Only Yesterday Part Two (WIP)
And of course, now I have realised that I wrote the whole thing longhand, so I have to edit and type it up at the same time. Hey ho!
A little more angst for your Sunday night, my lovelies?
Only Yesterday - My WIP being posted on Tumblr only until it’s actually finished when I will post it to AO3 (she said boldly!) No warnings other that John Watson being an angry man and a few non graphic injuries.
Part Two - A New World Order
“…and friction burns all down the left side of your torso and hip, concussion, severe bruising to your coccyx, ribs and left hip, two fractured ribs, abrasions to your brow, left cheek and jaw, you bit through your bottom lip but your teeth are okay, dislocated knee, hairline fracture to your right… wrist…”
Mike’s voice falters and he must catch something a bit desperate in John’s expression. Either that or he suddenly remembers that John is the human recipient of the lengthy list of injuries he is reciting. He winces a little and forces a smile and a more upbeat tone.
“So… how are you feeling?” He ruins the solicitousness by stealing some more of the grapes that he’d brought for John.
“Like I got hit by a bloody taxi,” John deadpans.
It’s bright in the hospital room and much too warm. John’s painkillers from breakfast are wearing off and lunch, and his next dose, are still an hour away. Mike Stamford has been in both days since he woke up here, jovial and chatty. Being a doctor has its perks - John has a private side room off the main ward, so he’s been able to get some sleep but between the pain from his injuries and the noise and hustle of a busy London hospital, he’s tired and aching, and people keep wincing when they see the tarmac burns across his face.He sighs and very gently shakes his head which turns out to be a bad idea.
“Tell me again what happened.”
“Again? Fine… fine. The lights went out. Everywhere. All over the world. Just for eleven seconds. Everything. Everywhere. Anything electrical just stopped. The media went absolutely mad for it. You missed all of that because…”
“…I was in here, unconscious,” John finishes for him. He frowns. It hurts, so he stops.
“And why did…?”
“No one knows,” Mike interrupts. To be fair they have been over this several times, but John feels like he’s missing something.
“Some people say solar flares, some say it’s magnetic north shifting or radiation or an EM pulse or just a coincidence. But it affected everything. You remember when the Y2K thing happened and they predicted pandemonium, that all the planes would fall from the sky as midnight struck? And then nothing happened? Well it was like that, but this time it really did happen.”
“Coincidence?” John asks, latching on to one word in the flood. Mike’s a good guy, and a good friend, but he could talk the hind legs off a donkey. “You know what he always said about coincidences.”
John waits for a moment of connection, of recognition and loss to flow between them. He doesn’t often talk about Sherlock but Mike was the one who introduced them; he was Mike’s friend before he was John’s.
“Who says what?” Mike asks, frowning. He looks around for a bin to throw the grape stalk away into, but there isn’t one so he carefully wraps it back in the paper bag and leaves it on John’s sheets.
“The universe is rarely so lazy,” John says in the best approximation of a deep baritone that he can muster when laying in a hospital bed with his bashed up lip threatening to split again and his ribs singing merry hell at him.
Mike smiles and again looks a little confused.
“Who’s that supposed to b… oh crap!” He catches sight of the clock and picks up his coat. “I’m late again… crap! I’ll try and pop in tomorrow. Take care of yourself - no picking fights with any Hackney Cabs!”
And with a quick pat on the shoulder (which hurts) he bustles off out of the room, a small whirlwind of geniality and grape juice stickiness.
“What do you mean, “who?”’ John calls after him, thinking he’d done a pretty good job of it, but Mike’s already out the door and off to whatever it is he’s late for.
&&&
As a concept, the idea of a celebratory drink with his colleagues from work is a good one. In practice, it’s less so but John acknowledges that he’s not the world’s most sociable man and leaves it there.
The pub is a great choice (Molly’s), and one they know quite well from weekend catchups. It’s close to the river but doesn’t feel as surrounded by city as it is; a little patch of quiet while the rest of the world goes on around it.
John is glad to have been discharged from the hospital; he’s feeling stronger by the day, the evening is warm and still sunny and the company is pleasant - there’s a small but choice group of colleagues from work but still John feels this sense of disconnection which he puts down to the painkillers and ignores.
He’s been working at Barts since he gave up his locum work. Mike had dropped John’s name into a few conversations when a part time position on the teaching staff had come up. Trauma medicine is something that John knows a thing or eighty about, and he was grateful for the opportunity. He’s surprised to have found that he genuinely enjoys interacting with his students - bright eyed, bushy tailed young things that they are, all convinced that they can make a difference. Being around them keeps his instinctive scorn and skepticism at bay, John finds. After all, this is where he is now and it could be a lot worse. It’s not where he belongs, of course, because that place was snatched from him on a cold day in April a couple of years back.
A handful of his friends and colleagues have turned up to celebrate his survival and liberation from a rival hospital, and although John isn’t exactly healed yet, the sight of his (slightly inebriated) co-workers gives him a genuine flush of warmth. In addition to Mike and Molly, there are Molly’s boyfriend Rob, Karen, who is a fellow lecturer, Diarmuid who works in admin and Marius, who is head of the teaching staff. They all cheer as he hobbles to the table they have bagged in the beer garden, Mike walking slowly and solicitously at his side.
There are backslaps and a couple of kisses and enquiries after his recovery. A round of drinks magically appears, which will later be followed by several more, no doubt. John will be sticking to soft drinks - his head stil aches slightly from the knock it took but he is touched by the enthusiasm with which he is greeted.
“Oh John! Your poor face,” Molly coos. “It’s not as bad as Mike said, but… How are you feeling?”
“A bit bashed up, but improving,” John nods to a chorus of encouraging noises.
“How many fingers am I holding up?” Rob laughs and John tells him to piss off. Rob’s nice enough but he can be a bit much sometimes, something that John thinks Molly knows only too well as she often has to step in and distract from the latest boorish thing her boyfriend has spouted.
“We were just talking about the blackout. What do you think it was?” Diarmuid asks once everyone is seated and in possession of a full glass. He’s a nice guy with a soothing accent and a peaceful vibe. John has a lot of time for Diarmuid.
“I read online that it was a weapons test that had gone wrong,” Karen begins. “Some sort of foreign power’s satellite system that uses pulses of EM…”
“That sounds like bollocks,” Rob hoots. “They would know if it had come from a satellite and besides, an EM pulse wouldn’t have taken out electronics on the opposite side of the world. It was everywhere - the whole world - all at once.”
He gets a few nods of agreement but no matter how much sense he is making, his manner is dismissive and several people at the table take a sip of drink to cover their discomfort.
“What about sun spots or solar flares?” Molly says quickly. “Several scientists have suggested they might have had something to do with it.”
There are general shrugs around the table and Rob looks like he’s about to squash that idea too, but John is saved from acting by Mike who quickly puts in his own suggestion.
“Nobody’s clocked the obvious reason,” he says with a grin. “Aliens!”
Molly rolls her eyes good naturedly and sits back from the table. “Well it’s been over a week and they are no closer to having an explanation. Why not aliens? It’s aliens or it remains a mystery forever.”
“There’s only one person who could have worked out this one,” John says with a quiet smile that he’s still not used to even after all this time. He’s surprised when everyone turns to look at him expectantly.He doesn’t speak about him, but John knows they all know what happened - the twitch of an eyebrow when he’s introduced to new people as they recognise his name. He wouldn’t mention him now either but he’s been on John’s mind a lot (even more than usual) during his recovery.
“Oh come on!” he says to the ring of watching faces. “He’d have loved this one.”
“Who would?” Mike asks, ready to laugh, a smile already quirking one side of his mouth.
“What do you mean, ‘who would’? Sherlock, of course.”
There’s a beat where everyone just waits to see who is going to speak
Is that someone’s name?” Rob asks inevitably. “Odd bloody name if you ask me.”
John gives Rob a withering glance and takes a deep sip of his lemonade. His gaze flicks from one colleague to the next and every one of them is watching him, like they are waiting for a punchline. He puts down his glass, frowning.
“Sherlock Holmes? You remember him, tall, thin chap, bit of a dick but also the world’s only consulting detective?” John waits to be let in on the joke, whatever it is.
He watches as those who don’t look confused, smile politely and sip their drinks. They are all very careful not to make eye contact with each other or with him. It’s like they think he’s raving, they’re embarrassed by his words. They must think they’re doing him a favour by avoiding the topic of Sherlock - they’re trying to be kind but John’s a grown man. He’s a bloody doctor and a soldier! Yes, admittedly he was a mess at the time, but he’s had the therapy and he’s moved on physically and mentally to all but the keenest observer. John knows how to hold it together when he has to.
“Listen, I know what you’re doing. You don’t have to. He was a big part of my life for a while.” The understatement of the decade right there, rolling off his tongue.
More shrugs and headshakes greet his words.
“Sorry mate, not a clue who you mean,” Marius offers cautiously.
“Seriously? Sherlock!” John can hear his voice becoming strained and too loud. He blinks and waits again - this is a really shit joke and he is beginning to get suddenly very tired of it. He turns to Molly who had had a crush on Sherlock that had been visible from space, but she’s tapping away at her phone and doesn’t look up.
“Mike, you introduced us!” John insists, appealing to his friend.
Good natured and as gentle a man as you might ever meet, Mike frowns. “I don’t remember that… it’s a pretty distinctive name, I think I’d remember if I’d known anyone called…” He trails off looking disappointed that he’s let John down.
Shaking his head so sharply it aches, John sits back from the table.
“This isn’t funny you know. Stop taking the piss. I’m not concussed anymore, so you can just… give it a rest.”
The tense silence that falls is broken only a few seconds later by the arrival of Chaz, another colleague come to wish him well, who has her new girlfriend in tow.
“Sorry we’re late. This is Ash, Ash this is everyone. Can I get anyone a drink?”
The chorus of greetings and alcohol orders overcompensates for the awkwardness of before. Several of them head off to the bar and Karen leans over and asks him how he’s been sleeping, if the pain is keeping him awake and John realises that they are glossing over his outburst, that for some reason, they don’t want to talk about Sherlock or about John’s past, and for the life of him, John cannot think of why they are so clearly rattled by his behaviour.
He clears his throat and pushes on, not wanting to ruin a gathering thrown in his honour. He fills in the gaps as Ash is told the story of his misadventures with the cab. He accepts another drink - they’re beginning to pile up a bit now and there’s only so much lemonade a man can drink - and he puts the strange moment out of his mind for now. The sun on his head and the chatter of the beer garden is soothing after being in hospital and he decides to lets it all wash over him.
He doesn’t think about the weird moment again until he is back in Mike’s car and on the way home.
“You’re not being serious about not knowing who Sherlock is?” John asks, watching as the sunlight turns redder and the evening settles over them.
“Seriously, mate,” Mike says. “No idea.”
“You knew him, you introduced us a Barts. Posh guy, curly hair. Smart. Was in the papers a lot…”
“Sherwood what was it?”
“Sherlock Holmes,” John offers, but Mike just pulls a bit of a clueless face and shakes his head. “He was my friend, my best friend.”
Mike glances across at him and looks as if he wants to agree, but clearly has no clue what John is talking about.
“When was this?” he asks carefully.
“When I came back from Afghanistan. I was in a bit of a bad place and he was looking for a flatmate. I ran into you one day in Postman’s Park and you introduced us.”
John stops to breathe for a minute when he catches Mike’s sad, worried expression. Why is he doing this - they’ve had their little joke. John’s certain it’s not him - he’s had all the scans and the tests they could throw at him in the hospital because of the concussion. He’s fine. He’s clear. Sherlock’s only been gone a couple of years - they could not possibly have forgotten him, even had it been twenty years. God knows, he wasn’t the kind of person that people forget. So it must be some sort of joke that the others are playing on him… but why? None of this makes any sense.
Mike signals and waits for traffic on the road they are joining.
“John, when you came back from Afghanistan Harry helped you find your place as far as I know. The first thing I heard about you being back was when you took the job at Barts. That was in the May of 2010.”
“What? No, I… we lived in Baker Street… and I did some locum GP work when we weren’t…” John trails off. This isn’t like Mike at all. He’s a kind man who wouldn’t know how to be cruel even if he wanted to.
“Listen,” Mike says, “you’ve had a hell of a week. They’ve signed you off for the rest of the term, so you should take it easy for a bit. A few days back at your place, a few good night’s sleep…”
And John can’t listen to this. It’s madness. It makes no sense. He feels fine. He is fine. But something like anger, like fury, is rising inside him and Mike doesn’t deserve that. He needs to get out of the car now. He doesn’t know if he’s going to be sick or fly into a rage or sob uncontrollably.
“Just let me out here, Mike,” he says, holding onto his temper by the thinnest thread.
“What are you talking about, man? We’re still miles from yours. What are you going to do? You can’t walk on crutches all the way back to your…”
“Stop the car,” John insists. “I… I need to walk…”
“I can’t do that! It’s getting dark and… John it’s miles!”
“Now, Mike!” John snaps, one hand on his cane and the other already fumbling for the door handle.
“John… for god’s sake!” Mike gulps as John unbuckles his seatbelt. “Alright… just…. Alright!”
He indicates and pulls into the kerb abruptly, waving an apology to the couple of cars behind who lay on their horns and steer around them.
John already has the door open and is struggling out of the car, his head pounding and half mad with confusion. He plants his cane and gets his feet under him, then gritting his teeth, pushes up and out, using the momentum to hobble a couple of steps before turning to Mike who is leaning across the car and looking up at him.
“At least drop me a text and let me know you’re home safe,” Mike says resignedly, obviously seeing no softening of John’s expression.
John nods and mutters a graceless ‘thank you’ before swinging the door shut. He turns and starts walking without waiting for Mike to pull away again. He is a good way away from home, he recognises. His leg and back are both aching, reminding him that he’s due another painkiller and it will be nearly dark before he gets it, but John needs the quiet.
This situation makes no sense and as far as he can see, it’s not going to while people are telling him that they don’t remember Sherlock Holmes - a media darling, the newspapers were full of him and the cases he’d solved for months leading up to his death. And after he’d jumped it was as if there wasn’t another story in the world for a few days. John had loathed it, but then found it had been worse when eventually entire days would go by without a mention of him in the press or in his life. Even if he didn’t like to talk about it himself, he knew what debt the country owed Sherlock and he’d wanted them to acknowledge that.
He hadn’t been thinking straight for a couple of months afterwards. Perhaps that’s what was happening to him now. Perhaps the shock of his own accident was distorting his memories of his friend. John knew that PTSD could have some strange effects on memory recall but he’d never heard of anything quite so precise as misremembering someone that had made such a huge impact on your life.
As he walks, or limps, really, he passes the time by testing himself, and he pulls together an order of their time. How they met, the flat, Mrs Hudson, the cabbie, his job, the circus, Moriarty, the pool. It sounds like a film plot or a series of thrillers but each piece is bright and sharp in his mind - nothing wobbles when he pushes at it a little and the detail he recalls cannot be anything but something he lived. He adds in the few things from that period that were only his, smiling to himself when he recognises how few there were, and how much of John’s life Sherlock had inhabited. It passes the time and it keeps his mind off the ache that has become a shrieking pain leaving him feeling like there isn’t an inch of his body that isn’t bruised or abraded.
He’s almost sick with relief when he finally steps through his front door. He locks it behind him and hobbles to the kitchen, finds his tablets and pops two, washing them down with gulps of water from the kitchen tap and watching out the window as night begins to fall on the world outside.
His flat is at street level, but there are two others in this converted Edwardian redbrick house, one above and one below with a garden. They all have separate front doors, so there’s not a lot of interaction between him and his neighbours. The woman downstairs is in her mid sixties, a ceramic artist. It is she who looks after the pretty garden that John can see out of the windows at the back of his flat. His living space is one long room that stretches from the street to the back of the house with his kitchen at one end and his sitting room at the other. Across the hall there is a double bedroom which also overlooks the garden, a small, chilly bathroom and a tiny box room that John uses as a study. It’s not exactly Buckingham Palace, but when all John had wanted was to not be at Baker Street, expecting himself to blow in at any moment with a sly smile and a new case, this place without memories or ghosts had been perfect.
John half sits, half falls onto the sofa. He’s exhausted but his mind is still full of swirling coat hems and eyes that can’t decide on a colour, on dark chuckles and quick fingers on violin strings. He clicks on a lamp, pulls his laptop off the coffee table and wakes it up. He doesn’t often allow himself to revisit those times online, and without the filter of his own memory he’s found they hurt more than he can put into words. But tonight, with the hospital and the long walk and the weirdness he decides to search for what comfort he can find there.
He opens the browser and types Sherlock’s name into the search bar.
The first hits are all businesswomen who go by Sherl, then there’s an American country singer, an animated character and an IT solutions firm. It asks him if he meant to type ‘Shrek.’
It feels like the world has lost all colour and sound instantaneously.John stares down at the keyboard and notices that his hands are shaking and realises with a tsunami of sweet relief that he must have made a typing error - Sherlock always did tell him he should learn to do it properly.He takes a calming breath to steady his hands and types the name again, watching each keystroke to ensure that the correct letter has been selected.The monstrous green face appears again alongside the LinkedIn profiles and Wikipedia entries and adverts.
“What the fuck is going on?” he asks into the silence of the flat.He types it again, backspacing when his fingers stutter and stumble over the familiar letters. He tastes bile, opens a new page and types it again.
And again.
He scrolls through three pages, four, five. It’s impossible.
It’s too huge for him to grasp. He must be doing something wrong, but he can’t catch what it is. The country, the world, cannot have forgotten the greatest consulting detective who has ever lived. There are thousands and thousands of pages dedicated to his methods, his exploits, his wardrobe, his legacy, the rumours and the conspiracy theories - he knows there are. So why can’t he find them?
After a moment or two John realises that with his hands pressed to his lips hard enough to hurt, he’s hyperventilating, his thin, wheezing breaths sounding like an injured animal, keening and high pitched.He forces himself to breathe slowly. Opens another window.
S-h-e-r-l-o-c-k
Same results. He shuts it down.
H-o-l-m-e-s
A village in Cheshire.
A hotel.
A beer hall.
A footballer.
A company that sells air purifiers.
A seafood wholesaler.
A skip hire company.
A Shakespearean character.
It takes a moment for his brain to reboot and all the while, the keening noise is right there, trying to escape his lips, trying to scream about pain and loss and the wrongness of the whole fucking world until the very bricks and mortar of London are shaken down to nothing.
He types 221B Baker Street.
He types The Lost Vermeer.
He types James Moriarty.
Faster and faster, barely waiting for the pages to load before he discards them and tries something else.
The date of Sherlock’s death.
The Science of Deduction.
Barts Suicide.
Geoff Hope.
There is nothing even remotely connected to the man who made such a profound impact on John’s life that he’s been grieving him for the last two years.
Through the numb howling in his head a thought unfolds. He can barely type in his own password as he opens up his blog. He’d hated it when he’d started it on the advice of his therapist all those years ago. To begin with it had been a sporadic and bitter record of a man who hadn’t known where he’d fitted anymore but as he’d become involved with Sherlock and begun to write about the cases they had shared, he’d come alive, words pouring out of his fingers and onto the screen, bright and vibrant and mad and wonderfully, wonderfully real.
He should have tried this first, of course. He’d documented their life together first hand… well, a lot of it. Some had been classified, some had been tactfully omitted and some of it John still hadn’t found the words to explain and now most likely never would, but…
His most recent blog post pops up and he navigates his way back to before that day at Barts when everything had stopped. There are posts there - dozens of them, but relief sours in seconds when he begins to flick through them. Post after post, dates that should have been commemorated, not a single one of his posts is how he remembers them. A few lines each about London or his training or his new job - some of them have a couple of comments - none of them familiar. And not a single mention of Sherlock Holmes anywhere. No cases. No consulting detective. No snarky commentary by the man himself.
“No,” John says simply. He forgets (refuses) to breathe until the only other choice is unconsciousness, when he drags in a ragged, wet gasp. Then he does it again. And again, until his ears are full of a whining buzz and there are dots in front of his eyes.
He pulls his phone from his pocket and scrolls for Greg’s number but it isn’t there. He doesn’t let this register for fear he will start hyperventilating again and instead pulls up a number from the internet for New Scotland Yard. He has to go through three switchboards to get to the right department where they at least seem to recognise who John is asking for. He then has to explain that although it’s not office hours, and he is aware of that, it’s vital that he speak to Lestrade.
“Who’s calling?”
“John Watson… Doctor John Watson.”
“And you say he’s expecting your call?” John has, in fact, not said this but he has implied very heavily that that is the case.
“Yes, it’s to do with what he’s currently working on. I’m from Barts.”
He doesn’t feel good, twisting things like that, but he hasn’t time to consider the moral implications of it right now.There’s a click and a muffled rumble of voices and a long sigh.
“Lestrade.”
John has never been so glad to hear a familiar voice, even one as weary as this.
“Greg, it’s John. Look I’m sorry to bother you… and that I haven’t been in touch lately but it’s about Sherlock.”
John doesn’t sound like a crazy person - he’s speaking fast and he’s a little breathless and thick, but he doesn’t sound crazy. He makes sure he doesn’t.
“Sorry?
”“It’s Sherlock, Greg. Something has happened and… I don’t know how to explain this really, but he’s… everything’s gone. There’s no trace of him anywhere online and it’s almost like he never… like he never…”
“Listen, Dr Watson is it? They said you were from Barts?”
John manages to make an affirmative grunt.
“You’re part of Dr Hooper’s team I assume? I haven’t got a clue what you’re talking about and I’m not waiting on anything from you, so unless this has something to do with the poor bugger we’ve just pulled out of the Thames, then I suggest you dial 101 and give them the details of your… cat, is it? Your Sherlock or whatever and they can take it from there, okay?”
“No, you don’t understand…”The call goes muffled and John can hear Greg shouting to someone who shouts back even more faintly. There’s a couple of concise swearwords and Greg is back, his Estuary accent strained enough to sound Cockney.
“I hope you find her, mate but do me a favour and don’t call Serious Crimes unless it actually is one.”
For an indeterminate amount of time, John sits, mobile still in hand. It gets quiet outside as even the drunks make their way home to bed.And then John sniffs. He picks up his laptop, wakes it up again and begins to type.
Omg. I both love and hate this! I’m so intrigued!!
