Fic: Multiply (the sum of our parts) - Chapter Nine
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
Chapter Nine - That the Theorem of Pythagoras may be Fallible
At the prospect of having to explain himself, Sherlock shifts, looking very uncomfortable indeed.
“John, I don’t...”
“No!” John all but shouts it. He would have shouted it if the children weren’t next door, asleep. “You don’t get to do that. You don’t get to choose anymore. You let me believe you were dead. For eighteen months, Sherlock, you let me believe you were dead. Don’t you dare try and hold back from me now, you complete and utter bastard, because you died and you left and you let me believe for eighteen months that you were dead and I swear to God, I should punch you, I should kill you where you sit for doing that to me, for putting me through that, but instead I’m going to give you this one chance to explain yourself, so unhinge that jaw and start talking and don’t you dare lie to me again.”
Sherlock has the decency, at least, to look abashed as he takes in John’s near-mania. A beat passes. Two beats. Finally, he clenches his jaw and nods. John all but collapses on the other side of the bed and listens with something like dread sitting heavy between his ribs as Sherlock finally, finally begins to talk.
John paces in front of him as Sherlock stares at his hands and begins to recount the days that John has played in his head, over and over and over again. John does not need this bit retelling but force of habit (nearly forgotten, but some things are just like riding a bike) means he is oddly unwilling to break Sherlock’s flow. John knows how it went. He was there for most of it. He had watched with something akin to horror as his husband grew more and more frantic, like a tiny bug caught in Moriarty’s web. The progression of events was familiar to him though, and he hadn’t been more than usually alarmed ... not until he’d looked up at the roof of St. Bart’s and seen him there, standing at the edge.
Sherlock talks through every bit of that day (and the relevant days, weeks before it), his voice a monotone, not the familiar, vigorous up and down dramatics of his usual deduction monologues. John doesn’t look at him (suddenly can’t bear to) as he draws close to the end of the day. His mind is reeling. Sherlock has told him nothing new, not concretely, but of course everything looks different through Sherlock’s eyes.
“Three bullets, John,” Sherlock says, finally, and there is a tremble (a catch) in his voice, barely noticeable, and yet there is more emotion in those three words than there has been in his entire speech until now. “He knew as soon as we left the pool that time that that would be all it would take to get me, and I knew from the start it would come to that... but I didn’t realise exactly how he’d do it until it was too late. I tricked him, easy, he shot himself in the head, that was ... it was easy.” John does not watch as Sherlock looks up at him but he can tell (can always tell) that he is staring at him now. “But he was smart, John, and he knew I’d do anything, anything to keep you alive.”
“So you jumped.”
John’s voice surprises himself. Sherlock jumps, slightly. John wants to touch him but he won’t let himself.
“Yes,” Sherlock says.
Now John looks at him, sharp, accusing. (Sherlock is no longer looking at him but at the floor. It shouldn’t hurt. It does.)
“You’re lying to me. You didn’t just jump off of St. Bart’s on a whim, survive unscathed and manage to trick me into thinking you were dead, write me a fucking suicide note, wedge it in a skull and then disappear. That was planned.”
“Of course it was planned,” Sherlock says sharply. His head jerks up and his eyes pierce into John’s. (And dammit if that doesn’t hurt as well.) “I had hours, John, just a few hours to save your life, and Lestrade’s and Mrs. Hudson’s. I had to cover all the options.”
“And you didn’t think, in all your desperation to keep me alive, to tell me - me, your ex-army husband, just in case he might have some tactical suggestions or heaven forbid, be prepared to take care of himself. I survived a bloody warzone, Sherlock, you don’t think I could handle one more person shooting at me?!”
Suddenly, Sherlock is on his feet, right up in John’s face, snarling. “You barely survived Afghanistan, John. Barely. All it takes is one bullet. You know that. And anyway, what about Lestrade? And Mrs. Hudson? No, John. This was the cleanest option. I knew what he would force me to do and I did what I had to do to make sure that in the worst case scenario, I could ensure you would all be safe.”
John (stubborn to a fault) does not back down, though Sherlock is towering over him. (Familiar but strange, to be so forcibly reminded of their height difference.) “What exactly was the worst case scenario, then? Explain it to me, Sherlock, because I still don’t see what part of this situation required you to disappear for nearly two bloody years and let me think you were dead.”
Sherlock huffs annoyance (and that too is familiar, though usually it is directed at Anderson) and his breath is hot and hard on John’s cheek. His eyes are wild with anger and frustration and something that John can’t (doesn’t want to) identify. (It looks like longing, and pain, and suffering.)
(It looks like what John has felt like for months.)
“Moriarty didn’t have a code. Of course that was entirely made up. He was the trigger, the instigator of all of it. Every last bit of it - including the kill-order for you. But there was always the danger, always, that he wasn’t working alone. I had to appear to die because that, and that alone, was the call-off signal. He liked to play along his own rules, and he’d thought it through carefully. He knew I might talk him into ... taking himself off the board but he still wanted the game to play out. He gave me an ultimatum. Kill myself, or kill the three of you. He thought it was funny. I just knew I had to keep you safe.”
“So you jumped.”
“So I jumped,” Sherlock agrees. “He hadn’t expected that, but he’d planned for it. Thorough to a fault, he was. I had to disappear. Mummy helped. Molly helped too.”
“Molly?!” John is shocked (betrayed). (He’d known that Celeste couldn’t be trusted, she is a Holmes, after all, though it be only by marriage, but Molly...)
“I believe we may all have underestimated Molly Hooper,” Sherlock is saying, but John is busy seeing red. Too many people knew, too many people let him believe (let him suffer, let him nearly die with it). People he trusted. People he liked. He doesn’t know what to do with this information. He can feel the anger rising somewhere in his stomach and his fists clench, hard, against it. He wants to listen to the rest (needs to know), but the urge to shout and rage against everything that Sherlock is saying is nearly overwhelming.
“You should have told me,” he says, instead, interrupting a sentence he hadn’t heard the beginning to. “I don’t know how but you should have at least let me know. I’m a soldier, I know about covert operations.”
Sherlock has the gall to laugh in his face.
“John, you may be a soldier but you are a terrible, terrible liar and an even worse actor. You would have acted yourself into an early grave. They had to believe I was dead, and they had to believe you were suffering. Can’t you see? This was the only way. I had to disappear and you had to believe it.”
“I would have come with you,” John says, urgently. (He is desperate now. Sherlock’s decision was so very wrong in so very many ways and he needs him to see it, but he can’t figure out how.) “All you had to do was tell me. I’d have come with you.”
“I know,” Sherlock replies. His voice and his eyes are suddenly so soft that it’s a kick to John’s stomach. “I know you would have, and God, John, it nearly killed me but I had no choice, there was nothing else to do. I had to die so that I could hunt down the rest of the web. I didn’t... I didn’t expect it to take so long.”
Abruptly weak in the knees, John sits down on the edge of the bed heavily. It is a relief to put some space between himself and Sherlock. (Or is it?) John is aware (has always been aware) that he is, generally speaking, an intelligent man but next to Sherlock’s, his brain might as well be that of a five year old. He refuses to believe that there were not other ways out of the situation, but he cannot think of any.
That doesn’t make it any better. It doesn’t relieve his anger (low, dull, but nearly consuming anger, the kind that when it finally boils over is vicious and ruthless and lasting).
He wants (badly) to punch Sherlock.
He wants (more) to kiss him.
He can’t (won’t) do either of those things. Not right now.
“Where did you go?”
Sherlock (staring at him), starts at the question. Hadn’t expected him to speak, or at least not yet. “I came here, first. Falling off a building, no matter how orchestrated, leaves one more than slightly bruised.”
If it weren’t so enraging, John would have laughed at that.
“After that... I don’t remember. Everywhere. Nowhere. I... There was no way to know how far down the chain the command went and I had nothing to work with. I started from the bottom and worked my way up.”
“When you say worked your way up you mean...”
When John looks at him this time Sherlock’s eyes are suddenly shallow, nearly dead. A void of emotion. (It is how he used to look, before he realised John Watson was no ordinary human. It is how he used to look, before he found the missing piece of himself hidden inside John Watson’s blue eyes and wrapped in his jumper-warm skin. It is horrible, empty and lifeless.)
“I mean I killed them. Or saw that they were killed. Or otherwise incapacitated.”
John’s breath leaves him in a shudder. John has killed men before. John is (was) a soldier, in a war, with a gun and people shooting at him and it was either kill or be killed. He’s killed in cold blood as well, but only ever for Sherlock (and somehow that made it alright).
He does not like it, he hates it, that Sherlock has now killed men too. That is his job, killing men to keep Sherlock (and himself) safe.
(It does not make it better that Sherlock was killing these men for him. Hypocritical. John doesn’t care.)
“How many?” he asks, instead, because he needs some how to know the human toll that his safety has somehow taken.
“I don’t know,” Sherlock answers, and his voice is hollow. (John knows that hollowness. He felt it himself, coming home from Afghanistan. He has heard it in the voices of his comrades. It strikes him that Sherlock has suddenly become a soldier as well, in his own right.)
(Though perhaps Sherlock has always really been at war with the world. Now he’s just made it official.)
“And the web? Moriarty’s web?”
Sherlock shakes his head minutely. “It’s... he had a second in command. Moran, he’s called. Sebastian Moran. He’s... resourceful. Now that his boss is out of the way, he’s in charge and he’s enjoying himself. He’s been ... proving difficult.”
“You’re here to catch him.” It is not a question. Sherlock nods agreement anyways. “Can you?”
“Eventually. It’s ... taken some time to track him down. He moves around a lot. Irene has a new plan, she seems to think we stand a good chance.”
“You’re working with Irene? She’s alive?! I thought...”
“You thought Mycroft had her killed? He did try. Several times. It didn’t take. So he gave up and enlisted her. He seems to find it handy to have an associate who literally does not exist anymore. I had little choice in the matter of working with her, though she has proven... enlightening. And infuriating, of course.”
Suddenly, John is not just angry, he’s unbearably, inexorably jealous. He remembers Irene, the way she captured Sherlock’s attention (in the way only John himself ever had). He remembers her stunning, ethereal beauty. He remembers, with especial pain, the way she outclassed him in every way: clever, cunning, witty, and so staggeringly sexy that even John (who’s mind had operated on pretty much a one-track system since falling for Sherlock) had looked twice at her. To think that that she has had unlimited access to Sherlock (John’s husband) for God knows how long is intolerable.
He can feel Sherlock’s knife-sharp eyes searching his face as he sits and fumes, rolling the information around in his brain. He knows that Sherlock knows exactly what he’s thinking and it is maddening.
“John,” Sherlock says, softly. “John, I had no choice. In any of it.”
“You always have a choice, Sherlock Holmes,” John snarls, angrily, and suddenly he finds himself on his feet again, barging his way into Sherlock’s personal space. Sherlock seems to shrink a bit, marginally, and if he were any less enraged John would preen, slightly, at being the only person bar his own mother that could make Sherlock Holmes appear cowed. Instead, he grabs Sherlock’s face with two rough hands and mashes it downwards onto his own. It is less a kiss and more a bite, fuelled by deep anger and rage, but Sherlock nearly melts into it, goes entirely pliant under John’s rough hands and demanding lips and teeth. John forces his tongue into Sherlock’s mouth and he tastes of coffee and it is heartbreakingly familiar and if only he weren’t so angry he would be reeling in the utter, wrenching joy that he is able to do this again.
Sherlock whimpers and curls his hands around John’s shoulders, but no sooner does he do so than John is shoving him back against the wall, hard enough that he lets out a soft grunt of pain, eyes flying open wide to look warily down at John.
Breathing heavily, John’s voice is low and threatening as he growls into Sherlock’s ear. “Listen very carefully to what I’m about to say, Sherlock Holmes, because I will say it once and only once. You made the wrong choice. You should have told me from the beginning what was going on. You should have told your brother. You should have told your mother, for that matter, and we could have figured something out.”
“John, I ...”
“Shut up!” John barks, slamming Sherlock’s shoulders against the wall again. (They are too thin under his hands. John pushes that information away to deal with later.) “Shut up and listen to me because this is something you are going to need to understand very, very well. You and I were a team, Sherlock. In everything. And then you died and it nearly killed me, I nearly died because I couldn’t bear to be without you. You were wrong, Sherlock, it was wrong. Are we clear?”
Sherlock says nothing; he returns John’s glare with a steady gaze. John growls and shoves him again.
“Are. We. Clear?”
Those unearthly eyes of Sherlock’s narrow and he purses his lips. John recognises it for what it is: defiance. With a low bellow of outrage, John shoves himself back into Sherlock’s space, because it is either kiss him (hard) or punch him (harder) and the kissing will always win out. (Sherlock is an addict but so, to a certain degree, is John. The proof is plain for all to see.)
This time, Sherlock is kissing him back, and it is rough and hard and not at all pleasant. John gets his hands tangled in Sherlock’s shirt and all but rips it open, spreading his palms wide across that once-familiar chest (claiming and punishing, all at once). Sherlock moans against his mouth, bites his lip, smears his mouth down across John’s jaw to bite, hard, at John’s collarbone. John growls and shoves one thigh (not trembling) between Sherlocks and ruts, hard, against him. Sherlock stuffs his hand viciously into the front of John’s jeans.
From there it is easy to fall apart. They tear into each other, literally, gasping and snarling and kissing and biting. John, always stronger especially now Sherlock is so emaciated (another thought to be pushed away and dealt with later), has little trouble divesting him of his clothing and shoving him down across the bed.
They wrestle, briefly, pushing and pulling on each other’s skin, kissing and biting in turns, until John gets Sherlock sprawled under him moaning wantonly with John’s tongue buried deep in his arse.
“God, John,” Sherlock gasps, but John just grunts, his nails digging further in to the globes of Sherlock’s buttocks, deep and hard enough to leave small, white half moons standing out across the skin. “John, John, fuck me, come on, fuck me.” Sherlock’s voice is a challenge, not pleading, but goading, and John surges up from between his legs, forcing him over on to his back before shutting him up with a bruising kiss to his lips.
“Baby oil, in the drawer,” John grunts, finally, into his mouth. Sherlock flings an arm out to scrabble around in it and all but hurls it at John, who spills nearly half of it over his fingers. He gives Sherlock a perfunctory two fingers before all but forcing three in (too fast, Sherlock winces, but John tells himself he doesn’t care).
“Come on then,” Sherlock pants, hips canting as John drives unrelenting fingers into him. “Fuck me already.”
John bites at his lips again but withdraws his fingers and abruptly replaces them with the slick head of his cock. Sherlock shouts as he pushes in relentlessly, gripping the arm John has planted next to his head for leverage tightly.
When he bottoms out, John takes a second to get a grip on himself (does not let himself think about how very much it feels like he’s home). Sherlock is writhing underneath him, egging him on with rolls of his hips and every single movement is engineered to get a rise out of John and John, once more, wants to punch him. Instead, he proceeds to fuck the living daylights out of him, pounding into him hard, over and over and over until Sherlock is a heaving, gasping mess, brown hair plastered to his forehead, eyes blown wide and head thrown back against the pillow. Every muscle in his body is tensed as he moves against John’s rhythm. (They are out of practice. Sherlock was dead for eighteen months. Nothing about this is graceful. It is vicious and messy and horrible and Sherlock is the most wonderful thing he has seen in years and it makes John want to cry. It makes John want to fuck him until he can’t even remember his own name.)
“John, John, John, fuck that’s so good, John,” Sherlock is coming undone underneath him but John is not ready, not yet. The spasms of Sherlock’s orgasm are delicious and John all but devours him, swallows the shouting down; his hips have lost any sort of rhythm they ever had until finally, finally, Sherlock jerks his hips and there; John shatters apart above him, silently, eyes slammed shut as his body shudders and shakes into a horrible, messy release.
“John,” Sherlock whispers as John collapses on top of him. Sherlock’s arms come around him and John doesn’t have the energy to push them off. His head is reeling with what they just did, he knows he should never have touched him, he’ll never forgive himself this later, when the anger is gone, but it was either fuck him or kill him with his own bare hands and John can’t bear to see Sherlock die, not again.
When John’s breathing calms, Sherlock looks up at him with big, round eyes and John’s heart shatters (again) into pieces. “God, I missed you,” Sherlock is saying, babbling almost, John can hear it but he doesn’t want to listen.
(Sherlock has come apart underneath him, his anger has passed but John’s has not. Not yet. He wonders, abstractly, if it ever will.)
“I missed you every second of every day, John, John, it was awful, it was unbearable, I can’t breathe without you and I couldn’t come back, I couldn’t, I had to keep going to know you’d be safe, John, you’re everything and he was going to... they were going to... I couldn’t let them, you know that right, you understand that, I couldn’t let them try, even. John?”
John, feeling calmer now, pushes up and out and away, rolling off of Sherlock and on to his back. He feels strangely empty. (The anger is no longer threatening to consume him; it has been beaten back but it sits there still, heavy in his gut.) Sherlock pushes up on one arm and watches him. John can almost feel his trepidation, rolling off him in heavy waves.
“John?”
Closing his eyes, John takes a deep breath. He doesn’t look at Sherlock when he speaks.
“Get out, Sherlock.”
The hitch of Sherlock’s breath should break his heart but right now, John has no heart left to break.
“What?”
“You heard me. Get out. I don’t want to see you again.”
“But...”
“I said go!”
His eyes are open again. (Mistake, he doesn’t want to see that look on Sherlock’s face. Confused. Hurt. Scared. And then ... angry. Again. John is so tired of anger right now but it is everywhere, in everything; John’s entire world right now is a swirling maelstrom of hurt and anger and relief and joy and love, so much love that it hurts him, it cuts him, and the anger seeps into the cuts and burns, dull and sharp at once, and it is all John can do to keep himself clinging to the edge of sanity.)
“No,” Sherlock starts to say. “No, I won’t, not until we’ve talked more ...”
“We’ve talked enough, Sherlock, and now I want you to go away.”
“John...”
“You died, Sherlock!” He is shouting now, sitting up, pointing in Sherlock’s face. (He is slipping, everything is burning, his skin his stomach his mind his heart.) How hard is it to understand?! Sherlock has never been one for emotions but this is above and beyond. “You thought it was better for me to think that you had died than to ask for help and I can’t ... I love you, Christ but I love you and you died, you were gone, gone forever and it nearly killed me, I nearly killed myself and the whole time you were alive and somehow, somehow, you think it’s acceptable to waltz back in and expect me to forgive you for putting me through that.”
“I don’t want you to forgive me, I want you to understand!”
“I don’t understand, though, Sherlock! You chose, you chose to go it alone rather than ask for help or even to tell me what was happening and you let me think you were dead. Dead! ... I can’t, Sherlock, it was wrong, you should never have kept this from me, not ever. I don’t want to see you right now. I want you to leave, and I don’t want to see you again.”
There is a long pause in which Sherlock all but crumples. John hates him, in that moment, just as much as he loves him, though it’s possible he hates himself more. But he doesn’t know what else to do. He can’t think with Sherlock around and he is so angry he no longer trusts himself.
“What about the children,” Sherlock asks, finally. His voice is that of a man condemned. John closes his eyes.
“What about the children?”
“Can I see them?”
“Sherlock.”
“John, if you want to cut me out of your life, fine, that’s... that’s your right and I’ll ... I’ll do what ever, we can ... get a divorce or... whatever, but ... John, my children, I...”
“You don’t know them, Sherlock.”
“Doesn’t mean they’re not mine.”
“It very nearly does.” John sighs. Sherlock looks as if he might literally fall to pieces, a porcelain doll shattered across the floor. John’s chest aches with how much he loves this man. Even now, full of anger and hurt, he can’t help himself. “I don’t want a divorce, Sherlock.” He laughs, bitterly. “I just... I’m so angry with you and I can’t process it if you’re here. I need you to go away and I don’t want you to contact us until I say it’s okay.”
“John...”
“Please, Sherlock.”
Sherlock takes a deep breath, considering, before nodding slowly. (John is vaguely shocked that he’s giving in. The old Sherlock would never back down so quickly. It’s nearly worrying.)
“Will you promise to take me back?”
“I can’t promise anything, Sherlock. Not right now. I half want to kill you myself. I nearly did, earlier.”
Once more, Sherlock nods. (John is, once more, shocked.)
(Something in Sherlock is different. Something small, but it’s definitely there. Sherlock has fought back and has been stubborn but it’s nothing like what it might have been, not at all. John doesn’t understand it and he doesn’t expect he ever will.)
They are silent a few more moments. John lets himself drink Sherlock’s face in (he is angry but that doesn’t change the fact that he’s missed this man so much he has felt it in his bones for months) before saying, “I’m ... I’m going to take the twins home to Baker Street tomorrow,” John begins, but he is cut off by Sherlock’s sudden emphatic, “No!”
John stops short, looking alarmed. Sherlock’s eyes are blown wide again, frantic. “You mustn’t leave Eastwell, John, it’s not safe.”
“What do you mean, it’s not safe? What’s wrong with Baker Street?”
“It’s too open, too easily targeted. They know where it is and they’ve probably bugged it just as much as Mycroft has. You can’t John, you have to stay here, this is the safest place in England for you right now.”
“You broke in with a harpoon,” John points out acerbically.
“Yes but John, I helped design the security systems and what’s more, I grew up here. And actually the harpoon was already here. I was requisitioning it.”
“I can’t stay here. I might accidentally kill your mother and then Mycroft will probably torture me with spoons.”
“You have to stay here,” Sherlock all but pleads with him, lurching forward to clutch desperately at his arm. “Please, promise me, you’ll keep the twins here. I don’t care if you never talk to Mummy again but promise me you won’t leave until we take care of Moran.”
The thought of being trapped in Eastwell with the people who have been lying to him for months on end, watching him suffer and doing nothing about it, sends a cold shiver through John’s spine. But John is no longer a free agent. There is a crackle on the monitor next to the bed, a soft whimper, that reminds him (needlessly but concretely) of that fact.
If it were just him, he’d have already left, of course. He’d have been out of there, away from the whole pack of them, long ago.
Of course, if it had just been him, there was every chance that Sherlock wouldn’t have come tonight anyways and he’d still be existing in miserable oblivion. (Or, quite possibly, not existing at all.)
No point thinking like that. John Watson is no longer a free agent, he is a father, and the safety of his children is paramount.
“Fine,” he bites out. “Fine, we’ll stay here.”
“Thank you,” Sherlock gasps; his clutch tightens on John’s bicep - John flinches.
“I’m not doing it for you,” he says, coldly. “I’m doing it to keep my children safe.”
“Our children, John.”
They are, of course, not John’s children. They are Sherlock’s. But Sherlock was dead and John was there when they were born. It is John’s name on their birth certificates. So he supposes they are technically their children, but something small and jealous and angry within John is shouting that Sherlock has to earn that right first, before he can lay claim to them.
“We’ll see,” John says, tearing his eyes away from Sherlock’s plaintive face. Sherlock (astonishingly) says nothing. Suddenly, John remembers something. “Hang on, did you say Irene is working for Mycroft? Does that mean ... are you working with Mycroft?!”
Sherlock snorts. “Unfortunately. It seemed ... prudent. As I said, I had little ... choice.”
John gapes at him (his husband, back from the dead, and now a complete stranger in his bed). “You’re willingly working with Mycroft?”
“Not willingly. I had no choice in the matter.”
“What could Mycroft ever do to convince you to take his help?” John asks incredulously, staring unabashed at the man sitting in front of him. (His face, so familiar, so beloved, eerily sunken and strange. Sherlock is back from the dead but there is something ... something different. He does not entirely know the man sitting here with badly cut hair and dark rings around his eyes.)
(Be careful what you wish for, John Watson.)
The look Sherlock is giving him is familiar, though. (It is a relief, even if it is maddening.) Patronising, but fond. One eyebrow quirked perilously high; cupid’s bow lips pursed disapprovingly. “He’s my brother, John, awful as it is. He knows my weaknesses better than any man, better than myself, and he is not above exploiting them. A few months back he acquired rather a large amount of ... leverage. Twice as much as he bargained for, in fact.”
The words slam into John’s chest like a sack of bricks.
The twins, John thinks, wildly. He’s talking about the twins.
Sherlock’s smile as he watches the look of dawning spread across John’s face is wan and desolate. “You may think me despicable, John, but my brother has long since discarded his moral compass in the face of ... how would he put it ... efficiency.”
And there it is. The line, of what John is and is not able to take. The line of what is bearable and what is not. He can handle (badly), the fact that Sherlock is not dead. He suspects he will, one day, accept that Sherlock willingly deceived him and caused him inestimable amounts of misery. But he cannot, will never be able to bear the knowledge that his children, the two things he loves most in the world (besides, maybe, his husband, the infuriatingly glorious and alive man sitting in front of him watching him intently) were only a product of one of Mycroft’s designs; that they were merely an efficient means of reaching an end.
John has had enough.
“Get out,” he growls, low and serious. “Get out right now. I can’t look at you, at any of you right now. Get out.” Sherlock’s smile does not fade, but it becomes infinitely more wretched.
“Of course, John,” he murmurs. John does not watch as he slides out of the bed, long lean form (covered, now, in bruises and scars that John has never seen before, not that he’s looking, because he’s not) uncoiling to catch up and pull on his (hideous, filthy) clothes.
Sherlock pads to the door and John is still not watching him leave, is instead sitting and trembling with something that is so far beyond fury it is indefinable, his eyes fixed resolutely and unseeingly on the doorframe. But Sherlock pauses before slipping through it, hesitating (and John has almost never seen him do that, it is unfamiliar, to see Sherlock unsure, and John hates it).
“John. I ... I love you.”
He does not say anything, but John does let his eyes slide, glacial in pace and emotion, to look at him across the darkened room.
Sherlock bites his lip, lets out a breath he didn’t even seem to be holding. His shoulders slump. He is defeated.
“I love you,” he whispers again, into the darkness that sprawls, seemingly infinite, between them.
John closes his eyes as Sherlock slips through the door, closing it gently behind him.
He doesn’t sleep that night, not one wink; he simply sits in the bed that was once Sherlock’s, staring at the door across the slowly lightening room, quite silently falling to pieces.
-------------------
The door of the room slams shut. Sherlock sags against it. The room is tinged with early morning light. Irene is (predictably) awake, propped up on the bed in her (frankly ridiculous) fuchsia silk nightgown and wrapped in a bath robe. She pauses briefly in flicking through the magazine in her lap to glance up at Sherlock, one (infuriatingly well-groomed) eyebrow arching sanctimoniously.
She knows.
“You prat,” she says, before turning right back to her magazine.
Sherlock closes his eyes.
His mind is strangely calm. He feels, faintly, that his mind should by all rights be reeling, staggering under the weight of everything that has happened since he left the room just a few hours earlier.
Instead, he feels ... He is fiercely numb.
That’s not quite right.
His mind is numb. His chest hurts. His heart is cramping beneath his ribs; it is agony. His limbs are heavy, and there is a dull, incessant ache behind his eyes that he knows, somehow, will not go away no matter how much paracetemol he pops.
The world is beginning to spin around him. He grabs hold of the door for support, for some sort of grounding.
Sherlock is used to dealing with the onslaught of information that is every day life, where every tiny sound and smell and sight and taste and sensation is an explosion across his brain. He is used to filtering out the significant from the insignificant; he cuts his way through a churning sea of data every minute of every day and he does it (now) with the (practiced) ease of a duck gliding through water.
He should be able to process these events like he does everything else. He should sort it out into significant and insignificant; his mind should be whirling away, cataloguing the important facts and discarding the trivial.
It’s just... he can’t quite work out what parts of this night are, in fact, trivial.
With a rising tide of horror, he thinks that perhaps none of it was trivial.
He wonders if this night was, in fact, the most significant night of his life.
His fingers clutch tighter on the curved brass handle of the door.
(Sense memory triggers. His index finger tingles with the recollection of Hamish’s lips, Anna’s fingernail, John’s clavicle.)
(Focus. He has to focus or he’ll never be able to step away from this door. He’ll never be able to stand up again.)
And if it was the most important (the least deletable) night of his life, what does that mean?
(It means that holding his children is more devastatingly momentous than holding his sister.)
(It means that losing John is more remarkable, somehow, than gaining him was.)
Sherlock is used to wading bodily through torrents of cold hard data, he is an expert at sorting out apparently contradicting external stimuli, but when faced with floods of conflicting emotions, he is immediately overwhelmed.
He can’t move. He can’t think. All he can feel is the bite of brass in his hands and the clamouring din of emotions rattling about in his head.
Irene is no longer looking at her magazine. He is dimly aware that she is watching him, as a mother bear might watch her cub.
He cannot bear to think about her right now.
He wants to go back.
Go back and do what, though?
John didn’t want him there. (It is a cold-hot knife blow to the stomach, the knowledge that John doesn’t want him.) The children aren’t old enough to want anything besides food and water and clean nappies. He doesn’t belong there.
Except he doesn’t belong anywhere else either.
The writhing tide of emotion threatens to drown him and his knees quiver under the assault.
“Sherlock,” Irene says. It is more a whisper than anything, a pained exhale, as if she can see the waves that are about to claim him. He scrunches his eyes closed tighter.
Sherlock has never been one for regrets. He doesn’t have time to regret things, usually, and anyways he only ever acts on his convictions (so what is there to regret?)
But now... now he wishes that something, somewhere, had gone differently.
He had acted, that day, on his convictions, on his understanding of the situation. He had chosen the best available course of action. He had to keep John safe and he had to do whatever he could to ensure that John’s safety was long-lasting. (He’d failed, before, to keep the people he loved safe. He refused, point blank refused, to let it happen again.)
He’d done what he had to do. John said he was wrong to do so.
He doesn’t agree with John (lovely, spectacular John), but he is beginning to wish he could.
“Sherlock, come on.” Irene is standing in front of him. Her eyes, usually sharp and alert, are soft and worried. (Sherlock entertains the notion that she has real feelings for all of a second before dismissing it out of hand.)
He lets her, though. He lets her pry his hand from the handle and push him, bodily, towards the bed. He stumbles like a man drunk.
The bed is soft and warm but all he can think of is John and his flashing eyes and his hands, rough and possessive and gentle, and the way it felt to have John buried as far inside him as he could get after months upon months of aching, cavernous emptiness.
(It felt like coming home. It felt like being whole again. It felt like he was being dragged, forcibly, back to life.)
Irene is clucking over him like a mother hen.
“When will you learn to listen to me?” she asks, but Sherlock doesn’t think she actually wants an answer. He curls in on himself, feebly aware that he is shaking.
Sherlock is surprised when he feels her lay down next to him; even more so when he feels one of her thin arms snaking around his waist. (He is not used to touching people that are not John, but this is not sexual, this is ... this is almost friendly.)
(Are he and Irene friends?)
(Insignificant.)
“What happened?” Of course she wants to know, odious woman, always prying. (She sounds concerned, but Sherlock knows her, she could sell a cow its own milk.)
He shakes his head, pressing his face into the pillow.
He couldn’t form words now if he tried.
The point of this, all of this, was to keep John safe.
If what John was saying was true (and what John says is always true), it nearly killed him anyway.
Sherlock cannot gauge pain in others, not very well at least. He is always aware, in a basic way, of people’s emotional states, but he is not very good at discerning between quite upset and devastatingly broken.
John’s voice, though, had been ragged and raw. His eyes were ringed with dark circles that were not just from sleeplessness but from months and months of unutterable sorrow.
(What have I done?)
He can gauge (inaccurately), John’s level of pain using his own. (Crushing, debilitating, all consuming - the harrowing fact of tearing his body away from his soul, leaving him raw and aching and gasping for breath.)
It had been awful, but it had been necessary. (There was no other way. There wasn’t time and Mycroft is a liar, had lied to him before, had betrayed him before. He had no other options.)
Irene is still talking behind him. She has her fingers in his hair.
(It reminds him of being a very young child, long ago, sobbing and screaming and dying inside while his mother sat behind him and stroked his hair, as if that could put the world to rights again, as if that could bring her back to him.)
(It feels good, though.)
A hot, salty tear traces a course down his cheek. Irene brushes it away with the back of her thumb.
“I told you not to go,” she repeats. Sherlock squeezes his eyes together again. Another tear falls. “What happened? You saw John, didn’t you? You should tell me, Sherlock, I need to know what I’m dealing with here.”
Sherlock swallows, blinks, nods.
“Oh, Sherlock.”
She squeezes his shoulder. He doesn’t have the energy to push her hands away.
They lay like that for a while. The sun rises beyond the curtains. Irene’s hands are never still, petting his hair and squeezing his shoulder. He doesn’t believe any of it, but it is, at the very least, comforting (in the basest, most physical sense that any touch can be comforting).
Sherlock’s chest does not stop hurting.
He gave up everything for John, but John hates him for it. (He’d said love, but Sherlock had seen the steel in his eyes.)
Suddenly, the words come. “I have to get them back,” he says. Irene’s hand stills on his head for a brief second before continuing to pet him. “I need your help,” he says. “I have to get them back.” Irene smiles against the back of his head.
“You always need my help, Sherlock. Lucky for you, I actually want to help you.”
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
Chapter Nine - That the Theorem of Pythagoras may be Fallible
At the prospect of having to explain himself, Sherlock shifts, looking very uncomfortable indeed.
“John, I don’t...”
“No!” John all but shouts it. He would have shouted it if the children weren’t next door, asleep. “You don’t get to do that. You don’t get to choose anymore. You let me believe you were dead. For eighteen months, Sherlock, you let me believe you were dead. Don’t you dare try and hold back from me now, you complete and utter bastard, because you died and you left and you let me believe for eighteen months that you were dead and I swear to God, I should punch you, I should kill you where you sit for doing that to me, for putting me through that, but instead I’m going to give you this one chance to explain yourself, so unhinge that jaw and start talking and don’t you dare lie to me again.”
Sherlock has the decency, at least, to look abashed as he takes in John’s near-mania. A beat passes. Two beats. Finally, he clenches his jaw and nods. John all but collapses on the other side of the bed and listens with something like dread sitting heavy between his ribs as Sherlock finally, finally begins to talk.
John paces in front of him as Sherlock stares at his hands and begins to recount the days that John has played in his head, over and over and over again. John does not need this bit retelling but force of habit (nearly forgotten, but some things are just like riding a bike) means he is oddly unwilling to break Sherlock’s flow. John knows how it went. He was there for most of it. He had watched with something akin to horror as his husband grew more and more frantic, like a tiny bug caught in Moriarty’s web. The progression of events was familiar to him though, and he hadn’t been more than usually alarmed ... not until he’d looked up at the roof of St. Bart’s and seen him there, standing at the edge.
Sherlock talks through every bit of that day (and the relevant days, weeks before it), his voice a monotone, not the familiar, vigorous up and down dramatics of his usual deduction monologues. John doesn’t look at him (suddenly can’t bear to) as he draws close to the end of the day. His mind is reeling. Sherlock has told him nothing new, not concretely, but of course everything looks different through Sherlock’s eyes.
“Three bullets, John,” Sherlock says, finally, and there is a tremble (a catch) in his voice, barely noticeable, and yet there is more emotion in those three words than there has been in his entire speech until now. “He knew as soon as we left the pool that time that that would be all it would take to get me, and I knew from the start it would come to that... but I didn’t realise exactly how he’d do it until it was too late. I tricked him, easy, he shot himself in the head, that was ... it was easy.” John does not watch as Sherlock looks up at him but he can tell (can always tell) that he is staring at him now. “But he was smart, John, and he knew I’d do anything, anything to keep you alive.”
“So you jumped.”
John’s voice surprises himself. Sherlock jumps, slightly. John wants to touch him but he won’t let himself.
“Yes,” Sherlock says.
Now John looks at him, sharp, accusing. (Sherlock is no longer looking at him but at the floor. It shouldn’t hurt. It does.)
“You’re lying to me. You didn’t just jump off of St. Bart’s on a whim, survive unscathed and manage to trick me into thinking you were dead, write me a fucking suicide note, wedge it in a skull and then disappear. That was planned.”
“Of course it was planned,” Sherlock says sharply. His head jerks up and his eyes pierce into John’s. (And dammit if that doesn’t hurt as well.) “I had hours, John, just a few hours to save your life, and Lestrade’s and Mrs. Hudson’s. I had to cover all the options.”
“And you didn’t think, in all your desperation to keep me alive, to tell me - me, your ex-army husband, just in case he might have some tactical suggestions or heaven forbid, be prepared to take care of himself. I survived a bloody warzone, Sherlock, you don’t think I could handle one more person shooting at me?!”
Suddenly, Sherlock is on his feet, right up in John’s face, snarling. “You barely survived Afghanistan, John. Barely. All it takes is one bullet. You know that. And anyway, what about Lestrade? And Mrs. Hudson? No, John. This was the cleanest option. I knew what he would force me to do and I did what I had to do to make sure that in the worst case scenario, I could ensure you would all be safe.”
John (stubborn to a fault) does not back down, though Sherlock is towering over him. (Familiar but strange, to be so forcibly reminded of their height difference.) “What exactly was the worst case scenario, then? Explain it to me, Sherlock, because I still don’t see what part of this situation required you to disappear for nearly two bloody years and let me think you were dead.”
Sherlock huffs annoyance (and that too is familiar, though usually it is directed at Anderson) and his breath is hot and hard on John’s cheek. His eyes are wild with anger and frustration and something that John can’t (doesn’t want to) identify. (It looks like longing, and pain, and suffering.)
(It looks like what John has felt like for months.)
“Moriarty didn’t have a code. Of course that was entirely made up. He was the trigger, the instigator of all of it. Every last bit of it - including the kill-order for you. But there was always the danger, always, that he wasn’t working alone. I had to appear to die because that, and that alone, was the call-off signal. He liked to play along his own rules, and he’d thought it through carefully. He knew I might talk him into ... taking himself off the board but he still wanted the game to play out. He gave me an ultimatum. Kill myself, or kill the three of you. He thought it was funny. I just knew I had to keep you safe.”
“So you jumped.”
“So I jumped,” Sherlock agrees. “He hadn’t expected that, but he’d planned for it. Thorough to a fault, he was. I had to disappear. Mummy helped. Molly helped too.”
“Molly?!” John is shocked (betrayed). (He’d known that Celeste couldn’t be trusted, she is a Holmes, after all, though it be only by marriage, but Molly...)
“I believe we may all have underestimated Molly Hooper,” Sherlock is saying, but John is busy seeing red. Too many people knew, too many people let him believe (let him suffer, let him nearly die with it). People he trusted. People he liked. He doesn’t know what to do with this information. He can feel the anger rising somewhere in his stomach and his fists clench, hard, against it. He wants to listen to the rest (needs to know), but the urge to shout and rage against everything that Sherlock is saying is nearly overwhelming.
“You should have told me,” he says, instead, interrupting a sentence he hadn’t heard the beginning to. “I don’t know how but you should have at least let me know. I’m a soldier, I know about covert operations.”
Sherlock has the gall to laugh in his face.
“John, you may be a soldier but you are a terrible, terrible liar and an even worse actor. You would have acted yourself into an early grave. They had to believe I was dead, and they had to believe you were suffering. Can’t you see? This was the only way. I had to disappear and you had to believe it.”
“I would have come with you,” John says, urgently. (He is desperate now. Sherlock’s decision was so very wrong in so very many ways and he needs him to see it, but he can’t figure out how.) “All you had to do was tell me. I’d have come with you.”
“I know,” Sherlock replies. His voice and his eyes are suddenly so soft that it’s a kick to John’s stomach. “I know you would have, and God, John, it nearly killed me but I had no choice, there was nothing else to do. I had to die so that I could hunt down the rest of the web. I didn’t... I didn’t expect it to take so long.”
Abruptly weak in the knees, John sits down on the edge of the bed heavily. It is a relief to put some space between himself and Sherlock. (Or is it?) John is aware (has always been aware) that he is, generally speaking, an intelligent man but next to Sherlock’s, his brain might as well be that of a five year old. He refuses to believe that there were not other ways out of the situation, but he cannot think of any.
That doesn’t make it any better. It doesn’t relieve his anger (low, dull, but nearly consuming anger, the kind that when it finally boils over is vicious and ruthless and lasting).
He wants (badly) to punch Sherlock.
He wants (more) to kiss him.
He can’t (won’t) do either of those things. Not right now.
“Where did you go?”
Sherlock (staring at him), starts at the question. Hadn’t expected him to speak, or at least not yet. “I came here, first. Falling off a building, no matter how orchestrated, leaves one more than slightly bruised.”
If it weren’t so enraging, John would have laughed at that.
“After that... I don’t remember. Everywhere. Nowhere. I... There was no way to know how far down the chain the command went and I had nothing to work with. I started from the bottom and worked my way up.”
“When you say worked your way up you mean...”
When John looks at him this time Sherlock’s eyes are suddenly shallow, nearly dead. A void of emotion. (It is how he used to look, before he realised John Watson was no ordinary human. It is how he used to look, before he found the missing piece of himself hidden inside John Watson’s blue eyes and wrapped in his jumper-warm skin. It is horrible, empty and lifeless.)
“I mean I killed them. Or saw that they were killed. Or otherwise incapacitated.”
John’s breath leaves him in a shudder. John has killed men before. John is (was) a soldier, in a war, with a gun and people shooting at him and it was either kill or be killed. He’s killed in cold blood as well, but only ever for Sherlock (and somehow that made it alright).
He does not like it, he hates it, that Sherlock has now killed men too. That is his job, killing men to keep Sherlock (and himself) safe.
(It does not make it better that Sherlock was killing these men for him. Hypocritical. John doesn’t care.)
“How many?” he asks, instead, because he needs some how to know the human toll that his safety has somehow taken.
“I don’t know,” Sherlock answers, and his voice is hollow. (John knows that hollowness. He felt it himself, coming home from Afghanistan. He has heard it in the voices of his comrades. It strikes him that Sherlock has suddenly become a soldier as well, in his own right.)
(Though perhaps Sherlock has always really been at war with the world. Now he’s just made it official.)
“And the web? Moriarty’s web?”
Sherlock shakes his head minutely. “It’s... he had a second in command. Moran, he’s called. Sebastian Moran. He’s... resourceful. Now that his boss is out of the way, he’s in charge and he’s enjoying himself. He’s been ... proving difficult.”
“You’re here to catch him.” It is not a question. Sherlock nods agreement anyways. “Can you?”
“Eventually. It’s ... taken some time to track him down. He moves around a lot. Irene has a new plan, she seems to think we stand a good chance.”
“You’re working with Irene? She’s alive?! I thought...”
“You thought Mycroft had her killed? He did try. Several times. It didn’t take. So he gave up and enlisted her. He seems to find it handy to have an associate who literally does not exist anymore. I had little choice in the matter of working with her, though she has proven... enlightening. And infuriating, of course.”
Suddenly, John is not just angry, he’s unbearably, inexorably jealous. He remembers Irene, the way she captured Sherlock’s attention (in the way only John himself ever had). He remembers her stunning, ethereal beauty. He remembers, with especial pain, the way she outclassed him in every way: clever, cunning, witty, and so staggeringly sexy that even John (who’s mind had operated on pretty much a one-track system since falling for Sherlock) had looked twice at her. To think that that she has had unlimited access to Sherlock (John’s husband) for God knows how long is intolerable.
He can feel Sherlock’s knife-sharp eyes searching his face as he sits and fumes, rolling the information around in his brain. He knows that Sherlock knows exactly what he’s thinking and it is maddening.
“John,” Sherlock says, softly. “John, I had no choice. In any of it.”
“You always have a choice, Sherlock Holmes,” John snarls, angrily, and suddenly he finds himself on his feet again, barging his way into Sherlock’s personal space. Sherlock seems to shrink a bit, marginally, and if he were any less enraged John would preen, slightly, at being the only person bar his own mother that could make Sherlock Holmes appear cowed. Instead, he grabs Sherlock’s face with two rough hands and mashes it downwards onto his own. It is less a kiss and more a bite, fuelled by deep anger and rage, but Sherlock nearly melts into it, goes entirely pliant under John’s rough hands and demanding lips and teeth. John forces his tongue into Sherlock’s mouth and he tastes of coffee and it is heartbreakingly familiar and if only he weren’t so angry he would be reeling in the utter, wrenching joy that he is able to do this again.
Sherlock whimpers and curls his hands around John’s shoulders, but no sooner does he do so than John is shoving him back against the wall, hard enough that he lets out a soft grunt of pain, eyes flying open wide to look warily down at John.
Breathing heavily, John’s voice is low and threatening as he growls into Sherlock’s ear. “Listen very carefully to what I’m about to say, Sherlock Holmes, because I will say it once and only once. You made the wrong choice. You should have told me from the beginning what was going on. You should have told your brother. You should have told your mother, for that matter, and we could have figured something out.”
“John, I ...”
“Shut up!” John barks, slamming Sherlock’s shoulders against the wall again. (They are too thin under his hands. John pushes that information away to deal with later.) “Shut up and listen to me because this is something you are going to need to understand very, very well. You and I were a team, Sherlock. In everything. And then you died and it nearly killed me, I nearly died because I couldn’t bear to be without you. You were wrong, Sherlock, it was wrong. Are we clear?”
Sherlock says nothing; he returns John’s glare with a steady gaze. John growls and shoves him again.
“Are. We. Clear?”
Those unearthly eyes of Sherlock’s narrow and he purses his lips. John recognises it for what it is: defiance. With a low bellow of outrage, John shoves himself back into Sherlock’s space, because it is either kiss him (hard) or punch him (harder) and the kissing will always win out. (Sherlock is an addict but so, to a certain degree, is John. The proof is plain for all to see.)
This time, Sherlock is kissing him back, and it is rough and hard and not at all pleasant. John gets his hands tangled in Sherlock’s shirt and all but rips it open, spreading his palms wide across that once-familiar chest (claiming and punishing, all at once). Sherlock moans against his mouth, bites his lip, smears his mouth down across John’s jaw to bite, hard, at John’s collarbone. John growls and shoves one thigh (not trembling) between Sherlocks and ruts, hard, against him. Sherlock stuffs his hand viciously into the front of John’s jeans.
From there it is easy to fall apart. They tear into each other, literally, gasping and snarling and kissing and biting. John, always stronger especially now Sherlock is so emaciated (another thought to be pushed away and dealt with later), has little trouble divesting him of his clothing and shoving him down across the bed.
They wrestle, briefly, pushing and pulling on each other’s skin, kissing and biting in turns, until John gets Sherlock sprawled under him moaning wantonly with John’s tongue buried deep in his arse.
“God, John,” Sherlock gasps, but John just grunts, his nails digging further in to the globes of Sherlock’s buttocks, deep and hard enough to leave small, white half moons standing out across the skin. “John, John, fuck me, come on, fuck me.” Sherlock’s voice is a challenge, not pleading, but goading, and John surges up from between his legs, forcing him over on to his back before shutting him up with a bruising kiss to his lips.
“Baby oil, in the drawer,” John grunts, finally, into his mouth. Sherlock flings an arm out to scrabble around in it and all but hurls it at John, who spills nearly half of it over his fingers. He gives Sherlock a perfunctory two fingers before all but forcing three in (too fast, Sherlock winces, but John tells himself he doesn’t care).
“Come on then,” Sherlock pants, hips canting as John drives unrelenting fingers into him. “Fuck me already.”
John bites at his lips again but withdraws his fingers and abruptly replaces them with the slick head of his cock. Sherlock shouts as he pushes in relentlessly, gripping the arm John has planted next to his head for leverage tightly.
When he bottoms out, John takes a second to get a grip on himself (does not let himself think about how very much it feels like he’s home). Sherlock is writhing underneath him, egging him on with rolls of his hips and every single movement is engineered to get a rise out of John and John, once more, wants to punch him. Instead, he proceeds to fuck the living daylights out of him, pounding into him hard, over and over and over until Sherlock is a heaving, gasping mess, brown hair plastered to his forehead, eyes blown wide and head thrown back against the pillow. Every muscle in his body is tensed as he moves against John’s rhythm. (They are out of practice. Sherlock was dead for eighteen months. Nothing about this is graceful. It is vicious and messy and horrible and Sherlock is the most wonderful thing he has seen in years and it makes John want to cry. It makes John want to fuck him until he can’t even remember his own name.)
“John, John, John, fuck that’s so good, John,” Sherlock is coming undone underneath him but John is not ready, not yet. The spasms of Sherlock’s orgasm are delicious and John all but devours him, swallows the shouting down; his hips have lost any sort of rhythm they ever had until finally, finally, Sherlock jerks his hips and there; John shatters apart above him, silently, eyes slammed shut as his body shudders and shakes into a horrible, messy release.
“John,” Sherlock whispers as John collapses on top of him. Sherlock’s arms come around him and John doesn’t have the energy to push them off. His head is reeling with what they just did, he knows he should never have touched him, he’ll never forgive himself this later, when the anger is gone, but it was either fuck him or kill him with his own bare hands and John can’t bear to see Sherlock die, not again.
When John’s breathing calms, Sherlock looks up at him with big, round eyes and John’s heart shatters (again) into pieces. “God, I missed you,” Sherlock is saying, babbling almost, John can hear it but he doesn’t want to listen.
(Sherlock has come apart underneath him, his anger has passed but John’s has not. Not yet. He wonders, abstractly, if it ever will.)
“I missed you every second of every day, John, John, it was awful, it was unbearable, I can’t breathe without you and I couldn’t come back, I couldn’t, I had to keep going to know you’d be safe, John, you’re everything and he was going to... they were going to... I couldn’t let them, you know that right, you understand that, I couldn’t let them try, even. John?”
John, feeling calmer now, pushes up and out and away, rolling off of Sherlock and on to his back. He feels strangely empty. (The anger is no longer threatening to consume him; it has been beaten back but it sits there still, heavy in his gut.) Sherlock pushes up on one arm and watches him. John can almost feel his trepidation, rolling off him in heavy waves.
“John?”
Closing his eyes, John takes a deep breath. He doesn’t look at Sherlock when he speaks.
“Get out, Sherlock.”
The hitch of Sherlock’s breath should break his heart but right now, John has no heart left to break.
“What?”
“You heard me. Get out. I don’t want to see you again.”
“But...”
“I said go!”
His eyes are open again. (Mistake, he doesn’t want to see that look on Sherlock’s face. Confused. Hurt. Scared. And then ... angry. Again. John is so tired of anger right now but it is everywhere, in everything; John’s entire world right now is a swirling maelstrom of hurt and anger and relief and joy and love, so much love that it hurts him, it cuts him, and the anger seeps into the cuts and burns, dull and sharp at once, and it is all John can do to keep himself clinging to the edge of sanity.)
“No,” Sherlock starts to say. “No, I won’t, not until we’ve talked more ...”
“We’ve talked enough, Sherlock, and now I want you to go away.”
“John...”
“You died, Sherlock!” He is shouting now, sitting up, pointing in Sherlock’s face. (He is slipping, everything is burning, his skin his stomach his mind his heart.) How hard is it to understand?! Sherlock has never been one for emotions but this is above and beyond. “You thought it was better for me to think that you had died than to ask for help and I can’t ... I love you, Christ but I love you and you died, you were gone, gone forever and it nearly killed me, I nearly killed myself and the whole time you were alive and somehow, somehow, you think it’s acceptable to waltz back in and expect me to forgive you for putting me through that.”
“I don’t want you to forgive me, I want you to understand!”
“I don’t understand, though, Sherlock! You chose, you chose to go it alone rather than ask for help or even to tell me what was happening and you let me think you were dead. Dead! ... I can’t, Sherlock, it was wrong, you should never have kept this from me, not ever. I don’t want to see you right now. I want you to leave, and I don’t want to see you again.”
There is a long pause in which Sherlock all but crumples. John hates him, in that moment, just as much as he loves him, though it’s possible he hates himself more. But he doesn’t know what else to do. He can’t think with Sherlock around and he is so angry he no longer trusts himself.
“What about the children,” Sherlock asks, finally. His voice is that of a man condemned. John closes his eyes.
“What about the children?”
“Can I see them?”
“Sherlock.”
“John, if you want to cut me out of your life, fine, that’s... that’s your right and I’ll ... I’ll do what ever, we can ... get a divorce or... whatever, but ... John, my children, I...”
“You don’t know them, Sherlock.”
“Doesn’t mean they’re not mine.”
“It very nearly does.” John sighs. Sherlock looks as if he might literally fall to pieces, a porcelain doll shattered across the floor. John’s chest aches with how much he loves this man. Even now, full of anger and hurt, he can’t help himself. “I don’t want a divorce, Sherlock.” He laughs, bitterly. “I just... I’m so angry with you and I can’t process it if you’re here. I need you to go away and I don’t want you to contact us until I say it’s okay.”
“John...”
“Please, Sherlock.”
Sherlock takes a deep breath, considering, before nodding slowly. (John is vaguely shocked that he’s giving in. The old Sherlock would never back down so quickly. It’s nearly worrying.)
“Will you promise to take me back?”
“I can’t promise anything, Sherlock. Not right now. I half want to kill you myself. I nearly did, earlier.”
Once more, Sherlock nods. (John is, once more, shocked.)
(Something in Sherlock is different. Something small, but it’s definitely there. Sherlock has fought back and has been stubborn but it’s nothing like what it might have been, not at all. John doesn’t understand it and he doesn’t expect he ever will.)
They are silent a few more moments. John lets himself drink Sherlock’s face in (he is angry but that doesn’t change the fact that he’s missed this man so much he has felt it in his bones for months) before saying, “I’m ... I’m going to take the twins home to Baker Street tomorrow,” John begins, but he is cut off by Sherlock’s sudden emphatic, “No!”
John stops short, looking alarmed. Sherlock’s eyes are blown wide again, frantic. “You mustn’t leave Eastwell, John, it’s not safe.”
“What do you mean, it’s not safe? What’s wrong with Baker Street?”
“It’s too open, too easily targeted. They know where it is and they’ve probably bugged it just as much as Mycroft has. You can’t John, you have to stay here, this is the safest place in England for you right now.”
“You broke in with a harpoon,” John points out acerbically.
“Yes but John, I helped design the security systems and what’s more, I grew up here. And actually the harpoon was already here. I was requisitioning it.”
“I can’t stay here. I might accidentally kill your mother and then Mycroft will probably torture me with spoons.”
“You have to stay here,” Sherlock all but pleads with him, lurching forward to clutch desperately at his arm. “Please, promise me, you’ll keep the twins here. I don’t care if you never talk to Mummy again but promise me you won’t leave until we take care of Moran.”
The thought of being trapped in Eastwell with the people who have been lying to him for months on end, watching him suffer and doing nothing about it, sends a cold shiver through John’s spine. But John is no longer a free agent. There is a crackle on the monitor next to the bed, a soft whimper, that reminds him (needlessly but concretely) of that fact.
If it were just him, he’d have already left, of course. He’d have been out of there, away from the whole pack of them, long ago.
Of course, if it had just been him, there was every chance that Sherlock wouldn’t have come tonight anyways and he’d still be existing in miserable oblivion. (Or, quite possibly, not existing at all.)
No point thinking like that. John Watson is no longer a free agent, he is a father, and the safety of his children is paramount.
“Fine,” he bites out. “Fine, we’ll stay here.”
“Thank you,” Sherlock gasps; his clutch tightens on John’s bicep - John flinches.
“I’m not doing it for you,” he says, coldly. “I’m doing it to keep my children safe.”
“Our children, John.”
They are, of course, not John’s children. They are Sherlock’s. But Sherlock was dead and John was there when they were born. It is John’s name on their birth certificates. So he supposes they are technically their children, but something small and jealous and angry within John is shouting that Sherlock has to earn that right first, before he can lay claim to them.
“We’ll see,” John says, tearing his eyes away from Sherlock’s plaintive face. Sherlock (astonishingly) says nothing. Suddenly, John remembers something. “Hang on, did you say Irene is working for Mycroft? Does that mean ... are you working with Mycroft?!”
Sherlock snorts. “Unfortunately. It seemed ... prudent. As I said, I had little ... choice.”
John gapes at him (his husband, back from the dead, and now a complete stranger in his bed). “You’re willingly working with Mycroft?”
“Not willingly. I had no choice in the matter.”
“What could Mycroft ever do to convince you to take his help?” John asks incredulously, staring unabashed at the man sitting in front of him. (His face, so familiar, so beloved, eerily sunken and strange. Sherlock is back from the dead but there is something ... something different. He does not entirely know the man sitting here with badly cut hair and dark rings around his eyes.)
(Be careful what you wish for, John Watson.)
The look Sherlock is giving him is familiar, though. (It is a relief, even if it is maddening.) Patronising, but fond. One eyebrow quirked perilously high; cupid’s bow lips pursed disapprovingly. “He’s my brother, John, awful as it is. He knows my weaknesses better than any man, better than myself, and he is not above exploiting them. A few months back he acquired rather a large amount of ... leverage. Twice as much as he bargained for, in fact.”
The words slam into John’s chest like a sack of bricks.
The twins, John thinks, wildly. He’s talking about the twins.
Sherlock’s smile as he watches the look of dawning spread across John’s face is wan and desolate. “You may think me despicable, John, but my brother has long since discarded his moral compass in the face of ... how would he put it ... efficiency.”
And there it is. The line, of what John is and is not able to take. The line of what is bearable and what is not. He can handle (badly), the fact that Sherlock is not dead. He suspects he will, one day, accept that Sherlock willingly deceived him and caused him inestimable amounts of misery. But he cannot, will never be able to bear the knowledge that his children, the two things he loves most in the world (besides, maybe, his husband, the infuriatingly glorious and alive man sitting in front of him watching him intently) were only a product of one of Mycroft’s designs; that they were merely an efficient means of reaching an end.
John has had enough.
“Get out,” he growls, low and serious. “Get out right now. I can’t look at you, at any of you right now. Get out.” Sherlock’s smile does not fade, but it becomes infinitely more wretched.
“Of course, John,” he murmurs. John does not watch as he slides out of the bed, long lean form (covered, now, in bruises and scars that John has never seen before, not that he’s looking, because he’s not) uncoiling to catch up and pull on his (hideous, filthy) clothes.
Sherlock pads to the door and John is still not watching him leave, is instead sitting and trembling with something that is so far beyond fury it is indefinable, his eyes fixed resolutely and unseeingly on the doorframe. But Sherlock pauses before slipping through it, hesitating (and John has almost never seen him do that, it is unfamiliar, to see Sherlock unsure, and John hates it).
“John. I ... I love you.”
He does not say anything, but John does let his eyes slide, glacial in pace and emotion, to look at him across the darkened room.
Sherlock bites his lip, lets out a breath he didn’t even seem to be holding. His shoulders slump. He is defeated.
“I love you,” he whispers again, into the darkness that sprawls, seemingly infinite, between them.
John closes his eyes as Sherlock slips through the door, closing it gently behind him.
He doesn’t sleep that night, not one wink; he simply sits in the bed that was once Sherlock’s, staring at the door across the slowly lightening room, quite silently falling to pieces.
-------------------
The door of the room slams shut. Sherlock sags against it. The room is tinged with early morning light. Irene is (predictably) awake, propped up on the bed in her (frankly ridiculous) fuchsia silk nightgown and wrapped in a bath robe. She pauses briefly in flicking through the magazine in her lap to glance up at Sherlock, one (infuriatingly well-groomed) eyebrow arching sanctimoniously.
She knows.
“You prat,” she says, before turning right back to her magazine.
Sherlock closes his eyes.
His mind is strangely calm. He feels, faintly, that his mind should by all rights be reeling, staggering under the weight of everything that has happened since he left the room just a few hours earlier.
Instead, he feels ... He is fiercely numb.
That’s not quite right.
His mind is numb. His chest hurts. His heart is cramping beneath his ribs; it is agony. His limbs are heavy, and there is a dull, incessant ache behind his eyes that he knows, somehow, will not go away no matter how much paracetemol he pops.
The world is beginning to spin around him. He grabs hold of the door for support, for some sort of grounding.
Sherlock is used to dealing with the onslaught of information that is every day life, where every tiny sound and smell and sight and taste and sensation is an explosion across his brain. He is used to filtering out the significant from the insignificant; he cuts his way through a churning sea of data every minute of every day and he does it (now) with the (practiced) ease of a duck gliding through water.
He should be able to process these events like he does everything else. He should sort it out into significant and insignificant; his mind should be whirling away, cataloguing the important facts and discarding the trivial.
It’s just... he can’t quite work out what parts of this night are, in fact, trivial.
With a rising tide of horror, he thinks that perhaps none of it was trivial.
He wonders if this night was, in fact, the most significant night of his life.
His fingers clutch tighter on the curved brass handle of the door.
(Sense memory triggers. His index finger tingles with the recollection of Hamish’s lips, Anna’s fingernail, John’s clavicle.)
(Focus. He has to focus or he’ll never be able to step away from this door. He’ll never be able to stand up again.)
And if it was the most important (the least deletable) night of his life, what does that mean?
(It means that holding his children is more devastatingly momentous than holding his sister.)
(It means that losing John is more remarkable, somehow, than gaining him was.)
Sherlock is used to wading bodily through torrents of cold hard data, he is an expert at sorting out apparently contradicting external stimuli, but when faced with floods of conflicting emotions, he is immediately overwhelmed.
He can’t move. He can’t think. All he can feel is the bite of brass in his hands and the clamouring din of emotions rattling about in his head.
Irene is no longer looking at her magazine. He is dimly aware that she is watching him, as a mother bear might watch her cub.
He cannot bear to think about her right now.
He wants to go back.
Go back and do what, though?
John didn’t want him there. (It is a cold-hot knife blow to the stomach, the knowledge that John doesn’t want him.) The children aren’t old enough to want anything besides food and water and clean nappies. He doesn’t belong there.
Except he doesn’t belong anywhere else either.
The writhing tide of emotion threatens to drown him and his knees quiver under the assault.
“Sherlock,” Irene says. It is more a whisper than anything, a pained exhale, as if she can see the waves that are about to claim him. He scrunches his eyes closed tighter.
Sherlock has never been one for regrets. He doesn’t have time to regret things, usually, and anyways he only ever acts on his convictions (so what is there to regret?)
But now... now he wishes that something, somewhere, had gone differently.
He had acted, that day, on his convictions, on his understanding of the situation. He had chosen the best available course of action. He had to keep John safe and he had to do whatever he could to ensure that John’s safety was long-lasting. (He’d failed, before, to keep the people he loved safe. He refused, point blank refused, to let it happen again.)
He’d done what he had to do. John said he was wrong to do so.
He doesn’t agree with John (lovely, spectacular John), but he is beginning to wish he could.
“Sherlock, come on.” Irene is standing in front of him. Her eyes, usually sharp and alert, are soft and worried. (Sherlock entertains the notion that she has real feelings for all of a second before dismissing it out of hand.)
He lets her, though. He lets her pry his hand from the handle and push him, bodily, towards the bed. He stumbles like a man drunk.
The bed is soft and warm but all he can think of is John and his flashing eyes and his hands, rough and possessive and gentle, and the way it felt to have John buried as far inside him as he could get after months upon months of aching, cavernous emptiness.
(It felt like coming home. It felt like being whole again. It felt like he was being dragged, forcibly, back to life.)
Irene is clucking over him like a mother hen.
“When will you learn to listen to me?” she asks, but Sherlock doesn’t think she actually wants an answer. He curls in on himself, feebly aware that he is shaking.
Sherlock is surprised when he feels her lay down next to him; even more so when he feels one of her thin arms snaking around his waist. (He is not used to touching people that are not John, but this is not sexual, this is ... this is almost friendly.)
(Are he and Irene friends?)
(Insignificant.)
“What happened?” Of course she wants to know, odious woman, always prying. (She sounds concerned, but Sherlock knows her, she could sell a cow its own milk.)
He shakes his head, pressing his face into the pillow.
He couldn’t form words now if he tried.
The point of this, all of this, was to keep John safe.
If what John was saying was true (and what John says is always true), it nearly killed him anyway.
Sherlock cannot gauge pain in others, not very well at least. He is always aware, in a basic way, of people’s emotional states, but he is not very good at discerning between quite upset and devastatingly broken.
John’s voice, though, had been ragged and raw. His eyes were ringed with dark circles that were not just from sleeplessness but from months and months of unutterable sorrow.
(What have I done?)
He can gauge (inaccurately), John’s level of pain using his own. (Crushing, debilitating, all consuming - the harrowing fact of tearing his body away from his soul, leaving him raw and aching and gasping for breath.)
It had been awful, but it had been necessary. (There was no other way. There wasn’t time and Mycroft is a liar, had lied to him before, had betrayed him before. He had no other options.)
Irene is still talking behind him. She has her fingers in his hair.
(It reminds him of being a very young child, long ago, sobbing and screaming and dying inside while his mother sat behind him and stroked his hair, as if that could put the world to rights again, as if that could bring her back to him.)
(It feels good, though.)
A hot, salty tear traces a course down his cheek. Irene brushes it away with the back of her thumb.
“I told you not to go,” she repeats. Sherlock squeezes his eyes together again. Another tear falls. “What happened? You saw John, didn’t you? You should tell me, Sherlock, I need to know what I’m dealing with here.”
Sherlock swallows, blinks, nods.
“Oh, Sherlock.”
She squeezes his shoulder. He doesn’t have the energy to push her hands away.
They lay like that for a while. The sun rises beyond the curtains. Irene’s hands are never still, petting his hair and squeezing his shoulder. He doesn’t believe any of it, but it is, at the very least, comforting (in the basest, most physical sense that any touch can be comforting).
Sherlock’s chest does not stop hurting.
He gave up everything for John, but John hates him for it. (He’d said love, but Sherlock had seen the steel in his eyes.)
Suddenly, the words come. “I have to get them back,” he says. Irene’s hand stills on his head for a brief second before continuing to pet him. “I need your help,” he says. “I have to get them back.” Irene smiles against the back of his head.
“You always need my help, Sherlock. Lucky for you, I actually want to help you.”