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“In this world, time is like a flow of water, occasionally displaced by a bit of debris, a passing breeze. Now and then, some cosmic disturbance will cause a rivulet of time to turn away from the mainstream, to make connection backstream. When this happens… people caught in the branching tributary find themselves suddenly carried to the past.”
— Alan Lightman, Einstein’s Dreams
Sherlock is wearing his dressing gown even though it’s four in the afternoon and he is pointedly not cleaning up his specimen jars from the table as John tries to tidy up the flat. He’s having a girl up before their date, and Sherlock understands from previous patterns this is so that Sherlock can meet her, or she him, or perhaps both. John pauses on his way to the kitchen, balancing some dusty teacups on top of each other. (Earl Grey leaves, sugar residue, all his.) They make a clattering noise.
“Sherlock, don’t… don’t read her, not out loud, ok? Not this one.”
Looking back, he knows right then. He can feel it coming without even seeing it. John has made a minor career out of trying to teach Sherlock when to keep his deductions from other people, but it’s the first time since they met that John has asked him not to share them with him.
////
How did you know that?
That’s brilliant. That’s just… that’s exceptional.
You know, some people don’t want to hear their private details spilling out of your mouth.
Just wait and tell me later, back at the flat. When we’re alone.
Bit not good, Sherlock.
You’re amazing.
////
He runs into her on the sidewalk in front of Scotland Yard. John is still inside, smoothing things behind Sherlock the way he does, and Sherlock is waiting for him out in the London night, wired from putting the pieces together, from the puzzle solved, waiting to walk out toward Baker Street, together.
“Hello, I take it you caught the murderer. Well done.”
“Yes, thank you,” he says, looking at her clothes. (Silk dress, a few years old but rarely worn, creased behind the knees and across the lap. Hoop earrings instead of the plain gold posts she normally favors. Lipstick, not fresh. Faint waft of perfume. Gardenia and a bit of smoky vanilla. John missed a date.)
“I hope you didn’t wait long. Reservations?”
“Yes, but that’s ok. He said you texted quite suddenly. I suppose violent crime is rather unpredictable, and not that concerned with dinner plans.” She’s smiling. He doesn’t know why.
Sherlock shrugs. “Still going out?”
“Yes, I think so. We can find something still open, maybe get a few drinks.”
They stand in the patch of light from an overhead post, people coming and going from the entrance behind them. Sherlock hates small talk, so he stays silent.
“Would you like to come?” she finally asks. “You’re probably famished as well. I’d love to hear about your case.”
“No. Thank you. John is better at that, anyway. Blogger.”
“Sherlock…” Mary has her bottom lip partly caught between her teeth. (Nervous tick.) “It doesn’t have to always be just me or just you. I’m not trying to… take him away.”
But she is. She is taking him away. She’s walking him off into the night in a different direction from 221B and she’s slowly taking the bits of his life that used to be open to Sherlock. Post-case takeaway. Two mugs of tea set onto the chipped side table between them when John gets off his shift in the afternoon. Sunday mornings when John is wearing his plaid pajama bottoms and the kind of thin, white T-shirt that comes in packages of three and his hair is sticking up in the back and Sherlock wants to crawl right into the warm space that is John but he hands him the comics section of the paper instead because he likes them, and he sits quietly there in the living room as long as John decides to spend there.
She’s taking away even possible bits that haven’t occurred, but might have, in a future where John had never asked him to not read this one, please. When Sherlock might have found him in the kitchen late some night after John had come down to escape one of the dreams he carried like leftover gear from Afghanistan, and he would have reached out across the impossible space to touch his forehead, to smooth his thumb along the crease between John’s brows and somehow John would have known and Sherlock could tell him, finally, with the faint pressure of his lips give them to me, I can hold them, I will hold them for you while you sleep.
And he hates that she can stand here smiling at him after he called John and he came, despite the dinner plans, when he begrudges every single moment of time that John gives her.
“Do you enjoy crime scenes? Does finding the pattern in strangulation marks and chasing down a serial killer excite you?” She raises her eyebrows, just a bit.
“It does John. He will always come, you know. He loves it.”
“I know,” she says, looking him right in the face, right in the eyes. “I’ve known that from the beginning. And I also know you don’t want to share, but we can. We can share him.”
And he knows, now. He knows without a doubt that she deserves John far more than he does and that he must take whatever crumbs she will throw him from her motherfucking table of John because there is not one single part of him that understands her kindness in not throwing all the things only she can give John back in his face.
////
After this Sherlock cannot stop imagining possible futures that might have occurred at various points in time, small and large events acting as intersections where what actually happens and what might have happened spool away from each other and head in different directions. There is a fixed point in his mind where these variations begin, one cosmic disturbance (don’t read this one) like a city center from which all possible paths unravel, but anything after that is a possible point of divergence.
////
They trace some tainted heroin that’s killed at least a dozen people so far to a small, damp room hidden behind a dingy launderette. There are people, greasy, filth-crusted, strung-out people laying in corners in various degrees of unconsciousness. Lestrade has the dealer up against the van and he’s being rough, his hand is a fist on the guy’s back and he’s glancing back through the door at Sherlock every moment or so as if he’s a toddler near a very deep swimming pool and Sherlock pretends he doesn’t notice.
Sherlock is looking down at one of the addicts on the floor. He’s young, so young (no lines around the eyes, plain trousers and navy jumper of a school uniform) and he’s passed out with his mouth open, smooth chin listing to one side, hair damp and slicked against his forehead. Sherlock knows he should be seeing a wasted potential, a deeply tragic squandering of countless bright possibilities, but he’s staring at the syringe lying almost perfectly parallel to the pale arm on the floor and he’s thinking instead about the bright bloom of not-pain-not-pleasure like the formation of a new star burning its way across his restless brain. He’s thinking about the feeling of surprised, focused quiet, the feeling of standing inside his own head like he’s watching fireworks on a summer night and everything else is hushed, a thousand amazed faces turned to the exploding light and there is nothing and no other time when his mind is still.
“Sherlock,” says John. His voice is soft in a place of hard edges.
Sherlock puts his hands deep into his pockets. He makes them into fists, tight balls of no that hurt deep in the joints. He slides his eyes to John. Quiet, steady John. He pulls his lips into a smile.
“How about dinner?” says John. “Chinese?”
John and Sherlock walk along the night-softened streets, their shoulders brush each other and the street lamps are almost like stars, constellations of meaning Sherlock can read if he only looks hard enough. They split a fortune cookie at the restaurant and the little paper fortune flutters into his hand. John touches it with his finger, drags it like a slow, whispering comet across his palm and Sherlock leans across the universe and kisses John’s mouth.
Something is shaking in Sherlock’s gut. He is too close to something, too thinned out and open.
“Don’t you have somewhere else to be?” He looks at his watch, raises his eyebrows in a flourish.
John doesn’t even rise to the bait. “It can wait,” he says evenly.
“There’s no need.” His voice is harsher than it should be. He leans back on his heels and turns toward the paramedics coming through the door. “Four unconscious. Three here and one behind the sofa in the corner.”
He steps outside. “Go see Mary, John,” he throws over his shoulder as he follows him out, and he leaves it behind, the flashing lights, the relentless swarm of activity, the pull of stillness. John.
It is more than a quarter of an hour and five different intersections before he feels Lestrade trailing him. He’s not trying to hide it and he’s not trying to catch up. He’s just… there, walking a block behind.
When Sherlock gets back to Baker Street he leaves the door open for him.
////
Sherlock is making tea and John is watching a documentary on the moon landing. John loves anything to do with space and Sherlocks hears him let out a huff that means can you believe that?! amazing! So Sherlock looks in from the kitchen and there’s an astronaut floating slowly through space on the television, white and stiff-limbed, tethered by a long cord like an embryo. He wonders if John used to stare up at the sky in the desert where it would have spread out darkly forever and ever and if he wished he were up there instead of the insistent gravity of the hot sun and sniper fire and trying to stem the arterial flow of blood with his fingers as men lay sweating in their camouflage. He’s hit with a wave of affection for the man so fierce it hurts him like a bullet would and John has the only hand that can plug up the wound.
What if everything, every small act, is a point where things could splinter? What if I don’t put milk in John’s tea and he is annoyed that I never do the shopping and that makes it easier for him to say yes to moving in with Mary? What if I hand him the mug and the handle is turned away so he brushes my fingers with his as he takes it and looks up at my face and we don’t look away? What if I push John into the back of the sofa and lick my way down his neck until my tongue can trace every small pucker of scar tissue on his shoulder and I take his cock in my hand until he feels dizzy and weightless and floating above Baker Street and I am his only tether?
Sherlock drops the carton of milk and staggers for a moment, face against his empty hands.
////
If John were an embryo and Sherlock were an embryo and they had floated in the same breathless sea maybe he would have been able to tell him, there in the darkness. That he loves him like a secret heartbeat sending shockwaves up his entire body.
////
On John’s stag night Sherlock hopes for a crime scene to crop up. It’s not like he wants someone to get murdered, precisely, but as it’s going to happen anyway (it always does) he feels that the violent imbeciles of London’s criminal class owe him some decent timing for once. He spends the morning looking at sections of ocular tissue from an accidental drowning. In the afternoon he sits in a plume of smoke, cross-legged on the sofa, and goes through an entire pack of Mayfairs one after the other. When they’re gone he gives in and texts Lestrade. Nothing.
The pub is relentlessly cheerful, all polished wood and brightly colored coasters and loud pop music. Sherlock despises it.
John is beaming and ordering rounds. He touches everyone on the shoulder as he moves down the line, conversation with everyone, easy and open. He’s happy. This is what normal people do, Sherlock supposes, in their real lives. He feels tired, and like everything is a little too bright behind his eyelids. Like his eyes can’t adjust.
“Jesus, you can’t even sit on a barstool without looking like there’s a poker shoved up your ass.” Lestrade claims the stool to his left.
“I fail to see the advantage in bad posture. If your abdominal muscles continue to deteriorate you’ll have to buy a new hip holster, Lestrade. Not to mention larger pants.”
Lestrade huffs. “Thanks for that, Ms. Bloody Cosmo.”
John throws his head back and laughs on the other end of the bar. Sherlock can see the slight, paler line of skin on his forehead where he’s recently had his hair cut. He knows what John’s soap smells like and the gel he smooths over the top of his hair to keep it from sticking up.
In a different bar, in a corner somewhere, Sherlock bends his head down slightly until his nose rests just above the top of John’s head, and he breathes him in, all the familiar, everyday scents he has catalogued in his long analysis of the man.
“Sherlock.” Lestrade’s eyes have gone wide in that way they do when he’s particularly concerned about something. Sherlock would groan and roll his eyes at the question he can see coming, but he doesn’t even feel he has the energy. He’s just tired.
“Are you ok?”
“What an asinine question, Detective Inspector. Why wouldn’t I be?”
Because you’re in love with him. Because he’s getting married tomorrow and your entire life feels like a murder victim, all the blood draining out of it.
“No reason,” Lestrade says finally.
////
Out at Baskerville there had been a moment when Sherlock’s hands had grasped both of John’s shaking arms and held on, when he’d looked down at him and felt the tremor move through John's arms and into his own body and ever since then he’s felt like a tectonic plate, sliding and bumping against all the increasing places that are devoted purely to John in his mind. Something started quaking deep inside him and it’s never stopped.
////
There’s a black sedan waiting outside when Sherlock leaves in the morning. He sighs, and walks four blocks, letting it trail slowly beside him, before he finally turns and opens the door.
Mycroft is wearing one of his nicer suits, the ones Sherlock has classified as mid-range. There are normal ones for work, the ones for formal events that cost twice his monthly rent, and then there are the World On Fire suits, which don’t bear thinking about. His girl is beside him, typing away on her blackberry. She doesn’t look up.
“Were you even invited?” Sherlock asks him nastily. “Or do you just feel a pathological need to show up and taint every aspect of my personal life?”
“Really, Sherlock,” he says, but there’s no spite in it. It’s as if Mycroft cannot bother to conjure it, not even for show. For a brief, explosive moment Sherlock wants to punch him, to feel his cartilage give under the knuckle of his middle finger. He can see exactly how the blood from his stupid nose would splatter onto the collar of his expensive linen shirt.
“It won’t help.” Mycroft stares out the window as buildings slip by them.
“That’s a matter of opinion.”
“What’s the divorce rate these days?” Mycroft turns from the window.
“One in five after the first ten years,” says the girl, still not looking up. “Forty-two percent chance overall.”
Mycroft hums, once. “Nothing is forever,” he says, as they pull up in front of the church.
“Fuck off, Mycroft,” says Sherlock, and slams the door closed behind him.
////
Love is a great disadvantage. He’d told The Woman that, had thrown it in her face as his fingers mercilessly tapped in four letters on the screen of her phone. Thank you for the proof.
It was how Moriarty got him, in the end. It was a self-fulfilling prophecy and he hadn’t even realized it. Boring. Predictable.
Proof. He can still feel the air on top of St. Bart’s against his face and the sweat where the cellphone pressed against his cheek. John small in the distance.
Caring is not an advantage, Sherlock. He’d wondered if Mycroft could hear him, could read his thoughts looking down to the pavement. He’d hear Sherlock agree, for once, agree and fall anyway.
In his dreams he falls and falls and there is nothing but falling. Sometimes John floats by in a white suit and Sherlock says don’t look.
Proof.
////
They’re watching some ridiculous foreign film. It’s the kind that comes from some pretentious small studio that calls itself an art-house instead of a studio and thinks being vague means being profound. And it’s in French. Of course it is. He can tell John doesn’t catch all of it, it’s been a long time since he spent any time on French grammar and his brow is wrinkled and his mouth slightly open as he tries to put together what the man and the woman just said to each other. Sherlock knows, of course, his French is impeccable, but it’s all so pedestrian he doesn’t bother translating it for him. He’s not missing anything. They’re eating takeaway and he knows John gets a little kick out of that: French art film and greasy Chinese in styrofoam cartons in the living room. It’s one of the first surprises he worked out about John when they first moved into 221B, this gentle pleasure in mundane paradoxes that most people wouldn’t even think about, an appreciation of the mildly profane.
Before John moved out, before John got married, Sherlock would have been working on his laptop across the room while the film was on, or looking at slides under his microscope and glancing up occasionally to watch John watch the telly. He would never have perched like this on the sofa, cutting leftover lo mein into tiny, equal rectangles. But John moved out, and with him went the luxury of taking his presence for granted.
“Well,” says John as the credits start, silent and full of themselves. "I can’t say I followed all that. All the girls at the clinic are on about it, but then they were allowed to watch it with the subtitles.”
“Lazy,” he says, and John smiles.
“Some decent shagging, though. Sort of like a romance novel with the cover ripped off, only respectable looking so women can feel it’s sort of classy.”
“Must be why Mrs. Hudson had it in the drawer with her soothers.”
And John is laughing. John’s laugh reaches all over the flat and the walls soak it in, hungry. Sherlock can’t stand to think about the silence when that laugh goes home.
“It’s a ridiculous film besotted with its own melancholy. Girl, boy, sexual relations, “in love” but it won’t work although they can’t explain why because it’s just a baseless plot device, then pan to Paris in the rain. Really, it’s nothing but stupid cliches about romantic relationships strung together and shot in soft focus.”
“With some really excellent nudity,” John points out, still smiling.
Sherlock eviscerates the rest of his noodles with the blunt end of a chopstick. “People stay together all the time because they say it’s love. People have intercourse and get married and get bored and lie to each other and hurt each other in an endless variety of cruel ways every day but stay together and say it’s love. What is it about having characters walk away from each other for no concrete reason that makes it art? What a waste of time. If they wanted to be interesting one of them would have murdered someone.”
John is still smiling, but it’s the ghost of a smile. It’s just a small upward turn of the corners of his mouth and he’s not looking in Sherlock’s direction anymore, he’s just staring at the screen that has gone blank and is letting off a faint blue shadow that touches, gently, the side of his face on Sherlock’s side.
“Maybe he had to leave exactly because of that. Just that. Because they both knew the endless ways they could hurt each other, and just how to do it in ways no one else understands and he knew she would hate him in the end for seeing all the ways he could hurt her. There are some people you can’t chance that with. He just couldn’t chance not having any part of her at all.”
Sherlock opens his mouth to argue, to point out to John that nothing in the film hinted at enough depth to infer such a hypothesis, and it didn’t even fit the plot, really, but he closes it again and watches how John is no longer smiling even a little and is still not looking at him.
Sherlock crosses the distance from the sofa to John on his knees, lays his head in John’s lap and tangles his fingers in John’s jumper.
John lays his hands on the back of Sherlock’s head and sighs as he presses a kiss against the fabric over his thigh. John stays.
John tenses and makes a joke about Sherlock’s utter disregard for personal space. John leaves.
Sherlock looks up at John and John kisses him, suddenly, full on the mouth. John stays.
Sherlock looks up at John and John takes his hands back. His wedding band shines under the lamplight. John leaves.
John pulls Sherlock to his feet and they stumble to the bedroom. Sherlock deduces by the application of data culled from a long study of John exactly where and how to drag his fingers along his skin until John lights up like a goddamn Christmas tree.
In the morning, John stays.
In the morning, John leaves.
Sherlock occasionally does the shopping and he learns not to say sharp, cutting things when his mind is full of darkness and he makes John happy.
Sherlock never understands how to fix all the things he does that hurt and annoy John, and John dreams about children and a bit of yard and dinner at the same time every night.
John stays.
John leaves.
Sherlock runs his fingers along all the threads spinning away from this moment in his mind and he plucks softly at all the futures that have turned into a web he can’t untangle. All his powers of deduction have failed him in this, he is blind and stumbling inside himself, he is stuck fast in this maze of possibility and dead-end desire. A point dislodges and floats up in his mind; “I’m just saying,” John says, “it’s all fine.” Sherlock is looking across the table at him in the dim lighting of Angelo’s and in five minutes John will forget his cane as they rush out into the London night to chase a cab more than ten blocks and through several alleyways. In the end they will stand at the threshold of 221B Baker Street and they will laugh. Sherlock will lean his head back against the wall and laugh with John, breathless, and it will feel for a moment like standing on the still point of a rotating planet.
Ah, thinks Sherlock now, that was it. The true center, the point of divergence when John flared up beside him and illuminated things he hadn’t even known to miss. The difference between one star and a constellation.
Now Sherlock lets the threads fall, he steps away and pulls his violin up to his chin. The bow drags a slow, deep disturbance through the air and John is looking at him again. Sherlock doesn’t trust himself to look back, but he moves his lips into a smile aimed in his direction and he pulls notes out of the stillness. He imagines them as individual bursts of light and he arranges them into patterns for John. London has hushed itself into nothing but a murmuration outside the window, a thousand upturned faces in Sherlock’s mind watching the slow burn of planets forming at a distance.
In Sherlock’s mind the lights will float above John all the way home.