Chapter Text
It’s raining on Titan.
The liquid methane pounds against the biodome, the orange clouds obscuring the sky.
Inside the biodome, condensation—from millions of humans breathing and sweating, and the stark contrast with the temperature outside— drips down in a poor imitation of the storm raging outside. It runs down the glass-covered facades of the tall skyscrapers that make up the upper levels of the city, down the brick walls of the middle classes and down the concrete walls of the tenements, before it collects, dirty and grey, in the puddles on the floors of the hovels that make up the Dregs.
Down in the Dregs, all the refuse from the shiny new world upstairs collects and runs in rivulets down into the methane sea, where it instantly freezes and sinks to the bottom.
John opens the little glass roof of his tiny courtyard garden, where he grows a few herbs that come in handy at the clinic, and breathes in the moist, humid air. A few drops of condensation fall on his face and into his hair.
He wonders, not for the first time and probably not for the last, what actual, real rain feels like. What it must be like, standing outside and smelling the earth as it soaks up the water.
Real water. Not synthesised, not cleansed.
Sherlock would scoff at this distinction, of course. Water is water, John. H2O. Chemistry. Science. Objectifiable truth.
The thing about Sherlock is that he never understood that there’s another sort of truth. A truth that has nothing to do with fact.
John turns away and dismisses the thought. He’s long since stopped caring what Sherlock would say. He wipes the moisture off his face but lets the drops linger in his hair. It feels good. It makes him feel alive.
That’s a rare commodity these days, and he’ll take what he can get.
*-*
His first patient of the day is a young woman with a malfunctioning contraception implant. She pays for half an hour of his time with an apple and an offer that John turns down.
Next he sees two local kids, one with a broken arm and one with the worst case of the Titan Measles he’s ever seen. He sets the bone and immobilises the broken arm, and is paid in actual hard currency for once. The second kid gets some antivirals, along with herbs for tea to soothe her raw throat until the antivirals kick in. John then tells her parents to come back when she’s healthy and he’ll see about getting all five of their kids vaccinated. Her parents pay with a hand-knitted jumper, a few old silicium chips they salvaged out of a dump site down by the docks, and a chicken.
He dumps the silicium chips in the battered old refiner and hopes the power will last until they’re cleaned. They’ll make valuable spare parts for all sorts of synthetic limbs, not the least of which is his own.
In the afternoon, he sees a few regulars. Sarah, who’s pregnant and scared, and comes in twice a week with home-made biscuits and hands shaking with the Titan cold that’s seeping into her bones. Irina, who bought her synthetic eye on the black market and got a motherfucker of an infection for her trouble. Lenny, a shaky drug addict who comes to John for a fix. John gives him a saline infusion and some food. If John worked in a proper hospital, like the one he trained in on Io, he’d see about getting Lenny into rehab or a halfway house. But here, in this city, with this patient, John has nothing to offer but kindness and half an hour in a warm bed. The next regular is Li, a hard-bitten veteran who has three synthetic limbs from her three Mars tours. She curses him out when he does something that hurts—inevitable, really, when you’re replacing nanochips in synthetic limbs that are fully integrated into the body’s nervous system—but gives him a gruff hug when he waves off payment with what are obviously her last credit chips.
His last patient is Harold, another regular and Mars veteran, whose synthetic leg has been acting up. “Shitty Magnussen parts,” he complains while John solders the faulty wires and re-sets the chip for the tenth time in six months. “They always dump their refuse on us because they know nobody gives a fuck about us vets.”
John doesn’t argue (it’s true in one way and complete shit in another) and sends Harold on his way, waving off payment like he always does for the veterans. Harold lost his leg in the same war that still gives John nightmares, that busted up his shoulder, and that sent him reeling and ricocheting all over the solar system until he lodged into Titan like a rusty old dart that got stuck in the board. Harold didn’t know John then, he served on the other side of the planet in a different unit, but they’re still brothers. John knows that tonight, while Harold is still sober, he will go over to John’s house and leave something on the doorstep. Bread. A knife he found in the gutter, repaired and cleaned and sharpened until it was a worthy gift. Basil seeds. A peony. John finds these gifts on his doorstep every day, and he recognizes them as the blessings they are.
John spends the evening in his workshop, repairing and configuring the silicium chips. They’re old, but they’re more reliable and a lot cheaper than the new Titan silver chips. Plus, John has three in his arm. One he’s done with the chips, he walks home, through dark alleys, past houses and tenements, bars and cafes and small shops. Past prostitutes and addicts high on Dust lying in the gutter, staring empty-eyed at nothing. Light and roaring drunk laughter spills out onto the wet pavement in front of the bar around the corner from his house. He knows that if he went in there, he could have a beer, some laughs and a hot plate of food he wouldn’t need to pay for.
He goes home. Once inside, he examines the variety of gifts that people leave on his doorstep every day, from drawings to flowers to food. He eats leftover pad thai noodles and reads an ancient spy novel by the dim light of a flickering lightbulb. He makes a pot of tea and sips it slowly, enjoying the aroma. Then he watches the Holonews. Elections on the core stations. Prime Minister of Io’s state visit to Titan. Dispute over Titan silver mining rights. Drug addict’s apparent suicide, solidly frozen body was dragged out of the Methane Sea last night. Low-Gravity Football tournament on the Moon—with the usual rant about the ridiculousness of still calling Earth’s moon “The Moon”, when there’s hundreds of moons, including several with larger populations and more importance to the System.
John switches off the holo, annoyed by the discussion.
When the electricity cuts out—third time this week—he sits in his tiny garden and looks out at the small patch of sky he can see. He will never get used to the way Saturn looms over this tiny world, but he’s grateful for any small patch of sky, even a hazy one.
It’s the only thing he misses from the Mars campaign. Days on Mars were hell. The winds and the constant vigilance and the ridiculous inch by inch advances and retreats, years spent in trenches, blood spilled over worthless pieces of rock because both the System leaders and Separatists want the precious ores under Mars’ crust.
But the night sky on Mars was brilliant and bright, nothing like he’d ever seen before or since. John was born on a station and at first all that space on Mars was intimidating, with no four walls around him. But he got used to it quickly, and learned to enjoy and appreciate the silence that comes with vast areas of empty space.
Here, nothing is empty. Every square inch of territory they’ve won from this hostile ice block of a moon is inhabited, used, planted, built on. Here, space is at a premium.
Here, this yard, this small enclave of green and sky, this tiny space to breathe and be still, is an invaluable luxury. It’s a sign of how much this community truly needs him, of how much he’s valued and appreciated.
It’s his space, his home. His people. It saved his life, quite literally. Twice. Once after he came here fresh from the war, reeling and hurting and ready to fall into the first available bottle. The second time after he trickled down from the upper reaches, an empty shell, sucked dry and thrown out by Sherlock Holmes like a used needle.
That’s what he was, in the end, he supposes. A quick fix. A distraction. Easily forgotten. Easily discarded.
Of course he didn’t know that then. When he came back here, he was nearly blind with grief and so broken that he could barely put one foot in front of the other. But these people welcomed him back as if he’d never left, and gave him a purpose again.
That purpose gave him the strength to tell Sherlock Holmes to go fuck himself when he came back. Not dead, indeed.
John wipes a hand over his face and unclenches his fist. No use being angry. It’s wasted energy. And what’s more, if he lets it, this anger will kill him. Will drive him straight into a heart attack, or a bottle, or the Dust that’s so easy to get. And he will not give Sherlock Fucking Holmes the satisfaction.
He looks up into the endless reaches of space, into the planet hovering above them, gas and ice, no real body, no solid, heated core. Just a cloud, held together by gravity and mass. By faith. Then he goes to bed and sleeps, wrapped tight in his duvet to keep out the cold seeping in from the icy core of Titan below.
*-*
Space is never truly warm. The only thing that truly generates heat in space is the presence of another body.
When John was a child, he sometimes used to sneak into the pens where they kept the animals. Cows, pigs, sheep. Dogs. John loved the dogs. He loved petting them and playing with them and curling up with warm fur under his fingers, feeling like one puppy among many. He was fascinated when Sherlock showed him the holos of the dog he had at his childhood home on Io. John’s mind was blown by the idea of actually owning a pet, having enough space to own a pet.
He dreams of warmth, of soft fur, of a teasing growl.
He dreams of bodies huddling together under a sheet of plastic to keep out the wind, camouflaged knees knocking into each other. Quick, half-dressed blowies behind thin barrack walls, a hot mouth on his cock, pleasure spiking and curling through his entire body.
He dreams of soft pillows and the hard angles of a familiar body pressed against his back, dreams of hands in his hair and tracing over his scar, lips on the nape of his neck, a deep baritone voice whispering his name reverently into his skin, the sticky sweat of skin against skin, the heat radiating from his heart into his toes.
He wakes up shivering and alone.
*-*
These days, John’s routine is well established and the days tend to blend into each other. He goes to the clinic in the morning, sees to patients until there aren’t any more, then does some maintenance work before going home to his tiny house. Occasionally, he has lunch with Mary, the technician who works at the clinic three days a week. She’s excellent with any synthetics, but she leaves the flesh and blood stuff to John. She was Mike’s last hire before he got a job on one of the Saturn stations, and he left her to John, along with his clinic, his patients and his house. Keeping Mary here was a good decision, maybe a better one than leaving the clinic to John, and John is grateful, because Mary’s presence eases the heavy loneliness he feels most days a little bit, and the clinic, dull as it can be, is a place he can go, a place where he’s needed and valued and necessary.
Sometimes, in the evenings, he goes for a pint at the local, a hole in the wall shack filled almost exclusively with veterans. It’s a place to have a drink and maybe some conversation if you’re in the mood. Many of his regular patients practically live there. The ones not addicted to Dust, that is.
Sometimes when he walks home, he allows himself a small detour past Angelo’s restaurant, the fanciest place in the Dregs. It even has tablecloths. On those nights he stands on the other side of the street and watches the table by the window. It’s always empty. Sometimes he closes his eyes and allows himself to think about sitting at that table, eating Angelo’s mouthwatering pasta and listening to Sherlock deduce the patrons. He thinks about his belly and his cheeks hurting from laughing and from too much food. Sherlock would give him a small smile when he was especially impressed by a deduction.
Sometimes he thinks of going to Baker Street and standing on the other side of the road and seeing if he can catch a glimpse of a shadow, a note of violin music.
These are the days that send John to the small hill outside the city, to the walls of remembrance that serve as graves in a world where digging up the ground isn’t really an option. He gathers the flowers he gets from his patients and walks towards the end of the rows, past hundreds of plaques rubbed nearly illegible from the touch of reverent fingers.
The plaque is unobtrusive. Cheap. A few people contributed, but they couldn’t afford marble, or even stone. The copper is soft and already oxidising. John occasionally cleans it, but it’s a pointless fight against time and physics. He always rubs his fingers over the H of her name, and puts the flowers into the tiny vase next to her plaque. And every time he looks over to the empty space where the other plaque used to be, the one made of the most exquisite marble, black lines cut into the stone. The one that used to read William Sherlock Scott Holmes.
It’s gone now, the four holes of the screws that used to hold it to the wall gaping empty like scars.
Sometimes, there’s a small candle resting next to Mrs Hudson’s plaque. Sometimes there’s a tea bag, or a button. John never touches the small offerings, but it does make him feel slightly less alone.
Maybe he isn’t the only one who misses their home after all.
*-*
The patients come and go. He gets every kind of problem, from gang stabbings to kidney stones to malfunctioning enhancement chips to obvious cases of drug withdrawal.
The rules stay the same. He asks only medically relevant questions, he accepts any form of payment except sexual favours and drugs, and he’s extremely careful about handing out pain medication.
He has a lot of regulars, but even they pass through this place like the water trickling down to the Sea. Many people who end up in the Dregs have nowhere to go but to prison or an early grave. Sometimes people come in every week for six months, then they’re gone, died of overdoses, sent to prison, or moved on to another place like this. Sometimes they even get back on their feet, get a better job, get dry, move on and up. Sometimes they move in with relatives. John hears of them through the grapevine, and he’s happy for those whose lives have gotten better. Yet sometimes he looks at the sky and thinks of just jumping into the next spaceship and leaving this place behind.
But the next morning he gets up, goes to his clinic, sees patients until there aren’t any left, then he goes home, eats dinner, sleeps, and starts the whole cycle again. And he will do this until the day he dies.
Sometimes that’s a comforting thought.
Sometimes it’s not.