The Metamorphisms of a Ghost started as a song written by 221b_hound on AO3 for her series Guitar Man. To sum it up, John was in a band in his youth and played the guitar and wrote songs. This Ghost, which I will leave at the bottom, is written after by John after he meets Sherlock. It is him reflecting on how he has become alive again. I contacted 221b_hound to seek permission to use the song to write this and she kindly said yes and much mutal fangirling happened. She also kindly agreed to beta this. So to N, Thank you. ~SRM

John lives in a shadow world of halves and have beens. It hurts, or rather, it doesn't hurt and he wishes so hard that it would. At least then he would feel something other than the awful burn that sits in his heart.

The price that he pays.

London, John finds, is not the bright, life-giving place that it was when he was a student. It slides in and out of his sight; the place that it once was, and the place that it is now. The contrast sears his retinas, makes the sodium of the street lights, the neon of signs and the lights of the cars and buses that splutter past, leave trails of their brilliance hovering in the air as a signal of where they have been, much like his own trail does. His trail is imprinted all over the world but has stopped now.

Everything has its time, as they say. Perhaps -that was his.

John has always burned brightly. A steady, solid burn, like carbon. Warming embers that are hotter and more brilliant than you expect. A burn that pulses with life, both his and those lives in his hands, spiralling upwards and outwards in a pattern of relentless, marching hearts, in a rhythm that changes with the clenching and release of atria and ventricle.

And yet, and yet now, with a grey skin over his eyes and the ghost of a life in his shaking hand, it seems like his vital heart is dead.

John is fine. That is what he tells everybody as loneliness rots his nerves, as his blood vessels disintegrate and his blood leaks from his body in the form of tears that he refuses to let fall. He doesn't care. It's not like he can feel with a heart that sits alone and burnt from the heat of a bullet.

Sherlock Holmes is strange, and clever in a way that John isn't, and sees him. Looks at him. It is diminishing, the effect of a cane on the way that people look at you. John had known about it, of course. He is doctor, and even if he has spent the past ten years in various postings curing everything from athlete's foot to broken bones to more, he remembers a woman while he was a curious intern explaining how people didn't speak to her anymore. It was like she wasn't a proper person now she couldn't walk, and was sitting in a wheelchair. John has, for the past one and a half months that he has been out of hospital, not been seen by anybody, not even Harry.

Sherlock Holmes looks and it shocks John into standing true and looking back and feeling, after the man has swept out of the door with a wink and a click of the tongue and an odd version of a smile, his burnt heart start to crack.

It feels wonderful. Like stepping into a sunrise that paints the sky gold or into a summer rainstorm and letting the drops flatten your hair to your scalp. He drops the cold cane and stands and runs and feels the burns peeling with every step that thuds down on the concrete and with every jump that takes them over railings. He feels raw underneath, fresh meat, and he knows that if there was a time to be hurt, this would be it, when he is exposed.

The risk is worth it. The risk is worth it.

He dreams of monsters now, and doesn't care. His lungs expand fully and the muscle on his shoulder aches as he consumes breaths of his own personal stratosphere, made of the ozone produced with the firing of a bullet.

He burns once more, this time in tandem. He feels the last of the dark scabs encasing his heart crack and crumble with every shared beat, with every shared look, with every shared laugh. There are a lot of those, the shared laughs, and they cause him to metamorphose into something that spreads and expands to cover this entire city once more. He was a ghost and now he is not. Now he is turning into himself once more.

It should be wrong, John knows, that his world is made of one man and his life, but it isn't. It isn't and he rejoices for it. Both he and Sherlock have a small mark on their souls, the trophy of loneliness; and now those trophies are slowly being melted down and the metal of each of them is spreading in bright silver veins that make the forged link between them shine burnished and brighter.

They sit in the firelight of the ending winter and don't look at the other. John is reading. Sherlock is sprawled on the sofa.

"I was a ghost," John says out loud and it comes out as a slow, thoughtful breath.

Sherlock breaths a slow thoughtful one in reply and then pulls himself up to look at John. His hair is an ink halo around his head. "Of yourself, yes. What else is a man to be when everything that he has is gone? But you are no longer." He looks at John as a cat would, strange eyes tilted. "Do you want to be?"

"God, no." John sits up properly and leans forward. "Never again. It ached of nothing," he confesses into the full air between them.

"That is… oddly lyrical of you, John," Sherlock says. "But," he bows his head and traces the patina of the violin, crooning with silent strings in its open case. "I know what you mean."

"Really?"

Sherlock opens his mouth and it is as if the words stick to his throat, leaving a hollow where they should be, shaped white in the room.

He plays instead, and the low, trembling notes that travel in the words' stead rest against John's pink-once-more heart and burrow their way into his lacrimal ducts, releasing themselves as the tears he couldn't cry before.

"There were once two ghosts," John says in a voice composed and wrecked at once. "One who was not seen as human, and one who was forgotten all together. They met by chance one day, and slowly turned into men for the whole world to marvel at." Sherlock stops playing and lowers the bow.

"Here I am," Sherlock says.

"Here I am," John says back and they both smile in the street light painting the scene in sodium streaks. He stands and lifts Sherlock's arm for him, places the bow back to the strings and touches his elbow gently to encourage him.

And it is wonderful.

Shadows and twilight and all the figures move

Half in and out of lines of vision

And I'm a fading afterburn

Of someone who once had a pulse

But alone is not a trophy

And lonely isn't strong

Why can't anybody see

A ghost, a ghost in London

Who used to be me?

Then you see me, you make me real

And we're chasing after dreams and monsters

You're lighting up the stratosphere

And give me a reason to breathe

Instead of afterburn, I'm burning

My heart beating to break free

This ghost's alive and breathing

This ghost is turning into me

Alone is not a trophy

And lonely isn't strong

I don't need anyone else to see

Now the world is made of you and me

Alone is not a trophy

And lonely isn't strong

This ghost's alive and breathing

This ghost is turning into me

A note on permission to use other's work: I asked 221b_hound if I could write this. I would not have done if she had said no. As someone who has been recently plagarised my youngest sister, who simply didn't think of the consequences, I understand the feelings from both sides.

Behind every piece of work on the site is a person who has put some of their mind and effort into each word. We need to remember that. ~SRM

Oh, and chp9 of MSD is with Shaindy. If you want it to go faster, go bug her.