Here, though the world explode, these two survive

And it is always eighteen ninety-five.

-Vincent Starrett, 221B

They find her approximately forty-six hours after the impact event, in a hole. She’s screaming. She’s covered in dirt.

“Sherlock—”

“No.”

*

After that, Sherlock does not speak to him for what feels like the length of a day. Then again, Sherlock’s black moods have a habit of stretching themselves out for much longer than they actually are by merit of mere foulness, and time has seemed longer ever since John has lost any ability to measure it. Or: it seems less ‘longer’ than it seems to have ceased to exist. Sherlock, of course, still has a watch, but John does not want to be caught glancing at him and he has a sinking suspicion that it, like the rest of the world, has stopped working.

Sherlock only deigns to speak to him again when John rolls his trousers up to his knees and wades into pond water with the baby cradled in his arms. He dips her into the water and starts wiping the dirt from her face. The water startles her, and she shakes, eyes growing wide, but she does not cry. John smiles at her.

“You’re wasting valuable resources.”

“I’m giving a baby a bath.”

Sherlock pulls his trousers up and charges in after him, cuffing John on the back of the neck. “You’re being ridiculous. Who knows when we’ll come across freshwater next.”

“And what do you want me to do, drink the whole damn pond?”

“I want you to stop bothering with a bloody baby!”

There are other humans crouched around the pond’s perimeter, drinking. A few have looked up across the water to determine the source of the commotion, but mostly they keep to themselves and fade away back into the woods. The pond has already lost perhaps half of its water. John cups some into his free hand and drinks, then takes another handful and tips it towards the baby’s open mouth. He knows that it’s not clean, or even contingent with a baby’s proper diet, but it’s something, and she needs something.

“Stop it!” Sherlock reaches out and grabs John’s wrist. “Just drop her, right here, it doesn’t matter. We’ll leave and it’ll all be settled and we—”

“What’s wrong with you?”

“Oh, don’t be such a moralist, we can barely take care of ourselves, let alone a baby, you’re mad to think we can—”

“You’re mad,” John says, and he storms out of the water and he hates Sherlock, he hates him.

Sherlock crouches down in the pond water and fills five water bottles. Neither of them speaks to each other.

*

By the time Sherlock has been ignoring him for eighteen hours (approximate, he’s measuring by an internal clock that’s telling him he’s been awake for far too long), John’s patience has worn thin, to the point that when he speaks he sounds weary, more than anything. “And how much longer are you going to ignore me? Several days?”

And Sherlock snaps, he rounds on John with his teeth bared, spit flying from his mouth as he tells John that the concept of ‘days’ is now completely irrelevant and he should really stop being so tedious as to live in the past.

“It’s not like the past was that long ago.”

The quip is a weak defense – he’s more looking for something to say as opposed to a genuinely valid argument, he’s sick of Sherlock pretending not to see him when he’s really the only person left for him to see, and he wants to get under his skin just enough to draw another angry sentence out of him – but is actually manages to stop Sherlock in his tracks, change his demeanor entirely. His back straightens. His gaze finds a small place somewhere in middle distance and then flicks its way back to John, his face alight as if he hasn’t spent a good portion of the recent past bitterly ignoring the existence of anything. The prick. “Do you suppose that the nature of time itself has changed now that we’ve lost our ability to measure it?”

“You’ve got your watch.”

“Yes, but say I didn’t have my watch.”

John stares blankly back at him. Somewhere at the back of his head he entertains the idea of being more enthusiastic, but it would take too much energy. “I don’t know.” Sherlock’s face falls and John wonders dully if he’d be able to convince him to allot some of his immense brainpower to something useful, like finding somewhere dark to sleep. Probably not. Sherlock has absolutely no grasp of the concept of ‘survival skills.’ “I’m hungry.”

Sherlock sighs, and after about five more minutes of walking in what John thinks might possibly be a companionable silence, they climb over the crest of a hill to hunker down into a ditch. They lie quietly in burnt leaves as a horde of victorious looters passes above them, yelling like drunks, and John presses the baby to his chest to make sure that she does not begin to cry.

*

“How old do you think she is?” John holds her up at arm’s length and turns her around a bit, as they walk. John hasn’t bothered asking where they’re going, mainly because he is not positive that Sherlock knows.

“We’re not talking about this.”

“Think of it as—”

“There’s a reason why she was abandoned, John.”

The sun is starting to feel very hot.

*

He remembers waking up the day the electricity went out. Sherlock, so adamant about the scientific method, so careful and precise in his way of figuring things, had stood in the entryway to the living room, flicking the light switch on and off for upwards from five minutes, waiting for something to happen.

“Sherlock,” John had said, quiet, touching his shoulder. “Sherlock, come on. It’s starting.”

“Not yet.” He’d sounded dazed. “I have things to do.”

John had stared at him.

“Get me a coffee, I need a coffee, I—”

“I can’t.”

“What do you mean, you can’t?”

“The power’s all gone out. The meteor—”

“John, don’t be ridiculous. You’re not trying to tell me that there isn’t a single place in London where I can get a cup of coffee.”

And then suddenly he knew, and all the pert alertness fell out of his face and his mouth dropped open and he was not Sherlock Holmes, walking miracle, world’s only consulting detective. He was alone, and he reached out, and his fingers found the thin material of John’s cotton t-shirt and took hold right against his chest. He was trembling.

“Come on,” John had said, wanting to touch him but not knowing how. “We’re going to be alright.”

“I know we’re all right, of course we’re going to be alright. We’re fine. It’s fine. I’m fine.”

*

The few days they had before the impact event were ones of organized chaos, the days of an anthill disassembling on its own accord. Publications and News Broadcasts kept up for perhaps three days before upturning priorities and realizing their careers no longer had anywhere to go. The noble art of reporting the news had long been lost to nothing more than the pursuit of money, something Sherlock had been complaining about for several years. John still has the last copy (ever, he realizes) of the Times scattered about the flat in half-empty sections, a few of the articles reduced to nothing more than bullet points. The front page is nothing but a headline, asking: “London and the Great Cretaceous: Will this Extinction Resemble the Last?” There isn’t an article paired with it. John assumes that it’s because nobody knows.

The meteor is projected to crash through the atmosphere at 4:46am London time, landing in the Pacific Ocean against the rotation of the Earth. The tsunami would – well, no one was sure, exactly, what the tsunami would do. What the rest of the Earth would do, really. The exact consequences were being kept from them to prevent mass panic (according, naturally, to Mycroft). The impact event, most had figured, would stop the rotation of the Earth. It would freeze time.

It’s ironic, in a way. For all the fuss about global warming, this would be the thing to do them in.

People, of course, figured out for themselves that this was the end of the world. They left their jobs. They abandoned responsibility so collectively that London lost electricity, then heat. They became messes of religious energy, handing out flyers citing that this was punishment for the sins of their species. They found each other again, or drove each other away. Suicides peaked. Murders and robberies became rampant and no one even bothered to report the crimes. They were busy fucking. Or falling in love. People wrote bucket lists and tore them in half and finally lost respect for the systems that bound them. They read books and they kissed and they killed each other, and became animals again, because they could.

John and Sherlock did none of these things. John and Sherlock had drawn the curtains of 221B and waited.

It surprised John that Sherlock had not sprung to his feet in search of a solution, but, then again, he never had cared much about the solar system. Instead they had spent days on the sofa, Sherlock curled up next to him like a cat. Every once in a while he would shove his head under John’s arm, or kiss chastely at his neck, and John wondered if this was Sherlock’s way of saying he was scared.

*

They didn’t need to tell each other. They never needed to tell each other.

*

They run into a pack of looters who say they escaped the London riots. Sherlock practically jumps out of his skin to see them. It would make John laugh, seeing Sherlock, of all people, starved for human interaction, if it wasn’t so sad to see Sherlock, of all people, starved for human interaction. Sherlock prances around them, exceedingly proud of himself, posture perfect and hands behind his back like he’s returned to the prime of his time in London, except ten pounds lighter. He deduces two former businessmen (their haircuts), a butcher (the knife in her pocket and the state of her nails), a former drug addict (going through withdrawal), and a planned murder to happen the moment the victim falls asleep (one—the potential victim looks exhausted and is thus suspicious, and has moved their gun from the back pocket of their jeans to the front: and that’s motive enough, the rest have naught but knives; not to mention the addict is anxious and ready to take his aggression out on something, though he doesn’t realize that he’s likely next). By the end of his diatribe, the whole party looks mutinous and ready to kill just about anyone, so John slides a hand across Sherlock’s chest and steps in front of him.

It’s like they’ve only just noticed him. Just like old times. John hasn’t opened his mouth before one of the pack speaks.

“You have a baby?” It’s one of the businessmen. He seems barely able to restrain himself from touching her.

“Do you want to hold her?”

He steps forward and takes her into his arms without saying anything. He looks up to John, eyes broken down and revealing someone younger, and John asks him what’s happened to the city.

“It caught fire.”

“London? London caught fire?”

The man nods. After a moment, he passes the baby back to John and they set off into the woods in another direction. Sherlock is quiet. He stays quiet until he falls asleep.

*

“She needs a name.”

“I still think we should drown her.”

It is John’s turn not to talk to Sherlock for eighteen hours, a gesture of spite that Sherlock does not understand at all, especially when he is only being logical.

*

It takes them perhaps twenty four hours after the impact even to realize that they cannot stay in the flat. Food, for one, is an immediate problem. And then Lestrade shows up on their doorstep and warns them about the riots.

Sherlock, at the sight of him, was immediately optimistic. “Has there been a murder?”

He had rolled his eyes in response, as if it was impossible for Sherlock to be serious at the end of the world. “I’ve mapped the safest route out of London for you,” he says, pulling a crumpled piece of paper from his pocket. “Avoids all the main roads. It just gets you to the coast, I wasn’t sure where you’d want to be going, but I think south—”

“Where, exactly, do you think that we’re going?”

Lestrade looks at the both of them with his mouth open. “You’re not serious.” When neither of them say anything (though Sherlock looks dangerously close to bursting into a monologue about when, exactly, he has ever talked to Lestrade and been anything less than serious), Lestrade launches into a distinctly practiced lecture about the predicted last days of London. “And I know you love this place, Sherlock, but you have to be practical, just look at New York, they—”

“We get it,” John had said, cutting in quickly and accepting the map. He scans it. Lestrade’s done nothing more than draw very simple lines in red pen across a Google printout of England.

Sherlock speaks out of the corner of his mouth and surprises the both of them when he says, “and what about you?”

The silence in the flat waits too long for him to answer.

“I—oh, you know me. I’m—staying here. My wife already left with the kids, but I—you know. Queen and country.”

John coughs, crosses his arms. “Greg, that’s not—”

“I’ve made up my mind.” He puts his hand on his hips and raises his chin in a gesture of defiance before softening, posture slumping. He bounces in place like he’s not sure what to do with his body and directs his gaze to the carpet. One hand leaves his hip and pinches at the bridge of his nose. “It wasn’t the easiest choice to make, alright? But if you idiots just— just promise that you'll— that you'll leave, then I can at least—”

“Alright,” John says, folding the map in half and putting it in his pocket, “we’ll go. We’ll go.”

*

They had not bothered saying goodbye to Mycroft. When they checked after her, Mrs. Hudson was already gone.

*

Sherlock finds the apocalypse appallingly boring. He reminds John of this on a daily basis, whatever ‘daily’ means anymore.

“How do creatures survive, just surviving?” Only Sherlock could complain about the tediousness of the apocalypse. “Existing has got to be the most tiresome thing on the planet.”

“Then why don’t you do us both a favor, off yourself, and be done with it?”

Sherlock looks at John with a surprise that holds absolutely no curiosity for figuring him out, and when they both lie down to sleep John wraps his arms around Sherlock’s waist and whispers “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry” into the nape of his neck.

*

John has had trouble sleeping since Afghanistan, but now it does not get dark at night and he’s almost always hungry and the baby wakes him up with crying and all he does is nap fitfully, if that. And when he does, he’s plagued by the terrible image of Lestrade barricading himself in a burning building with a rioting crowd at the door outside, everyone surrounded by the sound of dying. John tries to comfort himself with the idea that perhaps, with death, the world would finally return to darkness, but the idea of it is not that comforting at all.

*

John makes the baby laugh for the first time when he sneezes. His heart almost stops at the tiny sound.

“Sherlock.” John sounds like a little boy again, one who’s just found something quite amazing on the ground beneath an upturned rock.

Sherlock is fiddling with the gears of his watch and pretends that he does not hear him. He is wondering if his watch remains relevant, or if he could just set it to any old hour and have it all mean the same. And do hours lose meaning, if days have dissolved? If the Earth somehow managed to speed up again, but slower, with 30 hour days, would hours change? Who made minutes sixty seconds? Since when did become so bored he began theorizing about timepieces?

“Sherlock, look.” John feigns a second sneeze, and the baby dissolves into peals of belly-giggles. John beams at her.

Sherlock does everything he can not to look. He plays with the unmoving gears of the inside of his watch and pretends that he cannot hear when John sneezes again, and again, and again, and the baby laughs and laughs and laughs until she is fake-sneezing, mimicking John, and John is made so uselessly happy by this that he nuzzles his head into her tiny, concave stomach, and it all makes Sherlock feel like his brain is going to burst so he hurls his watch into the woods and walks as quickly as he can in the opposite direction. John looks up and watches him go, eyes wide and innocent and searching, and then he turns back to the baby and pretends that he does not care.

*

John wakes up on the forest floor after God knows how long – it’s nearly impossible to tell, now that the sun doesn’t move and there’s no indication other than exhaustion and a lack of it to determine how long sleep has lasted – to find Sherlock with the baby in his lap. They are facing each other, Sherlock’s knees propped up to support her, the sharp, defined angles of Sherlock’s face contrasting with the small, soft roundness of the baby’s features. In a move that is utterly ethereal, that John somewhat cannot even bring himself to believe, she takes Sherlock’s right hand in both of hers and begins to suck on his fingers. Everything seems to be happening in slow motion.

He doesn’t pull away, doesn’t sneer, doesn’t snap logic at her, doesn’t move. He merely watches, free hand supporting her back, eyes hard and unmoving and locked with hers. John watches, stunned and fascinated, before allowing the image to lull him back to sleeping.

*

The baby is young, but not young enough to stop Sherlock from trying to coerce it into walking when they stop to raid fridges just outside Surrey. Or Sussex. John’s forgotten. He searches his brain to recall if absent-mindedness is a symptom of something, but he can’t manage to remember that, either.

Sherlock’s affinity for breaking in to houses is yet another one of his many skills that has become obsolete: in their rush to get out, get somewhere, get to each other, people left doors wide open. John walks across the threshold with the baby in his arms and Sherlock climbs in through the living room window. He takes his customary glance around the room.

“Family of three lived here.”

John nods; speaks without thinking. “Like us.”

Sherlock scowls at him. He doesn’t say anything more, he won’t for hours. They stoically search kitchen after kitchen, rifling through cutlery, throwing open fridges and freezers in search of water, in search of anything useful. They don’t bother to close them again. Their first time, John had, putting everything back in to place after Sherlock passed through like a hurricane. But then John found a dead dog curled up next to the tan, broken body of a teenage boy in the bathroom, bones jutting out everywhere. They had both been covered in flies.

After that, John hadn’t cared. He knew that these homes weren’t places people were coming back to.

The sun streams in through the windows, constant and abrasive and unmoving, and John avoids it. It’s almost worse, inside houses. The stagnancy of light between rooms is apparent to the point of pain.

There is a stark contrast to all the colors in the house. The sun stains almost everything it touches – wallpaper, sofas, carpets, paintings – all are bleached near-white where it has shone unrelenting. John wonders what has happened to the wallpaper at Baker Street. He wonders what has happened to the Mona Lisa at the Louvre – wasn’t it never supposed to come in direct contact with sunlight?

Sherlock would scold him if he knew what was on his mind. Though, to be fair, at this point he likely would have scolded him about anything. He does not come around again until John leaves the baby sitting up on the countertop so he can search the basement for batteries uninhibited. When he comes back upstairs, he hides behind the doorway, as Sherlock is crouched on the far end of the counter and trying to convince the baby to crawl.

“Come on, you daft thing, just move. Come here. Come on! You can do it!” He commands this in the same imperative baritone he uses with everyone. He waves his hand towards his chest, beckoning, gaze iron. John is almost inspired to laugh.

He can’t stay hidden for much longer so he squeaks the door a great deal upon his reentry to the kitchen, hands full of batteries that he’s pulled out of flashlights. “We should go back down there in a bit; it’s dark.”

Sherlock’s posture stiffens itself to ramrod and he straights his shirt by pulling at the bottom and smoothing at the material across his chest. He walks through the kitchen and into the living room and John wonders if the heat is finally getting to him because it’s not like Sherlock to be so painfully obvious.

He finds it strangely endearing, of course. Incredibly endearing, actually. It’s like a pair of hands have wrapped themselves around his insides and are now reaching out in Sherlock’s direction on the off chance that he might take the offering, and know.

He strides through the rooms, surveying them like he would a crime scene. John can see him taking the room apart, is dead curious about what he sees, but Sherlock never says anything.

And then he does.

“I’m just a coffee pot.”

It’s mumbled, but John hears him.

“What?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“Sherlock—“ But Sherlock’s left – walking through the door like an ordinary person – and John would follow him, but he has to take care of the baby. “Sherlock!”

She’s actually started to crawl. She almost falls off the counter, and John wonders if that’s what Sherlock had been planning all along. She starts crying.

*

She cries for hours, sometimes. It’s horrific.

“Could you turn her off?”

“Christ, Sherlock, she’s not a machine.”

This is the wrong thing to say.

*

In spite of everything, when Sherlock finds tin cans full of formula in one of the houses, he loads them into a knapsack and immediately fills a bottle for the baby and gives it to her. She drinks quickly, John helping her small fingers hold onto it, taking it away every few moments so she doesn’t throw it up and waste the whole thing. Feeding her is one of the few things that gets her to stop crying.

“Is she too old to still be drinking formula?”

“Haven’t the faintest.” John taps his fingers a few times on the cool marble of the countertop. It’s been a while, since he’s touched something cold. He nods to the bag. It looks like Sherlock’s also shoved a stuffed animal into it. “And there was a lot of it? In the cupboards?”

“Yes,” Sherlock says. He looks at John very pointedly, tapping his fingers against the marble and raising an eyebrow. “I wonder why.”

They watch her drinking. She watches them with huge, brown eyes. Her hair is starting to get long. It’s curly.

*

John thinks it’s quite odd, how casually they break into houses. Looters make much too much of a fuss about it. Though at this point they must have figured out that there was no use in owning flat screens or laptops, and thus perhaps the lack of fuss was more about the lack of novelty, or profit. There’s no point in money, anyway. Or ownership, for that matter, and John thinks that this topic might be something Sherlock would be interested in talking about if it wasn’t so damn hot. No one steals anymore: they exist, they wander from place to place like dying bodies full of wind, wearing clothes.

Despite all of technology going obsolete, Sherlock still keeps his mobile in his pocket. During the first days (when they still thought of them as ‘days’), he had checked his mobile signal almost religiously until the battery ran out. He still checks, sometimes, taking the phone out of his pocket and fiddling with it, though less frequently. John pretends he doesn’t know. If he did admit to knowing, Sherlock would likely get snippy and say something waspish about sentiment before crushing the phone beneath his heel.

*

Kicked beneath the fridge of a home with a stereotypical white picket fence is a battery operated fan, the kinds that are sold at theme parks to sweaty tourists. They crowd around it, John, Sherlock, and the baby, and just feel the breeze against their sweat-soaked skin. Sherlock’s gotten so tan. John supposes he has, as well, but he’s been avoiding looking at mirrors if only because the amount of weight he’s lost is unsettling and incongruent to the way he imagines himself. The baby is so enamored with the fan that she babbles almost constantly as it blows in her face, and the ability to turn her talking on and off makes John giggle, just a bit. He plays with the power. Sherlock watches John’s face like an experiment.

When the small battery in the fan dies out, they clamber up the stairs to find a bedroom and fall asleep while they are still relatively cool. They both drink long sips of warm water out of the bottles before climbing into the unmade bed that inhabits the master bedroom.

And so they fall asleep in the bed of a stranger, the baby between them, light streaming in through the window. John doesn’t sleep well, but he knows he sleeps because when he wakes up, he finds Sherlock watching him. John watches back. Sherlock tentatively reaches across the baby and slides his fingers into John’s hair, thumb stroking against his temple.

*

Just as everything is starting to feel like it might be alright, the houses start catching on fire.

The cause isn’t something they’re exactly equipped to identify, but it isn’t wildly difficult to guess: the world’s been boiling for an indefinite amount of time under an unrelenting sun, everything is dying. Leaves. Sleep. Plants. People. Gas and all manner of flammable things have been left out without care, and in the end, the cause doesn’t even matter.

John is not even sure why the fires disappoint him so much, what he’s been planning. It isn’t a sensible way to live: jumping from house to house in southern England until eventually they ran out of food, or water, or everything, and died because that was the only plausible next step. But, then again, there doesn’t seem to be a sensible way to live anymore. Sensible ways to die, perhaps. But living isn’t the sensible choice anymore, a conclusion that John has been watching Sherlock draw since the very beginning.

Then again, sensible ways to live never were for him, which is why he took up a flatshare with a madman in lieu of becoming a doctor or killing himself.

Sherlock’s hair gets singed as they flee from a burning house, weighed down by knapsacks filled with things that they were perhaps only finding to keep themselves from being bored. John holds the baby to his chest so she doesn’t breathe in the smoke and she screams, which makes everything all the more intolerable, and for the first time in a long while John actually encounters other people. All fleeing houses, all as separate from him as if they had already died.

The fires turn the world even more orange than it already is. It throws what is already light into a yellow that is almost sickening, the shade of it, bleaching their surroundings with an unwelcome filter that feels like fever. The only beautiful thing about it is that the smoke, when it hits plastic or petroleum, goes from grey to a dark, inky black, and John freezes in his tracks to watch with bated breath as it stains the sky. John misses black like he misses water, like he misses crap telly and the sight of Sherlock in a blue bathrobe in the early morning. He misses it like a sunrise. He’ll never see another sunrise.

Sherlock has to actually pull him away from the blaze, yanking the back of his shirt with both of his hands and dragging him through dry dirt before the fire spreads to the second house, and that’s how he burns his hair: embers landing in it. And Sherlock doesn’t stop pulling him until John collapses out of Sherlock’s grasp and onto the ground, exhausted and confused and covered in sweat and so tired that he feels like sobbing out to Sherlock that he hates him, he hates him, but all he manages to do is fall to his knees and hold on to edge of Sherlock’s shirt by just his fingertips.

“You think the only thing left for us to do is die.”

It takes Sherlock a long time to respond. Either that, or he has to repeat himself several times before he can be heard over the sound of the baby. “I just saved you from a fire, didn’t I?”

The girl goes quiet, and Sherlock reaches down to take her out of John’s arms. She’s dressed in an elephant outfit they looted several houses ago and she’s probably sweltering in it. She’d be sweltering in anything, really. It’s a miracle of society that they all, somehow, still feel the need to wear clothes.

John presses his face into Sherlock’s leg. He finds the pressure of it reassuring. “You stupid git.”

Sherlock hums. He drops his bag onto the ground, sits next to it, and roots around in it until he finds some baby formula. John watches with mildly exhausted fascination as he pours the tin into the bottle with practiced ease.

When the girl finishes eating, she falls asleep against Sherlock’s shoulder. Sherlock stares at her like she is a mildly alien growth, and John chuckles. He searches through two bags until he finds kitchen scissors, and then he crouches behind Sherlock’s back and runs his fingers through Sherlock’s mop of dark hair.

“Your hair smells disgusting.”

“You’re the one who decided to take up sightseeing in the middle of a wildfire.”

John pets through Sherlock’s hair a few more times, fingers threading into the thick strands, lifting them up and letting them fall back place. If John had the benefit of seeing Sherlock’s face as he did this, he would have realized that his eyes had fallen closed, like the baby’s.

“Let me cut it.” He says this under the pretense of the scent of singed hair, but his voice is too quiet and careful for this to be the case.

Sherlock nods, almost imperceptibly, and adjusts the baby on his shoulder.

“Alright.”

*

Their pace is slower, now that they’re carrying food and supplies from now-burned houses, but they no longer have any aim or direction or place to go. There’s no need to rush if there’s no destination. John voices through a haze of half-thought that perhaps he’s like to go and see the ocean. Sherlock, with a small humph, agrees.

John keeps his eyes on the ground as he walks through the sparse woods because every once in a while he finds things that are interesting. Trading cards, letters, necklaces, wedding rings. The wedding rings he always gives to Sherlock, for something to entertain himself with. He, of course, would always narrate his deductions, pointing out different dents and flaws in the diamond or the varnish and identifying marital history from naught but that.

“This belonged to a poorer couple, look at the size of the diamond, either that or they got engaged very young. Unlikely, because the ring is at least ten years old – the style’s outdated, but the dents in the side – a young couple who grew to be well-off would have the finances to invest in new rings, or at least ring repair. The societal necessity exceeds sentiment, almost always does…”

It’s the most John ever hears him talk anymore. It’s lovely.

Also, if he keeps his eyes averted for long enough, Sherlock will take a toy he denies stealing out of his bag a spare several minutes to play with the baby.

*

John is carrying her when she starts speaking something beyond babble.

“Shhh- Sher—”

“Sherlock,” John says, freezing. He’s suspected that she’s been teetering on the verge of this for ages but couldn’t attempt to hurry it on for an easily identifiable amount of reasons.

“Sh—lock, Sh—er—Sher—“

“Sherlock, come on, you can do it, say it, Sher-lock!”

“John, I don’t—“

“Sher-lock,” the baby manages, and cracks a huge smile when John looks at her with uninhibited joy. She repeats herself, self-satisfied, if it’s possible for a baby to be self-satisfied. “Sher-lock. Sher-lock. Sher-lock.” The syllables stay distinctly broken in half, but John doesn’t care. He turns her around in his hands and waltzes with her.

*

John’s asleep when he hears it.

"John."

“Sher-lock.”

“No, you stupid thing! John. You can do it. Try.”

“Sher-lock.”

“For Christ’s sake, I know you can—! John. You can say it, you should be saying it, it’s easier, it’s got fewer syllables. You—“

“Sher-lock.”

“You’re useless.”

John opens his eyes just enough to see Sherlock gather the girl against his chest in a small hug.

*

They lie with their arms splayed out, staring up at the sun. The clouds are still remarkably sparse. John thinks that perhaps it is so hot that before it can properly rain, the water evaporates back up again. It’s hardly a scientific theory, but he does not want to ask Sherlock because Sherlock likely does not know, and drawing attention to that would bother him.

“Did you ever think that this would be how we’d go?” John asks with the lightness of pointing out an interesting cloud formation. The grass, dry and yellow and parched, cracks beneath him as he shifts against it.

“What? Cooked alive at the end of the world?” And Sherlock laughs, he actually laughs, a dark chuckle deep in his chest that John has not heard in a very long time. “I thought we’d be shot.”

John giggles, his nose screwed up, and Sherlock laughs and the contrast in pitches makes it all the worse, and John curls in on himself a bit with the force of his laughing, and he’s got sweat beading at the top of his forehead and they need to find shade and why are they lying there in the first place and Sherlock rolls over on top of him and curls his hands around John’s wrists and kisses him and it is not a question.

John raises his body up to meet Sherlock above him and his disposition moves from happy to a painful ache, fingers twisting themselves into Sherlock’s curls and holding, lip’s sucking against Sherlock’s as if trying to drink him. Sherlock’s hands move to hold his head and the grip is almost bruising, and John whimpers but does not make any indication that he wants to be let go. His own body is rigid with the tension of holding on and he would be alright if his cramping muscles forced him to stay this way until the stiff grass caught fire. His lips are chapped.

He wants to cry. How can it be so close to the end already?

Sherlock’s knees dig in to his sides and they lie there kissing each other with their eyes squeezed shut long after it becomes too hot for them to pressed so close together.

*

He walks up behind Sherlock while the baby is sleeping and presses a kiss to his shoulder.

“You’re not a coffee pot.”

Sherlock doesn’t say anything, but he does reach behind himself to hold John’s hand.

*

On the last day, John had read old cases aloud until his laptop battery died. Sherlock had forgotten to charge his. There wasn’t much to do on it, anyway.

“I just lost years of research,” Sherlock said, looking at the twin black screens, seated next to each other.

“That’s a shame,” John had said, and he laughed, because there was nothing left to do at that point but laugh.

Sherlock’s watch had read 2am. After that, they’d had three hours.

*

It finally rains.

John’s not certain of the shift that occurs in his chest, but it unravels something, and there’s nothing in the world that he wants more than to be in the open and in the rain. He realizes that his very lungs have felt dry, that his body has been inhabiting dry, hot space, and even though the rain is warm as it comes down the sun is blocked out by clouds and the sky is grey instead of blue.

He runs through the trees to nowhere, to the freeway, to the first open space he can find, leaving Sherlock behind with the baby, the lot of them getting soaked. Everyone getting soaked. Sherlock’s shirt getting wet and clinging to his chest. John’s suddenly giddy thinking about umbrellas, just the fact of them. Parasols. Maybe the rain is putting out the Sussex fires.

He’s thinking so clearly. Clearly but quickly, crazed with adrenaline, he hasn’t felt this way since running through the streets of London after a serial killer at night, in the middle of the night, with a bundle of stars stretched out above them in constellations he’ll never see again— they were beautiful—

He throws his arms out on either side of him and turns his face skyward. He can see, in the distance, other people doing the same. Unlike the fires, he can see everyone’s faces. And none of them are running: they are all here. And for the first time in a long time, John feels like a part of the human race.

Sherlock emerges from the woods behind him. John looks at him over his shoulder, chest heaving, arms still spread, and they smile at each other.

*

John sits down near a puddle with the baby between his legs and thinks about the movement of planets. The puddle is already warm as bathwater. John lets her splash happily in it as he thinks. Just because the Earth has stopped turning, the sun’s effect on the Earth hasn’t changed at all. Despite the meteor, then, the Earth is still moving around the sun. And so eventually—

“Sherlock.”

Sherlock twitches his head but doesn’t say anything.

“Sherlock,” John says again, like he’s sounding out something, “it’s going to get dark.”

“I was wondering how long it would take you to draw this conclusion.”

“How long do we have? Until then.”

Sherlock waits. He looks at the spot on his wrist where he watch would have been. “I don’t know.”

John squints up to look at the sun. He realizes that, despite everything, perhaps it’s moved.

*

It’s moved a great deal, actually. Perhaps, in another month or two, they’ll be approaching evening.

He thinks, just for a moment, that this idea might cheer him up: nighttime. Perhaps he will see another sunset, if only one more. And then the reality of planetary movements hits him and he scrambles away from Sherlock to vomit behind a bush. He stays crouched on all fours, breathing hard, until he becomes too exhausted to keep himself up and he falls onto his side. He has to stare at his own waste and it makes him want to vomit again, if he could. His stomach aches from how empty it is. His eyes screw up and his hands ball into fists and he thinks about how much he hates himself for wasting a meal to prevent himself from thinking about snow; cold; an unending, all-encompassing darkness; and what things are like on the other side of the world.

*

They start walking on freeway simply for sake of convenience, and every once in a while they’ll pass other people, which tend to fill Sherlock with a crazed delight that he won’t admit to. He’s been spending his time altering how he’s able to catalogue people, learning about different types of pond scum and tooth decay and whether or not their hair suggests that they’ve been looting.

They find an abandoned delivery truck full of violins on the M25. Sherlock climbs into it without abandon, like a child, and plays John and the baby a long selection of music that makes the girl laugh and laugh and laugh and laugh.

*

“Maybe we were meant—”

“Don’t bother finishing that sentence, John. You’ll only embarrass yourself.” Sherlock is seated on the ground, plunging his hands into the dirt and letting it sift between his fingers. He doesn’t seem to notice John’s expression, but John knows that he does, and Sherlock finally acknowledges it. “You’d really still believe in fate? After this?”

“It’s nice to believe in something.”

“I don’t want to believe in anything that would put something on Earth just to kill it.”

John wants to say ‘maybe she won’t—’ but he cannot actually bring himself to say it.

*

When they run out of food, they become birds, for the baby. John suggests looting again, but they’ve lost track of their location and they’re not even sure if they’ll be able to find a residential area that hasn’t already been completely stripped of all things useful. So they find orchards, and fruit trees, and anything in the woods that can be deemed semi-edible that hasn’t been completely ruined by the relentless heat and sun.

They chew it for her, mashing horribly thirsty fruits in their mouths and kissing it into hers, a practice that is likely extremely unhygienic and unsanitary. It doesn’t matter. It’s something.

Sherlock goes back to complaining, of course. He says that giving her food like this is a waste, that she is going to die and that they are only speeding up the process of their own inevitable starvation, but in response John just looks at him and Sherlock averts his gaze and he does not say ‘sorry’ but he is sorry.

The baby gets quieter, it seems. And quieter. While she is certainly hungrier, she is starting to cry much less.

This worries the both of them. There is nothing that either of them can do.

*

She becomes fixated on crawling, for a while. In pre-impact time, John supposes it would measure out to perhaps half a day. And so they spend half a day watching her. She crawls back and forth over leaves, alternating between baby babble and the words “Sherlock, Sherlock, sun, John.”

John thinks that she’s hilarious.

“Look at her! She takes after you, running around like a bloody madwoman.” He’s even inspired to hold her by the hands and try to encourage her to walk, but she’s too weak for that, she falls. Whenever she falls John has to pretend that it’s all alright and encourage her to continue crawling to keep her from crying.

Sherlock, for once, does not protest. He’s found some pond water to put into a test tube and has been watching it over the course of the hours, making various throwaway comments about algae and heat. And he says: “No, hardly. She’s much more like you. Steadfast. Not easily bored.”

“Crawling bored you?”

“I walked very early.”

“You’re taking the piss.”

Sherlock’s mouth quirks a smile and he does not look at John. “Maybe.”

John clambers over to him, shaking his head, leaving the baby to her own devices. He frames Sherlock’s face with his hands, straddling him. He tells him “you’re ridiculous” before he kisses him, and he finds that he cannot stop saying it, and he kisses him over and over and over, punctuating each one with the same declaration. Sherlock has to pry John’s hands away from him, and when he does John does not want to stop and cannot tell if he is ready to laugh or cry.

The baby finds John’s trouser leg and pulls on it, saying, “John. John. Sher-lock.”

*

Sherlock whispers it to her once. Only once, when he thinks that John's not listening.

"Don't worry," he says. "You're not going to die."

*

She dies. She dies while sleeping. The worst of it is when Sherlock tries to wake her up.

“Come on.” That’s all he says. He nudges her face with the tips of his fingers.

“Sherlock.” John touches the baby’s skin, her soft golden hair, and it’s the first time in a long time that he’s touched something that’s actually felt cold.

John continues to carry her, like a habit. Neither of them say anything about it.

It does not take more than several hours for the body to start to smell.

*

They throw her into the Atlantic, when they make it to the Atlantic. It makes John’s stomach turn, but he does not allow himself to be sick from it simply because disgust is not worth losing a meal over.

“I know that you didn’t—”

“I did.” Sherlock crosses his arms and doesn’t look anywhere. “Of course I did.” He affixes his stare in the direction of the horizon. John doesn’t know what to do with his hands.

“You know what’s awful?” John’s voice is only just loud enough to be heard over the sound of the ocean. “I keep thinking about how good it was that we didn’t name her. That naming things makes you grow attached to them.”

“I called her Rachel. In my head.”

John wants to reach out and touch Sherlock, but the several inches between them feels impregnable. He realizes, in a surreal moment where suddenly he is above everything, that even the sea spray against his face feels warm.

“I liked to think— sometimes, I thought about—if things were different—”

John nods. They stand on the beach for hours, as if waiting for sunset, for the end of the day, the coda to the symphony, the closure that will never come.