A/N Totally different style here, due to the title/prompt.

Thanks to johnsarmylady, total-animal-lover, Motaku1235, and Orchfan

Disclaimer I don't own Sherlock or any associated characters, events, etc.

LXI. Fairy Tale

Once upon a time, there was a soldier. He was a quiet soldier, a good soldier, a loyal soldier. He fought valiantly for his country, lived through battle after battle, confronted the bloodshed with an iron jaw and a steel will. He was scared, oh, he was very scared, but he never let it be known, and none of his comrades would have believed such a thing if they'd been told so. Oh, not him, they'd laugh, no, he's the bravest of us all. Shocker that he doesn't have a lady back home.

The soldier didn't have a lady back home, which wasn't to say he didn't want one. As a matter of fact, the brave little man desired love above all else, but it was his biggest secret, and he didn't tell anyone—not even himself. That truth was kept locked up deep inside the quiet soldier, hidden somewhere in the depths of his stomach, or perhaps his liver—nowhere near his heart, for its presence could be a danger there, and he already lived with enough danger; there was no need for him to have enemies on the inside as well as the out.

That all changed one day, though. One day when he felt the sting of a bullet like those which he'd pried out of his friends so many times before, burning like fire deep in his skin and muscle and tendon, branding him with a consequence, a horrible punishment for his good deeds. He'd be sent back home, back where there were no real friends, where there would only be the dark-eyed sister and the hollow lack of a home, the stiff cane and the raging nightmares.

Nobody understood the poor soldier, back home. None of them knew the battlefield.

Until, one day, he met another man, a man who was the battlefield.

His savior was tall, with the beautiful face of an elf or a fairy, skin the color of the moon and hair stained deep with the shades of a thousand nights. But the soldier's favorite part of the gorgeous-faced man was his eyes, endless eyes that seemed to contain the gleam of galaxies, stardust silver, early-morning blue, late-evening green.

Everything about him sparkled.

And the soldier knew that he wasn't lost anymore, because this was just what he'd been looking for, in all the days of dreading sleep and nightmares, the sweaty, bloody hours spent dodging bullets in the desert land, even his childhood, a cheerful period that still seemed as though it was lacking something from the very start.

The soldier didn't know about soulmates, but he still felt the pull, all the same. The longing lived deep inside his heart, sprouted inside that very organ that he'd tried so hard to keep locked away, soft and gentle and wondrous. One day, he'd learn to name the love, but not quite yet. Not for many months, for a fall and a rise and a thousand little trips out to buy milk.

It waited, though, curled up cozily inside of him, ever patient, knowing that someday, soon or far, it would get its chance to rise to the surface.