2010 - A bottle of whiskey
John POV
We sat in silence, both swallowing mouthful after mouthful of whiskey, as we waited for Sherlock to come back.
He didn't.
A minute stretched into an hour and an hour stretched into two, Mrs Hudson came and went with a tray of tea and biscuits – still looking shaken by the events of the evening – and, between us both, we managed to finish the bottle of whiskey. The last of the already dim light outside the window and the quiet conversation between us was long gone by the time Lestrade finally said what was on both of our minds,
"Sherlock should have been back by now." I frowned at the clock, midnight it told me,
"Do you think something's happened to him?"
"From what you've told me, anything could happen to Sherlock and he'd still walk through that door without needing to worry too much about his health."
"That doesn't mean I'm not worried about it for him."
"I could ring Donovan, get a search party set up-"
"No offense Greg but that sounds like the worst thing we could do at the moment; Sherlock won't want to see them at the moment, I can promise you that."
"Well, what do you propose we do?"
"Call Mycroft, he has CCTV trained on Sherlock most of the time-"
"Seriously? I always thought he was joking about that."
"They have an odd relationship those two. But then, lots of young relatives have to go looking for their lost grandparents nowadays, so I suppose it's not so unfamiliar a situation if you think about it. If anything, it's unusual for someone his age to also have his whole mental faculties intact... I may never get used to the idea that Sherlock is Mycroft's great – I don't know how many greats in fact - grandfather." He snorted slightly,
"Join the club; I'm still getting over the fact that it's his 194th birthday sometime soon."
Lestrade excused himself to make the phone call and I went off looking for a dry set of clothes, a warm blanket and a map, sending a text asking Sherlock where he was. Unsurprisingly, I received no reply – clearly he was hiding from us – and none of the other ten received an answer either. Lestrade came back with far more progress than me,
"Mycroft couldn't come to the phone but his assistant said that Sherlock was last seen heading towards Tower Bridge." We both stopped as we realised what he'd just said; we were running out of the door seconds later, Mrs Hudson calling after us,
"John? Where are you going? It's pouring with rain, you need a jacket!"
"Not now, Mrs Hudson!" Lestrade's police car was, mercifully, parked up next to the house and – with sirens blaring and tyres screeching – we flew off down the road in search of our lost friend.
Every second of that ten-minute drive was taken up by praying to God that he hadn't done something stupid, that he would be sat on a bench or in a café just thinking, just overwhelmed but not being a danger to himself. If Lestrade noticed my fingers crossed at my side or the waiver and crack in my voice as I begged him to go faster, to break the speed limit just a little bit more, he didn't say.
I couldn't help but picture us reaching the bridge to see him plummeting towards the water, tumbling down into its freezing indigo embrace, as he just grew fed up with the suffering and the pain he'd become only too familiar with in his long life. I know he's lived through bullets, lack of food, lack of water, freezing cold and brutal beatings that no-one should survive but it just felt like this could tempt fate. Just one more life threatening event and it would all catch up on him. If he had been changing, then perhaps he had changed just enough to tip the scales of the balance between mortality and immortality and allow him to drown.
Lestrade looked at me out of the corner of his eye, pushing the accelerator down just a little bit more,
"It's going to be alright, John." I scoffed, not able to look at him as I focused straight ahead, squinting through the rain and the sea of cars which parted before us,
"How can you possibly know that? For all we know, Sherlock could be at the bottom of the Thames at this very moment, and who could blame him after all he's been through?" Lestrade shook his head, but still not able to meet my eye,
"Don't talk like that, John. We both know Sherlock's too fond of himself to jump and he's going to be fine, because he has us now. He has you and me, and Mrs Hudson and even Mycroft, he's not going to jump and lose all that."
"Is he too fond of himself though? He spent years hating what he was, hating everything about himself. I still see him looking in the mirror and grimacing, noting every imperfection and seeing every scar and its source, even though they're too faded for us to see now. I just... I don't know what I'll do. I'm can't lose him-"
"I know, John, but he's going to be alright, I promise you." I couldn't say anymore, I just nodded, dropping my eyes down to my hands, which were resting in my lap.
Finally, to my great relief, he skidded to a half beside Tower Bridge and, before he could even fully stop the car, I had thrown the seatbelt off and leapt out. I barely even noticed the chill of the heavy rain or the clash of thunder above me. I couldn't see anyone on the footpath, the rain was so heavy that I could barely see a few metres ahead of me and the roar of thunder tore the sound of Sherlock's name from my lips before it could be heard. I only just heard the muffled sound of Lestrade cursing beside me,
"We've lost him. God knows where he could be now!" I ignored him, jolting forwards and running across the bridge, screaming out his name in a last ditch attempt to try and find him on the bridge.
God seemed to be on my side, just this once, because as I was nearing the other end of the bridge I spotted a dark figure huddled up on the concrete edge down below the bridge, his feet dangling just a few inches from the ever-rising water. I barely noticed the cars on the bridge around me skidding to a halt, their horns blaring, as I jumped the barrier and raced across the – thankfully not too busy – road and down the steps on the other side. He was sat on the concrete ledge where boats pulled up and moored themselves, but he was alone tonight, the boats all tethered somewhere safer to shield them from the rain. He hadn't been so sensible.
Despite the marginal cover provided to some of his body by the bridge, he was still getting soaked through to the skin; the thin t-shirt he was wearing looking more like a second skin than clothing – clearly he'd spent the hours before now wandering through the rain. He sniffed and coughed slightly, eyes red with unshed tears and pale hands shaking around a bottle that would no doubt contain something extremely alcoholic. I had never even seen him drink before, let alone down a whole bottle. Although the heaviness of the rain suggested that it would be diluted and mostly water now, as he swigged from it without even wrinkling his nose.
I approached slowly, careful not to startle him,
"Sherlock, what are you doing out here?" He didn't even flinch or jump in surprise, he had known I was coming no doubt,
"Nothing. Thinking." I nodded, edging closer and wrapping a hand around his arm, easing him under the cover of the bridge, out of the heavy rain, and dropping the blanket I had brought with me around his trembling shoulders,
"And what exactly is going through that genius noggin of yours?"
"I was pondering how cold the water would be... would it be so cold that - if I inched a little bit forward and allowed the currents to take me - it would burn? Would my life flash before my eyes, and show me my crimes? Would my lungs feel like they're in a vacuum, would I have to come up for air? Would I drown or would I simply wash up later and continue on, as I have for nearly two hundred years? Or would I just lie at the bottom, alone in the pitch black and the cold and the silence until the end of all time, as the world died around me-?" I couldn't listen to his calm tone anymore, couldn't bear to hear what he was saying without even a hint of emotion. So I gently muttered,
"Stop it, Sherlock."
I lowered myself to sit beside him on the ledge, noting with a small and humourless chuckle how much further my own feet were away from the water, and then saying quietly, "I don't want you to hear you speak like that ever again."
"Why shouldn't I John? Don't I have a right to contemplate what is happening with my body... what could happen if I attempted to destroy it once and for all?"
"Yes, you have that right to think about it but you're not going to act on that thought. Do you know how many people you would hurt if you acted on that contemplation?"
"I imagine there are about four; even you will admit that it is hardly a grand total for a man who has lived for twenty decades. I have made one fifth of friend every ten years," he chuckled, "I must be more sociable than I thought. You would think that all that time would make me a good person, a beloved one, and that I would improve. But no. I am still as fundamentally unlovable and disliked as ever, yet now I can't even say it is the scars that make me so, that is my face that they despise because it isn't. It's my own core, my own actions and personality that they despise so greatly."
"They don't understand you, Sherlock, nobody does-"
"You do-"
"No, I don't. You're locked up inside yourself and I care about you, because I know that in there you're a good person, but that doesn't mean I understand you. I just know a little bit more than they do and I can just about realise how you came to be this way. One day either you'll learn how to be a part of society and be accepted by then... or you'll accept yourself for who you are and know that you don't need their approval. I think you're almost there anyway, and that's why I care about you so much."
"Thank you, John." I nodded,
"No problem... can you come home now, please?"
He sighed, looking down at his drink,
"That's the thing though, isn't it, John? I'm not entirely sure that I can."
"Why? Lestrade knows about you and he doesn't judge you, he never has, if that's what you're worried about." Sherlock shook his head,
"That was never a concern, I have trusted him since the moment he noticed me in that side-alley, making my home in a cardboard box. My concern is everyone else. It's never going to be the same. People know John. I don't care for people knowing my business, it makes me appear vulnerable and weak and it puts me at risk."
"What do you mean at risk?"
"Think about it; they'll go looking for the truth, won't they? They're the police, they can track down all of my records... and they'll realise that there aren't any. There are the basic records that Mycroft provided that give my identity and schooling but there are no criminal records for my drug abuse, no birth certificate, no hospital records for my scars and no travel records, no credit card accounts except for the one I set up when you moved in. There are no identity tracers which they could usually use, I have spent my entire life avoiding them and making it easy for me to do a moonlight disappearance. They'll see that something's wrong, that I seem to have hardly existed, and they'll dig."
"And what do you think they'll find exactly?" He sighed, taking another swig from the bottle and saying thoughtfully, staring at the amber liquid inside,
"Have you ever tried to go two hundred years without being noticed?"
"Well no-"
"It's increasingly difficult. You do things, you go places, and people naturally want to document everything, especially in this digital age. Everything is connected now; a Google search can show you a person's whole life. There are records of me going just as far back as I do because, whilst there may not be official documentation of my past, there are newspaper articles and letters and photographs, even a few excerpts from books, about the scarred monster. You find my university schooling and you find courses, then you find the research from Mycroft's childhood and then you may even follow that thread back to Victor's, since they are such similar pieces of work. And if you find my true name, you find that I'm a Frankenstein and you can track me to my part in the war and to the strange occurrences in the family during Victor's time, and you may even find the sketches that Victor made of me, which went into his journals in his university years and were published by his father. They may be idiots but it only takes one idiot to stumble onto a thread and then the whole thing unravels."
"Sherlock, that's not going to happen-" He looked up at Lestrade, who had quietly arrived and stood to listen as Sherlock revealed his deepest fear,
"And why the Hell not, Lestrade? I thought you had more faith in them than that-"
"It's not going to happen because I have the British Government living in my house. We've talked about your past over the years and we've been working to hide it, we put blocks on everything. Not even the Queen has clearance to read any of that information-"
"Strange that Mycroft would block himself." We all burst out laughing at Sherlock's remark and the tension seemed to fizzle away as we just chortled for a good cathartic minute, until finally Lestrade sighed and said,
"It's going to be alright Sherlock, there are blocks on everything. It would take a world class hacker to find anything."
We were silent for a second, and then Sherlock nodded – unable to form the words but the sentiment clear, he was grateful. Lestrade took a seat on Sherlock's other side, watching the water contorting and writhing a few inches below his feet, "what are you so afraid of Sherlock? Is it just that you don't want people to know the truth?" Sherlock took one final swill and handed the empty bottle to Lestrade, reaching up to push the drenched curls back off his face,
"Partially. Humans are not the most accepting of creatures, they would reject me as they did long ago. Some people of religion - who claim to be of a religion which loves and accept everyone no matter who they are - have always despised me. They once called me ungodly, an abomination. I remember the extremists coming to the freak show, rioting and shouting out for my immediate extinction, just as people would protest for a stop to many scientific research studies nowadays. If people found out the truth… I would become a topic of debate, a thing to talk about in the street, should I live or should I die?
"Or perhaps upon knowing how I was born, how long I've lived, they would lock me up in a lab and study me. Humans have always coveted immortality and eternal youth, and I hold that secret in my genes. Maybe men would come to take me away from Baker Street, so I could be prodded and poked for the rest of my life or maybe even dissected. Men are jealous and greedy, they may force me to give them secrets which are far too precious and dark for them to hold, which come with a price that no-one should pay. Victor paid that price to give me life, the crimes I committed against his family in my ignorance were an impossible expense and he should have left it alone. I suffered first but then others felt my pain because of it. I did terrible things and, if there were more people like me, I don't know what they would do. I learnt long ago that another of my kind is possible but that doesn't mean it's right."
I couldn't help but reach up and put an arm around Sherlock's shaking shoulders, gently pulling him against my side as Lestrade reached out and grasped his other shoulder, both of us gently calming him. He froze for a second, not used to the intimacy, but then relaxed and rested his sopping curls against my neck. We were an odd trio, sat there in the pouring rain in dead silence, the two of them holding their feet aloft as the water lapped had started to lap at their ankles and nearly the soles of my shoes.
Slowly, night turned in morning and we watched the pale streaks of grey splash across the sky, and the sun rise in the distance from behind the river,
"Shall we go home, Sherlock?"
"For now... yes." I didn't ask what he meant by for now... but it didn't sound too good.