Oblivion
part three"Do you ever dream of falling?"
Sherlock opened his eyes, the blur of unused vision not changing the landscape of the ceiling by much. "I think it's safe to assume most people do," he said, bringing the heel of his hand up to his right eye to rub away the distortion that blinking alone could not remove. He didn't remember falling asleep on the sofa. In the time since he had, John seemed to have cleaned up a bit with papers and slides all still pressed to one end of the den's table but the cartons of Chinese no longer resting in their wake. Presently, John sat in his red armchair near the fireplace, looking down at his laptop as he pecked at the letters like a hen after seed. Right at home, then. Presumptuous as he was, Sherlock rather liked a guest who didn't expect to be seen to. It was far less irritating in the long run. He groaned and stretched, feeling the leather under him give little resistance to the slide of his dressing gown.
"Do you remember your dreams?"
Sherlock sighed with a roll of his eyes as he let his head flop over to the side, bangs bouncing against his forehead. "No. Not important. You're the only one with a preoccupation with dreams. The rest of us are quite content to idle in the land of the living."
John made an amused hum before shaking his head and pecking again at the tiles on his lap. "Well, so much for making conversation," he said, seemingly forgetting he'd just woken Sherlock up with his obtuse musing.
"It's not a conversation you're making," he corrected him, sitting up to the worn creek of the sofa. "It's an inquiry. The answer is no; I don't remember being anyone other than myself. In fact, I've deleted all dream material from my head to make room for important things like my study of poisons." Sherlock waved his hand in the direction of his kitchen table which seemed to have moved to the interior of a small aqua-tiled kitchen and held equipment he usually needed to frequent the university's lab facilities to use.
John hummed again with greater amusement as his hairline squished down into rolls of skin above his brow. "Well, we wouldn't want to clutter up the ol' mind palace, would we?" he said in a mocking tone.
"How do--" Sherlock cut himself off again, scowling with the discernment to know that only the fantastic answer was likely to be shared. Never the real one. It had to be Mycroft's doing; no one simply made random jokes about the Method of Loci without some sort of prompting of its relevance. It was infuriating to be fed fairy tales when the truth offered so much more of interest. The amount of conviction the man had in his mad explanations made him either the greatest actor to have ever lived or alluded to a serious breach of ethics and the perversion of justice in the British Government. Feeding crazy people with facts and setting them upon unsuspecting civilians was a curious notion but brainwashing spies into believing fantastic bullshit was even more brilliant a method of conditioning men of talents with a bulletproof alibi of dementia. That was what he wanted to be discussing. Not dreams.
The unlikely stalker didn't care about government conspiracies or the possibility he was a pawn in a much larger plot, though. He only seemed to care about one thing: Sherlock. Single minded devotion was not exactly a trait Sherlock held in high esteem but John certainly had a knack for it and a style all his own. Firm, not placating; challenging, not sycophantic. Concern, not pity. His confidence was undermined only by his melancholy and even that was easy enough to stomach from a man who pushed on rather than let it linger. It was a shame his head was such a contradiction of insight and blindness. He seemed the rare sort who, under different circumstances, might have been palatable even without the mystery.
To his credit, John never let his small victories spur him further and it was only a delicate smile and quick, sideways glance that stood up to the lingering question and the assumption of its expiration. "Don't rule out the impossible, Sherlock," he said, tone meant to inform more so than implore. "Impossible things happen. With increasing regularity."
Sherlock sighed, arms crossed as he threw himself back down against the sofa with a broken, long-suffering exhale. "Alright then. You're dying to tell me so go on. Tell me the impossible tale of Dreaming Dr. Watson and his nightmare Sherlock Holmes." It would be more interesting than whatever work he had left to do for his classes that had made it to rung zero on the ascending scale of things he planned to spare more than a sneer on.
It seemed John didn't need much more prompting than that. Closing the lid on his laptop, he licked his lips but seemed keen for the turn of conversation. He smiled intermittently as he sat staring at Sherlock's own abandoned green chair as though born upon it were a stack of books on the spines of which were alternating titles of misery and bliss. "I've lived it twice now and I still don't really know that I could tell it in a way that would make him happy," John said, scratching at the back of his neck under the fold of his red collar. "I'm too romantic and not scientific enough but I think it's safe enough to just say that he and I met, we shared a flat, we solved crimes together, shit happened, and in the real world that meant a global pandemic and billions dead. In the dream world... well, the story ended differently."
"He died."
John paused with the expression of a choking man, his breath caught in the purse of his lips. His brow scrunched into disturbed waves over eyes that had muddied so profoundly they were nearly black from several feet away. He frowned with a tight jaw and the dip of his Adam's apple as he swallowed.
"It's not exactly hard to figure out," Sherlock explained, not even attempting to disguise his boredom. "If Mr. Trevor was not your accomplice then you had no reason to be on hand--you were just watching me for your own comfort and happened to be there when the dog bit me. If you held much hope for my being him, you would have engaged me sooner and would be working harder at trying to convince me. You've demonstrated yourself to be a rather proactive person so you're not innately complacent. Then there's the matter of your wording--you lost him--which is peculiar if you're truly under the impression that he is me only I'm unaware of it. And you don't look at me. From afar you did but you rarely look me in the face when I'm speaking to you. It all paints a rather clear picture that you're not looking for someone, you're mourning them. You tried to distance yourself but were unable to ignore your instincts when you saw me requiring assistance. It doesn't bother me that you're worried a version of me I don't believe ever existed has died."
John's smile was vacant as his eyes sank into their pillows beneath. "You are every bit as brilliant an asshole as I remember," he said.
"Good to know I'm universally approachable."
He seemed to like that. John smiled a little brighter, a laugh uncontained through his sinuses as it buzzed through the hollow of his nose. It seemed almost instant, though, that the amusement faded to a soft, parting scoff of pained acceptance. He let the laughter settle in the peace of silence before adding to it his version of Sherlock's deduced concerns. "We were in the middle of a case and then... he killed himself. The things he said didn't make sense, it was just bits and pieces related to the case but coming out of his mouth like it was true despite the fact that it was complete rubbish. He wouldn't have said it and he wouldn't have done it. But he did. And that's when the stories went all wrong. Coincidences happen, I get that, but what are the odds that his death would happen at the same time as the dreams broke down and there not be some sort of link? I think whatever happened to the Ark project happened to Sherlock too. The computer did its best to make him dying make sense--that's what it does; it tries to make you rationalize and accept. But I couldn't."
"So you think I'm just a figment of your subconscious acting as you would expect me to," Sherlock surmised with a scrunch of his nose. "Sort of masochistic, really."
John shook his head, scooting closer to the edge of his chair as he beckoned with his hands for greater attention. "The Ark's a computer that our minds are synched into. And if it can go into our minds, what's to say it can't work in reverse? The Ark is supposed to preserve the intellectual elite and who wouldn't want to create a back-up as a fail-safe?" He seemed to skip over the part where he was quite obviously not an intellectual and yet seemed still counted among them. Minor detail; part of his delusional state to overlook the obvious. Sherlock was more interested in the focused serenity that seemed to pass over the other man's features. John liked getting to talk about it--to talk through his doubts with someone better at these sorts of leaps in logic. It was very hard not to admit that Sherlock himself rather liked being consulted. Still, John continued on, growing increasingly animated as his mental train continued to pick up speed. "I've met enough Sherlocks to say that they're always him. Even the crazy dreams where things are utterly ridiculous have a Sherlock that is unaffected by the prevailing insanity. I do think you're him. Just... not the living him. You're quite possibly all that's left. And somewhere in that archive there has got to be his memories of me. But until the dream says that's relevant data, I'm just crazy John Watson."
He was certainly right about one thing at any rate. Sherlock pressed his bangs back, sweeping them away from the hood of his eyes. "Why assume just because he died in the dream that he died in your perceived 'real world'? Just because there's no network connection doesn't mean the peripheral ceases to exist."
"If things were going well enough for them to wake him up, I'd be awake too." John smiled like a supplies teacher, hands clasped in front of him with index fingers steepled and pointing in Sherlock's direction. He was a master of sarcastic grins. "My Sherlock's skin is around seventy to eighty percent covered in scar tissue. The damage done around his mouth makes him look a bit like a comic villain. He's blind in his right eye, is missing large chunks of hair, and is one of the only known survivors of the pandemic. And as such, blood, marrow, organ tissue, everything is fair game in the research for a cure or vaccination. And I don't trust them not to scoop out his brain and scramble it into test tubes if it can help them in their cause. The world's desperate. And honestly, neither of us had much of a choice. It wouldn't even have to be something they did, though. I mean, we're all on life support but there's life support and then there's life support. If something were to happen to the power, the vast majority of us would be okay with a hiccup of interruption, but... Just... I've thought a lot about it. A lot. And there is no reason for them to wake him up before me. And that is literally the only way he would be alive and yet not here anymore." His voice seemed to lose traction in the end, trailing off into a gruff squeak of air over a closed throat. He swallowed thickly, chin bobbing with the effort as his tongue darted out once again to moisten his thin, cracked lips.
Sherlock wasn't, in general, very good with emotions. He could read the extremes without issue but there were always nuances in the spectrum that fell far bellow his perceivable grid. John felt sad. John felt cheated. There were lots of obvious shades set high in the hierarchy of feelings but why John should still feel pain over a memory and a guess fell far bellow his known threshold. "A shame you can't be one of the happy lunatics," he said, flexing his jaw as he blinked up at the ceiling. "You've created a rather bleak existence for yourself."
"Oh, fuck you!"
Sherlock paused at the expletive and shot a hurried glance towards his seated companion. John was angry. John was shaking. For the first time since he'd met the man, Sherlock felt a moment of fear at not being able to run away.
John rose up with the squeal of the chair's harried scoot over the wood, hands in fists and poised to pounce as his face turned red with rage. "You're not better than me just because you think I'm crazy. You're just some sad, pathetic teenager no one cares about. Everyone who knows you hates you and that's just fine by you because Sherlock Holmes doesn't need people. He doesn't need friends. Why don't you go see if Seb feels like giving you a hand? Hm?" He stood his ground for only a second, more threatening in silence then he could ever hope to be as he nearly spat with fury. He marched to the door and ripped his coat from the hook. "You know, the real shame isn't just that I'm stuck here with every conceivable iteration of him known to man but that you will never be him. You are just a memory of him he learned to be better than. And I am wasting my time." He'd hardly paused to shrug his shoulders beneath the asymmetrical coat before spinning towards the staircase and with one, sweeping gesture slammed the door behind him with such force that the teeth in Billy's jaw were set to rattle.