Disclaimer: I own nothing. Belongs to BBC, Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffat. I'm just writing for fun, I mean no harm.
A/N: This chapter is short! Hopefully, other chapters will be longer - it's been 4 years since I've properly sat down to write. This was more for the fun of it and for the love of the show.
Chapter One
It wrenched in his gut, twisted like a knife and burnt as if on fire. It hurt, hurt more than he ever thought possible. He did it to protect his soul, protect his friends - to protect him.
It had been little over a week since he'd been hiding in the afternoon shadows of the graveyard, little over a week since his life had crashed down; been torn asunder. The game; the great game of everything - cases, breath, cravings, John, John, John - was gone, dispelled into extinction by his one simple act. A simple act to save, but which killed and defiled; brought a stillness to his life that knocked him breathless and made him wretch.
Sherlock had lost himself to wondering whether his life were ever to come back again. He knew he had to move forward - onwards to the dusk, but he had no clue, no deduction as the where the start began. The world was blurred at the edges, now. The thoughts in his head clashed, creating obtuse, unreasonable outcomes - his mind was a stranger, full of thoughts and feelings both new and long forgotten.
John had lost a friend, Sherlock; a partner - the other side of the coin. Together they had lost everything.
How had the pessimistic, grumpy, glowing, alive John Watson succeeding in being his undoing, when to the outside, it was the other way round?
Summer. Surrey. The sky is not speckled by plumes of vapour or cloud, it shines like crystal and seems almost as touchable. Mycroft is on a lounger on the rolling, lush lawn, reading aloud from a volume of Bronte.
"If all else perished, and he remained, I should still continue to be; and if all else remained, and he were annihilated, the universe would turn to a mighty stranger."
Sherlock does not turn, but he hears every word - he can recite the whole book, near enough, from that one summer alone. At the time, he runs about with his cutlass and eyepatch, reasoning and manipulating the trees and plants into surrender.
His brother looks on with heavy eyes, as if he can see what will be and knows he has no way of preventing it.
He's sat at the desk - not his; his is back in 221B, either undisturbed or empty or gone. His fingers drum restlessly against the soft, aged wood as he awaits the text. It's now been three months - three long, hard, empty months - since the graveyard, the show he witnessed of heartbreak (no, not a show, it was real; real for John), the falsified tombstone of granite and lies. Still empty and rattling in his own form, Sherlock had grown uneasy with the pace his life had whirred down to. It left time for thought; time for reflection and regret. Stillness and inactivity were his enemy - the demon by his side that whispered how he didn't deserve or shouldn't disturb.
The vibration through the surface numbed his hand, it took his mind a while to realise it was his phone. Shaking the haze from his eyes he reached, and he read.
An audible gulp in the silence of the basement room, he dared not feel hope. This was just the beginning, the starting line to a goal he didn't know he should be allowed to achieve.
The first act was over, the arc into revelation and the future were laid.
Text received 06.30 02/03/2012:
'It's time - the vultures have stilled.
Time to take the first steps from obscurity, little brother.'
