A/N: An Inception AU/retelling originally written for a contest on the fuckyeahjohnlockfanfiction tumblr. Wish me luck! I hope that those of you who haven't seen Inception aren't too lost, but a general knowledge of the film would probably help you to understand the plot of the story. Regardless, I hope that you enjoy!
Sherlock is laughing.
Sherlock is always laughing, manic, eyes wide and wild, head thrown back, throat exposed. Sherlock laughs while cities fall, while buildings crumble, while Heaven caves in above him and the ground rumbles beneath his feet.
His hair whips in the wind while the landscape falls to its knees, teeth gleaming in the light of the dying sun.
"If I jump," he's saying, voice tinny across the gap, muffled by the sounds of collapsing steel and pummeling bricks. He stands on the roof of the building across from John, feet perched precariously on the edge.
A plume of smoke and dust swirls around him. The tails of his coat flutter.
"John, if I jump, will I survive?"
/
Lestrade finds John in Glasgow, tucked away in a shack of a hotel on the outskirts of the city.
"Took out another two men for you," he says without preamble, picking at a speck of blood on his cuff with his thumbnail.
John is sitting by the window, Glock laid out on the table in front of him. He runs his fingers over it, lips curled. "Glad to hear you haven't sold me out yet."
"If that price on your head gets any higher, I might have to."
"Yeah? Is that dead or alive?"
"Oh, they want you alive," he says, grinning. "Payback for mucking up their business, I suppose."
He hums. "Fair enough."
Lestrade takes a seat on the edge of the bed that sits in the center of the room, begins fiddling with a loose thread on the duvet. Now that John can see him, he can see how much older he looks, how haggard. There are dark circles under his eyes, fresh streaks of grey in his hair. "John, you can't keep this up," he says, voice suddenly soft.
His fingers twitch towards the Glock. "If you've come here to lecture me, I'd rather you didn't."
"This is four jobs now."
John nods. "I know." Four jobs that have gone to hell on his watch. Four dead marks, four disappointed clients. Sally won't even work with him anymore, not since the mess in Budapest that left Anderson with a bullet in his back. The team is unraveling, tarnishing, falling right apart at the seams, and he's at the center of it all, John and Sherlock, who is always laughing.
Lestrade sighs. "John," he says. "John, he's dead."
"I know!" he snaps, clenching his jaw. "I know he's dead. I watched him jump. I heard his bones break. I had his brain matter in my hair, for Christ's sake!"
He winces and scrubs a hand over his face. Sherlock's death had hit him hard, perhaps the hardest, after John himself. Lestrade had been the one who had found him, who had pulled him into the business and who had nurtured him, who had watched him grow. Their relationship had been something like family, and the pain of his loss is palpable. He clears his throat; once, twice.
"Look, I'm actually not here to lecture you," he finally says.
"Then what do you want?"
"Inception." He looks up, face wan, expression hesitant. "Can we do it?"
/
After Glasgow there is Paris, and there is a warehouse and Irene Adler, perched upon the desk in the center of the room. She paints the perfect picture of Parisian elegance, swathed in an olive green dress, now auburn hair twisted into an artful knot at the nape of her neck. She is calling herself Marie, and her accent curls around the syllables, as delicate and wistful as the tendrils of smoke from her cigarette.
"It's impossible," she says, idly picking at her fingernail.
Lestrade sighs. "John has assured me that it can be done."
Irene snorts, crosses her ankles. "The sheer depth that we would have to be able to reach for the idea to stick is—."
"It is possible," John interjects. "I've done it before."
She turns to him, eyes sharp, gleaming like the blade of the dagger that he knows she has tucked into the garter nestled upon her thigh. If she's noticed the way that his voice had cracked, she's kind enough not to mention it. "Who'd you do it to?"
John says nothing. He's certain that she already knows.
/
It's the swell of the summer in Madrid, sun blistering, sky barren and boneless.
Sherlock is stretched out beside John, all languid lines, cufflinks glinting in the light. "You hate Spain," he says, raising his hand to shield his eyes.
"You always loved it."
He hums, low and deep in the back of his throat. "If my memory serves me, I believe this is the moment where you told me that you loved me. Do you remember?"
John nods. Yes, he remembers, of course he remembers. Sprawled out beside him on a rickety motel bed, metal of the frame hot to the touch, his own heart beat thundering in his ears. "The Dimmock job."
"Mm, Stamford, actually," he corrects.
"Ah. My mistake."
He leans over and kisses his collarbone, kisses his jaw, kisses the sharp lines of his cheekbones, kisses the pale expanse of his eyelids, and he smiles, carding his fingers through Sherlock's unruly curls. "We have to stop meeting like this," he says.
Sherlock cracks open one eye, raises a brow. "What else do you propose we do?"
/
Madrid fades away, collapses, crumbles to rubble, and then he is awake.
Back in the warehouse, back in Paris, back in—he fingers the bullet in his pocket, feels three distinct ridge patterns—yes, back in reality.
The needle pinches as he pulls it out of his arm, leaving a pinprick's worth of blood behind. Lestrade has brought in a new chemist this time around, a mousy, quiet girl named Molly Hooper, and she watches from the shadows as he winds up the wires and tucks them into the lining of the small, silver case that sits at his feet.
"There's a place in Mombasa," she is saying, fiddling with the sleeve of her oversized sweater. John pretends not to hear her. "It's uh, a lab. Just for dreaming. You wouldn't have to go under alone."
"I don't need other people in my head," John says, snapping the case shut.
She worries at her bottom lip, still tugging at her sweater. It has a pattern of cherries on it, and it makes her look all of thirteen years old. "I know it's not really any of my business—."
"You're right. It's not."
"But," she continues, "this isn't healthy, John. Whatever you're looking for, whatever you need, this isn't worth it."
John squares his jaw as he gets to his feet. His limbs are sore, joints stiff. He idly wonders just how long he was under—seconds, minutes, hours? He can't remember anymore. "Molly," he starts, but she raises a hand before he can continue.
"No, I know," she says. "Lestrade told me what happened." She takes one small step forward, and then another, reaching out to wind her tiny fingers around his arm. "I know how much you must miss him, but this isn't real." Her expression softens. "You can't bring him back."
John says nothing.
/
"The girl is right, you know."
They're in Berlin, sitting at a café in the Mitte district. The air is dry, the day half blinding. The collar of John's shirt is sticking to his throat.
He takes a sip of his tea. "Are you going to be my conscience now?"
Sherlock shrugs. "You must want me to be. You brought me here."
John drums his fingers on the side of his cup. "I can't remember the last time I willingly brought you into anything."
"Regardless," Sherlock says, "I'm still here, and she is right."
John pretends that he hadn't spoken, stares out at the expanse of the city. "I always thought that we might wind up here."
"Berlin?" Sherlock snorts. "Dull."
"I'm glad to see that you're just as difficult as I remember you to be."
Sherlock's fingers twitch, as if tempted to reach out for something that isn't actually there. "John," he says. "This is your memory."
When John turns back to the seat across from him, he finds it empty. Sherlock is gone.
/
"Well?"
Irene sighs as she removes the PASIV line from her wrist. "I need more practice," she says. She runs her thumb over the trail of her vein. Her nails are lacquered a deep shade of red, her hair a dark blonde.
Lestrade reaches beneath the glasses he has just taken to wearing and rubs his eyes. "We don't have that kind of time."
"I know that," Irene snaps. She swings her legs over the edge of the lawn chair that she's been reclining on and tucks her wires back into the case. She adjusts the time setting and releases a fresh dose of the drug, ensuring that John will stay under for another ten minutes. "I'll be ready."
"We go under in two weeks."
"I'll be ready," she repeats, curling her fingers around Lestrade's tie. She gives it a gentle tug. "Tell Mycroft to stop worrying. It's unbecoming of the both of you."
Lestrade rolls his eyes. "Have you gotten ahold of Jim yet?"
"Really, darling," Irene says, eyes twinkling. "Enough worrying."
/
John blinks, and Sherlock is back at the café. They're still sitting across from one another, hands locked together beneath the table.
"You left," he says.
Sherlock inclines his head "Did I?"
/
John hates to be kept in the dark.
Lestrade won't tell him anything, not about the job, about their mark, about their client. He brings him to the warehouse only when it's empty, and he feeds him the smallest possible amounts of information.
"We need you to design three layers," is all that he'd told him. "We'll need you to build a maze."
John creates a hospital, creates a beach and then a hotel, creates labyrinths to rival those of Daedalus, intricate and vast. And if the wallpaper that lines the hotel's walls bears a familiar pattern, one that decorates a simple flat in the heart of London, well that's purely coincidence.
He's the best architect in the business, schooled under the watchful eye of Mycroft Holmes, who had never left a single detail to chance. He had brought John in after the war, had healed his shoulder by teaching him to draw, to take a grain of sand and mold it into a city. He'd taught him to build entire worlds, chapels and monuments and oceans and valleys.
And then Mycroft had introduced him to his brother, whom he had called the pointman, and they became the pair that no one could rival.
John has been left to pick up the point work since Sherlock's death, but he has let far too many things fall through the cracks. He doesn't have Sherlock's eye, he's not as sharp, not as observant, and so Lestrade has hired a man called Moriarty.
John is seething.
"Moran is out for blood and you know that," Lestrade is saying. He sits at the warehouse desk across from John, John's models laid out between them. "We fuck up one more time, and we lose everything."
"No, you lose your funding," John says, jabbing an accusatory finger in his direction. "That's all you're worried about."
"Jesus, John." Lestrade drags a hand through his hair. "I brought you in as the architect, didn't I? You're lucky I managed to do that."
John pinches the bridge of his nose between his thumb and his forefinger, and he breathes. In the main room of the warehouse, he can hear Molly and Irene, hear the strains of Bach, hear the voice of Jim Moriarty. The sound makes his stomach flip. "Sherlock never trusted him, and you know that."
"I do know that," Lestrade agrees. "But he's the best option we have."
Irene's laughter echoes through the space. John squares his shoulders. "I could do it, if you weren't so bloody insistent on keeping me shut out."
"I cannot bring you into this any further," Lestrade stresses. "The fact that you know as much as you do is enough of a risk."
"I don't know anything!"
Lestrade slams his palm onto the table. John catches a flicker of… something in his eyes, but it's gone too quickly for him to identify it. Guilt, maybe. Fear. Anger. Reluctance. Regret.
"John," he says. He pauses, draws a breath in through his nose. "John, you can't be involved. I'm sorry, but you just can't."
John scrubs a hand over his face. "Fine."
"We'll bring you in next time, yeah?" Lestrade makes an effort to smile, but the gesture falls flat. It never quite reaches his eyes. "Just take a break. You deserve it."
John doesn't reply.
/
Each night that John goes under alone, Molly is always there waiting when he wakes, sitting cross legged beside him with a book in hand. She never speaks, never asks any of the questions that John knows have bubbled up onto her tongue. When he's done, she takes the PASIV and stores it in one of the back rooms, and then she is gone before John has even fully woken up.
She never interferes, not once, not until the night that he dreams of Nice and finds her sitting in the sand.
"You shouldn't be here," he tells her. His hair whips in the breeze.
The entirety of the beach is quiet, encased in a muted sort of tranquility that even the breaking of the waves cannot breach. The expanse of the horizon bleeds into the boundary between Heaven and Earth, colors the water of the ocean with the shades of the setting sun. At the opposite end of the shore, Sherlock is standing with his hands in his pockets, staring out at the sea.
"I'm sorry." She glances up at him, eyes wide and childlike, cheeks flushed. "I was just—I was only curious."
John sighs. "You know, I proposed to him here," he says as he sits down beside her. The sand is warm beneath him, smooth and stark white.
"You were married?"
"Of course not." The very corner of John's mouth pulls up. "I could never get him to say yes."
"Oh." Molly turns to stare out at the water. "But he loved you."
John nods. "He did."
"I knew a man like you once," she says softly. "I met him while I was working in New York. He'd lost his wife."
John draws his fingers through the sand, watches the grains shift and catch the light. "And what happened to this man?"
Molly sighs. "He drove himself half insane trying to be with her. He'd forgotten that she was dead."
John stares at Sherlock; his figure shimmers, disappears. The beach is gone and now they are in London, standing on the sidewalk beneath St Bartholomew's Hospital. There is a puddle of blood pooling around John's feet. "No, I know he's dead," he tells Molly. "I stood here and I watched him die."
The scene shifts again and now they are at a grave, gem-like grass glittering beneath them. The air is cool. It is drizzling. "I buried him," John says. He reaches out and touches the headstone, fingering the small fissure that's cracked the surface. "It's not something that's easy to forget."
Molly closes her eyes. "I hope that you never do."
John brings them back to the beach. The sun has now set, the water laps at his toes. "Do you know what it truly is to be someone's lover?" he asks Molly. "To be other half of their whole? To know how they breathe and how they think and how they move as well as your know yourself?"
"No," she admits. Her cheeks have once again flushed pink.
"No," he repeats. "And until you do, you could never understand why this is so important."
"Why is it?"
John looks at her out of the corner of his eye. "Because we're still together here."
/
"You're sure he has no suspicions?"
"I'm sure," Molly says. Beside her, John is still asleep, and she absentmindedly swipes her hand across his cheek. "He just thinks that you're angry at him. That you're punishing him."
"I'm not so sure that I'm not," Lestrade tells her.
"You're doing the right thing." Molly gives him a sad smile. "How's Irene's forge?"
He extends his hand to help her up and takes the PASIV case. "It's flawless."
"So we're ready?"
Lestrade nods. "We're ready."
/
"John, if I jump, will I survive?"
/
John could hear the roar of the waves, taste the salt of the sea, feel the scrape of the shells beneath his palms. There were no clouds, no shade, no birds overhead, no sails on the horizon. There was sand, endless sand, miles and miles, hot to the touch, stretching out forever.
A paradox.
The shore of his own mind.
The ocean sighed, forced him to land. He rose and he walked, he wiped sand from his face, shook water from his hair. He walked and he searched, day blending into night, night back into day. He left tracks that the wind erased. His skin burned, his lips chapped.
And still he had searched, called for Sherlock, Sherlock who was back at Baker Street, sprawled out across the floor with a needle in his arm. Sherlock who never answered and who was too far out of reach, just too far, years away, days away, miles away, so close, just five more steps, five, four, three, two, one—
"John," he'd said. "Isn't it brilliant, John?"
"Yes, Sherlock."
Brilliant, yes. An entire world unto themselves, vast and unyielding and eternal, a blank canvas for them to fill, to transform into whatever they wanted.
Limbo, Sherlock had called it. An unconstructed dream. Raw, infinite, untouched subconscious.
/
"How long were you there?"
"In total?" John stops to think for a moment. "Something like fifty years."
Molly gasps quietly, presses her fingertips against her lips. "Fifty years?" she repeats breathlessly. "I can't imagine wanting to be stuck anywhere for that long.
John stares out the window to his hotel room, watches Paris bustle before him. "It wasn't all bad," he says. "Not at first."
He'd had Sherlock, and they'd built their own world. They'd built a life, moving from penthouses with plush satin sheets to a cottage by the water to the home that John had grown up in, flowered wallpaper and all. They'd constructed the flat on Baker Street and then torn it down, raising a mansion out of its ashes. They'd shaped sand into bands of gold and encircled one another's fingers, had loved and laughed and fought and grown in a sanctuary of their own design.
"What happened?" Molly asks. She settles her hand over top of his.
"There's a sort of balance that you have to maintain," he tells her. "A balance between allowing yourself the freedom to create, and keeping in mind that none of it is real." John closes his eyes, rests his forehead against the cool glass of the window pane. "It became impossible for me to live like that."
"But not for Sherlock?"
"At some point, he accepted it. He allowed Limbo to become his reality."
Molly exhales sharply, swears under her breath. "And you couldn't convince him otherwise?"
John reopens his eyes and turns to her. His lips pull into the ghost of a smile. "He'd chosen to forget what was real. He'd locked it so far deep inside himself that no matter what I said, no matter what I showed him, none of it made a difference." He reaches into the pocket of his shirt and pulls out his totem, the bullet, counts the three distinct ridges that line its surface. The ridges mean reality, a smooth casing signifies a dream. John squeezes it in his hand.
"He had a chess piece from a set that his father had given him," he continues. "If he was holding it in reality, there would be a hole at the bottom and if he was in a dream, it was solid." John grows quiet for a moment, gaze sweeping back to the window. "One day I took it from him, and I drilled a hole in it."
"You changed his reality," Molly murmurs.
"Yes."
"How did you wake up?"
John slides the bullet back into his pocket. "We built a cliff overlooking the water, and we jumped from it."
Molly's hand moves back up to cover her mouth again. John tries to pretend that he doesn't see the tears shining in the corners of her eyes. "And when you woke up?"
"I changed his reality," John repeats. "I'd rendered his totem useless, and I'd left him with the idea that his world wasn't real. He repaid me by stepping off the roof of a hospital."
"Jesus," Molly breaths. "John, I—."
"You have work you should be doing," John interjects as he turns back to her. Whatever she has to say is irrelevant now. The team goes under in twenty four hours, and he will home in London.
She nods and swipes at her eyes with the back of her hand. "I do." She falters for a moment before she curls herself around him, presses her face into the crook of his neck. "Thank you for finally telling me the truth."
John raises a hand to pat her on the back. "Goodbye Molly."
"Goodbye John," she says as she pulls back. Her smile is watery.
John turns back to the window.
/
"It's a bullet," Molly says, voice quiet and crackling across the telephone line. "A fired M855."
"Markings?" Lestrade asks.
"Three ridges in reality. It's smooth when he's dreaming."
/
Mycroft sits in the corner of the bedroom at Baker Street, hands clasped on his lap. "Five hours?"
Lestrade nods as he unwinds his line from the PASIV. Irene has settled herself on the floor. Molly is stretched out next to John on the bed. "You remember the kick?"
"Bach," Mycroft says, and he smiles. "Sonta No. 1 in G minor. Yes, I remember."
"Sherlock's favorite," Lestrade says as he slips the needle into the curve of his elbow.
"I imagine he would appreciate your selection."
"Five hours," Lestrade repeats as he lies down on the opposite side of Irene. When Mycroft nods, he dispenses the compound and closes his eyes.
/
John dreams of a hospital, of St. Barts.
Sherlock sits beside him in the plastic chairs outside of the morgue; this is the day that he died. His blood is on John's clothes, is lining the creases of his knuckles and is splattered on the face of his watch.
"Bit masochistic, this," Sherlock says. He lights a cigarette, flicks a bit of ash onto the toe of John's shoe.
John hums his agreement. "I thought that perhaps all of this was an elaborate ruse. One of your experiments."
"You watched me fall," Sherlock says around a mouthful of smoke.
"I was hoping that I'd dreamt it."
"Mm, perhaps you did."
/
Sherlock is standing on the cliff, toeing at the edge. A few stray pebbles fall into the ocean below him.
"You'll fall," John chides.
Sherlock throws his head back and laughs. He's always laughing.
/
John dreams of Cape Town, of the moment that he fell in love with Sherlock. It's raining. The shoulders of John's jacket are wet.
He dreams of Naples, of the first time he'd met Sherlock, on his knees in a dirty hotel room with the parallel of a gun pressed to his throat.
There is Hong Kong and Berlin, Australia and Mexico. There is sun and there is rain and there is snow. There are hotels and apartments and homes and warehouses and office buildings.
The scenes flicker in and out, shift and bleed into one another. They are memories but they feel like nothing but dreams, just distant, hazy images.
"Perhaps they are," Sherlock says.
"Are what?"
"Dreams."
/
"I know what's real," John says.
Sherlock raises a brow. "Do you?"
/
John is in the desert, sands shifting beneath his feet. There's a bullet in his shoulder, blood on his sleeve.
Sherlock stands above him, gun in hand. He's dressed in John's fatigues, helmet crooked atop his head.
This isn't right—no, this isn't right.
"Help me," John gasps.
"You're only dreaming," Sherlock says. He fires the gun. Afghanistan fades away.
/
"I know what's real!" John shouts.
/
John is back in bed at Baker Street, cloth of his tee-shirt sticking to his skin. Outside it's grown dark, moonlight streaming in through the curtains.
His totem sits atop the nightstand, shimmers in the dark. When John picks it up, its outside casing is smooth.
No, this isn't right.
His Glock rests within the top drawer. He reaches for it.
/
The funeral for John Watson happens on a Friday morning.
The grass is still wet with dew, and it is a cloudless day. The sun peeks out from behind the canopy of trees, highlights the headstones that sit side by side—one faded and cracked, one brand new.
"Are you still certain that we did the right thing?" Lestrade asks.
Mycroft nods his head, but says nothing.
Lestrade sighs. In the front pocket of his pants rests a bullet. It has three ridges marring its casing. Its doppelganger, still smooth and yet unfired, is in the hands of Molly Hooper.
"Business as usual, then?"
"There's a potential job waiting in Tokyo."
Lestrade looks back to the headstones, and he nods. "I think we could all use that."
/
John presses his nose against Sherlock's throat, and he breathes.
He knows what is real, and this is real to him.
It's enough.