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Joan has had to pick her way into the house, again. She hadn’t even bothered knocking first this time. She knows the score, and she’s just about had it with these silly little tests of his.
She’s about to call out for him to show his face when she hears his voice from the lounge to her right. She leaves the front door open, steps into the doorway, opens her mouth and narrows what feels like a death-glare at his turned back, and then promptly pauses, the words faltering in her throat.
“I apologise.”
At first Joan thinks he’s talking to her, is apologising for making her break into the brownstone every time she visits, but, after a moment’s pause following, frankly, the shock of it, she realises that he’s talking to someone else, and that someone is Clyde.
Sherlock is sat on the polished floor, his blazer cast across the leather armchair in front of him. Clyde is sat atop it, wearing his dinosaur cosy. Sherlock rests his chin on his clasped hands, tilting his head at the tortoise.
“Don’t look at me like that, like you wish you could shock me with your buzzer. I just apologised.”
Joan isn’t quite sure whether Sherlock knows she is here or not. She had been quiet. She wonders if she’s improved her lock-picking skills that immensely and whether Sherlock really has no idea she is listening to this very private conversation between a man and his tortoise.
“Look, I had to leave. If I were to stay...alone...without Watson... I am a creature of habit, I know this, and while at first I abhorred the idea of sharing my home with anyone else, I quickly grew used to having the constant companionship, the...distraction. If that were to change, I...”
Sherlock’s usual eloquence is failing him. Clyde stares at him with those tiny black eyes of his, impassive and yet somehow judging. Joan’s pride swells.
Kitty bangs around somewhere upstairs, strains of Beethoven coursing through the brownstone as a door opens and closes. When Sherlock speaks again it is quieter, softer, and he leans in closely to Clyde as he offers up a dandelion head from his proffered palm.
Joan wants to roll her eyes watching Sherlock trying to butter Clyde up like this, but something about his tone leaves the foundations of all that resentment and anger surrounding him subsiding, washing away and leaving those feelings hanging in mid-air, nowhere to go but to fall.
“Besides, I missed you both, the...whole time, in fact. I was worried about her, but she was fine – more than fine actually. She flourished. I always knew she would, and perhaps I was afraid of that as well, afraid of her moving on and I... I’m talking to a tortoise.”
This last realisation comes with a resigned sigh.
“I can’t say all of this to her, you see.” Sherlock props his elbow on the edge of the armchair next to Clyde and cradles his face in his open palm. “I feel – and quite rightly – she’s decided I am as untrustworthy as my brother. I suppose I am.”
This utterance is accepted by Clyde for the monumental admittance it is. He takes the dandelion.
Sherlock curls his fingers into his palm. “If only Watson was as receptive, then perhaps...”
The final word hangs there, with a thousand different endings, but only a handful fit his tone, his posture, the way his voice shapes her name, how gently his lips let the words pass. The open ending leaves Joan stumped, breathless, almost wishing she’d just thrown open the damn door and come stomping down the hall in her ankle boots.
What would have happened if she had knocked? Would she have ever heard this apology? Was this Sherlock’s way of, in his mind, making amends somehow?
Perhaps, Joan thinks, he is simply this desperate. For once, she takes pity on him, taking a few quiet steps back and kicking the front door shut.
“Sherlock!” She calls out. “I swear, if you don’t give me a key–”
“Ah, Watson.” He meets her in the doorway with Clyde in hand, his hair mussed and his face as unshaven as always. “Your dulcet tones are always a pleasant addition to the morning.”
His sarcasm is dimmed. It isn’t heartfelt. His gaze is somehow soft on her, expectant.
Joan’s cheeks burn. He had known she was there.
Sherlock had apologised to her, via their tortoise. Of course.
But she isn’t ashamed at her lock-picking skills or lack of finesse, rather she’s not ashamed at all. It is something else that makes her look anywhere but at his face, where she knows an offer, the same one that had ridden on the end of his soft ‘perhaps,’ waits for her there, if only she’d care to look. For now she leaves this charade between them, of him spilling those closely protected innards of his and her overhearing it all by accident, until she can lock herself away in her apartment and examine every piece he has given her.
It's a puzzle she already knows the answer to, the picture clear, but it is how they got here that stumps her.
It's always this way with him. Sherlock will give her the clues to something he has already solved and wait, and watch, just so he can see her mind work. But perhaps this time, he is just as lost as she is. Perhaps this time, he needs her to give him the answers.