Chapter Text
Three and a half weeks later, they were called to a crime scene. The Yard had tracked the synthetic stones to a distributor and from there to a shop which, by the sort of coincidence that really wasn’t, had subsequently been the target of a break-in.
Not the usual sort of burglary, though, and there were still enough of the stones there that Lestrade had called Sherlock in to identify them.
Sherlock had been practically vibrating out of his seat with anticipation on the way there and John had almost allowed himself to be swept up in it, almost let himself believe that this was the watershed he’d been waiting for. The proof of forward momentum.
(Almost allowed himself to believe things worked like that. Of all people, though, he did know otherwise.)
The reality of the situation hit him full-force as the taxi pulled to a stop in front of the shop. The street was filled with police cars, the area swarming with uniformed officers and plain-clothed detectives. It felt, to John, like unmanageable chaos, too much movement to track at once. Sherlock’s restored presence in his life still felt impossibly fragile. They’d found a balance over the last few weeks, true, but it was tenuous, its balance no thicker than a knife’s-edge. No give to it, no space to let his guard down. If this proved to be too much—
He watched Sherlock pause briefly before opening the door, saw the determined set of his jaw, and felt a surge of sympathetic anxiety make its way up his spine.
He didn’t have it in him to bring Sherlock home again. Knew he’d do it anyway, if he had to. The irreconcilability of that knowledge had been wearing him down for weeks.
He opened his mouth to remind Sherlock that they could always just leave; didn’t get the words out before Sherlock swung the door abruptly open and surged out onto the pavement, moving purposefully toward the door. John scrambled out of the cab and followed him, swallowing down his own nerves with the efficiency of long practise, allowing them to settle like acid in his stomach, a familiar ache.
If Sherlock needed him he’d be there. As ever.
The rest of it, he told himself firmly, mattered less.
John wasn’t sure precisely what he’d been expecting, but it was clear that they’d all prepared themselves for this. The faces that greeted them were schooled into a careful neutrality. John stood well back, surveying the room, while Lestrade briefed Sherlock on the facts—jeweller found murdered, safe opened, cash missing but apparently nothing else—and Donovan sidled up to stand at his elbow.
“Never thought I’d see this again,” she murmured.
“Mm,” John said, distracted. He had his eyes on Sherlock’s face; his gaze was sharp, concentrated, his movements precise. All normal, or near enough, apart from the lines of tension John could see drawing downward from the corners of the pale eyes.
Sherlock dropped to a crouch, balancing on his toes to peer more closely at the edge of one of the glass display cases, snapping at Lestrade to get out of his light.
“John,” he called without turning his head, and John threw a shrug in Sally’s direction before moving down to stand over Sherlock. “See here,” Sherlock said, indicating a scuff mark just at the edge of the display case.
“Yes, I see it.” It was a lie; he hadn’t taken his eyes off Sherlock’s face.
“Three millimetres wide. Make a note.” He flicked his eyes up to meet John’s gaze, then, his expression closed-off, and John clenched his hand against the side of his thigh.
He started slightly at the approach of a plain-clothes officer holding an evidence bag. “Here,” the officer said, holding it out to Sherlock. “From the safe.”
Sherlock unfolded to standing, snatched the bag from her grasp, spilled the small stones onto the palm of his hand. John watched the way Sherlock’s fingers curled around the hard edges of the stones and knew it wasn’t the first time he’d held them. He had a sudden vision of Sherlock bent over the table in Moriarty’s lab, empty-eyed and lost. The thought made him feel slightly dizzy, as though they were standing on the edge of a dangerous precipice, blood roaring in his ears like falling water.
Unbidden, in memory, the feel of the detonator as it had fallen to the floor. The smallest imprecision of muscle; impossible disaster. Three years ago, now, and he could still feel the sharp edges of the plastic casing against the skin of his palm.
Sherlock’s voice brought him back to the present. “Yes,” Sherlock said after a moment. “These are some of mine.” If John hadn’t been looking for it, he would have missed the momentary flexing of the muscles in Sherlock’s jaw. “See here, the striations, where the stone has been resized. Shaped as well. Bevelled edges.”
He dumped the stones on the counter and scowled down at them as though he could force information from them with the strength of his glare.
Around them, expectant silence. It went on for minutes while Sherlock stood, unmoving, and John watched the lines of his back. Waited for the fall, the inevitable explosion.
Over Sherlock’s shoulder Lestrade shifted nervously and mouthed a silent Anything? in John’s direction.
He had a job to do, as ever.
Right.
John swallowed. “Bevelled edges,” he prompted, his voice sounding too loud in the silence of the room. Sherlock’s head jerked up to meet John’s gaze. “What does that tell you?”
Sherlock’s brows drew together in the barest hint of a frown. “It tells me nothing, John, it’s all pointless.” His voice was low and hard-edged with frustration. He scrubbed his hands through his hair and took a step closer, the overhead fluorescents casting shadows that exaggerated the planes of his face, twisted the lines of his mouth into near-unrecognisability.
One of Sherlock’s hands settled on John’s left shoulder; John focused on the five acute points of pressure there as counterpoint against the brittle sensation in his chest.
When Sherlock spoke again his voice was sharp enough to force the air from the room. “Home, John,” and with an abrupt twist of his shoulders he was gone.
The cab had scarcely pulled to a stop on Baker Street before Sherlock was out the door, leaving John to fumble with his wallet for cash to pay the driver.
Sherlock had spent the ride home sitting silently beside him in the cab, chin resting on his steepled fingers, staring absently out the window at the city sliding by. John had spent the journey trying to restore some semblance of calm to his features.
Not the time to fall apart.
It never was.
It wasn’t until he saw his own hand reach out to open the door to the flat that John noticed how badly it was shaking. By the time he fumbled open the door Sherlock had already flung himself sideways along the length of the sofa, seemingly absorbed in his new mobile, thumbs flying over the keys.
He just needed a minute, John decided. Just a minute to himself, then he’d start assessing the damage, picking up the pieces.
“I’ll just be upstairs, then,” he said, his voice sounding breathy and strange to his own ears.
“Yes, fine,” Sherlock said, and when he looked up to meet John’s gaze there was something so terrifyingly distant in his pale eyes that, just for a moment, it seemed to physically stretch the air between them.
Climbing the stairs felt like dragging his legs through deep water. He drew the door almost-closed behind him and slumped on the bed, fisting his fingers in the quilt. There was an uncomfortable warm flush pressing against his chest and throat, creeping down to hang heavily around his ribcage.
He breathed, tried to think, and wasn’t positive he managed either. He felt impossibly tired, heavy down to his bones.
John blinked his eyes open again at the sound of movement downstairs. I should go down and see, he thought, and didn’t move. He could hear Sherlock opening his violin case, the small tremulous sounds of him tuning the strings. The sound didn’t have far to travel but it seemed to come from a great distance off. When the atonal plucking stopped and Sherlock began drawing his bow along the strings the notes wafted up the stairs to hang, brittle and half-familiar, in the space around him.
His chest and throat hurt; something about the way he was pulling the air into his lungs wasn’t right, didn’t fit. He was still too hot; couldn’t seem to catch his breath. With one hand he pulled his shirt up and over his head, an awkward struggle with cloth tangled around his ears, and flung it haphazardly into the corner.
His gaze landed on the few boxes still piled against the wall. He’d unpacked most of them, but there were still a few things he just hadn’t worked his way through, inessential items. He’d never been much of one for transitions; limbo, in any of its forms, didn’t suit him.
John abruptly couldn’t stand the sight of them any longer. He pushed his way off the bed and wrenched off the lid of the top box. It was full of old medical textbooks; he overturned it, the books thudding heavily to the floor in a messy pile. He huffed out a shaky laugh. The second box was just odds and ends, the detritus from his bottom desk drawer: sleeves of photographs, the engraved paperweight Harry had given him when he finished medical school. The dogtags he wasn’t supposed to have.
John pulled them from the box, watching his fingers curl around the chain. His hand was still shaking.
But: no. That was wrong; his hand didn’t shake when something was coming. John leaned against the bed and let his head fall back against it, squeezed his eyes shut. He tried to focus on slowing his breath but the tension in his shoulders was sending red-hot pincers up his neck and before long even the space behind his eyelids was red and dizzying and dark.
He hadn’t noticed when Sherlock set his violin aside or heard the footsteps on the stairs. Didn’t notice his approach at all, in fact, until he heard Sherlock say his name, low and tentative in the darkness before him. John peeled his eyes open to see Sherlock crouching in front of him, peering at his face through narrowed eyes.
“Something’s happened.” In Sherlock’s voice it was halfway to a question, and when John opened his mouth to answer what came out was a quick, hysterical-sounding giggle.
Sherlock’s reached out tentatively toward the chain still clutched in John’s hand, but he didn’t quite brush his fingertips against it. “I’ve upset you.”
That wasn’t it at all, except in all the ways that it was.
“No,” John said with a shake of his head.
“I’m not going to pretend—“ Sherlock broke off, tried again. “I mean, it’s not—“ He trailed off again, frowning.
The tags felt heavy, heated through with the warmth of his skin. John took two breaths before he spoke again, the words thick in his throat. “I shouldn’t have let you go today. I should have known it would be—“ Too much, he wanted to say, and didn’t.
“John,” Sherlock said, tentatively. “Are you all right?”
He seemed to be having difficulty breathing again. “Not really, no,” he admitted, too exhausted to offer Sherlock anything else. He let his eyes slide closed. “You left.”
“I had the information I needed. All that remained was to work it out. Which I’ve done, just now. I’ve already passed it off.” There was a pause; when Sherlock spoke again, his voice was lower, more thoughtful. “Cleanup is dull.”
When John opened his eyes Sherlock was looking at his chest, the freshly-healed scar there. His gaze slid up to John’s face and held there, the expression in the pale eyes clear and solid and familiar.
“You left,” John said again.
Sherlock took several deep breaths before answering. “Yes.”
They weren’t talking about the crime scene anymore.
Sherlock reached out and wrapped his hand around John’s fist where it was curled around the chain. His hand around John’s was warm and reassuringly solid; John’s next exhale shook from his chest, an abrupt release that took with it a great deal of tension that was so long-held he hardly remembered what it meant not to carry it. He loosened his fist and let the dogtags slide to the floor, twisting his hand to twine their fingers together, and Sherlock huffed out a breath that was somewhere between a cough and a sigh.
There was an odd sensation unfurling in John’s chest, relief and something far less quantifiable.
Sherlock leaned forward to rest his palm gently against the scar on John’s chest, aligning his hand by the mark he’d made over John’s heart. From there, it was just a matter of letting gravity take over, drawing him forward, closing the distance between them to bring their mouths together. John cupped his jaw, feeling the faint throb of Sherlock’s pulse against his palm; Sherlock’s mouth on his was as warm and solid as the rest of him, as undeniably present and alive, the improbable architecture of lips and tongue strange and unfamiliar and, for now, proof enough.
They passed the night together on John’s bed. Sherlock had fallen into sleep, still wearing his shirt and trousers, with one arm draped protectively against John’s waist, their fingers still entwined. Sherlock’s head was pressed against the back of John’s shoulder, his mouth just brushing the edge of John’s old scar, the even pace of his breath against his skin immeasurably reassuring.
The soft current of Sherlock’s breath against his skin was continuous and even, a reminder that, though there were still a great many things a very long way from right, they had the space and time to get there. John smiled into the pillow at the thought and drew their joined hands closer to his own heart, the slight shifting of Sherlock’s body behind him at the movement its own kind of reassurance.
John was content to pass the night this way, lying on his side with Sherlock’s warm, sleep-heavy body curled against his spine. He could feel the gentle pressure of Sherlock’s ribcage against his back as it expanded with the in-out of his breath, the faint thrum of Sherlock’s pulse below his skin, the warm, reassuring weight of his arm. It felt like enough; just the two of them, together, facing the open window while outside the sky lightened toward dawn. It felt like he was the one who had come home.