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James notices it before Sherlock does, but that’s hardly a surprise. Sherlock has always been terrible at keeping time – even if he can paradoxically recall everything that happened on every date if required, the concept of time itself always seems to slip from his grasp. He will be absorbed in something for what he thinks is five minutes, only to look up and realise it’s an hour later, two days later, several months later, it could be anything. A Saturday is the same as a Wednesday to him, a year is an undefinable thing. Sherlock’s family has long ago given up on expecting Sherlock to remember where he should be and now they just fetch him from wherever he is when they need him. Birthdays, Christmas, any special days are points of contention and probably always will be.
So yes, time is difficult for Sherlock, and he is very adept at missing things entirely. But James doesn’t miss it.
They’re all sat at breakfast in the Holmes Manor, quite a few months after returning from Constantinople. Everything is awkward because Beatrice is here and Silas is gone forever, and those are two things Sherlock never imagined could happen. And everyone is uncertain of each other, desperate not to offend. Cordelia, Sherlock and Mycroft are all eager to get to know Beatrice but also terrified of coming off too strong, and Beatrice is clearly rattled and nervous of them, liable to flee at a moment’s notice.
James, as Sherlock’s best friend, should be a pillar of support in this time, but instead he keeps fucking Beatrice.
Sherlock is not stupid. He has seen all the touches, eye contact, jokes. He knows they’re sleeping together, and the only thing that has stopped him from confronting James about it has been his apprehension that he might rock a boat that is already unstable and leaking – things in this house are sensitive enough without him screaming at James Moriarty. That doesn’t mean he hasn’t been entertaining some very satisfying daydreams about punching his so-called friend in the nose, though.
Right now, his rival/dearest friend is flicking through the morning newspaper, paying no mind to Beatrice for once. James is only allowed to read the newspaper after Mycroft is done with it, much to his chagrin, and unlike Sherlock he actually has an interest in the outer world, so when he is finally allowed access he is deaf and blind to anything else, in a very Sherlockian manner. He doesn’t usually speak when he’s reading, so it’s a surprise this morning when he does.
“Sherlock,” he muses. “What date did we meet?”
“May,” says Sherlock, which is the easy bit – he remembers how the students were panicking about exams, how the lecturers kept threatening to make them as difficult as possible. The full date is a little harder to extrapolate – Sherlock thinks back to that day, to everything he observed, and remembers a calendar on Professor Thompson’s desk which had always been accurate. “Fourth,” he says. “May 4th, 1871.”
James huffs out a laugh, pushes the newspaper towards Sherlock, finger on the date. The date reads ‘May 4th, 1872’.
“Happy anniversary,” says James, and when Sherlock glances up he is smiling all over his face, so brightly that it’s like the sun just blazed into the dining room, blinding Sherlock so that it’s all he can see. Everything else, like it always does when James Moriarty is around, fades into an insignificant background.
“We should celebrate,” Sherlock hears himself say, and James slaps him on the back.
“My thoughts exactly,” he replies, and they promptly decide to go to Oxford.
James and Sherlock have visited Oxford regularly since returning to England, and have even made vague plans about moving back to town, finding lodgings together, getting somewhat respectable jobs, but Sherlock has always shied away from actually committing to anything – he is still loathe to leave his mother alone and he wants to get to know Beatrice better, even if it’s a struggle. And James won’t go anywhere without him, so for now all their plans are just plans.
This doesn’t stop them frequently visiting town though, usually to drink or cause some kind of mischief. Their anniversary is not much different, they go to their usual haunts, speak to their usual contacts, James tries to do some pickpocketing and Sherlock stops him, so far so usual. But something between them is different.
It shouldn’t be – May 4th is just a date like any other date, and Sherlock is not exactly one for attaching importance to such things. But this realisation that he has known James for precisely a year keeps sending his thoughts back to the years before James. Sherlock is sure things happened on those years – so much seems to happen to Sherlock Holmes, too much if he’s being honest – but nothing in them seems as interesting as this last year. He could ascribe this to the fact that his family has completely and utterly changed in that time, but even that is not right. That’s not the best part of the year.
If someone were to stop him right now in this sunny Oxford street and ask him what the most important moment in his life was, he would say it was meeting charismatic, clever, darkhearted James Moriarty. Which is – well, it’s disturbing to say the least.
Sherlock is clearly not the only one feeling the importance of the day. When he comes alone out of a milliners with some parcel that Beatrice asked him to pick up, James bounds up to him, a yellow flower in hand.
“Happy anniversary,” he says, smiling, and proffers the flower with a silly little bow.
Sherlock takes the flower and examines it. It’s a yellow carnation. “Aren’t these traditionally funeral flowers?” he asks.
James rolls his eyes. “Beggars can’t be choosers, Sherlock.”
Sherlock glances up the road. There’s a flower seller not far away, presiding over a busy stall, distracted by patrons, and the bucket of carnations is sat carelessly to one side, where no one can easily keep an eye on them.
“You didn’t beg, you stole it,” he reproaches James.
James’s grin doesn’t even budge. “Well now, Sherly, that’s quite the accusation. What would make you think such a thing?”
“My knowledge of you,” Sherlock says, leaning forward and tapping James on the shoulder with the flower, “And the way that you are.”
“Ah ah.” James points at him. “You should never make deductions based on your emotional understanding of a person. People are changeable, as you well know. Shifting sands. The James Moriarty you know might not be the one others know.”
Sherlock thinks of Beatrice, thinks of the equation burning a hole in James’s pocket. “That’s certainly true,” he says, suddenly sober.
James seems to realise he’s said too much – he deftly changes his tune. “Come on, now, are we done with our chores? Pub?”
Sherlock gives up trying to understand James for one day. “Pub,” he affirms, and off they go.
They end up having to walk back to the Holmes Manor, having missed the last omnibus and without enough money for a hansom cab, since they spent it on whiskey instead. So they stumble in a drunken haze through the country lanes as the sun sets behind the hills and an unseasonal chill sets into the May air. They take their time, they have no urgency, they don’t need anything except each other’s company.
James laughs at one point, halfway through an involved discussion about chess moves. “You’re clutching that flower like it owes you money, Sherlock,” he says.
Sherlock considers the flower in his hand. It had gone with him to the pub, placed with all due ceremony in an empty whiskey glass between them, and when they’d left, he bizarrely couldn’t bear the thought of leaving it there, so he’d taken it with him. He has no idea why he still has it, or what he is going to do with it.
Beside him, James shrugs. “It’s just a flower,” he says, voice deceptively casual, but not deceptive enough for Sherlock. Sherlock knows then that James is feeling the effects of the day too, of the twisting push and pull between them.
“Nothing is just anything,” he says, stubborn, and, emboldened by whiskey and the dying light in the hills that pulls a swathe of darkness over them, he drifts his hand sideways and entraps James’s little finger with his own.
James says a very definitive nothing, and his finger tightens around Sherlock’s like he’s been reaching for him all day, waiting for Sherlock to notice.
After a moment, Sherlock carries on the conversation about chess and James responds, and they walk all the way back to the Holmes Manor in that oddly conjoined way, as the stars come out around them.
Sherlock doesn’t know what happens to the flower in the end – perhaps his mother takes it into her care. Perhaps she germinates it and there’s a bush somewhere around Holmes Manor covered in yellow carnations. Perhaps it went in the rubbish.
It doesn’t seem to matter much, in the grand scheme of things.
They almost miss their second anniversary, because they’re busy arguing.
At this point, they’re living together, badly, in a rundown flat in Oxford. Mycroft has set them both up with steady government jobs that are driving them mad with boredom, and James has been trying and failing to sell the nerve agent equation beneath Sherlock’s notice, but of course Sherlock has noticed everything. Now things have run to a head, with questionable men – bad men – coming after both James and Beatrice, and Sherlock is absolutely, blindingly furious that James would be so stupid as to risk not only himself but Sherlock’s long lost, achingly vulnerable, desperately unknown sister. So they are arguing – way beyond arguing, actually, shouting until the walls rattle – about how they’re going to get her out of this mess, when James takes a glance at his desk and then suddenly laughs.
“What?” Sherlock snaps. His hands are balled into fists. “This isn’t funny, James!”
James shakes his head. “No,” he says. “I just.” He waves a hand at his desk. There is a calendar he put on there that he maintains religiously in the desperate attempt to get Sherlock to align to the same timeline as everyone else in world. The calendar says ‘May 4th, 1873’. “Happy anniversary,” James says.
Sherlock’s rage, so thick in his throat up until now that it was a wonder he could speak, suddenly dissipates. It’s irritating. He watches his fists relax without his say so. “Happy anniversary,” he says back, and remembers how boring life was before James came along.
James takes in a deep breath, and Sherlock does too, and they’re back to working together again, aligning their brilliant minds to the task at hand, and the anger is gone, at least for now.
Later that day, after they’ve successfully extracted Beatrice, they’re walking her quietly back through Oxford, all of them a bit beaten up, when James spots a shop and says abruptly, “One minute,” and disappears for a second. When he comes back, he has a yellow carnation in his hand, which he gives to Sherlock.
“I actually paid for it this time,” he says proudly, and despite everything that has happened that day, Sherlock smiles.
Sherlock is determined not to forget their third anniversary, so determined that when he realises it is nearing the end of April, he actually draws up his own calendar on the wall of his flat, scratching the days off into the plaster with a penknife every morning.
There’s no one around to complain about this act of vandalism because he lives alone now – James finally gave up on ever being able to live peaceably with him and moved down the road. Sherlock doesn’t blame him, he has always been a nightmare to live with. He never keeps track of the days or nights, plays his violin badly at any hour, conducts foul smelling experiments, is either full of energy or full of lethargy, never cleans up after himself. Even the boys at the various boarding schools couldn’t bear to share a dormitory with him.
Sherlock sometimes thinks that the only person who would ever really be able to live with him would have to be the most patient saint in the world, and James Moriarty is most definitely not a saint.
On the night of May 3rd, Sherlock is wandering home late when he realises the clock is striking half eleven, and that, in half an hour, it will be May 4th.
He walks further down the road, expertly picks the lock of the house James’s flat is in since the landlady is abed, then knocks on James’s door with the special knock that they use for each other.
James opens the door, in a haze of whiskey. He looks like he hasn’t slept in a while. “Hello you,” he says.
“Happy anniversary,” Sherlock says, and kisses him for the first time, right on the stroke of midnight.
They spend May 4th, 1874 in bed, apart from a brief half hour when James goes out to get food and drink, and comes back with a yellow carnation that he carefully places in Sherlock’s tousled hair.
May 4th, 1875 is spent, similarly, in bed, Sherlock forgets whose. That is the year they simultaneously give up on their useless government jobs with no small relief, and Sherlock rattles around aimlessly whilst James manages to wrangle a new mathematics scholarship at Oxford University. Sherlock finds himself brought into criminal cases, just small ones, and starts a vaguely amiable acquaintance with Lestrade, who is climbing through the ranks.
Both of them start to find their footing, start to really engage with their respective passions. It should be a happy time for them, and sometimes it is – sometimes Sherlock is so blazingly happy it sets his teeth on edge because of how powerful it is, like a fire that he knows will eventually burn out under its own force. But there is always an edge to them, even when they’re being disgustingly harmonious. Because Sherlock knows that James is not just working on mathematics.
It’s small things, but a lot of small things, and Sherlock knows he only sees these small things because James lets him. What’s the point of playing the game if the other person doesn’t know they’re your opposition, after all? So Sherlock sees things, hears things, that all bounce back to James Moriarty, and sometimes he subtly shows James that he knows them and sometimes he doesn’t. Sometimes he even makes steps to prevent certain events from occurring, just to see the irritated set of James’s jaw when he comes to bed that night.
It’s a dance they’re doing, but the sort of dance where every step coils you further away from your partner, until you’re inevitably left alone on the dancefloor.
In 1876, James finishes at Oxford years ahead of his peers and goes away to Europe for a time on an academic secondment. Sherlock could go with him, he has nothing else to do and the thought of kissing James in Paris, in Rome, in Madrid, has its appeal, but in the end he doesn’t. He dislikes the thought of following James around like a pet, of waiting in his shadow as he achieves greatness when it is Sherlock who should be standing in the sun. He knows this is selfish and petty and does not help their relationship one bit, but he still does it, keeping his silence and distance. He is interminably bored.
On May 4th, 1876, a yellow carnation is delivered to Sherlock’s door, with an address tied to it, the address of a hotel in Vienna.
Sherlock is on the next available train out.
When he arrives at the hotel room, James is standing by the window, grinning all over his face, and sunlight is burning into the room.
“You bloody great idiot,” he drawls, and Sherlock dives into his arms and forgets to be jealous for a while.
James finishes his secondment but they remain in Europe during 1877. They drink at little Spanish cantinas, nose around Greek ruins, kiss on Italian beaches when no one is around. There’s something about being in different places in the world that scratches a restless itch for both of them, and for once they are very almost peaceable with each other. May 4th, 1877 is spent getting absolutely trashed in a Tuscan taverna.
A few weeks later, a begging message comes from Lestrade – there has been a spate of murders in Oxford and the police have no clue who is doing it. England needs Sherlock Holmes.
A fight ensues, and Sherlock comes back to Oxford alone. When James grudgingly returns, Sherlock is already deep in the case and has no time for him. So James, naturally, moves on to other things.
By 1878, it’s impossible to turn a blind eye to James’s actions. Sherlock can see them everywhere, threads of crime all leading back to James Moriarty, spreading out across the country with a breadth and detail that is frankly breathtaking. Up until now, Sherlock has remained on the edges of James’s schemes, because they were small and Sherlock very selfishly considered it a worthy sacrifice to keep James in his life, but everything is rapidly becoming too big, too worrying.
There is confrontation, and sex, and more confrontation. For a while they treat Sherlock unravelling James’s plans as a particularly complex kind of foreplay, but then Sherlock starts causing a little too much trouble. They both make warnings that neither heeds.
James goes into prison in March of 1878, implicated in the laundering of some money, although of course the police have no idea just how involved he really was. By the end of April, Sherlock is so bored he persuades Mycroft to get James out on a technicality. James Moriarty struts out of prison on May 4th, 1878, visits the nearest flower shop and brings Sherlock a yellow carnation, and for a while all is right with the world again.
1879 is the worst year of Sherlock’s life. In March, he tips off Lestrade to an illegal weapons ammunition factory being set up right in the middle of London, courtesy of one James Moriarty. He thinks nothing more about it, until he comes home one day to find Mycroft waiting for him, his hat in his hand and his eyes rimmed red.
“Sherlock,” he says. “You should sit down.”
And he proceeds to tell Sherlock that his sister is dead, all over again. That she was overseeing the construction of the weapons factory. That there was a police shootout at the factory. That she was shot. That she is dead, this time she is really dead.
She’d been in league with James Moriaty, of course, because she always had been – even after Sherlock thought she had found a way to a better life, James still had his claws in her. Sherlock knows, that’s just who he is.
They go to the Holmes Manor to break it to mother. If Cordelia Holmes was half broken by Beatrice’s death the first time, this shatters her completely. Sherlock has never heard screams like that before and hopes never to hear them again. He leaves her to Mycroft, ever self-centred, and waits for James to appear.
When he does, Mycroft sends him to the library, where Sherlock is sat. An odd numbness takes over him. He sees James falling at his feet, tears – perhaps genuine ones – running down those handsome cheeks. He hears him say, over and over, “I didn’t think she was there, Sherlock, I swear I told her not to be there, I knew you were sending the police, I wouldn’t have let her go there, Sherlock, I swear, I swear,” but there is a rushing of noise in his ears, like James is shouting the words at him over the sound of a waterfall.
And it doesn’t matter anyway, whether Beatrice had been told to go there or not. If James hadn’t created the factory, she wouldn’t have been there to get shot. If Sherlock hadn’t sent the police that way, they wouldn’t have been there to shoot her. If Sherlock and James had never met, had never shaken hands on that May 4th all those years ago, Beatrice might be alive now.
There was always going to be sacrifices in James and Sherlock’s games with each other – but this – this is the worst of them all. This is game changing.
Sherlock blinks himself out of the numbness, enough to speak. And James knows what he is about to say before he says it, because he always has, from the very beginning.
“No,” he says quickly. “Sherlock, don’t, don’t.”
“James,” Sherlock says, “I can never see you again.”
“No,” says James, because of course he does, he is always resisting Sherlock, he is always fighting him. “No, we can’t do that. You know we can’t do that. We can’t be alone. We can’t lose each other.”
“It’s lost,” Sherlock says through a tight throat, and James reaches up to shake him by the shoulders.
“Sherlock, I can’t, I can’t.” He is crying harder now – perhaps the tears before, the ones for Beatrice, really were fake. “Sherlock, I can’t bear what I’ll become without you.”
Sherlock stares James down and says the only thing he can think of to make him go away. “I don’t care what you become.”
And James flinches, harder than he would have if Sherlock had punched him, and then goes very still. Sherlock watches the emotion drop off James’s face. He stares at Sherlock with suddenly empty eyes and carefully lets go of him.
Sherlock watches James stand up and leave, listens to the front door close behind him, and then something breaks through the horrible cold barrier that had been protecting to him, and he’s howling, so hard his chest feels like it will split in two. Cordelia appears from somewhere, wrapping her arms around him, consoling him even as her own heart breaks, and Sherlock thinks there can’t be anyone more selfish than him in the entire world, because his tears are not for Beatrice – they are all for himself.
He can’t go back to Oxford after that – James only lives a few doors away from him, they never stayed far from each other, and Sherlock can’t run the risk of even seeing a whisper of him. He doesn’t know what he’d do and he doesn’t trust himself not to do something stupid.
Mycroft sorts it out. He sorts it all out because he has always had to, and Sherlock would like to feel guilty about that but he just doesn’t have it in him. Sherlock’s stuff is packed up, his flat is vacated and Sherlock goes back to Holmes Manor to look after mother.
He’s keeping an eye on the morning newspapers, pretending to keep track of whatever monstrous thing he loosed in the form of James Moriarty, but really he’s checking for the date.
On May 4th, 1879, he closes the morning newspaper, goes to the front door and opens it to find a yellow carnation on the doorstep.
He crushes it into pieces with the heel of his shoe and goes back to bed.
In 1880, Cordelia Holmes finally loses her already tenuous grip on her sanity and leaves Holmes Manor for a hospital, a good one this time. Sherlock’s mind at this point is also shaky, he hears things and sees things, sometimes, that aren’t there. So he leaves the Holmes Manor as well and goes to London, and hopes the bustle of the streets is enough to chase the shadows away.
Mycroft finds him a little flat on Montague Street, near the British Museum. Sherlock likes it, but his landlady, a sharp-tongued Mrs Turner, doesn’t particularly like him. He can’t imagine why, he only set fire to the living room once, but the woman is unforgiving. They live in a tenuous peace that is liable to shatter at any time, and Sherlock spends a lot of his time wandering the streets of London, getting acquainted with the place. He loves it, he finds. To be only one amongst the crowds, a nobody. He can do what he likes and no one cares, they’re too busy doing what they like.
Sherlock sees James a lot. He’s on the corner of the street under a chestnut tree, he’s in the park feeding the birds, he’s in the British Museum being enthralled by a great Egyptian statue. Sherlock doesn’t know if James is actually real or not, but he ultimately decides he isn’t bothered either way. If James is there and not a ghost, then he never does or says anything. And Sherlock is fine with being watched from a distance. It is, unfortunately, comforting.
The news is not comforting – there are signs everywhere that James has finally shaken the dust off his wings that was Sherlock and is now truly flying. The complexity of his criminal network staggers Sherlock in a way nothing else can. He knows he should be doing something, that this is his mess to clear up, but he is paralysed with loss, with so much loss.
One day he returns home from his rambles and Mrs Turner greets him gruffly in the hallway. “This came for you,” she says, and holds out a yellow carnation.
Sherlock’s world narrows down to that little flower. He remembers, suddenly starkly, James’s intoxicated mouth on his in 1877, his arm slung around Sherlock’s back as he murmured, “Don’t you ever go leaving me now, Sherlock Holmes.” And how Sherlock had smiled into the kiss and said, “I don’t plan to.”
And then he did.
And now, they are this. It is this.
“It’s May 4th, isn’t it,” he says, and Mrs Turner nods, clearly intrigued despite herself.
Sherlock twirls the flower in his fingers for a moment, then holds it out to her. “Mrs Turner,” he says, more polite than he has ever been to her before. “I don’t suppose you could do me the great favour of discarding this for me?”
Mrs Turner is fascinated – she clearly thinks Sherlock has some doomed romance going on. Well, she’s not wrong.
She does what he says.
Sherlock goes to Mycroft not long afterwards, sulking in front of him, hands in his pockets. Mycroft dealt with the cold, awful death of Beatrice and Cordelia’s flight into insanity by sticking even harder to his old routines. Now he never does anything or goes anywhere new. Sherlock thinks, sometimes, that he really should do something to shake Mycroft out of this before it becomes a truly concerning habit. But then he forgets again.
“I need a bigger place,” he says. “More central.”
Mycroft sucks his teeth between his lips in a way that Sherlock has always hated. “Suppose you’ll have to get a flatmate, then.”
Sherlock scowls. “I need a larger place for clients. I’m going to be a detective. Properly this time.”
“Wonderful, you can pay for your place from that.”
“I’m not doing it for the money, Mycroft.”
“No, I know why you’re doing it,” says Mycroft and sits up, suddenly focusing on Sherlock with a very Holmesian intensity. “You’re bringing him down.”
Mycroft doesn’t usually mention James anymore, not after the last time when Sherlock threw a teacup against a wall. But he does now.
Sherlock raises his jaw. “Yes.”
“Still playing a stupid game,” Mycroft says. “What’s the matter, Sherlock, not got enough blood on your hands?”
Sherlock doesn’t lose his temper. “This isn’t playing it,” he says. “This is ending it.”
They stare at each other. Sherlock is not sure if Mycroft believes him. He doesn’t care if he does.
Mycroft sits back again. “All right, I know a place. But I still think you should get a flatmate. You need a friend, Sherlock.”
Sherlock had a friend, once. He will never get over it.
“Give me the address,” he says.
And he goes to 221b.
In 1881, Sherlock meets John Watson and doesn’t trust his kind heart. It’s too good, no one is this honest, careful, compassionate. Sherlock keeps Watson on the fringes at first, testing him, but Watson passes every time without even realising he’s taking an exam. Because Watson is always completely and entirely himself, like it would never occur to him to be anything else.
And Sherlock, despite himself, is drawn in all over again.
They fall into a pattern of living with each other, and Sherlock thinks Watson must be a bit of a glutton for punishment because although he has his gripes, he seems to quite like living with Sherlock. James Moriarty could never.
Time rumbles on, hardly noticed by Sherlock of course because most of the time the game is afoot and he is alive, so alive with it all – until one day Watson comes springing up the stairs.
“This was left on the doorstep for you,” he says, and holds out a yellow carnation.
And James Moriarty is instantly back in the room.
Sherlock stares at the flower. He makes no move to take it. Watson gives him a good look.
“Is something wrong? Is it dangerous?” He looks instantly excited – Watson is a man of action.
Sherlock, with great effort, turns his back on the flower. “You can get rid of it.”
He can hear the unsaid questions crowding Watson’s mind, but he doesn’t ask them. Because Watson respects the walls Sherlock has built around himself like no one else ever has. Instead, he simply reaches over and places a hand on Sherlock’s shoulder, before leaving him to it.
It’s a simple gesture that means a huge amount, like everything Watson does.
Sherlock is so breathless he can barely swallow. But then James always did have a way of sticking in one’s throat.
The carnation comes every year, promptly on May 4th. Watson never asks about it. One of Sherlock’s favourite moments is when Mrs Hudson accidentally tramples all over one while cleaning the front door – he hopes James sees that, sees how little Sherlock’s new family thinks of him.
And then in May 1891, Sherlock finds himself at Reichenbach. And on the 4th May, 1891 he is stood at the Falls, facing the man who, twenty years ago, stole a yellow carnation for him, and is holding one out to him now.
“Happy anniversary, Sherlock Holmes,” James Moriarty says, and smiles. That smile might have a few more lines to it, but it is exactly the same one that brightened up Sherlock’s dining room so long ago and chased everything else into shadow.
Sherlock has dreamed, many times, of that smile.
Sherlock takes the flower. It gleams in the light of the waterfall behind them. “I looked this up once,” he says. “Yellow carnations. They are funeral flowers. They symbolise disappointment and rejection. And loss.”
James considers this, head tilted to the side that is so characteristic. “Maybe I should have chosen red,” he says.
A red carnation, Sherlock knows, means love.
“No,” he says. “I think you got it right.”
He throws the yellow carnation off the waterfall and says, “Happy anniversary, James.”
And then he turns to fight Moriarty.