Fic for keerawa: The Ashes to Prove It

[holmesticemods]

Title: The Ashes to Prove It
Recipient: keerawa
Author: cleflink
Characters/Pairings: Sherlock/John
Rating: PG
Warnings: none
Word count: 4275
Summary: John should probably be more afraid of the Dark than he is. AU-ish



Sherlock smelled of Darkness.

"Well now, doctor," Sherlock said. In the close confines of the taxi, the scent of ozone and earth reminded John strongly of heavy nights under the Afghan sky. It made his hackles rise. "Have you made your decision?"

They'd just enjoyed what John had to admit had been excellent Chinese - at no charge, thanks to Sherlock's connections, which John's wallet greatly appreciated - to celebrate the successful conclusion of the debacle with the murderous cabbie.

"You're the deductive genius," John said. His nerves were drawn taut thanks to the inescapable curl of Sherlock's Darkness, but he was feeling comfortably full and content for the first time in weeks, and the contrast between the two had left him in a strange state of mostly-calm hyperawareness. "You tell me."

Sherlock made a dismissive sound. "I can hardly be expected to anticipate the whims of your tiny little mind."

He seemed utterly unaware of the effect that his proximity was having on John. Even having only known the man for a day, John suspected that it was deliberate.

So John grinned. "Liar."

The faintest flicker of what John thought might be surprise crossed Sherlock's face. John would wonder why Sherlock wasn't used to having people smile at him, but he figured that the tang of Darkness probably had a lot to do with it.

Also, Sherlock was a colossal prat. That definitely didn't help matters.

John was still waiting for Sherlock to answer him when the taxi drew to a stop. Distracted as he was by watching the dangerously pale shadows swirling in Sherlock's eyes, John forgot to be equally as wary of Sherlock's preemptory "come along, John," and found himself automatically paying the fare - which he really couldn't afford - and following Sherlock out of the taxi.

It was only when Sherlock spun to face him, expectation clear on his face, that John looked around and realized where they were.

He nearly groaned aloud at his naivety. "I don't recall saying I was moving in," he said, refusing to stare at the inherent threat of the broad shadow stretching out beneath 221 Baker Street.

"You didn't need to." Sherlock stepped closer, not much more than a pale face amid a sea of black clothes and inky hair. The tang of his Darkness grew stronger.

John, git that he was, stayed right where he was. "And why's that?"

"Because I see you."

"Do you."

"Mm. You really shouldn't want so badly, you know." Sherlock's voice was a deep, heavy purr that rumbled straight down to John's bones. "It attracts Dark things."

"Like you?" John asked, a challenge.

"Maybe," Sherlock said, and let a little more of his strangeness slip free, letting John look his Darkness in the face. It was deeper than John had expected.

If Sherlock was discomfited by John's scrutiny, he didn't show it. He simply stood there, content to let John look his fill.

"Well?" he asked eventually.

"Are you human?" John demanded, point blank.

"Sometimes," Sherlock answered, without batting an eyelash. "Why? Does it bother you?"

It should have, John knew. God's blood, did he know.

Of course, no one had ever accused John Watson of having good sense.

So he rolled back his shoulders and looked Sherlock square in the face. "I'm not afraid of Darkness."

Sherlock's smirk was shark-sharp. "Hmm. You should be." His hand shot out, viper fast and gleaming white in the dark; John twisted neatly away before Sherlock could touch him.

"Don't," he warned.

If anything, John's easy evasion only made Sherlock smile wider.

"You're staying here," Sherlock said, and it was a command in all but Sherlock's ability to compel John to do anything.

Not that John was about to resist it either way. He'd already made his decision - probably the first moment that he'd seen this strange, fantastic man who smelled like danger and Darkness, and had understood all of John in a single glance. The man who'd seen the things that John wanted and had given him back his ability to run headlong into danger.

There couldn't be much more tempting in the Dark than that.

"I am," John agreed, then continued before the flare of triumph in Sherlock's eyes got too unholy, "in the morning. So why don't you do some of your magic hand waving and get me a taxi?"

There was a startled beat and then they were both laughing, Sherlock with what sounded like honest amusement and John with a startling sense of hope.

And that was how it started.

---

There was a reason why mankind was afraid of the dark.

Being afraid of the dark wasn't the same thing as fearing the Darkness, of course, but a lot of the same concerns still applied. Danger. Monsters. Helplessness. An enemy that couldn't be trapped in a box.

John was well used to steering clear of Dark things. Wary avoidance was trained into children from a young age, alongside fairy stories of witches with poisoned apples and real warnings of strangers with candy. John had grown up knowing full well the dangers of catching the wrong attention, both in the theoretical sense and from hearing first-hand the stories of his friends, neighbours, patients. Dark things could do a lot of damage.

Not that danger had ever stopped John.

In the long-reaching sands of Afghanistan, straying too far from the lights of base camp could mean never being seen again in daylight, and not necessarily because the Dark things had won. Eat or be eaten. Often, it was the people who had done the eating that were the most dangerous.

Which wasn't to say that the Dark had to be evil. Plenty of people had touches of Darkness inside them and still lived perfectly normal lives. The problem with the Dark was that it was subtle, that it corrupted people before they ever noticed that it was too late.

Darkness was temptation spun out in shadow: beguiling, enticing and sinister. The things inside the Dark were dangerous - they could tear and maim and rend right down to a person's soul - but giving too much over to the Darkness was far worse.

Which made Sherlock all the more fascinating since his Darkness didn't seem to bother him in the slightest.

Sherlock kept his Darkness close, for the most part. There was more than enough oddness about him to keep people's attention fixed firmly where Sherlock wanted it: on his eccentricity, his brilliance, his viper's tongue. He was a master obfuscator, John learned; John's Da would have said that Sherlock could have hidden a raincloud on a sunny day. If Sherlock wanted to keep something secret, then no one - with the exception of Mycroft, who was the most powerful elucidator that John suspected he would ever meet - would know any wiser.

But Sherlock didn't curtail his impulses out of concern for others' sensibilities or for self-preservation amidst the public distrust of the Dark. Quite the opposite, in fact. Sherlock thrived on being different and took particular delight in making people look at him sideways, as though they were afraid that he'd drag them into the Darkness the moment they took their eyes off him.

John despaired of Sherlock's hobbies, sometimes.

No, the reason that Sherlock didn't generally make a big production of his Darkness was that he didn't need to. People who got corrupted by the Dark tended to rely on it to their own destruction, but Sherlock treated Darkness like it was just another part of him, as intrinsic as an extra hand or heartbeat.

Sherlock wielded the Dark easily and thoughtlessly. In his hands, persuasion was a weapon and lies were a shield that had his opponents disarmed before they'd even realized that Sherlock could see also through every obfuscation they tried to throw against him.

Sherlock could shadow walk with more skill than John had realized was even possible for anyone who still retained their humanity. It had only taken one fruitless night of dragging himself around London and yelling at random shadows to teach John not to bother trying to keep up with Sherlock when he was sliding through the Darkness that coiled and pooled in the lees of doorways and beyond the spill of light from the streetlamps. Sherlock could travel much faster when he didn't have John plodding along after him and John had found that he often preferred not to know where Sherlock went on nights like that. All he asked was that Sherlock actually use his bloody mobile to keep in contact when he needed John's help. Which happened far more often than John figured made sense for a man who could literally melt into shadows.

For anyone else, such mastery of the Dark would have been the pinnacle of their accomplishments. For Sherlock, it was just another remarkable thing to add to his brilliance, his biting wit and his infuriatingly justified sense of superiority.

Sherlock was, in a word, extraordinary.

John, by marked contrast, was entirely normal.

As much as Sherlock complained about Anderson (who, from what John could tell, wasn't a bad elucidator so much as he wasn't as good at his job as Sherlock was) and his inability to find his arse with his hands, John was far more deserving of contempt. He had the sensitivity of a rock when it came to seeing through the obfuscations of the Dark, or even the basic lies that were the staple of all human communication.

Sherlock had already warned him about his susceptibility to Dark things and John had been told by several people - including his therapist and Sally Donovan - that staying in close proximity to Sherlock was just asking for trouble.

They were almost certainly right.

John's defenses against the Dark were few and far between. He wasn't an elucidator. He was hardly a paragon of virtue and goodness. He was perhaps more stubborn than the average man, but that was hardly a talent, or even a benefit half the time. Except, perhaps, when one was trying to make Sherlock to stop leaving duck feathers in the bathtub every morning.

John was just a man with a bad temper and a slightly battered heart. His hands were just skilled at taking lives as they were at saving them, and John couldn't find it in himself to regret either capacity. A dangerous mindset for anyone to be in, especially someone in constant and close proximity to the Dark.

And yet, despite the myriad reasons why moving into 221B was a disaster waiting to happen, John settled into his new life with an easy equanimity that distressed his therapist, confounded every member of Scotland Yard and seemed to be a source of both extreme smugness and faint perplexity for Sherlock.

Mycroft had accused John of missing the war and, while John still wasn't entirely convinced that he had it right, there was no denying that John had an unhealthy fondness for situations that were entirely bad for him. And his cohabitation with Sherlock definitely fit the bill.

---

Really, John shouldn't have been surprised when things finally came to a head. Wondered later, whether someone else would have noticed.

It wouldn't have made a difference if he'd known, obviously. But still, John wondered.

---

It started with Mycroft.

"You want to borrow me?" John repeated, with what he considered to be an entirely appropriate degree of incredulity. "I'm not a library book."

"Certainly not." Mycroft was settled in Sherlock's chair, looking posh and polished enough to have come directly from tea with the queen. Which he very well could have, knowing Mycroft. "You are, however, eminently suited to the task at hand."

"And what task is that?" John asked. "Something you don't want Sherlock to know about, or you wouldn't have waited until he was out to tell me."

Mycroft didn't bother confirming or denying John's claim. "I need you to attend a social function at which a certain Miss Diane Carrew is going to attempt to steal something very near and dear to the British government. Your job is to stop her."

John barked out a surprised laugh. "You're asking me to do undercover work. Even though Sherlock could probably figure out how to disguise himself as a toddler if he tried hard enough, and I know you know any number of ways to make him do what you want no matter how much he whinges."

Mycroft's thin smile - as close to dry amusement as John had ever seen him get - was all the answer John got.

John resisted the urge to sigh. God save him from smug Holmeses. "Alright, fine. Why are you asking me? Keeping in mind that I couldn't act my way out of a paper bag."

It was the truth. The nicest way of saying it was that John had an honest face. A more accurate way of saying it was that he couldn't lie about the colour of his tie to a blind man.

Mycroft looked entirely too calm. "That's exactly the point. I need someone to draw her out."

"So I'm bait." That made more sense. But- "That still doesn't explain why me."

"You'll tempt the Darkness inside her," Mycroft said, as though it was obvious.

John blinked. "I think you've got that the wrong way around."

There was that smile again, accompanied this time by an edge sharp enough to put John's back up. "Far from it, in fact."

John crossed his arms over his chest, realizing too late just how obviously defensive it was. But he couldn't undo the motion without giving away even more of his discomfort, and so he raised his chin to meet Mycroft's amused calm head on. "And how is that, then?"

"Because you're a good man," Mycroft said. He was one of the few people whom John had met who could make that sound like a bad thing.

"I think I might have to disagree with you there."

"But you are, John. Irrevocably so. But, more pertinently, you're a good man who does bad things. You've killed people in the line of duty and otherwise, you have your own set of morals and aren't afraid to break the law to uphold your idea of justice. You toe the line of Darkness without falling over."

It was a struggle to resist the urge to fidget. "So?"

"Darkness longs for the light even as it tries to corrupt it. You are the ultimate challenge: a good man who stands right on the cusp of Darkness, just one solid push away from it. That's why Dark things gravitate to you." Mycroft's expression was as serious as John had ever seen it. "They all want to make you fall."

John didn't want to ask. He was still going to.

"Including Sherlock?" he heard himself say.

Mycroft hummed noncommittally. "Who's to say? I'll have Anthea send you your new credentials and the information for your suit fitting," he said then, rising smoothly out of his chair. "Think on it," was his parting shot as he strolled calm as could be out the door.

He wasn't, John knew, talking about the job.

---

Sherlock, to put it mildly, was not pleased by this turn of events.

"I found you first," he growled. He was pacing up and down the length of the room like a mad thing, and his agitation was making all of the shadows in the room flicker and writhe. "He can't have you."

"Not a library book, Sherlock," John said mildly. He wasn't quite certain that Sherlock would get the reference, but it made John feel better to have said it to the both of them. Dealing with one Holmes brother was bad enough; he sometimes felt he deserved a medal for handling two.

Sherlock wasn't listening to him, too busy being in a righteous fury to care about what John thought about his own life.

"It's not as though I'm tossing you over for Mycroft, you daft bugger," John said. "Look, just come with me. You'll fit in better than me anyway."

The couch protested with a squeal of springs when Sherlock flung himself dramatically onto it. "No." The shadow being cast by the coffee table tried to wrap itself around John's leg.

John sighed. "Or you could be a petulant child about the whole thing. That works too."

A single pale eye glared at him through the tangled fall of Sherlock's hair. "John." It was warning and entreaty rolled into one. John made the conscious decision not to look any deeper into it.

"Never thought I'd see the day when you were worried about something. It'll be fine," John said, while Sherlock grumbled unhappily. "If I haven't managed to kill myself chasing after you yet, I hardly think a stuffy dinner's going to do me in."

---

John should probably have known better than to say anything.

---

The air was cool and damp in John's lungs, the sound of his feet loud in the midnight silence.

John paused with a dead end road at his back, chest heaving just slightly, trying to figure out where in the buggering hell Carrew had got to. Where John was at the moment was an excellent question, but there would be time for that later.

Right now, he was more worried about the woman trying to feed him to the Dark than how far he'd run to try and avoid her.

A hand shot out of the shadows and wrapped vice-tight around his wrist. John's pulse spiked for a heart-stopping second, and calmed abruptly when Sherlock's voice hissed in his ear. "Quiet!"

"Sherlock?" John twisted in Sherlock's hold to see the man standing behind him where he most definitely hadn't been a moment before. Only his face and torso were visible amid the shadows; John wondered where the rest of him was. "What are you doing here?"

The whites of Sherlock's eyes flashed in the lamplight as he rolled them. "Even by your standards, I hardly think this is the time for stupid questions. Come."

Sherlock started pulling, stronger than he looked. John balked.

"I can't shadow walk," he protested in an undertone.

"You can," Sherlock said, shocking John entirely. Sherlock had never done this before.

"What."

Sherlock's face glowed nearly black with temptation. "It'd be so easy for you, John. Just try."

John made himself very still. "Stop it."

"One step," Sherlock persisted. The intimate, throaty roll of his voice could have tempted an angel to sin. "That's all."

Velvet words wrapped themselves around John, coaxing him deeper into the shadows. Closer to Sherlock.

"Sherlock," John said. His voice wavered and he didn't like it. "Back away."

Sherlock smiled darkly. He didn't move out of John's personal space. So John did it for him.

He wrenched his arm free with a practiced twist and took a rapid few steps back. "What the fuck was that?" he spat, anger rising up hot and fast. The last few tendrils of Sherlock's will flickered around John's edges and he brushed them away with quick, brusque movements.

"John-" Sherlock started, but John wasn't about to let him pull that shit again.

"Decided to get to me before someone else could?" John demanded. His voice grew louder with each word and John was distantly aware that he shouldn't be shouting, but the momentum was unstoppable. Some things bloody well deserved to be shouted. "Or am I too boring these days? Is that it, Sherlock? Figured that corrupting me would be a good way to pass the time?"

Sherlock was shaking his head. "That's not what I-" his eyes widened, "John!"

And even when he wanted to strangle the man, John trusted Sherlock. He dove to the floor, barely getting out of the way before the sharp retort of a gunshot rang through the air and the bullet ricocheted off the wall right above his head.

Swearing, John rolled to his feet with his gun in his hand, scanning the alley for a sight of his opponent. A pale flash to one side had him diving out of the way again, and John didn't need the sudden shift in footsteps to know that Carrew was darting through the shadows, nowhere near the expert that Sherlock was, but in a space this small it didn't really matter how short her range was.

There was the sudden, sharp concussion of flesh hitting flesh and John was only marginally surprised to see Sherlock and Carrew come flying out of the dark and fall to the ground, grappling desperately. Sherlock was clearly the more talented fighter, but Carrew was wreathed in Darkness and the power coursing through her blood was more than enough to make her a match for Sherlock.

John lingered warily, not wanting to risk distracting Sherlock by barreling in where his talents weren't enough to guarantee an advantage. But it soon became a moot point: Carrew's fist buried itself in Sherlock's gut and he crumpled, winded and completely vulnerable to the gun Carrew leveled at his head.

John's gun was trained on her in an instant, dead centred on her chest. Everything stopped.

"Hold it," John said, with a deadly voice.

A strange, wildly exultant sort of smile pasted itself across Carrew's face. "No."

John shot her where she stood, not bothering with a flesh wound when there was a gun at Sherlock's temple. That smile was still on her face as she fell.

In the aftermath of her body's dull impact with the ground, John slowly lowered his gun. "Sherlock?"

"Alive," Sherlock said, with a familiar trace of disgust for having to be saved.

John let out a breath he hadn't realized he'd been holding. "Just what I like to hear." He tucked his gun away and walked forward, skirting around the blood slicking the pavement. Carrew's face was slack with death, not yet pale, and John felt an involuntary shudder down his spine when he looked at her expression. No one should look happy to have been shot.

When John pulled his eyes away, he found Sherlock watching him.

"Why is she smiling?" John asked, before he'd realized he was going to.

Sherlock shrugged. "Because she got what she wanted."

"She wanted to get killed?"

Sherlock's eyes never left John's face. "She wanted you to do it."

"Oh." John thought about that. "Oh."

"Indeed," Sherlock said dryly. His gaze skipped briefly down to Carrew before swinging up again. "Unfortunately for her, she was missing a crucial piece of information."

"What's that?"

Sometimes, John forgot how fast Dark things could move. Sherlock had him pinned against the nearest wall before John had managed so much as a startled shout and he boxed him in with his body and those long arms pressed against the stones on either side of John's head.

"That the only one who gets to corrupt you is me," Sherlock hissed, nothing but possession and fierce demand in his voice.

John glared at him. "Since when?"

Sherlock laughed, more of a dark chuckle than anything else. His breath ghosted against John's face. "Since the moment we met. Every instant, every heartbeat, I'm corrupting you with my very presence. I can drive you to Dark things, John Watson."

John's heart was trying to hammer out of his chest. "No, you can't."

"I can," Sherlock said, with the same certainty that identified causes of death and uncovered killers. "But do you know what the wonderful thing is?"

"What?" John was not breathless. He wasn't.

Sherlock leaned in closer. Their faces were inches apart, the heat of Sherlock's body searing a line down John's chest though they weren't even touching. "None of it sticks. Nothing. Despite everything I do to you, everything you let me make you do, you're still a good man. And it's fascinating."

John blinked, his brain stripping gears as he tried to process that. "I-" was as far as he got before Sherlock closed the infinitesimal distance between them and caught his mouth in a sharp, bruising kiss.

It was shocking until it wasn't - an inevitability John hadn't realized he'd been expecting until it happened. The shudder that ran through his body this time heralded something entirely different and John fisted his hands in the lapels of that ridiculous coat, just as unwilling to back down in this as in anything else.

Shadows coiled all around them, a writhing mass of Darkness that cradled and concealed them from the things prowling the night. John could feel their cold edges skirting along his body, could feel the same chill emanating from Sherlock's kiss even as he made John's body burn.

Sherlock pulled back as abruptly as he'd dived in. In his place, more shadows snaked out to twine possessively across John's chest and neck. John's breath caught in his throat.

Sherlock was watching him. "Does it bother you?" he asked, a question that John had heard from him once before. It meant so many more things this time than it had then.

It was a good question. "Not as much as the toes in the crisper," John said, after a long moment's though. He suspected that he ought to be more concerned by that truth than he was.

Sherlock's slow, pleased, dark smile was enough to convince him not to bother worrying about it. "It should, you know." He swayed closer, tempting John again.

Luckily for him, John knew how to deal with temptation. "I know," he said. He firmed his grip on Sherlock's coat and pulled him down as he arched himself up and whispered, into Sherlock's ear, "That's the best part."

Comments

[obscuriglobus.livejournal.com]

A really interesting AU, I enjoyed it very much :)

[cleflink.livejournal.com]

Wow, this is a ridiculously late response - sorry! Despite appearances, I really am delighted to have received your comment! I feel like your icon knows where I'm coming from, though. :)

Sherlock says he could get used to commanding the Dark. John is not complaining as much as he probably should.

Thank you! I'm glad you enjoyed!

[jcporter1.livejournal.com]

"that's the best part."

Love this concept. In an oblique manner it captures Sherlock and John.

[cleflink.livejournal.com]

Wow, this is a ridiculously late response - sorry! Despite appearances, I really am delighted to have received your comment!

I must admit to being a colossal sucker for ordinary-but-BAMF!John and this AU made that really fun to play with.

I'm glad you liked it! Thank you!

[chapbook.livejournal.com]

Sharply written, with a deft handling of rhythm. The dialogue feels right: I could hear Mycroft, Sherlock, and John speaking.

I'd love to know more about this 'verse!

[cleflink.livejournal.com]

Wow, this is a ridiculously late response - sorry! Despite appearances, I really am delighted to have received your comment!

I'm glad the voices rang true to you! Mycroft is surprisingly fun to write (sorry, Sherlock). And I love seeing John (mostly) hold his own against the Holmes brothers.

Thank you!

[innie_darling]

That was utterly fantastic.

[cleflink.livejournal.com]

Wow, this is a ridiculously late response - sorry! Despite appearances, I really am delighted to have received your comment!

I'm very happy that you thought so! It's no wonder that people think John's not quite right in the head sometimes, what with Sherlock pulling antics like this. There's not many people who can handle Sherlock with such equanimity.

Thank you!

[keerawa.livejournal.com]

God, this is fantastic, everything I could have hoped for! In the long-reaching sands of Afghanistan, straying too far from the lights of base camp could mean never being seen again in daylight, and not necessarily because the Dark things had won. Eat or be eaten. Often, it was the people who had done the eating that were the most dangerous
You've built a whole world here, in just a few words. I loved the way you write the shadows as a part of Sherlock shadows, like the shadow of the coffee table trying to wrap around John's ankle.


Mycroft, fully aware of his brother's capabilities and of John's oddities, using both quite expertly for Queen and Country. Sherlock walking the left-hand path, Dark-touched without letting the Darkness overwhelm him, sometimes human, possessive and fierce. John fascinated by the Darkness, and by Sherlock, a good man who does Dark things without ever falling. Sherlock's ever-unsuccessful efforts to tempt John, to control him, to re-make him.

Thank you so much for this gift!

[cleflink.livejournal.com]

Wow, this is a ridiculously late response - sorry! Despite appearances, I really am delighted to have received your comment!

I'm so very glad you enjoyed! I noticed right away that we have a lot of interests in common (why hello there, secretly BAMFy John) and I really enjoyed looking at how wonderfully flawed Sherlock and John are while still being awesome and lovely. This world has a lot more potential than I took advantage of, I fear, but you've definitely pulled some of my favourite parts as well. I feel like Sherlock and John's relationship is only just starting to get interested.

You are very welcome! Thank you for giving me a wonderful collection of options to play with! ^_^

[amindaya.livejournal.com]

This is amazing! I love the connection between Darkness and obfuscation and how you made it a source for Sherlock to use instead of making it the cause of his genius and deductive abilities. And how there's this tension and temptation shadowing all of their interactions but John fights it off. Perfect characterization. I sure love me a stubborn John. And I love Mycroft's conversation with John about being a good man, because it reminds me of that Terry Pratchett quote about how a good man will shoot you dead instead of making you suffer, so you'd better pray to be at the mercy of an evil one. This whole thing is just brilliant and well-done and I can't wait for reveals so that I can read your other stuff!

[cleflink.livejournal.com]

Wow, this is a ridiculously late response - sorry! Despite appearances, I really am delighted to have received your comment!

Oh, I love that Terry Pratchett quote; it suits John right down to the ground. And anyone who knows me knows how much I love a secretly badass, fundamentally good but quietly damaged John. Happily for John, Sherlock loves that about him too. :) And Sherlock says that only idiots let the Dark be the sum total of their abilities. Naturally.

I can't wait for reveals so that I can read your other stuff!
Ahaha, guess you didn't need to worry about that! I'm glad that I still hit the mark even when anonymous!

I'm so glad you enjoyed! Thank you!

[amindaya.livejournal.com]

Haha yeah, when reveals went up I looked to see who wrote this and I was like, AH I SHOULD HAVE KNOWN just because it was so amazing. You're so sneaky, though! You always add these intriguing, unique little details to the worlds you create, it's never one-note.

[anonlick.livejournal.com]

Intriguing AU! I like the interactions between all the characters.

[cleflink.livejournal.com]

Wow, this is a ridiculously late response - sorry! Despite appearances, I really am delighted to have received your comment!

I could watch John and Sherlock riff off each other all day. And Mycroft certainly knows how to make a memorable cameo appearance.

Thank you! I'm glad you enjoyed!

[holyfant.livejournal.com]

I enjoyed this very much! You managed to fit the characters into a new world very well, and it's a fascinating world at that. Great work!

[cleflink.livejournal.com]

Wow, this is a ridiculously late response - sorry! Despite appearances, I really am delighted to have received your comment!

It doesn't surprise me, somehow, that Sherlock has taken to the Dark so well. John thinks he should be more concerned that he's also taken to it rather well, himself.

Thank you! I'm so glad you enjoyed!

[saki101.livejournal.com]

Such a wonderful mood and cadence to this. The whole story is seductive, like an irresistible incantation.

[cleflink.livejournal.com]

Wow, this is a ridiculously late response - sorry! Despite appearances, I really am delighted to have received your comment!

Seduction appears to be the modus operandi for this version of their world. Sherlock, perhaps unsurprisingly, is enjoying himself very much. :)

Thank you! I'm glad you enjoyed it!

[billiethepoet.livejournal.com]

Ohhh, I love the idea of John as a fundamentally good and incorruptible man despite his BAMF behaviors. Very well done AU!

[cleflink.livejournal.com]

Wow, this is a ridiculously late response - sorry! Despite appearances, I really am delighted to have received your comment!

I love the dichotomy in John's character: a doctor who kills and a good man who's willing to do bad things when necessary. John is such an unassuming BAMF and I adore him for it and so does Sherlock.

Thanks! I'm glad you liked it!

[mundungus42.livejournal.com]

What an absolutely stunning meditation on the duality of darkness and light, both figuratively and literally, with the glorious, corrputing physical Darkness you've given us. This is marvelously creative in the corruputing, seductive Darkness, even as it comes at a cost that many are unwilling to pay. Having John and Sherlock at the center of this world, as the Dark man who does good and the good man who does Dark gives their romance an intense, breathless inevitability; the two equally and oppositely charged. And if that weren't enough, the gorgeous precision with which you create the world around them, both physical and supernatural breathes life into every sentence, every phrase, and every word. This is an absolute masterpiece of mood, suspense, and sophisticated thematic integration, and I adored every word. Bravissimaaa!!!!!

[cleflink.livejournal.com]

Wow, this is a stupidly late response - sorry! Despite appearances, I really am delighted to have received your comment!

Sherlock and John have a delicate balance between them that is almost more successful for just how much of a razor-edge it straddles. Their dichotomy is fascinating to me and I can only imagine that it would be even more compelling in a world like this one where John is willingly ensnared by Sherlock's Darkness but still refuses to surrender to it.

I'm very glad that you enjoyed! Thank you so much!

[cccahill18.livejournal.com]

Very cool concept for an AU! I love how John still is unexpectedly amazing underneath his inconspicuous shell, and how the darkness acts as a kind of metaphor for their personalities. Kudos :)

[cleflink.livejournal.com]

Wow, this is a stupidly late response - sorry! Despite appearances, I really am delighted to have received your comment!

Not-so-secretly BAMF John is one of my favourite things and I'll never pass up the chance for an extended metaphor. *literature nerd* :)

Thank you so much! I'm glad you enjoyed!

[mackiedockie.livejournal.com]

Outstanding. I love the way Sherlock's Dark warms itself on John's glow.

[cleflink.livejournal.com]

Wow, this is a stupidly late response - sorry! Despite appearances, I really am delighted to have received your comment!

Mycroft is off somewhere being at once smugly-satisfied that he, once again, anticipated Sherlock perfectly, and vaguely horrified that Sherlock is so gone over a 'good man'. Even by Sherlock's standards, it's an unexpected choice.

Thank you! I'm very glad you enjoyed!