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Those first weeks, John thought about Sherlock nearly every minute of every day.
Everything in the flat, every cup, every paper, every strange little artifact would bring on an ache in his chest so deep, so crushing, that he’d have to sit down and force himself to breathe. He hadn’t realized just how embedded his life had become in Sherlock’s, and how incredibly painful it would be to dig it out, piece by jagged little piece.
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He eventually comes to think of Sherlock less and less, the ache in his chest becoming a hollow space that nothing seems to fill, but it’s okay, he learns to move around it, to make it part of who he is, now. Life must move on, he tells himself firmly, and those first months of non-functional agony are now viewed with an almost-detached feeling, like someone else had lived that life, had those experiences, and now it’s put away, locked up, kept suspended in time.
He’s been thorough, too—all of Sherlock’s things (well, his things now, really, according to the will and who is John to argue? But the idea of him knowing what to do with it all is ludicrous) are in Sherlock’s room, even the very walls in the flat are bare of butterflies and skulls and books. He’d tried to get Mycroft to take it all, but he’d given him a pitiful look and said he’d not wanted anything of Sherlock’s that was at the flat. Not even his violin. So John put it all away— every piece of glassware, every strange stone, every paper—carefully, lovingly, and locked the door behind him.
But it’s hard to keep everything sealed up forever. Occasionally something will bring that grief close to the surface, like when he’d finally pulled his bed away from the wall to retrieve an errant sock and chase the dust bunnies away and found a slip of paper with Sherlock’s writing on it: Do NOT eat the chocolates – experiment in progress and John had laughed until he wept, wept for the loss of his friend and colleague, for the insane, maddening life they’d shared. Then he’d gone to the bathroom, splashed water on his face, and slid the little note under the Sherlock’s door where he’d never likely encounter it again.
While it wasn’t quite as devastating a thing to find as he expected, some things are just best left unseen. But he can’t make himself simply throw it away.
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Six months after the paper incident and John’s sitting on a bench in the park and enjoying the spring sun. He’s watching a group of boys trying to get a kite in the air when he spots the flash of a long dark coat out of the corner of his eye. He turns quickly, but there’s no one there; at least, no one wearing a dark coat in the soft warmth of the afternoon. But the image lingers, flashes at the corner of his eye and he’s absolutely sure he saw something.
He stands quickly, the day spoiled. It should be easier, two years on, to put these things behind him. It’s frustrating that he can’t seem to move past this, like he still can see Sherlock around every corner if he looks hard enough. He never tries to look hard enough, but yet …
He makes it back to the flat, dumps his coat on the sofa, sits in his chair without turning on the telly. The flat is so quiet he can hear the soft tick of the kitchen clock, and John reflects that it was never quiet before, that there was always something happening. But that’s his own fault, now, sitting like a lump in an empty flat every night. He huffs his frustration and clenches his fist on the arm of the chair. It’s time to restart his life, get out a little. To move forward. He’s got another 40 years or so, and he’s already been without Sherlock longer than he was with him.
To that end, John asks another doctor at the clinic, Carson, if he wants to go down the pub and watch rugby. Carson’s a fiend for it, and his chatter about the teams and players and his smartarse remarks on the play soothe John’s soul a little, give him something to think about, discuss, for an entire three hours that has nothing whatsoever to do with Sherlock or work. It’s liberating, and John actually feels a little lighthearted when he walks home after, just slightly drunk and quite a bit sleepy. He collapses into bed and sleeps, deep and dreamless, for twelve hours.
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When he wakes, the sun is bright and streaming through his window where he’d forgotten to close the curtains the night before. His head is a little muzzy but generally okay, and after a shower and coffee and toast and eggs, he reassesses and realizes he’s pretty fine indeed.
Perhaps he’ll go hire a car, take a drive to the sea on the weekend. He’s not been out of town in over a year, and the weather looks so fine that perhaps it’s time for it. John goes back to the bathroom, brushes his teeth, and as he puts the toothpaste back in the cabinet he bumps the shelf above and something falls off into the sink.
It’s a small silver pen. Sherlock’s pen, actually, the one he always kept in his little black notebook in his coat pocket. John is pretty sure he’d cleaned out this cabinet years ago, when he packed up Sherlock’s toothbrush and shampoo and deodorant. And he remembers the notebook, remembers sitting on the floor the day after Sherlock’s death with the bag of effects that Molly had collected, sobbing so long he lost track of time.
John picks the pen out of the sink and holds it gingerly, ready for the yawning chasm of grief to open up, but nothing comes. The silver pen warms in his hand, the weight a comfort, and instead of putting it away in Sherlock’s room he smiles, remembers watching it twirl through long, graceful fingers, and puts it in his pocket.
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From that day forward, John keeps the little pen in his pocket, all by itself, protected from keys and coins and anything that could harm it. He’s still unsure about dealing with anything in Sherlock’s room (Mrs. Hudson has hinted, as politely and obliquely as she can, that he might want to move into it. He can’t, oh God, he can’t. So he wastes thousands of pounds of Sherlock’s legacy and pays for two rooms.) But the little pen is safe, and useful, and warms his heart when he wraps his fingers around it.
In an effort to continue keeping himself busy, he takes on a full time position with the clinic, and he finds that the day-in and day-out interaction with people is still a bit exhausting but not nearly as nerve-wracking as he expected it would be. He dispenses scripts and advice, has lunch with Sarah on occasion. He comes home in the evening fairly sure he’s made a good day of it and can sleep, contented, the little silver pen in a dish next to his bed.
But there’s still the mystery of how the pen came to be in the cabinet to start with. Perhaps he could ask Mrs. Hudson first if Mycroft has been around lately. He may have been starting to sort through Sherlock’s things, deciding what to do with them. Technically Sherlock left everything to John, but John doesn’t mind, if Mycroft has decided there’s something he wants. He’s not really had much contact with Mycroft these two years, but he’d like to think Mycroft would at least give him the courtesy of a call, though, before rooting around his flat. His license for arbitrary surveillance died with his brother.
Nothing else of Sherlock’s turns up in the next few weeks, and John doesn’t linger on it. Much.
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John finds that forcing himself to get out and interact with people has improved his life more than any amount of therapy he’d tried over the last two years. Perhaps his brain just needed one last cry over that note a few months ago, that one last reminder, and now it’s decided to let go. He finds he can even come home in the evening, alone, to sit down in the quiet and read a book without feeling melancholy. He can watch telly and chuckle. He accepts Mrs. Hudson’s offers of tea with contentment and evenings down the pub with relish, and all in all, things aren’t so bad. And if he misses Sherlock still, that’s ok. Its wistfulness, missing his good friend, and not deep, soul racking despair any longer, and for that John is grateful. His questions to Mrs. Hudson about Mycroft are met with a shake of the head and a blank look, and he’s puzzled, but not concerned.
He picks up a curry on the way home from work on a Friday, drops it on the kitchen table while he rummages around for a plate. A quiet night is in order after a long week, and he puts on a DVD, clicks the remote, and sits his beer down on the table next to his chair.
He eats, and watches, and laughs and thinks distantly that plan to get a car might not be a bad idea for tomorrow if possible, and when he reaches for the bottle he can feel the condensation rolling down the sides, and realizes he didn’t really pay attention to what he’d put it on. A paper is stuck to the bottom and John peels it off, gets ready to clear a space when his hand stops in the act of picking up a pile of books and bills.
On top is a little, slim hardback with a faded blue cloth cover, “The Practical Handbook of Bee Culture” stamped in flaking gold.
John hesitates for a moment, then picks the book up carefully with shaking fingers, his mind drawn back to a cold winter’s day next to the fire, a glass of port (Mycroft’s Christmas gift) in one hand, Sherlock pontificating grandly with the freedom of warmth and alcohol. “One day, John,” he’d said, gesturing with his glass. “One day I’ll have the leisure to devote myself to research. And what I want to study are bees.” John had snorted, disbelieving, and Sherlock had grinned had tossed him this book. “Read that, sometime. Wouldn’t want you to be completely worthless as an assistant.”
“Oh, I’m to be your assistant, am I? Selling honey in a roadside stand is how I’m going to spend my retirement?”
Sherlock had looked at him for a moment, and a little of the mirth had died around his eyes. “Of course,” he said. “Won’t you?”
John nodded, the answer already forming itself without thought. “I can’t imagine being anywhere else.”
John lifts the book up, presses it to his mouth. He’d never read it; it had lain on his bureau for months until the day of Sherlock’s funeral, when John had seen it as he was pulling off his tie and sat on his bed with it for an hour, grieving the loss of that idyllic vision they’d shared by the fireside, a future he’d agreed to half in jest but had assumed just the same.
He strides through the kitchen to stand in front of Sherlock’s locked door. It looks as it always does, shut tight, barely a gap at the bottom to see light through. The knob still turns easily but the lock keeps the old door from opening, and John lets out a relieved breath that he wasn’t suddenly confronted with a room full of a life he no longer has. But he knows he put the book away, and has cleaned off that table any number of times since then. How did it get there?
He pauses for a moment, undecided. He could simply crack the door and toss the book inside, but something inside him is reluctant to do it. The little book pulls on his heart, makes him want to leaf through its old, yellowed pages, learn finally what it was Sherlock wanted him to do. Maybe … maybe he could read it, let Sherlock play in his mind just a tiny bit. The pen in his pocket brought him comfort, so perhaps could this.
He should have known that Sherlock, even in death, is too egotistical to be put aside for long.
John clicks off the DVD, curls into his chair and begins to read.
“Bees feel joy, and outrage, and contentment. Bees play, tossing themselves in flight with no point but for the pleasure of the thing. And bees despair, when hopelessness and loss have become their lot.”
John reads until it is finished, until a rosy pink stains the morning sky and he lifts his eyes to it, content.
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John begins to dream again. Not every night, and not the howling, dark nightmares of years past, but pleasant, even funny, dreams of things that never happened, that should have happened. That could have happened.
Sherlock is in most of them, hair wild and eyes alight, stalking around the sitting room complaining until John knocks him over and sits on him, determined. Or John cooking, only to find that Sherlock has stolen everything he needed, right in the middle, and has made up bolognaise in his chemistry apparatus (when John wakes he knows that would never happen – first off, Sherlock hates bolognaise because it has carrots in, and food in those beakers? John thinks not. They’d all die of arsenic poisoning, probably.) Dreams of the long line of Sherlock’s back, hollows and curves lit by lamplight, and he shudders awake, awed. It’s the most he’s thought of Sherlock in a year, in almost two years, and he’s not trying to, he’s not consciously allowing it, but there he is, regardless.
So John doesn’t question it, this sudden burst of emotional strength, and goes about his day. He doesn’t flinch when he passes Angelo’s while running errands, or cringe every time he sees a long, dark coat on a street corner. It makes a nice change. He’s happy, finally. All that tripe about healing, about moving on, is true after all.
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When he finds one of Sherlock’s glass precision pipettes in a mug in the cabinet, John does wonder if he’s starting to lose his mind. If the healing, the dreams, the little ephemera, are all figments of his imagination and he’s simply managed to crack, create some sort of alternate, more peaceful reality. It’s not so bad, he muses, but honestly, if he’s had some sort of psychotic break, perhaps he should go be evaluated.
John puts the pipette next to the book on his dresser and pulls off his clothes, gets ready for bed. He hasn’t seen Ella in a year, but he knows she’ll still accept an appointment from one of her most wayward clients.
He wakes in the pre-dawn light absolutely certain he’d just heard something, his heart hammering in his chest testament to the fact. He stares at the ceiling, eyes wide, and waits, muscles tensed and ready, but after an age has past (God, what, five minutes? Ten?) he doesn’t hear anything else. The adrenaline coursing through his veins has him well awake now, so he sighs, pulls on a tee shirt and goes downstairs to get a drink and calm down for a little while. Maybe watch some telly.
He fumbles around in the kitchen for the under cabinet lights and flicks them on, reaches for a glass. Glances into the sitting room and is startled to see the shadowy line of a graceful neck and shoulder highlighted against the windows, a long-fingered hand lifted in a tentative greeting.
“Hello, John,” echoes out of the darkness and the glass falls, shatters across the floor.
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Sherlock is up out of his chair and across the room in three long strides and John has backed up to the kitchen window. Christ, I really have cracked, I have, he’s here, standing here, and his hair is short but it’s him, his eyes and his voice, and I’d never forgotten it, no, not really ever, this must be what it’s like to feel your brain explode.
“John, please, are you all right? It’s a bit … sudden, I know, but I didn’t know how else to soften the shock.” Sherlock reaches out a hand to touch him, and John flinches.
“You…” John starts, and then has to swallow, hard. “You are dead. Were dead. I watched you die so what the hell are you doing in my kitchen?” He’s shouting by the end, but his voice seems otherworldly, echoing in his ears over the pounding of his heart.
“I wasn’t,” Sherlock says carefully, his hands raised. “And I’ll tell you the entire story, everything you want to know. But why don’t you sit down before you fall.”
John’s trembling, he can feel it starting in his knees and moving up his body and he stands there until his hands start to shake. A distant whine starts in his ears and he’ll be damned if he passes out. “Fuck you. I don’t even know it is you.”
Sherlock steps forward slowly. “The day we met I knew about your sister, I told you about her divorce in a cab.” John recoils against the window and Sherlock pauses, then yanks his shirt out of his trousers, unbuttons and pulls it open and points to the scar across his ribs. “You taped this for me; you cleaned me up after Kingsley hit me with that damned piece of roofing. Remember?” Sherlock’s voice grows softer, gentler as he edges nearer and nearer. “And the day I died, I told you it was all a magic trick. It was, but not for you. I didn’t ever want it to be for you.”
John can’t respond, can’t speak, but he finally gathers the courage to reach out, touch the silvery-white scar across Sherlock’s chest, and as he connects with solid flesh and bone under his fingertips, he chokes back a sob, a hand to his mouth. It is him, it is, but dear God how? Things are starting to grow a bit dark around the edges and he sits down abruptly, the lino cool under his hands.
“Please, John, let me get you something. Water, yes? You were coming down for a drink.” Sherlock whirls away, sidesteps the shards on the floor, gets John a glass of water from the tap.
“Drink,” he says and John, unthinkingly, obeys.
“You’re such a bastard,” John says, once the glass is drained and his trembling is under control. “Why? And why couldn’t you tell me?” Because it has to be “couldn’t” and not “wouldn’t,” or John will destroy him, right here.
“There were three gunmen, and if I didn’t jump, they’d kill you all. I did it to save you. And Mrs. Hudson, and Lestrade. I knew Moriarty had planned it, but I didn’t know he’d kill himself first to destroy my only way out. So I needed you to believe it so they’d believe it, do you see? And then they got lax, lazy, thinking me dead, and they never saw me coming.” Sherlock’s expression grows dark and fearsome, a fierce avenging angel in the glow of a summer sunrise.
John’s barely mollified; he’s torn between joy and fury and his head is swimming with the sound of Sherlock’s voice, the deep rumble of it so achingly familiar. “Tell me everything. Right now. Don’t you dare leave anything out.”
So Sherlock slides down next to John, so close their thighs are touching, and spins a tale so unbelievable that John forgets for a moment that it’s real, that it happened, and that he’s part of it. Sherlock looks amazing as he talks, thinner, yes, but younger somehow, with short little curls on the top of his head and razor sharp cheekbones almost too prominent to be healthy. His hands wave about as he talks, and John feels something tight in his gut start to relax, and before Sherlock is done its mid-morning.
“Did you kill them yourself?”
Sherlock pauses, gives John a searching look.“Yes,” he finally says.
“I’m glad,” John says, and he is, knowing that the last thing they saw was the terrible apparition of a man whose life they’d sought to destroy, leaving misery in its wake. “But two years, Jesus.” John scrubs his hand across his face. Over seven hundred days apart and John isn’t sure how to even begin to work through what he’s seen and heard tonight. “You should sleep,” John says abruptly, because his mind is spinning and he’s not sure what to do next. He rises and stretches out his cramped knees and pulls Sherlock up with him. “You look exhausted, and I am exhausted. C’mon, you can have my bed for a while. Your room isn’t fit to sleep in.”
Sherlock glances over his shoulder and his expression is so guilty John’s on alert almost immediately. He looks past Sherlock’s shoulder and sees the door to Sherlock’s room is cracked ever so slightly, as it never has been since John locked it almost two years ago.
A vague suspicion starts in his mind, a few things start to slot into place and Sherlock tries to grab his arm as he pushes past him and into the hall.
“John, please, I can explain—“
John throws the door open, confronted with the ephemera of Sherlock’s life that, just a few months earlier, he’d never wanted to see again. To his complete astonishment, all of the boxes have been stacked on one side, the bed is mussed, and an empty cup rests on the bedside table. John sits heavily on the bed with his head in his hands and thinks he’s going to be sick.
“How long have you been here?”
Sherlock kneels on the carpet in front of him, grasps his wrists. “Not long. I swear. I needed to see how you were, and it was so much easier to be close than watching you from the street like I had been. You just seemed so … “
“What, Sherlock,” John growls, all the anger he felt before back in full force. “I seemed so what? Broken? Lost? Weak?”
“No, no! Never weak. Intent. On living your life without me.”
“So you thought you should find your way back in, is that it? Leave a few reminders around, make sure I didn’t forget you? Christ, Sherlock, I thought I was losing my mind!”
Sherlock presses his forehead against John’s knees. “I only left the book and the pipette. I’d seen the change once you started carrying my pen in your pocket, that’s all, and I thought if you were happy with one reminder, I wanted to see what you made of more. If you would accept them. Accept me.”
John breathes hard, trying desperately to control his temper. A least a month, then. An entire month Sherlock was here, watching him finally crawl out from the crushing grief he’d been under all this time. Watching John start live a life Sherlock thought he no longer had a place in. God, how utterly wrong he was, how wrong in everything.
But Jesus, even in his fury, John’s happy to have him back to shout at.
“You seemed so determined. I’d sort of … had a look ‘round, to see how you were. I watched you.” Sherlock looks around, confusion wrinkling his nose. “You kept everything. Sentiment. But you didn’t want to see it. You had wanted to forget me, yes?”
John takes a deep breath. Oh God, had he ever. He’d tried, not to forget, exactly, but lock away every single thing that he ever saw, ever did, ever thought for the eighteen months they were together, until he was strong enough to deal with it. “I had to do something,” he says miserably.
Sherlock looks down at his hands. “Was I really so horrible?”
“No, Sherlock. This,” John says, waving his hand around the bedroom. “This is horrible. But not you. It was too painful, too difficult. Easier to put it away. Out of sight, out of mind, you know?” John laughs, and the sound is brittle, hard, even to himself. The pain in Sherlock’s eyes seems like a petty sort of triumph, but John cherishes that little shard of anger he can feel lodged in his heart. He deserves it, doesn’t he?
“What now?” Sherlock says, and his voice is small, nervous. “It’s too much, isn’t it. I knew it would be, that’s why it took so long to tell you. I should leave, stay somewhere else. I won’t bother you, if you don’t want.”
There’s a rising moment of panic that displaces the anger and leaves John stunned. He can’t, God no, he can’t leave again, I can’t let him, I won’t. Sherlock starts to pull away, eyes downcast. “No,” John says quickly, guilt rising. He leans forward, wraps his arms around Sherlock’s shoulders, lays his cheek on the top of Sherlock’s head. Hugs him close, inhales the scent of his skin. John’s sense memory lights up with a vision of a dozen stakeouts spent hidden in tiny spaces, the smell of Sherlock’s soap when he would lean over John’s shoulder to criticize his blog, and it threatens to overwhelm him entirely.
“I thought you were gone forever,” John says into his hair. “I don’t even know at this point if I’ll ever stop being angry at you. But I understand why you did what you did, in your own, twisted way. And I’m so bloody glad to see you again I don’t know that it matters.”
Sherlock sits quietly in John’s embrace for a few minutes, then he smiles gently, disengages from John’s arms. “Perhaps we should get some sleep,” he says. “Discuss it more in the morning.” He kicks off his shoes and socks and climbs under the blanket and curls on his side. John stands over him, vacillating between the bed and the door.
“Stay,” Sherlock says, and John eyes him uncertainly.
“I … well, all right,” he says, and sits on the bed (God, this bed, the bed he’d avoided for weeks after, wouldn’t touch for fear of disturbing even the tiny remnants of his friend before finally making it as is and surrounding it with boxes) and pulls off his shoes. Lies down on top of the duvet fully clothed and turns in toward Sherlock. John studies his face, those quicksilver eyes that see so much, and places a finger against the soft purple bruises that linger in the hollows under his eyelashes. “You’re not sleeping.”
“Not much,” Sherlock agrees, and closes his eyes. John strokes down his cheekbone, pauses. They’ve never been physical with each other, but the rawness of the night has stripped John of just about every wall he’d ever built to protect himself from exactly this, the opening of his heart to another. But how could he have foreseen, devised defenses for a situation he never envisioned?
Sherlock stirs, turns his lips into John’s cradling palm and pauses, as if waiting for permission. John sucks in a deep breath and his fingers tighten minutely on Sherlock’s jaw. Sherlock seems to understand, kisses the center of John’s hand gently, achingly softly, then opens his eyes wide in the dim room, catching John’s gaze and holding it.
“I thought of you,” Sherlock says. “Every day. I missed you.”
John’s heart swells, ready to burst. All of the things he’d never had the chance to say are pressing at the back of his teeth, and as much as he wants to say them, there would never be a worse time than now, when fury still lingers in the tension of his neck. “I missed you too, Sherlock. So much,” is all he can trust himself to say, but he can still pull Sherlock toward him, tilt his face and kiss him gently. Sherlock’s lips are soft and warm, and John sighs, content for the moment.
Sherlock’s eyes are crinkled at the corners, and he’s smiling. “You never truly answered my question. May I stay? Please.”
"This is your home, Sherlock," John says softly. "And I'd never make you leave it. Not since you've found your way back."
"Found my way back to it, yes. And to you, John. Please, tell me you want me here again."
The tiny note of pleading in Sherlock’s voice decides him. John jumps up, rummages around until he finds the right box, digs out the skull and tosses it to Sherlock, who catches it with a grin.
John climbs back over Sherlock and wraps him into a hug, squeezes him tight. “If I ever see you walk out that door again, Sherlock Holmes, I'll bloody well kill you myself."
Sherlock tips his head back and laughs, and the sound is so free and joyous John can’t help but join him, their shared delight echoing off of the walls, bringing life back to a place John thought long dead.