Title: Once We Had Wings
Author: Lily Winterwood (evil-sherlock-holmes on Tumblr, lily_winterwood on AO3)
Wordcount: 4727, not counting the quoted poem at the end that is the inspiration for the piece.
Characters/Pairings: Sherlock/John
Genre: Romance, Alternate Universe (Winglock, Red String of Fate)
Ratings/Warnings: R
Summary: "Why do our hearts flutter around certain people?
Why do we feel a tugging in the depths of our chests?
Our wings were identical, feathers of the same pair.
They are always struggling to find their other mate."
Written for the Johnlock Fanfic Competition. Fusion with the legend behind the Red String of Fate.
Disclaimer: I do not own the BBC adaptation of Sherlock or the poem "Once We Had Wings".
Once We Had Wings
The shop is full of dusty antiques, towering in spindly stacks up to the ceiling. A little boy enters with a tinkling of bells, looking around him curiously at the turrets of heirlooms and spirals of memories that had once belonged to other people, other lives.
He stops by an old gramophone that plays the same tune over and over, low and tinkling, like a whisper of another life from the other end of some long, dark tunnel. The little boy stands there for a moment longer, listening to the tune and closing his eyes.
Rain falls outside, cold and sharp. But he sits by the hearth, nice and warm, reading a newspaper while a taller, darker man sits across from him smoking a pipe, finger steeped together in some sort of thinking pose –
"Looking for something?" A dusty old voice, like the creaking spine of a long-forgotten book, pierces through the little boy's reverie. He blinks owlishly as he looks into the face of a wizened old man with moon-like glasses perched on a beak-like nose. Wiry silver hair falls about the man like a lion's mane, and his slight moustache and goatee give him the air of a benevolent old goat. The boy swallows, because this old man reminds him very much of a wizard – he has the same mysterious aura hanging over his thick, snowy brows and the same hints of magic about him and his shop. Somehow, this place keeps more than just antiques. This place is a repository for memories.
"I… no. I don't think so." The boy looks around him, noticing a skull perched on the shelf of some cobwebby bookshelf. "Is that a real skull?"
"Of course it is," replies the old man. "Belonged to a man who died searching for his other half."
"Other half?" echoes the boy.
The old man peers at him from underneath his eyebrows. "Do you know what this place holds?"
"Old antiques," replies the boy. He pauses, though, and looks about once more. "Memories, too," he adds.
"That gramophone belonged to a doctor once," the old man says, gesturing to the contraption that the boy had admired earlier. "He spent his entire life with his other half without even realising it."
"How did it end up here?"
The old man smiles, and beckons for him to follow him to the counter. The boy complies, hopping up onto an old stool to look down at the enormous collection of jewellery contained within – rings, necklaces, bracelets, anklets.
"What's your name?" the old man asks kindly, taking out a giant key ring full with an assortment of keys.
"John Watson," the little boy replies, looking up from his observations.
The old man raises an amused brow before bending down and unlocking the door to the glass counter, pulling out a simple red anklet, woven from string so fine it is almost invisible.
"This string," the old man whispers, "can only be seen by you."
"How do you know it's there, then?" asks John, frowning.
"The red tag," replies the old man, snipping off said red tag and handing the anklet over to the boy. "Would you like to know how this anklet works?"
John nods. Pleased, the old man pulls up a chair, locks the glass door, and smiles at John.
"We once had wings," he begins, holding up a finger as John opens his mouth to protest. "That's how the legend goes. We once had wings, but no hearts, no emotions within us. We could do whatever we wanted, go wherever we'd like, but we had no passion to do any of it.
"And then one night, a young man named Arthur Wordsmith made a magic potion that would take away his wings and replace them with a heart within his chest, a beating heart that would give him a reason to live. He drank the potion and lost his wings, but he found passion with his new heart. He found emotions like joy and sorrow and love. Love was what made him believe it was all worthwhile.
"You see, when we had wings we could tell, by the shapes and colours and sizes of those wings, who was the one meant for us. Our wingmate, or our other half. The wings would fit together, like a perfect set, in the mating dance. But there was never any emotion exchanged, or felt. We knew the other person with the matching wings would be our mate for life, but it didn't matter at all, because we couldn't feel a thing. Wordsmith changed it all. He had his wingmate drink the potion, and they were so happy and loving together that soon, everyone had drank the potion and lost their wings. And, as a side effect, children born to newly-wingless couples had no wings as well.
"Well, you could probably imagine how hard it was to find the wingmate from there on. With hearts, it was so much easier to fall in love with the wrong person. It was so much easier to hide or to lie, and so many people suffered, feeling the sadness in their new hearts but unable to revert back to the way things were. There was no cure for these new emotions. And so, unwilling to take away the joy in order to dilute the suffering, young Wordsmith decided to create a shop dedicated to helping people find their other half."
John nods, looking at the anklet in his hands. It shines red in his hands, but as the light catches it from different angles it almost looks rainbow, like some sort of limbo between the colours.
"That anklet is magical. The colour you see can only be seen by you and your wingmate. Anyone who isn't will see nothing at all. Your other half, now that you have one end of this string, will be compelled to come and find the other end – perhaps not today, but some other day later on in your lives – and once the pieces are set you will find yourself drawn to them no matter what. Once the string connects your lives, you will be destined to meet and fall in love. The only payment then is a memento for me." He gestures to the contents of the shop. "It doesn't have to be big or expensive or anything of the sort. It only has to mean something to you."
A tinkle of the bell at the door startles the pair. The old man looks up, over to the entrance. John follows his gaze to see another boy at the door.
The new boy is shorter and younger-looking than John, with curly dark hair and pale skin. Even from across the room John can feel his stare on him, analysing him from the inside out.
"I want my butterfly net back," the boy declares loudly. "This wingmate and magic nonsense is –"
John inhales sharply. The boy is holding up a red anklet, just like the one in his own hands. Slowly, John slides down from his stool and walks over to the other boy, who has frozen, eyes darting to the slender red anklet in John's hands.
The younger boy stares. "And who the hell are you?" he demands snottily, the very image of a petulant brat. John recoils, eyes wide.
"I could ask the same for you," he remarks icily, staring down at the little dark-haired boy, who is so well-dressed in a sailor's outfit but has bits of mud all over his shorts and elbows.
"None of your business. I can see there's something wrong with this." The little boy waves his anklet again, glaring at the old man from over John's shoulder. "They can't possibly pair me with a block-headed rugby boy. I'd hoped for someone better."
Anklet or not, John realises at that moment that whoever this little squirt is, he hates him with all of his might. "Well they must've made a mistake because there's no way in hell I'm falling in love with a stuck-up little twit like you!" he shouts, clenching the anklet in his fist and shoving past the other boy to the door.
"Do you kiss your Mummy with that kind of mouth?" sneers the other boy as a parting shot. "Oh, I guess you can't, because she's dead!"
At that John whirls around, anger and hatred bubbling within him like the contents of some witch's cauldron. "Take that back!" he shouts, diving for a sharp-looking stone in a wicker basket next to the doctor's gramophone and hurling it at the other boy, who, despite dodging away, still gets pegged in the left shoulder by the stone.
John blinks, and before the little boy begins to cry he turns tail and runs out of the store, followed only by the tinkling of bells.
Years pass. John still keeps the anklet wound around his right ankle. Sometimes he even forgets it exists.
He grows up and gets into the medical training school at St. Bartholomew's Hospital, intending on becoming a surgeon. But the outbreak of the war in Afghanistan quickly makes him reconsider, quickly calls for him to sign up for the Royal Army Medical Corps.
The night before his deployment to Queen Elizabeth Hospital Birmingham finds him in his favourite London pub, nursing his usual glass of whiskey.
"Something serious going on?" a deep baritone resounds next to him.
"How would you know?" John asks, not looking at the owner of the deep voice.
"I don't know, I notice." There's a pause, as the speaker takes another swig of something. John still doesn't look over.
"How would you notice that I'm facing something serious?" he asks, sliding the empty glass at the bartender. It's his fifth glass and he's well on his way to drunkenness. "Is it because I look sad or something?"
"Soul-shattering," deadpans the other man, punctuating it with a gulp of something. "But no, it's more than just the expression. You hold yourself pretty stiffly, as if you're at a wake. Your last hurrah, perhaps." A pause. "Army?"
"Close enough." John shrugs and takes out his wallet to see if he has enough money for his tab. He doesn't look at the man next to him, but he can feel him shift as if to get a better look at his wallet.
"Must have been hard, growing up without a mother," the other man says.
John pauses, frowns as he puts his wallet back. "How the hell –"
"Her picture in your wallet is old and faded. If she's still alive you'd have replaced it with a nicer one."
"I was four," John replies, not sure why he's telling a complete stranger about his past but deciding to blame it all on the alcohol. "She had breast cancer, late stages. She hadn't detected it until it was too late."
"I'm sorry," says the man, and John turns to look at him.
The man is taller than him, pale, with aristocratic cheekbones and pale, piercing eyes. Dark hair falls softly about his face. He's young, younger than John, but there are shadows under his eyes that make him look much older.
"Where are you from?" John asks curiously as the bartender passes him the now-full glass. He takes a swig.
"Somewhere," the man says vaguely. "I try not to think about my past."
John laughs. "Neither do I."
There's a certain attraction between them, a pull that's almost magnetic. John wonders why it gets harder for him to breathe, the longer he stares into the other man's eyes. His heart beats wildly, as if trying to escape his ribcage. To assuage his anxiety he takes another gulp of whiskey, looking over at the other man as he does so.
"Are you all right?" the mystery man asks quietly.
"It's a bit… hot… in here." John mutters stupidly. "Could be the alcohol, or…"
"Or the obvious signs of arousal on your part based on the dilation of your pupils and your elevated breathing." The mystery man grins at him, and John wonders why he's not objecting to having his entire life read out like some sort of fairy-tale by this complete stranger. "Shall we get a room?"
"A what?" John asks, blinking. The man chuckles.
"A room. Do catch up, won't you?" His hands are smooth and slightly cold against John's own as he hops off the bar stool. "Room 221 at the hotel across the street," the mysterious seductor whispers, before he moves away and out of the pub.
A strange sense of lack envelopes John as soon as the pub door closes. "Damn it," he mutters, downing his final glass, hopping off his stool, and grabbing his jacket on his way out the door.
The door to room 221 at the hotel is slightly ajar, and the interior is dimly lit. The stranger, who had sported a coat and scarf at the pub, now sits on the couch in the sitting area wearing a tight purple shirt and even tighter jeans.
"I don't usually agree to this with blokes," John says as he closes the door behind him.
"I wouldn't have been surprised," the mystery man replies, grinning. John wonders how much both of them have drank at the pub, and then reckons that he shouldn't really question it when facing an attractive stranger who's already beginning to strip.
"How much did you have?" John asks, feeling the warm haze of drunken arousal begin to creep on his mind.
"Enough to agree to this." But the mystery man is still grinning, albeit hazily, and his light-coloured eyes are darkened with arousal as he shrugs his shirt off his shoulders.
That does it. John crosses the rough carpet and closes the distance between them, crashing their lips together in a heated kiss. The stranger kisses back, their lips matching and melding together, eyes fluttering only half-closed as their breaths mingle in between their mouths and their tongues brush, slick and warm. It's sloppy with want; when they break apart a thin strand of saliva hangs in the air between their lips. John doesn't mind; he only heaves a sigh for breath before the other man is back again, hands pressed against the side of his face as he kisses him hard enough to bruise.
Once unclothed, they fall back onto an unyielding bed in an unfamiliar room, with gaudy watercolours on the walls and dim lighting casting their faces into shadow. John does not notice, when he licks and kisses a trail across the stranger's collarbone, a bright white scar on the other man's left shoulder. Likewise, the stranger makes no comment about the red string still wound around John's right ankle. For this night, past does not matter.
The stranger is very receptive, arching into John's touch, moaning into the room. John licks a trail from the man's navel to his half-hard cock, pressing a kiss against the tip. He moves back up, places a softer, lazier kiss to the stranger's lips, and bucks his hips lightly against the other's.
"Oh," mumbles the anonymous seducer. "I don't think we exchanged names."
"We'll never see each other again," John growls, before pressing their erections together and eliciting a gasp from the other. Normally he'd have thought otherwise – he'd have liked to get this man's name, at the very least. But they're both drunk, his mind's a fog, there's a strange fluttering in his chest, and they would wake up in the morning with no strings attached. John would go off to training, and the mystery man would disappear like mist, like dew on the grass in the early morning.
The stranger is now bucking against him, their breaths mingling in rushed staccatos. John needs more of this friction, more of the passion that connects them, more of the strange fluttering feeling that does very much feel like the beating of wings, frantic but gentle. It's as if he's trying to fly even closer to the man arching into his touch below him, trying to fly into his chest and connect the remnants of their wings together in the mating dance of legend. He thrusts downwards, rubbing their bodies together with growing urgency as pleasure mounts inside him, higher and higher –
The other man climaxes before him, but there's barely a difference – John cries out a string of half-intelligible curses as he comes, panting heavily against the stranger's shoulder. And in the dark, the thin, bright scar avoids detection.
As his skin cools and his heart rate returns to normal, for one startling moment John wonders if the stranger isn't a stranger after all. He remembers, unbidden, the petulant face of a young boy with the same pale eyes, the same dark hair. But that's preposterous. Why would that little boy with the butterfly net ever choose to seek him out again for a one-night-stand, especially after John had hurt him with the rock?
So he dismisses the thought, forgets the red string wound around his ankle, and kisses the stranger with all of his desperation because there won't be a tomorrow for them. And indeed, the next morning finds John lying in an unfamiliar bed with a strange pounding in his head, and no one else around. He would've sworn it was all a dream, but the room still smells like semen and sweat and a hint of cologne that he hadn't picked up last night, and there is a note on his now neatly-folded clothes.
You don't want to miss your appointment with the RAMC, Dr Watson.
SH
John traces the initials on the note, smiling to himself. Those initials are the only clue to his mystery man. He laughs a bit at how stupid he sounds in his head, but he still smiles at the fluttering in his heart, as if there is a tiny set of wings inside trying to bring him back to SH.
John Watson is wounded in Afghanistan by a bullet to the shoulder. His regiment, the Fifth Northumberland Fusiliers, had been making their way through Kandahar Province when they were attacked outside the village of Maiwand.
John lies on a hospital bed in Kabul, looking up at the ceiling. He is convalescing, but his shoulder injury had been infected despite his precautions when he had dug the bullet out himself with a knife dipped in boiling water. Such an injury, coupled with a bad right leg that the doctor said was psychosomatic, only means one thing – he would be invalided home.
John brings home from Afghanistan the memories of sand and blood, and for the first few months it seems as if they are tattooed beneath his eyelids – he can hardly sleep without remembering Afghanistan. His therapist thinks he's haunted. John's not so sure himself.
"Looking for a flatshare?" a former colleague at Bart's asks him one January morning, over cups of coffee. John shrugs and laughs, hand tightening over his ugly hospital-issue cane.
"Come on, who'd want me for a flatmate?"
Mike Stamford laughs.
"You're the second person to say that to me today."
The man Mike introduces him to is tall, dark, and unconventionally handsome in a jolie-laide sort of way – it seems as if the man can manipulate shadow and light itself to benefit his appearance. His eyes show it the best – with each change of light comes a different eye colour, and John is sure, for the few seconds that the man stares at him and tells him his entire life story, that he has never seen such eyes before.
(He has, twice, but they're all muted memories, distorted by time as if through a pair of old camera lens. Black-and-white or sepia, they're blurry especially in comparison with his more recent recollections.)
"The name's Sherlock Holmes, and the address is 221B Baker Street," says the man, and suddenly John remembers that voice, remembers those numbers. His breath flees him; he shifts from foot to foot and grips the cane until his knuckles turn white.
"You're the stranger," John breathes. "From the night before I went to training. You left me the note."
Sherlock says nothing, only winks at him on his way out the door.
They move in together into 221B Baker Street, and the months that pass after that are some of John's busiest yet happiest months. Despite all the danger of being the best friend of the world's only consulting detective (John had lost count pretty soon of how many times criminals had attempted to kidnap him), he finds himself enjoying every heart-racing moment with Sherlock. The psychosomatic limp disappears within the span of their first case.
One particular night, however, Sherlock comes home with a bleeding left shoulder and John takes one look at him before his doctor instincts kick in and he scrambles for the medical kit, instructing Sherlock to take off his shirt so he can tend to his shoulder.
Sherlock glowers at him and only clutches tighter at his shoulder, as if his fingers alone can staunch the bleeding. John frowns, setting down bowl of warm water that he had just fetched.
"Come on, take off your shirt. There's nothing I haven't seen before in some alcohol-induced haze."
They had never brought that up before. Sherlock had pointed out on their first stakeout that he was married to his work. John had tried to squash the painful wrench his heart had felt at that moment, as if someone had been trying to pluck every feather out of the tiny wings within his heart. He hated it.
Sherlock shakes his head. "There is. You saw that night, but you didn't observe."
"What do you mean?" John asks, frowning deeper.
With a long-suffering sigh, Sherlock undoes the buttons on his shirt and shrugs it off. The aubergine material falls onto the couch with a flump that echoes in John's ears, because suddenly his world has gone very, very silent.
Under the bright lights in the flat, the white scar on Sherlock's left shoulder stands out like a thin, bright streak. John's mouth goes dry.
"Oh my god," he whispers, and suddenly he remembers that afternoon in the dusty shop as clear as if he is there again. His heartbeat speeds up as his mind replays the entrance of the other boy, who had been demanding back his butterfly net – the other boy with the curly hair and the pale eyes – the other boy who had once been so short –
The other boy, who John had hurt a long time ago, is now sitting before him, eyes downcast. Blood still trickles out of the wound on his shoulder, but it's on the other side of the scar. Swallowing, John leans over, daubs some gauze in warm water, and starts cleaning Sherlock's wound.
"You were the boy, too," he mutters. "The boy I swore I would hate for the rest of my life because he called me stupid and reminded me that my mother was dead."
"Your tag stuck out that day and I saw you visiting the churchyard with your father before going into the shop," Sherlock replies.
"You knew all along, didn't you? With the night at the pub and everything?"
"That'd been more coincidence than anything. I had just finished a case but my roommates had locked me out of the dorms." Sherlock rolls his eyes.
John chuckles, continuing to dab at the wound. It's a graze wound from a stray piece of shrapnel; it wouldn't take too long to heal. "What were they up to?"
"I haven't the slightest." Sherlock bites his lower lip and looks at John. Their faces are almost ridiculously close, and John's breath hitches in his throat as his heart skips a beat. "I saw the anklet that night. Bright red. That's how I knew."
"Do you have yours?" John asks, and Sherlock nods, hoisting up his trouser leg to reveal the thin red thread. John kicks off his shoes and socks to produce its match, and suddenly his heart feels bigger, more solid, more complete, like two complementary puzzle pieces or two matching sets of wings fitting together at long last.
John barely gets the plasters onto Sherlock's shoulders before the consulting detective grabs him by the sides of his head, leans in, and brushes their lips together like a soft caress. And when they part from that, all John can do is sigh.
"Can't trick fate," he mumbles, chuckling sheepishly. "So there wasn't any mistake."
"You're still an idiot as ever," Sherlock replies. "But I suppose in this case it's fine."
The old man's shop still stands where it had stood all those years ago. John takes a deep breath. Hand-in-hand with Sherlock, he opens the door with a tinkle and steps back into the room of memories and magic.
"Took you two long enough," the old man remarks from the counter, and John marvels at how he hasn't aged a day. "Would you like your butterfly net back, Sherlock?"
Sherlock looks away sheepishly. John looks at his wingmate, coughing slightly. Sherlock shifts, a series of uncomfortable expressions rushing across his features, as John produces from his pocket the well-worn note that Sherlock had written him so long ago. He hands it over to the old man, who chuckles as he stows it away in a file.
"That doctor who owned the gramophone," Sherlock asks suddenly, "who was his potential wingmate?"
The old man chuckles and taps at his moon-like glasses. "The detective who once owned that skull," he says mysteriously, before fading away before their very eyes as if he is only a ghost, a memory once trapped but now released.
John looks at Sherlock, who is frowning speculatively at the spot where the man had once stood, and walks over to the counter. A piece of paper sits there, bearing a message in spidery print.
When I first created this shop for the wingless, each endeavour I had met ended in success. My threads never failed to bring wingmates together. Full of hubris, I grew bold, even creating a spell that would keep me from dying if I ever found half of a pair who could never find his or her wingmate. I thought that my threads of fate were foolproof. I thought wrong.
This particular case, the one behind that gramophone and that skull, the one between a Dr Watson and a detective named Holmes, was left unfinished. Despite Holmes's observational prowess, he did not notice that the string wound around his ankle was the same as the one around his friend's. By the time they died they still did not realise that the wings of their hearts truly beat for each other.
I've rectified that now. The two of you, by finding what had never been hidden in the first place, have released me from my own spell. Thank you.
A. Wordsmith
John looks up from the paper and back at Sherlock, who stands there looking a bit out of place.
"Do you know what that means?" John asks quietly. Sherlock looks down at the ground, and back at the old gramophone. It is still playing that cheery, familiar tune that John had heard years ago. He recognises it now as something by Sousa.
"I don't like waxing poetic about these sorts of things," Sherlock replies, quirking an eyebrow. "All of that rubbish about us being 'meant to be' or something. It's convenient, I suppose, but I don't like having no control over my life."
"I don't suppose you're complaining about me, though?" asks John, leaving the note on the counter as he walks over to Sherlock again, pulling him closer by the lapels. "I mean, you seem to be the unobservant one in that little note of his."
Sherlock snorts. "Neither were you," he quips. "And really, don't remind me."
"Must've been your darkest hour."
"Oh, shut up."
At that John beams, before pulling the taller detective down and kissing him. Their eyes flutter closed; their hearts beat in tandem like a set of wings, flapping in synchrony.
When they open their eyes the old antique shop is gone and they are in a dusty sandlot with the wind blowing through their hair. Sherlock raises an eyebrow, John shrugs, and hand-in-hand they leave the lot to the strains of Sousa in the air.
FIN.
Once we had wings.
Bright, full, heavy wings.
We were pure and white and smooth and perfect.
We had no minds
(we knew no worries).
We had no hearts
(we knew no passion).
One night the rain fell in broad black sheets
It burned where it touched our soft white flesh.
The rain ripped us in half, formed two beings from one.
It carved our jagged edges and limbs,
moulded the curvatures of our backs, and counted our vertebrae like leftover wishbones.
It melted our wings into misshapen orbs,
laced with tubs and chambers and flaps and stitches
It stained them black and blue and red.
They were shrivelled and perched uncomfortably in the cavities of our chests.
But as they throbbed we felt.
Felt, for the first time.
We were children, wise and ignorant, born into these new emotions.
We tasted them.
We rolled them between our teeth and crushed them under our tongues.
We poured them into our marrow and filled our lungs with them.
One heart (one wing) per person (per half).
Why do our hearts flutter around certain people?
Why do we feel a tugging in the depths of our chests?
Our wings were identical, feathers of the same pair.
They are always struggling to find their other mate.
But when they were melted, our new hearts were different.
Made of the same essence, the same stuff of dreams
but irrevocably changed in manner and appearance.
When we find the one we are meant to be with, there is no fairytale ending.
They are not perfect.
We are slightly mismatched - uncalculated flaws and errors.
It is raw, it is painful.
It is real.
So we push and pull to try to piece our wings together
to press their frayed edges against each other
and tie up their broken seams
(broken dreams).
And love is just a pursuit
of flight and dreams and forgotten things.
—Tammy Tseng, CSSSA 2011