Wounded With His Wounded Heart, Ch. 2
Disclaimer: I do not own any part of Sherlock; it all belongs to the BBC, Mark Gatiss, Steven Moffat, et al. I write these stories purely for enjoyment; no copyright infringement is intended.
Wounded With His Wounded Heart - Chapter Two
The silence that followed Sherlock’s outburst was deafening, and John didn’t even realize he had swung until his fist connected with Sherlock’s face, sending Sherlock sprawling to the floor.
“You sodding git. You absolute wanker,” John said, standing over Sherlock and breathing heavily with the effort of controlling his fury. “You did this for your bloody game with that psychopath? You risked your life, you faked your death, you let me grieve for you and mourn you, all so you could go running off and best him?” John’s voice rose steadily, shaking with betrayal, and he was quite sure he had never been this angry and hurt in his life. He had never thought Sherlock capable of being so duplicitous and disloyal, would never have believed that Sherlock could treat him with such callousness.
Sherlock looked up at him from the floor, and this time his eyes were wide not with concern, but with the realization of his mistake and some other, undecipherable emotion that John couldn’t identify. Then, to John’s complete and utter befuddlement, Sherlock began to laugh. It would have made him angry all over again, but there was something slightly hysterical in the deep chuckles that unsettled John and set his teeth on edge. Something was wrong here.
When Sherlock’s laughter ended with a muffled groan, and the detective seemed to fold in on himself in his position on the floor, another kind of awareness flooded John’s already prickling senses. He dropped to his knees next to Sherlock and reached out a tentative hand.
“Sherlock?” he said hesitantly. “What is it? Where are you hurt?” A frisson of alarm went through John as he realized that he might have exacerbated other injuries when Sherlock fell to the floor from his punch - it would explain, in fact, why Sherlock had not stayed on his feet, if he had less control of his body than he was used to.
“Cracked ribs,” Sherlock gasped, his breathing shallow. “I’ll be all right, just - give me a moment. Forgot how much it - hurts to laugh.”
John cursed mentally. No wonder he had fallen - twisting his torso with the punch would have been agonizing on cracked ribs. It also shed some light on why Sherlock had not supported John’s weight during his flashback and panic attack - Sherlock had used the wall for support, and used the strength of his arms to keep John upright without putting too much strain on his ribcage.
“Let me see,” he ordered, his hands already reaching for Sherlock’s suit jacket and shirt buttons.
Sherlock sat up slowly, one arm curled around his midsection, and shook his head in a weak protest. “Mycroft’s physician has already seen to it, John, there is really no need -”
“Sherlock,” John said again, his tone brooking no argument. “Let. Me. See.”
Sherlock closed his eyes and cautiously shrugged out of his suit jacket, then unbuttoned his dress shirt. John had been right about the new scar, he saw, a slender white slice over Sherlock’s collarbone, but he hissed as he saw the bloom of purple, blue, and yellow around Sherlock’s ribcage. The bruises were vicious, likely made by both fists and boots, and combined with the ribs had to pain the detective immensely. John let his fingers ghost over a few of the worst ones.
“Have you been keeping your lungs clear? Taking deep breaths? What pain meds are you on?” he asked, his mind whirring as the medical questions came automatically.
“Yes, I have, and Oxycontin, briefly, followed by high doses of ibuprofen,” Sherlock replied, his tone a bit terse but clearly acknowledging John’s need for information.
John nodded, keeping his eyes flickering over Sherlock as he absorbed that. Of course giving Sherlock Oxycontin for any length of time wasn’t a good idea, given his drug history - ten days was usually the maximum prescription allowed even for someone with no history and no addictive tendencies. As long as he had been preventing any mucous from building up in his lungs, that was the most important thing.
He caught sight of another bandage, through the white material of Sherlock’s shirt, and gently touched his forearm. “And this?”
“A knife,” Sherlock said succinctly. “Courtesy of one Sebastian Moran, the last person I … dispatched. Moriarty’s second in command. It should be fine. Minimal scarring, with any luck.”
There was a pause, during which they were both looking at each other, John doing more injury assessment and Sherlock taking in John’s expression, his eyes, some of the emotions written so clearly on his face. John was aware of that direct gaze even as his brain was cataloguing the new scars that he could see, calculating the amount of time it should take Sherlock’s ribs to heal, and thinking about alternatives for the ibuprofen; Sherlock wouldn’t be able to stay on that forever, but he would need something to ward off the residual pain for several weeks yet. He was also shockingly thin, easily as thin as Mycroft, which on his taller frame made him look almost emaciated. He had clearly slept and been hydrated, probably by force if John knew Mycroft at all, which was the only reason his coloring was better than his brother’s. He would have to eat consistently for some time, though, even to attain his normally slender and muscled physique.
Eventually, he looked back at Sherlock and nodded, a silent note that he was done with his examination, and Sherlock rebuttoned his shirt before slowly easing back into his jacket. John offered a hand to help him stand, and it was only then, when they were both standing, that Sherlock broke the silence that had enfolded them.
“I am sorry, John,” he said quietly, and John looked up at him, astonished. He could count on one hand the number of times Sherlock had verbally apologized to him. Sherlock saw his look and his mouth quirked up at the corner, amused and rueful. “There is a great deal you don’t know, and I am explaining it all very badly. I have been so absorbed in this, so determined to be done with this bloody business and come home, that I forgot for a moment just how much of a leap I am asking you to make.”
It was in that instant that John realized that neither of them had let go of the other’s hand, and his fingers tightened around Sherlock’s involuntarily, even as his breathing quickened just a fraction. He had been so far in doctor mode before that he hadn’t thought about the fact that he was seeing Sherlock’s body - but now just the one point of contact was threatening to make his head swim.
“I’m sorry I punched you; I clearly overreacted. Just don’t disappear on me again, please,” John said, giving Sherlock a small smile of his own. “Having you return from the dead is about all the shock I can take today, I think.”
“Understandably,” Sherlock said, again with the warm half-smile that John knew was completely genuine. “Come here.”
Sherlock tugged John over to the sofa and they both sat, still keeping their hands linked between them, though neither of them chose to comment on it.
“It was not about the game,” Sherlock started. “It might have been a game to Moriarty, but it was a game of the most deadly kind, and by the time I was up on that rooftop, I had long since ceased to see it as such, and saw it instead as the web of a man who simply had to be stopped. It might interest you to know that our dear friend Jim shot himself in the head before I jumped.”
John blanched. He had wanted to know what happened, but it hurt more than he expected to hear that Moriarty had already been dead, and yet Sherlock had jumped anyway, had faked his own death in front of John’s eyes when the criminal they had been seeking was no longer a threat. “I knew he had killed himself - the forensics proved that - but then why did you still jump? Why would you still go through with it when he was already dead? When all I could do was stand there and watch you die?”
“Because in death he beat me, too, at least in that moment,” Sherlock said tightly, and John realized belatedly that Sherlock’s fingers were trembling. It was not easy for him to relive this, to talk about this - there was much more here than John had initially believed. “If I had anticipated that, if I had known he would be willing to go that far, I might have been able to stop him before he pulled the trigger. If I had, this whole charade would not have been necessary.”
Sherlock gently disentangled his fingers from John’s, and when he raised both hands to cup John’s face, John could only stare back at him. Feeling that intense gaze drill into him left him dizzy, brought him back to the moment when Sherlock had been trying to get him to remember the Black Lotus cipher, and all he had been able to feel were Sherlock’s eyes and hands - it was like that now, but he knew why Sherlock had done it. Sherlock needed him to remember, needed him to see what had really happened.
“Do you remember what he said at the pool?” Sherlock asked, his eyes intent on John’s. John swallowed; how many times had that voice, that sentence, echoed in his head and his nightmares?
“I will burn the heart out of you,” he whispered, and Sherlock nodded.
“He meant it, John. It wasn’t just about humiliating me, making me look like a fake, discrediting my skills. It wasn’t even solely about wanting me dead, though he certainly wanted that, enough to kill himself to ensure it. He wanted me gutted, left with nothing and no one.”
Sherlock paused, and John could see the anguish flicker through his eyes before he continued. “I baited you, that day at the lab - I wanted you to be angry so that you would do exactly what you did and go to Baker Street - but I was also trying to tell you, in the only way I could.”
“Alone is what I have. Alone protects me,” John murmured. He closed his eyes as complete understanding finally washed through him. “I am such an idiot.”
The pads of Sherlock’s fingers tightened on his cheekbones. “You are not. You are not, John,” he said fiercely. “You care - and that is not idiocy, no matter what Mycroft might think and no matter how long I tried to convince myself that it was. I owe you a thousand apologies for all of this, and one of them is for twisting your heart to my advantage. If the worst happened, I didn’t - I didn’t intend for you to see it. But when you showed up - I still tried to tell you.”
John replayed the conversation he had relived so many times, slowly going over the lines in his head, for the first time in a year not feeling the soul-wrenching agony of knowing that he would never see Sherlock again. When he reached the correct point in the conversation, he sucked in a breath, knowing he was right. “‘It’s just a magic trick.’”
Sherlock nodded, another one of those truly kind half-smiles gracing his features. “I didn’t know for certain, but - I hoped it would be. If you figured it out afterward, I wanted you to be able to hope, too.”
John’s throat closed up. Sherlock was still Sherlock, but this strange - strange tenderness was new, new and brilliant and terrifying for John’s vulnerable heart. It was as though whatever hell Sherlock had been through in the last year had stripped away his reserve, made him willing to open up to John and show more of the emotions that John had always seen under the surface of his cold and abrupt demeanor. John wondered if what he was seeing was his alone, whether Sherlock was also different around Mycroft or Molly, and some terribly selfish part of him hoped that this Sherlock was all his.
Sherlock seemed to sense that John couldn’t speak, because he took another long breath before he continued, his hands still never leaving John’s face. “There were three snipers, John. Moriarty left warnings - IOUs - one on an apple, at the flat, when he paid me a visit the day of the verdict. That one was for you. One at the Yard, for Lestrade. One at Baker Street, for Mrs. Hudson. That day at Bart’s, the snipers had all three of you in their crosshairs - and either Moriarty had to call them off, or I had to jump. That was their signal to leave. If I was dead, the three of you lived. And we went several rounds, he and I - I was so close to getting him to give them whatever code he had set up,” Sherlock growled in frustration, “and he knew that I was. He put a gun in his mouth so that I wouldn’t succeed, so that the only avenue left to me was to jump. He was willing to die as long as I did, too - and he had found precisely the right way to make it happen.”
“My god,” John breathed. He could feel the color draining from his face as Sherlock explained, and by the end he just felt cold all over, his mind in turmoil as he tried to comprehend such an impossible choice. He raised his own hands and placed them lightly on Sherlock’s forearms, still needing to feel the detective’s flesh under his fingers - and needing a counterpoint to Sherlock’s hands on his own skin. “Sherlock, I never imagined -”
“Of course you didn’t - and I didn’t want you to,” Sherlock said determinedly. “No one but Moriarty could have dreamed up such insanity. That was the entire point - everyone had to believe I was dead, even you, John. As long as the world believed it, as long as the people closest to me believed it, then you were all safe. Not only that, but others were safe, too. Harry. Clara. Mrs. Hudson’s sister. Angelo. Lestrade’s children. And before you ask, John, Molly was safe from the start because Moriarty had deemed her unimportant - he had gone through with the charade of dating her, after all, and watched me dismiss her out of hand that day he was in the lab, saw me utterly ignore her. She didn’t matter, or so he thought, and therefore I could go to her when the need was greatest. I’ve never been so grateful for my own rude and antisocial tendencies,” he added wryly.
Feeling slightly more brave, now that he was starting to understand, John slid his hands up to Sherlock’s own and entwined their fingers, bringing them down so that their joined hands rested between them. Sherlock offered no objection at all, and John felt his own hope grow just a little more.
“What about Mycroft?” he said curiously. “Why didn’t he go after Mycroft?”
Sherlock’s brow furrowed in a way that told John he was dissatisfied with this aspect of the case, if case it could be called. “Neither I nor my dear brother have truly been able to figure out the answer to that question. Moriarty knew of Mycroft’s existence; he told me so on the roof of the hospital and in any case his network was everywhere - but perhaps he thought it too risky, to try and go after the British Government? Perhaps, again, Mycroft was unimportant to Moriarty because he apparently was utterly unimportant to me? Mycroft and I have a contentious relationship at best, and you have seen our animosity firsthand. If Jim truly wanted to do as he said, take away everyone who was dear to me if I didn’t kill myself first, then naturally he would go after those who seemed to be closest to me. To the outside world, Mycroft has never been on that list. It was fortuitous - Mycroft proved himself invaluable, once he knew I was alive, making sure I had money and passports and clearance at my disposal.”
“It is also possible that Moriarty wanted to leave Mycroft alive, leave Mycroft knowing that he had been bested and had helped to destroy me,” Sherlock added thoughtfully after a moment. “That idea would have been very appealing to him.”
John could say nothing to that. It was true, for one, and for another Sherlock clearly knew what had happened between Mycroft and Moriarty. Whether or not Sherlock forgave his brother was up to him, and from what John had seen, Mycroft had certainly exhausted himself in assisting Sherlock, perhaps to atone for what he had done. John himself wasn’t sure anymore how he felt toward the elder Holmes; he would need time to figure that out. Mycroft had made a terrible, heartless mistake, and he had kept the knowledge of Sherlock being alive to himself - but since that secrecy might very well have saved all of them, John wasn’t sure he could fault the man.
“And so being alone not only protected you, in this case, but protected me, and Mrs. Hudson, and Lestrade, and Molly, and Mycroft,” John summarized succinctly, his voice shaking. “Sherlock . . .”
He trailed off, not sure what he wanted to say or how much he could say without revealing his feelings completely, but thankfully Sherlock stepped in to the conversation.
“Quite,” he nodded. “I walked away from Bart’s having no idea whether or not I would succeed in taking down the rest of Moriarty’s network, or if one of them would take me down first. Molly knew I was alive, at least temporarily, but she didn’t know if I would stay that way, and had all of this gone on long enough, she would have assumed I was dead; perhaps she has already. Mycroft didn’t know until several months after the fact. Lestrade and Mrs. Hudson still don’t know. And of course, it was important that everyone I was hunting also assumed I was dead. They weren’t expecting me to come looking for them.”
“Where did you go?” John asked softly, and suddenly every bit of Sherlock’s exhaustion showed on his face.
“Everywhere,” he answered wearily. “Everywhere from Paris and St. Petersburg to Morocco and the Ivory Coast. Japan. Thailand. Brazil. Even Canada and the States. I started with the snipers and worked my way up. I wanted the immediate threats to you removed, and after that I focused on the key players, the linchpins. The minions, the hired muscle, would simply move to another organization or job if Moriarty stopped paying them, but the ones who could take over, who could keep running his empire - I wanted them dead. All of them. I wasn’t about to spare anyone who could come after you,” Sherlock finished. Just for a moment, his eyes turned hard, fierce, and John saw all of the ruthlessness and determination that had driven him to do something so desperate, to risk his life in a six-story fall and then risk it over and over again in the twelve months that followed.
“And if you died in the process, no one would be the wiser, since you were already dead,” John whispered, and Sherlock inclined his head in agreement.
“Mycroft would have been the only one who knew for certain, and the few others who cared would have already finished their mourning and moved on. It seemed . . . kinder, as well as the safest way,” Sherlock said, hesitating a bit over the idea that anything about his false death could be considered kind. John knew where the hesitation came from, and he smiled humorlessly.
“‘A bit not good,’ that - but nothing about it was even remotely good, so maybe it could be considered a saving grace,” he quipped, striving for lightness - but the statement came out more solemn than he intended, and John almost forgot to breathe as the phrasing struck him and he once again locked eyes with Sherlock. A saving grace - somehow, despite all the horror and grief of the last year, they were both here, they were both alive, as were the other people they loved. It was all thanks to the careful, swift planning of Sherlock’s genius mind and the willingness of his selfless heart, the heart he kept so carefully hidden and guarded under logic and sarcasm and cutting remarks, rudeness and arrogance and impossible behavior.
Neither of them could look away as John’s comment hung in the air. Sherlock was studying him intently again, and John gazed back at him just as fixedly, waiting, though he had no idea what he was waiting for - but John saw the instant when something changed in Sherlock’s eyes, some last wall of resistance came down and caution was thrown to the wind. Sherlock lifted one pair of their joined hands and rested them against his cheek.
“You were still alive. That was all the grace I wanted,” Sherlock murmured, and John thought his heart might burst.
He shifted position just enough so that he could lean forward and rest his forehead against Sherlock’s. “I never would have stopped mourning for you, you idiot,” he murmured back, his voice thick with tears. “You saved me long before you fell from that rooftop.”
In the next breath, he closed the few millimeters of space between their lips, kissing Sherlock with infinite gentleness and yet with all of the pent-up longing that he had thought would never find expression. Sherlock made a soft noise in the back of his throat, and then his long fingers were sliding through John’s hair, holding John in place. John felt dizzy with the sensation; Sherlock’s lips were so soft, the feel of him brand new and yet utterly familiar, as if John had kissed him a million times before and simply didn’t know it until this minute.
They kissed until they were both desperate for air, learning the taste and texture of each other slowly, reveling in the wet slide of their tongues and the soft brushes of their lips. When they finally broke apart, panting, John reached out and stroked Sherlock’s cheekbone, doing freely now what he had been too afraid to continue earlier.
“I love you,” he said softly. “Just in case that wasn’t clear.”
Sherlock smiled, a full smile that was, John thought, quite simply breathtaking in its happiness, and his hand found John’s again and held tightly. “I love you too, John. I should hope that would be quite obvious.”
Chapter Three
Wounded With His Wounded Heart - Chapter Two
The silence that followed Sherlock’s outburst was deafening, and John didn’t even realize he had swung until his fist connected with Sherlock’s face, sending Sherlock sprawling to the floor.
“You sodding git. You absolute wanker,” John said, standing over Sherlock and breathing heavily with the effort of controlling his fury. “You did this for your bloody game with that psychopath? You risked your life, you faked your death, you let me grieve for you and mourn you, all so you could go running off and best him?” John’s voice rose steadily, shaking with betrayal, and he was quite sure he had never been this angry and hurt in his life. He had never thought Sherlock capable of being so duplicitous and disloyal, would never have believed that Sherlock could treat him with such callousness.
Sherlock looked up at him from the floor, and this time his eyes were wide not with concern, but with the realization of his mistake and some other, undecipherable emotion that John couldn’t identify. Then, to John’s complete and utter befuddlement, Sherlock began to laugh. It would have made him angry all over again, but there was something slightly hysterical in the deep chuckles that unsettled John and set his teeth on edge. Something was wrong here.
When Sherlock’s laughter ended with a muffled groan, and the detective seemed to fold in on himself in his position on the floor, another kind of awareness flooded John’s already prickling senses. He dropped to his knees next to Sherlock and reached out a tentative hand.
“Sherlock?” he said hesitantly. “What is it? Where are you hurt?” A frisson of alarm went through John as he realized that he might have exacerbated other injuries when Sherlock fell to the floor from his punch - it would explain, in fact, why Sherlock had not stayed on his feet, if he had less control of his body than he was used to.
“Cracked ribs,” Sherlock gasped, his breathing shallow. “I’ll be all right, just - give me a moment. Forgot how much it - hurts to laugh.”
John cursed mentally. No wonder he had fallen - twisting his torso with the punch would have been agonizing on cracked ribs. It also shed some light on why Sherlock had not supported John’s weight during his flashback and panic attack - Sherlock had used the wall for support, and used the strength of his arms to keep John upright without putting too much strain on his ribcage.
“Let me see,” he ordered, his hands already reaching for Sherlock’s suit jacket and shirt buttons.
Sherlock sat up slowly, one arm curled around his midsection, and shook his head in a weak protest. “Mycroft’s physician has already seen to it, John, there is really no need -”
“Sherlock,” John said again, his tone brooking no argument. “Let. Me. See.”
Sherlock closed his eyes and cautiously shrugged out of his suit jacket, then unbuttoned his dress shirt. John had been right about the new scar, he saw, a slender white slice over Sherlock’s collarbone, but he hissed as he saw the bloom of purple, blue, and yellow around Sherlock’s ribcage. The bruises were vicious, likely made by both fists and boots, and combined with the ribs had to pain the detective immensely. John let his fingers ghost over a few of the worst ones.
“Have you been keeping your lungs clear? Taking deep breaths? What pain meds are you on?” he asked, his mind whirring as the medical questions came automatically.
“Yes, I have, and Oxycontin, briefly, followed by high doses of ibuprofen,” Sherlock replied, his tone a bit terse but clearly acknowledging John’s need for information.
John nodded, keeping his eyes flickering over Sherlock as he absorbed that. Of course giving Sherlock Oxycontin for any length of time wasn’t a good idea, given his drug history - ten days was usually the maximum prescription allowed even for someone with no history and no addictive tendencies. As long as he had been preventing any mucous from building up in his lungs, that was the most important thing.
He caught sight of another bandage, through the white material of Sherlock’s shirt, and gently touched his forearm. “And this?”
“A knife,” Sherlock said succinctly. “Courtesy of one Sebastian Moran, the last person I … dispatched. Moriarty’s second in command. It should be fine. Minimal scarring, with any luck.”
There was a pause, during which they were both looking at each other, John doing more injury assessment and Sherlock taking in John’s expression, his eyes, some of the emotions written so clearly on his face. John was aware of that direct gaze even as his brain was cataloguing the new scars that he could see, calculating the amount of time it should take Sherlock’s ribs to heal, and thinking about alternatives for the ibuprofen; Sherlock wouldn’t be able to stay on that forever, but he would need something to ward off the residual pain for several weeks yet. He was also shockingly thin, easily as thin as Mycroft, which on his taller frame made him look almost emaciated. He had clearly slept and been hydrated, probably by force if John knew Mycroft at all, which was the only reason his coloring was better than his brother’s. He would have to eat consistently for some time, though, even to attain his normally slender and muscled physique.
Eventually, he looked back at Sherlock and nodded, a silent note that he was done with his examination, and Sherlock rebuttoned his shirt before slowly easing back into his jacket. John offered a hand to help him stand, and it was only then, when they were both standing, that Sherlock broke the silence that had enfolded them.
“I am sorry, John,” he said quietly, and John looked up at him, astonished. He could count on one hand the number of times Sherlock had verbally apologized to him. Sherlock saw his look and his mouth quirked up at the corner, amused and rueful. “There is a great deal you don’t know, and I am explaining it all very badly. I have been so absorbed in this, so determined to be done with this bloody business and come home, that I forgot for a moment just how much of a leap I am asking you to make.”
It was in that instant that John realized that neither of them had let go of the other’s hand, and his fingers tightened around Sherlock’s involuntarily, even as his breathing quickened just a fraction. He had been so far in doctor mode before that he hadn’t thought about the fact that he was seeing Sherlock’s body - but now just the one point of contact was threatening to make his head swim.
“I’m sorry I punched you; I clearly overreacted. Just don’t disappear on me again, please,” John said, giving Sherlock a small smile of his own. “Having you return from the dead is about all the shock I can take today, I think.”
“Understandably,” Sherlock said, again with the warm half-smile that John knew was completely genuine. “Come here.”
Sherlock tugged John over to the sofa and they both sat, still keeping their hands linked between them, though neither of them chose to comment on it.
“It was not about the game,” Sherlock started. “It might have been a game to Moriarty, but it was a game of the most deadly kind, and by the time I was up on that rooftop, I had long since ceased to see it as such, and saw it instead as the web of a man who simply had to be stopped. It might interest you to know that our dear friend Jim shot himself in the head before I jumped.”
John blanched. He had wanted to know what happened, but it hurt more than he expected to hear that Moriarty had already been dead, and yet Sherlock had jumped anyway, had faked his own death in front of John’s eyes when the criminal they had been seeking was no longer a threat. “I knew he had killed himself - the forensics proved that - but then why did you still jump? Why would you still go through with it when he was already dead? When all I could do was stand there and watch you die?”
“Because in death he beat me, too, at least in that moment,” Sherlock said tightly, and John realized belatedly that Sherlock’s fingers were trembling. It was not easy for him to relive this, to talk about this - there was much more here than John had initially believed. “If I had anticipated that, if I had known he would be willing to go that far, I might have been able to stop him before he pulled the trigger. If I had, this whole charade would not have been necessary.”
Sherlock gently disentangled his fingers from John’s, and when he raised both hands to cup John’s face, John could only stare back at him. Feeling that intense gaze drill into him left him dizzy, brought him back to the moment when Sherlock had been trying to get him to remember the Black Lotus cipher, and all he had been able to feel were Sherlock’s eyes and hands - it was like that now, but he knew why Sherlock had done it. Sherlock needed him to remember, needed him to see what had really happened.
“Do you remember what he said at the pool?” Sherlock asked, his eyes intent on John’s. John swallowed; how many times had that voice, that sentence, echoed in his head and his nightmares?
“I will burn the heart out of you,” he whispered, and Sherlock nodded.
“He meant it, John. It wasn’t just about humiliating me, making me look like a fake, discrediting my skills. It wasn’t even solely about wanting me dead, though he certainly wanted that, enough to kill himself to ensure it. He wanted me gutted, left with nothing and no one.”
Sherlock paused, and John could see the anguish flicker through his eyes before he continued. “I baited you, that day at the lab - I wanted you to be angry so that you would do exactly what you did and go to Baker Street - but I was also trying to tell you, in the only way I could.”
“Alone is what I have. Alone protects me,” John murmured. He closed his eyes as complete understanding finally washed through him. “I am such an idiot.”
The pads of Sherlock’s fingers tightened on his cheekbones. “You are not. You are not, John,” he said fiercely. “You care - and that is not idiocy, no matter what Mycroft might think and no matter how long I tried to convince myself that it was. I owe you a thousand apologies for all of this, and one of them is for twisting your heart to my advantage. If the worst happened, I didn’t - I didn’t intend for you to see it. But when you showed up - I still tried to tell you.”
John replayed the conversation he had relived so many times, slowly going over the lines in his head, for the first time in a year not feeling the soul-wrenching agony of knowing that he would never see Sherlock again. When he reached the correct point in the conversation, he sucked in a breath, knowing he was right. “‘It’s just a magic trick.’”
Sherlock nodded, another one of those truly kind half-smiles gracing his features. “I didn’t know for certain, but - I hoped it would be. If you figured it out afterward, I wanted you to be able to hope, too.”
John’s throat closed up. Sherlock was still Sherlock, but this strange - strange tenderness was new, new and brilliant and terrifying for John’s vulnerable heart. It was as though whatever hell Sherlock had been through in the last year had stripped away his reserve, made him willing to open up to John and show more of the emotions that John had always seen under the surface of his cold and abrupt demeanor. John wondered if what he was seeing was his alone, whether Sherlock was also different around Mycroft or Molly, and some terribly selfish part of him hoped that this Sherlock was all his.
Sherlock seemed to sense that John couldn’t speak, because he took another long breath before he continued, his hands still never leaving John’s face. “There were three snipers, John. Moriarty left warnings - IOUs - one on an apple, at the flat, when he paid me a visit the day of the verdict. That one was for you. One at the Yard, for Lestrade. One at Baker Street, for Mrs. Hudson. That day at Bart’s, the snipers had all three of you in their crosshairs - and either Moriarty had to call them off, or I had to jump. That was their signal to leave. If I was dead, the three of you lived. And we went several rounds, he and I - I was so close to getting him to give them whatever code he had set up,” Sherlock growled in frustration, “and he knew that I was. He put a gun in his mouth so that I wouldn’t succeed, so that the only avenue left to me was to jump. He was willing to die as long as I did, too - and he had found precisely the right way to make it happen.”
“My god,” John breathed. He could feel the color draining from his face as Sherlock explained, and by the end he just felt cold all over, his mind in turmoil as he tried to comprehend such an impossible choice. He raised his own hands and placed them lightly on Sherlock’s forearms, still needing to feel the detective’s flesh under his fingers - and needing a counterpoint to Sherlock’s hands on his own skin. “Sherlock, I never imagined -”
“Of course you didn’t - and I didn’t want you to,” Sherlock said determinedly. “No one but Moriarty could have dreamed up such insanity. That was the entire point - everyone had to believe I was dead, even you, John. As long as the world believed it, as long as the people closest to me believed it, then you were all safe. Not only that, but others were safe, too. Harry. Clara. Mrs. Hudson’s sister. Angelo. Lestrade’s children. And before you ask, John, Molly was safe from the start because Moriarty had deemed her unimportant - he had gone through with the charade of dating her, after all, and watched me dismiss her out of hand that day he was in the lab, saw me utterly ignore her. She didn’t matter, or so he thought, and therefore I could go to her when the need was greatest. I’ve never been so grateful for my own rude and antisocial tendencies,” he added wryly.
Feeling slightly more brave, now that he was starting to understand, John slid his hands up to Sherlock’s own and entwined their fingers, bringing them down so that their joined hands rested between them. Sherlock offered no objection at all, and John felt his own hope grow just a little more.
“What about Mycroft?” he said curiously. “Why didn’t he go after Mycroft?”
Sherlock’s brow furrowed in a way that told John he was dissatisfied with this aspect of the case, if case it could be called. “Neither I nor my dear brother have truly been able to figure out the answer to that question. Moriarty knew of Mycroft’s existence; he told me so on the roof of the hospital and in any case his network was everywhere - but perhaps he thought it too risky, to try and go after the British Government? Perhaps, again, Mycroft was unimportant to Moriarty because he apparently was utterly unimportant to me? Mycroft and I have a contentious relationship at best, and you have seen our animosity firsthand. If Jim truly wanted to do as he said, take away everyone who was dear to me if I didn’t kill myself first, then naturally he would go after those who seemed to be closest to me. To the outside world, Mycroft has never been on that list. It was fortuitous - Mycroft proved himself invaluable, once he knew I was alive, making sure I had money and passports and clearance at my disposal.”
“It is also possible that Moriarty wanted to leave Mycroft alive, leave Mycroft knowing that he had been bested and had helped to destroy me,” Sherlock added thoughtfully after a moment. “That idea would have been very appealing to him.”
John could say nothing to that. It was true, for one, and for another Sherlock clearly knew what had happened between Mycroft and Moriarty. Whether or not Sherlock forgave his brother was up to him, and from what John had seen, Mycroft had certainly exhausted himself in assisting Sherlock, perhaps to atone for what he had done. John himself wasn’t sure anymore how he felt toward the elder Holmes; he would need time to figure that out. Mycroft had made a terrible, heartless mistake, and he had kept the knowledge of Sherlock being alive to himself - but since that secrecy might very well have saved all of them, John wasn’t sure he could fault the man.
“And so being alone not only protected you, in this case, but protected me, and Mrs. Hudson, and Lestrade, and Molly, and Mycroft,” John summarized succinctly, his voice shaking. “Sherlock . . .”
He trailed off, not sure what he wanted to say or how much he could say without revealing his feelings completely, but thankfully Sherlock stepped in to the conversation.
“Quite,” he nodded. “I walked away from Bart’s having no idea whether or not I would succeed in taking down the rest of Moriarty’s network, or if one of them would take me down first. Molly knew I was alive, at least temporarily, but she didn’t know if I would stay that way, and had all of this gone on long enough, she would have assumed I was dead; perhaps she has already. Mycroft didn’t know until several months after the fact. Lestrade and Mrs. Hudson still don’t know. And of course, it was important that everyone I was hunting also assumed I was dead. They weren’t expecting me to come looking for them.”
“Where did you go?” John asked softly, and suddenly every bit of Sherlock’s exhaustion showed on his face.
“Everywhere,” he answered wearily. “Everywhere from Paris and St. Petersburg to Morocco and the Ivory Coast. Japan. Thailand. Brazil. Even Canada and the States. I started with the snipers and worked my way up. I wanted the immediate threats to you removed, and after that I focused on the key players, the linchpins. The minions, the hired muscle, would simply move to another organization or job if Moriarty stopped paying them, but the ones who could take over, who could keep running his empire - I wanted them dead. All of them. I wasn’t about to spare anyone who could come after you,” Sherlock finished. Just for a moment, his eyes turned hard, fierce, and John saw all of the ruthlessness and determination that had driven him to do something so desperate, to risk his life in a six-story fall and then risk it over and over again in the twelve months that followed.
“And if you died in the process, no one would be the wiser, since you were already dead,” John whispered, and Sherlock inclined his head in agreement.
“Mycroft would have been the only one who knew for certain, and the few others who cared would have already finished their mourning and moved on. It seemed . . . kinder, as well as the safest way,” Sherlock said, hesitating a bit over the idea that anything about his false death could be considered kind. John knew where the hesitation came from, and he smiled humorlessly.
“‘A bit not good,’ that - but nothing about it was even remotely good, so maybe it could be considered a saving grace,” he quipped, striving for lightness - but the statement came out more solemn than he intended, and John almost forgot to breathe as the phrasing struck him and he once again locked eyes with Sherlock. A saving grace - somehow, despite all the horror and grief of the last year, they were both here, they were both alive, as were the other people they loved. It was all thanks to the careful, swift planning of Sherlock’s genius mind and the willingness of his selfless heart, the heart he kept so carefully hidden and guarded under logic and sarcasm and cutting remarks, rudeness and arrogance and impossible behavior.
Neither of them could look away as John’s comment hung in the air. Sherlock was studying him intently again, and John gazed back at him just as fixedly, waiting, though he had no idea what he was waiting for - but John saw the instant when something changed in Sherlock’s eyes, some last wall of resistance came down and caution was thrown to the wind. Sherlock lifted one pair of their joined hands and rested them against his cheek.
“You were still alive. That was all the grace I wanted,” Sherlock murmured, and John thought his heart might burst.
He shifted position just enough so that he could lean forward and rest his forehead against Sherlock’s. “I never would have stopped mourning for you, you idiot,” he murmured back, his voice thick with tears. “You saved me long before you fell from that rooftop.”
In the next breath, he closed the few millimeters of space between their lips, kissing Sherlock with infinite gentleness and yet with all of the pent-up longing that he had thought would never find expression. Sherlock made a soft noise in the back of his throat, and then his long fingers were sliding through John’s hair, holding John in place. John felt dizzy with the sensation; Sherlock’s lips were so soft, the feel of him brand new and yet utterly familiar, as if John had kissed him a million times before and simply didn’t know it until this minute.
They kissed until they were both desperate for air, learning the taste and texture of each other slowly, reveling in the wet slide of their tongues and the soft brushes of their lips. When they finally broke apart, panting, John reached out and stroked Sherlock’s cheekbone, doing freely now what he had been too afraid to continue earlier.
“I love you,” he said softly. “Just in case that wasn’t clear.”
Sherlock smiled, a full smile that was, John thought, quite simply breathtaking in its happiness, and his hand found John’s again and held tightly. “I love you too, John. I should hope that would be quite obvious.”
Chapter Three