catslash_rp | (no subject)

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"You can't just -"

John stops short as he takes in his new surroundings: this is not his flat. What the hell is -

Oh.

Oh god.

He closes the Door, slowly, and leans back against it, eyes closed as almost a year's worth of impossible memories flood into his head.

Oh god.

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He thinks how he would have reacted to that last time they met. Of course, he wouldn't have offered last time. Wouldn't have been able to bring himself to make the gesture.

Contrastingly, now his primary thought is to wish his Sherlock would take a hint like that more often.

He eats his paradox slowly, letting the smell soak into his skin.

Strat munches his way through several.

John finishes his and reaches for another. This one he dips in tartan sauce, just for added entertainment. It tastes exactly the way tartan really shouldn't.

"I got up the nerve to open my Door a couple days after we talked. There was nothing on the other side. I mean, literally nothing. I very nearly didn't go through."

"But you did," he murmurs.

"'Course I did," he says. "Walking out into nothingness beat the hell of finding Saxon on the other side."

His greatest fear had been discovering that, somehow, he wasn't dead at all.

Quietly: "I can see that."

His lips quirk into a slight smile of acknowledgment.

"Damned if I can tell you what happened next, though," he says. "One of those things the human mind is not built to retain, I suppose." His tone is a bit dry on that sentence; he knows how silly and 1950s sci-fi it sounds.

"But after that, things were all back to normal. I forgot everything, including Milliways."

"And then," he finishes, "you came back."

"And then I came back."

Well, a few things happened in the interim. Afghanistan. Sherlock.

But, yes - then he came back.

Strat can see them on him. The entire intervening year of—life, not merely overlaying but replacing what came before it. It's...

He realizes he is staring, and stops.

John is, by this juncture, not unaccustomed to being stared at by men called Sherlock. He doesn't react until Strat catches himself, at which point he raises an eyebrow, because men called Sherlock realizing on their own that staring is socially undesirable is rather more unusual.

He flickers a smile. "Sorry."

"Why?" he asks, genuinely interested in the answer.

"At some point in the last several centuries I've noticed that staring is rude?" he suggests lightly.

Several centuries, John thinks, biting into a fresh paradox.

"That does seem to be about how long it would take," he remarks after he's swallowed.

He laughs. "Doesn't it?"

"Give or take," John says. "I assume you were working on the idea that rudeness is a bad thing at the same time? If you did them back-to-back, you'd be nowhere near finished yet."

"One has to adapt to one's circumstances."

"You're sure you're Sherlock Holmes?"

John briefly considers wiping his fingers on his jumper, to add to the evidence, but that's a bit much. He uses a napkin instead.

"I'm sure I was."

There's an entire philosophical debate in that short sentence, one that's been had no doubt countless times by men far more qualified than John.

Although having briefly been dead and experienced two separate timelines also probably makes him a bit more qualified than most.

"Fair enough."

"I may still be," he adds, "and then again I may not. In some senses I am the same person, but I have not used that name in a long, long time."

John nods slowly.

"There was something else you were calling yourself," he says. "Sorry, it's sort of slipped my mind."

It has, after all, been a couple of years and an entire timeline for him since that conversation.

"Strat. And don't worry about it. It's certainly understandable."

"Right." He remembers now.

"Short for - Stratocaster, was it?"