Run to the Devil (Heart With No Companion)
I just have a lot of feelings after Reichenbach. I write better when I'm not overly emotional...but well, that's not going to happen anytime soon, is it? So this is basically gratuitous Post-Reichenbach flangst.
Title: Run to the Devil (Heart With No Companion)
Fandom: Sherlock (BBC)
Pairing: Sherlock/John, pre-slash
Spoilers: All of season 2
Disclaimers: No character is mine, title from 'Sinnerman' by Nina Simone and 'Heart With No Companion' by Leonard Cohen
Warnings: Murder, a bit of gore. What I thought was a rather erratic narrator until I realized that’s just how I write Sherlock without John. Sherlock should probably always be his own warning.
Summary: Sherlock leaves England to unravel Moriarty’s web, and then he returns to unravel his own.
the spider and the bee, ofttimes,
Suck from one flower.
-Ben Jonson, ‘Volpone; Or, The Fox’
What Sherlock will remember most, later, about the time after the pool and before the fall, is John.
But then, John is what he remembers most, regardless.
*** *** ***
John had never worn sunglasses because exposure in the Afghan desert had made the weak
English sun seem harmless and tame in comparison. He had laughed the first time he saw Sherlock wear a pair-apparently delighted by the human necessity--and Sherlock had, ridiculously, continued to wear the glasses as often as he deemed feasible, as a reminder of the brief triumph of making John Watson laugh.
Italy is hot in July. Sherlock walks in the shade out of necessity and not just habit, and only thinks of John whenever he puts on sunglasses, so he breaks his pair and never seems to find the time to buy another.
He avoids the direct sunlight and sleeps only when his body gives him no other option and speaks Italian with a flawless regional accent. Within a month he has discovered four drug trafficking rings, one freelance assassin and two high-powered plots to overthrow the government. He doesn't bother to stop either the trafficking or the plots himself, simply scribbles off an absent-minded note and dedicates it to the police before leaving it on the bed of his temporary room and moving on to another. Everything is transient.
He visits only the mercenary assassin himself. He breaks into the man's flat and waits on the sofa until he gets home, beginning to talk before the door is fully closed behind the man's back.
“Your name is Sebastian Moran,” he says, not looking up from the book on his lap. “Your father was an ambassador until his habit of taking teenage boys to bed came to light. You and your mother went back to London but you don't like England because your father's name isn't appreciated in his old circles. The woman who owns this flat knew your mother but doesn't know you're here. Jim Moriarty hired you to kill John Watson if I lived. You followed a rumour about my well-being here. To ascertain whether I am Sherlock Holmes, you've been spying on me.” Sherlock looks up, eyes the gun in Moran's hand before raising one eyebrow and smirking at the man “How is that working for you?”
*** *** ***
Sherlock uses funds from Mummy Holmes and uses the scarce information Molly is able to find under his instructions, and he doesn't think about John because he can't; because long ago a man threatened Sherlock's heart beside a pool and John had worn explosives. But sometimes he can't help it, because John is synonymous with sunglasses and blood and home. So the only logical thing he can do is forget a man named Sherlock Holmes who, quite unexpectedly, realized he had a heart one day.
Aliases are easy to take and discard, and by the time Sherlock has burned through eight of them and half as many countries he has almost forgotten the significance of a specific flat in London. Until, of course, he finds the man who would have killed Mrs. Hudson and Sherlock kills him in cold blood.
Afterwards, he crouches beside the body, steeples his fingers under his chin, and considers how the body fell, the way the blood pools in familiar circles. He reaches out a gloved hand and tilts the head, just so. He bends and moves the man's arms and then his right leg. He thinks of Sally Donovan's faith in his ability to kill. Once, he would have considered the specific positioning of the body a clue, and the trail would have lead right to Sherlock Holmes. He wonders if this is a more proper “note” than his phone call to John-a plea for recognition, a cry in the dark, a call on a ledge. He wonders if John will learn of the death and wonder, just for a moment, at the startling resemblance. Sherlock wonders if John would care.
He closes his eyes, thinks of sonatas and minuets and the languages that fall so easily from his tongue, and when he leaves it is as Ivan Greene, and Sherlock Holmes is just a fraud he once read about.
**** *** ***
In Sweden and then Germany Eion Jones is a charming, vapid tourist, and in Switzerland Xoan Beert is an introverted professor. In Zurich Xoan finds himself inexplicably buying a pair of sunglasses that seem, somehow, familiar; and that night Sherlock Holmes breaks them because sentiment will do nothing but get him killed.
Sherlock uncovers a gang of Moriarty's men just as the church bells of Bern ring in the New Year, and he kills them all with a stolen gun. After, he indulges his affinity for the rooftops of tall buildings and watches the city slowly quiet and lights gradually dim. And when the sun rises it finds Sherlock Holmes a broken man perched on a ledge, allowing himself a moment of reprieve, a moment when he does not have to shunt memories of John and the flat on Baker Street to the very dredges of his mind. In the golden light of dawn he allows himself to open the web browser on his phone and hesitates only a second before typing in the address of John's blog.
Reading John's words should not ruin Sherlock as it does, and it shouldn't make continuing harder, but still Sherlock has to force himself off the roof and into the third year of John's absence (which shouldn't feel like drowning, but it does.)
*** *** ****
When Sherlock sleeps he dreams and so he doesn't sleep until he must to avoid collapsing, and when Sherlock eats he remembers so he eats very little and only when there is something sufficiently interesting to distract him. And if sometimes it feels as though his heart is breaking, that was always the idea.
What Sherlock remembers most, now, when the temptation has proven too great and sentiment seems to leak around the edges of his thoughts, is John. But then, that is nothing new.
Moriarty had a web with a thousand strings, but Sherlock knows the strongest ties, the thickest strings. No longer does each man he kills lead him to another. Now he is picking off stray flies, the ones too dangerous to leave when they could have knowledge of Moriarty’s final problem. If Sherlock was a man prone to sentimentality, he would have staggered under the relief of knowing his task was nearly done.
France is damp during spring, but Sherlock settles there regardless, eating at dingy cafes and studying the profiles of police officers Molly has attempted to amass over the years. When her information proves insufficient he hacks into Lestrade’s computer and doesn’t bother to feel triumphant about the ease with which he does so. In the end, it is so obvious who Moriarty’s mole within Scotland Yard is that Sherlock spends his time cursing the ineptitude of the officers as he fires off a quick text to Molly and books the next available flight to the country he has not seen in three years.
*** *** ***
Once the mole is dead and only Lestrade contacted-a quick text of Officer dead. Spy for Moriarty. Self-defence. SH, and Sherlock knows Lestrade will ignore the text, thinking it a hoax until he learns of the body, but it should stand as a sufficient greeting, proof of Sherlock’s existence-Sherlock makes his way to Baker Street in the dark. It is obvious at once that John no longer lives there. The footsteps on the stoop are muddy, obviously Mrs. Hudson’s, and the lights of 221B are dark and John had a habit of always leaving one light on in case of emergency. Sherlock gazes at the door for several minutes, as cars and buses and cabs pass behind him, the familiar sounds of London assaulting his ears once more. Eventually, he turns to face the nearest camera (and really, had Mycroft thought he had been subtle with its placement?). He stares at the camera for a minute, eyebrow raised, long enough to alert Mycroft to his presence if Mycroft had not already been made aware of it. Then, almost hesitantly, he knocks on the door, waiting for the familiar sounds of Mrs. Hudson unlocking the deadbolt.
“Mrs. Hudson,” Sherlock greets, clearing his throat. “Where’s John?”
She does not reply, simply stands at the door and wrings her hands, her face white and drawn. Sherlock wonders at the significance of the lack of new tenants in 221B. “Sherlock!” she gasps. “You--”
“Quite,” he says drily. “Perhaps we should go inside.”
*** *** ***
John’s new flat is decrepit and dirty, and Sherlock braces himself before knocking on the door. It take John less than a minute to open it-evidence of trouble sleeping, given the early hour.
“John,” Sherlock begins, but is interrupted by the slam of the door. Sherlock winces and tries again, “John, please.”
“Don’t…You, you don’t get to do this. Don’t…dress up like him. Don’t imitate him in any way. This isn’t a joke, I won’t give you anything. God damn you!” John says, voice muffled through the wood of the door.
“John,” Sherlock repeats, uselessly. “I know it isn’t a joke. I wouldn’t do that.” He tries for authoritative “Open the door, John.”
John obeys, hands shaking and leaning against the doorjamb for support. “Go away,” he says, as though a minute’s fight is all he had left in him. “Just…go.”
Sherlock reaches out a hand, tries not to remember doing the same thing on a rooftop. “I came back,” he says quietly. “Couldn’t…” his voice fails, and he starts again. “It really is me, John I swear.”
John shakes his head in denial but is already lifting his own handing, grasping Sherlock’s how it couldn’t three years ago, and his whole body begins to tremble as he finds the pulse point in Sherlock’s wrist. “You bastard,” he whispers, “you bastard.”
“I-“ Sherlock starts, but John is already pulling his hand back, curling it into a fist and Sherlock doesn’t bother to deflect it before it hits his face because the promise of pain seems too much like absolution for him to try. He falls to the ground and looks up only to find John on the ground as well, legs in front of him and hands in his lap, staring blankly at Sherlock from the doorway. “You died,” John whispers. “You phoned me, and you made me watch, and then you died.”
“No,” Sherlock says, “I just had to make you think that.”
John is shaking his head again, and Sherlock kneels beside him. “Moriarty had men ready to kill you and Mrs Hudson and Lestrade,” he says urgently. “He was going to have you killed.”
“Unless you jumped,” John says, words shaky. He cups Sherlock’s face between his hands, as though he needs the physical touch to convince himself once more than this is real. John closes his eyes and brings Sherlock closer until their foreheads touch.
“I had to,” Sherlock whispers into the space between their mouths, and when John begins to cry quietly before him Sherlock is only slightly awkward in bringing him in for an embrace.
*** *** ***
Sherlock is not the man he was three years ago, the man who asked his flatmate to watch him die because he needed the validation of John’s continuing existence. He isn’t half that whole.
But if Sherlock isn’t half the man he used to be, then John is a mere ghost of his former self. His face is drawn and he looks as though he hasn’t slept a night through in three years. When Sherlock finds his way to the kitchen, as though making tea for John will help anything, he finds it barely stocked, and only the minimum of utensils in the cupboards. He finds tea in a dusty corner of a shelf and heats water on the stove. When he carries the chipped mug to John the man laughs shakily, and that is more than Sherlock ever let himself hope for.
They work one case, a week after Sherlock came back to England, and John finds it ridiculously amusing to stroll onto the crime scene, Sherlock in tow, and watch the officers react to Sherlock’s presence. John and Lestrade stand smirking in a corner as the others take in the news of Sherlock’s survival, and for the first time Sherlock understands why John ignored his request and took the time to prove to the world Sherlock’s innocence, the truth about Moriarty and deductions made from minimal clues.
After, the case nicely closed and both of them on the sofa, Sherlock says, almost idly “I thought we might take a break.”
“A break?” John asks, shocked.
“Yes,” Sherlock repeats. “In France, perhaps. We could study bees.”
“Bees,” John repeats dumbly.
“Yes,” Sherlock says placidly, because he can’t explain how much he had envied their simple lives, how he had seen them each summer and thought of John and London and running in the dark.
“You. A break. From,” John waves his hand around the flat, in-eloquently, “this.”
And so Sherlock attempts to explain, haltingly and without eye contact, how he would once have though a case so intricate it spanned years and countries would have been infinitely better than a flat on Baker Street. But that hadn’t been true, in the end. Sherlock murmurs of silence, of being unable to speak his deductions aloud for fear of revealing himself. Of how the lost three years seem to have unbalanced something necessary, teared something inside his brain, quite inexplicably changed him. How it feels, sometimes, as though maybe three years with John would right the balance, would demonstrate the necessity of his past absence, would fix them both.
John places a steady hand on his knee once he is finished, and Sherlock grabs it, holds it tight, because this, right here, seems like it could validate loss and pain and fear and all the other emotions Sherlock had simultaneously caused and hidden from.
John squeezes back just as tightly, desperately. “So, bees then?” he asks after clearing his throat.
And Sherlock smiles and wonders whether that means there will be time, later, to bring himself to tell John about the importance of bees.
** *** ***
What Sherlock remembers most about the wait after the pool and before the fall, is John and an intrusive sense of domesticity, and occasionally having to pause and stare at John and wonder whether any time Moriarty grants them will be enough.
In retrospect, Italy had been easy. Barely months into the chase, strong on adrenaline and certainty, so convinced he could become someone else. Two years later, and Switzerland had been more difficult because it was cold and stark and Sherlock had already been gone so long and he didn’t know what John was doing or whether Lestrade’s percentage of closed cases had risen significantly or whether John still had a cup of tea in the mornings or used his cane or worked in the same clinic.
England was supposed to be easy, but it isn’t. It is awkward around John the first few weeks of Sherlock’s return, and Sherlock is suddenly so filled with guilt it threatens to bleed into everything he does. John still has a cup of tea in the mornings, but he uses his cane and no longer works at the clinic and doesn’t live in Baker Street and it takes Sherlock weeks to accept these changes, and years more to accept that he was not there to witness them-even more, that he was their cause.
Sherlock takes John to France, and they do not frequent the cafes Sherlock is familiar with and they book a hotel that only accepts reservations longer than an hour. John books them only one room, with one bed, and Sherlock doesn’t comment because he needs it too: the proof that John is safe and close to him when he goes to bed and when he wakes in the middle of the night.
John thinks France is beautiful during the summer, and Sherlock can usually be cajoled into agreeing with him when he waxes poetic. They visit all the tourist traps upon John’s suggestion, and they spend hours walking to nowhere in particular and John no longer uses his cane. And one day, John walks into their room at the hotel and says, “I saw a bee.”
“Oh?” Sherlock asks, peering over the top of his book.
John nods, picks at invisible lint on his jumper. “Did you know that there’s a place that sells honey, quite nearby? Was thinking of visiting it tomorrow, if you’re up to it.”
And Sherlock smiles, because that seems the only appropriate response.
London Bridge, the rain at last
Back in these arms again
I'm sorry I hurt you
I hurt me too
And I can do this alone
But we can do this so much better
Together, together, together
I put my honour in waste
Pull you closer and embrace
So divided we fall
But stronger we stand
Together
-Patrick Wolf, Together
Title: Run to the Devil (Heart With No Companion)
Fandom: Sherlock (BBC)
Pairing: Sherlock/John, pre-slash
Spoilers: All of season 2
Disclaimers: No character is mine, title from 'Sinnerman' by Nina Simone and 'Heart With No Companion' by Leonard Cohen
Warnings: Murder, a bit of gore. What I thought was a rather erratic narrator until I realized that’s just how I write Sherlock without John. Sherlock should probably always be his own warning.
Summary: Sherlock leaves England to unravel Moriarty’s web, and then he returns to unravel his own.
the spider and the bee, ofttimes,
Suck from one flower.
-Ben Jonson, ‘Volpone; Or, The Fox’
What Sherlock will remember most, later, about the time after the pool and before the fall, is John.
But then, John is what he remembers most, regardless.
*** *** ***
John had never worn sunglasses because exposure in the Afghan desert had made the weak
English sun seem harmless and tame in comparison. He had laughed the first time he saw Sherlock wear a pair-apparently delighted by the human necessity--and Sherlock had, ridiculously, continued to wear the glasses as often as he deemed feasible, as a reminder of the brief triumph of making John Watson laugh.
Italy is hot in July. Sherlock walks in the shade out of necessity and not just habit, and only thinks of John whenever he puts on sunglasses, so he breaks his pair and never seems to find the time to buy another.
He avoids the direct sunlight and sleeps only when his body gives him no other option and speaks Italian with a flawless regional accent. Within a month he has discovered four drug trafficking rings, one freelance assassin and two high-powered plots to overthrow the government. He doesn't bother to stop either the trafficking or the plots himself, simply scribbles off an absent-minded note and dedicates it to the police before leaving it on the bed of his temporary room and moving on to another. Everything is transient.
He visits only the mercenary assassin himself. He breaks into the man's flat and waits on the sofa until he gets home, beginning to talk before the door is fully closed behind the man's back.
“Your name is Sebastian Moran,” he says, not looking up from the book on his lap. “Your father was an ambassador until his habit of taking teenage boys to bed came to light. You and your mother went back to London but you don't like England because your father's name isn't appreciated in his old circles. The woman who owns this flat knew your mother but doesn't know you're here. Jim Moriarty hired you to kill John Watson if I lived. You followed a rumour about my well-being here. To ascertain whether I am Sherlock Holmes, you've been spying on me.” Sherlock looks up, eyes the gun in Moran's hand before raising one eyebrow and smirking at the man “How is that working for you?”
*** *** ***
Sherlock uses funds from Mummy Holmes and uses the scarce information Molly is able to find under his instructions, and he doesn't think about John because he can't; because long ago a man threatened Sherlock's heart beside a pool and John had worn explosives. But sometimes he can't help it, because John is synonymous with sunglasses and blood and home. So the only logical thing he can do is forget a man named Sherlock Holmes who, quite unexpectedly, realized he had a heart one day.
Aliases are easy to take and discard, and by the time Sherlock has burned through eight of them and half as many countries he has almost forgotten the significance of a specific flat in London. Until, of course, he finds the man who would have killed Mrs. Hudson and Sherlock kills him in cold blood.
Afterwards, he crouches beside the body, steeples his fingers under his chin, and considers how the body fell, the way the blood pools in familiar circles. He reaches out a gloved hand and tilts the head, just so. He bends and moves the man's arms and then his right leg. He thinks of Sally Donovan's faith in his ability to kill. Once, he would have considered the specific positioning of the body a clue, and the trail would have lead right to Sherlock Holmes. He wonders if this is a more proper “note” than his phone call to John-a plea for recognition, a cry in the dark, a call on a ledge. He wonders if John will learn of the death and wonder, just for a moment, at the startling resemblance. Sherlock wonders if John would care.
He closes his eyes, thinks of sonatas and minuets and the languages that fall so easily from his tongue, and when he leaves it is as Ivan Greene, and Sherlock Holmes is just a fraud he once read about.
**** *** ***
In Sweden and then Germany Eion Jones is a charming, vapid tourist, and in Switzerland Xoan Beert is an introverted professor. In Zurich Xoan finds himself inexplicably buying a pair of sunglasses that seem, somehow, familiar; and that night Sherlock Holmes breaks them because sentiment will do nothing but get him killed.
Sherlock uncovers a gang of Moriarty's men just as the church bells of Bern ring in the New Year, and he kills them all with a stolen gun. After, he indulges his affinity for the rooftops of tall buildings and watches the city slowly quiet and lights gradually dim. And when the sun rises it finds Sherlock Holmes a broken man perched on a ledge, allowing himself a moment of reprieve, a moment when he does not have to shunt memories of John and the flat on Baker Street to the very dredges of his mind. In the golden light of dawn he allows himself to open the web browser on his phone and hesitates only a second before typing in the address of John's blog.
Reading John's words should not ruin Sherlock as it does, and it shouldn't make continuing harder, but still Sherlock has to force himself off the roof and into the third year of John's absence (which shouldn't feel like drowning, but it does.)
*** *** ****
When Sherlock sleeps he dreams and so he doesn't sleep until he must to avoid collapsing, and when Sherlock eats he remembers so he eats very little and only when there is something sufficiently interesting to distract him. And if sometimes it feels as though his heart is breaking, that was always the idea.
What Sherlock remembers most, now, when the temptation has proven too great and sentiment seems to leak around the edges of his thoughts, is John. But then, that is nothing new.
Moriarty had a web with a thousand strings, but Sherlock knows the strongest ties, the thickest strings. No longer does each man he kills lead him to another. Now he is picking off stray flies, the ones too dangerous to leave when they could have knowledge of Moriarty’s final problem. If Sherlock was a man prone to sentimentality, he would have staggered under the relief of knowing his task was nearly done.
France is damp during spring, but Sherlock settles there regardless, eating at dingy cafes and studying the profiles of police officers Molly has attempted to amass over the years. When her information proves insufficient he hacks into Lestrade’s computer and doesn’t bother to feel triumphant about the ease with which he does so. In the end, it is so obvious who Moriarty’s mole within Scotland Yard is that Sherlock spends his time cursing the ineptitude of the officers as he fires off a quick text to Molly and books the next available flight to the country he has not seen in three years.
*** *** ***
Once the mole is dead and only Lestrade contacted-a quick text of Officer dead. Spy for Moriarty. Self-defence. SH, and Sherlock knows Lestrade will ignore the text, thinking it a hoax until he learns of the body, but it should stand as a sufficient greeting, proof of Sherlock’s existence-Sherlock makes his way to Baker Street in the dark. It is obvious at once that John no longer lives there. The footsteps on the stoop are muddy, obviously Mrs. Hudson’s, and the lights of 221B are dark and John had a habit of always leaving one light on in case of emergency. Sherlock gazes at the door for several minutes, as cars and buses and cabs pass behind him, the familiar sounds of London assaulting his ears once more. Eventually, he turns to face the nearest camera (and really, had Mycroft thought he had been subtle with its placement?). He stares at the camera for a minute, eyebrow raised, long enough to alert Mycroft to his presence if Mycroft had not already been made aware of it. Then, almost hesitantly, he knocks on the door, waiting for the familiar sounds of Mrs. Hudson unlocking the deadbolt.
“Mrs. Hudson,” Sherlock greets, clearing his throat. “Where’s John?”
She does not reply, simply stands at the door and wrings her hands, her face white and drawn. Sherlock wonders at the significance of the lack of new tenants in 221B. “Sherlock!” she gasps. “You--”
“Quite,” he says drily. “Perhaps we should go inside.”
*** *** ***
John’s new flat is decrepit and dirty, and Sherlock braces himself before knocking on the door. It take John less than a minute to open it-evidence of trouble sleeping, given the early hour.
“John,” Sherlock begins, but is interrupted by the slam of the door. Sherlock winces and tries again, “John, please.”
“Don’t…You, you don’t get to do this. Don’t…dress up like him. Don’t imitate him in any way. This isn’t a joke, I won’t give you anything. God damn you!” John says, voice muffled through the wood of the door.
“John,” Sherlock repeats, uselessly. “I know it isn’t a joke. I wouldn’t do that.” He tries for authoritative “Open the door, John.”
John obeys, hands shaking and leaning against the doorjamb for support. “Go away,” he says, as though a minute’s fight is all he had left in him. “Just…go.”
Sherlock reaches out a hand, tries not to remember doing the same thing on a rooftop. “I came back,” he says quietly. “Couldn’t…” his voice fails, and he starts again. “It really is me, John I swear.”
John shakes his head in denial but is already lifting his own handing, grasping Sherlock’s how it couldn’t three years ago, and his whole body begins to tremble as he finds the pulse point in Sherlock’s wrist. “You bastard,” he whispers, “you bastard.”
“I-“ Sherlock starts, but John is already pulling his hand back, curling it into a fist and Sherlock doesn’t bother to deflect it before it hits his face because the promise of pain seems too much like absolution for him to try. He falls to the ground and looks up only to find John on the ground as well, legs in front of him and hands in his lap, staring blankly at Sherlock from the doorway. “You died,” John whispers. “You phoned me, and you made me watch, and then you died.”
“No,” Sherlock says, “I just had to make you think that.”
John is shaking his head again, and Sherlock kneels beside him. “Moriarty had men ready to kill you and Mrs Hudson and Lestrade,” he says urgently. “He was going to have you killed.”
“Unless you jumped,” John says, words shaky. He cups Sherlock’s face between his hands, as though he needs the physical touch to convince himself once more than this is real. John closes his eyes and brings Sherlock closer until their foreheads touch.
“I had to,” Sherlock whispers into the space between their mouths, and when John begins to cry quietly before him Sherlock is only slightly awkward in bringing him in for an embrace.
*** *** ***
Sherlock is not the man he was three years ago, the man who asked his flatmate to watch him die because he needed the validation of John’s continuing existence. He isn’t half that whole.
But if Sherlock isn’t half the man he used to be, then John is a mere ghost of his former self. His face is drawn and he looks as though he hasn’t slept a night through in three years. When Sherlock finds his way to the kitchen, as though making tea for John will help anything, he finds it barely stocked, and only the minimum of utensils in the cupboards. He finds tea in a dusty corner of a shelf and heats water on the stove. When he carries the chipped mug to John the man laughs shakily, and that is more than Sherlock ever let himself hope for.
They work one case, a week after Sherlock came back to England, and John finds it ridiculously amusing to stroll onto the crime scene, Sherlock in tow, and watch the officers react to Sherlock’s presence. John and Lestrade stand smirking in a corner as the others take in the news of Sherlock’s survival, and for the first time Sherlock understands why John ignored his request and took the time to prove to the world Sherlock’s innocence, the truth about Moriarty and deductions made from minimal clues.
After, the case nicely closed and both of them on the sofa, Sherlock says, almost idly “I thought we might take a break.”
“A break?” John asks, shocked.
“Yes,” Sherlock repeats. “In France, perhaps. We could study bees.”
“Bees,” John repeats dumbly.
“Yes,” Sherlock says placidly, because he can’t explain how much he had envied their simple lives, how he had seen them each summer and thought of John and London and running in the dark.
“You. A break. From,” John waves his hand around the flat, in-eloquently, “this.”
And so Sherlock attempts to explain, haltingly and without eye contact, how he would once have though a case so intricate it spanned years and countries would have been infinitely better than a flat on Baker Street. But that hadn’t been true, in the end. Sherlock murmurs of silence, of being unable to speak his deductions aloud for fear of revealing himself. Of how the lost three years seem to have unbalanced something necessary, teared something inside his brain, quite inexplicably changed him. How it feels, sometimes, as though maybe three years with John would right the balance, would demonstrate the necessity of his past absence, would fix them both.
John places a steady hand on his knee once he is finished, and Sherlock grabs it, holds it tight, because this, right here, seems like it could validate loss and pain and fear and all the other emotions Sherlock had simultaneously caused and hidden from.
John squeezes back just as tightly, desperately. “So, bees then?” he asks after clearing his throat.
And Sherlock smiles and wonders whether that means there will be time, later, to bring himself to tell John about the importance of bees.
** *** ***
What Sherlock remembers most about the wait after the pool and before the fall, is John and an intrusive sense of domesticity, and occasionally having to pause and stare at John and wonder whether any time Moriarty grants them will be enough.
In retrospect, Italy had been easy. Barely months into the chase, strong on adrenaline and certainty, so convinced he could become someone else. Two years later, and Switzerland had been more difficult because it was cold and stark and Sherlock had already been gone so long and he didn’t know what John was doing or whether Lestrade’s percentage of closed cases had risen significantly or whether John still had a cup of tea in the mornings or used his cane or worked in the same clinic.
England was supposed to be easy, but it isn’t. It is awkward around John the first few weeks of Sherlock’s return, and Sherlock is suddenly so filled with guilt it threatens to bleed into everything he does. John still has a cup of tea in the mornings, but he uses his cane and no longer works at the clinic and doesn’t live in Baker Street and it takes Sherlock weeks to accept these changes, and years more to accept that he was not there to witness them-even more, that he was their cause.
Sherlock takes John to France, and they do not frequent the cafes Sherlock is familiar with and they book a hotel that only accepts reservations longer than an hour. John books them only one room, with one bed, and Sherlock doesn’t comment because he needs it too: the proof that John is safe and close to him when he goes to bed and when he wakes in the middle of the night.
John thinks France is beautiful during the summer, and Sherlock can usually be cajoled into agreeing with him when he waxes poetic. They visit all the tourist traps upon John’s suggestion, and they spend hours walking to nowhere in particular and John no longer uses his cane. And one day, John walks into their room at the hotel and says, “I saw a bee.”
“Oh?” Sherlock asks, peering over the top of his book.
John nods, picks at invisible lint on his jumper. “Did you know that there’s a place that sells honey, quite nearby? Was thinking of visiting it tomorrow, if you’re up to it.”
And Sherlock smiles, because that seems the only appropriate response.
London Bridge, the rain at last
Back in these arms again
I'm sorry I hurt you
I hurt me too
And I can do this alone
But we can do this so much better
Together, together, together
I put my honour in waste
Pull you closer and embrace
So divided we fall
But stronger we stand
Together
-Patrick Wolf, Together