Chapter Text
"Anderson?" John could hear the slur in his own voice as he staggered against the brick face of a gift shop on Baker Street. He would've taken a cab from the pub but had lost his wallet somewhere. He couldn't seem to keep track of things since... since the Fall.
"Yes... It's me," Anderson replied, stepping from the shadows into the streetlight. He was wearing a high-collared trench coat, and his hair was longer than John had ever seen it. It had been eight months since Sherlock's suicide. That had been the last time he'd seen Anderson... at the funeral.
John shivered once and hard, realizing he had lost his coat, too. Then it clicked. His wallet was in his coat. And his coat was... "Bloody hell," he cursed through chattering teeth, "What're you doing here?"
"I couldn't sleep," the forensics flunky (as Sherlock had once called him) answered in a less than pretentious tone. He actually sounded... quite subdued, "You going home alone?"
John looked around him comically, as if searching for an invisible date. Upon seeing no one, he shrugged and shivered again, "Looks like."
"Where's your coat?" The taller man asked, slow to catch on. Sherlock would have deduced right away that John had lost it, along with his wallet...
"Oh, bloody hell," John cursed yet again when he realized what else had been in his jacket, "My keys! My bloody, fucking KEYS!" He shouted this last bit so loud that it echoed down the street.
Anderson stared.
"AND... And you know what?! Mrs. Hudson... is gone... TO HER SISTER'S!" John kicked the door of the gift shop repeatedly. A light came on upstairs.
"Um, well, John... how about I let you in, then?" Anderson offered soothingly, glancing nervously up to the lit window where the lace curtains began to move, "Come on, with me now before you end up in the back of a police car..."
It took John too long to register what Anderson had specifically said, but he did finally see the importance of moving along... as in following Anderson's jogging sillouhette farther down Baker Street and away from grumpy gift shop owners.
In the quasi-darkness of the London streets, strange lights and shadows cast by the electric night, John's inebriated brain somehow transformed the narrow form of a running Anderson in his black, flapping trench coat. John felt like he was flying across the pavement, weightless and running on his toes, after the quick, rakish shadow of his best friend in the whole world, one Sherlock Holmes.
That was when he smiled. And that was when he crashed into Anderson and they tumbled down onto the sidewalk with no little amount of awkwardness and pain.