Content warning: ashes, urns, a semi-graphic description of the cremation process, disturbing imagery.


One week After, John brings (his) ashes home from the crematorium.

As they always had, they take a taxi together back to Baker Street, John cradling the small, sturdy cardboard box on his lap. Only when he is back in the flat, the box on the kitchen table, does John open it, pull out the cotton packing, and carefully slide out the urn.

Mycroft had spared no expense: black Italian marble, hand-carved, polished impossibly smooth. The lines of the urn flute softly at the base, an inverted teardrop. Veins of dove grey and deep violet crackle against the shiny black like lightning. In small, carved letters, along the top of the lid, (his) name, birth and death dates.

He holds his palm against the stone, the marble sucking away the heat. He runs his thumb over the carving, feeling his flesh dip into the empty spaces of the letters.

John knew the process of cremation, both in the abstract (research for a case) and in the reality (Afghanistan, IED vs. truck). The glowing red body, muscles contracting from the heat, swells, steams, bursts, then finally catches fire, the brain the last to burn, down to a piece of skull here, length of tibia there. Bones raked from the hearth, pulverized to gunpowder, bagged, labeled, and stored.

The world's only consulting detective, the man who filled his life to the brim with wild, dangerous delight, reduced to nothing more than three kilograms of silvery debris.

Slowly, he unscrews the lid of the urn. The fragments of bone—bits of phosphate, calcium, sulfate—are surprisingly colorful; crumbs of cornflower, mostly cement grey, some bright white and others hinting of amber. He dips his left hand into the ashes, cool bits of sandpaper against his skin.

Softly, he pulses his fingers into the bones, opening and closing his hand slightly, as if he were stroking someone's hair. The shards clink against the marble, a sound like the tinkling of windchimes. The sensation is close enough to sand that John finds himself tracing lines in it, as if drawing pictures in the wet surf with a stick.

John had always wanted to get inside, to crack open the pale, cool exterior and understand how that magnificent brain worked, to witness that beating, pulsating heart, to get to the very center.

Holding a piece of (his) skeleton in his fingers, never in his life did he think he would be this terribly, horribly close.

One of (his) experiments is still on the table, an assortment of jars, moldy petri dishes, pipettes, unlabeled colored liquids. Among the detritus are several miniature test tubes. John picks up one and dips it into the urn, scooping up some of the bones, then seals it tight with the rubber stopper.

John presses the vial into his fist, letting his skin warm the bones from the outside in, then slips the vial into his jeans pocket, the glass a comfortable weight against his right leg. Turning to the urn, he wipes the surface of the ashes smooth again, blank and silent, and screws the marble lid closed.


For two weeks After, John doesn't cook. The freezer is stocked with casseroles, stews, and soups in an assortment of plastic containers, sandwiched in between foil-wrapped body parts. Between Mrs. Hudson's, Sarah's, and Molly's efforts, the only thing John needs to make himself is tea. Even Angelo brings by takeaways of lasagna and meatballs, on the house.

It is a relief to know where his next meal is coming from, to not worry about the unusually overwhelming tasks of selecting ingredients, reading a recipe, handling a knife.

Tonight it is pulled pork noodle casserole, courtesy of Sarah's slow cooker: long strips of flesh, breaking at the seams, mixed through with egg noodles and tomato sauce. John eats in the kitchen, stands over the sink with his bowl, his body tense and taut. He is still not used to being able to finish a meal in peace, expecting at any second to be dragged off into danger by a pair of pale hands.

The ragged clumps of meat drip blotches of sauce in the sink, bits of red spattering up onto his jumper. Among the meat and noodles are small, hard chunks, and he pokes at them with his fork: bones from the pork that Sarah had missed.

His hand goes to the vial still in his pocket, and he traces the shape of it with his fingers, the glass hard and unforgiving.

John ate bones once as a child, the soft, brittle bones in tinned salmon, so fragile they shattered when he bit them. He remembers how they tickled his throat when he swallowed, how it seemed so strange to be able to chew something that once held a body firmly in place.

He picks up the lump of bone, and puts it on his tongue. It is like soggy pumice under his teeth, the granules scraping the inside of his mouth, a sensation not altogether unpleasant. It takes him a full minute to chew the last bits of the animal's bones down to a dry nothingness.

(His) ashes are silent, waiting.

Slowly, John picks out the rest of the bones from his bowl and eats them one by one, chewing them away, leaving the flesh behind.


AN: The title references a line from the Ellen Bass poem, "Eating the Bones."