A/N: Terribly late. I'm trying to shape my life in ways in which it has never been bent before. A world of possibilities opens up if only I can pull things together. Right now I'm an amalgamation of distorted limbs and some two or three heads like the old mythological beings. Or maybe I just feel as if I were. But I needed *this* back. Sherlock and John, and their friendship and shenanigans. So here I am again. -csf


III.

'You look tired, John.'

I sigh, watching the burning logs slowly disentangle from their awkward embrace as they crumble apart in the hearth. I am, so very tired, but I will not retire yet. I can't. Someone needs to keep a watchful eye over this parallel-universes-hopper that looks a lot like me. It could be a set up of the worst kind. The newcomer has already got Sherlock pegged, after all. By giving the detective an impossible fact to reconcile, a break in the universe's time loop, he has tantalise the rational mind. It can't be, yet it most assuredly is. How can that be?

The overachieving investigator has the ultimate mystery to solve; a time fracture that ejected a doppelganger of his flatmate, someone he instinctively trusts over an acute resemblance to me. As much Sherlock trusts, and already watches over this stocky man from a different reality (in a manner that is so familiar yet so flagrant as I see it pinned on someone else), I feel the natural need to act as the counterbalance. The yang to the ying. It's only natural.

Besides, if someone is aware of the dark planes of a John Watson, it really should be me, and not the famous detective; it takes one to know one, after all. I'm not just a healer, I was a soldier with bad days. I don't just make tea and clean after Sherlock's bloody experiments (too many times, literally bloody), I can hold my stance with a gun against a dangerous armed criminal, and if they are aiming at Sherlock, let's just say I won't wait until I have full justifiable cause to shoot. Someone's got to save the skinny detective with so few survival skills. I cannot wait for him to be shot at first every single time. I've seen enough criminals, murdered, warlords, and other worse scoundrels to recognise the pattern and get ahead...

I shake my head tiredly and look away. It's almost with a jolt that I realise Sherlock has been eavesdropping on my thoughts once again.

It never angers me, somehow, this Sherlockian voodoo act. It lets me know I'm not alone anymore.

I look on over to the presence that inflicts its weight upon our homely duo.

'How do we know this guy is really who he says he is, Sherlock?' I ask, slowly, glancing unabashedly at the sprawling blond on the sofa, seemingly fast asleep. I frown; I never noticed how I couldn't quite fit the sofa from one end to the other. Take Sherlock, for instance, when he planks himself on the sofa, his head is raised on one arm rest and his big feet hit the other. Apparently I can't do that. I'm lying down sitting cushions only. Ha.

Sherlock allows a complicity smirk to my question. As if my personal oracle indeed expected my insurgency against the carbon copy of myself; I'm too familiar with myself not to recognise the flaws.

'He is as honest as you are, John. More so, if that's possible', he adds, looking genuinely puzzled. He glances a hard stare at my features, as if studying the Afghanistan desert dust deep in my facial wrinkles.

I snap my gaze back to my best friend, facing his analysis deadpan. There's nothing he can't read in me, so honesty is just a superfluous politeness with Sherlock.

'Maybe I'm not that straightforward. You just know me too well, mate.' I argue to the man who can deduce the intricate layers of most people's souls from a glance at the evidence they carry from a lifetime of habits and responses in their fingertips, their clothes, their walk.

'Nonsense, John. I could read the first day we met.'

Yes, one glance and he had my life story deduced up to that fateful afternoon at Bart's. But those were facts. What you do for a living, your pets, where you live, what you had for breakfast; sure all that is important, but it does not explain who you truly are. Just like watching a reflection on a mirror will not tell you if the reflected person is warm or cold to the touch, if they smell nice, if they are hiding something behind their back. It's a snapshot in time, a picture of someone, as opposed to a book containing their life story.

'Won't you read him for me, Sherlock?' I request.

The detective's analytical grey eyes narrow on me instead.

'You distrust him... Does that mean you distrust yourself in a parallel universe?' He smirks openly. But it's a distraction, and I know that.

I smirk too, and know better than to get tangled in metaphysics.

'Won't you do it?' I insist.

He is openly hesitant. I wonder if he deduces in me something I'm not entirely aware of, something that would make me uncomfortable to be confronted with. I'm not perfect by any means.

Does any one of us really wants to know who we are without the filters of our personal narratives?

Who can know you better than your best mate, when your best mate is also the world's best detective?

'You made me promise to stop deducing you, John. Made you particularly uncomfortable before breakfast, if I remember correctly.'

'I said him, not me.'

'John is you.'

I scoff immediately. 'Since when would anyone keep me from tea? He's clearly not all me.'

Sherlock flashes a grin at me. 'Conceded. He's a version of you, John. And no version of you would ever come home to hurt me.'

I blink in surprise at that passionate certainty pronounced so matter-of-factly.

Deciding to drop the evaded request for the moment, I huff annoyed, just to keep an illusion of self-righteousness.

'Right. Just keep an eye out. Soon you'll do your thing out loud to him; and I'll do my thing.'

He blinks, curiosity emanating from him like heat waves.

'My thing is deducing, according to you. How about your thing, John?'

Sherlock is genuinely lost.

'You'll deduce his mind. I'll narrate his heart.'

.

'I'm grateful, really I am, but why do you help me? None of the other Sherlocks did.'

This new Sherlock upon yet another Baker Street home, hummed to himself, quietly exploring the innermost secrets of the skies beyond the narrow balcony. It was the middle of a dark night, as dark as they can make the skies be over London (which actually isn't quite as much as it could be, given all the light pollution from the incessant city). For a moment we gazed upon the dark, cold, crystalline sky above us. We pondered its secrets, the ones we can see, and the ones we can only sense.

'There are full constellations and unknown universes in your gaze, John', the astronomer told me, quietly, mysteriously. I snapped my gaze at him, his chin pointing at the stars and yet he seemed to have been studying me all along. The moment was full of a thrumming familiarity.

This Sherlock was just as curious as mine, wanting to catalogue the universe's secrets, to rationalise its laws of physics and quantics, but did not spend himself with the same physical exertion with his own companion. No midnight runs across London, no guns concealed under waistbands. I found I enjoyed it, this quiet conversation in dusky street lights, these mingled whispers carried in the night; as if loud voices could somehow disturb the universe's designs, the very taunt strings with which human fates are played and intertwined in the most beautiful melodies. We were then mere insignificant creatures, and at the same time we were part of something as timeless as infinite, as harmonious as those lost streams of thought, quivering in the vast horizons of possibilities.

A quieter detective, I noticed, but still shocked full of the same wonders that homed in an acute interest in me, that sparked the same zest for life, the same lingering aftertaste of the exotic, of gunpowder – and a hint of melodrama. I was once again confronted with the fact that I am hooked on Sherlock. Each Sherlock, each full of different wondrous possibilities, has been as intoxicating and alluring as the last. Each Sherlock dug deeper the loss and the bittersweet memories of that one Sherlock that had been my whole universe. The One that started all.

And pushed everything to an abrupt end.

I sighed, and watched over the night as a quiet contemplation of fate.

This wasn't my Sherlock, and my quest had only to continue until I got reunited with him.

A half-strangled shout pierced the companionship silence and I jumped, bumping against the cold iron of the balcony railing. It came from within the house. Sherlock, I noticed, had quite a different reaction to mine. His eyes narrowed, his chin arose in defiance, at the same time the chiselled lines of his face differed considerably as we zoomed in on the source of the noise in the upstairs bedroom.

I looked down, awkwardly, on my feet. I know the nightmares. I've had them sporadically since a child, a strange trait that accompanied me throughout my life. Once, twice a year the most, I seem to be easily ambushed by my treacherous sleeping mind.

Belatedly, as Sherlock steps out to the living room in practical and practised footsteps, I notice the astronomer is very familiar and entirely comfortable with the upstairs John's nightmares. As if that John was more often plagued with them.

I frown into the night as I wonder what sort of life event could have brought that misfortune into my path. We find ourselves under the same abode of stars, but we seem to have wandered into very different life paths, just as our Sherlocks.

I find comfort in the fact that we all seem to have found our ways to Sherlock Holmes.

.

TBC