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The first time John met a Cursed, he was seven years old.
He’d never been a terribly loquacious child, preferring instead to sit back and watch the world unfold before him, not attack it head-on. His sister Harry, on the other hand, was positively garrulous and spoke for the sole purpose of hearing her own voice. It was for this reason that John always shadowed his sister wherever she went, prepared to diffuse any potentially disastrous situation that Harry’s big mouth had gotten her into this time.
He supposed, in retrospect, that Harry’s inability to control her inhibitions when speaking should have been a more obvious indicator of her struggles later on in life. Enough was never enough, be it babes, babble, or booze.
One of Harry’s primary listeners (read: victim) was the little old lady down the street whose ramshackle house they passed on the way to and from school every day. Whether the woman was out in the yard tending to her unruly shrubs or oscillating in the rocker on her decrepit porch, Harry would pause at the gate and regale the woman with tales of school yard scraps and tedious lessons. Winter, spring, summer, or fall, John stood beside his sister and watched the bees hover around lopsided roses and stunted daisies, stared pensively at icicles clinging desperately to drooping eaves, or pondered puddles sprawled despondently on the kerb. The woman seemed pleased to see the Watson twins most days, but every so often, Harriet would put her foot in her big mouth and John would see a horrible, dark sadness brewing in the old lady’s milky brown gaze. On those days, he would tug Harry home by the straps of her rucksack with murmured apologies tossed over his shoulder, chastising his uncouth sibling under his breath.
It was on one of Harry’s horribly insensitive days, when brown eyes looked black in the late afternoon sun, that the old woman laughed off Harry’s comments and invited them inside her dilapidated shack for a quick sweet before scurrying home for dinner. Harriet agreed without a second thought, her chubby fingers scrambling with the latch of the warped picket fence, her fingernails sending snowflakes of discoloured white paint spiralling to the pavement. John followed on her heels, wringing his small hands as he watched the stooped senior push open her crooked front door, ushering them into the fragrant gloom of her home. Where John had expected the scent of mothballs and rot, his nose was assaulted with a hodgepodge of sugary-sweet aromas. Soft hints of vanilla mingled with the cloying notes of burnt sugar and the spice of cinnamon as they made their way into the bowels of the woman’s home. John paused in the hallway, his small heart beating a frantic tattoo against his ribs as his eyes traced the changes in architecture taking place in the cracked hallways: crown mouldings melted into frosting, light fixtures morphed into gumdrops, candy floss replaced cobwebs, and floor boards softened into gingerbread. He wanted to run away, to race home and bury his face in his mother’s tattered blue apron, but Harry’s shrill scream took his feet in another direction. John slunk into the kitchen, crouching in the shadows of the doorway, his blue eyes wide as he watched the old woman shove his sister into a large cage, her once soft features now angular and twisted in the golden light from the stove. The witch cackled, shoving plates full of biscuits towards Harry, chipped teeth gnashing together in her oblong mouth.
“Eat up, my pretty. We need to fatten you up before we bake you, yes we do,” she crooned, her nasal voice sending chills down John’s spine. She was going to roast his sister, bake her in a pie, dip her in batter and swallow her whole! He cupped his hands over his mouth to muffle his frantic panting, his fingers leaving little bruises on his soft cheeks. Harry wailed, fat tears rolling down her face, her fists beating against the bars. The witch cackled again, turning and bending to stoke the fire under her massive cast iron stove.
John saw his chance and he took it.
Sometimes, in the future, when he woke screaming into the blackness, he didn’t dream of dry desert sands and the sharp copper tang of blood; he choked on the smell of burning flesh and the dying hints of fresh gingerbread.
When the police officers wrapped John and Harry up in scratchy orange blankets, there was no more witch. The crown moulding was stiff plaster, the light fixtures were tarnished brass, the cobwebs hung heavy in the abandoned corners, and the floor creaked like old wood when they brought in the Mage. John told their story to the nice woman with the red curls. Harry, for once, was silent.
At home, their mother sat them down and explained about the world existing alongside their own. That night, John and Harry curled up together in one bed, hiding behind a duvet shield and shivering in the dark, a torch clutched between them.
John met many more Cursed in the years to come. Some of them were the terrifying monsters that he’d feared hid beneath the frayed bed skirt in his room while others were tragic people leading tragic lives. He never forgot the day when a Reaper appeared, turning a young boy in his class to sea foam in the middle of lecture. The blonde boy for whom he’d traded his voice never even batted an eye.
During his residency, he helped to strap down a girl who couldn’t stop dancing, her graceful limbs flailing as bright red shoes dug deep into the tender soles of her feet. It wasn’t until he saw the rusty smears on the stark white hospital sheets that he realized the silk slippers had been dyed crimson with her blood. He sat in the observation room above the operating theatre as they performed a double amputation. She never danced again.
In Afghanistan, a Cursed sent him home with a ruined shoulder and a bum leg. He’d huffed and he’d puffed and he’d blown John’s entire platoon straight into the line of fire from enemy snipers.
His therapist told him he had trust issues. Privately, John thought that he had Cursed issues; he attracted enough of them. Maybe he could blog about that.
Mike Stamford had been Cursed the last time John had seen him, kicked out of his home after an incident with some beans and a giant…and something involving a goose and a harp. He bought John a coffee and they chatted about the old days, Harry, and the bottom of the bottle in which she could often be found.
Funny, how you can share a womb with someone and have them become a complete and total stranger.
“Have you considered getting a flatshare?” Mike tilted his head to the side, the afternoon sunlight glinting off of his rounded spectacles.
“Seriously? Come on, who’d want me as a flatmate?” John chuckled bitterly, knuckles white around his cane. Mike sat back, his own laugh warmer than John’s chilly dismissal. “What?”
“You’re the second person to say that to me today.”
“Who was the first?”
***
“Bit different from my day,” John mused as he limped into the small lab, the hum of fluorescent lights harmonizing with the tap of his cane against the tile floor.
“You have no idea. We teach Potions here, now, not just Biology.”
“Mike, can I borrow your phone? There’s no signal on mine.” The voice was deep and rich, startling John from his reverie. A figure moved about in the unlit portion of the lab, the heady aroma of a potion wafting from the space.
“And what’s wrong with the landline?” Mike inquired, his mouth twisting with mirth.
“I prefer to text.”
“Sorry, it’s in my coat.”
“Here,” John fished the mobile his sister had given him during a drunken bout of sentiment from his pocket, extending it towards the man hunched in the shadows. “Use mine.” The man turned, stepping out under the fluorescents, and John felt his heart stop.
Not a man. Monster. The creature was deathly pale, gruesome scars and stark sutures holding his lean body together. His face was mottled with violent reds and vicious purples, a jagged scar running from forehead to chin, lending a gruesome asymmetry to his features, another stretching along one ridiculous cheekbone; his head was bare and bruised save for a sad patch of matted, dark hair clinging tenaciously to the ruined skin towards the back of his skull. He looked like a reanimated corpse, the Frankenstein monster, a fearsome creation conjured from the depths of a madman’s twisted imaginings – a nightmare incarnate. He didn’t breath, didn’t blink, no heartbeat palpitated beneath the stretched skin of his long throat. Not human. Not at all.
“Afghanistan or Iraq?”
“Sorry?” John blinked, his blood running cold as mercurial eyes slid from the screen of his phone to his face, appraising him like a predator sizing up its midmorning snack. The doctor swallowed, meeting the calculating gaze until the creature’s eyes darted back to the unfamiliar keyboard gripped between scared fingers.
“Which was it, Afghanistan or Iraq?”
“Afghanistan, sorry, how did you…”
“I play the violin when I’m thinking and sometimes I don’t talk for days on end. Also, I’m Cursed; reanimated corpse of a sort. Would that bother you? Potential flatmates should know the worst about each other.” The creature smiled, a ghastly, fake thing that stretched his face too impossible dimensions and made John’s skin tingle with fear.
“You told him about me?”
“Not a word,” Mike grinned, his boyish face alight with glee.
“Then who said anything about flatmates?” Blue eyes narrowed, meeting silver-blue-green across a dark table top decorated in glistening lab equipment.
“I did. I told Mike this morning that I must be a difficult man to find a flatmate for, being Cursed and all. Now, here he is just after lunch with an old friend clearly just home from military service in Afghanistan. Wasn’t a difficult leap.” There were notes of condescension in the rich baritone, a sense of pride in the cadence as the creature strode around the lab, replacing chemicals and potion ingredients alike with care. The creature sat on a rickety lab stool, observing John like a gargoyle perched on the sloping roof of a cathedral.
“How did you know about Afghanistan?” John breathed, captivated and horrified all at once.
“Got my eye on a nice little place in central London. Together we ought to be able to afford it. We’ll meet there tomorrow evening, seven o’clock. Sorry, got to dash. I think I left my Grimoire in the mortuary.” The creature rose to his feet with a grace unsuited to his disturbing appearance, swirling towards the door in a dramatic greatcoat.
“Is that it?” John snipped, frowning.
“Is that what?”
“We’ve only just met and we’re going to look at a flat?”
“Problem?” One sparse brow arched: a challenge and an inquiry wrapped into one mundane expression.
“We don’t know a thing about each other,” John sighed, tightening his grip on the stiff handle of his cane, jaw clenched. “I don’t know where we’re meeting, I don’t even know your name.”
The creature watched him, silver eyes flashing with a mixture of intrigue and annoyance. His face twisted into something both feral and civilized: a mask of politeness concealing a dangerous temper. The cracked, full lips opened and a stream of words barreled into John, knocking the wind from his lungs.
“I know that you’re an Army doctor and you’ve been invalidated home from Afghanistan. I know you’ve got a brother worried about you, but you won’t go to him for help because you don’t approve of him, possibly because he’s an alcoholic, more likely because he recently got himself Cursed and walked out on his wife. And I know that your therapist thinks your limp if psychosomatic, quite correctly, I’m afraid,” he clucked, long arms limp at his sides. The creature cocked a matted brow again, his eyes snapping as he stared John down. “That’s enough to be going on with, don’t you think? The name’s Sherlock Holmes and the address is 221B Baker Street. Afternoon.”
And like that, he was gone, leaving the room empty and cold in his wake. John looked at Mike, flabbergasted as he tried to wrap his mind around the creature who’d just swept him up and spat him out like a sharp-tongued tornado.
“Yeah, he’s always like that.”
“He’s…”
Mike shifted uncomfortably, babbling in Sherlock’s defence. “I know he’s a bit frightening to look at, but he’s not all that bad, and it’s not a bad Curse or anything, and he’s usually –”
“Brilliant. God, that was amazing,” John shook his head, smiling. There was far more to Sherlock Holmes than a Cursed with a cutting tongue and presumptuous nature. As he left the dreary halls of St. Bart’s behind, John could feel his pulse thrumming in his veins, fear and anticipation keeping his heart thumping merrily until he could meet with the eccentric creature again.
He didn’t kiss the barrel of his gun goodnight.
***
Sherlock Holmes had stripped him bare in the back of a cab, deducing his life’s history from the tan of his wrists and the scratches of his second-hand mobile. He’d abandoned John at a crime scene, let him be kidnapped by a pompous Mage with a God-complex, and summoned him to his side – from across town – to text a murderer from his phone. They’d nearly been arrested after chasing a cab through the serpentine alleyways of London, leapt from rooftops over yawning chasms of black space, cured John’s limp in the process, and had a Power bust from the NSY’s most vindictive officers, who’d ripped apart their flat like impatient children tearing into Christmas presents. Sherlock had abandoned him anew to follow a cabbie-cum-Sorcerer to an abandoned school, putting his life on the line to prove he was clever.
Naturally, John shot the cabbie and signed the lease as payback.
***
“You were going to bite the damn apple, weren’t you?”
“Of course I wasn’t. Biding my time. Knew you’d turn up.”
“No you didn’t. That’s how you get your kicks, isn’t it? Risking your life to prove you’re clever.”
“That only works if one is actually living, John.”
“You’re still an idiot.”
***
“You are free to roam the flat, except for my room. The door will always remain closed.” The tone brooked no room for argument, the consonants rigid and the vowels sharp. John snorted, flipping the page of his paperback with a dampened thumb.
“Fine. Same applies to mine, then. No going poking through my things. Not even ‘for Science, John’, clear?” Sherlock started from his strop, narrowing his eyes at his new flatmate. Every time those verdigris eyes focused their intensity John’s way, it sent shivers skittering down his spine, jolts of unease leaping from vertebra to vertebra with wicked abandon.
“Fine,” the baritone acquiesced, returning to his sprawl on the sofa, his hands folded beneath his scarred chin as though in prayer.
***
Beneath his acerbic tongue and aloof exterior, John was quickly discovering another side of Sherlock that surprised him. It was something glimpsed only in the early hours of the morning, when the world was tranquil and the darkness all-consuming. While the rest of the world turned to Morpheus to ease the relentless barrage of thought that tortured their minds during their waking hours, Sherlock embraced his violin as if it were a lover, his mangled hands caressing the sleek wood with a hushed reverence. He wielded his bow like a sword, slaying the reticence of the city with mournful melodies and soulful songs, his disfigured frame swaying gently while he lost himself in the music.
John saw him, once – the first of many other encounters – when the nightmares became too much to bear and he’d come to his senses with the taste of metal heavy on his tongue and the safety disengaged on his Browning. He’d cried into his fist, his teeth drawing blood in the hollows of his knuckles. Wrapped in soft terrycloth, he’d descended into the kitchen, the hiss of the kettle drowning out the screams of dying men and women, the aroma of bergamot erasing the scent of entrails drying in the sun.
The music reached his ears before the kettle could protest and demand his attentions, the imploring melody calling to him like a siren to a sailor. He extinguished the hob, abandoning his tea for the shadows of the living room, weary eyes drawn to the swaying form of his flatmate, backlit by their front window. Sterling moonlight softened the scars splitting his skin, lending a youthful edge to his expression, the fan of his lashes leaving spidery spectres against his high cheekbones. There was a vulnerability in his face, a passion in the practised movements of his fingers over the strings. John sat in his chair and watched the midnight concerto unfold, his nightmares a distant memory. In that moment, with a smooth brow and a relaxed mouth, Sherlock looked content, passionate.
He looked very human.
John fell asleep in his chair, the sweet voice of his flatmate’s violin singing somnolent lullabies. In the morning, he woke to an empty room and an afghan across his lap, the only proof of the night’s proceedings perched on the chair opposite him, the polished wood gleaming in the morning light.
***
In the weeks to come, the violin became a balm to his frayed nerves when he woke screaming for his platoon, his throat burning and his shoulder throbbing.
On the nights when the faces of his soldiers were replaced with rotting teeth and the scent of gingerbread, he slept in his chair, Sherlock’s music chasing away the sound of insane laughter.
***
He never realized how important Sherlock’s suits were. The tailored fabric fitting his body perfectly, distracting from the flawed skin beneath the luxurious fabric. Each bespoke suit was similar, small variations in the minor details, a vast array of shirts making every ensemble look decidedly posh. It was a conflicting image: the mastery of his tailor’s creations against the ruin of his flesh.
John was not the only one who wore armour. Sherlock was a very complex man with surprisingly human traits.
In a moment of introspection, he wondered when he began to think of his flatmate as ‘Sherlock the man’ instead of ‘Sherlock the Cursed’ or ‘Sherlock the monster’.
If he was being sentimental, it began with the violin.
If he was being honest, it began with the first deduction.
***
“Get. Out. FREAK!” Donovan screamed, her tan skin flushed with maroon, glaring daggers at Sherlock from her post by the door.
“Donovan,” Lestrade’s voice was sharp, but his eyes were soft, fatigue etched deep into his weathered skin.
“No, he needs to leave,” she snarled and unleashed her rancour on the detective and his blogger, her tongue every bit as sharp as Sherlock’s when her temper flared. “I don’t care if you’re a bloody genius, you are a monster with no respect for humans, traipsing around crime scenes and getting off on human suffering.” She jabbed a finger at the ruined corpse of a little girl, flaxen pigtails dyed carmine as she lay in a pool of her own blood. It was a juxtaposition of innocence and corruption, a study in scarlet and gold. “One of these days, it will be you that put a body there, just because your twisted, monstrous brain got bored, you utter freak. You are a psychopath and you shouldn’t be allowed around human beings, let alone desecrating their remains.”
Sherlock watched her with dead eyes, his scarred face impassive when Lestrade reprimanded his underling, ejecting her from the crime scene between litanies of curses. John gaped after her, rage boiling beneath his skin. Sherlock turned and delivered his deductions to the DI before flouncing from the room, his Belstaff swirling behind him. The doctor followed after him, his shorter legs falling behind as the detective strode ahead and folded himself into a cab, speeding away.
“I told you,” Sally growled. “He’s a monster. He’s incapable of any human emotion. Creatures like him deserve their lot; they deserve to be Reaped or to die alone.”
John came home with blood on his knuckles and a warning for assaulting an officer.
Days passed with no sign of the detective, the flat as silent as a tomb without the clatter of his experiments or the screech of his violin. John haunted their shared spaces, nursing his bruised hand and a guilty conscience. Perhaps it would have meant more if he’d spoken out against Donovan when Sherlock had been there to hear it rather than settling the matter with his fists in private.
“You’re not a freak,” he whispered to a closed door, head hanging, hands grasping at thin air. “You’re my best friend.”
Soft violin music filled the flat that night, an olive branch and ‘thank you’ in A minor.
***
John knew the scars of Sherlock’s torso intimately, repairing the sutures after cases or helping to seal new ones accumulated on long chases through the urban battlefield. He’d traced his calloused fingers over raised skin, palmed bones jutting under mottled flesh, and grasped the ragged edges of bloodless wounds, healing dead flesh with practices designed for the living.
And those eyes always watched him, tracking his every move, dissecting his every gesture.
Those eyes haunted his dreams, unnerving and comforting.
His hands lingered when passing cups of tea, rested on bony shoulders when peering at the screen of a laptop, brushed against pitted skin in the confines of their flat, tapped thick wool at a crime scene, and found inane excuses to linger at the nape of a disfigured neck.
But John never admitted to it and Sherlock never commented on it.
***
“Do you ever want to break it,” John whispered, a briny patina adorning his brow as his heart raced in fear. Tonight, it was the witch. Tonight, he could only smell scorched flesh and cloying sugar. “Your Curse.”
“No.”
“Why?” The violin was mute, aphasia robbing it of its music as Sherlock contemplated the query.
“There is no such thing as ‘good vs. evil’, John,” Sherlock intoned, his voice dead. “There are only different definitions of ‘good’ twisted and tainted to fit the needs of an individual. If that is humanity, then I want no part of it.”
***
The bomber was the real monster.
With every pip, John understood.
There was no ‘good vs. evil’ as they raced to solve his puzzles. There were no heroes and villains.
There was a game; there was a victor and a loser.
It was not a humanity to which John was proud to belong.
***
John had often though that there was no smell that would ever pervade his subconscious as deeply as that of the old witch and the gingerbread house, but he’d been wrong. He knew that, if he made it out alive, he would never fully be able of scour the stench of chlorine from his skin, not even if he flayed it red and raw. His blood and bones would carry the smell to the grave.
The flash of betrayal in Sherlock’s eyes hurt more than the threat of his own demise at the hands of a madman. That, after all they’d been through, Sherlock would doubt him, cut deeper than he wanted to admit. When Moriarty finally appeared, there was no relief, there was only exponential terror flowing through his veins in place of blood; only dread filling his lungs, a heavy substitute for the oxygen he needed to live.
He didn’t think, when he threw his arms around the mad Sorcerer’s neck, screaming for Sherlock to run. John saw his chance and he took it.
The red light dancing on Sherlock’s scarred forehead turned his muscles to jelly and he slid from the consulting criminal, knowing pure hatred in that moment as the man straightened his lapels with a scoff.
“Westwood.”
Even with a gun levelled at his face, the madman prowled the pool deck as if it were a stage, screaming and yelling and smiling like a hatter fallen prey to their trade.
“Do you know what happens, if you don’t leave me alone, Sherlock, to you?”
“Oh, let me guess,” the detective drawled, his hands steady. “I get killed.”
“Kill you? Mm, no, don’t be obvious. I’m going to kill you anyway, someday, rip your organs from your chest, take you apart piece by piece until your undead corpse is too broken to function, and watch you scream. I don’t want to rush it, though. I’m saving it up for something special. No, no, no, no,” he shook his head, his flat black eyes roving over Sherlock’s face. “If you don’t stop prying, I will burn you. I will burn the heart out of you.”
“I have been reliably informed that I don’t have one. Cursed, you see.” Sherlock quirked his head, his fingers tightening minutely on the trigger.
“But we both know that’s not quite true. I should know, considering I’m the one who Cursed you, after all.” The Sorcerer shrugged, looking around with a bland expression. “Well, I’d better be off. It was so nice to have had a proper chat.”
“What if I was to shoot you now, right now?” There were beads of sweat forming at Sherlock’s temples, an impossible feat, a slip of his mask: a mark of the living.
“Then you could cherish the look of surprise on my face,” the madman’s eyes widened comically, his mouth dropped open into a perfect ‘o’ as he stared down the barrel of the gun. “’Cause I would be surprised, Sherlock, really I would, and just a teensy bit…disappointed. And, of course, you wouldn’t be able to cherish it for very long. Tell me, do you still keep my little gift in your room; my memento mori? It must be almost up by now.”
Sherlock paled, a muscle in his jaw leaping as Moriarty turned and sashayed away, peering over his shoulder. “Ciao, Sherlock Holmes.”
“Catch. You. Later.”
“No you won’t,” came the singsong reply, the words chilling in their glee. “Hard to catch a man when you’re dead for good.”
John’s ears roared as Sherlock stripped the bombs from his chest, his heart lurching as the explosives skittered over the tiles and into the shadows. He teetered on his feet, collapsing against a pillar slick with condensation and sliding to the floor, his mind running in circles.
“Alright? Are you alright?” The detective snapped, his eyes wild as he searched John’s face. The doctor looked up at him, feeling his stomach drop, recalling Moriarty’s parting words.
“Are you alright?” He croaked, his voice breathy and wavering. Clearing his throat, he tried again. “What he said, at the end…are you alright?”
The silence stretched between them, tense and brimming with emotions too strong for words. Sherlock shook his head stiffly, the scars on his face twisting as he hauled John to his feet, cold fingers bruising in their grip. “That was…good, what you did,” he whispered, dragging John from the building and wrenching his mobile from his pocket. Mycroft would handle it; he always did.
They piled into a cab, adrenaline sending the doctor’s world spinning as they raced home. He bolted from the cab when they reached the house, leaving Sherlock to pay while he raced to their flat on leaden limbs, ejecting the contents of his stomach into toilet, fear wracking his body with violent tremors. John flushed just as Sherlock came up the stairs, meeting the detective in the hallway with bloodshot eyes.
He was prepared to die for this man, to sacrifice himself so that Sherlock could go free.
Sherlock was prepared to do the same for him.
But for how much longer?
“How long?” He demanded, words rounded and slurred and his tongue rebelled against the movement.
“A while yet,” Sherlock whispered, his gaze affixed to the floor. “It’s already been ten years.”
“Ten…Christ, Sherlock! Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Why? Why does it matter to you what happens to me?”
“Because you’re my best friend, you git!”
Sherlock stared at him, his face a horrible mix of anger and sorrow, the scars pinching and twisting, straining the skin over his bones.
“Then you’re of no help to me,” he choked, pushing past John to his room, barricading himself within his forbidden space, leaving John untethered and helpless in the empty hall.
John feared that he would lose Sherlock because of his Curse.
Staring at the flat expanse of wood separating them, he realized that he may have lost him already.
***
Some nights, there were no nightmares. John was not haunted by Afghanistan or plagued by visions of witches in candy cottages. There were no confections, there was no carnage.
But there was still heat.
John dreamt of long violinist’s fingers splayed across his chest, of full, chapped lips tracing over flushed skin. He dreamt of verdigris eyes and sharp cheekbones, of mottled flesh slotted alongside his own and thick black sutures abrading his skin. He dreamt of desperate touches and passionate kisses, of his name cried out in a rich baritone.
He woke gasping and aching, his blood singing with a need to release.
If he continued the dreams as he took himself in hand, if he imagined another’s hand in his place, he kept those thoughts locked behind closed doors.
***
As the months dragged on, there was no news of Moriarty. The pink phone remained mute – no more pips, no more mystery. Each day that passed without contact from the madman was a good day.
Each day that passed was another day closer to Sherlock’s end.
Maybe the days weren’t so good after all.
***
A crash from the kitchen brought John barrelling down a flight of stairs, his soldier instinct scanning the flat for threats. Sherlock stood in the kitchen, hands braced on the counter, a pool of viscous green radiating from the smashed remains of a beaker on the floor. He was shaking, his blue dressing gown slipping from his shoulders as they heaved violently, gnarled knuckles white against the counter top.
“Sherlock?” The detective’s head snapped up, wild eyes raking over the blonde as he backed into a corner, one hand extended in front of his to ward of John’s advances. There was terror in the tremors that seized his muscles, fear in the needless breaths that stretched his ribs.
“Just…please,” he whispered, squeezing his eyes shut and leaning against the fridge, folding his long limbs around his body as though the sutures were no longer enough to hold him together. “Please leave.”
John mopped the puddle from the floor, sweeping shards of glass into the bin before coming to stand beside his flatmate, his blue eyes searching. Sherlock ignored him, breathing through his nose to calm himself, falling back on human gestures in a desperate attempt at control. His harsh breathing filled the room, hitching erratically as the shaking subsided. When all was still and his breathing stopped, he turned to John, his face unreadable.
“Would you stay with me forever?”
“I don’t know. You’d probably get bored and leave me, first.”
Sherlock’s eyes went dark. He left, the soft click of his door closing behind him deafening.
***
He asked again on the heels of a mournful violin solo, his face shadowed as he turned towards his flatmate.
“Would you stay with me forever?”
“Will you tell me how long you have left?”
He didn’t. He picked up the violin and continued his serenade.
***
When Sherlock stumbled at a crime scene, John was there to catch him.
When Sherlock’s hands trembled at the lab, John was there to steady him.
When Sherlock’s body began to fall apart, sutures pulling, scars splitting, John was there to hold him together.
“Would you stay with me forever?” He croaked, his body unnaturally warm against the cool tile, fingers limp against the porcelain bowl.
John cradled him as he heaved, his corpse rejecting being reanimated as his Curse drew to a close.
If only he had forever to give.
***
It was small and unassuming. Not something John would have pinned as Moriarty’s style, but the elegance of the irony prevailed.
“A heart.”
Sherlock nodded from the bed, eyes sunken. The jagged scar that divided his face into uneven halves was coming apart, a faint sliver of bone visible between the ragged edges of the wound. “He told me that I didn’t have one, so he would give me a Cursed one instead.”
“It’s…charred…” John raked his eyes over the blackened edges. Burn the heart out of you, Moriarty had said. It made sense, looking at the Token, but that didn’t make it any easier to stomach. “Is that what you’ve been hiding in here?” John’s fingers hovered over the small wooden sculpture, his chest tight. Sherlock’s room was like the man himself: a study in contradictions. The furniture was rigid, the sheets inviting; the décor was minimalist, the staple pieces meaningful; the room was dark, the colour scheme light. The Periodic table on one wall was John’s favourite.
“Not all of it,” Sherlock rasped, lashes scraping against the pillowcase. He didn’t breathe, he didn’t sleep, he didn’t leave the bed. John stayed with him, day and night, each day closing with the same question. Sometimes, he would let his eyes slip shut and hide in his mind palace, away from the torment of his transport. Those were the moments where John let his own eyes grow misty, the stolen seconds of weakness when Sherlock needed him to be strong.
Every night, he was asked to give forever to a dying man.
“I don’t understand,” John murmured, settling into the chair he’d pulled to Sherlock’s bedside. When the detective had been too weak to leave the flat, he’d confined himself to the couch. When even the couch was too much for his decaying body, he’d opened his door to John. “Why would someone Curse you?”
“My winning personality,” Sherlock chuckled drily, wincing when the sutures on his chest ripped. John was there, repairing the rift that split his body in two. “I scorned humanity, thought myself above it. I spent far more time among the dead than among the living, never caring for how they’d met their untimely end…I just wanted them for the puzzle. Moriarty left me a puzzle,” he murmured, fingers fisted in the sheets, tendons straining over brittle bones. “I solved it…a collection of corpses sewn back together into a monstrosity. It was not my finest hour. I fear that, in my haste to solve the case, there were a great many people that I hurt with my selfishness.”
“Well, not everyone understands how your mind works on a case,” John offered, wiping the sutures with a square of gauze as clear fluid leaked between the black knots. He slid the thin cotton shirt back down over an emaciated torso, his heart twinging at the state of his friend.
“A great many things have changed since I met you, John, my conscience being one of them.” His head slipped down towards one shoulder, his expression pinched. “Tell me, John, if I abandoned you at a crime scene as I was attempting to court you as a flatmate, what do you imagine I would have done to people for whom I had no regard whatsoever?”
John laced his fingers through the detective’s, giving them a reassuring squeeze. “We’ve all done things we’re not proud of, Sherlock. It’s whether or not we let those things rule the rest of our lives that matters.” He shuddered, the phantoms of his nightmares sitting heavy on his shoulders. They did not rule him, but yes, they still held sway.
The chime of his mobile required the use of his dominant hand and he relinquished the grip on his flatmate’s fingers to fish the phone from his pocket. His heart stuttered as he read the message, his free hand slipping over his mouth, stifling his ragged inhale of breath.
Your sister has been taken to the A & E. Alcohol poisoning. Victoria Hospital. –MH
“Oh, God, Harry,” he breathed, his hand shaking as he slid the phone back into his denims. Although he’d never admitted it to himself aloud – only acknowledged it in the most private of places in his heart – he knew that there was a counter, an hourglass, where Harry’s time trickled away, a little more with every tumbler she emptied down her gullet. Before the drink, he’d always suspected that he motor mouth would be the end of her. Now, he knew she’d go out to a whisky lullaby.
“Go, John,” Sherlock coughed, pulling himself to a seated position. “Harry needs you.”
“But –”
“Go. I’ll be here when you get back.” The smile was forced, fake and grotesque like the first smile from the lab. John cupped his friend’s face, running his thumb along a ragged patch of scar tissue. He left with a nod and a whispered thank you, Sherlock’s voice halting him by the door.
“Would you…stay with me forever?”
“Thank you, Sherlock,” he gasped out, grabbing his jacket and fleeing from the flat. If he stayed, Harry could die. If he stayed, he would never leave. If he stayed, he would promise forever to a dying man and be left loving an empty corpse.
So he left.
***
Caring is not an advantage. –MH
And look where that got me. –SH
We are not suited to forever. –MH
That’s no longer a problem, now, is it? –SH
***
“You bloody idiot!”
Harry winced, digging her chipped nails into the thin skin around her ears, palms flush to the sea-shell curves to drown out John’s reprimands.
“You could have died!”
“I’m already dead,” she screeched, heart monitors screaming along with her. “I’m a dead woman walking and there’s nothing you can do to stop that!”
“I’ve saved you before, Harry, just –” her bitter laugh cut him off, wild and maniacal as it rose in pitch, her dry lips cracking as her mouth stretched impossibly wide.
“You burned a witch trying to eat me, Johnny. This isn’t a cute little gingerbread house. This is a binding contract. I’ve given that bastard everything: my child, my wife, my house, my dignity…all because I don’t know his name.” The words creaked and cracked as she rocked on the bed, her eyes wide, vacant orbs in a too small skull. “Every day he comes and asks and every day I dance around the answer until I finally say no. Every day he comes and takes a little more from me, leaving a pile of gold behind. And it means nothing. Nothing.”
“Harry,” he sighed, grabbing her hand.
“Let me die, Johnny. Please let me die.” Fat tears rolled down her face – the little girl from the cage, begging and pleading for her brother to save her. He’d killed for her, once, beaten people for her more than that. Now, faced with the decision of helping her break her Curse or letting her choose her own fate, he faltered, drawing the parallels between his sister and his flatmate, their Curses rooted within their human failings.
“Harry, I love you. Do you know that?” He kissed her forehead gently, whispering into her ear as he pulled away. She stared at him with gleaming eyes, her lips mouthing the name, over and over again.
Deep in the desert sand of Afghanistan, a corporal Cursed himself to a small ginger man with a hook nose and beady eyes. The man spun gold in exchange for favours, the money went home to an expectant mother waiting for her travelling soldier. John had held the man’s bowels in his hands while the sun bleached the land, listened to a dying man’s final words, gunfire cackling around him.
He’d given him a name, the Counter to his Curse. John, in turn, gave it to Harry.
“Goodbye, Harry. Just…promise me you’ll put it to good use.”
That night, a small ginger man with a hook nose and beady eyes evaporated into a cloud of gold dust and Harry Watson wept.
***
The flat was dark when John returned, the silence unnerving after the cacophony of the hospital. He made his way to Sherlock’s room, settling into his chair as his flatmate stirred.
“You came back,” he breathed, the words wispy and insubstantial.
“Of course. Harry’s free of her Curse.”
“Then why…?”
John had never been a particularly loquacious individual, but he firmly believed that there were some things that should never remain unsaid.
“Harry’s my sister. I saved her from a Cursed, once; burned a witch alive to keep her from being eaten. She was my world, really, until Afghanistan. And then, even that was taken away from me. I came back a broken man from a broken family living in a broken room. I spent every night running my gun over my teeth and wondering if I had enough courage to pull the trigger.
“And then I met you.
“Sherlock, you are the most brilliant, amazing, and incredible man I have ever met. I’m a ruined Army doctor with a psychosomatic limp and a bum shoulder. I’m not really sure why you decided to keep me around, but…thank you. It means more to me than you’ll ever know.
“Thank you for saving me.”
Sherlock fumbled for John’s hand, long fingers scrabbling over thin sheets to find the calloused palms that had healed him more times than he cared to count. John met him halfway, curling their fingers together.
“Would...” His voice was too faint, too soft for the imposing man that swept John off of his feet, pulled him into his orbit and kept him there with quicksilver deductions and sonorous violin melodies. He closed his eyes and tried again, struggling to keep his focus on John. “Would you…stay with me…forever?”
“For as long as you’ll have me,” John promised, dropping a kiss to the scarred fingers. Sherlock sighed, pulling feebly at John’s hand. The doctor understood, slipping from his chair and crawling onto the bed, wrapping his arms around Sherlock’s broken body with care. The detective fell sleep, his face buried in the crook of John’s neck. John lay awake, his fingers floating over the scars of his friend’s back, the ridges solid and defined through the thin cotton of his t-shirt. His fingers continued their pilgrimage from the crest of his spine down to the dip of his waist and back again, his heart torn between contentment and anguish.
He finally had Sherlock in his arms, but he had no idea how to break the Curse. John decided that he would cherish every moment, every twitch, every flare of human warmth, because there was a finite window of opportunity in which to savour it. The doctor shifted and murmured his affections into the skin he could reach, lips ghosting over a swollen scar where Sherlock’s heart would be.
John fell asleep wrapped in a duvet and an excess of limbs, wishing he could hear a heartbeat reverberating through the scared chest beneath his ear.
***
Consciousness is a capricious thing. There are moments where it lingers on the fringes of one’s mind, elusive and taunting, prolonging the inevitable return to the waking world. Other times, it’s a brutal slap to the face, terror racing through swollen veins as it wrenches a body from the deepest sleep into the harsh reality left behind in the land of the living.
John Watson had experienced consciousness in all of its forms, his waking dictated by the role he’d taken on: soldier, doctor, lover, civilian. As sunlight filtered in through drawn curtains, John surfaced from his slumber to an empty bed and cold sheets. Consciousness rushed forward, filling him with fear as he leapt from the bed, searching for Sherlock in the nooks and crannies of the room, his heart constricting in his chest.
“Sherlock?” He stumbled out into the hallway, his breathing laboured when he tried to swallow around the lump in his throat. His lungs burned, his blood hand cold, his limbs shook as reality came crashing down around him.
It was too late. He was too late.
As he tottered into the living area, his eyes were drawn to a regal figure standing by the window, his back to John. The man was tall with dark, gleaming curls and pale, flawless skin, his lean frame wrapped in a bespoke suit, long limbs at ease while he watched the world below. His face was turned away, his features hidden from John’s scrutiny. Was he the Reaper of Sherlock’s Curse? The man who’d come to destroy his Token and erase Sherlock’s tale from the world? He turned then, John’s heavy pants alerting the stranger to his presence.
There was very little about him that John could recognize. His face was mysterious, his features polished. Intense eyes sat atop sharp cheekbones, soft lips twisted into a shy smile. There was familiarity in his gaze, recognition as he opened his mouth to speak.
“Hello, John.”
He knew that voice, those ever-changing eyes, the gaze that made you feel as though you were both the centre of the universe and the demise of the human race. That gaze had both terrified him and inspired him, chilled him with fear and made him flush with pride.
John staggered forward, reaching out to this strange version of his flatmate that had appeared in the dead of night. The man met him halfway, standing stock-still as John hovered before him, hands trembling inches from his skin. If he touched him, now, when the privacy and sanctuary of twilight had been burned away with the morning fog, would he still be real? If John cupped his face between his hands, ran his thumbs over the planes and angles of his cheekbones, traced the hollows of his throat, and the knobs of his spine, would he be solid under his fingertips or just a hallucination? He closed the distance between them, sliding his hands through thick curls and along smooth skin; no longer mottled or scared, but whole, unblemished flesh. His hands trailed down the column of the mystery man’s throat and the contours of his chest to wrap around slender hips, resting his cheek against the taller man’s sternum.
It was warm. There was a heartbeat.
“You’re alive.”
“Yes.”
“How?” John tightened his arms around his flatmate’s waist, burying his face in the silk shirt, breathing in the scent of Sherlock. “I thought…I thought I’d lost you.”
“No, John. You broke my Curse.” Sherlock ran his fingers through the silver-blonde hair, pressing his lips to the crown of his head. “You promised me forever. And…”
“And?”
“And, um,” Sherlock’s cheeks coloured – wasn’t that a lovey change – a blush creeping from his cheeks, down his neck, and into his chest. “You…”
“Love you.”
“Yes,” the detective murmured. “That. And the feeling is mutual, I assure you.”
John smiled, pulling back to look up into the new face that would greet him every morning. “Good,” he murmured, head tilted to one side. “So, what would you like to do to celebrate the start of forever?”
***
There were many things in which John took great pleasure: a proper cuppa, a Sunday lie-in, Sherlock’s deductions, a good Bond film, the noises Sherlock made when John took him apart, piece by piece. His new favourite was Donovan’s expression when they arrived on their first crime scene after John had broken the detective’s Curse. The PC’s face had settled into its cursory sneer as John had slipped from the cab, but her clenched jaw had dropped when Sherlock unfolded his lanky frame from the vehicle. He flounced past the stunned woman, leaving a trail of gaping mouths in his wake as he strode onto the crime scene. Lestrade had blinked twice, shrugged and shot the detective a smirk.
“Of course you look like a bloody supermodel. Poncy git.”
The case was rather simple – no more than a five – but Sherlock seemed to enjoy himself, insulting a stunned Anderson and berating the intelligence of every human being in the vicinity. But he was happy and, therefore, John was happy.
“How did you do it, mate?” Lestrade queried, sidling over to John’s side while Sherlock peered at a curtain intently. The doctor shrugged, smiling softly as he watched the detective snap at Anderson. He folded his arms over his chest, a faint gold band catching the light. The DI raised one brow, looking back and forth between the detective and his blogger until Sherlock gave a disgusted sigh. The brunette spun and stalked across the room, grabbing John by the shirtfront and slotting their mouths together to the collective gasp of the Yarders present. He pulled away with an obscene sigh, fixing Lestrade with a droll stare.
“It was the maid. She added a toxic plant extract to the laundry detergent. As the couple wore the clothes, used the towels, and lay in bed, the toxin was absorbed through the skin. Test for aconite, as there is monkshood growing in the back garden. And yes, to clarify things for your funny little brains, John broke my Curse. Now, since I have just handed you your murderer, my fiancé and I are going home.” Sherlock grabbed John’s hand and dragged him bodily out of the house and onto the busy London streets, raising an arm imperiously to hail a cab. They spent the ride home in silence, John sweeping his thumb over the ridges of Sherlock’s knuckles as he stared out the window.
“Not good?” Sherlock whispered as they paid their fare, his brow pinched.
“Sorry?” John climbed the seventeen steps slowly, peering back over his shoulder at his betrothed, the word sending a fission of giddiness down his spine.
“The…kiss in front of the Yard. Not good?”
“No, Sherlock. Very good.” John kissed him gently, teasing the curls at his nape. “Very good indeed.”
***
“Would you stay with me forever?” Sherlock asked, holding John’s hand in his own.
“For as long as you’ll have me,” John assured, feeling the heavy weight of the ring settle onto his finger; a reciprocal of Sherlock’s own wedding band.
They sealed their promise with a kiss, continuing on as they always had – chasing murderers and eating take away. It wasn't perfect, but it was their own happily ever after.
~fin~