Author's Note: This piece really came out of nowhere; I visited a beach this morning and the lighting and the feeling of the air was absolutely breathtaking. On the bus-ride back, the first line of this story (which ended up being the third-to-last paragraph in the actual finished product) almost wrote itself. Parts of this are also inspired by Setep Ka Tawy's gorgeous piece, "From Where You Are". The character of Dan mentioned briefly here is of my own invention - a figure from John's past who appears more prominently in another of my stories, "The Paper Memorial".
This can also be seen as a story for Remembrance Day, and I would like to dedicate it as such, recalling all those who had made such great sacrifices and who are honoured today. John, I think, would approve.
For my lovely readers who are awaiting the next chapter of "It Is What It Is", I do offer my apologies. It's coming, but slowly. Thanks for bearing with me!
Silver November
There was something John really liked about November.
Not that like was exactly the right word for it. He didn't like being chilled, being numb, nor being alone with the memories that tended to resurface so clearly this time of year, but what transcended all that was the stark and often bittersweet realisation of purely being alive; and after all that he had seen and been through in his still relatively young lifetime, John could never, ever, take that for granted.
Most people didn't think that way. He had to think that way, because he had watched with his own eyes and felt with his own hands the pulse of life shiver and stop—sometimes in the midst of chaos and flame, and sometimes very quietly, with a bare whisper that breathed once and never breathed again. He still didn't understand it, and wasn't arrogant or desperate enough to pretend that he ever would, but the respect was always there.
And because John knew the frailty and wonder of life, he needed to feel it—not through the tremors of someone else's body beneath his doctor's hands, but through the cold, pure shivering of his own in the face of something greater than it.
His shoes hit the sand with a muffled thump as he swung himself down from the rocks at the edge of the little road that wound steeply down from the top of the cliff. Glancing back up as he straightened, he could see the uneven pavement swooping sharply up and around the corner, up and up until it met the line of swaying brown grass that bordered the narrow car park. There were a few other souls braving the cold morning, but they were already leaving; John had passed them as he made his way down.
He was glad, in a way. He was not a recluse by nature, but being alone had come to have a great deal of meaning for him over the past few years—more than it ought, his therapist had told him gently—and even more so now, when he had sought this place out with only one thing in mind. What that thing was he could not define, however, not even to himself, for it encompassed solitude and memory and the simple drawing of a breath, and yet his mind never wavered in thinking that it was indeed one concept and not three.
It didn't matter, he told himself softly as he turned back and faced the beach, and he broke into an easy jog that took him in a gentle arc across the sand.
For a good few minutes, he kept his eyes fixed on the ground in front of him—smooth in places, littered with rock and seaweed in others—or on the cliffs to his left, which rose in sheer, slate-like slabs piled against each other to form a dark and rather ominous maze of sides and pinnacles. He could hear the waves hissing and rushing and breaking, calling to him, but he didn't raise his head to look at them yet.
He had time. He had all the time in the world, here.
There was another jagged peak of rock that rose in an odd shark's-fin from the flat expanse of sand, and here he stopped after a while to catch his breath. The air was as cold as he'd expected, and it seared into his lungs with a sharpness that, far from turning him away, only persuaded his breaths to become deeper. He felt as though he were clearing everything else away—all the past breaths and all the smudged and faded thoughts that his mind tended to built up in a quiet, cluttered pile in the back of his head.
Another thought, newly-formed, rose unbidden: You would've liked it here, Sherlock.
And it was true. The tight, enclosing arc of the cliffs, the dangerously unexpected descent from earth to water—John knew these would have appealed to Sherlock Holmes in a way that few might have realised, because it meant sinking deeper beyond the analytical barrier of the detective's mind and into the instincts for truth and beauty that had always been there, even if Sherlock himself might have been disinclined to admit it.
As if in response, the sound of another wave crashing onto the shore rang in his ears, pulling at him again, and this time he obeyed the hushed call. He turned, slowly, and then his body was straightened and his face was raised into the white-gold blaze of the morning sun.
For a moment he had the sense of being jerked from this shore to an otherworldly place, one that carried the breathtaking whisper of peace in the wings of the wind that folded around him like a mantle. The sun was an endless gleam in the sky before him, distilled by a thin white haze of cloud that turned the entire seascape into a shimmer of silver. The only thing that anchored him was the sand on which he stood, and he glanced down for the space of a second just to reassure himself that his feet were still planted firmly on the beach he'd come to.
They were; so John closed his eyes and willed himself just this once to let go of all tension and the instinctive need to know what was happening around him. The waves helped; he found that if he concentrated only on that sound, he could breathe and feel the icy ocean air reaching deep inside him and pushing away his apprehension.
He remembered that one time he had dragged Sherlock to the beach, and more clearly than the irritated mutters of "What are we doing here?" and "This is ridiculous" he remembered the moment when they had looked at each other, and then their mingled laughs were the only thing that mattered above the rushing of the sea at their feet. And then they had taken off their socks and their shoes—John still marvelling that he had gotten Sherlock Consulting-Detective Holmes to do something this pointless—and they had stepped into the water, and John had never in all the months that followed dreamed how precious that moment would become to him.
It was achingly familiar, this soft regret. He'd felt it more than once in Afghanistan, and the most keenly whenever he recalled the laughing friend that had been Dan, but what made this different was that he hadn't expected to go through that again so far from the war zone.
Or maybe it was simply that he'd never left the war zone—only transferred to a different part of it—Sherlock's part—where the battles were different and subtle and terribly complex, but the price, in the end, was the same: a breath, a heartbeat, and then nothing.
With the wind still streaming across his face, John bent over and took off his shoes and socks, rolled up the bottoms of his trousers, and then, as an afterthought, tugged off his jacket as well. He let out an explosive breath when his bare feet splashed into the shallow first waves, his back and neck and arms stiffening unconsciously against the numbing cold. But then he was jogging forward again, calm and steady, his nerves set and steeled with each icy plunge of one foot then the other into the water.
The waves kept coming, foaming and silver, and John met them with a sort of release he had not allowed himself in months. By the time he found himself stepping back, his feet and legs were numb up to the knee, his shirt was soaked with spray, and his body was shivering with the tiny, tight vibrations that had finally told him he needed to get out of the water or risk coming down with something less easily shaken than a head cold.
He had no regrets.
John left the beach with a clearer head and a calmer mind, and a few small memories tucked in his pockets.
For Dan, he picked up a bit of sea-glass, a deep blue-green, once sharp but carved into softness by journey of distance and the passage of time. He took a shell for Mrs Hudson—cone-shaped, barnacle-encrusted, worn rough and grey by the endless churning of the sea, but with a pearly warm interior smooth to the touch; and for himself, a white feather he found on the sand beneath the rocks, shed by a distant gull that no longer needed it.
The sun was still glistening on the silver sea as John turned his back and made his way up the narrow, curving road. He looked back only once, when he reached the top, and as his eyes traced the blazing expanse before him, he could feel the regret gently loosening its hold. He ran a hand along his hair, almost smiled, and started walking again.
He had taken nothing for Sherlock. It was time to move on.
As always, many, many thanks for taking the time to read, and any thoughts you'd care to leave are so very much appreciated. :)