I regret, learn and walk ahead (1)
Title: I regret, learn and walk ahead
Fandom: Sherlock (2010)
Pairing: John/Sherlock
Rating: NC-17
Summary: In which Harry adopts a child, John reunites with his painfully normal family, Sherlock is bored enough to come with him and the guest couch is realy not big enough for two.
The day that Harry tells him about it John lets go of his phone, which lands on the floor with a thud loud enough that even Sherlock in the living-room below can hear it.
"Please tell me you're having me on," he says after scrambling for the phone and re-entering the conversation that Harry has led without him in the meantime.
"---a country like this. What?"
He can hear her frown and begins to frown just as hard until a fine line appears between his brows, a Watson family trait. They have a staring match over the phone for several seconds until John says:
"Please. Think it through."
He was pleased when Harry told him she had gotten back together with Clara, because back in the day he did have faith in their marriage, in the fact that they adored each other and wanted to become better people. John isn't a romantic, but he has eyes, and he saw that special bond between his sister and Clara, a bond that only snapped because Harry persisted to be a twat.
People can only take so much, and while John can simply stop answering Harry's calls whenever she is pissed and begging for money, it is different when you are married to someone like her.
Someone with problems.
Harry is sober right now, she is sober and she's happy, ecstatic, over the moon, and while John doesn't want to spoil any of this for her he knows her well enough to guess she is not over her problems yet, that it might be a long way until she is.
"So do Mum and Dad know?" he asks her when she doesn't answer.
"Oh, that's why I called you in the first place. I proposed a family dinner at their place so we can all get to know each other."
There is glee in her voice like she is genuinely convinced of having had the best plan in ages, and it is that tone of voice that makes John anxious.
"So yeah," Harry blubbers on without waiting for any reaction, "You're free this weekend, aren't you? Dad says you can stay over."
"Harry," John tries again as sternly as he is able to, "I really don't think this is a good--"
"I told them you're coming, so see you on Saturday!"
She hangs up on him.
John stares at his phone, scratches the back of his head and heaves a sigh. It hits him that while he usually avoids Harry for conversations like this, the feeling of powerlessness that he gets from living with Sherlock feels disconcertingly similar.
**
John thinks about families on his way downstairs. He thinks about how messed up Sherlock and Mycroft are and that perhaps him and Harry are no better, nutters only in a different way.
John's family reminds him of the Benett's of Pride and Prejudice - his mother is happy as long as both her kids are in a relationship, stable or not, and she loves listening to neighbourhood gossip as much as providing it, while his father is about limitation of defect, overruling his wife if need be.
John thinks that comparison through for a moment longer, idly standing at the bottom of the staircase until Sherlock stops plucking his violin in thought and raises a questioning brow at him.
He hopes very much that doesn't make him Elizabeth. Sherlock is hardly the Mr. Darcy type.
So Harriet and Clara are not only back together, they are also adopting. A nine year-old girl from Korea.
When John asked Harry whether it was North or South Korea she lapsed into silence, telling John exactly how well-informed and prepared she was. He had to give up when she asked a question about Sherlock as a matter of distraction. Older sisters are well-versed at the art of terrorising their younger siblings, after all.
The only thing that calms John to a certain extent is how strict orphanages are. If Clara did not go and make all traces of Harry in her life disappear before trying to adopt a child (which is a distinct but small possibility that would involve hiring a consulting criminal, a thought that makes John shudder violently), then someone with a much stricter set of rules concerning proper living arrangements will have given the couple his okay.
Maybe he should, too.
"Apparently I'm going up to Norfolk this weekend," John says and his eyes hover somewhere in the vicinity of Sherlock's face, who does not make the effort to look up from his newspaper to answer him.
"I'm free this weekend," Sherlock mumbles eventually, but John is as quick to brush him off as he is surprised.
"You are not coming," he says simply, and Sherlock just shrugs.
"No really, Sherlock. You are not."
"You met my brother," Sherlock says, still reading.
"Your brother threatened me," John huffs, "It's hardly what I would call a family meeting."
"I see."
John stares at Sherlock, stunned.
"You aren't sulking, are you?"
No answer.
"Sherlock, there will be a kid. How can I know that putting you in a room with a nine year-old won't be something I'll regret?"
"Children are more useful than adults most of the time. More curious, honest, and with a set pattern of thinking in no way marred by morals and ideals."
"Usef--- Oh god."
John throws up his hands in exasperation.
"You are not coming, Sherlock Holmes. Go bother someone at Bart's while I'm gone."
**
John is highly suspicious when all Sherlock has to say to him on the day he leaves is "Have a nice weekend".
It is a warm April afternoon and Sherlock is standing at the entrance to 221 Baker Street, shirt sleeves rolled up, watching John throw his overnight bag holding enough for an entire week onto the back seat of the cab that will bring him to Euston.
When he looks closely, John can see two nicotine patches peeking through Sherlock's sleeves, and doesn't know whether he should feel guilty or happy at that, two patches without a case, one patch more than usual - Sherlock will be bored without him.
Still John momentarily contemplates hiding the cab's number plate from Sherlock's view, until deciding that if Sherlock really wanted to, he'd find John even without an address because much like Mycroft, he's already got his eyes and ears everywhere.
John gets into his cab, and he gets onto his train, all the while thinking about Sherlock even though he tells himself to stop, this is bordering on obsessive, stop.
He knows he's lost it when he turns his head toward the train doors and and inspects the people boarding the train at its first stop.
Pulling himself together thoroughly, John relaxes enough to sleep through most of the relatively short train ride, only to wake up to a familiar sight, sheep, grass, and more sheep.
He is more than relieved to see his father waiting for him at the train station.
While trying to unravel the mystery that is Sherlock Holmes is usually enough to keep him occupied during his waking hours, seeing his dad to John is instant relaxation - he knows this person, his habits, his reactions, and he will be able to have conversations on eye level once again.
By moving to London John successfully avoided the rest of the Watson family, people he had become estranged from because they did what he could no longer appreciate: Live a day to day live, eat, work, read, sleep and repeat.
Yet it was precisely this kind of life they wanted him to get used to again, they wanted to shape him back into the man he felt he had no right to be any more, not with all the deaths he had seen and the pain that will forever be throbbing through his shoulder and his leg, only a ghost of what he and his comrades had to endure.
Leaving was easy. He would never have thought coming back was so hard.
His father is standing on the platform, looking exactly the way John remembers him looking, the permanently tanned skin and wrinkly skin of a builder, the big moustache that is now completely grey just like his hair, the dirty overall he wears even though he's long reached retirement age.
He stands there, one hand in his pocket while he is smoking a cigarette with the other, close enough to the non-smoking sign to still seem rebellious.
The stubble on his cheeks burns as much in the simple hug they exchange as it did when he kissed John as a child, and he is certainly still wearing the same ragged boots, too, and it all seems to John as if time stood still here while he was gone, when exactly the reason he's here in the first place should be proof enough that nothing is the same any more.
"I've come to prepare you for what awaits you at home," John's father says, taking the bag from him.
They have formed this little alliance years ago, father and son working in a way only the two of them can.
Suddenly he turns sombre.
"Why did you suddenly agree to come? We haven't seen you since Afghanistan and I know your mother, this is not the first invitation you've received. If Harry hadn't told us, we wouldn't even have known you were here, we were convinced you'd gone again."
There is no anger there, just relief, maybe curiosity.
"All the things the neighbours say they've heard about you, like Margaret's son who said he saw you chasing after a cab at night! I don't think that's right, John.
"Ever the worried parent," John says happily and pats his father on the back.
"Do try and take after Mum a little. She prioritised my sex life over my health a long time ago."
"Okay," he says and takes a deep breath that indicates he is seriously thinking while he opens the passenger door for his son.
"So... Harry told us you live with your boyfriend now."
John cringes.
"Dad, when I said... I didn't really mean... is that what she said? Wait, of course that's what she said."
He can see his father's eyebrow rise at his own flustered demeanour.
"Look I do live with someone, yes, but that would be my male flatmate."
The eyebrow does not descend.
"You know it's okay, don't you?" he says and gets in the car, "We've been through this with Harry after all. Granted it wasn't easy, especially for your mother since Harry is such a pretty child, but we're very tolerant now."
"Dad!" John exclaims testily only to add, a little calmer: "Yes, I know it's all right, it's perfectly fine, but it is not happening, not in my life anyway."
His father shrugs and starts the car.
"So, your flatmate, then. What is he like?"
"Insufferable," John says, and then continues to talk at length about the mess, the experiments with severed limbs, his website, his violin and his non-existent eating habits.
**
The moment his mother comes storming out of the house John realises how unprepared he feels for an entire weekend with his family, and he is even less prepared for her proposing to turn it into a full week because the Mason's are giving a garden party and all.
John isn't prepared for the Masons or for small talk about the butcher's lamb steaks, and somehow this feels like S Sherlock's fault too, as if John has been forever rendered unable to hold a normal conversation with people any more.
His mother hugs him hard enough to make his back crack in protest, showers him with kisses and calls him Johnny, and John feels exhausted before he has even crossed the threshold.
Clara is the next one to greet him, her overall demeanour pleasantly calm, her hugs as strong as ever.
John can hear Harry's voice upstairs, "Let's meet Uncle John," she say in a voice completely and utterly unlike her own, but a smaller voice replies icily:
"Why do I have to? Meeting people is dull."
John freezes into place.
By the time Harriet has coaxed the out of her hiding spot and down the stairs, John has already been shoved into the kitchen, a fresh cup of tea and a mountain of biscuits on the table in front of him.
A small head appears above the table top and a pair of beautiful half moon eyes squints at John sceptically.
"Hello," John says slowly, mildly stunned, "I'm John."
"Un-Soo Min," she replies sharply and surprises John further by extending her small hand.
"Hi, John," Harry says and looks a little apologetic.
**
It feels like their early days, when Harriet and John were still inseparable, when they still had things in common, they talk to each other and they manage to look each other in the eye again but it's awkward, both of them too aware of what makes the other flinch or lose his temper, and John realises what he deems 'not much to tell' is a huge deal for his entire family, even Harriet who has always been so difficult to impress, the older, more successful sister who called him names and was better at football than him.
John never thought of himself as much more than the old skull on the mantelpiece when it came to his and Sherlock's working relationship, but to his family he is an important figure with the police now.
Maybe he is, but next to Sherlock anyone looks smaller than they are.
To John catching criminals isn't such a big deal any more because Sherlock won't allow it to be, when to him it is not about the victims, not about justice.
To Sherlock it is mental exercise, and without him there wouldn't be much that John could do.
He has always been aware of their lives, of this arrangement of their being far from ordinary, but John has given up on normalcy, and maybe that's what he's gotten in return.
Maybe he has never been normal, the wounded soldier missing the war, thriving on small spikes of adrenaline and the fact that he survives.
Here however, on his father's meticulously trimmed lawn and in his mother's kitchen with the baby pictures of him and his sister on the wall, John witnesses a life completely different from his own, his ever-rebellious sister finally settling down, a new family member.
The sort of life where people flirt and date and marry and love, argue and divorce, where no one has an arch nemesis or mortal enemies that wrap people up in C4.
Right now though there is only John and Harriet walking their mother's dachshund Jack (the Ripper) through the park while a small Korean girl named Min skips ahead, sometimes turning to scowl at her new uncle.
People change. The world changes.
John's world on the other hand seems to have come to a halt with Sherlock at its axis.
He doesn't want to doubt Harry, but his persistent silence seems to tell her what he's thinking.
She has always been good at that.
"You've never pictured me as this sort of person, did you?"
Of course she's right.
Hell, he had given up on picturing her sober.
"You should try and become a part of your own family again," she says after a pause, but there is none of the usual reproach in her voice.
It sounds more like good advice from someone who has rejoined the family and seems to be enjoying it.
"So this..."
John points vaguely into Min's direction, "...her. How did that come about?"
Harry smiles at his obvious discomfort.
John has never considered having a family of his own, no matter how grateful he is to his own parents. raising children is part of a big mystery to him that he was not meant to be a part of, for the sake of all of those involved.
"It was Clara's idea," she says and snorts slightly as if at least that much was perfectly obvious.
"I came back to her, and this might be her way of making sure it was for good. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy it. It was the right thing to do for all three of us."
John looks at the child who is busy inspecting some fern.
"But Soo-Min, she is kind of... good without us. It's more like she is teaching us something. Quite a handful, that one."
John grins at his sister.
"Finally found your master, eh?"
"As have you, I hear."
He rolls his eyes at the innuendo.
"John, this is a quiet neighbourhood, and you and your flatmate have been in the newspaper for 'aiding the police'. Everyone here was excited when you joined the army, but no one knew you had this in you, least of all us."
"Not you, too," he groans, but Harriet doesn't let go.
"I thought maybe it has got something to do with Sherlock."
"It does," John admits, exasperated. "He's absolutely crazy.
**
John spends his days handing his mother socks to mend and helping his father with the weeds around the fence, hiding the cigarettes from Harriet and making attempts at conversation with Soo-Min, who has apparently decided to dislike him whatever he says or does deliberately not say.
She is clearly convinced that at nine years of age there is no reason to treat someone like a child any more, and John who doesn't even know how to treat children like children is more than a little overwhelmed at being called obtuse by so much as a walking metre.
He very pointedly tries not to think of Sherlock but catches himself twisting his mobile phone in his hands more than once, surprised that there is no text from Sherlock informing him of a fire or anything Mrs. Hudson annoyed him with, the way he usually does when John has at least ten more important things to do than to listen to it.
It is Wednesday afternoon when someone rings at the door bell.
John tries to go and open it but his mother appears out of nowhere telling him something ridiculous about resting himself.
John can't hear who is at the door, but his mother's shrill laugh of delight makes him instantly restless, and so he pushes himself out of the armchair and goes to inspect the visitor.
"John, what a surprise," his mother coos, her cheeks tinted pink, "Why didn't you say something?"
Sherlock stands in the door, clutching a bouquet of flowers and smiling eerily.
Fandom: Sherlock (2010)
Pairing: John/Sherlock
Rating: NC-17
Summary: In which Harry adopts a child, John reunites with his painfully normal family, Sherlock is bored enough to come with him and the guest couch is realy not big enough for two.
The day that Harry tells him about it John lets go of his phone, which lands on the floor with a thud loud enough that even Sherlock in the living-room below can hear it.
"Please tell me you're having me on," he says after scrambling for the phone and re-entering the conversation that Harry has led without him in the meantime.
"---a country like this. What?"
He can hear her frown and begins to frown just as hard until a fine line appears between his brows, a Watson family trait. They have a staring match over the phone for several seconds until John says:
"Please. Think it through."
He was pleased when Harry told him she had gotten back together with Clara, because back in the day he did have faith in their marriage, in the fact that they adored each other and wanted to become better people. John isn't a romantic, but he has eyes, and he saw that special bond between his sister and Clara, a bond that only snapped because Harry persisted to be a twat.
People can only take so much, and while John can simply stop answering Harry's calls whenever she is pissed and begging for money, it is different when you are married to someone like her.
Someone with problems.
Harry is sober right now, she is sober and she's happy, ecstatic, over the moon, and while John doesn't want to spoil any of this for her he knows her well enough to guess she is not over her problems yet, that it might be a long way until she is.
"So do Mum and Dad know?" he asks her when she doesn't answer.
"Oh, that's why I called you in the first place. I proposed a family dinner at their place so we can all get to know each other."
There is glee in her voice like she is genuinely convinced of having had the best plan in ages, and it is that tone of voice that makes John anxious.
"So yeah," Harry blubbers on without waiting for any reaction, "You're free this weekend, aren't you? Dad says you can stay over."
"Harry," John tries again as sternly as he is able to, "I really don't think this is a good--"
"I told them you're coming, so see you on Saturday!"
She hangs up on him.
John stares at his phone, scratches the back of his head and heaves a sigh. It hits him that while he usually avoids Harry for conversations like this, the feeling of powerlessness that he gets from living with Sherlock feels disconcertingly similar.
**
John thinks about families on his way downstairs. He thinks about how messed up Sherlock and Mycroft are and that perhaps him and Harry are no better, nutters only in a different way.
John's family reminds him of the Benett's of Pride and Prejudice - his mother is happy as long as both her kids are in a relationship, stable or not, and she loves listening to neighbourhood gossip as much as providing it, while his father is about limitation of defect, overruling his wife if need be.
John thinks that comparison through for a moment longer, idly standing at the bottom of the staircase until Sherlock stops plucking his violin in thought and raises a questioning brow at him.
He hopes very much that doesn't make him Elizabeth. Sherlock is hardly the Mr. Darcy type.
So Harriet and Clara are not only back together, they are also adopting. A nine year-old girl from Korea.
When John asked Harry whether it was North or South Korea she lapsed into silence, telling John exactly how well-informed and prepared she was. He had to give up when she asked a question about Sherlock as a matter of distraction. Older sisters are well-versed at the art of terrorising their younger siblings, after all.
The only thing that calms John to a certain extent is how strict orphanages are. If Clara did not go and make all traces of Harry in her life disappear before trying to adopt a child (which is a distinct but small possibility that would involve hiring a consulting criminal, a thought that makes John shudder violently), then someone with a much stricter set of rules concerning proper living arrangements will have given the couple his okay.
Maybe he should, too.
"Apparently I'm going up to Norfolk this weekend," John says and his eyes hover somewhere in the vicinity of Sherlock's face, who does not make the effort to look up from his newspaper to answer him.
"I'm free this weekend," Sherlock mumbles eventually, but John is as quick to brush him off as he is surprised.
"You are not coming," he says simply, and Sherlock just shrugs.
"No really, Sherlock. You are not."
"You met my brother," Sherlock says, still reading.
"Your brother threatened me," John huffs, "It's hardly what I would call a family meeting."
"I see."
John stares at Sherlock, stunned.
"You aren't sulking, are you?"
No answer.
"Sherlock, there will be a kid. How can I know that putting you in a room with a nine year-old won't be something I'll regret?"
"Children are more useful than adults most of the time. More curious, honest, and with a set pattern of thinking in no way marred by morals and ideals."
"Usef--- Oh god."
John throws up his hands in exasperation.
"You are not coming, Sherlock Holmes. Go bother someone at Bart's while I'm gone."
**
John is highly suspicious when all Sherlock has to say to him on the day he leaves is "Have a nice weekend".
It is a warm April afternoon and Sherlock is standing at the entrance to 221 Baker Street, shirt sleeves rolled up, watching John throw his overnight bag holding enough for an entire week onto the back seat of the cab that will bring him to Euston.
When he looks closely, John can see two nicotine patches peeking through Sherlock's sleeves, and doesn't know whether he should feel guilty or happy at that, two patches without a case, one patch more than usual - Sherlock will be bored without him.
Still John momentarily contemplates hiding the cab's number plate from Sherlock's view, until deciding that if Sherlock really wanted to, he'd find John even without an address because much like Mycroft, he's already got his eyes and ears everywhere.
John gets into his cab, and he gets onto his train, all the while thinking about Sherlock even though he tells himself to stop, this is bordering on obsessive, stop.
He knows he's lost it when he turns his head toward the train doors and and inspects the people boarding the train at its first stop.
Pulling himself together thoroughly, John relaxes enough to sleep through most of the relatively short train ride, only to wake up to a familiar sight, sheep, grass, and more sheep.
He is more than relieved to see his father waiting for him at the train station.
While trying to unravel the mystery that is Sherlock Holmes is usually enough to keep him occupied during his waking hours, seeing his dad to John is instant relaxation - he knows this person, his habits, his reactions, and he will be able to have conversations on eye level once again.
By moving to London John successfully avoided the rest of the Watson family, people he had become estranged from because they did what he could no longer appreciate: Live a day to day live, eat, work, read, sleep and repeat.
Yet it was precisely this kind of life they wanted him to get used to again, they wanted to shape him back into the man he felt he had no right to be any more, not with all the deaths he had seen and the pain that will forever be throbbing through his shoulder and his leg, only a ghost of what he and his comrades had to endure.
Leaving was easy. He would never have thought coming back was so hard.
His father is standing on the platform, looking exactly the way John remembers him looking, the permanently tanned skin and wrinkly skin of a builder, the big moustache that is now completely grey just like his hair, the dirty overall he wears even though he's long reached retirement age.
He stands there, one hand in his pocket while he is smoking a cigarette with the other, close enough to the non-smoking sign to still seem rebellious.
The stubble on his cheeks burns as much in the simple hug they exchange as it did when he kissed John as a child, and he is certainly still wearing the same ragged boots, too, and it all seems to John as if time stood still here while he was gone, when exactly the reason he's here in the first place should be proof enough that nothing is the same any more.
"I've come to prepare you for what awaits you at home," John's father says, taking the bag from him.
They have formed this little alliance years ago, father and son working in a way only the two of them can.
Suddenly he turns sombre.
"Why did you suddenly agree to come? We haven't seen you since Afghanistan and I know your mother, this is not the first invitation you've received. If Harry hadn't told us, we wouldn't even have known you were here, we were convinced you'd gone again."
There is no anger there, just relief, maybe curiosity.
"All the things the neighbours say they've heard about you, like Margaret's son who said he saw you chasing after a cab at night! I don't think that's right, John.
"Ever the worried parent," John says happily and pats his father on the back.
"Do try and take after Mum a little. She prioritised my sex life over my health a long time ago."
"Okay," he says and takes a deep breath that indicates he is seriously thinking while he opens the passenger door for his son.
"So... Harry told us you live with your boyfriend now."
John cringes.
"Dad, when I said... I didn't really mean... is that what she said? Wait, of course that's what she said."
He can see his father's eyebrow rise at his own flustered demeanour.
"Look I do live with someone, yes, but that would be my male flatmate."
The eyebrow does not descend.
"You know it's okay, don't you?" he says and gets in the car, "We've been through this with Harry after all. Granted it wasn't easy, especially for your mother since Harry is such a pretty child, but we're very tolerant now."
"Dad!" John exclaims testily only to add, a little calmer: "Yes, I know it's all right, it's perfectly fine, but it is not happening, not in my life anyway."
His father shrugs and starts the car.
"So, your flatmate, then. What is he like?"
"Insufferable," John says, and then continues to talk at length about the mess, the experiments with severed limbs, his website, his violin and his non-existent eating habits.
**
The moment his mother comes storming out of the house John realises how unprepared he feels for an entire weekend with his family, and he is even less prepared for her proposing to turn it into a full week because the Mason's are giving a garden party and all.
John isn't prepared for the Masons or for small talk about the butcher's lamb steaks, and somehow this feels like S Sherlock's fault too, as if John has been forever rendered unable to hold a normal conversation with people any more.
His mother hugs him hard enough to make his back crack in protest, showers him with kisses and calls him Johnny, and John feels exhausted before he has even crossed the threshold.
Clara is the next one to greet him, her overall demeanour pleasantly calm, her hugs as strong as ever.
John can hear Harry's voice upstairs, "Let's meet Uncle John," she say in a voice completely and utterly unlike her own, but a smaller voice replies icily:
"Why do I have to? Meeting people is dull."
John freezes into place.
By the time Harriet has coaxed the out of her hiding spot and down the stairs, John has already been shoved into the kitchen, a fresh cup of tea and a mountain of biscuits on the table in front of him.
A small head appears above the table top and a pair of beautiful half moon eyes squints at John sceptically.
"Hello," John says slowly, mildly stunned, "I'm John."
"Un-Soo Min," she replies sharply and surprises John further by extending her small hand.
"Hi, John," Harry says and looks a little apologetic.
**
It feels like their early days, when Harriet and John were still inseparable, when they still had things in common, they talk to each other and they manage to look each other in the eye again but it's awkward, both of them too aware of what makes the other flinch or lose his temper, and John realises what he deems 'not much to tell' is a huge deal for his entire family, even Harriet who has always been so difficult to impress, the older, more successful sister who called him names and was better at football than him.
John never thought of himself as much more than the old skull on the mantelpiece when it came to his and Sherlock's working relationship, but to his family he is an important figure with the police now.
Maybe he is, but next to Sherlock anyone looks smaller than they are.
To John catching criminals isn't such a big deal any more because Sherlock won't allow it to be, when to him it is not about the victims, not about justice.
To Sherlock it is mental exercise, and without him there wouldn't be much that John could do.
He has always been aware of their lives, of this arrangement of their being far from ordinary, but John has given up on normalcy, and maybe that's what he's gotten in return.
Maybe he has never been normal, the wounded soldier missing the war, thriving on small spikes of adrenaline and the fact that he survives.
Here however, on his father's meticulously trimmed lawn and in his mother's kitchen with the baby pictures of him and his sister on the wall, John witnesses a life completely different from his own, his ever-rebellious sister finally settling down, a new family member.
The sort of life where people flirt and date and marry and love, argue and divorce, where no one has an arch nemesis or mortal enemies that wrap people up in C4.
Right now though there is only John and Harriet walking their mother's dachshund Jack (the Ripper) through the park while a small Korean girl named Min skips ahead, sometimes turning to scowl at her new uncle.
People change. The world changes.
John's world on the other hand seems to have come to a halt with Sherlock at its axis.
He doesn't want to doubt Harry, but his persistent silence seems to tell her what he's thinking.
She has always been good at that.
"You've never pictured me as this sort of person, did you?"
Of course she's right.
Hell, he had given up on picturing her sober.
"You should try and become a part of your own family again," she says after a pause, but there is none of the usual reproach in her voice.
It sounds more like good advice from someone who has rejoined the family and seems to be enjoying it.
"So this..."
John points vaguely into Min's direction, "...her. How did that come about?"
Harry smiles at his obvious discomfort.
John has never considered having a family of his own, no matter how grateful he is to his own parents. raising children is part of a big mystery to him that he was not meant to be a part of, for the sake of all of those involved.
"It was Clara's idea," she says and snorts slightly as if at least that much was perfectly obvious.
"I came back to her, and this might be her way of making sure it was for good. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy it. It was the right thing to do for all three of us."
John looks at the child who is busy inspecting some fern.
"But Soo-Min, she is kind of... good without us. It's more like she is teaching us something. Quite a handful, that one."
John grins at his sister.
"Finally found your master, eh?"
"As have you, I hear."
He rolls his eyes at the innuendo.
"John, this is a quiet neighbourhood, and you and your flatmate have been in the newspaper for 'aiding the police'. Everyone here was excited when you joined the army, but no one knew you had this in you, least of all us."
"Not you, too," he groans, but Harriet doesn't let go.
"I thought maybe it has got something to do with Sherlock."
"It does," John admits, exasperated. "He's absolutely crazy.
**
John spends his days handing his mother socks to mend and helping his father with the weeds around the fence, hiding the cigarettes from Harriet and making attempts at conversation with Soo-Min, who has apparently decided to dislike him whatever he says or does deliberately not say.
She is clearly convinced that at nine years of age there is no reason to treat someone like a child any more, and John who doesn't even know how to treat children like children is more than a little overwhelmed at being called obtuse by so much as a walking metre.
He very pointedly tries not to think of Sherlock but catches himself twisting his mobile phone in his hands more than once, surprised that there is no text from Sherlock informing him of a fire or anything Mrs. Hudson annoyed him with, the way he usually does when John has at least ten more important things to do than to listen to it.
It is Wednesday afternoon when someone rings at the door bell.
John tries to go and open it but his mother appears out of nowhere telling him something ridiculous about resting himself.
John can't hear who is at the door, but his mother's shrill laugh of delight makes him instantly restless, and so he pushes himself out of the armchair and goes to inspect the visitor.
"John, what a surprise," his mother coos, her cheeks tinted pink, "Why didn't you say something?"
Sherlock stands in the door, clutching a bouquet of flowers and smiling eerily.