Characters: Sarah Sawyer, Destruction, and John Watson in a minor capacity
Rating: T

Word count:

Note: Written as a sort of companion to How Not to Talk to Strangers in Bars at Midnight, and to Nitrogen-Breathing Butterfly-Winged Balloon-Fish and Fog-Flavored Spiders, which was a fill for this prompt on the Sherlock kink meme: Mycroft or Lestrade meeting any of the Endless.

Disclaimer: The characters of Sherlock are not mine, neither is the story, nor are the characters from the original stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. I make no monetary profit from this. The same goes for Neil Gaiman's Sandman and all characters thereof. Also I have taken certain liberties regarding the setting: I based it on a real walk, Charming Creek, but I haven't been there yet so please forgive me if I grossly misrepresent or misinterpret, and please feel free to tell me how I can correct it.

Dancing in the Wreckage of All We Could Have Had

John had said he needed to get away from the city, and she didn't blame him. She was surprised though, when he had asked her, Sarah Sawyer, to come with him to New Zealand.

"What about Sherlock?" she asked, without thinking.

John pressed his lips together, frowned so that a little crease appeared between his eyebrows. "Yeah, well, maybe I need to get away from him too." Then he paused, reconsidering that. "Just for a while anyway."

"Well, I hear it's nice there." She had smiled at him, leaned towards him over the lunch they were sharing at the surgery. "I've always wanted to visit Middle Earth."

And John started to laugh with her then, in that almost-giggle of his, and everything had been fine.

That had been nearly three weeks ago: one week of planning, several hours of flight (three and a half of which had been a stop in Hong Kong that had Sarah reminiscing nervously about Chinese gangsters and giant crossbows and incredibly expensive hairpins), a week and a half crashing in John's friend's spare room while they did touristy things in and around Christchurch, and then a day of leisurely driving to a small bed-and-breakfast somewhere North of Westport.

Sarah had enjoyed herself so far - even when she had been screaming, loudly, while they were falling, that she would never, ever forgive John for talking her into bungee jumping, which she hadn't meant, not even at the time - and so had John, or at least he said so, and she believed him when he said it. He wasn't quite so jumpy anymore, reaching for the gun he wasn't carrying at every suspicious shadow or sound in the street, though he still made soft, uncomfortable noises when he slept.

It surprised her that there was no Sherlock Holmes. She would have been embarrassed to admit, out loud, that she was still expecting him to swoop in from somewhere even if they were half the world away, but there it was. From the way John kept mentioning him, though - just small things, like how nice it was to open a fridge with just food in it, but constantly - it sometimes felt like they'd brought the man along. (It had started at Heathrow - "He's staying in London," John said when he noticed how Sarah was looking over his shoulder like she was expecting someone else. "Says he has a case, but I think he's actually going to stay in and sulk." - and had gone on from there.) She told John that she didn't mind, when he caught himself and started to apologize for telling what might have been one tiny story too much, and she told herself that that was true.

And it was. She didn't mind when John started swearing - "Christ, hasn't he realized I'm out of the country!" - as he checked his email, with some difficulty, on his mobile phone while she made them coffee in the guest's lounge at the B&B. And she still didn't mind when he spent the evening trying to reach Sherlock on his mobile, at their flat, at St. Bart's, even at New Scotland Yard. But it was hard to keep on not minding when a call came for John on the house phone on the morning of their last day there, just before they left for their hike. They had been planning it ever since John had found out that the derelict railway that the walk followed had belonged to a pair of brothers named Watson, and that there had been a woman named Harriet involved somewhere. He had laughed at that, and said that they'd have to go and see it and take pictures for Harry, and that had been back in London.

She pressed her lips together, and watched John hover, holding their packed lunch, shifting his weight from one foot to the other, clearly torn, clearly inclined to favor one direction over the other but too nice, too decent to come out and say it properly.

"Take it," she said.

"Really?" Relief broke over his face and stayed there for a while before letting an apologetic look sneak in. "I won't be a minute."

"No, it's all right. Take your time." She took the food from him, slung the pack over her shoulder before he could protest. "It might be important. I'll go on ahead, okay?"

"But-"

"It's fine. I'll wait for you at your mill."

"What?"

"Watson's Mill, silly. With the picnic area. Go on, take your call." And she left, telling herself it was just that she didn't want to miss her last chance for an early-morning trek, as John continued to protest, weakly, and to promise that he'd catch up.

A little way down the track, Sarah started to admit that she might, just might be angry, not quite at John, but at having come second to Sherlock. Again. Further on, she began to figure that maybe she did mind being invited on holiday only to be talked at about a flatmate - a very interesting flatmate, true, who could be amusing (in a thank-God-I-don't-have-your-problem way) and even quite attractive (when he wasn't trying to make you leave), but girls didn't go on holiday to be talked at about flatmates. They just didn't. And much, much later, she realized that she'd been tramping along the old railway like the wooden boards had done her a deep personal wrong without paying proper attention to the scenery.

She slowed down, took a deep breath, and tried to take stock of what she'd missed. The walk was starting to get steeper, and she seemed to remember stalking past the giant ore bins, although she hadn't seen the story boards that were supposed to tell you about the coal-mining Watsons. Which, she supposed as she took a sip of water, was a good thing. She didn't know how keen on Watsons she was at the moment.

Or no. She was keen on Watsons. She did like John. He was a rare combination of sweet and good and bad-where-it-counted, and if their first date had been interrupted and then turned frankly traumatic, at least it hadn't been boring. It had been something of an eye-opener to be honest, and sometimes Sarah caught herself remembering and wondering what she'd have been like if she hadn't been a doctor. Or if she'd lived in a more violent time and place.

And she had just woolgathered her way through another section of the track. This was getting hopeless. If she was going to keep this up, she might as well go back and do her broody walking along the highway. So Sarah made herself stop thinking about Watsons and their flatmates and an alternate career as a bounty hunter or sword-wielding shield-maiden, and began to actually look around her. She looked up the sheer rock walls hung with vegetation she thought was tropical. She paid special attention to the signs that warned her of falling rocks. And she turned her torch on and off a couple of times to make sure it worked before heading into the tunnel.

There was supposed to be a bend in it - "a strange kink" was what it said on the website - and she went on, picking her way by torch light, waiting for it to happen. It was taking her longer than she expected. She wasn't worried, it was a man-made tunnel after all, not a cave system, small chance of her getting lost. Still, she couldn't quite shake the idea, and, when she could no longer see daylight, she began to wonder how long she could last, walking in the dark until her food ran out and the torch batteries died, and how long it would be till, silver-haired and blinking, she found the way out.

The thought made her hurry, which may have been why she slipped in a patch of damp, taking a real head-over-heels backwards tumble with her torch going in one direction and the rest of her in another. She had time, as she fell, to panic, because she couldn't break her fall, and if she cracked her head open on a rock or on the old tracks, God knew if they'd find her in time...

And before she was quite done falling, someone caught her with a huge hand on her elbow, and helped her upright.

"Careful, miss," he said. "You could hit your head here, nasty business. And I'd rather not deal with family at the moment, if it's all the same to you."

Sarah stammered her thanks as whoever-it-was went to get the torch for her. By the light of it, she could see he was a big man, massive really, built such as you'd be surprised to see outside of professional wrestling, with his long hair tied back in a ponytail. And when he handed the torch to her, with the beam considerately turned away from her face, she saw he had a beard too, probably red in proper lighting.

"It was no problem. And self-serving, to be honest. Like I said, I don't want to deal with family right now. Come on," he said in a rumbling voice, "I'll walk you out."

He picked something up from the floor of the tunnel - a long stick, with something tied to the end of it - and hefted it over his shoulder, took a few steps, paused, waited for Sarah to get her bearings and catch up. They had gone a little way before she realized that he didn't have a light on him, and that he must have been standing there in the dark for God knew how long before she came along.

"If you don't mind my asking," she said, hurrying to keep pace with him, "What were you doing back there?"
"Eh?" There was a beat, where Sarah wondered if she should repeat the question or just let the matter drop, before he answered, "I was looking at glow worms."

"Glow worms?"

"Glow worms. You can see them better if you turn your torch off. Sometimes they spell out the names of old gods, if you know how to read them."

"What, like constellations?" Sarah meant it to sound incredulous, but it didn't come out quite as skeptical as she'd intended.

"Something like that, but more straightforward. Anyway, miss, I was just passing through. A last visit before moving on. I used to worked here, back in the day."

"Oh. Were you a park ranger?"

"No."

"A tour guide, then?" She tucked a stray lock of hair behind her ear, a nervous gesture in the dark. "Or rescue services?"

"Neither. I was in mining. For a little while."

"But didn't they close the mines back in - was it the fifties?" Sarah bit her lip, figuring that it was possible, if there'd been child labor in the New Zealand mines. She'd seen a documentary once, with eight- or nine-year-olds doing heavy lifting in mines in Southeast Asia. It was possible. "You must be older than you look."

He laughed uproariously then, a merry laugh that echoed resoundingly in the tunnel. "That I am," he said, as if it was the best joke he'd heard in a while.

"You're - you're not a ghost or anything like that, are you?"

The man laughed again, or rather he kept on laughing because he hadn't really finished with the first round of it. "No, most definitely not. I think there might be one or two around here, but I'm not one of them."

"Just checking," she said, laughing with him. It had been a ridiculous thing to ask. She wasn't even superstitious. "I'm on holiday," she volunteered to make it a fair trade of information. "With my - I guess he's my boyfriend."

"I mean, he is," she continued. "But it feels like I've got him on loan, sometimes. A lot of the time, actually. He has this flatmate, you see. They solve mysteries together. John enjoys it more than he lets on, I think. I mean, he lets Sherlock drag him all over the place. It wouldn't be so bad if he did it when it was, you know, convenient. I can count the number of uninterrupted dates we've had on one hand. Once he even dragged John away from the surgery. From a patient. She was just asking for a prescription for Vaseline –her daughter couldn't use Vaseline on her lips in school if she didn't have a prescription for it, some silly rule – but still. I don't know why I put up with it." Sarah wrapped her arms around herself, careless of the torch and the need to light the way. They rounded the bend in the tunnel with the beam of light bouncing on the walls with her every step. She might have been saying too much, but she couldn't stop herself now.

"Well, I do. John's nice. He's more than nice. He's sweet. And he tells me about the adventures he and Sherlock have. Honestly, it makes me feel like I'm pressing my nose against a window and looking in at something I badly want but can't have, but that's the closest I'll get to them. To those adventures of theirs. It's not like I can have any of my own. I do too much for that – I can't just run off like they can. It's not nice –I get the feeling I'm butting in where I don't belong sometimes. You'd get it if you saw how they are together, those two. But I can look in through the window, at least. So I put up with it." Daylight happened sooner than Sarah expected. She looked up at her companion, and saw that his hair was red, a fiery shade of it. He looked something like a younger Brian Blessed, actually, if on a much larger scale, and now that she was seeing him properly, she was struck by the feeling that she ought to know him from somewhere. Like someone from the movies, or television, or the news. Maybe a rock star. Something like that.

"I'm sorry," she said, suddenly very keenly embarrassed. "I shouldn't have said all that. You must think I'm so silly."

"Not at all. I've heard much sillier. And much more harmful. Though, if I may say so, miss, if I've learned anything at all, it's that you can run off." The man looked intensely serious for a bit, eyes focused introspectively on something that wasn't quite in front of him. And then he smiled like the sun breaking through storm clouds. "That, and you should never ask a dog for its opinion of your art."

Sarah laughed. "I don't suppose a dog would know very much about art, being color blind and all."

"That's what I said. But I was still told I could've done better choosing my colors and that my perspective was shot to hell." He hefted the stick on his shoulder – there was a bundle tied at the end of it, wrapped in a red-and-white polka-dotted cloth like something out of a fairy tale. "Anyway, I'm going down to the waterfall. I'll take my leave of you, miss."

"Okay. I'm meeting John at the picnic area. Um. We're leaving tomorrow. It was nice meeting you." She watched him as he headed down the trail, remembering to shout 'thank you' before he was completely out of earshot. He half-turned and waved at her before disappearing into the scenery.

Sarah felt that there was something weighing on her mind after that, and it sat there uncomfortably, as she and John shared lunch – he told her that Sherlock had called to ask things about type 2 diabetes, for a case, of course – and as they walked back to the bed-and-breakfast, even when she asked him to turn off the torch so that they could see the glow worms. (There weren't many of them, and she had to confess that she was disappointed – the names of old gods, she thought, and found them wanting).

The thought stayed there, riding in the front of her brain all through their last night, and on the plane back to England, where it began to crystallize and take shape. She finally realized exactly what it was while they were trying and failing to hail a taxi to take them home.

"This isn't going to work," she said.

"I know. It's pointless. You can never get a cab when you really need one. Damned if I know how Sherlock does it."

"No, not the cab. I meant us. It's not going to work."

"What? Sarah—"

"It's not your fault. Well, maybe it is a little, but you can't help it." And she began to tell John Watson true things there on the London sidewalk, with the sun warm on her shoulders. He looked hurt when she started, but as she went on he began to look relieved and maybe even enlightened, though she thought that he probably didn't realize it at the time.

"Look," he said, when she stopped long enough for him to realize she was done. He paused himself, looked around as if searching for something to hold onto, moved his arm as if he meant to take her hand, but didn't. "I'm sorry. I really am. Can't we talk about this? Please?"

"No." She shook her head. "You've got nothing to be sorry for, really. I don't just mean New Zealand. Everything. I liked everything. I just had an epiphany of sorts, I guess." And she kissed John lightly on the lips, and smiled at him. "Bye."

She walked back into the airport with her backpack and her small wheeled suitcase. She was going to buy a ticket, destination anywhere, and she wasn't looking back.

Much, much later, John told Sherlock what had happened over a consoling draft of beer. (He had his suspicions about the beer and the timing of his flatmate's shopping – Sherlock, after all, hadn't said that he didn't know about Sarah, only that John hadn't told them about it – but he wasn't going to call him out on it because if he was right, it meant that Sherlock had displayed a rare amount of tact.)

"I don't get it," he said, putting the bottle down on the desk between them. "I don't mean the breaking up part, she explained that pretty thoroughly" – he hadn't told Sherlock exactly what she had said, and likely never would – "but after that. She sold her half of the surgery, and referred all her patients to other doctors, a lot of them to me, actually, and all that over the phone or over email. I haven't heard from or about her since."