Fic: Multiply (the sum of our parts) - Chapter Seven
Title: Multiply (the sum of our parts)
Author: 1electricpirate
Rating: M
Pairing: Sherlock Holmes/John Watson (BBC)
Disclaimer: I do not pretend to own any of these characters (besides the two or three I have conjured from thin air). Credit for that brilliance falls to ACD and the Godtiss.
Previous Chapters: One | Two | Three | Four | Five | Six
Chapter Seven - the Division of Polynomials
John, when he is not busy being so exhausted it hurts his bones, is deliriously in love with his children.
The twins are not much more than crying, wriggling bundles of fresh pink skin that constantly need to be washed for one reason or other, but he loves them so much that some times he cannot breathe because of it.
It is an extraordinarily good job that he does not actually need a job in order to take care of them because he literally hasn’t got time to wash himself, much less hold down any kind of steady work.
He lasts an impressive two weeks before he has to step back, take a look around the flat (which now looks like it has some sort of nuclear baby-themed bomb explode across it), take note the state of himself (unwashed, in the same clothes for three days, having had only seven hours of sleep) and his two children, who are slightly more washed than he but he has only two hands and they can’t keep up with four very demanding, very messy ends of babies, and declare defeat.
Mrs. Hudson helps when she can but it is not her job (and she is a surprisingly busy lady) and John is loathe to call on Harry for help. (She had stayed with him the first night and then washed her hands of the whole messy affair.)
221b had transformed literally over night from charmingly chaotic bachelor pad to overwhelmingly messy nursery. There are nappies and bottles and various other bits and pieces everywhere. Someone (he suspects Mycroft, or at least one of his various assistants) has had a hand in the fact that everything he needs he has eventually found laying about somewhere, though most of it he doesn’t remember buying himself.
And why shouldn’t the bastard be buying prams and cots and extra sets of clothes? This entire venture was his idea in the first place. (John could literally kiss him, sometimes, when Teddy has done something adorable like be sick all over his sister.)
One baby is enough trouble; two at once doesn’t double the difficulty level - it triples it, at least. John does not for one second regret the decision that brought him here, sleep deprived and frazzled and probably covered in various body fluids. He is, as stated, irrationally smitten with both of them. But he is also overwhelmed and so far out of his depth it is laughable.
John is very stubborn and very proud, but when it comes to the wellbeing of his children, he decides he will be a big enough man to be able to swallow his pride, admit defeat and call in the big guns.
Namely: Mummy Holmes.
No sooner has John hung up the phone with her than a black sedan pulls up outside the flat and a rather burly man lets himself in, climbs the stairs and announces that he is here to take Mr. Watson and the twins to Eastwall. Does Mr. Watson need any help at all getting the children ready? (Mycroft has been expecting this. Smug bastard. John would pay anything to see one of his ridiculous suits ruined by baby puke.)
John eyes the holster at the man’s side warily while he (in a nearly-perfect army stance, feet together, shoulders back, arms clasped behind his back) rocks between his heels and the balls of his feet, impatiently. John hides his smirk in one of the ever-present white cotton puke-cloths (which seem to have bred and are now to be found on every conceivable surface, just in case) that he has slung over his shoulder. The man could not be less displeased with this assignment (trumped up babysitter) if he tried.
He takes pity on the poor man and instructs him to, “Just, stand right there and keep an eye on them. They should be okay but...” he shrugs, grinning, and leaving it at that as he sweeps off to gather his things together. The twins are asleep, strapped in two separate carseats slash carrying baskets that materialised in the flat the morning after he brought them home from the hospital.
John flies around the flat, packing as quickly as he can. The poor security guard (body guard? He has the look of one of Mycroft’s ruthless trained killers about him) looked terrified at the thought of being left alone with two infants, and John does not ever overestimate how long both of them will remain asleep simultaneously. (It is this refusal of theirs to sleep at the same time, above all else, that has driven John to the place he is now - frazzled and exhausted and covered in sick and absolutely desperate.)
He makes sure he has enough clothes for himself before throwing everything baby-related he can get his hands on into the first bag he can find. He only really realises that he has chosen, ironically, his well-worn, sand-beaten army service pack to stuff with baby clothes, bottles, rattles, blankets and the like, when he sees the body guard’s eyebrows fly, quite dramatically, into his hairline.
John grins at him. “Straight from one warzone to another, right?” The man does not laugh, but that doesn’t matter. (It wasn’t particularly funny in the first place.) John laughs at himself, tosses his laptop and a few of his books in on top of the jumble of tiny clothes, and then looks around the flat, taking quick stock of what is already packed, what remains, and what he can possibly get away with leaving behind.
“Do we need to - do you know if they’ve got cots there or anything?” The cots had been hell to get up in the first place - part of John would love to enlist this man’s help in dissecting a baby cot, just for the mental image, but the other part pities him and just wants to get him out of his zone of obvious discomfort as soon as possible.
“Mr. Holmes has said only that Mr. Watson is not to worry about anything, only getting the children to the car in one piece, and if he could manage to keep at least one if not both of the little devils from ruining his upholstery on the way to Kent, Mr. Holmes would be much obliged.”
The body guard (John decides to call him Hulk, based on his frankly ridiculous proportions) does not seem to think John has much chance of success in this endeavour. Secretly, John agrees with him.
In actual fact, the trip to Eastwell goes off rather well. Teddy decides he is exhausted and sleeps most of the way, and Rosie seems to find the movement of the car soothing as they dodge (slightly quickly for John’s comfort but he doesn’t dare question the Hulk) through traffic. John sits in between their carseats, one hand on either tiny stomach, and lets his head fall back against the headrest. He wakes once, about half way through, when Rosie begins to cry softly, but she is soon quieted and he drifts off again thankfully.
Celeste is waiting to receive the three of them with eager eyes, the doors to Eastwell thrown open. “John, darling, I was wondering when you’d cave,” she calls to him, as he hoists the service pack over his shoulder before picking up Teddy’s basket and following the Hulk (and Rosie) up the stairs to the entrance way.
“Thank you, Rupert,” Celeste says, taking Rosie and waving the Hulk away. John smiles at her, wearily, and follows her inside.
“Sorry to impose on you like this,” he begins, though to be honest, he’s not all that sorry. He needs help; this was her idea as well; she can jolly well share the responsibility. “It was fine for a while, but a bloke has to sleep sometime. We won’t stay long.”
“Nonsense.” Celeste waves him off. “Mycroft owes me fifty pounds, now. He said you wouldn’t last a week, but I knew you were made of sterner stuff.” She winks at him. John remembers why she is one of his favourite people on the planet. “Now. I’ve put you in Sherlock’s rooms again. We’ve cleaned up, just a bit, had to make sure there were no biohazards lying about for these little monsters to get their teeth into, crawling about.”
“They won’t be crawling for months yet, Celeste,” John protests, using his free hand to hoist the pack more firmly on his shoulder. “We won’t stay that long. Just a bit, just until I can catch my breath.”
“You’ll stay just as long as you need to, John Watson, and not one second less. I won’t hear of it. You can hardly be expected to take care of two babies all alone. Preposterous. Come now, see what we’ve done.”
The ‘we’ Celeste was referring to so often seems to include herself and her newest member of staff, Annette, who has a tidy bun of blonde hair and soft, rosy cheeks, and introduces herself as “the Nanny.”
John frowns, shifting Teddy’s basket to the other hand to hide his discomfort at the idea. “Celeste, I really don’t think...”
“John, dear, none of us keep you around to think. I rather thought you knew that by know. Now, Annette will be around just as much or as little as you need her to be, as will I. One baby is a two person job; two babies are at least a three person job, if not four, but I think between the three of us we should be able to cope. Now. Come see your rooms, dear.”
Sherlock’s rooms (the only parts of this house that John is really familiar with) are still charmingly chaotic, though the worst of it seems to have been tidied at least into a couple compact piles, leaving enough space in the sitting room for a rocking chair by the of the fire (and, John notes with relief, a rather high-tech TV set next to the hearth). There is a small fire in the grate. The overstuffed sofa that had previously been shoved against a wall has been dragged out and spun to face the TV, and on its right (completing the little square of comfort) is the mint green chaise longue that John was so enamoured with from the main parlour. There are pillows of every size and description stacked wherever there seems to be a space for them. (John has learned very quickly that oversized pillows are an outnumbered father’s best friend.)
Beyond the sitting area, towards the direction of the bedroom, is the most beautiful crib John has ever seen. It must be very old, clearly made from the same kind of wood that Sherlock’s bed is made of. It is wide enough to fit two babies in with more than enough space around them and has its own deep blue velvet canopy. There is a fully equipped changing table, a pram with two baskets side by side, and a variety of strappy contraptions that John guesses are for carrying babies against his chest or his back. There are several beautiful, oversized stuffed animals and next to them an entire basket overflowing with soft and plastic toys.
The familiar bed and its periwinkle blue silk covers are just through the folding doors and beyond them, a bathroom that puts most spas to shame. When you include the walk-in closet (no longer, he notes with overwhelming relief, full of Sherlock’s clothes), Sherlock’s rooms are as big as, or possibly even slightly bigger than 221b, even including John’s bedroom that has gone mostly unused since six months after John moved in. John and his twins can be a perfectly contained unit in here, coming out only for meals and if they want to. He is achingly thankful for that, because if he is going to be begging for help from his mother-in-law, he’d at least like to have some privacy once in a while.
Celeste and Annette are watching him with undisguised excitement. They have obviously been planning this for much longer than two weeks. (He can just see it: an entire brigade of Mycroft’s men, descending upon Hanley’s on Oxford Circus and coming out laden with multi-coloured bags, jostling against their gun holsters. Everything else has clearly come from somewhere like Harrods. John flushes, slightly ashamed at such careless displays of affluence. What little he’d bought in the way of baby-equipment had come mostly from second-hand shops or whatever small boutique he’d happened upon out of chance. Sherlock’s trust fund has made him a wealthy man, technically, but John will never know how to be rich.)
“Celeste, I... This is brilliant. Thank you.”
“Oh, John dear, thank you. This is not an entirely selfless arrangement, you know. This way, I get to spend some time with my precious grandchildren, and you get a rest once in a while.”
As if on cue, the basket in Celeste’s hands starts to cry softly. “That’s our lot of peace and quiet, I’m afraid,” John says, smiling at them. He goes to lift Rosie from the basket to quiet her against his shoulder, but Annette gets there first. “Oh, I don’t, you don’t...” He scratches his neck, uncomfortable.
“It’s my job, sir. Isn’t it, little one?” She picks Rosie up out of the basket, careful to cradle her neck; clearly she’s done this many, many times before, but John can’t help but reach out slightly, as if she might drop the baby at any moment. Celeste clucks her tongue at him.
“Now, John. I absolutely insist that you get out of those clothes and shower this instant. No son of mine was ever allowed to wander around looking like a tramp, and the rule goes for sons-in-law as well. Are we clear?”
That is one statement that John is very willing to believe; the thought of either Sherlock or Mycroft ever being messy triggered something akin to anathema in John’s brain. With one last worried glance at the twins he leaves them to their grandmother and the nanny. The time it takes him shower and dress is the longest he has been away from them since he brought them home and it makes him antsy, as if his skin is suddenly one size too tight. He forces himself to take the time to unpack some of the things from his service pack and finds that the drawers of Sherlock’s dresser have been emptied of his things and filled with an assortment of clothing that is all the perfect size for John. They aren’t even overly posh - he actually spies several thick-knit jumpers in there.
It seems that Celeste is not going to make it easy for him to find reasons to leave. Unsure how he feels about this, John sets the twins’ clothes in a separate drawer and hurries through the double doors to check on them, just as Teddy begins to cry. (It was just under a day and a half before John could confidently tell the twins apart by their crying; he finds that little fact fascinating and breathtaking.)
He finds Celeste cradling Rosie in one hand and holding a book in the other. Rosie seems happy enough so he turns anxiously to his son first; his mind tells him its probably nothing, of course, but he can’t help the gut feeling of panic. (He has learned, over the past manic fortnight, that the business of parenting does not have a lot to do with common sense. It is largely irrational and based on a whole lot of gut instinct and terror. The skill in parenting, he thinks - though he is obviously still a novice - comes in sifting through the terror to find legitimate sources of worry and dealing with those first.)
Teddy is wailing loudly now (it is only by some miracle that Rosie has not begun as well); Annette has him tucked firmly against her shoulder and is walking around the room, bouncing him gently, chattering away at him in what John can only assume is the standard language of nannies everywhere: baby talk.
“Whosa sleepy weepy eh? Whosseeden? Shhhhh Teddy weddy bear, Shhhhh Teddy weddy bear, whoseeden Teddy, whosee? Whoopsadaisy teddy weddy, whoopsadaisy teddy weddy.”
John watches, frozen, for as long as he can bear to before he finds himself bounding across the room and scooping his crying child from Annette’s startled arms. “Don’t,” he says, and it comes out sounding rather more snappy than he intends it to. (He really needs to sleep, he should really sleep while he can; logically he knows that nothing will happen while they are watching the twins but he can’t quite get the idea through his head, even though he’s about to fall over where he stands.)
Annette looks hurt and startled and confused. Celeste has put down her book and shifted Rosie to the other arm; she is watching John like a hawk. Teddy is quieting down now against John’s shoulder and John stands there, right in front of Annette, with one hand under Teddy’s bottom and one hand around his tiny head, swaying a bit until the wailing turns to snuffles and John can hear himself think again.
“Sorry,” he sighs, pressing a kiss to Teddy’s head, “Sorry, Annette, it’s just... Sherlock would never... He’d never allow baby talk even on the same street as his child, and I just... I can’t... Just don’t, please.”
Teddy sniffles against his shoulder; John presses another kiss to his fuzzy head before chancing a glance at Celeste. Her face is impassive but her eyes (Sherlock’s eyes) are alight and sparkling with approval. (John has just scored ten parenting points in the eyes of Mummy Holmes, who probably succeeded at giving birth to two fully grown adults straight from the womb; he reckons that’s enough to be getting on with for Day One.)
Annette is looking sheepish (but still alarmed). She nods and says, “Of course, Doctor Watson, sir, sorry, I didn’t realise.”
John sighs, jiggling the warm lump of his son slightly against his shoulder. “It’s John, please, no point in standing on ceremony. And it’s okay, you weren’t to know.” He places Teddy gingerly in the crib and stares at him for a few moments before shooting her his most winning smile. She is still watching him with wary eyes, as if he might lash out again at any minute.
“Sorry, I’ve not slept properly in weeks. Look, I’m not saying you have to talk Shakespeare at them, it’s just...” He scratches the back of his head and tries to find the words to explain himself. (Not for the first time, he wishes Sherlock were here to just sort of, bark commands and be obeyed immediately and without question. John has never been able to do that - unless it was part of the job description, in which case he was very good at it; but he’s never been good at assuming some sort of God-given prerogative and expecting others to buy into it and do exactly as he says. Put simply: John is not used to having employees.)
“I believe that what the good doctor is trying to say, Annette dear, is that my late son very much believed in treating everyone just the same. He was not one to dumb himself down for anyone, and he always treated children as if they were simply adults in miniature. Of course, no one expects a two-week-old to understand any sort of sentence at all, but I believe it is the principle of the thing to which Doctor Watson objects.”
John feels his shoulders sag with relief. “Yes, sorry, that’s... That’s precisely it. Thank you, Celeste, could not have put it better myself.”
Celeste shoots him a smile that lights up the room before she gathers a sleeping Rosie up and stands to place her next to her brother. “There, I think they’re both out for a few minutes at least. John, you should sleep while you can. Annette and I will sit with them for now. I want you to sleep for at least two hours, no interruptions, and then after you’ve had some rest we’ll discuss things further. Alright?”
John allows himself to be ushered towards his (Sherlock’s, it will never not be Sherlock’s) bed with one last glance at the twins (sleeping peacefully, curled up facing each other). He pulls the deep blue curtains around the bed and the darkness and muffled silence is complete and overwhelming.
For all that he is bone-tired (he has never understood that expression until now, not even three straight days of chasing criminals across London had ever had him this close to collapsing with exhaustion, but now he understands it, feels the fatigue in his very bones), John does not fall asleep immediately. Instead, he closes his eyes and lets himself, for one brief (heartbreaking) minute, imagine.
What it would be like if Sherlock were here with him; what it would be like to raise their children together? (I wish, I wish, I wish.) They could have stayed at 221b, probably, tag-teaming on sleep so that while one person watched the twins, the other could get some shut eye. They wouldn’t have seen each other properly in days but it would almost not have mattered. (Not much else matters, when you have two tiny mouths to feed and clean and two very messy bums to wipe. Everything else is background noise when your child starts crying and you can feel it in your stomach, in your blood, in your bones.)
Sherlock was not good with people or tedium, and babies are both of those things wrapped up in one very messy package. John likes to think, though, in the few minutes he has for such a luxurious activity as thinking, that he would have risen to the occasion. No one could look at Teddy and Rosie without falling head over heels for them (John is quietly confident of this fact, though he is perhaps biased); surely Sherlock would have been the same? (He’d probably insist on full names though, he despised nicknames. Theodore and Rosalyn, then, or - no, it was more likely to have been Hamish and Anna. For all that he hated social convention, sometimes he was surprisingly stubborn. He liked first names to stay first names and never did understand why people insisted on overcomplicating and sentimentalising such necessarily utilitarian matters as names.)
(A good name is like a perfectly suited tool, John. This, from Sherlock, what seems like a lifetime ago, while they prepared themselves for some deception or other. A good name and an even better disguise: Sherlock’s sharpest weapons.)
John knows, logically, that the sheets do not smell of Sherlock but he cannot help but bury his face in them, trying to get as close as possible to the memory of him that the sheets seem to carry in each and every thread.
For another brief moment, John allows himself to imagine the way Sherlock’s face would have looked as he watched the twins: brows furrowed in concentration, or perhaps his face would soften, like it had sometimes when he looked at John in his rare unguarded moments. John knows, without a shadow of a doubt, that Sherlock would have at the very least been fascinated by their inherent potential. John would probably have been hard pressed to stop him experimenting on them, but Sherlock would have watched and documented their progress with nearly obsessive levels of detail.
Sherlock had always been protective of him (in his own horrible way; it makes John feel sick to his stomach to think about that so he stops, abruptly) - it stands to reason that he would be protective of his children, if he loved them (and John does not doubt that he would have).
John lets himself imagine the four of them as a proper family; Sherlock curled around him in bed watching over his shoulder while the two twins napped beside them. Sherlock pushing a pram around Hyde Park and stopping to show two toddlers how to feed the ducks. Sherlock scolding them gently but firmly about their schoolwork. Sherlock sitting on the settee at 221b, with one arm around John and one arm around Teddy while Rosie showed them her newest dance moves. Sherlock taking Rosie to buy a new dress before bringing her home from school so that she doesn’t have to tell John how she ruined the old one.
(I wish, I wish, I really really wish)
John shouldn’t let himself think like this. His already tired eyes are burning as he pulls the sheets up around his head.
(He will ask, tomorrow, if there are any other sheets. He cannot stand these ones, not anymore.)
Firmly, he pushes these thoughts from his head and instead tries to focus on memories, happy ones (though he has only a few; they’d only had a few short months of bliss before Sherlock fell, and though every moment of them is etched on John’s brain and in his heart forever, still he feels cheated, ), because he cannot carry on wishing for something he will never, ever get. It is not fair to him, and above all, it is not fair to the children.
He misses Sherlock desperately, but he cannot imagine not having the twins. He could never have had one without losing the other. Perhaps ... Perhaps this is just the universe’s way of making it up to him.
(I wish, though, dammit, I wish I could have them all, can’t I have them all?)
When John wakes up later, he feels marginally better. He checks on the twins (miraculously, asleep - he wonders if perhaps Annette is possessed of magical powers) and lets Celeste lead him, fretting, to the winter garden.
“I thought it prudent that we lay some ground rules for the duration of your stay,” she begins, pouring him some tea from the familiar tea set and pressing a scone into his hand.
“That’s probably a good idea, yeah.” The scone is just as heavenly as the last ones were. He cannot remember the last time he sat down and had a proper bite to eat.
“I don’t want you to feel uncomfortable here, dear. I know it is a bit, shall we say, fancier than you’re used to, but Sherlock certainly used to trample mud in all over the carpets and climb on the antiques whenever he felt the need - I’d rather we get along without an overabundance of mud, of course, but the point remains: please, don’t feel obliged to stand on ceremony here. This is your home, for now, and I’ll be put out if you I find you treating it like a museum.”
“I’ll try to keep that in mind,” John says. Truth be told, he hasn’t seen much of the rest of the house. His previous visits here have been fleeting, at best. What he has seen of it has always reminded him of his trip to Holyrood Palace while on a school trip to Edinburgh, where the rooms and their contents had clearly not been touched for hundreds of years. Trying not to feel that the house is some kind of museum will be difficult, at best; made even more difficult by the fact that tour groups were regularly given access to the house and grounds (a requirement by the National Trust, apparently.)
“I understand, dear, that you’ll want to preserve your privacy and of course you are entirely entitled to it. Please don’t hesitate to tell me if you feel I am in any way encroaching on your jurisdiction. These are your children, dear, you must raise them as you say fit. I am merely here for moral support.”
John means it when he says, “Thank you, I appreciate that.”
“Now, as far as Annette goes. She has come highly recommended to me by more than one person and Mycroft has of course had her background checked rather more thoroughly than the poor girl deserved. I doubt even Sherlock could have come up with something about this girl we don’t already know.”
At the mention of his name, John’s hand clenches involuntarily around his teacup. Celeste smiles at him indulgently and reaches over to pat his hand gently. “There there, dear, it will get easier, with time.”
John doesn’t answer; instead, he busies himself with another scone. (He hadn’t realised quite how ravenous he was.)
“Where were we? Ah, yes, Annette. Annette has been given the room adjacent to yours. You can of course work out some kind of schedule with her but she is being paid more than adequately for her time and she is more than happy to give it. If you want for her to be on duty all night, she will be on duty all night. Our main priority right now is to get you rested and feeling fit again. You’re no good to them if you’re tired out. If I think you are exhausting yourself needlessly, I will step in and I will brook no arguments. Am I understood?”
John bristles at the thought of essentially being given a bedtime, but says nothing; for now, at least, he knows he desperately needs the help Celeste is offering.
“Excellent. I’m sure we’re going to get along splendidly, darling. It’s so nice to have company, this old house gets a bit empty when it’s just me and the staff. I’ll give you the full tour later. The kitchens are always fully stocked, of course; I’ll show you where they are and you simply must help yourself, or ask Pierre to create something for you if you’re ever peckish. I take my dinner at seven and I would appreciate it if you would feel that the invitation to join me always stands, but otherwise I think you should really make yourself at home as much as you feel you can. Pierre has laid in boxes of formula, also; I’ll show you where to find them. Oh, and if you ever feel the need to get out and stretch your legs, I’ll have Tom show you where to find the stables and the bike shed. If you want to go into town, I’ll show you where to contact Anders, and he’ll take you wherever it is you want to go. The first floor of the east wing is quite often occupied by lodgers - honeymoon couples, wedding parties, and the like, but I find they are rarely even noticeable when one is on this side of the house. I will of course show you which are the rented rooms and let you know when we have people staying. It goes without saying that anyone staying in the house will have had to pass Mycroft’s rather thorough background check; we wouldn’t even have lodgers if the estate didn’t need the boost now and then. If you have any questions, or need anything at all, please don’t be shy to ask, John dear. You’re family now. Okay?”
John nods throughout the monologue (he has been doing a lot of that but he’s unsure what else you are meant to do when faced with the force of nature that is Celeste Holmes) and attempts to soak it all in.
“Any questions?”
“No, No, I think that about covered it.”
“Excellent. I’ll let you finish your tea and get settled in, then; we’ll have a nice dinner tonight and then tomorrow I’ll give you the full tour, alright?”
“Perfect.”
Celeste beams at him and John is forced to admire the way this woman hovers expertly between being the perfect image of old world femininity and a creature of almost frightening intellect and cunning. She is exactly what John had always imagined Sherlock’s mother to be like, before he met her, and also (somehow) completely different.
Back in his room, he shoos Annette away until dinner time and carefully lifts the twins out of their crib. He sinks carefully into the sofa and, with a great deal of careful engineering and manoeuvring of first one then another baby while they fret and gurgle quietly, manages to get a soft pillow pulled across his lap so he can prop them against it. He flicks the TV on, but it is more for background noise than anything. As if he could ever pay attention to anything but his children.
“Well, chaps,” he says to them, thumbing some drool away from Rosie’s bottom lip softly. “I guess this is us for now, eh?”
The twins don’t answer him, of course. John (cupping their tiny heads in his hands, creating a little barrier around them with his arms) leans his head back and sighs. The sound does not quite echo around the room, but feels like it ought to.
“What would your dad say, if he could see us now, eh?” Teddy makes a sound that is somewhere between a burp and a cough; John laughs, his heart feeling as if it might explode. “Yeah, I guess it would be something like that, wouldn’t it? He’d probably be ranting about how no Holmes man has ever been a Dad for as long as anyone can remember; Holmes men are only ever Fathers.” John sighs and bites the inside of his lip.
I wish, I wish, I wish.
He’s not entirely sure, this time, that he didn’t say it out loud.
(Be careful, John Watson, you might just get what you wish for.)
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Sebastian Moran is not, it turns out, in Dublin.
Nor is he in Cork. He is not in Aberdeen, or Liverpool, or Scunthorpe. He has never been anywhere near Stoke upon Trent. Manchester, Durham, Dumfries, Edinburgh, Aberystwyth, Cardiff - even little Barry Island; all these places are places that used to hold Sebastian Moran but, by the time Sherlock and Irene catch up with him, no longer do.
Months pass.
At least Irene provides somewhat more stimulating company than last time (where his only company had been the whirling thoughts in his own mind). Irene can at least hold an intelligent conversation, which cannot be said about most of the people Sherlock comes across. She seems to find it a personal affront that Sherlock wants to focus on the work to the preclusion of all else (including, as she put it, “weaving some webs of our own, darling.”) At another time, in another life, Sherlock might have jumped at the chance (it would have seemed, to a previous version of himself, excellent and irresistible fun).
Now, however, is not the time for diversions.
Sherlock wonders why Irene is still helping them, but he never does question it too much. (Somehow, he always seems to break things when he pushes them as far as he needs to in order to understand them.) It is enough to know that (for whatever reason) she is in this with him until the end. (If he is going to guess, he would suggest that it has something to do with revenge: Moriarty and Moran nearly destroyed her. Sherlock sees her as a viper - quite harmless until provoked, and then vicious and deadly.)
He and Irene are a well-oiled machine. She is not quite as good at shooting people as John is, but Sherlock will take what he can get. (More than once, though, he has had good cause to miss his husband’s nearly flawless aim and steady hand.)
Thinking about John is a slippery slope. Mycroft’s plan (which had been, of course, to stand by and do nothing until John gave in and begged for help) had (surprisingly) gone accordingly. (John is proud, very proud, but perhaps his pride has come second to the need to keep his children happy and healthy. John Watson, army doctor. John Watson, professional father.) Sherlock can breathe because he knows that there is no safer place in all of England for his family than Eastwell Manor (especially after the ‘incident’, his parents had been of the rather paranoid variety of Cold War agents. Suffice it to say that Eastwell was always at the very cutting edge of defensive technology.) At the same time, though, it means he cannot do as he used to do: use the CCTV to stare at John until his eyes hurt and he was no longer afraid he was forgetting his face.
Mycroft sends him one picture a week. Some of them are posed (John smiling in front of the familiar facade of Eastwell with one child held carefully against either shoulder; a black and white shot of John giving Hamish a bath in an 18th century basin; a portrait of Anna playing with an enormous stuffed polar bear; professional-quality pictures in which his family might as well have walked off a catalogue page), but his favourite ones are the blurry candids (John on the sofa with the twins on an enormous pillow in front of him, staring at them as if nothing else on the planet exists; John holding Hamish against his shoulder with one large hand while placing Anna in her crib with the other; John cupping Anna in his arms and coaxing a bottle into her mouth while some horrid blonde-haired stranger (obviously a nanny) does the same with Hamish; John passed out spread-eagle across Sherlock’s old bed with the twins asleep next to him (a heavy cushion carefully placed in between them and the edge of the bed); tiny, fleeting snapshots of the daily grind Sherlock is missing out on in order to be here, chasing some mad Irish bastard as he darts effortlessly across Britain).
In theory, it shouldn’t be so hard to catch him. They have nearly had him so many times now. If only Mycroft would let Sherlock follow him out of Britain when he (quite frequently) jaunts over to the continent for a piece of business or two, Sherlock knows they would have had him.
But Mycroft is quite literally dangling Sherlock’s own life in front of his eyes as collateral and so Sherlock (for the first time in his entire life) does as he is told and stays put.
It is awful.
For entire weeks at a time there will be nothing, and he will be forced into hiding with Irene, where they sit and snipe at each other for hours on end. There are a few tolerable weeks after Sherlock devises a sort of 3-D chess game, which they play using a pad of paper, the back of a pizza box and figures made of cigarette butts and lipstick tubes.
Irene never asks about John. (Except for the occasional barb; “Not so virginal after all, are we, Sherlock dear?” He is annoyed at first but soon learns it is just a strange form of endearment. He finds himself joining in with some well placed puns, a thinly veiled (non-serious) insult here and there. Sometimes (when she is not busy being so infuriating he wants to rip her head from her porcelain shoulders) he wonders if this is what it’s like to have a friend.)
Irene never asks about John and Sherlock never tells her. Mycroft had, at their last clandestine check-in, pressed an envelope into his hand: it contained two tiny plastic bracelets (one pink, one blue, each printed with a serial number and a name) and a familiar gold ring on a long chain.
The ring bumps on his breast bone when he is swinging from rooftops and dashing down alleyways, as if he needed reminding that none of this was the same without John. (With John, it had been fun; now, it was nothing short of abhorrent.) The plastic bracelets have been slotted carefully into his wallet. The leather has become worn over them, leaving behind a faded imprint that Sherlock quite often finds himself thumbing idly during his down time.
They do not talk, not ever, about the fact that the Sherlock Holmes Irene once knew has been replaced by someone who is suddenly, unfathomably different. Sherlock is more than he was before; he is quicker in his deductions, swifter to jump to the (correct) conclusions that send him running after criminals that he no longer hesitates to harm if he thinks it might help. He is fiercer, now, in his determination to catch the bastard leading them on this merry chase, than he ever has been, and there is only one reason for it: he cares.
For all that Mycroft insists sentiment is merely a defect inflicted upon the weak, Sherlock (in his newfound ability to care) finds his mind sharper, his concentration more focused, and his conclusions less fallible by far.
(There is a small, dark part of him that he ignores fastidiously that wants to agree with Mycroft, because for all that is now a magnified, magnificent version of himself, he knows that all it would take would be one small mishap; one tiny thing (a single bullet, the smallest drop of poison, a tumble down some stairs) to create the crack that would ultimately shatter him into a thousand tiny pieces. If he lived through it, if he managed to build himself up after, it is entirely possible that the world would be shaking at his feat.)
(Sherlock does not feel, inherently, that he is a good man. That does not mean that he wants to be a bad one.)
(He would be, though. If it came to all that. He would be the most terrible man on the planet, if something happened to John - if something happened to his family.)
Sherlock and Irene talk about many things, but they never talk about the fact that Sherlock’s soul (magnified) is now split in three pieces (where before it was one). Everyone knows that three things are harder to defend than one. Occasionally, when it is three in the afternoon, and there are no crimes for him to prevent or criminals to track down and Irene is sleeping and Moran is infuriatingly absent from the country (as far as they can tell) and Sherlock is on some horrid, infested couch in a motel near Slough staring at the ceiling - at these times, when he really lets himself think, he thinks about how much more difficult it is to protect three than it is to protect one and the sudden weight of the responsibility sits so heavily on his chest (as if his ring has suddenly transformed into a block of lead the size of an elephant) that he can’t breathe, can’t think, can’t move, so transfixed is he by the pressure on his ribs, in his chest, around his lungs.
As far as he knows (assuming he can trust Mycroft’s information), Mummy has not yet had to use any underhanded methods to keep John at Eastwell, but Sherlock knows it is coming. John must surely be uncomfortable there, surrounded by richly understated opulence (a triple contradiction achieved only by those who have been very, very wealthy for a very, very long time). John, with his misshapen oatmeal jumpers and the same pair of jeans he wore before he joined the army (they are slightly too tight, now, but Sherlock would never complain about that), is painfully out of context in the sprawling corridors and the freshly trimmed grounds of Eastwell Manor. John needs comfort, and chaos, and to feel in control: none of which he will get at Eastwell Manor while Mummy is still in residence.
Sherlock desperately wants to get this whole messy business over with so he can at least get John home, back in 221b as he ought to be, before Mummy has to resort to subterfuge.
It is infuriating, this uselessness. He is, currently, less then twenty miles from Eastwell (tucked up in a B&B outside of Canterbury with Irene; they are a blissfully happy couple on their honeymoon, just a fleeting weekend visit before they have to go back to their jobs in London. Despicable ploy, but effective. Irene had wanted him to put his ring on, part of the costume, but he wouldn’t hear of it. (More to the point, she hadn’t articulated it and he hadn’t deigned to acknowledge it.) The proprietor finds them “scrumptious” together. Sherlock only barely resisted the urge to key her car.)
The point: he is less than twenty miles from John and his children (his family), so close he can almost touch them, the closest he’s been in half a year; so close he can almost smell the cologne on John’s oatmeal sweater (he’ll never ever admit that he misses that infernal thing), so close he can nearly see the eyelashes fluttering against Hamish’s cheek and the tiny perfect curl of Anna’s fingers. He is less than 20 miles away from them and he can’t get closer to them and it hurts worse than anything and he can’t do anything about it.
Or, rather, he could do something about it, but he shouldn’t.
Irene has been chattering away at him for at least twenty minutes (insufferable women; why are they always talking so much?) but he hasn’t heard a word of what she’s been saying.
What could he do about it? He lets his eyes close (folds his hands against his chin; a posture that reminds him, in a rather banal way, of a simpler time) and lets the possibilities swirl around him.
Eastwell is (now) nearly impossible to break into, he helped see to that himself, but he grew up there. It is his home and he knows it better even than the back of his own hand. (Never understood that saying. No one really looks at their own hands, not properly. Most people couldn’t draw an accurate diagram of the backs of their hands if they tried. Sherlock can most definitely draw an accurate diagram of Eastwell and its defences. He designed them.) There will be night guards at the gate but there are other ways on to the estate. Avoid the CCTV cameras (difficult, but not impossible; a bit of luck, or well placed guessing at where the guards are likely to be looking). Once he’s at the house itself there’s no issue: it’s his home. He has a key.
He could, of course, alert Mummy to his presence. A pretence: I need my harpoon. I simply must have that sample of a toadstool I took when I was 8, I think if we could extract just the right poison from it... Paper thin excuses; Mummy has razor keen instincts when it comes to her sons. She’d see through him in less than a second.
She’d let him in, though. She’d even said as much, when he first left, she’d said, “You can always come -”
Sherlock’s reverie is interrupted by a pillow to the face.
“Sherlock!” Irene’s voice is shrill and demanding. No doubt she looks something rather like one of those horrid harpy creatures father used to read to him about when he was younger.
He removes the offending article gingerly and tosses it back at her. She does, in fact, look like a harpy: hair slightly mussed, eyes bright with anger, nose and mouth sharp as knives, pinched into a beak-like protrusion at the end of her face.
“What?” he snaps, irritably.
“I’ve been calling your name for the past twenty minutes.”
“I was thinking! One of us has to, if we’re ever going to get rid of Moran, and you certainly weren’t going to start.”
“If you were actually thinking about ways to catch Moran just then and not cataloging ways to break in to your own house to see John, I’ll eat my hat.”
“Well, that would certainly be a spectacle,” Sherlock grumbles, kicking at the arm of the couch he is draped over. He does not bother to protest, though; she is another woman that has developed the infuriating ability to see right through him.
“You can’t, Sherlock.”
“I’ll do whatever I like and thank you to keep your abnormally large nose out of my business.”
“Your business became my business the second I signed up for this batshit insane venture. You can’t, Sherlock, you really can’t. What if you’re caught? What if John sees you? We’ve worked so hard! We’ve nearly got him, you’ll see, the trap will work, it has to, and then you can see them as much as you like, but I absolutely forbid you from leaving this room tonight.”
The trap was Irene’s idea. Sherlock isn’t really paying it much mind, to be honest. It involves Milton Keynes (hateful place) and some small contractor (untrustworthy) and a frankly hideous sum of money (illegally acquired). Irene seems confident it will prove bait enough for them to catch Moran once and for all (the advantage of the trap being that they will be the ones leading, rather than Moran himself). Irene is clever, and she has a certain knack for ensnaring people (with the added bonus that Moran quite clearly has no idea she’s working for Team Holmes now), but Sherlock is dubious of this plan of hers.
For once in his life he would love to be proved wrong.
At the moment, though, all they can do is hide in plain sight and wait for Mycroft to give them a signal, any signal, that means Moran is back in the country and fair game. Irene is still looking at him with her beaked face nearly stuffed in his, though, waiting for some kind of acknowledgement of her authority on the matter.
Inwardly, Sherlock scoffs. The woman is, quite frankly, ridiculous. “Oh, for heaven’s sake, I’m not going anywhere,” he says, and he genuinely means it.
He probably couldn’t get away with it, anyway. And even if he could, what good would it do? He can’t tell John he’s still alive, because John is without doubt being watched and he is simply the worst actor in the world. He could, feasibly, break in to Eastwell but once he got there, what would he do? What would even be the point?
You could see them. It is not a thought that comes from him but from the voice in his head that is always and forever getting him into trouble (and by now he should really know better than to listen). They are oblivious, they don’t know what they’re missing; but you! You are living on blurry surveillance pictures and quickly fading memories.
Sherlock huffs and curls on his side, pulling a cushion over his head - as if that could block out his own mind.
Sherlock Holmes, the boy who decided not to care anymore - but now you do care, and what’s it gotten you so far? You deserve to at least be able to see them.
“Honestly, Sherlock, you’re not five years old. Come out and have an adult conversation with me.”
“Piss off, Irene.”
Sherlock Holmes, all alone, letting his big brother tell him what to do.
“I am not,” Sherlock mutters, but he and the voice both know its not true.
“Are you talking to yourself again? Honestly, you’re most of the way to forty but any one would think you’re all of five years old, the way you carry on.” Irene huffs her annoyance; turns, instead, to the bathroom, and announces that she is going to take a bath and if he would like to rethink his vow of monogamy he is welcome to join her, otherwise he ought to stay out.
Sherlock ignores her.
What good would come of seeing them, anyways? Sherlock refuses to become one of those horrid, soppy types you always see on those awful TV shows, clutching at pictures of loved ones and sobbing their eyes out. Despicable creatures. It is all revoltingly sentimental. He will not stoop to such mawkish displays of human weakness.
He categorically refuses to become pusillanimous. (Beautiful word, that. Pusillanimous. Showing a lack of courage or determination. Pusillanimous. He rolls it around on his tongue indulgently, allowing his mind to drift, momentarily, to a vague worship of the English language - always coupled with a hint of despair at how others insist upon butchering it so - before shaking himself out of it. Pusillanimous. That which he will not become.)
It is ridiculous, to be so hung up on the idea of simply sharing the same space as John. He has thought so for months upon months, has tried to stop himself from becoming so banally saccharine, and yet he cannot shake the feeling that sharing oxygen molecules with John Watson again, after all this time, might actually be so wonderful as to cause him to pass out from the pure bliss of it.
But then - he has always been helpless when it comes to John Watson. John’s name is written in indelible ink across every molecule of his being (even though before they met Sherlock had been so utterly determined to keep everyone out). He has never even met his children properly but they occupy his every waking thought (that isn’t already occupied by the very frantic need to catch Sebastian Moran.)
He doesn’t think much about John, doesn’t need to, seeing as how he breathes him in and out with every breath and sees his name written thousands of time across his skin, but he thinks about the twins. He has never met them, and yet somehow he knows they are perfect.
They are six months old now. By now, they will be ... he frowns, trying to remember. (Once, for a case, it became prudent for him to know everything there was to know about projected infant development timelines; he’d deleted it, though, never thinking the information would ever be relevant.) Sherlock tosses the pillow off his face and pulls out his phone.
At six months, babies are expected to be able to roll themselves over; to seek attention from others besides his parents; to be able to play games; to feed themselves small bits of food. They may even be able to support some weight on their legs. Sherlock is advised, as a new parent, to read aloud to his baby, to encourage them to express themselves, to play them music and present them with a variety of stimulating objects to touch and feel.
Frustrated, Sherlock lets the phone drop to the floor. There are so many milestones to miss, and though John will be taking pictures and making notes, like most other doting parents, he will almost definitely not have been documenting their progress adequately. (How much do they weigh? Do they interact with each other? When, exactly, do their eyes begin to lose the newborn blue and how does it progress? How many hairs per square inch, precisely, did Anna have when she was born and how does that compare to how many she has now?)
It irks him more than it should that he does not even know what they smell like, much less how their skin feels beneath his fingers.
And John - how has all of this changed John? For all that John is the nearest thing to an immovable force that any one human can be, he is not built of stone (and even stones can be moved, if enough pressure is applied). Sherlock can see that he is exhausted in the photos but less so in the later pictures (the twins will be sleeping through the night by now, Sherlock’s phone supplies) and he looks almost happy in some of them. There are more grey hairs in among his tawny ones, though. Sherlock wants to count them. (Maybe not all of them. Would a rough estimation do? Four random sections of his head; extrapolate the data to cover the remainder of the scalp?) There are more lines around his eyes and they are deeper, more heavy set. (Sherlock put those there. He wants to kiss them away.) John has already changed so much since Sherlock left (has become, despite himself, a father), and it vexes Sherlock that he was not there to catalogue the process of this change.
He does not have to be caught. It does not necessarily follow that sneaking into Eastwell will lead to him being caught. He could see, for himself, the tiny fascinating curve of Anna’s thumbnail and the plump roundness of Hamish’s cheeks. If he is very quiet, quiet as a ghost (you’re dead, Sherlock Holmes, you’re a dead man walking), he could sneak into John’s bedroom and feel his warm breath against his skin.
A year and a half is such a long time to be on the run and he is so very, very tired.
Surely he deserves this. He has worked so very hard to keep them safe. No one will even know he was ever there. He needs this, this little gift, some incentive to live on. They are only twenty miles away. He can be back before Irene even thinks about getting out of the tub (lazy woman. There is a television in there and she is one of those odious people who sit in bathtubs until their skin turns to prunes.)
He will not be caught.
(He really had meant it earlier, when he said he wasn’t going anywhere.)
(He ought to know better, by now, than to trust himself around temptation.)
(Once an addict, always an addict, and there has never been anything quite so addictive as the knowledge that John holds his soul and he holds (held) John’s and that together (without conscious input on his part but very much with his own physical contributions) they made two tiny, fragile lives which are now theirs (John’s, but soon, hopefully, his as well) to love and hold and protect.)
Sherlock ducks out of the B&B and hails the first cab he sees, fingers flying over his phone. He sends two texts: one to Irene (Back later, not abducted. SH) and one to his mother (In the area. Need harpoon. Don’t tell M. SH).
The cab drops him off at the edge of the estate and Sherlock (a dead man walking) picks his way across it across it with the practiced ease of someone with a very good memory who grew up in a place. A window at the back of the house has been left unlocked (Mummy). He has it open and is darting inside within minutes. It takes him all of three minutes to locate the twins. (He picks up his harpoon from the study along the way. Plausible deniability.)
It could not have been easier if he had been a ghost.
The twins have been moved to this room, caddy-corner from John’s rooms, only recently. It is the room he and Mycroft knew as the nursery.
There will be a baby monitor. He must not wake them. He must be as silent as the grave.
(You’re dead to them, Sherlock Holmes, you’re a dead man walking.)
(This is madness.)
(His heart hasn’t beat this fast since John let him kiss him that first time. Nothing he ever injected into his veins or snorted through his nose or dissolved on his tongue had ever made him feel like this.)
They are perfect. He can hear the tiny sounds they make when they breathe. He has never heard anything quite so beautiful. It is all he can do not to burst out laughing with the simple joy of it. They are fast asleep, next to each other but carefully separated so they do not hurt each other. Anna has her tiny fingers curled around her thumbs; Hamish has one fist in his mouth.
They are in deep, non-REM sleep. (Eyeballs still behind delicate lids.) He decides to risk it (has to know, has to catalogue it, the feeling of their skin under his fingers). Leaning over their crib (he remembers seeing it many times as a child, and then laterm stuffed in the attic somewhere), he reaches out a hand to stroke a shaking finger down Anna’s fist.
There is a sudden creak of floor boards behind him and a light flicks on. He freezes.
Shit, shit, shit.
Terrible idea, this was a terrible idea. He is the biggest idiot on the planet. Why, why, does he never listen to his own better judgement?
Shit, shit, shit.
John’s voice behind him is sleep thickened and syrupy but it is low and forceful and threatening. (A shiver runs down Sherlock’s spine.)
“Touch even a single hair on their heads and you’re a dead man.”
You’re dead, Sherlock Holmes, you’re a dead man walking.
There is no way out of this. There is no way he can get out of here without John seeing his face (unless he were to hit John over the head with his harpoon... maybe... but no, he can’t, he could never).
Stupid, stupid, stupid. He should have known there’d be motion sensors. He should have thought. He shouldn’t have trusted his mother to understand why he was really coming and pave the way for him. Stupid, stupid, stupid.
There’s nothing for it. He has no choice, now. He can either let John shoot him believing he’s a stranger, or turn around and let John shoot him anyway, knowing who he is and what he did.
Let no man say that Sherlock Holmes was ever pusillanimous. (Pusillanimous (adj): showing a lack of courage or determination. No, better. Pusillanimity (n): the correct and sane response to finding yourself trapped between Captain John Watson (formerly of the RAMC, Army Doctor, father and most definitely armed) and his children in the middle of the night; see also, cowardice (n).)
Sherlock’s life may possibly be forfeit, but he is no coward. Except, it seems, in the face of John Hamish Watson.
You’re dead, Sherlock Holmes, you’re a dead man walking.
But not for much longer. He takes a deep breath, steels himself, screws his courage to the sticking point (which is, he learns, somewhere in his gut), and - with his hands slowly raised in the air - turns around.
Author: 1electricpirate
Rating: M
Pairing: Sherlock Holmes/John Watson (BBC)
Disclaimer: I do not pretend to own any of these characters (besides the two or three I have conjured from thin air). Credit for that brilliance falls to ACD and the Godtiss.
Previous Chapters: One | Two | Three | Four | Five | Six
Chapter Seven - the Division of Polynomials
John, when he is not busy being so exhausted it hurts his bones, is deliriously in love with his children.
The twins are not much more than crying, wriggling bundles of fresh pink skin that constantly need to be washed for one reason or other, but he loves them so much that some times he cannot breathe because of it.
It is an extraordinarily good job that he does not actually need a job in order to take care of them because he literally hasn’t got time to wash himself, much less hold down any kind of steady work.
He lasts an impressive two weeks before he has to step back, take a look around the flat (which now looks like it has some sort of nuclear baby-themed bomb explode across it), take note the state of himself (unwashed, in the same clothes for three days, having had only seven hours of sleep) and his two children, who are slightly more washed than he but he has only two hands and they can’t keep up with four very demanding, very messy ends of babies, and declare defeat.
Mrs. Hudson helps when she can but it is not her job (and she is a surprisingly busy lady) and John is loathe to call on Harry for help. (She had stayed with him the first night and then washed her hands of the whole messy affair.)
221b had transformed literally over night from charmingly chaotic bachelor pad to overwhelmingly messy nursery. There are nappies and bottles and various other bits and pieces everywhere. Someone (he suspects Mycroft, or at least one of his various assistants) has had a hand in the fact that everything he needs he has eventually found laying about somewhere, though most of it he doesn’t remember buying himself.
And why shouldn’t the bastard be buying prams and cots and extra sets of clothes? This entire venture was his idea in the first place. (John could literally kiss him, sometimes, when Teddy has done something adorable like be sick all over his sister.)
One baby is enough trouble; two at once doesn’t double the difficulty level - it triples it, at least. John does not for one second regret the decision that brought him here, sleep deprived and frazzled and probably covered in various body fluids. He is, as stated, irrationally smitten with both of them. But he is also overwhelmed and so far out of his depth it is laughable.
John is very stubborn and very proud, but when it comes to the wellbeing of his children, he decides he will be a big enough man to be able to swallow his pride, admit defeat and call in the big guns.
Namely: Mummy Holmes.
No sooner has John hung up the phone with her than a black sedan pulls up outside the flat and a rather burly man lets himself in, climbs the stairs and announces that he is here to take Mr. Watson and the twins to Eastwall. Does Mr. Watson need any help at all getting the children ready? (Mycroft has been expecting this. Smug bastard. John would pay anything to see one of his ridiculous suits ruined by baby puke.)
John eyes the holster at the man’s side warily while he (in a nearly-perfect army stance, feet together, shoulders back, arms clasped behind his back) rocks between his heels and the balls of his feet, impatiently. John hides his smirk in one of the ever-present white cotton puke-cloths (which seem to have bred and are now to be found on every conceivable surface, just in case) that he has slung over his shoulder. The man could not be less displeased with this assignment (trumped up babysitter) if he tried.
He takes pity on the poor man and instructs him to, “Just, stand right there and keep an eye on them. They should be okay but...” he shrugs, grinning, and leaving it at that as he sweeps off to gather his things together. The twins are asleep, strapped in two separate carseats slash carrying baskets that materialised in the flat the morning after he brought them home from the hospital.
John flies around the flat, packing as quickly as he can. The poor security guard (body guard? He has the look of one of Mycroft’s ruthless trained killers about him) looked terrified at the thought of being left alone with two infants, and John does not ever overestimate how long both of them will remain asleep simultaneously. (It is this refusal of theirs to sleep at the same time, above all else, that has driven John to the place he is now - frazzled and exhausted and covered in sick and absolutely desperate.)
He makes sure he has enough clothes for himself before throwing everything baby-related he can get his hands on into the first bag he can find. He only really realises that he has chosen, ironically, his well-worn, sand-beaten army service pack to stuff with baby clothes, bottles, rattles, blankets and the like, when he sees the body guard’s eyebrows fly, quite dramatically, into his hairline.
John grins at him. “Straight from one warzone to another, right?” The man does not laugh, but that doesn’t matter. (It wasn’t particularly funny in the first place.) John laughs at himself, tosses his laptop and a few of his books in on top of the jumble of tiny clothes, and then looks around the flat, taking quick stock of what is already packed, what remains, and what he can possibly get away with leaving behind.
“Do we need to - do you know if they’ve got cots there or anything?” The cots had been hell to get up in the first place - part of John would love to enlist this man’s help in dissecting a baby cot, just for the mental image, but the other part pities him and just wants to get him out of his zone of obvious discomfort as soon as possible.
“Mr. Holmes has said only that Mr. Watson is not to worry about anything, only getting the children to the car in one piece, and if he could manage to keep at least one if not both of the little devils from ruining his upholstery on the way to Kent, Mr. Holmes would be much obliged.”
The body guard (John decides to call him Hulk, based on his frankly ridiculous proportions) does not seem to think John has much chance of success in this endeavour. Secretly, John agrees with him.
In actual fact, the trip to Eastwell goes off rather well. Teddy decides he is exhausted and sleeps most of the way, and Rosie seems to find the movement of the car soothing as they dodge (slightly quickly for John’s comfort but he doesn’t dare question the Hulk) through traffic. John sits in between their carseats, one hand on either tiny stomach, and lets his head fall back against the headrest. He wakes once, about half way through, when Rosie begins to cry softly, but she is soon quieted and he drifts off again thankfully.
Celeste is waiting to receive the three of them with eager eyes, the doors to Eastwell thrown open. “John, darling, I was wondering when you’d cave,” she calls to him, as he hoists the service pack over his shoulder before picking up Teddy’s basket and following the Hulk (and Rosie) up the stairs to the entrance way.
“Thank you, Rupert,” Celeste says, taking Rosie and waving the Hulk away. John smiles at her, wearily, and follows her inside.
“Sorry to impose on you like this,” he begins, though to be honest, he’s not all that sorry. He needs help; this was her idea as well; she can jolly well share the responsibility. “It was fine for a while, but a bloke has to sleep sometime. We won’t stay long.”
“Nonsense.” Celeste waves him off. “Mycroft owes me fifty pounds, now. He said you wouldn’t last a week, but I knew you were made of sterner stuff.” She winks at him. John remembers why she is one of his favourite people on the planet. “Now. I’ve put you in Sherlock’s rooms again. We’ve cleaned up, just a bit, had to make sure there were no biohazards lying about for these little monsters to get their teeth into, crawling about.”
“They won’t be crawling for months yet, Celeste,” John protests, using his free hand to hoist the pack more firmly on his shoulder. “We won’t stay that long. Just a bit, just until I can catch my breath.”
“You’ll stay just as long as you need to, John Watson, and not one second less. I won’t hear of it. You can hardly be expected to take care of two babies all alone. Preposterous. Come now, see what we’ve done.”
The ‘we’ Celeste was referring to so often seems to include herself and her newest member of staff, Annette, who has a tidy bun of blonde hair and soft, rosy cheeks, and introduces herself as “the Nanny.”
John frowns, shifting Teddy’s basket to the other hand to hide his discomfort at the idea. “Celeste, I really don’t think...”
“John, dear, none of us keep you around to think. I rather thought you knew that by know. Now, Annette will be around just as much or as little as you need her to be, as will I. One baby is a two person job; two babies are at least a three person job, if not four, but I think between the three of us we should be able to cope. Now. Come see your rooms, dear.”
Sherlock’s rooms (the only parts of this house that John is really familiar with) are still charmingly chaotic, though the worst of it seems to have been tidied at least into a couple compact piles, leaving enough space in the sitting room for a rocking chair by the of the fire (and, John notes with relief, a rather high-tech TV set next to the hearth). There is a small fire in the grate. The overstuffed sofa that had previously been shoved against a wall has been dragged out and spun to face the TV, and on its right (completing the little square of comfort) is the mint green chaise longue that John was so enamoured with from the main parlour. There are pillows of every size and description stacked wherever there seems to be a space for them. (John has learned very quickly that oversized pillows are an outnumbered father’s best friend.)
Beyond the sitting area, towards the direction of the bedroom, is the most beautiful crib John has ever seen. It must be very old, clearly made from the same kind of wood that Sherlock’s bed is made of. It is wide enough to fit two babies in with more than enough space around them and has its own deep blue velvet canopy. There is a fully equipped changing table, a pram with two baskets side by side, and a variety of strappy contraptions that John guesses are for carrying babies against his chest or his back. There are several beautiful, oversized stuffed animals and next to them an entire basket overflowing with soft and plastic toys.
The familiar bed and its periwinkle blue silk covers are just through the folding doors and beyond them, a bathroom that puts most spas to shame. When you include the walk-in closet (no longer, he notes with overwhelming relief, full of Sherlock’s clothes), Sherlock’s rooms are as big as, or possibly even slightly bigger than 221b, even including John’s bedroom that has gone mostly unused since six months after John moved in. John and his twins can be a perfectly contained unit in here, coming out only for meals and if they want to. He is achingly thankful for that, because if he is going to be begging for help from his mother-in-law, he’d at least like to have some privacy once in a while.
Celeste and Annette are watching him with undisguised excitement. They have obviously been planning this for much longer than two weeks. (He can just see it: an entire brigade of Mycroft’s men, descending upon Hanley’s on Oxford Circus and coming out laden with multi-coloured bags, jostling against their gun holsters. Everything else has clearly come from somewhere like Harrods. John flushes, slightly ashamed at such careless displays of affluence. What little he’d bought in the way of baby-equipment had come mostly from second-hand shops or whatever small boutique he’d happened upon out of chance. Sherlock’s trust fund has made him a wealthy man, technically, but John will never know how to be rich.)
“Celeste, I... This is brilliant. Thank you.”
“Oh, John dear, thank you. This is not an entirely selfless arrangement, you know. This way, I get to spend some time with my precious grandchildren, and you get a rest once in a while.”
As if on cue, the basket in Celeste’s hands starts to cry softly. “That’s our lot of peace and quiet, I’m afraid,” John says, smiling at them. He goes to lift Rosie from the basket to quiet her against his shoulder, but Annette gets there first. “Oh, I don’t, you don’t...” He scratches his neck, uncomfortable.
“It’s my job, sir. Isn’t it, little one?” She picks Rosie up out of the basket, careful to cradle her neck; clearly she’s done this many, many times before, but John can’t help but reach out slightly, as if she might drop the baby at any moment. Celeste clucks her tongue at him.
“Now, John. I absolutely insist that you get out of those clothes and shower this instant. No son of mine was ever allowed to wander around looking like a tramp, and the rule goes for sons-in-law as well. Are we clear?”
That is one statement that John is very willing to believe; the thought of either Sherlock or Mycroft ever being messy triggered something akin to anathema in John’s brain. With one last worried glance at the twins he leaves them to their grandmother and the nanny. The time it takes him shower and dress is the longest he has been away from them since he brought them home and it makes him antsy, as if his skin is suddenly one size too tight. He forces himself to take the time to unpack some of the things from his service pack and finds that the drawers of Sherlock’s dresser have been emptied of his things and filled with an assortment of clothing that is all the perfect size for John. They aren’t even overly posh - he actually spies several thick-knit jumpers in there.
It seems that Celeste is not going to make it easy for him to find reasons to leave. Unsure how he feels about this, John sets the twins’ clothes in a separate drawer and hurries through the double doors to check on them, just as Teddy begins to cry. (It was just under a day and a half before John could confidently tell the twins apart by their crying; he finds that little fact fascinating and breathtaking.)
He finds Celeste cradling Rosie in one hand and holding a book in the other. Rosie seems happy enough so he turns anxiously to his son first; his mind tells him its probably nothing, of course, but he can’t help the gut feeling of panic. (He has learned, over the past manic fortnight, that the business of parenting does not have a lot to do with common sense. It is largely irrational and based on a whole lot of gut instinct and terror. The skill in parenting, he thinks - though he is obviously still a novice - comes in sifting through the terror to find legitimate sources of worry and dealing with those first.)
Teddy is wailing loudly now (it is only by some miracle that Rosie has not begun as well); Annette has him tucked firmly against her shoulder and is walking around the room, bouncing him gently, chattering away at him in what John can only assume is the standard language of nannies everywhere: baby talk.
“Whosa sleepy weepy eh? Whosseeden? Shhhhh Teddy weddy bear, Shhhhh Teddy weddy bear, whoseeden Teddy, whosee? Whoopsadaisy teddy weddy, whoopsadaisy teddy weddy.”
John watches, frozen, for as long as he can bear to before he finds himself bounding across the room and scooping his crying child from Annette’s startled arms. “Don’t,” he says, and it comes out sounding rather more snappy than he intends it to. (He really needs to sleep, he should really sleep while he can; logically he knows that nothing will happen while they are watching the twins but he can’t quite get the idea through his head, even though he’s about to fall over where he stands.)
Annette looks hurt and startled and confused. Celeste has put down her book and shifted Rosie to the other arm; she is watching John like a hawk. Teddy is quieting down now against John’s shoulder and John stands there, right in front of Annette, with one hand under Teddy’s bottom and one hand around his tiny head, swaying a bit until the wailing turns to snuffles and John can hear himself think again.
“Sorry,” he sighs, pressing a kiss to Teddy’s head, “Sorry, Annette, it’s just... Sherlock would never... He’d never allow baby talk even on the same street as his child, and I just... I can’t... Just don’t, please.”
Teddy sniffles against his shoulder; John presses another kiss to his fuzzy head before chancing a glance at Celeste. Her face is impassive but her eyes (Sherlock’s eyes) are alight and sparkling with approval. (John has just scored ten parenting points in the eyes of Mummy Holmes, who probably succeeded at giving birth to two fully grown adults straight from the womb; he reckons that’s enough to be getting on with for Day One.)
Annette is looking sheepish (but still alarmed). She nods and says, “Of course, Doctor Watson, sir, sorry, I didn’t realise.”
John sighs, jiggling the warm lump of his son slightly against his shoulder. “It’s John, please, no point in standing on ceremony. And it’s okay, you weren’t to know.” He places Teddy gingerly in the crib and stares at him for a few moments before shooting her his most winning smile. She is still watching him with wary eyes, as if he might lash out again at any minute.
“Sorry, I’ve not slept properly in weeks. Look, I’m not saying you have to talk Shakespeare at them, it’s just...” He scratches the back of his head and tries to find the words to explain himself. (Not for the first time, he wishes Sherlock were here to just sort of, bark commands and be obeyed immediately and without question. John has never been able to do that - unless it was part of the job description, in which case he was very good at it; but he’s never been good at assuming some sort of God-given prerogative and expecting others to buy into it and do exactly as he says. Put simply: John is not used to having employees.)
“I believe that what the good doctor is trying to say, Annette dear, is that my late son very much believed in treating everyone just the same. He was not one to dumb himself down for anyone, and he always treated children as if they were simply adults in miniature. Of course, no one expects a two-week-old to understand any sort of sentence at all, but I believe it is the principle of the thing to which Doctor Watson objects.”
John feels his shoulders sag with relief. “Yes, sorry, that’s... That’s precisely it. Thank you, Celeste, could not have put it better myself.”
Celeste shoots him a smile that lights up the room before she gathers a sleeping Rosie up and stands to place her next to her brother. “There, I think they’re both out for a few minutes at least. John, you should sleep while you can. Annette and I will sit with them for now. I want you to sleep for at least two hours, no interruptions, and then after you’ve had some rest we’ll discuss things further. Alright?”
John allows himself to be ushered towards his (Sherlock’s, it will never not be Sherlock’s) bed with one last glance at the twins (sleeping peacefully, curled up facing each other). He pulls the deep blue curtains around the bed and the darkness and muffled silence is complete and overwhelming.
For all that he is bone-tired (he has never understood that expression until now, not even three straight days of chasing criminals across London had ever had him this close to collapsing with exhaustion, but now he understands it, feels the fatigue in his very bones), John does not fall asleep immediately. Instead, he closes his eyes and lets himself, for one brief (heartbreaking) minute, imagine.
What it would be like if Sherlock were here with him; what it would be like to raise their children together? (I wish, I wish, I wish.) They could have stayed at 221b, probably, tag-teaming on sleep so that while one person watched the twins, the other could get some shut eye. They wouldn’t have seen each other properly in days but it would almost not have mattered. (Not much else matters, when you have two tiny mouths to feed and clean and two very messy bums to wipe. Everything else is background noise when your child starts crying and you can feel it in your stomach, in your blood, in your bones.)
Sherlock was not good with people or tedium, and babies are both of those things wrapped up in one very messy package. John likes to think, though, in the few minutes he has for such a luxurious activity as thinking, that he would have risen to the occasion. No one could look at Teddy and Rosie without falling head over heels for them (John is quietly confident of this fact, though he is perhaps biased); surely Sherlock would have been the same? (He’d probably insist on full names though, he despised nicknames. Theodore and Rosalyn, then, or - no, it was more likely to have been Hamish and Anna. For all that he hated social convention, sometimes he was surprisingly stubborn. He liked first names to stay first names and never did understand why people insisted on overcomplicating and sentimentalising such necessarily utilitarian matters as names.)
(A good name is like a perfectly suited tool, John. This, from Sherlock, what seems like a lifetime ago, while they prepared themselves for some deception or other. A good name and an even better disguise: Sherlock’s sharpest weapons.)
John knows, logically, that the sheets do not smell of Sherlock but he cannot help but bury his face in them, trying to get as close as possible to the memory of him that the sheets seem to carry in each and every thread.
For another brief moment, John allows himself to imagine the way Sherlock’s face would have looked as he watched the twins: brows furrowed in concentration, or perhaps his face would soften, like it had sometimes when he looked at John in his rare unguarded moments. John knows, without a shadow of a doubt, that Sherlock would have at the very least been fascinated by their inherent potential. John would probably have been hard pressed to stop him experimenting on them, but Sherlock would have watched and documented their progress with nearly obsessive levels of detail.
Sherlock had always been protective of him (in his own horrible way; it makes John feel sick to his stomach to think about that so he stops, abruptly) - it stands to reason that he would be protective of his children, if he loved them (and John does not doubt that he would have).
John lets himself imagine the four of them as a proper family; Sherlock curled around him in bed watching over his shoulder while the two twins napped beside them. Sherlock pushing a pram around Hyde Park and stopping to show two toddlers how to feed the ducks. Sherlock scolding them gently but firmly about their schoolwork. Sherlock sitting on the settee at 221b, with one arm around John and one arm around Teddy while Rosie showed them her newest dance moves. Sherlock taking Rosie to buy a new dress before bringing her home from school so that she doesn’t have to tell John how she ruined the old one.
(I wish, I wish, I really really wish)
John shouldn’t let himself think like this. His already tired eyes are burning as he pulls the sheets up around his head.
(He will ask, tomorrow, if there are any other sheets. He cannot stand these ones, not anymore.)
Firmly, he pushes these thoughts from his head and instead tries to focus on memories, happy ones (though he has only a few; they’d only had a few short months of bliss before Sherlock fell, and though every moment of them is etched on John’s brain and in his heart forever, still he feels cheated, ), because he cannot carry on wishing for something he will never, ever get. It is not fair to him, and above all, it is not fair to the children.
He misses Sherlock desperately, but he cannot imagine not having the twins. He could never have had one without losing the other. Perhaps ... Perhaps this is just the universe’s way of making it up to him.
(I wish, though, dammit, I wish I could have them all, can’t I have them all?)
When John wakes up later, he feels marginally better. He checks on the twins (miraculously, asleep - he wonders if perhaps Annette is possessed of magical powers) and lets Celeste lead him, fretting, to the winter garden.
“I thought it prudent that we lay some ground rules for the duration of your stay,” she begins, pouring him some tea from the familiar tea set and pressing a scone into his hand.
“That’s probably a good idea, yeah.” The scone is just as heavenly as the last ones were. He cannot remember the last time he sat down and had a proper bite to eat.
“I don’t want you to feel uncomfortable here, dear. I know it is a bit, shall we say, fancier than you’re used to, but Sherlock certainly used to trample mud in all over the carpets and climb on the antiques whenever he felt the need - I’d rather we get along without an overabundance of mud, of course, but the point remains: please, don’t feel obliged to stand on ceremony here. This is your home, for now, and I’ll be put out if you I find you treating it like a museum.”
“I’ll try to keep that in mind,” John says. Truth be told, he hasn’t seen much of the rest of the house. His previous visits here have been fleeting, at best. What he has seen of it has always reminded him of his trip to Holyrood Palace while on a school trip to Edinburgh, where the rooms and their contents had clearly not been touched for hundreds of years. Trying not to feel that the house is some kind of museum will be difficult, at best; made even more difficult by the fact that tour groups were regularly given access to the house and grounds (a requirement by the National Trust, apparently.)
“I understand, dear, that you’ll want to preserve your privacy and of course you are entirely entitled to it. Please don’t hesitate to tell me if you feel I am in any way encroaching on your jurisdiction. These are your children, dear, you must raise them as you say fit. I am merely here for moral support.”
John means it when he says, “Thank you, I appreciate that.”
“Now, as far as Annette goes. She has come highly recommended to me by more than one person and Mycroft has of course had her background checked rather more thoroughly than the poor girl deserved. I doubt even Sherlock could have come up with something about this girl we don’t already know.”
At the mention of his name, John’s hand clenches involuntarily around his teacup. Celeste smiles at him indulgently and reaches over to pat his hand gently. “There there, dear, it will get easier, with time.”
John doesn’t answer; instead, he busies himself with another scone. (He hadn’t realised quite how ravenous he was.)
“Where were we? Ah, yes, Annette. Annette has been given the room adjacent to yours. You can of course work out some kind of schedule with her but she is being paid more than adequately for her time and she is more than happy to give it. If you want for her to be on duty all night, she will be on duty all night. Our main priority right now is to get you rested and feeling fit again. You’re no good to them if you’re tired out. If I think you are exhausting yourself needlessly, I will step in and I will brook no arguments. Am I understood?”
John bristles at the thought of essentially being given a bedtime, but says nothing; for now, at least, he knows he desperately needs the help Celeste is offering.
“Excellent. I’m sure we’re going to get along splendidly, darling. It’s so nice to have company, this old house gets a bit empty when it’s just me and the staff. I’ll give you the full tour later. The kitchens are always fully stocked, of course; I’ll show you where they are and you simply must help yourself, or ask Pierre to create something for you if you’re ever peckish. I take my dinner at seven and I would appreciate it if you would feel that the invitation to join me always stands, but otherwise I think you should really make yourself at home as much as you feel you can. Pierre has laid in boxes of formula, also; I’ll show you where to find them. Oh, and if you ever feel the need to get out and stretch your legs, I’ll have Tom show you where to find the stables and the bike shed. If you want to go into town, I’ll show you where to contact Anders, and he’ll take you wherever it is you want to go. The first floor of the east wing is quite often occupied by lodgers - honeymoon couples, wedding parties, and the like, but I find they are rarely even noticeable when one is on this side of the house. I will of course show you which are the rented rooms and let you know when we have people staying. It goes without saying that anyone staying in the house will have had to pass Mycroft’s rather thorough background check; we wouldn’t even have lodgers if the estate didn’t need the boost now and then. If you have any questions, or need anything at all, please don’t be shy to ask, John dear. You’re family now. Okay?”
John nods throughout the monologue (he has been doing a lot of that but he’s unsure what else you are meant to do when faced with the force of nature that is Celeste Holmes) and attempts to soak it all in.
“Any questions?”
“No, No, I think that about covered it.”
“Excellent. I’ll let you finish your tea and get settled in, then; we’ll have a nice dinner tonight and then tomorrow I’ll give you the full tour, alright?”
“Perfect.”
Celeste beams at him and John is forced to admire the way this woman hovers expertly between being the perfect image of old world femininity and a creature of almost frightening intellect and cunning. She is exactly what John had always imagined Sherlock’s mother to be like, before he met her, and also (somehow) completely different.
Back in his room, he shoos Annette away until dinner time and carefully lifts the twins out of their crib. He sinks carefully into the sofa and, with a great deal of careful engineering and manoeuvring of first one then another baby while they fret and gurgle quietly, manages to get a soft pillow pulled across his lap so he can prop them against it. He flicks the TV on, but it is more for background noise than anything. As if he could ever pay attention to anything but his children.
“Well, chaps,” he says to them, thumbing some drool away from Rosie’s bottom lip softly. “I guess this is us for now, eh?”
The twins don’t answer him, of course. John (cupping their tiny heads in his hands, creating a little barrier around them with his arms) leans his head back and sighs. The sound does not quite echo around the room, but feels like it ought to.
“What would your dad say, if he could see us now, eh?” Teddy makes a sound that is somewhere between a burp and a cough; John laughs, his heart feeling as if it might explode. “Yeah, I guess it would be something like that, wouldn’t it? He’d probably be ranting about how no Holmes man has ever been a Dad for as long as anyone can remember; Holmes men are only ever Fathers.” John sighs and bites the inside of his lip.
I wish, I wish, I wish.
He’s not entirely sure, this time, that he didn’t say it out loud.
(Be careful, John Watson, you might just get what you wish for.)
------------
Sebastian Moran is not, it turns out, in Dublin.
Nor is he in Cork. He is not in Aberdeen, or Liverpool, or Scunthorpe. He has never been anywhere near Stoke upon Trent. Manchester, Durham, Dumfries, Edinburgh, Aberystwyth, Cardiff - even little Barry Island; all these places are places that used to hold Sebastian Moran but, by the time Sherlock and Irene catch up with him, no longer do.
Months pass.
At least Irene provides somewhat more stimulating company than last time (where his only company had been the whirling thoughts in his own mind). Irene can at least hold an intelligent conversation, which cannot be said about most of the people Sherlock comes across. She seems to find it a personal affront that Sherlock wants to focus on the work to the preclusion of all else (including, as she put it, “weaving some webs of our own, darling.”) At another time, in another life, Sherlock might have jumped at the chance (it would have seemed, to a previous version of himself, excellent and irresistible fun).
Now, however, is not the time for diversions.
Sherlock wonders why Irene is still helping them, but he never does question it too much. (Somehow, he always seems to break things when he pushes them as far as he needs to in order to understand them.) It is enough to know that (for whatever reason) she is in this with him until the end. (If he is going to guess, he would suggest that it has something to do with revenge: Moriarty and Moran nearly destroyed her. Sherlock sees her as a viper - quite harmless until provoked, and then vicious and deadly.)
He and Irene are a well-oiled machine. She is not quite as good at shooting people as John is, but Sherlock will take what he can get. (More than once, though, he has had good cause to miss his husband’s nearly flawless aim and steady hand.)
Thinking about John is a slippery slope. Mycroft’s plan (which had been, of course, to stand by and do nothing until John gave in and begged for help) had (surprisingly) gone accordingly. (John is proud, very proud, but perhaps his pride has come second to the need to keep his children happy and healthy. John Watson, army doctor. John Watson, professional father.) Sherlock can breathe because he knows that there is no safer place in all of England for his family than Eastwell Manor (especially after the ‘incident’, his parents had been of the rather paranoid variety of Cold War agents. Suffice it to say that Eastwell was always at the very cutting edge of defensive technology.) At the same time, though, it means he cannot do as he used to do: use the CCTV to stare at John until his eyes hurt and he was no longer afraid he was forgetting his face.
Mycroft sends him one picture a week. Some of them are posed (John smiling in front of the familiar facade of Eastwell with one child held carefully against either shoulder; a black and white shot of John giving Hamish a bath in an 18th century basin; a portrait of Anna playing with an enormous stuffed polar bear; professional-quality pictures in which his family might as well have walked off a catalogue page), but his favourite ones are the blurry candids (John on the sofa with the twins on an enormous pillow in front of him, staring at them as if nothing else on the planet exists; John holding Hamish against his shoulder with one large hand while placing Anna in her crib with the other; John cupping Anna in his arms and coaxing a bottle into her mouth while some horrid blonde-haired stranger (obviously a nanny) does the same with Hamish; John passed out spread-eagle across Sherlock’s old bed with the twins asleep next to him (a heavy cushion carefully placed in between them and the edge of the bed); tiny, fleeting snapshots of the daily grind Sherlock is missing out on in order to be here, chasing some mad Irish bastard as he darts effortlessly across Britain).
In theory, it shouldn’t be so hard to catch him. They have nearly had him so many times now. If only Mycroft would let Sherlock follow him out of Britain when he (quite frequently) jaunts over to the continent for a piece of business or two, Sherlock knows they would have had him.
But Mycroft is quite literally dangling Sherlock’s own life in front of his eyes as collateral and so Sherlock (for the first time in his entire life) does as he is told and stays put.
It is awful.
For entire weeks at a time there will be nothing, and he will be forced into hiding with Irene, where they sit and snipe at each other for hours on end. There are a few tolerable weeks after Sherlock devises a sort of 3-D chess game, which they play using a pad of paper, the back of a pizza box and figures made of cigarette butts and lipstick tubes.
Irene never asks about John. (Except for the occasional barb; “Not so virginal after all, are we, Sherlock dear?” He is annoyed at first but soon learns it is just a strange form of endearment. He finds himself joining in with some well placed puns, a thinly veiled (non-serious) insult here and there. Sometimes (when she is not busy being so infuriating he wants to rip her head from her porcelain shoulders) he wonders if this is what it’s like to have a friend.)
Irene never asks about John and Sherlock never tells her. Mycroft had, at their last clandestine check-in, pressed an envelope into his hand: it contained two tiny plastic bracelets (one pink, one blue, each printed with a serial number and a name) and a familiar gold ring on a long chain.
The ring bumps on his breast bone when he is swinging from rooftops and dashing down alleyways, as if he needed reminding that none of this was the same without John. (With John, it had been fun; now, it was nothing short of abhorrent.) The plastic bracelets have been slotted carefully into his wallet. The leather has become worn over them, leaving behind a faded imprint that Sherlock quite often finds himself thumbing idly during his down time.
They do not talk, not ever, about the fact that the Sherlock Holmes Irene once knew has been replaced by someone who is suddenly, unfathomably different. Sherlock is more than he was before; he is quicker in his deductions, swifter to jump to the (correct) conclusions that send him running after criminals that he no longer hesitates to harm if he thinks it might help. He is fiercer, now, in his determination to catch the bastard leading them on this merry chase, than he ever has been, and there is only one reason for it: he cares.
For all that Mycroft insists sentiment is merely a defect inflicted upon the weak, Sherlock (in his newfound ability to care) finds his mind sharper, his concentration more focused, and his conclusions less fallible by far.
(There is a small, dark part of him that he ignores fastidiously that wants to agree with Mycroft, because for all that is now a magnified, magnificent version of himself, he knows that all it would take would be one small mishap; one tiny thing (a single bullet, the smallest drop of poison, a tumble down some stairs) to create the crack that would ultimately shatter him into a thousand tiny pieces. If he lived through it, if he managed to build himself up after, it is entirely possible that the world would be shaking at his feat.)
(Sherlock does not feel, inherently, that he is a good man. That does not mean that he wants to be a bad one.)
(He would be, though. If it came to all that. He would be the most terrible man on the planet, if something happened to John - if something happened to his family.)
Sherlock and Irene talk about many things, but they never talk about the fact that Sherlock’s soul (magnified) is now split in three pieces (where before it was one). Everyone knows that three things are harder to defend than one. Occasionally, when it is three in the afternoon, and there are no crimes for him to prevent or criminals to track down and Irene is sleeping and Moran is infuriatingly absent from the country (as far as they can tell) and Sherlock is on some horrid, infested couch in a motel near Slough staring at the ceiling - at these times, when he really lets himself think, he thinks about how much more difficult it is to protect three than it is to protect one and the sudden weight of the responsibility sits so heavily on his chest (as if his ring has suddenly transformed into a block of lead the size of an elephant) that he can’t breathe, can’t think, can’t move, so transfixed is he by the pressure on his ribs, in his chest, around his lungs.
As far as he knows (assuming he can trust Mycroft’s information), Mummy has not yet had to use any underhanded methods to keep John at Eastwell, but Sherlock knows it is coming. John must surely be uncomfortable there, surrounded by richly understated opulence (a triple contradiction achieved only by those who have been very, very wealthy for a very, very long time). John, with his misshapen oatmeal jumpers and the same pair of jeans he wore before he joined the army (they are slightly too tight, now, but Sherlock would never complain about that), is painfully out of context in the sprawling corridors and the freshly trimmed grounds of Eastwell Manor. John needs comfort, and chaos, and to feel in control: none of which he will get at Eastwell Manor while Mummy is still in residence.
Sherlock desperately wants to get this whole messy business over with so he can at least get John home, back in 221b as he ought to be, before Mummy has to resort to subterfuge.
It is infuriating, this uselessness. He is, currently, less then twenty miles from Eastwell (tucked up in a B&B outside of Canterbury with Irene; they are a blissfully happy couple on their honeymoon, just a fleeting weekend visit before they have to go back to their jobs in London. Despicable ploy, but effective. Irene had wanted him to put his ring on, part of the costume, but he wouldn’t hear of it. (More to the point, she hadn’t articulated it and he hadn’t deigned to acknowledge it.) The proprietor finds them “scrumptious” together. Sherlock only barely resisted the urge to key her car.)
The point: he is less than twenty miles from John and his children (his family), so close he can almost touch them, the closest he’s been in half a year; so close he can almost smell the cologne on John’s oatmeal sweater (he’ll never ever admit that he misses that infernal thing), so close he can nearly see the eyelashes fluttering against Hamish’s cheek and the tiny perfect curl of Anna’s fingers. He is less than 20 miles away from them and he can’t get closer to them and it hurts worse than anything and he can’t do anything about it.
Or, rather, he could do something about it, but he shouldn’t.
Irene has been chattering away at him for at least twenty minutes (insufferable women; why are they always talking so much?) but he hasn’t heard a word of what she’s been saying.
What could he do about it? He lets his eyes close (folds his hands against his chin; a posture that reminds him, in a rather banal way, of a simpler time) and lets the possibilities swirl around him.
Eastwell is (now) nearly impossible to break into, he helped see to that himself, but he grew up there. It is his home and he knows it better even than the back of his own hand. (Never understood that saying. No one really looks at their own hands, not properly. Most people couldn’t draw an accurate diagram of the backs of their hands if they tried. Sherlock can most definitely draw an accurate diagram of Eastwell and its defences. He designed them.) There will be night guards at the gate but there are other ways on to the estate. Avoid the CCTV cameras (difficult, but not impossible; a bit of luck, or well placed guessing at where the guards are likely to be looking). Once he’s at the house itself there’s no issue: it’s his home. He has a key.
He could, of course, alert Mummy to his presence. A pretence: I need my harpoon. I simply must have that sample of a toadstool I took when I was 8, I think if we could extract just the right poison from it... Paper thin excuses; Mummy has razor keen instincts when it comes to her sons. She’d see through him in less than a second.
She’d let him in, though. She’d even said as much, when he first left, she’d said, “You can always come -”
Sherlock’s reverie is interrupted by a pillow to the face.
“Sherlock!” Irene’s voice is shrill and demanding. No doubt she looks something rather like one of those horrid harpy creatures father used to read to him about when he was younger.
He removes the offending article gingerly and tosses it back at her. She does, in fact, look like a harpy: hair slightly mussed, eyes bright with anger, nose and mouth sharp as knives, pinched into a beak-like protrusion at the end of her face.
“What?” he snaps, irritably.
“I’ve been calling your name for the past twenty minutes.”
“I was thinking! One of us has to, if we’re ever going to get rid of Moran, and you certainly weren’t going to start.”
“If you were actually thinking about ways to catch Moran just then and not cataloging ways to break in to your own house to see John, I’ll eat my hat.”
“Well, that would certainly be a spectacle,” Sherlock grumbles, kicking at the arm of the couch he is draped over. He does not bother to protest, though; she is another woman that has developed the infuriating ability to see right through him.
“You can’t, Sherlock.”
“I’ll do whatever I like and thank you to keep your abnormally large nose out of my business.”
“Your business became my business the second I signed up for this batshit insane venture. You can’t, Sherlock, you really can’t. What if you’re caught? What if John sees you? We’ve worked so hard! We’ve nearly got him, you’ll see, the trap will work, it has to, and then you can see them as much as you like, but I absolutely forbid you from leaving this room tonight.”
The trap was Irene’s idea. Sherlock isn’t really paying it much mind, to be honest. It involves Milton Keynes (hateful place) and some small contractor (untrustworthy) and a frankly hideous sum of money (illegally acquired). Irene seems confident it will prove bait enough for them to catch Moran once and for all (the advantage of the trap being that they will be the ones leading, rather than Moran himself). Irene is clever, and she has a certain knack for ensnaring people (with the added bonus that Moran quite clearly has no idea she’s working for Team Holmes now), but Sherlock is dubious of this plan of hers.
For once in his life he would love to be proved wrong.
At the moment, though, all they can do is hide in plain sight and wait for Mycroft to give them a signal, any signal, that means Moran is back in the country and fair game. Irene is still looking at him with her beaked face nearly stuffed in his, though, waiting for some kind of acknowledgement of her authority on the matter.
Inwardly, Sherlock scoffs. The woman is, quite frankly, ridiculous. “Oh, for heaven’s sake, I’m not going anywhere,” he says, and he genuinely means it.
He probably couldn’t get away with it, anyway. And even if he could, what good would it do? He can’t tell John he’s still alive, because John is without doubt being watched and he is simply the worst actor in the world. He could, feasibly, break in to Eastwell but once he got there, what would he do? What would even be the point?
You could see them. It is not a thought that comes from him but from the voice in his head that is always and forever getting him into trouble (and by now he should really know better than to listen). They are oblivious, they don’t know what they’re missing; but you! You are living on blurry surveillance pictures and quickly fading memories.
Sherlock huffs and curls on his side, pulling a cushion over his head - as if that could block out his own mind.
Sherlock Holmes, the boy who decided not to care anymore - but now you do care, and what’s it gotten you so far? You deserve to at least be able to see them.
“Honestly, Sherlock, you’re not five years old. Come out and have an adult conversation with me.”
“Piss off, Irene.”
Sherlock Holmes, all alone, letting his big brother tell him what to do.
“I am not,” Sherlock mutters, but he and the voice both know its not true.
“Are you talking to yourself again? Honestly, you’re most of the way to forty but any one would think you’re all of five years old, the way you carry on.” Irene huffs her annoyance; turns, instead, to the bathroom, and announces that she is going to take a bath and if he would like to rethink his vow of monogamy he is welcome to join her, otherwise he ought to stay out.
Sherlock ignores her.
What good would come of seeing them, anyways? Sherlock refuses to become one of those horrid, soppy types you always see on those awful TV shows, clutching at pictures of loved ones and sobbing their eyes out. Despicable creatures. It is all revoltingly sentimental. He will not stoop to such mawkish displays of human weakness.
He categorically refuses to become pusillanimous. (Beautiful word, that. Pusillanimous. Showing a lack of courage or determination. Pusillanimous. He rolls it around on his tongue indulgently, allowing his mind to drift, momentarily, to a vague worship of the English language - always coupled with a hint of despair at how others insist upon butchering it so - before shaking himself out of it. Pusillanimous. That which he will not become.)
It is ridiculous, to be so hung up on the idea of simply sharing the same space as John. He has thought so for months upon months, has tried to stop himself from becoming so banally saccharine, and yet he cannot shake the feeling that sharing oxygen molecules with John Watson again, after all this time, might actually be so wonderful as to cause him to pass out from the pure bliss of it.
But then - he has always been helpless when it comes to John Watson. John’s name is written in indelible ink across every molecule of his being (even though before they met Sherlock had been so utterly determined to keep everyone out). He has never even met his children properly but they occupy his every waking thought (that isn’t already occupied by the very frantic need to catch Sebastian Moran.)
He doesn’t think much about John, doesn’t need to, seeing as how he breathes him in and out with every breath and sees his name written thousands of time across his skin, but he thinks about the twins. He has never met them, and yet somehow he knows they are perfect.
They are six months old now. By now, they will be ... he frowns, trying to remember. (Once, for a case, it became prudent for him to know everything there was to know about projected infant development timelines; he’d deleted it, though, never thinking the information would ever be relevant.) Sherlock tosses the pillow off his face and pulls out his phone.
At six months, babies are expected to be able to roll themselves over; to seek attention from others besides his parents; to be able to play games; to feed themselves small bits of food. They may even be able to support some weight on their legs. Sherlock is advised, as a new parent, to read aloud to his baby, to encourage them to express themselves, to play them music and present them with a variety of stimulating objects to touch and feel.
Frustrated, Sherlock lets the phone drop to the floor. There are so many milestones to miss, and though John will be taking pictures and making notes, like most other doting parents, he will almost definitely not have been documenting their progress adequately. (How much do they weigh? Do they interact with each other? When, exactly, do their eyes begin to lose the newborn blue and how does it progress? How many hairs per square inch, precisely, did Anna have when she was born and how does that compare to how many she has now?)
It irks him more than it should that he does not even know what they smell like, much less how their skin feels beneath his fingers.
And John - how has all of this changed John? For all that John is the nearest thing to an immovable force that any one human can be, he is not built of stone (and even stones can be moved, if enough pressure is applied). Sherlock can see that he is exhausted in the photos but less so in the later pictures (the twins will be sleeping through the night by now, Sherlock’s phone supplies) and he looks almost happy in some of them. There are more grey hairs in among his tawny ones, though. Sherlock wants to count them. (Maybe not all of them. Would a rough estimation do? Four random sections of his head; extrapolate the data to cover the remainder of the scalp?) There are more lines around his eyes and they are deeper, more heavy set. (Sherlock put those there. He wants to kiss them away.) John has already changed so much since Sherlock left (has become, despite himself, a father), and it vexes Sherlock that he was not there to catalogue the process of this change.
He does not have to be caught. It does not necessarily follow that sneaking into Eastwell will lead to him being caught. He could see, for himself, the tiny fascinating curve of Anna’s thumbnail and the plump roundness of Hamish’s cheeks. If he is very quiet, quiet as a ghost (you’re dead, Sherlock Holmes, you’re a dead man walking), he could sneak into John’s bedroom and feel his warm breath against his skin.
A year and a half is such a long time to be on the run and he is so very, very tired.
Surely he deserves this. He has worked so very hard to keep them safe. No one will even know he was ever there. He needs this, this little gift, some incentive to live on. They are only twenty miles away. He can be back before Irene even thinks about getting out of the tub (lazy woman. There is a television in there and she is one of those odious people who sit in bathtubs until their skin turns to prunes.)
He will not be caught.
(He really had meant it earlier, when he said he wasn’t going anywhere.)
(He ought to know better, by now, than to trust himself around temptation.)
(Once an addict, always an addict, and there has never been anything quite so addictive as the knowledge that John holds his soul and he holds (held) John’s and that together (without conscious input on his part but very much with his own physical contributions) they made two tiny, fragile lives which are now theirs (John’s, but soon, hopefully, his as well) to love and hold and protect.)
Sherlock ducks out of the B&B and hails the first cab he sees, fingers flying over his phone. He sends two texts: one to Irene (Back later, not abducted. SH) and one to his mother (In the area. Need harpoon. Don’t tell M. SH).
The cab drops him off at the edge of the estate and Sherlock (a dead man walking) picks his way across it across it with the practiced ease of someone with a very good memory who grew up in a place. A window at the back of the house has been left unlocked (Mummy). He has it open and is darting inside within minutes. It takes him all of three minutes to locate the twins. (He picks up his harpoon from the study along the way. Plausible deniability.)
It could not have been easier if he had been a ghost.
The twins have been moved to this room, caddy-corner from John’s rooms, only recently. It is the room he and Mycroft knew as the nursery.
There will be a baby monitor. He must not wake them. He must be as silent as the grave.
(You’re dead to them, Sherlock Holmes, you’re a dead man walking.)
(This is madness.)
(His heart hasn’t beat this fast since John let him kiss him that first time. Nothing he ever injected into his veins or snorted through his nose or dissolved on his tongue had ever made him feel like this.)
They are perfect. He can hear the tiny sounds they make when they breathe. He has never heard anything quite so beautiful. It is all he can do not to burst out laughing with the simple joy of it. They are fast asleep, next to each other but carefully separated so they do not hurt each other. Anna has her tiny fingers curled around her thumbs; Hamish has one fist in his mouth.
They are in deep, non-REM sleep. (Eyeballs still behind delicate lids.) He decides to risk it (has to know, has to catalogue it, the feeling of their skin under his fingers). Leaning over their crib (he remembers seeing it many times as a child, and then laterm stuffed in the attic somewhere), he reaches out a hand to stroke a shaking finger down Anna’s fist.
There is a sudden creak of floor boards behind him and a light flicks on. He freezes.
Shit, shit, shit.
Terrible idea, this was a terrible idea. He is the biggest idiot on the planet. Why, why, does he never listen to his own better judgement?
Shit, shit, shit.
John’s voice behind him is sleep thickened and syrupy but it is low and forceful and threatening. (A shiver runs down Sherlock’s spine.)
“Touch even a single hair on their heads and you’re a dead man.”
You’re dead, Sherlock Holmes, you’re a dead man walking.
There is no way out of this. There is no way he can get out of here without John seeing his face (unless he were to hit John over the head with his harpoon... maybe... but no, he can’t, he could never).
Stupid, stupid, stupid. He should have known there’d be motion sensors. He should have thought. He shouldn’t have trusted his mother to understand why he was really coming and pave the way for him. Stupid, stupid, stupid.
There’s nothing for it. He has no choice, now. He can either let John shoot him believing he’s a stranger, or turn around and let John shoot him anyway, knowing who he is and what he did.
Let no man say that Sherlock Holmes was ever pusillanimous. (Pusillanimous (adj): showing a lack of courage or determination. No, better. Pusillanimity (n): the correct and sane response to finding yourself trapped between Captain John Watson (formerly of the RAMC, Army Doctor, father and most definitely armed) and his children in the middle of the night; see also, cowardice (n).)
Sherlock’s life may possibly be forfeit, but he is no coward. Except, it seems, in the face of John Hamish Watson.
You’re dead, Sherlock Holmes, you’re a dead man walking.
But not for much longer. He takes a deep breath, steels himself, screws his courage to the sticking point (which is, he learns, somewhere in his gut), and - with his hands slowly raised in the air - turns around.