Title: East of Hercules
Summary: If John Watson is learning how to live, then Sherlock Holmes is learning how to die. They both learn how to survive adrift.
Genre: Gen/Angst
Rating: T
Word Count: 2,600
Spoilers: Post-Reichenbach
Notes: Idea sparked by a discussion of those pretty tree graphics on Tumblr, and spurred on by rereading Annie Dillard's "Sojourner." Parallels and references to her work will probably be obvious. Not britpicked, but many thanks to Julia and April for looking this over xo
East of Hercules
The mangrove trees are outliers. They are red and yellow and black. They are short, disorderly, tangled together; the perfect swamp trees. They can be found near the mouths of large rivers, where the deltas provide enough sediment and mud to pack their roots together, a living community of wood and messy green. Life where there shouldn't be, allies - friends, even - against the odds. You take the best you can get.
If dying is an art, Sherlock considers himself a connoisseur. He tumbles from the top of Bart's Hospital; he plays possum at a hotel in Prague; in Belize he lowers his breathing, slows his pulse, and jumps when his assailants get so far as to start shoveling dirt over his head. He plants false trails and furthers rumors of his demise. None of them last, except the one that matters.
Bart's was his best piece. The others expire when the timer's up, a second or hour or occasionally aching weeks spent lying in wait, before the curtain's ripped away and sculpture starts moving. His one-hit wonder, the first genuine lie after a lifetime of proving truths, the only one they'll put his name by.
After each performance, he rises from the dead, a walking miracle, and gathers his things. He drifts away.
John is not bored. That'd be ridiculous, because who could be bored planning the funeral of his best friend, or packing up his flatmate's things for binning as he cleans up Sherlock's messes one last time – the only twit he knows that could possibly be so uncaringly subject to ennui standing at Sherlock Holmes's grave would be Sherlock Holmes himself.
Mycroft calls and calls until eventually he stops calling. Mrs Hudson sighs and fusses until even she retreats downstairs, leaves him to his thoughts without asking if he'd like to be anymore. John is a stranger to 221B each time he steps foot in again; he spends so much time out of the flat he eventually realizes he no longer lives there. He lives at work, or in the park, or in the graveyard, in the ground.
Sherlock was his best friend. For more than just the adventure. This was – he cared for more than the criminal-chasing and deductions and running across London like madmen. He's upset. Depressed, fine, maybe. He is not bored.
If he feels astray, like a lifeboat caught out at sea, shaken and impaired but still somehow keeping steadily above water, that's nobody's business but his own.
Mangroves are the first organic living islands. Sometimes, floods or hurricanes or tides or fate intervenes, and wrenches one away from the whole. They aren't concerned; they float, roots bundled at their base like a buoying lifevest. They can survive adrift.
Some drift far from the pack, suspended by a tendril, a single root that draws in and out. Others break away in one bold move and don't come back. But mangrove forests are adaptable: they may regrow, to fill in the lost area. Sometimes they regenerate so quickly it's hardly noticeable. Sometimes it leaves holes.
Oftentimes Sherlock thinks he's been trapped in the falling for months. He hit the ground running, only hasn't felt the impact yet. John will provide, if he returns. When. When he returns.
There's a hunt in Switzerland, in the mountains of the Bernese Highlands where he has lured Moriarty's right hand, who laughs as they exchange bullets and dodge words.
"You weren't supposed to die like this," Sebastian Moran confesses, "we set up that whole shindig in your honor for the occasion. This is just downright rude, considering." Moran's dark figure crouches over him, but Sherlock can barely see for all the blood caught in his eyes. There's a graze across his forehead and a hole in his arm. His gun dangles against the edge of the cliff, over the dizzying drop into the Reichenbach Falls; his right hand throbs from the blow that had sent the firearm spinning. He can barely hear over roars of the water, of the pain, over the ringing in his head.
"This spot is nice, though, innit? Jim told me about your little inside joke. Poetic and all."
It's all temporary. He's been cast out to do his duty, and when he's done, he'll return home. A ghost until then, forced to wander.
No, this was his choice. A proactive action, flung out into the space to bump and collide with other vagabonds. He chose this. John could have come. (No, he couldn't.) John would have been useful. (He couldn't.) John would have found it fun. (John. John.)
He is reminded of the falling when he's dragging Moran's body over the overhang three minutes later. He begins the trek back down the mountain.
He refuses to think of what happened at Bart's as an ending. John may believe what he will so long as he carries on living; for all his selfishness, Sherlock shall die enough for the both of them. He will hate every moment of it, but it'll have to do.
The sounds of the falling water doesn't leave, the rush no longer as loud but still caught in his ears. Echoes of the vertigo, reminding him to breathe.
On his birthday John had bought Sherlock a book on the solar system, for a laugh. On a caseless day Sherlock had skimmed the chapters, placed a few bookmarks on a dozen pages of particular interest that John could not uncover, and then given up and shoved it into the bookshelf, where it's gathered dust ever since. John doubts it's been touched in over a year. He isn't insulted; he's surprised Sherlock picked it up at all.
It's the third day of packing, half-filled boxes scattered across the floor and he now tips it forward and into his palm and flips it open, leafing through. Sherlock has scribbled in the margins – testing pens? – and crossed out five "heliocentric"s. Why? Not for his own amusement. Only John would get the joke.
John turns to a page bookmarked by a dirty napkin. The stain looks like coffee, ages old. Black, two sugars. He swallows.
It's a chapter on constellations. The napkin was wedged into the crease of the book, covering the picture of Hercules outlined against the stars. Sherlock has written, in black ink and quick, short strokes, the word OUT.
Ghosts don't leave clues. The suicide wasn't premeditated. There is no hidden meaning this time, no riddle or mystery to be puzzled together, no inside joke he is not getting. And John is a damn good doctor: he knows how to determine cause and time of death and study the shells he's given for meaning. For the first time since he's known him, Sherlock Holmes and his remains are speaking plainly - because what else is there left, really - and John is still lost and searching for answers, still doesn't understand.
John tosses the book in the 'rubbish' box. He doesn't know what it means, but then, he doesn't know what much means anymore.
The mangrove's root system could be a child's playground. The twists and turns are a self-sustaining maze of dependencies, push and pull, in and out with the water. It is so accustomed to surviving that others organisms come for assistance; sharks nose around the roots for hidden prey, herons flap around the branches. Provided enough water, the mangrove can gather the rest of what it needs, and if not, then it adapts. If it does not bring soil out to sea, it makes its own. It makes salt, survives in poisonous waters.
John picks up swimming. He buys a membership at a local gym's pool and strokes several laps thrice a week, until his limbs weigh him down and he coughs when he rises from the water. Sometimes he just floats, earplugs drowning out the echoing noise of the other patrons. He doesn't close his eyes, keeps them fixed on the ceiling.
He wanders around Hyde Park. He checks on Harry more than he wants to, and checks in with Ella less than he probably should. He meets up with Lestrade in pubs and talks to his mum a bit. He shuffles in between his roots and anchors there for an hour or day or several and does not feel like a satellite fallen out of orbit, or a soldier cast from another war again. He does not.
Six weeks after John had held Sherlock's cold palm, felt no pulse (he'd been handcuffed to that wrist hours ago, they'd held hands, god, Sherlock, god), he's at Sainsbury's picking out groceries for two again. Every time he catches himself and every time he continues on as though he hasn't. He finds himself picking out a carton of those sugar-coated pastries Sherlock liked to eat in lieu of breakfast, and an extra jug of milk that will inevitably spoil without a mad scientist around to grow bacteria cultures inside the carton. He uses the self-checkout without hassle. When he goes to pay, he finds he still has one of Sherlock's cards in his wallet. He stuffs it back behind the others.
He carries the groceries back to 221B to find the skull observing him from the mantle.
"I told Mycroft we should've put you in that coffin with him," John tells it suddenly, and he's surprised himself by sounding cross. "He vouched for your sentimental value, so the only reason why I'm not binning you is because I'm pretty sure he'd have you back on that shelf within twelve hours."
The skull doesn't respond. He'd hardly expected it to, of course, but looking at the dark sockets reminds him, as if in contrast, of Sherlock's pale eyes staring up at a sky he wasn't seeing, his hair matted with blood as it pooled on the pavement. The whites of his eyes, the pale skin against that soaked hair, the colorless bone –
He wants to smash it. He wants to smash everything of Sherlock's in the damn house.
Instead, John puts the groceries on the table carefully, where the bag handles stick up together, wrinkled from his grip. His arms ache from the walk and he's built up a bit of a sticky sweat in the summer heat. The Stradivarius is sitting across the room on the armrest in Sherlock's chair. It'd be so simple, the easiest thing in the world, one last screw you to the man he'd thought he'd known, to pick up the skull and shatter it against that damn smiley face stretched over the wallpaper, to plaster in the bullet holes and toss out the case notes and chemistry equipment, erase all the evidence of another man ever having stepped foot into this dump so he can stop fooling himself and it'll just be him, alone again, him and the empty space, and then –
The skull is still staring at him.
"He's gone," John says, and his voice cracks but he plows on, "he's gone and he's not coming back, so I hope you enjoy your new owner." He crosses the room, grabs both the instrument and the skull, and deposits them in the "rubbish" box on top of the book on outer space. He seals it up with two strips of duct tape, labels it DONATIONS in large blocked letters, and goes to put the groceries away.
Ten days later, he's donated the boxes to Oxfam, is getting used to an empty flat again, and the extra milk has indeed gone to waste and the pastries are hardening and he refuses to toss any of it, and the skull and violin greet him on the table when he arrives home from the clinic. John looks around and notices the books have been replaced, case files resumed their position next to the music stand, just a few messes short of normal. The hole in the shelf that had held the book on the solar system has been filled by the familiar spine.
They came back. The skull and violin and files and memories and lifeless things made their way back after death; he can come home to find it all waiting for him, everything he'd trade back in again and all the rest, everything except the man himself.
John doesn't read the note he can see lies waiting for him, paperweighted underneath the skull and addressed to him in the unmistakably lazy Holmesian scrawl. He breathes in, and out, and then heads into the kitchen to bin the wasted food. After he's done he settles in his armchair and stares into the fireplace, out the window, at anything he doesn't associate with Sherlock Holmes, which isn't much at all. When he runs out of options, he closes his eyes.
The mangrove islands are the captains of their own ships on self-directed courses; like bottles at sea; like comets. They gather debris and lose it again. It sounds freeing. It sounds lonely.
The earth goes around the sun. Ever since you laughed at me over it I haven't been able to delete it.
Sherlock doesn't let himself think about it, about not having had contact with people who haven't tried to kill him since Molly felt his pulse in the morgue; about not being lonely, or maybe just a little; about how John would think of him, keeping busy, look, he hasn't been bored in a whole two years.
You don't know a thing about the solar system? John had once asked. Wrong, Sherlock didn't say, I just don't care. He doesn't bother much with any other space, the astronomical or metaphysical or theoretical, but he does know some things. He has learned.
He doesn't know the particulars of faraway planets and dwarf stars and black holes, but at least he knows what he doesn't know, and what he knows most of all is that there is no point. The world spins, it creates day and night; it goes around the sun, it creates seasons; the moon twirls, it changes the tides; it still doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. People aren't planets or stars or galaxies. Their motives and deaths aren't tied in the constellations. They're tossed out onto the planet that's just as lost as they are, and they bump around and shiver or starve, burn or bleed to death – bodies break down eventually, the end's always the same. The difference lies in the places they settle into before it happens. Some even convince themselves they're home.
John liked to read out the horoscopes from the papers some mornings, to tease him. He's a Capricorn. Bits about pursuing your dreams or getting work done or running into foretold strangers that would redirect your future. Rubbish.
If Sherlock has learned anything from that book, from the fall, from John, it's that he's been aimless for a long while, at least since his first death, perhaps even from the beginning. The word sojourner comes from the Old Testament; he's not the first to figure the secret out. It reminds him of the American flag on the moon, the red white and blue: evidence of existence, the only color around for nobody to see. They're all careening out into the hollow vacuum, falling into the final stop on the line, some place east of Eden, and until then, the rest is all temporary. Transitory. Transport.
He is bogged down by his roots; the personal ties, however few, culture and customs and everything he has accumulated that has stuck to his person like tree wax. It sticks. God, no matter how hard he tries, it sticks.
Some mangrove trees form bunches before they break off. Some gather in packs and split from the whole, not by the tides or by nature – just because. Of their own volition, almost, like companions filling the empty spaces. A few tiny dots on an ocean horizon, and then one, and then they're gone. They float in the void, sunlit and partnered and lost.