Fic: Multiply (the sum of our parts) - Chapter Eleven
Title: Multiply (the sum of our parts)
Author: 1electricpirate
Rating: M
Pairing: Sherlock Holmes/John Watson (BBC)
Disclaimer: I do not pretend to own any of these characters (besides the two or three I have conjured from thin air). Credit for that brilliance falls to ACD and the Godtiss.
Previous Chapters: One | Two | Three | Four | Five | Six | Seven | Eight | Nine | Ten
Irene is shouting.
(Irene frequently shouts, but this instance of it is particularly screechy and ear-splittingly loud.)
Sherlock presses his hands harder against his ears in an attempt to block out the worst of the noise, but all that earns him is a cuff around the head by one perfectly manicured hand.
“You’re not listening to me!”
“On the contrary, I have little choice but to listen to you!” Sherlock retorts. The shouting stops, but only because Irene has resorted to staring down at him with her hands on her hips.
“Sherlock Holmes, for a genius, you are incredibly stupid.”
“Well, you’re being willfully obtuse.”
“Of the two of us, Sherlock, who is better suited to understanding relationships?”
Sherlock sulks and refuses to look at her as he grumbles, “You.”
“Correct. Now will you shut up and do as I say?”
“No, because, as I have already stated, what you are asking of me is impossible.”
They have been through this. It seems like they have been through this hundreds of times in the month and a half since Sherlock broke in to Eastwell. Sherlock hates repetition but he is literally trapped in this room with Irene for another ten hours before they can move to the next place and they have nothing better to do than discuss the ins and outs of his relationship troubles with John.
Or, that’s how this discussion had begun. (Using the downtime they had in the middle of searching out their prey to try and solve Sherlock’s other problems - namely the fact that his husband, on discovering the fact that he is not, in fact, dead, had kicked him out and told him he didn’t want to see him again.)
That (less than acceptable) state of affairs (the discussion of anything other than the case at hand) had quickly deteriorated into the present hell that was Irene, for all intents and purposes, ripping him a new one.
“John made it perfectly clear, Irene,” Sherlock begins for nearly the hundredth time. “He doesn’t want to see me again.”
“And I’m standing here telling you that that’s bullshit. That man has been utterly smitten with you since the day he clapped eyes on you.”
“Be that as it may, he is ... inexplicably angry at me, and John is completely unreasonable when he’s angry.”
“Inexplicably,” Irene echoes, as if she can’t believe her own ears. “He has every right to be angry with you, you prat.” She clips him another one around the head; Sherlock says “Ow!” and tries to swat her off but that just earns him another slap. “Shut up and listen to me, you colossal idiot. He’s angry because you, in your infinite wisdom, refuse to acknowledge that you made a mistake and put him through hell, and then you didn’t even apologise!”
Sherlock remains silent, scuffing at the floor with the toe of his shoe. Irene’s face lengthens into a twisted mask of horror, her blood red lips forming a perfect O.
“Oh, my god. You don’t even think you should apologise, do you?!”
“Well why should I apologise for keeping him alive?!”
“Because you put him through hell!”
“I was in hell myself! I don’t see how that warrants an apology. I’m sorry darling that I suffered for months and killed countless dangerous men to keep you alive. I’m not. I’m not sorry I did it, how can I be? He’s alive, he’s been alive for the past eighteen months, which is a damn sight longer than he would have been if I hadn’t done it.”
Irene nearly screams again with frustration. Sherlock cowers, just in case, but she doesn’t hit him this time.
“You prat. He thought you were dead!”
“Yes, he kept shouting that at me too. That was the whole point of the endeavour. He missed me and it was horrible; I missed him and it was horrible. Horrible, but necessary. I can’t apologise for something I had to do. It was awful being apart, but we both survived, I don’t understand why he’s still so angry! I'm not dead after all, shouldn't he be glad? How many people get to welcome their presumed-dead lovers back from the dead? Almost none.”
Abruptly, Irene sits on the edge of the bed opposite him (slumped across the couch) as if the wind has been knocked from her.
“My God. Maybe you are a sociopath, after all.” She covers her face with her hands, briefly, gathering herself before she looks back at him. “Sherlock, you might have missed him but you knew he was alive, that you’d see him again. I daresay he deserves an apology for the deception that made him believe that you were gone, permanently. It’s the worst feeling in the world, when the person you love dies. I'm sure he is overwhelmingly glad you're still alive Sherlock, but can't you see? He thought you were dead, and his world collapsed around his ears, and you let it happen."
“I... yes, I know it must have been awful but I’m back now, he knows, now, and I just... I can’t undo time, Irene. It is what it is, I did what I had to do. I had to keep him safe and it was worth everything I had to give. I won’t apologise for it.”
Irene is quiet for a long time before she looks at Sherlock and says, gravely, “You don’t deserve a man like John Watson.”
Sherlock agrees with her, has always agreed with her (he has never deserved anything half so good as what John possesses in his left pinky finger), but he will not acknowledge it (it feels too much like defeat). They had fallen together, him and John, but he is not too stupid to realise that nothing about that state of affairs is necessarily permanent. (The kindest thing he’s ever done to John is give him the power to leave if he felt it necessary. He’d said it, once, late at night, and John had told him to shut up and stop being so bloody maudlin all the time.) Sherlock is not too stupid to realise that he can never, will never, be what John Watson deserves but is all to keenly aware that he, for some reason, is what John Watson has chosen (had chosen, once upon a time), and he feels he owes it to himself, the bit of himself that he tries very hard to ignore, to put up a fight for him.
It is unfortunate for both of them, really, that the part of Sherlock that would do anything for John, anything at all, is currently marginally overshadowed by the part of him (very much used to running the Sherlock Holmes show) that places one hundred percent certainty in his own reasoning.
Logically, Sherlock knows what he should do. He should grovel, and beg, and plead with John to take him back. But John had been so adamant about not wanting to see him until he’d managed to think things through that Sherlock suspects begging would only exacerbate the situation. John was angry with him (is angry with him) and Sherlock, not understanding, was angry with John for being angry, which made John angrier. A vicious circle of anger and resentment. He did not want to make it worse by poking at it with a stick. (He clings, desperately, to the fact that John had said he didn’t want a divorce - though he’d not been entirely convincing. Still. It is a glimmer of hope in an otherwise bleak situation.)
Nevertheless, if Irene was right, if all John wants is an apology (a form of understanding that he’d made a mistake), Sherlock isn’t sure what he’ll do. John is the only person in the world who can see straight through him (and who isn’t also related to him). John will know if his apology is insincere, and he won’t appreciate it.
The crux of the matter is this: Sherlock does not regret what he did, all those months ago, or the choices he’d made. How can he, when they have (thus far) kept John (and his children) safe? He had decided, all those months ago, to keep John alive at all costs bar none, including their relationship.
(It had been horrible but Sherlock had done it, had walked away in order to keep John alive. He would do it again. It had worked.)
John had suffered, of course, but John has suffered many things, and though Sherlock wishes it had not been a necessary cost, there was little choice in the matter.
So when Irene is shouting at him that he should apologise and try to understand how much worse it is to believe someone dead than to be separated by thousands of miles, Sherlock finds himself resolute (though a part of him wishes he weren’t). Even though Irene continues to point out the fact that he had asked for her help for a reason, Sherlock will not (cannot) budge on this. He can do anything, anything else, but he will never be able to make John believe that he regrets his decision. (Because, quite frankly, he doesn’t.)
The argument is moot for now anyway. They can argue until blue in the face about what Sherlock should do to get John back but until they catch (and kill) Sebastian Moran, none of it matters. (There is always the small possibility that he won’t see John again. It is dangerous, what they are about to do, and Sherlock lets himself wish for just one second that his husband and his impeccable aim were coming with them.)
For a little while longer, it is a waiting game. A game of shadow-hopping, of whispers in the dark, of a strange and explosive (but calculated) mixture of chinese whispers and russian roulette. Then, they’ll set their trap in motion, and hopefully they’ll catch the spider before he catches them. It’s drawing close now. (Sherlock can feel the nerves characteristic of a new case settling heavy in his stomach.) Sighing, he pulls his knees up and hugs them to his chest, burying his face in them.
He has to do this, now, much as it pains him, and then, when its done, then he can worry about John.
(He always worries about John; it is as if a small section of his brain has broken off from the rest and simply sits in a corner, rocking back and forth, worrying about John. It’s infuriating. And now, of course, that little section has been joined by two more sections, which simply sit and worry about his children. Three whole sections of his precious processing space, taken over by worry.)
(There is nothing he can do about it, though. He has tried, he really has, to forget, but his armour was only ever fragile and John Watson has been hammering away at it for months, years - and now he has help. He cares, he cares deeply, and though it has made him sharper, keener, the sum of his senses plus this unfathomable need to succeed - where before he had only ever acted in curious disinterest as to the consequences of his behaviour - it has also made him infinitely more vulnerable.)
So while Sherlock works, he worries, and he works because he worries, and he and Irene will catch Moran, or die trying (and if that happens then at least he can take the bastard with him and know that his children, and John, will continue to live in peace because he died - for real, this time.)
Irene picks herself up off the bed and comes to sit next to him on the couch, one arm draping around his shoulders. Sherlock does not move to shrug her off. They sit there in silence for a long time until Irene says, quietly, “Just a few more weeks, Sherlock. Just a few more weeks, and then I promise, I’ll get you back to him.”
Sherlock glances at her witheringly and says nothing. Just a few weeks and an eternity of possibilities. Irene is making promises she can’t keep. He puts his head back in between his knees and waits.
Just nine more hours until they can move, swiftly and silently with the night, to the next hiding place. (They will stop off, briefly, to run some errands. John is in good hands but he could, in a few weeks, do with better, and so Sherlock has combed his his hair and unearthed a suit that nearly fits him properly, and Irene has found a dress and taught him how to do her hair, and so they will go calling in the night, like a pair of painted dolls, like a pair of ghosts, poor memories of themselves, calling in favours from the living.)
They sleep while they can and then, nine hours later, they slip out the window of the safe room, climb down the trellis to the ground below, and catch a cab at the corner of the road. The driver sees a newly-wed couple, drunk on love and cheap wine at six in the evening, on their way into central London for a night on the town. He drops them at the corner of Broadway and Victoria and smiles to himself as he drives off and does not notice them slipping into the shadows cast by New Scotland Yard. Irene puts her hand gently on Sherlock’s elbow and they stride in together, for all the world as if they belong there, as if they are not the dead come back to life, and no one stops them or even looks at them twice in all the time it takes them to get where they need to be.
There is one thing, just one thing, to be said about being a ghost (even if it is only in other people’s minds): it does rather make places easy to break in to.
(Lestrade does not shoot him in the face, once they have crossed the familiar floor to the familiar elevator and ridden it to the tenth floor and entered, quite without knocking, the all-too familiar office - but Sherlock can tell that he wants to.)
“Evening,” Sherlock says, as if it hasn’t been eighteen months since he last saw this man, tearing out his own greying hair as he watched his favourite consulting detective (his surrogate son, though neither of them have ever phrased it quite in that way) descending slowly into desperate madness. Sherlock guides Irene around the door frame, says “Evening” as if this is just any other night at the Yard, and Lestrade does not shoot him in the face (though he wants to, twitch of the right trigger finger instantaneous, irrepressible) but he does punch him, fast and sharp and bruisingly hard.
“I need your help,” Sherlock says, once he recovers from the blow and wipes the blood from his nose, as if he has not been dead for eighteen, nearly nineteen months. “Have you met Ms. Adler?”
--------------------------
Greg doesn’t go to the funeral. He’s utterly swamped with paperwork and facing a sacking on counts of negligence and abuse of confidential information. It is the negligence suit that irks him most of all.
Negligence was what it really boiled down to, wasn’t it? He’d ignored the undercurrents of dissent and distrust in his team, he’d written it off as harmless joshing - he had turned an entirely blind eye to the fact that no one except for him seemed to actually see the very (painfully so) quantifiable contributions that Sherlock Holmes made to their efforts.
He cannot even begin to list the number of cases which would have gone right over their heads (or not even be noticed at all) if it weren’t for Sherlock Holmes.
The man was a caution, and no mistake, but he was a genius. He worked more relentlessly and with more passion to find the answer than Greg’s entire team combined, and Greg had never had a single doubt that for all his posturing about being a heartless machine, a part of Sherlock genuinely wanted to see the criminals put to justice.
Greg had stood by and watched (even commiserated, to a point) as Sally and Anderson systematically tore Sherlock to pieces, he had watched as Sherlock stood there and took it and didn’t let it fluster him, and he had watched as Sally and Anderson got exactly what it was they deserved for it. He hadn’t realised there was actual malice there. The idea seemed alien to him.
Well now Sherlock is gone, and Greg finds himself crushed under the part of himself that misses the smug toff bastard desperately.
He can’t afford to play the ‘what if’ game. The ‘what if’ game is a slippery, slippery slope. What if he had stopped Sherlock lashing out just once or twice? What if he had cracked down on the needling and insults like he would have given any other employee? What if he’d told Sally to back the fuck off?
It’s too little too late now. What’s done is done. Sherlock somehow ensured the most dangerous criminal in Britain shot himself in the head and then jumped off a building to seal the deal, and if any singular person in London can still doubt his worth, Greg struggles to think of them as entirely human.
Greg once told John Watson, back in the very beginning, that Sherlock Holmes was a great man and that maybe one day, he’d be a good one - well the bastard had certainly lived up to his promise.
He just hadn’t deigned to live beyond it.
So, after the fall, after he ushers John Watson into his office for condolences (and revelations, earth-shattering revelations that make Greg feel, if possible, even more cold and empty and horrid), Greg is inundated with paperwork and doesn’t make it to the funeral.
He does go to the grave though. Just the once. He goes to the grave and he takes a bunch of flowers, though he can hear Sherlock scoffing at him in his head, and he sits next to the somber stone and rests his head back on it and says, “Bloody hell, kid, you always were a pain in my arse.”
It is a surprisingly sunny day and so Greg has no qualms about sitting by Sherlock Holmes’ gravestone and thinking himself into a stupor.
His headache, a residual effect of the night before (during which he was somehow trapped into watching the usually stoic John Watson drink himself into as stupor), pounds away at his temples so Greg closes his eyes, rests his head on Sherlock’s tombstone, and remembers.
He remembers the first time he met Sherlock, a gangly, tattered twenty-four year old skulking around a crime scene, out of his mind on what was surely some kind of horrible drug cocktail, nattering away at another officer about different kinds of tobacco ash and calling him an imbecile for not realising that the difference between them could prove the case for a murder rather than a suicide. Sherlock had turned glazed eyes on Greg when he’d tried to defuse the situation and calmly asked how his marital problems were going and was his wife still shagging her secretary?
He remembers thinking that no one with an accent so crisp, eyes so sharp and clothes once obviously so fine should be living rough on the streets and throwing as many drugs into their systems as they can get their hands on.
He remembers the tenth time he met Sherlock Holmes, skulking around yet another crime scene, and telling him to shove off home and get himself sober and then, maybe then, someone might actually listen to what he had to say.
He remembers waking in the night and slipping a gun into the back of his trousers before tripping down the stairs to see just who on earth it was banging on his door at 3:30 AM, just to find Sherlock on the verge of collapsing in a near overdose; he remembers watching the young man’s criminally wasted body shivering and shaking on his couch and spending half an hour trying to coax water down his throat and calming him with nonsense words until the worst had passed. Sherlock had looked at him then with wide, alien eyes and said the one word that Greg has never heard him say since: “Help.”
Greg sits at Sherlock’s grave and remembers calling Mycroft in the morning to come and pick his little brother up and take him somewhere where they might be able to help him. He remembers the look on Mycroft’s face, broken and terrified, as he bodily picked his baby brother up from the couch and held his trembling frame (for that was all he was back then, just a framework of skin stretched tight over too many bones) and bundled him into a car, bearing him away. Back then, Greg had thought he had washed his hands of Sherlock Holmes, but the bloke was like a bad fucking penny. You never could be rid of him.
Until now. Greg sighs and pats his hand on the ground over the area approximately where Sherlock’s head would be.
“You bastard,” he mutters. “I suppose I ought to be thanking you, for saving my life, but to be honest, I’m too fucking angry.”
Sitting at the grave with his hand over Sherlock’s head, Greg remembers: John’s limp the first time they met and how it had disappeared by the second time (accompanied, interestingly, by a newfound spring in Sherlock’s gait and a quickfire grin on his face); the fascinating way in which John could simply shoot a look across a room and suddenly Sherlock would find the line and toe it; the look on John’s face as he held up his left hand in front of Greg’s face and the way it felt to suddenly realise something he’d known all along; the emptiness in John’s eyes last night as he reached the bottom of his fifth pint and choked out the words, “I found a suicide note hidden in the skull.”
“How can you do this to him,” Greg asks the rotting corpse six feet below him, clenching his fists and resisting the urge to punch the ground. “How can you do this to me?”
Greg remembers the day he saw Sherlock Holmes again, after years of silence, after nearly having forgotten that he existed, and knowing without a doubt that he was clean and healthy and if not doing well then at least determined to live and not choke on his own vomit in a dumpster somewhere in Brixton.
For a while, Sherlock had consumed his world, and then he had disappeared without a trace, without so much as even a thank you, and then, suddenly, there he was again, back in Greg’s life and pushing his aristocratic nose right back into Greg’s job and Greg wouldn’t have had it any other way.
If he lets himself, he could drown in the guilt; he should have intervened, he should have explained the infuriating man to the people would didn’t, couldn’t understand. He should have seen something like this coming - but then, he can’t give himself enough credit to think that he might have expected Sherlock to die in order to save his life.
(Of course, he also saved John’s life, and - in retrospect, with 20/20 hindsight - it would take an idiot not to see that the man would have done anything, anything at all for the sake of John Watson.) But if it had just been John’s life at stake, maybe he could have simply taken his husband (odd that, to think of the two of them as married, and yet again not at all) and run away and disappeared into the night. Maybe, if it had just been John’s life at stake, none of this would have had to happen.
It is pointless, of course, to have these thoughts. Greg has lost track of time. Maybe he even fell asleep, resting against his friend’s gravestone (for they had been friends, even if they hadn’t realised it at the time) in the warm sun.
None of these thoughts are helpful. None of them are fruitful. He still has a deskfull of paperwork and a friend who is spiralling faster than he ought into a pit of despair. (He’d had to call in Mycroft last night, and he makes a habit of only doing that in absolute emergencies.) Sherlock is still dead, and will remain so, and Greg will just have to get on with it, no matter how much he hates it.
Standing up and brushing off his slacks, Greg rests one hand on the top of the gravestone and murmurs, “Thanks, kid,” before trundling back to his car, feeling much the same as he had before.
He only goes to the grave once, and it is enough. He will make it good, he has already started to make it good, by singlehandedly thwarting each and every false report of Sherlock’s actions. He could not save his friend but he can salvage his reputation, so that is what Greg does.
It is what Greg will continue to do, even after the moment where Sherlock Holmes (like the bad fucking penny he is), walks into his office eighteen months after being declared dead and buried under six feet of the ground, wearing a wedding ring around his finger and toting an incredibly beautiful woman (a woman Greg has only heard rumours of) on his arm.
------------------------
The first thing Greg Lestrade says to Sherlock is, “Does John know?”
Sherlock’s face is sombre as he nods; Greg nods back, heaves a sigh, and then throws another spectacular punch that leaves him wringing his hand out in pain and gives Sherlock a great big lesion across his cheekbone.
“Always did say those cheekbones could cut something,” Irene quips, stalking across the room on her frankly ridiculous heels to perch daintily on a chair opposite Lestrade’s desk. “If the two of you have quite finished your posturing, we are on rather a tight timescale, Sherlock, if you remember?”
“Are we quite finished, or would you like to throw another punch at me, Detective Inspector?”
“No,” Greg huffs out, rubbing his knuckles gingerly. “No, I think that’ll do for now. Christ, Sherlock, you bastard.”
“Yes, that does seem to be my new moniker,” Sherlock grumbles as he takes his seat next to Irene. “John must have shouted it about fifty times.”
“You deserved it,” Irene reminds him. Sherlock sulks. Greg watches the two of them with interest, still rubbing his knuckles. (Sherlock had expected more of a reaction, but perhaps he had failed to take into account the fact that Greg Lestrade deals with the impossible and improbable on a fairly regular basis.)
“We don’t have very long,” Irene prompts once more. Sherlock snaps to attention and leans forward across the small disaster site that is Greg’s desk.
“I need your help,” he says, urgently, without preamble. Greg gives him a disbelieving look and opens his mouth to say something, but Sherlock cuts him off swiftly (no time for pointless protests right now). “John and the children are in danger, and I need you to help me keep them safe. I have done you countless favours over the years without asking for a single thing and I don’t have time for your arguments or your protests or your lectures right now, I just need your help. Will you help me?”
Greg, kicked back in his chair with his feet on his desk and one eyebrow raised, watches Sherlock’s agitation silently for a minute before rolling his eyes. “All you had to do was ask in the first place, you great berk. What’s happening?”
“I can’t explain the details, there isn’t time. Moriarty’s web is all but eliminated, but his right hand man is just as mad as Jim himself and still at large. We’ve got a trap in place, it should lure him in, but I want you to go to Eastwell next weekend and stay with John. Just in case. Will you?”
“I was going up to see them sometime soon anyway,” Lestrade muses. “Guess I can change it to next weekend.”
“You were going to see them? Why?” Sherlock’s tone is sharp, accusing. Irene is laughing at him behind her impassive mask. Infuriating woman.
“John made me godfather,” Lestrade says, puffing up slightly, as if he were a challenging cockerel. “I haven’t seen them since they were little, it's been a bit hectic around here, thought I’d go see them now they’re moving about and such.”
“Moving about?” Sherlock’s voice is strangled. “They’re not ... they’re not walking, yet, surely.” (God, it aches, it hurts, he should be there for this, he should know these things, John still hasn’t called and it hurts.)
“No, not yet, but nearly. They’re crawling around at least. He’s had to baby-proof everything.” Greg’s voice is gentle, as if he can read Sherlock’s pain on his face.
“Oh.”
Greg is silent again for a few beats before saying, “John kicked you out, eh?”
Sherlock nods, miserably. Suddenly, Irene’s hand is on his knee, squeezing. (A reminder. They are on a tight schedule.)
“Just for now,” Sherlock hears himself saying. He knows that no one really believes it. “I have to finish this, anyway. Will you go to him? I don’t think ... nothing should happen but I’ve been wrong before and ...”
The look of shock on Greg’s face as the words fall from Sherlock’s mouth is priceless (and annoying) but Sherlock ignores it. (He has been wrong before. He was wrong about Moriarty, to an extent. Wrong about himself. Wrong about John. He has frequently been wrong about Sebastian Moran, and it is that that makes him most nervous of all. Never having met the man means that Sherlock does not understand him, does not know how he ticks, and Sherlock, when presented with something he does not understand, can be quite terribly destructive.)
“I just want to make sure there’s an extra set of hands on deck, to make sure he’s safe... and to make sure the children are safe. You understand, right?”
To his credit, Lestrade does not take the bait. He walks right past the wide-open opportunity to tease Sherlock and poke fun at him and instead nods, swinging his legs back underneath him to sit upright in his chair and fix Sherlock with a warm but stern glance. “You know me, Sherlock. You know my priorities. I will keep John and your children safe, but you must promise not to do anything stupid. I can’t bear watching him mourn you again. Are we clear?”
Sherlock nods. Irene also nods, seemingly pleased with the proceedings, and dusts her hands as she stands up again. “We have to go, Sherlock.”
“Yes,” he says to her, and stands up to leave, but his eyes do not leave Lestrade’s face. “You’ll look after them? You looked after me.”
(They do not talk about that chapter of their acquaintance, not once have they ever talked about it since it finished, since Sherlock threw out the last of his needles and threw himself into his new job.)
“I did, once, didn’t I?”
“Not just once.”
“No. I suppose it wasn’t just once, was it?” Greg stands as well and offers Sherlock his hand. His eyes are warm and familiar and Sherlock is suddenly immensely glad that he did not let Jim Moriarty’s men put a bullet through this man’s over-sized heart. “I’m glad you’re alive, Sherlock.” Sherlock squeezes the proffered hand and nods at him again. “You have, despite yourself, two beautiful children,” Greg continues, not letting go of Sherlock’s hand. “And you are married, God only knows how, to one of the very best men in England.”
“I know.”
“Good. Try not to cock it up again, will you?”
“I won’t.”
“Sherlock,” Irene’s voice cuts into their moment like ice.
“Coming.” He squeezes Greg’s hand once more and crosses the room to the door; before leaving, he turns and says, “Don’t forget your gun, will you?”
“Sherlock.” Greg raises an eyebrow at him again, and Sherlock smiles wanly, nodding.
“Thank you. I’ll see you again soon.”
“Good luck,” Greg calls after them - but they are already gone.
Author: 1electricpirate
Rating: M
Pairing: Sherlock Holmes/John Watson (BBC)
Disclaimer: I do not pretend to own any of these characters (besides the two or three I have conjured from thin air). Credit for that brilliance falls to ACD and the Godtiss.
Previous Chapters: One | Two | Three | Four | Five | Six | Seven | Eight | Nine | Ten
Irene is shouting.
(Irene frequently shouts, but this instance of it is particularly screechy and ear-splittingly loud.)
Sherlock presses his hands harder against his ears in an attempt to block out the worst of the noise, but all that earns him is a cuff around the head by one perfectly manicured hand.
“You’re not listening to me!”
“On the contrary, I have little choice but to listen to you!” Sherlock retorts. The shouting stops, but only because Irene has resorted to staring down at him with her hands on her hips.
“Sherlock Holmes, for a genius, you are incredibly stupid.”
“Well, you’re being willfully obtuse.”
“Of the two of us, Sherlock, who is better suited to understanding relationships?”
Sherlock sulks and refuses to look at her as he grumbles, “You.”
“Correct. Now will you shut up and do as I say?”
“No, because, as I have already stated, what you are asking of me is impossible.”
They have been through this. It seems like they have been through this hundreds of times in the month and a half since Sherlock broke in to Eastwell. Sherlock hates repetition but he is literally trapped in this room with Irene for another ten hours before they can move to the next place and they have nothing better to do than discuss the ins and outs of his relationship troubles with John.
Or, that’s how this discussion had begun. (Using the downtime they had in the middle of searching out their prey to try and solve Sherlock’s other problems - namely the fact that his husband, on discovering the fact that he is not, in fact, dead, had kicked him out and told him he didn’t want to see him again.)
That (less than acceptable) state of affairs (the discussion of anything other than the case at hand) had quickly deteriorated into the present hell that was Irene, for all intents and purposes, ripping him a new one.
“John made it perfectly clear, Irene,” Sherlock begins for nearly the hundredth time. “He doesn’t want to see me again.”
“And I’m standing here telling you that that’s bullshit. That man has been utterly smitten with you since the day he clapped eyes on you.”
“Be that as it may, he is ... inexplicably angry at me, and John is completely unreasonable when he’s angry.”
“Inexplicably,” Irene echoes, as if she can’t believe her own ears. “He has every right to be angry with you, you prat.” She clips him another one around the head; Sherlock says “Ow!” and tries to swat her off but that just earns him another slap. “Shut up and listen to me, you colossal idiot. He’s angry because you, in your infinite wisdom, refuse to acknowledge that you made a mistake and put him through hell, and then you didn’t even apologise!”
Sherlock remains silent, scuffing at the floor with the toe of his shoe. Irene’s face lengthens into a twisted mask of horror, her blood red lips forming a perfect O.
“Oh, my god. You don’t even think you should apologise, do you?!”
“Well why should I apologise for keeping him alive?!”
“Because you put him through hell!”
“I was in hell myself! I don’t see how that warrants an apology. I’m sorry darling that I suffered for months and killed countless dangerous men to keep you alive. I’m not. I’m not sorry I did it, how can I be? He’s alive, he’s been alive for the past eighteen months, which is a damn sight longer than he would have been if I hadn’t done it.”
Irene nearly screams again with frustration. Sherlock cowers, just in case, but she doesn’t hit him this time.
“You prat. He thought you were dead!”
“Yes, he kept shouting that at me too. That was the whole point of the endeavour. He missed me and it was horrible; I missed him and it was horrible. Horrible, but necessary. I can’t apologise for something I had to do. It was awful being apart, but we both survived, I don’t understand why he’s still so angry! I'm not dead after all, shouldn't he be glad? How many people get to welcome their presumed-dead lovers back from the dead? Almost none.”
Abruptly, Irene sits on the edge of the bed opposite him (slumped across the couch) as if the wind has been knocked from her.
“My God. Maybe you are a sociopath, after all.” She covers her face with her hands, briefly, gathering herself before she looks back at him. “Sherlock, you might have missed him but you knew he was alive, that you’d see him again. I daresay he deserves an apology for the deception that made him believe that you were gone, permanently. It’s the worst feeling in the world, when the person you love dies. I'm sure he is overwhelmingly glad you're still alive Sherlock, but can't you see? He thought you were dead, and his world collapsed around his ears, and you let it happen."
“I... yes, I know it must have been awful but I’m back now, he knows, now, and I just... I can’t undo time, Irene. It is what it is, I did what I had to do. I had to keep him safe and it was worth everything I had to give. I won’t apologise for it.”
Irene is quiet for a long time before she looks at Sherlock and says, gravely, “You don’t deserve a man like John Watson.”
Sherlock agrees with her, has always agreed with her (he has never deserved anything half so good as what John possesses in his left pinky finger), but he will not acknowledge it (it feels too much like defeat). They had fallen together, him and John, but he is not too stupid to realise that nothing about that state of affairs is necessarily permanent. (The kindest thing he’s ever done to John is give him the power to leave if he felt it necessary. He’d said it, once, late at night, and John had told him to shut up and stop being so bloody maudlin all the time.) Sherlock is not too stupid to realise that he can never, will never, be what John Watson deserves but is all to keenly aware that he, for some reason, is what John Watson has chosen (had chosen, once upon a time), and he feels he owes it to himself, the bit of himself that he tries very hard to ignore, to put up a fight for him.
It is unfortunate for both of them, really, that the part of Sherlock that would do anything for John, anything at all, is currently marginally overshadowed by the part of him (very much used to running the Sherlock Holmes show) that places one hundred percent certainty in his own reasoning.
Logically, Sherlock knows what he should do. He should grovel, and beg, and plead with John to take him back. But John had been so adamant about not wanting to see him until he’d managed to think things through that Sherlock suspects begging would only exacerbate the situation. John was angry with him (is angry with him) and Sherlock, not understanding, was angry with John for being angry, which made John angrier. A vicious circle of anger and resentment. He did not want to make it worse by poking at it with a stick. (He clings, desperately, to the fact that John had said he didn’t want a divorce - though he’d not been entirely convincing. Still. It is a glimmer of hope in an otherwise bleak situation.)
Nevertheless, if Irene was right, if all John wants is an apology (a form of understanding that he’d made a mistake), Sherlock isn’t sure what he’ll do. John is the only person in the world who can see straight through him (and who isn’t also related to him). John will know if his apology is insincere, and he won’t appreciate it.
The crux of the matter is this: Sherlock does not regret what he did, all those months ago, or the choices he’d made. How can he, when they have (thus far) kept John (and his children) safe? He had decided, all those months ago, to keep John alive at all costs bar none, including their relationship.
(It had been horrible but Sherlock had done it, had walked away in order to keep John alive. He would do it again. It had worked.)
John had suffered, of course, but John has suffered many things, and though Sherlock wishes it had not been a necessary cost, there was little choice in the matter.
So when Irene is shouting at him that he should apologise and try to understand how much worse it is to believe someone dead than to be separated by thousands of miles, Sherlock finds himself resolute (though a part of him wishes he weren’t). Even though Irene continues to point out the fact that he had asked for her help for a reason, Sherlock will not (cannot) budge on this. He can do anything, anything else, but he will never be able to make John believe that he regrets his decision. (Because, quite frankly, he doesn’t.)
The argument is moot for now anyway. They can argue until blue in the face about what Sherlock should do to get John back but until they catch (and kill) Sebastian Moran, none of it matters. (There is always the small possibility that he won’t see John again. It is dangerous, what they are about to do, and Sherlock lets himself wish for just one second that his husband and his impeccable aim were coming with them.)
For a little while longer, it is a waiting game. A game of shadow-hopping, of whispers in the dark, of a strange and explosive (but calculated) mixture of chinese whispers and russian roulette. Then, they’ll set their trap in motion, and hopefully they’ll catch the spider before he catches them. It’s drawing close now. (Sherlock can feel the nerves characteristic of a new case settling heavy in his stomach.) Sighing, he pulls his knees up and hugs them to his chest, burying his face in them.
He has to do this, now, much as it pains him, and then, when its done, then he can worry about John.
(He always worries about John; it is as if a small section of his brain has broken off from the rest and simply sits in a corner, rocking back and forth, worrying about John. It’s infuriating. And now, of course, that little section has been joined by two more sections, which simply sit and worry about his children. Three whole sections of his precious processing space, taken over by worry.)
(There is nothing he can do about it, though. He has tried, he really has, to forget, but his armour was only ever fragile and John Watson has been hammering away at it for months, years - and now he has help. He cares, he cares deeply, and though it has made him sharper, keener, the sum of his senses plus this unfathomable need to succeed - where before he had only ever acted in curious disinterest as to the consequences of his behaviour - it has also made him infinitely more vulnerable.)
So while Sherlock works, he worries, and he works because he worries, and he and Irene will catch Moran, or die trying (and if that happens then at least he can take the bastard with him and know that his children, and John, will continue to live in peace because he died - for real, this time.)
Irene picks herself up off the bed and comes to sit next to him on the couch, one arm draping around his shoulders. Sherlock does not move to shrug her off. They sit there in silence for a long time until Irene says, quietly, “Just a few more weeks, Sherlock. Just a few more weeks, and then I promise, I’ll get you back to him.”
Sherlock glances at her witheringly and says nothing. Just a few weeks and an eternity of possibilities. Irene is making promises she can’t keep. He puts his head back in between his knees and waits.
Just nine more hours until they can move, swiftly and silently with the night, to the next hiding place. (They will stop off, briefly, to run some errands. John is in good hands but he could, in a few weeks, do with better, and so Sherlock has combed his his hair and unearthed a suit that nearly fits him properly, and Irene has found a dress and taught him how to do her hair, and so they will go calling in the night, like a pair of painted dolls, like a pair of ghosts, poor memories of themselves, calling in favours from the living.)
They sleep while they can and then, nine hours later, they slip out the window of the safe room, climb down the trellis to the ground below, and catch a cab at the corner of the road. The driver sees a newly-wed couple, drunk on love and cheap wine at six in the evening, on their way into central London for a night on the town. He drops them at the corner of Broadway and Victoria and smiles to himself as he drives off and does not notice them slipping into the shadows cast by New Scotland Yard. Irene puts her hand gently on Sherlock’s elbow and they stride in together, for all the world as if they belong there, as if they are not the dead come back to life, and no one stops them or even looks at them twice in all the time it takes them to get where they need to be.
There is one thing, just one thing, to be said about being a ghost (even if it is only in other people’s minds): it does rather make places easy to break in to.
(Lestrade does not shoot him in the face, once they have crossed the familiar floor to the familiar elevator and ridden it to the tenth floor and entered, quite without knocking, the all-too familiar office - but Sherlock can tell that he wants to.)
“Evening,” Sherlock says, as if it hasn’t been eighteen months since he last saw this man, tearing out his own greying hair as he watched his favourite consulting detective (his surrogate son, though neither of them have ever phrased it quite in that way) descending slowly into desperate madness. Sherlock guides Irene around the door frame, says “Evening” as if this is just any other night at the Yard, and Lestrade does not shoot him in the face (though he wants to, twitch of the right trigger finger instantaneous, irrepressible) but he does punch him, fast and sharp and bruisingly hard.
“I need your help,” Sherlock says, once he recovers from the blow and wipes the blood from his nose, as if he has not been dead for eighteen, nearly nineteen months. “Have you met Ms. Adler?”
--------------------------
Greg doesn’t go to the funeral. He’s utterly swamped with paperwork and facing a sacking on counts of negligence and abuse of confidential information. It is the negligence suit that irks him most of all.
Negligence was what it really boiled down to, wasn’t it? He’d ignored the undercurrents of dissent and distrust in his team, he’d written it off as harmless joshing - he had turned an entirely blind eye to the fact that no one except for him seemed to actually see the very (painfully so) quantifiable contributions that Sherlock Holmes made to their efforts.
He cannot even begin to list the number of cases which would have gone right over their heads (or not even be noticed at all) if it weren’t for Sherlock Holmes.
The man was a caution, and no mistake, but he was a genius. He worked more relentlessly and with more passion to find the answer than Greg’s entire team combined, and Greg had never had a single doubt that for all his posturing about being a heartless machine, a part of Sherlock genuinely wanted to see the criminals put to justice.
Greg had stood by and watched (even commiserated, to a point) as Sally and Anderson systematically tore Sherlock to pieces, he had watched as Sherlock stood there and took it and didn’t let it fluster him, and he had watched as Sally and Anderson got exactly what it was they deserved for it. He hadn’t realised there was actual malice there. The idea seemed alien to him.
Well now Sherlock is gone, and Greg finds himself crushed under the part of himself that misses the smug toff bastard desperately.
He can’t afford to play the ‘what if’ game. The ‘what if’ game is a slippery, slippery slope. What if he had stopped Sherlock lashing out just once or twice? What if he had cracked down on the needling and insults like he would have given any other employee? What if he’d told Sally to back the fuck off?
It’s too little too late now. What’s done is done. Sherlock somehow ensured the most dangerous criminal in Britain shot himself in the head and then jumped off a building to seal the deal, and if any singular person in London can still doubt his worth, Greg struggles to think of them as entirely human.
Greg once told John Watson, back in the very beginning, that Sherlock Holmes was a great man and that maybe one day, he’d be a good one - well the bastard had certainly lived up to his promise.
He just hadn’t deigned to live beyond it.
So, after the fall, after he ushers John Watson into his office for condolences (and revelations, earth-shattering revelations that make Greg feel, if possible, even more cold and empty and horrid), Greg is inundated with paperwork and doesn’t make it to the funeral.
He does go to the grave though. Just the once. He goes to the grave and he takes a bunch of flowers, though he can hear Sherlock scoffing at him in his head, and he sits next to the somber stone and rests his head back on it and says, “Bloody hell, kid, you always were a pain in my arse.”
It is a surprisingly sunny day and so Greg has no qualms about sitting by Sherlock Holmes’ gravestone and thinking himself into a stupor.
His headache, a residual effect of the night before (during which he was somehow trapped into watching the usually stoic John Watson drink himself into as stupor), pounds away at his temples so Greg closes his eyes, rests his head on Sherlock’s tombstone, and remembers.
He remembers the first time he met Sherlock, a gangly, tattered twenty-four year old skulking around a crime scene, out of his mind on what was surely some kind of horrible drug cocktail, nattering away at another officer about different kinds of tobacco ash and calling him an imbecile for not realising that the difference between them could prove the case for a murder rather than a suicide. Sherlock had turned glazed eyes on Greg when he’d tried to defuse the situation and calmly asked how his marital problems were going and was his wife still shagging her secretary?
He remembers thinking that no one with an accent so crisp, eyes so sharp and clothes once obviously so fine should be living rough on the streets and throwing as many drugs into their systems as they can get their hands on.
He remembers the tenth time he met Sherlock Holmes, skulking around yet another crime scene, and telling him to shove off home and get himself sober and then, maybe then, someone might actually listen to what he had to say.
He remembers waking in the night and slipping a gun into the back of his trousers before tripping down the stairs to see just who on earth it was banging on his door at 3:30 AM, just to find Sherlock on the verge of collapsing in a near overdose; he remembers watching the young man’s criminally wasted body shivering and shaking on his couch and spending half an hour trying to coax water down his throat and calming him with nonsense words until the worst had passed. Sherlock had looked at him then with wide, alien eyes and said the one word that Greg has never heard him say since: “Help.”
Greg sits at Sherlock’s grave and remembers calling Mycroft in the morning to come and pick his little brother up and take him somewhere where they might be able to help him. He remembers the look on Mycroft’s face, broken and terrified, as he bodily picked his baby brother up from the couch and held his trembling frame (for that was all he was back then, just a framework of skin stretched tight over too many bones) and bundled him into a car, bearing him away. Back then, Greg had thought he had washed his hands of Sherlock Holmes, but the bloke was like a bad fucking penny. You never could be rid of him.
Until now. Greg sighs and pats his hand on the ground over the area approximately where Sherlock’s head would be.
“You bastard,” he mutters. “I suppose I ought to be thanking you, for saving my life, but to be honest, I’m too fucking angry.”
Sitting at the grave with his hand over Sherlock’s head, Greg remembers: John’s limp the first time they met and how it had disappeared by the second time (accompanied, interestingly, by a newfound spring in Sherlock’s gait and a quickfire grin on his face); the fascinating way in which John could simply shoot a look across a room and suddenly Sherlock would find the line and toe it; the look on John’s face as he held up his left hand in front of Greg’s face and the way it felt to suddenly realise something he’d known all along; the emptiness in John’s eyes last night as he reached the bottom of his fifth pint and choked out the words, “I found a suicide note hidden in the skull.”
“How can you do this to him,” Greg asks the rotting corpse six feet below him, clenching his fists and resisting the urge to punch the ground. “How can you do this to me?”
Greg remembers the day he saw Sherlock Holmes again, after years of silence, after nearly having forgotten that he existed, and knowing without a doubt that he was clean and healthy and if not doing well then at least determined to live and not choke on his own vomit in a dumpster somewhere in Brixton.
For a while, Sherlock had consumed his world, and then he had disappeared without a trace, without so much as even a thank you, and then, suddenly, there he was again, back in Greg’s life and pushing his aristocratic nose right back into Greg’s job and Greg wouldn’t have had it any other way.
If he lets himself, he could drown in the guilt; he should have intervened, he should have explained the infuriating man to the people would didn’t, couldn’t understand. He should have seen something like this coming - but then, he can’t give himself enough credit to think that he might have expected Sherlock to die in order to save his life.
(Of course, he also saved John’s life, and - in retrospect, with 20/20 hindsight - it would take an idiot not to see that the man would have done anything, anything at all for the sake of John Watson.) But if it had just been John’s life at stake, maybe he could have simply taken his husband (odd that, to think of the two of them as married, and yet again not at all) and run away and disappeared into the night. Maybe, if it had just been John’s life at stake, none of this would have had to happen.
It is pointless, of course, to have these thoughts. Greg has lost track of time. Maybe he even fell asleep, resting against his friend’s gravestone (for they had been friends, even if they hadn’t realised it at the time) in the warm sun.
None of these thoughts are helpful. None of them are fruitful. He still has a deskfull of paperwork and a friend who is spiralling faster than he ought into a pit of despair. (He’d had to call in Mycroft last night, and he makes a habit of only doing that in absolute emergencies.) Sherlock is still dead, and will remain so, and Greg will just have to get on with it, no matter how much he hates it.
Standing up and brushing off his slacks, Greg rests one hand on the top of the gravestone and murmurs, “Thanks, kid,” before trundling back to his car, feeling much the same as he had before.
He only goes to the grave once, and it is enough. He will make it good, he has already started to make it good, by singlehandedly thwarting each and every false report of Sherlock’s actions. He could not save his friend but he can salvage his reputation, so that is what Greg does.
It is what Greg will continue to do, even after the moment where Sherlock Holmes (like the bad fucking penny he is), walks into his office eighteen months after being declared dead and buried under six feet of the ground, wearing a wedding ring around his finger and toting an incredibly beautiful woman (a woman Greg has only heard rumours of) on his arm.
------------------------
The first thing Greg Lestrade says to Sherlock is, “Does John know?”
Sherlock’s face is sombre as he nods; Greg nods back, heaves a sigh, and then throws another spectacular punch that leaves him wringing his hand out in pain and gives Sherlock a great big lesion across his cheekbone.
“Always did say those cheekbones could cut something,” Irene quips, stalking across the room on her frankly ridiculous heels to perch daintily on a chair opposite Lestrade’s desk. “If the two of you have quite finished your posturing, we are on rather a tight timescale, Sherlock, if you remember?”
“Are we quite finished, or would you like to throw another punch at me, Detective Inspector?”
“No,” Greg huffs out, rubbing his knuckles gingerly. “No, I think that’ll do for now. Christ, Sherlock, you bastard.”
“Yes, that does seem to be my new moniker,” Sherlock grumbles as he takes his seat next to Irene. “John must have shouted it about fifty times.”
“You deserved it,” Irene reminds him. Sherlock sulks. Greg watches the two of them with interest, still rubbing his knuckles. (Sherlock had expected more of a reaction, but perhaps he had failed to take into account the fact that Greg Lestrade deals with the impossible and improbable on a fairly regular basis.)
“We don’t have very long,” Irene prompts once more. Sherlock snaps to attention and leans forward across the small disaster site that is Greg’s desk.
“I need your help,” he says, urgently, without preamble. Greg gives him a disbelieving look and opens his mouth to say something, but Sherlock cuts him off swiftly (no time for pointless protests right now). “John and the children are in danger, and I need you to help me keep them safe. I have done you countless favours over the years without asking for a single thing and I don’t have time for your arguments or your protests or your lectures right now, I just need your help. Will you help me?”
Greg, kicked back in his chair with his feet on his desk and one eyebrow raised, watches Sherlock’s agitation silently for a minute before rolling his eyes. “All you had to do was ask in the first place, you great berk. What’s happening?”
“I can’t explain the details, there isn’t time. Moriarty’s web is all but eliminated, but his right hand man is just as mad as Jim himself and still at large. We’ve got a trap in place, it should lure him in, but I want you to go to Eastwell next weekend and stay with John. Just in case. Will you?”
“I was going up to see them sometime soon anyway,” Lestrade muses. “Guess I can change it to next weekend.”
“You were going to see them? Why?” Sherlock’s tone is sharp, accusing. Irene is laughing at him behind her impassive mask. Infuriating woman.
“John made me godfather,” Lestrade says, puffing up slightly, as if he were a challenging cockerel. “I haven’t seen them since they were little, it's been a bit hectic around here, thought I’d go see them now they’re moving about and such.”
“Moving about?” Sherlock’s voice is strangled. “They’re not ... they’re not walking, yet, surely.” (God, it aches, it hurts, he should be there for this, he should know these things, John still hasn’t called and it hurts.)
“No, not yet, but nearly. They’re crawling around at least. He’s had to baby-proof everything.” Greg’s voice is gentle, as if he can read Sherlock’s pain on his face.
“Oh.”
Greg is silent again for a few beats before saying, “John kicked you out, eh?”
Sherlock nods, miserably. Suddenly, Irene’s hand is on his knee, squeezing. (A reminder. They are on a tight schedule.)
“Just for now,” Sherlock hears himself saying. He knows that no one really believes it. “I have to finish this, anyway. Will you go to him? I don’t think ... nothing should happen but I’ve been wrong before and ...”
The look of shock on Greg’s face as the words fall from Sherlock’s mouth is priceless (and annoying) but Sherlock ignores it. (He has been wrong before. He was wrong about Moriarty, to an extent. Wrong about himself. Wrong about John. He has frequently been wrong about Sebastian Moran, and it is that that makes him most nervous of all. Never having met the man means that Sherlock does not understand him, does not know how he ticks, and Sherlock, when presented with something he does not understand, can be quite terribly destructive.)
“I just want to make sure there’s an extra set of hands on deck, to make sure he’s safe... and to make sure the children are safe. You understand, right?”
To his credit, Lestrade does not take the bait. He walks right past the wide-open opportunity to tease Sherlock and poke fun at him and instead nods, swinging his legs back underneath him to sit upright in his chair and fix Sherlock with a warm but stern glance. “You know me, Sherlock. You know my priorities. I will keep John and your children safe, but you must promise not to do anything stupid. I can’t bear watching him mourn you again. Are we clear?”
Sherlock nods. Irene also nods, seemingly pleased with the proceedings, and dusts her hands as she stands up again. “We have to go, Sherlock.”
“Yes,” he says to her, and stands up to leave, but his eyes do not leave Lestrade’s face. “You’ll look after them? You looked after me.”
(They do not talk about that chapter of their acquaintance, not once have they ever talked about it since it finished, since Sherlock threw out the last of his needles and threw himself into his new job.)
“I did, once, didn’t I?”
“Not just once.”
“No. I suppose it wasn’t just once, was it?” Greg stands as well and offers Sherlock his hand. His eyes are warm and familiar and Sherlock is suddenly immensely glad that he did not let Jim Moriarty’s men put a bullet through this man’s over-sized heart. “I’m glad you’re alive, Sherlock.” Sherlock squeezes the proffered hand and nods at him again. “You have, despite yourself, two beautiful children,” Greg continues, not letting go of Sherlock’s hand. “And you are married, God only knows how, to one of the very best men in England.”
“I know.”
“Good. Try not to cock it up again, will you?”
“I won’t.”
“Sherlock,” Irene’s voice cuts into their moment like ice.
“Coming.” He squeezes Greg’s hand once more and crosses the room to the door; before leaving, he turns and says, “Don’t forget your gun, will you?”
“Sherlock.” Greg raises an eyebrow at him again, and Sherlock smiles wanly, nodding.
“Thank you. I’ll see you again soon.”
“Good luck,” Greg calls after them - but they are already gone.