Ghostly, a sherlock fanfic

A/N: I have no idea what to call this.

Angst? Sci-fi? Philosophy? A few elements of the supernatural?

This has a little to do with my vague love for theoretical astrophysics, a little to do with my beliefs about human nature and potential, and a lot to do with the friendship of Sherlock Holmes and John Watson. Keep reading and I promise it WILL make sense. I'd have liked to split this up into multiple chapters, more views and all that, but the format...well, you'll see...

"Sherlock?"

To say that John's voice breaks would indicate that the word began as more than a choked whisper. His face is, to use the abhorrent cliché, as pale as though he'd seen a ghost.

Closer to the truth, as it turns out, than either of us could have guessed.

Call me an idiot (and you would be surprised how many people have, over the years) but I never thought to see him react this way. One of the few occasions in my life I barely thought at all. Never having had much patience for wading through the murky realm of human emotion, I had a laughably limited comprehension of the consternation caused by my disappearance. But three weeks is hardly a long time, not compared with what could have been.

As I was soon to learn the hard way.

This is it. I spent my final afternoon in Mycroft's ridiculous, palatial country house (little though he pretends to care for the trappings of his position, I think it pleases him when the Holmes are taken for old money) reading up on the psychology of grief. It was my only free afternoon, in fact—the previous weeks were spent in Eastern Europe coordinating the efforts of the British/American surveillance network tasked with dismantling Moriarty's web. He was no surprise to us, James. Undoubtedly a genius, even more undoubtedly insane, but transparently, pathetically so. Consulting criminals, spiders—between us Mycroft and I have swatted more of them than we care to count. One of the unfortunate little consistencies in life that still bring us together from time to time, like goldfish and Christmas dinner.

Lest I pass too lightly over Moriarty's accomplishments, I will clarify that he did manage to keep my brother on his custom-leather-clad toes for a period of several years. It was Coventry in more ways than one—Mycroft could not save the bombing victims, track down the Gollum, crack the smuggling rings without revealing the extent of his own web. Those tasks were left to me alone. And in my own way, as suits me best.

John knew none of this. My "dear Watson", as he is ironically labeled by my brother, has little aptitude for opacity. His face is an open book, though it is harder work plumbing the depths of his heart than the shallows of his mind. Often he berates me for remarking upon his thoughts as they flit across his features. I reply that my observations are no more redundant than his muttered commentary on the contents of the London Times. This conversation, I seem to recall, usually terminates with my dodging a projectile aimed at my head. Our polarity has never been a barrier to our friendship, however oft it is remarked upon at Scotland Yard, but a glance at his face tells me it has become so now.

John's inability to deceive forced me to keep him in the dark. My inability to articulate this will drive a wedge between us. I am not too blind to see that.

Because it was only three weeks. But John had trust problems since before the war. I brought the war back to him—the tension, the adrenaline, and then the loss.

John, there is one thing I never understood, a question I need to ask, and from the look on your face I fear I have lost my chance.

How do you hold faith in a man to whom deception is second nature?

How do you believe in Sherlock Holmes?

John's face is nothing for which Mycroft's old Oxford textbooks could have prepared me. It takes all of a split second for the five stages to flash uselessly through my mind, and then John's fist collides with my jaw and it doesn't take a genius to deduce that I have stepped right into the middle of Anger.

Or did I start the cycle anew when I slipped back into my life, like a man picking up the coat he shed when the weather turned warm?

The heatstroke is well over now, and tracing the bruise along my jaw I know the ice storm has begun.

John has made a mistake. Or perhaps my study was too trivial, too elementary. For the first time I wish I had left it longer, taken time to get my bearings, to watch John, possibly to understand him in that way I rarely do, but which, when I manage it, is akin to a ray of sunshine on a winter's day. But I didn't. Too often, during that last afternoon, my eyes slipped from the text and my mind from its filing and pitched into daydreams.

It was more wrenching than I care to recall, leaving the quiet countryside as a teenager to attend university in a city crowded with repetitious noises and vehicle-choked avenues and dull, monotonous minds. Equally burdensome to abandon those same London streets for the crime-shadowed metropolises of Eastern Europe. I have been blowing about like a leaf on the wind for the better part of a month, but my mind likes to take root, it seems—the better to spread itself outwards. I need an anchor, a foundation. I have seen what I would become without one.

His name is Moriarty.

John has made a mistake, or I have. Because Anger was too brief and violent, blown over too quickly, but Denial lingers beyond the first shadow I saw in his face. There are other changes too, disquieting ones. Was John's hair tinged grey when I left? Did his face acquire new lines in the past three weeks? If the image filed duly away [framed with care] in my mind palace is a true one, then Mycroft is right. Caring is indeed not an advantage.

The dull clang of a teacup and saucer on the coffee table echoes the tone of my thoughts. I raise an eyebrow.

"Bit fancy, for Baker Street."

"It's not Baker Street," says John, not meeting my eyes. "It hasn't been Baker Street in a long time."

John's addiction to metaphor is not usually one I have difficulty processing, but I sit in brow-knitted silence for long seconds, peeling apart the layers of this one. Insufficient data.

"I threw out all the mugs." He clears his throat. "Long time ago. They were all full of—frog membranes, or something."

Shards of porcelain still gather dust beneath the oven, but I nod as though I believe him.

John's voice is distracted, dull. Like he doesn't care. Or still doesn't believe. Panic flutters in my chest—I have to do something, force him to believe that I'm back, I'm home, the last month is merely a shadowed memory. The need overtakes my judgment and my hand darts forward to seize his wrist before he can bring the floral-patterned, too-delicate teacup to his lips.

"John—" I begin, and then my eye catches a familiar flaw in the generic china and I stop short with a frown. "That's Mrs. Hudson's tea set."

John, who jumped at my touch, lowers the cup and raises an eyebrow. His face is curiously blank.

"Of course it is, Sherlock. Who else would she leave it to?"

Impossible, you would think, for the body to react to these words before the mind—my mind—can register them. But this…this is familiar. Recognizable from a rooftop tumble into an alley, a near-drowning in the Thames, an unarmed fight against one too many assailants…

The shuddering awareness that every atom of oxygen has been leeched from the atmosphere.

And now something is incontrovertibly, desperately, unfathomably wrong, a chill trickling down my spine and freezing me slowly from the inside. My heart has stopped entirely, or perhaps my ears, because what I just heard cannot be right.

"Mrs. Hudson?" The question comes out a croak.

Mycroft said nothing. Mycroft would have warned me, if it—if there were the slightest possibility this was true. Conclusion: it is false. For some reason John is lying.

His face is telling the truth, though. With that expression it always reserved for me. Didn't you realize, Sherlock? Can't you understand even this? But now there is cold contempt, not affection, swirling with the shock.

"She passed on. Nearly five years ago, now."

He takes a gulp of tea, and the cup rattles against the saucer.

My mind stutters to a halt after his first three words.

No.

Impossible.

Mycroft would have said.

Mycroft had surveillance.

Despite our games, Mycroft has always known—

Do shut up, Mrs. Hudson…

Mycroft!

Surveillance.

Something uncurls, dark and cold, inside my stomach.

Mycroft hears everything. Mycroft knows, but sometimes he does not understand—

You once half-killed a man who laid a finger on her!

She's my landlady!

You machine!

John said that to my face and I didn't flinch. To Mycroft, this was no feat at all. I have worked long hours at my brother's side in the past month—plotting, manipulating, killing— and witnessed no more slip in his poise than has been apparent since he went away to Oxford at sixteen. There is little data from before that time—deleted—but I think it was then that the Iceman closed off entirely.

He assumes the same of me. Of course, that is why I have never really been able to sting him with sullen silence and the cacophony of bow against strings. To Mycroft, the 'machine' is not a façade, because why would one be necessary?

[When did it become so?]

And what does a machine care for his landlady?

My brain, frozen beneath the sharpened point of unfamiliar agony, at length thaws enough to process the end of John's sentence. And then my stare pins him to his chair as anger of a depth never associated with him surges through me. Mycroft may not know, but John does. John felt the same. Who is he to make a joke, a torment, out of this?

"Liar." The word hisses from my lips before I can attempt to restrain it.

John's face hardens, and the delicate teacup clangs back onto the saucer.

"What did you expect, Holmes?"

His voice is sharp, and I flounder again because I have never, never been 'Holmes' to John. My surname is ugly in his mouth, with the harsh inflection of Sally's Freak, and everything has spun off, shattered, spiraled downward in a way I didn't know it could, and with this realization my senses catch up to reality and begin reeling off, documenting, archiving all of the ways in which Baker Street, John, and the world are Wrong!

Dust everywhere. Several millimetres thick on the mantle. Deeper in the cracks—John hasn't dusted in months, and Mrs. Hudson's more thorough touch has been absent much longer—my mind cringes away from the deduction five years. The greying at John's temples isn't a trick of the fading cloud-filtered afternoon, as initially I hoped. The tremor in his hand has returned in full force, a tic that not even the drama of my return from the dead can erase, too well-ingrained to be temporary. The cane, thankfully, has made no reappearance, though there is a dent in the wall where he threw it one day, in a fury. My beakers and microscope are gone, long cleared from the kitchen table, which still sports numerous burns and chemical stains. He has spent long nights there tracing each and every one of them. The oil buildup and fingerprints are obvious. Too obvious for three weeks.

I abandon my tea, swearing vehemently—John jumps, never having heard me revert to vacuous obscenities before—and am on my feet, vaulting over the sofa, staring out the window. Again, things are all wrong. Things I should have noticed, standing on the doorstep, twisting my scarf around my neck in absurd but prophetic apprehension. Things I must have noticed but pushed away, disregarded as unimportant [impossible], shoved into some dark corner of my mind palace to examine at leisure [at a time not already overcrowded with John]. New stains on the pavement, altered but well-weathered traffic signs, an overabundance of stray cats.

And Mrs. Hudson's flat, dark and empty, a touch of dust on the handle, eloquent, more beneath the window panes. No familiar stream of leaked heat from beneath the door, from the cracked and peeling rubber threshold that she pestered John a thousand times to repair. Lingering scent of floral perfume not only vanished, but overridden entirely by the tastes of stale emptiness and cheap café food.

Impossibilities. For three weeks.

My mouth is moving again, forming words I never thought to say.

"John, I don't understand."

"That makes two of us," John says tiredly, staring at the worn carpet as though hoping to carve a new design into it with his eyes.

My lips move but my throat is dry. "How long has it been?"

He frowns. "What?" he asks, as though he can't possibly have heard correctly.

"How long?"

"Since when?"

"Since I…left." Obviously.

Raised chin, deer-in-headlights shock, and then he drops his head back against his armchair and barks a laugh that is the opposite of amusement. "Seriously?"

"John…"

"Where've you been, then?" he continues, coldly oblivious. I can guess at the intensity of his anger because this is the question he determined not to ask the moment he saw me on the doorstep, because how could it possibly compare to the pain of what I have put him through.

The depths of which I am only now beginning to understand. How could it, indeed?

I ignore this, force myself to look past it, past John and the useless clutter of his emotion to the facts.

"In all seriousness, John, I need to know."

"Going to make me say it?"

"John…"

"Eight years," he spits out, still not looking at me. "And now that you've confirmed the depth of your indifference, you can get out. It was better when you were dead."

The words slice into my chest like knives, lodging there. There is no time to dwell on them now, but I take an involuntary step back.

"That's not possible."

The proof is all around me. What happens when you have eliminated the impossible, and nothing is left?

"It is." John replaces his drained cup carefully on its saucer, lowers them both gently to the coffee table, and in these actions I read the nadir of his swirling pain and anger. Grief's five stages may as well be swept beneath the oven with the shards of porcelain.

"You've been dead eight years." He says it to himself this time, determined not to say my name again.

I cross the room in a few strides and stand before him, braced for another blow, but it does not come.

"John." And then again. "John. Look at me."

I grip him by the shoulders, black leather against thick wool. Force him to see me, to look straight into my eyes and read the truth there, and his own widen even before I even say anything.

"I left you three weeks ago, John. Do I look as though I have aged eight years?"

Something hardens in his face and I want to curse, to shake him, you see but do not observe, can he really perceive nothing beyond further 'proof' of my callousness? John turns away. His hands tighten into fists at his sides. I lower my voice and carry on, willing rather to risk another blow than further silence.

"There must be another explanation."

But there is none.

"No."

Impossible to say which of us says it, but it hardly matters.

In the dead silence I cast my eyes about for something, anything other than John's accusing face, and alight on his left hand. I nearly laugh aloud, because at some point my whole body began shaking, mere transport, and I have brought down assassins and drug rings and blackmailers in a dozen countries in the last month alone and now I can't even face down my bestrealonly friend and somehow I have become John's tremor, permanent and ingrained and caringisnotanadvantagebrothermine, you always were so obvious, and from some long-neglected corner of my mind palace flits a picture of Mycroft's face if he were here to see

Mycroft.

And my mind catches at that thought, strokes it out and clings to it, because the coldness inside and the trembling without are anger, yes, of course they are, only possible explanation, Mycroft knew and didn't warn me that everything has gone to hell and how is this even possible…

And there's immeasurable relief in the destination marked out in scarlet on the map in my brain because at some point in the last minute? hour? second? my feet pivoted, shifted, backed up of their own accord and with a swirl of you forgot to turn your collar up left John standing silently in the thickening darkness of Baker Street.

"Pall Mall," I spit at the back of the first cabbie who mistakes the shivering for cold rather than withdrawal, and something in my face makes him press his foot to the pedal without a word. Other automobiles flash by, full of narrative but bleached of color and who cares anyway, and in a scant twenty minutes of frigid silence I am standing outside my brother's London apartment. Rushing streets asphyxiating exhaust stained pavement juxtaposed with the quiet opulence inside, because somehow even material things are just the opposite to Mycroft—

[Never cared for London, not the way I do, the only loyalty is in its utility, a central location to mark his steady pace through the corridors of power—]

—and the guard outside the door is a mere formality, I know, the real protections are inside and poised at strategic points within a two-block radius. But it doesn't matter to me, never has, because I can break in in the dead of night and none of them will so much as twitch a finger, done it before a hundred times…stride past and don't spare the man a glance as I raise fist to knocker. Too late to register the movement out of the corner of my eye…

And then the slam of head, back, shoulders against solid brick, and usually I don't spare a thought for onomatopoeia—idiotic, pointless word— but all that's running through my mind now is I don't know why it's called a thud, when it obviously bears so much more similitude to the sickening crack of rusted pipe on bare skin and snapping bone, and my head is ringing, chest pinned, surrounded, can't breathe, can barely in fact register the blurry shock on Mycroft's face when he finally ventures forth from his hole to treat with his heavily restrained visitor. The moment of silence is broken only by an oddly circumambient gasp of pain. And then,

"Sherlock?" he demands, crumpling against his ever-present umbrella like a bronze statue transformed into a paper doll. And it's almost funny except the word isn't his, it's John's, spoken on the doorstep only an eternity ago; but it's all wrong again, isn't it, because Mycroft and I parted ways just this afternoon, and if this is what coming back from the dead is like I think I'll just stay there, thanks anyway…

And for once fate is paying attention because after one more glimpse of my brother's stricken visage and the quick disbelief of fingers against my face the blackness pulls me down to meet it like an old friend.

Waking is merely a drift from one impossibility to another, because the hand on my brow and the voice floating round my head are all gentleness, and both of them belong to John.

"It's all right, Sherlock," he's saying, over and over again. "Everything will be fine."

Never having known him to lie, even in extremity, I put forth massive effort into opening my eyes. With the crack of dim light comes awareness of a massive, pounding pain in my head, pulsing and scrambling my thoughts. It takes a moment to make sense of the view, and then I realize there are stars upon stars, galaxies swirling above me, the rough lines of old high-rise apartments framing them on every side, decidedly mapping a sector of London into which John and I are only drawn during cases…but this one should be all wrapped up, we caught Moran weeks ago, it's all over, so what…

"You'll be just fine," John says again, voice cracking, and there's unfamiliar pressure on my hand and I open my mouth to correct him because I can feel it now, the sharp pain in my side, no, through my side, all along it in fact, and I'm searching my recollection of human anatomy for possibility of ruptured organs when the cold fire creeping from the spot spreads into a dull numbness in my arms and legs. The blackness is returning, crowding the edges of my vision and I panic because I still haven't apologized, only three weeks I know but he'll hate me all the same…

Warm liquid pools in the back of my throat; (obvious inference, elementary, but I can't taste iron, why can't I—)

The fingers are curling into my hair now, strong hands pressing against my temples, and something surges into view and I can no longer see the stars.

"John," I say

The door is a familiar and unapologetic black.

Reflective, though. I recognize myself, barely—a dark shape in a long coat, eyes narrowed, a half-conscious frown forming. Something about the image is off-kilter, distorted, pressed out of shape against an obsidian edge, and the wrongness is unusual because I learned about myself by observation, uncovered everything by hiding nothing, and the only reason they hate me is that they could never do the same.

Wear your secrets in plain sight and no one bothers to read them. Oh, they can pretend, they can pry, they can parody interest in all the wrong details, wear the face of understanding, but in the end they are all laughed off the stage. In desperation they point the finger of accusation toward whatever spotlight has descended on me. But in deception I am more myself than ever. They don't see how the world seethes nearer the surface in the best actors, how detachment is a necessary veil, how different is a synonym for "same", how freak is another word for "me".

(Put that in your blog.)

In short, they're afraid.

I wasn't.

It would be an act of unspeakable unfairness—or, if you prefer to think of it that way, generosity—to gloss over the twin blatancy that they're hopelessly stupid. As a critic, I never claimed to any degree of munificence. Never claimed to be a critic at all, actually, except where it comes with the territory. Who else makes up the audience but the players? Disguise, in other words, is always a self portrait—wasn't that what my old namesake took the time to say, through a mouth otherwise dedicated entirely to misgivings?

O, reform it altogether…

(What is the 'necessary question of the play', if not the scene on constant repeat? Enough to split the ears of the groundlings, you would think—but they remain stubbornly deaf, though unfortunately not mute. Suffice to say it out-herods Herod.)

The purpose of playing, both at the first and now, was and is, to hold the mirror up to nature.

Now I gaze into the polished surface and see only my brother's reflection.

But all of that is well beside the point that brought me here, halted like some tardy drunk in a stupor of indecision before a door that—

How long has that door stood in my mind?

(Three years, something whispers, three long years, idiot, when even the eternally omniscient Big Brother, the only god you still believe in, estimated a maximum of twelve months…)

More vividly so these last two months; neither Mycroft nor I counted on the unfortunate prescience of Baron Maupertuis. Odd, the way a web can cling for years, sometimes, in the corner of an abandoned door—

Door?

A blink, an invisible shake of the head, and proportions and contours and colors waver back into place. Door, indeed. Between hallucinations and absentmindedness, I have only ever been accused of the former, which, come to think of it, should surely have dissipated by now…

My lord, will you walk out of the air?

Into my grave?

Indeed, that is out of the air. But I have both been there, and done that, as John would say, drawing on his apparently inexhaustible repertoire of colloquialisms. It's over. Long past time to cut short any mental meanderings and focus again on my surroundings, a place I last set foot nearly three years ago. My grave.

Grass. Sun. Trees. A scattering of diminutive avian harmony. I would take it as almost a personal affront were it not that the gravestone itself lends an obliging air of finality to the scene—an idiotic sentiment, as I find myself alive, well, and entirely vertical. John believes in miracles, which is good, because I didn't. Don't. Whether trust or indifference will carry us through remains to be seen.

Why did I arrange to meet him here? What could I possibly hope to accomplish by waving the recollection of my premeditated demise in front of him, aside from dumb contrast? Surprise, John, I'm alive. We can dig up the corpse together and run a DNA test, if you'd like to be sure. Just like old times. Hope you don't mind if I keep the severed head in the—

"Sherlock?"

Trained bloodhound, indeed—so much for my accursed, fragmented, distracted mind, baying off down every false trail. Swing around automatically, half-expecting to meet my welcome in the form of curled knuckles again—

(Again?)

—but instead there is only John.

John.

Smaller than I remembered, face slightly more lined, again mercifully bereft of that despicable cane, but in the way he holds himself there is rather more of Who said anything about flatmates than We can't giggle, it's a crime scene…

But there's no denying it's John Watson, former captain of the Fifth Northumberland Fusiliers, veteran of Kandahar, Helmand, and Bart's bloody hospital, still, in defiance of all aesthetic mores to the contrary, sporting that horrendous lumpy oatmeal jumper. And despite an utter lack of precedent I have to concede that my mental image was flawed—no, not inaccurate, but timeworn, stale, flat, because even now he looks more John than anyone has a right.

"You look like hell."

It's an offering so utterly characteristic that my already derailed train of thought swerves hazardously, jolting me out of kilter again. Alarming beyond words to find myself nearly succumbing to mirth of the hysterical variety at the foot of my own grave, because surely it could be argued that it should be John frozen into speechlessness, John wearing the blank, protracted stare of a disciple witnessing an impossible resurrection, John wavering in the uncertain overlap between daydream and reality…but after the first croaked rendition of my name he merely stands at attention: straight, alert, and utterly unsurprised. Took you long enough, his body language says, and at another time I will read the sleepless nights under his eyes and the rosin traces beneath his nails and shrug off the requisite queries of how and why, but for now this is enough.

John said something, and my brain stutters back into working order long enough to form a reply, although I can't make it out until long after it leaves my lips.

"Yes, well, I had arranged to meet someone there."

Vaguely I wonder at John's definition of 'hell' and whether, like mine, it has changed in the past three years. When my eyes meet his again I no longer have to wonder.

"John, I…"

The intended apology—probably delivered in the form of Decided the afterlife was boring, or some such inanity—dies on lips benumbed with shock. Somewhere in that moment of indecision John strode forward and wrapped his arms around me in utter disregard of the long-dried bloodstains on the tattered rag of my old coat, and suddenly the threadbare oatmeal jumper completes the faultless logic of it all because where else would we end up but here, standing over a deceitful grave and held together by nothing but the threads of an old life.

"Bit disappointed, John," I hear myself mutter, pulling away. "I expected a homicide attempt, at least…"

John huffs out half a laugh and swipes a quick sleeve over his face, but when he turns to me again his eyes are as perfectly dry as his left hand, swinging at his side, is steady.

"Back to Baker Street?"

In John's voice, the eerie echo of my brother's words falls on my ear with all the old comfort of home, this time unthreaded through a mind overburdened with sleep deprivation and half-formed contrivances. And he wouldn't be John if he didn't add, in his understated way,

"Let's see what we can do about not giving Mrs. Hudson a heart attack."

The stones are rough underfoot but I hurry along anyway, feeling the stiff chill march up my spine, cousin to the swirling fog beneath the streetlamps. Objectively I recognize the tactical obstacle—harder to perform this way, too easy for London's criminals to slip their way from shadow to shadow, mist to mist, the clinging condensation withholding clues even from my practiced eye. But the combined effect, as it has always been, is to clear my head, sharpen it, make every breath whistling through my lungs more real.

I can bend the shadows to my own use as effectively as any garrotter. Here is where I have always been alive.

A heavy shadow alights from one of the carriages, and out of habit my fingers brace around the metal-studded stick in my hand. A split second later I recognize the ungainly form and relax.

"Mycroft."

"Not here," he whispers, but there is no annoyance in the tone, not a hint even of the urgency that compelled him here, he who so adamantly leaves all the legwork to me and would not break his usual orbit for all the gold in the Middle East. There is nothing facetious in this assertion; the offer has been made before. No, this is one thing the Holmes brothers still have in common, that we both live for something more than the laurels and wealth that kings can bestow; the abandoned country manor house is testament to that. My own idols will never be lost to me so long as cutthroats still lurk in the London fog, but his lie beneath the crosshairs now.

"Here," he hisses, already out of breath from the quick trot, steam rising from his nostrils like an overladen horse. And we duck inside an unlocked door, to a room vacant but warm and surprisingly dry.

"Keep your voice down," he warns swiftly, but I have no intention of articulating pointless inquiries into the security of the meetingplace; Mycroft always makes arrangements.

Cut to the chase, then, and back to Baker Street before midnight. Home again one last time before the real games begin.

"Moriarty?" I enquire briefly.

"Desperate. Your network was expected, brother, mine was not. He has no idea how far its extent, and as a result, his paranoia grows by the day. As does the danger he poses."

"Soon, then," I muse, an unconscious imitation of a villain in a bad vaudeville, stroking absent fingertips over the unfamiliar shape in my pocket. But I am not the villain. Not this time.

"He will be ready for you," Mycroft warns. "He always is."

"As I am ready for him. Have you ever witnessed the meeting of two unstoppable forces?"

"I anticipate sparks." Mycroft's gaze meets mine, brief, unreadable, and then a heavy bundle of papers drops into my hands. "All our intelligence could gather."

"It won't be wasted, brother mine."

I turn to leave, tucking the packet into my coat, but the pressure of a hand rests on my shoulder for the briefest second. "Be safe, Sherlock."

Safe. I nearly smile as I push my way back out into the fog. Whatever lies ahead will not meet that benchmark. The only taint of regret is pooled beneath the thick stack of papers that spell out my life's final undertaking.

Mycroft understands the necessity, but my dear Watson, will you ever find it in your heart to forgive me?

Sometimes the universe condenses to a single point in space, and it's utterly captivating.

I catch a glimpse of the wavering red dot with every step, flashing onto the tiles or glinting off the chlorinated surface of the water. Do keep up, I chide silently, because in a setup so beautiful it would almost be disappointing for something elementary to go wrong, and the dot obediently disappears again. I feel it like a cat's claw tracing patterns into my back.

"Another step, and Dr. Watson dies."

Voices in my head clamoring—Stupid, idiotic, so foolish to have come without reinforcements, but I silence them with a question of my own. Who is there? Who has there ever been?

And this is what you wanted, isn't it? None of the rest of it mattered. The plans, the painting, the bombed-out shell of Baker Street, the stationary, Bohemian, from the Czech republic—

The lives—today or tomorrow, they say. Well it's tomorrow for them now, much good may it do them, three cheers for Sherlock Holmes the hero—but that, as they are forever too dull to see, wasn't the point, never has been. All of that only serves to distract me from this.

"There is no Long John Silver," an exasperated Mycroft told me a long time ago. But he was wrong, wasn't he? All the proof I need is in the cannon just fired into the deep blue, the smiling glint in the coal-black eyes, the pointless precious memory stick sinking to the tiled depths to sleep with the fishes.

He understands, at least.

Just because I can should be a good enough excuse for anybody.

Consulting criminal. Brilliant.

Isn't it?

No one ever—

But I did.

Not a compliment—oh, wait, yes it was, of course it was. You and I were made for each other, Sherlock.

Back off. The next phrase is disjointed, stilted, over- or under-rehearsed, don't really care which, but it's fascinating, isn't it, that there are still things to learn, that some part of the spider still wonders at the finger riding the trigger. He's right to wonder, Jim is. It's not just formality; might blow his brains out, might not, but oh, what a waste that would be.

The uncertainty is evident in his next threat as well, and that's when I smile, because I have been reliably informed, haven't I, and there is nothing he can say to that.

Just waits, watches like a predator in his den. Doesn't betray a trace of the madness that possessed him seconds before, save for what gleams unguarded behind the eyes.

If you know what to look for.

There's a smile, too, a slight uplift to the curving brows. Waiting, wondering if the invitation will be recognized.

He'll kill me, of course, eventually. Of that I haven't a doubt. Kill me or die trying, haven't figured out yet which would be worse because neither of us has had this much fun in ages but it can't last forever.

Flames dance along the shifting surface of the water. When I meet his eyes, still smiling, they are echoed there—fire and ice, wasn't that one of Mycroft's favorite verses? At any rate they are darker for the embers within.

What will it be, then?

What indeed.

If the world is to end in fire, I prefer to have some part in it.

"Sherlock—"

[Red dots dance on the chest of the innocuous little blonde man in the corner, but none of it matters, does it, figured that out long ago, and if Lestrade and Mycroft and the rest haven't cottoned on yet, they soon will.]

I step forward.

"No!"

The shriek hangs in the air for long seconds, raw, pressing in on my skull like concrete, trickling into my ears like scarlet blood. It takes a moment to recall, why am I here, spread-eagled on the pavement, where did Moriarty go, wasn't there a gunshot, where's John…?

John.

"He's my friend…no…let me through…he's my friend."

John, I want to say, have to tell him, have to lift a hand and let him know I'm okay, known to be indestructible, just another case, John…but something is wrong, this time. Paralysis, my brain supplies, limbs stiff and uncooperative, and all at once alarm seethes through me, exploding as it always does when the mind can't give voice to it. Because everything has gone wrong, awry, dissipated into nightmare, the fall must've…

No, reason argues, a fall from that height would be death, not merely hell. Every eventuality was planned for, the angle, the airbag, and this is all wrong what's happening, a near-impossible when you have eliminated the improbable injury, must be the neck because there's no pain, just an incoherent numbness…

And in the midst of panic, my mind jolts backward into memory.

"Succinylcholine cocktail," Mycroft says, placing a small vial on the desk's smooth wooden surface. I don't spare it a glance.

"No."

Mycroft raises an eyebrow. "It's only temporary, little brother. And, I think, the only feasible option."

"No paralyzing agent will be necessary, Mycroft."

"I think you underestimate the strength of your reaction, Sherlock. John's grief will be…uncontrolled."

"I think you underestimate me."

He pockets the vial with a sigh. "Have it your way, little brother."

Treachery. Predictable, obvious treachery. The brief, unnoticed sting of a needle, administered by one of the 'nurses' in the adrenaline-numbed wake of my fall, no doubt. As soon as my limbs regain their movement I'll strangle him with his own brolly-patterned tie.

For now, all I can do is lie here and listen to John fall apart without fluttering an eyelid. Just like a corpse. Just like a machine. Until the drug finishes its work and I slide into blackness.

He's my friend.

Stuttering into wakefulness this time, the wrongness presses around with such relief that it's almost unbearable. I know this place. I know this—

"Sherlock?" Mycroft demands again, hoarsely, lofty tones betraying him for once, and the only answer I can manage is a guttural chuckle. Something in it brings him abruptly back to life.

"Unhand him, now," he orders, in the tone that's been known to directly precede military coups in Middle Eastern countries, and with the shifting of a half-dozen black-suited agents the pressure in the small of my back lifts. It takes a groaning moment to roll onto my side, massaging aching wrists, don't know what I've done to have him set his watchdogs on me this time…

When I turn my head the sky is oddly blocked from view, and it takes a moment to realize Mycroft has abandoned his posture and umbrella to kneel at my side, three-piece suit and all. Highly out of character, my brain supplies; he must be as put out as though the apocalypse had the indecency to come on a day he had something else scheduled. Fairly certain I'm not under the influence of anything, probably be feeling marginally more cheerful if that were the case, so…

But Mycroft's voice shatters whatever half-constructed theory was forming, and I'm left to finger the shards littering the concrete.

"Sherlock, is it really—" he catches himself, fortunately, and breaks off from voicing an inanity we both know I would never let him forget. Before my eyes slip shut again I catch a vague movement above my head; a command, no doubt, to whichever of the agents hasn't yet slunk back into the shadows.

"Don't let him sleep," says Mycroft, urgent through a blurry, descending haze, and there's a sudden scent, intolerably sharp, that twinges into my brain like physical pain. Pressure on the shoulders again as my head snaps to the side, involuntarily, and then—

And then somehow I'm propped on an overstuffed sofa in a regrettably familiar sitting room, half-lit by an overenthusiastic hearth fire chasing the concrete chill from my limbs, and Mycroft and I are alone. All I can see is his silhouette against the fireplace, backlit, though I know he must be squinting through the shadows at my face. His voice when he speaks is still strained.

"Sherlock, where have you been?"

Been? The urge to laugh bubbles up again, and upon a moment's reflection I let it, partly because annoying Mycroft never officially stopped being one of my life's goals and partly because he's the one person in the world who knows precisely where I've been, planned it every step of the way, in fact, and there's no explanation for him looking at me now as though I had taken years…

Years.

There was something about—no, that's not possible, eight bloody years—John may not have known, but Mycroft surely—

"Funny you should ask, Mycroft." My voice emerges a croak, and I turn my head for a few half-hearted coughs before continuing. "I've been where you sent me."

He makes a sharp movement, catches himself, and contemplates before getting to his feet. Another twinge of pain, and I close my eyes and let my ears trace the movements: a couple of sharp strides forward, a last-second halt, as though reconsidering, and then a wheezing groan of springs in the armchair beside me. Now I can watch the firelight flicker across his face and its eight years of added lines. The expression on it now is nothing I recognize—calculation, yes, but none of the accustomed indifference, ire, or disappointment I have witnessed collect there over the years. It's as though he's simply forgotten how to respond to my presence. A sense of nausea returns, the room spinning slightly, and when things coalesce I find myself staring into a glass of ruby-colored something-or-other that somehow found its way into my hand.

"Drink, Sherlock." The command is almost gentle. I blame my obedience on the room's continued rotation, which subsides slightly after a few burning sips.

"What's happening, Mycroft?" Another croaked demand.

"I wish you'd tell me, Sher—" he breaks off. "Your resurrection, it seems." His eyes drop to the side of my face, catching on something, and I raise an automatic hand to trace a fresh bruise along my jawline.

Mycroft's eyes narrow. "Have you been to see John?"

Have I? I don't know anymore, how would I, I don't remember the last eight bloody years—

There's some suspicion dawning in Mycroft's eyes, trembling on the tip of his tongue, and I'm distracted from demanding his thoughts by an answering suspicion of my own.

Whoever said eight? The number is riveted in my head, playing on repeat, like a childhood memory nudged irritatingly out of context, unconfirmed and floating freely until finally corralled into the deletion queue. Theorizing without data, in other words. A capital mistake.

"Mycroft, how long have I been gone?"

Something in his face clears without relaxing, as though the question is a confirmation of his thoughts, and instead of answering he reaches for a tableside lamp and scrutinizes my face in the ensuing, head-pounding brightness. After half a minute he mercifully flips it off again, apparently satisfied.

"Eight years," he answers promptly, as though there had been no pause. "You've been dead nearly eight years. A disagreement with a mob lord in Moscow, or so I heard."

"Dead?"

Scrambling to my feet isn't really an option right now, but my hands are gripping the crystal glass so tightly it's a wonder there aren't shards embedding the carpet.

"As though you didn't send me there, Mycroft! We planned this, or had you forgotten?"

"Yes, I sent you there." Mycroft isn't looking at me, apparently fascinated with the untouched contents of his own glass. His tone, like his curled hands, gives the indication of a tremor despite its perfect steadiness. "And six months later, I identified your body."

It's as though the words widen a hairline crack, top to bottom throughout the universe, making sense, in some irrational way, corroborated by phantom memories. But no, that's groundless, idiotic, and the ground slipped away one too many times even before this conversation began…

"Impossible."

"Is it?"

I don't have to flip on the lamp again to observe how very tired my brother looks. Somehow that brings something back, something I haven't felt in a very long time, or maybe it's become an undercurrent so omnipresent it's gone unnoticed these…

Eight years?

Shutting my eyes, reducing the number of distractions, doesn't work because there are at least as many in my head. How long have I lived like this? When did I let my mind palace descend into this level of chaos? It's a swirl of memories now, half of which make no sense… dislocated colors and corridors, doors open and shut at wrong angles, and there's nothing to go on, no way to answer Mycroft's impossible question. Or is there?

I know I dismantled Moriarty's network, I know that much. Don't I?

"I don't remember, Mycroft." The sentence emerges a whisper, because suddenly I'm sure of nothing…

"He's dead, isn't he?"

Mycroft frowns, swirling his glass absently. "Who is?"

"Moriarty."

Mycroft stares at me for a long time. Finally he comes to a decision.

"Get some sleep."

Already the room is hazy with pain and sleep deprivation, but Mycroft has gotten to his feet, back to me, and is saying something else. Something odd, something whose meaning I can't quite grasp through the haze of drowsiness.

"You know, it really is so dull when you're gone."

And suddenly I know the feeling again from a long time ago, and even the flood of relief at one crystal-clear memory to cling to—Baskerville, with John—can't mask that unnerving recognition. For some reason, I am afraid—terribly afraid to fall asleep.

There's never been nothing before.

Not in a hundred thousand nightmares. This is the one fumbled note in a perfect medley, and somehow it stuck, glued to the fingerboard and now it's all that's left.

Everything that can happen, will happen, and apparently has, but never in all of those endless possibilities did I imagine…

[Only ever one possibility, and it's been eliminated.]

Imagine? Since when have I ever imagined? That died with Captain Redbeard, several millennia ago at least, so why am I still standing over a rough granite stone engraved with—

No.

Is that the pounding of falling water or an overworked heart? Does the howl belong to a wind-stricken moor or the squeal of tires on pavement?

The patch of grass underfoot is vaguely familiar. I blink down at it. Yes, I've been here before, but it should be different this time. Blurrier.

Never been able to shed tears, not real ones, not since the sight of my first corpse, rusty fur matted with too much red. Spilling, puddling out—not stopping.

It doesn't stop. I know that now.

It made no sense to me, the idea that anything can be so precious that its loss is negating of life, and the question haunted my dreams until eventually I made a practical study of it, dismaying a plethora of well-intentioned relations and discovering two new hemoglobin reagents along the way…

Only one person wasn't shocked, and he was always there. Is here. Hovering. The only thing left, and entirely not enough.

(I hated him for it. I don't think I ever stopped.)

My thoughts were spinning then too, rambling, slowly meandering then racing out of control; couldn't think straight for days. When finally I could, I decided it was better the other way.

Same conclusion I'm reaching now.

I don't remember how to cry.

Three snipers, three bullets, three victims…did any of it matter, did I jump at all, did I hit the pavement and will I ever wake up again, I can still hear the last howl in the distance but can't bloody remember anything else and suddenly there's a hand on my shoulder and a low voice asking the only question that matters and it's wrong.

"Have you had enough?"

The slamming force with which Mycroft connects with the cemetery's encircling stone wall is nowhere near enough to make up for John Watson, beloved brother-in-arms, to say nothing of the moldering remains of a childless mother or a silver-haired second chance, but it's enough—just enough—to drag my collar up against the numbing chill and walk away. Back to whatever's left.

Back to the streets of London.

He's always there now. Like a shadow.

I read about how to lose your shadow, once. Didn't I? It was mixed in somewhere with pirates and fairy tales and never growing up, and a thousand less realistic things, like someone to be lost with.

A violin, an armchair, and wandering, as usual, into the aftermath of the explosion…

"John?"

John, John, you're not—

"I'm afraid my brother can be very intransigent."

"You're full of possibilities, Sherlock. Knighthood, piracy, I seem to recollect a brief stint onstage at the Globe theater—"

Not what?

Not staring at his mad flatmate in apparent concern would be a stretch, unfortunately. Whatever truth that diagnosis may hold remains to be seen.

John? I thought…

But no, there he is, all striped jumper and now a badly suppressed smile. Somewhere in between I watched him flit between a thousand different expressions. Was it something I said? It's usually something I—

"…have an arduous apology to make to a very old friend."

"…dead at nineteen of an overdose, Nobel prize in applied chemistry, imprisoned for mass-murder, even found yourself in possession of a small kingdom at one point, completely on accident of course…"

Wrong.

Wrong, as usual. One day I'll be properly sick of it, probably fulfill a prophecy or two, but for now an impatient tug at the material around my shoulders and a bitten back sigh will do. No amount of verbalized exasperation will serve to expand a detective inspector's IQ; believe me, I've tried. May as well get on with it.

Not just a marksman, a fighter. Obvious, hands couldn't have shaken at all. Probably with a history of military service…nerves of steel…

Lestrade's eyes narrow as I break off, choking in the relief wrapped around my mind in layers of orange fleece, so thick I can't breathe, can't speak because this time the realization hits a thousand times harder than ever—

Feet moving before my mind catches up, shaking off the hand on my arm—just caught you a serial killer, more or less, get off my back, let me go…

This time? Absurd. Now is what I live for, there's only ever been now.

Which is fine, I think. Because now is John looking up at me, absurdly trusting, awash in the trembling aftereffects of murder and adrenaline and the rock-hard knowledge that the world's only consulting detective won't manage to catch this one. We can't giggle, it's a crime scene, and how is it possible I've missed the word idiot…

"For heaven's sake, I occupy a minor position in the British government."

"…heading up New Scotland Yard—not a very popular Chief Superintendent, for some reason…now I think about it, the one thing you've never consented to do is work with me."

He's been following on my heels so closely that when we're finally alone it's hardly a surprise.

"What are we, Mycroft?" My voice is ragged, tattered. It sounds rather like I feel. Stretched.

My brother smiles in his best imitation of a piranha, leans back in his leather chair, and stretches long legs toward the flames. For a moment I think he will simply deny everything, feign disbelief in this nightmare I've been dodging through for a small eternity, and in my chest weary rage is battling with despair when he finally speaks.

"I thought you would never ask, little brother."

He swirls his cut-crystal glass of scotch—oh yes, Mycroft has always appreciated the finer things in life—before continuing.

"In all of your…travels…" a touch of a smirk, "You have no doubt noted that certain… intelligences…in this world are more collected than others."

I scowl back.

"Obvious. As you have reminded me often enough."

"As we have both reminded the world often enough. And for good reason. Although," Mycroft raises his glass and sighs, admiring the light reflecting off the crystal, "they never do quite seem to grasp the full picture."

I snort, a vulgarity that even Mycroft rarely drives me to. "You've never willingly delivered the 'full picture' on anything to anyone in your life."

Again my brother's smile is predatory. "True."

So it's to be the same weary charade as bloody always. Too tired to do anything else but go along with the script. Wipe the smirk off his face, at least.

"I said 'willingly'. You know full well that I am capable of obtaining information using less…straightforward methods."

"I have no intention of lying to you, Sherlock." Consideration of the contents apparently over, he sighs philosophically and drains the glass. "You've done a fine job of doing that to yourself."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"I mean, you've been dodging your heritage for longer than I care to remember. Possibly longer than I can remember."

Mycroft is wearing the usual expression of disappointment in me, [well acquainted with that, of course, but then the clash of words against logic is too much and the room spins, must be a side effect of the alcohol except I haven't taken a sip—]

"You're old enough to recall when I was born."

"In one sense only."

I slam my own glass down on the table between us. "Enough riddles, Mycroft!"

The outburst doesn't faze this version of Mycroft; apparently nothing does.

"Our very existence is a riddle, Sherlock. I…frankly, I never expected you to lose control this way, and consequently didn't foresee this conversation. I'm not certain where to begin."

Lose control? Quite prepared to show the fat ponce a loss of control, except for John's disbelieving, stricken expression flashes across my mind and suddenly loss of control seems a very good descriptor of the last few weeks, and questions are flooding out of my mouth before I can stop them.

"You called us 'intelligences'."

"That's my preferred word for it. Mortals have many others."

"Mortals? Mycroft, are you seriously suggesting we're…" I search my memory for a term that doesn't embody ridiculous superstition, and come up empty. "Gods?"

Mycroft sighs. "'Presences' might be a more accurate appellation."

Utterly ridiculous, except that I'm taking it seriously, mind reeling through observations and theories swirled amid the gaps of half-deleted mythologies. "And this entails…what, exactly?"

"Just what I said." Mycroft smiles thinly. "Intelligence. Self-discipline. In truth, Sherlock, I am not convinced that our fundamental nature differs from that of the human race. I strongly suspect that every soul participates in endless realities. Your own adventures are the perfect illustration."

"So what differentiates you and me?"

"Certain humans develop…a breadth of awareness, after a certain period of time. Our perception is stretched beyond a single lifetime and into those of our parallel selves. Allowing us to…consolidate, if you will."

"Consolidate what?" But I already know. "Our minds?"

"Precisely."

A frown twists the corners of my mouth. "You're saying you're aware of all dimensions simultaneously? That's supercilious even for you."

My brother gives a long-suffering sigh, but makes no attempt to refute my words. I frown again, drumming my fingers on the table. "Then why am I not the same?"

"You are. Or rather, you could be. Most of us raised an eyebrow when you elected to splinter your consciousness again—even if you did remain more intact than most mortals—but I was the only one intrigued enough to document the experience."

I shut my eyes, filing the us away for future investigation. "You're my brother."

"Yes."

"Biologically speaking, yes, but otherwise?"

"Most presences prefer to maintain a connection with the others. You, brother dearest, are the exception."

Realization dawns. "Hence why you spend so much time and energy maintaining my 'surveillance status'. Or rather, attempting it."

The tendons in the back of Mycroft's hand tighten in annoyance. "Yes."

"And you're aware of the exploits of my 'other selves' as well?"

"Of course. Along with any other inhabitant of London who catches my attention."

"Only London?"

"I'm spread, quite literally, across realities, Sherlock. Accessing other areas of the world on more than a semi-irregular basis takes an enormous amount of energy."

I snort. "Not omnipotent, then."

"Not quite."

"So you've anchored yourself in a specific place. Why London?"

"I didn't choose London, little brother. You did."

My mind grapples with this thought, struggling to reconcile the well-beaten paths of logic with a newfound sense of rock-hard knowledge, a firm and irrational conviction that Mycroft's explanation is absolutely true. This makes no sense, unless it's the consciousness that he's talking about. Memory, leaking out of some file stuffed in the rafters of my voluminous mind palace?

Or, alternatively, a drug that renders me incredibly suggestible. Trust is far too strong a word for what Mycroft and I have, but somehow I don't believe he would stoop to that. And the nightmarish past few weeks have been too vivid, too real, too coherent for narcotic-induced hallucinations.

Alternative hypothesis: the stress of confronting Moriarty, of faking my own death and dismantling his web drove me to insanity. Unlikely. Preposterous, in fact. Depending who you ask.

"That was the trigger." My voice sounds suddenly in the stillness, startling us both. "Leaving London. That's what started this…unraveling."

"Indeed." Mycroft's tone is mildly intrigued now. "It is also, I admit, an unforeseen development. Had I known that your travels would affect you so—"

"—you would have let me go forward with them anyway, in the interests of documenting the results," I finish with surprising calmness.

Mycroft frowns. "Do you really think so little of me?"

"If you're going to attempt to repair our brotherly bonds, I'd start with one of my 'other' selves."

Mycroft smiles again, thinly. "Not possible, I'm afraid."

My fingers curl around my glass. "What?"

"What do you think the 'unraveling' you have experienced means? It's the opposite, in fact. Your consciousness is consolidating again. The other awarenesses should be trickling back into your mind any time now—most probably they already have. For our purposes, there is only one Sherlock Holmes."

Panic flutters in my chest in the irritating way it does from time to time, creeping up the base of my throat. "You mean…" Even now it's a struggle to articulate the concept. "You're telling me I'm a single mind, reaching across dimensions. Like you." I can taste the edge of bitterness in the last two words.

"Yes, and I trust you'll be responsible with your newfound omniscience." Somehow the familiar irony in Mycroft's tone strikes at me, bringing with it the rush of a thousand childhoods, our old feud multiplied across realities. Images jump out at me again—a rusty, long-furred dog, a battered treehouse, an old green chemistry textbook—

Block. File. View later.

"How do you handle it?" Bluntly, fighting down something more than a trickle of panic now. "How do you maintain that kind of connection?"

"Fairly well, in general." Mycroft waves a careless hand. "Of course, I don't clutter my life with the sort of relationships you're prone to collecting…Genius has a reputation for aloofness that is not altogether unfounded."

"And if you did, could you maintain them?"

"Hardly. We are not gods, Sherlock. In many ways you'll find this is better—greater access to your gathered intellect being the most obvious example—but you'll find it easier to focus on hard fact than friendships and emotional excess. No hardship to you, I should think. It's what you've professed your entire life. Lives."

"No." That makes no sense. It can't. "Spread across infinite dimensions, are we not infinite beings?"

"We would be, if we were spread across infinite dimensions. Unfortunately, Sherlock, even the likes of you and me are confined to linear time and three spatial dimensions. Hence our limitations."

"Then…"

"The phrase you are looking for is 'parallel universes'."

"Infinity in any direction is still infinity," I snap.

"Is it?" Mycroft laughs. "We would never know if we reached it."

"Because 'reaching' infinity is a mathematical impossibility if you don't start there—"

"For someone who just learned that he is what could justifiably be termed a demigod, you're very determined about throwing around the word 'impossible'."

"So my view of the universe is altered. Mathematic truths remain static."

"How do you know?"

"Because I've been mentally verifying them as we speak," I say calmly. "Nothing you have said so far has stronger evidence behind it than the mathematical proofs underlying our most basic assumptions about reality. Nor does anything you've revealed contradict those proofs, save for your insistence that a limited consciousness can be spread across infinite 'parallel universes'. You're quite right, by the way, it's much easier to run the calculations in my 'consolidated form', as you call it. Xeno's paradox, Einstein's E=mc2…

"So either we assume that Euclidean logic doesn't work—in which case we have much bigger intellectual problems to grapple with than the purported breadth of our perception…or I presume you are lying in order to test me. Infinite universes, yes, in keeping with a tentative understanding of the implications of quantum mechanics. Infinite versions of ourselves, if your theory is correct, but no single consciousness has mastered all of them. Our awareness may stretch to a vast array of our own manifestations, but nothing you could call infinite."

Mycroft smiles. "Well done, Sherlock."

There is unexpected warmth in the praise, but I have more important things on my mind.

"John Watson."

Mycroft sighs. "Will remain your friend. If your personal charm doesn't drive him away."

"But…"

"You will find it difficult to connect as deeply. Or, at least, as completely. Your new perception is vast, but you are also now aware that you are one individual, not many."

Evidently my expression reveals more than I wish, because Mycroft glances sharply at me and continues.

"There are upsides too, you know. Your IQ is so wholly off the charts that human tests are incapable of measuring it—"

"—they hardly were before—"

"—you control all of your selves, and you can mentally or even physically project yourself into whatever reality you wish. I won't even begin to explain the physics of that. It takes excessive concentration, however, and you may temporarily lose your other connections. Your quixotic little journey was a mixture of both—and probably the reason you haven't connected with your various memories yet."

I don't correct him on that point. "Which reality are we in now?"

"Whichever you wish." Mycroft traces a finger around the rim of his glass. "However, for my purposes we are in Limbo. A mental construct, if you will. You and I are minds—what is it you always say about 'transport'?—thus, we communicate mind to mind. I determined an intervention was necessary. It recently came my attention that your adventures from plane to plane could be better termed…"

My shoulders slump.

"…unimpeded insanity?"

"You're not used to this," returns Mycroft, unexpectedly patient. "Your awareness has still not developed fully. Therefore your mental grasp of each plane was weak enough to dissipate whenever you lost consciousness, resulting in your little rampage through spacetime."

"Through my various lives, yes. How much do they vary?" I add as an afterthought, to fortify myself against the awarenesses that are already leaking past the mental blockade into my mind. It's strange, conversing in this straightforward way, while my thoughts spin off in a million different directions. Not so dissimilar from my old brain, the observations and reasoning that were impossible to shut off, but a thousand times more so…and more controlled. Like strolling through a tangled web of strings without touching any of them, like standing in a room made of mirrors. Mental construct, intriguing; calculate possible methods of inducing physical displacement at light speed; tell John not to open the oven, there's an experiment…

Mycroft smiles. "That depends entirely on you. I myself maintain a variety of social experiments, though in all my lives I prefer to project a certain amount of influence on world events."

So that's who we have to blame. Unsurprising. "I'm not your only project? How disappointing."

"I'll leave you to your own experiments, Sherlock. Unless you have any other questions?"

"None at this time." I bend forward to pick up the instrument and bow that certainly weren't at my feet five seconds ago. "Limbo, you say?"

Mycroft cocks an eyebrow, not smoothly enough to conceal his irritation. "You're getting the hang of this rather quickly."

I tuck the violin under my chin and raise the bow with a flourish. "We really must do this again sometime, brother mine."

Mycroft retrieves his umbrella and takes his cue to leave.

I live this way now. Just like someone I used to know.

Not a man at all, something whispers. A spider at the center of a web with a thousand strings...

There are older whispers, too.

Psychopath.

Freak.

Machine.

But it is easy to block them out when there are a hundred thousand other voices in my ear all the time, vying for attention. Lestrade's, Sally's, Molly's, Mycroft's, tinged with just a bit too much knowing…And John's. Always John's.

And lilting above it all the wavering salvation of the violin, still appreciated but no longer a necessity because omniscience, once an acutely painful pleasure, has blurred and spread across…

Across what?

Then there are scents. Asphalt and alcohol and perfume and people. Rain blowing down from the north on an icy wind, curls of cappuccino and earl grey rising from Styrofoam cups. Moss and gunpowder and smoke drifting from a blasted crater. And blood. I can see the iron, smell the red.

Sights. A thousand suspects, a thousand victims, a thousand clues. The twine on my wall traces a never ending back and forth, back and forth, newsprint to photo to Underground map and I could've sworn I avoided the bloody Death Frisbee this time around…

And finally an endless clamor in a ceaseless stream, into the flat, out again, oscillation on the doorstep, maximum pressure until the last second, footsteps pounding, creaking upwards, drugs bust and most people knock, but I suppose you aren't most…

People. Altered, boring, two-dimensional. Such a travesty they can't see themselves as they are, Jim's right about that, at least, a vaudeville of affectation and half-baked intentions, and you can just see how each and every one of them dances…

"Sherlock?"

Ignore. Not because you have to, anymore, but because you can, and that's always more amusing, to read rising exasperation like a heat tremor in the air…

John snaps the laptop shut, catching the tips of my fingers, his face hovering uncomfortably close to mine. Without effort I can look into his eyes and read his thoughts and somehow there is less there than ever.

"Yes, John?" is a river's current, ten hundred thousand identical molecules repeating, jumbled, running together in my mind until it whispers away, meaningless, over a faraway waterfall. That meant something once, and I am taking note of it, because that's what people do, isn't it, leave a note, when John drops into the spindly wooden chair on the other side of the scorched little table and leans in, catching my eye and refusing to let go.

"Just tell me one thing, Sherlock, just so I know. Am I still filling in for your skull?"

What? Oh, yes, marvelous job, lost without my blogger. Written up the matchbox case, then, let's see it, don't mention the unsolved ones…

I used to love dancing.

This isn't right. I know that. Don't know why, maybe, and in a quiet moment I'm just setting myself to puzzle it out when distraction appears in the reluctant form of Sally Donovan, looking none too pleased with her function as messenger, and the thought sifts out of my brain quicker than anything. Because it can wait, can't it, when she's brought me a quadruple murder, locked room, two sticks of dynamite but neither of them lit, and every victim's hair a curious shade of ginger…

And when that case settles in a surge of adrenaline and well-placed bullets, another follows hard on its heels—a thousand, actually, every riddle in London clamoring for my personal attention, and there's no point in bothering to be linear about it, no point taking time to contemplate a mislaid thought even if I cared to reach out and recapture it.

The raincoat is yellow but stained a moldering pine-green, hood half-torn and bolted to the post. The screw shows signs of corrosion, but the wood is new, unweathered, and triumph stabs me to the core because this one's cleverer than most but not cleverer than me.

A few quick words to John and we're off because we have to get to Willoughby Park before she does, never mind finding the body, never mind that Lestrade is left growling obscenities at the air behind us…

Footsteps pounding pavement, a tussle at the edge of the pond, where all the final clues slide into place just as the macabre toll of a single gunshot rings out—

And then the familiar shouts, flashing lights and slamming of car doors, the old pounding cacophony that would have once spelled pure pain but can't touch me now, and if this isn't right then it must be a bloody sight better.

Things quiet again, and one day tracing the garish wallpaper of 221B with a 'client's' left-behind saber it comes to me that there was more.

Wasn't there?

Yes. No. I can't remember.

No doubt the thought would disappear again, dissipate, filter back into the rest of my vast conscious if that realization didn't lodge, stinging.

Can't remember?

Near-limitless processor speed and space. You would bloody well think I could remember anything, at this point. Remember, at least, all my fragmented adventures across the space-time continuum. Remember the thousand, million, billion constant streams of information and I do, of course I do, remember The Woman and Bart's lab and Mike Stamford and the obscure fact that my mortal enemy—somehow it's hilarious that he is mortal, for all his menace— favors Westwood suits and ties with little skulls all over them and

Just so I know, am I still filling in for your skull?

A slight stutter in the smooth-flowing river of information, and somewhere I falter for a split second in explaining something to Lestrade. [Yes, of course, fine, Geoff, now can I direct your attention to the shade of that curiously fresh-painted hallway…]

Of all the stupid, disjointed, out-of-place thoughts…

Suddenly I'm conscious that I don't remember pain.

"John?"

Another case closed—not happily, this time. There were children involved, and for John that's always worse—that I do remember, from weight of previous experience—and the usual ride home through London traffic is unusually muted. John is staring out the window, contemplating the stark reality of mortality, or some other such nonsense.

I could relieve him of that misconception in a heartbeat, had I not a question of my own forming on my lips.

"What does it feel like, getting shot?"

He turns to me, the flickering comprehension in his eyes choked almost immediately by a degree of disbelief that leaves me wondering how long it's been since I've asked him anything vaguely personal. There's no use, John, I want to tell him, don't you know I can see it all already? Then why…is it better to ask anyway? Has the omission hurt him? Who knows how mortals think?

And I can't see everything, can I? Some things still slip through the cracks. Or else I wouldn't need to ask this question. But the need is there, impatience burning on the tip of my tongue, and when the disbelief fades away John pulls out of his contemplative silence and answers.

"It feels like the world is imploding, and you're the center of it. It feels like every cell, every nerve in your body wants to wrench itself apart, but can't, you're stuck there, to the core of the pain, and reduced to…to a raw wound pouring fire, and everything goes hot and cold and then silent, and it goes on and on…"

John keeps talking. He talks until the cab reaches the corner of Baker Street and his voice wears itself raw, and the words don't stop until we reach the flat and I press a cup of tea into his hands to stem them.

John has too many words, I think.

It bothers me that I have none.

I have all the time in the world, but in the end the decision takes none at all.

The pain is the worst part. Splintering, he said.

Time doesn't mean much, anymore. Shouldn't mean anything, in fact. I can go back and forth as I please, but relearning pain is a whole new dimension. Only way to keep a million sets of lungs breathing is to contain it all, push it into the new and vaguely familiar room built for the purpose, the one place to hold to when the now-infinite mind palace falls to pieces again. The white-hot splintering makes you human, the one thing I never wanted to be. I'd forgotten.

The pain rises and falls, like everything else. On and on, John said. Wrenching you apart, John said. As though any of this could be said, as though it isn't purified agony, raw and scraping and transcending every meaning in the world, because there are mysteries and then there's this, the difference is you can't express pain, I always wondered why screams have no words…

[Hurtle down the steps, stop, slam the door, breathe, you always feel it, Sherlock, but you don't have to…

Yes you do. You have to learn to fear it.]

Fear has a hundred thousand echoes, pulsing louder in my ears all the time, drowning out everything. There are worlds out there, infinite, I'd forgotten. How strange.

Time passes. It, too, rises and falls in the tiny buried room [the only reality now, only thing holding me together, keeping me from splintering at less reparable seams].

In the end [there is one, you know, not the End you want but better, perhaps, the impossible hope of Nothing fading into a tentative Something] I don't know how many eternities have passed before it comes to me, lying with my face pressed into the floor, that it's bearable again. The thought drifts strange and uncertain and alien, tugging inexorably toward the idea that it is in fact possible to get up, move, live again…

…and the endless stretch of staircase leads me here, back to the doorstep where it all began, in a dimension I have no business being alive.

No matter. I owe it to him to break the rules one more time.

He lets me back in without a word.

"Wondered if you were coming back. I half-thought you were a—"

The words trail off, but there is something different in the exhausted monotone of before. Fear—I recognize it after a split second; nothing is nameless anymore. Fear, but not the fear of hallucination that I know so well, the threat of a mind under duress. No, this is a dread I know even better. John has something to lose again.

For a moment the realization renders me speechless. After all this time?

And abruptly makes things worse. Because whatever the last weeks have been for a million desperate Johns in a million different worlds, I made a silent promise to this one. A vow to fulfill even if it costs everything.

But John stands silently aside, and there's no sense in mentioning what would only be further mockery to his mind. Stagger upstairs again, disregarding the aches of this body—strange, almost incomplete, to have one body again. In the back of my mind I'm aware of the others, breathing simultaneously. It's not time to cut them loose, not yet, but everything I have is here, now.

Briefly overcome by this last stretch of stairs, I collapse onto the sofa. For some reason John registers no surprise at this.

When he speaks again it is late the next morning. Not taking shifts at the surgery, then, I think, eyeing the permanent tremor in his hand. Yet the sleek laptop and the new bookshelves lining the walls proclaim that he is well-off. I don't bother to ask. 221 Baker Street is all Mrs. Hudson had, and John hasn't let any of the other flats, so either Mycroft is looking out for him, or someone wealthy must've died and left him—

Ah. Right.

"Where did you go?"

Not a question that should make a consulting sociopath erupt into convulsive and highly painful laughter, you would think, but really, John, as though you weren't there…

John raises an eyebrow. Beyond concern, it seems. Anger has faded along with fear, and now he is simply resigned, as though he ought to have seen this coming, known all along. You did know, remember John? Probably most likely definitely mad. And you thought I never read the blog.

Explaining away the Holmes brand of lunacy has always threatened to be a neverending process. Now more than ever, even though—especially though—there's finally a proper explanation. At this point it hardly matters anyway.

"Everywhere."

John is already turning away when the word emerges. Why did I say that?

"Went to see Mycroft," I amend, muffled into the sofa cushion. Can't recall ever being quite so tired. John hesitates, eyes flicking toward the jacket slung carelessly over the couch. Odd, John always hung it up neatly, never used to do that.

I did, though.

Beside the point. He's contemplating retrieving his phone, texting Mycroft, as though all the proof he needs regarding my return isn't sprawled across his bloody sofa. In another half minute he'll decide he doesn't care and turn away.

There's something missing.

Actually there are a whole host of things missing, probably could fill a mind palace with—oh wait, I already have. At any rate this is home, Baker Street, if you learn to step around the gaps. From the quiet absence of my old set of beakers to the roaring abyss left by Mrs. Hudson.

I've missed John. (The last eternity of clamoring consciousness doesn't count; even now it's hard work to shut them out, to quiet them.)

The something missing turns up eventually. At the bottom of John's wardrobe, heaped beneath a stack of well-worn jumpers. The hunt itself took about ten minutes, once I roused myself to actually attempt it; a mystery worthy of Scotland Yard. John comes up behind.

"Lost something?"

Turn to face him. It's the first he's spoken all day.

"Yes, actually."

He looks away at that. I'm still sifting through possible translations when he mutters, "You and me both."

And once again I marvel at my brother's ability to be so impossibly right and wrong all at once, because not one of the consolidated IQ points of a million genii tell me what to say to that. I settle for gesturing vaguely at the floor. "May I…"

John shrugs. And in a half a minute the case is unburied, the instrument tuned and nestled in my hands, bow running over the strings with a light trill. Not human yet, far from it, but I'd forgotten how much I need this.

Half an hour later, John is still slumped at the edge of the army-green bedspread, head bowed, rubbing a thumb along a crease in his jeans. Lost in thought, as though he'd forgotten too. I lower the bow. "John…"

"Where have you been, Sherlock?" He raises his head, eyes boring into the dull tan of the opposite wall. "For real this time. Please."

Nothing in the world should induce the truth to spill out.

When the words die down, his face is something it has never been before. Unreadable.

I keep silent. The silent stretches, not the familiar comforting stillness, or the longer-lived, sprawling resignation to crawling shadows, but something else. Something that makes me want to slash the bow across the strings merely to have done with it.

"Okay," John finally says, and goes to bed.

John's face holds something new now. Still unreadable, but somehow I can see it, etched between the lines of aged and fresh pain.

That first night he sat, silently fingering the phone in his hand, wondering again whether to call an old number (deleted, unlisted but still remembered), as though Mycroft has ever been of any use in retrieving me from the occasionally treacherous depths of my mind.

In the end he decides against it. Decides, as I always wished they would, to let me live as I am.

I'm only shocked by how much it hurts.

"Dinner?"

It's almost funny how jarring it is, waking in the same place every day. Waking in one place every day. Heaven only knows what that bodes for all my other selves. I can still feel them breathing, at least, on the far edge of consciousness.

That it's late afternoon when I wake is far less unusual. John's face registers no surprise at all, just that same blankness.

We go to Angelo's. I cast half a glance at John, but the moment we step inside all becomes clear. Angelo isn't there.

John doesn't need any more convincing of my reality, it seems, so why—

He's taken my usual vantage point. For half a minute I think I understand—if I'm uncomfortable sitting with my back to the window it can't be much better for a retired soldier, seen it before but why did he never mention—

Oh.

John is staring out the window. Over my shoulder. Looking slightly lost.

The defining characteristic of a sociopath is lack of empathy, they say. Inability to understand events from another's point of view. What does it mean, then, if I've been through every looking glass myself, held every reflection in my own hands? What does it mean that John has never needed infinite lives to accomplish the same?

[Define 'intelligence'.]

The meal is a quiet one, the patrons and staff alike inattentive, which is its own sort of relief. No lights, no cameras, no squeals or comments about the bloody hat or requests for autographs.

Except, after nearly an hour, one.

"Dr. Watson?"

The girl is ten, perhaps eleven, and unfamiliar. Hardly within the ring of our usual acquaintances. How does she know John? The daughter of an old friend, perhaps, except—no, in that case he would insist on being called John. 'Doctor' is reserved for stiffer acquaintances, professional relationships. A patient, then. Pink scar tissue behind the neck corroborates this, very visible against a deep cappuccino skin tone, tucked away behind long, curling hair. Apparently acquired in a car crash, but six months healed, perhaps more—

And John—John looks up at the voice and actually smiles. The first genuine smile I've seen since my return.

"Melissa, hi, how are you?"

The girl's parents are seated in a booth halfway across the room, casting benevolent glances in our direction. John gives a wave and they return it, faces displaying pleasure at a friend's face and mild curiosity about his unknown acquaintance.

"Fine," is the shy response, and she places something on the table and pushes it in our direction. "Mum and Dad got me this for my birthday, and they said next time I saw you…if it's no trouble…"

John reaches automatically for the book, and then there's a moment where his shoulders stiffen, and he very pointedly does not look at me. By the time he looks back up at the little girl his face has relaxed again into a smile.

"Of course."

Pulls a pen from his back pocket—since when have you taken to carrying around writing implements, John, to say nothing of the little grey notebook I've seen but haven't managed to pickpocket yet—flips open to the title page, and signs with a slight flourish, the usual chaotic doctor's scrawl almost legible for once. After a moment's hesitation he slides the book and pen across the table to me.

It's then that I catch my first glimpse of the cover.

Pluck the pen from the table, hesitant, draw it through my fingertips—an involuntary glance upward at John, who nods in my direction.

A hundred thousand realities later, John Watson is still full of surprises.

And so I uncap the pen, flip open The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, and add my signature to the title page directly beneath the author's.

Melissa beams as she takes the book back, and then her eyes alight on the signatures. There's a flash of recognition and surprise before her eyes dart back up to meet mine. Her grin stretches wider, leaving me in slight shock—what sort of lies has John perpetrated in this chef d'oeuvre? But I'm left with little time to ponder before the girl scampers back to her parents, holding the cover wide to show them, and John and I stand to leave in perfect synchrony before disbelief can manifest on their faces. During the walk home the air is charged, but different than before.

"I suppose I should have seen this coming," I say finally, and John huffs out a laugh of surprise.

"I'm a bit shocked you didn't," he agrees, steady left hand moving to his jacket pocket to stroke the binding of the little grey notebook.

John Watson, author. Who would have thought. And as for the character receiving such dubious attentions…

It's…strange. A novel distraction, you might say. Keeping step with him, falling into our usual automatic rhythm, all that dilutes my flat astonishment is the feeble hope that he hasn't mangled my deductions as appallingly as he did in that blog. Which I may, occasionally, have read and commented on. For accuracy's sake.

Which leads me to wonder…

"Fiction or nonfiction?"

He looks up in surprise, and I clarify, "Not that there's a great deal of difference, in your case."

"Nonfiction," John says, with a suspiciously casual air that says he's still wondering himself. "You're not the first to ask. My only defense to the public is that there's no way I could have invented you. Some of them still think so. It's flattering, really."

Flattering. I bite back a twitching smile because John wrinkles his nose as an engine backfires, spewing exhaust, and the scene brings to mind another: gunshots, a drifting cloud of plaster from the wall, and another of John's infinite repertoire of priceless facial expressions.

Fiction or no, that useless blog-prescribing therapist of his must be over the moon. Or seriously alarmed.

The thought is humorous enough that I contemplate asking him, but thankfully what emerges instead is the harmless, "Afflicted your long-suffering public with any other projects, then?"

Well. Relatively harmless, I register only as the words leave my mouth. John doesn't care, though, just shoots a glance and a suppressed smile my way, and I don't know quite what to make of either.

"A few," he says nonchalantly, actually pulling the notebook from his pocket and raking a thumb across the pages as though to illustrate that he knows I've divined its use, and doesn't care in the slightest. Whatever the other changes, John's lack of crippling dependence on my opinion of his scribbles is refreshing, and I blame my next words on that fact.

"That's a bit…" I hesitate. "Good."

His shoe catches on a crack in the pavement and he stumbles, catching himself on a nearby bicycle stand. "Really?"

Plaster a scowl across my face for the sake of form. "It hardly needs saying that I reserve the right to alter any and all opinions after reading…"

But this apparently doesn't have the intended effect, because now John is staring at me, openly wearing a bemused grin. "You want to read my books?"

Blast. "Damage control, Watson, that's all it is."

But I'm smiling inside, and he knows it.

The book is not appalling, and I tell him so. John smiles his old wry smile, and there's a blessed moment of normalcy—or our version, which I'm told has never been particularly normal at all. For half a day I entertain the hope that it will last.

But the glow of our one substantial conversation is quick to fade.

The violin is the lone voice of 221 Baker Street. Sometimes it wavers on and on through the night, and I can do nothing to make it stop. Only John, tottering downstairs in the early morning armed with the weariness of his footsteps and an icepack to press against my aching fingertips, has that power.

He stopped saying anything a while ago. Not entirely, of course; he's not me, after all. He uses words as a matter of necessity; a grudging "Good morning" to the teller at the bank, a few muttered curses to the chip-and-pin machine at Tesco's, scrawled platitudes on a 'Get Well' card to an old friend.

John even speaks to me on occasion.

But I have known for years that there is a great deal of difference between speaking and saying something. Now that his muse is returned, the author's words have dried up. Any day now he will be taking another locum job at the surgery, as he has admitted to doing when not engrossed in a literary project.

And I have still not gone back to Scotland Yard. It's clear enough now that that would be a mockery, a macabre travesty of what we once had. These days I find myself spending more and more time on the sofa, drowsing off, dreaming of the different realities that have begun to resurface…

Something within me pulls back at the thought. No. Not yet.

John waited for me, and now I am waiting for him.

It takes another week to realize that he has already arrived. Long before I did, in fact. In a fit of energetic boredom I have bowed to the inevitable and conducted a systematic search of the bookshelves. The yield is four handsome hardcover volumes, bound in leather and tucked away behind the old rows of battered spines. I have settled back to inspect them by the time John reenters the flat, grocery bags in hand, and pretend not to notice that he stops short at the lineup on the coffee table.

The American's Tale, Selecting a Ghost*…the contents are as varied as John himself, but between the pages lies no mention of medicine or military matters. For some reason The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes holds the only hint of his past.

John drops the bags on the kitchen tiles heavily enough to suggest a stormy mood, and my pulse quickens at the thought—better anything than the quiet, moldering indifference of the past weeks. His reaction, however, is neither. By the time I replace the fourth book on the coffee table he has settled at my side to watch.

"Why were these hidden away?"

He thinks this over. "Maybe I didn't want you to see them."

As though the extra inch of space between the shelf's wooden backing and its row of books wasn't blatantly obvious. I wait.

After a moment John sighs and picks the last book, rather romantically titled The Confession, out of the lineup, tracing a finger along the spine.

"I keep them out of sight," he says in a low tone, "so I can remember there are more waiting. It's hard to move on from a story, Sherlock. It's like…like a case with a lot of intricate details, and you want to know that each of them works out. But there's too much; it's not possible. So I can dwell on those, or I can keep writing."

He replaces the book on the table and raises his head, catching and holding my eye for the first time in days.

"But Sherlock..." John says slowly. "They're a part of me. All of them."

And in a burst of clarity I understand.

"You know."

"That you can't stay?" He half-smiles and looks away, letting out a long breath. "Yeah, I know."

"I can't, John. But I will. If that's what you want."

It doesn't matter that he doesn't believe me. John has never needed to understand something to know its depth.

"Why me?" He tries to ask it lightly, but the words trip, leaden, over his tongue. "Don't you have a hundred thousand others?"

Since that first pained silence it's the first reference he's made to my ill-considered explanation, my one dangerous foray into truth, and the question makes me draw back in surprise—and, perhaps, indignation. Incredible, as always, how dull people can be. How John, for all his intuition, is no exception.

"Yes," I say distinctly, carving each word out carefully. "And they're all you, John. That's the point."

John looks at me, and then away, and the sudden shudder of his shoulders tells me he understands.

And finally, it's time to go.

Splintering, my brother said. The image was that of crystalline shards littering the carpet, flashing light at wrong angles, distorting reality to an approximation of shadows against a cave wall. But this time there is no pain.

This time I'm going home.

Despite my customary disregard for Mycroft's warnings, the very sight of the place fills me with uncharacteristic dread.

It's been a long time. Too long. Six months, I had hoped at first. Six months that stretched into eight, then ten, a year, then two…

Serbia was the last link, and by the time it was taken care of, home seemed a fantasy, less a memory than a subconscious response to…the neatly embellished fictions on John's blog, perhaps. Vaguely I'm aware that the disconnect is nothing more than a psychological defense—detachment always works best for me, for some reason—but that doesn't make it any easier to move past. Hence the trepidation.

The restaurant itself is innocuous enough. Rather opulent in décor, of course, ridiculously high-end—that much is inevitable, if Mycroft is familiar with it—jangled, bubbling music setting the pace for bustling, tuxedoed waiters…

But in the end, it means nothing more than a place to reconvene with John Watson. Bart's lab, round two. Rebirth, you might say.

Into battle.

A tiny piece of my mind wonders, as I let my steps guide me inside, what John is doing in such a place—here to impress a girlfriend, I suppose; if left to his own devices he has always been more of one for takeout and evening telly—but all too quickly my attention is caught by a passing waiter, and suddenly a plan forms. Probably a bad idea, yes, but a way to see John, talk to him, analyze his wellbeing before the revelation, maybe even have something to laugh about afterwards—

Hits me suddenly, how much I miss his laugh.

And it's hardly a challenge; the work of seconds. Done it a thousand times these past two years. Glasses, menu, a touch of makeup. The art of disguise is hiding in plain sight.

Now—ah, there he is. Speaking of.

Seems in good overall health, happy enough, though the knot in his right shoelace could be taken to indicate— what is that on his face? Ah, yes, thank all the gods I don't believe in that Mycroft prepared me for that. This latest girlfriend really does have a lot to answer for.

I press a light finger to my lip, considering—suddenly my own drawn-on affair seems an unnecessary parody, further pushing the boundaries of bad idea, but honestly, the good doctor is asking for it.

Doesn't matter, nothing matters but that he's John and for some idiotic reason my heart is pounding irritatingly against my ribcage, ow, can practically feel it in every half-healed line of scar tissue. Irrelevant; carry through on the plan and move toward him, not before snatching a menu to hide behind.

And then I'm at his side, John's, and he's distracted or more obtuse than ever, because

Surprise!

and

Certainly endeavoring to, sir,

and all he can do is order a bloody bottle of champagne. Whisk back to the kitchen, then, hover long enough to let my annoyance simmer off, pluck up a bottle at random and zip back to the table and—

Ah, the offending girlfriend at last. Short blonde hair, green eyes, and a whole lot of other things I don't care to process right now, nurse, obviously met at work, size12tattooliar irrelevantpoliticalviews and somethingaboutcats; plenty of time for that later, assuming this one lasts. Immaterial. Only John matters now, and even John can't be obtuse enough not to realize when he's staring into the face of an old friend...

…and this time when I regain consciousness, John is still at my side, steaming mad and looking as though he's like nothing better than to unleash the rest of his bloodlust on my face, and a tentative bubble of hope rises in my chest because I'm still here, is it possible that this is the same…

There's a wordless nudge at my shoulder. The blonde, green-eyed woman—same woman, same restaurant, same night—is handing over a stack of napkins and pressing a hand over a vaguely familiar smile, and…

I smile back.

A/N: What did you think of this mad literary endeavor? Please leave a review! Oh, and congratulations if you made it to the end...

*All of John's book titles are taken from stories written by ACD