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holmesticeTitle: Glitter In the Air, Pt 1
Recipient:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
rachelindeed
Author:lyricaxxx
Fandom: Sherlock (BBC)
Characters/Pairings: Sherlock/John
Rating: Teen
Word Count: ~14,000 (Total – Pts 1 & 2)
Warnings: AU, Faerie Tale/Myth (sort of), Magical Realism
Summary:
As Sherlock leans over John’s shoulder, the breeze lifts the ends of Sherlock’s scarf. The soft fringe flutters across John’s cheek, and then, as if the wind has reached out with ghostly fingers, the long length of blue comes neatly unwound from Sherlock’s neck. Sherlock grabs for the scarf as it slips from around his neck, but the breeze snatches it playfully from his fingers and throws it skyward.
Sherlock darts into the alley, exclaiming at the way the scarf seems to dance away from his fingertips just as he reaches for it, and John trots after him. The scarf flies up in the breeze and then abruptly drops towards the brick wall at the end of the alley. It flutters down, hits the wall, and disappears through it as if the solid brick has suddenly become a curtain of dark red smoke.
Sherlock skids to a stop, looks back at John as if he’s looking for confirmation that he’s seen what he thinks he did. His expression is wild with surprise and delight.
John lurches forward, hand extended though he knows he can’t possibly reach Sherlock in time. He knows he’s too late. He knows what’s going to happen before Sherlock even takes another breath. “Sherlock, no!” he yells, but it’s like telling a child not to grab for a coveted toy.
Sherlock steps back, takes a deep breath. Plunges into the wall. And disappears.
Notes:
Written for![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
holmestice Summer 2016 for rachelindeed, who supplied an amazing list of prompts, ideas, and quotes, asked for a Johncentric fic, and said she was ‘angst-averse’ (as am I, so that worked out well *g*). I ended up writing for the prompt, ‘A magical realism or fairy tale fic would be amazing’ though I have to confess…it wasn’t planned.
Up to the point at which this story came to me, I was blocked. Big time. Despite the wonderful prompts, nothing was clicking, and I was beginning to panic just a bit. One afternoon, I was sitting the car with my dogs in the parking lot of a grocery store, waiting for my husband to finish his part of the shopping. Out of boredom, I picked up a book of Irish sayings for which I’d just paid a whole quarter at a used book sale and flipped it open. The saying was: Any man can lose his hat in a faerie wind. And I thought of Sherlock and his deerstalker and of the hat flying away in a fairy wind with Sherlock chasing after it. And, boom!, the whole story was just there in my head (contrary muse!), pretty much exactly as I’ve written it. Except for the hat, because the timing didn’t really work for angst-averse part of the request. But, hopefully, the scarf is an acceptable substitute and just as magical.
“Do you hear that?” Sherlock pauses in his perusal of the alley wall and tilts his head to the side as if he’s listening to something above them.
John looks up, then tilts his head the same direction. A sudden, unexpected whip of wind lifts the collar of his jacket and stirs the pages of a discarded newspaper, tossing it along the pavement. Other than that, he hears only the ever-present London noise—the distant hum of traffic, the blare of a car horn, a voice raised as someone down the street calls hello to a neighbour.
“What?” John asks after a moment. “The wind?”
Considering that the winter weather is so dull and dreary that it’s felt as if there’s been no air moving for days, the sudden swoop of breeze does feel a bit abrupt. But nice despite the cold. John tips his face up to it and fans his collar open, lifts the neck of his jumper away from his throat. Fresh air that feels warmer than he’d expected curls down his breastbone.
Sherlock shakes his head. “Can’t you hear it?”
John stops moving and listens again, but he still hears only the dull roar of city traffic and the whisper of newspaper against pavement. “What?”
“Voices in the wind,” Sherlock breathes, obviously entranced, tilting his face to the sky. “Singing… Music…” He turns slowly, head leaned so far back that John puts a hand out behind him in case he falls over.
Then his head snaps up, and he freezes and triumph washes across his face. He points towards the end of the alley. “There!”
John doesn’t look. He stands where his is, hand out, still trying to hear the voices on the wind, but Sherlock grabs his elbow and drags him deeper into the dank alley. “John, look!”
John follows the direction of Sherlock’s finger and sees, high on the brick wall that marks the abrupt end of the alley, a symbol in glossy red paint. It’s so nearly the same colour as the bricks that, except for the sheen, it would be imperceptible.
John shakes his head, half tired despair, half admiration.
He’s trudged behind Sherlock all morning, through train yards and junk yards and alleys looking for the graffiti—shades of the case John had written up more than a year ago as ‘The Blind Banker’—to support Sherlock’s theory that a multi-national gang of thieves is at work in the city. But unlike those garish yellow symbols which kept popping up at every turn, these symbols are proving elusive. Perhaps non-existent, except in Sherlock’s mind. Though John can’t see it, Sherlock insists there’s a connection between a squiggle that might be Sanskrit painted on a subway wall, and a Japanese haiku in a train yard, and a Latin word on a derelict car, and what—to the best of his ability to google and walk at the same time—John thinks may be a handful of Mi'kmaq symbols scratched on alley walls. None of it makes sense except to Sherlock. But it wouldn’t be the first time John’s seen Sherlock connect a handful of seemingly disparate clues and puzzle pieces into a whole picture, so John’s stayed with him, slogging through muck, breathing noxious smells, climbing piles of trash to photograph curlicue-d symbols and words in foreign languages.
He drags his cell from his jacket pocket and thumbs it on. The breeze plays across his fingers as he flips through the photos he’s taken during the morning. This symbol, all curves and squiggles, is very similar to one he photographed in a previous alley.
As Sherlock leans over John’s shoulder to look at the picture, the breeze lifts the ends of Sherlock’s scarf. The soft fringe flutters across John’s cheek, and then, as if the wind has reached out with ghostly fingers, the long length of blue comes neatly unwound from Sherlock’s neck. Sherlock grabs for the scarf as it slips off his neck, but the breeze snatches it playfully from his fingers and throws it skyward.
The breeze doesn’t seem strong enough to even lift the scarf, much less toss it about, but the scarf sails further into the alley. John says, “Look at that,” more to himself than anything else because Sherlock has already leapt forward, trying to catch the scarf.
It flutters just out of reach, and Sherlock follows it, exclaiming at the way the scarf seems to dance away from his fingertips just as he reaches for it. John shuffle-trots to catch up, trying to keep the dancing rectangle of blue in sight and not stumble over the uneven pavement and wads of paper—or worse—that litter the alley.
The scarf flies up, then abruptly drops towards the brick wall at the end of the alley. It flutters down, hits the wall, and disappears through it as if the solid brick has suddenly become a curtain of dark red smoke.
John skids to a stop. Blinks and shakes his head. Then blinks again. He can’t have seen what he thinks he just saw! It has to be a trick of the light. The scarf probably hit the wall and slid down it, the blue blending into the deep shadow that cuts across the brick.
Sherlock has stopped, too, a couple of metres ahead. “Did you see that?” he exclaims and looks back at John for confirmation that he’s seen what he thinks he did.
There’s such a mix of surprise and indignation and delight warring on his long face that John almost laughs.
Then, delight winning, Sherlock grins at him. And John’s heart lurches up into his throat. He leaps forward, adrenalin spiking, reaching out as alarm screeches along his nerves and dread clamps down at the base of his spine, because he already knows what’s going to happen. Before he can even summon the words, before he can suck in another breath, he knows.
“Sherlock, no!” he yells, but it’s like telling a child not to grab for a coveted toy. Not to touch a hot stove. Nothing short of a gunshot or an earthquake will stop Sherlock from what he does next…
Sherlock steps back, takes a deep breath. Plunges into the wall. And disappears.
The bricks waver and ripple like water in his wake. John rushes after him, heart hammering so loud it drowns out the clatter of his footsteps and the curses raining from his lips. He only just manages to stop himself from plunging into the wall at the last second. His feet slip and slide, shoe soles against newspaper against pavement, as he rocks back from the bricks.
His brain wars inside his skull, the instinct, the need, to rush after Sherlock warring with his instincts as a soldier, as a doctor. His training urges caution. His desire to protect Sherlock, to back him up, urges him forward. But if there’s trouble on the other side of the weirdly writhing wall, he’ll be no good to Sherlock if he rushes in blindly. If he can even get in.
He reaches forward and touches the soggy surface of the wall. The tip of his finger disappears into what should be solid brick, leaving his finger looking like it’s been cut off at the knuckle. Nausea roils in his gut even though he can feel his finger, can wiggle it.
The sensation is like pushing through a sheet of water filled with sand. It’s cool and fluid, but gritty, as if liquid brick is flowing around his knuckle. Where his skin meets what should be solid brick and mortar, the line seethes and writhes and ripples, the edges not quite straight, not quite in focus. He jerks his hand back and checks it. His finger is whole.
Okay, so he can get through. In. Whatever. He nods, a quick, decisive snap of his chin, though there’s no one there to see him. Except…maybe there is. In London, there almost always is.
He looks around quickly, spots the cctv camera at the entrance of the alley. Luckily, it’s pointed down the alley, towards him, instead of down the street. He speed dials Mycroft, says tersely, “Can you access cctv footage of Klippe Alley?”
Mycroft’s dignified yet indignant tone is clear. “Dr Watson, really. Do you actually think—”
“No time,” John interrupts. “This is an emergency. Yes or no? Sherlock just disappeared through a brick wall.”
“What do you mean, dissap—”
“Emergency, Mycroft! Yes or no on the surveillance?”
Apparently, the anxiety in John’s voice finally gets through. “Yes, I can access video of that area.”
“Watch the last few minutes. I’m going after him.”
“John—”
John cuts the connection with his thumb, shoves his cell in his pocket, takes three deep, deep breaths, and steps through a wall of red bricks.
The sensation is…not what he expected. He’d expected it would be like pushing through a waterfall of sand, but with his whole body immersed, it’s more like stepping slowly, slowly, slowly, through a curtain of cool, thick, gritty smoke. He closes his eyes against the fine dust and pushes through. Into…cool air fragrant with the scent of flowers and rich earth.
He stumbles as his feet meet something soft and uneven. He brushes at his eyes, dislodging what he imagines are flakes of brick from his lashes, and looks down.
Grass. He’s standing in lush grass.
He blinks. Rubs his eyes. Blinks again. Because what he’s seeing can’t be real. He’s in a small bushy clearing in the middle of a forest. On a warm spring day. The air shimmers with birdsong and bright golden light. And more green than he’s seen since he was a boy. He forgets, living in the city, just how green the forest can be.
But Sherlock’s not in sight.
John calls out, low at first. The birds pause their chirruping, twittering songs as if they’re listening for a response, then start up again when he calls out louder. “Sherlock?”
He hears a soft quaver of laughter, so low that he can’t tell whether it’s a male or female voice, whether it’s Sherlock or not. And he calls again, a little more strident this time. “Sherlock!”
Sherlock answers from somewhere ahead, in the trees, his voice too light and easy, too filled with delight, for him to be under duress. “John, this way!”
John breathes a sigh of relief. The bands of tension across his gut ease. “Sherlock, where are you?” Then he mutters, “Though a better question would be…where are we?”
“This way. Come on!” Sherlock calls again.
Sherlock’s voice sounds odd. So light it’s almost like he’s drugged. Except that John’s seen Sherlock drugged, and his extraordinary voice gets slow and slurry when he’s under the influence. And that’s certainly not how he sounds now.
John takes a couple of quick steps forward, then forces himself to stop. The way forward is obvious, a trail of flattened grass curving away, disappearing in the deep, inviting shade of the trees. Maybe it’s too obvious.
His muscles and the blood pounding in his veins, the too-quick thud of his heart, urge him to rush after Sherlock. To find him and run his hands over Sherlock to make sure he’s all right. To look into his eyes and make sure they’re clear. To punch him on his elegant jaw for rushing through a brick wall without stopping to think. For calling to him from a forest instead of waiting.
But, again, John forces himself to stillness, to exude a calm he’s not feeling.
He glances back. The brick wall is gone, replaced with trees and brambles interwoven with a vine of heavy, gold coloured flowers that smell faintly like honeysuckle. But the door—passage? portal? gateway?—through which he’s just passed is still there. It’s just barely visible, a rippling, not-quite-in-focus oval where the plants and tree trunks waver like a desert mirage. He reaches back, unable to resist checking, and his hand disappears into the misty green and gold.
He touches, carefully, a young oak just to the side of the shimmering oval. His hand connects with the tree trunk the way it should. The bark is solid and rough under his fingertips. It feels real, though it can’t possibly be real. It’s not possible. And yet… He pats the tree again. There’s no denying the reality of it.
He takes a deep breath. His initial clattering fear is easing; the screaming urgency to chase after Sherlock settling down to a taut hum.
Considering where he is and what he’s just done, that Sherlock is out of sight somewhere ahead, sounding like he’s had a few too many puffs on a happy pipe, John thinks he should be terrified, or at least jittering with nerves and adrenalin, but… He isn’t. The place into which he’s stepped is too light and airy to be frightening. Too…non-threatening.
Maybe it’s the chirping, tweeting birds, who would surely be silent if there was danger nearby. Maybe it’s the way everything sparkles with life and vitality. Even the shadows glisten and twinkle as if there couldn’t possibly be anything dark hidden in their depths.
As if it’s responding to John’s growing sense of calm, a dragonfly lights on his knuckles, its thin, transparent wings swirling with all the colours of the rainbow. John raises his hand, bringing it up to admire it, and it flutters away up the path, reminding him of the voices and laughter ahead. Of Sherlock, waiting for him.
He jerks his chin again, nodding to himself, and sets off, glancing back just once more to reassure himself portal is still there. Then he thinks better of it and goes back. Since the bright spring sun shining down on his shoulders is making him too warm anyway, he takes his jacket off and wraps it around the base of the oak tree beside the portal. He feels better this time when he glances back and sees his jacket marking the sight.
John reaches out as he walks, touching bushes and branches and the dark velvet of leaves, patting the solid bark of the trees again and again, reassuring himself that they’re really there. The air under the huge, ancient trees is cooler and scented a darker green than the clearing. Fingers of sunlight beam down through the trees, dotting the meandering path. Overhead, birds flit in and out of the shadows, calling to him in voices pure and high. Just ahead, voices call to him with unintelligible whispers and enticing laughter that promise of finding Sherlock.
John breaks into a trot, watching to make sure he doesn’t trip over anything, a rock or stone, a branch, but the path is flat and well-trodden, the hard ground showing through a bare cover of crunchy leaves. But he doesn’t seem to be catching up to the voices. His sense of time feels distorted, and he’s not sure whether he’s been walking only a couple of minutes or much longer. He’s not sure how long it’s been since he came through the brick portal, how long he stood admiring the rainbow wings of the dragonfly.
He slows to a walk and tugs his cell from his pocket. The screen is blank and dull, the only thing in the whole place that not’s flickering with life. As he drops the cell back into his pocket, he reaches out to a gnarled knot on the trunk of a huge tree. Has he seen that before? Slowed to inhale the blue scent of the flowers growing around the base of the tree? It seems familiar.
His breath quickens, sounding loud and harsh compared to the spritely twitter of birds and the ripple of breeze through the treetops. He’s opened his mouth to call out for Sherlock again when he realizes there’s brighter light ahead. A glow silhouetting the trees.
He trots toward it and bursts out of the forest into a glade. He almost stumbles over a pile of shoes littering the path. Shoes of all shapes and sizes. Men’s and women’s, trainers and sandals and heavy leather dress shoes. Sherlock’s long, narrow loafers, his purple socks peeking from under the tongue of one shoe, lie in the middle of them.
John huffs out a breath and takes a couple of quick steps forward.
And there’s Sherlock.
Every muscle in John’s body goes limp with relief, and then snaps taut again. Because he’s found Sherlock. But Sherlock as John has never seen him. His mouth drops open, and before he can even think what he’s doing, he steps quickly sideways, concealing himself in the deep shade of a giant oak.
Sherlock is barefoot and bare-chested, wearing only the grey trousers he was wearing when he went through the portal, and he’s standing in the centre of a group of dancing…it should be easy to think ‘people’, but John’s mind stumbles over the word as if his subconscious knows something his conscious mind doesn’t. There are ten or twelve of them—male and female, moving, twirling, leaping—with Sherlock as their musical centre. He has a violin tucked beneath his chin, and he moves sinuously, with supple, airy grace, as he plays.
The sound he’s drawing from the violin is like nothing John’s ever heard. Sherlock has played compositions that made him feel as if his heart was swelling, but never anything like this. The music sounds like the violin is giving voice to the radiance of light, to the dance of leaves. Like its weaving together laughter and the rush of water over stones and the lovely rhythm of a lover’s heartbeat. It’s the flash of pale bare feet on spring grass. The silver whistle of birdsong in crisp winter air. The laughter of children. Its magical, and John sighs and leans against the huge trunk of an oak and lets the music wash over him as he looks around the glade.
The pale greygreen trunks of young aspens gleam in bright, sparkling sunlight. Halfway around the clearing, right at the edge of an even denser wood then the one through which he’s just walked, is a huge hawthorn bush full of fairy lights so dazzling he can see them even in the bright light. Meandering through the clearing is a brook, a winding ribbon twinkling silver and gold, water burbling and sighing over a bed of stones. There are other people, too. Lounging in the clearing, walking arm in arm, picnicking, laughing and talking. Kissing. More figures flit in and out of the shadows across the clearing.
The whole scene, everything—dancers, leaves, water, light, the soft whisper of breeze through the trees, Sherlock—is like something out of a storybook or an old painting. And it all dazzles his eyes. It looks like someone threw a fistful of glitter in the air. Everything, everyone, shimmers with light and joy and unbridled, quivering happiness.
John’s gaze slides back to Sherlock.
The normally almost-too-tight trousers hang loose on Sherlock’s narrow hips. The button on the waistband is open and zip partway down, making Sherlock’s narrow torso look even longer than it is. And in the few minutes that he’s been out of John’s sight, it looks like someone has put their hands in Sherlock’s curly hair and ruffled it. The chocolate curls Sherlock tries so hard to subdue are mussed and tousled, standing out around his head like a burnished skullcap.
He looks like he’s been here forever, like he’s one of the laughing, dancing crowd, and it makes John wonder, again, how much time he spent wandering along the path. The light doesn’t seem to have changed since he stepped through the brick wall, but—
“Your friend seems to fit right in.” The voice is masculine and raspy with disuse.
John starts as the words, so close to what he was thinking, intrude on his reverie. His gaze darts around the clearing. He finds an old man, white shock of hair brilliant against the dark green, sitting on a fallen tree near the edge of the glade. He has a bottle clutched between his knees, and he’s nodding in time to Sherlock’s music.
John glances back, just checking, and, yes, the pile of shoes is still there. The shadowy rectangle that marks the path is still there, limned by dancing leaves. Keeping his gaze on Sherlock, he sidles towards the old man.
The man gives a slow nod towards the tree trunk, obviously inviting John to sit.
John nods his thanks, but before he sits, he steps forward into a beam of sunlight and calls out, “Sherlock!”
Sherlock’s head snaps up, and he meets John’s gaze. His smile is warm and welcoming, like they’re old friends who haven’t seen each other for a long time.
John points towards the tree trunk and the old man so that Sherlock will know where he is.
The music ceases for a moment as Sherlock waves with his bow. But then he takes up the song again and does a quick, light step. He twirls, his long bare feet flashing as he leaps. He’s not as light and graceful as most of the dancers around him, not as practiced, but John can’t help but laugh.
The people around Sherlock seem to be as affected by Sherlock’s joyous dance as he is. They clap and laugh, their voices as playful as the music Sherlock’s coaxing from the violin. Dancers spin away, leaving the circle, and others join. There’s a weaving, wandering pattern to it that John feels he could decipher if he could concentrate. But it’s difficult to really concentrate on anyone other than Sherlock.
Sherlock smiles at him, waves again, barely missing a beat, and dances away, leading the flock of dancers along the brook. They follow, weaving and winding about him, some even dancing into the water, squealing and splashing, sending water like sprays of flying gems arcing out.
It’s all so beautiful, so fantastical. And feels so comfortable. So…relaxing. Seeing Sherlock so carefree lifts John’s heart. Makes him feel like his nerves are alight and his skin is glowing. He wants to chase after Sherlock, but he also wants to question the old man who’s spoken to him. So he only watches as the group meanders along the brook.
They turn this way and that as the music weaves a spell like magic, notes soaring up into the sky. Just when John thinks he’ll have to go after them to keep them in sight, the group turns. Shifting like a flock of starlings in the evening sky, turning back towards the glade. Back towards him.
Sherlock waves again. He plucks the strings on his violin with his fingers to make up for the missed notes as he points, indicating that they’re just circling the glade.
John understands, with a comprehension that’s more intuition than logic, that Sherlock’s signalling that he won’t leave him again. Won’t bolt out of his sight.
He walks over and sits near the man, who’s also watching the dancers. Like everything else John’s seen so far, the old man is a character out of a book. Wizened face creased with age; ragged clothes that need mending; gnarled, bare feet dug into the earth. He has a bottle clutched between his bony knees.
John clears his throat. “I’m John,” he offers, hoping that, wherever the hell this place is, it’s not bad manners to give his name.
The old man clears his throat, too, and his voice is a bit less raspy than before. “Tom.” He offers John the bottle.
It’s the strangest bottle John’s ever seen. It’s double-bottomed and so rounded it can’t possible stand up. It reminds John, more than anything else, of testicles with an upright penis for a neck, the tip capped with a round cork. He grins as he takes it and holds it up to the light. The green glass is so thin and fragile that it feels as if it will shatter with the gentlest touch, yet it’s obviously sound enough to withstand being clutched between a probably drunk, old man’s wavery knees. It’s about a third full of a gold, fizzy liquid.
John uncorks the bottle and sniffs. The liquid smells of berries and lavender and vaguely like expensive champagne. His mouth waters as he contemplates how rich it will taste, how the flavour of ripe, fermented berries and rich herbs will burst on his tongue.
He raises the bottle to his lips, but the volume of the music increases, distracting him. The dancers flocks back towards them, Sherlock leading like some barefoot, bare-chested Pied Piper. Except, in this case, it would be a Pied Violinist, with—John squints as he realizes—a purple violin. Where in hell did Sherlock get a violin the exact same bruised-purple shade as that damned shirt he wears all the time?
“Where are we?” he asks and hands the bottle back to Tom, wine untasted.
The old man uncorks it and takes a big swig. He wipes his mouth with the back of his hand as he settles the bottle back between his knees. “What does it look like?”
John grins. “It looks like a fairy tale,” he says as he watches the—the…
Once again, his mind stutters around a good word the people dancing around Sherlock. They all look human though there’s just something about some of them…something not quite human. Which is as ridiculously daft as the idea of being in a fairy tale. Though the scene really could be a fairy tale setting right out of a film. Except there aren’t any winged creatures flitting about. Unless…
John tilts his head as if it’ll bring things into sharper focus. The figures dancing around Sherlock are all different sizes and shapes and races. All clothed in loose, fluttering clothing. The women and a couple of the men have loose, flowing hair—golden blond and chestnut brown and red the copper of a new penny. They’re all varying degrees of beautiful. Or ugly, in the case of one small, lanky lad with eyes too big for his face and hair so black it’s almost blue sticking straight out all over his head. And a woman John’s age who’s so skinny her bones stand out beneath her skin.
It’s not the way they looks that makes them strange, though, John realizes as they twirl around Sherlock. It’s the way they move that differentiates the people from the…not-people. The ones who don’t appear human, including the lanky boy, move like flowing water, like dandelion fluff in a breeze. The otherworldly ones dance as if their feet barely touch the ground.
A young woman wearing a dress that looks as if it’s made of gossamer and leaves walks past carrying a tray of cakes. The smell is better than any baked thing John has ever smelled and reminds him that he ate only a light breakfast before spending the whole morning traipsing over half of London in Sherlock’s wake.
He shifts as the woman passes, lifting his nose to sniff the sweetness of the air trailing behind her. She laughs, low and musical, and turns, holding the tray out to him. It’s filled with cakes and biscuits of all shapes and sizes—long fingers of sponge filled with cream; diamond cakes filled with a jelly so dark and rich it looks like blood; square cakes so coarse they look like American cornbread drizzled with golden honey; crescents that look like they’re iced with pastel diamonds; biscuits brimming with melted chocolate morsels; pieces of fruit dusted with sparkling sugar.
John wonders if it would be considered rude to sample one of each, but then Sherlock laughs. The sound is deep, as golden as the honey on the cakes, and so merry it’s like a living thing has been loosed into the sky. Not like any laugh John has ever heard Sherlock utter. There’s no undertone of derision or sarcasm, none of the despairing mockery that normally interlaces Sherlock’s extraordinary voice.
Cakes forgotten, John looks to see why Sherlock’s laughing like that. Who or what’s created it. But there doesn’t seem to be any reason for it other than just being at the centre of a group of twirling human and maybe non-human dancers, for making music so beautiful it makes the air around them shimmer and glow.
“Are we…? Is this a fairy tale?” John asks, aware of how ridiculous it sounds. But he’s also aware that he’s already said it once, and Tom hasn’t denied it.
If it sounds daft to the old man, he doesn’t show it. He simply shrugs. “Not—” His voice is tight and rusty again, and he stops to uncork his rude bottle, to sip from it. “Not if you mean like the things your mum used to read you when you was a young’un.”
John peers at him sharply. But it’s hardly mind-reading for Tom to think that John’s mother would have read him fairy tales. Though he’s right. John’s mother did read fairy tales to Harry and him. More to Harry than him, in an attempt to interest her in things their mother considered more appropriate for girls, frilly dresses and flowers and such. Harry had been, even back then, more interested things considered boyish, cars and dinosaurs and playing in the fields, than in dolls and clothes.
“How should I mean it then?” John asks.
“This ain’t like fairy, f-a-i-r-y, like in a story for kiddies. This is F-a-e-r-i-e. As in the Fae.”
“You mean like in that book…” John searches for the title. He never studied it himself, but he did attend a couple of seminars while he was at uni. Not that he was interested in fairies. Or Faeries. But a girl in whom he was interested had been, hence several hours spent pretending to pay rapt attention while some professor droned on about Celtic mythology and old beliefs and— The name pops into his mind. “Fairy Faith in Celtic Countries! Like in that book?”
Tom shrugs as if to say he has no idea what book John’s talking about. “Ain’t no book can really tell you about the Fae. You have to be here.”
“But that’s…” This time, John searches for the right way to say what he’s thinking without sounding insulting. “The Fae. Travelling to a fairy land. That’s all…a myth. Folklore. Isn’t it? No matter how you spell it.”
“Fae ain’t no folklore, boy.” The old man takes a long drink from his bottle, and this time, instead of tucking it between his knees, he plunks it down on the ground. “Faerie is real. Faerie gets in your blood. Faerie changes you.”
John leans forward, sure the bottle will topple right over.
Tom gives it a twist so that it sinks a bit into the soft earth and remains standing.
John grins. So that’s how it works!
Tom leans towards him and pins him with eyes so blue they’re almost white. “Use the eyes in your head to see what’s before you.”
It’s so near to Sherlock’s constant chiding to ‘observe’ that John can’t help but grin at the old man. And turn back to do what he’s been told to do. Observe.
A group of the dancers around Sherlock break away to leap and dance their way towards a smaller group of young women who’re walking across the glade. They gather near the hawthorn bush he’d noticed earlier, the one lit with fairy lights. As John watches, they clap their hands. The pinpoints of flickering light that John thought were electric (though now that he thinks about it, where would the power come from?) rise up from the bush in a swarm and flutter away. The women laugh and call out, their voices high-pitched and singsong-y, and the cloud of lights flows back into the bush. Settles and twinkles like stars set against a deep green sky.
John sighs at the beauty of it. The magic. Everything here, whether he believes it’s Faerie or not, is magical. So exquisite it makes his heart ache. So soothing it makes him want to go out into the sunlight and lie down on his back, spread his arms in the cool grass, and fall asleep to the music of Sherlock’s violin.
Maybe he’ll dream. Of music and Sherlock’s pale skin gleaming in the sunlight. Of the fairy stories of his youth. He can’t recall much of what his mother read to him and Harry. And not a lot from the seminars either. He remembers how bored he’d been. How smooth his girlfriend’s skin had been and the odd, squeaky sound she had made when she had an orgasm. But only some of the things he’d learned.
He sits up straighter and shakes away the lethargy that’s trying to settle into his bones. His smile fades as he recalls the sonorous voice of the professor, the notes his girlfriend had been scribbling… Fairies, or Fae, are tricksters. They never lie, but they don’t always say exactly what they mean either. And now that he’s thinking about it, there was something about how you’re not supposed to accept a gift of salt or eat or drink if you’re unlucky enough to find yourself in a fairy place. Or was the salt something different, from a different seminar? Something about welcoming a guest into your home? And what happens if you eat or drink? Was it something about not being able to go home? Or about having to perform some service before you could go home?
He frowns. He doesn’t remember. But it doesn’t matter. A fairy/faerie tale may have come to life before his eyes, but they—he and Sherlock—aren’t where they’re supposed to be. He’s been lulled by the warmth and magic, distracted by beauty, by Sherlock’s music, by wondering where he is, when he should have been thinking about how to get home.
“Can we go back?” he asks Tom. “Can we go home?”
The old man yawns and shrugs. “Depends.”
“On what?”
Tom shrugs again and stares off into the distance. When he speaks, John has the feeling that what he’s saying is more about himself than about John and Sherlock. “You can mebbe go back. But you won’t be the same.”
“You Can’t Go Home Again,” John says softly.
“What?”
John smiles. “Another book.” He nods to Tom as he puts his hands on his knees and pushes himself up.
Sherlock ends his song with a flourish and starts away from his flock of dancers. They protest, begging for more songs, and one of the young women catches his arm and tries to draw him back, but he smiles and breaks away.
A young man with a flute takes up where he left off as Sherlock walks towards John. “John!” he says.
For a moment, John’s so lost in the merry welcome in Sherlock’s voice, the depth of colour in his eyes, that he forgets where he is, what he was thinking. “You look like you’re having a good time,” he says, smiling.
Sherlock smiles, too, sweet and intimate. “I’ve never played in a forest before. I didn’t realize the acoustics would be so perfect.”
“Where’d you find your back-up dancers?”
Sherlock’s gaze wanders back to the dancers who are now fluttering around the flute player as if they’ve already forgotten him. A woman with a tambourine has joined in. The tune is similar to the one Sherlock was playing on his violin, but…different somehow. Less pleasing to John’s ear, but then, despite the reservations he’d had when he’d decided to move into 221B, he’s grown quite partial to Sherlock’s playing.
Sherlock shrugs. “They were just…here. Like magic.”
Which reminds John of why he stood up in the first place. “Sherlock, where are we?” He waves his hand to indicate the old man sitting nearby. “Tom says we’re in Faerie, f-a-e-r-i-e, but that’s just crazy.”
Sherlock gifts him with one of his everybody’s-an-idiot-you-included expressions, but it’s softened by the relaxation around his eyes and the fondness in his smile. “Honestly, John,” he says lightly. “Look around you. What do you see?”
“Trees, a brook, and dancing people dressed like they’re on a film set,” John says promptly. “Including you.” He eyes Sherlock up and down. Despite Sherlock’s penchant for lounging around their flat wearing only a sheet, John’s seeing more flesh than he’s seen since the last time Sherlock injured himself while chasing a suspect along the Thames and John had to patch up his cuts and bruises.
Sherlock’s the picture of health, now, though. Up close, his pale, flawless skin gleams with a dewy sheen of sweat. The shimmering sunlight sparkles off the fine coppery hair on his chest, on the thicker arrow of hair trailing down his abdomen and disappearing behind the half-open zip of his trousers.
John forces himself to look away from Sherlock’s torso, tilting his head further back so he can see Sherlock’s face more easily. So he won’t be tempted to ogle his friend’s belly. He grins. “Are you wearing pants?”
Sherlock grins back and lifts a shoulder.
And they laugh at each other, chortling like school boys, the way they did that day in Buckingham Palace.
Then John sobers. “So where are we, really?”
Behind them, Tom harrumphs as if he’s disgusted.
“Faerie,” Sherlock says simply,
In spite of all he can see, John says, “That’s not possible. That’s mythology.”
“And yet…” Sherlock drawls, scribing a circle in the shimmering air with his bow to indicate their surroundings.
John sighs. He can’t deny the evidence. And he can’t come up with a better explanation. He could be dreaming. He could be hallucinating. He could be drugged. But in all those cases, nothing he does will matter. He’ll wake up.
But that thought saddens him. The idea of discovering that Sherlock’s beautiful, ethereal music, Sherlock’s beautiful, otherworldly laughter, is only a dream, doomed to be shrouded in mist of waking is depressing. He realizes he’d rather be in Faerie than discover this is all a dream. He likes Sherlock smiling and relaxed and making otherworldly music that shines like glitter in the air.
Sherlock smiles into his eyes as if he can read John’s mind.
And John smiles back. Still…there is that whole, trapped forever in a fairy/faerie paradise thing that all the stories warn about. “Well, okay. If you accept that we’ve somehow come through a brick wall into Faerie, then you also have to accept that, if we’re going to leave, we need to go now.”
Sherlock looks around. Back at the circle of dancers. “Why?”
“Because if you assume that we’re in Faerie—and not in some dream or drug hallucination—you also have to accept the rules of Faerie. And from what I remember, if we eat or drink anything, we’ll be trapped here.”
The expression that flits over Sherlock’s face tells John that he knows the myths to which John is referring. But then he looks back at the circle of dancers with longing. “Would that be a bad thing?”
John’s breath catches behind his breastbone. “Are you saying you want to stay?”
Sherlock doesn’t answer. Instead he asks, “How long do you suppose we can stay without being trapped?”
John can’t answer that. “I don’t know that we’re not trapped now. But if we want to go home, I think we have to try soon.”
Sherlock nods. But he says, “Do we want to go home? Do you?”
“I—” John can’t answer that either. He thinks he should want to go home. And he’s a bit unnerved because he doesn’t feel more of a compulsion to find their way out of this gleaming world of faeries and honey-soaked wine and real faerie cakes (not fairy cakes) and wine bottles shaped like genitals. A world in which Sherlock seems to fit as if he was born to it, way better than he fits into the other one.
John laughs aloud at the thought. That would explain a lot, wouldn’t it, if Sherlock was a faerie changeling?
Sherlock peers at him. “What?”
“I was just thinking that if you were a faerie changeling, that would explain a lot.”
Sherlock draws himself up tall, though with him barefoot and John still wearing his shoes, the height difference isn’t quite as great. He gifts John with a peevish, affronted expression. “Explain what? And I think I would know if I was Fae.”
John laughs again. “Yeah, but wouldn’t Mycroft throw a wobbler if it was true?”
Sherlock laughs, but there’s still no derision in it, not even at the mention of Mycroft.
It’s difficult, with Sherlock so light-hearted, to concentrate on the more serious side of their conversation. To contemplate going back. Going home. But it is home. And this isn’t, no matter how much it shimmers and glows. “I think—” John swallows, finding the words more difficult to say than they should be. “I think we should head back.”
He looks to make sure the path is still visible. The pile of shoes and the rectangle of shadow is where he expects it to be. He takes a step towards it.
But Sherlock doesn’t move with him, and that makes him really nervous. “Sherlock, we have to go. Don’t we?”
Sherlock nods again, agreeing, but he points with his bow towards the musical circle. “One more song.” And he turns back towards the musical circle.
As he walks away, John remembers something else he’d read or been taught about the Fae. And faerie music. About how a mortal could be so captivated they danced until they were exhausted. Could be lured by faerie music, drawn into the faerie world by it.
“Sherlock!” he calls and chases after him. “We’d better go now.”
But Sherlock has already tucked the purple violin under his chin, already laid the bow across strings as blue as his scarf. As he steps into the circle of people around the flute player, he takes up the tune of the song being played.
John’s steps slow as the notes soar into the air, into the earth. There’s a flare, a burst of glistening light, as if the music Sherlock creates with the violin makes the sky bluer, the grass greener, the air clearer. The notes ripple across John’s skin. He’s tempted to take off his shoes and socks, his jumper. To stand barefoot in the grass, bare-chested in the sunlight, so he can feel the music spiral down and soak into his body like warm light pouring through his skin. So he can feel it echo up into his bare soles from the ground and vibrate through his bones.
The dancers around Sherlock whoop and whirl into fiercer movement. They sprawl out in a lazy, messy line and gambol towards a grassy mound John hasn’t noticed before. A beautiful woman with hair so nearly silver that the shining waves look like water spilling down her back catches John’s hand and pirouettes him into the weaving, spinning dance. He laughs and allows himself to be swept up in the music and the press of swaying bodies. He can feel Sherlock’s gaze on him as he brushes past. He’s charmed by the approbation and joy in Sherlock’s smile.
Sherlock lifts his elbow higher and sends a shower of notes up into the sky. They cascade back down like stars falling from the sky, skittering across John’s skin like fiery coals. Even he, with his less than musical ear, can tell that Sherlock is crafting sounds that no ordinary man, no ordinary instrument, should be able to create.
“That’s amazing,” John calls to him over the whirl of music.
Sherlock twists, gaze following John, without missing a beat. His grin is radiant, nearly manic. His face is flushed, beads of glistening sweat standing out on his forehead.
As John sweeps past Sherlock a third or fourth time—maybe the seventh, he’s lost count—he sees the underside of the purple violin. The wood is smooth, shiny, glistening like everything else in this place. And it has a button on it! The end button doesn’t look like a wooden peg, as on Sherlock’s violin in their flat. It looks like a shirt button with blue tail gut wrapped around it.
He twists, taking himself out of the sinuous line of dancers, grown to 20 or more strong now. He whirls to a stop near Sherlock’s upraised elbow and braces his hands on his knees as he gasps, trying to get his breath back.
He ducks, trying to get a better look at the violin, and almost gets an elbow to the temple as Sherlock swings around. John stays with him, resting his fingers on Sherlock’s hip to steady himself, to match the swaying tempo of Sherlock’s movement. On the side of the violin, the curl of the violin’s beak looks weirdly like a shirt cuff.
“Sherlock…” he whispers, his voice a disbelieving rasp. “We have to go now.”
As if John’s flipped a switch, Sherlock stops playing. He ignores the cries of protest from the crowd. “John? What’s wrong?”
John holds out his hand for the violin. He expects an argument, more questions, but Sherlock passes it to him easily, without protest.
John takes the violin gently by the neck and turns it. The end button is literally a button. A dark, suspiciously familiar button. He turns the violin on its side. Instead of the normal elegant but plain swirl of polished maple, the tip of beak is shaped like a rolled shirt cuff. And it has another button on it.
John catches the cuff-shaped edge between his finger and thumb and gives a gentle tug. The violin softens as if its dissolving and melts into John’s hand. His mouth falls open. He squeezes his eyes shut, then opens them to find himself standing on the edge of a faerie mound, in the glittering sunlight, holding Sherlock’s purple shirt and his blue scarf in his hand. Sherlock is standing beside him, bow gone, with his belt in his hand. The buckle gleams in the sunlight.
John looks up at Sherlock, shocked and a bit horrified. Sherlock looks a bit shocked, too, but then a blinding grin breaks out on his face. He’s delighted, as if he thinks John’s discovered something truly wonderful.
After a moment, John thrust the shirt towards Sherlock. But he holds tight to the scarf, clutching it to his chest. The scarf brought them here. So maybe whatever magic created the blue-stringed violin can’t be re-wrought without it. Maybe without the violin, without the promise of faery music, Sherlock will be content to leave with him. “We have to go,” he says quietly.
Sherlock nods. But he doesn’t take the shirt.
All around them, the dancing comes to a halt. The music trails off, leaving only the chirp of birds and the flutter of leaves high in the trees.
A ring of protests break out. “No!” different voices cry in various tones and languages, all recognizable for what they are—French, something Gaelic, a Russian dialect—yet surprisingly John understands the words of each as easily as he understands the pleas in English. “Don’t go!” “Play another tune for us.” “We want to dance.” “Stay!”
Sherlock gives them a moue of apology. “Thank you, but we must go,” he demurs and gives a bow as strangely formal as his choice of words.
John holds his breath, because one of the things he remembers from his mother’s readings was that you should never thank a fairy for anything. But no one seems to mind. No one turns into a red-eyed demon with fangs. No one reaches for Sherlock with scaled fingers tipped with talons.
The young woman who was carrying the tray of cakes murmurs, “But you can’t go!” She has a cap of blond curls the colour of corn silk and eyes nearly as bluegreen as Sherlock’s, and a voice that’s the feminine equivalent of Sherlock’s. It lowers to a husky promise. “Not without a kiss!”
John catches his breath as, improbably, Sherlock smiles at her as if he’s charmed by the idea.
Cont’d in Pt. 2
Recipient:
rachelindeedAuthor:
lyricaxxxFandom: Sherlock (BBC)
Characters/Pairings: Sherlock/John
Rating: Teen
Word Count: ~14,000 (Total – Pts 1 & 2)
Warnings: AU, Faerie Tale/Myth (sort of), Magical Realism
Summary:
As Sherlock leans over John’s shoulder, the breeze lifts the ends of Sherlock’s scarf. The soft fringe flutters across John’s cheek, and then, as if the wind has reached out with ghostly fingers, the long length of blue comes neatly unwound from Sherlock’s neck. Sherlock grabs for the scarf as it slips from around his neck, but the breeze snatches it playfully from his fingers and throws it skyward.
Sherlock darts into the alley, exclaiming at the way the scarf seems to dance away from his fingertips just as he reaches for it, and John trots after him. The scarf flies up in the breeze and then abruptly drops towards the brick wall at the end of the alley. It flutters down, hits the wall, and disappears through it as if the solid brick has suddenly become a curtain of dark red smoke.
Sherlock skids to a stop, looks back at John as if he’s looking for confirmation that he’s seen what he thinks he did. His expression is wild with surprise and delight.
John lurches forward, hand extended though he knows he can’t possibly reach Sherlock in time. He knows he’s too late. He knows what’s going to happen before Sherlock even takes another breath. “Sherlock, no!” he yells, but it’s like telling a child not to grab for a coveted toy.
Sherlock steps back, takes a deep breath. Plunges into the wall. And disappears.
Notes:
Written for
holmestice Summer 2016 for rachelindeed, who supplied an amazing list of prompts, ideas, and quotes, asked for a Johncentric fic, and said she was ‘angst-averse’ (as am I, so that worked out well *g*). I ended up writing for the prompt, ‘A magical realism or fairy tale fic would be amazing’ though I have to confess…it wasn’t planned. Up to the point at which this story came to me, I was blocked. Big time. Despite the wonderful prompts, nothing was clicking, and I was beginning to panic just a bit. One afternoon, I was sitting the car with my dogs in the parking lot of a grocery store, waiting for my husband to finish his part of the shopping. Out of boredom, I picked up a book of Irish sayings for which I’d just paid a whole quarter at a used book sale and flipped it open. The saying was: Any man can lose his hat in a faerie wind. And I thought of Sherlock and his deerstalker and of the hat flying away in a fairy wind with Sherlock chasing after it. And, boom!, the whole story was just there in my head (contrary muse!), pretty much exactly as I’ve written it. Except for the hat, because the timing didn’t really work for angst-averse part of the request. But, hopefully, the scarf is an acceptable substitute and just as magical.
Have you ever fed a lover with just your hands?
Closed your eyes and trusted, just trusted?
Have you ever thrown a fistful of glitter in the air?
Have you ever looked fear in the face and said, “I just don't care.”?
~Glitter In the Air, Pink
“Do you hear that?” Sherlock pauses in his perusal of the alley wall and tilts his head to the side as if he’s listening to something above them.
John looks up, then tilts his head the same direction. A sudden, unexpected whip of wind lifts the collar of his jacket and stirs the pages of a discarded newspaper, tossing it along the pavement. Other than that, he hears only the ever-present London noise—the distant hum of traffic, the blare of a car horn, a voice raised as someone down the street calls hello to a neighbour.
“What?” John asks after a moment. “The wind?”
Considering that the winter weather is so dull and dreary that it’s felt as if there’s been no air moving for days, the sudden swoop of breeze does feel a bit abrupt. But nice despite the cold. John tips his face up to it and fans his collar open, lifts the neck of his jumper away from his throat. Fresh air that feels warmer than he’d expected curls down his breastbone.
Sherlock shakes his head. “Can’t you hear it?”
John stops moving and listens again, but he still hears only the dull roar of city traffic and the whisper of newspaper against pavement. “What?”
“Voices in the wind,” Sherlock breathes, obviously entranced, tilting his face to the sky. “Singing… Music…” He turns slowly, head leaned so far back that John puts a hand out behind him in case he falls over.
Then his head snaps up, and he freezes and triumph washes across his face. He points towards the end of the alley. “There!”
John doesn’t look. He stands where his is, hand out, still trying to hear the voices on the wind, but Sherlock grabs his elbow and drags him deeper into the dank alley. “John, look!”
John follows the direction of Sherlock’s finger and sees, high on the brick wall that marks the abrupt end of the alley, a symbol in glossy red paint. It’s so nearly the same colour as the bricks that, except for the sheen, it would be imperceptible.
John shakes his head, half tired despair, half admiration.
He’s trudged behind Sherlock all morning, through train yards and junk yards and alleys looking for the graffiti—shades of the case John had written up more than a year ago as ‘The Blind Banker’—to support Sherlock’s theory that a multi-national gang of thieves is at work in the city. But unlike those garish yellow symbols which kept popping up at every turn, these symbols are proving elusive. Perhaps non-existent, except in Sherlock’s mind. Though John can’t see it, Sherlock insists there’s a connection between a squiggle that might be Sanskrit painted on a subway wall, and a Japanese haiku in a train yard, and a Latin word on a derelict car, and what—to the best of his ability to google and walk at the same time—John thinks may be a handful of Mi'kmaq symbols scratched on alley walls. None of it makes sense except to Sherlock. But it wouldn’t be the first time John’s seen Sherlock connect a handful of seemingly disparate clues and puzzle pieces into a whole picture, so John’s stayed with him, slogging through muck, breathing noxious smells, climbing piles of trash to photograph curlicue-d symbols and words in foreign languages.
He drags his cell from his jacket pocket and thumbs it on. The breeze plays across his fingers as he flips through the photos he’s taken during the morning. This symbol, all curves and squiggles, is very similar to one he photographed in a previous alley.
As Sherlock leans over John’s shoulder to look at the picture, the breeze lifts the ends of Sherlock’s scarf. The soft fringe flutters across John’s cheek, and then, as if the wind has reached out with ghostly fingers, the long length of blue comes neatly unwound from Sherlock’s neck. Sherlock grabs for the scarf as it slips off his neck, but the breeze snatches it playfully from his fingers and throws it skyward.
The breeze doesn’t seem strong enough to even lift the scarf, much less toss it about, but the scarf sails further into the alley. John says, “Look at that,” more to himself than anything else because Sherlock has already leapt forward, trying to catch the scarf.
It flutters just out of reach, and Sherlock follows it, exclaiming at the way the scarf seems to dance away from his fingertips just as he reaches for it. John shuffle-trots to catch up, trying to keep the dancing rectangle of blue in sight and not stumble over the uneven pavement and wads of paper—or worse—that litter the alley.
The scarf flies up, then abruptly drops towards the brick wall at the end of the alley. It flutters down, hits the wall, and disappears through it as if the solid brick has suddenly become a curtain of dark red smoke.
John skids to a stop. Blinks and shakes his head. Then blinks again. He can’t have seen what he thinks he just saw! It has to be a trick of the light. The scarf probably hit the wall and slid down it, the blue blending into the deep shadow that cuts across the brick.
Sherlock has stopped, too, a couple of metres ahead. “Did you see that?” he exclaims and looks back at John for confirmation that he’s seen what he thinks he did.
There’s such a mix of surprise and indignation and delight warring on his long face that John almost laughs.
Then, delight winning, Sherlock grins at him. And John’s heart lurches up into his throat. He leaps forward, adrenalin spiking, reaching out as alarm screeches along his nerves and dread clamps down at the base of his spine, because he already knows what’s going to happen. Before he can even summon the words, before he can suck in another breath, he knows.
“Sherlock, no!” he yells, but it’s like telling a child not to grab for a coveted toy. Not to touch a hot stove. Nothing short of a gunshot or an earthquake will stop Sherlock from what he does next…
Sherlock steps back, takes a deep breath. Plunges into the wall. And disappears.
The bricks waver and ripple like water in his wake. John rushes after him, heart hammering so loud it drowns out the clatter of his footsteps and the curses raining from his lips. He only just manages to stop himself from plunging into the wall at the last second. His feet slip and slide, shoe soles against newspaper against pavement, as he rocks back from the bricks.
His brain wars inside his skull, the instinct, the need, to rush after Sherlock warring with his instincts as a soldier, as a doctor. His training urges caution. His desire to protect Sherlock, to back him up, urges him forward. But if there’s trouble on the other side of the weirdly writhing wall, he’ll be no good to Sherlock if he rushes in blindly. If he can even get in.
He reaches forward and touches the soggy surface of the wall. The tip of his finger disappears into what should be solid brick, leaving his finger looking like it’s been cut off at the knuckle. Nausea roils in his gut even though he can feel his finger, can wiggle it.
The sensation is like pushing through a sheet of water filled with sand. It’s cool and fluid, but gritty, as if liquid brick is flowing around his knuckle. Where his skin meets what should be solid brick and mortar, the line seethes and writhes and ripples, the edges not quite straight, not quite in focus. He jerks his hand back and checks it. His finger is whole.
Okay, so he can get through. In. Whatever. He nods, a quick, decisive snap of his chin, though there’s no one there to see him. Except…maybe there is. In London, there almost always is.
He looks around quickly, spots the cctv camera at the entrance of the alley. Luckily, it’s pointed down the alley, towards him, instead of down the street. He speed dials Mycroft, says tersely, “Can you access cctv footage of Klippe Alley?”
Mycroft’s dignified yet indignant tone is clear. “Dr Watson, really. Do you actually think—”
“No time,” John interrupts. “This is an emergency. Yes or no? Sherlock just disappeared through a brick wall.”
“What do you mean, dissap—”
“Emergency, Mycroft! Yes or no on the surveillance?”
Apparently, the anxiety in John’s voice finally gets through. “Yes, I can access video of that area.”
“Watch the last few minutes. I’m going after him.”
“John—”
John cuts the connection with his thumb, shoves his cell in his pocket, takes three deep, deep breaths, and steps through a wall of red bricks.
The sensation is…not what he expected. He’d expected it would be like pushing through a waterfall of sand, but with his whole body immersed, it’s more like stepping slowly, slowly, slowly, through a curtain of cool, thick, gritty smoke. He closes his eyes against the fine dust and pushes through. Into…cool air fragrant with the scent of flowers and rich earth.
He stumbles as his feet meet something soft and uneven. He brushes at his eyes, dislodging what he imagines are flakes of brick from his lashes, and looks down.
Grass. He’s standing in lush grass.
He blinks. Rubs his eyes. Blinks again. Because what he’s seeing can’t be real. He’s in a small bushy clearing in the middle of a forest. On a warm spring day. The air shimmers with birdsong and bright golden light. And more green than he’s seen since he was a boy. He forgets, living in the city, just how green the forest can be.
But Sherlock’s not in sight.
John calls out, low at first. The birds pause their chirruping, twittering songs as if they’re listening for a response, then start up again when he calls out louder. “Sherlock?”
He hears a soft quaver of laughter, so low that he can’t tell whether it’s a male or female voice, whether it’s Sherlock or not. And he calls again, a little more strident this time. “Sherlock!”
Sherlock answers from somewhere ahead, in the trees, his voice too light and easy, too filled with delight, for him to be under duress. “John, this way!”
John breathes a sigh of relief. The bands of tension across his gut ease. “Sherlock, where are you?” Then he mutters, “Though a better question would be…where are we?”
“This way. Come on!” Sherlock calls again.
Sherlock’s voice sounds odd. So light it’s almost like he’s drugged. Except that John’s seen Sherlock drugged, and his extraordinary voice gets slow and slurry when he’s under the influence. And that’s certainly not how he sounds now.
John takes a couple of quick steps forward, then forces himself to stop. The way forward is obvious, a trail of flattened grass curving away, disappearing in the deep, inviting shade of the trees. Maybe it’s too obvious.
His muscles and the blood pounding in his veins, the too-quick thud of his heart, urge him to rush after Sherlock. To find him and run his hands over Sherlock to make sure he’s all right. To look into his eyes and make sure they’re clear. To punch him on his elegant jaw for rushing through a brick wall without stopping to think. For calling to him from a forest instead of waiting.
But, again, John forces himself to stillness, to exude a calm he’s not feeling.
He glances back. The brick wall is gone, replaced with trees and brambles interwoven with a vine of heavy, gold coloured flowers that smell faintly like honeysuckle. But the door—passage? portal? gateway?—through which he’s just passed is still there. It’s just barely visible, a rippling, not-quite-in-focus oval where the plants and tree trunks waver like a desert mirage. He reaches back, unable to resist checking, and his hand disappears into the misty green and gold.
He touches, carefully, a young oak just to the side of the shimmering oval. His hand connects with the tree trunk the way it should. The bark is solid and rough under his fingertips. It feels real, though it can’t possibly be real. It’s not possible. And yet… He pats the tree again. There’s no denying the reality of it.
He takes a deep breath. His initial clattering fear is easing; the screaming urgency to chase after Sherlock settling down to a taut hum.
Considering where he is and what he’s just done, that Sherlock is out of sight somewhere ahead, sounding like he’s had a few too many puffs on a happy pipe, John thinks he should be terrified, or at least jittering with nerves and adrenalin, but… He isn’t. The place into which he’s stepped is too light and airy to be frightening. Too…non-threatening.
Maybe it’s the chirping, tweeting birds, who would surely be silent if there was danger nearby. Maybe it’s the way everything sparkles with life and vitality. Even the shadows glisten and twinkle as if there couldn’t possibly be anything dark hidden in their depths.
As if it’s responding to John’s growing sense of calm, a dragonfly lights on his knuckles, its thin, transparent wings swirling with all the colours of the rainbow. John raises his hand, bringing it up to admire it, and it flutters away up the path, reminding him of the voices and laughter ahead. Of Sherlock, waiting for him.
He jerks his chin again, nodding to himself, and sets off, glancing back just once more to reassure himself portal is still there. Then he thinks better of it and goes back. Since the bright spring sun shining down on his shoulders is making him too warm anyway, he takes his jacket off and wraps it around the base of the oak tree beside the portal. He feels better this time when he glances back and sees his jacket marking the sight.
John reaches out as he walks, touching bushes and branches and the dark velvet of leaves, patting the solid bark of the trees again and again, reassuring himself that they’re really there. The air under the huge, ancient trees is cooler and scented a darker green than the clearing. Fingers of sunlight beam down through the trees, dotting the meandering path. Overhead, birds flit in and out of the shadows, calling to him in voices pure and high. Just ahead, voices call to him with unintelligible whispers and enticing laughter that promise of finding Sherlock.
John breaks into a trot, watching to make sure he doesn’t trip over anything, a rock or stone, a branch, but the path is flat and well-trodden, the hard ground showing through a bare cover of crunchy leaves. But he doesn’t seem to be catching up to the voices. His sense of time feels distorted, and he’s not sure whether he’s been walking only a couple of minutes or much longer. He’s not sure how long it’s been since he came through the brick portal, how long he stood admiring the rainbow wings of the dragonfly.
He slows to a walk and tugs his cell from his pocket. The screen is blank and dull, the only thing in the whole place that not’s flickering with life. As he drops the cell back into his pocket, he reaches out to a gnarled knot on the trunk of a huge tree. Has he seen that before? Slowed to inhale the blue scent of the flowers growing around the base of the tree? It seems familiar.
His breath quickens, sounding loud and harsh compared to the spritely twitter of birds and the ripple of breeze through the treetops. He’s opened his mouth to call out for Sherlock again when he realizes there’s brighter light ahead. A glow silhouetting the trees.
He trots toward it and bursts out of the forest into a glade. He almost stumbles over a pile of shoes littering the path. Shoes of all shapes and sizes. Men’s and women’s, trainers and sandals and heavy leather dress shoes. Sherlock’s long, narrow loafers, his purple socks peeking from under the tongue of one shoe, lie in the middle of them.
John huffs out a breath and takes a couple of quick steps forward.
And there’s Sherlock.
Every muscle in John’s body goes limp with relief, and then snaps taut again. Because he’s found Sherlock. But Sherlock as John has never seen him. His mouth drops open, and before he can even think what he’s doing, he steps quickly sideways, concealing himself in the deep shade of a giant oak.
Sherlock is barefoot and bare-chested, wearing only the grey trousers he was wearing when he went through the portal, and he’s standing in the centre of a group of dancing…it should be easy to think ‘people’, but John’s mind stumbles over the word as if his subconscious knows something his conscious mind doesn’t. There are ten or twelve of them—male and female, moving, twirling, leaping—with Sherlock as their musical centre. He has a violin tucked beneath his chin, and he moves sinuously, with supple, airy grace, as he plays.
The sound he’s drawing from the violin is like nothing John’s ever heard. Sherlock has played compositions that made him feel as if his heart was swelling, but never anything like this. The music sounds like the violin is giving voice to the radiance of light, to the dance of leaves. Like its weaving together laughter and the rush of water over stones and the lovely rhythm of a lover’s heartbeat. It’s the flash of pale bare feet on spring grass. The silver whistle of birdsong in crisp winter air. The laughter of children. Its magical, and John sighs and leans against the huge trunk of an oak and lets the music wash over him as he looks around the glade.
The pale greygreen trunks of young aspens gleam in bright, sparkling sunlight. Halfway around the clearing, right at the edge of an even denser wood then the one through which he’s just walked, is a huge hawthorn bush full of fairy lights so dazzling he can see them even in the bright light. Meandering through the clearing is a brook, a winding ribbon twinkling silver and gold, water burbling and sighing over a bed of stones. There are other people, too. Lounging in the clearing, walking arm in arm, picnicking, laughing and talking. Kissing. More figures flit in and out of the shadows across the clearing.
The whole scene, everything—dancers, leaves, water, light, the soft whisper of breeze through the trees, Sherlock—is like something out of a storybook or an old painting. And it all dazzles his eyes. It looks like someone threw a fistful of glitter in the air. Everything, everyone, shimmers with light and joy and unbridled, quivering happiness.
John’s gaze slides back to Sherlock.
The normally almost-too-tight trousers hang loose on Sherlock’s narrow hips. The button on the waistband is open and zip partway down, making Sherlock’s narrow torso look even longer than it is. And in the few minutes that he’s been out of John’s sight, it looks like someone has put their hands in Sherlock’s curly hair and ruffled it. The chocolate curls Sherlock tries so hard to subdue are mussed and tousled, standing out around his head like a burnished skullcap.
He looks like he’s been here forever, like he’s one of the laughing, dancing crowd, and it makes John wonder, again, how much time he spent wandering along the path. The light doesn’t seem to have changed since he stepped through the brick wall, but—
“Your friend seems to fit right in.” The voice is masculine and raspy with disuse.
John starts as the words, so close to what he was thinking, intrude on his reverie. His gaze darts around the clearing. He finds an old man, white shock of hair brilliant against the dark green, sitting on a fallen tree near the edge of the glade. He has a bottle clutched between his knees, and he’s nodding in time to Sherlock’s music.
John glances back, just checking, and, yes, the pile of shoes is still there. The shadowy rectangle that marks the path is still there, limned by dancing leaves. Keeping his gaze on Sherlock, he sidles towards the old man.
The man gives a slow nod towards the tree trunk, obviously inviting John to sit.
John nods his thanks, but before he sits, he steps forward into a beam of sunlight and calls out, “Sherlock!”
Sherlock’s head snaps up, and he meets John’s gaze. His smile is warm and welcoming, like they’re old friends who haven’t seen each other for a long time.
John points towards the tree trunk and the old man so that Sherlock will know where he is.
The music ceases for a moment as Sherlock waves with his bow. But then he takes up the song again and does a quick, light step. He twirls, his long bare feet flashing as he leaps. He’s not as light and graceful as most of the dancers around him, not as practiced, but John can’t help but laugh.
The people around Sherlock seem to be as affected by Sherlock’s joyous dance as he is. They clap and laugh, their voices as playful as the music Sherlock’s coaxing from the violin. Dancers spin away, leaving the circle, and others join. There’s a weaving, wandering pattern to it that John feels he could decipher if he could concentrate. But it’s difficult to really concentrate on anyone other than Sherlock.
Sherlock smiles at him, waves again, barely missing a beat, and dances away, leading the flock of dancers along the brook. They follow, weaving and winding about him, some even dancing into the water, squealing and splashing, sending water like sprays of flying gems arcing out.
It’s all so beautiful, so fantastical. And feels so comfortable. So…relaxing. Seeing Sherlock so carefree lifts John’s heart. Makes him feel like his nerves are alight and his skin is glowing. He wants to chase after Sherlock, but he also wants to question the old man who’s spoken to him. So he only watches as the group meanders along the brook.
They turn this way and that as the music weaves a spell like magic, notes soaring up into the sky. Just when John thinks he’ll have to go after them to keep them in sight, the group turns. Shifting like a flock of starlings in the evening sky, turning back towards the glade. Back towards him.
Sherlock waves again. He plucks the strings on his violin with his fingers to make up for the missed notes as he points, indicating that they’re just circling the glade.
John understands, with a comprehension that’s more intuition than logic, that Sherlock’s signalling that he won’t leave him again. Won’t bolt out of his sight.
He walks over and sits near the man, who’s also watching the dancers. Like everything else John’s seen so far, the old man is a character out of a book. Wizened face creased with age; ragged clothes that need mending; gnarled, bare feet dug into the earth. He has a bottle clutched between his bony knees.
John clears his throat. “I’m John,” he offers, hoping that, wherever the hell this place is, it’s not bad manners to give his name.
The old man clears his throat, too, and his voice is a bit less raspy than before. “Tom.” He offers John the bottle.
It’s the strangest bottle John’s ever seen. It’s double-bottomed and so rounded it can’t possible stand up. It reminds John, more than anything else, of testicles with an upright penis for a neck, the tip capped with a round cork. He grins as he takes it and holds it up to the light. The green glass is so thin and fragile that it feels as if it will shatter with the gentlest touch, yet it’s obviously sound enough to withstand being clutched between a probably drunk, old man’s wavery knees. It’s about a third full of a gold, fizzy liquid.
John uncorks the bottle and sniffs. The liquid smells of berries and lavender and vaguely like expensive champagne. His mouth waters as he contemplates how rich it will taste, how the flavour of ripe, fermented berries and rich herbs will burst on his tongue.
He raises the bottle to his lips, but the volume of the music increases, distracting him. The dancers flocks back towards them, Sherlock leading like some barefoot, bare-chested Pied Piper. Except, in this case, it would be a Pied Violinist, with—John squints as he realizes—a purple violin. Where in hell did Sherlock get a violin the exact same bruised-purple shade as that damned shirt he wears all the time?
“Where are we?” he asks and hands the bottle back to Tom, wine untasted.
The old man uncorks it and takes a big swig. He wipes his mouth with the back of his hand as he settles the bottle back between his knees. “What does it look like?”
John grins. “It looks like a fairy tale,” he says as he watches the—the…
Once again, his mind stutters around a good word the people dancing around Sherlock. They all look human though there’s just something about some of them…something not quite human. Which is as ridiculously daft as the idea of being in a fairy tale. Though the scene really could be a fairy tale setting right out of a film. Except there aren’t any winged creatures flitting about. Unless…
John tilts his head as if it’ll bring things into sharper focus. The figures dancing around Sherlock are all different sizes and shapes and races. All clothed in loose, fluttering clothing. The women and a couple of the men have loose, flowing hair—golden blond and chestnut brown and red the copper of a new penny. They’re all varying degrees of beautiful. Or ugly, in the case of one small, lanky lad with eyes too big for his face and hair so black it’s almost blue sticking straight out all over his head. And a woman John’s age who’s so skinny her bones stand out beneath her skin.
It’s not the way they looks that makes them strange, though, John realizes as they twirl around Sherlock. It’s the way they move that differentiates the people from the…not-people. The ones who don’t appear human, including the lanky boy, move like flowing water, like dandelion fluff in a breeze. The otherworldly ones dance as if their feet barely touch the ground.
A young woman wearing a dress that looks as if it’s made of gossamer and leaves walks past carrying a tray of cakes. The smell is better than any baked thing John has ever smelled and reminds him that he ate only a light breakfast before spending the whole morning traipsing over half of London in Sherlock’s wake.
He shifts as the woman passes, lifting his nose to sniff the sweetness of the air trailing behind her. She laughs, low and musical, and turns, holding the tray out to him. It’s filled with cakes and biscuits of all shapes and sizes—long fingers of sponge filled with cream; diamond cakes filled with a jelly so dark and rich it looks like blood; square cakes so coarse they look like American cornbread drizzled with golden honey; crescents that look like they’re iced with pastel diamonds; biscuits brimming with melted chocolate morsels; pieces of fruit dusted with sparkling sugar.
John wonders if it would be considered rude to sample one of each, but then Sherlock laughs. The sound is deep, as golden as the honey on the cakes, and so merry it’s like a living thing has been loosed into the sky. Not like any laugh John has ever heard Sherlock utter. There’s no undertone of derision or sarcasm, none of the despairing mockery that normally interlaces Sherlock’s extraordinary voice.
Cakes forgotten, John looks to see why Sherlock’s laughing like that. Who or what’s created it. But there doesn’t seem to be any reason for it other than just being at the centre of a group of twirling human and maybe non-human dancers, for making music so beautiful it makes the air around them shimmer and glow.
“Are we…? Is this a fairy tale?” John asks, aware of how ridiculous it sounds. But he’s also aware that he’s already said it once, and Tom hasn’t denied it.
If it sounds daft to the old man, he doesn’t show it. He simply shrugs. “Not—” His voice is tight and rusty again, and he stops to uncork his rude bottle, to sip from it. “Not if you mean like the things your mum used to read you when you was a young’un.”
John peers at him sharply. But it’s hardly mind-reading for Tom to think that John’s mother would have read him fairy tales. Though he’s right. John’s mother did read fairy tales to Harry and him. More to Harry than him, in an attempt to interest her in things their mother considered more appropriate for girls, frilly dresses and flowers and such. Harry had been, even back then, more interested things considered boyish, cars and dinosaurs and playing in the fields, than in dolls and clothes.
“How should I mean it then?” John asks.
“This ain’t like fairy, f-a-i-r-y, like in a story for kiddies. This is F-a-e-r-i-e. As in the Fae.”
“You mean like in that book…” John searches for the title. He never studied it himself, but he did attend a couple of seminars while he was at uni. Not that he was interested in fairies. Or Faeries. But a girl in whom he was interested had been, hence several hours spent pretending to pay rapt attention while some professor droned on about Celtic mythology and old beliefs and— The name pops into his mind. “Fairy Faith in Celtic Countries! Like in that book?”
Tom shrugs as if to say he has no idea what book John’s talking about. “Ain’t no book can really tell you about the Fae. You have to be here.”
“But that’s…” This time, John searches for the right way to say what he’s thinking without sounding insulting. “The Fae. Travelling to a fairy land. That’s all…a myth. Folklore. Isn’t it? No matter how you spell it.”
“Fae ain’t no folklore, boy.” The old man takes a long drink from his bottle, and this time, instead of tucking it between his knees, he plunks it down on the ground. “Faerie is real. Faerie gets in your blood. Faerie changes you.”
John leans forward, sure the bottle will topple right over.
Tom gives it a twist so that it sinks a bit into the soft earth and remains standing.
John grins. So that’s how it works!
Tom leans towards him and pins him with eyes so blue they’re almost white. “Use the eyes in your head to see what’s before you.”
It’s so near to Sherlock’s constant chiding to ‘observe’ that John can’t help but grin at the old man. And turn back to do what he’s been told to do. Observe.
A group of the dancers around Sherlock break away to leap and dance their way towards a smaller group of young women who’re walking across the glade. They gather near the hawthorn bush he’d noticed earlier, the one lit with fairy lights. As John watches, they clap their hands. The pinpoints of flickering light that John thought were electric (though now that he thinks about it, where would the power come from?) rise up from the bush in a swarm and flutter away. The women laugh and call out, their voices high-pitched and singsong-y, and the cloud of lights flows back into the bush. Settles and twinkles like stars set against a deep green sky.
John sighs at the beauty of it. The magic. Everything here, whether he believes it’s Faerie or not, is magical. So exquisite it makes his heart ache. So soothing it makes him want to go out into the sunlight and lie down on his back, spread his arms in the cool grass, and fall asleep to the music of Sherlock’s violin.
Maybe he’ll dream. Of music and Sherlock’s pale skin gleaming in the sunlight. Of the fairy stories of his youth. He can’t recall much of what his mother read to him and Harry. And not a lot from the seminars either. He remembers how bored he’d been. How smooth his girlfriend’s skin had been and the odd, squeaky sound she had made when she had an orgasm. But only some of the things he’d learned.
He sits up straighter and shakes away the lethargy that’s trying to settle into his bones. His smile fades as he recalls the sonorous voice of the professor, the notes his girlfriend had been scribbling… Fairies, or Fae, are tricksters. They never lie, but they don’t always say exactly what they mean either. And now that he’s thinking about it, there was something about how you’re not supposed to accept a gift of salt or eat or drink if you’re unlucky enough to find yourself in a fairy place. Or was the salt something different, from a different seminar? Something about welcoming a guest into your home? And what happens if you eat or drink? Was it something about not being able to go home? Or about having to perform some service before you could go home?
He frowns. He doesn’t remember. But it doesn’t matter. A fairy/faerie tale may have come to life before his eyes, but they—he and Sherlock—aren’t where they’re supposed to be. He’s been lulled by the warmth and magic, distracted by beauty, by Sherlock’s music, by wondering where he is, when he should have been thinking about how to get home.
“Can we go back?” he asks Tom. “Can we go home?”
The old man yawns and shrugs. “Depends.”
“On what?”
Tom shrugs again and stares off into the distance. When he speaks, John has the feeling that what he’s saying is more about himself than about John and Sherlock. “You can mebbe go back. But you won’t be the same.”
“You Can’t Go Home Again,” John says softly.
“What?”
John smiles. “Another book.” He nods to Tom as he puts his hands on his knees and pushes himself up.
Sherlock ends his song with a flourish and starts away from his flock of dancers. They protest, begging for more songs, and one of the young women catches his arm and tries to draw him back, but he smiles and breaks away.
A young man with a flute takes up where he left off as Sherlock walks towards John. “John!” he says.
For a moment, John’s so lost in the merry welcome in Sherlock’s voice, the depth of colour in his eyes, that he forgets where he is, what he was thinking. “You look like you’re having a good time,” he says, smiling.
Sherlock smiles, too, sweet and intimate. “I’ve never played in a forest before. I didn’t realize the acoustics would be so perfect.”
“Where’d you find your back-up dancers?”
Sherlock’s gaze wanders back to the dancers who are now fluttering around the flute player as if they’ve already forgotten him. A woman with a tambourine has joined in. The tune is similar to the one Sherlock was playing on his violin, but…different somehow. Less pleasing to John’s ear, but then, despite the reservations he’d had when he’d decided to move into 221B, he’s grown quite partial to Sherlock’s playing.
Sherlock shrugs. “They were just…here. Like magic.”
Which reminds John of why he stood up in the first place. “Sherlock, where are we?” He waves his hand to indicate the old man sitting nearby. “Tom says we’re in Faerie, f-a-e-r-i-e, but that’s just crazy.”
Sherlock gifts him with one of his everybody’s-an-idiot-you-included expressions, but it’s softened by the relaxation around his eyes and the fondness in his smile. “Honestly, John,” he says lightly. “Look around you. What do you see?”
“Trees, a brook, and dancing people dressed like they’re on a film set,” John says promptly. “Including you.” He eyes Sherlock up and down. Despite Sherlock’s penchant for lounging around their flat wearing only a sheet, John’s seeing more flesh than he’s seen since the last time Sherlock injured himself while chasing a suspect along the Thames and John had to patch up his cuts and bruises.
Sherlock’s the picture of health, now, though. Up close, his pale, flawless skin gleams with a dewy sheen of sweat. The shimmering sunlight sparkles off the fine coppery hair on his chest, on the thicker arrow of hair trailing down his abdomen and disappearing behind the half-open zip of his trousers.
John forces himself to look away from Sherlock’s torso, tilting his head further back so he can see Sherlock’s face more easily. So he won’t be tempted to ogle his friend’s belly. He grins. “Are you wearing pants?”
Sherlock grins back and lifts a shoulder.
And they laugh at each other, chortling like school boys, the way they did that day in Buckingham Palace.
Then John sobers. “So where are we, really?”
Behind them, Tom harrumphs as if he’s disgusted.
“Faerie,” Sherlock says simply,
In spite of all he can see, John says, “That’s not possible. That’s mythology.”
“And yet…” Sherlock drawls, scribing a circle in the shimmering air with his bow to indicate their surroundings.
John sighs. He can’t deny the evidence. And he can’t come up with a better explanation. He could be dreaming. He could be hallucinating. He could be drugged. But in all those cases, nothing he does will matter. He’ll wake up.
But that thought saddens him. The idea of discovering that Sherlock’s beautiful, ethereal music, Sherlock’s beautiful, otherworldly laughter, is only a dream, doomed to be shrouded in mist of waking is depressing. He realizes he’d rather be in Faerie than discover this is all a dream. He likes Sherlock smiling and relaxed and making otherworldly music that shines like glitter in the air.
Sherlock smiles into his eyes as if he can read John’s mind.
And John smiles back. Still…there is that whole, trapped forever in a fairy/faerie paradise thing that all the stories warn about. “Well, okay. If you accept that we’ve somehow come through a brick wall into Faerie, then you also have to accept that, if we’re going to leave, we need to go now.”
Sherlock looks around. Back at the circle of dancers. “Why?”
“Because if you assume that we’re in Faerie—and not in some dream or drug hallucination—you also have to accept the rules of Faerie. And from what I remember, if we eat or drink anything, we’ll be trapped here.”
The expression that flits over Sherlock’s face tells John that he knows the myths to which John is referring. But then he looks back at the circle of dancers with longing. “Would that be a bad thing?”
John’s breath catches behind his breastbone. “Are you saying you want to stay?”
Sherlock doesn’t answer. Instead he asks, “How long do you suppose we can stay without being trapped?”
John can’t answer that. “I don’t know that we’re not trapped now. But if we want to go home, I think we have to try soon.”
Sherlock nods. But he says, “Do we want to go home? Do you?”
“I—” John can’t answer that either. He thinks he should want to go home. And he’s a bit unnerved because he doesn’t feel more of a compulsion to find their way out of this gleaming world of faeries and honey-soaked wine and real faerie cakes (not fairy cakes) and wine bottles shaped like genitals. A world in which Sherlock seems to fit as if he was born to it, way better than he fits into the other one.
John laughs aloud at the thought. That would explain a lot, wouldn’t it, if Sherlock was a faerie changeling?
Sherlock peers at him. “What?”
“I was just thinking that if you were a faerie changeling, that would explain a lot.”
Sherlock draws himself up tall, though with him barefoot and John still wearing his shoes, the height difference isn’t quite as great. He gifts John with a peevish, affronted expression. “Explain what? And I think I would know if I was Fae.”
John laughs again. “Yeah, but wouldn’t Mycroft throw a wobbler if it was true?”
Sherlock laughs, but there’s still no derision in it, not even at the mention of Mycroft.
It’s difficult, with Sherlock so light-hearted, to concentrate on the more serious side of their conversation. To contemplate going back. Going home. But it is home. And this isn’t, no matter how much it shimmers and glows. “I think—” John swallows, finding the words more difficult to say than they should be. “I think we should head back.”
He looks to make sure the path is still visible. The pile of shoes and the rectangle of shadow is where he expects it to be. He takes a step towards it.
But Sherlock doesn’t move with him, and that makes him really nervous. “Sherlock, we have to go. Don’t we?”
Sherlock nods again, agreeing, but he points with his bow towards the musical circle. “One more song.” And he turns back towards the musical circle.
As he walks away, John remembers something else he’d read or been taught about the Fae. And faerie music. About how a mortal could be so captivated they danced until they were exhausted. Could be lured by faerie music, drawn into the faerie world by it.
“Sherlock!” he calls and chases after him. “We’d better go now.”
But Sherlock has already tucked the purple violin under his chin, already laid the bow across strings as blue as his scarf. As he steps into the circle of people around the flute player, he takes up the tune of the song being played.
John’s steps slow as the notes soar into the air, into the earth. There’s a flare, a burst of glistening light, as if the music Sherlock creates with the violin makes the sky bluer, the grass greener, the air clearer. The notes ripple across John’s skin. He’s tempted to take off his shoes and socks, his jumper. To stand barefoot in the grass, bare-chested in the sunlight, so he can feel the music spiral down and soak into his body like warm light pouring through his skin. So he can feel it echo up into his bare soles from the ground and vibrate through his bones.
The dancers around Sherlock whoop and whirl into fiercer movement. They sprawl out in a lazy, messy line and gambol towards a grassy mound John hasn’t noticed before. A beautiful woman with hair so nearly silver that the shining waves look like water spilling down her back catches John’s hand and pirouettes him into the weaving, spinning dance. He laughs and allows himself to be swept up in the music and the press of swaying bodies. He can feel Sherlock’s gaze on him as he brushes past. He’s charmed by the approbation and joy in Sherlock’s smile.
Sherlock lifts his elbow higher and sends a shower of notes up into the sky. They cascade back down like stars falling from the sky, skittering across John’s skin like fiery coals. Even he, with his less than musical ear, can tell that Sherlock is crafting sounds that no ordinary man, no ordinary instrument, should be able to create.
“That’s amazing,” John calls to him over the whirl of music.
Sherlock twists, gaze following John, without missing a beat. His grin is radiant, nearly manic. His face is flushed, beads of glistening sweat standing out on his forehead.
As John sweeps past Sherlock a third or fourth time—maybe the seventh, he’s lost count—he sees the underside of the purple violin. The wood is smooth, shiny, glistening like everything else in this place. And it has a button on it! The end button doesn’t look like a wooden peg, as on Sherlock’s violin in their flat. It looks like a shirt button with blue tail gut wrapped around it.
He twists, taking himself out of the sinuous line of dancers, grown to 20 or more strong now. He whirls to a stop near Sherlock’s upraised elbow and braces his hands on his knees as he gasps, trying to get his breath back.
He ducks, trying to get a better look at the violin, and almost gets an elbow to the temple as Sherlock swings around. John stays with him, resting his fingers on Sherlock’s hip to steady himself, to match the swaying tempo of Sherlock’s movement. On the side of the violin, the curl of the violin’s beak looks weirdly like a shirt cuff.
“Sherlock…” he whispers, his voice a disbelieving rasp. “We have to go now.”
As if John’s flipped a switch, Sherlock stops playing. He ignores the cries of protest from the crowd. “John? What’s wrong?”
John holds out his hand for the violin. He expects an argument, more questions, but Sherlock passes it to him easily, without protest.
John takes the violin gently by the neck and turns it. The end button is literally a button. A dark, suspiciously familiar button. He turns the violin on its side. Instead of the normal elegant but plain swirl of polished maple, the tip of beak is shaped like a rolled shirt cuff. And it has another button on it.
John catches the cuff-shaped edge between his finger and thumb and gives a gentle tug. The violin softens as if its dissolving and melts into John’s hand. His mouth falls open. He squeezes his eyes shut, then opens them to find himself standing on the edge of a faerie mound, in the glittering sunlight, holding Sherlock’s purple shirt and his blue scarf in his hand. Sherlock is standing beside him, bow gone, with his belt in his hand. The buckle gleams in the sunlight.
John looks up at Sherlock, shocked and a bit horrified. Sherlock looks a bit shocked, too, but then a blinding grin breaks out on his face. He’s delighted, as if he thinks John’s discovered something truly wonderful.
After a moment, John thrust the shirt towards Sherlock. But he holds tight to the scarf, clutching it to his chest. The scarf brought them here. So maybe whatever magic created the blue-stringed violin can’t be re-wrought without it. Maybe without the violin, without the promise of faery music, Sherlock will be content to leave with him. “We have to go,” he says quietly.
Sherlock nods. But he doesn’t take the shirt.
All around them, the dancing comes to a halt. The music trails off, leaving only the chirp of birds and the flutter of leaves high in the trees.
A ring of protests break out. “No!” different voices cry in various tones and languages, all recognizable for what they are—French, something Gaelic, a Russian dialect—yet surprisingly John understands the words of each as easily as he understands the pleas in English. “Don’t go!” “Play another tune for us.” “We want to dance.” “Stay!”
Sherlock gives them a moue of apology. “Thank you, but we must go,” he demurs and gives a bow as strangely formal as his choice of words.
John holds his breath, because one of the things he remembers from his mother’s readings was that you should never thank a fairy for anything. But no one seems to mind. No one turns into a red-eyed demon with fangs. No one reaches for Sherlock with scaled fingers tipped with talons.
The young woman who was carrying the tray of cakes murmurs, “But you can’t go!” She has a cap of blond curls the colour of corn silk and eyes nearly as bluegreen as Sherlock’s, and a voice that’s the feminine equivalent of Sherlock’s. It lowers to a husky promise. “Not without a kiss!”
John catches his breath as, improbably, Sherlock smiles at her as if he’s charmed by the idea.
Cont’d in Pt. 2
