Holy Wine - Silvergirl - Sherlock (TV) [Archive of Our Own] (2024)

Chapter 1: The Case of John Watson

Chapter Text

“Constantly in the darkness, where’s that at?”

Joni Mitchell, “A Case of You”

November–December 2013

Upon reflection, Sherlock realises that he could have handled that better. Upon mature reflection, he can admit that jumping out of a virtual cake at the Landmark in a fake tuxedo and a fake moustache had not been a good idea.

Deep down, he still thinks it could have been a good idea; but John’s reaction, which is all that counts, suggests otherwise. Throwing him to the floor, his back still on fire with pain; attacking him again every time he said something that was apparently insensitive; breaking his nose and splitting his lip—everything pointed to Mycroft having been entirely correct: Sherlock was not welcome.

All in all, it was a reception to be expected more from his recent torturer than from his—well. From John.

Very confusing, honestly. The mysterious almost-fiancée had been strangely receptive, asking good questions, even promising she’d calm John down. Or was it bring him round? Sherlock isn’t sure he wants this Mary bringing John round to Baker Street. Baker Street is his and John’s, and no third is needed. Quite the contrary, in fact. But at present she appears to be the only conduit between them.

Texts to John have gone unanswered. Confronting him feels counter-productive; until John wants to see him, there’s no point to forcing an encounter. But the days have dragged by, two weeks, and Sherlock’s still waiting.

Meanwhile there’s all this resurrection business to slog through. His brother is in Mycroftian mode number three: uncooperative and snippy (number one being controlling and high-handed, and number two manipulative and sneaky). This means Sherlock actually has to do his own legwork to de-activate his dead status, re-activate his accounts and his existence. All the legal, financial, practical, and bureaucratic rubbish that he’s spent a lifetime trying to unload onto someone else. Beyond tedious.

Of course, there’s a case: if there hadn’t been, Mycroft would hardly have gone in person to rescue him from that hellhole in Serbia. It’s disorienting to find himself back in 221B with an incident wall, a weeping landlady, a tattered web of London informants (most of whom think him a ghost), an imminent terrorist threat, and no John to help him think.

Only after the threat is neutralised—more slowly than it should have been, without John to refract and channel light—does he decide to ring. He hates talking on the phone. Too much scope for misunderstanding. Still, he has to try.

As it turns out there’s no scope for misunderstanding, because his number’s been blocked. He hadn’t seen that coming. John’s angry, he gets it, Mrs Hudson is becoming boring on the subject of his cruelty and cluelessness in leaving John to mourn for so long. He’s been giving John space to get over his fury; but what John appears to be getting over, is Sherlock.

In person it is, then.

But when Sherlock turns up at the flat John shares with Mary, it’s empty. There’s even a to let sign in the window, who does that anymore? (Who’d want to live in this featureless district south of the river, anyway?) He stands and stares in at what he can discern of the angles and shadows of the vacant space. If being unfurnished makes this cramped hole look larger than it is, John and his fiancée must have been living on top of each other. (Horrible thought.)

Back at the flat he takes down the incident wall. He’d kept it up to show John, show how brilliantly he’d solved the puzzle and prevented wholesale slaughter and national catastrophe. But John isn’t going to see it.

Regroup. Time to interview witnesses. Witnesses to John’s life, to his frame of mind. Scene of the crime.

First, Mrs Hudson. He’s spoken with her, or rather, she’s spoken to him, ad infinitum. Now he needs to listen to her unmuted.

“He couldn’t stay here. He was killing himself, Sherlock. I’ve never seen anyone fall into a blacker depression. He was paralysed. And the drinking.”

John? His face must betray his astonishment, because she draws an audible breath and all but rolls her eyes.

“He didn’t leave the flat for three months, except for therapy appointments. And after he left, he stayed away for two years. Over two years, Sherlock. Never a call, never a visit, not even an email. It’s as though I lost both of you.”

The tears in her eyes shame him. Why hadn’t he trusted her? Trusted John? His own parents had known; but for all his protectiveness, he’d never imagined Mrs H might be devastated by his death, all the more for thinking it a suicide.

“When he did come back, just recently, I was—well, I was very cross with him. He apologised, of course, said he was moving on, getting engaged, ‘if she said yes.’ I said—‘a woman ?’ and he gave me his tired old ‘I am not gay ’ lecture. As if that mattered.”

Oh, it mattered, Mrs H. It mattered.

“So you see, dear, what you did, well, it may have been to save our lives, but it… destroyed him. I was glad to see him alive and sober, though that moustache, now, that was a horror, but I can tell you it was a very near thing.”

Sherlock couldn’t agree more. The moustache wasn’t just a cosmetic failure, it was a distress signal. A sign that John had given up, moved into his late middle age. In retrospect, he sees how tone-deaf he’d been to mock it. But it wasn’t because he was cold-hearted. It was because he was terrified for what that abomination meant for John.

“I’d have gladly killed you myself, dear. Even though I thought you were dead.”

A conversation-stopper if ever there was one.

Molly, now. Molly was a more tricky witness to question; she knew what John was to him, always had known. “You look sad when you think he can’t see you”: he’d thought of that any number of times since she said it. But it was delicate to bring up John when John was the one he was sad about, while Molly’d been sad about him.

Still, he managed to ease information out of her, often in her pauses and ellipses.

Apparently John had withdrawn from everyone. No one had seen him, he hadn’t answered calls or texts. He’d just—faded away.

Molly, her conscience seared by guilty knowledge, said she hadn’t had the courage to go see him: either she’d have hated herself for not telling John, or Sherlock would’ve hated her for telling him.

“I kept your secret. It nearly killed John. I’ll never forgive myself.” A pause, and then, “Not sure I’ll ever forgive you, either.”

Sherlock’s lone heroics had come at a cost to more than himself.

Greg Lestrade: the man he owed so much to, owed everything to, really. The man who’d trusted him enough to bend and then break all the rules to give Sherlock access to cases, to give Sherlock an identity, the identity he’d presented to John when they met.

And Lestrade had been kind and even embarrassingly glad to see him alive, although Sherlock had essentially used him to climb out of addiction, aimlessness, and boredom verging on nervous breakdown.

When they meet to talk about John, though, in early December, Lestrade is neither glad nor kind. He isn’t surprised to hear that John and his fiancée have vanished, only somewhat taken aback that Sherlock hasn’t tracked them down. Essentially he confirms what Mrs H said. He doesn’t pull any punches, either, saying that Sherlock had “destroyed the village in order to save it.”

“I’m glad to be alive myself, of course. But John wasn’t alive after what happened. I thought he’d die in your flat, before he left.”

Stung, Sherlock thinks, I’m the one with the bruises and scars and broken bones. His resentment must be visible, because Lestrade speaks sharply.

“You don’t know what he was like. What you did to him. What you did to me was nothing in comparison. And what you did to me was unforgivable.” After a pause, though, he smiles. “Though I’ve forgiven you.”

Sherlock’s chastened. He’s starting to feel he hasn’t earned that forgiveness, or anyone’s, yet. “You’re right, I don’t know what he was like. Beyond what Mrs Hudson and Molly have told me.”

Lestrade nods, sombrely. “The drinking. I thought it would end his life.”

It doesn’t bear thinking of. With shame Sherlock hears his own flippant riposte to Mycroft, the night he’d come back: “What life? I’ve been away.”

None of these conversations were edifying, and none were hopeful. That John would drink himself nearly to death had been literally the last thing he’d imagined, after Barts. But although each of his sources saw John slightly differently, what they all agreed on was the drinking. But John wasn’t drinking when they met. Or was he the one whose drunken fumblings had scratched up his phone?

Sherlock flings himself on the dusty sofa to think about it:

No. For one thing, he hadn’t the means to sustain an alcohol addiction.

Maybe, once he knew about the deductions, he was careful to cover his tracks.

I wasn’t using when we met, and I was careful to cover my tracks.

We were performing … for each other .

He joined my circle, I pulled him out of his. That’s why he knows the people I know, but I know no one he knows.

With one exception. Mike Stamford knew John a decade—more—before introducing them. He must know whether John had been drinking back then. Sherlock rings, and hustles Stamford past his pleasantries to the reason for his call.

“Well, back during medical training, he drank socially. After exams and such. To unwind. But Sherlock, it was a lot. He was …known for it.”

If John had been a heavy drinker before Sherlock left (jumped) (died)—perhaps it wasn’t situational. Perhaps it wasn’t Sherlock’s fault.

The army must have controlled that, or channelled it. Because John’s military record was unblemished. He’d read it.

Records. There’s a thought.

Investigating The Case of John Watson would mean acquiring records on his current employers, employment, banking. Medical and therapy records. Computer hacking—he’d done it before, often. Activating Mycroft, who is still singularly unwilling to be activated. (After Sherlock’s dazzling success with the Underground terror plot, too. Ingrate.)

But he finds that he can’t. John isn’t that kind of case. John is what he did it all for, and all he’d done was to savage John, heart and mind and body, and leave him a smoking ruin. To hear most of the witnesses, Sherlock has done damage that might be irreparable. Not just to their friendship, but to John.

It’s just—uncontrolled drinking doesn’t square with the John he lived with. John, so sturdy, self-disciplined. So hard on Sherlock about just cigarettes, for God’s sake. Hardly ever had he seen John much beyond tipsy, feeling no pain. And that only after a night out with nameless army mates. People he’d never bothered to get to know.

He needs to know about John’s past life, before he and Sherlock had collided and melded.

How can he find out how far back this goes?

He has one witness left he can try, without shading into internet stalking of the man he’d died for and come back to life for.

It doesn’t take him long, despite having only a relatively common name and no idea whatever of profession, employment, residence, or schedule. Within a few hours he’s standing outside a bland pebble-dash row house in Upminster, ringing and then knocking loudly to be heard over the music blaring inside.

The music stops, and the door jerks open. From behind it a voice—the timbre so familiar his breath catches—snaps, “Who are you?”

Chapter 2: Meet the Watsons

Chapter Text

“I met a woman

She had a mouth like yours

She knew your life

She knew your devils and your deeds”

Joni Mitchell, “A Case of You”

December 2013

“Harriet Watson?”

Sherlock had never imagined that the sibling he’d deduced (wrongly) the night of their first case could look so very like John. Compact, muscled, contained. Looking suspicious, sounding curt.

Again she demands, “Who are you?” Sherlock is certain she knows very well who he is, but isn’t going to give him the satisfaction of admitting it.

“Sherlock Holmes.”

“What do you want?” Beyond terse: brusque.

What would work on John? “May I come in? I won’t take much of your time. It’s freezing out here.”

“In December? Weird,” she says drily, but opens the street door. “If you’re looking for John he’s not here, so you can bugger off.”

Between the two of them, John had got all the social skills.

“I was looking for you.” Sherlock can be curt too. Saves time.

She isn’t gesturing him in, but Sherlock knows how to insinuate himself where he isn’t wanted, and soon they’re sitting at her kitchen table.

Her stare is hostile, he keeps his neutral, as they study each other.

“What.” Forestall a challenge with a challenge.

“I just never met a resuscitated suicide before. Let alone one who lived with my brother.”

“I had reasons.”

“Reasons you couldn’t tell him.” Her mouth turns down, sour.

“If I could tell you, you’d actually approve. If you care about his life.”

“If I ca —you listen: bar one dotty aunt, Johnny’s my only family. I care.”

“But you never saw each other.” Sherlock keeps his voice level. John had seen Mycroft dozens of times, but his own sister, never.

“‘Never’? You knew him for what, a year? Year and a half? He and I drift in and out of each other’s orbit on a longer timeline than that.”

“Why in and out?”

“We had a pretty traumatic upbringing. We’re trying to get past it. In different ways. On different cycles.”

Sherlock gets right to the point. “Alcohol?” It’d been the first thing he’d known about Harry, after all. Though she’s patently dry now.

“Yeah. Among other things. Adrenaline, for him. He always wanted to beat the odds.”

“Beat the odds?”

“Our family home was all about beating. If you know what I mean.” She looks away, then up at the ceiling light, flickering in a bleak greyish-yellow.

Sherlock thinks about John and Harry, children who knew too much about beating, and odds. He and Mycroft had been lucky: fond if exasperating parents; no financial stressors the children would share. He feels another wash of shame.

“How often do you find yourselves … in contact again?”

Long pause. She seems to think it over. “Well. It all has to coincide, him being sober, me being sober, him being settled, me being settled. And it never seems to. We get together every couple of years, but really in touch—it’s been a long time.”

She looks sad. Resigned? But adds, “But I know he’s there for me. Wherever he is. If I need him he’ll come. He knows I will, too.”

“Did he call you when I—when he thought I had died?” Sherlock knows, now, how much John would have needed her, needed someone.

“No. And before you ask, he didn’t answer me, either. I knew what that meant.”

Her hostile expression is back, so when he asks it’s very tentative. “What did it mean?”

“That’s for Johnny to tell you.”

“But he won’t. He’s—left London. Gone.” Now he’s not in control of his voice.

“Without a trace?” Her expression shows a flicker of worry.

“No. His mobile number’s the same. And I know where he is. I just—haven’t gone there yet.” He lies in case Harry has a new address for John, one she can be induced to give to him.

Nothing doing. She laughs, shortly. “Don’t. If you came here to ask me anything, the answer is, don’t. You’ll only make things worse. I know him. I know what he’s done in his life, what he punishes himself for not doing. I don’t have to have seen him lately to say: leave him alone.”

Sherlock slumps on his exhale. “There really isn’t anything I can do?”

“Respect his choices. His privacy. His needs. For a f*cking change.”

That’s disconcerting. How does she know—

“What’s John told you about me?” He hates that his voice is uncertain.

“I thought we were talking about my brother, not you. For the last time, let him be. He’ll surface when he’s ready. Hunt him down, and it’s going to end badly. He has to be ready. Leave him that choice, for f*ck’s sake.”

Sherlock knows he’s being dismissed. With prejudice. After another couple of sharp-edged exchanges, he stands to go. She never once smiled, never offered him tea; he never took off his coat.

“If he needed you, though, you’d go to him.” God, he’s repeating information she’d already given.

“Yes.” No dramatics, no elaboration. “Don’t wait on him. He may be back and he may not. Just reclaim your life.”

“What life?” That he says this aloud startles him. Since when is he candid? Is it her resemblance to John that unlocks his neediness?

But John’s sister is impatient with self-pity: “Then make one. Give him something to come back to, if he—if he chooses.”

He turns to leave, then turns back. “May I have your mobile number? Just in case.”

She hesitates, then huffs and holds out her hand for his phone. “Don’t use it, unless. You know.”

She stabs in her initials and her number, hands it back. She may as well have said, “Now go.” So he does.

Later he wonders why he didn’t ask exactly when she last saw John. Rookie error. But from what she said and what she didn’t say, he thinks it was while he was dead, or before. And she never mentioned the fiancée, but then, neither did he.

Sherlock hasn’t been Sherlock for so long, yet he thought he could take up that identity quickly, smoothly. Shave and a haircut, reunion with the Belstaff, the violin, the flat.

Instead, none of it feels authentic.

It isn’t like a death, he reminds himself. John isn’t dead. He didn’t force Sherlock to mourn him.

But he did leave without a word. As Sherlock had.

Who suffered more, during that endless absence? Does it matter?

So John’s new flat is empty, and he’s left his previous surgery. Sherlock hasn’t asked Mycroft about him or his fiancée. Mycroft either knows where he is, or could find out if he cared to. But Sherlock doesn’t want John stalked by the British Government just for having once known a man who can’t forget him.

And he doesn’t know why, exactly, but he’s following Harry’s advice.

She’d said: “At some point we’ll converge again, we always do. For now, we each have to go our own way. Make our own way. If you know Johnny, you know he won’t be driven.”

But does he know John that well, after all? Maybe he should say he knew him a couple of years ago, for a few months. Maybe what he’s been thinking and feeling has been an illusion, a sentimental illusion. What Harry had said about their childhood—it certainly shed a different light on John’s rage, his violence. Most of all, on his flight. He had to get away from what had made him lash out like his—father? Sherlock imagines the shame. The self-hatred.

In fact, he’s beginning to be able to imagine them very clearly.

When it’s clear John’s gone for the long term, Sherlock starts composing letters to him, in his mind. Sometimes conversations: John doesn’t answer, but Sherlock provides plausible responses. And every day, he scores the words into memory. He doesn’t want to forget any part of this hateful transition to a new world without John.

Memories. Wishes. Daydreams. He feeds on them. His happy moments are in dreams, at least some dreams. He revels in them, then grasps at their tattered edges as they dissipate. If only he had the power to dream them at will; instead, he has to wait for them. It was like this while he was away, but he knew—he was certain—that would end when he could finally come home.

This has no ending. This is an open-ended nothingness. Outer space, cold and silent, only debris and detritus drifting by in disintegrating fragments.

He imagines his brother’s sneer at such melodrama. Sherlock would have sneered too, at anyone else. There’s work to do, the Work to resume, but the lustre is gone. Puzzles to solve, injustices to redress, people to help, and he can’t bring himself to care.

It’s intolerable. Between the bureaucracy and the boredom, the longing and the—admit it—loneliness, the homesickness (in his own home) and the powerlessness and the heartache, Sherlock is ready to look up some old contacts and score. He needs anaesthetic, he needs numbness.

Why not cocaine, after all? It’s always worked well enough before. It wouldn’t bother John, who’d neither know nor care. It would irritate Mycroft, always an added bonus. And it would muffle this agony.

It’s humiliating, somehow. To get high to avoid tedium-induced madness was acceptable. To escape heartbreak? Ridiculous.

He tells John about it, in his mind. The answering silence is unacceptable, so he fills it with John’s replies.

John. Where are you? Why did you leave?

You know why. I can’t be around you. You’re toxic to me.

If I thought someone was dead, and they came back, I don’t think I’d hit them. Not if I cared for them. Not if I’d mourned them. I’d be overjoyed. You weren’t. You were angry I’m alive.

Not angry you’re alive. You don’t get to be manipulative. I told you exactly why I was angry. You made me live through that f*cking nightmare, and live with it, hurting, for over two years. I don’t think I’d do that to “someone I cared for,” as you put it.

I’m hurting now. And I can’t stand it. I want to get high. I need it, John.

Yeah, sure you do. So you can die for real this time. Just don’t expect me to come to your funeral, you massive dick. One’s your limit.

You’re cruel.

Pot, kettle. Why don’t you try my system? Worked for me.

Sherlock can’t do cocaine, not in this frame of mind. And as for John’s system, alcohol’s never been his anaesthetic of choice. Too unaesthetic, both during and after. Especially after.

Sex, though. That was a thought. It worked for John, back in the day. He was on the prowl nonstop, with that lethal blend of sex appeal and soft-smiling charm. Sherlock swore he could smell it. And John didn’t drink while they lived together, not drink drink. Maybe the danger and the sex were enough.

Sherlock could try it. God knows he was always snubbing expressions of interest from both sexes, all genders. His appearance was a tool he deployed when needed to dominate his environment; apparently it was attractive, to certain kinds of people. It shouldn’t be hard to pull.

What would be hard: wanting to.

January–May 2014

In fact, though, once he started, both were effortless. At least, after a couple of awkward, embarrassing times. Sherlock got better at it: at the randomness of it. At calculating the other’s tastes. It was just observation and deduction, after all.

He was careful, he didn’t try with anyone who was indifferent or even ambivalent. And he was selective; he didn’t encourage anyone he didn’t warm to on at least some level. And no commitments. It wasn’t transactional, but it was … for a purpose.

It worked, most of the time. He’d come home to find home gone, identity and profession gone. The only constants were the empty flat, his tender landlady, his maddening brother—well, if it hadn’t been for the sporadic pursuit of org*sms with strangers, he’d have had a needle in his arm at the end of a week.

What he hadn’t seen coming was how quickly he would latch on to those sensations, how absorbing they would become. And the sensations were intoxicating, no matter who stimulated them.

There were a few repeat meetings, but they were the exception, and nothing long-term. He could count on one hand the number of people he’d seen more than twice.

Colin from Liverpool. God, dull. But what he lacked in conversation he made up for in pheromones, technique, and sheer stamina. Sherlock found ways to shut him up without having to tell him to. He looked like a young Brad Pitt, and he smelled like cocaine would smell if it were a human. Compatibility: 60%.

André from Burkina Faso. Lean, limber, classical dancer with an eating disorder. Sherlock finally understood what it felt like to want someone to eat for their own good. (Also because bony protuberances were unexpectedly painful.) The sex: brilliant. Compatibility: 72%.

Estle. Delectable body, compelling eyes, discreetly seductive gestures. He saw them every night the week they were in London, but he had no plans to go to Taiwan. Compatibility: 78%.

Martina. (Not her real name.) Considering he bats for the other team, she scored surprisingly high. No English, and he pretended not to know her language. She was discreet enough not to object when he would leave shortly after they finished. Compatibility: 50%, but no fault of hers, really. She was just practice, and confirmation that ultimately he wasn’t flexible.

Even these he saw no more than a few times. No one in his circle, for God’s sake. Things were complicated enough after his resurrection. One-offs were the norm.

Cases and hookups; hookups and cases, one after another. He lost track. Variety kept things fresh and surprising; the interactions were the price he had to pay for the chemicals.

It would all be a turn-up for the books, if John knew. So Sherlock tells him. In his head.

John. You’ll be surprised to hear what I’ve been up to. Maybe even aghast. I don’t have to say it, do I. Even you can tell how I’ve been spending my time.

Yes, you’re looking very … satisfied. Like the cat who’s drunk the cream. Grindr, I assume?

You assume wrong. That’s too much like shopping. You know I hate shopping. And on a website I can’t tell what people smell like.

Yeah, fair point.

In his mind John tunes out, as if bored. Sherlock keeps on, though.

Mycroft hounds me for indulging in illegal drugs, but these chemicals, while legal, are far more addictive. They create instant dependency. After every org*sm I cannot wait to feel that way again.

It isn’t just arousal and release and the languor after. It’s the—touching. I’m shocked to find myself craving it.

Even if I know—and I do know—this is an inferior product, cheaper because it’s been cut with indifference and novelty. Martina said there’s no comparison between sex with a stranger and sex with a lover, “someone who cares about you, someone you care about.” She said the real thing would be exponentially better than the sex we were having. Though of course she thought I didn’t understand her when she said it.

I can’t have the real thing.

I only ever felt connection with you, and you made sure that was never sexual. While I was gone I thought of nothing but coming back to Baker Street and my life with you—our Work, our complicity, our bickering that felt like intimacy.

I made you leave. I grieved and angered you, I humiliated and mocked you, until you had to go. I’ve broken whatever you used to feel for me, so it’s useless to follow you.

Second-best will have to do.

Is sex second-best to cocaine, or vice-versa? More data required.

And still John doesn’t answer. Doesn’t even look at him.

Chapter 3: False Dawn

Chapter Text

“I’m drawn to those ones that ain’t afraid”

Joni Mitchell, "A Case of You"

June 2014

It worked, it did, for months and months.

Sex was indeed addictive, though as with many addictions, the effect began to wane. The chemicals were still powerful, but the exhilarating effect was wearing off. There were too many annoyances and disadvantages to impersonal sex, too many people, too many distractions. He wasn’t inclined to reanimate the novelty of sexual discovery with threesomes, or role play, or elaborate kit or toys, or kinks or fetishes—none of these disgusted him, but none aroused or intrigued him either. One hookup had proposed tying him up, but for reasons he obviously didn’t state, the prospect did not appeal.

Could it be he was just rather … vanilla in his sexual tastes? A lowering thought. But he’d tried variety, and found it was beginning to pall. Worse: it wasn’t working as well to distract him from the alternatives. From cocaine.

It’s a cliché that sex with the same person loses intensity over time, becomes routine; he hadn’t expected for sex with a series of strangers to do the same. What was that Martina had said? It’s better when you care about the partner?

Meeting someone he would actually date hadn’t been in his plans, and it hadn’t come in his usual round of encounters. Lestrade and Donovan had strong-armed him into a Met press conference at the Yard. Tedious, but a necessary part of his public rehabilitation and he was meant to be grateful for it.

Phantom John was telling him to behave, to be composed, to keep his deductions to himself. And for his own benefit he did, but God it was hard.

Virtue is its own reward, at times. Or rather, Sherlock’s reward was the muscled, blond journalist with the American accent and the wicked smile. He asked the only good question of the lot, and ambushed Sherlock afterwards with an invitation for a drink. So he could stretch the presser into an interview, he said, but his expression and body language said differently.

“Why not?” Sherlock had answered, already struck with the man’s slight resemblance to John, and hoping that wasn’t in fact his name.

As they walked away from the shabby, crowded press room, the man took off his press pass, shoving it into a pocket before Sherlock could see what outlet he worked for. He made a mental note to find out. He’d refrained from mixing the streams so far, and if he was right about why he’d been asked out (no ifs about it), he’d handle this encounter carefully if he handled it at all.

Eric Canfield steered them to an ostentatiously “traditional” London pub, complete with decent pub fare (the chips were good); a fine selection of beer, ale, and hard liquor; and a dark-panelled snug that gave them privacy and quiet.

“You’re saying the perp didn’t recognize you? Your face has been all over the media for months!” Canfield looked astonished, and Sherlock, secretly gratified, said, “People don’t usually choose a life of violent crime because of a high IQ. Also, I’m quite good at pretending to be someone else.”

When Canfield looked sceptical, Sherlock rose to the challenge with improvised imitations of the barman, the server, Lestrade, David Tennant, and finally Canfield himself, down to his Hudson Valley accent with an overlay of New England summers (Maine, most likely).

“That’s amazing. So few Brits can do good American accents—yeah, yeah, no Americans do good British accents either. I thought Hugh Laurie was like the only one. How do you figure out what to focus on, what to copy?”

Again, a shrewd question. Sherlock answered it seriously and at length, and observed that Eric’s interest was unfeigned and his responses prompt and witty. He found himself laughing loud and long at Eric’s granular takedown of a mutually despised Tory leader, done with more wit than vitriol, and realised how long it had been since he’d laughed at all.

Another kind of endorphin.

When he realised the time, he was incredulous. The evening had passed easily, enjoyably, leaving the sensation that Eric was definitely interested, and not just in a quick shag. The impression was confirmed when Eric asked for his number, in case Sherlock felt like doing it again. To his own surprise, he did.

The second meeting (maybe a date?) was similar: conversation in a public place, a pub meal, a walk across London in the almost-summer dark. Eric’s arm kept touching his, but nothing clumsy or pushy.

The third meeting (definitely a date) is for dinner at Eric’s own apartment across town at Canary Wharf, and Sherlock makes sure to show up on time, looking his best, and ready for whatever might come.

Whatever might come, comes shortly after dinner (takeaway from a nearby vegan restaurant, and surprisingly good). As Eric stands to clear, Sherlock asks if he can look round the flat. (Always useful for deducing people. Especially the bookshelves.)

He’s staring at a roomful of high-end gym equipment when he feels Eric’s hand on his waist. He’s unsurprised by the touch, though it’s come sooner than he expected; but what he finds magnetic is the unselfconsciousness, the spontaneity, the confidence with which Eric turns him around, pulls them together. Sherlock’s always had a competence kink, been drawn and even aroused by demonstrations of capability and knowledge and experience.

(“Any good?” “Very good.”) Sherlock shivers, chases away the memory.

Eric has those qualities in spades. He’s handsome, too, which never hurts: fastidious and stylish, muscled and graceful. Comfortable in his own skin and very pleased to be looking at Sherlock’s, making short work of the aubergine shirt that conceals a multitude of scars on his back.

“Beautiful,” he murmurs, “you’re so f*cking beautiful, I can’t get enough of looking at you.” Concern shadows his face at the scars he feels, but he doesn’t say anything, doesn’t ask. He just keeps running his hands all over Sherlock’s upper body and then, after looking a query, over his arse, and gives a delighted, almost melodic mmmmmmm.

“Tell me if I’m going too fast. Just because you’re delectable doesn’t mean I get to have my way with you.” He infuses the old-fashioned phrase with obvious irony to take the edge off any embarrassment: again, tactful.

“I’ll bear it in mind.” Sherlock’s voice always sinks half an octave when he’s interested, sexually or otherwise, and Eric responds with a groan and an involuntary thrust of his hips. It occurs to Sherlock to be a little less passive, and he brings Eric in close, dips to rub groin on groin gently, experimentally.

It’s as though he flipped a switch. Both of them are moving faster, more deliberately and firmly. Eric’s shirt is off now too, and Sherlock’s not sure how that happened but he’s very intrigued by the gold hair, the erect nipples. The frankly incredible musculature, worthy of a statue. Eric’s staring too, when he draws back, and Sherlock would feel self-conscious about his nearly hairless chest and far less muscled physique but for the fact that Eric’s gasping with desire.

And now it’s Sherlock gasping, as Eric leans in and drags just the tip of his tongue over Sherlock’s left nipple. How had he not realised that area was so sensitive? At the reaction he’s provoked Eric doubles down, tongues the whole nipple and Sherlock moans with pleasure, thinking wildly that he could come from this alone.

When Eric takes Sherlock’s right hand and draws three fingers into his mouth it’s obviously as much for his own pleasure as for Sherlock’s, and again the feedback loop of arousal intensifies the sensation of having his fingers sucked, of being caressed and craved this way. “I want to lick you all over, God, you’re succulent, I want to taste your dick, suck your balls, finger you—”

And Sherlock’s nonplussed, he wants all this too, but his anonymous encounters had all taken place without a narrative voiceover. Caught between embarrassment and arousal, he laughs, “The mouth on you—!” as Eric unbuckles his belt and opens his trousers.

“Oh no, it’ll be my mouth on you,” and Sherlock’s sleek trousers are falling to the floor, followed quickly by his pants and then Eric’s knees hit the floor as well, as he steadies himself by grasping Sherlock’s hips, and thrusts his face into Sherlock’s crotch.

Sherlock’s hands are in Eric’s hair, careful but demanding as well, and Eric’s slide back to seize his arse as he nuzzles and lips at Sherlock’s erection.

And nothing about this seems forced, or strategic, although for Sherlock sex has always come with an end in view—getting something he needed or wanted, getting a hit real or ersatz. Now it’s sheer desire, urgent and reciprocal and pleasurable. But when Eric takes the head of Sherlock’s co*ck into his mouth as though it were a rare and precious food, too luscious to take in all at once—again it’s almost enough to make him come on the spot.

Sherlock clamps the base of his co*ck and pulls back; at Eric’s worried glance he says, “Let’s not hurry. You’re about to make short work of me.”

Eric’s relief is audible. “You drive, then. We’ll make it lazy and memorable.”

A writer, certainly, Sherlock thinks. ‘Lazy and memorable.’ He pulls Eric up by the elbows and says, “I can’t be the only naked man in the room. In your bed.”

“Oh, you won’t be,” comes the groan as Sherlock, mouth watering, palms the impressive erection flush up against Eric’s belly.

Eric’s bed is huge, his night table contains an array of luxury lubes and condoms and other supplies whose function isn’t immediately apparent, but it’s clear that he’s a master in the art of pleasure. He lays Sherlock out on a flannel-covered duvet, lofty with down, and stares at him with evident appreciation before he asks, “Can I get back to what I was doing?”

“Yes,” and Sherlock all but blacks out as Eric draws him into his mouth—hot and silky, all exploring and caressing tongue—and his hums shiver through Sherlock’s now-aching erection.

“Wait.” Eric freezes, pulls back immediately, and relaxes only when Sherlock says, “can we make it lazy and memorable next time?”

A chuckle and Eric’s positioning himself between Sherlock’s knees, putting a hand on his co*ck and one on his bollocks, shifting from slow caresses to a rhythm that makes Sherlock ache to pump hard, but now Eric’s sucking him off again and it’s dizzying, he’s losing control and it’s such a relief, such a relief, to want and be wanted and to ask and to have and he comes in long shuddering waves that leave him stunned and sated.

A surreptitious movement from a very much unsated Eric jolts him into action and he pulls himself up to reciprocate, more enthusiastically than he’s done with anyone ever.

And as he draws groans and finally a shout from Eric, Sherlock thinks, this could work. This could work.

This’ll make you laugh, John.

Eric asked me, “What should I call you for short? Sherl? Or Lock?”

No one’s ever asked me that. I don’t seem to invite nicknames, perhaps because I hate them. I never called you Johnny, the way your sister did. Does. Or Jo-Jo. Or John-o.

I answered him a bit repressively. “I’ve always liked both syllables, myself.”

He didn’t take the hint. “It’s just very… formal.”

“No more formal than Eric. Should I call you Air? Or Rick?”

He laughed, and said, “I’m going with Lock.” I mused about this. Lock. Locky. (No.) Lock Holmes. (God no.) It didn’t seem worth making a fuss about. I’ll see if it grows on me.

After all, it may not be a long acquaintance.

John doesn’t answer this time, either.

Chapter 4: Silver Linings

Chapter Text

“In the blue TV screen light”

Joni Mitchell, “A Case of You”

June–September 2014

Perhaps it only took falling into bed, and for more than a hookup, with a properly gay man, one who doesn’t want or try or pretend to be anything else.

Eric is prepossessing, if not captivating. A hungry and a confident lover, but tender as well.

Though he seems unduly impressed by the celebrity dimension of Sherlock’s return from the dead, he doesn’t try to capitalise on it for his own work. Just as well: it would be intolerable to be instrumentalised, sensationalised, for that painful episode.

In so many small ways he reminds Sherlock of John that it truly is easy to be his lover. Eric is pleasantly unflappable, for example, doesn’t make a fuss about every little Mycroftian abduction. Didn’t even mention it, in fact, until Sherlock asked.

“Have you met my brother?”

“I have, in fact. Does he do that with everyone? Ambush them and interrogate them about their intentions for you?” Eric sounded more bemused than anything else, neither alarmed nor indignant.

“Yes. Did it bother you?”

“Not really. Is it a British thing, or a posh thing?” A sly gleam in his eye.

“Neither, as you must know, given what you write about. It’s a Mycroft thing. You must have passed his test, though.”

“How canya tell? To me he just looked suspicious. And superior.”

“He hasn’t had you disappeared.”

This surprised a bark of laughter from Eric. “It must be a comfort, having someone willing to kill to protect you.”

If you knew. If you only knew.

October 2014

When Sherlock brings Eric home to meet his parents, Mycroft doesn’t join. That’s a relief, of course, but the reason is tedious: Mycroft doesn’t like Eric, and doesn’t trouble to hide it. Odd, because his brother can be urbane and polite with any number of awful people, but Eric—innocuous, clever, interesting—Mycroft cannot brook. Sherlock likes Eric all the better for it.

Mummy’s house in autumn is a glory. Not only are the trees brilliant, but his mother manages to have a garden in full colour in a season when most flowering plants are dying back. Eric is openly impressed, and Mummy and Daddy are openly impressed with him. Sherlock supposes they’d clasp to their bosom any man he brought home, but it helps that Eric isn’t just any man. Daddy’s already read Two Nations Separated and enjoyed it tremendously, can’t stop chuckling as he recalls bits he found particularly insightful and amusing. Mummy’s impressed by Eric’s solicitude and palpable affection for her son, not to mention he’s very presentable.

Lunch is mostly painless and the meal is good, though Mummy keeps serving Sherlock twice the portions he will ever eat (and well she knows it). Can’t she see that Eric is feeding him up admirably? Sherlock forgets the various dishes as soon as they’re eaten, but he remembers Mummy’s made a trifle for him and he’s saving room for that.

But over the trifle and coffee, Daddy and Eric bond over their lifelong devotion to musical theatre. (Sherlock had hoped to avoid the topic entirely, but no such luck.) Ten thousand hours ensue of tedious enthusing about different musicals, songs, productions, composers, performers, until Daddy prises out of Eric that his favourite song is “How Are Things in Glocca Morra?” and insists on accompanying him on the piano.

Sherlock would honestly rather endure a twenty-hour scolding from John on any subject; he’d rather chew ground glass. But he’s gotten better at finding silver linings: Mycroft’s absence, always appreciated, is now a downright blessing. The process of locating the song in Daddy’s library of sheet music further cements the atmosphere of complicity between them. And to Sherlock’s surprise, Eric and Daddy do the song rather well, without exaggerated sentiment or too many twee vocal ornaments.

There’s something to be said for finding common ground. Sherlock doubts he’ll ever be able to join in this love-fest for musicals, let alone fall in love with someone whose favourite genre that is. (He couldn’t even make it through the synopsis, fanciful and incoherent, of the one "Glocca Morra" came from.) But it’s good to see his parents accepting Eric so readily.

Off in the kitchen, Mummy will alert Sherlock to something he hasn’t noticed. (She often does.)

“That song! Oh darling, your man’s homesick.” Then and there she invites them both to come for Christmas. Sherlock temporises.

On the train back to London Eric wonders, sounding wistful, if they’ll be invited for Christmas. Again Sherlock temporises. He should have known: the song itself was a dead giveaway, after all. To Mummy, at least.

November 2014

Just once, Eric floated the idea of finding a larger flat they could share. Sherlock’s undisguised revulsion at the proposition was apparently convincing. Leave Mrs Hudson again? Unacceptable. Leave Baker Street? He didn’t ache for 221B for two and a half years to leave it now. He may as well cut out what’s left of his heart.

So Eric proposes moving in, tossing out the possibility as though it were uncomplicated, easy, obvious: they’ve been seeing each other for a few months. But that’s a bit soon, surely? Precipitous? Eric’s own flat is fine, and it’s where they mostly see each other. It’s neutral and modern, and if Canary Wharf is a bit out of the way, at least it’s worth getting to. Excellent food choices close to hand, though that’s because of a distinct surfeit of middle-class clientele. (Another thing Mycroft despises, the snob.)

Eric’s flat is reasonably spacious, or it would be without all the work-out equipment. (And clutter, but Sherlock approves of clutter.) The bed is fine, in fact it’s more than fine, it’s huge. Eric’s had a lot of company in it; he’s unabashed about having had many sexual partners, and appreciates that it doesn’t bother Sherlock. (Why would it?) For his part, Sherlock doesn’t talk about his own parade of partners in the winter and spring.

And his mother said that Eric is homesick. Solitude exacerbates that, Sherlock knows from experience. Could they share 221B?

He’s a scientist. He should be able to reason this out. Compatibility may be intangible, but it’s still quantifiable. If he and Eric are 80% compatible in bed, even if the other basic categories averaged out to 40 or even 60%—and they give each other space—they should be able to share the flat without disruption. Shouldn’t they?

He and John managed it almost effortlessly, on an infinitely slenderer acquaintance.

But it’s not fair to compare Eric to John. John is an unicum. Plus, he’s an unknown quantity, in terms of sexual symbiosis. Plus, he’s gone. Apparently forever.

With a brusque swipe he erases John from his mental spreadsheet.

Eric looks up from his laptop, frowning slightly. “What?”

Sherlock sighs. “Just thinking.”

“What about?”

Not a welcome question. Complete candour being inadvisable, he settles for partial. “You. When do you want to move in?”

A look of surprised delight, and Eric sets his laptop aside and stands to pull Sherlock up for a kiss.

The negotiation of shared space and time lurched from one unexpected change to another. When Eric’s gym equipment arrived it barely fit up the main staircase, and in no universe was it going up the tighter flight of stairs to the second floor.

Either the four bulky machines would take up the entire sitting room, or they would commandeer Sherlock’s bedroom and he and Eric would share the one upstairs. So Sherlock ends up having acrobatic, gratifying sex with Eric in John’s old bedroom. Farther from Mrs H, which is an advantage. She’s been politely welcoming to Eric, though nothing at all compared to how she’d taken to John.

At first it was fun watching crap telly with Eric, always so observant about things Sherlock takes for granted in his own culture. Always noticing, always questioning; Eric must love his work.

Eric studies or at least observes from the outside, and his insights are often illuminating. Even the ones that are uninformed or patently wrong cast a new light on the familiar, giving Sherlock food for thought.

But it soon became clear that for Eric crap telly was work, not relaxation. He’d make notes on his phone, sometimes getting up to write a paragraph or more. He’s endlessly curious, loves having what he calls a ‘native informant’ to explain the meaning or backstory of unfamiliar cultural references. So crap telly very quickly became not relaxing for Sherlock, either.

What relaxes Eric are old films, preferably black and white, WWII-era or just after. And dear God, the musicals.

Eric had cued up a banal weepie from 1950, My Foolish Heart. Some overwrought nonsense about a long estrangement from a friend, alcoholism, and marrying the wrong man. It took all his self-control not to snort at the melodrama, but he didn’t want to ruin it for Eric.

His reward for superhuman self-restraint was yet another silver lining: a captivating theme song. As soon as the credits rolled, he found a recording online and saved it. Learned to play it—here at least was some overlap between his taste and Eric’s.

“There’s a line between love and fascination

That’s hard to tell, on an evening such as this—”

As he played, he tried to echo the caramel, expressive voice of Ethel Ennis.

And Eric was indeed delighted. “Lock! You’re playing something with a tune!”

That stung. Not even “a tune I know.” Apparently his cherished violin repertoire is tuneless. Who knew? John had only ever objected to twelve-tone, or exercises played presto, or scales played aggressively.

After that song, Eric asked Sherlock to play “How are Things in Glocca Morra?” Easy enough to play, a quirky if sentimental little melody, and Sherlock didn’t mind learning it, though he can’t help but hear “Guacamole” every time the title line comes round. With his pleasant voice and fine intonation, Eric improves the show tunes he does hum or sing. But still.

Thus the Venn diagram of shared relaxation telly or music is slim, and headphones become the norm. Between Eric’s musicals, video chats with his American family or friends, and interviews with Brits all over the UK—Sherlock’s grown accustomed to hearing one-sided conversations, or to putting on noise-cancelling headphones himself.

Things that John had actively enjoyed—the violin, the murder wall, the brushes with death—Eric tolerates or ignores. He just isn’t involved with them, really. And that’s fine. Sherlock isn’t especially involved with Anglo-American relations or bodybuilding. His case roster is expanding again, and he’s keeping up with it just fine without a conductor of light.

He does sometimes miss his audience. Genius craves one, after all. The chemicals (grand euphemism) compensate amply. Anyway, the question is moot. John isn’t an option, having subtracted himself from the equation; there’s no choice to be made between Eric and John, only between Eric and no Eric.

And between Eric and no Eric, what is the calculus now? Sherlock is unwilling to return either to celibacy, or to serial sexual partners; the latter had been time-consuming and attention-fragmenting, compared to living with Eric. He’s still unconvinced by the difference between sex with sentiment, and sex without: Martina had exaggerated that, it would seem. He is content, though, with their parallel lives that intersect mostly in bed—and there they are quite compatible, for both sex and sleeping. At times Sherlock marvels that he’s become a man with something distantly resembling a sleep schedule. Almost more surprising than having an actual sex life.

Cases, along with this more socially acceptable form of chemical placation (occasionally elation), keep him in bearable balance; indeed, John’s approach had been useful. More useful than Martina’s, at any rate.

And Eric seems fine with the areas of non-overlap between them. He turns off his music when Sherlock comes in, and doesn’t show any impatience with the classical, though he doesn’t attend to it. He likes to eat regularly, but doesn’t mind doing it alone. Sherlock had learned his lesson about experiments in shared spaces, and rented 221C for an elementary lab and storage space. The light isn’t optimal and it remains damp, but it gives them both some privacy. When Eric needs quiet, he announces he’ll have his headphones on and won’t hear voices. And surely that, for flatmates, is compatibility, if not symbiosis.

One evening, after their parallel lives had intersected very satisfactorily in the bedroom upstairs, Sherlock asks, “You aren’t hoping I’ll start working out, are you? Bodybuilding?”

He meets Eric’s gaze of honest astonishment. “Why would I? It’s a choice I make for myself, not for anyone else. You don’t expect me to take up the violin, do you?”

Sherlock laughs and strokes Eric’s arm, squeezing that gorgeous deltoid. “Of course not.”

Eric takes his hand and brings a fingertip into his mouth to suck for a moment. “Good. And for the record,” and his voice goes suggestively husky, “I like you just the way you are. I never want to look at anything else but you. I never want to look at any one else but you.”

That, as the King of Siam would say, is a puzzlement. Has anyone, ever, liked him just the way he is? A jolt of gratitude that might be tenderness. Might be love.

December 2014–January 2015

Even Sherlock acknowledges the romance of the Christmas season. The contrast between the bitter cold and the spirit-warming twinkle lights; the constant indulgence of small sweet pleasures, from hot cocoa to fresh Christmas biscuits. The music is everywhere, played and sung live in the streets. It is a season for family, and friends, and lovers—and for the first time he is one-half of a couple in the month of December. It’s hard to believe.

Christmas with his parents was surprisingly pleasant, excepting the short stop-in by Mr Very Busy and Important. His parents remained as warm and welcoming as they were in October; Eric, now more used to being Sherlock’s plus-one, was even more relaxed and mellow. Certainly he was good at quiet and self-sufficiency, which made him a good fit for the Holmes family. Gifts were neutral, occupying that tentative space between things you give people you don’t know well, and things you give people you’re trying to get to know. Mummy seemed elated with the assortment of seeds Eric had assembled for her, and Daddy with the rare recording of outtakes and rehearsals of Les Miz.

For once, Sherlock wasn’t desperate for cases to distract him, and Mycroft’s quick departure relieved him of the obligation to hate the holiday and wish it shorter. All in all it was, as Mr Dickens wrote, a kindly time, and when January stalks back in with its cruel cold and its appalling crimes Sherlock isn’t sorry, but he is surprised not to have been missing it.

One thing, however, he is missing.

I thought you might get in touch, John. It’s been over a year. I tried not to hope you would, or wait for it. But nothing at Christmas, or New Year, or my birthday.

Seriously? You hate Christmas, and you’ve always been dismissive of artificial benchmarks like holidays and anniversaries. If I was going to get in touch, it wouldn’t be now.

I assume I won’t hear from you at the end of January either, then.

That’s a safe assumption. Why would you?

It’s always been a secret holiday of mine, but it doesn’t mean anything to you anymore, I imagine. Or if it does, then nothing good.

Right. Nothing good. A lucky escape from a depressive episode, nothing more.

Well. The limp.

Part of the depressive episode. Don’t flatter yourself.

Right. Of course. I’m not a magician, after all.

Damn right you’re not. You were just a distraction.

Maybe it’s time I said goodbye for good, then. I wish I could do it in person. But for what it’s worth: I wish you well, John. I’m sorry for who I am, who I’ve been. Who I was, when we met.

Even in his mind he can’t come up with an answer from John, who's growing nebulous, insubstantial.

Saying goodbye is clearly the right thing to do.

1 February 2015

The gathering fondness Sherlock has been sensing in 221B, in Eric, even in himself, has been coming to a head. One night, over a candlelit meal he cooked specially, Eric says with elaborate casualness, “Now that it’s legal, what would you think about us getting married?”

With the speed of light, Sherlock thinks over the past year and more: the sorrow and desperation; the resignation and distraction; the undoubted pleasure and the comfort of sharing a life and a bed with an intelligent, independent, and devoted man. And without hesitating long enough to give Eric pause, to hurt him or make him backpedal, Sherlock muses, “That—is a wonderful idea.”

That Mycroft will loathe the happy announcement only cements his decision: it’s a wonderful idea.

Chapter 5: 9.2 on the Richter scale

Chapter Text

“I remember that time you told me

Love is touching souls”

Joni Mitchell, “A Case of You”

4 February 2015

Mycroft cannot, apparently, limit himself to pinched-mouth disapproval. Oh no, he turns up, spiteful and superior, as soon as Eric leaves the flat, to flagellate his disappointing little brother for trying to live a stable and sober life. Excellent. It needed only that.

Sherlock declines even to speak, let alone to offer tea, but goes to sit in his chair and have it over, the sooner to be rid of Mycroft’s disapproving glare. He leaves his brother to take Eric’s seat, and pontificate.

“I’m sorry to be the ghost at the feast. But aren’t you taking a terrible risk in marrying this man?”

Sherlock doesn’t answer.

“You’ve not even known him a year.”

Sherlock’s sigh, short and percussive, conveys Irrelevant.

I am not a child, he thinks but refuses to say. Apparently his expression says it for him.

“My point precisely. You are not a child. Wanting to be happy with someone is not enough to actually be happy with them. For you, boredom is not just undesirable, it’s dangerous.”

Says the world expert on happiness, relationships, and other people.

“Canfield’s a spectator. An observer, who does nothing about what he observes. Simply—monetises it in his books.”

He shouldn’t ask, but he can’t stop himself. “What’s he meant to do about it?”

Something about the words he’s finally spoken makes Mycroft do what he never does: he shouts. “Nothing! He’s meant to do nothing! But that is the opposite of you. Marry him and you’ll dull your own mind, turn yourself passive. For God’s sake, Sherlock! You had a good man, an active, useful sort of man. He intervened. He sacrificed. He served queen and country, he saved lives. He saved yours, and you drove him away. This man—he doesn’t even care what it is you do, let alone make you better at doing it. By this time next year, your muscle-bound couch potato will have bored you to tears, or worse—”

Sherlock grits his teeth, knowing exactly what “worse” means.

“—and you’ll be beyond reclamation. I’ve a mind to involve Doctor Watson myself.”

Sherlock’s burning agitation ices over and he speaks, very slowly and distinctly.

“I’m going to forget you said that. Don’t you forget this: breathe a word to him of your intrusive reservations and you will never hear from me again, dulled edge or no. You don’t like Eric—fine. Mummy and Daddy, who are far more credible judges of love and marriage, do like him.”

“Do they? Compared to no one, I suppose they might. But you never let them know John Watson to compare Canfield to, did you. I wonder why.”

He winces and parries that topic, to get to the real point. “You just can’t stand seeing me happy.”

Mycroft’s silenced, stunned. Then: “You think that?”

Sherlock’s expression counters, I know that.

“You think wrongly. I urgently want you to be happy. Simply, I have never seen you do anything that will make you less so. Eric Canfield? Please. You cannot marry him. He is a nullity, and at best he will make you a mediocrity.”

“You think I don’t know what I want, or need. That’s —insulting.” He fights to hide the fury that puts him at a disadvantage in arguing with Mycroft.

“But true.”

“Oh, spare me your amateur psychology. You have no standing to dismiss him. You called John a goldfish, remember.”

“I never did. I said that I was surrounded by goldfish. The only thing wrong with John is that he always thinks you know what you’re doing, even when you absolutely do not. You forget that I tried to talk you out of making him believe in your so-called suicide. I tried to talk you out of intruding on the evening of his proposal with your arrogant, ludicrous mockery of a resurrection. I have shown far greater respect for John Watson than you have.”

If Sherlock had been furious before, at this outrage he stands, extends his arm to point at the door, and says only, “Leave.”

6 February 2015

Friday after lunch Eric goes out in a whirl of busy delight, with a scribbled to-do list of wedding-related tasks that leave Sherlock a bit bemused. He had assumed they’d get married with as little ceremony as they’d moved in together; clearly he’d been projecting. Eric’s been talking venues, and flowers, and matching bespoke suits; photographers, and menus, and engraved invitations. Save-the-date emails had gone out to his American family and friends, which makes sense for those making transatlantic travel plans, but somehow also makes Sherlock wince. He hasn’t even told his parents. (Eric may have.) (Unsettling thought.)

But for two or three hours he’ll have the flat to himself, with a vital task that requires concentration and quiet, so he tries to focus on that. Picking up the violin always brings a rush of grateful relief, and blissful clarity. Even touching its slightly grainy varnish, the lush rounding of its sides, the smooth ebony of the fingerboard, centres him to certainty and focus.

His most beloved Bach partita hasn’t sounded right since he got back and started playing again, and he’s going to work out why. (He knows it’s nerve damage in his left hand, but holds on to the faint chance—hope—that with time and practice it will improve.) Intonation is still inconsistent in the very passages where it must be precise; and the ornaments Bach wrote in are slurred and approximate, not crisp and flawless. He can’t even remember the last time he played this piece perfectly, before he went away.

He’s doing careful backward practice on four measures that keep thwarting him, when a set of sharp raps on the street door knocker stabs through his concentration. Oh, hell no.

He bashes away, determined to ignore the intruder, but the sound keeps coming, louder and more insistent. He scowls, sets down violin and bow, turns to fling the window open wide, bellowing “Go! AWAY!” with all the ferocity and volume he can muster. Which is, modestly, considerable.

He’s not prepared for the face of John Watson staring up at him, looking utterly astonished and a bit hurt. He’s haloed in burnished winter light and bundled in a black jacket, looking years younger than he had fifteen months and five days ago.

He’s sure his jaw has dropped. Had Mycroft actually dared to—? No. Mycroft knew Sherlock had meant what he said.

It’s several seconds before he can say, “J-John!—No, no, don’t go away, stay there, I’ll be right down.”

How like John to answer, shortly and with a faint smile, “Make up your mind.”

Sherlock races for a more flattering dressing-gown, then puts on the first one again (John would notice) (even John) (when had he ever changed dressing-gowns for John) and fidgets with his hair for eight seconds before pelting down the stairs to pull open the street door to John’s tentative “May I come in?”

“Of course, I’m—glad to see you.”

“Surprised, you mean.”

“That too.” He gestures to John to precede him up the stairs.

Very soon John’s standing in the flat, looking round as if unsure where to put his coat and gloves, and his mobile face goes still.

Through John’s eyes, Sherlock sees the flat as it was five years ago, superimposed over the way it is now. The differences between the two give the effect of his antique Stereopticon: two slightly different images, superimposed to create an illusion of depth.

John has to be seeing the signs of Eric’s residence: his chair by the fireplace (no Stars and Stripes cushion, at least). Two of Eric’s coats on the wall hooks. His framed photos crowding the mantel and bookshelves.

They take their usual places in front of the fireplace.

“You’re—you’ve—how’ve you been?” In the street John hadn’t been this stammering, uncertain.

Sherlock’s gut twists around a lead weight, and the sum total of thoughts in his head boils down to John is here he’s here he’s back and how do I feel about it and he has no idea at all.

His eyes flick over John like hands, checking that he’s sound and whole. Eyes: clear; nose: no redness; he’s not been drinking. Clean-shaven, and has been for months. Hands: he’s not married, not living with anyone. Left hand: no tremor, and very specific calluses; he’s drawing again, a lot—he’s left a drawing case by his coat. Thighs: cycling, again a lot. The black coat: second-hand; old trousers, shirt, jumper, shoes: money’s tight. Hair: cutting it himself. Working, not full time. Expression: uncertain, moved. Of course, the 221B effect: he’d felt it himself when he came back.

He realises he hasn’t answered, and the time-lapse effect is awkward.

“Well. Very well, in fact. Ah—you?”

From the window he’d seen John smiling, open; now he looks tense and guarded.

“I’m a GP with the NHS. Half-time. Mostly what I’ve been doing is getting sober. Getting therapy.” He looks down at his hands. “I—I’m sorry I haven’t been in touch. It’s been a bit of a, well, a process.”

Whenever John looks up, Sherlock looks away. He has to give John his privacy. No deducing him out loud; no staring, no asking. No revealing that he already knows about the drinking.

Restraining himself adds more awkwardness to answers that are already late and disjointed. “You—sober—I never saw you need to get—”

“Yes, well, you knew about Harry, from the start. I—” John’s off-balance too, looking down at his hands as he speaks, not at Sherlock, or around at the flat where all is changed. “I tried to make sure you didn’t know about me. I’m just as much of an addict as she is. And on top of that—I have a problem with, um, controlling my anger. Whether or not alcohol is involved.”

And that’s all John says about his endless, agonising, silent absence. He doesn’t talk about what Harry had revealed two Decembers ago: the family home, their father’s drinking, the violence.

“I wanted to… apologise to you properly, for attacking you that night you came back.”

Finally John looks up, looks around the sitting-room. And what he must see all around them smothers Sherlock’s response to John’s entire—confession?—and apology. Instead, before he can change his mind, before John can deduce it, he blurts out, “I’m getting married.”

“You’re—come again?”

John must be completely confused by the abrupt change of subject, of course he is. But it’s also a little insulting, as if he can’t believe anyone would ever want to marry Sherlock.

“I’m getting married. It’s something people do, you know. People in this very room have done it.”

“But—how—who—” He’s not even offering congratulations. “How do I not even know who the lucky—” He stumbles and stammers around the sex of Sherlock’s intended, as though that were ever in question (experimental hook-ups aside). And that isn’t just insulting, it’s hurtful: if John ever knew or remembered Sherlock well enough, or hadn’t disappeared, he wouldn’t be uncertain. At least it confirms he certainly didn’t hear it from Mycroft.

Sherlock can’t resist a small, sour dig at John’s long absence. “How do you not know who the lucky man is? I can’t imagine. After all, you’ve been so present of late.”

John finds his equanimity again, though, enough to show a friendly (hateful word) interest in Eric. Sherlock gives some pop-psych answer to John’s question about being in love, and John asks belatedly if he picked a bad time for a visit: their entire exchange seems out of sync.

Sideswiped by sadness that they’ve drifted so far away from each other, Sherlock makes tea. Surely John will stay if there’s tea. Conversation remains wooden, and to keep from pressing John on why he stayed away, Sherlock talks about Eric, how they met and laughed and clicked, and Christ if that isn’t unspeakably uncomfortable. He shifts to pressing a copy of Eric’s book on John: that might help him understand Eric’s humour, quirky enough to match John and Sherlock’s own.

Meanwhile, what he’s deduced he keeps to himself. And what he sees, he compares to his last sight of John, muddy-eyed, middle-aged, moustachio’d. Now he sees what he hadn’t seen that night, through the patina of John’s rage: that he’d been under long-term emotional stress. Now at least he’s more serene, if uncomfortable. Healthy. And here.

The light’s fading when Sherlock realises that an hour’s gone by and Eric is due back soon. These two worlds colliding right now is just about the only thing that could make this reunion worse, so he hurries into an incoherent explanation of why John has to go.

“Oh—God, I’m sorry, I’m supposed to be dressing for a recital. Eric will be back soon to pick me up.”

John’s already sprung up to leave, no doubt eager to get away from this hideous simulacrum of a friendly visit.

But he invites Sherlock to come “out” to his own place, gives an address west of London, and somehow he’s been and gone without the entire flat crumbling around Sherlock.

What did the rising young string quartet play at the Royal Academy of Music? Why had he thought Eric would like it, and insist that they go? He remembers nothing at all about the music, only remembers worrying the faint scar where John had split his lip (almost gone, and the last thing he has of John).

Over a tagine at Eric’s favourite Moroccan in Dorset Street, he can’t say anything lucid about the concert, and can’t eat at all.

Finally Eric sighs, puts down his fork, and says gently, “Out with it, Lock.”

So he tells Eric about John’s unannounced visit, and something—just a bit—about how disorienting it was.

“But were you glad to see him? Are you glad he came?”

Which is exactly what Sherlock’s been trying to work out.

“Of c—I think so. Yes. It’s been distracting, wondering what happened to him, why he left.”

Sherlock’s turn to stare at his hands, unseeing, until he feels Eric’s hand sliding gently over his.

“Oh, Lock. It hasn’t been distracting, it’s been painful. You can say it. I know he was important to you, back in the day.”

Sherlock’s eyes cut sharply up to Eric’s face, which shows only understanding and concern.

“Yes. Of course, you’re right. It’s been painful.”

“Why did he go away, anyway? Did he say?”

Sherlock is silent. He hadn’t asked why John had to disappear. He hadn’t even given him the chance to return to the topic of his absence, let alone to explain it.

Eric sighs, takes a sip of water. “He didn’t, then. Just expected you to welcome him with open arms? Classic straight man behaviour.”

Sherlock’s taken aback. “It wasn’t… really that kind of conversation. Maybe—scrambled by the occasion.”

“I get it. Still. Stereotypical male. The superpower of gay men is accessing the repressed, though. You’ll get it out of him, you’ll see.”

Staring at his plate, Sherlock says, dubiously, “He asked me to go see him sometime, out in Wargrave.” Horrible name. Especially for a wounded warrior.

“Are you going to?” Eric sounds only curious, not suspicious. Of course. All he knows is that John had once been important, back in the day.

“I don’t know. I finally made my peace with his going, and he just … popped up again. As though …” He doesn’t finish the sentence, and Eric doesn’t prod him to.

“Well, take your time and think about it, why don’t you. Meantime, try to eat something. That’s the best part of the chicken you’re ignoring on your plate.”

7–8 February 2015

Thank God Lestrade texts early the next morning, summoning Sherlock over to the east end—a curious disappearance, a more curious delivery (52 small plushies, all with ridiculous names), and a mounting set of obscure but ominous threats. The latter were left in the most old-fashioned, forensically telltale medium imaginable: letters and words cut out of newspapers and magazines, glued to distinctive art paper with a very rare glue.

The whole case was exasperatingly fanciful, as though someone had said, “I’m just going to assemble an utterly frivolous set of clues and challenge the great Sherlock Holmes to work it out.”

Someone, of course, was an idiot. It did take Sherlock thirty-six hours, though, only because he was distracted by the return of John Watson. Still, the puzzle—a sad, grey little shadow of the game he used to love—kept him busy for a bit, and he emphatically needed that. Even if the dénouement was maudlin and anticlimactic.

Early Sunday evening in Hornchurch, when it’s all over but the shouting, he sees a 248 bus marked Upminster and thinks of Harry Watson. He pulls out his mobile and finds her contact.

— No emergency. FYI: John came to see me 2 days ago. SH

Almost immediately, she answers.

— Tx. How was he, how did he look

So John probably hasn't been in touch with her.

— Well. Healthy. Sober. SH

This time, a few minutes pass before her reply.

— Good. So he was ready

John was, but is Sherlock? He has no idea.

— Yes. Thank you. SH

She doesn’t answer. And she’s no more forthcoming than when they met. No reason she should be, after all.

9–12 February 2015

No real cases are forthcoming in the following days, and there’s an acid coalpit where Sherlock’s stomach should be; insomnia has returned, and a turmoil of resentment at John for appearing in Baker Street again without warning. He swings between a furious resolve not to contact John at all, and a cooler need to know what made him come back just then, in just that way and out of the blue, since it patently wasn’t Mycroft’s doing.

John had to have known how painful that would be, how unbalancing. He had to have known he mattered too much to Sherlock to just march back in like that with a wisecrack. It was vengeful, and the John Sherlock had loved could be many things, but not that.

What had it been about John, anyway? Was it only that John had accepted him instantly, without reservation? That John had in some way needed him, when no one else did? That John had appreciated him for qualities that others called freakish?

Since John left, plenty of people had accepted Sherlock instantly, even for the most intimate of contacts. Plenty of people had needed him. And God knows Eric appreciates him, finds him special—but Eric makes him feel normal. Not a prodigy or an oddity: a man. Nowadays he feels stimulated in some ways, anaesthetised in others, but never freakish.

Still, although in his mind he’s said goodbye to John, now that John’s saying hello, he can’t stop thinking about it. About him.

Why did you come back?

Make up your mind. You were just whingeing that I hadn’t got in touch, and now you’re whingeing that I did.

Why did you go away, stay away?

I told you. You’re toxic to me.

Then why did you come back?

It wasn’t all bad. And I didn’t want to leave you the moral high ground.

Why—

Why are you asking me? You aren’t going to get any new data, Sherlock. I’m in your mind. Anything you want to know, you’re going to have to ask him.

Chapter 6: Weather front

Chapter Text

“Go to him, stay with him if you can,

But be prepared to bleed”

Joni Mitchell, “A Case of You”

13 February 2015

For days Sherlock has wavered about whether, or when, to go see John. On the one hand, he’d practically promised. On the other—there’s a laundry list of reasons why he shouldn’t.

He’s made his peace, said his goodbyes. In his mind, at least.

He has no time to slog out to the back of beyond to re-open an old wound.

He doesn’t want to disrupt his carefully constructed equilibrium any further.

He doesn’t want to give Mycroft the satisfaction.

And even if he were inclined to go, why subject them both to another episode of painful, stilted “chatting”? Maybe he should just accept that their friendship, however close or unique he’d imagined it to be, is a thing of the past. They’ve both changed. Too much water under the bridge. And all the other clichés of a soul-destroying breakup.

None of this is true, and he knows it. John’s like a drug. Just one more drug he can’t afford to take again.

But he tells himself he has questions, and that knowing the answers might help him to turn the page. John had said, last Friday, that it was his day off. Was he off every Friday? Sherlock forms a plan: he’ll go to Wargrave in the morning and text John. If John is off, they’ll meet. Otherwise, Sherlock will go to his flat, pick the lock, and examine the place for what he can glean from it. Either way, he’ll have some answers. (Or more questions, comes the unwelcome thought.)

He still won’t hack John’s phone or computer; he’s mindful of Harry Watson’s admonition, and her insistence on respecting his privacy. But he’d lived with John, studied him closely (obsessively), and knows more about his habits—and what any exceptions to those habits might mean—than any man alive. He’d not be violating John’s privacy any more in the new flat than he had in 221B.

After morning coffee, he prepares to leave. Eric’s already on the Bowflex for his first round of upper-body giant sets. It’s resistance training, he’d explained in too much detail, not cardio, but the forced-march pace of the exercises hitting every muscle group means that the sweat still pours off him, just not as alluring as in other circ*mstances. (Sexy as those muscle cuts are.) He calls out a goodbye and on the off chance, stops in at his favourite new bakery for scones, asks for an unmarked bag. For reasons.

On the train from Paddington he thinks about how the morning might go. John’s not texted him all week; was the invitation sincere? He’s halfway to Henley when he decides it’s time to text. Not the “maybe it’s best if we don’t see each other again” message he’s been considering, but “I’m in Henley. Is this a good time to come by?” and stares at his phone until John answers that he should come at 11.

John’s flat is a tidy, compact studio in the garden of a discreetly renovated Edwardian house. Originally it was the stables or coachman’s cottage, now it’s more window than wall, good for a man with depressive tendencies. The restoration included putting the name “Northern Light” in wrought iron on the wall by the door, in a fake sprawling cursive.

John opens the door to him with the fond and beautiful smile Sherlock has missed so painfully, and a bit of the glacier inside his chest thaws and seeps away.

He thrusts out his offering and takes off his coat, determined to avoid the banalities that had littered—hamstrung—their encounter last week. Silence is preferable to comments on the weather, the train journey, or the scones.

While John puts the kettle on, Sherlock examines the compact space as unobtrusively as he can. It’s suspiciously bare of drawings, but he can spot the almost invisible traces of artist tape on shelves, doors, and other surfaces.

When they sit down for the tea and scones, he presses to see the art John has obviously put away.

“Sure. Though calling it art might be a bit like calling my blog literature.” John’s always been unreasonably self-deprecating about his drawing, which is in fact very precise.

John hands over the portfolio he’d brought to Baker Street. Examining them is a tour through John’s brain, his memories, his perspective. There are a dozen familiar faces—Anderson looking moronic, John caught that beautifully. Lestrade: harried; Donovan: exasperated. Mrs Hudson: fluttery.

But John’s art has changed. It’s as if Sherlock had set aside classical for Celtic on the violin. He says as much to John, about the change in his style. John’s drawings had been useful in the past, on cases; now they’re an end in themselves. Not a single one of himself, he thinks with some frustration. Pity: he can detect John’s opinions and feelings about every one of his subjects.

The change in style leads to a bit of a minefield, as John raises the topic of his own last years. Guileless and matter-of-fact, he tells Sherlock about a prolonged struggle with violent impulses, with self-destructive drinking. How Mary had walked away just before John could do so himself.

The gentleness of John’s apology, his patently genuine contrition, move something in Sherlock. Though he’s still angry at the deception, John says, he never had any right to assault Sherlock for it.

“So basically, I came back when I was sure I could be a better friend to you. Not to mention, to myself.”

When Sherlock thinks his head might explode, he stands to leave, trying to look urbane and busy. He adds his own attempt at self-deprecating humour, to seem more self-possessed than he feels: “I should go. Witnesses to bully, you know. A consulting detective’s work is never done.”

The train schedule compresses their goodbyes to the bare minimum, as Sherlock has several minutes to walk to the station.

The trip back to London is interminable, and he feels—irrationally—that every mile is stretching something inside him to the snapping-point.

It’s too much to take in: that after all that time Sherlock had left him to futile suffering, John didn’t leave because he was angry or hated Sherlock: he left because he hated himself. Didn’t trust himself to do better than the rage and the thrashing in the restaurant, and after. Had to conquer ingrained habits, coping strategies, to “be a better friend” to him. (Has Sherlock ever thought how to be a better friend to John?)

He reviews their conversation in something of a panic: he’s not at all certain what he himself said, how he responded. Whether he made any sense at all. He remembers every word John spoke, though.

“Back in med school I never thought of my drawing as art. It was a way to be paid for studying. I learned more by reproducing muscles, bones, blood vessels, nerves, organs, than I could ever have done by just staring at them.”

“It’s my 221B sketchpad, you know everyone in it. Some of them you like, and some you don’t. Moriarty? Nah, I never want to see that little sh*t’s smirk ever again, let alone immortalise it. I just wish I could forget his voice. Taunting us. At the pool. In the courtroom. At Kitty Riley’s flat.”

“I didn’t tell you why I left, cut contact with you. Moved.”

“Losing Mary—no. It wasn’t that. Except insofar as she left for the same reasons. I was a mess, Sherlock. Basically an alcoholic, if a functioning one. And completely unable to control my anger. You saw that, the night you came back to tell me you weren’t dead. I wanted to kill you. I could have killed you. I had no right to hit you, let alone kill you.”

“I wish you hadn’t done it. I could’ve helped you. And maybe I’d have avoided a detour into—never mind. I just wish you’d told me, is all. You didn’t trust me, when it counted.”

The words, all clear; tone, expression, body language, it’s as though John were a hologram replaying his half of the scene in the train window Sherlock’s staring out of. But Sherlock’s own half—that’s gone, it may have been someone else speaking, in a different language.

It’s all beyond disorientating, and his racing thoughts can’t seem to catch the scraps of evidence he’s been juggling to reorganise them into a coherent pattern. The facts fall through his fingers, his interpretations stretch and squeeze like images in a funhouse mirror.

He should text John. Try to counter whatever disordered impression he must have projected.

— Thanks for this morning. SH (He’s not sure what for.)

Three minutes later, John answers.

— Thanks for coming. I hoped you would

Sherlock keeps up the pretence that his presence was fortuitous.

— I’d a witness to see in Henley, so I took a chance on the scones. SH

— That was lucky

Is John being sly? Could he possibly know it had been no such thing?

— The universe is rarely so lazy. SH

— Ah, yes. How IS your brother?

— Infuriating. SH

— I noticed your patented Mycroft glare when you saw the drawing of him

— You flattered him. SH

— I was working from a flattering photo. Quite a feat, to catch him looking anything but supercilious

Sherlock smiles.

— Still not a fan? SH

— Nah, Mycroft has plenty of minions to admire him, I’m sure. I’m team Sherlock

John is team Sherlock. Sherlock composes four replies to that, deletes them all, and gives up. John will assume he’s got busy with his imaginary case.

He’s restless now, and it’s the kind of restlessness he dreads, tearing him up. He needs distraction, stimulation. He needs not to be in his own head right now.

A year ago he’d have pulled. He’d have had one of these passengers in the loo of the train no matter how visible they’d be from the outside. He can almost feel it, the compartment rocking as it gathers speed, the thrust and retreat of an urgent f*ck making a counter-rhythm to the train, and he imagines, no, remembers, Colin, the way he’d get himself ready before Sherlock arrived, so they could go fast and hard without hurting him, and he’s so aroused he can feel his face burning, along with the rest of him.

If he was where he could score—he’d—never mind. He has a health-mad fiancé who’d be as outraged if he got high as if he hooked up. No, he can’t f*ck a stranger, not anymore, and he can’t get high. But he has a loving outlet, a man who loves nothing better than to ride Sherlock until they’re both a trembling mess. And God, the way Eric kisses when Sherlock’s fully seated, bending over him, it’s criminal.

He’s torn between making a quick trip to the loo, and saving up all this overpowering want for Eric. The vibration of the train under his aching bollocks isn’t helping.

He texts Eric, who can surely be talked into a mid-afternoon break.

— I’m coming. Or I’d like to be. Can you be ready? SH

— You bet your sweet ass. Or mine.

— Yours, please. 67 minutes from now. SH

When he gets back to the flat Eric is delighted, rather than surprised, at the urgency of Sherlock’s desire. Texting him had been an inspiration. Still, “Hold on, cowboy!” he protests, as Sherlock bundles him upstairs, but he comes around quickly when Sherlock starts kissing him hard and hungry.

After a few minutes, Eric, already eager, turns to brace a foot on the bedpost to remove the plug—he manages to make even that unromantic gesture mouthwatering—and Sherlock bears them both down to the bed, turning Eric efficiently so he can position his arse in the air, ready for a ruthless session of sucking and licking and tonguing that has Eric whining more, and now, and I can’t wait, Lock —

And Sherlock, intoxicated by the scent and sounds of Eric’s arousal, pulls away and slathers the almond-scented lube on his own aching co*ck as well as all around and into Eric’s arsehole. He lines himself up to prod tenderly—gently—in, and Christ does that take every ounce of self-control he has, he wants to push, thrust, pound—then Eric’s swearing and panting, “Do it, Lock, do it, hard, harder, don’t make me—aaaaaah!—beg” and that sweetly muscled, downy arse in his hands, that slick hot tightness gripping him, and Sherlock is grunting, shouting, vocalisations that if they had been words, might not have been Eric’s name.

The coming-down period is a blissful relief. He can’t remember why he’d been so desperate, but he’s lucky he’d sorted it with Eric and not a 7-percent solution. He drifts in grateful musing on Eric’s stamina, strength, insatiability: so desirable, golden, gleaming, sweat-sheened, and so eager for him.

He’s stroking Eric’s hair when he hears him draw breath to speak. Don’t say anything don’t don’t don’t…

But that’s not the mood Eric’s in, and he half-pants, “God, that was the hottest thing I never saw coming—you really missed me, didn’t you, baby?”

Sherlock hums an appreciative assent, although that had not really been the case. It hadn’t been at all specific. He’d been rattled, and he’d got used to deflecting that into sexual desire.

“Aren’t you glad I’m right here, not at Canary Wharf?”

Still dazed, Sherlock just tightens his grip in affirmation.

“But aren’t you a day early?”

He feels his own puzzled frown. Late for what?

“It’s only the thirteenth.”

Anniversary—no—birthday—no. What—? Oh for God’s sake. Valentine’s Day.

“I’m not complaining, mind. You can do it again tomorrow. Whatever you’ve been doing, you can do that tomorrow, too.”

Only he shouldn’t. He can’t. He really, really can’t.

And he can never tell Eric that he’d have taken a total stranger on the train, that he’d been hungry for distraction, relief, his motherboard was just scrambled.

By the time he’s got all this straight in his very not-straight head, he’s missed the moment to tell Eric he’s been to see John—to tell him casually, at least.

After the afterglow and the aftercare, there’s the relief of a solitary shower—221B still doesn’t have a shower that will comfortably hold two—and some thinking. He puts on the comfortable “athleisurewear” (vile neologism) Eric gave him for his birthday; despite the intolerable nomenclature it was an instant favourite. He stretches out on the sofa while Eric begins a round on the treadmill.

“Lock?” Eric calls from the weight room.

“Hmm?”

“You’ve saved all day tomorrow for me, right? For us?” Now Eric’s panting is from a different kind of exertion.

“Of course. You’ll tell me what you’ve got planned.”

Eric doesn’t answer. Perhaps it’s going to be a surprise. Sherlock tends to hate surprises, but he’s learning to reserve judgement.

It’s too soon yet to open the John wing of the Mind Palace. But now that he can—even without breaking and entering—acquire new data, he means to dust bits off, shift things around, add in the novelties.

Just at the moment, though, he’s wrestling with an unfamiliar sensation (oh, call it what it is, an emotion). He’s uneasy about what he did with Eric today. (Ashamed. You’re ashamed.) Not the sex. Never the sex. But making Eric into a means to an end, not an end in himself—without his knowledge—that isn’t on. They’re to be married, and Eric deserves his full attention. That wasn’t loving sex, whatever Martina meant by the concept: it was impersonal, even exploitative. He can’t do that again, and he has to make up for it. He’ll try to be the ideal companion on Valentine’s Day.

Late that night he texts John.

— Was that a tattoo I could almost see through your left shirt sleeve? SH

Deletes the text, types another draft.

— Thank you for showing me the drawings. They’re very good. SH

Delete.

— Your flat. Are you going to stay there? SH

Delete.

— Now you’re satisfied you’re in control, might you come back to London? SH

Delete.

— Would you believe it if I said I met your sister? Can’t say I liked her, but I think I could. SH

Delete, delete, delete.

It’s a relief to text John, even if he never taps “send.”

16 February 2015

Valentine’s Day is safely over when Eric asks if he’s going to see John again. Sherlock says lightly that he already has, on the Friday. Eric’s not an idiot, and he’s not fooled by studied nonchalance; Sherlock can see in neon letters that he’s thinking back to Friday afternoon. Making connections, probably not accurate ones. Though Sherlock can’t deny that seeing John did put him into something of a state.

After a few minutes Eric asks, “Is this going to change things between us?”

“What, seeing John? No, of course not. Why would it? We’re going to be married. Aren’t we?”

“It’s just—you might have loved him more than you love me.”

I might have. Certainly I loved him differently. More painfully.

“I never said I loved him at all,” Sherlock says carefully.

“You didn’t have to.”

“Oh, for—we weren’t lovers.”

“So you said,” said Eric, his tone quite hollow.

“I’m not going to have this conversation. I had to hear it from John a thousand times, I’m not going to repeat it to you a thousand times. He’s not gay.”

Eric must have thought Sherlock didn’t hear him when he muttered, “There’s only one reason that would bother you so much.”

But Sherlock heard him.

Chapter 7: Plate tectonics

Chapter Text

“Our love got lost”

Joni Mitchell, “A Case of You”

16 Feb. – 24 April 2015

For some weeks Sherlock doesn’t make any plan, let alone arrangement, to see John again. It isn’t to reassure Eric, or to spare his own stress levels for that matter, of course it isn’t. He’s moved on, and John has too, and they aren’t part of each other’s lives anymore. Let alone—he drops that thought.

But he always comes back to it: John’s an hour away, and open to seeing him. Sherlock tries out occasional bursts of texting in which they talk about trivia, mutual friends, or memories (carefully neutral). The topics aren’t the point; re-establishing contact is. Sherlock, who hates small talk, doesn’t hate it in texts with John.

What does John think about this? Sherlock can't ask him, so he asks the proxy who lives in the John wing of the mind palace. What would that John say about the texting?

You’ve texted me. A lot.

I’ve written texts to you. That’s different. I delete most of them. No wonder some of my texts confuse you. I forget that I’ve deleted the ones that would have made the next ones clear.

You should probably ask yourself why.

Because I’m just thinking things through. I don’t need you to—

No, you berk, not why you’re deleting texts, why you’re writing them. To me. You have a fiancé, you can bounce ideas off of him.

…

What, you’re not going to answer that?

I need to think about it. Do you mind when I text you?

If I minded, would I answer?

Weeks pass, and his equanimity creeps back, and Eric’s sudden suspicions about John seem to ebb. When it feels almost natural to bring John up, Sherlock makes another trek out to the hinterlands. In a week it’ll be spring, but for now it’s still damp and icy cold, and John meets him at the station to take him walking along the river.

Today there’s a different tension between them, as if John has something on his mind. Soon enough it comes out. From Molly, apparently, John’s learned the reasons for the fake suicide, and accepted that leaving him in hell for years was a monumental mistake, not indifference or intentional cruelty. Now, looking away across the water, he asks, “Tell me what you did while you were away. Please. I never asked, and I’d like to know.”

This isn't a question Sherlock's prepared an answer to; those weeks, months, years, are blurry now. Oh, he remembers the big picture: the pain and the tedium, and what he can now admit (if only to himself) was loneliness, and fear, and sometimes horror at things he had to do. He remembers the searing homesickness and how desperately he missed John, who’s at his side now but also terribly far away. And he knows he can’t tell it all, but John deserves to know, and Sherlock needs to say it—he never has, to anyone, outside of official reports. This neutral stretch of bare trees on the water, elemental and sombre, might be the right place for such a story of desolation.

He wasn’t just gone away during that time; Sherlock Holmes was gone altogether. His identity, his habits, his work, his values, and his—yes, loves—gone. In his place was a golem, never looking the same from one hunt to the next; an automaton, never using the same name or speaking the same language. A walking vendetta with a mounting list of scars and injuries, and hideous memories of doing outrageous harm to unpardonable people who’d more than deserved it. But every punishment he meted out drained him of a bit more of who he’d thought he was, back when he was Sherlock Holmes.

During his staggered narration, John is quiet. It’s a quiet Sherlock knew well, once: John’s solemnity refuses to hunt for comforting clichés; his silence shares the pain he hears. That discretion had always been able to make Sherlock open up, and he hopes he’s made himself understood—his remorse, especially. Whatever he went through when he wasn’t Sherlock Holmes, John was apparently going through worse.

So when they turn to walk back, he asks, “And in your own case? If you don’t mind.”

John too wasn’t himself during that time, it seems. He wasn’t at home, for all he was in London; he wasn’t a doctor, for all he was practicing. He wasn’t a soldier: there was no one he could defend or help, least of all himself. He clawed his way back to being John Watson, a better John Watson, through detox and therapy and drawing.

The story is elliptical and self-deprecating, but to Sherlock it’s a heroic tale and John’s survival a miracle.

He’s never felt more unworthy. With a sting of shame he remembers trying to patch John’s life story together in some way that would make the drinking not Sherlock’s fault, a bug built into him by genetics and experience, from adolescence (at least) to the day Sherlock gave him the key to 221B.

John made his own way out of the abyss with no Mycroft to deus-ex-machina him out of dying. And Sherlock will never again pretend that John’s despair was none of his doing. That John had to leave Sherlock behind to take back his own life should have made it clear to even the meanest intelligence.

When they’ve walked back to the bridge where they started, the visit is plainly over; they’ve just time for Sherlock to get back to the station for an express train. They’ve spent most of their walk not looking at each other, at least not at the same time; but the conversation needs some acknowledgment, so Sherlock stops and puts out his hand.

“So now we know. Friends, John?”

For one strained moment he thinks John isn’t going to shake his hand. But he does, and looks up, saying, “Always.”

It isn’t an apology, and it isn’t a healing; but it is a truce, and for now that is enough.

10 April 2015

It’s good to share The Work with John again, though sporadically and at a distance. He texts John about current cases, tries not to be too insistent. It still helps him think: to articulate his perplexities, to read John’s different perspective on them.

John’s mostly receptive. Just once he put his foot down, on a question regarding fingernails detached after death, but he’d always have done that, John hated every form of offence to the body. It outraged him as foundationally as the distortion of reason outraged Sherlock.

Eventually John was going to ask about his conversion from virtual celibacy and a haughty disregard for the bodily, to a relationship and an engagement. How would he take it, if Sherlock was candid about his use of strangers’ bodies for ulterior motives? And for his very specific ulterior motive, at that?

“We should have an engagement party. So I can meet your friends.”

Sherlock looks up, dismayed. “You have met them. We already had a party, at Christmas. I distinctly remember.”

“I wasn’t your fiancé then.”

Sherlock plays deliberately obtuse. “Our being engaged hasn’t changed them. Or you. I’m fairly certain.”

“I just think it makes sense to meet the people you care about. And for you to meet mine. At some point, for example, I’m going to meet your best man.”

“Eric. I hate small talk. I hate social occasions that drag on for hours. This is not going to change. I’m sorry, it’s just not. I’ve always been solitary, and at this age I doubt my tastes will change.”

“Well, I’m not proposing we make it a weekly thing.”

Sherlock yelps. “Weekly–! Getting married doesn’t mean I’m going to become sociable, you do know that.”

“And getting married doesn’t mean I’m going to become a hermit, you do know that?”

17 April 2015

Another full month’s passed before Sherlock makes his third trek out to Northern Light. With spring in full bloom despite the chill lingering in the air, they lunch outdoors at a riverside café under a cloudless sky.

And perhaps it’s the season of reawakening that prompts John to ask the question: “So what made you change your mind about relationships, and, you know, marriage?”

Matter-of-factly Sherlock answers, “I discovered that I quite like sex.”

John’s nonalcoholic beer must have gone down his windpipe, because his coughing fit goes on for at least a minute. When he can speak again, he rasps, “I could’ve told you it was worth pursuing.”

Sherlock, who hates hearing “I told you so,” doesn’t answer, just grimacing a bit, he hopes not too dramatically.

“But lots of people pursue it without relationships at all, let alone marriage.”

This is the moment he could say, “Yes, I tried that, and it worked until it didn’t,” but then he’d have to confess what it was working for, and he’s embarrassed just thinking about it; he isn’t ready for that conversation yet, and he’s sure John isn’t either. By the time a neutral answer comes to him, a couple of long minutes have gone by.

“I was given to understand it’s better with … sentiment.”

John looks pensive, as though he’s seriously considering the proposition: his own varied and lively sex life couldn’t always have entailed love, could it.

“So you set out to find someone to fall in love with.” John’s voice is oddly tight.

“Not at all. Falling in love with Eric was as easy as—” he pauses, thinking that this isn’t completely honest, he’s had to work at it—but it would be unkind to say so. (Disloyal, even, and he’s not going there again.) So he finishes, “—as easy as falling off a log.”

“So, uh, is it?” Why does he sound so strained?

“Is what what?”

“Is it better with sentiment?” John presses.

“Oh. Well. Still collecting data.” That at least is honest. He can’t entirely endorse Martina’s maxim just yet, but that may change.

He catches John’s eye and they both burst out laughing. It feels like a thousand other times they’ve laughed together, it feels like they’re finding their symbiosis again, it feels like his heart will soar or shatter.

When the waiter brings the bill, Sherlock asks John to be his best man. “I know you hate formal events as much as I do, but I need you there.” Please, John. For old time’s sake.

“I’d, um, be honoured.”

And before John sees him off at the station, he’s promised to come to 221B the following Friday, to meet Eric.

24 April 2015

Sherlock had meant to be at the flat when John arrived, make him feel welcome in what had once been his home. To smooth the introduction, especially, since that was bound to be awkward. So naturally this is the day he’s held up at NSY, can’t hail a cab and, once he does, gets stuck in traffic—of course he does, it’s Friday.

When he bounds up the stairs he hears John laughing, relaxed and candid, in the weight room, followed by Eric’s earnest, “So that’s the suite I had before I moved in here: the Bowflex, the rowing machine, the treadmill, the rack of kettle bells. But the bedroom was just big enough to add in the—”

“TRX suspension trainer, right. Another thing the Yanks cooked up in Afghanistan out of stuff they had lying around, because they weren’t busy enough over there.” Sherlock knows that tone: John’s voice always goes dry when he talks about the coalition forces in the war. “Does Sherlock use all this too?”

“Not in a million years. He’s the brains, I’m the brawn. He may think it’s a superficial and narcissistic obsession. He’s made a few snarky comments about the size of the mirror. And you should’ve seen what a nightmare it was to get all the equipment up here.”

Sherlock braces himself and calls out, “No talking about me behind my back, unless it’s incredibly complimentary.”

And right on cue Eric comes out to the sitting room to drape himself over his tardy fiancé, kiss his mouth, stake his claim.

John’s smiling placidly, body language perhaps a little stiff, but it has to be disconcerting, being the odd man out in 221B. Certainly Sherlock’s finding it surreal for John to be the one who doesn’t live here.

“Thanks for the gift card for Richard Way Books, Sherlock, that was a perfect birthday present. I used it to get Eric’s other book, and a book on retro drawing techniques I can actually use, and a—”

“A mystery novel, I’m sure.”

“Guilty as deduced. Watch out or I’ll start writing a mystery series about you.”

“Write one about Lestrade’s team instead. The mystery being how they’re still employed.”

Sherlock and John are laughing more than their moderately humorous exchange deserves, and Eric goes to set out a giant chef’s salad with a fresh baguette and some French cheeses “chambré, at room temperature,” he emphasises.

They sit down, Sherlock stiffening when Eric offers to introduce John to an attractive crime novelist friend. It feels officious, sounds like possessiveness. John isn’t receptive, saying only that it isn’t the right time.

“Well, maybe you’ll meet someone at the wedding,” Eric perseveres. “’Goin’ to a weddin’ is the makin’ of anither,’ as the song goes. Love is in the air, not to mention all that champagne.”

Without any visible embarrassment, John says, “I don’t drink anymore, can’t. Recovering alcoholic. So the love in the air will have to be enough.”

Eric, just reaching to pour the wine, freezes for a millisecond, then asks, “What can we give you to drink with dinner? Lock makes a mean fresh-squeezed orange juice, with lemon juice in for extra oomph.”

John, sounding bemused, accepts the offer, and while Sherlock juices the citrus, conversation turns to the wedding. It appears to be metastasising by the hour; next the royal family will be invited, or the venue moved to Westminster Abbey. John’s watching Sherlock closely, if surreptitiously, and he’s caught between his loathing of archaic and sentimental ceremonies, and loyalty to Eric.

“John, you’ll be writing one of those famous British best man speeches, right? Mockery and inside jokes and lampooning the groom?”

Sherlock’s insides curdle at the thought. He’s given John plenty of material for mockery, and plenty of motivation; but no one’s ridicule hurts like his. This may have been a terrible idea after all.

“Oh, God no. I hate that. Sherlock and I take the piss all the time, but—I’ve never understood why a man should be made a fool of in front of his spouse on their wedding day. Nope, I’ll write something short and sweet. I’ll have Mrs H look over it, and Lestrade. You’ll have your own best man, won’t you? And he’ll have his own speech?”

“She, and her, but yeah.”

Awash in relief, Sherlock tunes out and finishes cleaning the juicer.

When he tunes in again, it’s to John’s wry, “So it’s you who does the cooking?”

Eric’s laughing too, “When anyone does. There’s a lot of takeaway, and a lot of salad assembly. He’s definitely not marrying me for my cooking, though.”

“I can’t really visualise Sherlock marrying anyone for their cooking. Maybe excellence in cleaning laboratory glassware?”

“Oh, he takes care of that himself, down in the lab in 221C. I wouldn’t dare touch some of that stuff, it could burn the skin off my hands.”

John looks surprised. “Wait, if you’ve taken over 221C, couldn’t that have been the exercise room, save the removing people struggling up the stairs? You were always so attached to your precious bedroom, Sherlock!”

Dead silence.

John backtracks, “Of course, it’d have been more disruptive”— for Eric, Sherlock thinks, because it’s quite disruptive enough for him to have to separate his books and his laboratory. Eric breaks in to say they have reasons for wanting their bedroom farther away from the housekeeper. John’s eyes open wide and he looks at Sherlock, all but mouthing, housekeeper?

Shortly before 9 John gets up to leave, and Sherlock walks him down to the street door.

“Lovely man. Seems bombproof. Just right for you.”

And Sherlock, who’d once said the same about Mary, is startled into a laugh. “Come back soon, won’t you? Mrs Hudson hasn’t seen you properly.”

John smiles and tosses his chin up in that way that could mean twelve things, and turns away still smiling, gesturing “bye” with his hand as he strides off toward Baker Street station.

On his way upstairs, Sherlock regrets that what he’s feeling right now is, again, relief. But juggling the two parts of his life—before, and after—is an exercise in constant vigilance, and he remembers why he hates socialising and prefers solitude and relishes silence and oh, Eric is talking.

“Well, he seems nice. Repressed. Holds a lot in, doesn’t he.” Eric’s always more perceptive than Sherlock expects—why does he keep forgetting that?

He doesn’t know what to say about John’s reticences, so he asks, “That’s all?”

Eric keeps clearing the table as he answers, absently, “Well, he’s shorter than I expected. Pleasant, conversable. Kind of ordinary.”

A burst of indignation makes Sherlock turn away. John? Ordinary? Only to ordinary minds.

Unfair. He’d sought the ordinary, in Eric. And Eric’s opinion is tinged by jealousy.

He turns back to take him by the shoulders, kiss his temple, and say, “Just wait until I meet your best friend and call her ordinary.”

Chapter 8: Dreams before dawn

Chapter Text

“You are in my blood,

you're my holy wine”

Joni Mitchell, “A Case of You”

Late April and May 2015

Again they skip a few Fridays. Or is it Sherlock skipping them? He’s not willing to look too closely, but even squeezing his eyes shut he can’t help noticing a few unsettling details.

A disappointed murmur from Mrs Hudson, carrying away a plate full of her best ginger nut biscuits, nearly untouched.

A jab at Mycroft about pastry that generates a waspish, “At least I’m eating. You’re down by, what? Nearly a stone? Is there trouble in paradise, brother mine?”

A murmured conversation between Donovan and Lestrade, of which he could hear only, “Not completely focused. Absentminded.” And “Tamed. Like a leopard on a leash.”

Mycroft asking mildly if there are danger nights. “Would you tell me if there were? And if not me, would you tell John, or your fiancé?”

The spike of annoyance that Mycroft apparently can’t bring himself to say Eric’s name, gives Sherlock an excuse for not examining why Mycroft would even ask such a question. Let alone almost gently. There are no danger nights. Are there? There are night dangers, that he must admit.

Because for the first time since Eric moved in, the dreams are back.

15 May 2015

Three weeks after his last visit John comes to London again, this time brandishing a draft of his best man’s speech, asking Eric for an honest read. Lestrade hadn’t been any help at all, he says, and Mrs H is too emotional about—well, pretty much everything, at the minute—to make any useful edits.

Sherlock’s not allowed to read it yet, or to deduce it, says John sternly, his small smile tugging at something it’s best not to examine too closely. So given that eavesdropping and deduction are forbidden, he’s banished to the laboratory to speculate. Good thing the temperatures are warming and the damp is dropping: 221C is not particularly comfortable for sitting still in.

When he decides it’s safe to go back upstairs, it’s to John’s voice saying, “Ah, Sherlock’s playing was one of my favourite things about living here. Haven’t heard a note in years, though, except the day I interrupted him, when I dropped by. In February.”

“What was I playing?” Sherlock asks, padding into the sitting-room as quietly as he can. He knows perfectly well what he was playing; he remembers every second of that meeting.

John, bizarrely, goes red in the face. Is he embarrassed because he doesn’t remember?

But he does. “Bach. You were playing Bach.”

“The prelude to the third violin partita. It’s a favourite of mine.”

“Mine, too,” says John, quite awkwardly.

From his slight frown, Eric seems uneasy about this innocuous exchange. “You could play it now, Lock.”

He doesn’t want to play it with Eric looking bored, or John looking nostalgic. “I will. When it sounds right again. It’s not worth hearing yet.”

Just in case Eric’s about to knock John for six by asking for “How Are Things in Glocca Morra,” he briskly changes the subject.

Shortly after, John takes off for Jermyn Street and a fitting. Sherlock doesn’t accompany him: too much static in the air. Nor does he arrange for another visit in Baker Street, but he dreams. Oh, he dreams.

The ancients believed that what we dream just before dawn is a true presage of things to come.

If that were so, then what he’d been dreaming—when his eyes flew open and his hand flung Eric’s off his crotch with spontaneous revulsion—would come to pass. John, his eyes hungry, his head dipping to Sherlock’s straining erection, his voice low and lewd. His mouth closing hot and greedy around Sherlock’s co*ck, hands tugging him close, closer, Sherlock’s brain blissfully blanking out as he comes and comes and comes into John’s gutteral moans and eager mouth.

Somehow he gets free, ignoring the unquiet question Eric mutters half-asleep.

He stares into the bathroom mirror. He can’t deny the truth of the dream. Not a literal truth, not a future inevitability. The truth he can’t deny is the one it shows him about himself: what he really wants, whom he really wants.

There’s still time. The window is closing fast, but there’s still time to call it all off. Even if John had never come back, he’d still be considering it. Eric is proving to be a phase in his life after John, not a destination. Now John’s back, and they’re friends again, but no more than. And it seems a cruel move to devastate Eric for someone who will never stop calling him “mate,” who has him permanently slotted into the category of mad bastard friend. Worse: toxic friend, to be handled with care and from a distance.

The John in his mind takes him to task for this cowardice:

This isn’t the first time. You know it isn’t.

It’s just the first time you’re being honest with yourself about it.

That first day you saw Wargrave, and went back to London.

That wasn’t … agitation. You weren’t disconcerted. You wanted me.

Not a stranger, and not Eric: me.

More than once you’ve woken up hard as a rock, and gone down to shower, to deal with it yourself.

Telling yourself you wouldn’t use Eric again for generalised lust,

free-floating desire: it sounded so noble. But it wasn’t generic, was it.

It was a very specific desire, or you’d have felt just fine about turning to your lover. Your fiancé,

whom you aren't turning to very often of late. Don't think he hasn't noticed.

It’s always John you want.

You’ve just gotten really good about lying to yourself about it,

hiding it from yourself the way you hide it from everyone else.

What does John want? Have you ever asked him? Asking me still isn’t getting you anywhere.

7 June 2015

He’d had no case in Henley on the 13th of February, but because the Fates are sad*sts, he does have one in Nettlebed on the 7th of June. Sherlock’s quite aware, as he’s being driven out John’s way, that it’s Friday, and that John is probably free. He doesn’t text.

He’s escorted to the crime scene, and from the moment he steps into the dead man’s bedroom and begins cataloguing details, something’s off.

The house is a semi-detached with a lush, overplanned garden, English style but maniacally tended. An interior that aspires to an Architectural Digest photo shoot. A bedroom so mannered it looks more like a stage set.

He makes a mental tile game of what he sees and shifts the tiles at lightning speed, positing and discarding scenarios, forming and discarding hypotheses, faster than he can articulate them to the stammering police inspector on the scene. Lestrade—Donovan—Christ, even Inspector Clouseau would be able to follow him, what are they hiring into the force these days, and he’s about to explode, but he doesn’t text.

Phantom John tells him to slow down and articulate his uncertainties as questions: it’s quite possible something’s been moved or removed, and he needs to know what. But he can’t think, focus, concentrate, knowing that John’s seven miles off and probably available. It’s been so long since he and John were at a crime scene together, and with the wedding eight days away, it may never happen again. He’s blocked, and frustrated; John is right there, close to hand, and he’d always been able to break a logjam.

He texts.

— John. Are you there? SH

— I need your help. SH

— I’m overlooking something. SH

No reply. John always replies.

Except for today, apparently.

— Are you ignoring me? SH

— Answer me, John. SH

Finally his phone lights up. Not before time.

— Can you give me a little background? Something to go on?

Oh thank the God he doesn’t believe in.

— 50 years old, male, apparently by suffocation. Undressed on the bed, but I’m not convinced by the auto-erotic asphyxiation clues scattered about. SH

This time the answer’s immediate.

— What clues? What do you see that you don’t believe?

— A velvet rope around the neck, but unused. Several candles, suggesting a romantic or sexual set-up, which I don’t think is consistent with a date with oneself. But no obvious sign anyone else has been here. SH

— So what else might it be besides AEA? And why are you texting me?

— I don’t know, so far it’s just a hunch. Because you channel light even via text. SH

He’s mortified even to type the word “hunch,” but on his own he hasn’t been able to assemble the incongruous details into a coherent picture. That John channels light—that’s simply true, if metaphorical. He’s typed and sent a new message before he’s thought it through.

— Imagine your powers if you were here now. SH

Will he come? Or will he snub the obvious invitation? The seconds crawl by before the reply comes:

— Where is here?

Within twenty minutes John’s there, looking around the room carefully before pointing at the pillows on the bed. “Why’re the pillowcases different?” and of course, that’s all it takes. Someone had replaced a pillow with one covered in a very slightly different hue. No one so obsessive in his gardening and decor would have their bed linens unmatched: Sherlock had seen it but not registered it, not understood it.

It’s as exhilarating as it always was, John’s the prism, by his very angle of vision refracting the light into all the colours Sherlock wasn’t seeing — they work together as seamlessly as ever and the epiphany that had eluded him crests and breaks over him. John stares at him with the old incredulous admiration and he craves that, he needs it, it’s John who makes his mind work this way, John whose questions and demurrals channel his flood of analysis like water hitting a seawall before curling back into its proper place.

He crosses the ridiculous fussy bedroom in two strides, tears open the armoire to find a matching pillow that’s wet, almost certainly with saliva, and bellows,

“Of course, he couldn’t have suffocated himself with it, and if he had mastered that neat trick, he couldn’t then have closed it in the wardrobe, could he? Find out whom he’s been frequenting or paying, or see who inherits, if you can manage that much.” He hurtles out of the room.

Minutes later John is standing in the June sunlight with the look that says he’s missed this too, that this is what he and Sherlock are for, making sense together of the wreckage and the misdirection that always follow when human lives are ended before their time. From the beginning they’ve been a unit, more than a team, and Sherlock wonders why he’s never seen—never, in all this time—that John is right there, always was, if he’d only had the courage to go to him. So he does. He looks down from six inches away, and bends to kiss him.

And freezes. Because John’s eyes are widening, he’s surprised, maybe appalled, and Sherlock curses himself and his wishful thinking, he’s ruining everything, again, and he cannot have this because it isn’t mutual; John doesn’t want it and never has, and the only thing to do now is to step back and whirl away and pretend it never happened.

Which, given that it did not in fact happen, should be easier, but is decidedly not. There are people staring, people he doesn’t know but he knows they’ll talk, it’s what people do. He turns away to scold the police inspector (that he does it in a ferocious undertone is phantom John’s influence) about the inexcusably amateur oversight in the room search. He shouldn’t have been called in from London at all, he hisses, and when he’s relieved his overburdened temper he stalks out, waiting for John to join him so they can make the awkward goodbyes that lack the smallest shred of plausible deniability to clothe them in any normalcy or dignity.

There’s a cab waiting, miraculously, mercifully, because he can’t be here any longer, flayed and humiliated, with John undoubtedly repulsed and embarrassed at what just—almost—didn’t happen, not meeting his eye, resolutely normal, dear God, and not a minute too soon he’s speeding back toward London in a state he’s been dodging it seems like forever.

If he needed any proof that what he’d felt that day in February had been not turmoil but arousal—his current state of utter turmoil, utterly devoid of arousal, is that proof.

After spending an indecent amount on cabfare to escape John’s no doubt pitying eye, he comes in to find Eric still or again hard at it sculpting this muscle or that on the panoply of weight equipment that—now he looks—is beginning to bow the bedroom flooring. He considers an urban obstacle-course run, but mental tumult goes poorly with parkour, could more likely provide injury than relief.

He flings his best headphones at Eric and goes to pick up his violin and channel into sound every iota of his regret, mortification, and despair.

When he finally comes to himself again, the blameless instrument and the ambient air are as flayed as he is, and Mrs H and Eric are staring at him with worry. As kind as they mean to be, he can’t bear their solicitude, he can’t bear their knowing or not knowing of his utterly disastrous mistake.

7–12 June 2015

Unless maybe it wasn’t disastrous? Maybe John was only surprised, not displeased, not reluctant. A few hours after his punishing session on the violin Sherlock starts to hope, in spite of himself, that perhaps he hasn’t ruined everything after all. If that’s so, John will make contact, it’s only logical. Probe for more information, an explanation. Give Sherlock some hint whether he should continue evasive strategies, or offer an opening.

So he waits to hear from John. Which isn’t what he usually does, but he needs to take his cue from John, see what he’ll do unprompted. He has to wait.

Between the wedding frenzy that’s taken over 221B and his obsessive parsing and re-parsing of what happened on Friday, his nerves are coming through his skin. He aches for a hit, but holds firm. Eric’s parents arrive from America; Sherlock registers them through a haze, and flips his autopilot “manners” switch that has saved him many a time when he didn’t want to attend but didn’t want to offend either.

Amanda, Eric’s self-described bff, seems a cheerful, sensible soul who tries to get to know Sherlock. He can’t quite focus on her, and probably leaves her wondering what her bff sees in him (beyond the sexual compatibility Eric’s been playing up in public for some reason, probably to compensate for the recent fraying of compatibility and sex).

He’s preoccupied, not with cases—he promised not to take anything on this week or next, until after the honeymoon—but with the case of John Watson. He needs data. He needs a reaction, an impression, a cue.

And John must know he’s waiting, but he doesn’t text. Or call, or email.

Finally, the morning of the wedding rehearsal and the dinner, afterwards, he hears Eric call John.

“Hey, John, Eric here. You remember the rehearsal’s today at half-seven, right? Will you be coming here first, or meeting us directly at the Quartermain? Yeah, good, that’ll make transportation easier for the 221B crowd. Listen, I think I mentioned the photographer will be there tonight, taking some unposed shots. You don’t have to wear your formal duds though, we’ll all be casual tonight, and crisp and fresh tomorrow. Listen, you want to talk to Lock? He’s right here. —No? Okay, then, we’ll see you at the venue.”

John’s given him his cue, then. Sherlock turns away.

Chapter 9: Things fall apart

Chapter Text

“All good dreamers pass this way some day

Hidin' behind bottles in dark cafés”

Joni Mitchell, “The Last Time I Saw Richard”

12 June 2015

John’s late. Why is he late? Or is he not coming at all? Why was this damnable rehearsal and dinner scheduled so late in the first place?

Eric looks at him, startled and hurt. He said that aloud? Dear God.

“Lock, it’s wedding season. This is the only slot they had open for the rehearsal. We agreed on doing both the rehearsal and the dinner in the same place.”

“Of course. Sorry.”

A frosty tension coats the first few photos, as the photographer takes candids instead of waiting for the rehearsal proper to start. Sherlock’s fairly certain they won’t make very inspiring shots. Mycroft is making unctuous small talk with the four parents and Amanda. Mrs H, Molly, Greg, and Mike Stamford are huddled a few metres away.

The—chapel? Hall? Wedding chamber? is decorated in that bland good taste that borders on the tasteless. Mummy’s murmuring over the flowers as everyone takes their places near what obviously isn’t an altar, where the registrar will stand.

Some clatter from outside and John’s walking in gingerly, well, teetering a bit, lurching though steadied by a total stranger, and Sherlock’s heart sinks. He’s—clearly inebriated.

“I, hullo everybody, shorry, Serlock, I mean, sorry, late, cabbie’s fault”—and the outraged face beside John must be that of the cabbie, unjustly defamed.

“Yes, sir, my fault. I stopped so you could be sick by the side of the road instead of inside my cab.”

Silence falls over the group and Sherlock looks more closely at John, swaying in place with a vacant look on his face. Oh, God. If they get through this evening it will be a sheer bloody miracle. Both Eric and Mycroft are looking outraged, doubtless for different reasons.

Lestrade bundles John into position at the dais with the grooms and Eric’s Maid of Honour. The registrar—no one Sherlock knows, just a figurehead to marry them—walks through a diluted, thankfully secular, marriage ceremony. An awful foreboding settles into his chest and he watches, grieving for John’s current state, his future. What in God’s name had brought this on? John had been doing so well, had seemed beyond the risk of relapse.

Formulaic phrases in a plummy sing-song glide unheard past Sherlock; all his attention is on John, visibly more agitated as the practice “ceremony” proceeds. Lestrade’s still propping John up, his role not foreseen in the original plan but just now very necessary.

“Or forever hold my piss,” mimics John, and giggles.

When John tries to interrupt the officiant, Lestrade whispers something in his ear.

“Well, what if I wanna spoil the wedding?” at least, that’s what the gibberish sounds like.

Mycroft’s lip quirks, the bastard. Now he looks riveted. Fascinated, almost.

Stamford joins Lestrade in trying to calm John, but he gets belligerent, snapping himself free from their supporting grip like the soldier he still is and Sherlock remembers, oh how he remembers, the moments of lucidity and coordination and strength which, under pressure of danger or emotion, can break through the turgid haze of intoxicants. Lestrade and Stamford fall back and this is it, the point of no return, the point where the polite pretence that nothing is amiss can no longer be sustained.

Once free from their constraint John, from belligerent, softens to sappy. Simply and tragically, he turns to face everyone but stares at Sherlock as he says, “I can’t. Sorry, mate, sorry Sherlock. This’s’s’s’s killing me. I can’t—it’s jus’—I shouldm be your witness while you marry somebody else. Himbody else. Him.” And he nods clumsily at Eric.

John’s speech is slurred, sloppy, but has its own weird stateliness as he burbles on, verbs apparently optional, sentence structure non-existent.

“You don’t, you didn’t, you never”—well, that was the gist of it, but never what? “if I’d thought—y’see but y’don’t observe” and here John goes into a giggling fit which no one seems even remotely inclined to share— “didn’t know how to tell you, still don’, but you have to know, have to know, before’s too late, have to tell you I love—.”

Whatever else John has to tell isn’t made any more explicit because his legs crumple under him like a collapsing card table and he hits the floor, boneless and senseless, down and completely out.

A moment of frozen silence, then all hell breaks loose. The Oh my God’s are flying, Sherlock’s parents are twin statues, Eric’s are shouting abuse, Molly’s eyes are huge and her hands are clapped over her mouth. Eric is looking so stricken, so wretched, but John’s not moving and not even breathing and that’s all Sherlock can focus on just now.

He drops to his knees beside John and roars to everyone to stand back except Mike Stamford, who can surely judge what kind of dangerous syncope this is and whether John needs an ambulance. Sherlock’s hands are all over, feeling John for fever, for any limb out of place from the crashing fall, for a clear airway, until Stamford swats him away, saying “Let me see, damn it.” Stamford lifts John’s eyelids—whites only—and listens for his breathing and heartbeat, and before he says anything Eric is hauling Sherlock up from his knees and bawling something at him, something he can’t make out but is surely irrelevant, and Sherlock’s not even looking at him but still staring round down at John and Stamford.

“Listen to me, Lock,” Eric’s insisting, and Sherlock is suddenly furious, is Eric blind, can’t he see that John’s in danger, that he needs help, Eric will have to wait, and he realises he’s shouting all of this in his most savage bellow.

Eric takes a step backward and looks not merely mortified but suddenly aware. Amanda slips an arm around his waist and Sherlock turns back to John.

Stamford asks John repeatedly if he’s okay, but John’s out cold and doesn’t answer. “Pulse and breathing are weak but stable,” he mutters, and checks his watch. He raises his voice to say, “It’s been two minutes. Call 999. Greg, help me shift him onto his side.”

They make right angles of John’s hips and knees, and Stamford tilts John’s head back to keep the airway open.

Mycroft, damn him, steps over to tell Stamford, “I’ve called my agency’s emergency medical personnel, and they’re on their way. If this is alcohol poisoning, does Doctor Watson need to be admitted to a hospital?”

Stamford looks up, grim. “If we knew for certain that it was nothing but alcohol poisoning, no, he’d not need to be in hospital, but he certainly can’t be left alone.”

Sherlock’s brain stutters back to life again and he pulls out his phone and texts Harry Watson.

— You said you’d come if he needed you. He does now. He’s passed out, at The Quartermain, coordinates attached. Can you come? SH

Two interminable minutes later, a reply:

— Don’t leave him, on my way, 40 minutes

— Doctor friend is with him now, emergency medical team will have seen him when you get here. SH

— WTF happened?

— Nothing. My wedding rehearsal, he arrived drunk and lost consciousness. SH

— Jesus that’s not nothing

— Help’s coming. Are you safe to drive SH

He hopes to God she’s still sober. It would need only an accident to—but her next text is reassuring, if surprising.

— Clara will drive leaving now

When he looks up Eric is staring at him, in fact everyone is, excepting of course John, blissfully unaware on the floor. “What,” he says savagely.

“This is over. I’m out of here. You don’t—you don’t care about anyone but yourself, and him. I’m going back to the flat.”

Mycroft, curse him, interrupts. “Go with him, Sherlock. Leave John to us. He’ll be well taken care of.”

Anyone who thinks I’ll leave him in this condition is an utter moron, he informs Mycroft without bothering to speak, and his brother shrugs fatalistically and says, “Of course. Eric, Sherlock will be back shortly, and meanwhile you all can salvage what’s left of the evening.”

Eric, goaded beyond his limits, snarls, “Salvage—! There’s nothing to salvage here, and there won’t be any wedding. I’m just glad this happened when it did.”

And about this Sherlock feels absolutely nothing. Not sorrow, not contrition, not regret. Eric’s clearly waiting for an answer from him, so he says only, “I’ll be an hour or two.”

Eric’s party closes ranks around him, and that’s good, he’ll need someone to side with him about this, but John needs Sherlock here, now, and he’s not leaving.

Mycroft’s “agency team” isn’t an ambulance service, it’s an impressively expert team of doctors with a mobile lab. John doesn’t come to when they arrive, or while they’re drawing blood and running simple tests. Sherlock nudges Molly over to confer with them, but she protests, “I can’t do anything, Sherlock, he’s not dead,” which makes Stamford laugh and Sherlock’s blood run cold.

John doesn’t come to while Mycroft lays down the law for the remaining guests, who in their turn have closed ranks around their friend on the floor. Sherlock doesn’t pay much heed to any of them: John and the doctors have his full attention, until he becomes aware of his parents’ plaintive voices at his elbow. Mummy and Daddy are bewildered: they don’t know John but they do know Eric, and they keep nudging Sherlock to go after his fiancé, until Mycroft takes them in hand.

“Mummy. Daddy. This isn’t helping. None of us can leave John until we know that he is not in danger. What kind of friend would Sherlock be, if he did? He and Eric can talk when they’re both calmer. Do go wait in the vestibule while the medics finish here.”

John doesn’t come to when the manager comes in and informs Sherlock that his fiancé has cancelled the wedding, adding helpfully that none of the agreed-upon price is refundable at this point. Mycroft shoos him away as well. To Sherlock John looks stable, his colour is acceptable, his breathing is stertorous but steady; but then he isn’t a doctor, and John isn’t waking up.

John doesn’t come to when Harry and Clara finally turn up, or when the medical team loads him, inert and grey and sweating, into the medical transport, to take him to a nearby hospital for more tests. Sherlock makes Harry promise to text him with any new information.

When he finally turns his full attention on Mycroft, his brother is subdued and solicitous. Worried for him. After their vicious set-to in February they’d spoken again, of course, but the breach was unhealed. And now, after Eric’s furious declaration, Mycroft is behaving with kindness, not complacency. Sherlock sets the thought aside for later.

With suspicious gentleness Mycroft suggests he return to Baker Street. “You’ll be updated, I promise. Ms Watson has also promised. If you stay here much longer, you’ll—well, there’s no advantage to it. Go home, Sherlock. See what fences you can mend.”

Sherlock looks around at Mummy and Daddy, Molly, Stamford, Lestrade, Mrs Hudson, and sighs, “Should I take Mrs H with me?”

“Upon no account. It’s been a draining evening. I’ll keep everyone here and feed them, then get them on their way.”

With unmixed gratitude Sherlock shrugs himself into his jacket, waves lightly to everyone in a semaphore that clearly means “I’m done in, don’t ask me anything,” and steps outside to find Anthea by the long black car, ready to escort him back to 221B.

The flat does not, for the moment, feel much like home. The only bright spot is that Eric’s parents and Amanda have gone to their hotel, leaving Eric to berate him in private.

“I knew something was wrong, it’s been killing me. I hoped you were just having cold feet and I tried to be understanding. But you—he—it’s him you care about, and you didn’t even have the guts to tell me. I didn’t deserve that. That deception. That humiliation. I just didn’t.”

Sherlock can’t blame him.

Eric is entirely right about where his priorities lie, have lain for a very long time. I’d have thrown it all over last week, in a heartbeat. Only because of the look on John’s face—and the silence after—did I keep up this charade.

He blames himself for not noticing that Eric has been miserable because of John. Or rather, because of Sherlock. He’d noticed only his own misery, not Eric’s.

But one thing in Eric’s recriminations poleaxes Sherlock.

“I don't care what he said tonight, John doesn’t love you. John doesn’t even want you, he just wants you all to himself. He’s vicious, and narcissistic, and manipulative, and toxic”—and he went on to hurl all the facile words people get out of books of cheap popular psychology.

Sherlock’s always known that John was possessive. Jealous, even; but back then, he didn’t care. John was jealous of Sherlock’s attention, though without sexual desire, apparently. He wanted to be Sherlock’s most important person. But he already was, so where, Sherlock always thought, was the problem? And thus what need for a solution?

Sherlock for his part also wanted to be the centre of John’s universe, if he couldn’t be more; and John’s half-hearted pursuit of women to date, and his bristling jealousy of Sherlock, reassured him that he was.

So what Eric’s just told him is all too believable: John doesn’t want him, but wants Sherlock all to himself.

Close to eleven he hears Mrs H let herself in by the street door, hears her hesitate at the foot of the steps, then give up and go in her own door. Just as well.

Could everything he’s ever thought about John be a stupid self-delusion? He’s wanted John in every way, wanted him so tenaciously and so passionately, and if John only wants to keep him from everyone else—

He feels cold, and foolish, and filled with dread. Exactly the way Eric feels, seemingly.

They can’t connect, they can’t apologise, they can’t console each other. The night before their wedding and they’re standing in the rubble of it, of all of it. Texts from Harry don’t help; Sherlock’s thirsty for news, he can’t keep himself from reading and answering.

— He’s stable. Still unconscious but it seems to be just the booze

— Where is he? Are you with him? SH

— Course we are. We’re at some sketchy but well equipped clinic by the river

— He’s being examined, tests done, blood alcohol level not even that high

— He’s been on the dry, probably reacted more to a smaller amount of booze

Sherlock tries to wait until Eric has talked himself out before checking his mobile again. He fails.

— Have they admitted him? SH

— It’s not that kind of clinic

— I’m going back to his flat to stay the night with him, Clara’s off home to Upminster

— Will you be there alone with him? No other medical personnel? SH

— There’s a nurse too

— Is your brother trustworthy?

Good question. Harry is no fool. But in this case—

— You can trust John with him. SH

— Thought so

— Are you coming? Your brother says not to

Whatever the hell Mycroft is playing at, Sherlock’s in no mood just now to see John.

— No. I’m not coming. Thank you. Please update me tomorrow. SH

When Eric can’t stand his absent attention anymore, he tells him to go sleep somewhere else—well, he knows about the bolt holes—and to leave the flat to him until he can pack up and move out. Not that he knows where he’ll go. Sherlock, he says, can go to f*cking Amsterdam alone for all he cares, he never wants to see him again.

Sherlock collects the bag he’d nearly finished packing for the honeymoon, and with a blend of remorse and craven relief, says a subdued goodbye. Eric, standing in the kitchen with a glass of white wine, doesn’t answer.

13 June 2015 [thoughts from a bolt hole]

Sherlock had spent a couple of hours Friday evening veering between hope and disbelief. What he could decipher of John’s drunken ramble could really mean only one thing: that watching Sherlock love and marry someone else had been killing him, and he wanted to stop the wedding. Certainly that’s the impression everyone else in the room had taken away from the mortifying few minutes of befuddled oratory.

But there was a great deal he couldn’t make out, between the slurring and the ellipses and the soggy snuffles, and who knows what those bits added up to? It could be a sentimental declaration of platonic love for a best friend, such as a particularly repressed straight man might require a large dose of alcohol to make out loud and in public.

So at the Quartermain, then on the way home, he was swinging between two alternatives: that John—his north star, his centre of gravity, pickled and ridiculous and utterly beloved despite his inopportune display—loves him exactly as he is loved; and that John loves him as the resolutely straight man he’s always insisted he is.

But then Eric had wrenched this entire scenario sideways, with what he must admit is a plausible take. And if John didn’t love him in either way, but merely wanted Eric out of the picture—could Sherlock live with that? No. It would mean a selfishness that he had never suspected, and an imbalance between them that could never work, over time. Worse: it would mean that Sherlock had never known John at all.

The prospect freezes him to the bone. It would mean he’d imagined the devotion, the affinity, that has anchored him and everything he believed, everything he’s done, for the past five years.

He doesn’t sleep.

Sherlock’s got very good at finding silver linings, but there isn’t one, here. Unless the fact that John is all he’s thinking about, and not Eric, makes it a good thing the wedding’s off.

He receives an update from Mycroft, granular and reassuring. There too his officious brother tells him to stay away from John. He doesn’t need that admonition to stay away.

Saturday passes with just three texts from Harry, signing off as she left John in an worrisome slumber. She and Mycroft concur that John shouldn’t find her there when he wakes. Sherlock’s less certain.

The hour of the wedding ceremony passes, the hours of the reception. He’s unmoved by the abyss between what was supposed to be happening today, and what is happening. From Eric he receives a few stony texts asking the location of some object or another that he’s obviously looking to pack. When texts from John start flooding in, late in the day, he archives them unread and mutes the number.

He shies away from even thinking about John; Eric’s words are a third-degree burn.

Sunday afternoon he’s on his way to Amsterdam.

Chapter 10: Gradual clearing

Chapter Text

“With your face sketched on it twice”

Joni Mitchell, “A Case of You”

16 June 2015

It’s almost summer and the sun is glittering on the water, lighting the colourful canal boats, gilding the house façades. There’s a cheerful energy in the air typical of cities with a high proportion of pedestrians and bicycles, and a much lower one of cars and lorries. Sherlock can gauge the ambient temperature from the bare arms and sunhats and ices—it’s hot for this location.

So why is he so cold? His core temperature has gone deathlike, as if he’d been cryogenically frozen, defrosted, and set in motion before he’d been properly warmed. He’s suspended in exile and in limbo, waiting for his flat to be vacated by the man he was supposed to be here with.

He’s not sent or answered a text since Friday evening. The two exceptions are Harry Watson and Mycroft. Harry’s texts had petered out mid-day on Saturday, when she announced that she left John out cold in his flat—sleeping, that is, not unconscious. That had to be good news, though Sherlock’s not certain what he feels about anything to do with John. He’d cleared his calendar for this whole week, so work texts are few to none; but he’s a bit surprised to hear nothing more from Eric, nothing from anyone involved in the wedding (his parents aside), nothing even from Mycroft, after his reassurance on Sunday that John was vertical and ambulatory. As for John himself—those texts are still in exile, automatically archived.

He takes his temperature, as it were. He’s not agitated, surprisingly. He has no interest whatsoever in hooking up, even less in shooting up. That for months on end he’d had to do the first to avoid the second, seems utterly impossible. As though it had been someone else, not himself.

He’s not hungry, though he can’t remember his last full meal. Sunday afternoon, when he noticed he wasn’t steady on his feet, he ate a banana from the hotel lobby. He hates bananas. Mostly it’s been coffee and tea, the odd speculoos biscuit, the occasional pastry. He’s not slept more than a few hours since he got here, never more than an hour at a time.

In sum: suspended animation and indifference. A muffled and distant pain he’s unwilling to be fully present to. And miles and miles of walking.

Where are you, John? Are you all right?

Can’t tell where I am, really. What I am.

Did you ever care about me that way? Sometimes I thought you did, but were just denying it even to yourself.

Could be.

Other times I thought you didn’t, and couldn’t, and that hurt but it was nothing personal, you just weren’t wired that way.

That’s possible too.

The question’s moot. At the moment I don’t feel anything at all, one way or the other.

That won’t last. You’re cauterising.

Tell me, doctor.

Trauma response. You’ve shut down to avoid pain. It’s temporary.

And you? What state are you in? Cauterised, or suffering, or merely embarrassed?

You’re still asking me things you have to ask him. If you want to know, that is.

I’m not sure I do want to know.

If you do, you know where to find him.

He starts by opening John’s archived texts. As he’s starting, a new one comes in.

— I’m so, so sorry, Sherlock. I’m coming to Amsterdam. If you don’t want to see me, you only have to say. But if I don’t hear from you, I’m coming

He must want to know after all, because he doesn’t tell John not to come.

He hates waiting. He hates it even more viscerally when he doesn’t know how long he has to wait.

Why didn’t he bring his violin?

After several long and gruelling hours the room phone rings. He picks up to hear John’s voice, asking if he can come up.

“Room 312.”

He’s still frozen, but lets a visibly tense John into the room. Sherlock examines him quickly—nervous, still shaky, overheated, contrite—and gestures him to the sofa, cutting him off when he goes to speak, going straight to the point.

“Why did you never text me that whole week before the rehearsal?”

John looks startled, saying slowly, “You seemed rattled after we—in Nettlebed. With the wedding so close, I didn’t want to bother you. Anyway, you didn’t text either.”

So it had been deliberate. Not necessarily in the way he’d thought, though.

“Anything else before I start?” John’s voice is tentative, and he’s stretching and clenching his left hand.

“Obviously: did you mean it, what you said on Friday night?”

John looks panicked and says, “I’m not sure.”

That’s it, then. John still isn’t certain of his own feelings—or it’s a soft “no”—and Sherlock is in the same trap of misery he’s always known, and he doesn’t know what could possibly be worse than this limbo prolonged into infinity.

But John’s hurrying to continue. “No, Sherlock, wait. I absolutely meant, I mean, what Greg said I said. The thing is—I’ve absolutely no recollection of that night, or what I said, or when I decided to say it, or why. I don’t remember anything from the moment I fell into the taxi to get to the rehearsal, to the morning after when I woke up back in Wargrave feeling like death would be a blessed relief.”

The phrase “death would be a blessed relief” is so apposite that Sherlock can do nothing but make and suspend several attempts to speak.

“Can we come back to this, though? What I came here to say’ll probably cover whatever you still have to ask me.”

Sherlock turns away, trying to compose himself, and nods. John’s tone is like nothing he’s ever heard, and he wants to lose himself in it and say nothing at all until John’s finished.

“I came to apologise. Not just for Friday, though definitely for that most of all. But first of all—for not being honest with you. That started, I admit, with not being honest with myself. But these past few months, as we’ve been trying to reconnect—” Sherlock winces, but John soldiers on.

“I thought—I pretended—that I could manage being just your friend. Making friends with your fiancé. I pretended my only challenge was sobriety. I made myself hide everything I really feel, always have felt, about you. Maybe it was all bound to burst out sooner or later. I just never imagined it would be in a black-out bender and a marriage-busting public scene. I’m so sorry. I don’t even have the words to say how sorry.”

Everything I really feel, always have felt—and Sherlock wants to know, he has to know, he has to hear explicitly what that means. But John’s talking again and Sherlock focuses avidly.

“And the other thing I came here to say is that I’ll do anything I can, including move to Helsinki, to make it right between you and Eric. It must be galling to be jilted because your best man found nothing better to do than turn up hammered at your rehearsal and make a public—love-confession. It must have been so galling for Eric, after trying to make friends with me, to know I’d never been sincere with him. But I never meant this to happen, and I mean to make it right. Whatever it takes.”

Patch things up with Eric? Irrelevant. Impatiently, he says, “What have you always felt about me? How long is always?”

And finally, finally, John says it clearly. “I’ve loved you as long as I’ve known you. And before you ask, I kept a lid on it because you didn’t seem to want that, or feel things that way. And I didn’t want to have to leave your orbit because I asked for too much.”

It couldn’t be clearer. But candid? That remains to be seen. Eric hadn’t thought so, at any rate. And Eric’s no fool.

Buying time, Sherlock summarises most of what happened after John blacked out. John looks astonished and mortified, then stammers something about being in his own hotel room if Sherlock has anything else to say. But Sherlock has something else to say right now, and he fixes John with a look and tells him to sit down again.

“After the scene, back at the flat, Eric insisted that your—declaration—was only jealous manipulation. You don’t like me being with someone else, but not because you love me. It’s more—dog in the manger: you don’t want me, but you don’t want anyone else to have me either. Was he right?”

John looks gobsmacked, and flounders a moment before protesting, “No, no. I’ve told you the whole truth, at last, and—”

They talk over each other, why should I believe you, why would I lie to you, you never gave a sign, if you loved me why did you leave when I came back, and in John’s eyes something shifts and settles.

“Oh, Sherlock. I’m going to show you something. Two things. They’re evidence. You like evidence, don’t you,” he says, with unmistakable fondness.

Tugging up his left sleeve, he reveals the tattoo glimpsed back in February. Sherlock moves in to examine it and his knees might buckle from the beloved scent. He wants to touch what he can now make out. “Bach’s Partita in E Major. The first measures of the prelude.”

John answers, unsmiling. “The last thing I heard you play. I listened to it on an endless loop. Ask Mrs H. Before I moved out, she had to hear every version by every violinist on YouTube. —Sherlock. That wasn’t grief for a friend. I’ve lost friends before, and I never went into a depression, or tattooed their memory on my body, or went deep into alcohol to numb myself.”

Sherlock gives in and manoeuvres John’s arm to see the whole tattoo, in case there’s more to it than the notes and staff. His cold fingers on John’s warm flesh cause goosebumps to rise, and John’s nipples to harden under his white shirt; and his heartbeat is actually making the fabric flutter.

With his other hand, John’s holding out his drawing-case. Sherlock moves back to look at that, too.

“That’s what you gave Eric. I haven’t seen it.”

John’s face has softened, and lightened, and he says tenderly, “You’ll see plenty of you in this case. Not just the ones I drew for Eric. I added others. And you’ll see when I drew them, and I’m pretty sure you’ll see why. Look over the evidence. If you want to talk to me after you’ve seen it—I’ll be waiting. Even after I go back to London, I’ll be waiting.”

Sherlock’s staring at the case, dumb.

“I’m really sorry, Sherlock. If we can salvage a friendship from this, I’ll consider myself luckier than I deserve. And again: I’m ready to do whatever it takes to put things right between you and Eric. He shouldn’t have broken it off with you just because I’m in love with you. And I’m sure he sees that now.”

When Sherlock lifts his eyes from the shabby leather drawing-case, he’s alone in the room.

“ He shouldn’t have broken it off with you just because I’m in love with you.”

John wouldn’t have said that sober if he hadn’t meant it. No matter what Eric thought, John would never enter into a relationship he didn’t want, just to bind Sherlock to him. It would mean adopting a permanent performance, which is a great deal harder than concealing an addiction. Not to mention being very unlike him.

Nor would John have said it drunk if he hadn’t felt it. “In vino veritas” has a ground of truth: alcohol causes disinhibition, spontaneity, not calculated concealment and manipulation.

Sherlock was reassured, then, as soon as John spoke. So why hold back?

There’s too much at stake. He’s exhausted, tense. He needs time to process. He needs to think.

He’d asked why he should believe John, and received two pieces of evidence in reply. The tattoo: John drew it, that’s clear, though when, is not as clear. He’ll ask. It’s certainly not recent.

Suddenly he’s itching to see the other evidence.

Taking the drawing case over to the sofa, he settles into the warm space where John had been sitting. Sentiment. He opens the case and takes out a sheaf of 20 or so drawings, all of himself. John said he works from photographs, but Sherlock has no idea when or how he could have acquired photos of the first few drawings. He scrutinises each one and then, wanting to keep them in sight, lays them out around, on the sofa and table.

Himself bent over the microscope, his hair a mare’s nest, his softest pyjamas drawn with minute precision. Every wild lock of hair, the sheen on his silk dressing-gown, admirably detailed.

Supine on the sofa, hands in the pose he borrows from mediaeval tomb sculptures, hair untamed again. What was John thinking, portraying him at his most dishevelled, his most unguarded?

Flying down the stone steps of Barts into the street, finally looking fit for public view, hands in the pockets of the coat flaring out behind him, gaze focused and keen.

In the mirror Sherlock always sees all the ages he’s ever been, all the phases of gawky and alien, all the stages of discomfort and oddity. Abstractly he knows he looks different now—he takes good care to—but at some level he still sees a human stoat, or an otter.

In these drawings, he doesn’t see any of that.

John admires his appearance, that’s clear. It’s reminiscent of reading John’s blog, which always make him feel so much cleverer than he is.

Sherlock in profile and laughing, his forty chins on full display. He can’t even resent the unflattering pose, so patent is the affection in the drawing.

Naked in bed beneath a physique he doesn’t recognise, wide-eyed ecstasy on his heated face (none too intelligent-looking in org*sm, but no one is, really)—well, it makes the sofa pose look dignified by contrast. Three progressively more explicit images, the partner always different, a placeholder—but for whom? The drawings range in date from long before Sherlock’s return to well after John’s. And they’re decidedly not drawn from photographs.

He lays them out, bemused. Clearly he’s figured in John’s erotic imagination, but was John himself ever a part of these scenarios? Or is it a weird kind of fantasy-voyeurism? He can’t deduce it from a partial data set.

There’s nothing remotely sexual about the depiction of his nude form with imaginary bruises, cuts, burns rendered with surgical precision. The injuries aren’t ones he literally endured, and it’s dated from the week after he told John about his time away. His face is suffering, a pietà, and the entire image is suffused with the artist’s compassion.

And on, and on. Playing the violin at the window in 221B—technically admirable, patently admiring. John appears to take a particular pleasure in depicting him, if not nude, at least very lightly covered. And these tender, desirous, flattering images date over the course of five years.

Just one image of the two of them together. John doesn’t draw his own face as well as he does Sherlock’s; he doesn’t make the effort to render his every hair, or texture, or contour either precisely or expressively, the way he does with Sherlock. But he’s staring up at Sherlock with an expression of utter absorption. Infatuation? It couldn’t be more … revealing.

Every image reveals fascination, solicitude, wonderment. Love.

Sherlock scans the room for his mobile. John left two and a half hours ago.

— You don’t have to move to Helsinki. SH

A pause of a couple of minutes.

— You’ve got it sorted between you then. That’s good

Oh, for— how on earth had John found the only possible way to misinterpret his text?

— John. Don’t be thick. SH

— Sorry, how? Maybe explain first, insult me after?

— Eric didn’t break it off because you’re in love with me. He broke it off because I’m in love with you. SH