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When he was born his parents drowned him in kisses, and both agreed that he was just the most perfect baby ever, and so beautiful, and so smart, and that they loved him more than anything, but that he just couldn’t stay with them. It is too dangerous, his mother said, and his father had a pained expression on his face, and later it would make them both cry. But in the moment, they drew up a list of names, and rocked him, and made a decision, and packed him a few very special things.
They gave him a blue bassinet, and a black notebook, and swaddled him tightly in a white blanket. Then they held him and held him until they had to let go.
They promised they would visit him soon.
*
His adoptive mother was happy to take him in. She already had a special boy but had always wanted two. “This is your new brother, Mycroft,” she'd told him, holding out the little baby. Mycroft had instantly disliked him.
*
“This is very silly,” Mycroft had said, when Sherlock was seven and they were hunting ghosts in a thirty-story ice cream parlor.
“You’re very silly,” his father had muttered under his breath, and that made Sherlock love him very much.
*
Mycroft stopped going on their trips, soon after that. But by then he liked Sherlock, and Sherlock thought his brother was as best as a normal person could be, so it was okay.
*
He was three when they went to see the bees, but his mother hadn’t seen him in many more years than three and she clutched him so hard he almost cried.
*
“He does not need a sonic clarinet. Clarinets make noise already,” Mummy had lectured his father. Mycroft just shrugged, ignoring the gift. Sherlock didn’t tell her what was in his violin case. Mummy had to be hard, to keep the chaos at bay. That’s why she’d stopped traveling with his father in the first place, she told him, and now she needed to keep her sons safe.
A mature person could empathize with her position.
Sherlock was not a very mature person.
*
But he was very smart. Very, unusually smart. “You have your father’s eyes,” his mother said often, as many mothers did, but she meant: he saw, everything, all of it, laid plain before him. He saw space like his father saw time.
He had the best tutors, but they were there to occupy his time until his parents could visit. Then he learned.
*
They and Mummy kept his notebook up to date. It was all rather confusing, and Sherlock sometimes learned things improperly, out of order, so he learned to delete what was as-yet-unknown or dangerous. He found he was rather good at it.
He started deleting everything he found unnecessary or stupid. He kept French but Latin was right out.
*
His parents couldn’t visit every year, but they tried. It was glorious, getting to see them and leaving on adventures. Sometimes he got to travel for months, leaving after lunch and returning before dinner of the same day. Sometimes they would just see the bees, and drink lemonade, and then he had to go home. But they did try. Sherlock knew he was loved and that they just couldn’t keep him on.
He tried to prove that he’d be a good companion, that it’d be safe.
It wasn’t.
*
Sherlock didn’t see them when he was thirteen, or fourteen, or fifteen. When they came back they were most apologetic and took him on a very lovely trip to all kinds of times of London, but when he returned home the following week (the wrong week, he completely missed Mycroft’s birthday, but then so did Mycroft) and he listened to the blue box melt away, he wondered. He wondered if they could have kept him, if they’d just given up the work, the adventures and everything. And if that meant they loved the work more than him.
It was more lovable and important than him, really.
He could devote himself to something too. He’d find it.
*
He’d always thought that as he grew older, he would travel more. As a child he was a liability, yes. But as an adult, surely they’d come pick him up, and take him with them forever.
That was not true.
In fact, the older he got, the less and less often they came. The less and less often his mother called him ‘my baby’ and caressed his hair. His father didn’t change. And so Sherlock outgrew him.
*
When he was twenty-three, Mycroft pulled him aside and told him, “I’ve read your book.” (Of course he had.) “They’re doing something important and you’re not going to see them for years. I’m sorry.”
For years, Sherlock didn’t see anybody.
*
Sherlock was ten when he and Mycroft had their first fight. He called his mother Mummy, after a long trip and while saying goodbye, and then called Mummy by her first name. Mycroft castigated him in an obnoxiously paternal tone and told him that in no uncertain terms they shared the same Mummy.
Sherlock didn’t say, at least I know who my father is. But he thought it. And Mycroft knew that.
*
Sometimes just his father came to visit. It wasn’t ever just his mother. Once his father stopped in when he was on a binge, and had carried him into the old bedroom and kept him in the sweaty sheets for days. “Clean up,” his father had ordered, in the coldest tone Sherlock had ever heard.
He didn’t see either of them for another four years.
*
His parents made jokes all the time that he couldn’t understand. He hated not understanding. He learned what kind of jokes his father wouldn’t get, that made his mother laugh, and that was a pleasant revenge.
*
He had his own pages in the notebook, where he wrote about his trips, and his speculations.
He wrote down very carefully the day his father stopped in, walked right in the door and hugged him close and said, “Your mother is dead. She’s been dead for some time now, but I didn’t understand until today.
“I’m so sorry.
“We’re visiting next week. Don’t tell her.”
They arrived for their last trip all together. The Meridian, it was written in the notebook. Her next visits were in his past. His future would never behold her again.
So he gave her a very long hug, when she gaily said goodbye, and he and his father shared a look, and his father had kissed him on the forehead.
The next time Sherlock saw him, the Doctor didn’t remember any of that, and so he could never tell him anything.
That month, that was the first time he slipped memory and space and time by slipping forgetting into his veins.
*
Mycroft and Mummy were closer than Sherlock and Mummy. That turned out to be all right, because Mummy and Sherlock shared something Mycroft could never understand: the journey, the longing, the brilliant sound of the TARDIS calling them home, the way the Doctor made you feel like the most important bit of cosmic dust eternity had ever smashed together.
*
“I have a job,” he told his father. “I’ve invented it. The consulting detective.”
“That’s wonderful,” his father had said, “I knew you’d find it.” And he was very proud.
*
“I have a case,” he told his father, “I can’t go with you.”
“Oh. Oh, that’s good. Important, you can’t just get away from that. Well. Mine isn’t. Just a bit of fun. The Felspoon mountains will sway on, ah?”
He hadn’t felt vindicated.
But he did love his work.
*
John Watson wasn’t in his notebook at all.
It was the first real surprise of Sherlock’s life and he absolutely loved it.
*
At the hospital, after finishing Moran and the lot of them and almost dying, again or actually or anyway, it was confusing even to himself, Sherlock was lying broken apart in a hospital bed. And John was sitting next to him. He was drifting awake/asleep in a ghostly halo of morphine and pain and he couldn’t think properly and was just miserable. And then he felt John’s hand on his head, gently brushing back his hair. He leaned into it and John softly stroked his jaw, and whispered “Sherlock,” and Sherlock summoned every forceful drop of energy in his body to open his eyes and take John’s hand and hold it tightly. That moment he looked into John’s eyes, that was the moment Sherlock knew he was in love.
*
The day he first met John, Sherlock was leaving Bart’s to go meet with some other man, some Victor that Mycroft had suggested as a flatmate. He’d stopped for a coffee first and saw across the street his father run by, his father as he had been just once before, the cold man in a long coat who’d rubbed his back while he wracked shuddering detox. Sherlock left his drink on the counter and ran across the street and called out Father like a little child. But as soon as he’d said it he had realized his mistake; this wasn’t in his notebook. It was going to be all wrong. And he was right, he was always right; his father turned around and stared at him blankly and didn’t know Sherlock at all.
“Sorry,” Sherlock had muttered, and swept off. He did not cry or feel abandoned, like a little child. He just felt so bitterly disappointed he could taste it.
He blew off the drink and the appointment and went back to Bart’s to finish the lividity test and by the end of the day appraised events differently. It was fortunate, to have met this very interesting John Watson, perhaps worth the accident.
If it was. It was quite the coincidence, for his whole day to change just to meet with Stamford and be introduced to John who himself just happened to be walking by.
His father had always told him not to trust coincidences.
*
After four days in hospital he returned to the flat bruised and sore but victorious. Sherlock had thrown his bags on the floor and immediately flopped into his sofa, pushing the laptop lid open with relish. John had gone to make tea, and came back and handed a cup to Sherlock and then sat down in his chair with his tea in front of him, untouched.
This meant it was tea not to drink, but tea as an excuse for some conversation, which John had previously used for “they are cutting off the electricity next week, because of this bill” and “your tarantula molted in my bed” and “Harry is stopping by tomorrow, please try not to… be yourself…out loud…too much”.
So Sherlock put his computer back down, and took a drink while it was still meltingly hot, and waited.
“Do you think,” John started slowly. “Do you think we – at the hospital, you said – do we need to talk, Sherlock?”
“No. Yes.”
“Oh.” John frowned. (Sherlock noted that he had an adorable frown.)
“Yes, I agree, we should enter a romantic relationship. No, we don’t need to talk about it. There’s nothing new to it and the subject, in generalities, is dull.”
“There would be new,” John said, “I’ll point out. The kissing bits, for example.”
“Aside from the addition of sex, however, our lives would remain exactly the same.”
John considered this and admitted that it was true.
He then proved to Sherlock how a kiss was no mere addition but intensely new. And wonderful. And. Oh.
*
“He’s a doctor,” he told his father, while scouring through debris. “Here, you’ll need this.”
“Wonderful! For you and him and for this chromite ore which is just perfect.”
“He’s not only a friend,” Sherlock said, after some hesitancy. “He’s a real --- companion.”
His father had grinned, and promised to meet him, and then they’d both been distracted by a rather unpleasant smell. And then there were all those parrots. He didn’t have time to explain.
*
He wasn’t sure how to explain.
“I’m adopted,” Sherlock told John, after Mycroft sent some annoyingly intrusive flowers and a threatening letter to go meet Mummy for lunch.
John had nodded seriously and waited to hear more. When Sherlock didn’t say anything, still pondering, he had cleared his throat and said, “That’s fine. I mean, thank you for sharing with me.”
Sherlock still didn’t say anything, because he wasn’t ready for the truth, but also didn’t want to lie to John.
John was clearly feeling sympathetic, and drummed his fingers on the table and said, “If we’re sharing family secrets, I have one of my own.”
“Oh?” That was interesting, as he honestly couldn’t guess what it was.
“My father isn’t my biological dad. He was away for so long, in the war, my mother… she ended up getting real close to this friend of hers, and I was the product of their affair. Everyone knew, but no one talks about it. He’s my Uncle Jack.”
Sherlock analyzed the new data and reinterpreted drawn conclusions. “Perhaps I should meet him, some day.”
“Oh. That, uh. That might not be a great idea.” John laughed, awkwardly. “He’s… it can be a little… weird.”
“I can understand,” Sherlock muttered. “My father was a more unusual man than you can possibly imagine.”
This response began a ferocious debate. Sherlock was tenacious when necessary, and especially when completely unnecessary, but John wasn't the type to give up.
John knew there was no one quite like his Uncle Jack.
*
John possessed a certain natural charisma.
That was the polite way of putting it.
It was very subtle, as a child, barely there; people were just fond of him, without being able to say why. He was very trustworthy. He was given free candy all the time. He was picked as the kiss-ee in playground challenges.
But he grew into it.
“This is going to be interesting,” Jack said, on a visit. Then he’d laughed and tussled John’s hair, and was about to give some very awkward advice when the waiter came over and started flirting shamelessly.
*
That sort of thing happened a lot, John was used to it. He just wasn’t used to it when it started to happen to him.
*
When you are naturally, biologically, sexually fascinating, adolescence is more than just interesting.
*
It was better managed, as an adult. Not that John could put a full tamper on it, but there was some kind of control, in the way he stood and looked at people, in how interested he felt, the way he caught their eyes.
He travelled a lot, in the army. Made a lot of friends. Got a bit of a reputation. That was okay, because he was sweet and considerate and kind, and because everyone liked him anyway.
They couldn’t really help it.
*
His mother had told him everything when he was seven.
Jack had told him actually everything when he was nine, which as it turned out, was way bigger than “I’m your biological father”.
Like, “I’m immortal.”
“I’m from another century.”
“I work for a secret organization above the government.”
“The sky is a lot bigger than you’ve ever imagined, John.”
*
John saw him often enough as a child. His dad didn’t refuse their relationship, but he didn’t encourage it either. Jack was a distant family friend until his parents passed away while John was in uni, and Jack offered any help or attention John might want. But they were both very busy people, Jack with his job, John with school and then the army. And John couldn’t bother him, when he got back from Afghanistan (couldn’t deal with Jack, and the inevitable job offer and what it meant), so they hadn’t talked in a while.
Until John met him for dinner and said, “I’ve found a new flatmate. Yes, I live in London now. No, you cannot meet him. Why? He’s my boyfriend, that’s why.”
Jack had been so pleased, but when John had mentioned Sherlock’s name, he’d paused and said, “Really?” and then, “No, no, of course not, that’s silly!” and laughed.
*
When John was young Jack would take him to the library sometimes, but instead of getting a book he’d just tell him stories. Real honest adventures. Jack’s favorite stories were about the Doctor, this man who helped everyone, who saved the universe and travelled magically around.
John wasn’t ever sure Jack’s stories were completely true, especially this one, but he liked listening to them anyway. Everyone loved the Doctor. Everyone trusted the Doctor. He was an amazing, brilliant man. No one could do what he did.
Oh yeah? John had thought. He became a soldier, like his father, but he also become a doctor.
*
John tried to keep it to a minimum, when he met Sherlock. Which was difficult, because he was attracted to the alienly gorgeous man, and because interest meant that tampering down his natural chemical thing was near-impossible. And the things he usually did, to put a fence around it, Sherlock kept breaking through: gently taking his hand, standing close, standing very close, gazing deep into his eyes until John heard his own heart pumping and pushing desire through his blood. But despite that, despite the fact that everyone assumed they were a couple and Sherlock seemed to have no concept of personal space and was practically having eye-sex with him all the time, it was the case that Sherlock had no interest in actual sex, or dating or generally, well, interacting with people. So John set his shoulders and drank a lot of tea and ignored it, like any proper English bloke.
*
He still went out with women 1) to get over it, 2) to enjoy their company, 3) it was fun, and 4) they bloody well chased him down.
*
And then he didn’t have to stop it: after Sherlock’s death and resurrection, after the anger and betrayal waned away in the face of hope and joy, after Sherlock announced that he loved John, that he wanted John, the first time and the times after that, the times John kissed him or punched someone for him or the times they just had toast together. After their first time together John could not have, even if he’d wanted to, turn off the strange pheromonel magnet that pointed to Sherlock’s true north.
Likely because Sherlock had no basis to compare it with, he seemed to take the moth-to-flame attraction as a natural thing, the fire as deep as breathing burning in him at John’s lightest touch or slightest glance as what everyone went through. “No wonder people are so obsessed with this,” he said, and it would have sounded disgusted if he hadn’t said it breathy, broken, slamming his head back against the wall and burying his fingers into John’s hair.
They were in an alley. John....really didn’t have the control of it.
*
Meeting Mummy had been an interesting experience.
She looked much like Mycroft, the same soft features and flat nose, though of course much prettier. Her red hair had softened into a brilliant white and she greeted them outside a modest little country manor in a green cotton dress. Seeing the three together, one might guess that Sherlock was adopted, all thin and dark and sharp looking. There was plenty of family in them, of course, and then there was also something in their mother that was so very Sherlock. John had the hardest time placing it, thinking about it all night, over dinner as he politely answered questions and watched Sherlock v. Mycroft, Grudgematch Round Countless Times. Something in them both that seemed weightless, like they both might fly off at any moment, like they were waiting for a soundless call to whisk them away.
John wondered about it.
*
It was the morning after their visit that John asked. He dropped thin slices of banana into cereal bowls and waited for Sherlock to turn from the computer to pick desultorily at the fruit.
“Do you know your other parents?”
“Yes.”
There was no tone of invitation, or refusal to speak, so John plowed ahead. “You see them, then?”
“My mother has been dead for some time.” Sherlock said this slowly, as if picking his words carefully. “I still see my father, but I haven’t for about a year now. He visits, I have no reliable way of getting in touch with him.”
“Oh,” John said, frowning. “Sherlock, I---”
“He travels a lot. Business. There’s nothing to feel sorry about, John.”
And that was the end of the conversation.
*
For a week. John was checking the dead woman’s throat for vomit when Sherlock leaned in close and asked, “Did you want to meet my father before you proposed?”
Before John could possibly summon an answer Lestrade asked Sherlock for his guess. “We’re off to the V&A,” Sherlock answered. “Get me access to her house. And if a man in a green suit comes to ask about the corpse, arrest him immediately.”
Right then.
*
Reminding himself to offer Sherlock a lecture on timing, the conversation waited until their usual after-case dinner three days later. John did not miss the significance of Sherlock choosing Angelo’s.
“Sherlock,” he began, after Angelo dropped off the third candle (the third). “Do you...er...”
“Just spit it out, John.”
He drummed his fingers on the table. “I know you’ve deduced what I’m thinking about.”
“But you prefer it when I stay out of your mind.”
“Just this once I’ll let you in.”
Sherlock smirked, because they both knew it was never just once, but his face straightened into a careful neutral when his eyes darted about, capturing John’s nervousness and confusion under glass. “Is it a terrible idea?” he asked.
“No,” John said quickly. “No it’s... it’s good, Sherlock.”
“It would be helpful, logistically. We’re going to be spending our lives together. We may as well do so formally.”
“Ah.”
“I’ll have Mycroft take care of the paperwork. And Mummy will be pleased. I imagine she’ll send us on some ridiculously expensive honeymoon. Do you like the south of France, John?”
“Are you proposing then?” John asked quietly. “Right now?”
“No.” Sherlock rolled his eyes. “I’m making the appropriate plans so that one of us may propose formally without risking the relationship. I thought you might already have plans, since you were asking after my family.”
“I see. I... didn’t. I was just wondering where you came from.”
He chuckled at that, lowly, as if there was a joke only he knew. “Still. You should know everything before you commit yourself to me.”
“Too late for that,” John muttered, and they looked at each, and grinned. “And people get married because they love each other, you idiot.”
“Yes, I see how calling me names is much more romantic.”
“Look at us, fait accompli. We already bicker like we’re married.”
“Your French is horrific.”
“And I’m sure yours is perfect.”
“Of course.”
“I’ll make you prove that, then.”
Sherlock raised an eyebrow and gestured Angelo over for a bottle of wine. He brought another candle.
*
Sherlock was right.
About knowing everything, not about his tongue for French. Well. He was right about that too...
John distracted himself with that memory for a few minutes and Sherlock even stirred in his chair, looking up blankly as if sensing something, before returning to the flask before him.
But Sherlock was right. He deserved to know what John was. Who Uncle Jack was. He hadn’t told him because... well, because it would change everything, wouldn’t it, Sherlock’s entire knowledge of the universe. And because he wasn’t supposed to tell anyone. And because John wondered, when he watched Sherlock staring at the stars, looking at the ripples of movement and accident and purpose in the world, if he wouldn’t lose Sherlock to the big, beautiful new place out there.
Then he knew what it was. What he’d seen in Sherlock, and his mother; the same restlessness that Jack had, that same itch to escape gravity...
*
“Sherlock,” John said, “I would like to meet your father. And I think you should meet mine.”
“Excellent.” He untangled his legs from the blanket over them and vanished into his room. When he returned with a small black book John had never seen before, he flicked off the episode of QI, curious.
“What’s that?”
“I’m seeing exactly when we can see him. I know it’s very soon, I’ve been getting this arranged for it.” He said this with a wave, gesturing to John and himself, to the ineffable existence of their relationship. “Yes. This Thursday, he’s going to show up on the museum roof.”
“What museum?”
“The museum, don’t be daft, John.”
“On the roof?”
Sherlock just shrugged. “Can you arrange it for him to meet us there? It’ll be at three in the afternoon.”
“It’s supposed to rain,” John pointed out, relying on the known in the face of bafflement.
“It won’t,” Sherlock said, sounding rather smug about it. “Or Father would have told me to bring an umbrella.”
He did not even know where to begin, so instead he picked up his phone to call Jack. He reassured himself that this was the one phone call he could make in his life that Sherlock couldn’t deduce and Mycroft couldn’t trace.
...Presumably.
*
“Bit last minute,” Jack said. “There’s an alien flu outbreak, people are breaking out in big purple pustules.”
“I understand if you can’t come, it-”
“I’ll be there, Johnny,” he broke in cheerfully. “Wouldn’t miss it for all of time and space. Got to meet him before the wedding, right?”
John listened to some very strange squishing sounds in the background. Sometimes he wondered what it would be like, if everyone weren’t five steps ahead of him, and if he had such a thing as privacy. “Does Mycroft just run every British Government?”
“You know Mycroft Holmes?”
“Far, far too well.”
Jack laughed. “Then you know he’s too clever for just one secret organization. See you two lovebirds Thursday.”
*
Later they would wonder if Mycroft knew. He had all the facts at his disposal, and was very good at drawing conclusions. If maybe he had some hand in arranging things.
But that was later. John tried to keep things in temporal order; Sherlock’s way just gave him headaches. Before then, there was the day.
*
There was the beautiful, glorious day.
*
The day Sherlock snuck them onto the roof of the British Museum, to find Jack already waiting from them, and the two stared at each other, like they should know but they didn’t. And before John could explain, there was the noise. The beautiful, glorious noise. The one Sherlock turned to before the box even appeared, the one that made Jack laugh and say, “I knew it,” and when it was blue and there and a strange man stepped out, John felt he knew too.
And there was the Doctor and Captain Jack Harkness and their two sons, Sherlock Homes and John Watson, and everyone was giggling because it was so completely ridiculous, the magnitude of it, the sheer coincidence, and the Doctor said, with wonder, “Look at this. We’re already all family.”
That was the day four strange, lonely wanderers suddenly fit in.
*
Then they all went to the moon.