[x]
this is actually the worst
fUCK I’M CRYIGNSAD
Oh god. Crying.
*wibble*
[I don’t know why I did this, but here, have a quick mini-fill:]
It was frustrating how very little he could do.
There were stories and myths about what ‘angels’, or one’s deceased loved ones were capable of – prevalent thought that they could ‘watch out for you’ from beyond your perception. Well – Sherlock found to his frustration – he could watch, but little else.
He had already given everything he could to protect John, but that gift was tearing the man apart and there was little Sherlock could do from here to fix it – unable to communicate, to effect the physical world – all he could do was watch, and wonder vaguely if his ‘help’ had been more cruel than Jim’s harm. (At least that would have been quick.)
But as pointless as it seemed, he couldn’t leave John’s side – wouldn’t leave him like this, even if his presence did nothing.
It wasn’t until he followed a sentimental impulse one day – to extend one wing around John’s back, as if he could offer shelter – that things started to change. Though Sherlock didn’t notice at first, when those feathers brushed his back, some of that tension leaked out of John’s frame.
It happened more often, once he realized – one wing extended over him as he slept, driving the worst of the nightmares away, another brushing his back as they walked. Sometimes – when he wrapped his wings fully around John, when he came up behind John and wrapped him in everything he still was, his friend would relax, would sigh almost as if he could feel Sherlock there – and it would almost be ok.
It became a constant touch, and he slowly watched John… not quite heal, there was always that loss, that touch of emptiness in his eyes – but watched him put his life back together again; watched him live instead of exist.
It had ached to watch him hurt, but in another way it also ached to watch him move on – to know even as Sherlock stood beside him, he wouldn’t know, was slipping further away from being his John, his friend. Still, every so often John would stop, pause, do something he would only have done with Sherlock – a flicker of a smile at inappropriate times, a sentimental gesture – and that appeased him. That he wasn’t forgotten.
Sherlock could wait. Sherlock had never been a patient man, but he could wait – hoped to wait a long time, really – to be properly reunited with his friend again. After all, he had never truly left.
A point he was already planning to make often, throughout John’s afterlife.
[No, seriously – why did I just write that? I need to go find some fluff to read now.]
[(–Husband’s alternate take: Sherlock gets increasingly frustrated that John doesn’t notice him, and/or the clues around him (‘She’s obviously married, John’), and eventually whacks him with a wing out of sheer frustration, thus noticing the positive effects that way.–)]
Lady Karasu 