Work Text:
John leaves Baker Street but cannot leave London. He rents the spare room from a man in his late fifties who looks at John (single, never married, non-smoker, no pets) and reads ‘confirmed bachelor’. John doesn’t correct him.
He moves in with a stack of books and a suitcase full of clothes and a laptop holding most of the last entry he will ever write about Sherlock.
(He has updated once, since it happened. Just to let them know that no matter what anyone says, John knows the truth. He breaks the third to last request Sherlock made of him but he thinks I did the rest. I stayed back, I kept my eyes on you and you never wanted that lie from me anyway. You knew I would never believe it.)
John cannot make himself finish the post. My blogger, Sherlock had said, and John cannot let that part of himself die with the others, not quite yet. He leaves their story unfinished.
*
John feels sometimes like he’s dreaming. He takes the latest shifts he can, works out of hours and emergency calls, and struggles back to the new flat in the small hours. He loses track of the days and looks up sometimes to find he has travelled three stops too far on the tube line. He turns around and goes back the way he came. He doesn’t drink, and he doesn’t pick up his gun.
John smells cigarette smoke in his room and imagines things have moved. Ella tells him it is normal to feel a presence after someone has died. He tells her that’s why he moved. Sherlock was never here, and it should be easier to tell the difference in this place. Sherlock would have turned around once and sniffed and told John three impossible things about the previous occupants and why John had chosen this room rather than any of the others he’d seen.
John would tell him, if he could, that he had chosen this room because it was the first available, and he had needed to get away from Baker Street.
Mrs Hudson calls every day at first, then easing off. “Time,” she says, “What we need is time, sweetheart.” When he can make himself meet her, she pats his arm and he smiles back but doesn’t take her up on her offer to look at Sherlock’s things.
Without Sherlock to make sense of them, they are just scraps of paper and collections of chemicals and card games and a skull on the mantelpiece. Without Sherlock, none of it makes sense.
*
The first time someone stops him in the street to ask him about Sherlock, John punches them in the face. He should be worried, probably, that his first reaction to these questions is always violence now. But the sting as he shakes out his fingers is the first true feeling he’s had since the fall, so John stares down at the blood and lets someone drag him away.
Lestrade shakes his head and makes the report disappear. “John, you can’t just keep on like this, you need to…”
John shrugs off the hand and walks himself home. He doesn’t trust himself in a taxi right now.
When he gets back, John tries his voice. “I saw Lestrade today. He told me I can’t go around punching every idiot who says something about you. He says I’d be punching half of London. But I would have, you know. If you’d asked.”
No one answers.
*
John takes photographs. He stands outside Barts, where he had stood on that day, and aims the camera lens at an imagined Sherlock. He follows the line Sherlock had taken in his fall, with John running forward all the time. He examines all the angles.
Molly finds him at it one day, there during his lunch break from the clinic. Her mouth purses tight and she twists her hands together. “John,” she says, “he wouldn’t want…”
“I don’t care what he would want.”
She nods as though that is exactly the response she expected, and walks away again. She doesn’t offer to talk about it.
John makes models, showing the heights of the buildings and the way Sherlock had been out of John’s sight for only a moment. Not long enough for a miracle. He places the little figure representing Sherlock on the top of the building, and John on the pavement below. He reruns the conversation, looking for clues, looking for the moment Sherlock would have pointed to later (“You hear, John, but you don’t listen”) as the one John missed. He places Sherlock on the ground below, seeing the blood matted in his dark hair and haloed around his head, his pale face and his clear eyes clouded over and gone. John had seen the body.
When he wakes up the next morning, both figures are leaning together unharmed against the wall. John doesn’t remember moving them.
*
He buys endless CDs of violin music, hunting for the one piece that Sherlock had been playing before. He knows it’s a hopeless task, knows Sherlock could have been playing anything, could have been playing something of his own wild composing one night in the rain but each night John’s room is filled with cries of violin never quite as sharp and wretched as Sherlock would make it.
A Tuesday night, at three a.m. he calls Mycroft, who answers the phone with, “It’s called the FAE Sonata, the Scherzo. Brahms wrote it for violin and piano. That’s why you can’t find it. You only ever heard the violin part.”
John can hear it faintly through the phone speakers. He picks up the hum of it, the desperate leap into the next passage that Sherlock had dived into every fucking time. He hangs up the phone.
*
John tells Ella one day, “He terrified me sometimes. One case he- he drugged my coffee, or at least he thought he did. He was scared himself, so he induced hallucinations in me just so he could prove he wasn’t losing it.”
“And how did-.”
“Don’t ask me how that made me feel. I was angry with him, of course I was. But I understood why he did it, mostly. It made sense to him. Everything made- there was always logic to it, even if it wasn’t always apparent to the rest of us.”
“Do you think that’s why you keep trying to make sense of his death?”
“Do you think that’s why?” John counters.
“I think it’s normal to try and explain the inexplicable,” Ella answers. “It was very sudden, and it was traumatic, so of course you want to understand it.”
“I want to understand him. I had- if I had another twenty years, I don’t think I could have understood everything about what made him tick. But I wanted to. And this has to make sense, somehow, because it’s not enough just to say that he was worried about his reputation. I was the one who worried about things like that. Sherlock worried about puzzles, and being cleverer than other people, especially Mycroft and especially-.”
“And he worried about you.”
John hesitates. “I don’t- yes, I think so. He tried to make up when we fought. I don’t know that he would have bothered with anyone else.”
At the swimming pool, when Moriarty left the first time, Sherlock had been unable to hide the fear in his voice, and the relief when he got the explosives away from John. In Irene’s flat, with the gun at John’s head. Of course Sherlock had cared. And John would take the hallucinations of monsters in the shadows and the thugs abducting him in the night, if he could swap them for the not-ghost of Sherlock that lurks around him in a room Sherlock never entered. If he could have Sherlock at his side he would have made his peace with the rest. Anything, he says to the uncaring sky, if you can just not be dead.
*
John was put back together once and he does not have it in him to do it again. Sherlock said Come anyway, Sherlock said Could be dangerous and John followed him. John followed him and picked up his gun again and aimed it into the night shadows that Sherlock ran straight into. John allowed Sherlock to say Give me your hand and Come here and he let himself be put back together.
Harry laughs and cries and says, “You put yourself together.”
“No.”
“You did, John, it wasn’t-. Don’t do what he did.”
“What?”
“Don’t make yourself less. You’re more than just what you were to him.”
A conductor of light, Sherlock said. And that was enough, most days. It was enough because Sherlock was exactly as brilliant as he thought in all the ways that Sherlock believed to matter. And yet some days Sherlock turned his head to find John in a crowd and there was a question there. Some days it was just the two of them in the flat and Sherlock was still asking questions. He didn’t know everything and he got lonely talking to himself and he thought John was his only friend in the world. He needed John. So that is not all John is or was, but right now it feels like one of the most important things and that is over now.
John hugs Harry goodbye and promises to take care of himself.
He goes back to his rooms and says, “You see, that’s what siblings do, when they’re not Holmeses. She worries about me, even when she knows it won’t do any good. She thinks you didn’t deserve me. She’s biased that way.”
There is a quality in the silent air of listening, as though if John looked around he might see Sherlock with his hands steepled under his chin, considering John’s explanation. John sits at his desk and looks at the flashing cursor on his laptop screen.
*
John doesn’t know why he visits Mycroft. He supposes that he’s angry, and Mycroft is the person most likely to take it. His therapist is inured to those sort of outbursts and anyway was not close enough to care that way.
Mycroft cares.
He might not care the way other people care but he flinches back when John spits, “You must have had some kind of an idea. I never thought he was but there must have been something to-.” Something must make sense of this.
“It wasn’t suicide,” Mycroft pronounces carefully.
“Moriarty was already dead,” John says. “He wasn’t pushed. So if there was some great Holmesian reason then please, for the love of God, fill me in because I’m doing my usual job of not bloody getting it.”
“It isn’t suicide,” Mycroft explains, “to put yourself in front of a bullet fired at someone else.”
“There wasn’t any fucking-.”
“Three bullets. Yourself, Mrs Hudson, Detective Inspector Lestrade. Not a Holmesian reason, John. He weighed himself against the three of you and found himself somehow lacking. I am afraid I am at a loss myself how he came to that conclusion.”
John shrugs that insult off with the ease of long practice. He says, “Tell me about the gunmen.”
“John.”
“Tell me.”
Mycroft spreads the case in front of him – Sherlock’s last case, not quite finished. Mycroft says, “We have the one who was at your flat in custody. He doesn’t know much, but it’s enough to be of some use. Would you like to know what we have so far?”
This, John thinks, is what he has been waiting for.
*
Sherlock would do this faster, but Sherlock isn’t here. John looks at the files Mycroft gave him. He makes more models. Someone must have been close enough to see John – that must have been the cue. Lestrade would have got a phone call, and Mrs Hudson next. That last call might not have beaten the news bulletin but John did try.
He takes the file to New Scotland Yard and sets it in front of Lestrade. “He had someone in this office.”
“John, let me get you a chair.”
“He had someone in here, someone with a gun on you and I was trying to work out how he’d get an angle through your window but he didn’t need to, did he? He just put someone at one of those desks.” John nods at the cubicles outside.
Lestrade sits back down at his desk and gets a file out of his drawer. “It bothers me too, you know that. They’re reviewing the cases Sherlock consulted on and they’re not finding anything suspect. We both knew that they wouldn’t. We both know that most of what they said about him afterwards was made up. But it’s a leap to get from that to…”
John is unsurprised to find that they have developed an audience. It includes Donovan and Anderson. John opens the file. There are surveillance pictures of the man in the office, on his way through the doors. There are more photos of his arrest record in three Eastern European countries under assumed names, arrests that had been wiped away. “No leap,” John says. “Moriarty had someone inside. I’d recommend you try and find him.”
Anderson protests, “There was no Moriarty, there was only-.”
“Moriarty shot himself on the roof. That was conclusively proven even by your own forensic standards.” John looks back at Lestrade. “Sherlock was told there were three gunmen out there. One on me, one at the flat, and one on you. He made sure they didn’t fire. And because of that, he’s not around to defend himself.”
“John…” That’s Sally, hands out, trying to calm him down.
“I’m sure you did what you thought was best. You did your job. But you were wrong, all of you were wrong and because of that… It would be one thing, if you were right, and he died. That’s almost a victory, isn’t it? Or if you were wrong, but he lived. He wouldn’t have minded – it would just have proved that he was right all along, and he always liked that. Except you were wrong, and he died, and that’s something no one can- well. It’s something I can’t forgive you for, anyway.”
“John.” Lestrade this time.
“I don’t forgive myself either, if it helps. Somewhere along the line he got himself twisted up enough that he thought I would believe it too.”
“John.”
“Find the man in these photographs. And when you do, your Chief Superintendent should go on television and tell everyone that Sherlock was a lot of things but he was never a fraud.”
John goes back to his rooms and starts taking notes. He falls asleep in the chair and when he wakes up in the middle of the night, both pen and notebook are on the table instead of trapped under his hands. John doesn’t say his name, even alone in the room.
*
John sits in front of Mycroft in the club and says, “I just need to know-.”
Mycroft sits, impassive as ever, only he isn’t quite that any more. John wonders if Sherlock knew all the things he was breaking with that jump. He wonders if it would have been a comfort to know that Mycroft has not met John’s eyes since that day, that the British Government went on regardless but Sherlock’s brother has not been the same.
“Sometimes I think-.” John says. “I think that he’s been in the flat. And I just need to know… Tell me he couldn’t have done it.”
Mycroft’s hands flex around the arms of the chair. “My brother was brilliant. If anyone could have done it- but there was a body. I had a… a hope, but that was all it was. A small hope.”
That is no better than a wish for a miracle. John nods, and leaves Mycroft to his contemplations.
When he gets back to the flat, the window is damp with condensation and John can see the impression of fingertips – three dots. He looks at them under a magnifying glass but there are no prints.
John looks at the ceiling. “If this is- I don’t believe in ghosts and I don’t believe even you wouldn’t understand that this is cruel, but if this is you then please… either come back, or go. Don’t do this. And if this isn’t him, if this is someone dressing up in his memories then… I will find you out and I will kill you.”
There is no noise, and no change in the atmosphere of the room. When he wakes up the next morning, everything is exactly as he left it, and John doesn’t know whether to be grateful or not.
*
Lestrade texts him: Medical mystery. Come and see. Greg
John goes, not because he expects that it will help, but because if he doesn’t Lestrade will turn up on his doorstep again.
John examines the victim. “Poison.”
“Ingested?”
John picks up the man’s hand. “Under the nail. Trying to hide it but you can see the-.”
They’re interrupted by a fierce yelping noise. Lestrade looks up. “Anderson, I thought you were keeping that mutt under control?”
Anderson appears in the doorway with a bundle under his arm. “It isn’t my job to look after animals.”
“It is when they’re evidence and possibly connected to the murder.”
Anderson looses his grip on the dog and it bounds across the room to the body and whines. John picks it up. “Hello.”
“John,” Lestrade says, “you shouldn’t just-.”
The pup secures its teeth around John’s cuff, worrying at it. “It’s all right,” John says.
They take the animal back to the Yard and the body to the morgue. They still need to ascertain official cause of death, and it’s still possible the dog has evidence on it, or that it came into contact with the poison. Anderson mutters that the pup probably tried to eat its owner.
John doesn’t point out that animals will do what they need to survive. The body hadn’t been touched.
A woman comes back with the dog, cleared of forensic evidence. She says, “But he won’t make a pet. Not socialised, left alone with a body, not used to humans.”
John knows he speaks too quickly. “I’ll take him.”
Anderson and Lestrade turn around and look at each other and there are few things John hates more than that particular expression. He looks at the dog instead, a little bulldog pup.
Lestrade says, carefully, “Do you have room for a dog in your new place? What would you call it anyway?”
John allows himself the petty vindictiveness of saying, “Oh, Sherlock, of course, what else? He’s already got a bloody name, you idiots.” John shakes the tag on the collar. “Hello Gladstone. Come along then.” Gladstone snaps at John’s fingers and then noses at them, as though he can’t quite decide whether to try and eat him or fall in love with him.
‘And now you have a dog’, John hears, as he lets himself into his rooms. ‘That’s not clichéd at all. No wonder they’re concerned.’
“Yes, thank you,” he answers the imagined voice. “There’s nothing wrong with a little companionship. Some of us don’t keep skulls.”
Gladstone yips cheerfully at him and goes to destroy a jumper. It’s better than talking to himself anyway.
*
There is a homeless woman sitting on the steps outside the clinic. John is caught, the way he always is now, between swaying to avoid her (too much of a reminder) and walking into her path (were you one of his? Did you know?) and assuages his guilt by dropping a fiver into her cup while keeping a wide berth. She catches his arm. “You’re not going mad.”
“What? I’m sorry, what?”
“You should know. You’re not going mad.”
That is no comfort at all.
*
You’re not really supposed to have dogs in places like this, and Mr Fielding is sympathetic for a while when John explains that it’s purely temporary, a situation with a friend, all very sad. He starts to lose his patience after a week, when Gladstone barks unhappily through the night and chews on the furniture and generally can’t be left unsupervised for more than a few minutes at a time.
Then Mrs Hudson calls, upset. “I had another one.”
“Another what? Oh, in the flat?”
“Coming around to look at it for the- asking all sorts of questions about him. And I want to tell them to just- bugger off, but I can’t have it lying empty. I get even stranger sorts hanging about then. Did I tell you about the flowers?”
“No.”
“A woman, beautiful thing, leaving roses on the doorstep. And that’s to say nothing of the man with the bottle of whisky and the hats and I just-.” Her voice breaks.
“I miss him too. Still.”
“Well of course you do. Who ever said that there was an ending to a thing like that?”
John thinks about the case he is amassing, the evidence piling up on every free surface, all to clear the name of a man who is far past help. People are leaving hats on the steps at Baker Street. He asks, “How do you feel about dogs?”
*
He moves back into Baker Street on a wet Tuesday, and all of Sherlock’s things are still in boxes in the bedroom. John doesn’t touch them. He unpacks in his own room, and puts the papers over the coffee table in the middle. He doesn’t use the desk.
The wall has been plastered, where the bullet holes were, but John can still see the marks.
He takes his laptop to the café below, and is greeted warmly by Susan, who does the lunch shift. She says, “None of us believed all that, you know. Not when we’d seen him in action.”
John has his money waved away at the Chinese restaurant, and everywhere he goes he is told how glad they are to see him back. How they had never believed all of that nonsense. Sherlock had done things for them and they knew it.
John tries to smile back. He says, “Yes, I knew it too.”
And when they lean forward and say, “So?”
“And so I intend on proving it.”
*
Mycroft offers him a drink. “You have lost weight. You’re not eating.”
“And yet you’re offering me alcohol.”
“I’m not a doctor.”
“No. You know, I really thought your interest in me would have died with Sherlock.” John puts the emphasis on died, the way he wouldn’t with anyone but Mycroft. Sometimes he likes to see the wince. John doesn’t know that he was a sadist before all this – he had Sherlock to be cruel and John could simply enjoy the ensuing chaos. Before that, of course, he invaded Afghanistan and then developed a tremor in response to the absence of bloodshed. It could be argued that he always had this potential.
Mycroft says, “You’ve been looking into the shooters.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because he can’t. Because-.”
“Why?”
“Because he never should have had to make that choice, okay? Because I never should have left! Because he- right at the last moment, I believed his bad press. I thought he was exactly the machine he painted himself as and I left him. If I had been there-.” John is standing up, without recalling quite when that happened.
“You would be dead,” Mycroft says. “And Sherlock would be living with that failure.” He puts the emphasis on ‘living’, John is sure of it.
“It would be better than this.”
“Perhaps,” Mycroft says, without apology. “But he wouldn’t think so. I imagine he thought you were better placed to cope.”
“No one is…”
“Three bullets,” Mycroft says. “You, Lestrade and Mrs Hudson. He texted Molly Hooper and then he called you.”
“Mycroft.”
“There was no bullet for me,” he says, “and no phonecall. If you’re going to blame yourself for anything, John, let it be for mattering enough to him that he was willing to die rather than lose you. That was the truly damning secret and Moriarty didn’t need me to tell him that one.”
“Mycroft.” John sits again, and drinks. “No one could have got near you with a gun and you’re not… the two of you weren’t sentimental.”
Mycroft shrugs minutely. “I could have helped him. He didn’t ask.”
“He didn’t trust you.”
“No.” Mycroft sips from his own glass.
He hadn’t trusted John either, and John wishes he could say that was Sherlock’s error but he can’t think of a way that would have got all four of them out of that alive. He has had months and Sherlock had only the minutes it took but John still can’t solve the problem. He shouldn’t have left. He should have told Sherlock to get the others safe but they could risk the end together. He should have told Sherlock a lot of things.
Mycroft hands John another file. “The mole in the prison service. Work on that.”
*
He is stuck. All of the evidence is there but he can’t put it together properly. Sherlock would have retreated into his mental palace but John was never shown that particular trick. He walks the flat instead, and finds himself in Sherlock’s room.
John opens the violin case, and touches the silent strings. He looks into the first box. There is a skull, and a blue scarf. John wonders what kind of ordering Mrs Hudson was doing when she packed this away, and suspects that she wasn’t. He wouldn’t have been.
John takes the skull into the living room and puts it back on the mantelpiece. The flat has been unheated for too long and there is a chill in the air. John wraps the scarf around his neck. He feeds Gladstone and leans down to tell him, “Try and amuse yourself for a little while. Don’t destroy any more clothes. I have some things I need to do.”
John gets his laptop out and settles into the second chair. He looks at the skull. “Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. A consulting detective and a consulting criminal meet minds, right at the edge of everything. One solution to make it all make sense. And one person to tell the very last story.”
The skull offers no reply. John smiles back at it, and starts to type.
*
It takes weeks. He pulls together sources and cites evidence. He bribes the people in the homeless network who will still talk to him, and more evidence presents itself. He has had one year, three months and six days since Sherlock’s death and he is ready now. He hits post, and waits, while thousands of forgotten alerts send word to thousands of email addresses and in fifteen minutes, Lestrade calls. “John.”
“Yes?”
“John, some of this is police evidence, you shouldn’t have been anywhere near it. And some of it is- I don’t know where the hell you got the stuff on the last arrest.”
“People tell me things. People trust me.”
“That doesn’t mean you should…”
“They were wrong. They were all wrong and normally I would say, you know what, the legacy of a dead man versus exposing the errors made in a case by the police service… people ought to be able to trust the police. But this was Sherlock, and he needed… I had to write up the last one.”
“John.”
“You come out of it fine. Even Anderson and Donovan. They were doing their jobs, I don’t want them to lose them over this. I wouldn’t want anyone to think I was being petty. But all those people were wrong and even if no one cares, even if no one reads it but me and you… It needed to be said.”
“All right,” Lestrade says. “All right. Let me come round and have a chat about it, yeah? Some leads of yours that we could follow up on.”
Some of the leads have already started paying off. People have been caught in smaller crimes and evidence of the older ones have turned up. The web that had tightened around Sherlock is now missing many of its significant pieces. John assumes Mycroft is involved in his own penance for the dead.
*
Even more than a year on, people call to ask him questions. Someone asks John to go on television to talk about it, to explain his findings. He refuses that – he has had enough of cameras for a lifetime – but he does a few telephone interviews. He hosts a live chat on the website. He writes one more blog entry, answering the most frequently asked follow-up questions.
He does not get to see the Chief Superintendent apologise on television, but Lestrade phones John to say that all of Sherlock’s cases have been reviewed and there’s not a single one that had a different outcome.
They go out for a beer and Lestrade clinks glasses with John. “Unofficially officially, everyone knows he was right. No one from the force is going to make a statement against the one you wrote. That’s the best I can do, sorry.”
John laughs. “The court of public opinion is back with him. I think he’d prefer that to an official statement from New Scotland Yard. Sorry.”
Lestrade laughs too. “You’re probably right.”
John can’t be sure. Sherlock’s pride was always a funny thing. He claimed not to care what anyone thought about him as long as he could still get access to the crime scenes. But he remembers Sherlock in the taxi, making his case against ‘amateur’. Then, that hadn’t been anybody, that had been John. Maybe that had made a difference.
*
It is January, and raining, so John is too busy shaking the damp off himself to notice the extra set of footsteps going up the stairs. Mrs Hudson catches him in the doorway, “John, dear, I don’t suppose you’d come and take a look at this light fitting downstairs? Only they’re saying it's been flickering at them and I’ve just had the electricians in last week.”
There is a slight cough from the living room. “They’re the ones who broke it, trying to run extra wiring from the one socket. They’re afraid you’ll throw them out so they’re pretending outrage at your poor maintenance. It’s an offence rather than defence scenario.” Sherlock looks at them. “Hello.”
Mrs Hudson gasps, her hand to her heart.
John turns and walks into the kitchen. He breathes slowly, in and out, as he has been instructed. He braces his hands on the countertop and when his legs will not hold him up any longer, he allows himself to drop to the floor. He keeps his hands where they are, and his knees bump into the cupboard, which used to be full of baking supplies they never used except for experiments. He leans his forehead against the cupboard door and stares at the crack on the floor, where one or other of them had dropped a pan a month before the end.
John hears the sharp footsteps of a long-legged apparition crossing the room to reach him. Sherlock crouches on the floor behind him.
John turns his head experimentally, so he can keep Sherlock (wan, swaying) in his peripheral vision and lock eyes with Mrs Hudson. “Just please tell me you can see him too?”
Sherlock makes a low noise and it doesn’t matter that Mrs Hudson nods because Sherlock leans forward and presses his cheek against John’s back. “You’re not going mad.”
John considers this. “If you were an hallucination, you’d be the first to say that though, wouldn’t you? And if you aren’t, then you’re a person who pretended to be dead for more than a year while the rest of us mourned for you and I don’t know why I should believe a word that comes out of your mouth.”
“I’m sorry,” Sherlock whispers. His arms come around John, pressing tighter, as though he is trying to match John’s breaths. Then: “This isn’t how I thought you would react.”
“Yeah? And how was I supposed to react?”
Sherlock recites: “Sixty percent chance you would punch me. Fifteen percent chance that the shock would induce a faint. There was only a five percent chance that you’d do something I hadn’t predicted. This is it.”
“I’m sorry to disappoint,” John says.
“You’re not…” Sherlock taps his fingers against John’s arm, some frantic pattern. “I needed to make you safe.”
“And you think you did a good job with that, do you?”
“He was the spider,” Sherlock says, “and there was a web and there were too many of them and I can’t-.” He coughs. “I can’t, I’m tired and I-.”
John turns around in Sherlock’s arms and looks at him. He breathes out. “Christ, Sherlock.” John stands. “Let’s get you over here, okay?” He half-carries Sherlock over to the sofa and stands back to look at him. Sherlock has a poorly healed scar at his jaw and his hair has been mangled by an inexpert barber. He has lost more weight than he had to spare and he’s holding his breath and his hands shake. He says, “I got Moran. It’ll be in the papers tomorrow. He’s not quite the last but he’s the last that matters. And I am sorry but you told me-.”
“I told you what?”
Sherlock whispers it, “Friends protect people.”
John can’t help it. He laughs. He had told Sherlock that, after calling him a machine, after failing to notice that he was being led away from the one place he needed to be. It was true all the same.
Gladstone runs circles around John’s feet, barking, and Sherlock stretches out his hand to pat the dog’s head. “Hello. You’re new.” Gladstone sniffs Sherlock’s fingers and experiments with chewing on the cuff of his shirt. Eventually he makes a decision and scrabbles with his claws until John relents and helps him onto the sofa. Sherlock pats him some more and Gladstone curls up alongside him. The world is less complicated for him.
Mrs Hudson sniffs and says, “I’ll just make some tea.” She hurries forward and kisses Sherlock’s forehead. “I’ll be right back.”
John sits down. “Tell me how you did it?”
Sherlock sighs. “Molly.”
“You- You texted her before you called me.”
“Yes. To let her know that I hadn’t succeeded in my first plan and I would need to resort to the second. She performed admirably.” He crooks his neck to meet John’s eyes properly. “She wanted me to tell you. But I needed to be sure that you were-.”
John takes a moment to consider being angry with Molly, but there is no point to it. John can’t resent her for keeping a promise Sherlock asked of her, no matter how unreasonable it might have seemed. It had been important to Sherlock, and it had been the right thing in his mind. John would have done worse for littler incentive.
Sherlock tells them the rest, his voice slowing as he makes his way through the story. He gets to the last part – Moran – and drops his teacup. John catches it. “All right, let’s try for some sleep, shall we? The rest should keep for the morning. Yes?”
Mrs Hudson waves the two of them off, her eyes damp. She says, “I’ll see you in the morning,” and Sherlock nods at her. He hugs her with one arm. John watches them.
John helps Sherlock to his bed and, once Sherlock is under the covers, finds himself standing at the edge of it. Sherlock blinks sleepily at him. “You can stay if you like.”
John doesn’t bother asking why he would do such a thing. He shucks off his jeans and socks and lifts the corner of the covers. Sherlock moves across the bed to make room for him. His breath is slow and easy. It does not prevent John from waking every few hours, but when he turns his head to check, Sherlock is still there beside him. John goes back to sleep.
*
In the morning, John wakes up first. Sherlock is asleep beside him in the bed and stirs when John does. He touches John’s wrist. John is reluctant to move. “Breakfast,” he says.
“I’m not hungry.”
John is, he is surprised to discover. “I’ll be right back.”
Sherlock sits up in bed. “No, I’ll come with you.” His side is bruised, John notes, and he groans when he moves. But he follows John into the living room and sits down in his chair.
“Tea?” John asks.
Sherlock stares at him for a moment.
“Sherlock?”
“No, I’d just- Yes. Tea would be lovely, thank you.”
John goes into the kitchen to find the teapot and to see if there is bread to make toast. When he turns around from the kettle, Mycroft is sitting in the chair opposite Sherlock. Sherlock says, calmly, “You, of all people, shouldn’t be surprised.”
“I’m not ‘surprised’, Sherlock,” Mycroft says. “I’ve known you were alive for the past five months.”
John stirs the tea with more ire than it probably deserves.
Sherlock asks, “And you told no one?”
“I-.” Mycroft cuts himself off. “I betrayed your trust once before. It won’t happen again.”
Sherlock stares across at his brother. “Sentiment?”
Mycroft taps his umbrella on the floor. He uses it to poke the side of Sherlock’s bare foot and then, in a move which probably surprises them both equally, leans across the space between them and touches his lips to the side of Sherlock’s head. When he’s back in his chair he corrects Sherlock. “Apology.”
Sherlock’s gaze tracks over Mycroft’s face, his stance in the chair, his hand around the umbrella. John realises that he is holding his breath. “I would have done the same thing,” Sherlock says, “before I realised what he wanted. I can hardly blame you for that.” John exhales. Sherlock looks at John, “Although John apparently did.”
Mycroft looks somewhere on the wall when he says, “John wouldn’t betray you to protect all the state secrets in the world.”
“No,” Sherlock says, “he wouldn’t.”
And because there is no answer to that, John carries across three cups of tea and sits in the chair nearest Sherlock. He would rather be sitting opposite where he could be sure- Sherlock holds out his free hand. “What?” John asks.
“You were thinking I might disappear again.”
John takes hold of his hand. “You might.”
“I’ve done that before,” Sherlock says. He smiles, uncertain. “Boring.”
John leans back in the chair, with Sherlock’s hand tight in his own.
*
Lestrade texts him: Odd one. Want in? Greg.
Sherlock looks at him. “Lestrade?”
“Yeah. Don’t suppose you fancy a crime scene?”
Sherlock tilts his head. He grins. “Could be interesting.”
“You’re okay then? With people knowing.” John doesn’t know what the protocol is supposed to be here. They have talked about a lot of things, but not that yet.
Sherlock says, “Yes, well, someone spent an awful lot of time trying to clear my name. I would hate for all that effort to go to waste.”
John shrugs. “I had some unexpected free time. I was bored.”
Bored, Sherlock mouths to himself. “All right. Let’s go then. Shouldn’t keep Lestrade waiting.” He calls, “We’re going out, Mrs Hudson. Shouldn’t be long.”
Sherlock hails the taxi and when they get in John laughs. He can’t stop, losing his breath in it.
Sherlock asks, “What? What, John?”
“No one noticed. We just- we just stopped a taxi and got in and no one noticed. No one cares.”
“Isn’t that what you wanted?”
“Yes, but- yes.”
“Well then.”
They sit in the taxi, side-by-side, and the lights of London flicker past them. John finds himself in possession of Sherlock’s hand again. People will talk and John doesn’t care.
The police are already inside.
Sherlock trails John into the crime scene for what is probably the first time. He stands in the doorway. John coughs, a bubble of something – joy, relief – settled in his chest. “Brought someone along, hope you don’t mind.”
Lestrade turns around. “This is supposed to be a- Sherlock.”
“Yes.” Sherlock bounces on his feet. “Hello.”
Lestrade crosses the room in not quite enough strides and pulls his hand back in a fist. John catches it before he can connect with Sherlock’s face.
“You should have let him, John,” Sherlock says. “I probably deserve it and you-.”
Lestrade looks at John. “You didn’t hit him?”
“I- No.”
“Then you really should have let me do it.”
“Greg-.”
Lestrade shrugs out of John’s grip. “You haven’t called me that since the funeral.”
Sherlock’s gaze flickers to John. “Really? Not just Mycroft then. Everyone?”
“Me included,” John says.
“I did it though.” Sherlock’s eyes are wide. “Me. Why would you blame-?”
“Sherlock.” Lestrade sighs and clasps Sherlock’s arm. “You haven’t changed a bit.”
“Why would I?”
“Never mind. Sticking around are you? People are going to have questions.”
“People always have questions. But you have a dead body, getting colder by the minute. Shall I tell you who you’re looking for first, and then we can get moving on the tiresome bringing me back to life parts? Mycroft’s already dealt with most of the paperwork anyway.”
Lestrade makes as though he might go in for another punch, reconsiders, and embraces Sherlock roughly around the shoulders. Sherlock doesn’t move and when Lestrade lets go of him, he looks puzzled. Lestrade shakes his head. “You have no idea how…”
“What?”
“You’re an arrogant prick and you’ve caused some of us, John more than most, enough grief for three lifetimes. But I’m glad you’re not dead.”
Sherlock is silent for a moment. “Thank you,” he answers, testing that response for appropriateness. “Do you want to know how the murderer got in?”
“God, yes.”
*
John wakes up at three a.m. because his room is empty and he can’t hear Sherlock in the room below. There is still an indent in the bed beside him and John breathes out slowly. He can hear the violin.
Sherlock is standing at the window, elbow bent and pulling in and out. He’s composing, John thinks, or at least John doesn’t recognise it as something he’s played before. Sherlock meets his eyes over the instrument.
John sits down to watch him. He can’t look away.
When Sherlock finishes, he sits in the chair opposite John. “Did I wake you?”
“You- not the violin. You left the room. Sorry. It’s probably- for a while.”
“I’m sorry.”
“You said that already. It’s not like you to repeat yourself.”
“It’s been eighteen months. Maybe I’ve learned-.”
“What?”
“What it is to miss someone.”
John says, “I wondered, you know. When I brought you Irene Adler’s phone. If that was what you would be like when I died. If you would smoke a cigarette and go back to your microscope.”
“John.”
“Of course, we know now that she isn’t even dead, so maybe that’s a bad example. But even when I thought that was it, I didn’t actually mind. I was okay with the idea that you would get on fine without me. And then I find out that… What did you think I was going to do, when you came back? You said, what was it? Sixty percent I might punch you and fifteen percent I might faint. The five percent covered the stuff you hadn’t thought of. That leaves twenty percent.”
Sherlock looks at his hands. “Ten percent for calling the police. Ten percent that you kissed me.”
The air leaves the room. “And was that- you wanted that?”
“Yes. No. I don’t know.”
John keeps his voice steady. “That’s not like you either.”
“I didn’t want- I haven’t changed so much. Not in that way. But I-.”
But you took my hand, John thinks. You’ve been lying beside me in the bed and if I’m terrified I’ll wake up and find you gone again, you’ve been scared too. “Come here,” he says.
Sherlock slides off his chair, onto his knees on the carpet between them. He lays his hands, palms upwards, on John’s legs. John covers one of them with one of his own, and settles his other hand on Sherlock’s cheek.
He kisses Sherlock once. “I love you,” he says, because he had never been able to say it at the graveside. “And I missed you. Welcome home.”
Sherlock’s eyes are bright, his face too close for John to read the expression. He brushes his lips against John’s, a dry brief kiss. He sits back down on the floor, tight against John’s leg. He says, “Tell me how you did it. I read your blog. Tell me how you put it all together.”
“You don’t already know? I thought you were probably around for most of it.”
“Then tell me the parts I missed.” His left hand draws patterns on the carpet and his right is curved around his neck, rubbing circles. John takes hold of that one, and starts to talk.