Part One: Cut-Glass

John Watson had never thought of Thursdays as things that were particularly difficult to get a hang of. They had just sort of slipped by more or less blamelessly (Wednesdays though, Wednesdays were another matter entirely, the sneaky buggers – themyou had to watch). Only now, ever since the first Thursday following Sherlock's funeral, John found himself throwing his lot in with Arthur Dent on the subject.

It wasn't just that the dreams were strange. John had always been a lucid dreamer, and, well, dreams were never really normal, were they? What was unusual was the accompanying conviction that if he could only dream the right dream in the right way, he could somehow get Sherlock back.

Yes, it was nonsense, and he knew it, and he would never evertell another living soul. When he was awake,properly awake and not stuck in the muddled half-consciousness between sleep and actual waking, he told himself that it was a way of coping, that without the dreams and the deeply misplaced sense of purpose, he'd have gone mad (or perhaps madder) long ago and found a rooftop to walk off of himself.

What he thought as he drifted off on Wednesday nights, though, was entirely different.

Firstly, he didn't want to live in a world where it wasn't true that Sherlock could come back, even through means eldritch and arcane and obviously illogical. And, secondly, he knew that Sherlock's fall had been his fault so it stood to reason that he should be able to fix it, if he could find a way. Oh, it wasn't entirely on him, he knew that, he wasn't stupid, Moriarty had gotten to Sherlock somehow, had forced to say and do what he had said and done, and if anybody should take the blame for it, it was the consulting criminal, hands down. But John knew he'd had a part in it too. He'd left Sherlock alone at Bart's on the strength of a stranger's phone call, and, to make matters worse, he'd gotten angry and said words that were as indelible as tallow stains on a white silk shirt. He of all people should have known that Sherlock wasn't such a beast as that.

And so for believing in some small part and for the briefest instant what everybody else said and suspected about his flatmate, he had found himself alone in the world again, with the small selfsame bundle of belongings that he'd brought with him to Baker Street.

In any case, he dreamed strange and vivid things in the early hours of Thursday, between midnight and dawn. He knew, as a vague factoid dimly remembered from the literature of his school days, that that was when true dreams were supposed to happen, but he didn't set much store by that. What he knew for a fact was that he woke up each Thursday exhausted, as if he'd never slept at all, and he'd toss and turn in his sweaty sheets, doing the best he could to sleep till noon. Daytime sleep didn't sit well with him, though. John found that it was rather like bad sex: it wasn't satisfying, no matter how long you went at it, but because you were horribly stuck somewhere between sated and unsated, you wanted more of it just in case it got better over time (it didn't). As the phenomenon of Thursdays went on, he arranged things at the new surgery so that he'd have Thursdays off, because although being grumpy and cross by himself around the flat wasn't very nice, it was certainly better than being grumpy and cross at patients and co-workers.

The flat wasn't 221B Baker Street anymore. He couldn't stand staying there, though he always meant to visit Mrs. Hudson, and he even managed to from time to time, just for tea and then he'd be off again before it got late. After one such visit, he'd taken the skull home with him, because Mrs. Hudson said that she couldn't stand the thing and was about to donate it to some school somewhere, and he didn't want to abandon something that Sherlock, however jokingly, had referred to as a friend. He put it on a shelf on his bedroom, and it was company, if of a singularly grim sort. At least it didn't mind John's dreaming.

For the most part, the dreams fit patterns of half-remembered legends and tales. There were rules, and there were rules: conditions had to be met, instructions had to be followed, and, though he always knew what they were, something or another was always just a bit too hard to fulfill.

The one where he was talking with a woman who kept half her face covered with a fall of hair and smelled sickly sweet, like something rotten (but John hadn't mentioned that, it wouldn't have been polite), had been particularly brief. She told him that he could have Sherlock back if everyone in the world wept over the loss of its only consulting detective, and John had said thanks, but no thanks, and turned his back. He had no illusions as to what other people thought of Sherlock Holmes, and what he thought of them was unprintable in most media.

Equally short had been the one where he was sitting at a chessboard opposite a small, richly dressed man with a Gaelic accent so thick that you could have put it between two slices of bread and made a decent sandwich of it. He'd smiled knowingly at the doctor as he pushed one of his pawns forward, and John, knowing full well that he was hopeless at chess, woke up halfway through asking if they could maybe have a nice game of Cluedo instead.

There were others that went on for longer, and were thus harder to wake up from because of the cloying frustration and sorrow that came with them. It had been particularly difficult to come to terms with the one with the white rooster and the gray dog: John was supposed to find all of Sherlock's bones, and the rooster was supposed to crow over them, and the dog was supposed to bark, to bring the detective back to life, but he had missed the little stirrup-bone from Sherlock's left ear, and so all the crowing and barking amounted to naught.

This week there was a glass hill, as smooth as a windowpane and as steep as the side of a house. There had also been a horse, a huge copper-colored animal that had slipped about a third of the way up, and John had only stopped himself from sliding all the way down with it by throwing himself from its back at the last possible instant. He hoped the animal was all right (even if it was just a dream-horse): it had carried him pretty far, all things considered, until it was so hot that foam dripped from its sides. And that was all the thought he could spare for the poor thing, because it was all he could do to cling to the side of the hill. The edifice was smooth as a windowpane, yes, but it was as smooth as you could expect so huge a windowpane to be: there were little lumps and tiny cracks on its surface, and by some wild miracle, they were just enough for John to use as supports and toeholds.

It was a struggle, going up. A warm, light wind whipped at his clothes, and many of the edges he caught hold of were sharp, and they cut his fingers and his arms. There was something he needed at the top of the hill, though, much more than a princess and half a kingdom, and so John pulled himself up, inch by sharp, slippery inch.

After a long while, he was two thirds of the way up, and after still longer, he could see the very crest of the hill. The top was as flat as a tabletop, and about it was about the size of a table as well, and, when John Watson hoisted himself over the ledge, he saw that at the very center of it was a golden apple sitting on a purple cushion (and, unless he was very much mistaken, he knew that shade of purple).

"This is what all the fuss is about?" he said, incredulous, and he pulled himself up on his elbows to reach for the fruit. But in so doing, his right foot slipped from the little ridge he had rested it on, and down he slipped, cursing his luck.

Before he fell all the way down, however, the East Wind blew the golden apple into his outstretched hand, and his fingers closed around it as he tumbled down the glass hill.

John awoke aching all over, and his hands and arms were covered with what felt like innumerable paper cuts. There were two particularly deep ones near his elbows, right where they'd be if he'd tried to lever himself up onto a surface on his forearms. And when he rolled over, groaning sleepily, he found a perfect, round apple digging into the small of his back. He took it and held it up to the pre-dawn light filtering in through his window. It smelled very sweet, and he could have sworn that its skin was the rich yellow of pure gold.

"I think you're getting warmer," rattled the dry voice.

"Sod off," said John, yawning as he put the apple on his bedside table. "And if you don't let me sleep, I swear to God that I'll toss you in the bins downstairs."

Notes:

Mostly, this chapter is based on The Princess on the Glass Hill, but I slipped in some other things:
1. The woman with half her face covered is Hel of Norse mythology's underworld, and the conditions she sets are those she gave for the return of Balder to the living.
2. The small man is Finvarra, the most important of the Daoine Sidhe of Ireland, thought by some to be the King of the Dead. A skilled chess player, mortals often challenged him in high-stakes games only to lose everything they possessed. I, er, took the liberty of imagining that he could play for somebody's life.
3. The white rooster and the gray dog are from the Ilocano epic Biag ni Lam-Ang (The Life of Lam-Ang), where the hero is killed by a giant fish, and is brought back to life by his wife and those two aforesaid land animals.