Fic: 'Til the Light Shines (Sherlock BBC)
Apr. 18th, 2012 12:06 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
anactoriaTitle: 'Til the Light Shines
Author:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
anactoria
Characters/pairing: Sherlock/John, John/OFC
Rating: R
Summary: When Sherlock reveals he's still alive, things aren't all sunshine and roses. John can't forgive him, and can't promise that he ever will.
Notes: Written for![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
dark_fest, for the following prompt:
Sherlock, Sherlock/John, Things aren’t all sunshine and roses when Sherlock finally reveals to John he’s still alive. John makes him work for his forgiveness, a forgiveness that he may never give.
I... almost feel like I should warn for this being fairly tame bydark_fest standards? I mean, I think the original prompter possibly had some kind of kinky punishment scenario in mind (which could be awesome, don't get me wrong), but this is basically just miserable people being miserable.
Thanks very much tobluebellanon, kryptaria, and porridgebird, all of whom looked this over for me at very short notice.
“You took everything.” Sherlock presses the barrel hard against Moriarty’s temple, and thinks that he must surely stop smiling soon. How can he not see that he’s been beaten? “My work. My home. You separated me from my friends. You left me with nothing to lose. Did it never occur to you how dangerous that was?”
Moriarty does not stop smiling. “Oh, Sherlock, Sherlock, Sherlock.” His voice is soft as butter; it oils its way beneath Sherlock’s skin. “The thing is—the really funny thing is—you still think you can get it back.”
Over and over in his dreams he presses the trigger, and over and over Jim Moriarty dies laughing at him.
* * *
Sherlock snatches up his phone the second it rings, and doesn’t pause for a ‘hello.’ “Where is it?”
“I’m not sure that your appearing on his doorstep unannounced is the wisest course of action.”
Sherlock rolls his eyes. Useless gesture, given the thousands of miles currently separating him from his brother, but Mycroft sighs down the line at him anyway.
“He’s not injured or ill. You would already have told me.” If there’s a note of urgency in his voice, he doesn’t bother trying to hide it. Mycroft will hear all of his undercurrents anyway.
(You would have, wouldn’t you? because it’s been three years and many, many miles, and Mycroft gets stupid ideas about protecting him and so Sherlock does not always know the precise degree to which he can mistrust his brother, and No, no, just no, he’s not, he’s not allowed to be, no. Too many years and too many miles, and not just his patience but all of him is worn thin. He’s a threadbare thing, the stuffing kept from leaking out of him by will and tunnel-vision focus and hope, by knowing he’s so close now, one more night drinking cheap coffee to avoid sleep and he’ll smell London rain again.)
“Doctor Watson is fine,” Mycroft says, and the tug of the maelstrom lessens.
“The address, Mycroft.”
“I’ll send a car to meet you at the airport.” Flat; final; clearly all he’s getting.
“Stansted, not Heathrow,” he says, but the line is already dead.
He leans back on the hotel bed and closes his eyes. Mission accomplished, no plans left to make but the kind that begin and end with ‘go home,’ and the old, enervating throb of nothing to do drives him to pick and worry at every possible nuance and inflection of ‘fine,’ everything that every pause in Mycroft’s voice could have meant.
He lasts five minutes before lighting up a cigarette.
* * *
‘Anthea’ (real name: even Sherlock doesn’t know, but from the glee she takes in announcing the false ones it’s undoubtedly something painfully ordinary, Jean or Rachel or Sue) taps endlessly at her new-model iPhone and cheerfully ignores him. That’s why she’s about the only one of Mycroft’s people he can stand, even if he doesn’t like her any more than the rest of them.
His phone lights up. Message from Mycroft. He ignores it in favour of pressing his forehead against the window and observing as they come off the M11 into London, collating what he sees with his old mental maps. Overlaying new details (a new shop-front; an altered road layout; subtle shifts in the clothing styles people wear and the phones and tablet computers they carry), slotting a new city, altered in myriad minute ways, on top of the one that’s existed in his head for three years. Mechanical task, barely a distraction, ought to be calming if it’s anything at all, but it leaves him feeling oddly displaced. Separate from himself. Unsure whether the Sherlock Holmes returning to this city is a new one or an old.
Unwelcome sensation. Open and unsatisfying; not the relief he’s been half-expecting. He narrows his eyes and reminds himself that this won’t last. The city was the backdrop against which his old life happened. It’s the major players who matter. All he needs is John, really. Then this will be a homecoming.
The black car pulls up around the corner from John’s new flat and shows no sign of moving off when Sherlock gets out. “You don’t need to wait,” he snaps, through the window. ‘Anthea’ gives him one of her disturbingly bland smiles and turns back to her phone.
Piss off, he texts to Mycroft, just to make sure that his feelings are clear. The car still doesn’t move.
* * *
“What,” says John, and stands in the doorway staring.
Sherlock studies him. Wrinkles and new grey in his hair, and the shift of his weight says that his limp is back, but not as bad as it might have been six months or a year ago. Sherlock collates. Layers this John Watson over the one in his mind, the one who is (was) an inappropriate giggle at a crime scene and a steady, constant presence one step behind him and a choked voice on the other end of a phone-call, three years and a lifetime ago.
“What,” John says again. Dully, not even a question. The few seconds in which he questions his sanity are written clearly on his face. He is not processing this; too much for him. Sherlock’s considered the possibility; found it preferable to the one that involves him getting punched in the face. John’s clearly close to shutting down, so Sherlock takes the initiative.
“Aren’t you going to invite an old friend in for tea, John?” he asks, voice as gentle as he can make it (and it’s an effort; gentleness has never come naturally to him and certainly not now, after three years’ harsh necessity and struggle.) “I thought you were more hospitable than this.”
John nods obediently, and turns to ascend the stairs.
The flat (of course) is preternaturally neat, the few personal touches (a Views of the Lake District calendar, clearly courtesy of Mrs Hudson; one of those glass picture-frames people fill with photographs of themselves and their friends to illustrate the fullness and vitality of their social lives, half-empty) standing out so baldly they ring false. Attempts to convince any visitors who might stop by that the man who inhabits this place is halfway normal.
It’s worked, though. Someone’s been convinced. (Someone female; early thirties; professional—possibly a fellow doctor but more likely a teacher.) Guardian Weekend magazine on the coffee table, open at the fashion column; something French and arty on top of the DVD player. Sherlock can picture John yawning politely behind his hand, doing his very best to look interested and secretly longing for something with a few more explosions in it. Early in the relationship, then; he’s still trying to impress her, and there aren’t any other obviously not-John’s possessions lying around the living room.
He studies the pictures in the glass frame, and John’s reflection in it as he makes tea. (The exaggerated care with which he carries out each movement; ritualistic, as though routine is all that’s holding him together. Sherlock tries to ignore the worry that curls in his gut.) Old pictures of John’s army buddies, taken years before they met; John and Harry in Hyde Park, clutching melting ice-creams and smiling at the camera with strained brightness; Lestrade and Molly (bound to happen eventually) in a pub somewhere, he standing with an arm around her shoulders and looking thoroughly pleased with himself, she beaming shyly over the top of her wine glass. And, oh. There.
Thirtyish, curly brown hair, fashionably unflattering top, seated next to John in some self-consciously trendy café (a collage in violent reds and blacks on the wall behind them; food artfully arranged in portions that John would certainly deem much too small.) Shoreditch, maybe. John looks painfully out-of-place there, but the smile he’s directing at her is genuine. Her hand is on his arm.
“Here.”
John is standing behind him. He meets the eyes of Sherlock’s reflection instead of Sherlock’s own, hands him a cup of tea and sits down on the sofa and doesn’t look at him. Sherlock perches on one of the arms and does look at John, very intently. (How much of John is old, and how much new? How long will it take for the image in his head to merge with the one in front of him? For this to be real again?)
Skimmed milk in the tea. John doesn’t drink skimmed milk. The girlfriend’s choice, then, and he’s gone along with it, as he always does. John moves the boundaries of himself for other people. He accommodates; arranges himself around them. Unobtrusive, until one morning they wake up and realise the impossibility of living in a world without him.
It occurs to Sherlock that he’s frowning. He stops, sips his tea and waits, listens to the silence as it stretches out between them and grows uncomfortable.
The need to fill silence: nothing he’s ever felt, or understood. A sign of weak-mindedness, surely, that need to distract oneself with inane chatter, to avoid thinking. But John’s silence unbalances him. No version of this scenario he’s played out inside his head has been so calm. So lacking. He’s considered bitter recrimination, physical violence, tears, even flat-out refusal to believe it—but he could work with those. This is an unexpected variable. What to do with it?
“Don’t you want to know what happened?” he asks, eventually.
John shrugs. “I suppose you’re going to tell me,” he says, to the empty middle of the living room.
So he does, and John sits and winces when he says Molly’s name and again when he says Mycroft’s and doesn’t look at him and doesn’t look at him and doesn’t look at him, and Sherlock feels something cold rise in his throat. Panic, he thinks, at last. He’s spent three years on the run, escaped from trained killers, known every hour could be his last, and been certain that he’s catalogued its many varieties exhaustively. But this cold, creeping thing—this is new, and this is worst of all.
And when he’s finished, John sets down his mug of stone-cold tea on the coffee table and doesn’t look at him and says, “I think you should go.”
It’s Sherlock’s turn to say, “What?”
“You heard me.” Minute tremble in John’s hand; distance in his eyes. “You should go.”
John’s avoiding his eyes. Afraid of being persuaded to change his mind. Sherlock jumps to his feet, circles round in front of him to press upon the weakness. “John. Look at me. Please.”
“No.” Headshake; sigh. “No. Sherlock, I—I don’t even know. I don’t know what I know, I can’t just get my head around this straight off the bat like you can, I’m going to need—”
“Need what?” Time? An explanation? Those are easy, those he can give.
“I don’t know.” John slumps forward in his chair. “Please. Just go.”
Sherlock does. “Put that DVD back in its case,” he says, on his way out. “She won’t be happy if you scratch it.”
“Bethany,” John says. “Her name’s Bethany.” Then he presses his lips together and glances away. Sherlock watches him a second longer; gets nothing more. Apparently John has already shared more than he wanted to.
Belatedly—while he’s walking, ignoring the black car that follows him at a discreet distance, wondering what to do with this unfamiliar hollow lightness in his bones, this sense that he could take one wrong step and float off the surface of the planet—he remembers something else.
There were no photographs of him on John’s wall.
* * *
Later that afternoon, he gives in and reads Mycroft’s message.
It’s just a link. It goes to John’s blog.
I know you all have the best of intentions, reads the entry, but I’m going to ask one favour. I know there’s been the occasional rumour about ‘sightings’ since Sherlock died, and I’m not daft enough to think I can stop people speculating on the internet, but please don’t involve me in it.
I was there with him that day, and I know the rumours aren’t true. I’ve had to come to terms with that, and it hasn’t been easy, but I’ve managed it. People claiming to have seen him alive might have given me hope once, but honestly, now they just make me angry. I won’t tell anybody what they can or can’t say in their own corner of the blogosphere, but out of respect for those of us who knew and cared for Sherlock when he was alive, please stop sending it to me.
We’ve cleared his name—and I can’t thank you all enough for your support in doing that—but that’s all we can do. It’s time to let him rest.
A cursory once-over of the conspiracy sites reveals nothing but shoddy guesswork, conclusions so wide of the mark they’re laughable. (Goa? Him?) He can imagine John reading it and anticipating his own contempt, sharing a wry, bitter laugh with a Sherlock inside his head, and for a few startling seconds he loathes his imagined dead self with a violence normally reserved for Moriarty and his associates.
He shakes himself. Back to the matter at hand.
John’s having trouble accepting this. Slotting the new reality on top of the one he’s grown accustomed to, erasing the parts that have been revealed as false. But he’ll manage it eventually. It’s going to take time; that’s all. John adjusted to being part of Sherlock’s life in the first place, didn’t he? His endlessly accommodating nature served them (or Sherlock, at least) well there; it will come through again, this time. It has to. Sherlock—loath as he is to admit it about anyone—has faith in him.
(The thought of John looking him in the eyes, smiling to see him risen from the grave, might have been all that kept him going, those last few desperate months. Of course he has faith in John. He has no choice.)
* * *
The next time he turns up at the flat, John closes the door in his face.
Sherlock regards his reflection in the window as he considers this latest development. Anger, then; delayed, but not unexpected. Troubling, though, that it’s taken until now to manifest itself. John should have shouted at him on his first appearance, maybe hit him or even stormed off, but it should have exhausted itself in a brief flash, not continued to burn and burn and grow, an ember fanned in the dark.
What was it that John said, last time? I’m going to need— I don’t know.
The anger must have been there already, simmering quietly beneath the surface. John wasn’t talking about what it would take for him to get used to the situation (more than time, apparently)—or not just that, at any rate. He was talking about what it would take for him to forgive. What Sherlock would need to do to win back his place in John’s (their) life.
He’s not talking about it now. He’s not talking to Sherlock at all. Sherlock will have to figure it out on his own. Shouldn’t be too hard; John’s a simple creature. A couple of attempts, maybe. No more.
Trial and error, John? Sherlock thinks (makes himself think.) Pedestrian.
But not once does he seriously consider refusing the challenge.
* * *
He secretes himself in a café at the bottom of the street where John lives (temporarily—surely) now. Clear view of the bus stop at which John will alight on his way home from work, passable coffee. John appears later than he should. Sherlock is on his third cup, the proprietor pointedly sweeping up around his feet, when he sees John—no. When he sees them.
So that’s why he’s late. She is a teacher—no, lecturer, sixth-form college—and exam season is in full swing. He’s waited around after the end of surgery hours to see her. Her arm linked through John’s: casual (proprietorial.) She smiles into his face, saying something with a gentle, earnest expression and finishing it up with a softening laugh. (Irritating.) (Caring.)
Between the caffeine and the rampant soppiness on display, Sherlock finds himself feeling a little nauseous.
The stiff lines of John’s back and shoulders relax infinitesimally. He’s happy. Happier, at least. With her.
This will have to wait.
* * *
It’s easy to track her down. Mycroft raises an eyebrow at him, but stops short of saying anything. Bethany Robbins: teaches French and Italian at City and Islington College, heavy workload, Zumba on Tuesdays, cocktails with sister on Fridays. The rest of her schedule is erratic, though she certainly doesn’t spend it all with John; she stays at his flat two or three nights a week, no more. (For the moment. She clearly has intentions.) Still, those are the only two nights Sherlock can be certain he’ll have John to himself.
Today is Wednesday. Two nights seem an unacceptably long time to wait.
He picks up his phone, thumbs through the contacts (doesn’t take long), changes his mind and puts it back down. Ordinary people imbue words with differing levels of value depending on the method of delivery. He hasn’t forgotten that during his exile. A text message isn’t going to do it.
So when John sets off for the clinic on Thursday morning, he finds Sherlock waiting at his bus stop.
He wilts visibly for the briefest of instants, then squares his shoulders and turns back the way he came.
“John.” Sherlock catches him easily, but John doesn’t slow down or stop to look at him. Doesn’t give in. “John, what are you doing?”
“Getting the Tube.”
“It’s a fifteen-minute walk. You’ll be late.”
“Stop pretending you give a shit about that and tell me what you want?”
“I don’t—”
“Sherlock.”
“Fine.” Deep breath. (Don’t hesitate. God.) “I want—to apologise.”
“You. Want to apologise.”
“Yes.”
John’s still walking, but he’s looking at Sherlock now, out of the corner of his eye. That’s good. It has to be good.
“It was never my intention to hurt you, John. It was unavoidable. I wouldn’t have had you grieve for me, given the choice. I am sorry.”
“Okay.” John keeps walking.
“‘Okay’?”
“You’ve said your bit, I’ve listened to you. You can go now. Okay?”
“John.” It is Sherlock who stops first. They’re in the middle of the pavement. Passers-by glance at them curiously, no doubt pegging this as part of some embarrassing, protracted break-up. Which feels disconcertingly close to the truth. “I—”
“What did you expect me to say? ‘Oh, you’ve said you’re sorry, that’s all fine, then? We can just go back to the way things were, and I’ll believe you’ve got all the answers and jump at your every whim’? I can’t do that, Sherlock, I can’t just forget that you let me—” John breaks off, keeps his eyes determinedly down. “I can’t,” he repeats.
“Why not?”
John shakes his head, and starts walking.
* * *
“You’re still blaming me for this, John? It was your life on the line, in case you’ve forgotten. I saved it. I’ve come back, I’ve even played along with your feelings and apologised, and you’re still—sulking. It’s pathetic.”
His voice is hard and contemptuous. It’s not difficult. He’s had time to think about this, since his failed apology—has thought about little else, in fact. It nags at him, an itch deep in his bones. He’s right.
“You’re right,” John says, simply, and stops him in his tracks. “That’s what you still don’t get, though, isn’t it? Feelings? You can argue the point as much as you like, you can even be right, but that doesn’t mean I can—” He shakes his head. “I would’ve trusted you with my life, you know. You didn’t even trust me with my own. I don’t think I know what I am to you, any more. What I ever was. If you ever saw me as—I don’t know. I just. I don’t know.” The set of his mouth is still stubborn, but there’s something sad in his face. He’s tugging at the sleeves of his jumper. Oh, God. He’s about to apologise, isn’t he?
Apologise. Not forgive.
Sherlock is out of the door before he can.
* * *
Lestrade does punch him, as if to make up for John’s negligence in not having done so. Sherlock stumbles and supports himself with one hand against the office door, but he doesn’t miss the way Lestrade’s eyes flick to the empty space behind him, or the question he can see forming behind them.
He shakes his head before Lestrade has a chance to ask it.
Something promising comes up a fortnight later, by which point Sherlock’s fingers twitch every time he glances at his phone, he is growing accustomed to the sinking weight of disappointment each time a text message turns out not to be from John (though he has no reason to expect any differently), and Mycroft has given up trying to hide his worried looks at the breakfast table. The distraction’s welcome. It’s also quite possibly useful.
One victim. Early twenties; struggling musician; house-sharing with three other girls, two PGCE students and an office temp. Cause of death: asphyxiation. No marks on the body, no sign of forced entry to her (locked) bedroom. Two housemates at home on the night she died, and neither of them heard a sound. It’s simple, obvious, a waste of his time, and Sherlock has the answer after a cursory glance around her bedroom, but he can get away with playing ignorant for an hour or two.
Office Temp is sniffling in the hallway while a female police officer Sherlock doesn’t know (young; new addition to the team; might actually last) nods understandingly and proffers a hanky.
“Last time I spoke to her we had an argument about the microwave,” she’s sobbing. “Her baked beans went everywhere and she didn’t clean it up and I shouted at her and now she—what if she—oh my God—” The girl starts howling again. Sherlock elbows past her without saying ‘excuse me,’ earns a glare from the officer, ignores in in favour of his phone.
On a case, he types. Need your input. If it’s not too much trouble. SH
He erases the last sentence before pressing ‘send.’
It’s lunchtime. John will have received the message. However angry he is with Sherlock, he won’t be able to resist reading it.
Twenty minutes before he gets a reply. John has no doubt typed and deleted several possible responses in the interval. He’s tempted. Good.
I’m at work.
A woman is dead, John.
SH
I didn’t know you cared.
Caring won’t prevent
anyone else from dying.
Working out what killed
her might.
SH
Five minutes.
What’s the address?
* * *
John frowns and looks around the room and at the dead woman and not at Sherlock’s eyes.
“Yeah,” he says, after he’s examined the body. “Asphyxiation. Suffocated?”
“By an intruder stealthy enough to have entered a locked room without arousing the suspicions of the other two people in the house?”
“Poisoning, then? Was she on any medication?”
“No. Lestrade’s lot found an unfilled prescription for antidepressants on her bedside table.”
“Unfilled?”
He watches John glance around the room again, take in the tarot deck on the bookcase and the dream-catcher hanging in the window, watches the pieces fall into place. The obvious conclusion itches in his throat; he swallows it and forces himself to be patient.
“Did they find anything else? Looks like she was a bit of a hippy. Might’ve been into—” John makes a face. “—alternative medicine. Some of those places aren’t exactly scrupulous about what they sell.”
“Of course.” It’s a struggle not to roll his eyes, but Sherlock manages it. He pulls open the top drawer of the bedside table, rummages, pulls out a little box of what looks like dried herbs. “And Anderson insisted it was incense.”
He tosses the box at Lestrade on his way out of the house. “Have that tested. Aconitum, commonly known as monkshood, used as a treatment for fatigue in traditional Chinese medicine. When not properly treated, it’s highly toxic, leaving the casualty apparently dead from asphyxiation. Your mysterious killer is a herbalist with a rather lax safety policy.” He turns to John. Tries to remember how it felt to smile, when they worked together, when John used to say things like that’s brilliant and mean them. His face feels like it’s about to crack. “You’ve saved me a tedious waste of an afternoon. Lunch?”
John’s face clouds. “I’ve got to get back to work,” he says, shuffling his feet with a nervousness that makes it obvious he’s lying. Sherlock doesn’t miss the questioning look Lestrade shoots John as they leave, the way John shakes his head, the later implicit in the gesture.
He’s unaccustomed to it, this feeling of watching his friends—if he can still call them such—as an outsider looking in. In his absence, it seems, they’ve banded together, formed an odd fellowship of loss from which he—the lost one—is excluded.
Outwardly, he shrugs. He waits for John to round the corner at the bottom of the street before following him.
* * *
That’s how he finds out that John still visits his grave.
Mycroft has had the graveside bugged all along, of course—a thoroughly hideous plastic flower arrangement, labelled ‘Love Mummy,’ disguises a discreet microphone—so he doesn’t risk getting close enough to hear what John is saying. Time enough for that later. He waits, at a discreet distance, for a few moments before turning away. And then, for reasons he can’t (won’t) quite put a name to (sentiment, stupidity, an ache deep in his chest that draws him toward what only makes it worse) he finds himself pulled through the city to Baker Street, involuntarily reaching into his pocket for a key he’s never thrown away.
Mrs Hudson is on holiday. It can do no harm.
He knows Mycroft’s been paying the rent; that he’s left clear instructions that nothing be touched. The mausoleum silence of the place settles heavily over him; the dust on the mantel rimes his fingertips like hoarfrost. His hands twitch with the desire to disturb, to throw papers and boxes into disarray just to make the whole thing seem less dead, but when he reaches out a hand to do so he stops, paralysed. He ends up sitting in John’s old armchair, knees pulled in close to his chest, staring into empty space and thinking that if he looks down he might discover that he’s faded into nothingness.
Unexpectedly, his brain throws up the image of the dead girl’s flatmate, sobbing in the hallway and blaming herself, as though all the petty little arguments that make up day-to-day life could actually mean something.
It takes him three attempts to delete her.
* * *
“It’s funny,” says John’s voice through Mycroft’s computer. “There were all these things I never said, and I used to think that if I could just see you again, just once, just for a minute, I’d tell you all of them. And now you’re back, and I can’t even—I can’t look at you, Jesus Christ. Because if I did, if I let myself, you’d just—you could—I don’t know. I don’t even know any more.”
There’s a pause, long enough that he wonders if John has walked away.
“I was so grateful to you,” John’s voice goes on, then. “You made staying alive seem worth it. I.” He swallows. “I loved you.” He bites down hard on the plosive, hammering his past tense home with enough force that it has to (has to) be a lie.
* * *
He texts John, claiming the need for a medical opinion on one case or another, as often as is possible without being pathetically obvious. John is always reluctant, and never able to resist his better nature when Sherlock reminds him that more people may die if they don’t solve the case. Even when there is no killer; even when Sherlock has to struggle not to tear out his hair with impatience and reveal that he already knows.
John never looks him in the eye, always leaves as quickly as he can, claiming work or Bethany. Sherlock settles slowly back into something resembling his old routine, but there are spaces in it that ache—no-one to meet his inertia-born rages with amused exasperation, or to sit quietly with him after a case, eating chow mein out of the carton and complaining half-heartedly about his incessant channel-hopping—and so he keeps on texting John, hoping that this time it will work. This time John will give in.
He knocks at John’s door on nights that he knows Bethany won’t be there. He’s never met her in person and has no desire to do so, but from the increasing number of her possessions strewn around the flat, he’s worked out that she’s a vegetarian; that she reads books that don’t interest her in order to talk about them in the break room at work; that her sister is getting married in Exeter next month and she’s bent on dragging John along for the weekend.
John will go. John is serious about her. Or, at least, he is trying very hard to be.
Most of the time, John makes coffee and the bare minimum of conversation, and Sherlock sits in near-silence, wanting to yell at John to yell at him because it would be better than this nothing, and not doing because he knows it wouldn’t work. Then he finishes his coffee and leaves, and sometimes, on his way back to Mycroft’s, he finds himself skirting dangerously close to areas of London where he used to score cocaine and wondering.
If he could make John hate him it would be something. If he could make John hate him John would care.
And one evening when John says, “I can’t now, Sherlock, not tonight, I can’t” and “Just fuck off home or something, please,” (something in that last tearing at him, because Mycroft’s isn’t, will never be, home) he sits on the doorstep in the rain and shivers and doesn’t care because there was a plea in John’s voice, there was hurt there, and that was something. And when he’s still there in the morning John swears copiously and hauls him into the flat, puts his sodden coat on the radiator and makes him hot coffee with exactly the right amount of sugar and doesn’t look him in the eyes.
He aches, and it’s not just with the cold.
He finds himself wanting to say things. They might not fix anything if he does, there’s no guarantee they would work, and yet he wants to say them anyway. Sentiment. John’s trying to pretend he doesn’t exist, and John has broken him without even trying.
He remembers John speaking to his grave, saying I loved you (which Sherlock automatically corrects to, I love you, even though I don’t want to in his head), and he knows—has always known that, in the idiom of ordinary people, that’s the closest approximation of what he wants to say, too.
John wouldn’t believe it if he said it. But he might pay attention to something more immediate, less ignorable.
There’s little else he hasn’t tried. It only takes him a moment to make up his mind.
For once, he’s sitting beside John on the couch, not perched on the arm. He sets his coffee cup down on the floor, far enough away that he won’t kick it over. John flicks his eyes sideways, momentarily; blinks when Sherlock takes his mug out of his hands and places it beside his own.
“Sherlock,” he says. “What are you—”
“Translating,” Sherlock says, and kisses him.
John’s lips; warm and dry. His breath; bitter from coffee and no breakfast. He pulls away a half-second too slowly, and Sherlock thinks, yes.
“I’m with Beth,” John protests, and Sherlock doesn’t listen because John is breathing hard and at last, at last, looking right at him. “She’s a good person. She doesn’t deserve—”
“You shot a man dead for me just after we’d met,” Sherlock snaps. “Don’t you think it’s a bit late to start getting moral?”
And that does it, snaps something, because then John is in his lap, hands fisted in the front of his damp shirt. John’s eyes have narrowed, they’re so angry, and the whole of their focus is on Sherlock, and he thinks with a jolt that this, this is how ordinary people communicate the parts he doesn’t understand, and he still doesn’t understand but he’ll try if that’s what it takes.
He’ll try to make John make him.
John kisses him back, and there’s nothing warm or dry about it now. It’s messy; insistent; punishing, and that thought sends a jolt of something shooting down his spine, makes him gasp in surprise at himself. (He’s never thought himself so simple a creature.) The fingers of John’s right hand twist in his hair, nails scraping his scalp.
He pulls back, breathless. “Perhaps—”
“Bedroom.” The heat in John’s voice is still mostly rage, but it’s there and that’s what matters.
The bed is neatly made. There’s a bottle of CK One on the dressing-table; a pair of powder-pink slippers tucked away under the bed. Sherlock flings himself down on top of the covers with more force than is strictly necessary, and with a stab of satisfaction at the thought of spoiling the sweet little domestic picture.
Both of them are clumsy in their haste. John’s steady doctor’s hands tremble as they push up his shirt; fumble at the front of his trousers. He reaches for John’s fly to reciprocate and finds his wrist grabbed and pinned against the pillows and doesn’t fight it. He closes his eyes instead, feels his pulse flutter in John’s grip and thinks that this anger is precious, because he can live with it better than he can live with nothing. And when John fists both of their erections and strokes them together, the fingers of his free hand dig into Sherlock’s hip. He bruises easily; there’ll be a mark tomorrow. Evidence. And the thought makes him lean in to kiss John again, and John shudders and spurts over Sherlock and his hand and the clean duvet, and bites down on Sherlock’s lip hard enough that he tastes copper.
Blood, bruises, marks. That’s what he wants. John won’t be able to pretend any more, then.
But when Sherlock opens his eyes again John isn’t looking at him. He’s blinking up at nothing, and then he rolls over onto his side, with his back to Sherlock. “Fuck,” he says, quietly. There is no rage in it now. His voice is flat; deadened.
“John.” Sherlock reaches out tentatively with his right hand; places the flat of his palm between John’s shoulder-blades; wants to absorb the warmth of him through his shirt. “I think I—”
John shrugs him off with a violence that startles—and then turns cold and settles in his gut like stone.
Sherlock watches John and John doesn’t move. He doesn’t know what to do. The inside of his head catches up to the world and rushes and swirls and he feels dizzy, as if the bed is tilting sideways up to meet him, and still he doesn’t know what to do, he has no clue, nothing at all.
“I think he won,” Sherlock whispers, finally, and can’t decide whether or not John hears the unspoken part of the sentence, the part that is, you were my heart.
John’s shoulders shake. “Get out.”
* * *
Sherlock ends up at Baker Street again that evening. Mrs Hudson’s back from her holiday. He hasn’t told her yet; now seems like as good a time as any. (That’s all.)
When she answers the door, she clutches at her chest and grabs for the doorframe. He catches her, and apologises with as much sincerity as he’s ever possessed. And at last she fusses and gets out the biscuits and showers him with kisses, and he shuts his eyes and accepts them with more gratitude than she will ever know, or he acknowledge.
* * *
I’m scared.
SH
Don’t.
I’m scared of what
I’ll be without you.
SH
I said don’t.
I need you.
SH
Don’t make me your
keeper. You sacked me
from that job pretty
effectively when you
let me think you were
dead for 3 years.
John.
SH
Just stop texting.
I’m sorry.
SH
Please.
SH
No reply.
* * *
“I finished with Beth,” John says to Sherlock’s headstone, trying not to watch his reflection in its hard surface. “I don’t even know why. She wouldn’t have known.” He sighs. “Well, okay, I do know why. She deserves better. As in, someone a lot less fucked up than me. So, yeah. Here I am again. Just like when we met. I’ve got nothing. Hope you’re happy.”
He pretends that he’s imagined the footstep behind him, even though combat instincts never lie. He keeps his eyes off his reflection.
“I don’t know, I suppose I just thought we were—I always thought I’d be part of your inner circle, you know? I thought you’d give me that and you—” He breaks off, and sighs deeply.
“I had to protect you.”
“I fucking mourned you. Jesus, I listened to ‘Gloomy Sunday’ on repeat for a whole afternoon and I don’t even like Billie Holiday, I wrote notes. I thought about—” John presses the back of his hand to his mouth, because he thinks that he might sob if he keeps talking.
“John. Look at me.” For all the command in Sherlock’s voice it’s a plea, and that’s worse somehow, more irresistible. John wants to give in, wants to obey it so badly. So much of him still wants to be Sherlock’s fool; really, honestly wants to be that pathetic.
If he turns around and says, it’s okay, I forgive you, he’ll be lying. But he is so, so tired of being honest.
“John.”
He turns. He looks at Sherlock and tries not to notice how bone-white he is, how bloodshot his eyes.
He steps forward to meet Sherlock instead, looks up and meets that gaze and lets it trap him, and God, there was never any hope for him, was there? Not when defeat can feel so much like coming home.
* * *
In an office in Westminster, Mycroft Holmes watches John Watson stand on his toes to kiss his brother, and sighs and switches off the monitor. They’re both grown men; old enough to know that kissing the dead won’t make life into a fairytale. Resurrections are not miracles, and there’s a reason we fear the undead.
He calls Anthea.
“Have someone collect Sherlock’s things from my house. No, no need to call a hotel; Baker Street, I think.”
He’ll send someone over to spruce the place up this afternoon. It won’t look like a tomb any more. If he could guarantee its inhabitants more than the ghost of what they once shared, then he would fix that, too.
He puts down the phone, and closes his eyes.
Author:
anactoria Characters/pairing: Sherlock/John, John/OFC
Rating: R
Summary: When Sherlock reveals he's still alive, things aren't all sunshine and roses. John can't forgive him, and can't promise that he ever will.
Notes: Written for
dark_fest, for the following prompt:Sherlock, Sherlock/John, Things aren’t all sunshine and roses when Sherlock finally reveals to John he’s still alive. John makes him work for his forgiveness, a forgiveness that he may never give.
I... almost feel like I should warn for this being fairly tame by
dark_fest standards? I mean, I think the original prompter possibly had some kind of kinky punishment scenario in mind (which could be awesome, don't get me wrong), but this is basically just miserable people being miserable.Thanks very much to
bluebellanon, kryptaria, and porridgebird, all of whom looked this over for me at very short notice.“You took everything.” Sherlock presses the barrel hard against Moriarty’s temple, and thinks that he must surely stop smiling soon. How can he not see that he’s been beaten? “My work. My home. You separated me from my friends. You left me with nothing to lose. Did it never occur to you how dangerous that was?”
Moriarty does not stop smiling. “Oh, Sherlock, Sherlock, Sherlock.” His voice is soft as butter; it oils its way beneath Sherlock’s skin. “The thing is—the really funny thing is—you still think you can get it back.”
Over and over in his dreams he presses the trigger, and over and over Jim Moriarty dies laughing at him.
Sherlock snatches up his phone the second it rings, and doesn’t pause for a ‘hello.’ “Where is it?”
“I’m not sure that your appearing on his doorstep unannounced is the wisest course of action.”
Sherlock rolls his eyes. Useless gesture, given the thousands of miles currently separating him from his brother, but Mycroft sighs down the line at him anyway.
“He’s not injured or ill. You would already have told me.” If there’s a note of urgency in his voice, he doesn’t bother trying to hide it. Mycroft will hear all of his undercurrents anyway.
(You would have, wouldn’t you? because it’s been three years and many, many miles, and Mycroft gets stupid ideas about protecting him and so Sherlock does not always know the precise degree to which he can mistrust his brother, and No, no, just no, he’s not, he’s not allowed to be, no. Too many years and too many miles, and not just his patience but all of him is worn thin. He’s a threadbare thing, the stuffing kept from leaking out of him by will and tunnel-vision focus and hope, by knowing he’s so close now, one more night drinking cheap coffee to avoid sleep and he’ll smell London rain again.)
“Doctor Watson is fine,” Mycroft says, and the tug of the maelstrom lessens.
“The address, Mycroft.”
“I’ll send a car to meet you at the airport.” Flat; final; clearly all he’s getting.
“Stansted, not Heathrow,” he says, but the line is already dead.
He leans back on the hotel bed and closes his eyes. Mission accomplished, no plans left to make but the kind that begin and end with ‘go home,’ and the old, enervating throb of nothing to do drives him to pick and worry at every possible nuance and inflection of ‘fine,’ everything that every pause in Mycroft’s voice could have meant.
He lasts five minutes before lighting up a cigarette.
‘Anthea’ (real name: even Sherlock doesn’t know, but from the glee she takes in announcing the false ones it’s undoubtedly something painfully ordinary, Jean or Rachel or Sue) taps endlessly at her new-model iPhone and cheerfully ignores him. That’s why she’s about the only one of Mycroft’s people he can stand, even if he doesn’t like her any more than the rest of them.
His phone lights up. Message from Mycroft. He ignores it in favour of pressing his forehead against the window and observing as they come off the M11 into London, collating what he sees with his old mental maps. Overlaying new details (a new shop-front; an altered road layout; subtle shifts in the clothing styles people wear and the phones and tablet computers they carry), slotting a new city, altered in myriad minute ways, on top of the one that’s existed in his head for three years. Mechanical task, barely a distraction, ought to be calming if it’s anything at all, but it leaves him feeling oddly displaced. Separate from himself. Unsure whether the Sherlock Holmes returning to this city is a new one or an old.
Unwelcome sensation. Open and unsatisfying; not the relief he’s been half-expecting. He narrows his eyes and reminds himself that this won’t last. The city was the backdrop against which his old life happened. It’s the major players who matter. All he needs is John, really. Then this will be a homecoming.
The black car pulls up around the corner from John’s new flat and shows no sign of moving off when Sherlock gets out. “You don’t need to wait,” he snaps, through the window. ‘Anthea’ gives him one of her disturbingly bland smiles and turns back to her phone.
Piss off, he texts to Mycroft, just to make sure that his feelings are clear. The car still doesn’t move.
“What,” says John, and stands in the doorway staring.
Sherlock studies him. Wrinkles and new grey in his hair, and the shift of his weight says that his limp is back, but not as bad as it might have been six months or a year ago. Sherlock collates. Layers this John Watson over the one in his mind, the one who is (was) an inappropriate giggle at a crime scene and a steady, constant presence one step behind him and a choked voice on the other end of a phone-call, three years and a lifetime ago.
“What,” John says again. Dully, not even a question. The few seconds in which he questions his sanity are written clearly on his face. He is not processing this; too much for him. Sherlock’s considered the possibility; found it preferable to the one that involves him getting punched in the face. John’s clearly close to shutting down, so Sherlock takes the initiative.
“Aren’t you going to invite an old friend in for tea, John?” he asks, voice as gentle as he can make it (and it’s an effort; gentleness has never come naturally to him and certainly not now, after three years’ harsh necessity and struggle.) “I thought you were more hospitable than this.”
John nods obediently, and turns to ascend the stairs.
The flat (of course) is preternaturally neat, the few personal touches (a Views of the Lake District calendar, clearly courtesy of Mrs Hudson; one of those glass picture-frames people fill with photographs of themselves and their friends to illustrate the fullness and vitality of their social lives, half-empty) standing out so baldly they ring false. Attempts to convince any visitors who might stop by that the man who inhabits this place is halfway normal.
It’s worked, though. Someone’s been convinced. (Someone female; early thirties; professional—possibly a fellow doctor but more likely a teacher.) Guardian Weekend magazine on the coffee table, open at the fashion column; something French and arty on top of the DVD player. Sherlock can picture John yawning politely behind his hand, doing his very best to look interested and secretly longing for something with a few more explosions in it. Early in the relationship, then; he’s still trying to impress her, and there aren’t any other obviously not-John’s possessions lying around the living room.
He studies the pictures in the glass frame, and John’s reflection in it as he makes tea. (The exaggerated care with which he carries out each movement; ritualistic, as though routine is all that’s holding him together. Sherlock tries to ignore the worry that curls in his gut.) Old pictures of John’s army buddies, taken years before they met; John and Harry in Hyde Park, clutching melting ice-creams and smiling at the camera with strained brightness; Lestrade and Molly (bound to happen eventually) in a pub somewhere, he standing with an arm around her shoulders and looking thoroughly pleased with himself, she beaming shyly over the top of her wine glass. And, oh. There.
Thirtyish, curly brown hair, fashionably unflattering top, seated next to John in some self-consciously trendy café (a collage in violent reds and blacks on the wall behind them; food artfully arranged in portions that John would certainly deem much too small.) Shoreditch, maybe. John looks painfully out-of-place there, but the smile he’s directing at her is genuine. Her hand is on his arm.
“Here.”
John is standing behind him. He meets the eyes of Sherlock’s reflection instead of Sherlock’s own, hands him a cup of tea and sits down on the sofa and doesn’t look at him. Sherlock perches on one of the arms and does look at John, very intently. (How much of John is old, and how much new? How long will it take for the image in his head to merge with the one in front of him? For this to be real again?)
Skimmed milk in the tea. John doesn’t drink skimmed milk. The girlfriend’s choice, then, and he’s gone along with it, as he always does. John moves the boundaries of himself for other people. He accommodates; arranges himself around them. Unobtrusive, until one morning they wake up and realise the impossibility of living in a world without him.
It occurs to Sherlock that he’s frowning. He stops, sips his tea and waits, listens to the silence as it stretches out between them and grows uncomfortable.
The need to fill silence: nothing he’s ever felt, or understood. A sign of weak-mindedness, surely, that need to distract oneself with inane chatter, to avoid thinking. But John’s silence unbalances him. No version of this scenario he’s played out inside his head has been so calm. So lacking. He’s considered bitter recrimination, physical violence, tears, even flat-out refusal to believe it—but he could work with those. This is an unexpected variable. What to do with it?
“Don’t you want to know what happened?” he asks, eventually.
John shrugs. “I suppose you’re going to tell me,” he says, to the empty middle of the living room.
So he does, and John sits and winces when he says Molly’s name and again when he says Mycroft’s and doesn’t look at him and doesn’t look at him and doesn’t look at him, and Sherlock feels something cold rise in his throat. Panic, he thinks, at last. He’s spent three years on the run, escaped from trained killers, known every hour could be his last, and been certain that he’s catalogued its many varieties exhaustively. But this cold, creeping thing—this is new, and this is worst of all.
And when he’s finished, John sets down his mug of stone-cold tea on the coffee table and doesn’t look at him and says, “I think you should go.”
It’s Sherlock’s turn to say, “What?”
“You heard me.” Minute tremble in John’s hand; distance in his eyes. “You should go.”
John’s avoiding his eyes. Afraid of being persuaded to change his mind. Sherlock jumps to his feet, circles round in front of him to press upon the weakness. “John. Look at me. Please.”
“No.” Headshake; sigh. “No. Sherlock, I—I don’t even know. I don’t know what I know, I can’t just get my head around this straight off the bat like you can, I’m going to need—”
“Need what?” Time? An explanation? Those are easy, those he can give.
“I don’t know.” John slumps forward in his chair. “Please. Just go.”
Sherlock does. “Put that DVD back in its case,” he says, on his way out. “She won’t be happy if you scratch it.”
“Bethany,” John says. “Her name’s Bethany.” Then he presses his lips together and glances away. Sherlock watches him a second longer; gets nothing more. Apparently John has already shared more than he wanted to.
Belatedly—while he’s walking, ignoring the black car that follows him at a discreet distance, wondering what to do with this unfamiliar hollow lightness in his bones, this sense that he could take one wrong step and float off the surface of the planet—he remembers something else.
There were no photographs of him on John’s wall.
Later that afternoon, he gives in and reads Mycroft’s message.
It’s just a link. It goes to John’s blog.
I know you all have the best of intentions, reads the entry, but I’m going to ask one favour. I know there’s been the occasional rumour about ‘sightings’ since Sherlock died, and I’m not daft enough to think I can stop people speculating on the internet, but please don’t involve me in it.
I was there with him that day, and I know the rumours aren’t true. I’ve had to come to terms with that, and it hasn’t been easy, but I’ve managed it. People claiming to have seen him alive might have given me hope once, but honestly, now they just make me angry. I won’t tell anybody what they can or can’t say in their own corner of the blogosphere, but out of respect for those of us who knew and cared for Sherlock when he was alive, please stop sending it to me.
We’ve cleared his name—and I can’t thank you all enough for your support in doing that—but that’s all we can do. It’s time to let him rest.
A cursory once-over of the conspiracy sites reveals nothing but shoddy guesswork, conclusions so wide of the mark they’re laughable. (Goa? Him?) He can imagine John reading it and anticipating his own contempt, sharing a wry, bitter laugh with a Sherlock inside his head, and for a few startling seconds he loathes his imagined dead self with a violence normally reserved for Moriarty and his associates.
He shakes himself. Back to the matter at hand.
John’s having trouble accepting this. Slotting the new reality on top of the one he’s grown accustomed to, erasing the parts that have been revealed as false. But he’ll manage it eventually. It’s going to take time; that’s all. John adjusted to being part of Sherlock’s life in the first place, didn’t he? His endlessly accommodating nature served them (or Sherlock, at least) well there; it will come through again, this time. It has to. Sherlock—loath as he is to admit it about anyone—has faith in him.
(The thought of John looking him in the eyes, smiling to see him risen from the grave, might have been all that kept him going, those last few desperate months. Of course he has faith in John. He has no choice.)
The next time he turns up at the flat, John closes the door in his face.
Sherlock regards his reflection in the window as he considers this latest development. Anger, then; delayed, but not unexpected. Troubling, though, that it’s taken until now to manifest itself. John should have shouted at him on his first appearance, maybe hit him or even stormed off, but it should have exhausted itself in a brief flash, not continued to burn and burn and grow, an ember fanned in the dark.
What was it that John said, last time? I’m going to need— I don’t know.
The anger must have been there already, simmering quietly beneath the surface. John wasn’t talking about what it would take for him to get used to the situation (more than time, apparently)—or not just that, at any rate. He was talking about what it would take for him to forgive. What Sherlock would need to do to win back his place in John’s (their) life.
He’s not talking about it now. He’s not talking to Sherlock at all. Sherlock will have to figure it out on his own. Shouldn’t be too hard; John’s a simple creature. A couple of attempts, maybe. No more.
Trial and error, John? Sherlock thinks (makes himself think.) Pedestrian.
But not once does he seriously consider refusing the challenge.
He secretes himself in a café at the bottom of the street where John lives (temporarily—surely) now. Clear view of the bus stop at which John will alight on his way home from work, passable coffee. John appears later than he should. Sherlock is on his third cup, the proprietor pointedly sweeping up around his feet, when he sees John—no. When he sees them.
So that’s why he’s late. She is a teacher—no, lecturer, sixth-form college—and exam season is in full swing. He’s waited around after the end of surgery hours to see her. Her arm linked through John’s: casual (proprietorial.) She smiles into his face, saying something with a gentle, earnest expression and finishing it up with a softening laugh. (Irritating.) (Caring.)
Between the caffeine and the rampant soppiness on display, Sherlock finds himself feeling a little nauseous.
The stiff lines of John’s back and shoulders relax infinitesimally. He’s happy. Happier, at least. With her.
This will have to wait.
It’s easy to track her down. Mycroft raises an eyebrow at him, but stops short of saying anything. Bethany Robbins: teaches French and Italian at City and Islington College, heavy workload, Zumba on Tuesdays, cocktails with sister on Fridays. The rest of her schedule is erratic, though she certainly doesn’t spend it all with John; she stays at his flat two or three nights a week, no more. (For the moment. She clearly has intentions.) Still, those are the only two nights Sherlock can be certain he’ll have John to himself.
Today is Wednesday. Two nights seem an unacceptably long time to wait.
He picks up his phone, thumbs through the contacts (doesn’t take long), changes his mind and puts it back down. Ordinary people imbue words with differing levels of value depending on the method of delivery. He hasn’t forgotten that during his exile. A text message isn’t going to do it.
So when John sets off for the clinic on Thursday morning, he finds Sherlock waiting at his bus stop.
He wilts visibly for the briefest of instants, then squares his shoulders and turns back the way he came.
“John.” Sherlock catches him easily, but John doesn’t slow down or stop to look at him. Doesn’t give in. “John, what are you doing?”
“Getting the Tube.”
“It’s a fifteen-minute walk. You’ll be late.”
“Stop pretending you give a shit about that and tell me what you want?”
“I don’t—”
“Sherlock.”
“Fine.” Deep breath. (Don’t hesitate. God.) “I want—to apologise.”
“You. Want to apologise.”
“Yes.”
John’s still walking, but he’s looking at Sherlock now, out of the corner of his eye. That’s good. It has to be good.
“It was never my intention to hurt you, John. It was unavoidable. I wouldn’t have had you grieve for me, given the choice. I am sorry.”
“Okay.” John keeps walking.
“‘Okay’?”
“You’ve said your bit, I’ve listened to you. You can go now. Okay?”
“John.” It is Sherlock who stops first. They’re in the middle of the pavement. Passers-by glance at them curiously, no doubt pegging this as part of some embarrassing, protracted break-up. Which feels disconcertingly close to the truth. “I—”
“What did you expect me to say? ‘Oh, you’ve said you’re sorry, that’s all fine, then? We can just go back to the way things were, and I’ll believe you’ve got all the answers and jump at your every whim’? I can’t do that, Sherlock, I can’t just forget that you let me—” John breaks off, keeps his eyes determinedly down. “I can’t,” he repeats.
“Why not?”
John shakes his head, and starts walking.
“You’re still blaming me for this, John? It was your life on the line, in case you’ve forgotten. I saved it. I’ve come back, I’ve even played along with your feelings and apologised, and you’re still—sulking. It’s pathetic.”
His voice is hard and contemptuous. It’s not difficult. He’s had time to think about this, since his failed apology—has thought about little else, in fact. It nags at him, an itch deep in his bones. He’s right.
“You’re right,” John says, simply, and stops him in his tracks. “That’s what you still don’t get, though, isn’t it? Feelings? You can argue the point as much as you like, you can even be right, but that doesn’t mean I can—” He shakes his head. “I would’ve trusted you with my life, you know. You didn’t even trust me with my own. I don’t think I know what I am to you, any more. What I ever was. If you ever saw me as—I don’t know. I just. I don’t know.” The set of his mouth is still stubborn, but there’s something sad in his face. He’s tugging at the sleeves of his jumper. Oh, God. He’s about to apologise, isn’t he?
Apologise. Not forgive.
Sherlock is out of the door before he can.
Lestrade does punch him, as if to make up for John’s negligence in not having done so. Sherlock stumbles and supports himself with one hand against the office door, but he doesn’t miss the way Lestrade’s eyes flick to the empty space behind him, or the question he can see forming behind them.
He shakes his head before Lestrade has a chance to ask it.
Something promising comes up a fortnight later, by which point Sherlock’s fingers twitch every time he glances at his phone, he is growing accustomed to the sinking weight of disappointment each time a text message turns out not to be from John (though he has no reason to expect any differently), and Mycroft has given up trying to hide his worried looks at the breakfast table. The distraction’s welcome. It’s also quite possibly useful.
One victim. Early twenties; struggling musician; house-sharing with three other girls, two PGCE students and an office temp. Cause of death: asphyxiation. No marks on the body, no sign of forced entry to her (locked) bedroom. Two housemates at home on the night she died, and neither of them heard a sound. It’s simple, obvious, a waste of his time, and Sherlock has the answer after a cursory glance around her bedroom, but he can get away with playing ignorant for an hour or two.
Office Temp is sniffling in the hallway while a female police officer Sherlock doesn’t know (young; new addition to the team; might actually last) nods understandingly and proffers a hanky.
“Last time I spoke to her we had an argument about the microwave,” she’s sobbing. “Her baked beans went everywhere and she didn’t clean it up and I shouted at her and now she—what if she—oh my God—” The girl starts howling again. Sherlock elbows past her without saying ‘excuse me,’ earns a glare from the officer, ignores in in favour of his phone.
On a case, he types. Need your input. If it’s not too much trouble. SH
He erases the last sentence before pressing ‘send.’
It’s lunchtime. John will have received the message. However angry he is with Sherlock, he won’t be able to resist reading it.
Twenty minutes before he gets a reply. John has no doubt typed and deleted several possible responses in the interval. He’s tempted. Good.
I’m at work.
A woman is dead, John.
SH
I didn’t know you cared.
Caring won’t prevent
anyone else from dying.
Working out what killed
her might.
SH
Five minutes.
What’s the address?
John frowns and looks around the room and at the dead woman and not at Sherlock’s eyes.
“Yeah,” he says, after he’s examined the body. “Asphyxiation. Suffocated?”
“By an intruder stealthy enough to have entered a locked room without arousing the suspicions of the other two people in the house?”
“Poisoning, then? Was she on any medication?”
“No. Lestrade’s lot found an unfilled prescription for antidepressants on her bedside table.”
“Unfilled?”
He watches John glance around the room again, take in the tarot deck on the bookcase and the dream-catcher hanging in the window, watches the pieces fall into place. The obvious conclusion itches in his throat; he swallows it and forces himself to be patient.
“Did they find anything else? Looks like she was a bit of a hippy. Might’ve been into—” John makes a face. “—alternative medicine. Some of those places aren’t exactly scrupulous about what they sell.”
“Of course.” It’s a struggle not to roll his eyes, but Sherlock manages it. He pulls open the top drawer of the bedside table, rummages, pulls out a little box of what looks like dried herbs. “And Anderson insisted it was incense.”
He tosses the box at Lestrade on his way out of the house. “Have that tested. Aconitum, commonly known as monkshood, used as a treatment for fatigue in traditional Chinese medicine. When not properly treated, it’s highly toxic, leaving the casualty apparently dead from asphyxiation. Your mysterious killer is a herbalist with a rather lax safety policy.” He turns to John. Tries to remember how it felt to smile, when they worked together, when John used to say things like that’s brilliant and mean them. His face feels like it’s about to crack. “You’ve saved me a tedious waste of an afternoon. Lunch?”
John’s face clouds. “I’ve got to get back to work,” he says, shuffling his feet with a nervousness that makes it obvious he’s lying. Sherlock doesn’t miss the questioning look Lestrade shoots John as they leave, the way John shakes his head, the later implicit in the gesture.
He’s unaccustomed to it, this feeling of watching his friends—if he can still call them such—as an outsider looking in. In his absence, it seems, they’ve banded together, formed an odd fellowship of loss from which he—the lost one—is excluded.
Outwardly, he shrugs. He waits for John to round the corner at the bottom of the street before following him.
That’s how he finds out that John still visits his grave.
Mycroft has had the graveside bugged all along, of course—a thoroughly hideous plastic flower arrangement, labelled ‘Love Mummy,’ disguises a discreet microphone—so he doesn’t risk getting close enough to hear what John is saying. Time enough for that later. He waits, at a discreet distance, for a few moments before turning away. And then, for reasons he can’t (won’t) quite put a name to (sentiment, stupidity, an ache deep in his chest that draws him toward what only makes it worse) he finds himself pulled through the city to Baker Street, involuntarily reaching into his pocket for a key he’s never thrown away.
Mrs Hudson is on holiday. It can do no harm.
He knows Mycroft’s been paying the rent; that he’s left clear instructions that nothing be touched. The mausoleum silence of the place settles heavily over him; the dust on the mantel rimes his fingertips like hoarfrost. His hands twitch with the desire to disturb, to throw papers and boxes into disarray just to make the whole thing seem less dead, but when he reaches out a hand to do so he stops, paralysed. He ends up sitting in John’s old armchair, knees pulled in close to his chest, staring into empty space and thinking that if he looks down he might discover that he’s faded into nothingness.
Unexpectedly, his brain throws up the image of the dead girl’s flatmate, sobbing in the hallway and blaming herself, as though all the petty little arguments that make up day-to-day life could actually mean something.
It takes him three attempts to delete her.
“It’s funny,” says John’s voice through Mycroft’s computer. “There were all these things I never said, and I used to think that if I could just see you again, just once, just for a minute, I’d tell you all of them. And now you’re back, and I can’t even—I can’t look at you, Jesus Christ. Because if I did, if I let myself, you’d just—you could—I don’t know. I don’t even know any more.”
There’s a pause, long enough that he wonders if John has walked away.
“I was so grateful to you,” John’s voice goes on, then. “You made staying alive seem worth it. I.” He swallows. “I loved you.” He bites down hard on the plosive, hammering his past tense home with enough force that it has to (has to) be a lie.
He texts John, claiming the need for a medical opinion on one case or another, as often as is possible without being pathetically obvious. John is always reluctant, and never able to resist his better nature when Sherlock reminds him that more people may die if they don’t solve the case. Even when there is no killer; even when Sherlock has to struggle not to tear out his hair with impatience and reveal that he already knows.
John never looks him in the eye, always leaves as quickly as he can, claiming work or Bethany. Sherlock settles slowly back into something resembling his old routine, but there are spaces in it that ache—no-one to meet his inertia-born rages with amused exasperation, or to sit quietly with him after a case, eating chow mein out of the carton and complaining half-heartedly about his incessant channel-hopping—and so he keeps on texting John, hoping that this time it will work. This time John will give in.
He knocks at John’s door on nights that he knows Bethany won’t be there. He’s never met her in person and has no desire to do so, but from the increasing number of her possessions strewn around the flat, he’s worked out that she’s a vegetarian; that she reads books that don’t interest her in order to talk about them in the break room at work; that her sister is getting married in Exeter next month and she’s bent on dragging John along for the weekend.
John will go. John is serious about her. Or, at least, he is trying very hard to be.
Most of the time, John makes coffee and the bare minimum of conversation, and Sherlock sits in near-silence, wanting to yell at John to yell at him because it would be better than this nothing, and not doing because he knows it wouldn’t work. Then he finishes his coffee and leaves, and sometimes, on his way back to Mycroft’s, he finds himself skirting dangerously close to areas of London where he used to score cocaine and wondering.
If he could make John hate him it would be something. If he could make John hate him John would care.
And one evening when John says, “I can’t now, Sherlock, not tonight, I can’t” and “Just fuck off home or something, please,” (something in that last tearing at him, because Mycroft’s isn’t, will never be, home) he sits on the doorstep in the rain and shivers and doesn’t care because there was a plea in John’s voice, there was hurt there, and that was something. And when he’s still there in the morning John swears copiously and hauls him into the flat, puts his sodden coat on the radiator and makes him hot coffee with exactly the right amount of sugar and doesn’t look him in the eyes.
He aches, and it’s not just with the cold.
He finds himself wanting to say things. They might not fix anything if he does, there’s no guarantee they would work, and yet he wants to say them anyway. Sentiment. John’s trying to pretend he doesn’t exist, and John has broken him without even trying.
He remembers John speaking to his grave, saying I loved you (which Sherlock automatically corrects to, I love you, even though I don’t want to in his head), and he knows—has always known that, in the idiom of ordinary people, that’s the closest approximation of what he wants to say, too.
John wouldn’t believe it if he said it. But he might pay attention to something more immediate, less ignorable.
There’s little else he hasn’t tried. It only takes him a moment to make up his mind.
For once, he’s sitting beside John on the couch, not perched on the arm. He sets his coffee cup down on the floor, far enough away that he won’t kick it over. John flicks his eyes sideways, momentarily; blinks when Sherlock takes his mug out of his hands and places it beside his own.
“Sherlock,” he says. “What are you—”
“Translating,” Sherlock says, and kisses him.
John’s lips; warm and dry. His breath; bitter from coffee and no breakfast. He pulls away a half-second too slowly, and Sherlock thinks, yes.
“I’m with Beth,” John protests, and Sherlock doesn’t listen because John is breathing hard and at last, at last, looking right at him. “She’s a good person. She doesn’t deserve—”
“You shot a man dead for me just after we’d met,” Sherlock snaps. “Don’t you think it’s a bit late to start getting moral?”
And that does it, snaps something, because then John is in his lap, hands fisted in the front of his damp shirt. John’s eyes have narrowed, they’re so angry, and the whole of their focus is on Sherlock, and he thinks with a jolt that this, this is how ordinary people communicate the parts he doesn’t understand, and he still doesn’t understand but he’ll try if that’s what it takes.
He’ll try to make John make him.
John kisses him back, and there’s nothing warm or dry about it now. It’s messy; insistent; punishing, and that thought sends a jolt of something shooting down his spine, makes him gasp in surprise at himself. (He’s never thought himself so simple a creature.) The fingers of John’s right hand twist in his hair, nails scraping his scalp.
He pulls back, breathless. “Perhaps—”
“Bedroom.” The heat in John’s voice is still mostly rage, but it’s there and that’s what matters.
The bed is neatly made. There’s a bottle of CK One on the dressing-table; a pair of powder-pink slippers tucked away under the bed. Sherlock flings himself down on top of the covers with more force than is strictly necessary, and with a stab of satisfaction at the thought of spoiling the sweet little domestic picture.
Both of them are clumsy in their haste. John’s steady doctor’s hands tremble as they push up his shirt; fumble at the front of his trousers. He reaches for John’s fly to reciprocate and finds his wrist grabbed and pinned against the pillows and doesn’t fight it. He closes his eyes instead, feels his pulse flutter in John’s grip and thinks that this anger is precious, because he can live with it better than he can live with nothing. And when John fists both of their erections and strokes them together, the fingers of his free hand dig into Sherlock’s hip. He bruises easily; there’ll be a mark tomorrow. Evidence. And the thought makes him lean in to kiss John again, and John shudders and spurts over Sherlock and his hand and the clean duvet, and bites down on Sherlock’s lip hard enough that he tastes copper.
Blood, bruises, marks. That’s what he wants. John won’t be able to pretend any more, then.
But when Sherlock opens his eyes again John isn’t looking at him. He’s blinking up at nothing, and then he rolls over onto his side, with his back to Sherlock. “Fuck,” he says, quietly. There is no rage in it now. His voice is flat; deadened.
“John.” Sherlock reaches out tentatively with his right hand; places the flat of his palm between John’s shoulder-blades; wants to absorb the warmth of him through his shirt. “I think I—”
John shrugs him off with a violence that startles—and then turns cold and settles in his gut like stone.
Sherlock watches John and John doesn’t move. He doesn’t know what to do. The inside of his head catches up to the world and rushes and swirls and he feels dizzy, as if the bed is tilting sideways up to meet him, and still he doesn’t know what to do, he has no clue, nothing at all.
“I think he won,” Sherlock whispers, finally, and can’t decide whether or not John hears the unspoken part of the sentence, the part that is, you were my heart.
John’s shoulders shake. “Get out.”
Sherlock ends up at Baker Street again that evening. Mrs Hudson’s back from her holiday. He hasn’t told her yet; now seems like as good a time as any. (That’s all.)
When she answers the door, she clutches at her chest and grabs for the doorframe. He catches her, and apologises with as much sincerity as he’s ever possessed. And at last she fusses and gets out the biscuits and showers him with kisses, and he shuts his eyes and accepts them with more gratitude than she will ever know, or he acknowledge.
I’m scared.
SH
Don’t.
I’m scared of what
I’ll be without you.
SH
I said don’t.
I need you.
SH
Don’t make me your
keeper. You sacked me
from that job pretty
effectively when you
let me think you were
dead for 3 years.
John.
SH
Just stop texting.
I’m sorry.
SH
Please.
SH
No reply.
“I finished with Beth,” John says to Sherlock’s headstone, trying not to watch his reflection in its hard surface. “I don’t even know why. She wouldn’t have known.” He sighs. “Well, okay, I do know why. She deserves better. As in, someone a lot less fucked up than me. So, yeah. Here I am again. Just like when we met. I’ve got nothing. Hope you’re happy.”
He pretends that he’s imagined the footstep behind him, even though combat instincts never lie. He keeps his eyes off his reflection.
“I don’t know, I suppose I just thought we were—I always thought I’d be part of your inner circle, you know? I thought you’d give me that and you—” He breaks off, and sighs deeply.
“I had to protect you.”
“I fucking mourned you. Jesus, I listened to ‘Gloomy Sunday’ on repeat for a whole afternoon and I don’t even like Billie Holiday, I wrote notes. I thought about—” John presses the back of his hand to his mouth, because he thinks that he might sob if he keeps talking.
“John. Look at me.” For all the command in Sherlock’s voice it’s a plea, and that’s worse somehow, more irresistible. John wants to give in, wants to obey it so badly. So much of him still wants to be Sherlock’s fool; really, honestly wants to be that pathetic.
If he turns around and says, it’s okay, I forgive you, he’ll be lying. But he is so, so tired of being honest.
“John.”
He turns. He looks at Sherlock and tries not to notice how bone-white he is, how bloodshot his eyes.
He steps forward to meet Sherlock instead, looks up and meets that gaze and lets it trap him, and God, there was never any hope for him, was there? Not when defeat can feel so much like coming home.
In an office in Westminster, Mycroft Holmes watches John Watson stand on his toes to kiss his brother, and sighs and switches off the monitor. They’re both grown men; old enough to know that kissing the dead won’t make life into a fairytale. Resurrections are not miracles, and there’s a reason we fear the undead.
He calls Anthea.
“Have someone collect Sherlock’s things from my house. No, no need to call a hotel; Baker Street, I think.”
He’ll send someone over to spruce the place up this afternoon. It won’t look like a tomb any more. If he could guarantee its inhabitants more than the ghost of what they once shared, then he would fix that, too.
He puts down the phone, and closes his eyes.
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Date: 2012-04-19 03:15 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-04-19 05:16 pm (UTC)