Chapter Text
Relief fills John’s mouth with saliva.
“He’s alive? He’s okay?”
“For a given value,” Mycroft agrees, voice somber, “I suspect he will pull through.”
His knees give out beneath him in sheer relief. The concrete beneath him sends a jolt from his tailbone to the top of his spine, and he ground his knuckles into his hot eyelids, tight with dried tears. “Can I...”
“He’s not actually awake,” Mycroft says.
“Damn it, Holmes,” John growls. He’s gone through the wringer for hours, he does not have the energy for this. “What was that about? And why am I still here?”
“I’m sorry, Dr. Watson. I had been preoccupied with the near-death of my only living sibling. The fact that you chinned numerous officers of the Met in a rabid attempt to get to him, and that you’d obviously just killed a man certainly didn’t help to get you processed any faster.”
Which took the wind right out of John’s sails, but beneath that was the hot simmer of something else in his blood. He could feel it in the soles of his feet, and the back of his neck, Sherlock alive, Sherlock breathing.
*
He meant to tell Sherlock.
Sherlock had died and the world lurched beneath John’s feet, and for several terrible hours John had cried and kicked out with boneless legs in impotent anger at himself, that he’d let the world burn down without telling it it had been brilliant.
But then he’d gone back, collected from the station by one of Mycroft’s endless black cars, and sat sentry all night waiting for Sherlock to wake up. Feeling, like a great arrogant tit, that so long as there was someone to listen to the rhythmic chirping of his heart monitor, it couldn’t possibly stop.
“Juh,” Sherlock rasps, well after the sun came up the next morning. John had taken to blinking in five second stretches and jolting back to top-tier awareness every few minutes. He does one such jolt now, lurched from his micro nap back into consciousness to see Sherlock, one eye cracked.
“I’m here,” John says, and Sherlock’s pale hand pushes himself from under his sheet. It flops uselessly, dangling beside the bed as Sherlock makes a small groan, like a door on a hinge. It only takes John a moment of indecision before he takes it in both of his own.
Sherlock’s puckered forehead relaxed like cotton under an iron. He didn’t stay awake for long.
In the morning, John’s neck is stiff and Sherlock looks less like he’s made of wax. He’s breathing deeply with his eyes closed.
“You’re not sleeping,” John says. He isn’t sure if he has or not -- the night is a blur of painful dragging moments and feverish anxiety. Likely he dozed at points.
The corners of Sherlock’s mouth tilt down, but he doesn’t open his eyes.
“Greg left a dozen texts.”
After a moment of no response, John goes on. “You’re going to be fine. The bastard put a hole in an impressive list of internal organs, but.”
“But the good doctor put a hole in his...” Sherlock took a pause to pant, before swallowing.
“Yes,” John grimaces. “There was that.”
Sherlock gave his hand a limp squeeze, and John looked down with the dull surprise that he’s still holding it.
*
Sherlock heals in fits.
Of course, he doesn’t get nearly his doctor’s recommended level of bed-rest. John passes by a lot of moments where he thinks: this is the time to tell him.
Sherlock takes over the entire floor of their flat for recuperating entertainment. John has not seen him with so many experiments and miscellaneous junk out at once, ever. There are dollhouse models of old crimes on the table and various sound-proofing materials and gravel and shotgun shells on the ground.
“You’ve got twenty-five tabs open on two computers, Jeremy Kyle on the telly, and nine different projects out,” John points out, when Sherlock grows listless and techy.
“Ten,” Sherlock tells him, viciously stabbing a watermelon with a small knife. “The moss and the algae in the sink are entirely different. They’re on different sides for a reason, John. It’s a wonder you can mate your own socks.”
Sherlock has been on edge for days, but this is the first time he's directed his ire John's way since he left the hospital.
“Come over here, please,” John says calmly from the couch, unperturbed by Sherlock’s rudeness.
Sherlock, after glaring at him for some time, stiffly walks over to the couch and sits down.
“Do you want to breathe with me?”
Sherlock rolls his eyes. “Could you reach any new levels of pedantic?”
“Probably,” John says, putting a hand across Sherlock’s eyes, and then starts a slow count.
Sherlock huffs, but then structures his breathing to John’s counts. Instead of keeping it even and rhythmic, John alters the timing to be sporadic but slow.
After a while, Sherlock slumps against him, heavy at his shoulder.
“How do you feel?” he asks.
“Like my brain has too many tabs open, and my body is itchy.”
“Close all of them,” John suggests, moving his hands to wrap around Sherlock’s arm. He pulls him tight against him, shoulder to shoulder. “Do you want me to read you a cold case? Lestrade brought some by while you were napping.”
Sherlock shook his head. “No. But I could tell you about one I’m having trouble thinking through.”
Sherlock talks until he rasps, finally softening some of his agitated edges, and John thinks don’t we have something worthwhile?
*
Sherlock’s bullet hole heals.
His first case back is a quick one: a string of identity theft targets turn out to all be sex workers, which had intregued Sherlock for about the three and a half seconds it took him to the heart of it and accuse their pimp.
There is no chase to round out the day, no bullets, no one to kidnap John, no need for Sherlock to have to whip out his knowledge of different type of dust.
But John squeezes his shoulder regardless. “Amazing,” he says, massaging the tense cord of muscle tight between his shoulder and the nape of his neck.
“Hardly,” Sherlock scoffs. “Mindless criminals don’t even have the decency to steal the identites of another pimp’s employees to throw us off the scent.”
John tries not to laugh. “There’s always Christmas.”
*
John studiously avoids looking at the ground. His instinct is to stare, like worrying a loose tooth with his tongue, because he’s never had a blank expanse before him. He doesn’t know what that means. Is Sherlock no longer his soulmate, or does it just not understand that Sherlock’s still alive? John hasn’t met many widows, but he knows that there’s usually someone else, at some point.
He’s not sure if he wants that to happen. It might be simpler, in some ways, to move on from this unhealthy pining for his flatmate, start over with someone capable or interested in reciprocating.
But. He’s not sure that he wants that. He may not be Sherlock Holmes’ soul mate, but he’s important to him. Maybe not in the same way, exactly, but besides sex, and affection, the spectrum of touch, John has everything he needs in 221b.
He keeps glaring at the floor, feeling as if he can keep a new set of footsteps from emerging from the sheer force of his resistance.
Apparently, John isn’t as effective in not looking at his lack of heart line as he was not looking at it when it lead to Sherlock, because unlike his constant knowledge of Sherlock-as-his-soul mate, Sherlock sees fit to mention it.
“She’ll be back in country soon enough, John, you don’t have to obsess over it.”
“Pardon?”
Sherlock sighs the way he does when he feels like he is the only human in a hundred mile radius capable of having a complete thought. “All week, you’ve been looking at your heart line an average of twice as often as when we met, and looking away within a second, looking perturbed. Prior to that, you’d stop wandering off and going on dates for quite some time, indicating that there was almost no chance of meeting her, pushing thoughts of both meeting your soul mate and interim romance to the back of your thoughts.”
John waits out his stream of speech, feeling like he’s standing in the curl of a wave, his heart smashing painfully in his chest. “Are you done?” John asks.
“No,” Sherlock says, petulantly.
“I think you are,” John disagrees. “And I don’t care about any of that nonsense,” he said, waving vaguely at the ground before him. Let Sherlock puzzle out what he meant, like he’d done to John all those months ago. The mad man had become his best mate in the space between then and now and John was still no closer to answering the mystery of Sherlock’s heart line.
“What,” Sherlock says, flatly.
“Exactly what I meant,” John says, shrugging with a bravado painted on like the face of a china doll. “We’ve got a good thing going, you and I, without any sentiment getting in the way.”
“Exactly,” Sherlock agrees, frowning.
They stand in the living room awkwardly for a while, Sherlock in his purple shirt, straining at the buttons and the lines of his neck taut. “I,” John says, mouth dry. Under his shirt, Sherlock has a healed-over bullet wound that still itches, and it is now stunningly clear that he didn’t immediately look at John and deduce amputee, afghanistan, one-way soul mate like John had always assumed, “might as well hit the hay. I’m knackered.”
It isn’t the elephant in the room for both of them. It is only John’s elephant. He needs to retreat to think about this.
“Wait.” Sherlock says, reaching out to clutch at the sleeve of John’s dressing gown.
“I know there’s someone else. At any moment she could get on a plain and be back on the continent and you could -- you could take a cab fifty kilometers and find her, but.” Sherlock says, voice cracking somewhere in the middle. “You said it yourself -- we have a good thing going.”
“What are you trying to say, Sherlock?” John asks, hope ricocheting around his body like shrapnel, destructive and far reaching.
John can see the tremor in Sherlock’s throat as his adams apple twitches up and down. “I’m saying. I know I’m not the one the universe chose for you, but… choose me.”
*
John’s thought process goes crashing off-rails, for a dizzying moment his vision starts to blur at the edges. He moves into Sherlock’s personal space, planting both feet between Sherlock’s, standing eye-to-chin with him. “You idiot,” he says, and Sherlock winces deeply, opening his mouth to issue apologies, but John puts his hand on the collar of his shirt, enough to ground him, but not actually touching any skin. “Isn’t it obvious I already have?”
He moves slowly, enough that Sherlock has the time to jerk out of the way, as he puts one hand on the back of Sherlock’s neck and reels him in, directing his face closer to John’s.
“No,” Sherlock says.
John moves his face back a few inches, far enough to see his expression clearly. “No? Please get out of my personal space, no? Or...”
“No, it wasn’t obvious,” Sherlock huffs.
“Oh. In that case,” John says, and pulls him down much more quickly this time, leaning in and hovering a millimeter from Sherlock’s mouth with the curl of a smirk threatening to unfurl until Sherlock smashed his mouth against John’s clumsy and sweet and petulant all at once.
When Sherlock pulled away, he was grinning, red mouth wet and tempting. John stole another rapid smack of a kiss before he stood back. “I thought this business wasn’t your area?”
Sherlock frowned. “Seven billion people, more or less, and after my soul mate died, there was no one else. I’m apparently so singular that there was no second option. I didn’t know I’d meet a John Watson.”
John left his hand curled around Sherlock. “Did you know him?” John asks, before catching himself. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to assume.”
“I assume the same,” Sherlock says with a shrug. “It must have been a he. He passed away when I was only fifteen.”
The impact of what Sherlock says makes him take a step back. “He would have been nineteen,” John says, not meeting Sherlock’s eyes. “Maybe a bee sting. Maybe your soul mate’s allergic to bees. And it took a long time for someone to find his epi pen.”
Sherlock’s eyes are huge, and John feels a jab of adrenaline along with everything else at figuring out a puzzle before Sherlock Holmes for once in his life.
“You would have been nineteen,” Sherlock says, so far away, one foot in his mind palace. John’s known him long enough, he can see it: Sherlock combing through every interaction they’ve had since they met. Of course, now Sherlock realizes why he’s been looking at the floor, and how they now have the shared experience of having had a soul mate’s heart stop long enough for a soul line to fade, but not long enough for death to be fatal.
He knows they both have no soul lines now, but against all odd, have found their soul mates regardless. What a world. John looks down at the empty space between them on the ground, with no footsteps. It already seems less hateful.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” Sherlock scowls.
“I thought I was obvious enough,” John grins. “I agreed to move in with you after one day. You’re the one that cut me off at the pass at Angelo’s. I figured it just didn’t go both ways.”
“John, I started labeling the contents of the fridge for you.”
“As far as declarations go,” John muses, “I suppose in retrospect it’s very … you.”
*
Somehow they end up back on the sofa. John shucks his dressing gown fairly quickly, leaving him in a plain navy t-shirt and his trousers, hovering above Sherlock, who somehow ends up on his back across the body of the sofa. The whole thing is very mysterious, shrouded by a fog.
John supports himself on his knees, both framing Sherlock to the side of his hips, and his palms, flat by Sherlock’s face. He leans down to kiss him, teasingly, sweet and coy, and it feels like getting something he’d resigned himself to never having. Every time John moves away from Sherlock, he follows him up, neck straining, with a silly little hopeful noise.
John pets his sides and nuzzles into his neck.
“Sherlock,” he murmurs, and beneath him, when he finally gives in to Sherlock’s little surprised, needy noises and lets his body settle against him, he can tell he’s so overheated. He threads his hands through his curls, kisses the crest of each cheekbone. “I’m so glad.”
Sherlock beneath him is hard, squirming and looking more flustered and adorable than any grown man has a right to be. “Yes, John,” Sherlock agrees, and pulls on John’s bum with his hands, still in his denims, and brings them flush together.
“Oh,” Sherlock says.
“Forgot about that?” John winces. “Sorry.”
“You do not apologize for your body,” Sherlock scowls, vicious.
John touches his face until he calms. “I meant, that you got pinched by it, you dolt.”
Something seems to occur to Sherlock, because his face lights up with the unholy glee of his scientific curiosity as he struggles to prop himself up. John is foced to sit up to give him the room to do so. “When you still had a heart line--” he asks, voice sliding into a slight lisp as it does when he gets too excited to exert perfect control over his transport.
John rolls his eyes. “Yes, I saw two footprints. No, I don’t know why.”
“I’m going to have to make a study,” Sherlock beams, and then relaxes back into the couch. “Now back to the task at hand.”
John is only too happy to oblige.