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In the first few hours after Sherlock’s death, Joan doesn’t feel anything at all. Not red-hot blazing anger, nor grief over his senseless death, nor irrational hope that he’s still alive. She feels absolutely nothing.
She can sense Marcus lurking in the periphery, his concerned eyes never leaving her like he’s just waiting for the dam to burst.
But there isn’t going to be any bursting. Any outward show of emotion.
Joan buttons herself down like she buttons up her coat.
She goes home. But it doesn’t feel like home anymore. It never really was Joan’s home, was it? It was Sherlock’s, and now he’s gone.
Joan doesn’t even know if he has a will. He might have left the brownstone to someone. With his brother and father both dead, Joan has no idea who’s in charge of Sherlock’s estate—or if he even has an estate to begin with.
What is she going to do without Sherlock?
The thought of staying here—without him—is out of the question.
Joan sighs. Perhaps she’ll start looking for her own place come morning.
She wearily lets herself into the place she’s called home for the last seven years of her life and slips her handbag off her shoulder, letting it drop to the floor by her feet. She nudges the door shut and turns, shedding her coat, when she lets out a startled gasp.
A long shadow in the shape of a man shambles toward her. Joan snaps on the light switch by the entrance.
“Sherlock?” she manages, her heartbeat jumping into her throat. She presses a hand against her chest, as if to hold her heart back.
Sherlock emerges, pale and thin, rings under his eyes. His left arm is encased in a plaster cast.
Joan rushes him, throwing her arms around his neck while trying to be mindful of his arm. “I thought you were dead,” she whispers into his shoulder.
Sherlock’s hand pats her back, awkwardly, his injured one resting at his side. “I would have told you of my plan beforehand but I didn’t want to put you in harm’s way,” he mumbles, giving her a squeeze. “More than you already are, given your association with me,” he adds after they separate.
Sherlock offers Joan an almost sheepish, shy smile as his eyes skim her appraisingly.
“You look awful,” Joan says, reaching out and taking his hand in hers. “If you had to fake your death, why are you back?”
“I needed to see you,” Sherlock says, turning his hand until he can catch Joan’s fingers with his own. “I’m going away for a while, Watson.”
“How long is a while?” Joan asks, frowning at him.
“With Odin Reichenbach framed for my murder, I must stay dead,” he says. “I can never come back.
Joan drops his hand. “Why?”
Joan hasn’t even allowed herself to grieve Sherlock’s evidently phony death, and now she night never see him again? She rakes a frantic hand through her hair.
“He has to pay, and we both know he’ll never answer for my father’s death,” Sherlock says, turning pleading eyes on Joan. “Watson, you must understand—”
Joan shakes her head. “I don’t, Sherlock. I can’t. We could have found some other way.”
“This was the only way,” Sherlock says, resolutely, tipping his chin up. “I will miss you, and our time together. Dearly.”
Joan thinks she sees something in his eyes. A brief flash, and then it’s gone. A momentary shimmer of vulnerability before he locks it away.
Joan reaches out, grabbing his arm. “What if I came with you?”
“What?” Sherlock asks, but he doesn’t try to twist his arm out of her grip.
“I no longer have anything tying me here. Not without you or our work,” Joan says, letting go of Sherlock’s arm to smooth down the rumpled sleeve of his jacket. “We’ve done it before. Leaving behind everything and starting anew somewhere else. We could do it again.”
Sherlock considers her, eyes narrowing for a moment. He tugs his arm away from her and Joan’s heart sinks, but before she can even begin to let the disappointment start to sink in, Sherlock’s scooping her against his chest and tightening his arms around her in a genuine, full-bodied hug.
Joan wraps her arms around him and closes her eyes, fingers knotting in the back of his coat. “Is that a yes?” she murmurs.
“Indeed it is a yes,” Sherlock assents, letting go of Joan to hold her at arms’ length. “You’re certain about this? You had a miserable time of it in England, you remember.”
“Back then, I knew I’d probably see you again,” Joan says. “If you step out that door tonight…”
Sherlock gives her a slight nod. “I understand fully.”
Joan vaults onto the tips of her toes and gives Sherlock a kiss on the cheek, near the corner of his mouth. It’s too intimate, for what they are to one another: friends, business partners. She feels him go still against her, his hands tightening on her arms, and she wonders if she’s overstepped a boundary. Perhaps he’d been unwilling to cross the line between platonic and more than friends for a reason.
But when Joan pulls back, Sherlock’s smiling at her. There’s a bit more color to his cheeks too.
“What?” Joan asks, fiddling with a suddenly very interesting loose thread on the cuff of his shirt.
“You kissed me,” Sherlock says.
“On the cheek. It was a friendly kiss,” Joan mutters.
She feels Sherlock’s fingers on her chin, tipping her head up. She flicks her eyes up to his.
“This opens up a wealth of possibilities, Watson,” Sherlock says, sliding his fingers away from her face.
“Oh, it does, does it?” she asks.
“If I’d known you were amenable to kissing, I’d have done this long ago.” Sherlock leans in and gives Joan a gentle kiss, just the slightest press of lips against lips. He steps back, beaming at her.
Joan rolls her eyes and sighs.
“Stop talking and kiss me," Joan says.
“I'm not—” Sherlock is cut off mid-sentence when Joan shuts him up with another, more purposeful kiss, her fingers lacing through the short hairs at the back of his neck.
Joan sighs happily against his mouth.
“Where should we go?” she asks, nudging against his lips with her own.
“I think I’d like to go to Venice,” Sherlock says, pausing between words to pepper Joan’s face and lips with light kisses. “Or Paris.”
“I bet Paris is lovely this time of year,” she says, slipping her arms around him,
Sherlock wraps Joan up in a warm hug and presses his chin into her shoulder. “We can go anywhere we like,” he says. “Anywhere at all.”
***
Joan skims dark hair away from her face as she digs her toes in the sand. From this distance, she can hardly see Sherlock. He’s nothing more than a speck, more an ant on a log than a man on a surfboard.
A trio of giggling children race past Joan with brightly colored plastic buckets and spades clutched in their hands. Their harried parents follow soon after, calling out their names. The mother has a sleeping infant clasped against her chest.
Joan’s heart clenches with yearning. Her life with Sherlock doesn’t have room for a baby, at the moment.
Joan flicks her eyes back toward Sherlock as he paddles back to the beach on his yellow surfboard.
Sherlock parks the surfboard in the sand and collapses next to Joan on her beach towel. He gazes up at her, squinting.
“You look troubled, my darling Madeline,” he says.
Joan lifts her sunglasses off of her face, hair dripping back into her eyes. “How could you tell?”
“I’m a detective. It’s my job to sense what’s amiss,” he teases her, his tone light.
“Nothing’s amiss,” Joan says, and truly it isn’t.
Sherlock turns and glances after the fleeing family. “Life on the run no longer suiting you?” he asks.
They’d come to an agreement shortly after they decided to disappear for a second time. The moment either of them were no longer satisfied with their ruse, they’d call the whole thing off. Sherlock couldn’t risk returning from the dead, for obvious reasons, but Joan’s story was far less complicated. After Sherlock had ‘died,’ Joan had taken a leave of absence and then simply left her job to return to the civilian life. It would be far less suspicious if Joan popped up, back in New York City.
She doesn’t want to leave Sherlock, though.
She just sometimes wishes she could have it all: this partnership with Sherlock, her old life in the city, and a quiet life with a white picket fence, a baby, and a golden retriever.
But Joan can’t have all three, so she’s picked Sherlock. Most of the time, it’s enough.
“I’m fine,” Joan says.
“Not having buyer’s remorse, are you?” Sherlock teases her, his tone deceptively light.
“No,” Joan says, huffing an exasperated sigh as she slides her sunglasses back down over her eyes. “I knew what the risks were. I knew what I was giving up.”
Sherlock sits up next to her and shakes sand off his wetsuit and out of his damp hair. “You know,” he says, slowly and deliberately.
Joan cuts her eyes back over to Sherlock. “No, please do go on.”
“There’s nothing that says we can’t start a family. Madeline and Gareth Montague could always adopt.”
Joan shakes her head but even as she dismisses Sherlock’s idea, it takes hold, catching fire in her chest.
Joan reaches out and takes Sherlock’s hand in hers, holding onto it loosely. She’d always told herself she wouldn’t bring children into an unstable environment but… Things weren’t exactly unstable.
“Right now, I’ve got what I need,” she says, turning and gazing at Sherlock from behind her sunglasses. “But…”
Sherlock squeezes her hand. “But someday,” he says. “We could do it. We will.” He lifts her hand to his lips and kisses her knuckles.
Someday, they’ll start a family. They’ll have the white picket fence and the baby. Even the dog. Joan smiles to herself.
It's not perfect. Joan would have preferred not having to run away at all, but it's Watson and Holmes and she can't imagine having it any other way.