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John stops suddenly in the middle of Portobello Road, his hand rising unconsciously to his mouth. He knows it is neither the first time nor the last time that he will see Sherlock Holmes in the street. A turned-up collar, a haughty baritone will send John’s heart into a panicked flutter. A glimpse of brown curls, even a shadow of approximately the right height can make him feel breathless, winded.
Sherlock is the man head in line at Tesco, buying cigarettes; the dark shape in the alleyway; the silhouette in the taxi window; the stranger in crosswalk at Portobello Road.
John’s therapist says this is to be expected.
“You have to allow time for your brain to adjust to new routines, John,” she says in her calm, relentless voice, “just as you did after the war. You see Mr Holmes because you expect to see him; you’ve grown accustomed to his presence. In time, you will become accustomed to the lack of it.”
But it doesn’t end, not after two months, not after five. And the people don’t stop writing, either, those desperate hopefuls with their cases in need of solving. As if John could simply step in and be Sherlock, as if Sherlock was a thing that could rub off on someone. It is hard to say which hurts him more acutely: the notion that Sherlock could be replaceable or that one day he will be gone forever, not even a ghost in someone else’s greatcoat.
Still, John knows that for the time being, the sightings won’t end and that the reason they won’t is that there is a part of John still looking for Sherlock, a part that is waiting for the magic trick to be over and Sherlock to begin explaining. There is a part of him that simply cannot believe that Sherlock Holmes is dead. Not cannot accept—he’s tried again and again to explain this—to his therapist, to Lestrade, to Mycroft, to poor Mrs Hudson—he can accept it—or he could, he supposes, given enough time—if only he could believe it were true. It is simply so unlike Sherlock to have failed. It is not at all like Sherlock to be dead.
Sherlock Holmes wasn’t ordinary enough to die—and John knows, too, that this is why people continue to come to him. It isn’t really that they believe him the innocent party, still able to be trusted, and it certainly isn’t that they believe him capable of doing what Sherlock did with such manic ease. They write because they, too, believe in the magic trick. They believe John’s got Sherlock up his sleeve.
And there were ways, weren’t there, that it might have been done? John might not know exactly how he did it, but there were ways. Hadn’t they spent the better part of two years on these types of things—suicides that weren’t suicides, staged deaths, timely disappearances? It wasn’t as if Sherlock would have been unfamiliar with the ways and means. He knew how people dropped off the grid.
Lost in these thoughts, John finds himself at his own doorstep, key in hand. There’s nothing in his memory of the walk from the pub except the man in the crosswalk. It seems, lately, as if there is nothing much in life worth paying attention to.
He unlocks the door and steps inside 310 Elgin Crescent, the sterile, modern flat he’s taken in Notting Hill. And it’s only then, upon seeing the chrome, the sharp edges, the sage-coloured grasspaper on the walls, that John Watson knows for just a moment that he cannot delude himself forever, that the more time passes, the more tremulous his hold on Sherlock Holmes becomes. He cannot wait patiently forever for a dead man. He has been left behind.
***
Most days, John takes the tube to St Bart’s. He’s working again, seeing patients. The kind of job that results in a cheque, not a solution. He never looks up as he enters the building, and he stays out of the morgue as often as he can help it, keeping to the fluorescent lights and sanitized corridors of the upper floors of the hospital. He was surprised at first not to see more of Molly. But then, he figures, the lift works both ways, and he hasn’t exactly been haunting her doorstep. There’s a lot of distance between there and here.
And so he leaves Molly to her lab and her bodies. There’s a funny look in her eye when she sees him, anyway. He supposes that she was, in the end, another of those who bought into the idea that he and Sherlock were a couple, and now she sees him not only as bereft friend but also grieving lover. Go on, then, he thinks. If it gives you a taste of what I’ve lost, if it lets you leave me in peace. John’s got no more energy for correcting these things, for himself or anyone else.
“You’re doing it again,” says a voice from his left, and John turns sharply toward it. It’s Stamford, and John has no recollection of seeing him in the lift.
“I’m sorry, doing what?” John asks, shaking his head slightly.
“Riding all the way to the bottom,” Stamford says. “You’re on three, are you not?”
“Three, yes,” John says and hastily pushes the button. “Thanks for that.”
“Not at all,” Stamford says. “I heard you’d been found wandering the car park last week.”
“Hmm. Well. Not really wandering so much as stretching my legs. Too many distractions, you know.”
Stamford lifts and eyebrow but says easily, “That I do.” He steps off, and the lift begins to rise again, carrying John back to three, to patients and normalcy.
**
The thing is, he cannot understand why Mycroft wouldn’t have told him. Surely if Sherlock has pulled off this level of slight of hand, Mycroft has had a part in it. John can imagine Mycroft spiriting Sherlock off to any number of unlikely places, setting him up with papers, a flat, a whole new life. Mycroft would probably be chuffed to bits, come to think of it, to have Sherlock so squarely under his thumb. John has said as much to him, as recently as this morning, after Mycroft unexpectedly sent Anthea round to fetch him for coffee. Or whatever it is that Mycroft wants these days.
“Why keep it from me?” he asks again and again. “What possible danger could there be in my knowing? I’ve killed a man for him, you know. Broken the law in probably countless ways. He’s got more than enough on me to—”
But Mycroft only shakes his head, his pursed lips a caricature of sympathy. “John, John, John,” he says. “I haven’t the slightest idea what you’re talking about. My brother is dead. You must learn to accept that. If it had been the other way round, he’d have grieved you long enough to acquire a packet of cigarettes and then got on with things.”
That isn’t true, John thinks, and Mycroft knows it isn’t true. Sherlock always had more feelings than Mycroft thought prudent. Wasn’t it always Mycroft who called to warn him of danger nights? Wasn’t it Mycroft who—
“Oh, no, you don’t,” Dr. Paulson says, taking John by the shoulders and steering him back into the lift.
“Beg pardon?” John says, stepping away.
“Not like that, you don’t. Can’t see patients in your condition.”
“My condition,” John repeats, bemused.
“Better head home and have a lie down. In fact, John, maybe best not to come in the rest of the week. Cathy will cover your patients if you like.”
John hates this, hates the fake sympathy and the knowing glances, hates what must be in his own face. “There’s really no need,” he begins, “I’m perfectly—”
“Perfectly entitled to some rest. You’ve had a tough year, John, and we’re all on your side. But you’re not helping anyone when you’re like this.”
“When I’m like—what? What am I like?” He’s angry, but still, he’s being ushered relentlessly back into the lift, and it’s easier, isn’t it? To watch the doors close and blink back the frustrated tears that always seem about to well up. This wasn’t spur of the moment, he knows. This was planned, an ambush, and they’re sending him back to hell.
John sees Sherlock twice on the way back to Notting Hill.
***
John has not killed the blog. To do so, it seems would be to erase the last two years, erase Sherlock, to somehow admit that he’d been wrong, to call it all a lie. So the blog remains, dormant since that day at St Bart’s, unchanged. John still skims the comments and the emails when he feels like torturing himself, when the day has been sufficiently awful to warrant some kind of outburst. There were, of course, in the first weeks, the outraged, hateful tirades of those who believed themselves duped. Most seemed to think (for reasons John cannot fathom) that somehow John had made money off the blog, reporting ‘lies,’ and felt they deserved monetary recompense. This makes about has much sense as anything else these days, but John has learned that anger can be cathartic, and he lets it wind him up, the absurdity of it, the unfairness.
THINK! He wants to yell (and he recognizes the horrible irony of it). Did people really believe—did Lestrade—really believe that Sherlock had somehow managed to fabricate the entire Black Lotus crime ring? That a single oddly-educated, difficult man could extend his influence to government experiments in America? It was absurd.
It wasn’t that he didn’t understand how it had happened. Every harsh word, every insult and belittling comment suddenly made punishable—who (besides himself, he thinks angrily) wouldn’t have leapt at the chance? Donovan, Anderson, hundreds of others—it was no surprise. Sherlock had not been a man who had inspired a great deal of affection, but for God’s sake, wasn’t he owed some loyalty?
And it is partly that longing—for anyone to remember the Sherlock that he remembers—that keeps him checking the comments to the blog. Because there are a few who still write asking for help, as if nothing has changed at all. Please, Mr Holmes, I hope that you will take my case as I feel sure there is no one else that can help me.
And so begins the message that John opens on the day that he’s been sent away from work (indefinitely?), sent back to the chrome-plated cell he calls home. No, not home, never home. Still though, there is a bit of home in the message, a bit of what was lost there in Baker Street.
The case is one that Sherlock might have taken, John thinks as he reads. A double locked-room mystery. A woman found dead in her home, police having been alerted by the postman. No forced entry, no marks on the body, no sign of foul play. Nothing of interest there—until her next of kin is alerted, a brother, living several houses down the road. Also dead inside his locked house. Same circumstances.
Boring? John asks the man who lives inside his head, but the Sherlock in his mind only presses his fingers together and says, “More.”
A third sister reports that her siblings showed flu-like symptoms and a suspicion that the two had picked up something toxic at the hog farm where they worked. The deceased pair had driven to the farm together each morning. Perhaps a cover-up? Waste leakage? Water contamination? The sister fears she’ll be a suspect, as she had keys to both houses.
John’s mind-Sherlock humphs and says he doesn’t do whistle-blowing, but he’s interested, John can tell. He’s beginning to pace around John’s mind.
John shakes his head. This is why they’ve put him on leave. There’s a sociopathic detective living in my mind. He sits, staring at his Mac book, for some time. Finally, he touches the screen, his fingers skimming over the soft glow of the letters. This one… this one makes him remember wild curls, the sharp smell of tobacco smoke, and the sound of Sherlock’s quick, clipped questions. Yes, as if nothing had changed at all.
He sighs and runs a hand over his eyes, shutting them against the letter, against Sherlock, all of it.
He’s not deluded, not really. He knows that he’s no Sherlock Holmes and that the man in his mind is made of longing and loneliness. He won’t see anything the police haven’t seen, and surely the forensics will exonerate the sister if she deserves to be exonerated. Still, what’s left to him if not this? He answers the letter.
There is a reply before he can even refresh his coffee.
Mr Watson: I am aware of the recent difficulty concerning your partner. On this I can only say that I have faith you’ve picked up some of his skill after working with him for so long.
John laughs, a harsh bark of a laugh, and looks into hiring a car.
***
It’s nearly a two and a half hour drive to Norfolk, and the day is gloomy, pervaded by a grim, unceasing drizzle. John arrives at the address he’s been given by the surviving sister and steps out of the car in something of a daze. The swish of the wiper blades combined with the monotonous landscape seem to have driven everything out of him until he is numb, empty.
The street on which he finds himself is a bit rustic and overgrown; the houses are further apart than the eye would expect, and the tangle of weeds around each of them makes it appear that they are being slowly pulled away from each other by the vegetation.
Tempest Jenner is younger than John expects when she steps from her car. It is clear in everything about her—from her Audi to her manicure—that she doesn’t belong here. John knows instantly that this is why she truly believes herself a suspect. She’s different from her siblings. Estrangement?
“Mr Watson, I presume,” she says.
“John,” he corrects.
“John,” she says, a bit more warmly, and he can see in the softness of her face as it relaxes that there is, perhaps, still a bit of the country girl about her. “Let’s get this over with.”
John follows her toward the nearest house, trying to look about him and see more than a slightly beaten down neighborhood, occupied mostly by farmhands. He wishes he could see whatever Sherlock would have seen: the sun bleached curtain that would speak somehow of marital discord, the wild juniper that would tell him from which county the occupant had hailed. He missed it, even still, the way he always felt like holding his breath when Sherlock would begin to rattle off his deductions.
Ms Jenner pushes open a rusty screen door and sticks her key into the lock.
“I won’t stay, if you don’t mind,” she says. “It’s… difficult.”
“Of course,” John says, and he gives her the warm, crinkly smile that makes people trust him, that makes them feel it’s perfectly alright to let him wander alone through their houses.
“I’ll be in the car,” she says.
And so, John is left to take in this rather small, and certainly very ordinary, dwelling. Flat-pack furniture mixed in indifferently with old, solid oak pieces. Large farm table. Mismatched china. The sister was said to have been found in the kitchen, so John wanders that room, opening drawers and shutting them again at random. He reaches for his inner Sherlock, but nothing comes; the man in his mind stays petulantly silent.
John goes to the window and gazes out. It won’t be long before he’ll need to visit the farm where the siblings worked. God knows he doesn’t relish the idea of poking around their waste treatment facilities. Preliminary internet searches have shown no sign that other workers are becoming ill, but John thinks he’ll visit the local doctors anyway… see if he can get them to admit anything to a colleague that they wouldn’t to a paper.
There’s a door from the kitchen into a small attached garage, and John opens it. There is a heavy smell of gasoline and oil—the truck’s old, it seems. It’s odd that the sister was the one who owned the—
Oh, Jesus.
There’s a man in the garage, leaning against the bonnet of an old pickup, his face lost to John in the dark. Instinctively, John reaches behind him to the waist of his trousers, where his gun should be, lying flush against his back.
He hears his own quickened breathing and nothing else. Whoever is hiding inside this house must be—is it connected to the sister? Has she set this up? But why?
“John,” the man says, and John takes two involuntary steps back. He would know that voice anywhere.
“Is this a joke?” he says, trying to keep the panic, the desperate hope, out of his voice, and Sherlock steps into the light.
He looks haggard, his sharp eyes heavy, and a few days worth of stubble on his cheeks. Still, he is unmistakably Sherlock. Which is impossible, because Sherlock is dead.
“Carbon Monoxide poisoning,” the man says brusquely, indicating the pickup with Sherlock’s long, graceful fingers. “I expect you’ll find a leak in the exhaust system. They’d been unknowingly poisoning themselves for a while—that explains the persistent flu-like symptoms. A fatal dosage must have finally been delivered—probably they’d felt ill and returned home before their bodies had had a chance to recover from the morning’s exposure. Or perhaps it simply aggravated existing heart conditions—they were siblings, after all; it’s not outside the realm of possibility that there was some genetic defect at work. In any case, I checked at the morgue. Pink cheeks. Textbook. The sister wasn’t ever going to be a suspect.”
John takes this in without listening to a word. All he hears is the pedantry of the words, the clipped speech… he needs to sit down. He needs to touch Sherlock, if this is Sherlock (it is, he knows it is). He needs to verify that he isn’t going mad. His knees buckle.
“John?” Sherlock’s brow furrows and he steps toward him.
“No—” John rasps. “Don’t come any closer.”
“It’s me, you know,” Sherlock says as if this is all some rather tedious game John is playing. “The password to your computer is ‘Fuck off Sherlock.’ The first thing I ever said to you was, ‘Afghanistan or Iraq?’ You always wear that striped sweater on dates; perhaps you fancied the surviving—”
“—Stop,” John says. He sucks his bottom lip into his mouth and looks at Sherlock through squinted eyes, as if the very sight of him is too much.
“How?” he says finally.
Sherlock purses his lips and nods in resignation, as if to say he knew there would be questions and that he is prepared to tolerate them.
“It was never supposed to really happen.”
John cannot think how to respond to this, so he waits for Sherlock to continue.
“I made the plan, John. I set it up in advance. While you were with Mycroft. I didn’t think I’d need it—not really—but there was still a chance that it would be the only way. To beat him at his own game, do you see? If I had jumped, if I’d let him think he’d won—I had evidence, of course. I’d recorded everything on my phone, a confession, everything. Enough to ruin him.”
“But then, why—? I haven’t heard any—”
“The game. The game and my own pride. I didn’t want to do it. Ah, John. I was so certain. So certain I could beat him, outthink him, stay one step ahead.”
John feels lightheaded, and he knows his hands are shaking though he doesn’t look at them. He cannot prise his eyes away from the man before him, and he’s desperate not to faint in case the spectre is gone when he comes to. Carbon Monoxide poisoning, John thinks. Is any of this real?
“So you’d have risked your life to take him down, then?” John whispers.
Sherlock waves an impatient hand. “Of course I would. Haven’t you been paying attention? I’d have risked my life—I’d have risked your life. I did—more frequently than you ever seemed to notice.”
John closes his eyes against the scorn in Sherlock’s voice. “Just because I was willing didn’t mean I didn’t notice.”
“No, John,” Sherlock says. “You risked your life for me. I risked our lives for the game.” There’s bitterness in his voice, anger, disgust.
“Then you never—”
“Never what? Never cared for you? Don’t be ridiculous. I’d have never done it if I hadn’t been sure I would win.”
There begins an answering anger in John, rising steadily through his shock. This is Sherlock, he knows. This could not be anyone but Sherlock, marching in with his brusque statements of fact, not even bothering to notice the anguish of the man on the cement floor before him.
“And did you?” John asks, a bit ruthlessly. This doesn’t look like a Sherlock who’s won, no matter what he says.
“No,” Sherlock says, turning away, his voice dropping. “He beat me. He beat me. I thought we were the same, do you see? In the end, I thought he would want to go on playing more than he would want to win. To keep up the distraction.”
John’s head drops into his hands, where they are dangling between his knees. His beloved distractions. “Tell me you haven’t been with him all this time. Tell me this wasn’t all some… twisted…”
“No!”
John raises his eyes above his fingers to take in Sherlock’s horror-stricken face. “God, no. No. But the worst of it is that I know why you would think it. You knew… you know me. Know the worst of it. Know I loved it.”
“Loved him?” John can barely bring himself to ask this question.
“Loved the game.”
“But you lost?” John says incredulously, almost dismissively.
Sherlock begins to pace in such a tight area that it is less pacing than turning in circles. His hands are restless, rising to press together beneath his chin and then falling stiffly to his sides again.
“There was a gun on you. I knew there would be, knew it from the moment you got that ridiculously transparent phone call about Mrs Hudson. He’d done it before—assumed you were my weakness.”
John huffs out an angry breath. “But I’m not, am I? Never was.”
“No! Why do you never listen? How could you be my weakness if I was certain I could save you?”
John shakes his head restlessly from side to side. All of this is going over his head, and he feels strangely detached. “I don’t know, Sherlock. I don’t see, I don’t understand any of this.”
“There was a gun on you, John. A sniper, like before. And one on Mrs Hudson, and one on Lestrade. There were only two ways to call off those gunmen. One—”
“You jump.”
“Quite right. I jump. Or I force Moriarty to call them off himself.”
“So you jumped to call off the gunmen, fine. Fine, Sherlock, yes, it was all for me. Fine. But then why not tell me, for God’s sake? Why leave me like this?”
“Do you really think I’d have done it, then? Just done as he asked. Given my career, my reputation, without trying the second option? Because there would have always been questions, wouldn’t there? Even if I’d managed to prove what he was. People would always remember the fall.”
John can’t speak. He’s torn between his exasperation with the ruthless way Sherlock is telling this story and his cold fury at being left out of it.
“I thought I could—”
Sherlock shakes his head, and it’s as if John is watching his cold detachment melt away. His mouth works, but nothing comes out of it. His eyes squeeze shut. He clenches and unclenches his fists. Despite how he feels at the moment, it is impossible for John not to recognize that Sherlock is in extreme distress, and some part of him wants to respond to that distress.
“Sherlock,” he says, attempting to cut off the abortive cycle that Sherlock’s face seems to be going through.
“No, let me get this out,” he chokes. “I’m not what I thought I was. I couldn’t beat him. I couldn’t save you. I let you walk toward that building, knowing what must be waiting in one of those windows. John, I picked the building.”
John says nothing. There is nothing he can say. He is as powerless not to hear these words as Sherlock is not to say them.
“He shot himself. In the head. He did what I wouldn’t and ended the game. Forced my hand—outsmarted me—”
“Jesus,” John whispers.
“—Forced me to see what I am, what I’ve done. He knew I’d let you come. So sure of myself, so bloody confident—”
“Sherlock.”
“And then there was only one way left, wasn’t there? And you, walking toward that building. You were the key all along, don’t you see that? When he stripped me, reduced me… he knew exactly where to apply the pressure. You were the key. Once I could see that, I knew he’d anticipated even my little magic trick, John. That gunman wouldn’t be called off until he got the sign from you.”
“What sign, Sherlock? I didn’t give any sign.”
“Your grief.” Sherlock turns away and rakes his fingers through his messy hair. “If I’d escaped the trap, he’d have seen it in your face. He used even you against me.”
“But you said he was dead—”
Sherlock’s face turns back to John’s, crazed and shouting. “How can I know what’s out there? How can I even begin to know what plans he’s put in place? I cannot protect you, John, I never could. I never could.”
“So you made me believe you were dead? You let me—”
“If you’d known I was alive, you’d have come after me. They might have seen, they might have realized… and they’ll always hurt you first, John. Hurt you first to get to me.”
“Can you hear yourself, Sherlock?” John asks, rising to his feet at last. He is confused, incredulous, frightened. “Can you hear what you’re saying? Moriarty is dead, you’ve said it yourself! Who is ‘they’?”
“I don’t know,” Sherlock says, and he sounds more defeated than John has ever heard him. “I don’t know. I’ve tried to follow the threads. Mycroft sent me to America. I thought I’d start there. I thought if I could dismantle his network, it might be safe…”
“And you’ve done it?”
Sherlock gives a terrible huff of laughter. “No. I… I can’t think. I can’t see. America was so loud, and—”
John throws up his hands. “That’s what you have to say? You’ve put me through all this, and all you have to say is ‘America was so loud’?” He turns away and walks through the doorway, back into the kitchen of a woman who died so needlessly, so pointlessly.
After several steps, he senses that he is alone, that Sherlock has remained in the garage. He turns back.
“Are you coming?” he barks.
Sherlock appears in the doorframe, and John is shocked anew at the hollows beneath his eyes, the… reduction of him.
“Where are we going?”
“Home.” John picks up his mobile and calls Tempest Jenner. He explains that something’s come up in London and that he must return immediately, but that he thinks he may be onto something and that he’ll be in touch. When he sees her pull away, he walks out into the daylight, which feels surreal and unbelievable after the garage. Sherlock follows him out of the house and into the hire-car without saying a word.
“Not Baker Street?” Sherlock asks, and John sighs heavily.
“You’ve been following me for weeks, haven’t you? You know it isn’t Baker Street.”
Sherlock simply nods, and John rolls his eyes to the ceiling. They don’t speak at all for the next two and a half hours.
***
Sherlock looks absurd in the new flat. Even in his current state, he seems too large by far, and his coat looks antiquated against the modern walls. He seems to know it, to see that he doesn’t belong here, and he sits, folded up, in one corner of the couch as if trying to be less conspicuous.
He accepts John’s coffee, his food and his presence without a word. John wonders what this is costing him, staying so bloody still and silent. What it costs and why he’s doing it. He must be going mad. He doesn’t seem to have anywhere to go; after all, he dropped into Norfolk, seemingly out of the air, nothing with him at all, expecting (as always) to simply be carted back to London. And if he did have somewhere to go, John assumes he would have fled by now.
John won’t turn him out, but he doesn’t feel any particular urge to make him more comfortable. It isn’t as if Sherlock has been terribly fussed about John’s feelings all these months, and he simply can’t bear to cater to Sherlock’s quirks at the moment.
After dinner, John turns on the telly, mostly to annoy Sherlock, but also to give himself something to focus on besides the man sitting on the other end of the couch. His eyes seem drawn to Sherlock’s face of their own accord, measuring the changes there, trying to read from his body whatever it is that Sherlock is still not telling him.
“Well, then,” he says at last, standing and brushing his hands together, “I’m shattered. Couch is yours if you want it.” His voice sounds brittle and fake, even to himself, but it seems that if he doesn’t get out of this room, away from Sherlock and all that is hanging in the air between them, he’ll suffocate.
Once there is a closed door between himself and Sherlock, John feels the weight of what’s just happened descending on him. He sits on the end of his bed and begins to remove his shoes, just for the normalcy of it, but before he knows it, he’s sobbing soundlessly into his hands, his entire body quaking with the force of it. He’s alive. He’s alive. He’s alive.
Once it has passed, once the tears slow to a trickle and he’s able to breath without covering the sound of it with his hands, he turns off the light and strips down to his pants. He climbs into bed and stares into the darkness. There are still so many things that don’t make sense—John saw Sherlock, felt the heat of his blood, felt the absence of pulse in his wrist. And if Sherlock is as hell-bent on protecting John as he seems to want John to think he is, why, for fuck’s sake, is he here?
Although he expects to lie awake all night, he actually falls asleep rather quickly, the stress and catharsis of the last few hours combining to force him into a thready, uncomfortable doze.
He wakes at three, and although he doesn’t know why, he is quite certain that Sherlock is in the room with him. For some reason he doesn’t want to speak, and so he slowly turns his head until he can make him out, sitting beneath the window in the moonlight. His chest is bare and the light shines off his pale skin until he looks like he might be glowing. John’s personal ghost.
Sherlock knows he’s awake, John feels sure, and yet neither one of them has said a thing. The silence stretches until it is a wire, taut and twanging, between them.
“How did you do it?” he asks, finally, quietly in the dark.
Sherlock sighs, a sad, lonely sound. “I jumped onto a lorry. It was all arranged ahead of time. And the cyclist who hit you—”
“Homeless network,” John supplies grimly.
“Mmmm,” Sherlock agrees.
“But your body, Sherlock. Cyclist or no cyclist, I saw you.”
“You saw a dummy corpse. Facial prostheses. My own blood, drawn hours earlier. Molly helped me,” Sherlock says, and this earns and painful bark from John.
“Molly knew, and I didn’t. You trusted Molly, and you didn’t trust me. And—AND,” says John, suddenly remembering (In any case, I checked at the morgue. Pink cheeks. Textbook), “you’ve stayed in touch with her. You saw her today before you saw me.” John doesn’t turn over or cover his face, although he wants to. All those looks, all those pitying glances, and she knew. Poor John Watson, he thinks bitterly, look at him so lovelorn, so broken. It’s too bad Sherlock didn’t trust him enough to tell him. He can’t speak, his throat is closing up—how could Molly know when he didn’t?
“You don’t understand—you think—Oh, God,” Sherlock says, rising to his feet and flapping his hands anxiously. He abruptly crosses the room and kneels at the side of John’s bed. John has time only to think how rarely he has seen Sherlock unable to express himself verbally, unable to make himself understood, before Sherlock takes hold of his forearm.
He’s touching me, John thinks, perplexed, and in a flash of deduction so sudden and bright (is this what it feels like when he sees?) he knows that Sherlock wants to take his hands but is afraid to do it.
“Molly was safe,” Sherlock says carefully. He pauses. “Moriarty didn’t realize… I was always so ugly to her. He couldn’t know what she would do for me. I knew she was safe.”
“I would have—” John begins, and it’s difficult to keep the hurt out of his voice.
“I know,” Sherlock says shortly. “That’s the point. He always knew about you.”
There’s something comforting in this, even if it isn’t any kind of explanation for how they could have kept it from him, how they could have seen him crumbling and never said…
“Why are you here now?” John whispers, closing his eyes against his own hot tears. He works his hands into Sherlock’s, feeling their fingers interlace, comfortably at first, and then tight, so tight.
Sherlock leans forward, pressing his forehead to their joined hands. “I—couldn’t,” he chokes and then stops.
John’s lips part slightly as he waits. The sound of Sherlock’s distress is calling something primal in him, something that wants to clutch Sherlock to him and fight off any who would hurt him. What had Moriarty done to him up there?
“I had to see you,” Sherlock says, finally. “I had to know that you were unharmed. Yes, well, I had to know that as well, but really I just had to see you. And when I saw what I had—when I saw that you were suffering—” Sherlock makes a small, painful sound, “—I’m sorry.”
John snorts in complete disbelief. “Did you think I wouldn’t care? That I’d just go on as if—”
“I thought… evidence had suggested… I thought you would forget me.”
“What evidence?” John exclaims, tugging at Sherlock’s hands in frustration.
“I don’t know. Other people have always seemed so glad to be rid of me, and I—”
“You think I’m like other people?”
“No, I never have,” Sherlock says quickly. “Never once. No one else has ever tolerated me so well. No one else has ever failed to bore me. Only you.” He takes a deep breath. “I came back because I couldn’t stay away.”
John is lost. His head is spinning with such a maelstrom of emotions that it is impossible to separate them, to sort them into some kind of clarity: relief and gratitude, reverence. Anger—a bitter fury, really—and sweet, sharp pain. Confusion and compassion and traitorous desire… and John feels carried outside himself as he lets go of Sherlock’s hands and takes hold of his face.
“Say that again,” he says.
Sherlock’s eyes drop but he says again, “I can’t stay away.”
The distance between their faces begins to close, and John knows that this is probably a terrible idea, but it is the only idea, the only thing left unspoken in the dark.
Sherlock’s lips are hesitant at first, dry and skittish, skimming over his own. Briefly, their faces brush one another to lean against each other at the temples, skin to skin, as if everything could just pass more easily that way from one head to the other.
“You… you know that I,” Sherlock falters, and John thinks that maybe… maybe he knows what Sherlock can’t figure out how to tell him. I’m sorry. I’m frightened. I love you.
“I do know,” John says, and he feels his stomach drop, both in charged anticipation and in fear of all he’s just agreed to forgive.
He turns his head slightly, bringing his mouth back to Sherlock’s, and this time the kiss takes.
John had always thought that if he and Sherlock were ever going to come together, it would be frantic, nearly aggressive. He’d imagined shoving and teeth and the taste of blood, as if they would finally have to tear from each other what it was they needed. But this is nothing like that. Sherlock’s mouth is hot and desperate, clinging to his own, and bittersweet, like cigarettes and sugared coffee and fear.
John wraps his arms around Sherlock’s bare shoulders, surprised at the heat of his skin, and feels Sherlock’s arms as they slip beneath his and clutch at his spine.
This kiss… this kiss at last, this long-awaited, longed for kiss… it goes on, Sherlock’s head twisting, seeking the perfect angle, a deeper fit. John seeks with him, his eyes closed tight so that he can focus, so that he can feel each swipe of Sherlock’s tongue against his own.
John is breathing in great gasps of air through his nose, unwilling to be the one to tear his lips away. He tugs at Sherlock’s shoulders and Sherlock climbs into the bed, his mouth still fused to John’s, and John scoots backward simultaneously to make room for him. Once Sherlock is settled in beside him, though, John can’t help pressing himself into Sherlock’s space, squirming eagerly against his body. Sherlock sighs into his mouth and pulls him closer still, slipping a leg between John’s and tangling their feet together.
Now that the rest of their bodies are touching, it seems they can bear to break the kiss. As soon as their lips part, Sherlock whispers, “John.” Barely a breath.
“Sherlock,” he says in return, savoring the feel of it in his mouth, this address he had feared he would never use again.
Sherlock’s breath hitches, but he doesn’t move, and John knows that he is afraid, both because he doesn’t want to press John and because he has never done this before. Probably this is the first time that Sherlock has ever been kissed, let alone lain like this with anyone, and he must be painfully aware that John was furious with him less than an hour ago.
“In case you’re wondering,” John says, and then he stops to find exactly what it is he wants to say. “I… I want you here. I want you here. I want—”
Sherlock’s mouth is on his again, stopping his words, and he thrusts his hips into Sherlock’s and drags his palm down Sherlock’s back, down the line of his spine, over his hip and back up his ribcage. He wants to take the time to learn each texture, each press of bone and expanse of muscle, but his arousal is too loud in his head to allow it.
Sherlock’s body. Sherlock’s alive and intact body. His heart thumps heavily in his chest.
“Please,” he whispers, and Sherlock places his mouth over John’s ear and says, “What? Tell me what you want.”
John knows that Sherlock knows what he wants. It does not, after all, take a genius, but the Sherlock beside him is not the same as the one he knew before. Still beloved, still desired, but subtly different, and it’s his confidence, his absolute faith in his own calculations that’s missing. The Sherlock he’s kissing is a Sherlock who doubts. John knows that it won’t last. Sherlock will find his feet again. He might never have quite the same swagger, but it will be replaced with the quiet confidence of a man who is sure he is loved.
“Naked,” John breaths, and Sherlock’s hands are instantly at John’s hips, tugging at the waistband of his shorts.
“No, you, you,” John urges, replacing Sherlock’s hands with his own and removing the offending garment quickly. He is gratified to see that Sherlock is struggling out of his own pants, and he barely keeps from grinning as Sherlock kicks them away impatiently.
Sherlock is on his back now, and John runs his hand down the planes of his chest, over the flat of his stomach, and he sees Sherlock’s cock twitch in response.
It should frighten him, this. John has never been with a man before, never held any man’s erection but his own. And yet, Sherlock’s cock in his hand feels not just right, but deeply arousing. He can feel the throb of his pulse in his own cock, which he cannot seem to help grinding into Sherlock’s hip.
Sherlock rolls toward him to catch John’s mouth with his, and this brings them hip to hip. Shuddering, John feels his cock pressing against his own fist where it is wrapped around Sherlock. There’s a whimper—he honestly doesn’t know which one of them it comes from—and then they’re pressed together, flesh to aching flesh, and Sherlock’s hands are scrabbling for purchase on John’s shoulders and his hips are flexing, and John is breathing, “Sherlock, Sherlock,” as he curls his fingers around both of them together.
It is quite literally like nothing John as experienced before. He had no idea how it would enflame him, the sensation of rubbing himself against Sherlock’s body. The pulses of pleasure in his groin are explosive, and while John knows he’ll come tonight, he also burns with the knowledge that there’s something else, something more, and someday, they’ll find it together.
“John,” Sherlock pants into his ear. “John, I want to taste you.”
“Jesus,” he whispers as the blood-rush hits him, surging in his cheeks, his chest, his cock, at Sherlock’s words.
“Please let me.”
John hadn’t realized a response was required. He makes a little huffing moan of assent and releases his grip on the two of them.
Sherlock slides down the length of John’s body, his mouth slack and opened against John’s skin. He presses his face, momentarily, against John’s cock, and John watches—watches and tries to process the feeling of Sherlock’s stubbled cheek against him, the hot, slick pull of Sherlock’s lips.
Sherlock’s mouth is painful and greedy and perfect. He doesn’t know yet how to keep from nicking John with his teeth or how to stroke him with his hands as well as his mouth, but it doesn’t matter. John is ready to come in an instant, just from the joy of it, his body inside Sherlock’s, everything admitted.
When he feels himself beginning to fall, he can’t speak, so he drums a wild rhythm on Sherlock’s shoulder with his fingers.
Sherlock raises his face, flushed with arousal and concern, just as John tumbles over the edge, his orgasm tearing through his body in throbbing spurts.
Understanding dawns hot in Sherlock’s eyes, and there is a look of fierce pride about him for a single fleeting instant. Then he sits back on his heels and looks into John’s face searchingly.
“John, did I—”
“Don’t you ‘John’ me,” John says nonsensically, pushing himself (against his instincts, which want to roll deliciously in the covers after being sucked off by Sherlock Holmes) into a sitting position. John knows, somehow, that if he doesn’t make this equal now, right now, immediately, there will always be something not quite right between them. No, Sherlock needs to understand just how much the feeling is mutual.
“Lie down,” he says.
“John, it isn’t necces—”
“Lie down, you,” John says firmly.
Sherlock obeys, but his body—it feels almost as if his very skin is thrumming with tension.
“Sherlock?”
“Yes?”
John can hear the fear in that single syllable, and he wishes he could press his lips to Sherlock’s and somehow breathe it right out of him.
“You know I wouldn’t hurt you,” John says. Sherlock shudders, but he nods.
“Relax and try to enjoy this,” John says a bit ruefully, noting the smile that doesn’t quite reach Sherlock’s eyes.
John crawls between Sherlock’s thighs, and his hands grip Sherlock’s shoulders as he traces the line of his sternum with his mouth. Slowly, the strange thrumming of Sherlock’s nerves seems to subside, and when John licks a ring around his navel, Sherlock begins to squirm, raising his hips and thrusting against John’s belly.
John sits back and kneads the insides of Sherlock’s thighs briefly, running his thumbs along the pale creases where his thighs meet his groin.
“John,” Sherlock nearly sobs. And taking Sherlock’s cock in his hand, John guides it into his mouth.
John knows what to do, insofar as he’s had this done to him before and he knows what he likes. But Sherlock seems to like all of it. His hands fist almost instantly into the sheets, and his head rolls back and forth against the mattress, his sweaty curls sticking to his face in matted tendrils.
He is beautiful to watch—he has always been beautiful to watch in extremis—so John does, glancing up as often as he can at Sherlock’s pleasure-riven face.
“Oh, God, I didn’t realize it would be so—John, John, please, John,” he mutters, mumbles, sobs, and when he shatters in John’s mouth, John helps him to ride through it, drawing long and slow on Sherlock’s shuddering flesh.
When it is over, Sherlock’s fingers tangle instantly in John’s hair and tug him upward. John finds himself scrambling into Sherlock’s arms, eyes shut tight and face crushed in Sherlock’s neck. They lie this way for what might be hours, sweating, craven, breathing each other’s breath.
“Don’t make me go,” Sherlock says at last, his voice gravelly and strange.
John knows that Sherlock means tonight, that he’s asking to stay here in John’s bed. But he also knows that Sherlock means back out into the world alone, that loud, dangerous world that he used to own so effortlessly.
“You idiot,” John says fiercely, affectionately. “You bloody fucking idiot. You might have been willing to kill us both, but I never would.”