Chapter Text
“Do you know that poem?” John asks him. “’Do not go gentle into that good night’?”
Sherlock closes his eyes, briefly. Imprints the image in front of him into his synapses: John, smiling. John, tender. John, old; John, young; John, in-between. John. Just that. John.
“Yes,” he says.
“’Rage, rage, against the dying of the light’?”
“I know it.”
John takes his hands between his own. The texture of his skin is pressed against Sherlock’s once more. For the last time. Calloused at the fingertips, soft in the middle. A metaphor, in that, Sherlock thinks. The wedding band that has been there so many times cold, but always clean, shining, and warmed by the both of them now.
“Let’s go gently,” John says.
__
This time he finds John when they’re young.
He’s only ever seen images before. Photographs, old and ragged at the edges. A John whose smile he’d never touched, and laughter he’d never heard. Shown to him by an older version. A broader version.
John is softer, when he’s young. Because he hasn’t yet grown into his shoulders and his jawbone and his muscles. Because he hasn’t yet been through the rough patches Sherlock knows are to come.
They meet in a bar, this time. It’s John’s own birthday party. He’s eighteen.
Sherlock is a year younger. He feels it. It’s strange, but he always has. Despite his many lives, he still gets the feeling of growing older each time around. Youth always sits in him, still.
It’s not their usual scene, the bar. It’s not the kind of places they’ll go to, later, when they can mingle with people like themselves, queer and out and proud. This is before John has reached that security.
They sit in the corner, John and his friends. Stamford, who they will know later, is among them. Sherlock settles in at the bar, making sure that John will be able to have a good view of him. His shirt is a little too tight. His hair is made up, with a messiness that will make the mind wander to sex. He knows how to entice John; get him to come over.
He does. Only under the disguise of getting a new round of drinks, but Sherlock doesn’t mind. It’s not shame, he knows. John has talked about this before. It’s just the uncertainty of being young and still figuring things out.
“Hello,” John says. His tone is deliberate. He clearly wants something.
Sherlock knows how to hide a smile. He’s done it before, when needed. So he is able to do it here. But it’s difficult.
He likes this part. John, taking him in, eyes roaming, licking his lips. John trying to pick him up. John, a little uncertain, underneath it all. Because there’s the same insistent tug present, as the very first time. He always looks like there’s something at stake. Like if Sherlock rejects him, he’ll have lost something more significant than the situation warrants.
“Hi,” Sherlock says. I’ve missed you. You look good. How long before you’ll let me kiss those eyelids as you fall asleep?
John shifts on his feet. Does that watching, eyes down Sherlock’s body, stopping at his neck. He bites his lower lip.
“It’s my birthday,” he says. He’s a little tipsy, Sherlock realizes, as he points to a badge on his chest, which says his age in numbers.
“You’re old enough to buy me a drink, then,” Sherlock says. He watches when John’s teeth are shown to him, as he grins, wide, and drunk, and surprised.
“Yes,” John says. He watches Sherlock, before turning to the bar. Then he glances back. Unsure. Sherlock must be his first boy, this time.
“I’m John,” he says. He holds out his hand, open and welcoming. “By the way.”
“Sherlock,” Sherlock says. He takes John’s hand, gives it a firm squeeze. He’s reluctant to let go but, to his amusement, so is John. His thumbs caress Sherlock’s knuckles, for a moment.
“Sherlock,” he says. As if testing it in his mouth, and deciding that it tastes good. “Sherlock. Can I tell you something?”
“Sure.”
“I’m drunk.” John’s hand is on his shoulder now, warm through the fabric of his shirt. “And you’re very pretty.”
John’s hand is warm against his shoulder. It’s only been seventeen, this time; seventeen years since the last time he saw John. Sherlock still grasps onto that. John touches his shoulder.
He touches John’s arm. His wrist. Turns it, puts the skin of the inner forearm on display, milky white and fragile. He could kiss it. He won’t, but he could, some day soon.
“Pen,” he requests, of no one in particular, and has one handed to him. John watches him; fascinated. Sherlock puts the tip of the pen between his lips, and keeps the cap there, as he frees the rest. John’s eyes linger. John licks his own.
“I’m giving you my number,” Sherlock explains. Writes it down, all of the digits, on that skin he won’t-but-could kiss. It’s a lifeline. Has been. John doesn’t know yet. John looks at them like they’re a pick-up in the making, and he’s in favour.
“Why?” he asks. “I’m not by best self right now.”
Oh, John, Sherlock thinks. My love. You’re always the best you could ever be.
“Then show me your best self,” he says. “Tomorrow. I’ll be waiting for your call.”
He needs to, just once. To hand the fate of their making over to John, instead of keeping it in his own two palms, safe and always put into creation. Tomorrow, he says. What he means is, I want to see if you will.
John’s hand turns around in his grasp. Fingertips come down to touch his wrist. John is leaning in closer. John is wanting. Sherlock is aflame with it.
“Sherlock,” John says. Slurring it, making it deep. Filthy. But his cheeks are pink. This is still a thing he needs to dare to do.
“Mm–hm?”
“I would like to kiss you.”
Sherlock turns up his head. John is in-between his legs by now. Nearer, still. He is closing in on his target. Sherlock, that is.
“Then do it,” Sherlock says.
John’s lips are hesitant. Yielding. Not taking as much charge, not as dominant, as they usually are. How, Sherlock thinks, can you live this long, and still experience things anew all the time?
Sherlock is the desperate one then. Sherlock is the one who claws at John’s upper arms, presses himself in close, makes it firm, hard, craving.
“Sherlock,” John says, and for a moment, for a brief second, it almost sounds like he’s recognizing love. Sherlock looks down, swallows, does it again. He’s stronger than he thought he was, if he can refrain from crying now. He claws, and blinks, and tries to remember that no, John doesn’t know him yet. No, John never will.
When he looks back up, John is watching him. His gaze, upon Sherlock’s face, is gentle. Kind. Sherlock worries he gave too much away. It should be dripped in, he thinks, this time. With a young John, it can’t be his beginning line. The information should be given only in time.
Palms are on his cheeks; John’s. His gaze is fascinated, yet again. His lips are slightly upturned at the edges.
“Who are you?” he asks. Like it’s a song. Like he’s coming from a dream, waking from it, still in it.
“A strange man,” Sherlock says. John calls him that, often. Later on.
“Or brilliant,” John, this John, says. His hands are back on Sherlock’s shoulder. Sherlock hasn’t stopped noticing. He smiles.
“Call me,” he says.
“I will.” It’s true on his lips. Sherlock believes him. “Sherlock.” Tasting it, again. Trying it out, trying it on. Realizing it. “Sherlock. I think you’ll be very strange indeed.”
“Or brilliant,” Sherlock says.
John, for the first time, grins. John, for the billionth time, grins.
__
They go for coffee. John smiles when he sees him, and stands up from the table he’s been sitting at, waiting. He watches Sherlock walk up to him. They meet. They wait.
It’s significant, this time. Here you are, Sherlock thinks. Again, for the fourteenth time. Here we are; you and me, and all of the things we’ll be, all of the possibilities, between us now. Here it is, the centre of his life, for one last time.
John reaches out his hand, over the pool of their life’s prospects, as if he’s saying, “let’s make a deal.”
“Hello,” he says. His lips upturned, once more. He exhales a breath of laughter; amused. “Again.”
Sherlock doesn’t stop his smile this time. Again, he thinks. As always. From the beginning, then.
“Hi,” he says. “Again.”
Their hands meet. Squeeze, hold tight, linger. Don’t let go. Their eyes meet. Fondness, smiling, there you are, John.
Their lips meet.
How could they not?
__
This is Sherlock’s sixteenth life. It is also his last.
This time, when he turns five, and all of the memories come crashing back to him, rushing in like a tidal wave, all he feels is tired. He thought about it in his fifteenth life. While John was losing him yet again, slowly, this time, he thought of how some things, even the thing of life, must come to an end.
He counts it on his fingers. All of the years he’s had. All of the variations. This is a condition he’s in, but it’s not one that the human brain was made to contain. Well. Really, the human heart.
Muscles grow stronger from usage. The heart must, too. Sherlock’s has. He gets better at it over time: loving. Better at the variations of ways to articulate it. Better at recognizing it when it is returned.
But muscles must someday stop. Sherlock’s legs get tired and worn in old age. His heart, it seems, has reached its time, too.
He crawls into Mycroft’s bed. As always. Arms are there to accept him in. He was expected.
He doesn’t speak. Mycroft’s arm is around him, and he doesn’t speak. How do you say it? Life is coming to an end for me, I think?
He speaks.
He says, “This is my last one.”
Silence. Breathing, and then, a drawn-in gasp of emotion. Mycroft will lose him the most. Or Mycroft will come with.
“Yes,” Mycroft says then. “I thought it might be about time.”
Sherlock puts his head into Mycroft’s chest, when he closes his eyes, and sleeps.
__
He thought maybe waiting would be the right thing to do. Would John believe him, this time, he thinks? John did, once, but he was older, then. He knew more of lives dark sides, more of the desperation. He could see it, probably, more clearly; the way Sherlock looked at him and saw.
But he can’t wait.
Coffee turns to lunch. Lunch turns to a walk around the part, walking turns to dinner. Dinner turns to drinks and then John, outside, kissing him gently up against a brick-building wall, with the moonlight shining down upon them. Sherlock is young too, and it’s maddening, the way John holds his hand as he lets their lips meet.
“I need to tell you something,” he says. He turns away to do it, so John’s lips hit his cheek instead, but John appears not to mind. He squeezes Sherlock’s hand. There are fires burning in his eyes, when he watches Sherlock, waiting.
“I need to tell you something,” Sherlock says. He says, “Is it not going fast, do you think?” He says, “Ask me if we’ve met before?”
John doesn’t hit him this time, when he answers the question with a yes. John doesn’t hit him, but he pulls his hand away, and that is, really, far, far worse.
“What do you mean?” he asks. But his face is closed off in a way Sherlock forgot it could be. It’s been so long. Last life didn’t have many fights towards the end.
He says, “I mean I’ve lived before.” He says, “This is my sixteenth time.” He says, “You. I–” and stops, because John doesn’t look like he’ll recognize love now.
“That’s not funny,” John says.
“I’m not joking.”
John’s mannerisms of anger develop quickly, it seems. He sniffs, then hums. He takes a step back, then one forward, like it is trapping energy inside of him and he can’t get it out.
“Are you fooling me?”
“No.”
“Why should I trust you? Hmm?”
“John,” he begs. He didn’t realize this kind of desperation would live within him here. But he’s seventeen. Maybe that’s why.
“Hmm?”
“Harry is on drugs,” he says. It’s the same story, most of the time. She begins early. But this is the start. John will only have lived with it for a few months.
He walks away. He leaves Sherlock there, up against the wall where he kissed him just before, and stalks away with angry steps. His back is tight, like he’s fuming. I should have told him sooner, Sherlock thinks. And: I should have told him later. No one trusts a boy of seventeen. Not even the boy who might love him.
He sags against the wall, and thinks, so maybe not this one, then. I can’t go out like this.
But John is wiser even now than Sherlock might ever be. And John must feel it too, like the first time; the something, there already from the first time their eyes meet.
He comes back. His steps are as angry as when he walked away, but he comes back.
“This is not what I meant by strange,” he says, before he reaches Sherlock.
“I’m sorry,” Sherlock tries. But the words are swallowed down by John’s lips when he kisses him. It’s hard, and confused, and upset, but he kisses him. Sherlock gobbles it up, gulps it, like it’s oxygen and he’s been deprived.
It is still hard, when John puts their foreheads together, and pants his fuming breath into the skin on Sherlock’s face.
“Sixteen?” he asks. Sherlock swallows.
“Yes.”
“That’s a lot of kisses then,” John says.
There he goes again with the kindness, despite it all. There he goes again with the swelling Sherlock’s heart.
“Yes,” he says.
“Are you bored of them, yet?”
My love, Sherlock thinks. You are far too good to me.
“Never.”
“Good.”
John kisses him. It’s not fond, but it’s less bruising. It’s not happiness, forgiveness, love, but it is acceptance. We can do this, it says. I don’t understand. But we can do this.
“Good,” he repeats. Sherlock kisses him back.
___
Sixteen. That is the amount of lives that he has lived by now.
The worst, by far, was the thirteenth. The one where he was too late, the one with Mary, was bad. It was his heart, on the ground, stamped on, repeatedly. His thirteenth was the knife, too.
John was kind in it. John was brave, and grumpy, and marvellously lovely, like he always is. But he was also kept in the dark. Sherlock could have told him, in time, but so much of it had passed before he realized he wanted to. It was too late.
And even if it wasn’t: Losing John in the twelfth was worse, far, far worse, than it had been before. Because John knew, then. And losing that was losing everyone who went before him along with him. Telling him, each time, and building up a history shared, only to see it ripped away again. Only to have to start over, still. No: it would be too much.
So he stayed quiet. He said: like this, I’m only losing one. One John. That, in itself, is painful enough.
This is only the second time he tells John.
It cements his decision. Finally, it is decided, irrevocably, within himself, that this: this is the last time he’ll wake up anew. This death, when it comes, will be the final one.