Fic: Contingency Planning (Sherlock)
Title: Contingency Planning
Author:
aubkae
Rating: PG-13
Wordcount: 1500
Characters/Pairing: Sherlock & John, Sherlock/John
Disclaimer: ACD's & BBC's
Warnings: Post-S2. Brief mentions of suicide & violence.
After everything is over, there's this: seventeen steps, and a door. He's planned this, endlessly, examined every contingency. In his head the first part always goes right. It's just walking up some stairs.
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Sherlock has thought about this moment, the stairs and the door. He's planned it meticulously, examined possibilities and calculated probabilities, revising based on new information and new connections between existing data points.
It has been... difficult.
Seventeen steps, and a door. Ordinary. People go up stairs and open doors every day. It's nothing, nothing, unremarkable, boring.
And yet.
A week ago, Sherlock killed the last of the snipers. It was a lucky shot, it was his first real murder, and he threw up afterwards. Most people would be surprised by this, he knows. He thinks that John would understand.
An hour ago, Sherlock sat on a certain bench in a park. A homeless woman came up to him and told him that Mrs Hudson had gone to her sister's and John was definitely home, and he'd meant to plan it better but he'd ended up in a cab somehow with an address on his tongue like it belonged there, still.
Right now, Sherlock is standing in a hallway choking on his pounding heart and about to return from the dead. He has been doing so for 9 minutes and 12 seconds.
He told himself that when (if) he made it back here, he'd memorize every detail. Every new chip in the paint, every creak in the floorboards, the mud from John's shoes on the hall mat, all of it, all of the traces left behind as life went on without him. He's never had a home before, never missed a place (a person) enough to even notice; now it's this terrible gutting desperate fervour, emotional violence. Expected and unexpected all at once.
He'll savour the moment, then. As he should. And after he's through, he'll just walk up the stairs.
Sherlock stands unmoving, staring at the steps and observing nothing at all.
17 steps.
John opens the door. "I always believed," he says. "I know you."
Sherlock remembers everything about John, the flecks of colour in his eyes, the rise and fall of his voice, the efficiency of his movements, the clean-tea-cotton-gun oil-home-safe scent of his skin, but facts are nothing compared to this.
17 steps.
John opens the door. Sherlock says "John," and he apologizes, and he explains, and nothing comes out right; it's all run-on sentences and blocky paragraphs of text that don't make sense and don't excuse anything, as if he's been storing up words for John all this time and saying John's name has released them all in a flood, which makes sense, really, John has that effect on him.
"I don't deserve you," he says when John grabs his shoulders and tells him to stop hyperventilating before he passes out.
"Fucking right you don’t," John says, fingers on Sherlock's frantic pulse. "But you have me. You idiot. You have me."
17 steps.
John opens the door. Sherlock says something incredibly flippant and callous, and then runs out of words entirely in the face of John's shock and hurt. John lets him into the flat, but the distance between them stretches a little wider and cuts a little deeper. He wonders if this is it, the last cut, the one that bleeds them out.
17 steps.
John opens the door. He punches Sherlock in the face, knocking him back into the wall. As his nose gushes blood onto his coat, Sherlock hears somebody loves you echo in his head. He corrects the tense of the verb, because he might not be good but at least he can be accurate.
"Get out," John says. His voice is empty and cold, and that's it, then, it's over, all of it, everything.
17 steps.
John opens the door. He walks straight through Sherlock and down the stairs, because Sherlock is a dead thing and dead things don't come back.
17 steps.
Sherlock opens the door. John is on the couch, blood and brain matter sprayed up all over Mrs Hudson's wallpaper. It's an easy decision, finally, after all this time. He'll go anywhere to be with John, anywhere at all.
17 steps.
John opens the door. The blood drains from his face, and he falls to his knees. Sherlock kneels too, grabs at John's shoulders, unable to bear the distance.
"Please," Sherlock says, his face against John's throat and John's fingers in his hair. "Please. I think I love you."
17 steps.
John opens the door. He pulls Sherlock inside by his coat, kisses him against the wall, breaks him into pieces with his hands, gives himself over to Sherlock in turn. They end up clinging to each other on the sofa, needy and pathetic and so perfect, and Sherlock thinks that maybe he'd like to have this always, from now on, forever.
17 steps.
John opens the door. Sherlock panics and runs away.
17 steps.
Mycroft opens the door. "You're too late," he says. "She's sweet, and normal, and so very dull. But she does love him." He spins his umbrella as Sherlock leans against the wall. "That's something, isn't it?"
"You keep that bakery in business single-handedly," Sherlock says, and he turns his face so that he doesn't see the pity in Mycroft's eyes.
17 steps.
Sherlock opens the door. The flat is empty. He's been fed false information, and John isn't here, John could be anywhere, John was supposed to be safe, that's the whole point, Sherlock has missed something, missed everything that matters, and where is John.
17 steps.
Jim Moriarty opens the door. "You've got it all wrong, my dear. Thought you were the only one with a hidden card up your sleeve, did you? Playing fair is so boring, and I'm so very, very disappointed."
Behind him, John waves.
- No. No, no, no, abort, delete!
It's entirely possible that John will hate him or leave him or never want to see him again (likelier than many of the other scenarios, he has to admit). But not that. Sherlock doubts everything, yes, but if there's anything certain in the world it's John Watson's loyalty.
Sherlock digs his nails into his palms, takes a deep breath, and forces himself to focus. He wishes, suddenly and violently, for cocaine. No.
There are details written all over the front hallway, traces of John and Mrs Hudson and everyone who has visited recently. Mycroft, Lestrade, Harry, a woman wearing cloying rose perfume and shoes that pained her feet, a man with a small boy and a heavy short-legged dog, a group of teenage girls - who are all these people? No way to know. He's been gone too long.
His hands are starting to hurt. His breathing is ragged and too loud. His feet feel weighted to the floor. He can't see anything in the data. He doesn't know what will happen.
17 steps. And a door.
Only 17 steps, but somehow they're insurmountable, worse than stepping off a building and out of his own life.
The staircase isn't the problem, after all.
It's all bad, the guilt and the fear and the hurting-because-John-hurts. He's terrible at dealing with all of it. The worst is the hope, that delicate and impossibly stubborn thing curled up in his chest, made of light and razors in equal parts.
Sherlock swallows with some difficulty. He watches his own hand touch the railing, his own shoe lift up. It's uncharacteristically dirty and scuffed, but it's been so long since he's been in London that he couldn't quite bear to wash her off his feet.
He's leaning heavily on the railing with one foot hovering when he hears it.
Above him - creaking sound followed by a scrape. Sherlock's lungs stop working but his brain kicks into gear: it's the sound of John getting up from the desk. He can see it in his head as if he's watching surveillance footage. There are footsteps, John without shoes, limping slightly (oh god). Several small shuffling sounds, the swish of fabric. It's... the sound of John putting on his shoes and coat.
John is going out. John is going to come out of the door and down the stairs. John is just metres away, nothing between them but seventeen steps and a door, and Sherlock is still standing here.
He's moving then, adrenaline propelling him up the steps two at a time. Eight leaps, familiar-unfamiliar creaking under his feet. He misses the last step, the seventeenth step, falls forwards, pinwheeling his arms and catching himself with his hand on the doorframe.
Sherlock has planned this, endlessly, extensively. It seems strangely fitting that when the moment finally arrives, he careens into it unprepared. He thought that he was prepared for all contingencies when he let loose rapid-fire deductions at a sad-faced army doctor in a lab at Bart's a lifetime ago, didn't he, and look how that turned out.
John opens the door.