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“Shit,” John breathes as the attic door pulls down to reveal streaming light.
“What is it?” For once, Sherlock’s behind him. For once, Sherlock doesn’t rush forward. He stares at the light, which is golden with dust, with narrowed eyes. It resembles sunlight, streams of it cutting through clouds.
“I’ve seen this before,” John says. “Help me close it up.”
“Why?”
John looks at him with closed-off eyes, eyes shuttered against the war he carries with him. He lifts the attic stairs, and Sherlock moves to help him push it back into the ceiling, cutting the flow of light.
When the doorway seals with a clunk, it’s as if a high breath of a note has stopped quivering the air.
“What happened in Afghanistan?” Sherlock asks, and John smiles, because this is something the detective cannot deduce, because it isn’t a fact and it didn’t leave a mark, and it didn’t change how his body moved.
All it did was leave fingerprints on his thoughts.
All it did was prepare him for this day, so that this day would not be the first time he saw the light. So that this day, he could stop his friend from rushing to his doom.
“Tell me,” Sherlock says. There is demand and plea in equal measures in his voice, but it’s the question – why won’t you tell me? – in his eyes that wins John’s words.
John sits down in on the stairs of this great house they’re searching, far enough away from the attic entrance to stop Sherlock glancing at it every few moments. He waits for Sherlock to tear himself away and join him, his gaze finally settling on John.
They had been chasing a man, at the behest of a client, who had endangered the client’s children. The trail had led here. John knows the war would follow him all his days, but he had not looked for this light to trail him as well. Perhaps once you saw it, it could find you.
“It was during a routine search,” John begins. “Looking for weapons, wanted persons, obvious signs of attack planning. House to house, turn it inside out, move on.” He looks away. “We did it randomly, but on that day, we’d chosen to save the big house for last – the local political head’s house. A mansion there. It was just a simple two story, with an attic.”
John focuses his gaze on his hands, which he’s folded together on his knees, the gun dangling from the right. His gun. His little piece of the war.
“Go on.”
John nods. “On the day, when we arrived, the women of the house were beside themselves. They rushed out, crying, grabbing at us, trying to get us inside – we thought it was a trap, an ambush, a trick, but that’s what we were there for, so we cut in through side entrances – well, the others at first, I stayed outside and tended to the cuts and scrapes and bumps the women had, some old, most fresh.
“When I had finished, all except two of the unit were inside. No shots fired. No sounds of struggle.” John shrugs. “So I picked up my kit and walked in, past the door sentry.” John closes his eyes for a moment, breathes in, and it’s like he’s there again, breathing the sudden dark of a stone-walled house in the desert, wide, bleached sky above.
“What did you see?”
John shakes his head. “Nothing yet.”
With his eyes closed, he can feel the war on his face, and he knows Sherlock can see it. When people normally notice the war, they look away, change the way they were walking to avoid passing him, like he’s a black cat or an inconvenient ladder. Like he’s a broken mirror, and if they look at him, they’ll see a cut up version of themselves.
It’s what he sees, at any rate.
Sherlock only shifts to look more closely.
Eyes still closed, John continues, “It wasn’t until my eyes adjusted that I noticed everyone had their eyes trained on the ceiling. No one would say a word when I asked. I looked up, too, but didn’t see anything.” John shrugs again. “So I climbed the stairs and found the rest of the men in the same state, except one, the youngest, was pointing at the attic door, which was open.
“At first I thought it led outside, since sunlight was pouring through, but then I recalled the outside of the house, unlike many of the others, had a full and un-marred roof – and there had only been electrical wiring for the bottom-most floor.” John opens his eyes and stares at Sherlock, and Sherlock doesn’t look away from the sudden depth in John’s eyes.
“And that’s when I realized two of my team were missing – gone up and into the light. I asked Gerry – the youngest – what had happened, and he said that the man of the house had gone in, and that those two men had followed, but when the rest had called for them, no sound had emerged.”
John pauses and swallows, hands clinging to one another. “We waited, and the light finally faded, as if it was retreating. I followed it’s receding tide up, step by step, and finally poked my head into the attic. I caught a glimpse then – the light must’ve been pooling where my head had been – of what they had seen –”
Sherlock says nothing, only watches John struggle to breathe through the memory, lets him thrash through it without interfering.
“Those three men were on their knees and on their backs and on their sides. They were being taken apart by what they saw.” John pauses again. “I saw it, too. It was… a reflection of sorts. It was a map. A landscape, an internal topography. The light was showing them themselves.”
John bites a lip. “I lost two good men that day – or at least, I stopped thinking of them as good men that day. But they did perish, along with the man of the house. I caught a glimpse of their insides, all twisted and broken and bursting with decay –” John gasps, then looks at Sherlock with apology in his eyes. “To this day I’m not sure if some of that was me.”
Sherlock nods and looks away, finally, giving John the space he needs to tidy away the memory, to reel in the war. When he has, Sherlock reaches out a hand and rests it on his shoulder for a moment.
“So the lawyer with a penchant for molestation – you believe he’s in there.”
John barks a hollow laugh. “I know it.” A frown claims his face. “This light, Sherlock…it calls darkness. Do you understand?” He fixes Sherlock with his Captain stare. “We are not going in after him.”
Sherlock hesitates only a moment before acquiescing, “No of course not.”
And in that moment, John is suddenly back in London, back inside himself here and now, and he looks at Sherlock, and realizes for the first time that his friend is a mirror of sorts, too – like his face, like the light, Sherlock reflects back at people something they wish not to see: their little lies and uncomfortable truths.
He wonders what Sherlock sees when he looks at John, because John knows what he sees when Sherlock looks at him with those piercing eyes. He sees the war, and the marks it left, and his days before it with the skills they imparted, but he also sees himself, John Watson. It’s the truest, kindest, wholest reflection, one he cannot find in mirrors even, not even if he’s looking for it, trying to pinpoint the man behind the scars and compulsions.
“Might as well go and tell the client,” Sherlock says briskly and stands.
They leave the house, they leave the case, they leave the memory of desert and light and seeing.
John thinks it’s done. He thinks it’s finished.
Two weeks later, when he returns from Tesco, laden with groceries and ready for a bickering session with Sherlock, he opens the door and feels it.
No, he hears it.
The bags spill by the door, and he leaps up the stairs, fatigue abandoned along with the eggs and bread and milk. He bursts into his room, arms himself with his little piece of the war, and bounds out and up, until he reaches the attic door. It is open, and light is spilling out and spreading.
“Sherlock!”
No answer, of course.
If John squints against the flow of light, he can just barely make out the line and shape of a man in an impossible coat.
Suddenly, he’s wading through light. Suddenly, he’s climbing the stairs.
“Sherlock!”
He’s almost completely in, his gaze fixed on Sherlock’s light-drenched shadow.
Sherlock turns at the sound of his name. “John?” The word is soft, questioning.
John surges the rest of the way in. He grabs Sherlock’s arm, then slides down to take hold of his hand. “I’m here – let’s get ou—” He turns, and cannot see the way out. He closes his eyes. Of course, they’re stuck. If the others could have left, they would have.
He turns to look at Sherlock. There are tear tracks on his face. “What do you see?”
Sherlock closes his eyes and shakes his head, holding onto John’s hand even more tightly. John realizes Sherlock cannot see him. Perhaps he doesn’t even know he’s here, crushing the detective’s hand right back.
“Sherlock,” he whispers, “I’m here.”
A sob works its way out of Sherlock’s throat, “John.”
John pulls him into an embrace as they both sink to the floor, the detective shaking in his arms, little gasps and tremors escaping his self-control. Finally he stills against John, breathing evenly if shallowly. John takes a moment to look around, expecting the worst, expecting the war, the men he couldn’t save, the father he couldn’t love, the world he couldn’t please.
Instead, he sees himself, alone, no Sherlock in his arms, even though he can feel him.
The image of him, the reality of him, on his knees, arms flung around nothing but air, cracks his throat open and a gasp escapes, twisting like a serpent until it becomes a wail. He tightens his arms and closes his eyes, but the loneliness remains. “Please,” he whispers.
He doesn’t know how long it lasts, but he finally feels arms-not-his own tighten around his sides and back, as if someone, somewhere in this empty world, feels he is worth keeping. It must be Sherlock. It must Sherlock. It must be Sherlock.
He collapses into the touch, collapses into weeping, collapses into acceptance. “Please,” he chokes out. “Don’t let go. Don’t leave me.”
The unseen arms tighten, and John could perish from relief. His heart is beating painfully inside his rib cage, but he can feel another heartbeat, close by, pressing against him from the outside.
He doesn’t know how long it lasts, but finally the light grows dimmer.
When next John opens his eyes, he’s clinging to Sherlock, and Sherlock is clinging to him, so much in each other’s arms they must have traded atoms and air and blood and everything that matters and doesn’t matter. They are on their knees, pressed tight together, twisted around each other like roots, like ivy, like copper wire catching lighting.
The light is leaving, and with it goes a loneliness and with it goes a darkness. John recognizes the loneliness, and he recognizes the darkness, as his own.
He recognizes the loneliness and the darkness as not his own.
“John,” Sherlock begins, and John crushes the air out of his lungs with his arms, steals it with an inhale, and says,
“Please,” and Sherlock moves against him, and John shifts against him, and then they are looking each other in the eye, seeing themselves in their reflections in each other’s faces, and John can feel the war has left his face in no small way, and he leans into that, into Sherlock, and –
Sherlock leans into him and on him and against him, and –
Then the last boundaries are overwritten, overflown, overturned, as their lips touch, and their hands seek and find, and they breath each other’s air, taste each other’s molecules, swap heart beats, trading loneliness and darkness for together and light, even as that other light recedes, even as the pain of it decays, and it doesn’t matter.
It doesn’t matter.
It doesn’t matter.
Everything is shattered, and everything is whole.