Hello, all! Sorry it's been such a long time. Real life has been pretty hectic recently, and I only have internet capabilities while I'm at work. My 30 Shades of Sherlock project is currently on hiatus until I'm done with my new project Standing Still. As you may have figured, this is my NaNoWriMo project for 2014. While my posting will be sporatic at best, I'll do my best to have the first installment of my Standing Still series finished by the end of November. That being said, these chapters are generally unedited, non-beta'd, and definitely not brit-picked. The revision process will commence starting in December, and hopefully a better product will make its way out sometime in the spring. Sorry for the lengthy AN, dear readers. Now, without further ado, I present the first chapter of Standing Still!
John was always considered one of the lucky ones. At just seventeen, he had two years, seven months, and fourteen days left until he'd meet his Soulmate.
Soulmate. That word had been tossed around in everyday conversation for longer than John could remember. One of his first memories was watching wide-eyed as his mum asked the post-man about the little, green Clock embedded in his wrist, sparking a long conversation about Soulmates, and Destiny, and a whole lot of other words that hadn't made sense to five-year-old John. Blearily, he'd ended up dozing for an hour on the couch while his mum had invited the post-man in, served him tea and biscuits, and listened as he'd talked through all his nervous energy.
Now that he was older, John not only understood the words and phrases associated with Soulmates and Clocks, but he had also memorized his mother's speech. He knew, after countless conversations with strangers about it, that his mother's eyes would light up with joy whenever she saw a Clock that was nearing zero. He knew just how her mouth would pull into a wide smile, twenty years of laugh lines softly framing her grin. Closing his eyes, he could even hear the way she spoke each of her words as she'd ask, "Excited about your Countdown, yet?" Whomever she was talking to would splutter for a brief moment, go quiet for a heartbeat, and then shyly respond with a small smile and quiet words, slowly easing into a conversation as the minutes passed.
Lately, John had been lucky enough to steal a few moments here and there to talk about his own Countdown. Just last week, he'd come home from school, leaned against the kitchen counter, and told his mother about his homeroom teacher's Pairing while licking blackberry pie filling from his fingers. When he'd finished his story, his mum had laughed, her head falling back as flour-covered hands left streaks of white across her apron. "Not all Pairings are perfect, Johnny," she'd said, reaching out a finger to nudge the tip of his nose fondly. "But all that matters is that you've found your Soulmate. It's like the rest of the world ceases to exist." John had just smiled, wiped the flour from his nose, and retreated to his room to slog through a mountain of homework.
His professors seemed fond of giving their students hours upon hours of homework every night. If it wasn't a paper, it was a project or presentation. Sometimes, it was all three. Every afternoon when he'd returned home from school, John had locked himself in his room, sat down at the small, well-worn desk he'd gotten second hand from Harry, and had diligently worked his way through his assignments in half the time it took his classmates. What John called hard work and persistence, his classmates and professors called luck and intelligence. Whatever it was, it earned him high marks on all his midterms, praise from his peers, and scholarship pamphlets in the mail.
John was always considered one of the lucky ones, one of those special people who had their lives just fall into place for them without a lick of effort. He'd meet his Soulmate young, get married, and get a good education. Then a good job would plop itself in his lap, and he'd have a house with a white picket fence and two children to run around in the yard, all because he was lucky. Nobody ever imagined that John would have a different future, that his luck would run out.
Everything stopped on a Tuesday. It was a bright, sunny day complete with singing birds, and a gentle breeze. It was the kind of day that people wrote poems and songs about, the kind of day that led to a promotion at work or good marks at school; the kind of day that nothing could go wrong on. John was sitting in the middle of his Biology class, scribbling down notes as his professor rattled on about the skeletal system when his left wrist began to itch. Frowning, John paused, scratched at the skin briefly around his Clock, and continued taking notes, doing his best to keep up with the lecture.
The itching didn't stop. As time progressed, the sensation intensified, and no matter how much he scratched at his skin, nothing seemed to soothe John's flesh. After five minutes, it felt as if his epidermis was crawling. The skin was red and puffy, irritated and swollen in a ridge around his Clock. In a moment of annoyance, John wondered if he could rip the embedded machine from his flesh. Closing his eyes, John could see it, the image burned vibrantly against the back of his eyelids.
He'd seen it happen before, once, when he was fifteen. A boy with a broken Clock two years his junior had carved the plastic and metal bit from his wrist with a razor blade during lunch. The boy's blood had gotten everywhere, flowing in thick rivulets from the small crater his Clock had left behind. His flesh was torn and ragged, the edges stained dark and flecked with spots of plastic and sinew. He'd smiled then, his eyes manic and gleeful as he'd dropped the Clock to blot the excess blood away. The school nurse rushed in and pulled him to a waiting ambulance, staring horrified as the small boy had laughed. A small skin graft had patched up the hole, and two days later, the boy was back in school and sitting his exams. The only evidence that anything had happened were the thick, white bandages wrapped around his left wrist. Nobody ever talked about James' blackened Clock, nor the little stunt he'd pulled.
Shaking his head to clear the memory from his mind, John absentmindedly wondered what it would be like to be Clockless, to never have to worry about finding his Soulmate, or getting his annual checkup, or the blasted itch that never seemed to go away. There would be no more crawling skin, no more people staring at his Clock in the supermarket, no more "Lucky John Watson". Sighing, John kept scratching lightly at his wrist. As much as he hated his Clock sometimes, the desire to meet his Soulmate always prevented him from acting on the gruesome fantasy.
The lecture continued, and every few words, John would stop his scribbling to scrape at his wrist. When he broke skin some ten minutes later, he'd looked at the red smears across his notes and the red caked under his fingernails and clenched his jaw. Taking a shaky breath, John shoved his bloody wrist under the table, picked up his pencil, and did his best to quell the mild glee that mixed with the mild horror at the sight of three, thin lines of reddened skin raised around his Clock.
Moments later, John's class was dismissed. He hurried into the bathroom and thoroughly washed the scrapes and the blood from his hands. With a groan, he patted his skin dry and angrily tossed the soiled paper towels away. While the itching had mostly gone away, his skin had now taken to burning. Taking a deep breath, he reminded himself that it was fine; it was all fine.
Three hours later, John had to admit that everything was not fine. The mild burning sensation that had been centered around his Clock had grown and spread, slowly trickling it's way up his arm into his torso, finally spreading down his legs to engulf his entire body in heat. His skin was on fire, little, yellow blisters bubbling up painfully up and down his flesh. In minutes, his forearm was covered, and John could feel every single mark as they burned and blistered across his body. Blinking blearily, John raised an unblemished hand to rub at his eyes. The room swam around him, his classmates reduced to nothing more than masses of floating, swirling, colors. Moments later, John felt the the fire creep into his lungs and groaned as his alveoli caught fire and the oxygen that had filled his lungs turned to smoke. His chest heaving for air, John faintly registered that he was swaying dangerously just before he hit the ground.
His eyes dropped to stare in disbelief at his Clock. The rest of the world ceased to exist, and John found himself easily ignoring the way his classmates huddled around him, ignoring the way his professor had screamed his name, ignoring everything except for the thick, black tar that oozed out in thick rivulets from behind his Clock. Closing his eyes, John recalled the image of James once more, watching as his face twisted and contorted with maniacal laughter, his bloody Clock clutched in his right hand. Slowly, the image faded, the blood and gore twisting into dark tendrils of wispy smoke.
John woke up a few hours later and was greeted by an overwhelming amount of white. Sighing, John ran a hand through his hair, grimacing as the throbbing in his head made it's presence known, and hauled himself from the cot he'd been laying on. Groaning as the world seemed to pitch and tilt around him, John leaned heavily against the wall and attempted to catch his breath. He knew, based on a few past experiences, that he was in the student medical center. Finally, when he felt steady enough, he started shuffling his way to the front, hoping to catch the attention of a passing attendant.
"Mr. Watson!" a startled nurse exclaimed as he tripped into a bucket. "You should be laying down!"
John held up a hand and reached for the bucket as a wave of nausea threatened to empty his stomach. "If I'm going to be miserable, I want to do it at home," he grumbled, making his way to slump in a chair by the door.
The nurse nodded and scurried around behind the clinic's desk, her clumsy hands knocking the phone off the hook. Fifteen minutes later, John was being loaded into his mother's car, a small rubbish bin situated between his knees.
"What happened, John?" his mother asked, looking at him in the rear-view mirror. "Perfect attendance for years, and suddenly a sick day out of nowhere. What's wrong?"
John looked out the window and tightened his grip on the rubbish bin, watching as his knuckles slowly turned white. "I don't know," he admitted after a moment, allowing his head to thunk loudly against the cool window. "One minute I was fine, and then the next, it felt like I was on fire."
His mother was silent for a few moments, chewing the inside of her cheek as she chose her words. "Johnny, did you take something?" she asked hesitantly, shuffling her hands on the steering wheel.
John shook his head slowly. "No. Nothing. It came out of nowhere," he replied. "All I know is that I don't want it to happen again."
His mother nodded once and exhaled loudly. Mercifully, the rest of the ride home was silent.
When the car finally stopped, John's mother helped him inside. Carefully, she guided him to his bedroom and tucked him in, making sure he had everything he needed before leaving him to sleep. She had managed to take a quick glance at her son's arm before she had left, and the sight of his burnt and blackened skin was enough to make her stomach heave. Never before had she ever seen anything like the markings on John's arm, nor had she heard a whisper about anything like it. A frown marring her gentle face, Susan Watson quietly left her son's room to put the kettle on. A cup of tea would help, she thought as her hands methodically readied her tea mug. A cup of tea always helped.