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Fantastic (meretricious)
Clever. That was the most important thing. It had to be clever. In Istanbul and Hamburg, in Glasgow and Shanghai, Sherlock had polished the words fantastic and brilliant and amazing where they sat in a locked room at the back of the mind palace until their light made the dusty corridors gleam raw. Now he would hear them aloud.
And John had always liked saying those words. Had got almost as much pleasure out of those exchanges as Sherlock had. He would hear how Sherlock had survived against all odds, had planned his own death in genius detail, and John would be a little appalled in the way he so enjoyed being.
‘He’ll be delighted,’ Sherlock said aloud, the words fitting neatly against his tongue, almost tasteable. He could move without hurting, now, at least a little bit. He could move sometimes, even, without remembering hurting, for whole moments at a time. Mycroft was saying something unimportant, and Sherlock was feeling his body beneath him, finally receding into unimportance. It had been tedious, these past two years, all those little incursions that forced a constant physical awareness on him. Now he would go back to paying attention to his body only when he felt like it, indulgently allowing it its silly little twirls and hand claps and bewildering but necessary excesses, carefully controlling its more problematic excesses and desires.
Had John hurt? While Sherlock had been resisting each pain signal and jolt of irrational loneliness, had John faced different, but equally troublesome, emotional invasions? It should distress Sherlock to think of it, he knew, but after all Sherlock wasn’t dead and none of that pain was real, so perhaps it was all right to take just a few seconds to treasure the thought of John by his grave, so noble and upright and reverential. Pouring out trust and admiration, even after everything that had happened. That would go to anyone’s head, and these days Sherlock felt he had great swathes of empty space in his head that needed filling. Or – not quite empty, no, not exactly; the things that had carved out the space had left echoes there, and they moved through it, casting shadows across the rest of the palace.
Wretched things. But the light of brilliantfantasticamazing and the thought of John missing him was often enough to drown them out. He would have to plan it carefully. John was in a restaurant, apparently. That had lovely dramatic potential. The lights would go out, first – that would be easy to accomplish. John would be alert instantly, and when a fire started in the kitchen and John heard a scream of course he would rush to help, and then –
No. On second thoughts, no. Sherlock had planned his death carefully, he already had that sort of impressiveness on hand for John, the detailed masterminding of possibilities. Much better, instead, to remind John of Sherlock’s more quicksilver brilliance, his ability to improvise on the spot and create something more impressive than an ordinary person could have done with years of strategising. Yes. He would go to the restaurant, and he would be extraordinary, and John would receive that extraordinariness and beam it back.
The shadows would retreat. The mind palace would blaze with light.
(Welcome to London)
He was sitting, alone two menus chin up nervous suit and tie fingers against pocket for now.
The moustache was worse in real life than in the photograph, covering an unacceptable quantity of John’s face. And why was he deliberately aging himself? What could that mean?
It was intolerable, not knowing. John’s face had been a benchmark of reality, so familiar Sherlock had only to look at it to know John – and himself – better than he had before. When Sherlock had been uncertain – a state that never lasted long, but was vile while it did – he could look at John’s face and know exactly what state his own mind was in by the deductions it chose to make first.
Now the uncertainty continued, unabated. Sherlock stood like an idiot in the restaurant doorway and stared. That pocket, and those nervous fingers returning to it again and again, had disturbing possibilities, but after all this time it was quite possible that Sherlock was reading it wrong. That was disturbing too. But on the whole he preferred to think that he was making a mistake, misunderstanding what he saw – and that preference was the most disturbing thing of all.
Sherlock entered the mind palace, just for a moment, to search for possibilities as to what to do next, and came slap up against a memory. He distinctly remembered locking this memory in a room right at the back, but it must have got out somehow. That was happening a lot more lately: boundaries slipping, doors unlocking themselves, walls melting together.
The memory looked and walked like John, but contained overlapping layers of meaning. A performance, delivered thoughtlessly, a mildly amusing line thrown to a man in a taxi who wasn’t a murderer. And John had been watching. And John had laughed.
Sherlock had wanted that laugh, had frantically cleared space for it in the palace and locked it in at once with the intention of studying it, and its curious effect on him, when he had time. But each time he opened the door to its room the warmth that emerged distracted him entirely. In the end he had a collection of giggles and smiles and no data on what any of it meant.
He had never once dared to enter the room while travelling, but some of its contents had slipped under the door or through a dissolving wall, and haunted the corridors, so that sometimes while walking down a street in Moscow or Mexico City, Sherlock would hear a sound behind him and stumble as he whirled round to stare at nothing. He whirled even though he had realised what the sound was and where it came from before he had a chance to move. Just in case he was wrong.
John shooting the cabbie for him had intrigued him, had created a strange little glow, an odd pleasure at being protected that he had never got from Mycroft’s endless interfering attempts to do so. But it was that giggle, afterwards, so delightfully inappropriate. John, aware of its inappropriateness, uttering an admonishment he didn’t mean and promptly ignored: We can’t giggle, it’s a crime scene...
John adored inappropriate humour, had adored Sherlock for supplying him with it. Their friendship had from the beginning been built on laughing at the terrible things they did and saw together. The arson plan had been too serious; that was why it hadn’t felt right. Sherlock’s return should include an appalling joke to make John giggle and look at the ground and screw up his face and shake his head at his own abnormality. To make him, then, look at Sherlock and remember that Sherlock was the only person in the world who saw all the things he tried to hide and wanted them.
A joke. Yes. Definitely the way. An absurd, inappropriate joke. Bow-tie, glasses, eyeliner. An extraordinary thing that no one else would ever have considered, remarkable, luminous. A walking story ready to go straight onto John’s blog. That was who Sherlock Holmes was. That was what he would do.
Machine (most human)
He’d miscalculated. Probably inevitable, after all this time, but maddening. His data was all slightly off. John had changed, perhaps just a little, but enough to upset all Sherlock’s calculations. Had Sherlock gone too far with his joke, or not far enough? It was impossible to tell.
The case, then, try and drag John along. John had missed all that. This time, Sherlock could not be quite as confident in his predictions. Perhaps John would hurt him again, overlaying the hurt that had been done by others with justified inflictions, ones that came tangled up with obvious love. And perhaps, better still, John would say yes, would come with Sherlock where he liked and when he liked, and things would go back to how they were.
I’m never bored (that’s good, isn’t it?)
‘Calling the police,’ John said, hands on phone, and Sherlock snapped What? No! before he could help himself. Couldn’t resist. He had called them, of course – it was probably safest, and in any case if they showed up just as Sherlock stopped the bomb they would provide an extra audience, someone for John to turn to and say wasn’t that amazing?
But John didn’t know that. And he was putting his phone down. Following Sherlock alone into a darkened tube tunnel with no chance of backup. Heart pounding, Sherlock heard John’s footsteps behind him, following, trusting. Their sound echoed through the tunnel and into the palace, rebounding off the walls.
(Just for me) (Just stop it) (Stop this)
He had had a plan. He knew he had. Something to do with – what was it – even terrorists needing safety precautions, some detail he had learned while – while away – while somewhere, he couldn’t remember where, doing something – trying to kill someone, possibly, or trying to avoid getting killed.
Coming in here he had known what he meant to do. But now the whole carriage was a bomb, he was inside it, like John at the pool in that Semtex jacket all those years ago, and here Sherlock had brought him into another deathtrap and didn’t know how to – oh, it was all so obvious now, all the things Sherlock had refused to see. John had moved on with his life. He would have been fine. Sherlock had done what he meant to do, had saved him. And now – now bonfires and bombs, why had Moriarty ever bothered to threaten burning the heart out of him when Sherlock was so perfectly equipped to do it himself?
‘Mind palace,’ John suggested, but Sherlock hadn’t bothered to save the plan to the mind palace, he had only thought of the plan a minute or an hour or at any rate not long ago, it shouldn’t have gone already. Before all of this he had been a meticulous archivist, saving things at once if they mattered and deleting them if they didn’t. But the mind palace was full of broken walls and doors that existed in several places at once, its geography suddenly far more beautiful and devoid of coherent functionality.
Terrorists – safety – destruction and a way out – he had known, he had known. He entered the mind palace because that was what John wanted and what other option did he have anyway, and stood in the entrance hall gazing about at the maze around him.
It had been like this before, in Nice and Pretoria and Dallas, and he’d got out. If he could just remember how he’d done it. In Cork and Washington, in Podgorica and Wellington, in Brussels in Quetta in Jaffna in Sydney and he didn’t know, didn’t remember where he’d been or what he’d done –
– it had been like this when he fell, and he couldn’t remember what he’d done then either. He tried to think, and when he couldn’t think imagined he was talking to someone stupid, explaining it step by step for – who – Anderson, yes, Sherlock distantly remembered him now, he would do – explaining it slowly to give Sherlock’s own faltering brain time to catch up. Even though there was no time for that. What choice did he have? If he could just remember how he had been brilliant before, remember what Sherlock Holmes would do – but his brain was already failing him, putting in obvious lies, neatening the edges of the story. A plan, perfectly formed and proceeding exactly as intended. Mycroft swooping in, dispatching the sniper that had hunted through the palace and Sherlock’s dreams for months afterwards. The chaos and terrible fear that were all Sherlock remembered replaced with order and safety –
Safety, yes, that was important, everyone needed something to come back to, some way to make it all stop to go back on the danger – if he could only just get at that thought instead of being dragged back, over and over, to the danger he kept putting John in, to how much better off John would be – and yet John needed him, or didn’t he? Perhaps this horrible dependence had only ever been one-sided, which was surely preferable in a way to John needing something so very bad for him, but why shouldn’t he need if Sherlock did, how could he how dare he stand there not forgiving Sherlock when Sherlock needed so badly to be forgiven, what justice or balance was there in that, how could he have moved on and changed softly in tune with himself, remaining John but different, how could he shift and adapt around a wound without losing himself, but then John had always been able to do it and Sherlock had so much admiration for that capacity, had longed a little to wound John just to admire how he coped but had never or almost never gone through with it because John hurting was painful in a banal straightforward way that Sherlock had avoided for most of his life. John hurting, John in pieces in an underground tunnel, bits of the two of them in a heap together but –
He’d told John to go, like John did for him once. He’d gone to the mind palace. He’d done everything he could think of and he could swear he never used to run out of thoughts, they used to swarm like marvellous otherworldly creatures through his head, but that was when he was Sherlock Holmes and now things were different.
It didn’t matter, then, what he did. He had killed John already, had failed, spectacularly, to save him. Sherlock might as well take what he wanted from him.
So he stopped even bothering to try to be Sherlock Holmes. He fumbled desperately at the bomb, let John see how frantic he was, let his face do whatever the hell it felt like. His hands were moving and he was smiling, why on earth would he be smiling? He let that go on for a few moments, and then let John see his despair as he gave up. He let his voice go breathy, let the tears lurking in his throat out through the barriers he normally kept shut tight. He said sentimental things. Things he meant, but not things Sherlock Holmes would say. If this, this dreadful open door and all the stumbling imperfect humanity pouring out of it, didn’t make John forgive him, then, well, the result would undoubtedly be shattering loneliness. But Sherlock would only have to cope with it for a minute.
‘You were the best and the wisest man that I have ever known,’ John said. ‘And yes, of course I forgive you.’
It had worked.
Sherlock’s brain lit up. The mind palace shook. He forgot to control his body, had no idea what his face might be doing. He didn’t worry, for now, about the past tense, you were, about the fact that John was talking about Sherlock Holmes. He could be Sherlock Holmes again. He would remember.
Back to the palace, to Anderson, to the stupid story. It didn’t matter now, the details, he wasn’t looking for those. Somewhere in there must be the kernel, the basis of the idea, a clue to how Sherlock Holmes, genius, human being, brave and wise and charming and just a little callous sometimes and utterly, utterly brilliant, would have thought. Somehow there must be a way to turn this all off, make it stop –
Turn it off.
Make it stop.
He had to laugh. No wonder he hadn’t been able to remember, no wonder going back to the past, to when he was Sherlock Holmes, hadn’t worked. It had never been a brilliant, a dazzling, an extraordinary plan. Never been what Sherlock Holmes would do. It had been a trick. From the start, just a magic trick.
The laughter was irrepressible, grim-sounding, shaking his whole body. He tried to marshal his thoughts. When had he done it? Oh, yes, the frantic rummaging, hands clawing with deliberately obvious ineffectuality at the bomb. And he’d been so occupied, first in trying to be Sherlock Holmes and then in being nothing but a flow of helpless emotion that he hadn’t noticed the bit of his brain that had come up with the whole stupid plan flash, momentarily, online.
He looked at the bomb. Its timer flickered but had ceased counting down. He had saved them. Part of him had saved them, or some version of him had, or – he didn’t know.
What he did know was that John would, any moment now, notice him laughing. That wasn’t good: being no one and letting all control slide had got exactly the result Sherlock had hoped for, but he could hardly stay like that indefinitely. Time to be dazzling and deceptive and unpredictable again. Sherlock Holmes was all of those things, wasn’t he? So the laughter should be deliberate. Part of a clever plan.
John was smiling and shouting at him, a combination Sherlock had seen before and whose meaning he had carefully worked out over several months. That, too, was uncertain now. He would have to improvise.
So he laughed at John, said things he probably meant as flippantly as he could, and told something like the truth. ‘There’s an off switch,’ he said, with a flawless impression of his own condescension. ‘There’s always an off switch.’
Always a way out. He could remember believing that, too. And in a way nothing had happened to disprove it. He had jumped off a building, and survived. He had been hunted and locked up and – and harmed – and done many other things that were lost somewhere in his head, and survived. He had pulled John out of Semtex vests and bonfires and here they both were, still. There was no reason, really, not to believe that what he’d just told John was true.
‘I didn’t lie altogether,’ he said. He’d never, really, lied at all, or he didn’t think he had. How was he supposed to know what the truth was, anyway? He’d sought it his whole life, made a profession out of finding it, and apparently all it took to detach him from his sense of objective reality was a slightly violent extended gap year. It was pathetic. But undeniable, in a way that little else was.
He made another horrifying joke, much worse (and therefore much better) than his first try. And there. There. John was laughing.
It had worked. It had all worked. In time, Sherlock suspected, he would come to believe that he had planned it this way all along.
(The hat photograph)
‘I asked you for one more miracle,’ John said. ‘I asked you to stop being dead.’
Sherlock had never stored that moment in the mind palace. It was too sore, too full of contradictions. He didn’t know how it made him feel, or what it made him think. It defied categorisation, and was in consequence unstoreable.
He had thought he’d forget it, because of that. But he had remembered every agonising instant. And it was all worth it now. Because he could turn to John, and say, ‘I heard you,’ and know, finally, that he was telling the truth.
He took it in, that feeling, for as long a moment as he could. Then he turned away from John and towards the door. He took up the hat, adjusted the coat.
John was right behind him. People wanted the story.
Time to go and be Sherlock Holmes.