Beta'ed by Lohis, thank you!


Two.

The living room is gloomy like every night. The orange light coming from outside is like a glow of frozen flames.

John is still lying on his side on the couch, face towards the room. There is a figure sitting on the other armchair.

John stares. Sherlock smiles at him.

"Hello John," he says, his voice unusually soft.

John stares. He tries to speak but no sound makes it out.

Sherlock continues to smile at him, a small smile that somehow looks very unfamiliar on his very familiar face. There's blood on his skin, on his brow and over his eye and on his neck. His eyes are very pale and bright.

"You're among the exceptional ones," the sleuth says and smiles, just a bit. The blood dribbles down his jaw.

John closes his eyes and draws in a shuddering breath. When he opens his eyes his cheeks are wet and Sherlock is gone.

.

Greg calls him the next day. John stares at his ringing phone for a while before finally answering. It tells how shaky he actually feels.

"Yes?" he says. He can't bring himself to be any more polite than that.

"John? Hello!" Greg sounds a bit baffled that John is actually accepting to speak with him.

"Hello Greg," he says wearily. He glances at the clock. He still has time before his next patient will enter.

"How have you been?" Greg asks, his voice a bit tentative, like he's carefully testing whether John would actually answer the questions honestly.

He will be disappointed.

Of course I'm fine, I'm just peachy, expect I saw Sherlock last night and he talked to me and that isn't the only crazy thing that has happened in the last few days and I think I'm going insane.

"Fine, just fine," he says.

"That's good, good," Greg says though his tone clearly has a suspicious echo in it.

The phone call ends soon after that. Neither of them really knows how to carry on the conversation. In the end John bails out by appealing to work. Greg apologises hurriedly for taking his time and they disconnect.

John sits in silence for a while, playing with his phone.

That night he returns to the flat like a zombie, dragging his feet up the stairs and into the living room.

He's more than tired, he feels like his brain works on autopilot. He goes to the kitchen and makes tea and sits on his armchair and the TV isn't working and he wonders when the hell he really did began to lose the remains of his sanity.

.

He falls asleep on the armchair. When he wakes up his back and neck are killing him. However, the aching pain is soon forgotten as his eyes settle on the armchair next to his.

Sherlock is once more sitting there, clad in his usual fine clothing and curly dark hair looking black in the darkness of the room.

There's still blood on his face.

"Evening John," he says.

John doesn't say anything for a long time. Instead he closed his eyes and breathes. When he opens them again Sherlock is still sitting in front of him, a patient smile on his face, like he knows exactly what he is trying to do and is waiting for him to snap out of it.

John slowly stands up. "You're not Sherlock," he says warily.

The not-Sherlock looks at him with a small melancholic smile. "I'm not."

"What are you, then?" John's eyes flicker over the room. Everything looks normal. Is he dreaming?

The familiar stranger stands up too, slowly and turns slightly to face him properly.

"I am an angel," he says. "My name is Lucifer."

John laughs aloud then. Probably the stress, he reasons. Sherlock's doppelganger looks at him patiently.

"I'm not the type to visit the church every week," John says after growing serious again, "but even I know that a fellow called 'Lucifer' doesn't play for the angelic team."

Sherlock (because he still cannot stop thinking about him as Sherlock, no matter how he knows that thing in front of him is not his deceased friend. Because Sherlock is just that. Dead.) tilts his head just minutely. The small smile doesn't leave his face.

"But I am an angel. Cast away from heaven but an angel nonetheless," Sherlock-lookalike says and takes a step closer. John straightens his back, easily adopting his military pose.

"An angel. Right. Right." He lets out another bark of laughter. "You're saying you're the devil, then. This is just great. This is magnificent."

The man calling himself Lucifer tilts his head again. "You're not going crazy," he says.

"Of course I am. I am asleep. Or hallucinating. That equals: I'm going nuts. So now shoo, I'd like to go crazy by myself, thank you very much."

"You are asleep, but only because it's the only way I can reach you."

John rubs his face. "And you're looking like my dead best friend why, again?"

Sherlock-not-Sherlock just smiles. "I have my reasons."

John flexes his fingers. "You are not real."

"If I were created by your imagination, shouldn't you be able to dispel me?"

"I'm a doctor, not a psychologist but I still know that's not how it works."

"As you wish. However, this all is meaningless," Lucifer says and the grey eyes bore deep into John's. The ex-army doctor hates the familiarity of those eyes.

"Okay, whatever you are, an angel or the devil or a hallucination, what exactly do you want?" John's voice is exhausted and resigned. The dark flat feels surreal, out of time. Like he can't even remember what it is like when the sun is up and the sky is bright and he is working a normal day at the surgery.

"I need a favour from you," Lucifer says. "I need to ask you a question and I need you to answer me yes."

John takes in a deep breath and fixes the other man (or creature, or hallucination, or whatever) a steady glare. "Okay, if I play along for a moment and pretend I'm not going crazy. Then you'd be the bloody devil. Why the hell would I want to help you?" Maybe he has schizophrenia. That would explain so much. All the freaky hallucinations and insomnia. He figures there are tons of people out there in the world who hallucinate the devil coming to strike deals with them.

Lucifer looks at him with patronizing eyes. The sight is so wrong, because it hadn't been an unusual expression for Sherlock, but it still looks like it doesn't really fit, like there's something truly condescending behind it all now and though Sherlock sometimes scoffed at the whole humanity it had never been directed on John. Not like that.

"I might be real but it doesn't mean everything they say about me is true. What you have heard people say about the devil... That is only one point of view to look at things." Lucifer tilts his head once again and continues with the same quiet tone: "I was cast out because I began to think on my own. To question the order of things around me." He lets out a small sigh. "Isn't that what you humans regard as basic rights? Would you condemn that action in any other human being?"

John arches his eyebrow. "You know, there's two ways to do that 'only one point of view' –trick."

Lucifer smiles a bit. Sherlock smiles a bit. John feels bile threatening to rise up his throat.

"You are a doctor and a soldier, John," he says. "You should be the one to know there are no black and white in the world. Good and evil are relative."

"In most cases, yes," John grounds out, thinking of a certain criminal mastermind. "But I'm pretty sure not always."

The grey eyes narrow. John finds himself swallowing but he refuses to back down.

"What about your friend, then? Was that only relatively bad what happened to him?"

John stiffens. His eyes go unfocused for a moment before he shakes his head minutely and glares at Lucifer. "Shut up. You know nothing of him."

Lucifer smiles sadly. "But I do. I know what your journalists and press wrote about him. I know who did that to him. I know what he was forced to do."

John realizes he isn't breathing and draws in a shaky breath that feels like it catches coarsely somewhere in his throat.

"What did the police do? Accuse him for crimes he hadn't done because it was easier to them. And the newspapers? They got a good juicy story. What about the commonwealth? They turned their backs to him at the second when it became fashionable."

John closes his eyes and almost bows his head. "And what," he says quietly, "does this all have to do with you?"

Sherlock-Lucifer tilts his head. "And now he's gone," he continues as if he hasn't heard John speak at all, "and no one really cares, and why would they? He was just a murderer after all, a kidnapper of children."

"I'd advise you to shut up right now."

"Why? Because I'm telling the truth? Not the truth about him, mind you, but how he was mistreated."

John frowns, his head starting to ache more and more. He raises his hands up to his face and presses them against his eyes.

"Mistreated by you, too."

John's head snaps up. "What?"

Sherlock's indefinable eyes bore into his. "You know he was innocent, and what have you done to set things straight?"

"What have I – I have done bloody much!" John shouts, white blinding rage raising its head inside him. "I did everything I could to make them see he was innocent."

Lucifer smiles. It's not a nice sight and looks wrong on Sherlock's features. "Just like you're doing right now, hmm? Doing everything you can to make things right, to cleanse his reputation. Because to me it looks much more like you are doing absolutely nothing besides simply existing."

"I – I tried but they wouldn't listen, and –"

"So you ceased trying."

"Shut up!" he screams because the words hurt too much, tearing something open deep in his gut and twisting the wound anew. "I tried and I failed," he says, now much quieter, and his legs suddenly feel weak and he collapses to his armchair. He buries his face into his hands and takes deep breaths.

Lucifer refuses to back down. "You know it's the truth," he says, his voice once more going softer. "But it wasn't your fault, John. No one can keep going forever. "

Even though his eyes are closed John can feel the other man move in front of him and can hear him crouch down. John's hands move up to his hair and his fingers tighten around the bangs.

"You were not able to set things right alone," Sherlock's voice says to him kindly. "But now I am here to help you."

John raises his head and looks into the grey-blue-green eyes of his best friend. The blood is glistening in the dim light.

"How?" he asks, his voice threatening to break. "How the hell could you help me with anything?"

"I look like him because I have no other choice," Lucifer says. "I don't have a body on this world. I am merely an incorporeal being, forced to drift around." He smiles again. "I need a body to walk this Earth, and I need a body to help you too."

John stares at him, his mind whirring. His thoughts had already arrived to a conclusion but he couldn't yet believe them.

"What the hell are you asking," he says.

"I need a vessel, John," Lucifer says. "And only rare ones will do. I cannot choose just anyone of the commoners going living their meaningless lives on this planet. You are one of the only ones that are suited."

John laughs aloud then and sits back on the chair. Lucifer straightens and looks at him with expressionless face.

"You cannot possibly expect me to agree. You're the bloody Devil, why the hell would I do anything to help you, let alone that?"

"So because I am who I am you will not help me?" Lucifer lets out a laugh, and John feels sick in his stomach at how much it sounds like Sherlock's usual laugh. "Because everything is black and white, the devil is evil and the good is infinitely good. Tell me John, what has God ever done for you? Ever done for anyone?"

The Sherlock-lookalike stares down at him. "God is the one who has abandoned you all here, to suffer in each other's teeth. He is the one who allows humans to torment one another. I have been locked away, not being able to do anything for anyone. So tell me, John, who is really the one you should be angry with here?"

John squeezes his eyes shut. "I'd really much like to wake up now," he says.

Sherlock's voice drifts through the space around him. "So do all who live in a nightmare, John. Most of them cannot change it, but you can."

John holds hands over his ears and thinks Wake up wake up please wake up.

He doesn't know how long he does that, but when he opens his damp, aching eyes daylight is slithering in through the curtains and he is still sitting in his armchair.

Sherlock is nowhere to be seen.

He does his morning routines on autopilot and carries through the day. He thinks last night was just a horrible dream and that it won't repeat itself.

.

He is, of course, wrong.

.

It carries on through the whole week.

Each night he wakes up to find Lucifer looking like Sherlock's dead body sitting by his bed, or in the armchair, or on the sofa. Each night his friend's deep voice asks him for help, tries to reason him, offer comfort, telling it will all be over once he agrees.

He tells him no every night, willing himself to wake up. But he cannot wake up, and each time it feels like days until he finally gets his wish and wakes up to meet the new day.

He works, he goes to Tesco's when he needs food, takes long walks. But in the evening he always ends up back on 221B and it's like he steps right back into the nightmare, like the whole flat is now only a horrible dream he cannot wake up from.

Or, he thinks as he sits in his armchair sipping tea one evening, it's starting to be more and more like his life outside the flat, in the sunshine or rain, in the busy streets of London – as if that is the dream, and this is his reality. And he cannot escape.

He goes to see his therapist, and Ella eyes him with suspicion as he insists he is fine. For the whole meeting he is aching to spill it all out, to tell everything. I'm becoming insane. I don't know what to do.

Please help.

But in the end he does not, because he fears more than anything that they'll lock him up but the nightmares won't stop, that Sherlock/Lucifer will still keep haunting him and then he'll have nowhere to escape.

So he keeps his mouth shut and returns to Baker Street, Ella's worried eyes burned to his mind.


AN: Thank you very much for everyone who reviewed, favorited, followed or simply read the first chapter!

The conversation between John and Lucifer was a pain in, well everywhere, to write, so I really hope it turned out fine.

Thank you for reading, and please leave a review! Next chapter will be posted in a week.