Chapter Text
John carefully balanced his phone between his ear and shoulder as he finished making his tea at the kitchen counter, burning his hand on some of the hot water splashing over the side of the mug. He bit back a muttered curse or two. "Hello?" He shook the water from his hand.
"Have you been online any in the last few days?" Ella asked. He couldn't decide if she sounded excited or exasperated.
"Online?" he asked, as if it was a foreign word he didn't recognize.
"Yeah, like on any of your social media accounts?"
"El, if we're being honest, I'm not even sure what my passwords are for most of those things. I don't like having an online presence, for author purposes or personal ones. Had a blog for a minute, once. Don't recommend it. Why?" The sigh he heard was definitely exasperated. He grabbed his mug in one hand, phone in the other, and wandered back to the bedroom.
"Because the story is everywhere, John."
"What story?"
"About your interview with Liber Weekly."
He frowned to himself, and asked after a pause, "Why would anyone care about that?"
"Because, much as I wish this weren't the case, it's still a big deal when a famous person very publicly outs himself."
John shook his head and set the mug on the nightstand. "I'm not a famous person, Ella. I'm a writer."
She scoffed. "Yeah, well, I regret to inform you, John, but you are, in fact, famous."
Their conversation continued for a few minutes more, ending with Ella begging him to log into an account, any of them, and engage with his fan base. She insisted the response from the public had been overwhelmingly positive, and he needed to take advantage of it. He solemnly promised he would, despite having precisely no intention of doing so, and part of him was sure Ella knew this. But the lie was enough to placate her for now. When the new book hit shelves soon, he'd be back in the throes of interviews and signings and tours. He had no energy left to spare for social media engagement. The mere thought made him long to toss his phone into the Thames.
Instead, he dropped it onto the rumpled blankets on the bed and finally reached for his tea. It had gone cold. He sighed and put it back, sitting down in defeat.
The simple reality of it was that the world could have been ending just outside his windows any time in the last several days, and John would have had no idea. He had been far too preoccupied by the book, which he picked up from the bed, fingers absently tracing over the silver letters on its dark blue cover. The title - No Inherent Magic - was stamped in the center, framed above and below by two large constellations. The rest of the cover's night sky was dotted with the pinpoint approximations of scattered stars. And at the bottom of the cover, in noticeably smaller print, was Sherlock's name, as if he didn't really want to draw attention to his ties to the book, preferring to disappear into its little star field. And maybe that was true. Sherlock had made himself scarce ever since giving John the book a few days ago, claiming meetings with Irene and family obligations, avoiding John if he saw the book in his hand. If it were anyone else, John might have found the behavior concerning, but he knew Sherlock would settle down once it dawned on him that this simple action wasn't going to ruin anything.
John had fought the instinct to devour the book in one go the night it was given to him. But Sherlock had said more than once that poetry was not meant to be consumed rapidly, but savored, lingered over, and in John's admittedly limited experience, that was true. But even pacing himself, he'd managed to read the collection twice, and some of the individual poems more times than he could count. He opened the book carefully, trying to avoid bending a page or breaking the binding, as if this was the only copy in existence and he had to preserve it like an archivist. The table of contents stared back at him.
1. Blue Lights on the Thames
2. Criterion
3. The Blanched Soldier
4. A Case of Identity
5. Questions
6. The Astronomer
7. No Answers
8. The Silver Blaze
9. Second Sight
10. Heaven Not Walking Alone
11. The Visible Man
12. Grand Romantic Gestures
13. Laurelwood
14. The Impressionist
15. A Supernova, in Reverse
16. Wisteria Lodge
17. The Only Accessible Star
18. Here You Are
19. A Theory Confirmed
20. No Inherent Magic
21. One Lamp on the Nightstand
22. Telling
23. Showing
24. Bare Hands
25. The Still and Sacred Night
26. Love Song in G Major
27. Conductors of Light
28. Devotional
29. About the Author
30. Enough
John had grown increasingly understanding of Sherlock's reluctance to discuss his work in general, his skepticism about unleashing it on the public. Because even if this wasn't effectively a love letter to him, it spoke of a vulnerability and degree of personal revelation that any average person might not want the world to have ready access to. This was someone's heart, bound and printed. John finally truly grasped what Sherlock had meant when he said poets could not hide. There were pieces of John's heart in The Silent Child and A Study in Scarlet, but they were easily enough concealed from readers. His books were not emotional risks like this one was. It was a far bigger public confession than anything John could have said in a Liber Weekly interview.
Of course, what John wanted more than anything was to tell Sherlock that it was a good risk. At this rate, to do so, John would have to set a trap for him, like capturing an exotic bird, but he was determined. Sherlock needed to hear it. And John knew that he still might take a while to truly believe it. John pictured Sherlock like a child holding something precious and breakable, refusing to give it over lest others be less responsible with its welfare. He supposed that was true, if Sherlock's jittery behavior was any indicator. John cradled the book in his hands, thinking to himself I promise I won't break it, the blue and silver heart that had been so delicately placed in his care.
* * *
"How many more days are you going to hide in my office?" Mike asked, watching Sherlock from the door. "You could at least have the decency to stick to the guest chair." Sherlock sat in Mike's own seat behind the desk. In fairness, he hadn't intended on ending up there, but he'd seen the copy of Liber Weekly and sat down to read it, and had been immobile ever since.
"Hiding? I'm not hiding," he said, fingers tapping nervously against his own leg. Mike shook his head, rolled his eyes, and stepped into the office. Only then did Sherlock register the box in his arms, which he set on the desk with a thump. He pulled back the cardboard flaps and extracted a book from the stack inside, extending it to Sherlock and nudging the rest of the box at him.
"Well, while you're not hiding, make yourself useful and sign these. Pen's in the drawer on your left." Sherlock took the book obediently, but frowned at it. "I still wish you'd do a proper signing," Mike added with a hint of reproach. Sherlock rifled through the drawer until he found a pen that suited him, the black felt tip sliding across the cream paper.
"And I still think you overestimate the turnout for such an event. Poets don't draw crowds. Leave that bit to John." He began methodically working his way through the box of books, setting each signed copy to the side in a neat tower. In between books, he caught flashed of the Liber Weekly beneath, still open to John's interview.
"I think this particular poet would draw a decent crowd, even if only due to the public's sense of morbid curiosity." Mike nodded toward the magazine as he sat down heavily in the guest chair. Sherlock covered it with another copy of No Inherent Magic.
"I'm not interested in the drama. The work will have to speak for itself. If John wants to add fuel to that fire, he can do so at his signing." Though really, how much more fuel could he add? The interview had been painfully direct. More importantly, it had been so defensive of Sherlock. He would have killed to have seen the look on Riley's face when John delivered his death blows. Irene had read the interview and immediately proclaimed to Sherlock, "Better keep this one, Mr. Holmes." He had resisted the urge to hang up on her.
"Has he read it?"
"My interview?"
"The book."
Sherlock's pen stalled over the title page, just long enough that he was certain Mike noticed. "Presumably. He has a copy of it."
"That's why you're hiding, is it?"
"I'm not." He shot Mike a glare.
Mike only smiled placidly back at him. "He was texting me, wondering if I'd seen you today. I told him I was holding you up, had asked you to sign some stock."
Sherlock glanced at the box of books, feeling suddenly grateful for them. "Thank you."
"You've got to face him eventually. Frankly, I don't know how you've managed to avoid it this long, since you live together."
"I didn't tell you we lived together."
"If you didn't live together, you wouldn't be using my office as your secret lair." Sherlock huffed out a sigh and dropped another book on the stack. Mike's tone softened, and the kindness in his voice was almost unbearable. "What are you so afraid of, Sherlock?" There wasn't enough time in the world to answer that question, and Sherlock had no plans to try. What good would it do to lay out every insecurity in front of Mike Stamford?
Well, not all people might appreciate being so publicly immortalized. Who's to say John won't turn out to be one of those people, and resent me for putting so much of him on paper, the man whose about the author page has always been so brief? He may not want the world to know so much about him. Even though I never name him, everyone will know.
What if you're all placating me, and this isn't actually anywhere near as good as Sic Transit was? What if this gets eviscerated as a sophomore slump?
The fact that this is a deeply personal work could either make it well-received or backfire on me horribly, and I'm not entirely sure it won't be the latter.
What if, after all this time, I'll still end up being the move loving one? What if, at the end of the day, he reads this, and thinks me overly sentimental, saccharine, and embarrassing?
Instead, he shrugged and reached for another book.
* * *
When John saw the name flash across his phone, he couldn't bite back the immediate dread that settled in his stomach, even though logically he knew that if something was truly wrong, it would be Clara's name, not Harry's.
"Harry, is everything okay?" he asked, instinctively wrapping his free arm around himself like someone tending a punch to the stomach.
"Love that you assume something is wrong," she said. Her voice sounded clear, no slurring, none of the telltale stumbling over her words that meant she'd slipped again. He turned his head away from the phone slightly so she wouldn't hear his sigh of relief.
"In fairness..."
"I know, I know." There was no irritation in her voice at his assumptions. "But no, nothing is wrong. Have you been getting any calls from Dad?"
John let out a sound that was somewhere between a scoff and a laugh. "I've gotten five or six, and I've been ignoring them, if that's what you mean. Why?"
"Because he's losing his fucking mind, John," she said with just a hint of delight. Harry spoke and interacted with their father far more than John did, partly due to her still living in Glastonbury, and partly, John thought, out of some misguided and ultimately doomed lingering desire to earn his approval, but if pressed, Harry was always going to choose John over him, and she relished in the moments where they could have him as a common enemy. John smiled a little, wondering what they would be united by today.
"Oh, Harry, I think that ship sailed decades ago."
"It's about your Liber Weekly interview."
John flopped back on the bed with a groan, staring at the ceiling. "Christ, how many people have read that thing? Why have any of you read it?"
"John, Mum saves all your interviews. Didn't you know that? The last time they made one of your books into a movie, she hoarded Entertainment Weekly like it was gold. She's proud of you." He hadn't known that, in fact. He never talked about his work all that much with his family. He'd sooner talk about it to thousands of strangers than sit down to a fireside chat about his motivations and process with his blood relatives. He had endured a few conversations at Christmases over the years, and it had turned him off it entirely. He was more content to pretend to his family that he was still a doctor or soldier and nothing more. As soon as the thought crossed his mind, he had to admit it sounded a great deal like something Sherlock would say. Birds of a feather, he thought, with a hint of chagrin.
"Dad less so, I imagine."
"He keeps going on and on about that impudent man, but he doesn't mean you. He looked up that poet and turned an alarming shade of red. Do they know each other?"
He rubbed his hand over his eyes. "Sort of. Dad met him when I came home to Glastonbury for, well, you know. Dad was acting like a bastard, and he didn't take kindly to it."
"You know, I remember hearing something about that, when I got out of treatment. Dad kept going on about some man showing up to the house with you, kept implying you were more than friends, but I didn't think much of it. So it's true, then?" John loathed the mental image of his father going on, from the sound of it, multiple rants about John's personal life. He wondered what his mother had thought of all that. While he never made any effort to hide any of himself from her, he still never supplied that information about himself, and it never occurred to him to share that with her. Had she believed any of it, before the interview came out, or assumed it was her husband's paranoid exaggeration? Always somewhat more perceptive about her children than he was, he doubted she was that surprised.
"Yeah, it's true."
"And your guy took Dad down a peg, did he?" she asked, barely containing her giggling.
"Quite efficiently." The smile came before he could stop it.
"So he's having a fit over a bruised ego, basically?"
"More intense than a bruise, I'd say. Severe blow to his ego's head. Laceration to his ego's major artery." Harry's laughter intensified. "It was fantastic," he added. No one looks forward to an intervention, but John couldn't help but admit that having to go home for it had benefited him, too. He sat back up, picking up No Inherent Magic.
When Harry's laughter finally died down, she paused and took a breath, and after a moment of silence, she said, "I'm really happy for you, you know?" John froze, said nothing. "You've been alone for too long. That's always been your problem, John, thinking you should go it alone." Was that true? John had never thought of himself that way, but in retrospect, perhaps she was right. Had that not more or less been his conclusion after all those doomed first dates? For all his talk across the years about people needing each other, he had always said that even as he kept them firmly at arm's length at every opportunity. He was on the verge of admitting to his sister that she was probably right, thanking her for her well-wishes, when she asked, "Does he make you happy? Does he feel like home?"
Had she only asked the first question, he would have thought little of it. But the second question felt so pointed. It was as if she knew, simply by nature of being his sister, that home had always been something just out of his reach. The house in Glastonbury had never felt that way, and he was able to abandon it without a hint of nostalgia or bittersweet regret. There were no homes in the military, certainly. And he smiled a little sadly to himself at the memory of Sherlock calling his flat corporate. Not a home to be found there, either. He flipped the book open to one of the pieces he had reread several times, staring down at it, barely resisting the urge to read it to Harry in lieu of answering her.
This house is not a mansion,
but verges on it,
and I fear I'll somehow get in trouble for the cigarettes
I smoke
while I wait for him,
half-shrouded by foxglove in his parents' garden.I am painfully aware that this house is not a home,
a theory confirmed by the exhaustion on his face
as he sits outside
bathed in that rose and watermelon light
that forces its way past other houses,
past bricks and shingles,
to give his face an artificial flush.I know too well that my own is real,
a theory confirmed when I,
falsely captivated by a stand of evening primrose,
hear a whispered incantation of
"Incredible."
I'm inclined to disagree, but can't,
not when he looks at me with such tenderness
beneath the melting sun's last stand.
And late that night,
in another house, another town,
I think of realtors rambling on about
location
location
location,
and decide that if it matters all that much,
that surely here,
my location in his armsmeans I am home.
He was not the only one who had searched, often fruitlessly, for a sense of home.
"John? Are you there?"
He shook his head to himself. "Yeah, sorry. Mind wandered. But to answer your question: yes. Yes, he does."
* * *
Sherlock came home later, John already in bed, the lights off. He changed out of his clothes silently, lest he wake him, and settled into bed in relief. Within seconds of doing so, he heard the voice beside him say, "Glad you're home."
He clamped his eyes shut for a moment and let out a defeated sigh. "You set me up."
"You forced my hand." Sherlock turned on his side so they were facing each other, John's expression visible even in the faint blue light coming from the window. Sherlock was too tense to read whatever was there on his face.
"In my defense, I was actually signing books for Mike."
That earned him a small smile, one of John's breathy half-laughs. "Today, maybe." Sherlock said nothing, the silence barely broken by his own measured breathing. "So, which constellations are they?" John asked, and Sherlock frowned, not having expected that to be the question he led with.
"What makes you think they're anything specific and not just something vaguely celestial cooked up by the cover designer?"
"Because it's you."
After some hesitation, he said, "Perseus and Andromeda."
"Hmm. Who's the sea monster, then? Who do I have to slay? Mycroft?"
John meant it as a joke, but Sherlock couldn't help but examine the question seriously, and the conclusion he came to felt more revealing and more damning than the entire book did: that the monstrous thing that had chained him to the rocks for so many years was just some dark part of himself, and that John had quite effectively slain that beast. "I think you've already handled it," he said, ignoring the slightly puzzled look John gave him. And because the idea of John joking with him to spare him felt unbearable, he added, "Say what you want to say, John."
John watched him silently for a moment, as if he could see Sherlock bracing himself for whatever was coming. But John didn't speak, only rested a hand in Sherlock's hair and leaned forward, placing a kiss against his forehead. He could feel John's breath on his skin as he said, "You have such a good heart, Sherlock." He froze; whatever he'd been expecting, it wasn't that. John remained in place for a moment more, lips seemingly reluctant to leave Sherlock's skin, before he pulled back to look him in the eye.
"I'm sorry if it makes you identifiable," Sherlock said, struggling to get the words out.
"Yeah, well, after those interviews, I think that's a moot point." John's voice was soft, full of fondness that Sherlock was finally beginning to believe he might actually deserve.
"May I ask you something?"
"Of course," he said, his thumb brushing casually over Sherlock's cheek.
"Is it any good?"
John laughed, and in such a way that Sherlock knew he only found it endearing, that this was equally concerning to him, that he was just as worried the work was bad as he was that it would be ill-received by John. He pulled Sherlock close to him, kissed him with more affection than one man should be able to hold, and said, "Yeah, Sherlock. It's perfect."
* * *
Tonight, I meet up with not one, but two authors, following one's signing for his newest release. The two men comfortably take up space in Criterion Books, as if it's more living room than business to them, perhaps due to their friendships with the owner; we sit around in chairs left from the signing, informal. One of them has been running the gauntlet all night, fielding questions from voracious readers, and is still willing to field a few from me. The other has watched him from the back of the room all night, often with a smile on his face, leaning against the end of one of the shelves. They've made waves in the literary world lately, in more ways than one! This week's BookEnds Q&A: John Watson and Sherlock Holmes.
Janine Hawkins [BookEnds]: It's so good to have the two of you talk to me tonight! Thank you for making the time after such a busy evening.
Sherlock Holmes: You're more pleasant company than many interviewers.
John Watson: We're glad to be here.
JH: I confess I've been watching the proceedings all night, John. I couldn't resist coming!
JW: [laughs] I don't know that I'm that exciting, but I appreciate it all the same.
JH: Sherlock, will I get to attend a signing for you soon?
SH: Christ, I hope not.
JW: He's not very sociable.
JH: But he came out tonight!
SH: Of course I did.
JH: So now and then he can be persuaded.
SH: For one person, I can be.
JH: Tell me, John, how does it feel to have another hit on your hands? Do you ever get used to it?
JW: Never. It's hard for me to think of any of my books as successes, despite the emails my agent sends me. Even more so when it's books like this one, that I wrote more for myself than I did for the public.
JH: Do you ever hope for certain reactions when a book is published? Or do you just unleash it and move on to the next project?
JW: If we're being honest, half the time, I have no idea what reactions a book is getting. I don't go looking to see. It's always a surprise.
JH: What about you, Sherlock?
SH: I actively avoid discovering what people's opinions are, but somehow I can't avoid them entirely.
JH: Have you seen any of the positive reception No Inherent Magic has been getting, then?
SH: John leaves whichever reviews he finds the most interesting casually lying around the flat where I'll be unable to ignore them.
JW: It's the only way to make confront the fact that he's made something that's touched a lot of people.
SH: [rolls eyes] It's immaterial to me if it reaches anyone else. It has accomplished what I needed it to.
JH: Which is?
SH: It reached its intended audience.
JW: We are each other's intended audiences, I'm afraid.
JH: People have thrown around the word "muse" a lot lately in relation to your work, Sherlock.
SH: I'm sure they have. But muses are traditionally something remote and untouchable, something only to be admired from afar. So I don't know that it's the most accurate description.
JH: John, it's rather made you even more of a public figure than you already were.
JW: I get nearly as many questions about his work as I do about mine, it's true.
JH: How does it feel to be both someone who writes books and is the subject of one?
JW: Honestly? [looks at SH] It feels good.
JH: How did the two of you meet?
SH: We met in this shop, actually.
JW: He derailed my last signing here.
JH: It must be rather surreal, then, to be here now after another signing, with your...
JW: Hmm.
SH: What?
JW: [laughs] Partner in crime?
SH: Honestly, John
John Watson is the author of several bestselling novels, most recently A Study in Scarlet. Born and raised in Glastonbury, he attended medical school and served in the military before becoming a writer full-time.
Sherlock Holmes is the author of the poetry collections Sic Transit and No Inherent Magic, with another collection already in the works.
They live together in London.