Uh…oh wow, that’s…eerily in line with a story I’ve been working on. *considers kidnapping some ideas*
Okay, so this is not quite the story that I amwriting, but it might be kind of really close…
John’s been dreaming of Sherlock ever since he died. At first it seems pretty normal. He dreams of the Fall, and of memories, and mish-mash things that never really happened the way he dreams them, but it captures the spirit of things—things unspoken, things they meant to do but never did, scenes from the perspectives of other people on the scene, places they caught glimpses of but never explored.
But the dreams won’t stop, and John is grieving, and it hurts to relive what he lost so vividly every night and then wake up to find it gone. So he starts going for walks, trying to shake this stuff loose. And in the course of those walks, he discovers that those places he keeps dreaming of are just the way he dreamed them.
That…kind of freaks him out, and maybe he gets a bit obsessed. Because between everything, he starts to feel a bit like he’s cracking, and these places are evidence that it’s not just him. And sometimes he can pretend, like he’s just fallen behind, that Sherlock is just a little ahead and around the corner.
One night, on one of those trips—maybe down by the river, or near the Tower of London or something—a beggar he’s walking by asks, “What would you give?”
“Anything,” John says.
He thinks nothing of it, though he meant it absolutely. But after that, things start getting weird. It starts with a growing sense of being watched. At first John thinks Mycroft’s being a prick, but then he begins to think he really is cracking, because it’s everywhere, no matter where he goes. Then strange things begin to happen, like birds or stray cats follow him, or cab drivers spout off stuff that has a bizarre amount of bearing on his personal situation, or he walks into situations where the people do and say things exactly like they did in his dreams. And he wants to be able to tell himself he’s simply insane…except that sometimes these things happen when he’s with people. So Stamford and Lestrade and Mrs Hudson have seen it.
Meanwhile, in his dreams, those footsteps he sometimes imagines chasing become the tail of a coat flashing around a corner; the echo of a shout in a familiar voice; and then one night Sherlock pauses ever so briefly to glance back at John before ducking around a corner and disappearing.
So there’s nothing John can do but chase the phantoms of his dreams through those spaces in real life, even as dreams and real life increasingly conflate for him. And there’s a growing presence, in dreams and life both, of something massive and aware all around him, like he’s walking through the chest cavity of some mind-bendingly old and powerful leviathan, groaning under the weight of its own history.
By the time the evening comes that John rounds the corner and finds Sherlock standing there, he’s not even sure whether he’s awake or dreaming anymore. Sherlock claims to have been alive all along (chasing Moriarty’s people), but his recollection of that time is oddly disoriented, and many of the things he remembers clearly fall right in line with John’s dreams. And it’s as though they’re both stuck in this nebulous half-dream state, where they still deal with the normal world but things around them are profoundly not-normal…
Ummmmmm…so the problem is that I’m not entirely sure where to go from there, but the idea is a rough London-as-sentient-entity kind of thing, to which John pretty much unknowingly sold himself in return for getting Sherlock back. And Sherlock is real but he’s not, y’know, exactly real; they have both essentially been made into stories. Myths. A part of London’s legendarium. But I suspect that exploring what that means would be the work of a novel. They wouldn’t age; they wouldn’t pass on. Some things would change strangely around them (from their perspective), while others would stay the same (always 221b). Maybe they would change, like they have through the years in real life, faces, clothing and behaviors shifting while they’re always recognizable to each other. They would touch on reality sometimes, like dreams emerging into real life to get embroiled in weird cases, but they’d always get dragged back down after, unable to grab on and pull themselves back into normalcy. And of course they’d have adventures and I’d need to explore what it means to belong to London (I think the consequences wouldn’t be altogether pleasant), and this is turning into a Neil Gaiman novel, so yeah. Not exactly how my actual story is going, but with some startling similarities.