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Nine days after John's daughter is born, the apocalypse starts.
//
Seven days after John’s daughter is born, he moves back into 221B without her. Sherlock knows why, and has cautiously hoped for this outcome since he met Alice Hannah Watson and looked into her eyes. They were richly brown as burnished maple, too dark to belong to John’s biological child. John had obviously reached the same conclusion, but his determined cheerfulness as he sat at Mary's bedside said that he’d already repressed the knowledge, along with everything else he couldn’t handle thinking about.
When Sherlock opens the door to John, he looks worse than Sherlock has ever seen him, haggard and hunted and hurt. “I had a paternity test,” John grits out, posture stiff. “Mind if I stay here for a while?”
“For as long as you like,” Sherlock says, and tries not to look happier than John will allow.
“Thanks.” John nods once, tightly, and climbs up the stairs to his bedroom.
The next morning, John’s chair is occupied again. The flat feels indefinably warmer with him in it.
For the first time in years, Sherlock has (nearly) everything he wants.
He should have known something would go wrong.
//
The first thing Sherlock notices is that the rhythm of London is just slightly off, a hitch in the metronome that marks his waking hours. It stutters and then stumbles, no longer a constant background beat. In the streets, traffic slows like coagulated blood from a dying heart, and his hope flags along with it.
He spends the rest of the day staving off panic, looking for any possible solution, an ameliorating gift to give to John when he comes home. Sherlock made a vow, after all.
When his mobile lights up with an incoming call from Mycroft, Sherlock already knows what his brother will say.
//
Los Angeles, New York, Paris: the world’s cities are flickering out like guttering candles, and London will be next.
He finds John upstairs, jaw set, cleaning his gun. He has the same look on his face as he did that day at the pool, when he told Sherlock to run.
"How long have we got, then?"
"A month, at most. Probably less."
John nods, as though he expected nothing else from the world but a catastrophe.
Sherlock clears his throat from his place in the doorway. "John, we need to leave London. Are you—"
"Of course I'm coming with you." John squares his shoulders, as if daring Sherlock to try and stop him. "Of course I am."
//
A mere month ago, in another life, Janine Hawkins, née Moriarty, was arrested for tampering with the British Telecom network, and her property was seized by the British Government. When Mycroft suggests that Sherlock and John leave while they still can, he offers them the cottage in Sussex. They flee to the country like children in a wartime drama. Sherlock brings his violin, and John brings his gun.
Mycroft remains in London, as do their parents. Mummy has just accepted a research position, which she "already delayed for twenty-five years so I could raise the two of you, thank you very much," and Father stays with her. Stubbornness is a Holmes family trait.
//
Sherlock has never been particularly attached to his dwellings, but it’s difficult to leave 221B when the time comes. He was content here, even happy. There are memories stored in every corner, every case file, every bit of damaged wallpaper. He studied John here, left and was left by him here, and he fell in love with him here, which Sherlock can finally admit to himself since it won’t matter for much longer.
He outran love for as long as he could, but it still found him, stalking him like a lion on the veldt until he finally let down his guard. Ruthless, it tore out his heart to cherish like a ruddy cabochon jewel.
In a way, Sherlock was right: falling in love really is the end of the world.
//
They settle into the cottage, everything strange and new while the world falls apart outside. It’s not 221B, but it’s home now, because it's where John is. Sherlock finds beekeeping gear in a shed in the garden and repairs the hives, order in the midst of chaos. John watches from the house, convinced Sherlock is going to set off a swarm, but Sherlock knows how to placate the bees. His hands move over them like a conductor’s over his orchestra.
He hangs his hood and coveralls by their front door where his Belstaff ought to be, but he and John don’t go out anymore; there’s nowhere safe to go.
“I wouldn’t have thought you’d like the country,” John says from the kitchen. He’s checking to see how much water they have left, but he pretends to be looking for tea once he spots Sherlock.
Sherlock observes John, who is in their unfamiliar kitchen, small and steady and here, and still trying to protect him, futile though it is. “It has its advantages,” Sherlock says softly, and helps John find the kettle.
//
Neither of them sleep much. All of the things left undone and words left unsaid ache like a palpated bruise, even after their hurried goodbyes in London. Lestrade and Molly had stayed at their posts, and Mrs Hudson had gone to her sister’s in Brighton. Harry was, as John bitterly put it, “dead to the world anyway” and in Manchester. Mary and the baby were gone, underground somewhere, and John claimed to be fine but clearly sometimes still missed her and the life he was never going to have.
Sherlock himself has only the relatively straightforward regrets of a) hurting John, b) leaving John, and c) not having come to terms with his own emotions while his life expectancy was measured in years and not weeks.
//
They wait for word that never comes. Sherlock makes his own deductions, but for once doesn’t share them, for all the good it does.
That night, John enters his bedroom, sits on the edge of his bed, and circles Sherlock’s wrist with his fingers. Sherlock turns his hand palm-up and mirrors the gesture, his long fingers curling around John’s wrist and resting on his radial artery. John's pulse is drumbeat-steady and somewhat elevated, allegretto. Sherlock tugs slightly in invitation, and John accepts, lying face-down on the bed next to him, still touching him, and meeting his unblinking gaze in the darkness. He can feel the ridges of John's fingerprints against the inside of his wrist. The moonlight pools between them like mercury, lapping against John's edges, and Sherlock doesn't look away.
In the morning, Sherlock finds that not only did they both fall asleep at some point, but John also draped himself over Sherlock’s body as if he was waiting for bombs to fall. John’s back rises and falls under the sheets like the bellows of the earth.
Sherlock makes himself leave before John wakes up. They don’t talk about it, but Sherlock can still feel the warmth at every point where John’s skin pressed against his, their pulses keeping perfect time.
//
Sherlock mourns on the microscale—the perfect, firework thrill of a case newly solved, of a poison correctly identified; the patina of his violin in the lamplight; the sunlit warmth of John’s voice when he says fantastic. The world won’t have them for much longer.
There is no case, nothing to solve, nothing even to survive.
But Sherlock has John, finally, exclusively, and—well. There are worse ways to die.
He would not like to live in a world without John Watson in it.
//
He plays his violin quite often now. There wasn’t time to bring his chemistry equipment, and the cases are unavoidably cancelled, but the music distracts him and keeps John from pacing like a caged tiger. Sherlock plays all of the most sentimental pieces in his repertoire, and John always stops to listen, watching Sherlock with something unnameable in his eyes. Sherlock watches back and lets his fingers retrace the mathematically marvellous proportions of his violin, while his eyes do the same to John.
The lower bout of his violin echoes the sweet Darwinian curve of John's skull, and the waist of his violin mirrors the arc of John's throat. They're recurring tessellations in the cosmos, patterns that ripple out into nothingness.
Perhaps it means something, perhaps not, but either way, Sherlock plays on.
//
Sherlock is meticulous with data; he always has been. All of his experiments and cases and criminal studies are recorded in notebooks and digitally archived and stored in his mind palace, a triune unity of information. Even his informal studies of John are inscribed on Sherlock's neural pathways, the sparks of thought flashing in the same captivating colours as the police lights that glanced off of John’s hair after he shot a man for Sherlock.
Sherlock hates to lose data: it leaves holes in the universe, little darknesses that eat away at the edifice of knowledge and increase the entropy of existence. Sherlock hates that when they die, the vast reams of information that make up who they are will be erased: the acicular acuity of his thoughts will be blunted and shattered, and so will the precise angles of the furrows in John’s brow when Sherlock exasperates him, the refractory index of his irises, and the proud line of his spine when he holds a gun.
There must be some method of preservation. Surely, in a just universe, one of the laws of thermodynamics would have accounted for this and provided a loophole, some way in which all the discrete quanta that comprise their material existence could remain intact.
But injustice is only one of the many things wrong with the universe, and when John wanders in to find him crumpled on the floor, surrounded by pages and pages of unsolvable equations, he doesn’t even say anything, just sits down heavily next to Sherlock and puts an arm around his shoulders and lets him breathe into John’s jumper.
Sherlock shuts his eyes and tries not to think of the void.
//
It seems fitting that it once again takes impending doom to get them to talk to each other about their emotions.
The alcohol doesn’t hurt either. When Sherlock comes in from tending the bees, he finds John curled up in his chair, shoes off and shirt wrinkled, and clutching a generous glass of Scotch. John wordlessly holds out a second glass to Sherlock, so he takes it, bemused, and sits down.
John stares at him across the space between their chairs. He looks tired, and vulnerable, and angry, though not at Sherlock, exactly; Sherlock knows that expression all too well.
"Do you ever wonder," John says, sounding almost accusatory, "what it would be like to completely start over? Do you ever want to?"
“I—sometimes, yes. I do.” He doesn’t know what else to say. Or rather, he does; he knows what he wants to say, has wanted to say for some time now, but he’s not sure how this John will take it. There’s still so much distance between them, for all that they’re sitting in the same room, and Sherlock has never been good at reconciliation.
John stands up from his chair to loom over him, their usual positions reversed, and Sherlock has nowhere to look except at John, who fills Sherlock's vision like he fills his existence.
“I’m not an idiot, Sherlock. I know that ‘Sherlock is actually a girl’s name’ wasn’t what you wanted to say on the tarmac. I realised it later, just like I realised you weren’t going to come back. You were going to leave again, go off and die without me—” John’s voice breaks, and it's shocking. His chin drops down to his chest, and his fists clench; Sherlock can see the muscle contractions cascade up to John’s shoulders, straightening his spine in military command. “So,” John grits out, gaze snapping back up to Sherlock’s, “what were you going to say? What would you say if it were your last night on Earth, since it actually might be?”
Sherlock stares back at John, at the blue drowned look in his eyes, and knows he’s done for; they both are. “John, given the circumstances, I think you should know—it seems that I—” He's choking; why is he choking? His voice worked just fine a moment ago.
John seems to deflate, all the anger and tension seeping out of him, and a calm determination settles in their place. "Sherlock. Stand up."
Sherlock does, and suddenly there's so little distance between them that he only has to dip his head to touch his forehead to John's. Their noses brush. Sherlock tilts into John's orbit like a drunken planet.
Then: John’s hands, John’s mouth, John’s heart, after all this time.
They engage in their own act of creation, of defiance in the face of destruction. Just the two of them against the rest of the world.
Outside, the bees hum a dirge.
//
He lies awake after John has gone to sleep, memorising. He tangles their legs together and splays his palms on John's back and breathes in time with the expansion and contraction of John's rib cage, as cyclical as empires.
In the morning, John's hands find his hair and pet at his curls, and Sherlock breathes into the signpost solidity of John's sternum.
If there's any sort of heaven, it will just be this.
//
John is here, and Sherlock loves him, and John loves him back.
The world is ending, and London is burning, and it's such a beautiful day.
//
He wants to feel John breathing against him for the rest of their days, the warmth of John's skin welling up under his fingertips like the radiant heat of yellow suns, stellar birth in the depths of John's eyes every morning, nebulae in the linings of his lungs, gravity wells in the palms of his hands: Sherlock's own little pocket universe, safe against the tidal forces of destruction, or so he'd like to believe.
How pedestrian of him.
//
They settle in for the night while the remaining lights on the horizon wink out like dead pixels.
He takes John to bed and loves him very, very slowly, as if the space between their bodies is all the world they need.
John keeps his eyes shut in the dark, but his fingers play over Sherlock's ribs like a sculptor's Braille, and a smile struggles to be born at the corners of his mouth.
Sherlock traces the outline of John's scar with a tactile reverence, and John's hands soothe over the raised marks on Sherlock's back, the same ones that John had earlier mapped out with his mouth, murmuring murderous threats against Sherlock's captors the entire time.
“John,” he says softly, haltingly, “I’m sorry.”
“For what?”
“For—almost everything. I would stop this, save you, if I could. But if not, I’m glad you’re with me, John.”
John chokes out a laugh. “Me too. Here at the end of all things.” He finally smiles, in the way he has when he’s made a pop culture reference he knows Sherlock won’t understand. But then John twines their fingers together and rests his head against Sherlock’s shoulder and breathes very carefully, so Sherlock finds that John’s banality is something he can more than forgive.
If it weren’t for the knowledge of their certain death, he’d be perfectly happy.
//
Death has never particularly frightened him, his own included, but he finds he cannot countenance the idea that John Watson will cease to be. Sherlock knows, logically, that he will be likewise dead and unconscious of any change, but it seems fundamentally wrong that the universe should ever forget John, one of its best creations. Surely, there will be some echo left. Energy is always conserved in a closed system, so perhaps the waveforms that make up John’s consciousness will quiver and quaver but not entirely go quiet. Perhaps what’s left of Sherlock, if anything, will merge with what’s left of John.
It’s appallingly sentimental, and yet undeniably comforting.
//
"I wish I'd realised it sooner." John admits it with his arms crossed, still wearing his favourite cabled jumper even though it's not remotely cold in the house. "Maybe I should have, but I was so angry for so long, and I never thought you would quite feel that way about anyone, least of all me."
"I wanted . . . I would have liked to grow old with you," Sherlock confesses, as if to a crime. "I wanted to know every change in you, every permutation of every variable."
And he could have done; they could have retired together when Sherlock's transport finally betrayed him, and they could have wizened into old men here. He could have watched John shuffle about the house as he grew slower and even shorter, bundled in increasingly terrible jumpers. Sherlock could have measured the tonal degradations in John's hair as it faded from bronze to silver, and seen the sun crown him in argent while the bees rose up behind him like a prayer. They could have been a matched set, wrinkled and diminished but still together and alive, telling death to piss off for as long as possible.
It's just another potentiality that will never occur, now. He'll never find out what John looks like in reading glasses, or whether he'll still be a crack shot at sixty-five.
It's very difficult not to hold this against the universe.
"I would have stayed with you," John says, "if you'd let me."
"Always."
"That won't be much longer."
Sherlock smiles. "The offer still stands."
//
The honey-strained morning light brings with it the sight of smoke smudged against the sky like sooty fingerprints left by a malevolent hand. John stands stock-still at the window, staring.
"You know," Sherlock says from behind him, "I always wanted to be cremated." John looks, for a suspended second, utterly stricken, and then he starts to laugh. Sherlock joins in, helpless. They laugh until their stomachs hurt and the laughter fades into an airless, hollowed-out sadness, as if they're at a funeral.
Well. Close enough.
//
"John! Come outside." He pauses briefly at the door, waiting for John to follow him one last time. "It's almost here."
"Your death wish is really coming along," John says, in a tortured attempt at levity.
"Just the opposite, in fact," Sherlock avers, and John's expression softens. They stand barefooted amongst the hives like remembered kings, and the bees emit a low elegiac hum.
"Do you think," John asks, watching the sun set vermillion over the Downs, "that there's anything after this?"
"After what, John? Be specific."
John huffs in frustration. "You know exactly what I mean. After we die."
Sherlock sighs. "No, I never have. Do you?"
"I don't know, really. Maybe not. I think I'd like there to be, though. If you were there."
"That would be . . . good." Sherlock clears his suddenly tight throat. "'To die would be an awfully big adventure'," he quotes, and John chokes out a suspiciously wet-sounding laugh. His face does something complicated.
"You don't know who the Prime Minister is, but you didn't delete Peter Pan."
"It seemed worth holding on to at the time," Sherlock says, and takes John's hand. "John, you should know—there's something I ought to say . . . " he starts, but finds himself at a loss. He doesn't know how to fit everything he's feeling into words. They're paltry approximations of constants he still can't entirely comprehend.
"I do know, Sherlock," John says. "I—me too." He laughs. "Better late than never, I suppose."
"Yes," Sherlock agrees ruefully. "Better late than never." And they settle down together on the grass, still so incongruously green, and wait, propped against each other, for the end to arrive. John is a bracing reassurance all along Sherlock's side. He can feel the seismic shift propagating towards them, and see the air on the horizon twist and distort. The sky turns an even deeper red, haemorrhaging out. Immolation glimmers in the distance like embers, and the earth burns, inexorable as a lit fuse.
"John?"
"I'm still here."
"Yes." Awed, Sherlock lifts John's hand to his mouth and kisses it. He keeps his eyes fixed on the points where they connect, on the movement of his thumb over John's knuckles. Their palms clasp together like closed parentheses.
When the air becomes a heavy molten heat against his face, he looks away from their hands and back to John and takes a shaky breath. John's eyes are smiling at him, even as the world goes white as starlight.
It feels like flying.