Fic: Multiply (the sum of our parts) - Chapter Two
Title: Multiply (the sum of our parts)
Author: 1electricpiratexkeijukainenx
Rating: M
Pairing: Sherlock Holmes/John Watson (BBC)
Summary: After Reichenbach and in order to 1) Keep Sherlock alive, 2) Keep John alive and 3) Get Sherlock home to England as soon as possible, Mycroft devises a plan that will not only incentivise John's continued sanity and survival but force Sherlock to come running. It is a perfect plan, though perhaps less than ethically sound. He has no doubts that using frozen samples of your younger brother's sperm to create children for his husband to care for falls deeply within the realm of socially unacceptable behaviour, but it is efficient, and that is what matters most.
Author's Notes: This is an AU and I have not even *tried* to be true to the original canon timelines. You have been warned. The story has been beta'd rather thoroughly and any mistakes that remain are mine and mine alone.
I am neither a scientist nor a mathematician, so if any of this is scientifically inaccurate... well, I apologize. I did try to research but you know what they say about Wikipedia. Also, I have never been to Kuala Lumpur. So. You know. Do with that what you will.
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
Chapter Two - The Commutative Property of Addition
It is Sherlock who takes the first step. Later, John will wish he had done it - wish he had been the brave one, like he was meant to be - but it is Sherlock who takes the long, striding step that takes him across the width of the flat and brings him into John’s space, into John’s arms, into the last piece of John’s life that he didn’t already possess.
The case hadn’t even been that interesting, but Sherlock had been magnificent; he had walked into the closed room murder scene (trailing coat tails and John behind him), cast his pale eyes around the room once, twice, three times and then turned, without a word, and strode out of the room again. Thirty minutes later he and John were literally leaping across rooftops after the murderer. Sherlock had nearly fallen and John had tackled the suspect to the ground and held him there until Lestrade’s team turned up - late, as usual.
John fidgeted under Sherlock’s gaze on the way to give their statements and had twice asked him what was wrong (receiving no answer, not even an acknowledgement of the question) and Sherlock seemed loathe to let him out of his sight until they were home again (had badgered Lestrade about the relative necessity of statements in the grand scheme of things until Greg had given up and sent them home). John had vaulted up the stairs, eager to order some food and Sherlock had followed behind him, slowly, as if his mind were working too hard and too fast to solve some insolvable problem to make his legs move any faster.
“John,” he’d said, when he finally reached the flat, and something in his voice had made John freeze, drop the telephone, and turn to stare at his flatmate, his best friend, the man who had saved his life by exploding into it like a firework across the night sky.
At that moment, John had known exactly what was going to happen; he had known exactly where they stood, but he was frozen, unable to take the first step.
So Sherlock takes the first step and John lets him, and perhaps that introduces some kind of horrible precedent into their lives, but it would be foolish to think that it didn’t exist before. (Sherlock leads and John lets him. It is always that way, it has been that way since Day One.)
They kiss and for John it is less like kissing and more like learning to breathe again. He has known this mad, crazy bastard for all of six months and they have been the best, the most terrifying, the most real six months of his life. Sherlock’s lips are hot and needy against his and John realises with the serenity that comes before an explosion that Sherlock needs him just as much as he needs Sherlock; that they are two mad bastards locked in this thing that they were not looking for but somehow found (Mike Stamford will wake on Christmas morning to find his doorstop covered in gifts, John resolves) and Sherlock has an addictive personality and John is an immovable force (stuck, like a limpet, to the side of a boat as it careens over a waterfall) and even though this is their first kiss, John knows with the calm, clear determination of a soldier that this man is his life now.
They part for breath, and a pale fire is flickering in Sherlock’s eyes as he wipes the back of his hand over his mouth, never taking his eyes from John’s face, and John grins and reaches to pull him back in by the collar of his aubergine shirt.
Sherlock is a bomb in his hands, ticking and ticking and just waiting to explode, and John has always thought that bombs were fantastically, tragically beautiful. The purple shirt slides to the floor and there is no time for questions (What would they be, anyway?) before John is sliding to his knees, tearing Sherlock’s trousers open and pressing his open, gasping mouth to hot, hard flesh. It does not matter, in this moment, that John has never done this before; all that matters are Sherlock’s hands in his hair and the desperate sounds that he’s making and the way he tastes on John’s tongue.
John has been a goner ever since he first saw the way the blueish lights of the laboratory turned Sherlock’s skin alien-translucent. There was never a time for internal questioning and indignant protests like, “But I’m straight!” There are simply two times in John’s life: Before Sherlock and After Sherlock. He does not question himself because he knows he is not the same John Watson as he was before; ever since Day One he has been John Watson (After Sherlock), and John Watson (Before Sherlock) has long since been forgotten.
Sherlock’s fingers tighten in John’s hair and he groans, and John’s name falls from his tongue like a benediction as John swallows him down, taking everything he can get of this glorious, infuriating, wonderful man who has ruined him for anything else in life but himself.
John Watson (After Sherlock) stands up and wipes the corners of his mouth with the back of his hand and grins up at Sherlock Holmes (After John) who is looking down at him as if he holds the answers to the secrets of the universe.
“Hi,” John says, stupidly.
It is a testament to how far they are both gone that Sherlock does not scoff but instead smiles a shy, shaking smile, brushes John’s cheek with the back of two knuckles on his left hand and says, in that deep voice of his that suddenly goes straight to John’s crotch, “Hi.”
They kiss again, slower this time; John tastes of Sherlock and Sherlock doesn’t mind, and John gets his sticky hands in Sherlock’s hair and Sherlock laughs against John’s throat and they stumble towards the bedroom that instantly ceases to be Sherlock’s and becomes, instead, Theirs (as if one of them had been carrying the other over the threshold; the symbolism of their linked hands and the white smear across John’s cheek and Sherlock’s favourite shirt crumpled in a pile on the floor of the living room is the same).
Sherlock’s sheets are deep wine purple and his skin, when John peels back his his trousers and rips off his pants, is like miles and miles of porcelain, and John wants to (decides instantly that he will) possess it all, every single inch of it.
They fit together awkwardly (nothing about this practice is graceful, it is sticky and sweaty and the most undignified thing mankind has ever thought up) but Sherlock lets John lay down back and cover him in kisses until the nervous tension (Sherlock Holmes, nervous, is a sight to behold) melts away. He whispers his uncertainty and inexperience against the hard lines of John’s chest and John kisses him instead of discussing it, because they are both new at this, and it is the farthest thing from being important right now.
Sherlock has, in fact, done this before (to varying degrees of success) and John was in the army, he has seen and heard enough to understand the basics, and of course everyone knows how sex works: Tab A into Slot B, apply friction, enjoy; but somehow its a lot more complicated when you can’t seem to pry your hands off one another’s skin for long enough to think it through.
There is bumping and laughing and more than a bit of discomfort and yes, it is awkward, and messy, and embarrassing, but then suddenly it is fantastic, it is breathtaking, and John slides home into Sherlock’s body (and it really does feel like home, the way he fits around him) with a groan that masks Sherlock’s whimper (of pain, yes, but also satisfaction) and John thinks that if he could make it so that he could stay here, just like this, forever, he would.
But then Sherlock’s hips twitch beneath him and oh god, John is lost. Sherlock has consumed him whole and John is completely okay with that.
Sherlock’s hand clutches at John’s shoulder (the bad one, the one that nearly killed him and brought him here where he is now, balls-deep inside the most fantastically beautiful, broken man on the planet) and his nails scrape down John’s chest and his hips cant against John’s, begging silently for more, faster, deeper, take me, John, I am yours, and suddenly John cannot hold it back any more and he comes with Sherlock’s name on his lips and Sherlock’s hair in his mouth and Sherlock’s fingers twisted painfully against the scar in his shoulder.
John huffs out a breath across the expanse of white skin that stretches across eternity (or the eternity contained by Sherlock’s chest, a life time at least of skin to explore and discover and possess and own; a universe of pale, flawless skin for John to write his name on, over and over again in kisses and caresses and gentle words).
Sherlock’s fingers find their way back to John’s hair and they fall asleep like that, a tangle of limbs on dark wine sheets, and when they wake up in the morning nothing is different and yet everything has changed, shifted slightly, and John feels the universe has righted itself when Sherlock brushes his fingers absently across the back of his neck.
They never talk about it, there is never any discussion about what they are and why they are and who they are to each other. There is simply Before (John and Sherlock) and After (John&Sherlock), and they both know it, and so what is left to discuss.
It was Sherlock who took the first step but John let him do it; it takes two to make a two lives together as one. That has always been understood between them, wordlessly, like so many other things. John needs Sherlock to breathe; Sherlock needs John to think.
So Sherlock Holmes took the first step and kissed John Watson, but John Watson let him do it, and that is how John and Sherlock become John&Sherlock; how John (Before) is slain by a kiss and becomes John (After); and John (After) cannot go back to John (Before), even though John (After) is now John (After After).
--------
The first time Sherlock stops for breath, he finds himself in Kuala Lumpur, neck deep in an illicit trading circle run by one of Moriarty’s littlest spiders.
He does not know how far down the chain the knowledge of him and his weaknesses (three of them, spread across London, and in the hands of one of them, his soul) goes, so he will not take any chances.
Moriarty was a giant spider at the centre of an enormous web, spreading out across London, beyond the encasing ring of the M25 in which Sherlock has always felt safe and at home and distinctly within is depth, out out out, and as far as Sherlock can see, as far as he can even imagine, little insects are dancing on the threads that Moriarty spun from his tiny, forgotten council flat in Brixton.
Sherlock does not know how many people have been shown his face (shown John’s face) and instructed to kill, upon sight. He does not know and that knowledge was blown from the world by the bullet exploding through Moriarty’s brain on the top of St. Bart’s.
He had not expected this. He had underestimated his opponent and now he was paying for it.
Stupid, stupid, stupid.
It is hot and oppressive in Kuala Lumpur. If he closes his eyes and stands very still, Sherlock can imagine himself back in time; if he ignores the heat, and the smells, and the language, and the angle of the sun against glass buildings, he can almost imagine himself standing in the middle of Piccadilly Circus with the sounds of London crashing around him in great tidal waves of familiar sensation (home).
Almost, almost, it is almost the same.
Sherlock does not think about John. When he is darting across rooftops and in and out of shadows, tracking and hunting and sniffing out crime, the name he thinks of is not John’s. (It all comes down to that one name, the name that everyone knows but nobody speaks, and no one seems to know he’s dead which makes him all the more dangerous - the memory of a man that is no longer a name but a memory, an idea, potent and enabling; someone is pretending to be him and they are good at it.)
Moriarty wanted to kill John and take Sherlock with him; above all, Moriarty wanted to take Sherlock with him and Sherlock does not know that he has not succeeded in bringing Sherlock with him into madness, if not death (not yet, at least).
Sherlock is no longer the sum of his senses plus John, as he was so used to being.
He is a shadow in the night, thin and wary.
He is ruthless, and heartless, and it would break John to see the way his fingers (John loved his fingers, daft, daft things to love but he did) curl around a man’s neck, just as easily as they used curl around delicate china cups, to snap and break or slide deadly sharp knives across.
The people he kills are not good people. Sherlock does not think twice about their lives; they are forfeit from the moment they hear the name that no one speaks and everyone knows. Moriarty wanted John Watson dead and Sherlock will not rest until everyone that knows that is just as dead as their master and John is safe once more.
(John Watson has rarely been safe, but there is a difference between people shooting at you because of the uniform you wear or the fact that you have discovered their guilt in some heinous crime or other, and being shot at because you fell in love with the man upon whom the world’s most dangerous man has fixated. Sherlock does not mind (much) John being in danger because he put himself there - he knows John well enough to know that without the danger John cannot breathe - but he cannot bear the thought of John being targeted because he is a piece of Sherlock’s heart (and all of Sherlock’s soul) and some twisted Irish bastard was clever enough to figure it out).
Sherlock comes up for air in Kuala Lumpur for reasons that are not entirely clear, even to him. He has been running (falling) for six months and maybe it is exhaustion that forces him to take a break, maybe it is the fact that he is suddenly aware of himself again because Kuala Lumpur could, at the farthest stretch of the imagination, be London.
He finds a hotel (dingy, but adequate, with a decent internet connection that he is able to hack almost without even trying) and calls Mycroft, because Mycroft has been waiting for his call ever since he figured it out. (Three weeks after the fall; Sherlock preens, he has never deceived his big brother for half that long. Mycroft has been interfering again, but for a while Sherlock has not been himself enough to care.)
“Sherlock.” It is not a question; with Mycroft it never is. “Malaysia?”
“Heroin,” Sherlock replies. Has it really been six months since he felt the familiar sting of annoyance at the sound of his big brother’s voice? It feels like just yesterday he was sitting with him on an airplane full of corpses, discussing Moriarty as if he were a particularly vexing weather pattern. “Massive stockpiles of the stuff.”
“Moriarty?”
“He’s dead.” You know that, Mycroft. “He shot himself on the roof of St. Barts.”
“You’re dead, as well, brother dearest,” Mycroft intones, the infuriating tones of one indulging a child, “and yet, here we sit, chatting on the phone. Just like old times. How’s the weather in Malaysia?”
“Hot. Moriarty put a bullet through his own brain. He’s dead.”
“Yes, Sherlock, I do know.”
“The name isn’t dead.”
“No,” Mycroft concedes. “Perplexing isn’t it? The flat in Brixton has been emptied but...”
“Look in Belfast,” Sherlock interrupts.
“Belfast is clean.”
“Look again.”
“Sherlock.”
They are silent. They have reached an impasse. Mycroft wants him home but Sherlock wants John safe and after the stunt Mycroft pulled seven months ago, Sherlock would rather trust his life to Irene and John’s life to Mummy than even spend five more minutes talking to Mycroft.
Unfortunately, the bastard has his uses, and Sherlock (so very far outside of the warm, polluted embrace of the M25) has realised that he is out of his depth.
“Come home,” Mycroft says, finally. It is a concession; a small victory for Sherlock, not to have broken first.
“I can’t.”
“You’re not helping him.”
“He would have died.”
“He nearly died anyways, and that wasn’t anything to do with Moriarty - it was to do with you.”
Sherlock’s breath hitches in his chest.
“What?”
Mycroft sighs; Sherlock can tell he is frowning, most likely squeezing the bridge of his nose between two tired fingers.
“Mycroft. John. Tell me.”
Sherlock does not think about John while he is hunting because he does not need to think about him for him to always be on his mind. Sherlock wonders sometimes, idly, when he is about to drift off into sleep (whenever he can get any) whether if you opened up his chest you would see the words John Hamish Watson scrawled across every single alveolus of his lungs. Sherlock does not think about John because he breathes him in with every breath and thinking about John makes it impossible to breathe.
He knew it would be hard, to remove himself from John, but he never imagined that he might find himself in a situation in which John removed himself from Sherlock. (Not just from Sherlock, from life.)
“Come home and see for yourself.”
“I can’t.”
“Sherlock.” The tone of Mycroft’s voice is stern, unforgiving. This is your fault, it says, you did this to yourself. Sherlock knows, with a sinking heart, that Mycroft is unbearably right (the fat, smug bastard).
He is thinking about John, now, and the possibility that John might not be anymore, and it hurts more than anything.
“Please, Mycroft.”
“He’s alive, Sherlock, which is more than he might have been if I hadn’t stepped in when I did.”
“Oh, thank you,” Sherlock gasps. He’s never meant anything quite so much, especially nothing he’s ever said to Mycroft.
“Come home,” Mycroft says again. “Or at least tell him you’re alive. Can’t you tell him?”
“He’s the worst liar in the world, Mycroft, I’d be found out in minutes.”
The silence on Mycroft’s side of the call means he agrees.
Outside the window of Sherlock’s hotel room, the sounds and smells of Kuala Lumpur rise up in a heady, chaotic tumble. Sherlock loves London because the ordered chaos of its streets provide perfect the mapping zone for the less-than-ordered chaos of his mind; but the barrage of sound and taste and smell here is not comforting, it is an assault on his senses.
He sits on the phone line with his brother in silence for two minutes while Mycroft catalogues every breath he takes, while Sherlock struggles to rise above the onslaught of information and emotions.
“Will you help me?” he asks, finally. His pride is stuck somewhere in his throat, making itself painfully known. Sherlock swallows it down (for John; only for John would he ever do this).
The sound that Mycroft makes is not a whimper but it is as near to one as he has ever heard his brother make since he dropped the foot of a bookcase on his toe at the age of seventeen.
“Oh, Sherlock, of course.”
Sherlock clears his throat. There is a rustling sound that means Mycroft is tugging at his collar. (The cough means, Thank you; the rustle means, You’re my little brother and I will do anything for you..)
“I want ... Can you ... I need to be able to... to see him. Once in a while.”
“I’ll have Bethany send you the CCTV access codes,” Mycroft offers. “And a team will be in touch with you shortly to work out some sort of plan for extrication.”
“No,” Sherlock sighs. He needs Mycroft’s help but it has to be in secret and it has to be contained far, far away from himself. “Too much room for error. Belfast. Please, Mycroft. The name isn’t dead.”
“It’s just a name, Sherlock.”
“No ... Its so much more than that. It’s the memory of a name. Don’t you see?”
Mycroft, as usual, does not understand. In some ways, Mycroft is worse about understanding human psychology than Sherlock has ever been (though he is infinitely more interested in it). Sherlock doesn’t really need him to understand, in the end; someone is using the name as a smokescreen and they are doing it nearly as well as the man himself used to. That is what it boils down to.
Mycroft wants him to come home but he can’t, he won’t, until this is over.
Until John is safe again. He has failed to protect the people he loves before and he will not, he cannot, let that happen to John.
“Don’t send your people after me, Mycroft. And... And take care of him, will you?”
“Of course I will. He’s family now, right?”
“Right.” Sherlock smiles, despite himself. John Hamish Watson-Holmes. Sherlock had suggested that once, as a joke, and John had thrown a book at his head and told him to, “Fuck off, you daft bastard, as if I’d ever become a Holmes.”
“Be careful, Sherlock.”
“I always am.”
“Not always.”
“I am now. Goodbye, Mycroft. Remember - start in Belfast.”
The line clicks dead. Two minutes later, Sherlock’s mobile beeps with lines of computer access codes; a secure way into the CCTV protocol that Mycroft has drawn up (Operation Bulldog, he likes to call it) that ensures that nearly all of John’s predicted movements will be tracked and recorded and reviewed on an hourly basis.
It is the protocol he used to use for Sherlock, when Sherlock was safely ensconced within his jurisdiction. (Sherlock spares another moment to long for the protective circle of the M25.)
Perhaps John really is a Holmes brother now after all.
Sherlock spends 24 hours above the surface in Kuala Lumpur before he slips back into the shadows. He bathes and shaves and buys himself some new clothes that fit both his frame and the oppressive weather. Mummy sends him the next clue that she unearthed (he will never ask her how she is finding these things; he is sure he doesn’t want to know) and the hotel attendant knocks on his door with an envelope that includes a single one-way ticket to Bangkok.
He gets off the plane in Bangkok and is immediately subsumed by the heat, the noise, and the endless sea of faces. He ceases to be Sherlock Holmes and instead becomes a shadow and he kills three men before he leaves for Indonesia the next day.
He does not think about John because John is hurting but alive and for now, that is enough to be getting on with.
------------
Mycroft looks concerned.
(Later, much later, years later, John will learn that he has just been on the phone with his dead brother in Kuala Lumpur, having tried and failed - as anticipated, of course - to bring him home. For now, John is oblivious, though he is intrigued by the unfamiliar lines on Mycroft’s face.)
They meet often now; once a week, for coffee. Mycroft never announces himself, he merely begins showing up wherever John is at three o’clock on a Thursday afternoon. John decides to make it easier on both of them and picks a cafe near Hyde Park to frequent on Thursdays.
He does not begin to think for one second that he and Mycroft are friends (that may or may not be tantamount to blasphemy or treason in the eyes of the law, the idea of Mycroft having friends), but he has slowly begun to hate his brother-in-law less.
If anything, Mycroft seems genuinely concerned for his wellbeing, and while it is suffocating, it is also somewhat touching.
Of course, most people are concerned for John’s wellbeing, lately. (Greg still can’t look at him without grimacing. Molly cries every time they bump into each other. Sally even looks like she wants to ask him something like, “How are you holding up?” but Greg must have warned his team off because she never does.)
For all intents and purposes, John is actually doing fine. It is still unbearable - six months is not enough to change that, not by a long shot - but John is a solider and he is very, very good at squaring his shoulders, looking his problems in the face, and getting on with it.
He has six months to sort his life out and he finds that the deadline, while slightly terrifying (he often lays awake at night wondering what he’s doing, why he thought this was EVER a good idea), is mostly a comforting thing to have looming on the horizon.
It is a definite and unavoidable fact, the result of an active decision that John made himself (under duress, of course, but he’s past that now), that in five months he will be solely responsible for the welfare of a tiny, helpless human being.
Three and a half weeks after his kidnapping, Mycroft called him and told him that stage one of their project had been successful. (Translation: somewhere, in the top fertility labs in England, some doctor had mixed his dead husband’s sperm with his sister’s eggs and successfully implanted an embryo in a surrogate uterus. John, as a doctor, knew that by then the embryo (more accurately, blastocyst, a tiny group of cells containing a tiny spark of life) was embedded in this stranger’s uterine lining, where it will continue to divide and grow for 36 more weeks.)
The phone call had not been life changing (the life changing had happened at Eastwell Manor, at the breakfast table, when John’s shoulders had slumped and he had given in and said, “Okay”) but John felt like it had been. The horrible greyness that was threatening to devour him whole had receded and, for the first time since he’d watched Sherlock fall from the top of St. Bart’s, John felt like he could see his own hand in front of his face again.
The sudden reality (before, quite a nebulous and uncertain possibility, and IVF could take dozens of tries to succeed, couldn’t it?) of a child, his child, seems to have restored a sense of purpose to John’s day to day existence.
He has six months left to get a grip on himself and get his life in the sort of shape into which it is acceptable to bring a child.
For John, it is the restored sense of purpose that is the saving of him.
Mycroft meets him every Thursday at three o’clock to check for himself that John is alive and (John assumes) to be able to assess his moods more accurately than he might be able to through the blurry footage of a CCTV camera. So far, he has not kidnapped John and forced him to return to Eastwell, so John assumes he has been meeting expectations.
This week, though, Mycroft seems agitated. John assumes he won’t explain why so he doesn’t ask. They drink their coffees in relative quiet. They never do talk much, during their meetings, but John finds he doesn’t mind. (He will take everything he can get of Sherlock, even if it is his infuriatingly stuffy older brother. Mycroft is only three years older than John himself but those three years quite often feel like fifteen. John does not like people who condescend to him and Mycroft does little else.) Despite themselves, though, they have struck up some sort of amicable accord.
Finally, just as John is downing the dregs of his coffee, Mycroft gets to the point that John assumes has been bugging him since he sat down.
“I think you ought to move back into 221b,” he says, over the top of his frappe.
John shifts uncomfortably. “Mycroft...”
“Mrs. Hudson can’t keep it empty forever, you know.”
“I can’t... I don’t...” John sighs, frowning at the bottom of his mug. He wishes he had some tea.
“You think of the flat as yours and Sherlock’s, don’t you? Where else better to raise his child than the place he loved most?”
There are coffee grounds at the bottom of the mug. John swirls them around in the last of the liquid (cold, bitter). They coalesce in odd shapes - if they were tea leaves, maybe they could tell John something about his future. A boomerang, a star, the shaky outline of a gun. Coffee grounds are not normally known for their prophetic qualities, though, and for the sake of his (and Sherlock’s) unborn child, John certainly hopes the gun is just a coincidence.
“John?”
John’s head snaps up and he finds Mycroft staring at him. Those creases are still on his forehead. John wonders, idly, if he could iron them out.
The sizzle of a hot iron on skin might actually be satisfying. Maybe then Mycroft would understand what it’s like to have that unnatural stare of his fixed on one’s skin for so long.
“I can’t breathe in that flat,” John says, finally, and the words have not even left his mouth before he regrets saying them.
“That is understandable,” Mycroft deigns to acquiesce, nodding his head slightly. “But I should think that perhaps the thought of a stranger occupying such sacred space would be even harder to bear?”
John had not thought of it that way; the thought of some stranger stretched out on their couch, looking at their wall (without the spray paint and the bullet holes), cooking in their kitchen, fucking in their bedroom -
John shakes his head briefly. He can’t go back. It’s too painful. He sees Sherlock everywhere as it is. How can he keep his head enough to raise a child in the same space that had once held Sherlock?
(But then again, where else better to raise Sherlock’s child?)
“And of course, there’s Mrs. Hudson to consider,” Mycroft continues, pretending that he is oblivious to John’s internal crisis. (The bastard is never oblivious. It is infuriating. The past six months have caused John to wonder, with increasing awe, just how Sherlock kept himself from shooting his brother every chance he got.)
“She’s quite distraught, of course, and getting on in life. I’m sure she’d love to have you back as a tenant. And think about what might happen to her, if some one less ... desirable ... takes your place in the building.”
Mycroft has him and he knows it. John squirms again, uncomfortably. The coffee grounds swirl around and leave behind a moon, an arrow, the single petal of a rose.
John knew that Mycroft did not approve of his living situation. At first after - after the fall, as John has taken to calling it in his head, he went to stay with Harry. His sister had leapt at the chance to be the put together one, for once, and John had spent the worst two months of his life sleeping on her couch.
She threw him out after the incident with the drinking, the gutter, and Mycroft’s well-timed kidnapping. Too risky to have him around. Too much temptation. She was sober, for once in her life, and she wasn’t about to have her drunken little brother around to tempt her.
John hadn’t actually been drunk since then. He’d been far too busy panicking to be drunk.
He has told exactly three people what he and Mycroft had done: Harry (of course; a baby takes two parts and she was providing the one that John couldn’t), Greg, and Sarah.
Greg had looked at him with wide eyes and though he’d congratulated him, John could tell he clearly thought he’d gone insane. (He’d agreed to be Godfather, though, which John supposed was something.) Sarah had also been none-too-pleased at the idea, but had agreed to keep him on for the nine months before John expected he’d become too busy to work.
Sherlock’s trust fund had passed on to him and he didn’t think he’d ever have to worry about money again (when Mycroft had handed him those particular papers, John had nearly fainted at the sight of the numbers on the page), but work had the added bonus of keeping John both busy and sane.
So John is working full-time at the surgery and living in a small apartment just down the road that can only be described as beige. Mycroft finds it distasteful; as if the very idea of one of the Holmes clan living in such bland accommodation is offensive.
(It is no small secret that despite himself, Mycroft found the chaos of 221b charmingly bohemian. Why else would he have allowed Sherlock to persist in living there?)
John loves their old flat. He suspects that Mycroft has his own reasons for wanting him to move back there (no doubt the whole flat is bugged, much too cleverly even for Sherlock to find), but the only reason John hasn’t already moved back in is because he doesn’t know how he can face the ghosts that will no doubt haunt him once he’s there.
He gives the coffee cup one last swirl. A bear, a snowflake, a heart. He looks up at Mycroft and nods.
“I’ll hand in my notice to the landlord tomorrow,” he says.
Mycroft looks pleased and downs the rest of his drink. (Too creamy and sugary by half. John ought to make some kind of barb but he cannot help of hearing it in Sherlock’s voice - Fat, you’re getting fat again Mycroft, what happened to the diet Mycroft? - and he never can bring himself to that kind of familiarity with Mycroft, anyways. It feels like taunting the queen to her face. Blasphemy. Treason. John has sat in Buckingham Palace with his husband naked beside him in nothing but a sheet and stolen the queen’s ashtrays but he is far too British, far too military, to think of being disrespectful to his monarch to her face. So he never teases Mycroft because it is, in his head, equivalent.)
“Excellent. Mrs. Hudson will be expecting you. I daresay you ought to warn her about the impending changes in your lifestyle, though. She’ll want to make some arrangements of her own, I wager.”
Mycroft’s smile is like the cat that got the cream and then, in a whirl of criminally long legs and perfectly pressed suit pants and with the toss of an umbrella from one hand to the other, he is gone just as quickly as he appeared, leaving John to stare at his tea leaves once more (Coffee grounds, but are they so very different?).
He sees a heart, a star, a crescent moon.
He wonders what that means, if anything, and then (exasperated with himself) pushes the mug away and stands to leave. Lestrade has invited him to come take a look at a crime scene (as if that will make the ache in his chest any better) and he has nothing better to do with himself.
He has a deadline now, five more months of monotony, and he finds himself wishing (I wish, I wish, I wish, yes, he wishes for that too, but at least these other ones might come true) that five months wasn’t quite such a long time.
Author: 1electricpiratexkeijukainenx
Rating: M
Pairing: Sherlock Holmes/John Watson (BBC)
Summary: After Reichenbach and in order to 1) Keep Sherlock alive, 2) Keep John alive and 3) Get Sherlock home to England as soon as possible, Mycroft devises a plan that will not only incentivise John's continued sanity and survival but force Sherlock to come running. It is a perfect plan, though perhaps less than ethically sound. He has no doubts that using frozen samples of your younger brother's sperm to create children for his husband to care for falls deeply within the realm of socially unacceptable behaviour, but it is efficient, and that is what matters most.
Author's Notes: This is an AU and I have not even *tried* to be true to the original canon timelines. You have been warned. The story has been beta'd rather thoroughly and any mistakes that remain are mine and mine alone.
I am neither a scientist nor a mathematician, so if any of this is scientifically inaccurate... well, I apologize. I did try to research but you know what they say about Wikipedia. Also, I have never been to Kuala Lumpur. So. You know. Do with that what you will.
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
Chapter Two - The Commutative Property of Addition
It is Sherlock who takes the first step. Later, John will wish he had done it - wish he had been the brave one, like he was meant to be - but it is Sherlock who takes the long, striding step that takes him across the width of the flat and brings him into John’s space, into John’s arms, into the last piece of John’s life that he didn’t already possess.
The case hadn’t even been that interesting, but Sherlock had been magnificent; he had walked into the closed room murder scene (trailing coat tails and John behind him), cast his pale eyes around the room once, twice, three times and then turned, without a word, and strode out of the room again. Thirty minutes later he and John were literally leaping across rooftops after the murderer. Sherlock had nearly fallen and John had tackled the suspect to the ground and held him there until Lestrade’s team turned up - late, as usual.
John fidgeted under Sherlock’s gaze on the way to give their statements and had twice asked him what was wrong (receiving no answer, not even an acknowledgement of the question) and Sherlock seemed loathe to let him out of his sight until they were home again (had badgered Lestrade about the relative necessity of statements in the grand scheme of things until Greg had given up and sent them home). John had vaulted up the stairs, eager to order some food and Sherlock had followed behind him, slowly, as if his mind were working too hard and too fast to solve some insolvable problem to make his legs move any faster.
“John,” he’d said, when he finally reached the flat, and something in his voice had made John freeze, drop the telephone, and turn to stare at his flatmate, his best friend, the man who had saved his life by exploding into it like a firework across the night sky.
At that moment, John had known exactly what was going to happen; he had known exactly where they stood, but he was frozen, unable to take the first step.
So Sherlock takes the first step and John lets him, and perhaps that introduces some kind of horrible precedent into their lives, but it would be foolish to think that it didn’t exist before. (Sherlock leads and John lets him. It is always that way, it has been that way since Day One.)
They kiss and for John it is less like kissing and more like learning to breathe again. He has known this mad, crazy bastard for all of six months and they have been the best, the most terrifying, the most real six months of his life. Sherlock’s lips are hot and needy against his and John realises with the serenity that comes before an explosion that Sherlock needs him just as much as he needs Sherlock; that they are two mad bastards locked in this thing that they were not looking for but somehow found (Mike Stamford will wake on Christmas morning to find his doorstop covered in gifts, John resolves) and Sherlock has an addictive personality and John is an immovable force (stuck, like a limpet, to the side of a boat as it careens over a waterfall) and even though this is their first kiss, John knows with the calm, clear determination of a soldier that this man is his life now.
They part for breath, and a pale fire is flickering in Sherlock’s eyes as he wipes the back of his hand over his mouth, never taking his eyes from John’s face, and John grins and reaches to pull him back in by the collar of his aubergine shirt.
Sherlock is a bomb in his hands, ticking and ticking and just waiting to explode, and John has always thought that bombs were fantastically, tragically beautiful. The purple shirt slides to the floor and there is no time for questions (What would they be, anyway?) before John is sliding to his knees, tearing Sherlock’s trousers open and pressing his open, gasping mouth to hot, hard flesh. It does not matter, in this moment, that John has never done this before; all that matters are Sherlock’s hands in his hair and the desperate sounds that he’s making and the way he tastes on John’s tongue.
John has been a goner ever since he first saw the way the blueish lights of the laboratory turned Sherlock’s skin alien-translucent. There was never a time for internal questioning and indignant protests like, “But I’m straight!” There are simply two times in John’s life: Before Sherlock and After Sherlock. He does not question himself because he knows he is not the same John Watson as he was before; ever since Day One he has been John Watson (After Sherlock), and John Watson (Before Sherlock) has long since been forgotten.
Sherlock’s fingers tighten in John’s hair and he groans, and John’s name falls from his tongue like a benediction as John swallows him down, taking everything he can get of this glorious, infuriating, wonderful man who has ruined him for anything else in life but himself.
John Watson (After Sherlock) stands up and wipes the corners of his mouth with the back of his hand and grins up at Sherlock Holmes (After John) who is looking down at him as if he holds the answers to the secrets of the universe.
“Hi,” John says, stupidly.
It is a testament to how far they are both gone that Sherlock does not scoff but instead smiles a shy, shaking smile, brushes John’s cheek with the back of two knuckles on his left hand and says, in that deep voice of his that suddenly goes straight to John’s crotch, “Hi.”
They kiss again, slower this time; John tastes of Sherlock and Sherlock doesn’t mind, and John gets his sticky hands in Sherlock’s hair and Sherlock laughs against John’s throat and they stumble towards the bedroom that instantly ceases to be Sherlock’s and becomes, instead, Theirs (as if one of them had been carrying the other over the threshold; the symbolism of their linked hands and the white smear across John’s cheek and Sherlock’s favourite shirt crumpled in a pile on the floor of the living room is the same).
Sherlock’s sheets are deep wine purple and his skin, when John peels back his his trousers and rips off his pants, is like miles and miles of porcelain, and John wants to (decides instantly that he will) possess it all, every single inch of it.
They fit together awkwardly (nothing about this practice is graceful, it is sticky and sweaty and the most undignified thing mankind has ever thought up) but Sherlock lets John lay down back and cover him in kisses until the nervous tension (Sherlock Holmes, nervous, is a sight to behold) melts away. He whispers his uncertainty and inexperience against the hard lines of John’s chest and John kisses him instead of discussing it, because they are both new at this, and it is the farthest thing from being important right now.
Sherlock has, in fact, done this before (to varying degrees of success) and John was in the army, he has seen and heard enough to understand the basics, and of course everyone knows how sex works: Tab A into Slot B, apply friction, enjoy; but somehow its a lot more complicated when you can’t seem to pry your hands off one another’s skin for long enough to think it through.
There is bumping and laughing and more than a bit of discomfort and yes, it is awkward, and messy, and embarrassing, but then suddenly it is fantastic, it is breathtaking, and John slides home into Sherlock’s body (and it really does feel like home, the way he fits around him) with a groan that masks Sherlock’s whimper (of pain, yes, but also satisfaction) and John thinks that if he could make it so that he could stay here, just like this, forever, he would.
But then Sherlock’s hips twitch beneath him and oh god, John is lost. Sherlock has consumed him whole and John is completely okay with that.
Sherlock’s hand clutches at John’s shoulder (the bad one, the one that nearly killed him and brought him here where he is now, balls-deep inside the most fantastically beautiful, broken man on the planet) and his nails scrape down John’s chest and his hips cant against John’s, begging silently for more, faster, deeper, take me, John, I am yours, and suddenly John cannot hold it back any more and he comes with Sherlock’s name on his lips and Sherlock’s hair in his mouth and Sherlock’s fingers twisted painfully against the scar in his shoulder.
John huffs out a breath across the expanse of white skin that stretches across eternity (or the eternity contained by Sherlock’s chest, a life time at least of skin to explore and discover and possess and own; a universe of pale, flawless skin for John to write his name on, over and over again in kisses and caresses and gentle words).
Sherlock’s fingers find their way back to John’s hair and they fall asleep like that, a tangle of limbs on dark wine sheets, and when they wake up in the morning nothing is different and yet everything has changed, shifted slightly, and John feels the universe has righted itself when Sherlock brushes his fingers absently across the back of his neck.
They never talk about it, there is never any discussion about what they are and why they are and who they are to each other. There is simply Before (John and Sherlock) and After (John&Sherlock), and they both know it, and so what is left to discuss.
It was Sherlock who took the first step but John let him do it; it takes two to make a two lives together as one. That has always been understood between them, wordlessly, like so many other things. John needs Sherlock to breathe; Sherlock needs John to think.
So Sherlock Holmes took the first step and kissed John Watson, but John Watson let him do it, and that is how John and Sherlock become John&Sherlock; how John (Before) is slain by a kiss and becomes John (After); and John (After) cannot go back to John (Before), even though John (After) is now John (After After).
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The first time Sherlock stops for breath, he finds himself in Kuala Lumpur, neck deep in an illicit trading circle run by one of Moriarty’s littlest spiders.
He does not know how far down the chain the knowledge of him and his weaknesses (three of them, spread across London, and in the hands of one of them, his soul) goes, so he will not take any chances.
Moriarty was a giant spider at the centre of an enormous web, spreading out across London, beyond the encasing ring of the M25 in which Sherlock has always felt safe and at home and distinctly within is depth, out out out, and as far as Sherlock can see, as far as he can even imagine, little insects are dancing on the threads that Moriarty spun from his tiny, forgotten council flat in Brixton.
Sherlock does not know how many people have been shown his face (shown John’s face) and instructed to kill, upon sight. He does not know and that knowledge was blown from the world by the bullet exploding through Moriarty’s brain on the top of St. Bart’s.
He had not expected this. He had underestimated his opponent and now he was paying for it.
Stupid, stupid, stupid.
It is hot and oppressive in Kuala Lumpur. If he closes his eyes and stands very still, Sherlock can imagine himself back in time; if he ignores the heat, and the smells, and the language, and the angle of the sun against glass buildings, he can almost imagine himself standing in the middle of Piccadilly Circus with the sounds of London crashing around him in great tidal waves of familiar sensation (home).
Almost, almost, it is almost the same.
Sherlock does not think about John. When he is darting across rooftops and in and out of shadows, tracking and hunting and sniffing out crime, the name he thinks of is not John’s. (It all comes down to that one name, the name that everyone knows but nobody speaks, and no one seems to know he’s dead which makes him all the more dangerous - the memory of a man that is no longer a name but a memory, an idea, potent and enabling; someone is pretending to be him and they are good at it.)
Moriarty wanted to kill John and take Sherlock with him; above all, Moriarty wanted to take Sherlock with him and Sherlock does not know that he has not succeeded in bringing Sherlock with him into madness, if not death (not yet, at least).
Sherlock is no longer the sum of his senses plus John, as he was so used to being.
He is a shadow in the night, thin and wary.
He is ruthless, and heartless, and it would break John to see the way his fingers (John loved his fingers, daft, daft things to love but he did) curl around a man’s neck, just as easily as they used curl around delicate china cups, to snap and break or slide deadly sharp knives across.
The people he kills are not good people. Sherlock does not think twice about their lives; they are forfeit from the moment they hear the name that no one speaks and everyone knows. Moriarty wanted John Watson dead and Sherlock will not rest until everyone that knows that is just as dead as their master and John is safe once more.
(John Watson has rarely been safe, but there is a difference between people shooting at you because of the uniform you wear or the fact that you have discovered their guilt in some heinous crime or other, and being shot at because you fell in love with the man upon whom the world’s most dangerous man has fixated. Sherlock does not mind (much) John being in danger because he put himself there - he knows John well enough to know that without the danger John cannot breathe - but he cannot bear the thought of John being targeted because he is a piece of Sherlock’s heart (and all of Sherlock’s soul) and some twisted Irish bastard was clever enough to figure it out).
Sherlock comes up for air in Kuala Lumpur for reasons that are not entirely clear, even to him. He has been running (falling) for six months and maybe it is exhaustion that forces him to take a break, maybe it is the fact that he is suddenly aware of himself again because Kuala Lumpur could, at the farthest stretch of the imagination, be London.
He finds a hotel (dingy, but adequate, with a decent internet connection that he is able to hack almost without even trying) and calls Mycroft, because Mycroft has been waiting for his call ever since he figured it out. (Three weeks after the fall; Sherlock preens, he has never deceived his big brother for half that long. Mycroft has been interfering again, but for a while Sherlock has not been himself enough to care.)
“Sherlock.” It is not a question; with Mycroft it never is. “Malaysia?”
“Heroin,” Sherlock replies. Has it really been six months since he felt the familiar sting of annoyance at the sound of his big brother’s voice? It feels like just yesterday he was sitting with him on an airplane full of corpses, discussing Moriarty as if he were a particularly vexing weather pattern. “Massive stockpiles of the stuff.”
“Moriarty?”
“He’s dead.” You know that, Mycroft. “He shot himself on the roof of St. Barts.”
“You’re dead, as well, brother dearest,” Mycroft intones, the infuriating tones of one indulging a child, “and yet, here we sit, chatting on the phone. Just like old times. How’s the weather in Malaysia?”
“Hot. Moriarty put a bullet through his own brain. He’s dead.”
“Yes, Sherlock, I do know.”
“The name isn’t dead.”
“No,” Mycroft concedes. “Perplexing isn’t it? The flat in Brixton has been emptied but...”
“Look in Belfast,” Sherlock interrupts.
“Belfast is clean.”
“Look again.”
“Sherlock.”
They are silent. They have reached an impasse. Mycroft wants him home but Sherlock wants John safe and after the stunt Mycroft pulled seven months ago, Sherlock would rather trust his life to Irene and John’s life to Mummy than even spend five more minutes talking to Mycroft.
Unfortunately, the bastard has his uses, and Sherlock (so very far outside of the warm, polluted embrace of the M25) has realised that he is out of his depth.
“Come home,” Mycroft says, finally. It is a concession; a small victory for Sherlock, not to have broken first.
“I can’t.”
“You’re not helping him.”
“He would have died.”
“He nearly died anyways, and that wasn’t anything to do with Moriarty - it was to do with you.”
Sherlock’s breath hitches in his chest.
“What?”
Mycroft sighs; Sherlock can tell he is frowning, most likely squeezing the bridge of his nose between two tired fingers.
“Mycroft. John. Tell me.”
Sherlock does not think about John while he is hunting because he does not need to think about him for him to always be on his mind. Sherlock wonders sometimes, idly, when he is about to drift off into sleep (whenever he can get any) whether if you opened up his chest you would see the words John Hamish Watson scrawled across every single alveolus of his lungs. Sherlock does not think about John because he breathes him in with every breath and thinking about John makes it impossible to breathe.
He knew it would be hard, to remove himself from John, but he never imagined that he might find himself in a situation in which John removed himself from Sherlock. (Not just from Sherlock, from life.)
“Come home and see for yourself.”
“I can’t.”
“Sherlock.” The tone of Mycroft’s voice is stern, unforgiving. This is your fault, it says, you did this to yourself. Sherlock knows, with a sinking heart, that Mycroft is unbearably right (the fat, smug bastard).
He is thinking about John, now, and the possibility that John might not be anymore, and it hurts more than anything.
“Please, Mycroft.”
“He’s alive, Sherlock, which is more than he might have been if I hadn’t stepped in when I did.”
“Oh, thank you,” Sherlock gasps. He’s never meant anything quite so much, especially nothing he’s ever said to Mycroft.
“Come home,” Mycroft says again. “Or at least tell him you’re alive. Can’t you tell him?”
“He’s the worst liar in the world, Mycroft, I’d be found out in minutes.”
The silence on Mycroft’s side of the call means he agrees.
Outside the window of Sherlock’s hotel room, the sounds and smells of Kuala Lumpur rise up in a heady, chaotic tumble. Sherlock loves London because the ordered chaos of its streets provide perfect the mapping zone for the less-than-ordered chaos of his mind; but the barrage of sound and taste and smell here is not comforting, it is an assault on his senses.
He sits on the phone line with his brother in silence for two minutes while Mycroft catalogues every breath he takes, while Sherlock struggles to rise above the onslaught of information and emotions.
“Will you help me?” he asks, finally. His pride is stuck somewhere in his throat, making itself painfully known. Sherlock swallows it down (for John; only for John would he ever do this).
The sound that Mycroft makes is not a whimper but it is as near to one as he has ever heard his brother make since he dropped the foot of a bookcase on his toe at the age of seventeen.
“Oh, Sherlock, of course.”
Sherlock clears his throat. There is a rustling sound that means Mycroft is tugging at his collar. (The cough means, Thank you; the rustle means, You’re my little brother and I will do anything for you..)
“I want ... Can you ... I need to be able to... to see him. Once in a while.”
“I’ll have Bethany send you the CCTV access codes,” Mycroft offers. “And a team will be in touch with you shortly to work out some sort of plan for extrication.”
“No,” Sherlock sighs. He needs Mycroft’s help but it has to be in secret and it has to be contained far, far away from himself. “Too much room for error. Belfast. Please, Mycroft. The name isn’t dead.”
“It’s just a name, Sherlock.”
“No ... Its so much more than that. It’s the memory of a name. Don’t you see?”
Mycroft, as usual, does not understand. In some ways, Mycroft is worse about understanding human psychology than Sherlock has ever been (though he is infinitely more interested in it). Sherlock doesn’t really need him to understand, in the end; someone is using the name as a smokescreen and they are doing it nearly as well as the man himself used to. That is what it boils down to.
Mycroft wants him to come home but he can’t, he won’t, until this is over.
Until John is safe again. He has failed to protect the people he loves before and he will not, he cannot, let that happen to John.
“Don’t send your people after me, Mycroft. And... And take care of him, will you?”
“Of course I will. He’s family now, right?”
“Right.” Sherlock smiles, despite himself. John Hamish Watson-Holmes. Sherlock had suggested that once, as a joke, and John had thrown a book at his head and told him to, “Fuck off, you daft bastard, as if I’d ever become a Holmes.”
“Be careful, Sherlock.”
“I always am.”
“Not always.”
“I am now. Goodbye, Mycroft. Remember - start in Belfast.”
The line clicks dead. Two minutes later, Sherlock’s mobile beeps with lines of computer access codes; a secure way into the CCTV protocol that Mycroft has drawn up (Operation Bulldog, he likes to call it) that ensures that nearly all of John’s predicted movements will be tracked and recorded and reviewed on an hourly basis.
It is the protocol he used to use for Sherlock, when Sherlock was safely ensconced within his jurisdiction. (Sherlock spares another moment to long for the protective circle of the M25.)
Perhaps John really is a Holmes brother now after all.
Sherlock spends 24 hours above the surface in Kuala Lumpur before he slips back into the shadows. He bathes and shaves and buys himself some new clothes that fit both his frame and the oppressive weather. Mummy sends him the next clue that she unearthed (he will never ask her how she is finding these things; he is sure he doesn’t want to know) and the hotel attendant knocks on his door with an envelope that includes a single one-way ticket to Bangkok.
He gets off the plane in Bangkok and is immediately subsumed by the heat, the noise, and the endless sea of faces. He ceases to be Sherlock Holmes and instead becomes a shadow and he kills three men before he leaves for Indonesia the next day.
He does not think about John because John is hurting but alive and for now, that is enough to be getting on with.
------------
Mycroft looks concerned.
(Later, much later, years later, John will learn that he has just been on the phone with his dead brother in Kuala Lumpur, having tried and failed - as anticipated, of course - to bring him home. For now, John is oblivious, though he is intrigued by the unfamiliar lines on Mycroft’s face.)
They meet often now; once a week, for coffee. Mycroft never announces himself, he merely begins showing up wherever John is at three o’clock on a Thursday afternoon. John decides to make it easier on both of them and picks a cafe near Hyde Park to frequent on Thursdays.
He does not begin to think for one second that he and Mycroft are friends (that may or may not be tantamount to blasphemy or treason in the eyes of the law, the idea of Mycroft having friends), but he has slowly begun to hate his brother-in-law less.
If anything, Mycroft seems genuinely concerned for his wellbeing, and while it is suffocating, it is also somewhat touching.
Of course, most people are concerned for John’s wellbeing, lately. (Greg still can’t look at him without grimacing. Molly cries every time they bump into each other. Sally even looks like she wants to ask him something like, “How are you holding up?” but Greg must have warned his team off because she never does.)
For all intents and purposes, John is actually doing fine. It is still unbearable - six months is not enough to change that, not by a long shot - but John is a solider and he is very, very good at squaring his shoulders, looking his problems in the face, and getting on with it.
He has six months to sort his life out and he finds that the deadline, while slightly terrifying (he often lays awake at night wondering what he’s doing, why he thought this was EVER a good idea), is mostly a comforting thing to have looming on the horizon.
It is a definite and unavoidable fact, the result of an active decision that John made himself (under duress, of course, but he’s past that now), that in five months he will be solely responsible for the welfare of a tiny, helpless human being.
Three and a half weeks after his kidnapping, Mycroft called him and told him that stage one of their project had been successful. (Translation: somewhere, in the top fertility labs in England, some doctor had mixed his dead husband’s sperm with his sister’s eggs and successfully implanted an embryo in a surrogate uterus. John, as a doctor, knew that by then the embryo (more accurately, blastocyst, a tiny group of cells containing a tiny spark of life) was embedded in this stranger’s uterine lining, where it will continue to divide and grow for 36 more weeks.)
The phone call had not been life changing (the life changing had happened at Eastwell Manor, at the breakfast table, when John’s shoulders had slumped and he had given in and said, “Okay”) but John felt like it had been. The horrible greyness that was threatening to devour him whole had receded and, for the first time since he’d watched Sherlock fall from the top of St. Bart’s, John felt like he could see his own hand in front of his face again.
The sudden reality (before, quite a nebulous and uncertain possibility, and IVF could take dozens of tries to succeed, couldn’t it?) of a child, his child, seems to have restored a sense of purpose to John’s day to day existence.
He has six months left to get a grip on himself and get his life in the sort of shape into which it is acceptable to bring a child.
For John, it is the restored sense of purpose that is the saving of him.
Mycroft meets him every Thursday at three o’clock to check for himself that John is alive and (John assumes) to be able to assess his moods more accurately than he might be able to through the blurry footage of a CCTV camera. So far, he has not kidnapped John and forced him to return to Eastwell, so John assumes he has been meeting expectations.
This week, though, Mycroft seems agitated. John assumes he won’t explain why so he doesn’t ask. They drink their coffees in relative quiet. They never do talk much, during their meetings, but John finds he doesn’t mind. (He will take everything he can get of Sherlock, even if it is his infuriatingly stuffy older brother. Mycroft is only three years older than John himself but those three years quite often feel like fifteen. John does not like people who condescend to him and Mycroft does little else.) Despite themselves, though, they have struck up some sort of amicable accord.
Finally, just as John is downing the dregs of his coffee, Mycroft gets to the point that John assumes has been bugging him since he sat down.
“I think you ought to move back into 221b,” he says, over the top of his frappe.
John shifts uncomfortably. “Mycroft...”
“Mrs. Hudson can’t keep it empty forever, you know.”
“I can’t... I don’t...” John sighs, frowning at the bottom of his mug. He wishes he had some tea.
“You think of the flat as yours and Sherlock’s, don’t you? Where else better to raise his child than the place he loved most?”
There are coffee grounds at the bottom of the mug. John swirls them around in the last of the liquid (cold, bitter). They coalesce in odd shapes - if they were tea leaves, maybe they could tell John something about his future. A boomerang, a star, the shaky outline of a gun. Coffee grounds are not normally known for their prophetic qualities, though, and for the sake of his (and Sherlock’s) unborn child, John certainly hopes the gun is just a coincidence.
“John?”
John’s head snaps up and he finds Mycroft staring at him. Those creases are still on his forehead. John wonders, idly, if he could iron them out.
The sizzle of a hot iron on skin might actually be satisfying. Maybe then Mycroft would understand what it’s like to have that unnatural stare of his fixed on one’s skin for so long.
“I can’t breathe in that flat,” John says, finally, and the words have not even left his mouth before he regrets saying them.
“That is understandable,” Mycroft deigns to acquiesce, nodding his head slightly. “But I should think that perhaps the thought of a stranger occupying such sacred space would be even harder to bear?”
John had not thought of it that way; the thought of some stranger stretched out on their couch, looking at their wall (without the spray paint and the bullet holes), cooking in their kitchen, fucking in their bedroom -
John shakes his head briefly. He can’t go back. It’s too painful. He sees Sherlock everywhere as it is. How can he keep his head enough to raise a child in the same space that had once held Sherlock?
(But then again, where else better to raise Sherlock’s child?)
“And of course, there’s Mrs. Hudson to consider,” Mycroft continues, pretending that he is oblivious to John’s internal crisis. (The bastard is never oblivious. It is infuriating. The past six months have caused John to wonder, with increasing awe, just how Sherlock kept himself from shooting his brother every chance he got.)
“She’s quite distraught, of course, and getting on in life. I’m sure she’d love to have you back as a tenant. And think about what might happen to her, if some one less ... desirable ... takes your place in the building.”
Mycroft has him and he knows it. John squirms again, uncomfortably. The coffee grounds swirl around and leave behind a moon, an arrow, the single petal of a rose.
John knew that Mycroft did not approve of his living situation. At first after - after the fall, as John has taken to calling it in his head, he went to stay with Harry. His sister had leapt at the chance to be the put together one, for once, and John had spent the worst two months of his life sleeping on her couch.
She threw him out after the incident with the drinking, the gutter, and Mycroft’s well-timed kidnapping. Too risky to have him around. Too much temptation. She was sober, for once in her life, and she wasn’t about to have her drunken little brother around to tempt her.
John hadn’t actually been drunk since then. He’d been far too busy panicking to be drunk.
He has told exactly three people what he and Mycroft had done: Harry (of course; a baby takes two parts and she was providing the one that John couldn’t), Greg, and Sarah.
Greg had looked at him with wide eyes and though he’d congratulated him, John could tell he clearly thought he’d gone insane. (He’d agreed to be Godfather, though, which John supposed was something.) Sarah had also been none-too-pleased at the idea, but had agreed to keep him on for the nine months before John expected he’d become too busy to work.
Sherlock’s trust fund had passed on to him and he didn’t think he’d ever have to worry about money again (when Mycroft had handed him those particular papers, John had nearly fainted at the sight of the numbers on the page), but work had the added bonus of keeping John both busy and sane.
So John is working full-time at the surgery and living in a small apartment just down the road that can only be described as beige. Mycroft finds it distasteful; as if the very idea of one of the Holmes clan living in such bland accommodation is offensive.
(It is no small secret that despite himself, Mycroft found the chaos of 221b charmingly bohemian. Why else would he have allowed Sherlock to persist in living there?)
John loves their old flat. He suspects that Mycroft has his own reasons for wanting him to move back there (no doubt the whole flat is bugged, much too cleverly even for Sherlock to find), but the only reason John hasn’t already moved back in is because he doesn’t know how he can face the ghosts that will no doubt haunt him once he’s there.
He gives the coffee cup one last swirl. A bear, a snowflake, a heart. He looks up at Mycroft and nods.
“I’ll hand in my notice to the landlord tomorrow,” he says.
Mycroft looks pleased and downs the rest of his drink. (Too creamy and sugary by half. John ought to make some kind of barb but he cannot help of hearing it in Sherlock’s voice - Fat, you’re getting fat again Mycroft, what happened to the diet Mycroft? - and he never can bring himself to that kind of familiarity with Mycroft, anyways. It feels like taunting the queen to her face. Blasphemy. Treason. John has sat in Buckingham Palace with his husband naked beside him in nothing but a sheet and stolen the queen’s ashtrays but he is far too British, far too military, to think of being disrespectful to his monarch to her face. So he never teases Mycroft because it is, in his head, equivalent.)
“Excellent. Mrs. Hudson will be expecting you. I daresay you ought to warn her about the impending changes in your lifestyle, though. She’ll want to make some arrangements of her own, I wager.”
Mycroft’s smile is like the cat that got the cream and then, in a whirl of criminally long legs and perfectly pressed suit pants and with the toss of an umbrella from one hand to the other, he is gone just as quickly as he appeared, leaving John to stare at his tea leaves once more (Coffee grounds, but are they so very different?).
He sees a heart, a star, a crescent moon.
He wonders what that means, if anything, and then (exasperated with himself) pushes the mug away and stands to leave. Lestrade has invited him to come take a look at a crime scene (as if that will make the ache in his chest any better) and he has nothing better to do with himself.
He has a deadline now, five more months of monotony, and he finds himself wishing (I wish, I wish, I wish, yes, he wishes for that too, but at least these other ones might come true) that five months wasn’t quite such a long time.