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“I’m off out,” John announces, bounding through the sitting room and gathering up his things. “Don’t wait up, eh?”
Sherlock hums from his place on the sofa, pretending not to watch through slitted eyes as John rummages for his wallet on the table. It’s under the stack of old BMJs, but Sherlock doesn’t bother to say so; John’s wearing the dark wash jeans tonight, the nice ones, with brown brogues and a pressed shirt and the dark, spicy aftershave, the one that smells like sitting around a bonfire in the Norwegian woods on a clear night—freshly applied just now at half past six in the evening, along with a little more hair product—a little too much product, in Sherlock’s expert opinion, not that anyone’s asking, John never does—and it’s so painfully, excruciatingly predictable, so dreadfully, awfully (achingly, arduously, awfully, caustically, distressingly, harrowingly, horribly, terribly, uncomfortably, etc. etc.) boring, the deduction is: date.
The wallet, when John finally finds it, goes into his back right pocket. It’s a bit of a snug fit; Sherlock snaps his eyes closed again.
He’s hungry.
Actually hungry, not just—anyway. No, he’s been lying on the sofa for an hour or two, plotting and planning where he might take John to dinner tonight and under what ruse—Greek, to investigate a smuggling ring of illegal ancient artifacts (been done, but John would never remember) or Chinese, to practice his Mandarin (never mind that he speaks Mandarin fluently and has done for years), or Indian, to experiment on curry spice levels (John shovels away even the spiciest foods like so much white rice, it’s fascinating)—and all the while, John has been upstairs, plotting and planning to go out with someone else.
How exceptionally unfair.
Sherlock rolls over, burying his face into the back of the sofa. It’s none of his business whether John goes out, he reminds himself. It’s none of his business whether John comes home late—and he will be late, past midnight at least, on a Friday night with nowhere to be in the morning. He might not even come home at all, and it’s really none of Sherlock’s business whether he does or he doesn’t, because he’s just a friend—and that’s fine, actually, because Sherlock has had so few of those, and he doesn’t want to risk just a friend for the sake of more than friends when the alternative—without friends—is still so recently familiar, and anyway he hasn’t yet figured out how to transition from one to the other without the risk of the third, so: pointless.
So it’s fine. Sherlock’s thought all these thoughts before and decided that it’s fine, for John’s Friday nights out with someone to be none of his business. Even if he were never the someone John wanted to go out with, like that, as long as John still came home—late tonight, or tomorrow morning, or whenever, as long as he did—it would be fine.
He really is hungry though. And there isn’t even anything in. Insult to injury, he thinks dejectedly, and burrows deeper into the cushions.
But then: a thought, followed by an idea.
It’s a little spark of an idea that slips and slides its way through Sherlock’s mind, startling a craving into life. If John’s going to be out late, and it’s only half-six now, well. That is quite a bit of time, isn’t it? Plenty of time, in fact. If John is leaving now and might not be back until morning, Sherlock will really have the time to indulge.
He never has the time to indulge these days, not with John around, but tonight—tonight he could really savour it.
Small comfort, compared to what he really wants, but a comfort nonetheless.
“Did you hear me?” John interrupts, zipping up his jacket. “Text me if anything comes up, all right? Don’t lay there all night either, it’s bad for your back.” He stops at the threshold, drums his fingers against the doorway. “Should I bring the leftovers back for you?”
A curl of satisfaction blooms in Sherlock’s stomach—not planning on being gone all night then. Probably not even past midnight at all. Small comforts indeed, he thinks, mentally trimming down the time frame for his new evening plans. He looks up at John with an appropriately disdainful expression. “Do what you like,” he sniffs. “I certainly won’t be eating them.”
“Right,” John says. “Course. I should’ve—well. I’ll see you later then?”
Sherlock hums and waves a hand at him distractedly, half-preoccupied with the planning and plotting of an evening alone and half-only-pretending-to-be-preoccupied with literally anything other than having to wish John good luck on his date. He may be just a friend, but he still has his limits.
John huffs—rolling his eyes, no doubt—and jogs down the stairs. Sherlock listens to him go, listens to the front door open and close. Listens to the silence of the flat for five minutes, then another ten just to be safe—just in case John were to come back unexpectedly, just in case he forgot something. He steadfastly refuses to contemplate the other scenario flirting with the edges of his mind—just in case John changed his mind about who he wanted to go out with—and focuses instead of the clandestinely extravagant (grandiose, lavish, lush, luxurious, opulent, sumptuous, etc. etc.) night that lays ahead of him.
Finally, slowly, stomach jumping and mouth salivating with anticipation, Sherlock takes out his mobile, scrolls through his contacts until he finds Great-Aunt Viola, and hits call.
He puts the phone to his ear and waits.
“Yes, for delivery, please. 221B Baker Street. Large, pepperoni, extra cheese, and there’s an extra twenty quid in it for you if you can get it here in twenty minutes.”
*
Sherlock ate his first slice of pizza when he was six.
It was obsession at first bite: the bursting zing of tomatoes and the garlicky comfort of crust, the cheese upon cheese upon cheese upon cheese and all of it hot enough to burn the roof of his mouth. His mother had tutted her displeasure and cleaned his greasy fingers every time he set the slice down, but his father had winked conspiratorially and said, “They’re kids, a little pizza’s good for them,” and Sherlock’s fate had been sealed.
Mummy didn’t much like pizza. She preferred fresh, unassuming food when eating at home and Michelin-starred cuisine when dining out, and she despised grease in all its many forms. But every once in a while, when she was gone and the boys were left to fend for themselves, Dad would pull a worn-out old Pizza Planet menu from a folder in his desk drawer and let Sherlock and Mycroft order whatever they wanted. They’d all pile into a blanket fort under the kitchen table to eat it, little bandits with sauce-smeared mouths and glorious knights with stains on their shirts.
“Just our little secret,” Dad would say. And that’s what pizza was, for years: a secret.
At uni, pizza had been cheap and available and popular, and it didn’t have to be a secret anymore. Sherlock tried everything—from traditional Neapolitan margherita to Hawaiian, from New York-style to Chicago deep-dish, from wood-fired to grilled and everything in between. There was a whole world out there of potential and possibility—the varieties in sauces alone! And there was nothing that couldn’t be used as a pizza topping if one was adventurous enough, if the flavours were combined just right—eggs and pork belly, shrimp and pesto, potatoes and truffle oil—and that’s not even mentioning the cheese (mozzarella and gorgonzola and parmesan and feta, gouda and goat and gruyere, brie sometimes and ricotta sometimes, and cheddar and provolone and fontina and god, Sherlock loved the cheese).
He did, somewhat embarrassingly, have a strong preference for the quick five pound pizzas with thick crusts and rubbery cheese from hole-in-the-wall shops with neon signs and no seating—childhood impressions and rose-tinted memories and all that rot—but he’d try anything at least once.
Then he tried cocaine.
Things went to shit for a bit. Sherlock supposed he should’ve expected that.
It was right in the middle of a pretty particularly shit bit, right about the time that Sherlock was beginning to wonder what the point of it all was, to wonder whether there was anything really to stop him from tipping over the edge into whatever was beyond oblivion, that he ended up in exactly the first place he did not want to be, which coincidentally turned out to be perhaps the only place that could have saved his life: face to face with a bunch of cops.
It had been late, too late for decent people to be out. Sherlock had been stumbling home, high as a kite and broke as a joke, wearing grubby old sweatpants he couldn’t remember putting on and carrying half a box of whatever the Friday night special at Pizza Express was, when he took a wrong turn and practically fell into a crime scene.
“That body’s been frozen,” he told the beat cop who was patrolling the scene perimeter, unable to help himself. “Look at the feet. The hands! Bloody obvious.”
“Keep moving, lad,” the cop said, giving Sherlock a look up and down like he was a particularly disgusting, insistent zit. “Or I’ll have you for public intox.”
Fortunately, the detective inspector on the scene eventually overheard the ruckus and intervened before Sherlock could be disappeared away into the back of a panda. Six hours later, with the victim identified and the killer in cuffs and the sweat starting to run in rivulets down Sherlock’s back, Lestrade had handed over his card. “If you ever get clean, yeah,” he said, eyeing the grubby sweatpants, the crooks of Sherlock’s elbows, “give me a call.”
Sherlock took the long route home, ignoring the trembling in his hands and knees, walking the streets of London with the card burning in his pocket and the victory burning in his brain. By the time he got there, his mind was already made up. He swallowed his pride and his nausea, and phoned Mycroft. “I’m fine,” he said, to spare Mycroft the pain of having to ask. “Well, mostly fine, but I suspect I’m about to go through a spectacularly unpleasant detox. I want to go to rehab.”
There was a pause.
“Really?” Mycroft asked, astonished. A sudden flurry of activity rushed through the background of the call.
Sherlock laughed, actually, without bitterness and with a bit of a thrill that he could still catch Mycroft off his guard. “Yes, really.”
“All right—don’t—don’t move, Sherlock. I’ll be right there.”
Sherlock did not move. Instead he set the sweatpants on fire in the tub, put on a pair of mostly clean denims, and went to rehab.
After that came the suits, the blog, the business cards; the strange, terrible urge to be believed, to be taken seriously, to be acknowledged as competent and intelligent. He made himself razor sharp, crisp and cuttingly clear, undoubtable, unquestionable, too big and too insistent to be dismissed and ignored and run off. He finally had something he was good at, something that mattered, and one day, if he was fast enough, if he was smart enough, if he was good enough, that might mean that he mattered, too.
And then came John.
*
Sherlock had honestly thought that John Watson would live with him for a about month or so, just long enough to rouse him from his obvious depression, and then once John got enough energy up to actually notice how odd Sherlock was, things would begin to deteriorate and he would pack up and go. Sherlock was expecting it; he was resigned to it.
But John did not go. He stayed, even after the self-loathing and helplessness began to fade into memory. And he did get his energy back, though Sherlock rather thought that was a mixed bag—John mostly used it to make shockingly bad tea or an even worse thing with tuna and peas, or to fiddle with Sherlock’s socks or to search his drawers for illicit cigarettes or to tidy up the flat with long-suffering sighs and pointed glares.
But Sherlock could ignore all that—accept it even, grow strangely fond of it—because there was more than that to John Watson. So, so much more.
He was an enigma, John was. He was fiercely competent and fervently contradictory—a killer with a doctor’s hands, a strong moral principle with an illegal handgun—and there was something a little surprised and secretive about him sometimes, about the way he looked at Sherlock. Something about the way John made himself appear as though he was keeping to himself, minding his own business, when really he was oriented toward Sherlock like a sunflower to the noonday sun. Like he was always waiting for something to happen—like if he looked away for too long, Sherlock might do something amazing, and he didn’t want to miss it.
And he thought Sherlock was brilliant, and funny, and he said so, and then suddenly he had a whole blog dedicated to the work they did together and he made it sound like it was all some grand adventure, like Sherlock was some kind of a superhero. Like what Sherlock did wasn’t just a neat party trick. John thought it mattered.
John thought Sherlock mattered.
(He was also muscular and compact, quick-fingered, honey-haired and lapis lazuli-eyed and gentle-smiled. In short: almost embarrassingly attractive.)
That was all it took, really.
It was perfectly and horribly cliché. Sherlock meets the one person who can possibly stand him, the one person who likes him, wants to be around him, and promptly goes head-over-heels, arse-over-tits (swept-off-his-feet, over-the-moon, full-throttle and full-speed-ahead, somersaults and butterflies and the whole nine enchantingly charmingly terribly preposterous yards, etc. etc.) for him. It was almost offensively stereotypical. It was ridiculous.
Still, though. A fact’s a fact whether Sherlock likes it or not, and by the time Jim Moriarty thought to wrap John up in explosives and put him in the cross-hairs of a rifle scope, Sherlock knew—he knew, he knew it like he knew that the sun would rise in the east or that water would expand as it froze—he knew for a fact that John Watson was the person. The person, the only person.
The capital-O One person. The One for Sherlock.
So the first time John bumped into his shoulder as they walked away from a crime scene and said, “d’you know, I could really go for a pizza right now,” Sherlock had panicked (greasy fingers and torn-up napkins, a childish secret and a furtive addiction and John’s eyes laughing at him, John’s eyes sliding over his greasy mouth the way Lestrade’s eyes had done over the crooks of Sherlock’s elbows) and flushed and sneered as he stalked off. “Pizza, John, really? How pedestrian.”
Maybe—possibly—more than likely, really—all right, almost certainly—things had gotten out of hand.
But then, that was often the way of things at 221B.
*
The pizza arrives hot and fresh and steaming. Sherlock chucks the extra twenty quid at the delivery boy and slams the door, flipping open the lid to examine his prize before he even makes it all the way up the stairs. His mouth waters at the smell rising from the bubbly surface, the crisp edges of the pepperoni spiraling across the expanse of melted mozzarella. Beautiful.
He sets the box amid the rubbish on the kitchen table and calculates: eight slices, divided by about five hours. He really shouldn’t eat the whole thing, but he knows his weaknesses well enough and it’s been long enough since he’d last indulged this particular vice to understand that he is about to make some decisions that his stomach will no doubt regret.
Worth it, he thinks.
He picks up the first slice, wiggling it a little to remove it from its compatriots, letting the cheese draw out in advert-perfect strings for a moment before reaching out and piling all the left-behind bits back on top. The first bite is a symphony of taste and smell and memory, the mellowness of the mozzarella, the smoke of the pepperoni, the zing of tomato sauce and comfort and warmth and happiness.
And underneath that, the delicious sense of getting away with something.
He knows that John doesn’t actually care whether or not Sherlock enjoys pizza. John enjoys pizza. John is the sort of person that thinks everyone likes pizza, and anyway, he already knows Sherlock better than anybody else has ever known him.
But this isn’t like anything else. This is a passion hidden by a lie, and telling John the truth now wouldn’t be just about pizza, would it?
So Sherlock can’t. To tell John now, to admit that he loves pizza, to go back on his denials and rejections and to admit that yes, he wants, that yes, he craves, that yes, he has secrets and yes, maybe he wants to share them, to share them with John—to sit with John in some dark restaurant with red-and-white checked tablecloths, to brush fingers against John’s as they fight for the last slice—it’s too intimate now. It’s too intimate for just a friend. It’s the sort of thing Sherlock always thought he’d share with the One.
He just hadn’t considered what might happen if he wasn’t the One back.
Sherlock shakes the thoughts away: illogical, useless, unhelpful. He focuses again on finishing his pizza instead of focusing on John—out with someone else, looking at someone else, laughing with someone else, touching someone else, holding someone else—and picks up the next slice.
*
John slinks in at a quarter to midnight, noticeably sans leftovers. Sherlock’s secretive pizza has long since been finished and the evidence of it binned; Sherlock is stretched out on the sofa, drowsing and rubbing occasionally at his tum. Definitely worth it though, he reminds himself.
“I see you haven’t moved,” John says, sounding a bit resentful, as though he wishes he too had spent the night lounging around in the peace and quiet of the flat. He tosses his jacket over the back of his chair and falls back into it, moving stiltedly, like he’s expecting himself to creak and pop. Not a very good date, then.
Sherlock refuses to be pleased about it. He may be just a friend, but he does try to be a halfway decent one, when he can. He shifts, putting on a show of coming out of deep thought. “John,” he says. “What time is it?”
“Only about midnight. Did you eat?”
The pizza is uncomfortably present in his stomach. “Mrs Hudson forced a couple of biscuits on me.” He hesitates, but John’s sitting with his knees apart and not stomping away to lick his wounds in private, so he’s clearly open for conversation. “I see your date was a bust.”
John grimaces. “She was nice enough. There just wasn’t any . . .” He waves a hand distractedly. “Dunno. Spark, I guess.”
“She was boring,” Sherlock translates with a snort. John barks his own laugh, an agreement and an admission, and that’s all right, then. “Don’t know why you bother, really. When’s the last time you went on more than one date with someone? That doctor woman?”
“Sarah,” John supplies, sighing. “It’s just about trying to find the right person, Sherlock. I don’t want to be alone forever.”
Sherlock’s insides twist and squeeze uncomfortably around his full stomach; for a moment he thinks he might be sick. “Good thing you’ve got me then,” he quips, but the delivery falls flat and his cheeks threaten to burn. John looks away.
“You’ve never wanted that sort of thing, I suppose,” he says, rubbing at his eyes. Every molecule of Sherlock wants to shout out in protest—no, I do want that, I want that with you—but John doesn’t seem to notice. “Not your area and all. Must be nice, actually, not to worry about it.” He smiles, forced and awkward, before heaving himself onto his feet. “I’m going up to bed, yeah? See you tomorrow.”
Sherlock closes his eyes and hums, not daring to open his mouth lest his confessions all fall out. The pizza is starting to give him heartburn.
*
“Ugh, god, Sherlock,” John says, throwing him a look crossed with disgust and exasperation. “What in the hell did you eat last night?”
Sherlock raises the newspaper higher, covering his face—it should be embarrassing, having forgotten his lactose medication before diving into something melted over with dairy, but there’s just enough four-year-old boy left in him to have to try not to laugh instead. “Ask Hudders, she’s the one who brought the biscuits up.”
Another inelegant little noise echoes in the silence of the kitchen.
John snorts. Sherlock dares a look over the top of his paper; the corner of John’s mouth is tugging hard at his cheek. When their eyes meet, they both spill into laughter, the sort of gasping, uncontrolled laughter that hurts Sherlock’s chest in the best way.
It’s not everything Sherlock might wish it could be, but having John here with him is better than anything he’s had before, and that’s plenty.
*
July gives way to August, which gives way to September, which gives way to Irene Adler. She makes John puff out his chest and stand a little too close to Sherlock for a few days, reaching out with soft, protective touches to his arms and shoulders to make sure Sherlock’s okay.
Sherlock hates it.
It doesn’t mean anything, or it doesn’t mean the right thing, and Sherlock hates it. John sits with Sherlock on the sofa, laughing at James Bond movies and drifting half to sleep against him, and afterward gets up to take a phone call locked away in his room, and Sherlock hates it. John chases after him on cases and listens to him explain his experiments and writes about him as if he’s the most fascinating thing in the world, and then he disappears on Saturday nights wearing the nice jeans and the brown brogues and the Norwegian fireside cologne, and Sherlock hates it.
The thing he hates most about it is that he can’t even tell himself that he doesn’t understand it, that he doesn’t know why John bothers: John is trying to find his person. He’s looking for someone who will make him happy, who will make him complete. He’s looking for his One.
Sherlock can’t deny John that. He knows what he would give to have his.
And Sherlock knows that no matter what it would mean to himself, no matter how much it would hurt and ache and slice, no matter how much it would flay him open and burn him alive, if John were ever to find the person he wanted to leave Sherlock for, the One person he wanted to spend the rest of his life with, Sherlock would help him do it.
*
In October, John goes on three dates with the same woman. She’s got a nose of some description and a dog that Sherlock doesn’t even get to meet, and she makes Sherlock’s hands shake. The first time they go out, John stays out until four in the morning and comes home loose-limbed and giddy; the second time, Sherlock stays up all night and only manages to eat two slices of his spicy-sweet wood-fired margherita pizza. It’s a shameful waste, but when John comes home the next morning smelling like vanilla and freesia perfume, Sherlock’s glad of it—he barely manages to keep himself from throwing up as it is.
He follows them once, just to see.
If he’s honest with himself—and he very rarely is, if he can help it, self-introspection isn’t exactly his idea of fun, after all, but he did promise himself after the pool that he’d have to at least be honest enough about John not to get John killed—he’s hoping that he’ll see something in them that will reassure him that she’s not John’s One. That he’ll see that she’s cheating on him, or on someone else, or that she’s into retail fraud or at least petty shoplifting, or that she voted Tory in the last election, or that she will never understand or appreciate Star Trek—not that Sherlock gets it, not really, but he’s not out here trying to be John’s One, so: irrelevant—or that she doesn’t believe in washing her socks, or else anything at all. Anything that will mark her out as harmless; anything that could nudge her from her spot in John’s affections if only Sherlock is patient enough for it to out itself.
So he’s follows them. What’s a little following between friends, anyway? John won’t even know he’s there.
It’s overwhelmingly disappointing: there’s nothing at all wrong with her from the off. She’s perfectly lovely, aside from the nose thing, but John’s a bit self-conscious about his own nose sometimes so maybe that appeals to him. Sherlock wouldn’t know—he never thinks about his own nose—why bother—and he likes (admires, appreciates, values, cherishes, adores, loves, etc. etc.) John’s.
Sherlock follows them all the way from kisses-on-cheeks at her front door to a little Italian trattoria off Clerkenwell Road. It’s an unbearably romantic little place, all exposed brick and chalkboard menus and globe lights strung across the ceilings, with the warm, hearty smell of good garlic and fire spilling out onto the pavement. John and his date are taken to a table somewhere near the back, back where Sherlock can’t quite see—he’s trying to be discreet, after all, and doesn’t dare to do more than peer into the edges of the windows.
He should’ve worn a disguise; then he could have slipped inside, maybe even listened in a little. Maybe next time.
There may be nothing wrong with John’s date, per se, but it quickly becomes apparent that she’s entirely too boring. They laugh and split a bottle of wine and talk and flirt, but Sherlock sees the way John squirms in his chair, sees the way his left hand fiddles with the tablecloth. Their conversation seems to flow as though they’re both on autopilot.
Sherlock relaxes a little: uninteresting, then, which is probably worse for her chances of stealing John’s heart than anything Sherlock might’ve hoped to see in her. He starts looking through his email on his mobile for a case good enough to interrupt John with. It would be a mercy at this point, he thinks, and he’s trying to decide between the beheaded black dahlias—flowers, this time, rather than Hollywood starlets—or the ransacked rugby lockers—allegedly, but not possibly, a poltergeist—when the waitress arrives with the meal.
Sherlock’s heart clenches in his chest, stuttering to an imperfect beat.
The woman receives a plate of pasta—boring, predictable—but John, oh, John. Sherlock catches only the barest glimpse of it as the waitress places it before him, but he could recognise that dish anywhere: a flat, rustic crust, hand-twisted round the edges to hold its treasure of roasted spinach and smooth cheese safe in its middle.
John ordered himself a pizza.
Stupid, Sherlock berates himself, ripping himself away from his watching place and tugging his coat around him, shoving his hands deep into his pockets. Stupid to come. Stupid to think—it’s not like I have some kind of monopoly—it’s not like he’s done it because of me—stupid.
He looks up the menu in the back of the cab. A white pizza: grilled crust with olive oil, smothered in garlic-infused ricotta and laid over with slices of mozzarella, dotted with roasted garlic and spinach, pine nuts and red pepper flakes. He reads the description with something sharp in the back of his eyes, and when he gets home, he showers the scent of fresh-baked bread out of his hair and takes himself to bed, feeling sick and tense and, for the first time in months—for the first time, really, since he met John—utterly without appetite.
*
It’s probably best for all involved that the woman with the nose only lasts another week—there isn’t even another proper date before she calls it off. Sherlock can’t even pretend to be offended on John’s behalf, he’s so pleased, and to celebrate he takes a case in a high-end boutique that specialises in custom hand-made bath products. They do a stake-out overnight in the kitchens, laughing at one another as they try to avoid causing a ruckus by jostling the racks of metal dishes and pans, standing too close and shushing one another over their giggles, and John’s hand lands on Sherlock’s chest when the back door opens, curling into his coat to keep him steady.
Sherlock thinks his heart will probably give them away, it’s beating so fast.
“John,” he whispers, dry-mouthed and suddenly anxious, but John isn’t looking at him, doesn’t hear him, and then he’s gone.
Hard to be upset, though, when John uses the opportunity to tackle the would-be thief into a rack of baking tins. The clatter jolts Sherlock out of his own mind, and he manages to cuff the struggling woman without giving himself away entirely.
And if the proprietor just happens to present them with a custom cache of their nicest products made specifically for a bloke who enjoys woodsy essential oils with lemon or bergamot or lavender and who experiences regular muscle aches and worries about his propensity toward wrinkles, well. It’s not as though Sherlock could’ve orchestrated that, now could he?
“That was just what the doctor ordered,” John says, emerging from the bath a few days later, wrapped in his robe and smelling overwhelmingly like mint and oakwood, dark and unbearably fresh. There’s water still dripping from the hair at the nape of his neck; Sherlock’s mouth goes dry under the desire to lick it off. John flops into his chair, crossing his legs and tipping his head back and heaving a great, satisfied sigh. “Brilliant. Have you tried any of that stuff?”
Sherlock shakes his head, suddenly very focused on the magazine in his hands. He can’t remember what the article was even about. “No, I—” he catches another waft of scent rolling off John and has to cough, to clear his throat. “No, I’ve used the same system for ages. Wouldn’t want to fuss it up now.”
John grins, absolutely carefree and cavalier. “Yeah, that’s what I thought. You’re a sop when nobody’s looking, did you know?”
“No idea what you’re talking about.”
“I bet you don’t.” John settles further back into his chair, closes his eyes. “You’re a complete codger, you are. How could I forget?”
“Shush, or I’ll drown you in a bath bomb,” Sherlock says primly, and John laughs.
*
The secret is very nearly out after John takes up with the boring teacher. Sherlock orders a ham and sausage with mushrooms, John having gone off with her to—a movie? an art gallery? Sherlock can’t remember—and has just sat down to dive in when John texts that he’s already on his way home and does Sherlock need anything from Tesco? Sherlock has barely twenty minutes to get rid of the evidence and wash up before John stalks up the stairs, closed off and irritable.
Sherlock rolls over and stuffs his face into the back of the sofa, his stomach grumbling bitterly. John didn’t even like this one, not really, and yet he persisted. Like he did it just because he thought he ought to, and not because he really thought she might be the One, and Sherlock doesn’t understand the point any longer.
Is it really so terrible, to spend Saturday nights with him? Is it really so awful to just be friends and have that be it? Isn’t it at least better than this awkward, artless (bumbling, inelegant, cumbersome, embarrassing, troublesome, etc. etc.) and altogether worthless dating of women John can’t seem to make himself care enough about?
Sherlock doesn’t understand it, and now he doesn’t even have his pizza to soothe the wounds.
The following morning, John is on a cleaning-up rampage, stacking files and papers and making disgusted noises at all of Sherlock’s experiments, threatening to dust the shelves and toss out printers numbers two through seven, when he unearths a forgotten napkin out from under a stack of books about nineteenth century microscopes. “You’ve got to remember to throw your actual rubbish out at least,” he rages at Sherlock, who ignores him, just as disgruntled as John but refusing to show it. “This flat is enough of a mess as it is without rubbish floating around. That’s how people get bugs, Sherlock! What even is this anyway, straight grease?”
Sherlock’s head snaps up; he recognises the napkin on sight. A pizza napkin—no! “I had a bit of a chemical spill last week,” he invents, his hands sweating. “Things got a bit sticky for a moment.”
“Chemical spill?” John half-shouts, dropping the napkin again.
“No—” Sherlock splutters. “It’s safe! I put a neutraliser on it, of course. That’s what made it sticky.”
John shoots him a dirty look and snatches the napkin back up, brandishing it in Sherlock’s direction. “Sticky things go in the bin, Sherlock Holmes!” Then he sighs, deflating. “Sorry, sorry. I’m just a little—well.” He looks back down at the napkin in his hand, searching for some way to change the topic. “It smells like food, actually. Are you sure it was from last week? What were you eating in here last night?”
“If it’s food, it’s yours,” Sherlock says, concentrating again on his laptop so he doesn’t give himself away. “Really, John. You’ve got to remember to throw your actual rubbish out, you know. That’s how people get bugs.”
It’s a joke inasmuch as it is a forgiveness. John snorts, and then he laughs, and then they both do, and then Sherlock gets up from the desk and helps him finish with the tidying up so they can go out for chips.
The napkin is forgotten at the bottom of Mrs Hudson’s bins, and Sherlock resolves to be more careful. He thinks giving himself away now, this late into everything, would be worse than if he’d just gone for it at the beginning.
No: he’ll keep his secrets, and thank you very much for minding your own business.
*
The new year starts with a snow flurry and a gift Sherlock doesn’t want: a sleek mobile phone with a passcode he can’t break, and Irene Adler filling up the flat between them once again.
“So, she’s alive then,” John says, shuffling his feet. He’s beautiful in the Christmas lights they’ve strung around the flat, and Sherlock can barely stand to look at him. “How are we feeling about that?”
Sherlock doesn’t feel anything about Irene Adler and whether she’s alive or dead. Sherlock doesn’t care about Irene Adler. Not really. Not the way John means.
I want to know whether you were jealous, he wants to say. I want to know if you will ever stop looking for someone else, if you will ever find your One, if you will ever leave and not come back. I want to know why it is so, so easy for everyone else to see that you are my One even though I am not yours, and all I want is to share a pizza with you and I can’t because you don’t really want to share a pizza with me, the way I mean, the way that would be important, and if you must know I’m feeling very tired about that.
Instead he says, “Happy New Year, John.”
“Do you think you’ll be seeing her again?”
Sherlock sighs, and instead of daring to say anything more, he lifts his bow. Should auld acquaintance be forgot, and never brought to mind? Should auld acquaintance be forgot, and auld lang syne.
You can stop worrying about her, John. I won’t forget you, Sherlock promises, watching the snow come down in fat, lazy flakes. Even if you forget me.
*
But the thing about John Watson is this: he is entirely, thoroughly, perfectly unpredictable.
Sherlock knows that. Sherlock had known that from the first moment they’d met, when he’d heard bit different from my day—doctor, obvious—and looked up to see a handgun and a kill count in a jumper. But John has a way of lulling a person into a false sense of security about his patterns. He’s fairly unassuming, all told, and doesn’t make a fuss about much—the contents of their fridge aside—and somehow, that translates into an odd ability to skirt around the red flags and trip wires that would normally alert Sherlock to the various deviations and aberrations that John is occasionally capable of.
Which is to say that it takes Sherlock almost two months to realise that John has stopped dating.
The realisation takes him by surprise one Saturday morning over breakfast. He is circling suspicious-looking personal ads in the newspaper while John makes a grocery list, and when John reaches over and taps his pen on Sherlock’s arm to ask what he wants for dinner that night, the answer—I’ve a craving for pizza—almost topples out without thought.
He has a craving because he hasn’t had any in almost two months, because he only has pizza when John goes out, and John hasn’t been out. Hasn’t even been looking, now that Sherlock thinks of it. Hasn’t been disappearing up to his room to take phone calls, hasn’t been coming home from nights down the pub with Stamford with perfume clinging to his collar, hasn’t been going out to social mixers with his colleagues.
“Curry?” John suggests, looking up expectantly. “With some of that weird Indian beer you like?”
“It’s not weird,” Sherlock defends automatically, and John laughs and adds it to his list like it were any other Saturday.
Once Sherlock notices it, of course, he can’t stop noticing it: John’s well of affection, usually buried so deeply beneath his breastbone, seems to be spilling out everywhere, but with no dates in sight. He picks up the beer Sherlock likes and leaves the telly turned on to nature documentaries when he goes up to bed; he clears an extra space in the tub for an experiment Sherlock has been musing about conducting and clips interesting obituaries from the papers.
And for the first time, Sherlock thinks: maybe.
Maybe John will stay after all.
They take case after case and share laughs and giggles and late-night Chinese and get caught in the rain and in mafia hide-outs; they break into Harrod’s and steal paperwork from Lestrade and have Sunday dinner with Mrs Hudson at her tiny kitchen table. They help Molly Hooper conduct autopsies, and they help Mycroft catch a rogue agent, and they help a teenage girl find a lost cat, and it all seems terribly fun and worthwhile and important, and John suffers no fool who would insult Sherlock Holmes, and Sherlock Holmes blushes and fiddles with the end of his scarf and tries not to fidget in front of the cameras.
Sherlock even considers coming clean about the pizza.
It would be easy, actually, just to suggest pizza for dinner one night, coming back late from a case. There is a place just a couple of blocks away that is really more of an epicurean pizzeria than he generally prefers, but they over-char the bottoms of their pies just so and their roasted aubergine and chèvre would melt in John’s mouth. It would be easy, as easy as John had been that first time when he’d bumped into Sherlock’s shoulder as they’d walked down the pavement. “I fancy a pizza,” Sherlock would say, rolling his eyes when John laughs and calls him out—you said! “Don’t be silly,” he would say. “Of course I like pizza.”
And maybe, just maybe, sitting there in the darkened booths of a restaurant buckling under the weight of its own trendiness, with glasses of excruciatingly expensive wine and pizza piled high with arugula and prosciutto between them, Sherlock would find the courage to say, “I like you too, you know.”
Sherlock thinks about it for weeks, trying to picture John’s face, trying to predict how he might react. Trying to think how he might say it, how he might give John the appropriate out if he wants one, how he might reassure John that nothing need change if he isn’t really interested. How he might say, I think I love you, a little bit, without admitting that John is his One.
And maybe he would’ve really done it, some night. Maybe he would’ve figured it out eventually, found the words, the moment, the courage.
Maybe he would have, if it hadn’t been for Dimmock’s new detective sergeant.
*
She is blonde. John has a thing for blondes, a bit. Sherlock had noticed it ages ago—small, cute, irreverent blondes. John’s type.
She at least has the decency to wait until she clocks off before asking John if he’s interested in going out for drinks. Professionalism indeed, Sherlock thinks haughtily. Probably if he took up sitting in Lestrade’s office eating pizza and leaving his greasy napkins on all the important papers, he would get chewed out, but apparently asking co-workers out on dates—even if they’re unofficial, off-the-record co-workers, they still are—is fair game.
She’d made John laugh. Standing at the crime scene, waiting for Sherlock to finish inspecting the body of the murder victim, waiting for his stream of deductions so they could go catch a murderer, she had made John laugh. Bloody amateurish, it was.
To be perfectly truthful—and Sherlock thinks that maybe he ought to get out of the habit of being that truthful with himself, if it is going to turn out like this—it’d made him feel small, when he’d turned back to John and had to repeat his name three times to get his attention. It had made Sherlock feel like he was still dressed in that pair of sweatpants from so many years ago; like Sherlock is still just a nobody with a Pizza Express box in his hands, trying to say something important to someone who would never listen.
“I don’t particularly think dating officers at the Met is appropriate,” Sherlock says, trying and failing not to watch John as he gets ready for the date. He hasn’t been able to train himself into passiveness entirely—he’s been meandering around with his violin for the better part of an hour—but at least his voice is steady. “Mixing business with pleasure and all that. Isn’t there a policy or something?”
John has the temerity to laugh. Laugh! “It’s fine, Sherlock,” he says absently, shifting through a stack of books about Tennyson as he searches for his mobile. It’s actually next to the stack about Whitman, but Sherlock doesn’t say so. “It’s just drinks, not a lifetime commitment. I’m sure we can both be adults about it if it ends badly.” He finally snaps his mobile up—Sherlock glowers—and stuffs it into one nearly-too-small back pocket. “Look, I know you’ve been mulling over that case about that warehouse out in Berkshire, the one on the river—if you’re going to head down there, at least shoot me or Lestrade a text so we know where to dredge for your body.”
Sherlock hmmphs and makes a truly ugly sound on his violin, refusing to laugh. Probably a pepperoni and extra cheese night tonight. Keep it simple, comforting. At this rate, he might even walk out and get a slice to go from somewhere, get out of the flat for a bit and get some air. “I’ll be fine,” he snipes. “I don’t need a mother-hen.”
John only grins. “Never sure with you,” he says. “Text me if you need anything.” He pats down his pockets, checking one last time for his keys and phone and wallet, and then puts on the navy blazer that Sherlock particularly likes. Sherlock frowns at it.
The next question slips out before Sherlock even knows he wants to ask it. “And if I did? Text you, I mean.” He sounds petulant and childish, and jealous, and he shifts uncomfortably on his feet. “Would you just walk out on your date?” Good Lord, he needs to get a hold of himself.
John’s smile fades into some kind of serious earnestness that Sherlock can’t quite read. “Depends on what you need, I suppose,” he says.
Sherlock blinks. “What’s that supposed to mean? Yes if I’m getting murdered, no if I’ve only burned the flat down?”
John looks away. “It means if you need me, you can ask for me, and I’ll be here,” he says with finality, buttoning the blazer as if that weren’t somehow more confusing than it had been initially. Then he sighs, shaking his head as though to clear it. “Nothing, it’s fine. I’ll see you later, all right?”
He’s gone, then, jogging down the stairs before Sherlock can say anything else. Sherlock turns back to the window and watches him walk away, shoulders hunched, looking pretty depressed for a man who’d been all cheer and smiles not ten minutes ago. Pretty depressed for a man going out for a first date.
Sherlock puts a hand against the windowpane as though that could call him back, but John doesn’t turn around.
No messing about then: it’s going to have be a quattro formaggio tonight. There’s a shop in Twickenham—an unassuming hole-in-the-wall, to-go counter only, known only to those who know already where to find it—that does a slightly sour crust and a comforting, soothing (consoling, encouraging, smoothing, assuaging, calming, etc. etc.) mozzarella, fontina, parmesan, and gorgonzola that walks the perfect line between the cheap junk Sherlock loves to indulge in and the gourmet food he’d grown up on with his mother.
His emotions are in a shambles and so is the flat. Sherlock pulls on the Belstaff, flips up the collar, and goes out.
*
Two hours later Sherlock is wandering through Regent’s Park. A fine mist is settling onto the lake as dusk begins to fall; the whole park smells like cut grass. It would have been the perfect night to meander through with John, to watch the sun set and the mists rise and lose themselves in talking about nothing.
John is the only person Sherlock has ever been able to talk about nothing with.
Instead all Sherlock has is a cardboard pizza box and two-thirds of a pie left inside. It’s a shame, actually—Fantastico Pizza had really outdone themselves on it, all creamy cheese and zesty sauce and sourdough crust—but the secrecy of it has finally turned it bitter and ashy in his mouth.
He is being stupid, though, and Sherlock knows it. He generally despises it when other people act the way he is, like a bunch of pitiful, pining, lovelorn fools. It’s not as though he has any reason to be surprised that John wanted to start dating again. Couple of months off the dating scene and a man like John would be quite ready to flex his skills, so to speak.
So John doesn’t want to flex those skills with Sherlock. There’s nothing new about that, nothing unusual. Sherlock had made his peace with that more than a year ago—he only needs now to remember it.
Just friends is a lot more than some people get to have with their One, Sherlock knows, and he would be an idiot to risk everything he has with John by not giving up on his hopes about it. Someone he can talk about nothing with is no small thing, when he can’t usually find anything to talk about with anybody else.
It’s time to go home, he thinks, watching the sun finally dip below the horizon. Time to stop moping about and hoping for too much; time to accept that just friends is more than just enough—it is everything he can ever have.
He stops at a rubbish bin on his way out of the park and pauses, contemplating the cardboard box in hand. There’s still two-thirds of a perfectly good pizza in there. Perhaps he should just give up on all this secrecy, just stop giving it any sort of power. Perhaps he should just . . . bring it home. Leave the box in the fridge. Let John find it in the morning. Let John know it was his.
John would either say something about it or he wouldn’t, and that would be that.
He draws the Belstaff closer around himself. He always has liked cold pizza in the mornings, if nothing else.
*
When he turns onto Baker Street, Sherlock has to stop and get his bearings a moment—to steady his stuttering heart, to calm his shaking hands.
All the windows of 221B are lit.
*
Sherlock lets himself in slowly, pausing at the bottom of the stairs, clutching the pizza box. John is upstairs, not in love with Sherlock. He’s never going to be in love with Sherlock. No matter how his date went or how many more dates he goes on, no matter how long it takes for John to find his One or if John never even finds his One at all, it’s never going to be Sherlock.
A fact’s a fact, Sherlock reminds himself, and this is the reality of the situation. And he is through with living outside reality, through with secrets and metaphors and hope.
John must’ve heard him come in, because he’s standing just outside the kitchen doorframe by the time Sherlock makes it to the darkened landing, waiting for him. “Sherlock? All right?” He catches sight of the box in Sherlock’s hand. “What’s that?”
“It’s a pizza.” He swallows, forces himself to start up the second set of stairs. “Obviously.”
Sherlock wonders if he can sense the tension in him, if John—beautifully unobservant, endearingly clueless John—can see how hard it is to climb up these steps. If he can, Sherlock can’t tell—John’s standing with his back to the light and his face is gone in the shadows. “Smells good.”
“It is. Best four-cheese pizza in London. I—I love pizza. Always have, all sorts.” He reaches the top of the stairs and looks down at his feet. “I lied to you, that one time. I’m not sure why.”
Then John is standing in front of him, dipping his head a little as though he’s trying to meet Sherlock’s eyes. There’s a smile on his lips, a curious, peculiar (strange, bizarre, puzzling, baffling, inexplicable, weird, wonderful, etc. etc.) little thing. He takes the pizza box from Sherlock’s hands, and Sherlock lets him—John can have this now. It’s his, really. Two-thirds of a four-cheese pizza and whatever’s left of Sherlock’s heart.
But the thing about John Watson is this: he is entirely, thoroughly, perfectly unpredictable.
And John Watson does not laugh at him. John Watson doesn’t needle him, or sigh, or roll his eyes, or dismiss or reject or refuse or rebuff or turn away.
John Watson says, quietly, gently, “I know.”
Sherlock inhales, embarrassingly sharp. “You know.”
“I’ve always known, actually. I don’t know who you thought you were fooling—pizza smell’s pretty distinctive, and I may not be the biggest genius in the room, but I know your methods. No matter how improbable, where there’s pizza smell, there’s going to have been pizza, right?” There’s a lilt in his voice that could be a tease, Sherlock thinks, if Sherlock let it. There’s a choice, written there—we can laugh this off still, if you don’t want this. We don’t have to do anything about it.
He doesn’t say anything.
John steps back, taking the pizza into the kitchen and leaving Sherlock to follow. There’s the sound of the fridge opening and closing, no doubt stashing the pizza inside. Sherlock works his throat around his fear, his clenching stomach—thank God he’s only eaten a third of that pizza instead of the whole thing—and finally gets up his nerves to step into the kitchen and face whatever John might have to say now.
On the kitchen table is a Pizza Express box.
“I’m not sure why this is the thing,” John says, trying to sound conversational over an unexpected tightness that Sherlock can’t identify. It almost sounds like courage, like uncertainty. Like hope. “At first I just thought that maybe you didn’t like sharing pizza with anybody, but that didn’t really make sense because so much pizza, fancy pizza especially, is just sized for one. You get your own, right? So then I thought that maybe it was me, that you just didn’t want to get pizza with me. But we do everything else together, pretty much. And then I realised that it wasn’t just that you were hiding it. You don’t ever get pizza when I’m gone to the clinic or anything. It’s just when I go out. With other people.”
He looks up at Sherlock and waits, as though expecting Sherlock to contradict him, to sneer or rage or to dismiss him. Sherlock only nods. Yes, that’s—yes.
“So then I realised,” John goes on. “You, Sherlock Holmes, love pizza, and you think you shouldn’t. You hide it away like you’re ashamed of it because you are, because you don’t think you should want something like that, you don’t think you should ask for something like that.”
He comes over to Sherlock where he stands on the threshold and takes his hands—Sherlock thinks he should step back, that his fingers are still a little greasy from the four-cheese and John will feel it, but he can’t make himself move. If John notices the grease, he doesn’t say so.
“You’re allowed to like pizza,” he says, with that strange little smile again. “Frankly I’m pleased that you like anything that isn’t a kinder bar.”
Sherlock flushes and they both giggle a little, some of the tension easing out between them. “I like plenty of things other than kinder bars,” he says, mock-defensively.
“You don’t, really, you just know you can’t actually survive on tea and chocolate. And that’s fine, you know, because— ” John falters for a moment, like the next thought has taken him aback. He draws in a deep breath, steadying himself, and then says, “I love pizza, too.”
Sherlock blinks. “Oh,” he breathes, unsure suddenly that he’s followed the conversation correctly. Did he mean—but he couldn’t possibly? “I—good. That’s good. Me too.”
John laughs again and leans in a little. His face is open and kind and Sherlock’s heart skips three beats right in a row. “Just to be clear,” John says, low and conspiratorial, “I’m not actually talking about pizza, Sherlock.”
“Oh,” Sherlock repeats, “Right,” and then John kisses him.
John kisses him.
Sherlock thinks: soft warm soft soft like he’s waiting for me to pull back I’m never pulling back. Sherlock thinks: gentle tender quiet smooth serene tranquil slow slow slow etc. etc. and he smells like tomato sauce and baked cheese and he tastes—he tastes, God, oh my God—he tastes like heat and warm and pizza and home and I love—I love—
Sherlock thinks: John Watson is kissing me.
Sherlock thinks: shit, I’d better kiss him back
An eternity later and entirely too soon, John breaks away. His eyes are shining; his cheeks are pink. “Is that all right?”
“That’s—” Sherlock’s mind is beyond itself somehow, stuck somewhere in the slow-soft caress of John Watson’s mouth on his. He takes a breath, trying to pick up the thread of the evening again, and ends up asking, incredibly nonsensically, “What about your date?”
John gives a self-deprecating little laugh and shrugs; his smile just won’t quit, though, and he has to talk around it. “I didn’t go,” he says. “I got down to the Tube and thought, what am I doing? So I popped round the corner to Pizza Express instead. Pepperoni and extra cheese, right? But by the time I came back, but you were already gone, so I thought, all right, that just gives me a bit of time to decide what to say.” He looks back at the box on the table and shrugs again. “Got a little hungry though. Might have had a few slices without you.”
“So you’re offering me a half-eaten lukewarm pizza as a declaration, is that what you’re saying?” Sherlock raises one eyebrow; he can’t stop smiling either. “Tut, tut, John.”
“Shush, it’s your own fault.” John kisses him again. “I’m pretty sure this is the part where you say you love me back, by the way.”
“For a half-eaten pizza? I don’t think so. Even I only ate a third of mine.”
“Sherlock,” John says, laughing and laughing, wrapping one arm around Sherlock’s waist and pulling him close.
Sherlock rests his forehead against John’s and closes his eyes, giving in, giving himself over. “John Watson,” he says simply, “don’t you already know? You’re the One.”
And there is no more talking after that.
*
A fact’s a fact whether Sherlock likes it or not, and now Sherlock knows—he knows, he knows it like he knows that the nitrogen in John’s blood and the calcium in John’s bones and the iron in John’s will and the carbon in John’s breath are all made of star-stuff—he knows for a fact that John Watson is the person. The right person, the only person.
The capital-O One person. The One for Sherlock Holmes.
And Sherlock Holmes is the One for John Watson, too.