he catches his breath—Sherlock.
Contacts, John tells himself frantically, Irene is wearing contacts, but it's too late—it's like touching a live wire to his tongue, and his heart is doing something so desperately unfamiliar that for a moment he's not sure whether he's going to come right there or lose his erection or vomit all over the itchy, tacky bedsheets .
When he does, it's with his eyes still wide open and she laughs, in that way he's supposed to understand is not at him or his predictability or his pathetically average mind: it's the situation darling; just look at us both.
He remembers the first time she said that to him, and wonders at what point it became funny. To her, anyway—he's late to a lot of punchlines these days. Though he can see very well how ridiculous he has been, the absurdity of the thing between him and Sherlock, between his imagination and that great empty space.
As he dusts himself off and stumbles into a cab, he realises he has no idea how she found him here in Dublin. As to why she came looking, he has only a slightly better guess.
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The next time he sees her, it's almost Chinese New Year and he can smell Mary's cooking from the stairwell, the winter melon soup for their visit to her family. He breathes in the smell as he opens the door, expecting Rumours or A Night at the Opera or any other album off their default mealtime soundtrack but is greeted with heavy silence, dim lights, and a steaming Tupperware cooling on the counter.
Mary is quiet and her oval face is sharp with worry. John's instincts push him toward her and his hands reach out to take hers, but she cocks her head, stopping him pre-emptively, and nods her head towards the sitting room.
He turns to look and there Irene is, contrary and incongruously bright, the swath of her cheeks a pale shock from under a heavy woollen blanket on their sofa. He feels his face blanch and his mind goes blank—all he can see is the way the blanket eclipses her, curled tight like a prawn and sleeping with the furious concentration of a madman whose mind drives the dark night away for days at a time.
God knows what Mary must think, a strange woman showing up like this, and John at a loss to explain. His throat has disappeared somewhere behind his spine and he looks at her helplessly, ducks his chin, raises his palms to try and start.
"This is about him, isn't it?" she whispers and then John knows it must be obvious by how shaken he is but he doesn't care as long as it means that Mary understands, that he doesn't have to speak. He nods silently and she steps closer, eyes sad and dark. She doesn't say anything, just strokes her hands down his arms and he lets his head fall forward against her and his breath rush out.
"She's supposed to be dead," he says, and Mary's face registers confusion and... sympathy, he supposes. She touches his cheek and he rests his forehead against hers, breathes in the bergamot smell of her hair.
"Is there anything...?" she asks and he shakes his head minutely, closes his eyes. She tilts her head up to kiss him, soft and calm, and he breathes in her breath, lets her touch set him at ease. They stay like this for a moment, her short fingernails a gentle pressure against his nape, and something occurs to him.
"Your shift," he says. "Don't you have to...?"
She sighs, scratches at his scalp. "I could always—are you going to be all right?"
"Of course," John reassures her, as if the confidence in his voice could banish the vines creeping in his rib cage. "I was just surprised; I'll… do what I have to."
She kisses him again, light and familiar, and like muscle memory, he tangles his fingers in her thick hair and tugs her close, pretends not to let her go—an old joke. She smiles against his lips and does up the buttons on her coat.
"Put it in the fridge when it's cooled, yeah?" she says, coiling her ivy scarf. "There's enough if you want some tonight, too."
"Thanks," John hears himself say and she's out the door for Bart's, and he knows it would be useless to try to eat, but he ladles himself a bowl anyway and sits over the steaming soup, breathing in the filling smell of ginger and prawns and broth.
He doesn't know what to do with his hands, so he goes to the fridge and takes out a beer. He plunks it on the table and watches it warm. Drops of condensation run down the sides in an erratic race, staining a dark ring on the tablecloth. He and Mary own a tablecloth, a linen one, and not to cover up chemical burns or knife gashes or to provide an environment for mould to grow but because people have tablecloths, with patterns and thread counts, maybe, and different ones for special occasions. He picks at a bit of candle wax, swallows a bite of his soup.
There's a cough from behind him and he turns and there she is, standing in his sitting room in bare feet and Mary's pyjamas. She's about the right height, but Mary has a figure, lovely full hips and thighs still strong from playing football, and her clothes hang blockish and wide on Irene.
Irene has always been skinny, but now she's almost consumptive. Paler, too, than John remembered, and her hair is thinner, its colour dull and dusky. There's a thousand things Sherlock might have gathered a cheap dye job like that but not a one comes to mind.
"She's sweet, Doctor," Irene says, and he flinches involuntarily. "Hardly what I'd have imagined for you, though," and that smirk is entirely unchanged.
Shut up, he wants to say. Fuck you. Leave me alone; don't do this. His hands are still by his sides, fingers clenched in half fists.
"Why are you here?" he says instead.
She shrugs, smiles demurely. "Everyone needs friends, darling. People they can lean on." She raises a skinny arm, ring of bruises around the wrist, and tucks a curl behind her ear. Her hair is still wet, John realizes, from their shower. If he stepped closer, he'd smell Mary on her.
There's a matching bruise on her forehead—he can see it now. Her bottom lip has been split recently but has almost healed. She moves slowly, as if her bones are grinding against one another. John suspects that under the baggy pyjamas, she's even thinner than he's imagined, and he is a very good doctor.
"And I know you're there for your friends, John. You don't turn people away when they need you."
"Fuck you," he spits, and there's a sensation like coals under his skin—his eyes are hot, his throat is lead, and for the first time in his life, he literally sees red.
She takes a step closer and peers at him, head cocked, not at all phased by his bubbling ire. She looks at him like he's some creature on the other side of a pane of glass—a lionfish—examining his spines and stripes, wondering at his poison.
"And you still love him," she muses, and he hates that familiar tone. "And so much. How do you stand it?"
"Fuck you," he repeats, and the spine slips weakly out of his voice. "Just..."
She doesn't make the obvious joke, just looks at him, penetrating and almost compassionate. "You'll be all right," she says. "Well, you always would have anyway. You're a soldier. You carry on."
She's infuriating and he had been all right, would still be if she would just leave and let him try to forget. "Why are you here?" he says again.
Her face changes, goes smooth and composed and authoritative, and she stares a challenge into his eyes (no contacts this time, he notes, and it takes the fight out of him).
"I need a place to stay. Just for one night— I'll be gone before dawn. And you'll be perfectly safe. I wouldn't do that to you; he wouldn't like it."
John doesn't correct her, just summons up his Captain Watson nod: this, I'll give you, this and nothing more. "One night," he says.
"One night. On the sofa." She smiles at him, and for a second he almost thinks it might be genuine. "I like your wife, Doctor. I hope the two of you work it out."
There's nothing wrong between him and Mary—they almost never row.
"You never were good at dividing your time," she says, absently fond.
"What do you mean?" His voice is suddenly hoarse and raw in his ears. He feels like one of those horrid little naked moles, blind and screaming in the pressing darkness of the earth.
She just looks at him and that same beatific, lilting smile holds until he thinks he's going to break. "Don't shoot me," she chides. "I'm just the messenger."
John wants to grab her by her shoulders and shake the answers out of her, shake her until her teeth rattle in her ridiculous porcelain skull. He wants to throw her out of his flat, or throw her down and scream his rage into her red mouth. He does nothing.
"What do you want me to say?" he asks pitifully. "What do you even want from me, ever, I don't..."
She takes another step and now she's right there and he does smell Mary. The clash of images makes him sick.
"You poor thing," she says softly. "You love him so much. It won't be easy."
She leans in close enough to touch his face, and her nails are brittle and broken, unpainted. "Look at us both," she says softly and John doesn't feel any of the revulsion or arousal or guilt, just the cool touch of her first two fingers on his cheek.
"I'm going out," he says. "If I'll be safe, that is." He bites the word but she doesn't react.
"Of course," she says. "I suppose I should make myself at home."
His coat is still on, he realises, so all there is to do is button it up again and grab his scarf and gloves. She sits down at the table and opens his beer. The sound breaks across the room like a record scratch and he tightens the scarf around his neck, checks his pockets for his keys.
"John," she says, and he stiffens at the sound of his name, turns against his will. She's so small, so battered the more he looks—there's no question she's in a bad way, and John is a doctor, a good one, and yet he doesn't have it in him to ask if she's all right, if there's anything he can do.
She sighs and the bottle clunks against the tabletop, very unladylike. "If it hurt you," and the words are forced, "if it—that's not what I wanted. I hope..." She swallows and he's blinking there like a fool until she rallies. "It's not easy being dead." She breaks her gaze to take a sip, clears her throat thickly. "You'll understand soon enough."
He has nothing to say to that, to any of that, but he knows it's as close to an apology as he's going to get. He's not even sure he wants one—what he does want is to get out of here as soon as he can, to press his way through the biting cold night until he can come back knowing his flat is empty.
He nods curtly and reaches for the door, but she stops him.
"Wait."
She's studying him—she has the nerve to study him, cocking her head like a loyal dog—and John can't stand there and take it, can't wait around for another cracked genius to puzzle at his simplicity, but he does. He waits.
Finally, she drops her chin, straightens her neck and looks him in the eye. "Aim for the teeth this time," she says. "Get yours."
John breathes in through his nose. "Right," he huffs — what does any of this mean?—and closes the door behind him.