Chapter Text
Tell me again. SH
Six days, Sherlock
Too long. SH
Six days is not very many days
Not even a full bloody week and the first is nearly over
You’ll manage
I don’t want to be apart from you, John. SH
Christ, John thinks, staring down at his mobile. What is this, then? Sherlock doesn’t say things like this. Sweet things. Warm things. Honest things, even. Neither of them do, though he wishes more than anything that they could, that they would. The man has been back from the dead for three solid months and all they’ve managed to do is rage at each other for a full week and then return to the way things were before. Or some version of it, anyway. John certainly hadn’t wasted any time moving back to Baker Street, despite the lingering resentment and emotional unrest simmering between them.
John knows that things between them aren’t actually the way that they used to be. He is no fool. He is, however, utterly broken—a shattered fucking shell of his former self, trying desperately to remember how to be the man he was the last time he’d devoted his entire existence to Sherlock Holmes. He’d been the happiest, most secure and sure version of himself during those precious months—and he is certain that he will never, ever be the same. He is certain that the grief he’d endured in the following two years of hollow hunger has changed him into something...else. Someone else. He is certain.
But he’s trying, for Sherlock. He’s living, now, for Sherlock. He broke off his feeble bloody engagement for Sherlock, yet still hasn’t found the words to tell the man why.
Sherlock is quieter, now. More careful. They’re together constantly, orbiting one another gingerly as they try in vain to regain what they once had. Perhaps that’s the problem.
I don’t want to be apart from you either, Sherlock, but I need to do this for Harry
And maybe some distance—the sort of distance that they both know full well is temporary, not the sort that one of them believes to be eternal—will do them good.
Sherlock doesn’t respond. John curls up under his gran’s old quilt on his mum’s old couch in his sister’s tiny flat and shivers himself to sleep.