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Sherlock Holmes comes back from the dead bruised and battered, a two-inch gash on his forehead still bleeding, and John takes one look at him with wet, wide eyes and pushes him into bed. Sherlock lets him, too tired to protest, too tired to offer apologies, too tired to do anything but let John slip his coat from his shoulders, tug his shirt off, and ease him down onto the sheets. They're recently laundered, but still smell of John, of 221B, of home, and maybe those scents have become fused in his mind because he's been gone too long. Maybe they were always one and the same.
"Have you been sleeping in here?" Sherlock mumbles, turning his nose into the pillowcase. "Why would you sleep in here?"
"Too many stairs some nights," John says, looking away quickly and opening the first aid kit.
It's a lie, and Sherlock files it away for later, when he's not shaking with exhaustion and relief and the strange, sudden blankness of a mind that's been churning for too long over too many problems, and now nothing. He offers only a grunt in response and lets himself doze as John carefully washes the blood from his face and presses bandages to the cut above his left eyebrow. He shivers when John pulls back the blankets and runs careful, sure hands over his arms, his ribs, checking. He drags his eyes open when he feels John's thumb run along a jagged, poorly healed scar along his hip. He does not remember how he got it, only that it happened about a year after he left. In Gdańsk, possibly. Or Zurich. One of those. He had stitched it up himself with shaking hands in a dimly lit hotel bathroom, sweating and gritting his teeth and aching to go home.
"Sherlock," John whispers, and his voice catches in his throat on the second syllable.
There are others: a small stab wound on his right shoulder, a smattering of almost faded burns from an ill-timed explosion, the needlepricks in the crook of his elbow from Paris.
They tell a story of the last three years, but not the whole story, not those two weeks he spent on Molly's sofa with bronchitis or the three weeks he spent squatting in that abandoned flat in Paris with no water and no electricity and not caring because all he wanted to do was curl up on the cold floor and sleep and never get up, trying to restart his brain with whatever illegal substances he could afford. They don't tell about the blood he's cleaned from his hands, the blood of dozens of men, some innocent but in the way, and therefore still a threat. They don't tell about the heavy, unfamiliar weight in his chest, the hopelessness that ate away at him, and the terrible realization that he had never felt hopeless before, couldn't possibly because he had never known something as seemingly frivolous as hope, not until John Watson limped into his life, ready for danger, ready to kill for him, ready to die for him.
"It's fine," he mumbles, curling his fingers around John's wrist and pulling his hand away from its inspection. "I'm fine."
"Sherlock, you're--"
"Sleeping now," Sherlock says, and he tugs the covers back up and turns his head into the pillow.
"You've come back. You were dead, and now you're back, and you're going to bed? Just like that?"
"I'm very tired."
John sighs and packs up the first aid kit, and then the room is silent.
"Are you going to sit there all night and watch me?" Sherlock asks.
John clears his throat. "Reckon I am. Might run off again if I don't."
"In my sleep?"
"You were dead the last time. So maybe, yeah."
Sherlock looks up at him. He's thinner than Sherlock remembers. Older. And yes, three years have passed, and one does tend to get older, but this is different. This is the John Watson that first walked into Bart's that day with a tight, polite smile, a psychosomatic limp, and the weight of merely existing weighing him down.
"Oh, for heaven's sake," Sherlock says, and he grabs John's wrist once more and tugs him toward the bed.
John hesitates, his feet dragging along the carpet. "What are you-- Sherlock."
"I've enough on my conscience at the moment without you sitting up all night by my bedside as well. Just pretend there are too many stairs tonight," Sherlock says and shifts over to make room as John lands on the bed beside him.
"A conscience, hm? Didn't know you actually had one of those."
Sherlock turns to face the wall as John settles in beside him, pulling off his shoes and rearranging the pillow. A moment later, his fingers find the mark on Sherlock's shoulder and brush against the skin as he lets out a shaking breath.
"It's not good, what you did," he says. "Disappearing like that. Not good at all."
"I know. I'm sorry." Sherlock shouldn't be saying it to the wall, but somehow it's easier right now, when he means it this much. He knows he'll be saying it again. He'll be saying it for years, and it will never be enough. He's sorry there wasn't some other way to put an end to it all. He's sorry that he left John behind, not because he didn't trust him, but because there is already too much blood on John Watson's hands because of him. John Watson is a good man. A good man could not do what Sherlock did for three years, and Sherlock would have hated to see John--John who slept in his bed and is still touching his shoulder with trembling, disbelieving fingers--become a monster out of loyalty. Sherlock needs John to be a good man, always, because Sherlock never will be. Not now. Not like this.
"You're going to tell me all of it. About where you were and what happened and about that scar and this one and all the others," John says, and he's close enough that Sherlock can feel the warmth of his breath against his skin. Too close, he thinks. Too good. Too devoted when Sherlock doesn't deserve any of it.
"Three years is a lot to remember."
"All of it, Sherlock," John says.
"Okay. All of it."
John rests his forehead against the back of Sherlock's neck and breathes out like a man whose lungs have been too full for years. "Okay."