#everything can change except John killing Afghans.

[bauliya]

deeply sorry if a million ppl have made this suggestion already but have you heard of the podcast 'sherlock and co' it's pretty much exactly what you described (john exploiting his autistic ket-doing roommate for a true crime pod and sherlock being a dick to him back)

man I really wanted to enjoy this but the unapologetic imperial propaganda of Watson being an English soldier in Afghanistan got to me. Like yes the ACD stories have always been pro-British empire but it’s 2024. We’ve had enough white dude murders brown people let’s focus on how much it sucks for him narratives. They could’ve made him a Red Cross or MSF volunteer. ESPECIALLY DURING A GENOCIDE FUNDED IN PART BY THE UK. I could not listen to it! The entire point of that show is looking at it through a modern lens so Sherlock’s going to be openly autistic and John’s going to be a podcaster but we’re going to dehumanise global south people and brush off their murder all the same uwu. Goes to show centuries can go by and literally everything can be transformed about the English except them murdering afghanis like animals.

[fourteenacross]

For the ghosthunters prompts (this is from A Softer World): I think I've got fireflies where my caution should be (instead of slowing down, I just shine brighter)

Everything at the exorcism is going fine until it’s not.

Herc’s muttering incantations and Laf’s drawing runes on the ground and Burr’s burning different combinations of chemicals and Alex is ordering everyone around and it’s the sort of chaos that’s really business as usual. Until John turns and sees a second entity, or at least a second shape. It’s inching along the wall, a shadow of a shadow on the clear opposite side of the room from the spirit they’ve cornered for their ritual. It’s moving towards their electrical set-up and John doesn’t pause to think. He jumps out of the ring of salt spread on the ground, the one protecting them from harm. He runs for their set-up, another container of salt already in his hand because they don’t need that equipment to finish this, sure, but all that data…he can’t just watch as they lose all that data.

It doesn’t help that it’s lab equipment—any damage comes out of their paychecks, and they really can’t spare a thousand dollars in repairs.

Of course, his movement catches the attention of both of the spirits in the room. It’s a race to the equipment and John shakes a salt circle around it as quickly as he can manage. He miscalculates and there’s not enough to finish so he drops to his knees just as the shadows are converging on him and spreads the salt he’s already poured out, using his fingers to connect either open edge of the circle just in time. There’s not really enough space for him to move around, the circle is so tight, and with Herc shouting, now, and Laf muttering to himself and the unearthly wind whipping through the room, it’s not until the lights flicker again and the spirits are gone for good that John manages to get his bearings again.

The room is quiet in the aftermath of the exorcism, and John groans a little as he pushes himself to his feet, resting his weight on the audio mixer to steady himself. He hears Herc mutter a curse and Laf let out a long sigh and finally turns around again.

“You’re a fucking maniac, Laurens, you know that?” Herc says, stretching and rolling his shoulders.

“We’ve been staking this house out for three days, there’s no goddamn way I’m letting us lose all that data, especially not when it’s on a thousand bucks worth of lab equpiment,” John says with a shrug.

“Yeah, well, good job, man,” Herc says.

John wipes his palms on his thighs and looks up again to see what needs to be done to start packing up. His eyes fall immediately on Alex and he freezes.

Alex’s complexion has gone pale and grey, his eyes wide, his hands wrapped in fists around the recorder in his hand, so tight that his knuckles are white.

“Alex?” he asks softly.

“Laurens! Help me get these cameras down!” Herc calls over from the corner. John turns automatically to look at him, and when he turns back to Alex, he’s already directed his attention elsewhere, bent over a box and packing away equipment.

He brushes off the encounter and helps Herc with the cameras. He nearly forgets about it entirely as they load all of their equipment into Herc’s van and then go their separate ways home for the evening—Herc back to his apartment, Burr to campus, Laf to their apartment in his car, and John and Alex in John’s. He’s exhausted—they’re all exhausted, he’s sure. It’s late, they have work and class and paperwork waiting for them in the morning, and exorcisms always zap all his energy.

If Alex is quieter than usual, he doesn’t think much about it as they come inside and go through the motions of getting ready for bed. He’s a little confused when Alex climbs into bed after him, spooning up against his back, but while it’s uncommon for Alex to go to bed at the same time he does, it’s not unprecedented.

“I love you,” Alex whispers fiercely against the back of his neck.

“I love you too,” John says around a yawn. He wants to ask if something’s wrong—there was an edge to Alex’s tone, a frenetic energy that seemed out of place whispered in their bed as they curled up to sleep for the night. John is tired, though, and his brain is already full of a running tally of what he has to do in the morning. He’ll ask Alex about it in the morning, if he remembers. If he doesn’t…well, Alex isn’t one to hide his feelings away. If it’s important, he’ll bring it up.

*

John’s not normally the type to wake up in the middle of the night, especially since his jam-packed first semester at Morristown when he learned to wring every second of sleep he could out of a day. Something wakes him tonight, though, pulls him right out of a heavy slumber. He would have rolled over and gone right back to sleep, but he sleepily realizes the bed next to him is cold and, for whatever reason, that startles him awake. It doesn’t make any sense—he goes to sleep without Alex far more nights than he goes to sleep with him. Being alone in bed shouldn’t be enough to worry him. Something about the absence gets under his skin, though, and he sits up and rubs his eyes and stretches.

Alex isn’t in their bedroom, and after a moment of silent, internal battle, John slips out of bed to look for him elsewhere. There’s always a chance he’s gone for a walk or up to the roof; sometimes when he’s blocked on an article, a change of scene clears his head. Alex hasn’t left, though—he’s sitting crosslegged on the couch with the afghan from the foot of their bed wrapped around his shoulders. He’s not reading or writing or looking at his computer or tablet. He’s not doing anything, really, except staring into space and weaving his fingers in and out of the holes in the crochet pattern of the blanket. He doesn’t stop, even when John sits down at the other end of the couch.

“Hey,” John says.

“Hi,” Alex says. His gaze shifts slowly until he’s looking at John. The bags under his eyes are even larger than usual.

“Is something wrong?” John asks. “Did you have a nightmare?” Alex’s occasional nightmares have a routine, now, one that usually involves John reading to him or talking to him or, when he’s particularly jittery, driving him around the neighborhood in the middle of the night. Alex rarely tries to deal with them on his own any longer, and John’s a little hurt that he’s reverted back to that now.

But, no. Alex shakes his head and pulls the blanket more tightly around his shoulders. “Didn’t sleep long enough for nightmares,” he says. “At least, not the dream kind.”

John pinches the bridge of his nose. “Babe, it’s three in the morning. Please spare me the brain cells and just say what you mean? You’re usually so good at that.”

“You’re reckless,” is what Alex says.

John blinks at him. “Yyyyyes?” He waits for further elaboration. He’s well aware that reckless is probably in the top five mostly frequently used words to describe him.

“I just—I guess I’ve never thought about it before? Not really. I mean, of course I’ve thought about it—I’m fucking terrified of losing you, so I’ve thought about it, but seeing it tonight. It was different.”

John blinks again. “Alex—”

“You,” Alex explains before John can continue. “You just…leapt out of the salt circle. We were in a twelve by twelve room, there was nowhere to go and two entities in our space and one of them had already been violent and you just—leapt out. To save fucking equipment.”

“We were borrowing it from the lab,” John says automatically. “Damage comes out of our pay. Plus, three days of—”

“—data, I know,” Alex says. He waves his hand dismissively at John. “I don’t care. I don’t care about data, I don’t care about equipment. I care about watching you fucking jump into danger, watching two spirits converge on you, watching you drop to your goddamn knees in the middle of a exorcism like something was sucking the life out of you—”

John replays the scene in his head again and again and then says, “No, I was kneeling to fix the circle, they hadn't—”

“I know that now,” Alex says. It’s more like a hiss, something soft and sharp and ripped out of him. “Standing in that goddamn room and watching you drop from sight—I had no fucking idea what had happened but it felt like my fucking heart had been ripped out of my chest. I couldn’t breathe.”

John remembers the look on Alex’s face in the aftermath, the way he had gone grey and shocked, the way he stared.

“I….” John struggles for a response. What can he possibly say to that? He shifts on the couch and pulls his knees up to his chest. “I’m sorry?”

“It’s not—” Alex sighs sharply and covers his face with his hands. “I know that about you, right? I love that about you. That you’re just—that you just throw yourself into things. And…I don’t know, there’s a line, I guess. A line between doing things that are gutsy and doing things that are going to get you killed.”

John doesn’t know how to tell him that line is invisible if you don’t care whether you live or die.

“I don’t…think about things like that in the moment,” he says, which isn’t a lie. “I just…I react.”

“I know,” Alex says. He runs his hands through his hair. “It’s just…it’s like you’re missing the part of you that knows the meaning of the word ‘caution.’” He laughs a little. “God, I’m a fucking hypocrite.”

John wants to tell Alex that he’s not a hypocrite—that his recklessness and Alex’s are two different animals. He wants to tell him that there is something wrong with him, that these dangerous things happen and a part of him lights up like a beacon, like a shooting star. Something in him is activated by that danger, something that knows because he doesn’t care what happens to him, it’s his duty to do the things that no one else will.

But, god, that’s a conversation he doesn’t know that he can have. He can’t handle the inevitable look on Alex’s face while he tries to describe the difference between wanting to die and not caring enough to keep living. He definitely can’t handle it at three in the morning.

“I’m sorry,” he says again instead. “And I get it. Because this is a really fucking dangerous field we’re in and I feel the same way every time you do something stupid. But I can’t promise it won’t happen again anymore than I could ask you to promise me the same thing.”

“I know,” Alex says. “I just—I keep seeing it every time I close my eyes.”

They sit in silence for a moment. John finally gives in and crawls across the couch until he’s close enough to touch Alex. He holds back until he sees Alex’s shoulders droop and takes that as the invitation to touch, to wrap his arms around Alex’s shoulders and pull him against his chest.

“I’m here,” John says, because the only other option is to say I’m sorry for a third time.

“Yeah,” Alex says, tucking his face into the curve of John’s neck.

“And,” he adds after a moment, “not for nothing, but it’s your project about time-disturbance correlation that we were collecting data for, so I basically saved your ass from Adams.”

Alex’s body shakes with something between a groan and a laugh.

“You’re a fucking asshole.”

“Yeah,” John says.

“Next time I’m gonna let a ghost suck the life out of you.”

“No you’re not,” John says, biting back a grin.

“No, I’m not,” Alex agrees.

And they really should go back to bed, but if they’re already up, there’s no harm staying here for a few more minutes, sitting close and quiet in the peace of the early morning.