Hi again. Yes, me. This is for a prompt from this Monday's Monday Prompts over at sherlockbbc lj. It reads as follows:

I want an AU in which everyone is born with a "gift" (can be anything, really, like the ability to make plants grow when you sing, etc.). This ability being stressful to the brain even if not used, people need to bond with another person, to ground them and gain a mental and emotional balance.
Normally, people pair off when they're between 16 and 20 years old. There's not just one possible bondmate but the more people wait, the harder it will be to find someone compatible.
The lack of a bond after 25 won't kill a person outright but push them into depression, and sometimes to suicide.
The bond between two people is empathic and/or telepathic at varying degrees, depending on the strength of the bond.

And of course, I want Sherlock and John to bond (preferably at the same age as they are when they meet in canon, but before is good too).
How they get there and how it affects them after bonding is up to the author.
Sherlock's gift can be his deductive abilities or something else (in which case I'd like something related to playing the violin).

As you can tell, the prompt is really long and rather detailed, so as usual, what's below isn't it exactly. But is mostly is. I quite like it. It's up there with Metamorphasis of a Ghost as one of the most poetic things I've written, especially towards the end, but it works. Descriptions wise it's a bit like the After Love series by AfroGreekGoddess.

Mostly written to music by Amanda Palmer, especially Trout Heart Replica.

~SRM

Sherlock Holmes sees everything, everylittlething, everytinything. He can't help it. He always has, it's what he does, what he has to do no matter how hard he squeezes his eyes shut and hides curled up in sheets under the bed where it is dark and quiet and sometimes, just sometimes, it stops. He doesn't know why he's like this, why he can't be like Mycroft who can subtly influence people or Mummy who can take pigments out of thin air and lay them on paper to create the most wonderful images. All he knows is that he is.

John Watson is teased on the playground. He is called freak, he is called giftless. He ignores them. He's good at that.

It doesn't stop them being right. Harry has the gift, bright shining Harry who can create wonders out of imagination, friends and toys spun into reality from nothing, from the air itself just because she wants them. It is rare, that someone will not have a gift of any sort, like John. It will only occasionally happen, and when it does it happens in fraternal twins, like Harry and he are. Harry the eldest, the gifted, who never lets him forget it. Never lets him forget how much better she is, and how broken he is. It doesn't help, however kind his parents are, that they are ashamed of him, that he doesn't have that one unique aspect that is so common and necessary.

Sherlock learns to deal with it. He does this by finding reasons. Everything that he sees must have reason, so he finds them, follows the clues back and lines become apparent in the endless swirling mass that smacks him in the face each time he opens his eyes.

They make sense. It's wonderful. The clearness of mind that he hadn't felt since, well, he can't remember, is lovely. He is seven years old and the world shines, offering up facts and secrets in equal measure.

Mycroft, for example, is finding it easier to twist other people's desire to match his own, but that unsettles people, so he's pretending that he can tell truth from lies instead. Mrs Harding who is his teacher, and is the best person in the entire world, (because she will always answer Sherlock's questions, and if she doesn't know will say "I don't know Sherlock, shall we find out?" and will order a book from the big library in town and two days later they will sit together at lunch and find out the answer) young and gifted with smiles that never fail to make you feel better, is feeling sick in the mornings. (Sherlock doesn't realise that this is because she has a child -a whole other person, how do they fit?- growing inside her until later.) Henry's parents have been fighting, and he knows this because Henry comes in with red eyes and is tired and worried and horrible all the time. And Papa is doing something and kissing Belinda Jose-Cruz, who is Spanish and has a pretty voice that she uses to sing her garden into the finest for miles and miles around.

So when he follows Mycroft's footsteps to boarding school, it's better than it ever was when he was younger. He wasn't quite prepared for the people.

John learns to deal with it. He does this in various ways. He learns that people have knives as tongues and by staying quiet they assume that not being noticed is his gift. He learns that by working hard, by being nearly perfect in his studies people assume that his gift is the ability to quickly process information and come up with answers. He learns that by being quick on his feet and accurate in his passes people assume that sports in general are his gift. He learns that people are easy to fool, really. That they see what they expect to.

People, Sherlock finds, as his body changes and gets up to no good, are tricky. Emotions are tricky, and most people thrive on emotions. It is far easier to retreat into the neat, ordered lines of facts that create patterns across his eyes that to stay drowning in the emotional output of those around him.

It's not his fault he's like this. What did they expect, life not to be too much for the person who can see everything?

John goes to university and studies medicine. He's good at it, and people assume his gift is diagnosis, or some small ability to heal.

Sherlock gets to twenty five and acknowledges that finding someone was unlikely anyway. Who wants to put up with someone who so often can't see the point of it all, not when everything is so obvious, written in Times New Roman large and clear across their faces? Anyway, bonds aren't perfect. Look at Mother and Father.

But Mrs Harding had been. She had been very happy, and completely in love and her smiles had been more potent than usual those last few months before he was sent away.

It still hurts a bit, damn emotions and hope. He ignores it, and on his twenty-sixth birthday decides that if he's going to die alone and depressed as common knowledge says he will without a bondmate, to see how far he can push his body, push himself.

The answer, as it turns out, is a very long way.

John joins the army and people still assume that his gift is some minor healing, until they see his marksmanship scores and then they assume that it's accuracy.

Sherlock watches the world pass in streams that are now chemically distant and far too close.

Until Mycroft steps in and all he can see is a white room with nothing to see. He isn't sure whether to be glad or whether losing this final trait of himself is something unknowably awful.

He decides on unknowably awful.

John watches so many people; so many humans who are all so similar really, pass him by. He is one of them. For the first time, he is fully included. Gifts are so arbitrary and it doesn't really matter out here in the dust whether he can create music from any instrument or twist metal into sculpture or kill a man with a thought.

What does matter is that he can deliver a healthy child from the womb, or that he can remove a bullet without caring about the face and allegiance of the man he is removing it from. It's that when it comes down to it, he will pick up a weapon to protect those in his care. It's that he has. It's that after, he will go to the abandoned bodies of those he has had to kill and care for them, and clean them.

Absolution, they assume. That must be his gift. Absolution.

Sherlock is clean, and he'd forgotten that life could be this fascinating. So many things to see. Knowledge creeps in his blood and replaces the itch of want in his mind. Facts on a white sheet lay neatly in front of him, the shrouds of their lives laid out across the dead. Never had he thought that he could apply seeing to this, this revelation and unpicking of everyone else.

The fact of the matter is that when John is shot everything stops. A bullet aims at the apricot of his neck as he works, having set up an impromptu open clinic in the road of the village where their convoy has stopped for two hours, with Sadeq who is their translator, a young man with a gift for languages who assumes that John has the same because he put effort into learning Dari.

It misses, the bullet, but only because Murray summons what little breeze he can in the seconds he has to knock the piece of lead off course slightly. It punches, twisting, through John's shoulder, and he falls forward as he feels his heart stutter.

Shouts, screams. He can't tell. Children, he thinks. I was treating children. Where's the girl? She had a scraped knee. Didn't need to see me, just wanted the novelty.

And also the thought no one else can help me now. Aside from…

"Please, God, let me live," he mutters, and it is heard by Sadeq, and Murray, and taken up and spread and fumbling fingers attempt to bind his shoulder and a vigil starts over a just-clinging-to-life-man as they wait for the MERT to arrive.

The only problem is, Sherlock thinks, and scratches at his wrist where the band should be, that people expect there to be someone else. As if being himself by himself is not good enough. Only freaks live alone they say.

That's fine. Sherlock's always known that he's the odd one. It's at the back of everybody's eyes where they think that he can't see. They always forget that he sees everything.

The clouded sky weeps the shock everybody feels as they wait, and John shakes with a rising fever in the house of the village elder, brought inside from the grey rain. No healing they try sticks to the bones of his body, to the meat and the blood that insists on slipping away.

It's only then they realise that John Watson has a gift, and exactly what it is.

"Here, use mine," says the man brought to him by Mike Stamford. Mike is a man who makes matches and is one of the only who accepts that Sherlock doesn't want someone.

Sherlock can barely take his eyes off this John Watson. Doctor John Watson, a man who is a healer and a killer, he can tell that already. A distant alcoholic brother, second hand clothes, a mind that has spent its whole life hiding in layers.

That is all Sherlock can tell. There is no white timeline of facts across his head, wrapped in double helices around his body. Only the superficial. How wonderful, how lovely, how strange this new man is.

How beautifully violent.

It happens over the Chinese, probably. Two men who shouldn't really be alive brush hands.

They realise what is starting, purposefully separate and finish eating. They walk back to Baker Street. They close and lock the front door, the door to the bedroom Sherlock has already claimed. John doesn't really live here; there is no official to supervise the process that has already been started. All of this is thoroughly illegal.

Neither of them cares.

"I don't do sex," is the first thing Sherlock says in the morning on waking. They are curled fully dressed on the covers, shoes removed, like symmetrical question marks. Only their little fingers are touching.

"That's fine," John says, confused by just a bit. "I wasn't asking for any."

They're quiet for a while longer, accustoming their waking brains to this new way of thinking for two. Each can feel the other's blatant curiosity.

"So, See-All." John quirks a small smile that is half hidden by the pillow his face is pressed into. "That must be tough."

"It's better now," Sherlock says. "But when I was a child, yes. It was. And you, everything just slips off you."

"Mmm," John agrees. "Only really found out when they were trying to heal my shoulder."

"No wonder Mycroft was so frustrated with you. He has no influence whatsoever."

"Nope."

There is quiet for a while longer. This new give-take of images and feelings is odd, but they are both acclimatising to it.

"It's a minor miracle, I suppose," John says quietly.

"That we're both here and relatively sane, yes." Sherlock stands and stretches. The bedroom is still mostly boxes, but there are rough collections of where things are going to go. "After Lestrade has come for our statements we'll get your boxes from that awful place you are now. Mrs Hudson has aired out the upstairs room."

"I don't know." John stays where he is, utterly comfortable, and feeling safe and able to relax for the first time in months. "I quite like it where I am right now."

"Oh, well, of course, you can have this one if you want, I don't mind." It is remarkably like yesterday evening with Sherlock whirling around in a transparent attempt to pretend to tidy up a bit.

"God, no, Sherlock." John sits up and rubs some of the sand crystals out of his eyelashes. "I'm fine with the upstairs room. You were here first. Anyway, I need to stretch the leg out a bit. Stairs will help."

"No you don't," Sherlock insists as John stands, still marvelling that he's slept without nightmares for longer than four hours.

"Yes, I do. I've been using it unevenly for the past three months."

"Very well." That is the last last word that John gets for quite some time.

Adapting to something that he never thought that he would have takes some doing. John had grown used to the idea as that someone without a gift, he would never be allowed to bond. Not only does it seem he has a gift, the gift of everybody else's not working on him, but he's bonded, illegally and without supervision to a madman whose idea of fun is exploring the back streets or using his gift to outperform every detective on the police force.

John is having a brilliant time. So brilliant that he knows that it will end at some point. He tries to shove it to the back of his mind, but the idea is constantly there.

It's not that he's worried that Sherlock will leave him, he's said to John that he finds him a constant enigma due to his not being able to read John, utterly Not-Boring, which John knows is the highest compliment that Sherlock can give. It's that, John doesn't know what it is. But John knows that it will end someday.

Everything ends. That's fine though.

They're nothing like your regular pair of bondmates. For a start, they have no matching bands on their wrists because they have bonded illegally and surreptitiously, away from the gazes of anyone else. They have bonded late in life, in their thirties, at a time when most unbounded people have gone properly stark raving mad instead of the quiet complementary mad that the two of them are. They sleep in separate rooms instead of the same one. Even platonic mates usually share a bed, connection in sleep vital to keep the interactions of minds open. They don't need to. Even though they know they can have telepathic connections to a massive extent, they communicate mostly through speech, aside from the first experiments concerning distance and intensity of their link.

To any outside they would appear to be two unbounded men, amazingly still sane at their age and sharing a flat. That's what they want, and so that's how it is.

If you capture lightning in a bottle it attempts to escape. To break its bounds, to flash once and leave lasting impressions burned into your eyes.

Such is the life of two improbable men.

The thing about lighting in a bottle is that you never know that that is just what you are holding until it escapes and then you are blind. Too blind to see anything else aside from it. That's when you know, when the seal is removed by a stumbling, petty, desperate woman and the when the ferocity with which it burns strips lies away. You realise just what magic you held in your hands, and how precious it was, and how it should have been marvelled over instead of tossed aside as an empty glass bottle.

Silly woman. That glass bottle was the only thing keeping you safe.

Everything ends. It's not fine though.

John has a gap in his head and his heart. He's gone and fallen in love without realising it. He thinks he might hate Sherlock for being everything, but what's left of his ruined heart won't let him.

Sherlock has extra bits cobbled onto his head and his heart. They're called John. They're the only reason he cares. He doesn't like them. They cry silently in the night, speak of dreams faced alone when before that wasn't the case. They form sneaky tendrils that attempt to sneak back to the rest of John when Sherlock can't afford for them to. The only solution is to wrap those most precious pieces in his own brittle crystalline form and to try and cage the lightning that had once roamed free.

So this is what everybody truly fears, John thinks as he looks in the steamed bathroom mirror at a dying reflection. This silent deadly madness.

"He was mine," John finds himself shouting at Greg some months later. "He was mine."

"What, like... Christ mate."

John swipes at his eyes. "Like that. Since the first night," he admits. To his credit Greg doesn't give any of the protests that he should, no band on John's wrist, no obvious connections at a cerebral level, no announcement in the weekly list of bondings.

"No offence mate, but how are you doing so well?" You can have more than one bondmate. It's like marriage, or having a girlfriend or a boyfriend. Sometimes you break up. Sometimes you know it's for life. Hindsight screams that what the strange pair had was for the rest of this earth. Greg is asking how, when John has had that one person ripped away from him in a manner so suddenly vicious, how is he not a sobbing curled ball in the corner, or by the grave with just a name and dates.

"I don't know," John says, and doesn't say another word for an hour.

John pushes Sherlock back against the wall, hands fisted in his hoody.

"John," the miraculous man half-sobs, and drops his head. John leans forward and they are forehead to forehead and Sherlock brittle crystalline self breaks into a shower of a thousand tiny pieces. They are caught by the bits of John that he has carried these past months away and carefully placed back together like a jigsaw made of shards of obsidian.

John stares back at him with opal eyes and it aches that even though he has carried John all this time he can't see this reflection-less man in front of him.

Everything ends. That's fine though, it can start again from the middle, or where it left off, or even from the beginning.

Images of separation cross a divide via a patched bridge. They're both freaks and lightning can be caught twice, in the same bottle even. That's why this works.

They're not official bands. Two copper bracelets gifted to an unconscious and fever wrecked John by the village elder who could see the future as he lay dying in the man's hut during a vigil filled wait for a helicopter to wing him away.

They wear them anyway.

Tah-dah! This was a really exercise in going back to the prompt and checking. Worth doing only for that.

I am working on the epilogue of MSD, I promise. It's a bit like walking through a forest on a starry night; you know the stars are up there but you can't see them. I know exactly what's happening down to the diologue, but it won't come out of my head yet.

Goodnight my dears ~SRM