"[Bruges] is a fairytale town, isn't it? How's a fairytale town not somebody's fucking thing?"
-Ralph Fiennes (In Bruges)
John stumbled out of the church into a side alley and collapsed on his knees, ready to lose his stomach on the pavement, but instead got stuck dry-heaving a breakfast he hadn't eaten. He didn't like to eat before he went out on an assignment. It made him feel slow and heavy.
He wanted so many things at the moment. He wanted to burst inside and see if what he saw was real, he wanted to go pick a fight with whoever was closest so he could get hit, see stars, feel pain, and know this wasn't just a dream like he feared, and he wanted to go back to the hotel and crawl into bed and lay there forever.
But John Watson did none of those things.
He sat in that alley, curled against the wall.
He sat, and didn't stop the tears when they fell.
He sat, and he mourned for his best friend for the first proper time in three years. He mourned for the days he spent doubting himself, thinking Sherlock was dead, and he mourned for that living, breathing man sitting in the church for god knows what reason, because he had now been sentenced to death. John didn't know for what, but if anyone had international enemies, it would be Sherlock.
John was Atlas and the weight of the world had collapsed on him. He felt heavy, his chest felt full of lead, full of heartache and suffering and pain as the heavens crashed down on him and he buckled under its weight, unable to hold it up any longer. He tasted the salty dirt of grief, the iron of blood, the taste of pain and tears and suffering.
All those days of wondering, all those days of loneliness, and Sherlock had been just as alive as he'd ever been. How could John not have figured it out? How many times had he passed Sherlock in the street and not noticed? Relief should not feel this awful, knowing that Sherlock was alive and that the only thing separating them was an old brick wall. But it wasn't just the wall that separated them. It was circumstance. Sherlock was alive, and only because John had not killed him like he was ordered to.
Sherlock was alive.
Sherlock was alive.
Sherlock was alive.
And what had John done? John had run away.
But John had also let him live. He had spared him, and now Sherlock owed him his life, not that he would ever have pulled that trigger.
John started, realising suddenly just what he had done.
He had spared Sherlock's life.
Fuck.
He was so fucked. So utterly and completely fucked. So fucked that he needed to invent a new word just to describe the extent of how fucked he was.
The agency would not allow Sherlock to live. If John couldn't do it, then they would find someone that would. He could tell them all sorts of stories. The target was a no-show, the shot wasn't clear, the risk of civilian casualties was too great—
But no. No. Those wouldn't work. The agency knew his history, knew his whole life because he had to disclose it when they hired him. They knew his relation to Sherlock Holmes, knew they had lived together, knew what they had done (all of London did anyways), and they knew he had requested that the assignments be complete strangers to him. They knew that he wouldn't take Sherlock out.
They knew. So why did they assign it to him?
He had to get back to the hotel.
He had to talk to Mary.
Sherlock yawned.
Boring.
Mikheia had dragged him to the nearest Orthodox church that morning to receive communion, but they had arrived late, so now he was meeting with the priest to get it. Why a little piece of bread and watered down wine was important to his everlasting soul, Sherlock didn't know or care, but it made Mikheia less anxious and jittery, so he went along with it. And Mikheia agreed to take him to the Russian consulate to find his next contact, so Sherlock supposed that this was his way of thanking him.
The church was well built, structurally sound, and had a pleasant darkness about it. Everything was wooden and old and creaked like the church's old bones when it got up in the morning. Sherlock quite liked old, wooden, creaky things. He liked the idea that someone once sat where he sat and was just as bored as he was. The brotherhood of the bored, externally coerced churchgoers.
The people inside weren't interesting. A widow with three children, one cat, who had burned their breakfast that morning, a meal of bread and eggs, in their kitchen of a flat three blocks south. A man who came here without his wife because she was sick—no, she's having an affair with their neighbour and faked illness for a quick tryst—who rolled his own tobacco and favoured the brothel two streets away after Sunday services.
Sherlock smirked. How dull their lives must be.
Something moved in the balcony to his left and he paused, listening closer. Footsteps, brown suede trainers—size 11—jeans, pressed shirt, possibly a woollen jumper as well. They fidgeted with something, possibly a camera from the way it was being assembled with precise twists and turns. He heard them pause a moment, a still silence settling over the church, before they quietly packed their equipment back up and left in a hurry.
Odd. This place was certainly aesthetically pleasing enough for a photograph. Maybe the shot wasn't as good on the balcony as elsewhere in the church.
He sniffed. Whoever it was used a similar shampoo to John's, a plain, unscented brand that smelled only of cleanliness. Sherlock had never told John how much he liked the smell, how peaceable it was and so unornamented that it complimented anything it was put with. In a way, it was much like John himself.
"You're tofu, John. Did you know that?"
Sherlock smiled at the memory.
He and John has been sitting in their flat, eating Chinese food after a particularly exhilarating encounter with a pair of thieves that liked to use acrobatics in their heists.
"Sorry?" John asked as he spooned a forkful of noodles into his mouth.
"You are tofu." Sherlock repeated calmly.
"Alright." John said, mildly confused, before returning to his plate. "Why, exactly?"
"You lack so much taste that you go with everything."
"That doesn't sound like a compliment."
"It's not. It's a statement of fact."
"Last I checked I was human, Sherlock, not a soy curd."
"I meant personality-wise."
"You said I lack taste?"
"Yes. And with the colour jumpers you wear, I'd say you rather look like a soy curd too."
John gave a sigh then resumed eating.
"I don't see how I'm supposed to take this."
"See, John? See? The neutrality of your response negates your argument." Sherlock scooted closer out of the excitement of explanation. He liked the look in John's eyes as he got something, the moment he understood it. "You are so devoid of any defining characteristic that you can confine to anything you'd like, so long as it suits you. Therefore, you are tofu."
There was the look, the comprehensive sun dawning on John's face.
Instead of being offended, like most people, John smiled. Then again, John was not most people. He was special. He would always be special.
"Well if I'm tofu, you're squid." John said, picking an egg roll out of the box.
"Explain."
John chewed a moment, thinking.
"Not a lot of people like squid. They don't have the palate for it. It's slippery and you can never pin it down, so it kind of just slides around too much for you to bite into it. But once you actually get used to the texture, the taste is quite good."
Sherlock stared at him a moment before he grinned.
"Squid. I think that may be the nicest thing anyone's called me. Squid." He repeated, tasting the word, his smile marginally broadening.
"I suppose it goes well with tofu then." John said, smiling back.
"They go together so well that one would ever want to eat anything again after they tried it. Pass me an egg roll."
Sherlock blinked, snapping back from that comfortable kitchen on Baker Street, to this airy, dark cathedral in Belgium, so far away from home. So far away from John.
Mikheia was walking back up to aisle to him and he stood.
"Did you have fun?" Sherlock asked bitingly, buttoning up his coat. "I trust the wafer and wine were as mediocre as anywhere else."
"You should not be so critical, sir. Maybe if you tried it once, you'd like it."
"Unlikely. I can't stomach cannibalism; eating the body and blood of a dead man. I'm more of a soy-based product fan myself. Much more humane."
Mikheia gave him an utterly confounded look, like Sherlock had just sprouted a horned second head.
"What is soy?"
Mary was waiting for him. He was surprised, but knew he shouldn't be. She was always close by.
"Hello, John."
"What game are they trying to get me to play, Mary?" He asked, tossing his bag in a chair by the door and tearing off his cap.
John—"
"They told me to shoot Sherlock. They told me to murder my best friend who, by the way, until recently I thought was dead and buried-"
"So it's murder now, if you know the target personally?"
Her question caught him off-guard.
"The agency knew I would never, never, have completed this assignment, so I don't know what they're getting at—" John stopped. "But you do, don't you Mary?"
She looked at him rather forlornly and he realised that she had been keeping a great and terrible secret from him.
"We have a lot to talk about John. A lot of things to tell you that we couldn't before. That I couldn't."
"Well, we've got time now. So I think you can start."
Mary hesitated, then began.
Thank you to everyone who reviewed! I loved your freakouts!
To the anon who messaged me: Yes, feel free to submit fanart for this! I was so flattered that you asked!
To the-sun-will-always-shine: Unfortunately (or fortunately), the ending of this story won't mirror the one of In Bruges (that would be far too cruel), but I suppose you'll have to wait and see if there's any other parallels! Thanks for the comment!