Fanfic - Waiting To Be Known [Sherlock BBC: John/Sherlock]
Title: Waiting To Be Known
Rating: R
Pairing(s): John/Sherlock
Warning(s): Implied bullying; implied suicide/suicidal ideation; minor character death; drug use; sexual violence inflicted on a child. Spoilers for S2, especially 2x03.
Summary: Written for this prompt. John Watson has been saving Sherlock's life for a very long time, even if he doesn't know it.
Waiting To Be Known
Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known. - Carl Sagan
Sherlock locks his door (that’s breaking the rules; Mummy says they’re not allowed to lock their doors in case of emergencies), pulls the covers back on his bed (they’d been neat and crisp and perfect and he’s not supposed to be there again till bed-time; Daddy thinks he spends too much time in his room as it is), crawls under them (tight and too-warm and stifling and maybe he can just stop breathing) and sobs.
He knows he’s different, but he doesn’t know why. Mummy tells him to be quiet and not to ask people about things he shouldn’t know about, but how is he meant to know what he should or shouldn’t know about? It’s all there, on them, so how can anyone not see it? Sherlock hadn’t been born like this. He’d learned. And surely others learn the same way? Why don’t they see things the way he does? Mycroft does, Sherlock knows he does, but Mycroft tells him the same things Mummy does, don’t tell people about things you shouldn’t know, and no one will tell him how he’s meant to know the difference.
The bed dips to the side abruptly. “Oh,” someone says. It doesn’t sound like anyone Sherlock knows. Whoever it was hadn’t come through the door. His room was on the second floor, so entrance through the window is unlikely but possible. Sherlock makes himself very small and tries not to hiccup through his tears.
“Dreaming, I suppose,” the man says softly. The bed un-dips itself. “I’m sorry,” the man says, sounding awkward. “I don’t suppose you know where I am?”
Sherlock sniffles quietly.
“I think I might be de - dreaming,” the man says. “I’m not where I was a moment ago. But I don’t remember falling asleep either. That’s peculiar, isn’t it?”
Sherlock waits, but the man doesn’t say anything else. The bed doesn’t move again, but he can hear the man’s breathing. He’s not leaving the room, but he’s not doing anything either.
Sherlock pushes the covers aside a little and peeks out.
The man is sitting on the floor, leaning against Sherlock’s bed. His hair is brown and gold and has little bits of grey all through it and it’s cut short and neat. He’s got his back to Sherlock, so Sherlock can’t see his face.
“Who are you?” Sherlock asks tentatively.
The man turns around. He’s old and he’s got a funny nose, Sherlock thinks, but his eyes are a pretty blue-grey colour and they’re very kind. They’re also quite surprised, as the man looks Sherlock up and down.
“My name’s John,” the man says after a few moments. “Who’re you?”
“Sherlock,” Sherlock says. The man looks even more surprised. Then he shakes his head quickly and gives Sherlock a smile. It’s also very kind, just like his eyes.
“It’s nice to meet you, Sherlock,” John says. “I don’t suppose you know how I got here?”
Sherlock shakes his head. “I was here by myself,” he tells John. “And then you were here.”
John frowns a little. He’s got bags under his eyes and lines on his face from smiling and laughing. He’s not doing either now, though. He looks dreadfully sad, for some reason. The sadness had come on suddenly, but it’s hiding in the corners of his eyes and lips. Sherlock watches him carefully. John doesn’t seem like a bad man, but Mycroft had told him that you couldn’t always tell a bad man by looking at him, and that he should always be careful around people he didn’t know.
And John had come from nowhere and Sherlock doesn’t know how that’s possible.
John reaches out suddenly, then just as suddenly hesitates. His hand hovers over Sherlock’s cheek. “Sorry,” he says. “Were - were you crying?”
Sherlock nods, remembering why he’d come to hide in his room. “They were being mean,” he says, and bites his lip.
“Well, that’s not right,” John says. “No one should ever be mean to anyone else. It’s not a nice thing to do.”
John’s hand is warm and confident as he rubs away the tear-marks on Sherlock’s face. Sherlock sits there quietly and lets him. He doesn’t know John, and Mycroft and Mummy and Daddy would probably all be upset if they knew John was here, but Sherlock doesn’t care. None of them had cared that the others said nasty things to Sherlock. Does John?
John runs his hand through Sherlock’s hair, once, twice, thrice. “Chin up, Sherlock,” he says. “It’ll get better.”
Then he smiles and vanishes.
Daddy’s dead. Daddy’s dead and Sherlock doesn’t know what to do.
Mummy is crying quietly again. She doesn’t make much noise when she cries. Just little hitching gasps of breath. Mycroft is sitting with her.
Sherlock clutches Daddy’s violin closer to himself. Daddy’s dead. Daddy had given Sherlock his violin and then died.
“I don’t understand,” Mummy says. “Why would he do that?”
Sherlock doesn’t understand either. Very slowly and quietly, so that neither Mycroft nor Mummy sees him, he sneaks out of the room and goes up to Daddy’s study.
They’ve cleaned it up a bit, but they haven’t changed out the carpet yet. It’s still dark and sticky and tacky.
“Sherlock?” John says uncertainly.
Sherlock reaches up, carefully puts Daddy’s violin down on the table (he’d been sitting there, listening as Sherlock had tentatively played the too-big instrument), then turns and throws himself against John.
“Daddy’s dead,” he whispers into John’s waist.
He can feel John shifting as he looks around. Then strong arms come around his shoulders and wrap him in a tight hug. “You shouldn’t have to see this,” John says. “Let’s go out.”
“I saw it,” Sherlock tells John. He still hasn’t told Mummy or Mycroft, but it slips easily from his mouth when he talks to John. “I saw Daddy. He gave me his violin and then he died.”
John makes a funny, hissing sort of noise, and desperately clutches Sherlock closer. “I’m so sorry,” he says into Sherlock’s hair. “This should never have happened.”
“I don’t understand,” Sherlock says, hiding his face against John’s chest. “I don’t understand. I don’t.”
“Neither do I,” John says. “But god, Sherlock. I’m so, so sorry.”
“Daddy’s dead,” Sherlock says again, and John rocks him gently until the tears finally come bursting out in great, gasping, heaving sobs and Sherlock can’t see for how hard he’s crying but through it all John’s there, warm, kind John and his gentle voice, until the sobs lose their vigour and then John vanishes and Sherlock is alone and the doorknob is turning and Mycroft is stepping into the room.
“Sherlock?” John asks.
Sherlock nearly falls off his bed. “I was almost positive I’d hallucinated you,” he says.
“I’m not convinced I’m not hallucinating,” John tells him, running his eyes over Sherlock’s gangly teenage body. “It’s been a while for you, hasn’t it?”
“Five years,” Sherlock confirms, sitting up in bed.
“It doesn’t feel like any time has passed for me at all,” John confesses. “Like it was just a moment ago that I last saw you, and you’ve suddenly… sprouted.” He waves a hand vaguely.
“Lovely,” Sherlock says. “Now I’m a plant, am I?”
John steps forward, catching Sherlock by the chin and tilting his face into the light. “No, but it looks like someone’s been trying to plant you in the dirt,” he observes.
“That,” Sherlock says, “was a terrible extension of a metaphor.”
“I’m no poet,” John says agreeably, and thumbs the small cut. “It’s healing well, at least. Nicely cleaned out.”
“I’ve had practice,” Sherlock says. More than he wants to think about.
John frowns. Military man, Sherlock thinks, looking over John with a more practiced eye than his younger self had managed. Judging by the haircut and bearing, at any rate.
“Are you still on active duty?” Sherlock asks.
It takes a moment for John to switch tracks. “What? Oh. No, no, I was invalided home,” he says. “Been a while now. Two years, almost.”
Invalided from where? But Sherlock holds his tongue and watches John instead, as the older man checks Sherlock’s face and neck and makes disapproving noises with every fresh scrape and bruise he discovers. Sherlock wonders what John would do if he knew. Suddenly, he badly wants to know. Before he can think about it, his hands fly up to the buttons on his shirt, undoing them rapidly.
“Sherlock!” John says in surprise. Then he sucks in a breath when he sees the bruising on Sherlock’s chest. “Oh, bloody hell. You need to see a doctor about those.” He drops to his knees in front of Sherlock, pushing aside the shirt and checking the injuries. His fingers are careful and gentle as he assesses their extent.
“I think I am,” Sherlock says slowly.
“One other than me,” John amends, slanting an amused look at Sherlock. Sherlock looks at him, and tries to remember how to breathe.
“I’m sick of it,” he confesses quietly.
“I can’t help you,” John says in a voice full of despair. “I don’t know how to stay with you. I want to protect you but I’m useless, I’m always so bloody useless.”
“You’re not,” Sherlock says vehemently. “You’re not, you always show up when I need you. I don’t care who you are or how you get here, but you always do just when I need -”
Oh. Oh. It couldn’t possibly be that simple, could it? Three times now. Three times is by no means conclusive. He’ll have to conduct further experiments.
“Do you go to anyone else?” he asks. Jealousy flares sharply within him at the possibility.
“No,” John says. “It’s just you. What have you figured out?”
“I’m not sure yet,” Sherlock says. “Don’t go.”
“I’ll try,” John says. “It’s just, I don’t know how to stop myself from going.”
“Don’t go,” Sherlock says, and presses a clumsy kiss to John’s cheek. “Please. Don’t go.”
“Oh,” John says. His eyes are a little moist and his voice is thick when he speaks. “Sherlock. I want to stay, you know that, don’t you? I want very much to show whoever did this to you exactly why they shouldn’t touch you.”
“Then stay,” Sherlock says. He doesn’t care that he’s begging. He’s so sick of being alone.
“As long as I can,” John says. Sherlock takes John’s hand, pulls him up and onto the bed, then pushes him back and makes him lie down. With John on his side and Sherlock curled into the crease between arm and body and bed, it’s almost like he’s ten again and John is sheltering him from the world.
John lies there with him silently, carding his fingers through Sherlock’s hair, pressing light kisses into the curls. He probably thinks that Sherlock can’t feel them. Sherlock doesn’t say a word to enlighten him.
John vanishes half an hour later. It’s not nearly enough, but at least Sherlock doesn’t feel like going ahead with his plan to kill his tormentors anymore.
Sherlock lets himself get caught the next day. John doesn’t show up. Again, and again, until one day, even the possibility of seeing John isn’t enough and he starts thinking a little too much about Daddy. Then John shows up.
Half an hour again.
Afterwards, Sherlock revises his hypothesis. It’s not that he needs to be in danger, he thinks. It’s that it all needs to be too much for him. He needs to be in a state where he can’t help himself, whether physically or (his lip wrinkles distastefully) emotionally. Those are the only times John will appear.
He still thinks, sometimes, that he might be imagining John. It does make sense. But it doesn’t matter, really, because John (whether real or a figment of Sherlock’s imagination) is always there precisely at the moments when Sherlock needs something solid to hang on to, at the moments where Sherlock is in no state to be analytical and suspicious of everything and everyone.
John never stays longer than an hour. Sherlock wonders if there is a maximum time John can stay, or if he simply vanishes the moment Sherlock starts to recover himself. Some dark part of Sherlock starts planning how best to postpone his own recovery. What must he think, what must he convince himself to believe, in order to keep John by his side?
Hurting himself comes easily. First, the physical - then, when that doesn’t get results reliably enough, the mental. So simple, to talk himself into a state of either homicidal rage or suicidal despair. And every time, just as long as he really believes it, John comes to him.
But what begins as simplicity itself becomes harder and harder to maintain over the years. Sherlock’s mind sharpens and his intellect rages against his self-destructiveness. He can’t do it consciously any more, and combined with the fact that he’s learned to hold people at bay with the keen edge of his words - well. Suddenly years have gone by and despite everything he’s gotten himself into, he’s also managed to get himself out of any trouble.
And John is nowhere to be found.
He never existed, Sherlock tells himself, at age twenty-four, hanging around crime scenes to tell the police how wrong they are, and searching desperately for some sort of reason for this pathetically mundane existence. He never existed and it is useless to have wanted him to. Sherlock’s mind claws for stimulation, rages for something interesting, and finally turns on itself when nothing is forthcoming. He tears himself to shreds and his mind keeps going and going and going and nothing can stop it until it has bloodied itself and blooded itself and just for a while it needs to stop until it recovers its strength.
He is going insane. Then he discovers cocaine.
The next time Sherlock sees John, he almost dismisses it as a hallucination.
The slap is less easy to dismiss.
“You - absolute - idiot,” John bites out. Sherlock laughs and presses his face against John’s shoulder. How had he gotten there? Oh. John’s pulling him up by the arms. Had he been on the floor?
“Sherlock!” John barks. There’s his military man. He’s wanted and wanted and wanted this and he’s finally got his army man right here and his arms are nice and warm and even stronger than Sherlock had thought they would be. “Sherlock!”
“John,” Sherlock purrs, and reaches up, interlacing his fingers behind John’s neck. A small tug, and John comes so easily, their lips fitting together so nice and snug and sweet. Sherlock hums contentedly. Oh, he’s been waiting so long. Waiting and waiting until he’d almost forgotten what he’d been waiting for.
“God,” John groans, and pulls away. Sherlock frowns in disappointment and attempts to go back for more. John pushes him back, holds him off with one hand. John doesn’t want him. Well, of course he doesn’t.
“I hate you,” Sherlock informs John. “You’re mean and you’re - mean. I hate you.”
“How much did you take?” John asks. His fingers are at Sherlock’s neck and Sherlock thinks, for one wild, beautiful moment, that John will strangle him. He kicks out but his legs don’t make any contact and all he accomplishes is making John roll him into a tight hold he doesn’t have a hope of escaping. “Sherlock. How much did you take?”
Sherlock rolls his eyes. God, not this again. He gets it enough from Mycroft. He’d expected better of John. “You’re mean,” he tells John petulantly.
“I suppose it’s not a nice thing to do,” John says softly.
Sherlock suddenly feels rather dizzy. “I think I’d like to lie down,” he says. He dimly sees John reaching for Sherlock’s phone, watches as John dials a number and speaks through fog and water.
“Might not be nice,” John says, leaning in close and whispering straight into Sherlock’s ear, into his brain, into that wounded animal that turns at the soft words and quivers in uncertainty. “But if it’ll save you from your own damned ego, I’m doing it anyway.”
John vanishes just before the first paramedic comes into view.
“You’ve hardly got the right to tell me what to do with myself,” Sherlock says.
“No, I don’t,” John says quietly. He’s looking out the window. He hasn’t once looked at Sherlock since he showed up here. Sherlock hates it, hates every second of it. Something dark and ugly inside him wants to hit John, wants to force him to pay attention. Wants to tie him up and keep him tucked away and never let him leave.
Sherlock knows his little flat’s not exactly fine accommodation. He can’t afford any better, though. Mycroft has cut him off until he “cleans up.” And he needs money for more important things than a pretty flat. All the same, John could at least do Sherlock the decency of looking at him when he speaks.
“I don’t know why you’re here,” Sherlock says, as bitingly as he knows how. “I don’t need or want you here.”
“Can I just ask,” John says. “Why cocaine?”
“Because I want to,” Sherlock says. Because the rush is beautiful and his mind is so sharp and clear and he sees everything and he can keep up with himself. Because even the crash is beautiful in the way it makes him forget. His mind doesn’t remember to break apart when it’s being dragged under by the drugs. Sherlock doesn’t say any of that, but he gets the unsettling feeling that John has heard every word he hasn’t said.
“It’s destroying your brain,” John says. “But then you know that, don’t you?” His voice is cynical but not forceful. “It’s a triple reuptake inhibitor, messes with your levels of dopamine and serotonin and norepinephrine. It’s the kind of drug you might give someone who’s suffering from depression. Know what it does to someone who isn’t? It teaches your body to stay out of balance so that you have to keep taking it to feel at all normal. Makes you give control over to it - no, makes you want to give control over to it. Do you like the fact that it’s an appetite suppressant? Do you like how clear your mind is during the high? Does it all cancel out the fact that it causes hallucinations, paranoia, psychosis? Is it worth the fact that while on it, you can’t trust the evidence of your own senses?”
Sherlock stares at John’s back resentfully. Damn him. Damn him. How had he known about Sherlock’s greatest fear, how had he so unerringly honed in on the one thing that might scare Sherlock into listening? “What would you know?” he mutters.
John finally turns to look at him. “I’ve seen people destroy themselves through addiction,” he says. “Drugs, drink. I’ve not got it in me to see one more person I love do that to themselves. Call it selfish, but I want you to live.”
“For you?” Sherlock asks softly.
“For you,” John replies. “And yeah. For me. Just for me, Sherlock, can you do that?”
Sherlock rolls over in bed and presses his face into the threadbare pillow. When he finally looks back up, John’s gone.
Detox is torture.
He grimly goes through the abrupt mood swings, the insomnia, the constant exhaustion, the sensation of something living crawling under his skin. There is no nausea. He thinks nausea may have been easier to deal with than the tricks his mind plays on him. He clings to the thought that once this has passed and his body has rediscovered homeostasis, it will be over.
(It won’t be, but just for now, he pretends.)
Mycroft thinks that the stick of being cut off from his money has worked. Lestrade thinks that the carrot of being allowed to work with the police if he’s clean has worked. Sherlock will never enlighten either of them. He works through the withdrawal symptoms and stays clean. Five months later, he relapses. Three weeks on cocaine and then he drags himself from its grip again and goes through the whole horrible process again.
He relapses twice more (seven months, four months). He’s on his fourth go at kicking the habit (ninth month now and going strong) when he next sees John.
“Don’t try to move,” John instructs him calmly. “Just lie back.”
Sherlock looks down dimly at the knife handle sticking out of his thigh. He can’t feel any pain. That’s probably not a good sign. John pushes down close to the edges of the blade and oh - there’s the pain, and Sherlock’s vision whites out for a while.
When he opens his eyes again, John’s on the phone. It’s peculiar, Sherlock thinks hazily, that John never stays long enough for anyone to see him, but he can communicate perfectly fine to other people over the phone.
“He’s just come back around,” John says. The phone’s tucked between his ear and shoulder, and he’s got both hands on Sherlock’s thigh. “No. No, not yet. Yes, I suspect so. Serrated edges. I’m fairly certain it didn’t. No, not sterile, definitely not. Yes. ETA?”
Sherlock blinks up at John. His chest really hurts quite a lot.
“Sherlock,” John says. “Try and stay awake.”
No chance of his falling asleep now. The pain’s rather a distraction. John’s eyes crinkle at the edges, even as he continues putting pressure on the wound around the knife.
“No, it’s not,” John says. Not what? Oh, he’s talking into the phone again. “Sherlock, any trouble breathing?”
Sherlock considers that, then shakes his head a very little.
“No,” John reports. Then he starts slightly. “Yes, I hear the sirens now. Yes - yes, thanks.”
John leans back slightly and lets the phone fall onto the ground. “Hold on just a little longer,” he tells Sherlock. “They’re almost here.”
“Please stay,” Sherlock manages to say.
And for once, John stays. The paramedics arrive and have Sherlock transported to the waiting ambulance in short order. John is useful in concisely summarising Sherlock’s injuries to the paramedics, and so they have no qualms about letting him ride along with them. Sherlock tries to figure out what it means that John can apparently be seen by the paramedics. It’s a departure from the norm, but he can’t quite focus on why that might be the case.
Once at the hospital, though, Sherlock’s whisked away to surgery while John’s left behind to wait. John has to be there when he gets out, Sherlock thinks desperately, as the anaesthetic begins to work. He has to be.
When he finally wakes up, he thinks for a heart-stopping moment that John’s left after all. Then he hears a soft thump to his right, and turns to see John sitting by his bed.
“I didn’t actually stay,” John says by way of greeting. “The moment you were out of sight, that was it for me.” He snaps his fingers. “But then, five minutes ago…”
“John,” Sherlock says plaintively.
“I’m glad I got to be here when you woke up,” John admits. He pours out a little water into a plastic cup and gently slides his hand under Sherlock’s neck. “Careful.”
His leg aches dreadfully as he drinks the water. He lies back down gratefully, before a thought occurs to him. “The painkillers,” he says in alarm. “I don’t want -”
“They’re not giving you anything strong,” John says. “I had a look at your chart, I hope you don’t mind. It’s nothing addictive.”
Sherlock relaxes. “I went back to it,” he confesses. “Three times. This is my longest yet.”
“Thank you,” John says, and gives him that warm smile that’s all in his eyes.
“It’s hard,” Sherlock says in a very small voice. “I keep trying but it never sticks. I don’t even want to anymore. I hate it. But I need it.”
“I’ve heard cocaine addiction is one of the hardest to kick,” John says with a sigh. “But I can’t imagine that you won’t eventually manage to do exactly what you want with your life. As long as you’re committed to whatever you want…”
“Mycroft doesn’t think I can,” Sherlock says, and that’s it, that’s his deepest, darkest secret, the fact that his own brother doubts his ability to ever truly give up the drugs.
“Mycroft,” John says with disturbing finality, “has an overinflated sense of importance and is not nearly as all-knowing as he would like to make himself out to be. His God complex will get good men killed if he doesn’t watch what he’s doing.”
Sherlock stares at John.
John clears his throat. “You’ll do it,” he says. “I know it doesn’t happen straightaway. But you’ll manage it.”
Something unclenches in Sherlock’s throat. He closes his eyes quickly, before they can do anything ridiculous like tear up. Consequently, he doesn’t see the look on John’s face as he bends over and presses his lips gently to Sherlock’s, and by the time he does open them in surprise, John’s gone again.
It is not Sherlock’s physical distress that next summons John from wherever he comes from, but a child’s.
Robert Nicholson has raped and killed four young children. Sherlock had been called in on the fifth case, once it had become clear that May Kendrick had become Nicholson’s fifth victim. He had been racing against the clock from the beginning and he’d known, he’d known there was only a very slim possibility that he’d get to her before Nicholson decided he was done. And yet.
And yet.
Sherlock’s hand trembles as he tries to find a pulse. He doesn’t know what to do. May Kendrick is alive, but she won’t be for much longer. Lestrade is on his way and an ambulance has been dispatched but Sherlock knows that May Kendrick will not live to see them arrive.
“What do I do?” he chokes out, and just like that there are hurried footsteps behind him and two strong hands firmly moving him out of the way.
Sherlock watches, numb, as John quickly checks May’s vitals. “Give me your jacket and belt,” he orders. “And go see if there’s anything in the way of medical supplies here.”
Sherlock strips off wordlessly, then runs to the bathroom. There’s a first-aid kit, but it’s not well-stocked. At least there are bandages and sterile gauze in it. He brings it back to John, and then goes flying through the rest of the house in search of anything else that might help.
There’s nothing. He returns to find that John has constructed a makeshift tourniquet to stop the blood that had been spurting from May’s arm. Severed artery, Sherlock thinks. He knows what the injuries would have been; he simply doesn’t know how to best treat them without causing further harm. John is now cleaning May’s groin, his face set in a grim expression.
Sherlock looks away. Robert Nicholson’s dead eyes stare up at the ceiling. Sherlock had wrested the knife away from him (not quick enough to spare May) and driven it upwards through his chest, between his ribs, into his lungs. It had looked to be a painful death. Sherlock is glad for it.
“Sherlock,” John says. “Help me out here.”
He applies pressure where John tells him to. He tries not to think of what would have been possible had he been just a little faster. A little better.
“Stop it,” John says quietly. “What’s important now is helping this little one and getting her home.”
Sherlock watches John’s face rather than his hands. How does John do this? How can he be so composed when faced with this? Had he been this in control on the battlefield?
“The tearing’s bad,” John says. “I can’t do anything for that here.” He mops up the freshly spilled blood. “ETA on the ambulance?”
Sherlock checks his watch, does a quick calculation, and says, “Ten minutes.”
“She’ll make it,” John says. He scrubs blood off his hands with a bit of scrap gauze, then tentatively touches her forehead. “It won’t be pleasant, but she’ll make it.”
“Thank you,” Sherlock says. His eyes are hot. “Thank you.”
John leans across May Kendrick’s unconscious body and presses his forehead against Sherlock’s. “Thank you,” he says. “For finding her.”
“Can’t you stay at all?” Sherlock asks quietly. “I wish you would.”
John’s eyes rake over Sherlock’s body speculatively. “How old are you?” he asks.
“Twenty-nine,” Sherlock says.
“Soon, then,” John says. “Very soon.” It sounds like a promise, and Sherlock clings to the memory of the sound as he is left alone with a dead body and a broken girl.
Sherlock’s next encounter with John is in a laboratory at Barts.
This John does not know Sherlock. A careful cataloguing of this John’s appearance leads Sherlock to suspect that whatever it is that enables John to travel to Sherlock’s side in the past, it has not yet taken effect. This John’s face is as tired and worn as the one Sherlock is familiar with - but there’s less grey in his hair, less anguish in his eyes. And how odd, that Sherlock’s John would be more anguished than this one, despite having more time between himself and the war.
There’s only one logical explanation for that, and that is that something worse than the war has happened to him.
Sherlock finds he quite strongly desires to stave off whatever that something is. It’s ridiculous. He remembers the feel of John’s lips on his. He remembers curling up in bed with him - though never as an adult. He’d been a teenager the last time. John had felt solid and safe. Part of Sherlock can’t stop obsessing over how John might feel now. If the touch of his hands would be in any way different. If he might be more protective, or less. But this John is not interested in a romantic relationship with Sherlock, and at any rate, Sherlock’s not entirely sure he wants to be in a relationship with this John either.
He doesn’t really know John, that’s the problem. He knows how he feels around his John. He knows that his John has always been there for him exactly when he’d most needed someone and been most alone. He knows that his John is the reason he’s still alive today. But actually living with John - that’s new, and different, and difficult. Living with John means being careful with his experiments or risking being yelled at. It means needing to curb his more outlandish tendencies. It means hearing the sounds of night terrors drifting down to him and being unable to do anything about them. It means late nights over takeaway and companionable silences. It means a person who, despite how aggravating Sherlock is, gives exactly as good as he gets and refuses to let Sherlock be anything less than he can be.
It’s wonderful. It’s terrifying.
Sherlock had already been halfway infatuated with the John he’d known. Now, he thinks he might be halfway in love.
So he takes stupid risks. He toys with taking a possibly poisoned pill. He plays Moriarty’s game. He lets Irene Adler seduce him and pretends, just for a moment, that she might actually understand him. And again, he plays Moriarty’s game. Almost all the way through and he knows what he needs to do now, what plans he’ll have to put into play.
He just doesn’t know if he can go through with them.
Sherlock stands on the edge of the roof. His John had worn more anguish in his eyes than the John Sherlock had met eighteen months ago at Barts. That anguish, the anguish he’d wanted to protect John from, is his fault.
He hates himself.
He throws his phone aside and stares out at the street. Everything’s in place. He just needs to finish the process of destroying himself (and John) now.
“Sherlock!”
The scream comes from across the street and behind him. Sherlock doesn’t look back. He spreads his arms and lets himself fall.
John greets him with a fist to the face.
“Ow,” Sherlock says. He’s on the ground, without quite having registered the process of toppling over. John really has quite the excellent left hook.
“You bastard,” John says, and straddles Sherlock’s lap. His fists are clenched in Sherlock’s coat collar, flexing bloodlessly as if he’s trying to decide whether to punch Sherlock again. “You complete and utter bastard.”
Sherlock lurches forward and clings to John desperately. “I hoped,” he says, pressing his face against John’s neck. John’s pulse throbs steadily beneath his weathered skin, just a little faster than its norm. “I hoped that you’d come. That you’d see.”
“It was a magic trick,” John laughs. “It really was.”
In the distance behind them, a broken-hearted John strides away from Sherlock’s grave.
“All I wanted was a miracle,” John says. “Just this one.”
“I heard,” Sherlock says, and pulls back from John. “How long?”
John’s fingers are tracing the lines of Sherlock’s face. “How long what?”
“How long did I leave you like that?” Sherlock asks. “How long before this, before you knew?”
John kisses the tip of Sherlock’s nose, then the very top of his cheekbones, left and right, then his forehead. “Six months,” he says, breathing the words over Sherlock’s lips. “It’s been six months. I hate you.”
“I love you,” Sherlock replies.
“I don’t understand why I was there,” John confesses.
Sherlock blinks up at him hazily. This is an all too familiar situation.
“On the roof,” John says. “I thought, for a while, I thought I basically showed up when you needed me to. But on the roof, before you jumped…”
“Couldn’t do it,” Sherlock explains. Blood, he discovers, actually tastes rather nauseating. Or perhaps it’s a culmination of various factors. “Had to do it, but couldn’t. To you. Needed you to know.”
“Oh,” John says, and presses a little harder on the bullet wound in Sherlock’s chest. “Right.”
“Had snipers,” Sherlock says. “You. Mrs Hudson. Lestrade. Had to jump. Or.”
“We’d be shot,” John finishes. “Makes sense now. Okay. Last resort then, the way you planned it if you had to die.”
“Chose roof,” Sherlock says. He shuts his eyes against the glare of the lamp and smiles tiredly. “Planned it. Molly.”
“She helped,” John says. “Bloody - Molly knew. That’s what she was on about when she -”
“Asked her,” Sherlock says. It’s hard to breathe. John’s pressing awfully hard on his chest. “Look after -”
He passes out before he can finish the sentence. He wakes up in a private hospital. Even in France, he can feel Mycroft’s influence reaching out to shield him from Moriarty’s men while he heals.
John’s not there, but that’s all right. Sherlock knows that John’s got his back.
A few months after, there’s another bullet. This one grazes an infinitely more precious brain than Sherlock’s. Sherlock isn’t quite fast enough, and gets there only in time to witness the aftermath.
Moran has escaped. He’s the last Sherlock needs to eliminate before he can return home. He’s the reason Sherlock still hasn’t had the chance to confess to John, to finally throw himself at John and let those strong arms shelter him just as they had when he’d been a child.
And Moran has almost managed to do what Moriarty couldn’t. Sherlock can’t help but marvel at the irony, as he sneaks into John’s hospital room and kisses his lax lips.
“Soon,” he promises. John lies there quietly, as people in comas tend to do. Sherlock’s name has already been cleared, thanks to Mycroft. All he needed to do was ensure that Moriarty’s most loyal men didn’t decide to finish what Moriarty had wanted to do. “I’ll get him and then I’ll come home and I don’t mind if you hit me again. Just.”
He brushes his fingers through John’s hair. It’s longer and shaggier than he’s ever seen it before. It suits him, though Sherlock also rather likes the short military cut that’s he’s used to. There’s a faint scruff on John’s cheeks and chin, and Sherlock scrapes his nails across it lightly.
“Just wake up,” he breathes. “One miracle, John. Just for me. Wake up.”
He does get Moran. He gets him in front of almost half a rather incredulous Scotland Yard, but at least he gets him. Or at least, he corners him. The ‘getting’ bit of the equation… well, Sherlock’s working on it.
“You actually believe him?” Moran spits at the police officers, as he backs up to a more defensible position. He’d decided to try for Lestrade second, just as Sherlock had suspected. The plan had been audacious and perfectly executed; if not for Sherlock, it probably would have worked. Now, though, Moran’s trapped and he knows it. “He’s a fraud, remember?”
“You really haven’t kept up with the news, have you?” Sherlock asks in faux disinterest. “Funny thing about lies. They twist and twist and twist on themselves until they just - snap apart. And there’s the truth, for all to see.”
Moran stills. He’s still searching for an escape route. There is none. Moran will not escape this. The trick will be in taking him down without anyone else winding up in the cross-fire.
Thus far, Sherlock has seven plans which end in Moran’s capture or death. Unfortunately, all of them involve - at minimum - five bystander deaths as well, which Sherlock thinks would probably not be good. At the very least, John would not be happy, and he can’t let John down yet again.
Oh. John.
Moran has the most spectacularly shocked look on his face as he collapses. Sherlock barely tamps down the totally inappropriate urge to giggle.
“Hi,” he says.
“Hello,” John says from behind Moran, and lowers his gun. “So, what are the chances of me getting out of this without being arrested?”
“Seeing as you’re currently in a coma in a hospital bed, quite good,” Sherlock says giddily. “John. John, that was Moran. He was the last one. God, I can come back home now.”
John’s eyes light up. “Brilliant!” he says, and vanishes. Sherlock looks back at Moran’s body, then glances up at the shell-shocked officers around him.
“Bloody hell,” Lestrade says, with feeling.
Explanations take an annoyingly long time. Sherlock explains why he’d had to fake his death and what he’s been doing since. (Thankfully, Lestrade doesn’t punch him. Donovan rather awkwardly sidles out of the room when Sherlock explains exactly why Lestrade had been targeted; her reaction and Lestrade’s almost make the complications of Moran’s death worth dealing with.) He also adroitly dodges all attempts by Lestrade to figure out how earth John had managed to be in a coma and shoot Moran at the same time. When he finally escapes Lestrade’s clutches, Mycroft sends a car to bring him back to 221B Baker Street - where, he’s assured, he’s still got a home with John.
Mrs Hudson slaps him, and then hugs him, and then cries all over him, and then shoves him out the door and tells him to go to John. It’s about what he’d expected of her.
He heads to Barts first, to thank Molly for all she’d done. The words aren’t even awkward rolling off his tongue anymore. She’s got a new boyfriend, he sees, but he doesn’t mention it. He gives her a hug and takes his leave without asking any favours of her.
Then he goes to John.
John’s still terribly quiet. Mycroft pulls some strings so that Sherlock can stay with him as long as he likes. It’s very odd to be sitting by John and not hear any responses to even the most inane comments.
“Is that what I look like,” John says critically.
“Surely you’ve seen yourself in the mirror before,” Sherlock comments.
“Oh, yeah, sure,” John says, walking around the bed. “Looks different like this, though. Can’t put my finger on it.”
“When are you going to wake up?” Sherlock asks plaintively.
“Don’t know,” John says.
“Hasn’t this happened to you yet?” Sherlock asks.
“Nope,” John says. “Or, well, I’ve been shot. I remember being shot. Sniper, wasn’t it?”
“Yes,” Sherlock says, his expression darkening. John walks back over to him and ruffles his curls. “It was Moran. I suppose you got your revenge.”
“Suppose so,” John says.
“Don’t tell me you’ve been doing your - travelling - while in a coma,” Sherlock says with a frown. “That’s just ridiculous.”
“I won’t tell you, then,” John says, then laughs at the face Sherlock pulls. “It’s not like I really know either, Sherlock. Seems a viable guess. I remember being shot, but not waking up. Stands to reason this is the time I’m from, right?”
“You look different,” Sherlock says, glancing between the still body on the bed, and the warm one standing next to him. “Your hair’s back in a military cut, you’re clean-shaven - and you shot Moran. Do you appear as you picture yourself to be? Your clothes. You’ve always appeared wearing the same combination of those jeans with the jumper I bought you. Certainly not a hospital gown. You didn’t have your gun on you before. You’ve never had your gun with you.”
“I did once,” John says. He puts his hand on Sherlock’s shoulder and leans in, staring at his own body lying on the bed. “That time when you were stabbed. I shot the guy who stabbed you.”
“Oh,” Sherlock says. He thinks back to that time, years back. “And you were visible to the paramedics then,” he realises. “And to everyone back there, when you took out Moran.”
“I had to tell the paramedics what had happened,” John says. “I sounded just authoritative enough that they took me at my word and began with what I told them to right away. Still close, though.”
“Might have died if you’d left before giving them the information,” Sherlock muses. John’s fingers clench convulsively in Sherlock’s shoulder.
“I’m all right, darling,” Sherlock says, reaching up to tangle his fingers with John.
“Did you just -” John begins in a tone of utmost incredulity.
Sherlock gives him his most defiant look.
“Never mind,” John says. “It’s fine.”
“Of course it is,” Sherlock huffs. “And it will be perfect once you wake up.”
John lifts their joined hands and presses a quick kiss to the tops of Sherlock’s knuckles. Then he lets go and steps closer to his body. “Well,” he says. “Let’s see.”
He reaches out and puts his hand on his own face, and vanishes. On the bed, John takes a stuttering breath and painfully opens his eyes.
The actual recovery process takes much longer. John comes out of the coma slowly, incrementally, though still quickly and smoothly enough that his doctors call it a bloody miracle when they think Sherlock can’t hear them. They hadn’t expected it to happen, that much is clear. Part of Sherlock wonders if John would have survived, if he hadn’t wound up flung through time to save Sherlock’s life. Another part of him wonders how on earth this had happened, and starts cataloguing areas of research which might point him towards the answer. The largest part of all, though, is telling him not to look a gift horse in the mouth.
John has problems with his memory now, both long- and short-term, which he seems to find terribly embarrassing. That’s the only significant symptom of brain damage he’s exhibiting at the moment, though, so Sherlock really couldn’t care less.
“There are ways around it,” he tells John, as they lie spooned together on John’s hospital bed in a manner that’s sure to make John’s doctors unhappy, if they were there to notice. “You’ll learn. And I promise I’ll help.”
“Okay,” John says with a sigh. Sherlock puts his arm around John’s chest, catches his hand and twines his fingers through John’s. John promptly kisses Sherlock’s hand and pulls it to his chest.
“I can’t wait till I’m better,” John says. “Also until my every bodily function isn’t being monitored.”
Sherlock huffs a laugh into John’s hair. “There are so very many things I have planned for us, John,” he murmurs. “But I’ll wait. I can be very patient when I need to be.”
“You’ve been waiting a long time,” John says.
“I have, yes.”
“Just a little longer, then,” John says.
Sherlock presses a little closer and closes his eyes, luxuriating in the sensation of homecoming.
~fin
Rating: R
Pairing(s): John/Sherlock
Warning(s): Implied bullying; implied suicide/suicidal ideation; minor character death; drug use; sexual violence inflicted on a child. Spoilers for S2, especially 2x03.
Summary: Written for this prompt. John Watson has been saving Sherlock's life for a very long time, even if he doesn't know it.
Waiting To Be Known
Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known. - Carl Sagan
Sherlock locks his door (that’s breaking the rules; Mummy says they’re not allowed to lock their doors in case of emergencies), pulls the covers back on his bed (they’d been neat and crisp and perfect and he’s not supposed to be there again till bed-time; Daddy thinks he spends too much time in his room as it is), crawls under them (tight and too-warm and stifling and maybe he can just stop breathing) and sobs.
He knows he’s different, but he doesn’t know why. Mummy tells him to be quiet and not to ask people about things he shouldn’t know about, but how is he meant to know what he should or shouldn’t know about? It’s all there, on them, so how can anyone not see it? Sherlock hadn’t been born like this. He’d learned. And surely others learn the same way? Why don’t they see things the way he does? Mycroft does, Sherlock knows he does, but Mycroft tells him the same things Mummy does, don’t tell people about things you shouldn’t know, and no one will tell him how he’s meant to know the difference.
The bed dips to the side abruptly. “Oh,” someone says. It doesn’t sound like anyone Sherlock knows. Whoever it was hadn’t come through the door. His room was on the second floor, so entrance through the window is unlikely but possible. Sherlock makes himself very small and tries not to hiccup through his tears.
“Dreaming, I suppose,” the man says softly. The bed un-dips itself. “I’m sorry,” the man says, sounding awkward. “I don’t suppose you know where I am?”
Sherlock sniffles quietly.
“I think I might be de - dreaming,” the man says. “I’m not where I was a moment ago. But I don’t remember falling asleep either. That’s peculiar, isn’t it?”
Sherlock waits, but the man doesn’t say anything else. The bed doesn’t move again, but he can hear the man’s breathing. He’s not leaving the room, but he’s not doing anything either.
Sherlock pushes the covers aside a little and peeks out.
The man is sitting on the floor, leaning against Sherlock’s bed. His hair is brown and gold and has little bits of grey all through it and it’s cut short and neat. He’s got his back to Sherlock, so Sherlock can’t see his face.
“Who are you?” Sherlock asks tentatively.
The man turns around. He’s old and he’s got a funny nose, Sherlock thinks, but his eyes are a pretty blue-grey colour and they’re very kind. They’re also quite surprised, as the man looks Sherlock up and down.
“My name’s John,” the man says after a few moments. “Who’re you?”
“Sherlock,” Sherlock says. The man looks even more surprised. Then he shakes his head quickly and gives Sherlock a smile. It’s also very kind, just like his eyes.
“It’s nice to meet you, Sherlock,” John says. “I don’t suppose you know how I got here?”
Sherlock shakes his head. “I was here by myself,” he tells John. “And then you were here.”
John frowns a little. He’s got bags under his eyes and lines on his face from smiling and laughing. He’s not doing either now, though. He looks dreadfully sad, for some reason. The sadness had come on suddenly, but it’s hiding in the corners of his eyes and lips. Sherlock watches him carefully. John doesn’t seem like a bad man, but Mycroft had told him that you couldn’t always tell a bad man by looking at him, and that he should always be careful around people he didn’t know.
And John had come from nowhere and Sherlock doesn’t know how that’s possible.
John reaches out suddenly, then just as suddenly hesitates. His hand hovers over Sherlock’s cheek. “Sorry,” he says. “Were - were you crying?”
Sherlock nods, remembering why he’d come to hide in his room. “They were being mean,” he says, and bites his lip.
“Well, that’s not right,” John says. “No one should ever be mean to anyone else. It’s not a nice thing to do.”
John’s hand is warm and confident as he rubs away the tear-marks on Sherlock’s face. Sherlock sits there quietly and lets him. He doesn’t know John, and Mycroft and Mummy and Daddy would probably all be upset if they knew John was here, but Sherlock doesn’t care. None of them had cared that the others said nasty things to Sherlock. Does John?
John runs his hand through Sherlock’s hair, once, twice, thrice. “Chin up, Sherlock,” he says. “It’ll get better.”
Then he smiles and vanishes.
Daddy’s dead. Daddy’s dead and Sherlock doesn’t know what to do.
Mummy is crying quietly again. She doesn’t make much noise when she cries. Just little hitching gasps of breath. Mycroft is sitting with her.
Sherlock clutches Daddy’s violin closer to himself. Daddy’s dead. Daddy had given Sherlock his violin and then died.
“I don’t understand,” Mummy says. “Why would he do that?”
Sherlock doesn’t understand either. Very slowly and quietly, so that neither Mycroft nor Mummy sees him, he sneaks out of the room and goes up to Daddy’s study.
They’ve cleaned it up a bit, but they haven’t changed out the carpet yet. It’s still dark and sticky and tacky.
“Sherlock?” John says uncertainly.
Sherlock reaches up, carefully puts Daddy’s violin down on the table (he’d been sitting there, listening as Sherlock had tentatively played the too-big instrument), then turns and throws himself against John.
“Daddy’s dead,” he whispers into John’s waist.
He can feel John shifting as he looks around. Then strong arms come around his shoulders and wrap him in a tight hug. “You shouldn’t have to see this,” John says. “Let’s go out.”
“I saw it,” Sherlock tells John. He still hasn’t told Mummy or Mycroft, but it slips easily from his mouth when he talks to John. “I saw Daddy. He gave me his violin and then he died.”
John makes a funny, hissing sort of noise, and desperately clutches Sherlock closer. “I’m so sorry,” he says into Sherlock’s hair. “This should never have happened.”
“I don’t understand,” Sherlock says, hiding his face against John’s chest. “I don’t understand. I don’t.”
“Neither do I,” John says. “But god, Sherlock. I’m so, so sorry.”
“Daddy’s dead,” Sherlock says again, and John rocks him gently until the tears finally come bursting out in great, gasping, heaving sobs and Sherlock can’t see for how hard he’s crying but through it all John’s there, warm, kind John and his gentle voice, until the sobs lose their vigour and then John vanishes and Sherlock is alone and the doorknob is turning and Mycroft is stepping into the room.
“Sherlock?” John asks.
Sherlock nearly falls off his bed. “I was almost positive I’d hallucinated you,” he says.
“I’m not convinced I’m not hallucinating,” John tells him, running his eyes over Sherlock’s gangly teenage body. “It’s been a while for you, hasn’t it?”
“Five years,” Sherlock confirms, sitting up in bed.
“It doesn’t feel like any time has passed for me at all,” John confesses. “Like it was just a moment ago that I last saw you, and you’ve suddenly… sprouted.” He waves a hand vaguely.
“Lovely,” Sherlock says. “Now I’m a plant, am I?”
John steps forward, catching Sherlock by the chin and tilting his face into the light. “No, but it looks like someone’s been trying to plant you in the dirt,” he observes.
“That,” Sherlock says, “was a terrible extension of a metaphor.”
“I’m no poet,” John says agreeably, and thumbs the small cut. “It’s healing well, at least. Nicely cleaned out.”
“I’ve had practice,” Sherlock says. More than he wants to think about.
John frowns. Military man, Sherlock thinks, looking over John with a more practiced eye than his younger self had managed. Judging by the haircut and bearing, at any rate.
“Are you still on active duty?” Sherlock asks.
It takes a moment for John to switch tracks. “What? Oh. No, no, I was invalided home,” he says. “Been a while now. Two years, almost.”
Invalided from where? But Sherlock holds his tongue and watches John instead, as the older man checks Sherlock’s face and neck and makes disapproving noises with every fresh scrape and bruise he discovers. Sherlock wonders what John would do if he knew. Suddenly, he badly wants to know. Before he can think about it, his hands fly up to the buttons on his shirt, undoing them rapidly.
“Sherlock!” John says in surprise. Then he sucks in a breath when he sees the bruising on Sherlock’s chest. “Oh, bloody hell. You need to see a doctor about those.” He drops to his knees in front of Sherlock, pushing aside the shirt and checking the injuries. His fingers are careful and gentle as he assesses their extent.
“I think I am,” Sherlock says slowly.
“One other than me,” John amends, slanting an amused look at Sherlock. Sherlock looks at him, and tries to remember how to breathe.
“I’m sick of it,” he confesses quietly.
“I can’t help you,” John says in a voice full of despair. “I don’t know how to stay with you. I want to protect you but I’m useless, I’m always so bloody useless.”
“You’re not,” Sherlock says vehemently. “You’re not, you always show up when I need you. I don’t care who you are or how you get here, but you always do just when I need -”
Oh. Oh. It couldn’t possibly be that simple, could it? Three times now. Three times is by no means conclusive. He’ll have to conduct further experiments.
“Do you go to anyone else?” he asks. Jealousy flares sharply within him at the possibility.
“No,” John says. “It’s just you. What have you figured out?”
“I’m not sure yet,” Sherlock says. “Don’t go.”
“I’ll try,” John says. “It’s just, I don’t know how to stop myself from going.”
“Don’t go,” Sherlock says, and presses a clumsy kiss to John’s cheek. “Please. Don’t go.”
“Oh,” John says. His eyes are a little moist and his voice is thick when he speaks. “Sherlock. I want to stay, you know that, don’t you? I want very much to show whoever did this to you exactly why they shouldn’t touch you.”
“Then stay,” Sherlock says. He doesn’t care that he’s begging. He’s so sick of being alone.
“As long as I can,” John says. Sherlock takes John’s hand, pulls him up and onto the bed, then pushes him back and makes him lie down. With John on his side and Sherlock curled into the crease between arm and body and bed, it’s almost like he’s ten again and John is sheltering him from the world.
John lies there with him silently, carding his fingers through Sherlock’s hair, pressing light kisses into the curls. He probably thinks that Sherlock can’t feel them. Sherlock doesn’t say a word to enlighten him.
John vanishes half an hour later. It’s not nearly enough, but at least Sherlock doesn’t feel like going ahead with his plan to kill his tormentors anymore.
Sherlock lets himself get caught the next day. John doesn’t show up. Again, and again, until one day, even the possibility of seeing John isn’t enough and he starts thinking a little too much about Daddy. Then John shows up.
Half an hour again.
Afterwards, Sherlock revises his hypothesis. It’s not that he needs to be in danger, he thinks. It’s that it all needs to be too much for him. He needs to be in a state where he can’t help himself, whether physically or (his lip wrinkles distastefully) emotionally. Those are the only times John will appear.
He still thinks, sometimes, that he might be imagining John. It does make sense. But it doesn’t matter, really, because John (whether real or a figment of Sherlock’s imagination) is always there precisely at the moments when Sherlock needs something solid to hang on to, at the moments where Sherlock is in no state to be analytical and suspicious of everything and everyone.
John never stays longer than an hour. Sherlock wonders if there is a maximum time John can stay, or if he simply vanishes the moment Sherlock starts to recover himself. Some dark part of Sherlock starts planning how best to postpone his own recovery. What must he think, what must he convince himself to believe, in order to keep John by his side?
Hurting himself comes easily. First, the physical - then, when that doesn’t get results reliably enough, the mental. So simple, to talk himself into a state of either homicidal rage or suicidal despair. And every time, just as long as he really believes it, John comes to him.
But what begins as simplicity itself becomes harder and harder to maintain over the years. Sherlock’s mind sharpens and his intellect rages against his self-destructiveness. He can’t do it consciously any more, and combined with the fact that he’s learned to hold people at bay with the keen edge of his words - well. Suddenly years have gone by and despite everything he’s gotten himself into, he’s also managed to get himself out of any trouble.
And John is nowhere to be found.
He never existed, Sherlock tells himself, at age twenty-four, hanging around crime scenes to tell the police how wrong they are, and searching desperately for some sort of reason for this pathetically mundane existence. He never existed and it is useless to have wanted him to. Sherlock’s mind claws for stimulation, rages for something interesting, and finally turns on itself when nothing is forthcoming. He tears himself to shreds and his mind keeps going and going and going and nothing can stop it until it has bloodied itself and blooded itself and just for a while it needs to stop until it recovers its strength.
He is going insane. Then he discovers cocaine.
The next time Sherlock sees John, he almost dismisses it as a hallucination.
The slap is less easy to dismiss.
“You - absolute - idiot,” John bites out. Sherlock laughs and presses his face against John’s shoulder. How had he gotten there? Oh. John’s pulling him up by the arms. Had he been on the floor?
“Sherlock!” John barks. There’s his military man. He’s wanted and wanted and wanted this and he’s finally got his army man right here and his arms are nice and warm and even stronger than Sherlock had thought they would be. “Sherlock!”
“John,” Sherlock purrs, and reaches up, interlacing his fingers behind John’s neck. A small tug, and John comes so easily, their lips fitting together so nice and snug and sweet. Sherlock hums contentedly. Oh, he’s been waiting so long. Waiting and waiting until he’d almost forgotten what he’d been waiting for.
“God,” John groans, and pulls away. Sherlock frowns in disappointment and attempts to go back for more. John pushes him back, holds him off with one hand. John doesn’t want him. Well, of course he doesn’t.
“I hate you,” Sherlock informs John. “You’re mean and you’re - mean. I hate you.”
“How much did you take?” John asks. His fingers are at Sherlock’s neck and Sherlock thinks, for one wild, beautiful moment, that John will strangle him. He kicks out but his legs don’t make any contact and all he accomplishes is making John roll him into a tight hold he doesn’t have a hope of escaping. “Sherlock. How much did you take?”
Sherlock rolls his eyes. God, not this again. He gets it enough from Mycroft. He’d expected better of John. “You’re mean,” he tells John petulantly.
“I suppose it’s not a nice thing to do,” John says softly.
Sherlock suddenly feels rather dizzy. “I think I’d like to lie down,” he says. He dimly sees John reaching for Sherlock’s phone, watches as John dials a number and speaks through fog and water.
“Might not be nice,” John says, leaning in close and whispering straight into Sherlock’s ear, into his brain, into that wounded animal that turns at the soft words and quivers in uncertainty. “But if it’ll save you from your own damned ego, I’m doing it anyway.”
John vanishes just before the first paramedic comes into view.
“You’ve hardly got the right to tell me what to do with myself,” Sherlock says.
“No, I don’t,” John says quietly. He’s looking out the window. He hasn’t once looked at Sherlock since he showed up here. Sherlock hates it, hates every second of it. Something dark and ugly inside him wants to hit John, wants to force him to pay attention. Wants to tie him up and keep him tucked away and never let him leave.
Sherlock knows his little flat’s not exactly fine accommodation. He can’t afford any better, though. Mycroft has cut him off until he “cleans up.” And he needs money for more important things than a pretty flat. All the same, John could at least do Sherlock the decency of looking at him when he speaks.
“I don’t know why you’re here,” Sherlock says, as bitingly as he knows how. “I don’t need or want you here.”
“Can I just ask,” John says. “Why cocaine?”
“Because I want to,” Sherlock says. Because the rush is beautiful and his mind is so sharp and clear and he sees everything and he can keep up with himself. Because even the crash is beautiful in the way it makes him forget. His mind doesn’t remember to break apart when it’s being dragged under by the drugs. Sherlock doesn’t say any of that, but he gets the unsettling feeling that John has heard every word he hasn’t said.
“It’s destroying your brain,” John says. “But then you know that, don’t you?” His voice is cynical but not forceful. “It’s a triple reuptake inhibitor, messes with your levels of dopamine and serotonin and norepinephrine. It’s the kind of drug you might give someone who’s suffering from depression. Know what it does to someone who isn’t? It teaches your body to stay out of balance so that you have to keep taking it to feel at all normal. Makes you give control over to it - no, makes you want to give control over to it. Do you like the fact that it’s an appetite suppressant? Do you like how clear your mind is during the high? Does it all cancel out the fact that it causes hallucinations, paranoia, psychosis? Is it worth the fact that while on it, you can’t trust the evidence of your own senses?”
Sherlock stares at John’s back resentfully. Damn him. Damn him. How had he known about Sherlock’s greatest fear, how had he so unerringly honed in on the one thing that might scare Sherlock into listening? “What would you know?” he mutters.
John finally turns to look at him. “I’ve seen people destroy themselves through addiction,” he says. “Drugs, drink. I’ve not got it in me to see one more person I love do that to themselves. Call it selfish, but I want you to live.”
“For you?” Sherlock asks softly.
“For you,” John replies. “And yeah. For me. Just for me, Sherlock, can you do that?”
Sherlock rolls over in bed and presses his face into the threadbare pillow. When he finally looks back up, John’s gone.
Detox is torture.
He grimly goes through the abrupt mood swings, the insomnia, the constant exhaustion, the sensation of something living crawling under his skin. There is no nausea. He thinks nausea may have been easier to deal with than the tricks his mind plays on him. He clings to the thought that once this has passed and his body has rediscovered homeostasis, it will be over.
(It won’t be, but just for now, he pretends.)
Mycroft thinks that the stick of being cut off from his money has worked. Lestrade thinks that the carrot of being allowed to work with the police if he’s clean has worked. Sherlock will never enlighten either of them. He works through the withdrawal symptoms and stays clean. Five months later, he relapses. Three weeks on cocaine and then he drags himself from its grip again and goes through the whole horrible process again.
He relapses twice more (seven months, four months). He’s on his fourth go at kicking the habit (ninth month now and going strong) when he next sees John.
“Don’t try to move,” John instructs him calmly. “Just lie back.”
Sherlock looks down dimly at the knife handle sticking out of his thigh. He can’t feel any pain. That’s probably not a good sign. John pushes down close to the edges of the blade and oh - there’s the pain, and Sherlock’s vision whites out for a while.
When he opens his eyes again, John’s on the phone. It’s peculiar, Sherlock thinks hazily, that John never stays long enough for anyone to see him, but he can communicate perfectly fine to other people over the phone.
“He’s just come back around,” John says. The phone’s tucked between his ear and shoulder, and he’s got both hands on Sherlock’s thigh. “No. No, not yet. Yes, I suspect so. Serrated edges. I’m fairly certain it didn’t. No, not sterile, definitely not. Yes. ETA?”
Sherlock blinks up at John. His chest really hurts quite a lot.
“Sherlock,” John says. “Try and stay awake.”
No chance of his falling asleep now. The pain’s rather a distraction. John’s eyes crinkle at the edges, even as he continues putting pressure on the wound around the knife.
“No, it’s not,” John says. Not what? Oh, he’s talking into the phone again. “Sherlock, any trouble breathing?”
Sherlock considers that, then shakes his head a very little.
“No,” John reports. Then he starts slightly. “Yes, I hear the sirens now. Yes - yes, thanks.”
John leans back slightly and lets the phone fall onto the ground. “Hold on just a little longer,” he tells Sherlock. “They’re almost here.”
“Please stay,” Sherlock manages to say.
And for once, John stays. The paramedics arrive and have Sherlock transported to the waiting ambulance in short order. John is useful in concisely summarising Sherlock’s injuries to the paramedics, and so they have no qualms about letting him ride along with them. Sherlock tries to figure out what it means that John can apparently be seen by the paramedics. It’s a departure from the norm, but he can’t quite focus on why that might be the case.
Once at the hospital, though, Sherlock’s whisked away to surgery while John’s left behind to wait. John has to be there when he gets out, Sherlock thinks desperately, as the anaesthetic begins to work. He has to be.
When he finally wakes up, he thinks for a heart-stopping moment that John’s left after all. Then he hears a soft thump to his right, and turns to see John sitting by his bed.
“I didn’t actually stay,” John says by way of greeting. “The moment you were out of sight, that was it for me.” He snaps his fingers. “But then, five minutes ago…”
“John,” Sherlock says plaintively.
“I’m glad I got to be here when you woke up,” John admits. He pours out a little water into a plastic cup and gently slides his hand under Sherlock’s neck. “Careful.”
His leg aches dreadfully as he drinks the water. He lies back down gratefully, before a thought occurs to him. “The painkillers,” he says in alarm. “I don’t want -”
“They’re not giving you anything strong,” John says. “I had a look at your chart, I hope you don’t mind. It’s nothing addictive.”
Sherlock relaxes. “I went back to it,” he confesses. “Three times. This is my longest yet.”
“Thank you,” John says, and gives him that warm smile that’s all in his eyes.
“It’s hard,” Sherlock says in a very small voice. “I keep trying but it never sticks. I don’t even want to anymore. I hate it. But I need it.”
“I’ve heard cocaine addiction is one of the hardest to kick,” John says with a sigh. “But I can’t imagine that you won’t eventually manage to do exactly what you want with your life. As long as you’re committed to whatever you want…”
“Mycroft doesn’t think I can,” Sherlock says, and that’s it, that’s his deepest, darkest secret, the fact that his own brother doubts his ability to ever truly give up the drugs.
“Mycroft,” John says with disturbing finality, “has an overinflated sense of importance and is not nearly as all-knowing as he would like to make himself out to be. His God complex will get good men killed if he doesn’t watch what he’s doing.”
Sherlock stares at John.
John clears his throat. “You’ll do it,” he says. “I know it doesn’t happen straightaway. But you’ll manage it.”
Something unclenches in Sherlock’s throat. He closes his eyes quickly, before they can do anything ridiculous like tear up. Consequently, he doesn’t see the look on John’s face as he bends over and presses his lips gently to Sherlock’s, and by the time he does open them in surprise, John’s gone again.
It is not Sherlock’s physical distress that next summons John from wherever he comes from, but a child’s.
Robert Nicholson has raped and killed four young children. Sherlock had been called in on the fifth case, once it had become clear that May Kendrick had become Nicholson’s fifth victim. He had been racing against the clock from the beginning and he’d known, he’d known there was only a very slim possibility that he’d get to her before Nicholson decided he was done. And yet.
And yet.
Sherlock’s hand trembles as he tries to find a pulse. He doesn’t know what to do. May Kendrick is alive, but she won’t be for much longer. Lestrade is on his way and an ambulance has been dispatched but Sherlock knows that May Kendrick will not live to see them arrive.
“What do I do?” he chokes out, and just like that there are hurried footsteps behind him and two strong hands firmly moving him out of the way.
Sherlock watches, numb, as John quickly checks May’s vitals. “Give me your jacket and belt,” he orders. “And go see if there’s anything in the way of medical supplies here.”
Sherlock strips off wordlessly, then runs to the bathroom. There’s a first-aid kit, but it’s not well-stocked. At least there are bandages and sterile gauze in it. He brings it back to John, and then goes flying through the rest of the house in search of anything else that might help.
There’s nothing. He returns to find that John has constructed a makeshift tourniquet to stop the blood that had been spurting from May’s arm. Severed artery, Sherlock thinks. He knows what the injuries would have been; he simply doesn’t know how to best treat them without causing further harm. John is now cleaning May’s groin, his face set in a grim expression.
Sherlock looks away. Robert Nicholson’s dead eyes stare up at the ceiling. Sherlock had wrested the knife away from him (not quick enough to spare May) and driven it upwards through his chest, between his ribs, into his lungs. It had looked to be a painful death. Sherlock is glad for it.
“Sherlock,” John says. “Help me out here.”
He applies pressure where John tells him to. He tries not to think of what would have been possible had he been just a little faster. A little better.
“Stop it,” John says quietly. “What’s important now is helping this little one and getting her home.”
Sherlock watches John’s face rather than his hands. How does John do this? How can he be so composed when faced with this? Had he been this in control on the battlefield?
“The tearing’s bad,” John says. “I can’t do anything for that here.” He mops up the freshly spilled blood. “ETA on the ambulance?”
Sherlock checks his watch, does a quick calculation, and says, “Ten minutes.”
“She’ll make it,” John says. He scrubs blood off his hands with a bit of scrap gauze, then tentatively touches her forehead. “It won’t be pleasant, but she’ll make it.”
“Thank you,” Sherlock says. His eyes are hot. “Thank you.”
John leans across May Kendrick’s unconscious body and presses his forehead against Sherlock’s. “Thank you,” he says. “For finding her.”
“Can’t you stay at all?” Sherlock asks quietly. “I wish you would.”
John’s eyes rake over Sherlock’s body speculatively. “How old are you?” he asks.
“Twenty-nine,” Sherlock says.
“Soon, then,” John says. “Very soon.” It sounds like a promise, and Sherlock clings to the memory of the sound as he is left alone with a dead body and a broken girl.
Sherlock’s next encounter with John is in a laboratory at Barts.
This John does not know Sherlock. A careful cataloguing of this John’s appearance leads Sherlock to suspect that whatever it is that enables John to travel to Sherlock’s side in the past, it has not yet taken effect. This John’s face is as tired and worn as the one Sherlock is familiar with - but there’s less grey in his hair, less anguish in his eyes. And how odd, that Sherlock’s John would be more anguished than this one, despite having more time between himself and the war.
There’s only one logical explanation for that, and that is that something worse than the war has happened to him.
Sherlock finds he quite strongly desires to stave off whatever that something is. It’s ridiculous. He remembers the feel of John’s lips on his. He remembers curling up in bed with him - though never as an adult. He’d been a teenager the last time. John had felt solid and safe. Part of Sherlock can’t stop obsessing over how John might feel now. If the touch of his hands would be in any way different. If he might be more protective, or less. But this John is not interested in a romantic relationship with Sherlock, and at any rate, Sherlock’s not entirely sure he wants to be in a relationship with this John either.
He doesn’t really know John, that’s the problem. He knows how he feels around his John. He knows that his John has always been there for him exactly when he’d most needed someone and been most alone. He knows that his John is the reason he’s still alive today. But actually living with John - that’s new, and different, and difficult. Living with John means being careful with his experiments or risking being yelled at. It means needing to curb his more outlandish tendencies. It means hearing the sounds of night terrors drifting down to him and being unable to do anything about them. It means late nights over takeaway and companionable silences. It means a person who, despite how aggravating Sherlock is, gives exactly as good as he gets and refuses to let Sherlock be anything less than he can be.
It’s wonderful. It’s terrifying.
Sherlock had already been halfway infatuated with the John he’d known. Now, he thinks he might be halfway in love.
So he takes stupid risks. He toys with taking a possibly poisoned pill. He plays Moriarty’s game. He lets Irene Adler seduce him and pretends, just for a moment, that she might actually understand him. And again, he plays Moriarty’s game. Almost all the way through and he knows what he needs to do now, what plans he’ll have to put into play.
He just doesn’t know if he can go through with them.
Sherlock stands on the edge of the roof. His John had worn more anguish in his eyes than the John Sherlock had met eighteen months ago at Barts. That anguish, the anguish he’d wanted to protect John from, is his fault.
He hates himself.
He throws his phone aside and stares out at the street. Everything’s in place. He just needs to finish the process of destroying himself (and John) now.
“Sherlock!”
The scream comes from across the street and behind him. Sherlock doesn’t look back. He spreads his arms and lets himself fall.
John greets him with a fist to the face.
“Ow,” Sherlock says. He’s on the ground, without quite having registered the process of toppling over. John really has quite the excellent left hook.
“You bastard,” John says, and straddles Sherlock’s lap. His fists are clenched in Sherlock’s coat collar, flexing bloodlessly as if he’s trying to decide whether to punch Sherlock again. “You complete and utter bastard.”
Sherlock lurches forward and clings to John desperately. “I hoped,” he says, pressing his face against John’s neck. John’s pulse throbs steadily beneath his weathered skin, just a little faster than its norm. “I hoped that you’d come. That you’d see.”
“It was a magic trick,” John laughs. “It really was.”
In the distance behind them, a broken-hearted John strides away from Sherlock’s grave.
“All I wanted was a miracle,” John says. “Just this one.”
“I heard,” Sherlock says, and pulls back from John. “How long?”
John’s fingers are tracing the lines of Sherlock’s face. “How long what?”
“How long did I leave you like that?” Sherlock asks. “How long before this, before you knew?”
John kisses the tip of Sherlock’s nose, then the very top of his cheekbones, left and right, then his forehead. “Six months,” he says, breathing the words over Sherlock’s lips. “It’s been six months. I hate you.”
“I love you,” Sherlock replies.
“I don’t understand why I was there,” John confesses.
Sherlock blinks up at him hazily. This is an all too familiar situation.
“On the roof,” John says. “I thought, for a while, I thought I basically showed up when you needed me to. But on the roof, before you jumped…”
“Couldn’t do it,” Sherlock explains. Blood, he discovers, actually tastes rather nauseating. Or perhaps it’s a culmination of various factors. “Had to do it, but couldn’t. To you. Needed you to know.”
“Oh,” John says, and presses a little harder on the bullet wound in Sherlock’s chest. “Right.”
“Had snipers,” Sherlock says. “You. Mrs Hudson. Lestrade. Had to jump. Or.”
“We’d be shot,” John finishes. “Makes sense now. Okay. Last resort then, the way you planned it if you had to die.”
“Chose roof,” Sherlock says. He shuts his eyes against the glare of the lamp and smiles tiredly. “Planned it. Molly.”
“She helped,” John says. “Bloody - Molly knew. That’s what she was on about when she -”
“Asked her,” Sherlock says. It’s hard to breathe. John’s pressing awfully hard on his chest. “Look after -”
He passes out before he can finish the sentence. He wakes up in a private hospital. Even in France, he can feel Mycroft’s influence reaching out to shield him from Moriarty’s men while he heals.
John’s not there, but that’s all right. Sherlock knows that John’s got his back.
A few months after, there’s another bullet. This one grazes an infinitely more precious brain than Sherlock’s. Sherlock isn’t quite fast enough, and gets there only in time to witness the aftermath.
Moran has escaped. He’s the last Sherlock needs to eliminate before he can return home. He’s the reason Sherlock still hasn’t had the chance to confess to John, to finally throw himself at John and let those strong arms shelter him just as they had when he’d been a child.
And Moran has almost managed to do what Moriarty couldn’t. Sherlock can’t help but marvel at the irony, as he sneaks into John’s hospital room and kisses his lax lips.
“Soon,” he promises. John lies there quietly, as people in comas tend to do. Sherlock’s name has already been cleared, thanks to Mycroft. All he needed to do was ensure that Moriarty’s most loyal men didn’t decide to finish what Moriarty had wanted to do. “I’ll get him and then I’ll come home and I don’t mind if you hit me again. Just.”
He brushes his fingers through John’s hair. It’s longer and shaggier than he’s ever seen it before. It suits him, though Sherlock also rather likes the short military cut that’s he’s used to. There’s a faint scruff on John’s cheeks and chin, and Sherlock scrapes his nails across it lightly.
“Just wake up,” he breathes. “One miracle, John. Just for me. Wake up.”
He does get Moran. He gets him in front of almost half a rather incredulous Scotland Yard, but at least he gets him. Or at least, he corners him. The ‘getting’ bit of the equation… well, Sherlock’s working on it.
“You actually believe him?” Moran spits at the police officers, as he backs up to a more defensible position. He’d decided to try for Lestrade second, just as Sherlock had suspected. The plan had been audacious and perfectly executed; if not for Sherlock, it probably would have worked. Now, though, Moran’s trapped and he knows it. “He’s a fraud, remember?”
“You really haven’t kept up with the news, have you?” Sherlock asks in faux disinterest. “Funny thing about lies. They twist and twist and twist on themselves until they just - snap apart. And there’s the truth, for all to see.”
Moran stills. He’s still searching for an escape route. There is none. Moran will not escape this. The trick will be in taking him down without anyone else winding up in the cross-fire.
Thus far, Sherlock has seven plans which end in Moran’s capture or death. Unfortunately, all of them involve - at minimum - five bystander deaths as well, which Sherlock thinks would probably not be good. At the very least, John would not be happy, and he can’t let John down yet again.
Oh. John.
Moran has the most spectacularly shocked look on his face as he collapses. Sherlock barely tamps down the totally inappropriate urge to giggle.
“Hi,” he says.
“Hello,” John says from behind Moran, and lowers his gun. “So, what are the chances of me getting out of this without being arrested?”
“Seeing as you’re currently in a coma in a hospital bed, quite good,” Sherlock says giddily. “John. John, that was Moran. He was the last one. God, I can come back home now.”
John’s eyes light up. “Brilliant!” he says, and vanishes. Sherlock looks back at Moran’s body, then glances up at the shell-shocked officers around him.
“Bloody hell,” Lestrade says, with feeling.
Explanations take an annoyingly long time. Sherlock explains why he’d had to fake his death and what he’s been doing since. (Thankfully, Lestrade doesn’t punch him. Donovan rather awkwardly sidles out of the room when Sherlock explains exactly why Lestrade had been targeted; her reaction and Lestrade’s almost make the complications of Moran’s death worth dealing with.) He also adroitly dodges all attempts by Lestrade to figure out how earth John had managed to be in a coma and shoot Moran at the same time. When he finally escapes Lestrade’s clutches, Mycroft sends a car to bring him back to 221B Baker Street - where, he’s assured, he’s still got a home with John.
Mrs Hudson slaps him, and then hugs him, and then cries all over him, and then shoves him out the door and tells him to go to John. It’s about what he’d expected of her.
He heads to Barts first, to thank Molly for all she’d done. The words aren’t even awkward rolling off his tongue anymore. She’s got a new boyfriend, he sees, but he doesn’t mention it. He gives her a hug and takes his leave without asking any favours of her.
Then he goes to John.
John’s still terribly quiet. Mycroft pulls some strings so that Sherlock can stay with him as long as he likes. It’s very odd to be sitting by John and not hear any responses to even the most inane comments.
“Is that what I look like,” John says critically.
“Surely you’ve seen yourself in the mirror before,” Sherlock comments.
“Oh, yeah, sure,” John says, walking around the bed. “Looks different like this, though. Can’t put my finger on it.”
“When are you going to wake up?” Sherlock asks plaintively.
“Don’t know,” John says.
“Hasn’t this happened to you yet?” Sherlock asks.
“Nope,” John says. “Or, well, I’ve been shot. I remember being shot. Sniper, wasn’t it?”
“Yes,” Sherlock says, his expression darkening. John walks back over to him and ruffles his curls. “It was Moran. I suppose you got your revenge.”
“Suppose so,” John says.
“Don’t tell me you’ve been doing your - travelling - while in a coma,” Sherlock says with a frown. “That’s just ridiculous.”
“I won’t tell you, then,” John says, then laughs at the face Sherlock pulls. “It’s not like I really know either, Sherlock. Seems a viable guess. I remember being shot, but not waking up. Stands to reason this is the time I’m from, right?”
“You look different,” Sherlock says, glancing between the still body on the bed, and the warm one standing next to him. “Your hair’s back in a military cut, you’re clean-shaven - and you shot Moran. Do you appear as you picture yourself to be? Your clothes. You’ve always appeared wearing the same combination of those jeans with the jumper I bought you. Certainly not a hospital gown. You didn’t have your gun on you before. You’ve never had your gun with you.”
“I did once,” John says. He puts his hand on Sherlock’s shoulder and leans in, staring at his own body lying on the bed. “That time when you were stabbed. I shot the guy who stabbed you.”
“Oh,” Sherlock says. He thinks back to that time, years back. “And you were visible to the paramedics then,” he realises. “And to everyone back there, when you took out Moran.”
“I had to tell the paramedics what had happened,” John says. “I sounded just authoritative enough that they took me at my word and began with what I told them to right away. Still close, though.”
“Might have died if you’d left before giving them the information,” Sherlock muses. John’s fingers clench convulsively in Sherlock’s shoulder.
“I’m all right, darling,” Sherlock says, reaching up to tangle his fingers with John.
“Did you just -” John begins in a tone of utmost incredulity.
Sherlock gives him his most defiant look.
“Never mind,” John says. “It’s fine.”
“Of course it is,” Sherlock huffs. “And it will be perfect once you wake up.”
John lifts their joined hands and presses a quick kiss to the tops of Sherlock’s knuckles. Then he lets go and steps closer to his body. “Well,” he says. “Let’s see.”
He reaches out and puts his hand on his own face, and vanishes. On the bed, John takes a stuttering breath and painfully opens his eyes.
The actual recovery process takes much longer. John comes out of the coma slowly, incrementally, though still quickly and smoothly enough that his doctors call it a bloody miracle when they think Sherlock can’t hear them. They hadn’t expected it to happen, that much is clear. Part of Sherlock wonders if John would have survived, if he hadn’t wound up flung through time to save Sherlock’s life. Another part of him wonders how on earth this had happened, and starts cataloguing areas of research which might point him towards the answer. The largest part of all, though, is telling him not to look a gift horse in the mouth.
John has problems with his memory now, both long- and short-term, which he seems to find terribly embarrassing. That’s the only significant symptom of brain damage he’s exhibiting at the moment, though, so Sherlock really couldn’t care less.
“There are ways around it,” he tells John, as they lie spooned together on John’s hospital bed in a manner that’s sure to make John’s doctors unhappy, if they were there to notice. “You’ll learn. And I promise I’ll help.”
“Okay,” John says with a sigh. Sherlock puts his arm around John’s chest, catches his hand and twines his fingers through John’s. John promptly kisses Sherlock’s hand and pulls it to his chest.
“I can’t wait till I’m better,” John says. “Also until my every bodily function isn’t being monitored.”
Sherlock huffs a laugh into John’s hair. “There are so very many things I have planned for us, John,” he murmurs. “But I’ll wait. I can be very patient when I need to be.”
“You’ve been waiting a long time,” John says.
“I have, yes.”
“Just a little longer, then,” John says.
Sherlock presses a little closer and closes his eyes, luxuriating in the sensation of homecoming.
~fin