221B Recs

Title: Birdsong
Author: aderyn8
Pairing: Sherlock/John or Sherlock & John
Length: 912
Rating: PG
Warnings: Temporary Major Character Death
Verse: Sherlock BBC

Author's summary:
The cemetery is full of birdsong, as it should be.

(John. I’ve brought you back to life as well.)

Reccer's comments: This moving one-shot is inspired by quarryquest's wonderful meta post, Cemetery Birding, about the wildlife at the cemetery in TRF. I was hooked by the end of the first section of Aderyn's work, hopelessly caught by its melancholy then joyful beauty. The birds provide benediction, a sense that life continues amidst death, that physical healing does more than mend physical hurts. Both men call out to each other (as the birds do): Sherlock with his cries for "John"; John with his series of slow, melodic "Goodnight"s. The blackbird and his healer will roost again, amidst the rooks, gulls, blue tits, and swifts of London.
(Full disclosure: this was dedicated to me)

Excerpt: It’s at the cemetery that he hears the rooks. Settling in for the night, a whole storytelling of them, sounds like, he thinks, having heard that word once (a parliament, a clamour, or was it glamour; a whole rookery of rooks, he thinks, but not one of you).

A whole storytelling but there’s not one story he can tell save the one, which has an ending he does not like.

“Goodnight, Sherlock,” he says. The wings are soft all around him, the calls, but the headstone doesn’t call back....

In Afghanistan, land of pigeons and falcons, he once clipped a dove’s leg free from twine while some men watched and afterwards blessed him in Pashto as a good man, not a veterinarian obviously but a healer, and that translates cross-species; he can mend wings as well as arms, set fine bones, salve scaled feet, hear the whistle of wings, high, as a patient wheels away.

Once, in London again, as he was in a desperate flutter of knife and hands cutting rope from Sherlock’s arms (a case, of course, gone wrong), he thought about that bird and choked with relief as Sherlock palmed his neck and whispered, John. (John. I’ve brought you back to life as well.)