There is a point, a moment at the end of a long day, long and particularly terrible, at which it seems that something, some form of nostalgia, perhaps, comes over all spies, or nearly all. There is something in the air, if not in the water, something they breathe in, something which saturates them to their very cores -- which all sounds very poetic, but of course it isn't, not really. The word 'nostalgia' implies delicacy, implies the bittersweet, some nuance, but all anyone becomes, and Peter no less than the rest (perhaps more), is maudlin.

He cannot lie about who they are. Not even this trained liar, this exclamation point at the end of vehement mistruths that he has made of himself (or has been made; if he were more charitable towards himself he might be able to deny his own involvement). There is the work. There's always the work, and that's the core of the argument, this argument he would make if he could, that they are lonely men, sad men, the last in any world which ought to be given any power whatsoever, the last that ought to be left to control from behind their curtain (iron or otherwise) the fate of nations. If they knew, the public milling about outside, if they had any idea...

He'd have been hanged long before Casablanca. They'd be strung up from the trees, a pathetic collection of spiteful, petty men.

They come to a point: it wasn't always like this. Even in the business: once there was the war, and hadn't the war been good? Peter wouldn't quite know; he'd missed it, been too young, but he remembers his mother, and her weariness, but the quiet pleasure she'd seemed to take in her work, of which she was never able to tell him. At home they were lotus eaters, she and he, and over their heads hung Damocles' sword, tied up all the way in France. Father. Sometimes he came home, and they pretended they were a family, that he was a businessman, a dealer in goods, not documents smuggled across the French border and then the channel.

He hadn't known at the time, of course. Nous ne parlerons pas de ça. But it had become clear.

Perhaps he had been groomed for it. Perhaps Peter Guillam could never have had a normal life, not ever; he suspects it, sometimes, nights like these, curled up around a tumbler of cheap scotch in his empty flat, lights off, reminiscing. No, it wouldn't ever have been normal -- not since the first time he'd really noticed a boy's shape, all of them a collection of skinny limbs, hair fair and dark; they'd blazed or they'd smouldered but they had all made their imprint on his consciousness, and he'd bitten down on the bitter gall of the guilt of it, the shame. He'd saved his kisses for girls. In public life he still does.

Sometimes he even brings them home, and he'd done that then too, but then it had been hopeful. Now it's a chore, and he's practiced at going through the motions but that hasn't ever managed to produce enjoyment. Some of them relish it, the lying. Maybe not men like him, but the ones who run several lovers, several wives, families with children; they get off on the lying because they were trained to, because it's the greatest thrill any of them have ever known, better than sex. It is. God, it is, but Peter has never stopped dreaming of picket fences and grandchildren, and that's the most despicable thing of all.

Sod the rest. Sod it entirely; Casablanca should have taught him better. Bloated faces, blackened tongues; he can't be trusted with agents, much less children, even if that wasn't his fault, even if they'd been blown; he ought to have known, ought to have guessed, ought to have worked it out faster. Every moment of distraction, every quiet instance of admiration for dark skin and darker eyes and long eyelashes, however brief, weighs on his mind like an anchor. On one of his shelves there rests, in the original, a collection of the poems of Abu Nawas, and some days he can hardly bear to look at it, no matter how much he loves the words.

Have they destroyed him? Has he destroyed himself? Was there anything salvageable in the first place? Ricki Tarr had wanted out; I don't want to end up like you lot, but there is no out for them anymore, is there? Certainly not for Peter. Not anymore. God, if only the knowing stopped the wanting. If only he weren't too frightened to try. If only it weren't for obligation, for George, poor old George, if only...

Pointless tripe, 'if only'. That's the great irony in it, Peter thinks as he raises the glass to his lips and takes a burning swallow. The funny bit. He's going to hate himself no matter what he chooses now.

There are moments of recognition; that's the worst of it. Moments of something -- not in form, which is wholly different (and that shouldn't matter, but in combination with the rest, it does), but somewhere else, in some abstract and unquantifiable quality, there in a smile or the movement of a hand or the edge of a sigh. Sherlock doesn't know if he could've adored it, given the absence of prior experience, but he thinks he might've done. He doesn't believe in fate, but he does believe that people fit, bear qualities which make them mutually beneficial to one another on an emotional level and in their traversal of the physical world. Perhaps something carries over, across universes, that one undefinable thing that makes a John Watson (or Joan Watson, apparently) singular.

It's a wildly uncomfortable state of affairs, because they aren't at all the same, this woman he knows, in the end, not half as well as he knows John. He's seen enough to know that their lives have been very different, have shaped them in utterly independent ways, and yet he looks at her and he wonders how long it'll take for the familiarity to fade and for her presence to eclipse John's absence. He stubbornly considers it impossible, and maybe it is, but the fear that it mightn't be settles in his chest all the same.

He dislikes her, or he attempts to, and she dislikes him, he senses, save for the curiosity. That's not entirely like John, is it? It's colder, more like Sherlock is, and that alone would be enough to set him on edge. Then again, maybe John was simply subtler about it. Maybe he too machinated to disassemble Sherlock down to his constituent parts, only Sherlock never realised. It's so difficult to tell when he can't just look, when he's confined to trawling through memories to suss out some sign, to find where the similarities lie.

It's a torturous exercise, and why he bothers he doesn't know. Perhaps because his life here is confined to this, to remembering, because not remembering isn't an option (or not one he would willingly choose) and there's little else to do, most days. It's pathetic even to him that he clings to these points of overlap, searches out any hint of comfort in places he shouldn't, in people he ought to leave well enough alone.

It's a miserable state of affairs, but then there she is, and let's go run, and all of the utter, utter nonsense aimed at sorting out the tangle in his head. Misguided, because being miserable with it is better than not having it, and why can't people try to find a way to make the tangle nicer, some sort of elegant protein fold, rather than trying to set him up the way they are? Is it so hard to imagine?

Maybe it is. Sherlock has sought to examine them down to their cores, the real people, and John, who is something else entirely, though you'd hardly know to look at him. He's tried, and that's not even almost, not even as close as different minds and different faces can be close.

So sod it. It'd be the work of a lifetime to sort even one person out, and maybe this is better than nothing, having her here, even if she is a pretender to the throne, as it were. Maybe it'll stop, the disliking, though it still appeals more than the weary acceptance that likely must follow. Maybe it already is, maybe he's already settling into the understanding that that's all that he gets: only almost.

Abstractly, snow is a small mathematical miracle. Sherlock could, if he wished, bind the whole of his life up in it, in the uniqueness of every little crystal, in their imperfections, in the changes in the lattice which hinge on so many tiny variables. The information contained in a single snowflake is shocking, mirroring the shocking and improbable variability of life. Snow is eloquent, like dust is eloquent, but it's far more graceful.

That alone is faintly pleasing, though he has to be out in it, not wholly a pleasant state of affairs in a physical sense. It crunches under his feet like glass and he wonders if John -- anyone else in the world, really, but especially John -- ever thinks of it in those terms. Or at all; perhaps they don't, perhaps snow is simply a fact, a solid thing, an inviolable fact, just there. Perhaps that's how everything is for most people, perhaps they don't ever think about the why, don't wind themselves up around the jagged crystal edges of snowflakes. If Sherlock could be like that, if he could help it, would he?

He thinks not, in the end. It's not as foregone a conclusion as it sounds, though it's still the one he always chooses. In the end the fear of loss outweighs the potential for benefit.

"Shoes," he says musingly to his companion, and it's an old game. Maybe too old, but there's a gap to bridge.

"Sherlock..." It's a sigh, an exasperated sigh, punctuated by a particularly loud crunch of icy snow. Putting his foot down, as it were. Probably didn't notice. Sherlock did, though. He knows what the hint of a limp means -- but it's impossible, impossible to tread on the crust without breaking something, and you've got to if you're going to get anywhere. It's just another of winter's particular cruelties.

"Shoes," he says again, insistently. People have taken to listening. Staring. Aren't any out here, up in the north -- he hadn't wanted to come, not really, but what other opportunity might there be to work again? So here they are, crunching across an expanse of snow towards a crime scene slowly being buried. There's a time constraint. Normally Sherlock would be running.

"I don't-- whose?" Sherlock wonders if he mightn't invent a scale by which John's exasperation could be quantified. He points at the ground as they walk, to the path of footprints they're following.

"There's hardly anything left, Sherlock." No, maybe it's immeasurable.

"Ought to be a quick deduction, then."

"Size thirteen, men's, belong to a prat." John sets his jaw. Sherlock knows it. John expects Sherlock knows it, and Sherlock knows that too. It's all very predictable. Clockwork. Familiar.

"Prat who can't even-- we haven't talked, you know. Not once. Just, 'oh, hello, John, not dead, nice to see you, care to catch a murderer?'" And why on Earth he'd gone along with it neither of them know. Sherlock would assume it to be tied to his undying love of danger; that's why he'd asked, that's what he'd exploited. John might have chalked it up to escapism, a desire to forget, to avoid the problem entirely, and that's, really, that's... both of them, isn't it? And that's why they're bloody here, not talking about it. People have taken to staring, and Sherlock's taken to snarling them down over supper, but they don't talk.

It's like pulling teeth. And he's not helping, he knows he's not helping, but if Sherlock could just--

He's the one who jumped. That had to've been easier than watching it.

"We're talking now," Sherlock responds mildly, though he knows very well what John means. "Anyhow, I tried, and you hit me, and that was the end of it; I can take a hint. Occasionally." A snowflake sticks to one of his eyelashes and he lets it rest. The curious heaviness tugging at his eyelid is ample distraction from the curious heaviness that weighs on the both of them from elsewhere.

"That wasn't-- no. That wasn't a hint, Sherlock. That--"

"So talk about it." Silence. When they're big enough and it's quiet enough, one can hear snowflakes land. They aren't. Now it's just the sound of the two of them breathing, out here in the cold. Sherlock's breath fogs between them as he turns expectantly, waiting.

John waits too, waits for... something, something to come up. "You prick."

"Mmm. I know."

"No, I mean it. You utter prick."

"Clever, though."

"Insufferable."

"Brilliant. And I saved you."

"Nearly did me in."

"Didn't, though. And Mrs. Hudson."

John huffs out a breath, grinning. It's not the happy grin, it's the annoyed one, the exasperated one, but at least it's not miserable. "I was--"

"I know."

"No, you don't; that's the problem. You've-- great big head and you still can't--"

Sentiment. And he probably can't, it's true, not the way John expects or the way John experiences it, but he's got one better. He has, even if there aren't words for it. Not many. Not except these: "You killed me. You did. Your bloody blog; last thing a detective needs is a name and a public face, very last thing. You must've known from the start that it'd kill me; I did and I let you anyway, so don't tell me I can't. Might have got it wrong; I don't know, John, but I'd've done it again. Knowing."

The snow is melting in his hair, starting to trickle cold little rivulets down his scalp, and he brings up one hand to brush it sullenly away in the silence that falls again between them.

"You..." John has never been particularly eloquent, not like Sherlock is; he knows that, even if he can turn a pretty good phrase, given time to think. This isn't the sort of thing he writes about. This is for other people, ridiculous fairy tales, and that's probably where he got it, didn't he? Sherlock Holmes, who wanted to be a pirate, standing out in the snow and confessing, in his own wildly insulting fashion, that he'd have died for a stranger. No, not a stranger; Sherlock saw more about him in a few minutes than nearly anyone he'd ever known, so there must've been something. Something that ran through that storybook of a head of his that tipped the balance in favour of keeping him around, even though...

"You utter git." That's the sum of it, John thinks, satisfied with the assessment. Oh, there's more to it than that; it's fairly complicated. Everything to do with Sherlock is. One grows used to that. But this, yes, in the end, comes down to that easy simplification. So easy that John feels lightened by it, a weight lifted from his mind and his shoulders and his leg, because they're going to solve a murder now, and who knows? Maybe someone will get shot by the end of it, and if he's anything to say on the matter, it won't be either of them.

"I know. Coming?"

"Mm." John nods, eyebrows raised, utterly innocent in the face of the look Sherlock shoots him. Eyes narrowed. Suspicious. An old game. Familiar. As it should be, maybe. But Sherlock does still turn -- he'll always still turn, John trusts -- to let him scoop up a handful of snow, pack it down, and lob it at the back of that ridiculous coat. Sherlock will turn and give him a look that says he's behaving in the most undignified of fashions, and later, when he least expects it (though really, it'll be entirely predictable), he'll end up with snow packed down the back of his collar. That he can tell how it'll all play out isn't really a bore, not after all this time.

John thinks it over. Sherlock does too, as he walks away, and expects the expecting. It's a test, really, in the end. Some sort of litmus test of rightness, and the paper turns the right shade of blue as thousands of improbably unique little crystals spread out in impact square between his shoulders on the back of his coat.