A/N: My first Sherlock fic, originally published on AO3 under my "suitesamba" pen name. This one is gen, and short. Post-R.
Before a Fall
It's bad enough when he sees him pass in the reflection of the mirror, movement in the corridor, from the corner of his eye. The breeze stirs the curtains, but even as he stills, listening through the quick beat of his heart, his flat is silent. Silent save the horns in the street and the heavy thrum of bass from the flat above.
Silent save the phantom footsteps, the whispered creak of aching floorboards. In this flat that is his flat, John's home, ghosts are free to roam.
It's not the first time he's seen him, sensed him.
He splashes water on his face and stares in the mirror.
His face is the same face, but he looks at himself through different eyes. He is not the same man he was.
He goes out for coffee. The barista has his back turned when he stumbles inside. The limp is back – he hasn't been sleeping well. He's been too focused on the aches and pains and infirmities that he'd forgotten. He glances up and his heart races, just for a moment, as he sees him again, sees him outlined in an impossible place and time as the man reaches up and places mugs, two in each hand, held by the wide handles, on the shelf above the counter.
The barista turns to take his order. His lip is pierced. He has the eye of Ra tattooed on his wrist.
It's bad enough to chase ghosts and shadows in coffee shops. It is infinitely worse to see him on the other side of the street, sidling in and out of the packed commuters, or on a crowded platform pushing off the Tube just as he has gotten on. Lurching forward, face pressed to the window, searching the throngs through darkened glass.
He has lost before. Lost friends before. Been lost before.
He has seen men die, felt them die beneath his fingers. Death is tangible. Permanent. A side-effect of life. He is stoic. He is always stoic. He has always moved on. Before.
He understands shadows and ghosts. But he has never before been haunted like this.
Faces and forms in the streets and shops and crowds of London. Glimpses of a familiar silhouette, always, always hurrying, always moving in the other direction.
He knows a therapist, a psychiatrist, who will explain this. Explain his inability to let go. Who will explain this motion away. The back of his head. The close brushes, the near misses, the almost-encounters.
When he wakes at night, stumbles to the loo, there is no sliver of light beneath the other door, no soft strain of music from the front room, no muted composition of tones from text messages written with agile fingers ghosting over virtual keys.
Life has slowed for him, inevitably, just as it has ground to a halt for Sherlock.
Sherlock's quick mind – his genius – no longer sets the pace for John. He no longer pivots on a moment when his mobile vibrates, speaking to it, to him, through nimble fingers that send messages out as virtual dance moves, pasos, cortes, boleos. The shadows that assault him in the streets are invading his mind now as well, dulling the edges, sleeping giants in corners and crevices only recently dusted and cleared and sharpened.
He has made only one attempt, with Mycroft staring at him from across the table, to pull himself together and move on. Mycroft does not need – nor want – the detritus of his brother's life. He is not stone cold, though, and there is something in his eyes – pity, perhaps, regret for what might have been but could never have been, for brilliance and genius wasted even before the fall – something John finds reprehensible.
But Mycroft gives him space. And time. One month, he says. Another try, another essay, in another month.
He is not one to visit churchyards, to touch cold, still marble and remember warm skin and keen eyes and the high speed blurry hard to follow motion of a body that could not – quite – keep up with the mind that raced at Autobahn speed while maneouvering through London traffic. But he goes, drawn by the words and the feel of the stone, smooth, concrete, the only thing real in this altered reality that cannot be real.
Too late. It is all too late.
He stares at his mobile.
It vibrates on the table, sliding sideways three inches and trembling just on the edge. When it vibrates again, he watches it with vague disinterest, watches it lose its precarious footing, then tip off the edge of the table onto the carpet. Bounce once. Rest, face up, at his feet.
It doesn't vibrate again.
He considers stepping on it. It is a beetle, upended, legs scrambling in air, trying to right itself. An immobile mobile. He laughs. He does not like the harsh sound in the silent tomb of his mourning.
But he picks it up. Habit, not hope.
A text message.
He doesn't know the number.
Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall.
He stares at the message until the screen fades to black.
He drops the mobile onto the table.
It's Mycroft, surely. Quoting scripture. Mycroft with access to a hundred mobile phones, a thousand identities.
He stares vacantly out the window, through the buildings across the block, at the clouds behind the buildings and the blue sky behind the clouds.
His leg twitches.
When his mobile vibrates again, he ignores it. It shudders across the table, but gives up, out of steam, before it reaches the edge.
It is still there when he leaves the flat.
It drums on the table a minute later, creeping slowly across the surface until it hovers on the edge, precariously balanced on the precipice, then dips, tumbles.
And falls.