Archive of Our Own

John Watson is a caretaker. He picks broken things up and he holds them until they’ve mended and gone. 

His heart isn’t his own, has never been his own. His heart reaches out like a newborn baby with desperate hands, touching people’s pain with salve. It gives and gives and gives and never takes, pieces of John’s heart lost to every person he’s ever cared for. The baby cries out at night, a plaintive, needy thing that John stifles. 

At first, he smoulders it in the throes of gunfire, the high of anxiety and riding the thin edge of death. It’s hard to listen to his heart, when his world is screaming and deafening. When his hands can’t still enough before someone else rips another piece of John’s heart away. John’s mind is on fire, busy with purpose and his heart quietens. 

But John is nothing, if not his heart.

When the bullet flies through his bones, shatters the fibre of his being and misses his heart, it breaks all the same. He feels the bullet like a gaping hole in his chest, withered pieces lost to the comrade lying still next to him. And John has saved so many, and lost so many, but it's hard to reconcile the cold hands he clutches with the warm ones that’d held his in the dark. He doesn’t even know the man’s last name, but God, he’d given anyway. So he lies in the sandy ditch, growing numb with the slowing beat of his wounded heart, eyes locked onto unseeing green ones. He lies with his own blood melding into the dirt, and he thinks, not for the first time, that his heart will finally give out, finally worn and torn.

When he blinks awake days later and feels the steady thrum of his heart beat, he wonders how much there is left of his heart to give. 

His heart cries louder after his departure from fields of red. It cries to feel, and it cries to be felt. But with the ripped tapestry of his shoulder, his body doesn’t feel like his anymore. The heart that refuses to die ravages against its cage. Alcohol dulls the sobbing on the loudest nights. On nights when the poison doesn’t take, the threat of a silver maw looms like an incendiary mother. 

Shut up. He begs.

Please.

The night after he adds a second bullet to his revolver, he meets Sherlock Holmes. 

John's heart is wrenched from his chest with cold, plying words. His body is laid bare, more naked than he was in the heat of the warmest Afghan nights. He feels wrung and laid out to die in a sandy ditch, the bullet wound flayed open under icy-blue eyes.

“Dying to your own hand would be incredibly stupid, Watson,” Sherlock says, “If you’re going to die, let your heart do the killing.”

The words chafe, rough and abrasive. But as those words grate against his flesh, the eyes on his flash with something like recognition.

He lays dying. But this time—this time the hand that holds his is warm. 

❥

He meets a Mrs Hudson the day after.

For some reason utterly beyond him, she takes to him like a house on fire, like she sees something special in him, even though he’s never felt more ordinary. She asks him questions about his days in the army, shares stories about Sherlock and looks at him with something akin to maternal love. It catches him off guard a little, because he’s never been looked at like that before, not unless he’s done something particularly worthy.

She makes him a tea, absently rubbing at her hip. She winces a bit as she turns.

“Mrs Hudson,” he says politely, hurrying over to take his tea from her. She just bats him away dismissively.

“It’s an old pain, John, nothing to worry about.”

But she’s the first person in a long, long time that has cared for him in the simplistic, plain way humans do. He shakes his head and helps her to the sofa, before he pencils her in for a visit with one of the blokes he used to run with in medical school. “I’d help you,” he says, “but Mike’s got experience in these things, and I trust him.”

“You’re a lovely one, aren’t you?” Mrs Hudson says and her beaming smile melts something in him. “Sherlock’s one lucky man.”

John blusters stupidly until Mrs Hudson laughs it off as a joke. Later, he returns to the flat with his small suitcase and a bag of aspirin, ibuprofen and muscle ache patches. He knocks and leaves it outside her room.

❥

Living with Sherlock confuses the child that lives in his chest. It is both simultaneously fed and starved, held and dropped. 

Sherlock is somebody to care for. Somewhere his desperate hands can go, someone who takes but doesn’t leave. When Sherlock takes John with him on cases, the screaming he can’t escape dulls. He always seems to know when the screaming is the loudest. 

He says, “John’s coming,” and there’s that. 

He says, “Let John see,” because he sees John through the layers, even when John’s in his thickest jumper. The most gruesome crime scenes, a bruise he’d earned by goading another riled-up brute—he lets John see. He doesn’t talk about the elusive tremor that rears its head when John makes tea or the way John stumbles down the stairs on bad nights. Not after the first day.

When they’re running, he grabs John’s sleeve and trusts John to catch up. When the nights border on the cusp of day, he drinks the tea John leaves in front of him. He lets John be the soldier, he lets John be the caretaker, he lets John be his heart. 

Sherlock takes, but he gives too.

He says things to John sometimes, that feel like a palm soothing over a crying child. 

“You make the best tea.”

“You forgot to mention the missing candle, John. Include every detail in the next one.”

“I took the liberty of ordering Chinese today, already deduced your favourite dishes.”

Once, a couple of weeks after John had moved in, Sherlock said, “Mike was wrong.”

And John had looked up from his latest blog post and said, “About?”

And Sherlock had replied, “You,” and he’d smiled and John was momentarily stunned by the handsome slant of that mouth.

“You’re not ordinary, not in the least. You are fascinating, John Watson.”

The child stretched out like a warm cat in the space of his heart. Soft and sated.

But John, as Sherlock had declared on the day his world flipped on its axis, is incredibly stupid. 

The child grows greedy. It gets accustomed to taking and begins demanding. It seems to grow, thriving on Sherlock and all his richness. John feels the space in his chest, not like a hollow anymore, but a bursting pressure. For all that he’s given to everyone he’s touched, Sherlock has returned ten-fold. And John, John begins to want Sherlock’s hands and fingers and touch.

With a sort of quiet mortification, John realises his heart wants to be given, too full to be carried in-between ribs. 

One night, when John’s the one that’s suffered a blow to the nose, Sherlock sits with him. There is a furrow between his brows, the one that seems to say Sherlock Holmes is solving a puzzle. He’s holding an ice pack gingerly to John’s black and blue nose and he’s quiet. John is swatting at his hand because Sherlock doesn’t do this. 

Sherlock is edges and coldness and unseen warmth but Sherlock doesn’t give the way John does. 

“I can do that,” John says, because he’s afraid. He touches his neck. “The water is cold.”

Sherlock says nothing, but he replaces the wet towel with a dry one. His mouth is downturned in a frown John doesn’t recognise. It bothers him, more than it should.

“Alright?” he asks, timid now, his voice coming out as a whispery rasp.

“Unacceptable,” Sherlock finally says. His eyes flicker to John’s, and there’s something hard in them. John sucks in a breath that has nothing to do with the cold. “They hurt my conductor.”

I need you. Sherlock doesn’t say, but John hears it anyway.

John’s hand drifts up to Sherlock’s, clutching wildly at the ice pack, and he rests his hands upon Sherlock’s too-large ones. 

John keeps his eyes on Sherlock’s, the heat beneath his palms and he feels the second his heart slips.

❥

Sherlock Holmes is in John’s veins, in his soul and in his heart like a grafted second skin.

Whether John is in Sherlock’s doesn’t matter. John Watson is a caretaker, he gives and gives and gives, and he never takes.

He ignores the new cries, the new reason for his restless nights. He will not take from a man who cannot give. Not this. Not when he’s already been so generous.

It is a mantra he repeats, even as Sherlock begins to touch back. Brushed shoulders and fingers in passing, secret smiles that John hardly understands. A tea cup on the counter after John’s roused from a particularly haunting desert. 

“John,” Sherlock says on an unremarkable, cold afternoon, “Your hand.”

John looks up from his laptop, eyebrows scrunching. He’s got two layers on today, and it’s still chilly. “What about it?”

“Place it here,” Sherlock says, curt but not unkind. He sits back a little, and in his hands is the skull he keeps in his room. The one that Mrs Hudson says moved in with Sherlock when John was over that first week. 

He talks to it sometimes. 

John casts an inquisitive eye at Sherlock.

“Just an experiment,” Sherlock says. When John hesitates, Sherlock huffs a little and it makes John smile. “It’s just Billy, obviously he’s dead. He can’t bite you.” 

To prove his point, Sherlock rattles the skull around a bit. Billy is old and yellowed, with minute scratches along the sutures, streaks and specks of dirt dotting the bones. Curiously, a white cast, in the shape of a hand, seemed to stamp itself on the parietal bone.

“John.”

John grins a bit, then goes to ask, “Where—“

“Don’t be tedious,” Sherlock deadpans, gesturing a bit frantically at Billy. “You just gathered data, use it.”

John places his laptop on his chair as he stands, and goes to touch Sherlock’s skull. His hand is smaller than the mark on the bone, a sight that awakes something warm and twisting in John’s belly. 

Sherlock hums a little, considering. Then he places his hands over John's, aligning the fingers along the smooth bone. They’re inescapably warm, and John chances a glance at the head of black curls, heart stirring.

“Thank you,” Sherlock says.

It’s so unlike him, and his hands are so lovely, his body is so close to John’s and John can hardly breathe. I love him, he thinks, because he does.

❥

When Sherlock falls, John feels the gape in his chest again. Wider, deeper, an empty cavern.

When he holds pulseless hands, when he feels the lingering warmth and all he can think about is that single day back in the desert, John staggers backwards. Hands catch him, steady his wavering form, but how is his body meant to live without his heart? John claws at his ribs, breathless, silent cries escaping from his lips. His hands shake and his eyes burn, but the tears are trapped behind a veil of disbelief.

Not again. 

He watches as Molly takes Sherlock away from him, long after Sherlock takes his heart away from him. He ignores Greg’s quiet words, ignores Sally’s hand on his shoulder. John sits and waits, until the sky is painted black and the hollow in his chest grows cold. 

Hours pass, and John doesn’t know what he’s waiting for. He goes home when Mrs Hudson finds him.

Days pass, and John sleeps in Sherlock’s room. The sheets don’t smell like him anymore. The day of the funeral, all John remembers is a grey-cast sky and the mud sticking to his boots. There’s so many things John wants to say to Sherlock, but his eulogy contains none of it. He just stands there, blankly eyeing the coffin, until someone ushers him back to his seat. He wishes he could’ve said more, but those three words don’t belong in dull cemetery.

John’s mourning, he’ll get better.

He leaves the petri dishes on the counter for thirty days before he shoves them into a bag in a fit of rage. He doesn’t tell Mrs Hudson that he wakes up at six the next morning and digs through the bin outside for them. He also doesn’t tell her that he cries when he can’t find them. John’s sure she knows anyway, because there’s a freshly brewed tea waiting for him when gets in.

That night, he sleeps in the cemetery, hand holding onto to the cold stone.

Months pass, and John wakes up one day to find that the human liver in the freezer has turned black with age. Sherlock’s fly colony in the corner of the kitchen has died out too. He can’t bring himself to clear any of it out, so he drains another bottle of whiskey instead and smashes the empty glass on the floor. His socks bleed red and his fingers are dripping crimson by the time he clears the mess. 

It’s hard to care without his heart.

A year passes, and the child has never been so quiet. John never knew the quiet could be so much more terrifying than the crying. Sometimes he fills it with the sound of breaking plates, other times he fills it with his own gasping, wet breaths. His revolver makes its way back to the bedroom, the promise of oblivion just beneath his head. 

He lives like a ghost and when he adds another bullet to the barrel, he wishes he were.

❥

A year and a half later, Molly visits John. Greg had just visited last week. 

She looks at him with pitying eyes, and something like guilt. John doesn’t care.

“Sherlock wouldn’t want this, you know,” she says, and her voice is tight. There are creases of worry on her face and her hands seem to shake.

“No,” John replies, “but it's hard to want when you’re dead.”

Molly bites her lip. She leaves John with a couple of scones from the bakery just by the flat. He used to buy Sherlock the same scones.

❥

John plays his game that night.

He doesn’t die.

❥

Five-hundred and eighty days after Sherlock dies, John finally throws away the liver. He finds a sheep’s heart beneath it and it makes him pause. 

John has stopped talking to his friends, though they never stop talking to him. Even his old therapist texts. When he receives a text from Mycroft, he almost smiles.

Don’t be rash, John.

He reads and re-reads the message, until it stops looking like words. And then it’s just awful and all John can do is laugh. He laughs until tears fill his mouth and mucus clogs his throat. 

Two hours later, he has his belongings packed in a small luggage, just the pieces of him he brought over when he moved in. He tries to ignore the parts of him that he’s lost. 

The case is barely half full when he’s done. On a whim, John wanders back into Sherlock’s room—his room now, for the past year. He’s never tried to clear out any of Sherlock’s belongings, for fear he’d crumple into a heap. It’s oddly masochistic of him then, illogically contrarian of him, when he truly takes in the room he’s been spending all his darkest hours in. He recognises some of the books, left strewn on the couch on case nights. A couple of glass cases containing bees. A preserved human eye that Molly gifted.

There is a gap between two anatomy textbooks on the shelf facing the bed. There’s some dust in the spot, but it’s shaped around something irregular. John’s heart clenches.

It takes him another half an hour to comb the room for Billy, before he realises that the skull is gone. Along with Sherlock perhaps. Buried with him, maybe, at his own behest. John wouldn’t put it past Sherlock to write a skull into his final wishes. 

John leaves the room without taking anything. He thanks Mrs Hudson and kisses her cheeks as he bids her goodbye. Her eyes are shiny, but she lets him go.

He leaves 221B Baker Street, five-hundred and eighty-one days after his heart breaks.

❥

He goes back to his empty bedsit and thinks it’s a good fit for him. John works for the clinic across the road as GP, because John puts in good hours and no one else does it quite like him.  He doesn’t need breaks after all, he just needs something to fill in the silence. It’s the one thing he has left, even if he’d lost the capacity to.

They call him the Phantom Doc which is funny, because he used to be Sherlock Holmes’s.

He spends his money on alcohol, and his fridge is a maze of beer cans and spirits. John makes sure to pick the drinks with the highest congener content, because they all taste like water now. Sometimes, he goes home at four in the morning and he takes the tube back to his bedsit, looking forward to poisoning himself.

On one of these sometimes, he notices a dark figure on the balcony of the opposing flats. John figures it’s Mycroft, but he’s so tired of being angry, so he just walks into his flat building and doesn’t look back.

❥

He’s been existing with the hole in his chest for two years now.

There’s a hatred burning there, on nights he can’t bring himself to play the game, because a part of him thinks the dead can return.

❥

Mycroft does show up to his flat, a couple of days after the balcony. Through clenched fists and a bitten tongue, John tells him to leave.

Mycroft ignores him, because of course he does, of course he’s like Sherlock. Of course, he’s tall and lanky and dark, calculating and determined. Of course, he has Sherlock’s eyes and laser gaze, of course he’s like Sherlock, except in the only way it matters.

It makes John hate him.

“Why’re you here?” John asks, when Mycroft scans down John’s body. John is thrust back into nostalgia, the first day he met Sherlock, the way he’d been flayed open and sewn back together. But Mycroft doesn’t mend.

“My brother entrusted me to your care, and I’m seeing to it that I abide by his wishes.”

John snorts, an ugly, derisive sound. “I’m alive, mate. Your caring hasn’t gone to shit. Wish you could’ve cared more about your own brother.”

Grey-blue eyes flash, Mycroft straightens his umbrella. The stance is dangerous and poised, and the frisson of fear that hisses down John’s back is almost instinctive. He almost wants Mycroft to hit him. 

Mycroft is silent, then he says, “You’re right, John Watson. If I’d cared more, he’d still be alive.”

❥

That night, choking on sobs and crying so hard he can’t use his phone right, John calls Mrs Hudson. It’s shameful and it makes his throat feel like it’s been stung by a thousand bees, but he has no one. 

“John?” Her voice filters in, honey-toned and sweet, swelling in the darkness of his too-small bedsit and his too-small existence. Hearing his name like that, with relief and concern and joy, a pang shoots straight through his chest and his breath hitches just once. “Oh, dear.”

The flimsy walls he put up over the past weeks crumble in the blink of a second, and then he’s crying hard and fast, listening to Mrs Hudson hushing him in low-tones over the line. I miss him. I miss him so much.

“I miss him too,” she says in the gaps between his sobs. Her voice sounds wet, like she’s holding onto the control John’s lost. 

John sucks in a breath, memories flashing like an old film reel. “Sometimes,” he says, “I try to remember how he used to sound, all his whinging and childish strops and the clattering of his test tubes in the kitchen. His brilliant deductions and his awful temper—” John laughs, a bit sadly at the thought “—god, he brought the weather with him, everywhere he went. And I used to love it, Mrs Hudson, I adored everything, the sun and the shine and the rainy days when everything would be cold and wet and still it was so much better than my life before I met him, because that was surviving and with Sherlock, it felt like living.” John swipes another errant tear from his cheeks. “I’m so scared that I’m beginning to forget how it feels to live, Mrs Hudson. I’m terrified of waking up one day and forgetting how he used to say my name or the clever tone of his voice or the sound of his violin at two in the morning.”

The silence over the line is a solemn one, like leaving a seat empty at a wedding. 

A crackle, then: “Oh John, you don’t just forget the people you love.”

John stills, glancing out his tiny window, into the quiet, moonlit streets. He’s always known, of course, that the heart that died along with Sherlock was a lovesick one. “Do you think—if I hadn’t loved him—”

Mrs Hudson’s reply cuts him off, “No, I won’t be having you berate yourself for loving someone. Not while I’m alive.” She seems to take a ragged breath. “I think, if you hadn’t met, and you hadn’t loved, then none of you would have made it this far, do you understand me, John? You two needed each other, and that’s all I’ll say about it.”

And now I’m alone. And he’s dead and neither of us are making it out alive.

It rings, sonorous in the claustrophobic room, echoing back at John with a quiet mockery. 

“Okay,” he says instead.

❥

On the following Thursday, John walks past a tattoo parlour. The storefront has that sort of new age look to it, adorned garishly with neon lights and a sleek, black awning. There are several photos of previous clients on the glass, from flowers to pets and names and words. The work is beautiful, delicate in some and fiercely imposing in others. John rubs a hand down his right shoulder.

Then he steps in and thinks at least it’ll be easier to identify my body.

❥

And that’s how John Watson copes with the death of his heart; work, alcohol, a gun and a tattoo on his right shoulder.

❥

Six hundred and fifty-seven days after the death of John Watson’s heart, John is on the eighth hour of his twelve-hour shift, staring unseeingly at the door to his consultation room. 

One of the nurses ping to let him know a new patient will be with him soon.

John sets down his phone, tilts his head and comes face to face with the ghost of Sherlock Holmes. The apparition is an almost perfect replica of Sherlock, if it weren’t for the gauntness of his cheeks and the impossible paleness of his skin. The coat is unfamiliar, dirty and a little bit scuffed up. John stares at the mess of curls, at the slant of the blue eyes that haunt his dreams, at the stubborn ridge of a nose, until his heart ratchets upwards and his mouth runs dry. 

“No,” he whispers, even as his hands begin to shake with cold, the mild throbbing in his head turning into a pulsating pressure. “No.” He’s scrambling backwards, and his ankle is caught in the rollers of his chair, a biting pain that does nothing to distract from his shock. “You’re dead.”

John sees his reaction catalogued on Sherlock’s face, the way his pupils dart around John’s legs and body and arms. Then something peculiar happens to his expression, something like sadness and a pinched confusion. “Oh,” is the sound the ghost makes.

Then the ghost starts muttering to itself. “Stupid! Idiot! The balcony was a terrible vantage point.”

“I—what—“ John reaches behind him for anything to steady himself. Sherlock’s death anniversary is two months away.

The ghost takes two steps forward, slow, like John is some wild, unpredictable animal. John almost hyperventilates, casting his eyes around the room for his gun. Perhaps he’d really done it this time, stuck in limbo now, with a man that doesn’t even know he’s dead.

“John—I—You looked well and I wanted—"

Suddenly, John decides that he can’t do this right now. If he’s dead, if he’s alive, if he’s currently bleeding out on the clinic floor with blood gushing from a hole in the back of his skull. He can’t deal with this. With unfeeling hands, he gathers his things and side-steps the apparition.

“John.”

There’s a hand on his shoulder, a soft pressure, a desperate plea. It sounds like Sherlock, god, it sounds so much like Sherlock. 

But if it is—

“Don’t,” John rasps out. It’s a tired syllable, the weight of two years of weary pain behind it. He feels the second the grip falls away, a coldness where there was warmth.

It’s ridiculous. 

John leaves the clinic and walks home. It takes him two whole hours, and his limp has him tripping over his own feet every twenty metres, but when he gets home it feels like no time has passed at all.

The arrow hand in the singular clock at his bedside makes two whole rotations before John finds it in himself to look for his gun. Probing under his pillow, his fingers curl around the cool metal. John breathes out, pulling the gun from under and checking the cylinder rounds.

Three.

And then his phone vibrates.

John slips the gun back, pulling his phone from his pocket.

I’m sorry.  

John blinks and another message appears. It’s from Molly. 

He told me not to tell you. But please, hear him out. It’s important.

His fingers hover over the words, still unbelieving.

So, still alive then?

The answer appears, relatively fast, a brusque Yes. Like John hasn’t spent the last two years of his life figuring out whether he wanted to live. Figuring out how to live. Like he hasn’t spent the last two years looking down the barrel of a gun and wishing that he’d stop waking up so he didn’t have to feel guilty about choosing to end it. He looks at the small word, and he feels strangely fragile, like sodden paper in the rain, a speck of existence doomed to dissolve away in the grandness of everything else. 

John Watson, the caregiver. He gives and he gives and he gives, and this time, he’s given his heart away to a man who doesn’t even care that he has it. 

He thinks back to the clinic, the talk about the balcony.

Watched like some kind of low-budget television show.

He is an utter fool. 

❥

There’s a rapping at his door.

John knows who it is, because no one knows where he lives, not even Mrs Hudson. And Mycroft is smart enough to leave a grieving, angry man alone.

And John used to think Sherlock was the most brilliant, bright bulb in the room. He used to be blinded by the shine in his eyes. He’d been blind-sided, taken on a little folly; a circus horse in a tiny pen, lured around with carrots on sticks and water in pails. 

Even Molly knew. Even Molly Hooper knew.

John sniggers, choking a bit. 

What did he really think he was, to Sherlock Holmes? 

A conductor of light.

Fascinating.

An experiment, most likely. How quickly Sherlock can turn a depressed, pathetic shell of a man into a loyal mongrel. And then John had taken it one step further and fallen in love.

He’s worse than a dog, even dogs know when their owners are gone. He grieved an empty coffin, slept next to an empty grave. 

The knocking comes again, louder this time. 

He waits for the tell-tale sign of a lock being picked. For his life to be torn apart by the whirlwind that is Sherlock Holmes. He waits, and waits and waits, just like he did that one day, two years ago. Because apparently the dead do rise, but John can’t see through his fury.

It’s like a standoff of sorts, when Sherlock doesn’t rattle the door open and John doesn’t make a move to let him in. After all, he’s the one that left.

John falls asleep on the couch, facing the door.

He stamps down on the traitorous disappointment when the door remains shut. Still, he sleeps fitfully, his dreams a cutting montage of tall buildings and tall figures with rowdy, black curls.

❥

The sky is on the cusp of dawn when he awakens. He can see the barest whisper of orange across a black sky, the kiss of light upon the waking city. John blinks awake slowly, mouth dry, eyes sticky. 

He’s got work in two hours, he thinks, if the clinic hasn’t fired him yet. 

John pulls himself up, the weight of his body a sudden inconvenience. He stumbles around a bit, dizzy.

Sherlock is alive.

Retrieving the toothbrush from its mug, John goes through the motion of a morning routine. A semblance of one, a skeleton. Sherlock looked a little bit like that, yesterday.

And it’s just like him, to care, even now.

John pulls on a serviceable shirt and trousers. He makes a tea that tastes like water, so he downs some whiskey with it. There are eggs in the fridge, but he can’t be arsed to take care of himself.

There is another message on his phone. From Mrs Hudson.

Oh John! It’s a right miracle, isn’t it? 

Don’t be too angry at him. I’ve already given him a good talking to, and the poor boy didn’t say a word back. 

“Cause he wasn’t even listening, was he?” John says to no one. Then he goes to grab his bag and pulls open his door.

And, of course, Sherlock is right outside, looking rather put out. 

John sniffs a little, tries to side-step the man again, before his emotions boil over and he does something stupid. A hand to his shoulder, steadier than yesterday, stops him in his tracks. John twists his body, fighting the hand. It doesn’t let go. He thrashes some more, for the sake of it, for something to fight against. What’d he’d do to shoot a fucking wall right now.

“I listened,” Sherlock’s baritone voice croaks out, and it’s enough to stop John fighting for a second, “John, stop.”

John whirls around to face the idiot on his doorstep. “Leave me the fuck alone.”

Sherlock tightens his hold, his face grim. Now that they’re standing this close, John can see a wetness to Sherlock’s cheeks. And isn’t that rich, he’s hallucinating. 

“Is that what you want?” Sherlock says, so soft. 

“It’s what you did!” John shouts and then he’s pulling away, leaving Sherlock on the steps, alone.

❥

John spends the day in a sort of trance, accepting the warning for his abrupt departure yesterday with a nod. They send him back to his consultation room, where he talks to people but doesn’t really know what he’s saying.

He’s still grieving, he realises, when he’s sent the next person away and his chest feels achingly hollow. His lungs produce a wheezing laugh, because he’s pathetic. The person he’s grieving showed up to his front door and tried to talk to him, and he’s still grieving. 

He thinks back to the years he spent in his childhood, always picking up after Harry, hoping it’ll make her happy, before she decided to bottle was a better companion. He thinks back to the years he’d spent making his parents happy, good grades, good job, good person. He thinks back to his ex-girlfriends and how he spent entire relationships caring and caring and caring and never expecting anything in return and—

and not once, was he chasing his own happiness. 

He thinks about his time with Sherlock. The happiest days of his minute existence, the one time he’d looked at something and thought you’d make me so happy and knew it was true. He lived it and cherished every moment of it, because he’s never known happiness that shrouded him like a warm blanket and he’s never been cared for the way Sherlock had cared for him. 

And to think that it was all a sham. 

Molly, Mrs Hudson, Greg. 

None of them were ever truly his. Not the way they were Sherlock’s. 

There’s a bottle of vodka in his pocket; small, for quick shots. He downs it, because it makes reality sweeter. 

It’s a lie, but what’s another one?

❥

There is a letter waiting for him when he returns home. 

To John Watson

Messy, slanting script. Crinkled in the corners. John knows who it’s from. A force of habit maybe, but John glances around before he picks up the letter and heads inside. 

The door is still unlocked, he remembers leaving it that way in the morning. Briefly, he wonders if Sherlock entered and deduced everything he could about John’s new life. He supposes it doesn’t matter now.

He’s still holding the letter in his hand when he sits down with another bottle of whiskey. His name stares up at him, so innocent in the child-like handwriting. 

John takes a shot and opens the letter. 

Dear John,

I am sorry.

John breathes slow, in and out. Three words, seemingly squeezed in between the address and the first paragraph. 

Seeing as you’re unresponsive to my attempts at civil conversation, I have resorted to this method of communication. Mycroft’s suggestion, if you must know. 

I am sorry.

Three words again, so rare from one Sherlock Holmes. And still, it feels abrasive and wrong. John thinks about the twisty balloons, the ones that kids love, manipulated into amusing shapes and objects. 

It appears that I have hurt you. It was not my intention to, in fact, I endeavoured to do the opposite. I concede that the balcony was a miscalculation, I had missed you too much and longed to see how you were, without putting you in danger. I know you are angry, and you have every right to be. I only request that you allow me to explain myself in person. Tomorrow, after your shift has ended. I will be at your flat.

I believe my explanation will alleviate some of your fears. 

Please do not doubt my intentions towards you.

With regret,

Sherlock

John reads the letter once through again. Then he steels himself for tomorrow.

❥

He spends most of the next day thinking about the letter. 

Intentions, Sherlock had written. A word that could mean everything and nothing to John. You have every right to be angry and still, Sherlock believes his explanation will alleviate everything. It sounds like Sherlock had a plan and the plan did not account for John’s pain. It sounds like Sherlock looked in the face of John’s trust, and decided it wasn’t worth his time. It sounds—

John buries his face in his hands. 

I had missed you too much.

Then why did he leave?

John is being unfair, he’s well aware, flinching, defensive and hurt, keeping the one person he wanted on the outside. Sherlock’s back, but all he can manage to do is push him away. All he sees is his own hurt reflected back at him, his naivety, his stupidity, and really, it’s not Sherlock’s fault that John fell in love. 

He can’t fix this. He doesn’t know how. He doesn’t know how to look at Sherlock’s face and not cry. 

John roughly rubs at the raw skin around his eyes. There will be tears later, he decides, and there will be shouting, maybe John will hurt Sherlock too, and maybe then they’ll be even. Maybe that’ll be enough for John to take his damn heart back, pack it back into his chest and keep it safe.

John ends work at seven. He takes the tube home, hand clenched in the handle of his bag. The walk home is gruelling, every step feels like uncertainty.

When he rounds the street corner, spotting the dark figure crouched at the stairs to his place, he pauses and takes a breath. Sherlock is slumped over, hands fidgeting with his white sleeves, his head of curls is disarray. His pants are rumpled, shirt buttoned unevenly. He looks defeated. Some part of John, an ugly, ugly part, relishes the thrill of vindication that coils down his spine. John bites his lip, hard.

Sherlock looks up as soon as John approaches. There are dark bags beneath his blue eyes, and a frown on his lips. 

John feels his hackles rising as soon as their eyes meet, and he won’t let his anger win, not this time. “Talk, Sherlock, please, before I change my mind.”

“They had sights on you,” Sherlock blurts, eyes wide and pleading, “You, Mrs Hudson, Greg. I had to jump, John. To save all of you.”

John closes his eyes, memories pouring unbidden beneath his eyelids. Some nightmares, a figure falling. Checking for a pulse with more tenderness than he should, tears staining a coat. 

“I watched you die.”

“I know,” Sherlock whispers, still crouched, “it was the last thing I could think to do.”

“Two years, you’ve been gone. Not a word, not even a sign you were alive. Molly knew, didn’t she?” John looked away, fingers flexing. “Good to know that she watched me sleep beside your grave, mourn an empty coffin, with your living breath in her pocket.”

Sherlock seems to shudder a bit, but John fixes his gaze resolutely on the street. “I needed her, John.”

And I don’t need you.

“Okay,” John says, “I understand.” His tone is final, and he goes to unlock his door. 

Sherlock stands up, an ungrateful flurry of movement, like shock, like disbelief. “What? I haven’t—“ He pauses. “Oh, don’t be so obtuse, John.”

John grits his teeth together, his hands shake. “Forgive me, for believing I’m of any importance to you after you left me bumbling around like a damn fool for two whole fucking years.”

John hears Sherlock’s aggrieved sigh, can almost see the eye roll. “I died to save you, John, don’t be an idiot. Don’t you see? I needed you to believe it. I needed you to play the role, so you’d be safe from Moriarty. I only ever wanted—”

John snaps.

His fist makes the connection to Sherlock’s jaw before he’s fully cognizant. Sherlock stumbles backwards, hands flying automatically to cup the area. He stares at John, almost defiant, not at all surprised. It makes John angry, vanquishing any immediate guilt.

“Was it fun then? Watching me?”

“The balcony was an exception, John, I wanted—”

“Fuck the balcony,” Johns seethes, “and fuck you!” John drops his bag on the floor, crowding into Sherlock's space. “Have you ever considered what I fucking wanted?!” There’s a threshold somewhere, something he was trying to keep at bay here, but there is fury in his blood and his brain feels shot through. “You think you’ve saved me, but you’re wrong, Sherlock—” John slaps futilely at Sherlock’s chest, each blow weaker than the last. He thinks he’s crying, but he’s not sure. “I thought you trusted me. I fucking—

Loved you.

He trips backwards, the words hanging on the edge of his tongue like forbidden fruit. 

“I can’t do this anymore.” John backs up, the edge of stairs guiding his wayward stance. 

Sherlock’s face pales. It’ll confuse John later, the stricken expression of loss. But now, all John wants is to hide in his miserable bedsit and mourn. Mourn Sherlock, mourn their life together, mourn his heart.

There is a last, final, “John,” before John shuts the door in Sherlock Holmes' face.

❥

Four beers later, John is tipsy enough to open the front door. Sherlock isn’t there.

❥

For the next five nights, John opens his door, always after he’s inebriated. Always hoping Sherlock will be there, maybe that kid is still inside of him, still reaching out with feeble hands, even as John squashes and batters and kicks.

❥

Molly calls him on the sixth night. She lets him shout and scream himself hoarse and doesn’t say a word back in defence. It riles John up more, and he’s exhausted by the time she says, “We don’t have to be friends anymore.”

“Good,” he spits, but his voice wobbles.

She sighs. “I’m sorry for lying to you, but I’m not sorry for saving your life, John. And I’m sure Sherlock feels the same.”

“Must’ve taken the piss, the both of you, watching me humiliate myself every day. Entertaining, I should hope?”

“I’m only going to say this once,” Molly says, it's the closest to terrifying he’s ever heard her, “There was not a single second, in the last two years, that I didn’t want to tell you. But that wasn’t my decision to make. You can take it out on me all you want, but the truth is, John, you’re hurting and it’s not me you should be talking to.”

Molly’s words wash over him, settles a bit over his skin. He’s still angry at her, but it’s a dull blade now. “We talked.”

Molly hums, the kind of sound someone makes when they don’t quite believe you. “You didn’t talk about what was important.”

“We—”

“You’re punishing yourself as much as you’re punishing him, John.”

The glass of whisky in John’s hands, dull and brown in the waning light, smothers John’s denial.

“He broke my heart,” John says, plain and simple; it should feel like a momentous admission, but in the waxy, yellow light of his single bulb, it feels like defeat, “and I don’t know how to fix it.”

“Has it ever occurred to you, John, that maybe he does?”

He doesn’t tell Molly that he doesn’t know how to let Sherlock back in. That everything feels wrong and out of sync, their edges rubbed raw from the years apart. 

You don’t just forget the people you love.

Maybe Mrs Hudson was wrong, John thinks. They’ve forgotten how to fit together.

❥

If someone had told John a year ago that Sherlock would return, and John would spend every second of his return harbouring a fermenting grief within him, John thinks he would’ve cursed them. Why would he? Why would he deny himself his own happiness? Preposterous. 

The man he loves is back, and he has spent the past month finding every way to avoid him. 

❥

Thirty-five days after Sherlock returned from the dead, John winds up in front of 221B Baker Street, drunk on too much whisky and beer. His loneliness has guided him all the way up to the only home he’s ever known. 

He’s not been there more than five minutes, before the door opens and a familiar little woman walks out. She looks just about the same as she usually does, because Mrs Hudson is industrial steel moulded into a quilt-knitting, jumper-loving elderly woman. 

She takes one look at him and doesn’t say anything, just steps over the threshold and offers him a hug. John falls into her arms, feeling a bit like a coddled child, as she guides him down to the ledge beside the bannisters. He burrows into her, willing himself to hide in her flowery scent and talcum powder, until the world stops turning for a minute. Just a single minute.

“Did you ever tell him?” she asks into his hair.

John shakes his head. 

“Why not?”

It's a loaded question. John can do nothing but hiccup and say, “I didn’t even tell his grave.” He hums a little to himself. “You know, people will tell graves all sorts of things. The whole lot of it, apologies and thank yous and confessions, always tacked on with I wish I’d told you when you were alive. Regrets.” 

Mrs Hudson rubbed a soothing hand down his back. 

“It’s easier to talk to a stone than to a living person. It’s easier to yearn without the threat of denial than to face the truth.”

“My dear boy.” Mrs Hudson pressed a kiss to his forehead. “Is that why?”

John nods into the crook of Mrs Hudson’s neck. “I think this is the first time I’ve had someone hold me; you know.” He giggles. “Which is funny, because my whole job is to care for people, but sometimes it feels like I’ve been cursed.”

There’s a soft sound of indignance beneath his ear. “John, so many people care for you. You just make it hard to let them in.”

John blinks hard, his vision going a bit blurry. “I’m scared—of being hurt again.”

A hand slides strokes down his hair. “But maybe your happiness is worth the risk.”

“And if it isn’t?”

“Well, my dear, you’ll always have the rest of us to pick up the pieces.” 

John sits with her a little longer. At some point, he feels his body being shifted around, gingerly manoeuvred until he’s lying on something soft, something that smells a little bit like home.

❥

Light rouses him slowly, a streak of warmth that yawns open with the rising sun. John’s hands move first, catching on a duvet that’s much softer than the one in his bedsit. His head is throbbing as he rolls onto his back, eyes open in a slight squint. 

He sits slowly, taking in his old room. It’s been a couple of months since he’s seen it, but the lack of dust tells him Mrs ‘Not-Your-Housekeeper’ Hudson had been cleaning. The aspirin tablets on the side table are testament to that. 

He swallows the pills gratefully and chases it with a gulp of water. The conversation from last night comes back to him in fragments, stitched together haphazardly. He should feel mortified but mostly, he just feels lighter.

Sherlock is in the house, he knows this, because Sherlock’s home has always been 221B. There will be the inevitable confrontation, and John supposes that he’s tired of leaving, and being left. 

He waits until his head stops spinning, then he walks out of his room and washes up. There are still two toothbrushes in the mug, despite him having taken his when he left. It makes his chest ache. Later, when he decides to take a quick shower, he finds his body wash and shampoo sitting on the ledge, like he hadn’t taken them with him at all. 

He peers at them, out of shock and curiosity maybe, and notices that they’ve been used. Halfway through, unlike the ones he has in his bed-sit that are almost out. He holds the bottle a little too tightly, then continues on with his shower.

By the time he’s feeling better, an hour or so has passed. He puts on an old set of clothing that he didn’t bother packing with him. It sits loose and sagging on his frame, but it’s comfortable. 

Then he makes his way down the stairs, and is not the least bit surprised when Sherlock Holmes comes into view and says, “I heard you, last night.” He pauses for a second, eyes darting about John’s body.

Instinctively, John crosses his arms, eyes settling on something like a scar on Sherlock’s left cheek. He doesn’t remember that one; a bitter feeling settles in his gut that he wasn’t around to treat it.

“Where’s that from?” John asks before he can think too much about it.

Sherlock’s only tell is the bob of his throat. “One of Moriarty’s men, Hokkaido, I believe.”

John nods. He walks into the kitchen, an old ritual that feels sweetly nostalgic in the light of morning. He puts the kettle on and waits for the water to boil. There are blue eyes on him, a heavy gaze that he used to be so fond of. John risks a glance, finding Sherlock wearing an expression close to wonderment. 

“What is it?” John says, when the quiet becomes stifling.

Sherlock seems to blink back to himself. His steps are careful, slow, reminiscent of the ones he took in the clinic. John hates it, this cautious tip-toeing. Having to find a new equilibrium, when he isn’t even certain there is one. 

“You said, there’s something you wanted to tell me, at my grave. But you didn’t. Why?”

The kettle’s boiling, John turns around to switch off the stove. “Because, I thought, if I should ever say it, it should be something real. Someone who could hear it, not a slab of carved stone. And if I never said, it would’ve been fine, because it was meant for you anyway.” 

It’s automatic, the way John retrieves two mugs and two tea bags, the way he adds three sugar cubes and a splash of milk to one mug and just a splash of milk to the other. He hands the sugary one to Sherlock, who’s doing a great job of being stunned every time John moves. 

They drink in a bated silence. A good ten minutes of tentative company, until Sherlock sets his mug down, catches John’s eye and says, “I’m sorry.”

There are a thousand apologies in that single apology, and he sees them in Sherlock’s eyes, hears them clattering around in the space between them, trying to wedge their way into John. But the one apology he really wants, he isn’t entitled to. 

“I should say I’m sorry too,” John says, because Molly was right. “But I don’t think I’d mean it very much.”

“Still angry then?”

“Astute observation.”

“Why?” Sherlock asks, and he’s never sounded more lost. John can hear the cogs in his head spinning, a checklist of things to ameliorate John’s pain being crossed. A simple equation, but the result is all wrong. 

“Because you’ve manipulated me, stripped me of my own choices, made me question every emotion I’ve ever felt in the last three years and still, I stand here and make your tea perfectly.” Before Sherlock can respond, John is barrelling on, “Because you hurt me. But I can’t even blame you for it, not when you did it to save my life. Not when you’re Sherlock Holmes, it’s just—how you work, isn’t it? This is you caring. Taking all the variables and finding a model that best fits all of us.” John bites the inside of his cheeks. “But, it appears my role in your equation was miscalculated.”

In the pause between his words, John sees the second Sherlock straightens. Sherlock catches his eyes, there’s a million thoughts running in there than John will never, ever comprehend. “You didn’t move on,” he whispers, aghast.

Then John realises that lack of comprehension is being reflected back at him. And isn’t that something? To confuse the great Sherlock Holmes.

“Impossible,” John says simply. He keeps his gaze on the empty tea cup.”

“Why?”

It makes him braver, to not be the only one out of his depth. Say it, Watson.

“You once told me that if I should die, I should die by my heart, and not by my hand.” John holds Sherlock’s stare, wills him to remember, to understand. “And then you jumped to save my life, but on that day, Sherlock, I think I died anyway.” 

Something happens to Sherlock’s face, a writhing that turns into pure horror. It turns John’s stomach inside out.

Oh.

John immediately starts for the stairs, his face heating up, his chest tightening and he’s thinking this is why John Watson never lets anyone—

“John!” Sherlock shouts. “John, goddamnit, wait!”

“It’s fine, it’s fucking fine, it’s all bloody fine,” John is muttering, not really looking at Sherlock, leg buckling under his weight.

“Listen to me, John!” Sherlock’s yelling a bit, “you absolute moron, it’s not fine. It’s never been fine!” 

John pivots on his feet, shell-shocked, and then he’s spitting out, “I did not fucking ask to fall—“

He doesn’t finish the sentence, because Sherlock shoves him against the counter and slams his lips against John’s. John freezes, hand reaching behind him for purchase, eyes wide. And then Sherlock’s lips are moving against him and it’s not perfect because they’re both so utterly broken and angry, but John is pushing back anyway, kissing Sherlock hard, he’s got a hand in Sherlock’s hair and Sherlock’s hand is tight on his jaw, like he’s still afraid John will run. 

“How many people on this planet,” Sherlock rasps as he pulls away, “do you think I’d die for?”

“Three?” John rasps, not quite thinking.

“One. One infuriating, fascinating, stubborn blogger.”

This time, John reels him back in.

When John kisses him, its angry and its grief and its relief. He bites at Sherlock’s lips hard, mashes his lips against Sherlock’s as his tongue darts out. He’s inside Sherlock like he can press his heart into him, like he can take his heart back. And Sherlock, Sherlock pushes back with vengeance and god, John can’t do anything but squeeze his eyes shut, the stinging pressure impossible to ignore. 

“Why’d you have to fall in love with me, John?” Sherlock snarls, and it would have torn through John’s chest, if it weren’t for the tremble in Sherlock’s voice, the hitch in his breath and his presses John against the kitchen counter.

John hisses against teeth, hands grasping the broad shoulders. “I don’t bloody know,” he grinds out, “why did you take my heart?”

“Because, as it stands, I wasn’t aware of the presence of mine until you took it.” Sherlock's lips inch away, his voice taking on the pitch of gravel and granite, rough and thick. "John Watson, I won't have you believing anything less than what I tell you now. You are what the most sentimental of poets claim to be the sun to my moon, the light to my darkness, the lamp to my scripture. If I were a suffocating man, you will be the only oxygen I breathe; the blood that I bleed—because you are nothing short of an ordinary miracle. If the moon cannot exist without the sun, then by God, John, I cannot exist without you."

John stills. He’s panting hard, his hips swivelling, back digging into the awful granite edge. Dragging in a ragged breath, his eyes flick open, staring into stormy trenches. There’s so much in Sherlock’s gaze, the pain and penance, anguish and adoration. The undercurrent of rabid desire. He wields the sharpest blade of sentiment John's ever felt, and John craves the cut.

John is so scared, but he wants and he wants and he wants. “When?” he breathes into panting lips.

“That first day, when you said I was ‘brilliant’.”

John is nodding, panting. His body feels like air and molten lava at the same time. Words stream from his mouth. “When—when you took me apart at Bart’s, I think—that was the start for me. It’s why I called you ‘brilliant’.”

Wet lips trail away from his own, biting lightly at his neck. John tilts his head back with a groan, scarcely registers the thump of his skull on the cabinets. 

“It happened—so quickly. God, oh my god, you returned my heart to me and it chose to stay with you anyway.”

There are hands stroking up his sides, racking up his jumper. There’s a forehead pressed against his own, mutual panting breaths. 

Sherlock’s words are soft, a murmuring ponder. “Maybe that’s why.”

John hums, questioning.

Sherlock slips a hand into John’s, brings it up his chest and squeezes. They’re quiet for a beat, feeling the steady thump. “Feel it, John, the heart you gave me.”

Standing there, mid-snog, with their bodies flushed and hands holding a heart, safe at last, between them, John feels the last of his walls fall. 

“All this time, carrying your heart around and I didn’t know.” Sherlock’s eyes are closed in reproach. “How I’ve hurt you, my John.” 

John shivers.

“Then don’t do it again, don’t leave me without my heart again, or I swear, Sherlock—I won’t survive it.”

John presses forward, catching Sherlock’s mouth again. The kiss is softer now, raw and tender. Every brush and nudge and press sends a ripple of indulgent pleasure along John’s skin. 

“Never again.”

Sherlock seals his promise by kissing John senseless. Fast and slow, hesitant and certain. 

It takes everything in John to pull away, even as he stifles a moan in his throat. His hands are fisted in the lapels of Sherlock’s coat, delirious from all he’s being given. 

“Do you—should we?” 

It’s a testament to Sherlock’s state of mind that he doesn’t so much as quip at John. He just tugs their intertwined hands into his bedroom, both of them wordless and breathless. They’re careful now, closing the door with a quiet click, approaching the bed hand-in-hand. 

Sherlock sits first, by a nudge of John’s hand, and he stares up with gentle clarity as John climbs into his lap, his legs tucked up on either side of Sherlock’s thighs. He can feel a hardness pressing up against him and he rolls his hips, just once. Sherlock’s breath hitches.

Hands roam up his body, caressing. “You used to tell me to eat all the time, and yet I can feel your ribs from here.”

John nudges his nose against Sherlock’s and he laughs a bit at the irony. “I couldn’t, it didn’t seem right to care for myself, when I failed to care for you.”

Sherlock huffs out a breath. “You’ve never failed, John. And I will endeavour to prove it to you right now.” He drags John into a kiss, lingering with emotions neither of them had the words for. The lull in their ministrations begins to dissipate as the kiss grows messier, as they try with vigour to breathe life back into each other. There is a hint of inexperience in the careless bites Sherlock doles out, the too-desperate way he snakes his tongue into John’s mouth and god, it sets John on fire.

John returns the heat as best as he can, grinding against Sherlock in his lap, the moans spilling unbidden from his lips. There’s a hint of residual shame that his vocality dredges up, unused to seeking pleasure so wantonly. Maybe a little of it shows on his face, because Sherlock presses an impossibly tender kiss to his eyebrow. He pulls back, and John is struck by the beauty of him—soft curls and red lips, eyes a mercurial sea—not for the first time and not for the last.

Then he’s being kissed again, within an inch of his life, hands fumbling between them as they lay each other bare. Sherlock’s shirt goes first and the scars have John stunned, hands fluttering around helplessly. He looks up at Sherlock as hands come up to cradle his face, then down to the jutting ribs of John’s body, the scars on his palms where he’s hurt himself on glass and plates. All the places they’ve been hurt for each other, by each other. Later, Sherlock seems to say.

John’s old shirt goes too, and of course, Sherlock notices the tattoo, he doesn’t even pay the bullet wound on the opposite shoulder much attention. He gets the investigative glint in his eyes, and he looks up curiously at John. John nods, watching silently as Sherlock traces the ink, the thick outlines, the thin shading. It’s strangely sensual, his chest going full with feeling, and he buries his face under Sherlock’s jaw when he feels the full shape of a palm on his shoulder. 

“John.” And there’s so much in that single utterance of his name.

“I couldn’t find Billy, after you—” John exhales shakily. “But I wanted something of you with me.” Like you had of me.

He feels lips pressed to his shoulder. “I took him, John. That’s why, that night I asked you to—”

“Oh,” John says, a quiet revelation.

And really, what else is there to do but lean forward and kiss, kiss, kiss until every part of John is every part of Sherlock and John can crawl into Sherlock and just stay.

At some point, between bitten out whines and frustrated grunts, Sherlock tips John onto his back, shimmying his pants down. His boxers go next and then there are too-warm palms on John’s hips, sliding John’s trousers and boxers off in an impatient tug. The petulant glare Sherlock fixes his trousers dislodged a laugh from John’s chest and by god, it feels like happiness.

The sound seems to wipe whatever exasperation Sherlock seems to be feeling, and his face breaks out in this blinding grin. There’s some kicking and tangled limbs and what sounds like a huffed laugh and then they’re as naked as the day they were born, a hot press of skin and lips, until Sherlock props his body up just a smidge and looks at John like John is a fleeting dream and John refuses to be a remembered as some ridiculous fantasy and then he laughs again because they are such fools, stupid and idiotic and so in love it makes his chest ache. 

John fumbles a hand between them, sticky with sweat, groping clumsily he has them both in his grip. There’s precum mixed in somewhere, and it shouldn’t turn him on this much, the two of them mixing, but it does and he begins to stroke roughly. Sherlock goes from biting his lips to sucking aimlessly at his collarbone and John just whines a little at the onslaught of painpleasurepain. He tugs a bit at the heady feel of hot flesh in his palm, dropping his head back at the sensation. Sherlock moans into his throat, nuzzling at the bob of John’s throat as he swallows. 

Sherlock presses a kiss to his jaw, then reaches down, John splaying his thighs out to make room. He feels Sherlock’s larger hands over his, and it makes something sweet bubble in his belly.

“Alright?” Sherlock asks, lips brushing by John’s ears. His usual baritone has dipped impossibly low and John doesn’t trust his voice against the rush of arousal, so he nods. Then they’re rocking together, slow at first, their hands working to establish some semblance of rhythm, bodies curving around each other, gaps and ridges sliding together to find a fit.

“Oh god,” John breathes out, when Sherlock swipes across his frenulum, alternating strokes and swipes. “Sherlock—”

Hands speed up, John canting his hips for more contact, more friction, high on the feeling of Sherlock and him and always and nothing has ever felt more right. A small part of him is wondering if they should have taken this slower, more deliberately with steady hands and steady hearts. Almost as soon as that sentiment materialises, it dissipates. John wouldn’t have had this happen any other way. They’ll have time for luxurious, slow pleasure later, when they’ve had the time to learn each other’s bodies with hands and mouths and tongues.

But this, this is a carnal expression of everything they thought they’d lost. The beginning of something precious, like laying down a fresh coat of paint where the walls have chipped and faded, like taking the beams of an old house and building it up again, stronger. It’s an assurance maybe, a licking of mutual wounds, an affirmation and a mending of hearts.

The same power I’ve used to hurt you, love, I will use instead to heal.

Because that’s love, John thinks. This gorgeous and terrible thing, with its thorns and roses. John will embrace it for all its worth, even if it pricks him at times, even if it scares him half to death, because he knows Sherlock’s right there beside him. And he knows without a doubt that years from now, he wants to admire the roses together with Sherlock, a love grown from pain and sacrifice and hurt, but also pleasure and happiness and the bone-deep desire to live.

“I love you,” John gasps out, just as he feels himself dangling over the edge of his climax. “I love you, I love you, I love you.”

Sherlock’s brows are crumpled, deep in the throes of pleasure. His eyes are rounded, pupils dilated as he gazes at John and John knows before he says it, will always know even if he never says it.

John squeezes his eyes shut and with one more stroke, he’s careening off the ledge into oblivion and the darkness has never felt more like home. He’s aware that he’s whimpering, a stuttered sound that ebbs and flows as he rides out his climax. He’s aware of Sherlock watching him with wide eyes, stroking himself now as John tries weakly to help. He sees the second Sherlock comes with a low groan, feels the warmth slicking itself to the both of them, notices the slight tremble of Sherlock’s body as he finds his way back to John.

His Sherlock.

And then it’s over.

❥

The aftermath is serene, Sherlock’s curls tickling his neck as he rests lightly on John’s chest. John inhales nice and slow, the scent of them and sex and Sherlock settling over him luxuriously. 

“Alright?” John asks the silence.

“Alright.”

Before the stickiness between them dries into glue, Sherlock rolls off John, pressing a palm to his shoulder to keep him there. John complies, if only to relish the unusual scene of Sherlock cleaning up. He disappears outside for a couple of seconds, which John absolutely despises, but comes back quickly, old towel in hand.

“No need to be so surprised,” he remarks with an uptick of his mouth, when he swipes at John’s abdomen and groin and then his own, taking care to be as sloppy as possible. He drops the soiled thing on the floor before climbing into bed, sprawling on his back and manoeuvring John into him. John tilts his head, admiring his profile absently, before he follows his gaze to one of the bookshelves.

And there Billy was, in all his morbid glory, perched exactly where John found the settled dust. 

“We had an audience,” Sherlock says.

John smiles into Sherlock’s chest. “I don’t mind,” he says, “and I don’t think he minds either.”

“No?”

“No—” John pushes up, kissing Sherlock “—because we’re home.”

❥

It’s noon by the time they make it back out, and only because Sherlock hears voices coming from outside. It would have worried them, if it weren’t for the distinct sounds of a ticked off Mrs Hudson and a monotonous Mycroft.

The annoyance on Sherlock’s face is palpable enough to send him into a mini strop, and he swans out of the room in nothing but a hastily tied dressing gown. John’s still gathering his wits when he hears the voices of Mycroft and Sherlock rise in agitation, then grow quieter with Mrs Hudson’s admonishment. He takes a deep breath to tamp down on his embarrassment, before he walks out of the room. 

“Hello,” he greets, feigning nonchalance as he goes to prepare tea. He pointedly ignores Mycroft’s scathing gaze and Mrs Hudson’s pleased smile. Sherlock’s still glaring at Mycroft, and the normality of it has John hiding a secret smile.

He’s still smiling when Mycroft clears his throat. John takes the tea tray to the living room and sets it on the coffee table, then he takes a seat where Sherlock is fuming. It’s more than a little awkward, and then Mycroft says, “Dr Watson, it appears that I misjudged my choice of words the last time I saw you, as my brother—” he sends a meaningful look to Sherlock “—has pointed out, you are crucial to his happiness and well-being and I regret implying otherwise. I was weak in my emotional evaluation and for that, I apologise.”

John gapes. He looks to Sherlock, who gives him a smug shrug, then back at the unnaturally stiff Mycroft. “It’s—uh—alright, I understand completely,” he manages, then lets his guard down a little, “grief and love are just opposite sides of the same coin, after all.”

He ignores the miffed sound Sherlock emits. Mycroft gives him an assessing stare, something human peeking through, before he goes to pick up his umbrella.

“What about the tea?” John calls after him.

Mycroft replies without looking up, “Next time, seeing as you’ll be moving back in.”

Sherlock doesn’t react, John ducks his head a little and Mrs Hudson just grins harder. Then Sherlock presses a quick kiss to John’s cheek, in a move of affection so sudden John can do nothing but stare dumbly at him as he follows his brother outside.

He blinks. 

“So when can I expect you back?” Mrs Hudson appears beside him, which startles him more than it should, considering her small frame and advanced age.

“I—uh.”

Gently, she takes John’s hand into hers, tenderly stroking with her thumb. He feels the strange tension of the morning seep out of him and he gives her a grateful smile. “I miss having you here,” she says, eyes crinkling with something like joy, “you’ve left a rather John Waston-shaped hole in more than just Sherlock’s life when you left, dear.” 

John watches her, eyes resolutely not stinging, as she raises a hand to his chest. “You’ve got a big heart, John and there’s so much love in there. That’s why pieces of it end up in other people.” She goes to touch her own chest, where her heart beats. “Giving them away, does not mean they’re gone or that they’ve been lost for good. It just means your love is living in one more person.” Satisfied by whatever stunned look John is wearing, she sips her tea happily.

Sherlock comes back in, seeming significantly less incensed. He pauses and looks between Mrs Hudson and John. “Did she say something egregiously sentimental?”

Mrs Hudson says nothing, just kisses John and Sherlock on the cheek as she takes her tea downstairs.

Sherlock takes his seat next to John, coaxing John closer, until they’re flushed together on the sofa.

“Did she tell you I’m a lucky man?”

John nods.

“Predictable,” Sherlock says, but there’s no bite to it. John sees the shining joy in his eyes and pecks him on the lips. “She said you’re a lucky man too.”

The giggle that John lets out is warm and unfamiliar, and so welcome. 

Sherlock laughs with him, their joy mingling and twining around them. “Problem?” 

“Depends who’s luckier,” John quips.

“We’ll need more data for that.”

John leans into Sherlock, half in his lap now and he couldn’t care less. He is incandescent. “How long are we collecting for?” 

Sherlock kisses him soundly.

“Forever.” 

And it’ll be a perfect ending, to say forever and mean forever, but they are Sherlock Holmes and John Watson, and if their lives thus far is any indication, it’s that forever has to be fought for. John links his fingers with Sherlock’s thinking about every time they’ve fought each other, and thinks about what it’ll mean if they resolve to fight together. 

He thinks about waking each other up from personal demons, about dragging each other off dark roads and darker memories, about silly fights over milk and body parts. He thinks about thrilling cases and brilliant deductions, about dinners at Angelo’s and lots of belated kissing. 

And so he says, reverent:

“Forever.”