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The nurse pushes the IV stand along the length of the neat, empty bed to the corner of the hospital room, where she removes the extenders from which IV bags once hung and sets them on a countertop. There is a vase of flowers on the countertop—white petals, green stems, dying. The sheets have been changed and are pristine and sterilised; the single pillow at the head of the bed is undented. John smooths his hand over cloth as he slowly folds a slightly damp coat.
A second nurse strides into the room, her footsteps muffled noises from practised movements designed to minimise agitation. She stops a few metres away from John’s chair by the bed, and although the movements of his hands pause, John does not turn.
“Are you Sherlock Holmes’s family?” she asks.
“Yes,” John says. He hears the rustle of moving paper, the scratch of a pencil.
“What is your relationship to the patient?”
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It was bound to happen one day, John thought numbly. He could only watch, too far away to do anything—anything at all—as a dark stain blossomed on Sherlock’s shirt, his chest; as Sherlock let out a grunt of pain and his eyes widened and his fingers scrabbled futilely up the fabric covering his skin; as Sherlock’s knees buckled and he fell. John ran over, his legs not fast enough, his heart choking, his gaze fixed in unadulterated terror on Sherlock: bleeding, fallen, broken. John didn’t care that their criminal was running away; John saw only Sherlock, only ever Sherlock.
The shirtfront was soaked with blood by the time (mere seconds, unforgivably long) John found himself kneeling next to Sherlock. John’s fingers scrambled for a pulse, his eyes blurring with frantic, fearful, angry, terrible tears. He pressed down on the wound, but it was warm, cooling dampness and stickiness and dampness and he was a doctor, damn it, he should know how to fix this. Red, sticky hands grappled with his pocket for his phone, smeared the screen as they tapped furiously, shakily. He gave an address, begged and pleaded with and shouted at whoever was at the receiving end to hurry, to be here right now, to do something.
“Sherlock,” John implored of the man in his arms and the organs and the beating, slowing, injured heart that Sherlock had pledged to be John’s. “Sherlock—oh god, Sherlock. Please,” he said, his voice cracked and dripping sentiment. So much sentiment.
Sherlock’s fingers twitched on John’s arm—his pulse was too weak too weak too weak—and his mouth moved in an attempt to form words but there was nothing but wet ragged breaths.
“Don’t,” John pleaded. “Don’t.” He didn’t know what he meant, and then the ambulance was there and medical personnel placed Sherlock onto a stretcher and then they were off. John held Sherlock’s hand during the ride, breaking as he felt the weakening echoes of Sherlock’s heartbeats from his skin. Sherlock was unconscious by the time they got to the hospital, unconscious as they wheeled him into the ER. John followed, gripping Sherlock’s slack hand the entire time.
“You’ll have to wait outside for this part,” a nurse informed him.
John wanted to protest, to snap that he was a doctor too and that he was going to fucking stay if he wanted to. He swallowed it and allowed his feet to drag him out of the room. He sat down on one of the chairs outside the impenetrable doors to the ER, and Sherlock was everywhere in his mind but too far away.
Minutes felt like hours and then the doors slid open and the same nurse walked out. John pushed himself off the chair to his feet, his clothes still darkened with Sherlock’s blood. In the nurse’s hands was a stack of paper, and when he stopped in front of John, he said, “You’ll need to sign this surgery consent form. You’re the patient’s…?”
“Friend,” John said. “Best friend. We’ve lived together for thirty years.” Twenty-eight, John, he heard Sherlock’s voice correct him in his head, and John’s chest was a pincushion. “We’re practically family.”
The nurse glanced away then back, and hesitated before speaking. “But if the patient has any living family members, we’ll need a signature from one of them.”
“Please,” John said, his eyes darting to the once-again closed doors of the ER. “Please.”
“The hospital has its protocols,” the nurse said. “I don’t have the authority to forgo them.”
John wanted to scream at him; punch him, maybe. “I’ll bear all responsibility,” John said.
“I’m sorry,” the nurse said.
“I’m a doctor,” John tried, although he wasn’t sure how telling the nurse his profession was going to help. Hey, I’m a doctor. I’ll do the surgery if you won’t. Just let me borrow your equipment and talk me through it.
That wouldn’t work. John was an army doctor. He knew emergency medicine and bleeding control and combat wounds. He had administered emergency first aid for bullets and after explosions, and he had completed intubation and defibrillation procedures. John knew how wounds work: there had been more than one occasion during which he had administered a reasonable dose of painkillers to wounded soldiers to ease their way because it was the battlefield and John was not a cardiothoracic surgeon. John could stitch up a wound on Sherlock’s arm or leg or face, but John could not cut open Sherlock’s chest and extract the bullet and repair Sherlock’s heart.
“We’ll need a family member’s signature,” the nurse repeated.
Mycroft wasn’t in the country, but John called him anyway. Anthea’s pre-recorded voice informed him unhelpfully that Mycroft was currently unavailable. Tears burned in John’s eyes and he sent a message, messages; continued to dial. It was almost two hours before Mycroft returned John’s messages and calls, and ten minutes later Mycroft had managed to convince the hospital to perform the surgery without a signature.
It was too long; John could see it in the way the doctor looked at him as he briefly explained the procedure.
John sat by Sherlock’s hospital bed, holding Sherlock’s hand again. Sherlock was unconscious, hooked up with IV catheters and to wires and machines. Silence reigned in the room between the beeping of the machines. The only source of light was a bedside lamp. Outside, rain pattered.
The beeps were like sand in an hourglass. Dripping and dripping. Slipping. John stared at Sherlock’s face: nose, cheekbones, mouth. Pale and striking. Wrinkles that John had long since grown fond of, especially when Sherlock smiled at John the way he only smiled at John. John wished he could see Sherlock’s eyes, but he knew they wouldn’t open. His heart throbbed terribly, and he was sure his eyes would never be dry again. His bed would never feel warm again.
The moisture pooled in his eyes welled out and down his cheeks when the cardiac monitor sounded a long wail, piercing the air, John’s eardrums, John’s heart. He didn’t have to turn to infer the flatline—high deduction; Sherlock would have been proud.
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“John,” Sherlock said. John loved it when Sherlock said his name in bed. “John, this is important.”
“Yeah?” John replied, turning around to face Sherlock. He pressed a kiss to Sherlock’s bare clavicles, ran his hand down Sherlock’s equally bare arm underneath the covers.
“I love you,” Sherlock said.
John smiled. “And I love you,” John said. “This is equally important.”
Sherlock nodded thoughtfully. John pulled him close and it didn’t matter that it was almost noon and they had lain in bed for most of the morning. It didn’t matter that there was the faintest pang of hunger dwelling in John’s stomach. It didn’t matter that a police statement was waiting for them at the Scotland Yard.
In those moments, the world didn’t matter.
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“John,” Sherlock said. They were sitting pressed up against each other on the sofa, John watching crap telly while Sherlock read, his hand fiddling with John’s hair. “I need to give you something.”
“Hm?” John asked.
Sherlock removed himself from the sofa, and John mourned the loss of warmth and contact and Sherlock. A moment later, Sherlock returned with a small bag. He sat back down beside John, took a box out of the bag, opened it and held it out to John.
John stared at it, his breath tangled in his lungs. “What is this?” he asked.
“You know what it is. You’re looking at it,” Sherlock said.
“You—” John shook his head, a smile curving his mouth. “It’s a ring.”
“Excellent. You can recognise common objects,” Sherlock said, but it was without much bite. “Give me your hand.”
John did, and Sherlock’s fingers curled around his. Sherlock’s hand was careful, even reverent, as he slid the ring onto John’s finger. Then Sherlock dug back into the bag and presented John with another box, almost shoving it into John’s hand.
“Now you,” he said.
John raised a brow and looked at the box in his hand. “You got yourself a ring,” he concluded.
“Of course I did,” Sherlock replied. “I was under the impression that ring-giving was a reciprocated activity.”
John chuckled but obediently opened the box and retrieved the ring. He held out his hand, and Sherlock very naturally placed his own hand in it. John smiled and fit the ring onto Sherlock’s finger.
“You do know, Sherlock, that people usually buy rings together?” John asked.
“I do,” Sherlock said. “But I figured I could do it for the both of us, since in matters of taste you are usually either predictable or abominable.”
John pulled back, mock offended. “Hey! You don’t have to insult me right after a grand gesture of love, do you?”
“It’s not an insult if it’s fact, John,” Sherlock quipped. He pulled John forward by the collar and brushed his mouth over John’s, once, light. “Anyway, if you really dislike it, we could always return it and get another. Do you?”
John stole another kiss before answering. “No, I’m fine with it. More than fine—I’m rather elated.”
“I thought so,” Sherlock said. Then his eyes turned from jesting to sincere. “John.”
“Yes?” John asked, squeezing Sherlock’s hand just slightly.
“This is a vow.” Sherlock’s voice was heartrendingly earnest. “The rings.”
John pulled him close. “I know, Sherlock,” he murmured by Sherlock’s ear. “I love you.”
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If they could have had a wedding, it would have been like this.
They would be in suits, meticulously pressed and ironed and possibly tailored. It would be indoors, somewhere simple but tasteful. Food from Angelo’s, perhaps. There would be in attendance both of their families, however reluctant Sherlock may be about Mycroft being there. The officiant would not be a priest, and their wedding vows would be short and to the point, because they had said most of it to each other already, and the things that hadn’t been said had been heard anyway. Sherlock would have written them their own wedding march, of that John was sure and more than fond.
If they could have had a wedding, it would be glorious, and in John’s mind it was always a bright day, the sun unobscured but not blinding. Sherlock would scoff at John’s romantic tendency to label coincidences as fate, but his remarks would be affectionate, and John would know that Sherlock appreciated him for it.
The romance was there—he could not tamper with the facts.
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“Are you Sherlock Holmes’s family?” the nurse asks from behind John
“Yes,” John says. He hears the rustle of moving paper, the scratch of a pencil.
“What is your relationship to the patient?”
The nurse by the window draws apart the pale, flimsy curtains, and sunlight casts its rays upon the hospital bed and on the bridge of John’s nose. John lifts his head from the folded coat, and when his eyes meet the window, he knows they are red. His heart thuds in dull, rhythmic aches and when he speaks he hopes desperately (illogically) that Sherlock hears him—
“I’m his husband.”
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“But the romance was there,” I remonstrated. “I could not tamper with the facts.”
—Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Sign of the Four