A/N: Special mention to hiddenlacuna, mydwynter and dee-light, who had so much to do with this chapter that by all rights, I should probably list them as co-authors.
John's lost his horse. His big black warhorse, who followed him through so many battles and fought at John's side; he's drowned in the swamp, and John has nowhere to go. He can't be a soldier without a horse. He shuffles through the dusty city in his long brown coat, and asks for work from the men holding wheels on the street corners.
He's not a soldier anymore, and he can't be a doctor, not with his horse's blood on his shaking hands. It's all he can do to feed himself, and the crows that come to visit. Always feed the crows. They carry luck in their beaks and decide how much they want to give you.
They seem so familiar, watching him with their beady, knowing eyes, like they're waiting for him to call their names. He should be able to, he thinks. They're so familiar.
They watch him, and he thinks they're waiting for him to fly, but he can't. He's broken, ever since the wind blew him off that long tall wall and knocked him off-course. They all fell to lie shattered at the base, and melted like wax puppets in the hot sun so that now his arms hurt and shake, and his wing bones are cracked and hollow.
Hospital rooms smell like paint. The scent makes you invisible; blends you right into the walls if you work there long enough. They don't notice you, as you lie there sick and hurt. It doesn't matter, though. The colours are the same everywhere. John doesn't have anywhere else to go.
From here, he can see the lake. The water in March is so cold it will shock the breath out of you like a punch to the chest. The children should be in bed now, hiding. They've all heard of the monster who lives in the deep of the lake. He comes into the west wing and smells of rotting wood and fish and bile, and if you sleep he will steal you away. Every child locks their room against the night and doesn't sleep, till after the sun comes over the hill in the morning, just for a few hours.
But John's not afraid. That's only a tale. It's nothing compared to what's really out there.
A woman promises to heal him. He pushes back her hair and takes her to bed.
She's beautiful, with a perky upturned nose and cheerful freckles and a smile that lights up like a Christmas display. He aches to touch, but she's made of flowers, and he knows they'll shrivel and die under his hands. She straddles him, and when her red-brown hair tumbles down undone around him, he realizes. Sherlock. They're lying in the ocean, and it's battering down his shores, and it's all Sherlock.
John wants, he wants, oh god he wants, but it's time travel gone wrong. He can't. He can't go back. He can't undo what happened.
He burns, though, oh god. He floats in the dead sea, salt waves of blood caressing him and burning in his wounds, and it's not dead, no, it's Sherlock's fingers bathing him, holding him, surrounded and supported and caressed. Reaching gently into his bullet wound, alive and hot, flowing through him.
It should hurt, he thinks, but it's no harsh penetration. It's soft and subtle and enlivening and necessary. Osmosis. Semipermeable membrane, the salt and the waters seeking balance on both sides, and the orgasm isn't a rush so much as a core-tight relief at the balance being redressed. The pleasure of the salts and water moving from within to without and without to within, until everything is calm and silence.
He wakes, he thinks, but he's too tired to open his eyes. It's all dark and body warmth and another man's breathing, and John sinks back into the undertow of his own mind and the humid heat of a vast burning forest and a sweating dance to the drums that drive them on, silhouetted around the campfire while the mushroom cloud blooms overhead. They pound and twirl and cry out in a slow-moving frenzy. Everything smells like sex and cloves and whiskey, and something is going to happen at 3am, and none of them is sure just what.
He needs to purge this. He needs to bleed, let the hurt pour out and lance from him.
Sherlock didn't mean for this. John can feel him wanting to fix it, but he doesn't know how. All he knows is how to break things. "I put them together wrong, when I try to fix them," he says mournfully.
Which is probably how John came to be on stage, in a frock and lipstick and fishnets and heels. The velvet curtain goes up. John is the performer, and also the audience, but he can't tell what they want from him, the divisive bastards. Finally sick of it, he storms off stage to put on a suit of armour over his dress and slams the door on the way out.
It backfires, of course.
"In your head," he tells Sherlock without looking at him, "it's love and romance and destiny. In their head, it's fear and being trapped and nausea. Stalkers never think they're doing anything really wrong."
So why is Sherlock so shocked, then? John did warn him. It's that sick feeling in his throat when he needs to take something back and he can't. And a dawning horror that this all happened for a reason, was supposed to happen, that the end was inevitable and there was nothing he could do. You were always going to cause pain to the one you love.
It backfires. Death.
"Barrow wight."
"Black suits you, dancing beneath the moon."
They dance together in tuxedos among the headstones. It's a full moon, and the graveyard is lit up like day, if daylight were white. One of them is dead, or was, but John can't for the life of him tell who.
There's a gramophone playing somewhere, and the music sounds like wind. Old music full of scratches, the kind where John keeps expecting it to resolve itself into a tune he knows, but it never quite does. Still, he can't stop listening for that note combination. He knows it has to be there, if he just listens long enough to the music in between the spaces.
If he falters in the dance everything will end. He can feel the burden of it weighing him down. He's tired, but not tired enough to stop. Or maybe he can't. Maybe Sherlock and the dance and the music are feeding each other, and he'll be trapped here under the hill for ages and ages while time falls to dust outside under the human sky. He can't stop dancing, and the night will never end.
And why would it? When Sherlock's smile is nearly as bright as the moon, and his hair as black as the sky, and the stars dazzle and feed John's heart, and everything is as clear as it's ever, ever, been.
They're gliding on glass, a mirror on the floor of a cool green forest. What can you see? John, look.
Checkers in the morning, and the torn pages of a book. It's the Brothers Grimm. The leaves are wet.
John wakes up, wound in his own gingham sheets.