Chapter Text
Chapter Eight
John was having a terrible day. Which was a shame because he’d had a pretty damn spectacular night.
Which was why he was having a terrible day.
His head ached, and the patients never ended, and John’s thoughts made him dizzy, made him nauseated, made him want to track Sherlock down and pin him into place and shout at him until he was hoarse about all the things Sherlock had apparently never told him, if Janine was to be believed.
He had broken Sherlock’s heart when he married Mary. But Sherlock had never said that. And how had John been supposed to know Sherlock’s heart had been involved, ever, at all, in any of it? Sherlock had faked his death by leaping off of a building in front of him and then had lived without him for two years. John would never have been able to do that. John had only lived two years without Sherlock because Sherlock had forced him to. John could barely live one month without Sherlock when Sherlock was around. Mary had noticed that, had said that he got progressively more snappish the longer he went without him.
Janine thought he had broken Sherlock’s heart when he’d married Mary. And John had had no idea. And John sat and looked at patient after patient and just could not make up his mind if he still would have married Mary if he’d known. If he’d known that he would kiss Sherlock and Sherlock would kiss him back the way Sherlock had kissed him back.
Because John had never expected that. John, who had wondered for so long what Sherlock’s mouth felt like when kissed, if it would soften out of the moue of proud deductions, the way it did when John made him smile, when John made him laugh. John had wondered that for so very long without ever thinking that he would find out, the way one might wonder what it felt like to walk on the moon.
He had kissed Sherlock in the kitchen the night before because he’d been feeling reckless, like he had nothing left to lose. He had lost a wife and a child and a future, but he had not lost Sherlock. And somehow, even after everything else, there had still been hope in that. Sherlock, who had always been the person on the planet who had made him feel most alive when he otherwise most felt like he was dying. And he had kissed him, desperate to taste that aliveness, to feel it light him up the way it lit Sherlock up, and he had never expected Sherlock, in ten thousand years, to ever kiss him back, to ever, even for a heartbeat, want him that way.
And what had John done with that revelation? Well, he had shagged Sherlock, of course. He had let him say unbelievably amazing things, and had had no idea how to say anything even half as meaningful, so he had said something completely inadequate and fallen asleep by Sherlock’s side and thought that in the morning everything would be brand new and life would begin all over again, misunderstandings cast aside. John had had only a vague idea of how it would work, but he had had a clear idea that it was going to be lovely.
And instead Sherlock had disappeared and he’d got a book thrown at his head by Janine, as if he’d taken Sherlock to bed the way he would have taken any random warm, living person he met to bed. As if it hadn’t been a wild leap out of an airplane without a parachute.
All you have to do is look the right way at something and Sherlock would literally destroy his life to get it for you, said Janine’s voice in his head. And he had looked the right way at Mary. He had actually loved Mary. He really had. And he had married her because he had thought it would make him happy. And in the end it was an incontrovertible truth of his life that Mary had made him happy, but Mary made him happiest when there was Sherlock on the side. And that had never been true of Sherlock, John had never really needed anyone beside Sherlock, Sherlock had always been the single sun at the center of John’s orbit. And to admit that meant that he had been making so many mistakes for so many years that he had almost destroyed everything.
The two of you have this rare and beautiful thing, this once-in-a-lifetime thing, this thing the rest of us spend all of our lives looking for. You two fell right into it, and ever since you’ve been doing your best to destroy it. He had broken Sherlock’s heart, Janine said. Sherlock couldn’t even bear to look at his chair, Janine said.
And it couldn’t be true. It couldn’t be. If Sherlock had loved him like that surely he would have known. Surely he would have noticed. But Sherlock ran hot and cold with him. Sherlock was good at pretending to love people who he didn’t really care about it. Janine was a case in point. Sherlock could be cold and unfeeling and not even notice the level of destruction he was leaving in his path. That was Sherlock.
And Sherlock had planned his wedding. Had shot a man who was blackmailing his wife. Had told him to forgive his wife for shooting him. Had planned the funeral of his wife and child without even flinching. Had taken him to Sussex and given him space to have a private breakdown and picked up the pieces when John was ready. Had kissed him back last night like John was the missing part of a chemical equation he’d been working on forever. Sherlock had said, in the darkness between them, utterly naked, You’re the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. You utterly destroy me. You wreck me. I look at you and can’t breathe.
It was possible Sherlock loved him. No, that was wrong because John would have believed willingly anyone who had told him that Sherlock loved him. What John was spending an entire day of his life making sense of in his head was that Sherlock was apparently in love with him. Might have been in love with him all along. If John had known this earlier—But how would he had known it earlier? When Sherlock had never said?
Not that John had ever said anything to him, either. But he had thought it would be impossible for Sherlock to miss. Sherlock, who missed nothing. John had always assumed that Sherlock ignored it out of a desire to make their living arrangements—which Sherlock obviously liked—awkward.
John felt like he could tear his hair out, like he was being torn in two directions, and why hadn’t Sherlock just stayed this morning to talk to him? John took out his mobile once every few minutes to text him and had no idea what to write. Can we talk? seemed ridiculous. Why did you flee? sounded accusatory. You have always been the only thing I can’t live without was accurate but terrifying to put into a text when he still didn’t know that Sherlock wouldn’t be bewildered by it, wouldn’t think that he wasn’t just saying mad things in a grief-stricken state.
And he wasn’t, he realized. It wasn’t grief. For a while now Sherlock had been the only thing in his life that had not been about grief.
“There’s someone here demanding to see you, Dr. Watson,” hissed Penelope into his examining room. Penelope. Who hadn’t known his sad history, because he’d switched surgeries precisely so it wouldn’t be known, and who had asked him out for coffee days ago. And John had said no. And he hadn’t said no out of respect for Mary’s memory. He hadn’t said no because he wasn’t ready. He’d said no because he was already in a relationship.
John blinked at her dazedly as the realization finally dawned on him. Janine was utterly wrong. He wasn’t looking for the next Mrs. Watson. He had no interest in looking any further than Baker Street for anything else ever again.
“Dr. Watson?” prompted Penelope.
“Yeah,” said John, coming back to himself with effort. His hand fingered the mobile in his pocket. Text Sherlock, he thought. Say, You’re my next Mrs. Watson. Oh my God, he was literally hysterical. “What did you say?”
“There’s someone here asking for you.”
John didn’t dare to hope. “Who?” he asked, slowly.
“He’s—” There was muffled shouting from down the hallway, and Penelope glanced over her shoulder before turning back to John. “He’s causing a ruckus.”
Oh, God, thought John. Because it had to be Sherlock. Only Sherlock would sneak out of his own bedroom and then show up in a strop at John’s surgery because of it.
“Thanks,” said John, and walked past her and down the hallway, trying to determine what he was going to say. I love you seemed about right.
And yet not at all appropriate to the scene John came upon.
Sherlock was saying, “It’s just that it’s ridiculous for you not to have realized that this baby must have been another man’s,” and a woman with a baby was crying, and a man was furiously demanding whose it was, and a teenager who happened to also be there and apparently knew the couple said, “I bet it’s Tommy’s,” and this caused more fury and shouting. John stepped in front of the man just as he looked about ready to launch himself onto Sherlock, getting a glancing blow for his trouble.
Which did not put John in a good mood. Couldn’t Sherlock just not cause trouble for long enough for John to sort through all this confusion? John glared at Sherlock. “What the hell are you doing?”
“I’m deducing,” Sherlock spat out.
“Outside,” John ordered. “Now.” Whatever John was going to say to him, it wasn’t going to happen here.
Sherlock went with a swirl of his coat, and John left the mess for the cheating wife to clean up, because he wasn’t in the mood.
John meant to start with something nice, but he was bad at this, so he started with, “What the bloody hell was all of that—”
Sherlock whirled on him. “How could you not have realized?”
John blinked, startled by how truly furious Sherlock looked and suddenly ashamed. Because if Sherlock was talking about what John thought he might be talking about then John had spent the entire morning asking himself that same question. “Realized what?” he asked cautiously.
“How could you not have realized that this entire time, everything I’ve done, everything I’ve done, since the moment you told me what you wanted, was to give you what you wanted? Why did you think I was doing it? Did you think I was doing it for fun?”
Yup, definitely the same thing. John swallowed thickly.
“Mary,” ranted Sherlock, not noticing John’s silence. “The wedding. The baby. Magnusson. You told me you wanted it, and I gave it to you, and you never even said thank you.”
And suddenly John was furious. Sherlock had given him all of that, but Sherlock had never once actually asked him what he’d wanted. If John had known that Sherlock cared enough to be trying to determine that then John would have bloody started to suspect that Sherlock cared more than John had ever thought. “When did I tell you I wanted it?” John shouted at him.
“In the subway carriage!” Sherlock shouted back.
“The what?”
“The subway carriage! I said, ‘If I hadn’t come back you’d still have a future with Mary,’ and you said, ‘I know.’”
God, that long ago? John reeled backward in his memory, pulling up bits and pieces of being trapped in a subway carriage with Sherlock, convinced he was going to die. He had not been doing the clearest thinking of his life, and his recollection of those moments was mostly about what Sherlock had said and done, not himself. He must have said what Sherlock had said he said; Sherlock’s memory was flawless. “All right,” he said, not quite getting the point.
“You wanted her. She was your priority. I exposed that. So I gave her to you. Even though it meant that I lost you—”
That pushed a sensitive button on John, because this was a mess, all of it, but it wasn’t entirely of John’s creation. John shook his head. “Oh, no. You don’t get to act like you lost me first. Because that isn’t how it happened.”
“I know! And I’m sorry! I did a terrible thing to you, so I gave you Mary. I gave you your space with her, I protected her at every cost, I did everything I could think of to ensure that you could have her, because you wanted her and because I thought…She wasn’t supposed to do terrible things to you. I wanted to give you that, a person like that, a person who wasn’t me because you didn’t want me. And I did it for you even though it literally killed me—”
“When did I ever tell you that I didn’t want you? You’re the one who turned around and immediately replaced me with your best friend Janine—” snapped John, and knew he sounded petty and jealous and stupid because what did Janine have to do with this, really, except for how much it had cut John to the quick to see her in his appointed position in Baker Street. And Sherlock had hurt him, in so many ways over the years; this had not been one-sided.
Sherlock stared at him. “Are you jealous of Janine? How can you possibly be jealous of Janine? You married somebody else and I wasn’t allowed to be jealous. Oh, no, I had to pick out dresses and write you a sodding romantic song and pretend I wasn’t dying every single moment, and now you’re all upset because after you left I let someone else make me laugh once or twice. I thought that was what I was supposed to do! It’s what you did! And I made sure I didn’t push you, I made sure that you would never feel torn or conflicted. I took whatever you were willing to give me and I never complained. Never once. I never complained. I planned a wedding for you, and I never complained. How did you not realize? What did you think? Did you think that I was suddenly just a nice person? Did that make any sense?”
Sherlock hadn’t even thought they were best friends, how was John supposed to know that was because Sherlock had thought they were more? John had just thought he was trying to make up for everything, not… “I thought you were being a good friend—” managed John.
“I’m a terrible friend, John!” exclaimed Sherlock. “And, anyway, I made you forgive your wife for killing me. You didn’t think that went beyond just ‘good friend’?”
John thought of rushing into Magnusson’s office to find the blood seeping insidiously out of Sherlock’s body, soaking his designer shirt; remembered leaning over him and pressing it powerlessly back into his body; willing him to keep breathing, keep breathing, keep breathing; shoving his way into an ambulance with him and talking to him, endlessly, on the off-chance that John begging him not to leave him again might be the one thing that would keep Sherlock fighting. And it had been a ridiculous idea, but suddenly John wondered if his subconscious, gaining traction in the panic, had known all along the truth about the two of them, had known all along that John’s voice might be the most important thing Sherlock had needed just then. “You said she saved your life,” John said, and he thought suddenly that he might cry, because that one moment, that one decision on Sherlock’s part, had changed the entire path of their lives. “You said it was a surgical gunshot wound—”
“She shot me, John. I almost died. I got lucky. And you—”
John pushed at the sorrow, shifted it into anger. Because a piece of him had known all along that Mary hadn’t really cared one way or the other what had happened to Sherlock, because Mary had put a bullet into his chest, which was not a good place for a bullet to be, as John knew from bloody good experience. Mary had killed Sherlock, and then John had taken Mary’s side, and Sherlock had caused this. “That is not what you said,” John bit out at him. “That is never what you told me. You told me it was all fine because I choose inappropriate people to love because there’s something wrong with me—”
“There’s nothing wrong with you. You’re perfect. You choose inappropriate people to love. That doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with you. That makes you perfect. Because I thought that for a little while you might possibly have chosen me. Do you know how amazing that made you? That I could imagine, for even the briefest of moments, that if I’d realized it sooner, if I’d done less to make you hate me, you might actually have chosen me? You? Chosen me? You love inappropriate people. I don’t know why you ever thought it was a bad thing. It’s an amazing thing. You almost chose me. That was the closest I’ve ever come to someone actually wanting me. How could I have denied you, after the gift of that, the person you actually wanted? The person who was giving you a child and this normal life you thought you wanted and—”
“The normal life I thought I wanted,” said John, dully, his mind whirling with everything.
“Yes,” agreed Sherlock, hesitantly.
“You knew,” John realized. “You knew all along that Mary wasn’t going to make me happy.”
Sherlock was silent for a long moment. Then he said, “No. I didn’t. I hoped I was wrong. I hoped she would make you the happiest person on the planet. She was what you wanted. I wanted the thing you wanted to make you happy. If she didn’t then everything I did would have been a waste.”
“Why would you do any of that?” asked John desperately, feeling the weight of all the choices he hadn’t got to make because Sherlock had made them for him. “I never asked you to— How could I ever begin to—”
“You didn’t have to ask me. The point was that you never had to ask me.” Sherlock hesitated, then took a deep breath, as if he was about to plunge himself underwater. “The point was that I was in love with you,” he said in a rush.
John listened to that. Oh, how John listened to that. He had flung himself out of an airplane without a parachute, and it was possible Sherlock had just handed him one. John said carefully, “Was?”
“Am. I am. In love with you. How can you possibly not know this? After all this time. John Watson, I am the person who loves you most in the world.”
John rocked backward a little with the impact of the words, lost all ability to speak, stared at Sherlock for so long that Sherlock’s expression faltered. “So that’s that,” he said with a little shrug, as if the whole thing had been nothing but an astonishingly good deduction. “Just thought you should know.”
“Sherlock,” said John firmly, and reached out to hold Sherlock’s collar, keep him in place.
Sherlock looked down at him, looking wary, as if he didn’t know if he was going to be kissed or punched.
“You need to stand right here and let me think of exactly what I want to say to you,” John told Sherlock’s chin, because he couldn’t look into Sherlock’s eyes right at that moment. “Because I am not good at this stuff,” he reminded him.
“Just tell me you don’t hate me,” said Sherlock in a gulp.
“Why should anything that you just said to me make me hate you?”
“I don’t know. Because it’s you. And I make terrible mistakes with you. I make the worst mistakes.”
John thought of everything his life would have been if Sherlock hadn’t jumped off St. Bart’s. Would they have ended up here? Or would they have never got here? Had they needed the tragedy of his lost wife and daughter, the driving force of Janine, all of Sherlock’s built-up pain to suddenly lash out in a rage that would let him finally insist that John see what he had been refusing to see? John could see it suddenly, could see the two of them living out the rest of their lives together in Baker Street, no tragedy and no grief and no loss but no stunning declaration of love, either, no night in the darkness when John had felt a rightness he had never felt before in his life, like Sherlock had been put on the planet for him and he had finally thought to grab hold and take him.
John took a very deep breath and focused on Sherlock’s coat collar in his hands. “You didn’t give me the chance last time. You took it from me. You never told me this. You never asked me.”
“I didn’t want you to have to tell me no,” said Sherlock helplessly. “And I wanted…I just wanted you. Whatever that was, whatever you could give me. John, it doesn’t matter—”
“Shh,” John said, and finally looked up at him. “I’m trying to tell you, because you didn’t let me tell you last time: I choose you. I will always choose you.”
Sherlock stared at him, his eyes very wide. It was bright outside, and his pupils were tiny dots in the middle of irises that John had never been able to classify. John was going to spend the rest of his life, he thought, marveling at the fact that he had never realized the way Sherlock’s eyes looked at him.
And there was so much between them, so much tragedy and so much misunderstanding and so much mutual hurt. John tried to keep his voice steady when he said, “Can we start over? You and me. Can we wipe everything clean, forget everything we’ve done to each other? Can we just be—”
“Sherlock Holmes,” said Sherlock, and held out his hand.
John looked down at it, and slowly, hesitantly, took hold of it. “John Watson,” he said.
“I’ve got this lovely flat, Dr. Watson,” said Sherlock.
“How do you know I’m a doctor?” said John.
“You’re wearing a stethoscope.”
John laughed. He couldn’t help it. He laughed, and Sherlock smiled at him in response, his eyes bright, like there was nothing in the world better than John Watson laughing. Everything in his universe was shiny and new, and Sherlock looked at him like that, and John loved him with a desperation that he couldn’t bear. Sherlock, who had been his unchanging point, even when John had thought him dead. It had always, always, always been Sherlock. Everything, every beat of his heart. How had he been so stupid?
John said, “No flat.”
Sherlock, quizzical, lifted his eyebrows. “No?”
“At least, not until I take you to dinner first. Have some standards.”
Sherlock smiled, a corner of his mouth turning up. “I don’t eat.”
“Tea, then,” suggested John.
“I have a feeling you’re really rather excellent at making tea,” said Sherlock.
John hugged him suddenly, throwing his arms around his neck and pressing his nose into the soft curls behind his ear. “I love you,” he said, muffled against Sherlock. “You tosser, why didn’t you tell me so much sooner that I love you?”
“I’m an idiot,” said Sherlock, and hugged him tightly, kept him close.
John squeezed his eyes shut and said, “Tell me you’ll never leave me again.”
“Never. Well, I’m shortly going to leave you to finish seeing to your patients, but I expect you to come and see that flat with me. Quite centrally located, I think we’ll just be able to afford it between the two of us.”
“I think, between the two of us, we could do just about anything,” said John.
“Just so,” said Sherlock, and John heard the smile in his voice.
“I will never leave you, either,” John said. “You need to demand that of me. Make me promise never to leave you.”
There was a moment of silence. “Promise me you’ll never leave again.”
“Never,” said John, fervently. “I will choose you, every single day, for the rest of our lives. You. Just you.”
Sherlock took a deep shaky breath and held him and said, “Tell me, do you happen to have a truly terribly written blog? I’ve grown used to my flatmates having truly terribly written blogs.”
***
“How’s the new place?” asked Sherlock, sliding into the seat at the bar next to her, and Janine was almost amused by this attempt at chit-chat.
“You ought to come over and see it. I had a housewarming party and you were a no-show.”
“See how you called it a housewarming party?” pointed out Sherlock, with a little grimace. “Anyway, I’m still protesting the fact that you moved out. You didn’t have to move out. Especially when the flat was finally a two-bedroom flat again.”
“Ah, but my work as Cupid was complete. I go where the wind takes me, you know, pushing together stubborn, idiotic people, never finding one of my own. Speaking of.” Janine bumped her shoulder against his playfully. “Come on. Pick me a live one here, Sherl.”
Sherlock rolled his eyes and slid a piece of paper across the bar to her. “No need. Ring that number.” Sherlock stood.
Janine looked at the number. “Whose is it?”
“I called in a favor from my brother to get that,” said Sherlock sternly, “so you’d better appreciate the sacrifice.”
“Okay.” Janine looked up at him, intrigued. “But whose number is it?”
“Be sure to stop by anytime. John says he’s never playing Wii with me again, and I can’t allow myself to get rusty.”
“Yeah,” agreed Janine, dazedly. “But whose number is this?”
Sherlock kissed her cheek. “It’s a thank you. For everything,” he said into her ear. Then he winked at her and left.
***
September 30, 2015
Operation Find Someone FANTASTIC: COMPLETE – FINISHED – OVER
Shezza totally outdid himself. And I’ve already been warned by Mike that to say anything more would be a violation of the Official Secrets Act.
Comments
It’s Prince Harry, isn’t it? –Mrs. Hudson
Official Secrets Act, Mrs. Hudson. –Shezza
THE END.