3 linking 221B ficlets, using the nature of lines as a base.
This is an idea I've kind of been batting around my head for a while and I would, eventually, like to flesh it out a bit more. Hopefully this makes sense, 'specially since it was supposed to be only one fic and then kind of.. evolved...
(Also, Doctor Who reference!)
PARALLEL
John feels like he made a promise to meet again one day.
The clock ticks over to 4am and Sherlock is standing in front of the window, coaxing Vivaldi out of his violin, when he first feels it.
Steps.
Twelve of them, descending from the second floor of 221B.
A memory?
The music comes to an abrupt, screeching halt, and it's gone. He chastises himself for being so fanciful.
221B only has one floor.
John feels like he made a promise to meet again one day. The only problem is: he can't remember who he's supposed to be meeting.
Or when.
Or where, for that matter.
He writes it off as wishful thinking and forgets about him.
Yesterday, Sherlock took his tea with milk, two sugars.
Today he takes it black, no sugar, because it reminds him of a dream.
There's a knock on the door. It reverberates through the flat, a hollow thunk thunk that feels entirely out of place.
When John answers the door, he's met with a flash of tall-blue-black-grey that dissipates the second he blinks, revealing the mail man.
He takes the package with a thin smile, leans down to sign it, and when he looks up again, the man is staring over his shoulder.
"You alright, mate?"
The man shakes.
"There is something on your back."
PERPENDICULAR
John no longer dreams of forgotten promises and strange knocks on the door that reveals nobody.
Instead, he's back to gunshots and explosions and the low whine of an alarm ringing overhead.
The gap left behind feels like the outline a painting leaves when its taken off the wall. Stark white and blindingly apparent, but only when he looks at it.
John stops looking at it.
Sherlock can almost see the frown on his face as he twirls the syringe between his fingers.
"No," he says.
Who says?
"Yes," Sherlock says.
221B has no answers for him.
His footsteps thunder in his ears like they've never done before, one after the other, filling his mind with an overwhelming defection that clings to his skin and pulls him forward by the navel.
Forward and forward and forward until he runs into someone that sends him crashing to the ground.
"Watch where you're going," idiot, John can hear reflected in his voice.
John scowls, looks up, and takes in a familiar (wrong!) scarf/coat/cheekbone combination that leaves him reeling.
Wrong!
(Wrong!
SH)
"Sorry," he says, and the moment passes. The world rights itself when he looks away (goes a little askew).
He sucks in a breath, walks away, and doesn't stop.
He holds it until he no longer feels like he's going to break.
PARABOLA
Parallel lines: two lines on a plane that are always the same distance apart and never meet.
Every time Sherlock takes to the pavement, he hears the memory of footsteps falling into step beside him. And sometimes, if he looks out of the corner of his eyes, he receives a flash of white-black-stripe, cream-coloured knit, a gun-
He also receives a headache that persists for the rest of the day.
Perpendicular lines: two intersecting lines that form a 90° angle. They meet once, and only once.
John is the horizontal line, stretched out along the ground, that watches the sky without knowing what he's looking for.
(He's watching for Sherlock's vertical lines that drift up, above, away.)
His one meeting is spent, a crash bang in a crowded street. It leaves John with a bad taste in his mouth.
Sherlock's line curves.
He turns left, turns back towards the man he left behind.
"Excuse me, are you-"
"My name is John Watson," he speaks over Sherlock, then takes his hand and shakes it.
Sherlock grins. "Sherlock Holmes," he says. "Pleasure."
A simple thing, fingers sliding together, but that's all it takes for his pieces to fit together again.
His vertical line no longer stretches out in one direction, infinite. He becomes a mess, tangled in John Watson's parabola.
They become a ballad.