Chapter Text
“John,” says Sherlock, his voice perfectly normal, smooth as John pass me my phone, or John, would you make some tea?
John flinches. He looks down at the coarse floor, dark; and the barest outline of something darker, spreading outward from a bulk next to Sherlock’s feet. He closes his eyes. Opens them. Sherlock is still there, watching, observing, and John has never felt so sick in his life.
“Sher-” he tries, and takes a deep breath, and tries again. “Sherlock. What is this?”’
Sherlock cocks his head. The shadowed light from the thin sliver of moon in the sky catches his face. His eyes are sure and clear. His expression is painfully, utterly familiar, exasperation mixed with a peculiar tenderness that he has only ever directed at John.
“Don’t be dull,” says Sherlock, and John’s heart squeezes tight, and falls somewhere small and far with the rest of him, filled with a distant terror that is not even for himself. Absurd. He tamps down a hysterical giggle - it’s a crime scene. Sherlock holds his hands up, like a surrender, the glint of metal in the palm of his gloves. “What does it look like?”
-
John is silent. Sherlock lets the knife fall from his hands. It lands with a soft tinkle, a small shard of light on the floorboards, the reflection half marred by something wet and dark. He says, “You’ve woken up in the middle of the night more than once to find me missing. You’ve been in my room, which always smells clean, and occasionally of disinfectant. You’ve been warned off me by dozens of acquaintances. You’ve noticed that London is occasionally, intolerably crime free, until one day I leave, and it’s not.”
Sherlock pauses, and continues, “You have a gun in your pocket. You don’t bring your gun unless you’re reasonably certain that you will encounter danger. Denial is not attractive on you, John.”
“Don’t,” warns John, low and furious. After everything, John was still hopelessly, helplessly destroying himself, and now this. “Don’t. I’m not going to-- I’m not going to shoot you.”
“Why not?” asks Sherlock, curious, as if he actually expects an answer. John does laugh, then, a little wild around the edges, and he covers his mouth to stop the sound. “Interesting,” murmurs Sherlock, as if it were a reply. John doesn’t really care what Sherlock’s deduced from that, except that he does. He steps forward and bends to pick up the knife.
Sherlock moves with frightening speed, seizing John’s wrist in a painful clamp, and John doesn’t even think - he twists and attacks. He catches Sherlock on the side of his jaw, glancing, and is almost literally swept off his feet because Sherlock has done something with his legs while he was moving, and John ducks into a roll and comes up with his shirt damp and sticky. He touches a hand to his side and it comes away smelling of copper. Sherlock stands, cradling his jaw with bloody gloves, and watches John, cool and knowing.
“I have a black belt in judo,” says Sherlock. “Too much of your combat repertoire is meant to maim or kill. Further hand-to-hand is pointless since you have already established your disinclination to do either.”
“Shut up,” John grits his teeth, a dead man’s blood on his clothes. On his clothes.
“You’ll have to burn them,” says Sherlock, sounding not in the least affected, or maybe even slightly happy. “It’s an awful jumper, anyway.”
John says, “I like this jumper,” and then, slightly horrified at the extent he realises he is able to go for this mad, impossible genius, at the ease with which he says, resigned, “I’m covering for you, aren’t I,” just like fetching tea, hot enough to burn.
“And I’m covering for you covering for me,” says Sherlock, who leans down and recovers the knife. “Luckily, I’m much better at this than you are. Please try not to touch things without gloves.”
John makes a strangled sort of sound. He almost buries his face in his hands, but remembers the blood just in time.
-
“I’ll be a few hours,” says Sherlock, blood and wool slung over his arm. John’s hand is no longer wet, but he doesn’t know where to put it. He asks. Sherlock shrugs, a soft line of movement in the darkness. “Clench your fist. No one’s going to look. Wash it off at home.”
“What about my shoes? Or the rest of my clothes. Fibres. Whatever it is you do at crime scenes.” John swallows. “When you’re investigating them, I mean.”
Sherlock says with absolute calm, “I’m covering for you, John,” and, “It’s alright. Go home.”
John opens his mouth. Closes it. Obeys.
-
John sits, jumperless, in 221B. His hands are clean. They do not shake.
His mobile shudders on the armrest; he slides it across and holds it up to his ear.
“John,” comes Mycroft voice, plainly tired. John pulls the screen away to check the time: 03:15. He is suddenly exhausted, and bends over in the couch. Two weeks ago they had post-case takeout here at three in the morning. John had laughed at the way Sherlock devoured all the siew mai; Sherlock had favoured him a with a crooked smile that spoke to the adrenaline rush in John’s veins, and there in the middle of the night John had felt invincible.
“John,” says Mycroft again, voice tiny from the speakers. He puts his phone back to his ear.
“Yeah.”
Mycroft’s voice is heavy in the silence, the distant voices of night muffled through the curtains that John drew closed to shield his home. “You must understand. Sherlock is very important to me, and you to him. In general, neither of us are in the habit of caring for others. Whatever else, he would never harm you.”
John breathes quietly. “You would.”
Mycroft doesn’t try to deny it. “Sherlock comes first,” he says.
John understands. How couldn’t he? In too many things, he is the same. It almost makes him smile, and after a while, he decides he can afford it: a sad upward tugging of one cheek, a whisper into the phone. “Goodnight, Mycroft.”
“Goodnight, John,” says Mycroft. The line goes dead.
John holds his phone, and his gun, and waits.
-
He knows how Sherlock sounds traversing the front door and climbing the steps, careful of the loose floorboards, shifting his weight so only the faintest footfalls can be heard. He knows the sound of the doorknob turning, and the sound of Sherlock’s surprise: a quiet little huff, like when he’d opened his birthday present and found new sets of microscope slides - because he’d either corroded or broken most of his own two days before - and John had smiled at the look on Sherlock’s face, desperately fond. He doesn’t turn around to see what Sherlock looks like now.
“I’ll be a minute,” says Sherlock, his voice a low sound in the night. He heads to the bathroom. At the sound of the running water John looks down at his own hands. He’d scrubbed them clean enough to perform an impromptu surgery, but it’s himself that he needs to open up and rearrange: to bring his heart back to his ribcage, to reboot his brain where tendrils of emotion have infiltrated his nervous system. He’s always been better at fixing others than himself.
Sherlock comes up to stand beside him, and he sits on the armrest, dipping the couch to the right. The smell of hydrogen peroxide twists John’s head, and he looks.
Sherlock is impeccable, natural. He raises his arm, covered with wool. John’s jumper, washed white as snow.
“You said you liked it,” says Sherlock simply.
John puts down the gun. Sherlock notices, and makes another quiet huff, and smiles wide. John reaches out, digs his fingers into the warmth. “I do,” he says.
Sherlock leans in. John closes his eyes, and yields.