Work Text:
Nightingale
Sometimes, when the water is high and the air is heavy and hot, John dreams of a man to live lifetimes over for.
It’s the only time he’s allowed to think about him, in the dark outside his bedroom window, where dewy grass clings to his bare ankles and the smell of springtime is just thick enough to touch, and the taste of it lingers in the back of his throat. It’s in those moments, that he sees the man he’s always seen. The man he’s followed and tracked and found every time.
Tall and pale, statuary skin with wild, night-dark curls. Eyes like fog, or cigarette smoke.
The man he misses without having met, this time around.
At sixteen, John wades into the river down the road from his house, and lets the current make his body sway and twist. He dances with the water beneath a Cheshire moon, and he remembers.
1.
He meets a man in Sussex when he’s just turned 65, when the persistent silver colonizing through his hair finally overtakes the blonde completely, and the lines around his eyes are happy and worn through the years.
In Sussex, he meets a man who’s dying.
His hair used to be black, a raven’s wing almost-purple shock of wild, windswept hair that framed a pair of eyes that reminded John of fairy wings, translucent smoke trapped. He’s hunched in on himself, and in the white void of the hospital, he mutters often about bees and serial killers. He looks at John and tells him his life story, picks him apart at the cell level and spreads him out across city maps and family trees, but says it all to himself.
John falls in love with him, sometime between a knee surgery and his discharge, when the man starts to mutter Ode to a Nightingale when he can’t find anything to amuse himself. “I am an immortal bird,” he whispers.
The man dies quietly, in the middle of the night, without ever speaking to him.
The aged-baby-soft pads of his feet stick with mud and briars as he stumbles down towards a river, crashes to his needs, and tries to count all the stars.
He can’t.
He might have cried. He might have laughed, as the reflection on the water caught the dark blue of his own gaze, his face turned young again by the distortion of the ripples.
John is most sure he prayed, to whichever intelligent creature might shaped the universe billions of years ago.
He dies of pneumonia two weeks later.
2.
He is born this time in 1968, beneath a fabric of stars.
At sixteen he stumbles into water and is flooded with every intimate, secret crevice of his last life. He goes to find him, the man. The war takes him before he gets there, though, and the sound of bullets is his lullaby for years and years and—
So many years.
Sherlock dies of an overdose when John’s adrift on desert sands.
6.
John stays in school as long as possible this time, reaches top honors with all he’s remembered. His hands come to know a body better than anything else. They work and pull and split-at-the-seams and sew back together.
This is his life, and it’s not all for Sherlock Holmes.
But some nights, only some nights, the need is more than he can handle—is a physical itch beneath his skin that wants and burns, to thread fingers together, to touch feverish skin, to kiss.
He finds him by accident, in a café in central London.
John has already married.
They spend one night together, wordless, pouring passion into one another. Trying to absorb each other through osmosis, John wonders if he can leech into Sherlock like the man has done to him. If he can force the man to carry pieces of him around on the current.
9.
They spend almost all of their lives together. From sixteen to seventy-seven when they both die peacefully in Sussex.
They don’t love in this life, not like they have in brief, firework-bursts of interaction in previous ones. They are best friends until death, and John thinks that’s all he’ll get if he gets any time at all.
And that’s okay.
12.
John dies at thirteen in a car accident.
Before he loses it completely, he sees Sherlock, gaunt and high and confused and only fifteen, emerging from the driver’s side.
14.
He helps Sherlock on a case at Oxford, where he teaches.
It’s more than John could’ve ever dared to dream about. It’s the taste of lightning and the sound of starlight. It’s the rush of the chase and the color-wheel bursts of wonder from Sherlock as he deduces, pale eyes roaming empty space for information only he can see.
When the murderer is caught, by a penitence for buying both soy and whole milk at the same organic deli, John kisses him. He forgets about the ring on his finger and the children at home.
Sherlock kisses back.
It’s a bit like flying, and a bit like falling, and a bit like dying.
18.
The worst part is Sherlock doesn’t remember.
Every time John finds him, wandering through IED’s and murder and disease and childhood trauma and car wrecks, there’s nothing but the hope. This time, he’ll turn around and say “Where’ve you been?” and laugh that throaty, baritone laugh of his.
Only he doesn’t.
His eyes stay that calculated, cold intelligent. Indifferent.
That’s worse than anything else.
24.
It’s always the same era, his birth hovers around 1975 consistently, now that they’ve got the age worked out right.
He feels like the universe’s house of cards.
He’s put back together in a suit of hearts over and over again, no matter how many times he falls short of a castle.
26.
At sixteen, his school record shifts from above average to genius.
His teachers think he’s started cheating or is a guinea pig for a new miracle study drug. John’s mental library fills entire cities, is huge and sprawling with the years he’s lived. Two thousand and fifty two.
He’s kissed Sherlock a hundred times.
He’s told him he loves him none.
27.
Sherlock is in the newspaper when John turns sixteen and the bruises shaped like his father’s hands are just beginning to turn sour yellow.
Overdose.
Again.
John is more than half in love with death by now, knows it lets him start over with a new hand, knows it’s not the end. Knows he wasn’t born for death.
He was born for Sherlock.
So he swallows a bottle of sleeping pills and lets the river sweep him away.
28.
In Afghanistan, John lets himself dream of him, because sometimes watching children take machine guns to his mates is just too much, and the sand has rubbed his throat too raw for alcohol. And he thinks—these just dreams.
He hasn’t met Sherlock in more than two hundred years, and has grown used to the hole it puts in his chest, the way he can feel wind pass through him.
But still, the water accepts him when he slips away from base camp to stick his ankles in the Panj River, and still, he thinks of a man muttering about bees and serial killers and the exact quantity of dust motes on a framed copy of Ode to a Nightingale by his bedside.
He’s reached his thirties again, but youth never really dies for him.
John dreams about a love the world will stop and lie down for. One that will stop aging. That will stop dying.
He dreams of weaving his fingers through Sherlock’s hair and saying what he hasn’t yet.
He’s shot at thirty seven. He lives. He comes home.
He wishes he hadn’t. He wishes he didn’t. He wishes the shot was just a bit more to the right.
It happens while John isn’t even looking, when he isn’t ready for it, when the rest of the world is continuously turning and John’s growing too tired of it to bother, devolving into an injury in a POW camp from five lifetimes ago, something he’s almost managed to squeeze back into the box of things he can’t forget but doesn’t linger on. It happens while pieces of him are sleeping, and others have decided to pick themselves off the ground and trudge along.
He hasn’t met Sherlock for more than two hundred years.
He doesn’t think today like he used to.
But it is.
It’s:
“Afghanistan or Iraq” Isn’t it always Afghanistan?
And
“I play the violin.” I know.
And
“That’s enough to be getting on don’t you think?” Yes.
And
“The name’s Sherlock Holmes and the address is 221b Baker Street.”
And it’s beautiful. It’s the taste of midnight at spring and three am in winter, it’s a sweet, brittle frost and the cling of dew to bare ankles. It’s dusk and dawn, transition hours, where the sky is painted like wildflowers. It’s everything.
And John will lose his limp and shoot a cabbie and meet Mycroft for the fourteenth time and move in with Sherlock for the second and feel like he is living for the first time in much too long.
If John takes a holiday to his old homestead, which (no matter what else changes) is always his homestead, to stick his feet in the water and remember what it felt like to dream, then Sherlock doesn’t need to know.
If John stays awake at night and remembers one-night love affairs, kisses and feverish skin and sucked bruises and the move of them together beneath the Cheshire moon, he can only hope Sherlock won’t deduce.
He doesn’t, in the end.
In the end, they’re breathing hard and dripping wet, their coats clinging desperately to their bodies like drapery on Greek statues, their faces flushed with the freezing cold. They shake in a strange, unknown rhythm.
“You could’ve died, John,” Sherlock explains irritably, pulling the orange shock blanket closer to himself. John doesn’t look at him.
“The Yarders were right there, you didn’t have to come in after me.”
“Oh please, like the Yarders can manage anything so important!”
John wants to know how he manages to make the words themselves sneer, how he manipulates and controls, until they taste strange in John’s mouth when he tries them on for size, long after Sherlock’s done speaking them.
They pull each other close for the heat, to try to rub nerves back into their fingertips and preform a duet with shivers rising to a crescendo.
“You could’ve died,” Sherlock repeats when John seems to still be upset with him for jumping without thought into the Thames in January. John’s mouth twitches into a smile.
“I was not born for death. I’m an immortal bird,” he whispers, almost to himself.
In the end, it’s Sherlock’s fingertips on John’s jaw. It’s a question, and an answer, and a hope. It’s Sherlock trying to form a sentence, a word, past the chattering of his teeth and the swirls of half-remembered dreams from youth.
In the end, it’s a half glimpse of recognition.
“I love you.”
He says it around a small, kind smile. One he hopes will prompt a spark and blow a flame and make something more than this dreamy-gaze burst in Sherlock’s pale eyes. And there’s a moment, one filled with the sound of the Thames and police sirens mixing, making love to each other beneath the haze of London’s fog until they’re just one indistinguishable noise behind them. A moment where Sherlock’s eyes widen, and they almost look like sea-foam in this light, his mouth works soundlessly and John gives him room enough to dare, room enough to hope.
Where have you been?
I remember.
But--
“John.”
--No.
It’s a kiss before Sherlock can say anything more, one that sends shivers of lightning into all the secret places inside John’s chest. One that makes him grip the edges of Sherlock’s shock blanket and just hold on, where Sherlock’s clumsy and cold and pushing back just as desperate, just as needy. Like he’s been deprived just as long. Like he needs it just as bad.
John thinks maybe they’re both addicted to more than just the danger in this life. Maybe they’re addicted to the taste of each other, to the roll of sweet, delicate fire down their spines. Maybe he’s addicted to the color of Sherlock’s eyes and the wild raven curls of his hair and the paleness of his skin. Maybe he’s addicted to the way he says John’s name like it’s a kind of prayer.
It starts to rain, stinging drops of cold against their faces as they struggle to remain upright and twined around each other. The cold seeps into their skin and makes a home in their shuddering ribcages. John doesn’t think he’s ever been this happy.
“It’s okay. It’s okay,” he murmurs against Sherlock’s mouth, his hands anchoring the taller man to the ground.
For a few moments, John forgets.
He doesn’t think about missing and wanting and loving and dying and for a moment, he isn’t sure if this is real. He isn’t sure if this is a waking dream.
Sherlock makes a noise somewhere between a gasp and a moan when John leaves crescent-moon canyons on the back of his pale neck, and John can taste him, can breathe him in. It’s so much like music, the violin at midnight when John wakes from nightmares and his flatmate doesn’t know how to say ‘I’m here’. It’s like dancing, being caught up in the current of fey-water and the reflection of moonlight. It’s like remembering for the first time, how it had knocked him over, how it had made colors sing and gave light a sound, for just a moment.
He breaks away, and Sherlock dips to follow him, to press a series of quick, desperate kisses to his lips, jaw, cheek, forehead. John’s never felt this beautiful, like there’s a light inside him only Sherlock can see.
He blinks, and finds a breathless, warm smile overtaking him. Sherlock mirrors him, and it’s like floodwaters breaking. It’s okay. It’s okay, that Sherlock doesn’t remember, and the nights they’d had scattered over two thousand years of life are lost on the current. It’s okay that John’s got the years pent up inside him, raging at the walls of his chest every time his heart beats. It’s okay that he still vibrates with the energy of the Thames beneath the moonlight, and he feels like that Nightingale Sherlock whispered about so many years ago, in Sussex. Because this is like flitting back down to earth. Like finally coming home.
“God. I’ve missed you.”