Everybody else is writing amazing scary Halloween Sherlock stories, but I don’t have a finished one. All I can give you is this excerpt.
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It’s dangerous to need too loudly, John’s grandmother once warned him. There are things that might hear you.
For weeks After, John dreamed of falling: his stomach rolling in soft lazy flips, untethered by gravity, the wind brushing away the fading echo of a name shouted in his own voice.
The world in that dream was lonely but restful, holding only that frozen, falling moment. The pain stayed in the waking world. John woke each morning to a moment of blissful peace, and then reality bit into him, sawing at his heart with its serrated edges. John fixed breakfast, ate, went to work, came home, sat in his chair and contemplated the pattern of the wallpaper, and the moment he could justify it to himself, he went to bed.
He slept well for those first few weeks, with Baker Street wrapped around him like a security blanket, bundling him away from the world. He slept better than he had in years, and he never considered why.
Then, as though Mrs Hudson had someone come in to redo the wallpaper while he was out one day, he came home from work to find Baker Street transformed into a torture chamber. Every mug, book, and cabinet drawer shoved itself into his chest with another reminder into him that Sherlock was gone. He’d never stab that knife into another letter, never palm the skull like a bowling ball, never shove that rack of test tubes aside with a clatter to reach for the tea tin behind it.
John went to bed.
He held out for another week after that started. He went to bed earlier, got up earlier—before sunrise—and stopped turning the lights on. He knew the flat well enough to navigate without seeing, and in the dark there was no one to tell him that Sherlock wasn’t sprawled across the sofa, watching John’s silhouette prowl to the kitchen. He didn’t want to move out. 221b was the last thing he had left.
But when the dream changed, he gave in, tendered his apologies to Mrs Hudson, and began packing.
He dreamed of London by lamplight, the city fast and bruising around them as they ran through it, laughing as it beat at them. That laugh, the velvet of the night sky, and eyes the color of moonbeams on mercury, never still, never soft, daring him to follow. Gunpowder and chlorine, hot sand and blood, sandalwood soap and disinfectant and the dry cold smell of an old stone courtyard in the early spring.
He woke up with it still in his nose every morning. It never went away. He thought of it as the smell of guilt. It summed up everything he had ever done, hadn’t done, should have done.
He could burn it out with a bullet. That was the only pain he’d ever known that reached deep enough. Placed—just so, he marked it with the reddening pressure of two fingers just an inch or two down from his scar—a few minutes of clean, dying agony and done.
He didn’t have the right. He owed too many people. He’d already taken too much, letting him die.
So he and Lestrade and Stamford moved him into his new flat in Hackney, and John let himself bleed and wish.
Nine days later, John dreamed of the moon crashing to earth with a sound like a split watermelon. It landed in front of St. Bart’s, with blood on its face. He stood over it in shock, while it stared up from the flagstones with sightless moonbeam-coloured eyes.
He met Stamford and a couple other mates at the pub the next evening.
“John! Catch the eclipse last night?”
“Forgot all about it,” John admitted. No loss. He hadn’t been planning to watch it anyway.
“You missed a real show, then. Halo from the cloud cover and all. It was quite the sight.”
One of the others snorted with good-natured derision. “Fancy yourself a poet now, Mike?”
Mike turned his nose haughtily over his pint. “A bloke can have a bit of romance in his soul!”
“Maybe you should teach astronomy instead of anatomy!”
John smiled wistfully. When had the idea of stars got so tangled up with Sherlock? “At least you know how the solar system works, Mike.”
Mike laughed and clinked glasses with him. “See, there’s hope for me yet!”
John stumbled home late that night, glad that there wasn’t enough in his flat to trip over, and fell into bed with his clothes still on. When he fell asleep, Sherlock met him by the pool while the stars glittered overhead.
Sherlock’s eyes were miniature moons in his face, huge, round and silvery, and pitted with craters. He smelled foul, of gunpowder and lemons. It made John queasy.
“You want him back,” Sherlock said.
“Of course I do.”
“Souls can’t come back.”
“He’s dead. I know that.” He knew he was being snappish, but he wanted Sherlock to stop talking. Something was wrong with his voice.
“Would you give him your soul?”
John laughed.
He sat up out of the dream, nausea revolving in his stomach from the buzzing wrongness of Sherlock’s voice.