Title: Emotio and Ratio
Author: TABUretka
Translator: LaSuen
Beta: bitchinblackframedglasses
Pairing: John/Sherlock
Disclaimer: We do not own anything.
Summary: AU, seven years back. Another version of Sherlock and John's first encounter. Contains mentions of drugs.
T/N: As always, thankful to the author who gave me permission to translate this beautiful story, and immensely grateful to my wonderful beta.
Reviews are love. Every review is like a little morphine injection. Honestly. We hope you're going to enjoy it as much as we did. Happy reading!
Emotio and Ratio
"Sorry? I can't hear you. Could you repeat that? How much time passed? You're insane! He must be bleeding dry! It's no good. Okay, I'll be there in ten minutes."
In the darkness of the room John fumbled for a pair of jeans and socks. He gingerly slipped out of the bedroom, taking no notice of the attentive and pained expression of grey eyes which watched him leave, not bearing a trace of sleepiness.
It was a murky night outside, as it duly had to be at three in the morning. It was warm, too, which also made par for the course for the middle of July; and it was quiet, for John made sure to rent a flat in one of the calmest districts of London. He spent a hard time battling with the buttons of his jacket thrown hastily over his crumpled t-shirt, his head throbbing wildly from sharp awakening. John habitually began walking faster and soon enough hailed a cab, swiftly jumping inside, so that, five minutes later, he just as swiftly sprung out next to a rather uninspiring hospital's front entrance.
Later, when he walked out of the front door on his way back, the light of the early morning seemed oddly dim; four hours in the operation room (abundantly lit with stark white fluorescent lights) took their notorious toll on his eyesight. One of the novice nurses was so obliging that she brewed him coffee and now John was doing his best to attempt a sip from the paper cup without spilling the rest of it all over himself. His hands visibly trembled with over-tension, and John finally let them tremble away. The caffeine, starting to race in his body, merged with adrenaline into a blissful symbiosis which bestowed upon him a five minute respite. That is, until his mobile buzzed out in the pocket of his jeans, completely startling him with the sudden call.
"Shit!" Almost boiling coffee splattered the dusty sidewalk and a few droplets landed on his shoes. "Mary!"
He forgot. It entirely slipped his mind. How could he have forgotten? Incredibly.
The phone persisted on ringing.
"Yes, Mary. I received an urgent call, and I didn't have time to leave a—"
"I figured as much. It's fine. Don't worry about that. We have yesterday's lasagna in the fridge, and I've made ragout, too. I'll come back in three days. Maybe I'll call you in between, although you know the reception is bad there at Aunt Kate's."
Son of a bitch. John skidded to a full stop in the middle of the street, as if struck by a lightning bolt. The trip. Relatives. He couldn't, for the life of him, remember it last night, and he didn't even… Oh. Just perfect.
"Mary, I'm so sorry…"
"Well, you'll come some other time then, it's nothing big. Alright, I'm taking my train now, we'll talk later. Love you."
"Love you too," he mumbles back automatically, but she had already hung up.
John felt like an idiot. Actually, he was one and he felt horrible about himself. When he got back home, the weight of all his accumulated guilt sledgehammered on his shoulders in its absolute ruthlessness, pictures of tasty home-cooked food and perfectly dusted furniture popping at the very forefront of his mind. Flinging himself onto the meticulously made bed, John started thinking that Mary was a saint. How else would he have to explain her patience, her patience which had been tried by him time and again during… God, during the last six years.
They started dating when he was just a few months away from getting a degree in medicine while she was two years away from majoring in history of art. Mary was contrastingly different from everything that surrounded John at that moment. She was a quiet, nice young girl coming from a decent family; she moved smoothly and gracefully, and her laugher had a child-like chirp to it; long light curls fell in waves on her shoulders and big grey eyes adorned her beautiful face. Unlike his classmates, she wasn't staying up late at night, worn out from insomnia and rote learning, nor was she panicking about tests; she wasn't attempting to pour fake blood all over him purely in the interests of science. She didn't smoke like a chimney and didn't give off the pungent scent of formaldehyde.
So, they started dating and made quite a couple. Mary surrounded John with care and forgiveness and sometimes she appeared so enthusiastic it seemed even scary. And sometimes…
Almost always.
… he missed the insane rhythm of life. That's why he received such a great deal of calls late at night, being phoned up even when it was practically hopeless, being phoned up because they knew he was going to come nevertheless.
That's why six years into their relationship they still couldn't move in together.
Exerting virtually inhuman strength, John finally managed to tear his head off the soft pillow, scramble up on his feet and, with a mental shudder, make for the bathroom, dreading to come across the traces of tidying up even there. The guilt would most definitely burn him alive, there and then, without mercy. It was Mary all over. Why bother shouting if there are even more efficient and cruel ways to bring moral pressure on John's conscience? His conscience was, admittedly, hypersensitive to that kind of emotional blackmail, yet shut down each and every time someone would say something like "John, we have a bullet wound" or its various modifications.
'How can she even put up with me?' he mused, shoving the lasagna into the microwave.
'I'm so lucky to have her,' he thought, masticating contemplatively while surfing through the TV channels and feeling like a heartless bastard.
Usually, when he was alone, John dozed off at the buzzing of some inane show for housewives. This time wasn't an exception as the long summer day dragged by, lulling John into a slumber. Through the comfortable sleepy haze he heard the distant voices telling him about the banana filling which was deliciously palatable with chocolate syrup, then about the activists of the Ba'ath Party who attacked the allied forces, still then he heard some repetitive sounds, nagging signals…
A call.
Not opening his eyes, John fumbled blindly for his phone.
"Yes. What, duty rounds? I'm just off the surgery. Alright, but only until midnight, let Wolf cover for me afterwards."
With a resigned groan of immeasurable disappointment, he turned the TV off. Five minutes later he was already catching a cab.
o0o
Even if there was the moon somewhere lurching on the sky, while John was getting back home, he ignored it. He ignored everything, save the pavement under his feet, though even the sidewalk received a rather scarce amount of his attention. The lack of sleep during these last three days wasn't a rare occasion in his line of work, yet he anticipated with sheer pleasure the moment his head would touch a pillow, and…
"Damn it."
The by-street between a pizza place and a pub delivered a rustling noise, then a loud rumbling, after which everything relapsed into a dead silence. John was just about to pass it by when the silence was broken by a sequence of gurgling sounds, as though laughter transformed into a choking cough. Inertia brought John two steps forward till he lingered. He perked up his ears. The thought of home with its soft warm bed and long-awaited and well-deserved sleep was deeply enticing. Somebody in the murky darkness of the dingy by-street was apparently spitting his lungs out. John rolled his eyes heavenward, running a weary hand over his haggard face, inwardly congratulating firstly himself on his irrepressible zeal, secondly, God, on the concurrence of circumstances and, finally, Hippocrates on his wonderful oath.
It was obscure and gloomy, and rather muddy at that, but nothing out of the ordinary, nothing filthily grotesque about these decent districts. It had to be partly that exact reason why a bloke, sitting on the ground, stood out a mile in that area of town. He sat sagging against the wall, with his lanky legs stretching out, and looked like a straw scarecrow missing a ramrod stick. His chin hanging low on his chest which was heaving convulsively with the effort to draw air, the bloke was miserably failing to even out his breath.
"Hey, mate, you need help," noted John, stepping up closer.
The scarecrow jerked up his head, and John's memory promptly offered other fairy tales which also included creatures with wild grey eyes slit by vertical pupils. Although, mere seconds after, his doctor's instincts kicked in, regaining reins on his rampant imagination, and John recognised an ordinary drug addict, painfully thin, awfully pale and altogether lacking any mystery.
"Just how much have you injected, mate?" muttered John, watching the man having a hard time maintaining a vertical position. "Don't move, alright? I don't care what it was and where you got it, I'm just going to make sure your heart can take it, alright?"
Not getting any reaction, John squatted next to the man, reaching out to take his pulse. The rhythm was ragged and didn't promise anything good; his breathing indicating a poor state of health as well. John was tugging out his mobile to call an ambulance when he felt a faint, shuddering touch to his wrist.
"Don't," came a quiet, but adamant plea from the stranger.
"You need a doctor," followed John's equally resolute reply as he was about to press a call button.
"I've got one here. Don't."
"How did you—? What the hell?"
"Just. Don't. Call. An ambulance." The last word exhausting his remaining strength, the man attempted to black himself out, keeling over to the left side against the wall, but John caught him by the shoulder just in time.
Watching as the bony fingers tried to prop against the ground, to no particular avail, John hitched a long-suffering sigh and looked upwards at the blackening clouds.
"Why, God, why me? What have I ever done? Or am I supposed to leave this thing like this, in this condition?"
A five minute walk from the pizza place to the front door turned into a twenty minute long struggle with the limp body, which seemed to consist entirely of bones and joints, barely upholstered with a thin layer of skin. Not that John carried him all the way on his own, but it could be hardly defined as an independent walk either.
Taking into account a rather phenomenal amount of luck that had abundantly poured all over him in these last days, it came quite as a surprise that he managed to drag the half-conscious, shivering stranger into the apartment before the first drop of the oncoming cloudburst caught up with him.
Finally unloading his burden onto the sofa and keeping off the thought of having to buy a new one, John tried to remember where Mary had dislodged the medicine chest. John was going to search for some legal medicine until the effect of whatever the bloke had injected himself with didn't shake off the living soul out of him. Rummaging among the vials and ampoules, John fished out Diazepam, a syringe and a tourniquet.
When he returned to the living room, the bloke had already lost consciousness. He wasn't dead and he wasn't in in a coma, either, which was John's first worried assumption. He had simply fallen asleep. He was completely unresponsive to John's endeavours to switch him back online, the man only waving him off almost listlessly, and tried to turn onto his other side. Which, considering his height and the shortness of the couch, was proving to be rather problematic.
At two sharp at night John Watson was standing in the middle of his own apartment, squinting at the rare flashes of lightning. There was a pounding clatter of the torrential rain, rattling off beats on the windowsill, interrupted only by low peals of thunder which mercilessly rolled over John's sleep-deprived brain. He wouldn't call himself an idiot, because even that definition was all too flattering. Possibly, 'a helpless imbecile' would ring much closer to the truth.
The bloke on his couch brought his feet onto John's favourite cushion.
"Mum, he took in a tramp cat!"
"Harry, you promised!"
"Mum! This flea-infested ball of fur has ruined my shoes. And it stinks!"
"His kidneys are bad, and—"
"John, we've been through that. No pets at home."
"But—"
"John."
"Alright. Can I keep one at the garage, then?"
The cushion lost the uneven battle and fell down on the floor.
"You can be proud of me, Mum," grumbled John, scooping it up, and carefully perched on the coffee table with a cushion in his hands. "I'm not taking in dirty cats anymore. I'm past that. I'm taking in mentally unstable junkies."
His gaze, directed at the stranger, was a mixture of annoyance and compassion.
He looked somewhat in his twenties, and if before John was preoccupied with the prospect of explaining all of that to Harry in case she happened to pay a social call early in the morning, now he thought, panic flooding his mind, about how he could explain all of it to the police. After all, the bloke appeared to be a minor who was stoned beyond his senses.
The young man was seemingly freezing from cold, notwithstanding the warmth of July, if his attempts to hide his hands deep into the pockets of his shabby leather jacket were anything to go by. The mentioned piece of clothing was the only item which didn't hang loose on him, whereas his stretched t-shirt and faded jeans clearly tried to slip down his clavicles and thighs, respectively.
He was frighteningly close to starvation by the looks of it.
He was thin.
He was lanky.
He was somewhat insipid, toneless even, as though he was drained of all colour, sparing only lightly pistachio green tinge on his sunken cheeks and gloomily violet shadows under his eyes and pale lips.
His eyelashes were rare and colourless; his hair lay lifelessly, neglected for a long time. The only bright spot was a blue smudge staining his sharp knee.
Taking a deep sigh, John left the bloke to his most likely hallucinogenic dreams and stumped up to his bedroom, hoping to get his own for the rest of the night. Or, which could be even better, to plunge into salvational darkness.
After snapping awake the following morning, he couldn't quite put a finger on what was vaguely bothering him, persistently trying to remind him of something important. As if he forgot to switch the water off or make a call, or… Shit. He had a drug addict ensconced in his apartment. Emitting a mumbling groan, John buried his face into the pillows. Of all the things in the world, he just wanted for the stranger to magically evaporate from his living room and for his new stereo to remain in its proper place. Much like his other valuable stuff.
Shuffling out of his bedroom and upon entering the living room, to his unending relief, he didn't see anybody in there. The cushion was lying abandoned on the floor as a single reminder of his stupidity yesterday, and, surprisingly, nothing seemed to be missing. In a blink of an eye, the morning acquired all the characteristics of a decent one, and the idea of breakfast started to make its way into John's mind. With a wide yawn, John stepped into the kitchen.
"What the—"
A creature, reminiscent more of that of a ruffled bird than it was of a person, with its legs tucked underneath in what seemed a humanly impossible fashion, perched on a chair. It cradled a mug of coffee with both hands like a child, or rather someone who didn't hold a complete trust in their own limbs. Fingers lightly brushing its smooth porcelain, the young man squinted at the soaring steam coming from the hot liquid.
"Hey, Doc. There should be a sip left in the coffee maker. You're out of sugar, though."
Theoretically, John knew all too well that sometimes life throws at you situations that are not easily fathomable. And then one is completely thrown for a loop and utterly at a loss for what to do, with insolence of such proportions, for instance. Coming across that phenomenon first-hand, John hoped for his eyes to remain safely in their respective sockets and not drop dead on the tiled floor, filled to the brim with indignation and astonishment. A few seconds ticked by while he stood frozen to the spot, unable to move and only gawking wide-eyed at the man who was drinking his coffee, in his kitchen, from his mug. The bloke looked absolutely unruffled, unheeding of John's piercing, laser-like stare, and interested, apparently, only in the stark white wall in front of him. Flicking a glance in its direction and failing to discover anything worthy of such close scrutiny, John finally snapped back to reality and poured himself the remainder of the black liquid. The first draught of that inhumanly bitter filth cleared John's mind to a point where he pulled himself together to ask the unwelcomed guest when the latter is going to get the hell out of his apartment. John had to clean his sofa, and later he had to ask how Mary's god-forsaken Aunt with bad telephone reception was faring, and, he had to probably buy some flowers so that he finally would stop feeling this all-consuming guilt eating him alive. His chain of thought was cut off as the stranger spoke:
"So what's wrong with her?" His voice sounded like a bloody ocean, tranquil, deep, and bewitching. Taken utterly aback, John forgot what he even wanted to say.
"Who?" he repeated, not sure if he heard it right the first time.
"Mary," the bloke answered, unperturbed, taking a drink from his mug.
If John was superstitious, he would've stared at the stranger in sheer horror. But he wasn't, and a thicket of wild thoughts flashed across his mind at a lightning speed, every each of them failing to explain how the hell he had done it.
"No, I didn't snoop through your things, save for the cupboard shelves. No, I'm not an MI6 agent. No, I'm not a maniac who would follow you around. And no, I'm not a mind reader."
"I see," John nodded, mentally shook himself back to reality and drained his coffee in one draught. His mind became clear again.
"Alright, let me have a go at it myself. Too caring? No, more likely, impossibly nice. Yes, I seem to have hit the right chord."
The stranger smiled, slightly smug.
John returned it, curving his lips in one of his most polite smiles.
"Surprise me, Mr. Magician, reveal the secret of your powers."
There was a gentle thud of the mug being stationed back on the table.
"In that case, I have a full right to call the police and file a complaint about a break-in—"
"The name on your mug. It says Mary. There are bottles of perfume in the bathroom that are hardly yours. Therefore they have to belong to a certain female, possibly your mother, but given the fact that you spoke to her yesterday evening while looking at the ceiling, she is no longer alive, which means it must be your girlfriend. Traces of her presence are noticeable only in the bathroom, while the living room has a bachelor air to it; but there's also ragout cooked no more than twenty four hours ago. It stands to reason that she doesn't live here on a daily basis, but comes quite regularly, giving off care and love at that, after which there's this funny expression of guilt across your face. Although, you're best describable right now as… dumbstruck. Still going to call the police, Doc? You didn't even called the ambulance yesterday. Don't spoil this wonderful morning, will you? I hate police cars."
All of it took him less than a minute to deliver. Another ten seconds passed as John realised he was standing with his mouth opened, and hastily snapped it back shut.
"I don't want what you've taken, but it has the most amazing effect," John finally got out.
The stranger huffed a dismissive noise and fumbled in the pockets of his jacket. His hands seemed like two huge scrawny spiders scattered over the black leather. At length, a pack of cigarettes and a lighter were promptly extracted out of his left pocket.
"You confuse the cause and effect," he mutters indistinctly, attempting to light the tip of the cigarette with a shabby lighter. "The thing that I take helps me get rid of that precise effect."
"You can't smoke in here," John protested.
"No doubt about that. I'm not asking for an ashtray, then." The bloke breathed out a wreath of smoke and shook a portion of ash into the empty mug.
Fogged into a cloud of greyish blue smoke, the stranger seemed even more abnormal. Otherworldly, perhaps, like a kind of lost Peter Pan with a cigarette at the corner of his mouth. Suddenly, John realised what in the cannon-like delivered speech of the stranger tugged at his mind.
"Talking to my mother while I looked up at the ceiling? How would you know? You were asleep!"
"No, Doc. You thought I was asleep while you were staring me all over."
"My name's John," he finally couldn't help noting. "What do you mean, staring you all over?"
"Alright. Studying, if that's what you prefer. Calm down, John. I'm twenty five; I can't exactly file a lawsuit against you for violating a minor. Actually, I wouldn't file it anyway."
"I didn't— I haven't even—" he trailed off, stuttering from sheer indignation at the thought.
"I know." The stranger's gaze, all of a sudden worn out and incinerating at the same time, looked up from the table's surface and collided with John's.
In a blink of an eye, it got cold, then, abruptly, hot, and the scent of smoke resuscitated in John's memory his graduation year when he decided to bid the bad habit of smoking goodbye. Unable to tear his gaze from the filter squeezed in the clutches of thin fingers, he watched as the full, broken lips gripped at it and grudgingly let go.
John came to his senses at the sizzling sound of the cigarette butt being disposed of into the coffee mug. The present morning had managed to send him into a stupor a record amount of times.
The bloke lightly sprung off the chair and scooped his lighter off the table.
"Thanks, John. You're a good doctor," he said in an undertone, looking down at John's lost face, and headed for the door.
"How—?"
"The scent," his voice rang out from the hall, and a click of the door lock let John know that the odd stranger disappeared out of his life.
At long last?
o0o
And there were late calls again, and duty rounds, and Friday drinks at the bar when he wasn't supposed to spend the entire day in the O.R. There were home evenings with Mary, the hospital hubbub, flashing days of July, and bleak nights of August. It was right there, in the middle of an everyday routine, that John started to hate his irresistible craving to help everyone around, every Tom, Dick and Harry. A heavy, yet soft exhaustion engulfed him every now and then as soon as his frazzled body touched the horizontal surface of the bed after another wearisome day, morphing his mind into an amphitheatre for strings of memories. It was pointless and very, very stupid. First John compared the stranger to a splinter that stuck under his mind, but then, standing in the O.R., he suddenly snorted at the sight of a laid out set of surgical instruments, throwing his colleagues into awkward confusion. A walking scalpel would be the best definition for the by-street drug addict. With the caustic blade of his tongue, he cut into the raw without anesthesia unheeding of anyone's feelings.
John was mad at himself. He was a grown man, after all, whose line of work required concentration and precision, and he couldn't get those idiotic ruminations out of his head. Later, he saw some guy being pushed into the resuscitation department who had a similar blue smudge on his jeans, or he would see someone with curly mussed hair and his blood would freeze in his veins at the mere thought that it could be him.
Right now he would be glad to have Mary around more often, but the museum she worked at had a new exhibition coming up, and she was catastrophically short of time.
John was afraid to stay on his own. He longed to be running somewhere and he longed to be out of time; if there ever was a pointless moment in his life, he was irresistibly pulled to look back at the past six years, chock-full of unique precious seconds which altogether merged into one huge, never-ending day. A shiver ran down his spine at the possibility of the next forty years passing in much the same fashion.
Nothing was happening in his life. Nothing new.
Trees in the small yard in front of the hospital turned yellow as autumn advanced, and the cold, unremitting rain that started on Monday didn't promise any positive perspectives. Streets became a myriad of drab black umbrellas, ebbing away only towards night and vanishing in the dense and dank fog which wouldn't disperse until the very morning.
It was one of these beautiful autumnal mornings that John was lying wrapped in a nest of warm blankets, attempting to conjure up at least one moderately serious argument for scrabbling out of bed into this early grey dullness. Mary stayed late at work the other day and didn't come over, and John had a day off. He wouldn't mind having a cup of hot coffee, but getting up, let alone forcing himself out into the streets in order to go get some (since he was out of coffee), seemed like a well-nigh impossible idea to even ponder over. John was buried so deep in his musings that all but dozed off again. He was ruthlessly dragged out of his peaceful slumber by the sudden chirp of his mobile phone. Again. His personal hell would be an eternity of being put to sleep and then diabolically being brought awake with the same ringtone.
"Hello," said John in a voice hoarse with sleep, without even glancing at the number. He coughed and tried again, "Hello."
"It's me."
Bloody ocean.
Immediately sitting up straight, John untangled himself out of the sheets. With a foreboding of impending doom, he realised he wasn't even surprised. Moreover, he was expecting just that.
"Good morning," John greeted, overcoming the temptation to ask "Who?" just to take down a notch someone's pride and haughty self-confidence. A few weeks passed since their encounter and the bloke hadn't a doubt that John hadn't forgotten him.
The thing was, John did remember him.
"Come to Scotland Yard."
"What on earth for?"
"I need your help."
"My help? Why would you?"
"Because right now you're the only one who can help me. Are you coming or not?"
No. No! Of course not. It's madness and it's utter nonsense. He can't possibly consider it.
John's gaze dropped down to a cup of coffee left desolately on the bedside table. His memory promptly provided him with a bird-like creature gripping it tightly with both hands.
Damn it.
"Yes."
All taxi drivers seemed to purposely ignore him. They probably sensed he was a barking lunatic who rushed out of his apartment not just somewhere, but to Scotland Yard, urged by a convinced drug addict and, most likely, a potential criminal. Shrinking under the ghastly drizzle, John was already regretting it.
He regretted not having taken his umbrella, he regretted agreeing to help, he regretted answering that call and not entirely switching his mobile off yesterday evening. A fit of self-reproach came upon him and went on until John finally got through a maze of the corridors inside of the building, which sparkled with glass and iron. He entered a roomy hall, generously furnished with office desks.
Faxes, copying machines, computer processors and tons of rustling paper were buzzing in the room. Amongst the cornucopia of office paraphernalia, a man with his back rigid like a pole clad in a faded t-shirt stood out as something foreign.
John stepped up closer hoping against hope for the bloke to not turn back for at least another couple of seconds: meeting his gaze was very close to masochistic. John would rather just silently contemplate the man's protruding cervical vertebrae and his long, somewhat inhuman-like arms, crooks mottled with dots of injections and copiously circled with blackening bruises. And closer to his wrists… what were those, handcuffs? Were they afraid he'd do something? Get in a fight? John couldn't help snorting at the idea.
"John."
The man turned abruptly on his heels, pinning him down with his light grey eyes.
"How did you know my number?" John finally asked the question that had been haunting his mind for a while now.
"You left your mobile in the living room. I just phoned myself," he answered in a bored tone.
"Naturally. Could've figured that out myself," muttered John. "Alright, I'm here. What exactly—"
"Good morning, Mister-" There appeared a tall, dark-haired man in front of them with such a huge stack of papers in his hands he was almost entirely hid behind it.
"Doctor Watson."
"Sergeant Lestrade," the police officer presented himself, unloading the precarious pile of paper tower onto the desk. "If you don't mind, let's get straight down to it. Mister Sherlock Holmes," the Sergeant's face crinkled at the name as though the mere sound of it brought him immense pain, "asserts that the night on the fifteenth to sixteenth of July he spent in your apartment."
John blinked. The drug addict, who apparently went by the name of "Sherlock", was tapping the tip of his shoe against the leg of the desk, causing even greater danger to the stack of papers atop, and seemingly disinterested in direct participation in the talk.
"Is that true?" Lestrade slouched into his chair and now was searching for something in the upper drawer.
"Yes," John answered, thinking there wasn't much sense in denying. "And what exactly is th—"
"Strange. You don't look like a person who would spend nights in such company." At length, Sergeant Lestrade unearthed a blank sheet of paper and a pen.
"You think?" Sherlock inquired in a languid voice, disengaging himself from kicking the desk and scanning John with a long and inscrutable look on his face. "I wouldn't say so."
"Sherlock, your input is of no interest to anyone here. When are you going to finally accept that fact?" Lestrade stopped perusing his computer screen and turned to him. He had an appearance of someone who was left in charge of looking after a reckless little boy.
Sherlock gave another kick to the desk leg, this time beautifully sending the batch of papers flying into different directions until they elegantly landed onto the floor.
"For God's sake!" the Sergeant hissed, doing his best not to lose his patience and toss a stapler at him.
While Lestrade was crawling under the desk, John decided it was time to learn what the whole spectacle was about.
"Sherlock it is, then?"
"Yes."
"What's going on?"
"I'm accused of a bank robbery."
"What?!"
"To be more precise, of helping robbers get round the bank security systems."
"Did you?"
"John, as a doctor, would you say that during the night I stayed at your place I was capable of breaking into anything?"
John shook his head.
"You weren't asleep, you said so yourself," he answered, lowering his voice. "How can I know that you didn't leave during that time?"
At the next moment, angry and panting, Lestrade heaped a stack of papers onto the desk with a loud thump.
"Mr. Watson, you have to sign the form that confirms Mr. Holmes' alibi. You remember that perjury is a criminal offence?"
His gaze not leaving Sherlock even for a second, John nodded: "Yes."
The man in front of him reminded of a species of an entirely different race which couldn't possibly survive in the surrounding world. He reminded John of a result of some atrocious experiment, still extant among common people. This uniqueness made John's head spin and commit stupidity after stupidity.
"Give me the form."
Afterwards they stood on the wet tiles of the Scotland Yard's porch. John was trying to turn away and get back home. Sherlock shrugged into his thin leather jacket and was flinging his gaze in all directions. Stumping upon the lustrous black car, parked at a good fifty metres distance away from the entrance, he made a face.
"How pathetic he is."
"Who? Lestrade?"
"No, of course not. My brother. It's his fourth attempt this year to enjail me. It's high time for him to get over it."
John's eyebrows involuntarily crawled onto his forehead.
"Enjail you? Your brother? Well, it's no surprise that you—" he trailed off, realising what exactly he was about to say.
"You're confusing cause and effect again. He thinks if he drives me into a corner, I'll cave in and turn to him for help. So naïve."
Sherlock lifted his collar up, hunching into himself from the freezing wind, and looked at John.
John fought the silly urge to pull off his own scarf and wrap it around this fool who seemed to always get himself into trouble.
"Don't worry, John. See you soon," Sherlock proclaimed with bewildering certainty and strode away, leaving John to ponder whether it was a promise or a threat.
o0o
However, the events of the following days shoved these words away at the back of his mind. Their exact meaning John discovered only much later.
It's true that back then in those times of folly he couldn't boast of a quickness of wit. For instance, when that same evening Mary came over, a hint of half-sad, half-solemn air about her, John didn't notice anything funny about her conduct. And he kept on not noticing until she, looking straight into his face with her clear all-forgiving eyes, informed him that she was seeing someone else and that she decided to break up with him.
"I'm so sorry, John," was all she said, her expression oddly radiant. Her previous statement concerned London's weather and John nodded to the next one automatically, only moments later dropping a box of biscuits on the floor.
"So you weren't staying late at the museum?" His socks were spattered with cream, and he had a strong suspicion he was going to be spread against the cold kitchen tiles just like those unfortunate tarts.
"No, I wasn't."
"I see."
"You see? That's all you have to say? After all these years?" Now she was frowning.
John thought he should be angry as well. He was cheated on, he was lied to, and at the present moment he was being dumped. But all his feelings boiled down to a dim worry. And his feet were freezing cold.
"Of a happy family life?" John offered as a continuation, barely making it in time to duck a mug hurled in his direction with her name across its smooth porcelain. All-forgiveness seemed to be wearing thin by the minute.
After a two hour long altercation which ended in a slammed door, loosely clinging to its hinges, and a prolonged tidy up, John flopped onto the sofa and stared, unseeing, in front of himself. Now he was a free man. Strange. He felt strange. His anxiety augmented as he slowly realised that without Mary his life had to change. And, at the same time, nothing had to change, whatsoever.
He honestly tried to put aside those musings for the next morning. He even climbed into bed and lay there for an entire hour. No thoughts, no sleep, with only nauseating sense of indeterminateness, as though waiting for something inescapable, something inevitable which made him toss and turn around in bed for quite a while.
At length, John bounded to his feet and padded to the kitchen. His indecently long pajama pants – Mary's present – swept the floor as he went, its tiled surface still cold to the touch, but at least not sticky anymore. On the very upper shelf, next to the ancient electric iron and a jar of something long forgotten and desiccated, sat another present, this time from his colleagues - a bottle of whiskey. John wasn't a regular drinking person, and almost never consumed anything stronger than beer, remembering all too well from his college years how unbearably hard it was to wake up early for hospital rounds after a night out. Right now whiskey seemed like the best choice.
After the first shot, drained in a single draught, John decided it was too quiet in the apartment. The TV was switched on just to show another row of news, and with the second glass of whiskey the TV started to feel in sync with John's mood.
The first sip from the third glass was followed by a persistent knock on the door. John got up to his feet, probably too abruptly, because he had to sit back down immediately. For a very long moment he felt like there was a string stretched between his throat and a door handle, and as though it was going to either break or throttle him. He executed another attempt at standing upright which proved to be successful, and headed for the door.
"I've brought cigarettes. I thought it would be something you could do with at the moment."
John breathed out and stepped away, letting Sherlock inside while automatically taking notice of his narrowed pupils and smoothness of movements.
"You knew," which was an assertion and not a question. John sat back on the sofa. "You meant it when you said we were going to see each other soon? You said that I shouldn't worry."
"I did," Sherlock nodded, moving around the living room and lingering first next to the bookcase and then by the window.
"And?" John waved his hand, nearly spilling his whiskey. "Beam me up on how you managed to pick up on something that I haven't noticed for weeks."
"You had a perfectly ironed shirt. She wanted to make you see what precious treasure you're losing, and therefore tried two times harder than usual to make you notice her. Though, she seemed to have destroyed almost all dishes, which means you weren't impressed very much."
"So you understood that my personal life was falling into pieces by the state of my bloody shirt. Amazing."
"You would think otherwise, had you not drank so much."
John turned to glance at Sherlock who was just about to settle comfortably on the floor. It looked as though the living room was now adorned with a quaint garden statue.
"Why did you come?"
"To say thank you, possibly. Who cares. You wouldn't have opened the door if you didn't want to see anyone."
John took a drink from his glass. He was in the company of a mad hatter at the tea ceremony without tea. The room slowly spun around its axis. The TV screen showed a picture of Baghdad in ruins.
"Bad idea." The voice whacked John somewhere in his left shoulder. Or maybe even lower, maybe straight in his heart which stupidly skipped a beat at the sound of it.
"Reading my mind?"
"It's written all over your face. I'm telling you. Bad idea."
"Why? They need doctors there."
"You'll get killed."
John snorted and then, unable to contain himself, burst out laughing in a loud and slightly hysterical laughter.
"My well-being is questioned and cared about by an insane man who gets high by injecting measured doses of poison into his bloodstream. Life is beautiful, isn't it?"
There came a rustling sound from Sherlock's spot, promptly followed by a click of the lighter. A scent of smoke filled the living room.
"No. Not in here, no."
He was considerably staggering when he approached the frozen figure on the floor. Sherlock's eyes glimmered in the darkness, and there was a burning tip of his cigarette. John reached out taking away the cigarette, and his fingers collided with cold skin. The sensation from the touch and John's first intake of smoke hit him at the same time, clouding his already unclear mind. Not feeling the firm ground under his feet, John precariously walked into the kitchen and turned the lights on.
"Oh, shit."
"Too bright, I take it?" John couldn't even open his quickly watering eyes, but Sherlock's voice sounded close. Very close.
John took another puff from Sherlock's cigarette, trying to calm himself.
"Why did you come?" he repeated. He needed to hear an answer. The cigarette was already scorching his fingertips, even though there was still a short way to smoulder towards the filter. John felt as if the air was hot like anvil.
"Day after day I'm trying to switch off my ability to think rationally. What do you want? Then you appeared in the picture. You didn't let me take another shot that evening."
"It would've killed you."
"What, my well-being is cared about by a lunatic who wants to go run under bullets because his life is boring?" Sherlock imitated John's intonation quite well. "I came to prove Lestrade wrong."
"How so?"
"He said you weren't someone to spend nights in such company. Was he wrong?"
At length, John took the risk of opening his eyes. Sherlock was standing too close to him. His pupils were wild, there were dark circles painted under his eyes, his face was devoid of colour; John couldn't look away from his jutting cheekbones and his clavicles in the collar of his t-shirt. Not breaking the eye contact, he threw the cigarette in the sink.
"Yes. God, yes."
He reached out to thread his hand through the mop of black hair, touching the man's lips with his own, realising only now how much he wanted to do just that. To press Sherlock's body flat against his own, closer, stronger, subjecting and yielding. Holding each other in a tight embrace, they swayed to the side, almost bumping into the table. Somewhere unthinkably far away, in the other galaxy, a last intact coffee mug was sent toppling down onto the floor. John was too busy to pay it any mind as he planted his hands on Sherlock's chest, on Sherlock's neck, catching sounds that escaped from Sherlock's throat when his fingers were replaced by his lips, and bites followed gentle touches. The button on his shirt didn't want to unfasten, his zip didn't want to undo itself; either that or John's hands just trembled too much, so much so that Sherlock had to take them in his own, his long fingers encircling John's wrists. He shucked his jeans off his ankles before settling on the edge of the table. In what seemed like a half of a second John was gripping Sherlock's pale hips while his previous life shattered into porcelain smithereens of a broken mug on the floor, and it was tight, and hot, and almost painful.
"Oh," John breathed out heavily, suddenly realising something and coming to an abrupt stop. "I'm sorry, I forgot. I—"
"Shut up." Sherlock shifted forwards and froze, his head thrown back. There were droplets of sweat trickling down his neck. His cheeks were flushed. "I've taken a good anaesthetic today. Don't stop, don't… shit, come on!"
His long legs crossed behind John's back.
"Look at me," John hissed. "I want to see you."
He caught Sherlock's hazy, out-of-focus gaze and rocked forwards. And again. The table screeched dangerously. Sherlock's lips moved without making any sound. John looked him in the eye and felt like he was dying. He was dying from desire, from horror, from pleasure, and from all of those feelings at the same time. Grabbing Sherlock's firm length, he stroked him in time with his thrusts, watching his eyes roll upwards. John felt a shudder run through Sherlock and he couldn't last any longer. The world came to a halt, his legs almost giving way. His breath caught in his throat, and it was amazing. It was as it was supposed to be. It was right.
At long last.
o0o
The morning met John on the sofa in the living room. Alone. The night when he stumped upon an odd bloke in a deserted by-street seemed to have happened ages ago. Now, as his head was being pounded with a plethora of miniature sledgehammers, and his mouth was dry, his hands weighing at least hundred pounds, John, in fact, wouldn't mind that much to find the impossible, inhuman, and unique Sherlock Holmes sitting in the chair in his kitchen and sipping coffee. But the apartment appeared to be empty; it was drizzling outside, and the tiles were strewn with the haphazard remains of the shattered mug. There sat a solitary pack of cigarettes on the table.
John hid his face in his palms. He could pretend it was all just a dream; one very long and very surrealistic dream in which a genius who forgot to grow up was too scared of his own feelings and decided to escape from a drunk embrace of one very stupid doctor. John doubted he would be able to find Sherlock, if only the latter wished to be found. The dream seemed more of a nightmare now.
Much like the next seven years that followed it.
o0o
Entering a familiar, yet slightly modified laboratory, John bore a bullet wound, psychosomatic pain in his leg, a cane and real nightmares. Though, notwithstanding the visible changes, still, nothing was happening in his life.
"Mike, can I borrow your mobile? Mine doesn't pick up."
John looked at the tall, dark-haired man clad in a luxurious suit and felt immediately dizzy.
"What's wrong with the stationary telephone?" asked Mike.
"I prefer texting."
"Sorry, I left it in my jacket."
"Here," John hoped for his voice to stay even. "Take mine."
The curly head turned towards John and pierced him with an ice-cold look. Nothing wild about it, nothing feral, only the congealed, snow-like indifference. John couldn't move. He waited.
The next moment Sherlock recognised him. He recognised him and his face twitched almost imperceptibly as though it was a mask which concealed a real living person.
"Oh. Thank you."
Sherlock took a few steps forward reaching out to take his mobile, while John was still trying to ascertain if his mind wasn't playing tricks on him. His hand convulsively gripped the cane.
"Afghanistan or Iraq?"
"Afghanistan."
"Told you it was a bad idea."
John burst out laughing before he could help it.
"So you two know each other?" asked Mike.
"Kind of," answered John, his lips curling in a smile. He felt a long forgotten sense of vague anxiety gradually bubble up in his ribcage. "Are you my prospective flatmate?"
"Yes." Sherlock stared at him with an unfathomable expression on his face. "Although, I don't think it's a very good idea."
"Well, I once had to put up with a bastard who tried to turn off his own rational part. And now, apparently, you decided to go to the other extreme and switch off your emotional side. That's bound to be interesting."
Caught off guard with the prompt comeback, Sherlock blinked. Then snorted.
"You're even more insane."
"Want to prove it?" John stood stock-still waiting for an answer and gazing at the different, yet still same old Sherlock. A smile broke over his face when he heard a terse reply:
"Yes, I do."
FIN