A/N: This is the long-awaited sequel to Murderous Imprint. It's been a wild and busy year, and I'm grateful y'all have been so patient! If you haven't read Murderous Imprint yet (or if you've forgotten most of it), you'll want to do that first. This story picks up almost 6 months after the events of the first story. I dedicate it to all my readers: you have been so enormously enthusiastic and supportive and encouraging. I had no idea that writing could be such a fun and rewarding thing, and you all remind me of why it's worth the time and the energy to keep doing it. Thank you so much for following along.
ScienceofObsession and Snogandagrope are joining me again as my betas-extraordinaire, and all the tight plot-points and streamlined writing you may attribute to their skill and dedication. I'll try to update no later than once every two weeks, and hopefully more frequently than that. We shall see.
I have already been given art for this story! Kayjaykayme and Stitchy have done some fabulous things, and you can find them on the AO3 site for this story or on my Tumblr account. The one for this first chapter is by Kayjaykayme, so y'all should go shower her with lovely compliments when you've seen it.
Chapter 1: The Wait
The egg is enormous, fully a meter from tip to tip, crowding the bed where it lies. It is situated in a place of honor, placed carefully in a rather ancient, awful puce afghan nest, hemmed in by pillows. Some days, it seems to John to emanate a slight air of entitlement which whimsically reminds him of Sherlock. The light of the February morning outside is gray and cold, but the egg looks lusciously warm, basking under two heat lamps, with a space heater humming from the floor. Its shell is rigid, lightly textured, mottled in greys, from deep charcoal to dove, and speckled and swirled with highlights of aubergine.
John usually sits beside it, curled against his own pillow, tea steaming on the night table next to him. The lounge has lost its appeal in favor of the bedroom, and if it weren't for Mrs. Hudson stopping by occasionally to dust, it would probably have the musty air of a room long abandoned. He keeps a small speaker in the egg-nest, and hooks it up to the music he has stored on his phone (primarily classical, featuring the violin), and the safe den of their bedroom is warm and soothing. A welcoming environment for Sherlock to hatch into, when the time comes.
One hand taps a well-thumbed notebook titled Incubation Procedures for Optimum Hatchability, and the other rests on the egg. He carried it up from the basement almost two weeks ago, and cares for it assiduously every day. He has just finished the first round of daily rotations, has misted the shell with warm water to keep it at the proper humidity.
Several times a day, John itches to ask Mrs. Hudson what she knows. After all, she is the one who sent him downstairs on that fateful, beautiful, terrifying day. And she had done the same with Sherlock, fourteen months earlier, when he had discovered John's egg, warm and alive in the basement. Surely she knows something.
His wary hints are either too subtle, or Mrs. Hudson is not going to answer him regardless. He mentally shrugs and carries on, babying the egg, rearranging heating lamps, recording all the data he can on the unused pages of Sherlock's Incubation notebook.
The timing for this go-round is a bit off, and so does not completely parallel the previous hatching experience. John had hatched almost exactly four months after his death; Sherlock had incubated John's egg for a bit more than three months. Sherlock had died five months ago already, and John has cared for the egg for only 13 days. Had it sat in the basement flat for weeks, possibly months before John found it? He cannot know for sure, and it is frustrating not having comparable timelines for both eggs. John does not consider himself to be a scientist, preferring to leave the experimenting to Sherlock, and finds this open-ended uncertainty to be both baffling and discouraging.
John is generally infused with a sense of cautious optimism, a wary joy and sharp-edged hope. How can the egg be anything but Sherlock? The timing, the coloring, the very fact that he himself had hatched, brought up from the very same basement after his own death; these are all reassuring facts. There is a faint tug, behind his breastbone, brand new and as ephemeral as the wall of a soap bubble. It reminds him of Sherlock, gently echoes the flavor of the imprinting bond they had shared.
And yet.
It is, after all, a huge leap of faith that the egg will produce Sherlock. That it will produce any human. And if it does… what are the odds that it will be the Sherlock that he knew? Everything he has done for the past two weeks is based on no more than a hope and a prayer. As much as his life had crashed to pieces in those stark, terrible months following Sherlock's fall, it had the potential to do so all over again, depending on what, if anything, breaks through the fragile calcium of the shell.
Tonight he is meeting Greg Lestrade, with whom he had become friends over the eight months that Sherlock and he had consulted with the Met... before Sherlock plummeted to his death. He dreads it. He doesn't want to sit in a pub, raising a glass to Sherlock's memory when he hopes sincerely that Sherlock is right here in the flat. He doesn't want to hold his tongue, when the need to confide is clawing at his seams. He doesn't want to maunder over Why did he jump? as they drink a pint.
Why did he jump, indeed? They'd found the body of Moriarty, dead of a clearly self-inflicted gunshot-wound on the roof. Why did he jump? Why did he call John? Was he hoping John would catch him? Because if that was Sherlock's plan, if John flying up to meet Sherlock halfway down the walls of St. Barts was his plan, than that day embodies the most traumatic, epic failure of John's life.
Usually John can keep such thoughts at bay. But there are days when they creep upon him, his bad days, when he is blindsided by doubt and despair.
As he gets ready to go to the pub, he shaves with deliberately quick, determined strokes, trying to infuse his body with enthusiasm and optimism and from there hoping it will permeate his mind. Heavy circles beneath tired eyes inform him that it isn't likely to work tonight. He puts on a cheerful red jumper nonetheless. He doesn't want Greg to worry too much about him. Greg has a rather paternal nature and has kept a concerned eye on him after Sherlock's harrowing fall. John thinks Greg might be concerned that he'll jump himself, or do something equally rash and fatal. John does not like to dwell on the fact that during those first months, before he found the egg, Greg's foreboding may have been more accurate than not.
The visit at the pub goes about as well as John had glumly predicted. Greg is sympathetic, supportive and as irritating as a burr. No matter what Greg says, whether it is eulogizing Sherlock or an enthusiastic recap of Manchester's latest game, John's wretched internal desire is to violently sweep the pitcher and glasses off the table and scream, I don't believe that Sherlock is dead!
He cuts the night short abruptly, and Greg says goodnight in a puzzled, worried way. John stops on the way home to pick up a fifth of scotch and drinks half of it, sitting drearily at the foot of the bed, maudlin and frightened of the uncertainties which face him.
When he finally stands up, it is nearing midnight, and John staggers sharply as the alcohol suddenly hits him. Turning to alcohol in these times is a sick, needy, dangerous thing to do, but John is not always as strong as he would like to be. It is as if his hope needs watering, from time to time.
He stumbles to the kitchen and pours the last of the scotch down the sink, disgusted with himself and aching with loneliness. His left eyelid keeps twitching, it is utterly annoying, and his hand shakes a bit as he chucks the drained bottle into the bin. The kitchen reeks of the stale smell of this morning's burned toast, and John's stomach churns in protest. He snaps his wings out and begins a clumsy flapping, thinking to disperse the odor. Great gusts of air thunder in the small room and massive wings catch on the table and chairs, knocking a mug off the counter with a crash; paper napkins accumulated from too many nights of takeaway begin to swirl like a localized snowstorm.
John grimaces at his disarrayed feathers when he is done. What a stupid thing to do: there is no space in the kitchen for this sort of thing. He has not fully extended his wings since Sherlock… died. Doing so would only make him sad, now that there is no admiring partner to croon over their beauty; no one to stroke through his feathers; to teasingly ruffle through down and lesser coverts. No one remains to blow hot breath against the skin underneath, until John is sensitized and heady with it.
Now his primaries are bent, and he thinks one swept through the butter. Ugh.
He washes his hands because they smell like liquor and walks, overly-careful, to the loo to brush his teeth. His wings are held close to his body, hunched up around his ears, and the tips drag along the carpet. He's drunk and ashamed of himself; not angry, but hollow. And so lonely it hurts. It seems that there is a black hole in his chest, a sucking chasm carved out around a gentle thrumming strand. The strand connects him to Sherlock, he is sure of it. It seems as if it has been growing stronger over the scant weeks he has cared for the egg, but it is so fragile, an evanescent echo of the bond they used to share.
It is such a precarious, breakable thing, swallowed in the darkness. John is terrified, almost daily, that he could be wrong. That he may simply be hallucinating hope for himself. Because... Who knows, really? Who knows what is in the egg? Just because its patterned colors make him think of Sherlock in a suit, the bright flashes of aubergine against the myriad shades of gray mottling the shell, that does not reliably indicate that it is Sherlock in the egg.
And even the days where he's comfortable, the days when he's confident in the warm hum of the gossamer strand stretching between the egg and himself, he is still afraid. His heart tells him it is Sherlock in there. But who is to say what he will be like when he hatches? What if the fall damaged him? Severe head trauma such as that which killed Sherlock would surely have led to brain damage if he had survived. Will he hatch with that? John cannot help but remember the phantom pain from his wounds in Afghanistan which plagued him between the sudden, shocking loss of Sherlock's death and the moment he found the egg in the basement apartment. Extrapolating from that, the injuries that death dealt could indeed affect Sherlock in some way.
What if Sherlock hatches, but he is no longer the Sherlock that John knew? What if his brilliance is gone, his quirky affection, his irrepressible vivacity? What if he is no longer characterized by the voracious appetite with which he devours the world, seeking to uncover and interpret pure information, to weave together what everyone else sees as disparate? What if he… has no connection to John anymore?
He swings towards the bedroom, and the flat swings with him, sickeningly detached; he has to freeze momentarily for it to settle back into the normal arrangement of walls and floor, horizontal meeting vertical at customary right angles. Feathers brush the hallway walls as he automatically uses his wings to correct his balance.
He shuts the bedroom door behind him and locks it tight. He turns on the bedside lamp, adding gentle golden light to the more clinical glare of the heat lamps. The egg is a massive thing, nested on Sherlock's side of the bed. He has got blankets beside it, acting as a barrier to it pitching off the edge, and there are several more on the floor, just in case they're needed to soften a fall.
John winces at the thought of another fall, and rapidly blinks against the image of a pale face, dulled eyes, the shocking brush strokes of red and the shattering pain in his chest.
He pulls his wings in tight, crawls up to his own pillow and lounges on his side, head propped on a fist. He curls towards the egg in a pose so familiar to him after the past couple of weeks that he no longer even thinks about it. He touches his head to the warm shell, presses his face to it, rolling slightly to achieve contact: forehead, nose, mouth, chin. His upper hand reaches out, tracing a swirl of gray, and he speaks with his lips moving on the pitted surface of the egg. "I miss you," he says, and his voice is broken and low and wheezy with anguish. "Sherlock. I miss you so much. I need you to-. I wish you could-. I wish I knew for sure..."
He runs his hand across the long length of the egg, reaches the rounded end near his knees and tugs the behemoth closer into the curve of his body. There is a flutter and a flurry behind him, and his uppermost wing stretches out, swoops delicately forward until it encloses John and the egg in a sheltered space. John fluffs his down and ripples his feathers. He's felt absurd doing this before. For god's sake, is he no more than a brooding hen? But brooding or no, it makes him feel better to cover the egg, to sweep it into the shelter of his wing, to keep it warm and safe.
He hugs the egg close. "Are you in there, Sherlock? Can you hear me?" He kisses the shell, cooler than human flesh, harder; a sad, unyielding substitute. He closes his eyes. Focuses on Sherlock as he saw him that final morning: dressed in a sleek, slim suit, dapper and confident and as oblivious of his exquisite beauty as he always has been. John presses a hand to the shell and pretends it is Sherlock's chest, that he is flicking open buttons, that the taut surface against his palm is hot, living skin.
He lays another kiss on the egg, begins to murmur things, wings trembling and settling in a rhythmic pattern. "When you come out, when you know who I am-. God I hope you know who I am. I hope you know who you are." He lets his lips trail wetly down the gentle curve, the soft interior flesh of his mouth damp against calcium that could almost, almost be a pale pectoral. His groin tightens as he slips his tongue out to taste. He ignores the slightly chalky flavor, imagining that it's salt and the unique scent of Sherlock: laundered cotton with that faint undertone of formaldehyde, making John oddly nostalgic about flash-patter deductions in the morgue of St. Barts. He always got uncomfortably close to an erection while witnessing the rapid flow of brilliant analysis from his flatmate. He presses his hand briefly against his cock, lips parted on a silent mewl.
He strokes the shell again, pressing the pads of his fingers in tight, until he can feel the ridges of his fingerprints, the pushback of callus skittering over the lustrous curve under his hand. How he longs for soft curls, the tickling sweep of eyelashes against his skin, the proud prominence of an angled cheekbone. He pulls the egg closer to his body, thinking of sharp scapulae, of the way his fingers could slide into the indents between ribs which would appear as Sherlock sighed or gasped.
The ache of missing Sherlock turns into a wanton reverie about the man. He lifts his knee, rests it against the top edge of the egg, giving his burgeoning erection room to grow. "I'm going to keep you naked when you finally hatch, Sherlock," he murmurs, forehead tightly pressed to the egg. "I haven't seen you in so long. I'm going to keep you naked and push you right back onto this bed. I want to see-" He rolls a bit, so he isn't crushing his other wing, and then slides up to his knees, kneels at the base of the egg, and lets his feathered appendages beat as they yearn to do. The bedroom has long since been cleared of the knickknacks and paraphernalia which would fall prey to the flapping in which he indulges during sex. Golden brown feathers are a flash over his shoulder, brushing the walls in his peripheral vision; but his focus is on the blurred chiaroscuro of the shell, and the alcohol fuels lust, burning hot and uninhibited in his veins.
His cock clamors its enthusiasm, and John is lost to his own heat. With one hand firmly on the egg, he opens his flies with the other, clumsily dragging down his pants until his erection springs free, bobbing in the air.
"Sherlock," he leans his weight forward a bit, thumb rubbing circles on the shell, other hand stroking himself without finesse, body beginning to flinch and shudder as he tugs at himself. He thinks of Sherlock curled inside the egg, staring at him with his disconcertingly light eyes, hair tousled, tangling around his ears, highlighting porcelain skin. He envisions the long, lean body contorted into a ball, strokes his hand down the shell until it rests over where Sherlock's arse might be: juicy, round, tempting.
His chest heaves, and the punishing jerks he applies to his cock morph into a fist that he can fuck, leaning his weight on the egg, rutting hard into his own hand and growling, wings protectively arched high over his back, wingtips shaped into a strong parabola so that they enfold both him and the egg, quivering.
"I want you under me, Sherlock. Want to flip you over. Need to- huh - open you up-" he can feel it racing along his nerves: the tension, the electricity. The fine hairs rise on his body; he feels the prickling of oversensitized skin, the raging, unstoppable heat. And he pretends; he dreams. The spot in his chest where he faintly feels Sherlock begins to ache and itch and grow warm. He grunts, lips chapped and parted, eyes slitted open only enough to keep the egg in his view: the charcoal, the purple, the sensual curve of its shape. His fist is hot, but he believes that inside Sherlock would be even hotter: an act he can only imagine, one they'd never gotten around to. "You need to- You need to belong to me- Ah-"
The alcohol in his system has slowed down his response, but is eventually overcome by desperation, by need and overwhelming sensation, by a fertile flight of fancy, by a corroborating tsunami in that place beneath his sternum-
And when he finally comes, jetting crass stripes of white across that enticing shell, the egg itself rocks. John can feel the pulse and throb of it under his restraining hand, and lazy satisfaction blooms throughout his chest.
He kneels there, back curled, wings flared and rippling, cock still hard in his hand, staring at the pattern of semen on the egg, at the cooling streaks of it across his fingers. He licks his lips, eyes heavy with repletion. Kicking the remainder of his self-respect to the kerb, he runs his hand through the mess, feeling it soak into the crevices of his skin, smearing it across the broad shell of Sherlock's egg until it is no more than a sticky, unseen layer. He flaps his wings one last time, licks the palm of his hand, bitter with his emissions and chalky from the shell, and has no room for shame, floating on the satiated, growing link between him and the egg. He smirks a bit at the buzzing sensation of the link, and smugly, ironically, ponders the scientific necessity of continuing to feed the nascent bond in such an… enjoyable… fashion.
The alcohol soon reasserts its effects, and the room spins around John again. He fumbles his pants and trousers up a bit, gives up on fastening the flies, and falls to his side next to the egg, careful of his wings, high on the smell of his own sex. "You belong to me," he whispers. He spreads the uppermost wing over the egg, umbrella-like, and lets it settle. He fluffs the bits of down that have been accumulating at the base of the egg; these smallest, softest of his molted feathers have been blown around by the flapping wings. He tucks them in a ring around the base, scooting blankets closer in, and then drops into a heavy, dreamless slumber, anguish released.