Dedicated to Yuu and her wonderful John Watson ask blog (Askdrjohnwatson dot tumblr dot com). Title is taken from the song One Foot On The Gas and One Foot In The Grave by Streetlight Manifesto. I don't own that song, or anything related to Sherlock Holmes.

One Foot In The Grave

John Watson isn't sure how long he's been alive now.

It's more than a hundred years and less than four-thousand, and if anybody asks him he forces a laugh that sounds like machine gun shells clattering to the floor and tells them he's thirty-seven years young. It's a lie, but then, what in his life isn't?

He can't remember the first war he's been in, either, only that it was before guns were widely employed (or maybe before they were invented) and he much preferred it that way. Guns are too easy, too crippling, and they take away the back-and-forth that gets his adrenaline thrumming. Arrows needed more skill, and he's always had a fondness for the crimson gleam of blood on a blade. He was never particularly fond of guns. He was even less so when he was shot by one.

He still keeps one beside him, though, on his nightstand with the express purpose of making someone else just as displeased with guns as he is.

He could have healed the scar from the bullet easily, but he likes having the marks on his body as a table of contents. You can read in his scars and his burns the life of a body that has seen more than others could fathom. They form a picture of a man who has killed and hunted, cried and gone numb, laughed and snarled and seduced and done everything in between, so much so that he doesn't even remember his age.

The one thing he hasn't done in all his years is love. He knows it's beyond him.

Whenever Jim is in town, which is fairly often, he and John meet up for harsh animalistic sex that involves a lot more blood than is probably healthy for humans.

But that's always been the escape clause for them, hasn't it?

He sends John a text, usually with the word 'sexy', 'penis', 'orgasm' or 'bloodfucking' in it, and John knows he has about two minutes to drop whatever he's doing and prepare for Jim Moriarty to swoop through his door and smash their lips into a kiss by way of a proper hello.

The kiss is fierce and demanding, all wrestling tongues and snapping teeth, and usually they're both naked before their erections have even fully cemented. It's the upside of sleeping with someone who works with computers, thinks John, because it's all practicality and inserting discs into drives with him, clawing nails down backs until blood wells up from the scrapes, teeth biting into necks. It's harsh, bruising sex that benefits all because Jim likes to feel the struggle of a victim, and John just likes to feel. The closest they get to sappy cuddling is lying on sheets stained red and torn as Jim paints symbols on John's stomach in his own blood. He manages to shift position to read a few, all written in the elegant symbols of Jim's native tongue.

"Death. Sex. Blood. Loss."

Jim looks up at him, his enchanting eyes gleaming so dark John can't find his pupils. His hair is damp, the way it always is, and his smile is predatory in a way that nothing else can be. Not for the first time, he feels a vague sort of pity for the flirty girls and boys that dance after him, entranced like children to their Pied Piper. It doesn't revolt John, which already says something about his humanity or lack thereof, but it makes him feel faintly melancholic to think of those bodies lying face-up in the river, eyes glassy like fish eggs with the marks of Jim's hands around their necks and river-water leaking out of stained red lips.

"I met someone today," Jim says lazily as he gracefully licks a stripe of blood off his index finger.

"Oh?" Jim's met a lot of people and John really doesn't care about any of them. He loves to toy with them, sometimes say he's in love with them, swears they're his heart and his only, then bores of them within a week and strangles them in the river he calls home. He leaves them to drown with his fingers around their tender throats and his lips on theirs as a last memento for the afterlife.

"He's fascinating. Almost as smart as I am, and his eyes are the colour of quicksilver."

"Is he one of us?" John asks, trailing one finger in the symbols. The words are slowly blurred and ruined, and suddenly Jim grasps his wrist so tightly it makes him gasp in pain.

"Leave them alone," he says in a calm, friendly voice, his nails digging into John's wrist. Small half-crescents of blood well up where he has touched and John isn't so used to him that he doesn't feel fear. He knows Jim is younger than he is by a few hundred years, but age means nothing to their kind. John may smell of pheromones, but Jim reeks of sex and death combined in a way that haunts the nightmares of mortals, both waking and sleeping. Every moment he spends with Jim is a flirtatious dance with the grave, promised to him in the most painful way possible.

He yearns for it with a twisted need he can't deny. He's damned either way, so his soul was never at stake. All he can offer up to gamble is an empty life of an indeterminate length and a body covered in scars.

It's not a prize, at any rate.

His pride clogs his throat of the apology Jim is waiting for, but he puts his hand to rest beside him like a docile kitten and Jim lets it go with a laugh that dances beautifully around the edge of sanity with a grace that makes John's head spin.

"No, Johnny-Boy. He's not one of us. But he could be, with those eyes. They've seen things. You touch his hand and you feel death standing beside him. I think I'm in love. He could really be the one."

John forces a smile so he doesn't shake his head and sigh.

John can tell the man when he meets him in the graveyard because his eyes really are like molten silver. He's as tall and malnourished as the shriveled tree towering behind him, but his eyes are like moonlight and John can immediately see what's caught Jim's interest. He's a little older than most of Jim's targets, and the cheeks that once must have been cute with baby fat now outline shaded hollows and brittle bones. Something about the corpselike man, just tiptoed into his twenties, is strangely alluring and John reads the name on the headstone before him.

"Holmes," he says aloud. There's something on the gravestone written in Latin, and he knows he could read it once. He could speak it too, and his lips curl around the long-forgotten sounds, but the other man is speaking and the words scatter and flee like frightened birds.

"My brother is buried here," he says, his voice neutral and unfeeling. John remembers his sister's death. She was stabbed in the throat repeatedly with a fountain pen by the jealous fiancé of her last lover. He didn't mourn, even though he had wanted to, but he did keep the pen. It was a beautiful blue colour and the black ink never seemed to run dry.

"Mycroft? What kind of name is that?"

He shrugs. "My brother's. Mine is Sherlock, if that redeems it any."

It doesn't, but it does explain why Moriarty is entranced by him. Sherlock Holmes is a storybook name for a boy almost too eerily beautiful to be real. For some foolish reason, he wants to say this to Sherlock, but it won't make any sense. Instead he just says "Oh" and tugs at the sleeves of his cinnamon-coloured jumper.

"Afghanistan or Iraq?" he asks casually.

"Pardon?"

"You're an army doctor returned home from duty. You were shot. Were you in Afghanistan or Iraq?"

This is puzzling to John's mind for a few minutes for a few reasons. Not only is he wondering how the other man knew private information like that, but he couldn't remember which place he served in this time around, or even that he was a medic. All the wars in his mind blend together seamlessly. A tapestry of blood. "Afghanistan," he blurts, hoping that it's right, because the other man seems to be a mind reader of some sort. "But how did you know?"

He rattles off a series of indicators, and John is awed that this stranger can tell more about him than he himself can remember. "That was amazing," he whispers, and a smug, if surprised look flicks across his face.

"Oh? That's not usually what people say."

"They usually think you're a freak," John says quietly, and he doesn't take his eyes from the polished headstone as he feels the other's man's eyes on him. He doesn't voice agreement with John's statement, but he doesn't have to. After being around people for so many years, John has a good idea of how they tick.

"And you disagree." It's more of a clarification than a question.

John flashes him a well-worn smile, twisted and self-deprecating. "What is normal, really?"

He isn't surprised when he finds out that Sherlock spends most of his spare time lurking around crime scenes and crumbling graveyards because of the suspicious amount of time Jim spends in both places. They had to meet somewhere, after all, and Jim' fetish with the macabre had to play into it somehow.

It does come as an unexpected turn, however, when Sherlock asks him to accompany him to a crime scene. He knows Jim might be livid or disgustingly amused, but he doesn't think, just says yes, and off they go into the dirty streets of London that smell of gunfire and grime, against the backdrop of crisscrossing headlights. They're chasing after cabs, climbing on ladders, sprinting through dank alleyways, John's limp all but forgotten.

It's not entirely psychosomatic, as his leg was riddled with shrapnel sometime in the early twentieth century. He's healed it, of course he has, but sometimes he still feels (or thinks he feels) the sharp bits digging into his flesh, cutting through his veins.

That part is psychosomatic. But it was actually damaged, once upon a time.

But somehow Sherlock makes him forget all that, forget how old he is (not that he really knows), and it just doesn't matter. All that matters is the frail man with supernatural eyes, the press of his fingertips, the bounce of his curls, the wild gasps of air he takes through pink, chapped lips when he's running so fast his scarf streams behind like a banner.

He would be lying if he said he didn't want to fuck him. And sometimes, even John Watson tires of his own lies.

But he won't, because he's pretty sure it's just his baser nature struggling eagerly against its cage at the sight of a beautiful creature more vulnerable than he realises. And he refuses to succumb to the bait. John prides himself on finding ways around what is basically his essence, the pull other Incubi feel telling them to wrap their claws around something pretty and delicate and have sex with it until it breaks.

After too-many years of having sex with everyone from prostitutes to vicars, John Watson realised that it wasn't the act he liked, but the spike of adrenaline he experienced during. He loves the way he can feel his heart struggling against his chest, trying to force itself out. He loves how during moments of intensity, his fingers curl in slightly and his teeth press together tight enough to crack a walnut's shell.

In short, John Watson figured out pretty quickly that he wasn't a nymphomaniac. He was simply addicted to adrenaline.

The jump from adrenaline to danger was a quick and easy hopscotch to spring over, and it could be alleviated in the most interesting of ways. Having sex was the most obvious, but everything from stealing a horse to getting drunk and peeing on the gallows in the town square gave him a small thrill of adrenaline curling up his spine, better than any lover's caress. He's hunted pirates on behalf of the Royal Navy, breathing in air thick with sea salt and dancing gaily to a haunting tune played on a thin piccolo. He's raced in chariots, his heart thrumming with the clatter of hooves and the splintering of spokes as he rammed against opponents. He's explored new lands, befriending natives, being attacked by a few, and he always made sure to try some poisonous berries along the way to keep things interesting.

And then he discovered war, and everything else was obliterated from his mind.

When he was discharged, it felt like there was a cavern inside him desperate to be filled because he needed the danger, damn well thrived on it, and even the nightmares flitted between terrifying him and enticing him with honeyed tastes of what he missed. The carnage he could do without. The lack of adrenaline was killing him.

Running through the streets with Sherlock Holmes fills that hole completely.

"You've been playing with my love," Jim purrs to him as he neatly finishes painting the word 'agony' on his abdomen. It's been three days since John and Sherlock ran through London together, so Moriarty has known Sherlock for four days. He reminds himself that nobody has made it past seven and feels an uncomfortable prickle of nerves.

"Playing with? Hardly."

"I'm not angry," he says with a flash of gleaming teeth, and John sags in relief. "I understand that you're a rather bland moth drawn to a bright and enticing flame. But if you latch on to him like a leech, I might have to separate you so you don't taint him."

After years of sleeping with Jim, John understands perfectly. He's allowed this misstep because Jim doesn't view him as a threat, and probably because the two of them spend most of their free time engaged in heated sex each other. But if oversteps boundaries, their relationship won't save him from Jim's animosity, which he cringes away from with more fear than he does death. If nothing else, death is certain and finite, but there are no bounds to what Jim might do to him.

Maybe it's the danger, maybe it's Sherlock, or maybe it's both, but John spends the next three days seeking out those silver eyes. Sherlock is addictive as nicotine and much more beautiful, and John's feeble attempts to stay away are quickly smothered before they can begin. They examine dead bodies in the morgue, fight criminals in an abandoned warehouse, crack ciphers, and do a bunch of other things that seem to fall under the wide umbrella of 'consulting detective'. He spends the whole time unable to look away from Sherlock's eyes, looking for all the world like they're crystallized starlight.

Jim's interest is waning, the way he expected for it to, but he's surprised how every day feels like walking towards the guillotine. He gets tighter-lipped on the subject of Sherlock, to the point when a crowbar wouldn't pry the information from his lips, and he recognizes the small scowl that seems to be permanently on his lips. On the eighth day, Sherlock will be taken to the river, and there's nothing he can do to stop it.

It's 11:57 on the seventh day, and he and Sherlock are sitting on a park bench in the single sliver of moonlight peeking out from between black clouds. John had gotten a text with his location, and after a moment of hesitation, he printed one word in black pen on an old receipt and hurried out the door. He can feel the paper in his breast pocket, crinkled into a sloppy ball. His heartbeat against it is touched with nerves.

They sit in utter silence. Neither of them have said a word, but the silence only seems to be uncomfortable for John. The clock breaks out into a beautiful chime, and the pigeons settled around them suddenly scatter. There's music in his ears and feathers flying around him, and with Sherlock by his side, he realizes he's as close to heaven as he'll probably ever get.

After twelve chimes, the magic is over and it's the eighth day. He turns to him, and the thought is still to warn him Moriarty isn't human, slip him the paper, and leave, but what blurts out of his mouth instead is, "If you knew you were going to die today, what is the one thing you would do?"

Sherlock looks out at the street, his eyes cool and distant, a God in his own right looking over the world that he never seemed to fit in. "Shoot myself," he said calmly. "In the head."

And the answer is so beautifully human that John has to pull him close and kiss his lips.

The paper in his pocket, where only the word 'RUSALKA' resides in a doctor's messy scrawl, is left there. When he returns to his flat, he takes it out, starts a fire in the fireplace, and drops it in. The paper curls prettily as it burns, and John sits back in his chair and lets his mind fill with numbness.

He goes to the river late in the day, when the sun is beginning to delicately sneak under the horizon. The river is clear, and the water trips around the limp body sprawled on the ground. John leans over him, and the resemblance to Jim's other victims is uncanny. He wants to feel something more, but there's just the same vague sadness, and it makes him angry.

He was worth more than this.

Maybe I could have loved you, he wants to say to the body, but the admission feels cheaper said after death. He strokes dark curls out of lifeless eyes and instead says "We could have been something." He isn't sure what that something was, but maybe it's better not knowing.

He carefully closes those quicksilver eyes and turns away. He can't bear to look at the long shadow stretching from Sherlock's prone form because it somehow makes him look more human than before, and he wants to badly to grieve for him as he couldn't for his sister. The man without a family, who managed to only forge connections with supernatural beings who had left humanity far behind them. But he cannot and there's no sense wishing for things that cannot be.

He turns away and begins walking forward, away from the sun, away from the body. He doesn't know where he's going, nor does he care. He has a thousand lifetimes to live stretching before him like a barren wilderness, and like a true soldier, he has to keep marching.

All he knows is that forever has never seemed so bleak.