Fic for ellipsical: To a British Soldier
Dec. 10th, 2016 10:00 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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holmesticeTitle: To a British Soldier
Recipient:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
ellipsical
Author: Emily Nicaoidh (apismel1fera.tumblr.com; emily_nicaoidh on ao3)
Verse: BBC Sherlock
Characters/Pairings: Sherlock Holmes/John Watson
Rating: T+ (for mild gore)
Warnings: mild gore
Summary: Deployed in Afghanistan, in the winter of 2016 John Watson receives a christmas card written by a child addressed "to a British Soldier."
The letter was sent in 1992.
“Captain Watson! Letter for you, sir!” The hand that John extended, palm up, shook with exhaustion. After five surgeries in as many hours he was dead on his feet, and he prayed that the triage line had not grown after the last round of shelling that had just rocked the field hospital.
“What is it?” Tired as he was, John was mildly curious. There was nobody back home who was likely to write to him--his parents were long dead, no close cousins, and Harry--well. Harry probably was too drunk to know what month it was, let alone what day.
Christmas Eve. It had always been John’s favourite part of Christmas: cookies and mulled wine around a roaring fire, the piney scent from the tree filling the room, twinkling fairy lights circling round the tree and mantlepiece.
It was nothing like that in Afghanistan. There was dust, blood, and for good measure, chunks of mixed dust and congealed blood that dried cement-like onto his boots, uniform, and any tools he couldn’t get sterilised fast enough.
He wiped a grimy hand on his jacket, then turned the envelope over to read the front.
To a British Soldier was scrawled in sullen, messy handwriting, and the bit of anxiety that had started to grow in his stomach lessened. Okay. It wasn’t somehow bad news about Harry, then. Good. Good.
He tore a corner off the envelope and edged his thumb along it, keeping most of the envelope intact so that he could slide the card back in later to protect it.
When he saw the card, he was glad that he had: the picture on the front was exactly the sort of classic British Christmas that he was missing. A country estate house, complete with trimmed hedges and decorated pines, nestled amid a comfortable drift of snow. The photo looked professionally done, but when he opened the card he saw that it was more personal than that.
“Dear Sir,” the card read, and the writing inside was recognizably from the same hand as the person who had addressed the card, but while the address had been hastily scrawled, this was careful and precise. He read on.
“We’re supposed to write a Christmas card to a British soldier for school. They gave us cards at school but they are the most inane thing you can imagine, and I don’t think you would want that. This is a picture of my house from last Christmas eve that Mummy had printed on cards for this year. We didn’t get this much snow this year, but you get the general idea. Cosy, festive, et cetera. That is Latin for ‘and so forth’ if you didn’t know.
I don’t know what else to put here. I was going to tell you about my experiments but Mummy said not to be morbid, that you probably saw lots of dead things there and didn’t want to hear about the rate of decay of a pigeon that I found in the woods behind the house the other day. But if you want to hear about it you can write me back and ask.
I wish you,
Very sincerely a
Happy Christmas,
Sherlock Holmes”
John stifled a giggle, then flipped the card over to look at the address: somewhere in Sussex. Write me back and ask indeed, he thought. He might actually do that.
As he held the envelope open to slide the card back into it for safekeeping, he saw for the first time the date on the postmark of the card: December 5th, 1992. What?
“Cap! We’ve got people waiting!” John signed, tucked the card into an inside pocket of his coat, and went back to work.
--
Getting shot changed everything, except that it changed nothing. Instead of looking down into the eyes of a terrified and bleeding soldier while he fished bullets out of them as gently as he could, John was looking up into the terrified eyes of another unit’s surgeon while blood dripped from a shallow cut on the woman’s forehead as she tried to remove shrapnel from his shoulder as gently as she could.
At some point he realized he was about to pass out, and his last thought was a wave of gratitude for the impending unconsciousness.
--
He didn’t remember the field hospital, or the first surgery. He was briefly conscious in Germany, only long enough to register that the actors speaking in the show playing softly on the TV in his room were speaking in German; almost the moment the thought registered, he was gone again.
--
In England, after the third surgery, he finally woke and stayed awake. The hospital released him sooner than he’d hoped, and then he had too much time and too little money and no idea how to fix that.
He started taking long walks, initially only because the physiotherapist said that it might be good for his limp, but he continued because he was starting to like it. He had a routine: Hyde Park in the morning, Regent’s Park in the late afternoon. He got to know where to expect the swans, and after that started paying more attention to the woods around him and walking more quietly. He was able to see a trio of hedgehogs one morning, and one evening, after sitting very still on a bench that was somewhat off the main paths, he got a glimpse of a fox.
It wasn’t a bad way to spend his first days out of the hospital, and he had time to think.
At first he tried not to think about Afghanistan, but of course that was impossible. Those memories rose to the surface constantly, at once blistering hot and bone-shatteringly cold. He heard cannon fire in car horns and the screams of his injured mates in children’s playground yells.
He wasn’t sure how he had managed to hold onto the card through three surgeries and transport from Afghanistan to Germany to England, but he had it still. He carried it in his jacket pocket every day and propped it up on his bedside table every evening. The edges were starting to get worn, and there were little tears in the sides of the envelope from him taking the card out to look at the picture so many times.
The first days out of the hospital turned into first months, and his limp improved incrementally.
He didn’t open the card as often anymore; he mostly knew the words by heart and usually what he really wanted was to look at the house. To imagine the warm hearthfires that must be inside, and the wide sofas and deep armchairs with soft cushions.
More than anything else, the picture on the card became home for him, and he sometimes wondered if the boy who had written it, who must surely be grown up by now, still lived at the manor house. Or still lived in England at all.
He became more familiar with the less-popular, narrower, back paths of the parks that were more protected from the city noises and found himself spending more and more time sitting in stillness on a bench or patch of grass, watching the brush, waiting to see an elusive stoat or hedgehog or fox. He started seeing them more and more often, and then he wondered if they were showing themselves because they were getting used to him, or if they had been there all along.
One evening, after the sun had mostly set, John rose from his spot on the grass, brushed a few early-winter leaves off his knees, and started towards the main path to the Regent’s Park gate. They were closing it earlier and earlier now that the days were getting shorter again, and he didn’t fancy getting locked in. One night near midsummer he had stayed until well after sunset and found the gates locked. Somehow, infected with the bright moon and the strength of the solstice, he had managed to scramble over the hedgerow wall, but he didn’t fancy trying it again in the late fall with a leg that seemed to only be getting dodgier.
He was about to slide the card back into his jacket pocket when he heard a familiar voice.
“John? John Watson?”
He turned slowly, stiffly, and faced Mike Stamford, whom he hadn’t seen since their graduation from Bart’s.
“Mike, hi,” John said.
“Heard you’ve been away, in Afghanistan getting shot at,” Mike said. “What happened?”
“I got shot.” John swallowed. He wasn’t sure he liked where this was going.
“What’s that?” Mike pointed at the card.
“Oh, this silly thing? It’s really nothing,” John said, not sure why he was embarrassed by it. “I got this Christmas card last year. Christmas Eve it came in, if you can believe that. Written by some school kid, probably because their teacher made them. But I liked the picture, and there was something funny about the date. I just sort of held onto it.” He fell silent, and when Mike didn’t reply, he began to feel a little odd. Unsure what to do next, he decided to show Mike the card.
He offered the card to Mike, though he was uncomfortable the entire time it was out of his hand.
Mike inspected the picture, and nodded. “That must have been nice to see, all the way out there in the desert.”
“It was, it was really great,” John said with relief, accepting the card back.
“What was funny about the date?” Mike asked.
“The postmark is from 1992,” John said. “I figure it must have gotten lost? Sat in a mailroom for years, and then somehow delivered to my unit.”
“Can I see it?” Mike asked.
John didn’t want to, but he couldn’t think of any good reason to refuse to hand him the envelope when he had already let him handle the card.
He handed it over.
“Ha!” Mike chuffed. “You aren’t going to believe this, but I know him!”
“What?”
“Sherlock Holmes, of Sussex Downs, I know him,” Mike repeated.
“Are you serious?” John was very cold, and held out his hand for the envelope. Mike returned it and John carefully slipped the card back inside, then stowed both in the inner pocket of his jacket.
“Oh, it gets weirder. I’m actually on my way to see him now. Come on, come with me!” Mike insisted, clapping John on the wrong shoulder.
John crumpled with a shout of pain, barely managing to keep his feet with the aid of his cane.
“Sorry, sorry!” Mike said hastily. “But really, you should come meet him!”
“What? Are you serious? I can’t go like this,” John protested.
Mike laughed. “Like what?”
“Like...I don’t know, wearing old clothes and and I’ve probably got grass stains on these jeans, and mud on my shoes, and I don’t know what else,” John said.
“Oh, he’ll love that,” Mike promised. “He loves that kind of stuff. He’ll tell you your whole life history from looking at the pattern of wear on your shoes, or something. Drives most people crazy.”
John digested that thought for a moment, then nodded.
“Right. I’ll go.”
--
John supposed that he should have asked Mike where he was heading to meet Sherlock Holmes of Sussex Downs, but by the time it became apparent that their destination was a morgue, he felt it was too late to back out.
It wasn’t the morgue: he had spent plenty of time in medical school working on dissections late at night, a scalpel in one hand and a sandwich in the other. Had spend plenty of time in this specific morgue, to be exact.
“Good old Bart’s,” John murmured as they passed through the doorway, patting the weathered stone.
“He’s always around here, making a nuisance of himself,” Mike said. “Begging body parts off the medical examiner, stealing my time on the liquid chromatograph. He’s a terror.”
“He sounds nice,” John said absently, straightening his spine as they approached the morgue doors.
“Who sounds nice?” The owner of the rich baritone voice sounded deeply mistrustful.
“You do,” Mike said with a chuckle. “Sherlock, meet John Watson. Old friend from Bart’s days.”
“How do you do,” John nodded, turning around to face him.
The man’s’--no, Sherlock’s, THE Sherlock’s eyes scanned him. John wasn’t sure what he was looking for, and wished that he would glance away for a minute so John could get a better look at him without Sherlock seeing, because from what he saw so far--well, it was bloody unfair how beautiful he was.
“Afghanistan or Iraq?”
“Uh--sorry?”
“Your hands are tan, but you’ve no tan lines above your wrists, I can see just there where your coat sleeve is pushed up a bit. So you’ve gotten some sun but not sunbathing. Abroad for work, then. The way you hold yourself says military and your limp, which is almost certainly psychosomatic clearly says recently injured under traumatic circumstances. So: military, been abroad recently, and injured. That leaves Afghanistan or Iraq.” Sherlock’s words rushed out in a torrent, threatening to pull John under.
“I--Afghanistan,” John replied.
Sherlock’s eyes glowed, and he focused on John’s cane. “You already knew your limp is psychosomatic, that’s why you forget about it when you’re standing up and hold your cane so loosely...hang on.” He trailed off. “What’s that?”
“What’s what?” John asked.
“What’s that you’ve got?” Sherlock replied.
“I haven’t got anything,“ John said, feeling his palms start to get warm. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Yes you have,” Sherlock insisted. “You’ve got something and I can’t figure out what it is. What have you got in your pockets?”
“I--” John didn’t see any way out of this, but he desperately did not want to show Sherlock the card. Any chance (and he doubted he had any chance at all, but hope springs irrational and eternal) he had with Sherlock would surely be destroyed as soon as the man found out that he carried around a card he had written as a child every day. There would be no recovery from that.
He looked at Mike for help, only to see a student hurrying down the hall towards the three of them hollering “Dr. Stamford! Dr. Stamford!”
“Dr. Stamford! You weren’t at your office hours and I have a question and I saw you in the hall so can I ask about next week’s test?” The student somehow managed to expel this thought in a single breath despite having just run the entire length of the corridor.
Mike checked his watch.
“Oh, sorry, Ryan. I’m late for office hours...Sherlock, we’ll have to discuss those pathology results another time,” Mike said, turning to walk with the student back to his office.
As soon as Ryan’s back was to John and Sherlock, Mike turned around and threw a grimace at John over his shoulder. John shook his head.
“Do you...do you want to go for a cuppa?” John asked, when the sounds of Mike’s footsteps had faded.
Sherlock’s laser-focused attention settled again on John. “I will if you’ll show it to me,” he said.
“I can’t promise that,” John said, his throat dry. “I don’t...it’s not...”
“Fine,” Sherlock agreed. “Speedy’s cafe on Baker Street, tomorrow at seven.” He turned on his heel and stomped off, making considerably more noise than Mike and Ryan had.
John watched him go, then stood in the hallway for longer than he probably should have, thinking.
That night his leg was stiffer than usual as he gingerly lowered himself into bed, and he hesitated before pulling the card from its envelope and propping it up on his bedside table. With the things Sherlock had somehow known about him, it was probably too late to hide this last, embarrassing revelation from him anyway, so John figured he might as well enjoy the comfort this habit gave him as long as he could.
Because the more he thought over their conversation, the more convinced he was becoming that Sherlock thought he was extremely creepy at best and a dangerous stalker at worst. Lying in bed, the curtains drawn against the streetlight outside his window, John was able to admit to himself what he feared most about tomorrow: that Sherlock would demand the card’s return.
Calling him a stalker, (which he knew he was not, but could admit that it might look that way to someone else) or maudlin (he would readily admit to that), or even calling him to call off their---what was it? A date? John wasn’t sure of that--were nothing compared to how much it would hurt to lose the card.
The card, which had been there for him through three surgeries on three continents and five months of loneliness in London--that was a loss he didn’t know if he had the strength to face.
--
John tried to be early to meet Sherlock, but the tube was delayed for maintenance and he ended up being thirty minutes late. He stumbled across the threshold of the cafe without really looking around, and was surprised when a gloved hand caught him by the arm to steady him from falling.
“Why won’t you show it to me?” Sherlock asked, releasing John’s elbow as soon as he was back on his feet.
“Can we not do this until after I’ve had my tea?” John asked wearily.
“I’ve already got us both tea, yours is just with milk how you like it, over here,” Sherlock replied, steering John towards a table beside a heater.
John sank into the seat with a grimace at the pain shooting up his leg and leaned his cane against the back of his chair.
“Do I even want to know how you know how I like my tea?”
“Probably not,” Sherlock answered absently, his attention focused on the pocket of John’s jacket where he knew the letter would be. “Anyway. The letter.”
“It’s--it’s nothing,” John insisted. “Just a letter I got while I was over there.”
Sherlock’s eyes narrowed.
“A letter you got while you were over there. Who from? Your wife? No, you don’t have one. No ring. Girlfriend or fiancée then? Possibly, but you spent the day sitting on a hill in Regent’s Park, unlikely you have a girlfriend or you’d be doing something better with one of the last warm Saturdays of the year. Family? You’re clearly not close with them because you have traces of Scots in your accent yet you live here, in London, alone.”
“How--”
“Speck of shaving cream below your left ear, classic giveaway that you live alone,” Sherlock replied impatiently. “Who. Is. The Letter. From.”
There was no way out.
“Well, you, actually,” John said without looking at Sherlock. Mechanically he pulled it from his pocket and handed it over.
“That’s not possible,” Sherlock breathed, recognizing it instantly. “I sent that as a child.”
“And I received it eleven months ago in Afghanistan,” John said. “It’s not what it looks like, I wasn’t stalking you. I just ran into Mike in the park and I was holding it because--well, I always liked looking at it, the house, with the hedges and the snow and everything--and Mike asked to see it and I didn’t want to show him because it’s a bit off, innit, carrying around a letter from a stranger written fourteen years ago, but I couldn’t think of a good excuse not to show him and I did and then he said he knew you and was going to meet you and practically dragged me here,” John finished.
Sherlock looked from the letter in his hand to John’s miserable expression, smiling somewhat as he touched the words he had written fourteen years earlier, and privately made a decision.
John, privy to none of this, shifted his weight, leaned to his right a bit more. His dodgy leg was beginning to get sore even though he was sitting.
“Come home with me,” Sherlock blurted out.
“What?”
“There,” Sherlock said, waving the card around. John was startled to realize that he still had it--normally if the card was away from him for so long he began to feel anxious, but he was surprised to realize that it didn’t bother him at all that Sherlock was still holding the card. “It’s Christmas next week, I’m going. Come with me.”
“I don’t want to intrude,” John said, unease creeping into his voice. “We don’t really know each other.”
“After I wrote that letter I couldn’t stop thinking about the soldier who might get it,” Sherlock said, ignoring John’s words entirely. “I would make up stories in my head where I would somehow meet him, what he would be like, look like.” He paused, and something in his expression had become vulnerable, almost shy.
“What kind of stories?” John asked.
“Crime stories. I knew I wanted to be a detective from the beginning. I would need a partner, and you were always with me on stakeouts, listening while I talked through the evidence...” Sherlock shook his head. “It probably sounds creepy.”
Something warm began to blossom in John’s chest.
“I thought about you too,” John admitted. “I wondered if you still lived in England, what you had grown up to be like. If your house was as warm and cosy on the inside as it looked from the picture.”
“Warmer, if you can imagine, quilts and afghans everywhere,” Sherlock promised. “Say you’ll come home with me, please.”
“I wouldn’t be, I don’t know, a bother, at your family Christmas?”
“It’s just Mummy and Mycroft and Graham and me,” Sherlock said, “and she’s been after me for ages to...oh. Oh. I--sorry.” He looked away.
When John’s brain caught up to Sherlock’s words, he pushed his chair back, causing his cane to clatter to the floor. He ignored it in favor of bracing himself against the side of the table, and carefully made his way around to Sherlock’s side. Taking a deep breath, he caught Sherlock’s hand, which was still holding the card, between both of his.
“Hey. I would be honored,” he said, and leaned down to place a whisper of a kiss on Sherlock’s cheek. “Merry Christmas, Sherlock Holmes.”
Recipient:
ellipsical Author: Emily Nicaoidh (apismel1fera.tumblr.com; emily_nicaoidh on ao3)
Verse: BBC Sherlock
Characters/Pairings: Sherlock Holmes/John Watson
Rating: T+ (for mild gore)
Warnings: mild gore
Summary: Deployed in Afghanistan, in the winter of 2016 John Watson receives a christmas card written by a child addressed "to a British Soldier."
The letter was sent in 1992.
“Captain Watson! Letter for you, sir!” The hand that John extended, palm up, shook with exhaustion. After five surgeries in as many hours he was dead on his feet, and he prayed that the triage line had not grown after the last round of shelling that had just rocked the field hospital.
“What is it?” Tired as he was, John was mildly curious. There was nobody back home who was likely to write to him--his parents were long dead, no close cousins, and Harry--well. Harry probably was too drunk to know what month it was, let alone what day.
Christmas Eve. It had always been John’s favourite part of Christmas: cookies and mulled wine around a roaring fire, the piney scent from the tree filling the room, twinkling fairy lights circling round the tree and mantlepiece.
It was nothing like that in Afghanistan. There was dust, blood, and for good measure, chunks of mixed dust and congealed blood that dried cement-like onto his boots, uniform, and any tools he couldn’t get sterilised fast enough.
He wiped a grimy hand on his jacket, then turned the envelope over to read the front.
To a British Soldier was scrawled in sullen, messy handwriting, and the bit of anxiety that had started to grow in his stomach lessened. Okay. It wasn’t somehow bad news about Harry, then. Good. Good.
He tore a corner off the envelope and edged his thumb along it, keeping most of the envelope intact so that he could slide the card back in later to protect it.
When he saw the card, he was glad that he had: the picture on the front was exactly the sort of classic British Christmas that he was missing. A country estate house, complete with trimmed hedges and decorated pines, nestled amid a comfortable drift of snow. The photo looked professionally done, but when he opened the card he saw that it was more personal than that.
“Dear Sir,” the card read, and the writing inside was recognizably from the same hand as the person who had addressed the card, but while the address had been hastily scrawled, this was careful and precise. He read on.
“We’re supposed to write a Christmas card to a British soldier for school. They gave us cards at school but they are the most inane thing you can imagine, and I don’t think you would want that. This is a picture of my house from last Christmas eve that Mummy had printed on cards for this year. We didn’t get this much snow this year, but you get the general idea. Cosy, festive, et cetera. That is Latin for ‘and so forth’ if you didn’t know.
I don’t know what else to put here. I was going to tell you about my experiments but Mummy said not to be morbid, that you probably saw lots of dead things there and didn’t want to hear about the rate of decay of a pigeon that I found in the woods behind the house the other day. But if you want to hear about it you can write me back and ask.
I wish you,
Very sincerely a
Happy Christmas,
Sherlock Holmes”
John stifled a giggle, then flipped the card over to look at the address: somewhere in Sussex. Write me back and ask indeed, he thought. He might actually do that.
As he held the envelope open to slide the card back into it for safekeeping, he saw for the first time the date on the postmark of the card: December 5th, 1992. What?
“Cap! We’ve got people waiting!” John signed, tucked the card into an inside pocket of his coat, and went back to work.
--
Getting shot changed everything, except that it changed nothing. Instead of looking down into the eyes of a terrified and bleeding soldier while he fished bullets out of them as gently as he could, John was looking up into the terrified eyes of another unit’s surgeon while blood dripped from a shallow cut on the woman’s forehead as she tried to remove shrapnel from his shoulder as gently as she could.
At some point he realized he was about to pass out, and his last thought was a wave of gratitude for the impending unconsciousness.
--
He didn’t remember the field hospital, or the first surgery. He was briefly conscious in Germany, only long enough to register that the actors speaking in the show playing softly on the TV in his room were speaking in German; almost the moment the thought registered, he was gone again.
--
In England, after the third surgery, he finally woke and stayed awake. The hospital released him sooner than he’d hoped, and then he had too much time and too little money and no idea how to fix that.
He started taking long walks, initially only because the physiotherapist said that it might be good for his limp, but he continued because he was starting to like it. He had a routine: Hyde Park in the morning, Regent’s Park in the late afternoon. He got to know where to expect the swans, and after that started paying more attention to the woods around him and walking more quietly. He was able to see a trio of hedgehogs one morning, and one evening, after sitting very still on a bench that was somewhat off the main paths, he got a glimpse of a fox.
It wasn’t a bad way to spend his first days out of the hospital, and he had time to think.
At first he tried not to think about Afghanistan, but of course that was impossible. Those memories rose to the surface constantly, at once blistering hot and bone-shatteringly cold. He heard cannon fire in car horns and the screams of his injured mates in children’s playground yells.
He wasn’t sure how he had managed to hold onto the card through three surgeries and transport from Afghanistan to Germany to England, but he had it still. He carried it in his jacket pocket every day and propped it up on his bedside table every evening. The edges were starting to get worn, and there were little tears in the sides of the envelope from him taking the card out to look at the picture so many times.
The first days out of the hospital turned into first months, and his limp improved incrementally.
He didn’t open the card as often anymore; he mostly knew the words by heart and usually what he really wanted was to look at the house. To imagine the warm hearthfires that must be inside, and the wide sofas and deep armchairs with soft cushions.
More than anything else, the picture on the card became home for him, and he sometimes wondered if the boy who had written it, who must surely be grown up by now, still lived at the manor house. Or still lived in England at all.
He became more familiar with the less-popular, narrower, back paths of the parks that were more protected from the city noises and found himself spending more and more time sitting in stillness on a bench or patch of grass, watching the brush, waiting to see an elusive stoat or hedgehog or fox. He started seeing them more and more often, and then he wondered if they were showing themselves because they were getting used to him, or if they had been there all along.
One evening, after the sun had mostly set, John rose from his spot on the grass, brushed a few early-winter leaves off his knees, and started towards the main path to the Regent’s Park gate. They were closing it earlier and earlier now that the days were getting shorter again, and he didn’t fancy getting locked in. One night near midsummer he had stayed until well after sunset and found the gates locked. Somehow, infected with the bright moon and the strength of the solstice, he had managed to scramble over the hedgerow wall, but he didn’t fancy trying it again in the late fall with a leg that seemed to only be getting dodgier.
He was about to slide the card back into his jacket pocket when he heard a familiar voice.
“John? John Watson?”
He turned slowly, stiffly, and faced Mike Stamford, whom he hadn’t seen since their graduation from Bart’s.
“Mike, hi,” John said.
“Heard you’ve been away, in Afghanistan getting shot at,” Mike said. “What happened?”
“I got shot.” John swallowed. He wasn’t sure he liked where this was going.
“What’s that?” Mike pointed at the card.
“Oh, this silly thing? It’s really nothing,” John said, not sure why he was embarrassed by it. “I got this Christmas card last year. Christmas Eve it came in, if you can believe that. Written by some school kid, probably because their teacher made them. But I liked the picture, and there was something funny about the date. I just sort of held onto it.” He fell silent, and when Mike didn’t reply, he began to feel a little odd. Unsure what to do next, he decided to show Mike the card.
He offered the card to Mike, though he was uncomfortable the entire time it was out of his hand.
Mike inspected the picture, and nodded. “That must have been nice to see, all the way out there in the desert.”
“It was, it was really great,” John said with relief, accepting the card back.
“What was funny about the date?” Mike asked.
“The postmark is from 1992,” John said. “I figure it must have gotten lost? Sat in a mailroom for years, and then somehow delivered to my unit.”
“Can I see it?” Mike asked.
John didn’t want to, but he couldn’t think of any good reason to refuse to hand him the envelope when he had already let him handle the card.
He handed it over.
“Ha!” Mike chuffed. “You aren’t going to believe this, but I know him!”
“What?”
“Sherlock Holmes, of Sussex Downs, I know him,” Mike repeated.
“Are you serious?” John was very cold, and held out his hand for the envelope. Mike returned it and John carefully slipped the card back inside, then stowed both in the inner pocket of his jacket.
“Oh, it gets weirder. I’m actually on my way to see him now. Come on, come with me!” Mike insisted, clapping John on the wrong shoulder.
John crumpled with a shout of pain, barely managing to keep his feet with the aid of his cane.
“Sorry, sorry!” Mike said hastily. “But really, you should come meet him!”
“What? Are you serious? I can’t go like this,” John protested.
Mike laughed. “Like what?”
“Like...I don’t know, wearing old clothes and and I’ve probably got grass stains on these jeans, and mud on my shoes, and I don’t know what else,” John said.
“Oh, he’ll love that,” Mike promised. “He loves that kind of stuff. He’ll tell you your whole life history from looking at the pattern of wear on your shoes, or something. Drives most people crazy.”
John digested that thought for a moment, then nodded.
“Right. I’ll go.”
--
John supposed that he should have asked Mike where he was heading to meet Sherlock Holmes of Sussex Downs, but by the time it became apparent that their destination was a morgue, he felt it was too late to back out.
It wasn’t the morgue: he had spent plenty of time in medical school working on dissections late at night, a scalpel in one hand and a sandwich in the other. Had spend plenty of time in this specific morgue, to be exact.
“Good old Bart’s,” John murmured as they passed through the doorway, patting the weathered stone.
“He’s always around here, making a nuisance of himself,” Mike said. “Begging body parts off the medical examiner, stealing my time on the liquid chromatograph. He’s a terror.”
“He sounds nice,” John said absently, straightening his spine as they approached the morgue doors.
“Who sounds nice?” The owner of the rich baritone voice sounded deeply mistrustful.
“You do,” Mike said with a chuckle. “Sherlock, meet John Watson. Old friend from Bart’s days.”
“How do you do,” John nodded, turning around to face him.
The man’s’--no, Sherlock’s, THE Sherlock’s eyes scanned him. John wasn’t sure what he was looking for, and wished that he would glance away for a minute so John could get a better look at him without Sherlock seeing, because from what he saw so far--well, it was bloody unfair how beautiful he was.
“Afghanistan or Iraq?”
“Uh--sorry?”
“Your hands are tan, but you’ve no tan lines above your wrists, I can see just there where your coat sleeve is pushed up a bit. So you’ve gotten some sun but not sunbathing. Abroad for work, then. The way you hold yourself says military and your limp, which is almost certainly psychosomatic clearly says recently injured under traumatic circumstances. So: military, been abroad recently, and injured. That leaves Afghanistan or Iraq.” Sherlock’s words rushed out in a torrent, threatening to pull John under.
“I--Afghanistan,” John replied.
Sherlock’s eyes glowed, and he focused on John’s cane. “You already knew your limp is psychosomatic, that’s why you forget about it when you’re standing up and hold your cane so loosely...hang on.” He trailed off. “What’s that?”
“What’s what?” John asked.
“What’s that you’ve got?” Sherlock replied.
“I haven’t got anything,“ John said, feeling his palms start to get warm. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Yes you have,” Sherlock insisted. “You’ve got something and I can’t figure out what it is. What have you got in your pockets?”
“I--” John didn’t see any way out of this, but he desperately did not want to show Sherlock the card. Any chance (and he doubted he had any chance at all, but hope springs irrational and eternal) he had with Sherlock would surely be destroyed as soon as the man found out that he carried around a card he had written as a child every day. There would be no recovery from that.
He looked at Mike for help, only to see a student hurrying down the hall towards the three of them hollering “Dr. Stamford! Dr. Stamford!”
“Dr. Stamford! You weren’t at your office hours and I have a question and I saw you in the hall so can I ask about next week’s test?” The student somehow managed to expel this thought in a single breath despite having just run the entire length of the corridor.
Mike checked his watch.
“Oh, sorry, Ryan. I’m late for office hours...Sherlock, we’ll have to discuss those pathology results another time,” Mike said, turning to walk with the student back to his office.
As soon as Ryan’s back was to John and Sherlock, Mike turned around and threw a grimace at John over his shoulder. John shook his head.
“Do you...do you want to go for a cuppa?” John asked, when the sounds of Mike’s footsteps had faded.
Sherlock’s laser-focused attention settled again on John. “I will if you’ll show it to me,” he said.
“I can’t promise that,” John said, his throat dry. “I don’t...it’s not...”
“Fine,” Sherlock agreed. “Speedy’s cafe on Baker Street, tomorrow at seven.” He turned on his heel and stomped off, making considerably more noise than Mike and Ryan had.
John watched him go, then stood in the hallway for longer than he probably should have, thinking.
That night his leg was stiffer than usual as he gingerly lowered himself into bed, and he hesitated before pulling the card from its envelope and propping it up on his bedside table. With the things Sherlock had somehow known about him, it was probably too late to hide this last, embarrassing revelation from him anyway, so John figured he might as well enjoy the comfort this habit gave him as long as he could.
Because the more he thought over their conversation, the more convinced he was becoming that Sherlock thought he was extremely creepy at best and a dangerous stalker at worst. Lying in bed, the curtains drawn against the streetlight outside his window, John was able to admit to himself what he feared most about tomorrow: that Sherlock would demand the card’s return.
Calling him a stalker, (which he knew he was not, but could admit that it might look that way to someone else) or maudlin (he would readily admit to that), or even calling him to call off their---what was it? A date? John wasn’t sure of that--were nothing compared to how much it would hurt to lose the card.
The card, which had been there for him through three surgeries on three continents and five months of loneliness in London--that was a loss he didn’t know if he had the strength to face.
--
John tried to be early to meet Sherlock, but the tube was delayed for maintenance and he ended up being thirty minutes late. He stumbled across the threshold of the cafe without really looking around, and was surprised when a gloved hand caught him by the arm to steady him from falling.
“Why won’t you show it to me?” Sherlock asked, releasing John’s elbow as soon as he was back on his feet.
“Can we not do this until after I’ve had my tea?” John asked wearily.
“I’ve already got us both tea, yours is just with milk how you like it, over here,” Sherlock replied, steering John towards a table beside a heater.
John sank into the seat with a grimace at the pain shooting up his leg and leaned his cane against the back of his chair.
“Do I even want to know how you know how I like my tea?”
“Probably not,” Sherlock answered absently, his attention focused on the pocket of John’s jacket where he knew the letter would be. “Anyway. The letter.”
“It’s--it’s nothing,” John insisted. “Just a letter I got while I was over there.”
Sherlock’s eyes narrowed.
“A letter you got while you were over there. Who from? Your wife? No, you don’t have one. No ring. Girlfriend or fiancée then? Possibly, but you spent the day sitting on a hill in Regent’s Park, unlikely you have a girlfriend or you’d be doing something better with one of the last warm Saturdays of the year. Family? You’re clearly not close with them because you have traces of Scots in your accent yet you live here, in London, alone.”
“How--”
“Speck of shaving cream below your left ear, classic giveaway that you live alone,” Sherlock replied impatiently. “Who. Is. The Letter. From.”
There was no way out.
“Well, you, actually,” John said without looking at Sherlock. Mechanically he pulled it from his pocket and handed it over.
“That’s not possible,” Sherlock breathed, recognizing it instantly. “I sent that as a child.”
“And I received it eleven months ago in Afghanistan,” John said. “It’s not what it looks like, I wasn’t stalking you. I just ran into Mike in the park and I was holding it because--well, I always liked looking at it, the house, with the hedges and the snow and everything--and Mike asked to see it and I didn’t want to show him because it’s a bit off, innit, carrying around a letter from a stranger written fourteen years ago, but I couldn’t think of a good excuse not to show him and I did and then he said he knew you and was going to meet you and practically dragged me here,” John finished.
Sherlock looked from the letter in his hand to John’s miserable expression, smiling somewhat as he touched the words he had written fourteen years earlier, and privately made a decision.
John, privy to none of this, shifted his weight, leaned to his right a bit more. His dodgy leg was beginning to get sore even though he was sitting.
“Come home with me,” Sherlock blurted out.
“What?”
“There,” Sherlock said, waving the card around. John was startled to realize that he still had it--normally if the card was away from him for so long he began to feel anxious, but he was surprised to realize that it didn’t bother him at all that Sherlock was still holding the card. “It’s Christmas next week, I’m going. Come with me.”
“I don’t want to intrude,” John said, unease creeping into his voice. “We don’t really know each other.”
“After I wrote that letter I couldn’t stop thinking about the soldier who might get it,” Sherlock said, ignoring John’s words entirely. “I would make up stories in my head where I would somehow meet him, what he would be like, look like.” He paused, and something in his expression had become vulnerable, almost shy.
“What kind of stories?” John asked.
“Crime stories. I knew I wanted to be a detective from the beginning. I would need a partner, and you were always with me on stakeouts, listening while I talked through the evidence...” Sherlock shook his head. “It probably sounds creepy.”
Something warm began to blossom in John’s chest.
“I thought about you too,” John admitted. “I wondered if you still lived in England, what you had grown up to be like. If your house was as warm and cosy on the inside as it looked from the picture.”
“Warmer, if you can imagine, quilts and afghans everywhere,” Sherlock promised. “Say you’ll come home with me, please.”
“I wouldn’t be, I don’t know, a bother, at your family Christmas?”
“It’s just Mummy and Mycroft and Graham and me,” Sherlock said, “and she’s been after me for ages to...oh. Oh. I--sorry.” He looked away.
When John’s brain caught up to Sherlock’s words, he pushed his chair back, causing his cane to clatter to the floor. He ignored it in favor of bracing himself against the side of the table, and carefully made his way around to Sherlock’s side. Taking a deep breath, he caught Sherlock’s hand, which was still holding the card, between both of his.
“Hey. I would be honored,” he said, and leaned down to place a whisper of a kiss on Sherlock’s cheek. “Merry Christmas, Sherlock Holmes.”
