snowdarkred

Title: When the War Fires Fade
Author:

snowdarkred
Word Count: ~7000
Pairings: Gen; Sherlock/John pre-slash
Disclaimer: I own nothing. Seriously.
Rating/Warnings: PG-13, magic!AU, violence, swearing, vampires that don't sparkle and are actually supposed to be somewhat scary, gratuitous descriptions
Author's Note: I. Had. SO MUCH. Fun. Writing this. I can't even begin to tell you, seriously. Okay, Sunshine is my favorite book and is pretty much the only current book dealing with vampires that I can stand. So it was only a matter of time before I wrote a fusion/inspired/crossover/thingamabob using it as a backdrop. And guess what? I did! But I would like to assure you that no knowledge of said amazing book is necessary to reading this, since I pretty much just adapted some of the mythology to my own ends. Um. Yeah. Anywho, my thanks to

anruiukimi and

shanachie_quill for their encouragement and comments. You rock!

ATTENTION:

munchinglunch made a podfic of this for

help_japan! You can download it here.

Summary: The Wars turned the world on its head, and in that unrivaled chaos, John Watson was born with a rare gift. Sherlock, naturally, was born with an even rarer one. Years after the Wars end and the Others return to their dark lairs, two men are introduced by a well-meaning mutual acquaintance. And their world is upturned yet again.

Magic is believing in yourself; if you can do that, you can make anything happen.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

That's the thing with magic. You've got to know it's still here, all around us, or it just stays invisible for you.
Charles de Lint

A world in which elves exist and magic works offers greater opportunities to digress and explore.
Terry Brooks

We must try not to sink beneath our anguish, Harry, but battle on.
Albus Dumbledore

The story is always better than your ability to write it.
Robin McKinley

When the War Fires Fade

John was just young enough during the Wars for the details to be lost in the fuzzy layers of memory. He only really recalled the general terror and some of the scarier incidents from the news. School was canceled often enough that he and Harry did most of their learning at home, from textbooks illuminated by flickering apotropaic candles. Their mother plastered the doorways and windows with wards and always tucked protection spells in her children's pockets when they left the house.

She was killed by a rogue werefox when John was ten. It had been just after the Wars had ended, during that blank space of time when no one was quite sure whether it was really over. The werefox in question had been unable to afford the cycle-stopping medication that was so popular on the black market. The Special Other Forces (SOF in common parlance) had declared the murder a cold case shortly after it was confirmed not to be the work of the Darkest Others, vampires; they had no interest in something as ordinary as an uncontrolled were.

John burned with anger, but not nearly as hot or hard as Harry did. His father just fell into the bottle and never found his way out again.

---

With his older sister venting her rage on the world, and his father stewing in grief and alcohol, it fell to John to take care of the wards that kept his family alive. Protective spells always worked better and lasted longer if you spent a little time with them, and his mum had taken pride in how strongly the Watsons were guarded.

Clearly, it hadn't been enough.

At least once every week, John would settle into the center of their little house with a box of the latest incense in one hand and a burning bowl in the other. He lit the incense and watched it spiral upwards in slow, mournful arcs, and then he let it carry him outwards, into the walls of the house. The wards greeted him with enthusiasm, wrapping themselves around him and shaking themselves in a manner not-unlike that of a pack of excited dogs.

John kept it a secret. It was the only thing he could do. Both Harry and their father had turned their backs on magic altogether. They refused to have anything to do with it, as if not acknowledging its existence would somehow stop its wielders from breaking into their house and killing them all. He tried to make the wards last as long as he could on his own. Wards, even stationary wards like the ones that protected their house, didn't last more than a month or two before fizzling out. One had to replace them before they did, or else, but decent wardcraft-work was expensive, and John didn't have the money, and his father wasn't going to pay for what hadn't saved his wife.

But to his surprise – they didn't die. They didn't even fade. If anything, they grew stronger.

And that was how John Watson discovered that he had a gift for wardkeeping. Too bad he would never be able to do anything with it.

---

Magic was funny. It was a proven fact that if you started using it, you had to keep using it, for fear of madness. Magic-handlers walked the thin line between what people considered human and what they considered Other every day. There was a reason the government required all magic-handlers and Others to register. A loaded gun was a dangerous weapon, but a person who could set the world on fire with their mind was a nightmare made flesh – when they were lucky. Sometimes what you couldn't touch was more dangerous than what you could.

John was an untrained wardkeeper. He could walk into anyone's house or place of business, no matter how well-warded, and be welcomed, no matter how ill his intentions were. Everywhere he went, wards clamored for his attention, shouting over each other to be heard. He may not have been able to freeze water with a touch or suck the shadows out of a room with a deep breath, but he could go anywhere, and nothing magical could stop him. Nothing would stop him.

When he entered 221b for the first time, John discovered two things:

One, Mrs. Hudson had surprisingly powerful wards for an elderly retired woman on a pension.

Two, the wards hated Sherlock Holmes. John had never seen anything like it.

There were three types of wards – well, no, there were an infinite number of ward-types, but there were only three that the general public was supposed to be aware of:

There were stationary wards, which guarded houses and businesses. The more people who passed through a space, the quicker the wards wore out, which meant that there were security holes that had to constantly be patched up. London was famous for, in the thick of the Voodoo Wars when the terror and paranoia was at its zenith, having stationary wards posted in a circle around the city and carved into every manhole cover throughout. The city kept a squad of hedgewitches on staff to recharge them every hour, not that it did much good.

The Wars had hit the larger cities the hardest; the Others were as drawn to populated areas as mundanes. London was quite populated and had been for centuries. The city was still feeling aftershocks from them.

The second type of ward was personal: Wards meant to be worn close to the skin, like necklaces or wristbands. Tattoos. Of course, most people stuck with the separate wards, something that you could easily remove if it went haywire. (Like, say, if someone with John's ability decided to change a tatt-ward's purpose and use it against you.) Too many spells inked in someone's skin tended to send them mad – too many voices screaming for attention, shouting me me me me me into the mind of even the most mundie of mundies. Everyone had a personal ward tucked away somewhere; it was downright stupid not to. They did not protect against everything (or most things, really, but people were extraordinarily good about lying to themselves when it made them feel better – like John's mother) but they helped.

The third was traveling wards, which were extremely expensive and notoriously unreliable. Car companies had been trying to figure out ways simplify them for decades; every company that had made it through the Wars had worked a warding symbol into their logo, meaning that all vehicles had some protection – it was just very poor. But specific wards tuned to traveling that didn't, well, suck were nearly impossible to find. John had never had much trouble with them, but then, most people weren't John.

Every single ward that Sherlock encountered hated him. All of them.

It wasn't just unusual, it was bizarre. Wards weren't made to hate people, not ordinary people. Not mundanes. It was against their nature. Sure, they did what they were meant to and kept bad people and magic from creeping where they weren't supposed to go, but spells couldn't hate. They were neither good nor bad, even the most deadly of blood curses. Agrestal magic was a force of nature; it didn't hate anymore than a lightning or thunder or rain hated.

The whole time Sherlock showed him the flat, John absentmindedly poked at the wards, trying to figure out why they were acting so strange. It wasn't in the parameters of the spell-work, and the wards had already been tuned to Sherlock, so it wasn't as if they could attack him even if they wanted to, which they didn't, actually. It was just—

They hated him. They fell silent when he walked near them, unnaturally hushed with resentment. John poked at them harder, but they didn't want to talk to him about it, which was almost as strange as everything else about this whole situation. The wards at Bart's were almost non-existent, they were so old and worn, so he hadn't noticed anything when Mike had introduced them with the pride of an old matchmaker. John didn't know if other wards or spells reacted this way or if it was just Mrs. Hudson's.

He didn't have the opportunity to investigate, either, because before he knew what was happening he was chasing after Sherlock on an entirely different kind of investigation. Bloody hell.

The bad spots that peppered London were especially dark. The city was listed as one of the five most dangerous places to live in the world, and yet people kept returning to it. It was like they were drawn to it, despite its dank and drizzle and the darkness that lurked around every corner. There had been too much blood shed by both sides for it not to be crawling with Others – Dark Others, Light Others, even, some whispered, the Darkest Others. Not that anyone was under any delusion that the Darkest Others weren't already there. Vampires existed wherever humans did, although no one could agree on the exact number, since vampires had never obliged in not killing anyone who tried to count them. It was estimated that there were six gangs coexisting in London proper, each with at least a fifty fledgelings.

That was a lot of vampires in one city.

London was also quite popular with water demons and a whole range of Others who liked it a little wet. John had spotted more than one shedu and kappa walking amongst the mundanes. He'd given them just as wide a berth as everyone else. No one wanted to brush too close and risk being cursed with a tracking thunderstorm by an irritated shedu or lose a limb because a kappa forgot to eat lunch and thought your arm would make a good snack.

The bad spots were best avoided, and for the most part John did as well as anyone in doing just that. Bad spots didn't oblige the human race by staying in one carefully cordoned-off space. The borders and boundaries changed with no rhyme or reason, and sometimes they disappeared and reappeared in different areas of the city. There wasn't anything that could be done about them, except to stay as far away from them as possible. Real estate agents made a lot of money rearranging the population; there was a reason that John's sister had been drawn to the profession.

Going into a bad spot meant that the nightmares would be that much worse for weeks afterward; the residue left behind from the skirmishes and Wars wore away at the brain, crept under the skin, and ate at the soul. The Voodoo Wars had left their marks on the land. This was the price the earth had to pay because of a long and nearly senseless fight that neither side had won. (Although, some would say that the fact that humanity still existed was a victory in and of itself. Humans wanted extinction for the Darkest Others; vampires wanted eternal slavery for humans. Neither had succeeded.)

Chasing after Sherlock meant running into unexpected bad spots.

He almost didn't notice it when they slipped through the deserted street. It didn't take long for that to change. The shadows laid wrong against the pavement, and the air felt thick like tar. Within three meters, John felt like he was drowning, drowning, drowning, and his skin was burning, like the sun was tearing at his hands, but that didn't make any sense, it was night, they were out at night, it hurt it hurt it hurt, it was agony, oh gods, the blood—

He didn't feel Sherlock grab him. He felt hands around his wrists, holding him still, and he reacted, twisting away just just as he'd been trained. He stumbled back, distant gunfire and screams roaring in his ears, until he felt his body hit something, hit brick, a wall, and the shouting began to dissolve into something that he could understand.

“John, John, I want you to look at me, John, please, come on, it's alright. You're in London. You're safe. You're fine. John, I need to you focus, focus, focus, John. Can you hear me? Are you focusing? John—”

Hard, thin hands wrapped themselves around his head, palms resting on his temples, and John—

John felt his mind clear.

He blinked, breathing fast against tears he hadn't known he'd been crying. There were sobs shaking his chest, shaking his whole body, and he felt like he was going to fall apart at the seams. His wards were murmuring worriedly in his ears, twitching in distress under the onslaught. His shoulder and leg burned.

Sherlock led him backwards, never taking his hands off of John. He took them back the way they came, picking his way through the trash that littered the abandoned street. The instant they stepped over that invisible line that marked the beginning of the bad spot, John felt every muscle in his body relax at once. If Sherlock hadn't grabbed him and propped him up, he would have fallen into the gutter.

“Bloody hell,” John gasped, because that seemed like pretty much the only thing he could do. “Holy fuck.”

“I don't think 'holy' had anything to do with it,” Sherlock said drily. He had his arms around John now, holding him as the aftershocks worked their way through his system.

“You wanker,” John said when he began to regain control of himself. “What were you thinking, running through that?”

“I was thinking that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line.” Sherlock's eyes narrowed sharply. “I take it that I led you through one of those so-called bad spots then?”

John gaped at him. Sherlock, he noticed, was completely unaffected, which didn't make sense because everyone was affected by bad spots, everyone. Except, perhaps, for certain kinds of the Others, due to their nature. For example, the Darkest Others, who were known to set up dens for their gangs in the bad spots—

John felt his heart rate kick up. His flatmate was looking at him with cold, distant eyes, hard, perhaps even inhuman— But no, this was Sherlock. Sherlock, who was mad and energetic and brilliant and occasionally very funny. Sherlock, who made the darkness and terror recede just by placing his palms on John's temples. Sherlock, who didn't even notice that they were in a bad spot until John had had a panic attack.

John breathed deeply and made a very valiant effort not to step back from his flatmate.

It wasn't just their house wards that hated Sherlock. All wards hated him.

And at the same time, all wards ignored him.

John had never met someone other than himself who could walk past any ward, no matter how strong, without a single twitch. Most spells were noisy, constantly muttering and shifting about, but Sherlock never reacted to them at all. It was as if they didn't exist to him, like they didn't factor into his life at all.

John froze at the thought.

Sherlock was deaf to magic. Suddenly everything made so much sense.

---

No matter what the idiots over at the Yard thought, there was no way that Sherlock was a vampire. For one, he breathed. Two, he didn't burst into flames when his skin was touched by sunlight. Three, a vampire could never be mistaken for human. Sometimes the younger – fresher? – ones could “pass” from a distance, and the delinquents of the city liked daring each other to try and find one in an effort to prove Darwin right, but vampires were only ever recognizable as vampires.

The human brain was very attuned to danger. It had to be, in this crazy world they all lived and breathed and fought in.

John had only ever seen a vampire once in his life. It had been from a distance, and at night, and only briefly, but he had known. It was in the way the thing moved, in the way it tilted its head, in the unnatural thinness of its limbs and the cut of its cheekbones and the dead glow of its eyes. John had no idea if it – and vampires were its, they were too wrong to be otherwise – had been a man or a woman when it was alive; there was literally no way to tell. It must have been young, though, for the moon was out, reflecting the sun's rays into the night. The older the vampire, the less they could bear the burn of moonlight, and eventually, if it lived long enough, it wouldn't be able to go outside at all. There was a reason enduring vampires ran gangs; they depended on their young fledgelings to ensure their survival.

So when Donovan or Anderson or the photographer grumbled and hissed under their breath (“Vamp,” they whispered unsubtly, “Freak”) John did his best to ignore them. The unnaturalness of Sherlock was very unlike the unnaturalness of a vampire.

But it was clear that Sherlock was...not normal. Before, when John had thought about it at all, he'd assumed that there was demon blood in the Holmes family tree. It wouldn't be the first time an extraordinary human turned out to be, well, extraordinary. And it wouldn't even be the first time one of them gained as much control in the World Government as Mycroft appeared to have.

However, Sherlock was complete unaffected by magic, and that only meant one thing.

Sherlock was a null. An actual, honest to gods and angels, null.

---

John had a chance to see his conclusion put to the test a short time after figuring it out. Naturally, it was in the most violent and painful way possible.

They were running down a case, chasing a murderer through the wet streets of London in the early morning. Fog parted and drifted around them, muting the sound of their footfalls and obscuring the line of sight on their prey. The murder had been been straightforward, a simple domestic depute. It was something that was usually far beneath Sherlock's notice; boring, in other words. But they hadn't had as many cases lately, and Sherlock was eying John's illegal firearm in a particularly predatory manor. So Sherlock took the case and then here they were, running down the street after a man who stabbed his wife with the kitchen knife he bought her for their anniversary.

And the thing was, not all magic-handlers registered like they were supposed to. John certainly hadn't. Some sources estimated that as many as forty-two percent of magic-handlers were unregistered, with thirteen percent of those being simply unaware of the explosive danger lurking in their bodies. It was no secret that magic-handlers were tracked by the government, or that they paid higher taxes, or that they were sometimes, depending on the origin or nature of their magic, barred from certain careers. And if there was even a hint of demon blood in their family, they were barred from pretty much anything but fast food joints and crime. It made a sick kind of sense that at least one criminal they chased would be an unregistered magic-handler, and that there would be no way for Sherlock to deduce it, because if the person in question didn't use their ability, no one except maybe a magic-sniffer would be able to tell.

And Sherlock was deaf to magic anyway.

There was a split second when John's wards, who had been grumbling at the pace and the difficulty of doing their job while he was racing down the open street, began to scream in earnest, just like they had in Afghanistan when he'd been shot. (Wards are not good against iron, and the insurgents had taken to using cold iron rounds in their machine guns, the bastards.) John reacted instinctively: He put on a burst of speed and tackled Sherlock to the ground, just as the streetlamps up and down the street exploded and the pavement began to crumble like wet sand.

“Jesus fuck,” he swore, coughing as the spell clogged his throat. Gods, that tasted foul; what the hell kind of crazy arsehole would use that curse? “Jesus Christ.”

Sherlock did not cough. He didn't even sniffle. He shook his head, pushed John off of him, and sat up. He looked at the ground, looked at the dark streetlamps, and looked after where their prey – if a man who made lamps explode or turned pavement into sand could be prey – had disappeared into the mist.

“I take it he is a spellcaster,” he observed dryly.

“No offense,” John said, “but no shit, Sherlock.”

“Hm,” Sherlock hummed absently. He poked at the pavement; it came away with his finger and clung to him soggily. “It appears that he was able to transmute the physical structure of the—”

“Of course he was,” John snapped. He stood up. His hands weren't shaking at all. “He threw a bloody fluidify curse at us.”

Sherlock frowned. “How can you tell it was that particular category of curse? A 'fluidify curse' as opposed to something else that would achieve the same result?”

John stared. “I don't know; I just could. It's not something you think about. You just know.”

“I didn't know,” Sherlock said, and then the skin around his eyes looked pinched, as if he hadn't meant to say that aloud. “But then, I wouldn't, would I?”

“You mean you're a null,” John said slowly, because he was tired of wondering about it.

“I don't know what that is,” Sherlock snapped in a way that screamed the opposite, before levering himself up and stalking off, the pavement-that-wasn't squelching under his boots.

Nulls were an avoided topic in modern conversation because what they represented made people uncomfortable: If people without any magic at all were completely insane and antisocial, than that made magic a source of sanity, the norm, and a lack of magic abnormal. It implied what everyone involved in heavy magic-handling already knew – that everyone was connected, in some way, to that vast and indescribable power called magic. The average voter and tax-payer wanted to be nomral, and went to great lengths to prove it, but none of them really liked what normal was. No one wanted to admit it.

There had been very few truly magicless persons in the history of the entire human race, and all of them were a little...off. Strange. Not demon-strange, or magic-strange, because they were the opposite – they were individuals so grounded in reality that they were cut off from everything that could not be determined by the first five senses. Magic was in everything, however; every living creature (even nulls) had at least some form of innate magic inside them, in the beat of their heart. But nulls were deaf to it. Nulls were deaf to what made life special.

A high percent of the human serial killers – those who weren't bad magic-crosses with too much demon blood in them (which made them notoriously mad) – were nulls. Nulls were sociopaths, psychopaths, dangerous. They were incapable of connecting with anyone who wasn't themselves, of having outside interests beside their own selfish desires. And what was worse: While they were not actually vampires, they were thought to be vampiric in nature – somehow, in a way that a lot of private research and government money had yet to discover, they absorbed magic. Not consciously, and not in anyway that the null in question noticed, but spells, curses, and wards just slowly and inexplicably lost power around them.

And no one who the public didn't already label as abnormal would dare admit that they existed.

---

A null and a wardkeeper, living in the same flat in one of the most dangerous cities left on earth. It sounded like the set up to a very bad joke.

---

John spent the next few days quietly considering everything his flatmate did, and Sherlock spent the next few days pretending that John didn't exist. John didn't know what he was expecting; it was one thing to consider the possibility, another to realize it.

Sherlock was still Sherlock, and after that few days were over, John made a conscious decision not to think about it. It hadn't mattered before, and it didn't matter now. Unless Sherlock did as Donovan and Anderson predicted (unlikely, as he would probably rather live a life of ultimate boredom than prove either of them right) and went rogue, John didn't see any reason to make it a thing. Besides, Mycroft (who was definitely not a null, judging by the number of wards scattered around his person) obviously had an eye on the situation.

So John didn't think about, and Sherlock resumed talking at him, and life moved on.

He didn't hear them coming. But then you didn't, did you, when they were vampires.

---

One minute John was storming out of the flat, heading towards Sarah's, listening to his wards assure him that his flatmate was a right prat, and the next he was surrounded by eerie figures that his mind immediately identified as vampires. Vampires. Vampires.

John was going to die. People didn't escape from vampires. They disappeared and died, or they disappeared, died, and reappeared drained in an anonymous alleyway. Very occasionally, they disappeared and were Changed into vampires themselves, but no one was quite sure how often that was. (Vampires didn't exactly sit still for the census takers.) John was surrounded by vampires, and he was going to die.

They didn't kill him. They grabbed him, and his wards shrieked loud enough that John's ears felt like they were ringing (even though 'hearing' wards had less to do with his actual ears and more to do with his magic-handling abilities; it only seemed like hearing because that was the closest equivalent his brain could grab on to). Cold hands – dead hands, oh gods – grabbed him, forced him to turn his head, and then he was staring into the distinct non-color of a vamp's eyes. The vampire leaned forward and let out a careful breath, and John felt his eyes roll up in his head as the Sleep was laid on him and he was dragged down...down...down....

The world went dark.

---

John swam back to consciousness through sheer determination. His head felt like a swamp, and his mouth tasted disgusting. His internal clock was thrown to hell, and it took him a second to remember why.

Vampires. Sleep. Sherlock. The case. Oh gods and angels, what if they'd gotten him too?

Adrenalin hit him like a freight train, tearing through his brain and overpowering rational thought. He surged upwards, ready to start swinging, only to be caught by sharp, inhuman hands. Cold. Boney. Dead in a way that hands shouldn't be. John looked up into the eyes of the vampire leaning over him, far too close for comfort.

Its face was thin and hallow, with sharp cheekbones that could – probably literally – cut glass. It was attractive, in an unnatural razor-edge supermodel kind of way. There were no fangs visible, for which John was almost grateful, because he didn't think that his heart could handle it if this got any more like a horror movie. Its grip was as hard and unforgiving as steel manacles; John could feel bruises forming, and he had the sickening idea that the vamp could as well. It could probably sense the blood. It leaned in close, pale and unearthly and horribly, horribly still. It wasn't bothering to breathe.

The vampire was nothing like Sherlock.

Sherlock was a creature of movement. He was always fiddling, always twitching, always pacing and talking and living. No one could possibly mistake Sherlock for a vampire; there was no comparison. If Donovan or Anderson, gods forbid, ever got the chance to see a vampire and survived, they'd know it too.

The vampire grinned, and the skin stretched weirdly over its bones. It was close enough to John to kiss him, close enough to bite.

It exhaled, and John fell into the darkness once again.

---

The second time he woke, he was slapped into consciousness. His head felt even worse, and there was something wrong with his ears. There had to be, because—

Everything was silent. No, not really, because he could hear the excited giggling from above him and the rush of traffic outside. But. But. But. Something was gone. Some part of John was...gone. For one instant, one terrible second, John thought that he'd been Changed. That he'd had his humanity stripped from him and that this was what it felt like, this aching emptiness that clawed at his chest like a hungry beast.

Then logic asserted itself, and his physical awareness fully returned to him. There was a heavy weight around his neck. A long chain that was wrapped again and again, like a leash around a dog. The links dug sharply into his bare skin. It felt extremely unpleasant, although John couldn't think of a concrete reason why, aside from the slight discomfort of its tightness. It wasn't choking him; he could still breathe freely. It was just wrong, wrong like the vampire was wrong.

John's head felt muted. He could hear, but he couldn't hear. Where there should be a comforting hum underlying his every thought, there was nothing. The familiar-looking man hanging over him grinned like a schoolboy attempting a pleasurable prank. Pain was beginning to gnaw at the edge of his chest. When he slowly looked down to examine his new fashion accessory, he saw several dark runes carved into each link.

John Watson was the fifth pip, and the chain around his neck wasn't just a chain.

John was going to have nightmares about this for months. Possibly years.

“Do you know what this is, around your little pet's neck?” Moriarty – Jim from IT – taunted gleefully. He tugged at the end of the chain, and John pitched forward a bit. He hadn't expected being cut off from his magic to weaken him this much, hadn't expected it to hurt. “No, you have no idea, do you? Well. That's not much fun. It's only interesting if you know just how close your pet is to death.”

Sherlock's fingers tightened around the gun. “Oh?” he asked blandly. “What is it?” His gaze flickered up, taking in the vampires that leaned against the rails of the second floor. They smirked toothily, and Sherlock glanced away, back to Moriarty and the two identical human (or mostly human) spell-casters who stood demurely behind him. (Moriarty may have been able to figure out that John was a protective magic-handler, but he hadn't deduced that Sherlock was a null. He had no idea that his spell-casters would have no affect.)

“It's a little something some...colleagues of mine whipped up. Vampires. They're so clever, aren't they?” Moriarty laughed. “Old, too. Brokering a deal with them is quite an accomplishment, even for me. If I do say so myself.” He tugged at the chain again. “And I do.”

“Do get on,” Sherlock said tersely. “You're becoming boring.” He didn't look bored, and he wasn't fooling anyone. Between the rune-covered, magic-canceling chain, the vampires, and the spell-casters Moriarty just couldn't help but brag about, John had seen the look on his face when Moriarty had led John into sight, the shock and growing horror that the madman had him leashed. The anger that simmered in plain sight. It had been written across Sherlock's face more starkly than anything John had seen so far, and he was rocked by the startling confirmation that his flatmate could feel. He was worried. For John.

“Bored? Don't you think we're a little beyond such juvenile games now? No, you're not bored. And isn't that what you wanted? Isn't that what this is all about? Although I suppose you want your pet back, hmm?” John, for one, wanted nothing more than to punch that stupid smirk right off Moriarty's smug face. “This chain is special. It was specifically forged for your John. For his...magic. And the thing about magic-handlers, my dear Sherlock, is that they depend on their tool for life. Without it, they die. Waste away. John is dying right now, every second this lovely bit of iron is around him like a noose.”

Sherlock inhaled sharply. John felt sick. He'd never had any formal magic-handling training; all that he knew he had picked up on the street or the military or worked out for himself. He knew that magic-handlers lived much longer than the average person, and he hadn't been looking forward to another hundred years of chaos, but he hadn't known.... He hadn't known that this thing that Moriarty had wrapped around his neck was killing him just by being there. He had hurt, but John was used to feeling pain. He had felt weak, but he had thought that it was just another side effect from having the Sleep laid on him, twice.

“Every second we spend in delightful banter is a second closer to death for Johnny-boy.” Moriarty's laugh echoed around the darkened swimming pool. He looked positively delighted.

“And if I were to pull this trigger,” Sherlock said. He stepped closer, anything to get him closer. “I could kill you right now. Get that chain off of him in seconds, before your pets could do anything.”

“Then you could enjoy the look of surprise on my face.” Moriarty's expression twisted into one of outlandish amazement before morphing back to the smugness that seemed to be his default. “But you wouldn't get to enjoy it for long, because then all my little vampire comrades would rip you limb from limb while my spell-casters boiled your blood in your veins. And Johnny's.”

John's knees trembled. Spots began to dance at the edge of his vision. He'd been wearing this damn chain for almost three hours, at least. It was killing him. Sherlock saw the trembling, saw the growing weakness. John could see him seeing it, and he knew that he had to act before Sherlock did.

Sherlock didn't care for many (any) people in this world, but after this, only an idiot would be able to miss that John was terribly important to him. Vitally important. Worth dying for.

He wasn't going to let Sherlock die. Not on his watch.

Something inside him broke.

John reached into the part of himself that was achingly empty, the part that usually held his power, and pushed. The chain fell away, and suddenly – he found it, all of it, trapped in the cage he had never even realized he was suppressing it in. More than he had ever thought he had.

He opened his eyes and let his magic flare out from him like impossibly bright, golden waves, rising and crashing and rising and crashing until it filled everything, everywhere, except the small bubble surrounding Sherlock. And Sherlock was.... Sherlock was staring at the air like it was nothing he'd ever seen, like he was seeing the sun for the first time, like the magic floating around them was the perfect solution to the perfectly puzzling case and everything in life made sense now.

John felt his magic expand..and expand...and expand, until it was everywhere. It surrounded them all, from Moriarty and his pet spell-casters, to the vampires above – the same vampires who were now held in place by John's power, which he hadn't even realized he could wield. John's magic expanded, and with it, so did his anger.

They took him. They threatened his friend. They knocked him out, held him down, and stripped away his gift. They gave him a glimpse of the hell it was to live every second of every day without magic, and it made him furious. How dare they? How dare Moriarty? He played with people's lives, strapped curses to their chests, toyed with their hopes. He dared put himself on the par with Sherlock? Dared breathe the same air? Dared kill in the name of the great game, the constant struggle against boredom?

He could not be allowed to live. He just couldn't.

So John killed him. He killed them all, even the ones who weren't, technically, alive anymore.

“John. John. John, can you hear me? John? Fuck, fuck, where are those damnable fools?” A cool hand brushed against his forehead. “John? Please, please wake up. I don't – I don't know what to do; you have to wake up and tell me what to do!”

John twitched. His eyelids slid open, briefly, but the world was a mess of blurry splotches that only made him nauseous. He closed his eyes again, just for some relief. Everything hurt. Everything hurt so much. But a voice – Sherlock's voice, he could recognize it even under the considerable panic – was calling to him. He had to answer, had to offer some assurance. Sherlock needed his help.

“Calm down,” John croaked. The words were nearly incomprehensible. He cleared his throat as best he could and tried again. “Sher-lock. Sherlock. Calm down.”

“John,” Sherlock breathed. He sounded...relieved. John opened his eyes again, just to see if he wasn't suffering from auditory hallucinations. The world came into focus a bit more, and he could squint a little without everything being reduced to a splashy and painfully modern painting. Sherlock's funny colored eyes stared back at him. John had never thought he'd see a more welcome sight.

“Help me up, will you,” John grunted, just to break the silence. Sherlock looked doubtful, but he did it anyway. Once he was upright, John could see what damage he'd done.

Which was not much. He'd been expecting wholesale destruction. The tiles weren't even scratched, and the water lapped gently at the edge of the pool just as it had done before. There was no sign that John had done some serious magic-handling – except for the dead bodies, of course.

Moriarty was laid out were he'd been standing. His limbs splayed out like a puppet with its strings cut, and his expression was frozen in genuinely shocked surprise. (Turned out they would get to enjoy it.) A few links from the magic-canceling chain were still grasped in his hand, and the flesh was burnt were they touched, as if it had turned red hot in seconds. The rest of it was in rusted pieces on the ground, the runes smudged and melted away. It was just a chain now, a simple, very ruined chain.

His eyes were burned out of his skull. Jesus.

The spell-casters were small lumps behind their master, their twin faces twisted in horror and pain. Whatever John had done – and he had no real idea what that had been, only that it was tiring and massive – had hurt them as it killed them, and John...felt rather sick. This whole situation made him sick.

The vampires were dead. John refused to look up and see what his magic had done to them. Judging from Sherlock's raised eyebrows and interested stare, it was probably gruesome.

John took a deep breath and felt his feelings slide back into place. The disconnect that came after battle was starting to fade, and in its place, his natural human responses returned: Horror, exhaustion, residual anger, and the awareness that the only thing he'd been running on these last few minutes was battle-fury.

After a moment, Sherlock turned his attention back to John, who was quickly working himself up to another panic attack.

“I am a magic-null,” Sherlock said flatly. “That was impossible.”

John laughed wildly, coming down from adrenalin and magic and gods knew what else. “Whatever remains,” he gasped hoarsely around his smile. Gods, he was tired. Tired and horrified and alive. Fantastic.

“Improbable, then,” Sherlock snorted, but there was a smile of his own tugging at his lips. “Gods, is that what it all looks like?”

“What?”

“Magic. Your magic. Is that what it all looks like?”

“Yes. No. I don't know,” John said. He wobbled a bit. For a second, he missed having his cane to lean on. “We can find out later. I want to go home.”

“Yes,” Sherlock nodded, shifting closer to John so that he could grab him if he needed to. “It would probably be best if we left before SOF come to question you about your unregistered magic-handling abilities.” John groaned, all but collapsing against his flatmate. He'd completely forgotten about that, and all the trouble was likely to bring them. “Although, knowing Mycroft, he's probably in the process of sorting it right now.”

“Great,” John grumbled to himself. “More Holmes oversight into my life.”

“Cheer up,” Sherlock grinned slyly. “At least neither of us is going to have to scrape vampire goo off of the rails. Though I wouldn't mind getting a sample....” John looked up at him in disbelief. Now that his head was starting to clear, he noticed the tightness had returned to the edges of Sherlock's eyes. Worry. Sherlock was still worried about him.

“Sherlock,” John said seriously. “I'm fine. Really.” Sherlock opened his mouth, most likely to list off all the ways that John was not, in fact, fine. “Mostly. I just want to go home.”

Home. Where Mrs. Hudson would fuss over the bruises on his neck, and the wards would shake with concern for him. Where there were bullet holes in the walls in the shape of a smiley face, and the wallpaper in the corner was peeling. Where there were heads in the refrigerator and eyeballs in the microwave, and the garbage disposal only worked half the time because Sherlock insisted on shoving incompatible objects down it. Where they could watch bad telly, and John could sit his favorite chair, and maybe, after he had gotten his feet under him again, he could properly chew Sherlock out for arranging a secret meeting with a true psychopath just because he thought it was exciting.

Sherlock nodded after a moment's hesitation. “Right. Home.”

They hobbled off together. John leaned on Sherlock the whole time.

A null and a wardkeeper, living in the same flat in one of the most dangerous cities left on earth.

It sounded like a grand adventure.