The Paradox Series

By Wordstrings

John is teasing him again. But Sherlock closes his eyes even so, because he can picture himself invading something this very instant, can see himself walking right into Dr. John Watson’s mind and on every separate cell—no, every neuron, then later cell by cell, and then atom by atom, skipping the molecules because that would be redundant—writing his own name on John’s brain. He would be able to muse upon nothing but Sherlock. All the time. And when all is said and done, Sherlock thinks, am I not the most interesting thing he could possibly be preoccupied with? Am I not unique? Am I not burning so much more brightly than the others that it’s like being tied to a stake with fiery faggots at my feet even to wake up in the morning? Could John ever, if he looked, find a finer obsession? It wouldn’t hurt him, might even be an act of charity.

No. It would not. Be. Charitable, Sherlock thinks with positively bestial fury at himself.

“Right. You’re going to ... tell me about it, then?” John wonders in that wandering, direct, impossible-to-chart way of his.

And suddenly Sherlock knows exactly what to do. It all clicks in his head. This was a problem, and he hadn’t even realized it—a five-patch problem, maybe, but that’s over now, he’s solved it, and he sits up very quick, pulling his legs out from behind John and setting his feet on the floor. They ought to vacuum, he thinks. Cat, dirt, crisp crumb, dried beer—

“You have to get out of here,” Sherlock says very seriously.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wordstrings
• Release date: Apr 28, 2018
• ISBN: 9781370311248

Book preview

An Act of Charity

In which what’s in Sherlock’s head is never going to get any better, and John is nearly thrown out of his flat.

Sherlock is thinking.

It’s a sordid little problem about a missing husband who doesn’t wish to be found, an appeal made via his website, not even worth the price of a patch. Not worth the kilobytes sent The Science of Deduction, really. So he stares at the rather gritty ceiling, making other deductions. The musty-smelling damask pillow is tucked at the perfect angle behind his dark head, balanced like a Swiss watch, not an angle to waste by getting up. His phone is across the room, after all, and his client won’t be enjoying his news. His client, with her modernist nite spelling, and the mad, utterly mad, completely insane desperation involved in signing business correspondence xoxo. She’s unbalanced enough already. Let his client be happy for twenty or so more minutes. Or let her be worried to death, rather, for a bit longer, before the house burns to the ground. It can’t hurt, might even be an act of charity.

No, it isn’t, Sherlock thinks, viciously unsentimental about himself as usual. It might be possible, if the practice were cultivated, to grow sentimental about others. Plenty of people do that, and even a sociopath might manage it. But one cannot grow sentimental about oneself, not when one is simply being too lazy to get up.

And it’s rather interesting here. Shocking amounts of detail to sift through. For instance, there is a stain just above him in the cracked plaster of the old flat, barely visible. A spray of champagne, by the distribution. It could be nothing else. Twenty years old at least, by the looks of it. And by the miniature tracks, scratches, and scrapes in the flooring, all the little traces men and women leave without knowing they’re dropping bread crumbs through a forest, not to mention the carpet indentations, all of them telling Sherlock precisely where the furniture was twenty years before, when the bottle was opened … yes, it was a post-wedding toast.

Either that or an anniversary party. He can’t be entirely certain, can he, not with the limited data at hand.

With his fingertips just touching, and his eyes closed just so, it’s difficult not to let the long-ago wedding toast bleed into the present-day extramarital affair. He’s seeing patterns in everything, even in unrelated things, has never been able to help that, really, and suddenly wants chemicals other than nicotine rather badly. He’s entirely sober just now, he didn’t even have coffee this morning. Though John did, with a splash of cream and only half a teaspoon of sugar, which means that John drinks his coffee black as a habit, but is drinking it now with just as much cream and sugar as he can stand simply because he’s alive and in London where one can indulge in cream and sugar. He’ll stop that within a week, Sherlock thinks, and then Sherlock will tell him why.

You’ve taken your coffee black this morning.

Ah. So I have. Never fear, your brother hasn’t replaced me with a cyborg just yet, you’re quite safe.

"No, you’re quite safe. Or I mean, you’re not entirely safe, which is much more interesting. You’re continually in the presence of dangerous things."

What, things like you, you mean?

Yes, precisely. And so you’re taking your coffee black. It makes you feel quite at home.

It?

Me.

No, he won’t say that, Sherlock thinks.

Yes, precisely. And so you’re taking your coffee black. It makes you feel quite at home.

It?

Surely you’ve noticed that the man shooting at us last night drove you to the very peak of good health.

Something too much of this, for the moment. He thinks enough of John Watson accidentally without dwelling on the poor man deliberately.

Drawing in a long breath through his nose, Sherlock decides to brave an experiment. He is in perfect health. He is awake, aware, quire keen. His mind is, just at the moment, entirely free of artificial stimulus. So let us, Sherlock determines, embark upon a little test. The only important test, really. The one for all the marbles.

The first such test in five years, and a terrifying one to contemplate attempting. But it’s a diagnostic that needs gritting one’s teeth and doing periodically, and he has life rather firmly by the bollocks just now, so it might even be successful for the first time.

The question to be tested is a very simple one.

Is it better now than it used to be?

He stops thinking, deliberately. He tries to focus on nothing. The void. The calm, sure, inner peace of self. It must be in there, it’s just been hidden all this time. But now he’s older, in his early thirties, and has a career, and is sober for once. He has finally caught up with himself. Just for an instant, let there be nothing, he thinks.

And there was nothing.

For exactly three seconds, there was nothing at all.

God had it entirely backwards, didn’t he, all the things in the world, all the useless, petty, undusted, uncared-for, forgotten, overlooked things in the world, it’s an utter sham isn’t it, the way there are so many individual things with their individual smells and textures, and half of them warped and cracked, and green and teal being so different and there being a thousand varieties of blue at the minimum, I ask you do we need it all, and God probably doesn’t exist anyway, but if He did, that would be a joke, wouldn’t it, leaving someone alone here who can see all of it at once and knows that pink tastes different from vermillion in a certain way, that girl by the underground staircase earlier for instance with her aquamarine boots which matched not a thing about the rest of her and meant she desperately wants to be looked at, and she must certainly have been an executive in the music industry, and yes, her boyfriend had just moved out, because of the aquamarine boots and the concealer under her eyes and her wearing a scent that didn’t suit her a bit but was nevertheless a new one, just longing for a new smell about her, never fear, one of her friends will tell her by this afternoon that jasmine makes her smell like a fucking funeral, but how can one oblige, how can one look at her, how can anyone be seen at all, what with so many bloody things filling the world and not a chance of erasing any of them at the rate these millions upon millions upon billions of worthless ant-people make new ones, and them all too stupid for any of the new things to be any good, or at all fundamentally different really, why, we ought to burn it all down, it really all deserves so ripely to be incinerated, we should find a match and soak it all in gasoline and–

Sherlock comes out of it with a start and a tiny gasp.

And it isn’t any better than it used to be.

There’s a knot in his flat stomach like a hard fist. He’s shaking ever so slightly, and that’s ridiculous. Hateful. So he tells himself at once that he knew it wouldn’t be any better, but it’s the duty of a man to face up to facts and determine the worst of it, and that’s why he’s trembling just now beneath his pale outer shell. Because it was very bad indeed, and he stared at it, and he could have drowned in there. And if Sherlock were capable of being sentimental about himself, it might have worked, too.

That wasn’t it at all, he thinks savagely. It was the hope that did it. You hoped it was gone, that you could go blank like all the others. Hope got you into this mess.

He moves his fingertips up to his eyelids. He’s going to pull himself out of it, he’s going to love the singularity of the things in the world. He will find a particular, and he will see its details, and he will ride them like a California surfer does a wave. They’re going to lead him to a deduction from memory. That is what he does, and no one uses an umbrella to saw timber or a light bulb to change a spare tire or a tomato to scrub the flat’s kitchen floor.

No one uses the freak as the poster child for peace of mind.

Freaks are for conclusions, he concludes.

Take John’s jumper, for example. That oatmeal sort of coloured one. Harry gave it to him before he went to Afghanistan. That much is obvious—his trousers are good but not brand name, his shoes completely dull, that black jacket with the leather bits is rather finer, but he got that for himself from a good secondhand store when he returned to London, it’s last season’s and almost new but previously belonged to a man who smoked Parliaments. John doesn’t smoke Parliaments and he hasn’t any money, so he bought a barely used coat for much less, but the fashion taste is completely off from the jumper, which was much more expensive when new, but came out of storage just before a strain of mould found it, you can smell as much. So: it’s from before the War, isn’t precisely his taste, was expensive, and fits him perfectly. No girlfriend in her right senses would buy him such a thing, not if she fancied him and wasn’t stone blind, he’d look so much better in blue cashmere or a v-neck in dove grey, it’s warm and comforting and sisterly, a garment you wear to be warm, not to look attractive. Not that he doesn’t, but in principle. And without the colour oatmeal and scent of Parliaments, which are both completely irrelevant to you, you’d never have worked that out, would you?

There are footsteps coming up the stairs, he realizes.

Sherlock wonders, as the door opens and John comes in, what exactly about this fellow makes him want to crush him against a wall. There is a reason for everything. There is a reason that, having just nearly sent yourself into a ludicrous psychic fit, he reflects, that you were spinning logic out of a jumper to come out of it. Probably it had nothing to do with being John’s jumper specifically.

Jumpers are warm and secure, and just because he’s a sociopath doesn’t mean that the entire human perception of comfort is lost on him, symbolically speaking.

Hullo, John says. Anything astir, then?

Send a text for me, will you?

John sighs. He is sighing because that is the best way to hide a smile in Sherlock’s company. John is a military man. He is thus strong and capable and self-determined, but there is a pleasure he takes in being given orders. He derives a very soulful, cheerful satisfaction from being told, for instance, Pat him down for weapons, John, we don’t have all day, do we? And in a smaller sense, while being outwardly annoyed, he enjoys being Sherlock’s personal secretary. Not when Sherlock is polite about it, because of course he tested this theory as soon as it occurred to him, but only when Sherlock barks out orders.

It fascinates Sherlock like nothing else does. And like absolutely everything about John does.

Suppose I simply bring you your mobile, and you send the text yourself? I think you’d make a pretty good job of it.

John is sitting by Sherlock’s shoeless, stockingless feet by this time, having shoved them out of the way back into the other dreadfully mismatched pillows. There is no way in hell, as pleasing as it would be, that Sherlock is now going to send him to the mantelpiece where his skull has been restored, to find Sherlock’s mobile.

God, how tedious. I haven’t the time for you to walk across the room and back. Use yours. Here’s the number, I’ve set it down. Write this exactly: ‘Husband’s disappearance traced to pair of international tickets to Bermuda coupled with illness of assistant meant to tell you he was called away to conference.’ Oh, and if you like, add ‘Condolences.’

"If I like?"

Well, they wouldn’t be from me.

I think you suppose I have a blackberry. This is a mobile phone.

Get on with it, I’ll say it again if you like.

But John is growing used to this ritual, and doesn’t need the message repeated. He enters it, he sends it, and then he looks at Sherlock as if that had all just been a very elaborate and strange way of shaking hands. And it was, in a sense.

What’s the matter? John asks then, the bags beneath his eyes changing shape sympathetically. What were you thinking when I came in? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.

Sherlock scoffs, a queerly airy sound for all its depth. "Backwards, John, backwards. Always backwards. Get it right. You mean I look like a ghost. You are the one seeing the ghost."

That’s fair, so John cocks his head and drawls out a longish, Right. Well, you are a bit pale.

I live in London and have never invaded … well, anything, really. Of course I’m pale.

Never invaded anything? In your entire life? That I call hard to believe.

Do you?

Well, you ought to try it. Sometime. I mean, invigorating– pshhh. It’s the ultimate.

John is teasing him again. But Sherlock closes his eyes even so, because he can picture himself invading something this very instant, can see himself walking right into Dr. John Watson’s mind and on every separate cell—no, every neuron, then later cell by cell, and then atom by atom, skipping the molecules because that would be redundant—writing his own name on John’s brain. He would be able to muse upon nothing but Sherlock. All the time. And when all is said and done, Sherlock thinks, am I not the most interesting thing he could possibly be preoccupied with? Am I not unique? Am I not burning so much more brightly than the others that it’s like being tied to a stake with fiery faggots at my feet even to wake up in the morning? Could John ever, if he looked, find a finer obsession? It wouldn’t hurt him, might even be an act of charity.

No. It would not. Be. Charitable, Sherlock thinks with positively bestial fury at himself.

Right. You’re going to … tell me about it, then? John wonders in that wandering, direct, impossible to chart way of his.

And suddenly Sherlock knows exactly what to do. It all clicks in his head. This was a problem, and he hadn’t even realized it—a five-patch problem, maybe, but that’s over now, he’s solved it, and he sits up very quick, pulling his legs out from behind John and setting his feet on the floor. They ought to vacuum, he thinks. Cat, dirt, crisp crumb, dried beer–

You have to get out of here, Sherlock says very seriously.

I … John trails off. Did an arch-enemy make an appointment with you?

No, of course not, you bloody idiot, and Sherlock doesn’t even care how this sounds, even though John was patently joking, he never cares how this sounds. It’s only the truth. He leans closer. Leave now. Right now.

No, John says, annoyed.

Ah.

So there is something he won’t obey out of hand.

But you have to, Sherlock says, more persuasive this time.

Why?

And what to say to that … it’s a profound question.

Well, why not tell the truth? Yes, that would be better, would it not? It would avoid all the ugly intricacies of lying, and lying is a thing invented to spare the feelings of oneself and others, and Sherlock certainly never spares his own feelings, let alone those of bloody others, and so the truth. Yes, that would be better. Cruelty is quicker than kindness. More efficient.

I’m not like you, Sherlock says softly, with the floating half-smile on his face.

John clears his throat. Um, no. You’re not like anyone. But you don’t seem contagious.

And it’s just that, really.

What if I am contagious?

"Fine. No, fine. I’ll– God, why must I– I’m not like you. These things I order you to do … there are others. Which I … I think about things. I’d like to say them to you. I won’t, though."

John doesn’t gasp, not even close. He doesn’t even move. But it’s a quick little breath. Not a normal one. He doesn’t leave, however. The stupid bloody-minded man slides closer, of all things, so close that Sherlock can see the pale eyelashes on his lower lid, generally lost in shadow. He loves them the way a man would love a tender, helpless, lovely thing.

You’re not making any … John clears his throat, tries again. I did say to you. Weeks ago. Well. It’s … all fine.

It isn’t, Sherlock whispers despairingly.

Because he has a list. A neat mental list of fine things and not-fine things. A very, very abbreviated version of the first list, things which are undoubtedly fine:

Kiss me. Now.

Take that jumper off, it looks dreadful, and anyway later I’ll use it for a pillow.

Tell me about every lover you’ve ever had. I want to make them each smaller in your memory.

Press your mouth over every inch of my skin. It’s rather sensitive, but I’ve barrels of self-control.

Get on your knees.

Tell me about the last time you got on your knees, it wasn’t in the Army, it was in London. I know these things.

Say my name, but breathless, very breathless, with your fists twisting the sheets of my bed. Say Sherlock. Say it again. At least I know you’ve never said that name in that way before now.

Ask me whether I’ve ever made a scientific study of the effects of sex on the human body. Ask me if I ever repeated the experiment once I found out about sodomy.

Never leave me. Not even when I ask you to.

But there is another list. And Sherlock knows that nothing on that list is fine. It’s all dreadful, in fact. He’s never wanted to spare anyone anything in his life, and this is a new sensation, this feeling of kindness, perhaps even of empathy, it’s what’s ripping him apart, and he’s constructed in such a way that he feels each and every seam. But he wants achingly to spare John this second list. The not-fine list. It’s ugly, but he dwells on it, can’t help but linger there, and it’s such a struggle to know which are the edgier parts of the first list and which are the more forgivable aspects of the second one. The one he wants John to leave him over.

Tell me you’ll never love anyone other than me, now you’ve met me.

Let me take you to a train station I know in Liverpool. It runs below ground, and we’ll stand on the tracks with the train coming at us, and at the last second, we’ll violently tear ourselves away from each other and throw our bodies against the opposing walls and it’ll pass us by, we’ll be unharmed. I promise. I’ve done it before.

Watch me put a gun to my head with only one bullet in the six chambers and pull the trigger. I’ll probably be fine, and I’ll see your face when I’m all right, that sweet harried sagging beautiful face of yours, witnessing me remain alive. It’ll look like you love me. Even if you don’t just yet.

Since I never want to forget you, take this knife and draw a long shallow gash down my inner thigh. I don’t mind that it’ll hurt. I swear. I’d prefer to have it.

It isn’t all fine, Sherlock says. And I don’t want you to see I’m right. You have to leave.

Okay, John answers, getting a bit lost and blinking and one-must-remain-calm, you want to tell me … things you don’t actually want to tell me. That’s. Not making sense, is it?

That’s it exactly.

Because it isn’t all fine, you claim.

Well, at least you aren’t deaf as well as stupid.

I think, being as stupid a man as I am, you ought to explain further.

You have no idea, Sherlock whispers.

He shakes his head. His lips are parched. How does one explain something when one cannot breathe? It’s too much to ask of a fellow. Even of a high-functioning sociopath. Sherlock slaps his hand—once, very hard, but not hard enough to alarm John—to his forehead. It helps a bit.

I get so confused, he murmurs. "You can’t know what it’s like. Facts all in a row before you, and never knowing what’s right. Every single day. Have you any idea, in this world of yours, how impossible it can be to do the right thing? Do you know what it’s like when everything is so very vivid and so very fucking detailed that you suddenly find that it all turns grey? I want to be … I want you. Near me. Not like my work, I can’t ruin my work, I want you … possessed. Yes. And everything I touch gets dissected and thrown away after it’s used. Do you suppose I want that happening to you? So get the hell out of my flat."

John thinks about this. He is surprised, to be sure. He looks away. His tongue nervously touches his lips. He begins to speak, stops. Sherlock catalogues every moment, saves them for when John will not be there. Which will happen in about five seconds.

I can tell you, John says, casually. He shrugs off his coat.

What?

I can tell you. I’m very good at right from wrong. It’s a specialty. Ask me something.

This is a very bad idea. You’re not fit for him. You’ll encase him in plastic and keep him in the cellar. God knows what you’ll do. Don’t do that, please don’t do that, you already love him and you’ve known him a month. Make him leave.

You’re one of a kind, though. Doesn’t he deserve one of a kind? Doesn’t he merit a unique specimen? You would never hurt him, and this might even be an act of charity.

It isn’t, Sherlock thinks as he drowns.

There is a champagne stain from a wedding celebration on the ceiling, and everyone either leaves each other or ultimately dies, he observes.

That’s all true. And. I’m not sure whether it isn’t the most utter rot I’ve ever heard.

You take your coffee black, not with cream and sugar.

How in bloody hell–

I’ll wreck you, you know.

You’re going to do what the entire Afghan army couldn’t manage? I … congratulations. You’re a marvel.

"Do you know you say these things out loud?"

I know every word, John answers, reaching for the back of Sherlock’s neck with a very steady hand.

Oh, God. To hell with the both of us. Kiss me, he says, desperate.

And John does.

And that’s fine, really. It’s better than fine. It’s a loving, wet, warm tongue against his own, sure of itself and already panting, and it’s fine.

It’s fine.

It’s fine it’s fine it’s fine God it’s fine it’s better than fine it’s almost like not being alone, being with him. It’s so very close. So near it’s only a hair’s breadth to not being alone anymore. He’s so boring, incredibly dull really, and then he does or says—it’s fine. He’s not like everyone else either. Your brain is leagues above theirs, and so is his heart. That makes him the antithesis of dull. He’s unique, only not the way you are. What on earth produced a character like that? Don’t hurt him, always ask him first, so that it’s fine. Try to be like him. Less grey. More colour. Their sort, not yours.

Sherlock will just have to try harder. And anyway, he has John now to tell him right from wrong. Doesn’t he?

It seems that I do. It seems most definitely that I do.

What a tremendous advantage that will be.

The Paradox Suite

Being with Sherlock is a series of shocks, but John is game for it anyhow.

John Watson is a man who is comfortable with paradoxes. He has learned to be. Has to be.

He is a good man, and he went to war.

He is a doctor, and dying is what people do.

So he copes with opposites quite handily—better than most, with more grace. Most contradictions cause him no more than a couple of slow blinks, an inner shrug, and a tired smile. Then he goes about his business, and the paradox, whatever it was, is allowed to live in peace without John Watson insisting it account for itself in any way. This is why it occurs to him two weeks after being ordered out of his own flat as if there were a ticking bomb in it, and then discovering that bomb’s self-identified name was Sherlock Holmes, and then being kissed as if the sky were falling by the world’s tallest, palest, most alarming and beautiful madman, that he ought not be so very surprised by anomaly at this point in his life. It ought to be the case that the most unsurprising thing about sleeping with Sherlock Holmes is that it’s all so surprising.

It’s a job, though, not being startled. By nearly everything about it.

I– what? What is it?

Sherlock is staring again, this time at the back of John’s neck, which is currently slick with sweat that’s beading thicker by the second as John valiantly tries to endure the sort of scrutiny normally reserved for severed heads, murder scenes, flogged corpses, and other inanimate objects which were once alive and are now somehow gruesomely not alive. The fact that he can’t see the expression doesn’t mean it’s not there. They’re flush against each other, just moments afterward in fact, not even fully apart, and John can feel ash-grey eyes boring holes through his spine. At times, John wonders if Sherlock remembers that he’s still an animate object for the time being, capable of being rendered uncomfortable. His flatmate removes the hand from his hip and puts two elongated fingers very softly against his spine. And then, inevitably, it all becomes so much more shocking than it could be.

I didn’t know you’d played football as a child.

Oh.

It takes John a few seconds to decide what he wants to know first.

Um. Important, is that?

You never told me.

And of course, John had played football as a child, for two years, when he was ages twelve and thirteen. But how that information could be gleaned from the back of his neck remains a mystery.

Should have disclosed it sooner, eh? Two years at being a crap goalie is the deal breaker?

No, it’s lovely.

And there is the kicker, the lurking shock to the system waiting to pounce. Moonlight-coloured, mad-eyed scrutiny is to be expected. It was always a central tenet of living here, in fact, and at times it was even helpful. John can’t spend nearly so much time rigourously examining himself, his dreams, his ridiculous leg, when someone else is already doing it for him. That would have made his own pathologies seem far too important. John isn’t a vain man. And now that he seems to have placed himself entirely at the disposal of London’s only consulting detective, he could hardly expect the chillingly thorough study to lessen. That would have been completely out of character for his friend, and anyway John supposes he might actually have missed it. So deductions and scrutinies are all very much in their usual line, necessary, no matter how … exposed they might make him feel at times.

No, it’s lovely in a hushed baritone, on the other hand, is borderline earth-shattering. He means it, too. John knows he does. Sherlock never says anything he doesn’t want to say.

John Watson is a man who is comfortable with paradoxes. But some are easier dealt with than others.

For instance, it is just after a frankly harrowing case during which he and Sherlock were very nearly done to death by way of the sort of poison gas soldiers wake up screaming about, and their hair still smells slightly of burning lye, though they’ve washed it at least three times apiece, and binned their clothing, and scrubbed each other’s skin pink, Sherlock’s pinker than John has ever seen it, and now they are naked in John’s bed and Sherlock is on top of him, raised on his elbows, grinning the genuine but blinding grin of the utterly cracked.

Fantastic day, wasn’t it? I don’t know that I can remember a better.

And no, it wasn’t fantastic. Not really. Not exactly. Not what with the three dead transvestites, and the being locked in a makeshift gas chamber, and Lestrade’s looking so horrified even for a hardened policeman. Not when the terror of taking a single breath more was considered, and accurately recalled—the cold sweat and the steadily growing panic making John’s every limb perfectly calm and still. He’s not sure why that happens to him, actually. And it isn’t precisely pleasant, turning into a survival machine. It takes him hours feel startled by anything afterward. To feel human and not this detached breathing apparatus. But then again, the day had after all been spent with Sherlock, and lord knows it hadn’t been dull.

By your standards, yes.

What, you’d have preferred it spent at the cinema, falling comatose?