Graceless was a fic by belladonnaq, in which John was a fallen angel and Sherlock…was not.
I love it. It colonized my brain. I’ve been trying to write a prequel for it ever since (with her permission).
This…is not the entire prequel, but it’s the part I’ve been able to make work.
***
Sherlock. Wings mantled, sword out. Ablaze with a light that burns John’s eyes.
He lifts his hand to shield his sight. Heat stings across his knuckles. He’s not made for this kind of light anymore. It will kill him if he stays here. “Why are you here?” Sherlock. John had never expected to see him again. He had thought that no Hell he was ever exiled to could include Sherlock.
He had been wrong.
“You’ve become a monster.” Sherlock’s beautiful smooth face twists with disgust and hurt.
Maybe John should be grateful that Sherlock still feels something for him. But no; he really isn’t. The air ripples with his barely restrained desire to blast this entire encounter off the face of time.
But that would send Sherlock away again. Sherlock, drinking him in with that old analytical sharpness John had thought he’d never see again, bright with the shining glare of intellect as he notices John’s every corrupted detail: the smell of old fear soaked into the walls; the points of John’s fangs pressing against his lips; that void of gnawing hunger that now forever makes up his core, gnawing in Sherlock’s direction.
So much warmth. So much beauty. So much love. Surely that, at last, would fill him.
He stays where he is and smiles at Sherlock, pretending it’s not a grimace of pain. “For you.”
The reminder doesn’t seem to please him. The last time John saw him, he’d still been too innocent and unearthly to think of how lush that mouth was, how it might feel against his own. Now Sherlock’s lips pull back to bare his teeth.
The hypocrisy is too much. John laughs. “Do you remember?” He lets the bitterness etch his voice like acid. Let him feel it. Let the truth pour down on them both and eat Sherlock alive, the way it has John. “That’s why I fell. I didn’t make myself into this.”
Sherlock’s mouth tightens in a flinch. Something hateful inside John clenches in victory. And then Sherlock speaks, and destroys him all over again. “Yes, you did.”
Time stops at John’s command. Not even the sound of dust settling cracks the perfect silence.
John lets his face fall to rest and his eyes slip half-closed, into the expression of mocking seduction he’s become so used to wearing. “Because I chose not to die like Saefrael?” His voice rasps off the walls, dull and hoarse. Saefrael burning, blue-white flames of his own making, because this world was too polluted for him to bear it, because final oblivion was better than an existence with nothing but a crater where God’s love had been. “Is that what you wanted?”
Sherlock flinches. John laughs at him, a sound like old rust ripping apart. For a moment, when he’d first seen Sherlock, he had been poised at the top of the void inside him. Now he remembers all over again what falling felt like. Black and blank and screaming. And the pain of having his wings torn off, being burned and scarred by holy fire into a hollow monstrosity.
“Or do you mean, because I chose to take the fall instead of you? Are you here to cleanse your own guilt, Sherlock? Am I your own little sin, waiting to be purged? The nasty little reminder that it was your fault?”
Sherlock takes a step forward, wrist stiffening to pull his sword into a more threatening position. “They were right. You have no virtue left in you at all.”
“THEY.” It’s a roar so loud the walls crack. Suddenly John is moving sideways, the ground bubbling under his feet in the radius of his fury, leaving a trail of molten glass as he circles Sherlock. He has no blade, but his hands rise, wicked claws glinting obsidian black at the tips. “They sent you. Why? Wasn’t I suffering enough? Were my agonies not amusing enough—” Words fail him, air superheating in his throat before he can shape it into speech.
How could you?
Sherlock hears it, slamming through the matter of the world with the force of John’s betrayal. His head jerks back.
I did this for you. Became this for you. Every moment of my exile on this godforsaken dirtball was made worthwhile because it meant you were still where you were meant to be.
Of course Sherlock had to do as he was instructed. To do otherwise would mean being cast down, undoing everything John sacrificed for. Of course they sent Sherlock to finish John off when his suffering was no longer enough. It’s the perfect final touch to John’s damnation.
But you agree with them.
Right in this moment, he would burn Sherlock into Hell if he could. He would, he would. “Sitting in judgment on me,” he hisses. Nothing human is left in his voice. “You absolve yourself of all wrongdoing, do you?”
It’s too late to do anything useful. Too late to stop the words. Sherlock flexes his will and the frozen moment shatters in a rain of crystalline, razor-edged time.
It’s not enough to kill John, but he falls again, for a very long time. But still not long enough to make him forget.
from Tumblr http://ift.tt/1wAI6oQ