Chapter Text
Somewhere along the path from aeroplane to car, John had probably been calling after Sherlock to ask him something important, and somewhere in that instance Sherlock had probably responded quite articulately, but we advise readers not to read too heavily into his response; Sherlock Holmes was sky high while the figures of reality danced fluid and translucent around him, where buttons and uncomfortable subjects would sprout wings and go flying away when pressed too hard at. It was the epilogue of an overdose, all the strange shapes that filled the mind’s filing cabinets then laid strewn about like the aftermath of a tornado or teenager — here across the cerebellum, there in a heap next to the stem. They varied in color and content just like anything would, and whenever he’d try to lift one up he’d find it entirely too heavy and have to put it back down again. He was in the front parlor of the palace, so of course he heard the parliament gentleman tell him “you’re off the hook,” and he heard when John kept asking him if he was alright, but he was inside and hearing them from just behind the door, looking out through the peephole. He shouted his replies but it wasn’t as though they shared a room, as though he could meet them face to face without a door in the way. He heard them, but even their words were something changed in psychedelics, filtered through his ears or the door, all he could truly concentrate on was inside the palace walls, a singular question scrawled across them:
Who the hell is Mary Morstan?
A person, a blonde person (who tried to kill me) who likes cats and (lying) enjoyed the wedding (not me) and (shotmeshotmeshotmeshotme), yes, is an (ex)assassin(?), no doubt about that. A sniper with a terrifying skill set (in anything outside of dancing and wedding vows) and, yet, shot him (shot me) in a strange place (why not an artery? why not my head? ambivalence? guilt?).
Maybe.
Too nebulous, too unclear, and none of the facts would stay still long enough to be connected; anytime he’d try to join a link between two, each would go skittering in a different direction, laughing impishly as they went. They sounded like her. The pieces were too much to keep wrangling, he couldn’t keep the facts facts, instead getting bombarded by figures: Mary in a wedding dress, Mary with a gun, Mary over his hospital bed, Mary watching him board the plane. They sat around in chairs drinking coffee with Cheshire grins, two playing cards across a iron side table, one picking the petals off a daisy, the last stared at him with an expression of wild loathing.
And the rest wear the same.
“So,” interrupted John, who certainly hadn’t been there before, “you’ve overdosed before.”
Sherlock blinked back, rather jarred, it was a new kind of noise introduced which would never not be a hit of ice water to him, but there he was, shimmering and in the flesh: John Watson, MD to the stars and personal house-breaker, slipped through the bolted door (must get that fixed)(better drugs)(that really won’t do, he knows no bounds) like a brilliant cat burglar or magician or John Watson MD without the sign of fuss or trouble on him. No, in fact his face was rather unreadable (well), and he merely leant against the door frame, as all those prolific skulking characters of literature are so apt to do.
Then, with no more than an emphatic gesticulation (a head-lock in fact, gripping sufficient enough as though it had been literal) and yes, he’d done it, he’d yanked Sherlock out of the palace all together and brought him back down to Baker Street, only a chair across from John in his own.
”Sherlock?”
“Hello to you too.”
“Hi, Sherlock. Now answer the first thing.”
He closed his eyes and hummed, rubbing each lightly between a forefinger and thumb, “Can’t answer, that was a statement, one answers questions, not statements, John.”
John was quite lost. He thought he might do something sincere, but Sherlock read it too fast and sneered.
“Oh behave, would you?”
Sans verbalization, the man in question merely re-angled himself horizontally on the chair so that his head was slid down one arm rest as both legs dangled over the opposite.
It was deliciously wrong, and superlatively perplexing, and this he wore like a Cartier diamond set as he sung, “No.”
”’No?’”
“No,” he preened.
John merely blinked. “I haven’t even asked anything yet.”
”Thank God. I could read it was going to be lividly boring. Believe me, preemptive measures are to be thanked reverently.”
There were too many strains of ‘I’ll just get my coat, shall I?’ to enumerate, so we won’t. At the end of the several second struggle, John finally settled on a universal truth. “You are… strange.”
Sherlock returned with another fact, his greatest posh plosive ‘k,’ a follow up question to boot: “And you talk to me, who’s stranger?” (All this without looking up!)(he missed much in that, things he generally never would, and that’s all the depth of feeling that shone through each pore and iris fleck, the ways his eyes and lips pinched down, the way he deflated a little, lost fragments of hex codes as he listened).
A new tactic: “How can I help you?”
This was met with a small bout of snickering.
“No seriously, how can I help you?
“My doctor would like to help,” and for the first time in many sentences, he turned his eyes to John, who felt it like an electric bolt “Fix me, cure me, make it better?”
“Mostly I just want to quell a raging twat,” he breathed, “but yeah.”
With a soft ‘hmph’ and a smirk he sprang from his chair with all the grace a junkie while high ought to possess.
“Sherlock-“
“No, no, shhh help me,” he beseeched, already halfway towards the string wall, “I got a case before my brother took me to the boring government to get a pardon, it’s been all I can do not to go running like the officers in Normandy to the scene of the crime but it was always taxi to taxi to here, and if you don’t let me finally work on this right now I swear to God, John, I will finish my work from the plane and I will take you with me, are we clear?”
Through gritted teeth, “Crystal.”
”Brill, John, simply brill, now we start with the death threat sitting in my inbox, only it wasn’t for my death, for once, but rather that of a Ms. Dahlia Harris, though it was obvious from the lack of follow up, back tracking, and overall nature, of the threat that it was meant for me, I missed it while I was off playing Hamlet at my parents’. The woman was found in a river with a shot through her chest, and also through her face, entirely before the message had ever been sent, however. Strange, no? Rather defeats the purpose, sending the threat after the crime, and the police have no leads despite the low population density of a rural town, my parents’ town, a couple streets over theirs at the same time we were over. It’s fantastic! A belated death threat to the body in the river? Sent to me while we were minutes away from the scene of the crime? Why-“
He turned and suddenly John was there (a genuine soldier, all the excellence in stealth training, still, it’s me, and very likely just the result of a palpable overdose and, for lack of better word, blinding, by him).
Then he took a hold of his friends’ arms, (upper biceps on each side, though he might know the exact strains and sub genres he’s lighting upon by name, probably doesn’t but in a mere few hours I will. I’ll learn all of the cumulative eighteen square inches by rote, or even by heart if it means feeling it with every beat, every breath, every blood cell sent its way and beyond.)
Eyes searching, at last he smiled, ”There you are.”
How much was there? How many different things at once? Sherlock babbled “Of course I’m here, where else would I—
“Still paused, probably.”
To that, Sherlock’s face positively fell. “‘Paused?’”
“Yes,” John swallowed and nodded a bit off to the side, beginning to fumble and flush from the proximity. “Just, for you, it’s been a lot, and it might—“
“Help? Right? Because you just want to help, yes?” He leaned perilously closer into and through the interrogative, eyes unabashedly wide and searching as John could only just meet it. “The greatest thing you may contribute to that score is if you immediately cease listening to my characteristically nocuous pain dolt of an elder brother. Despite the impression he makes out of me, I am not a silly little bird twittering about, ready to get plucked from the sky, so you can stop the doctor bid altogether with me. I am not your patient, you needn’t fuss with the eggshells and taking my temperature or, or holding me when I cry or whatever perfectly ridiculous thing you people say because I don’t cry, and I’m absolutely fine.”
At the close of his monologue, in a singular and very sleek motion indeed, John spun him him around and back into his armchair (dead easy, I’m dead weight in his arms, I hardly even notice, I’m standing there and then here, and he’s looking at me now, like he’s about to say something, and I know in a matter of moments I will want to be nowhere at all).
“No,” he answered very simply, looking Sherlock up and down crumpled in the seat.
Sherlock gaped back, “‘No?’”
”No.”
”Well why not?”
“Because you nearly killed yourself, Sherlock!”
”How many times do I have to explain it to your liminally sized mind, it was for—“
“Sherlock,” the addressed looked up into John’s face, the one dressed up in stress lines and red shapes where his palm had pressed into, which emoted all the ache from the rest of his body, and ached doubly as it tried to push out of his body and through his mouth to finally be realized as words, and it drained the salt from Sherlock’s person as though John’s face were in fact a magnet for solutes, and he went quite quiet.
”Yeah, okay.”
His friend opened his mouth ready to reply, then closed it again upon registration. “Really?”
“Yes.”
John’s eyes checked Sherlock’s a few times over, and didn’t lift until satisfied. Then his face smoothed and he exhaled. “Right. Alright, that’s, yeah.” He grinned a bit. “That’s good.”
”You’re welcome.”
”You’re a prat.”
”Yeah.” They smiled at each other the way that people who speak in looks and gaps only can. Subtly, with their lips just barely slanting, and somehow with world’s more weight than a line reader would find. Sometimes it was choking.
John cleared his throat, he asked “Eat?” which was supposed to be a question from how it lilted up at the end so we marked it as such, but it was very obviously not. The detective made a noncommittal noise. “It’s been days, I’m sure.”
”Oh, John,” he snapped back, tossing his head, “no nursemaiding, let me beg you.”
”Of course I’ll let you, you’ll have quite a time of it around gluts of lo mein but I’ll let you.”
“But—“
John was already mid-dial, but he paused at the abruptness of the stop. Sherlock was blinking a bit madly and worrying his lip and unable to get out another word.
”But what?”
But I wasn’t joking, I meant it. Stop standing while I sit, like your patient waiting to have my vitals took since it’s next on your list and sit with me, here. Don’t leave to the next, the next on your list, shorten your list to one name, mine, and sit with me. Sit like you’re my friend, my partner and equal, forget a while that I am ill and so are you, and eat with me in this house that we shared, like I’m something more than your charge, like you more than care.
But nothing came out, all he could do was blink once more for good measure, remain disappointingly quiet, and deflate. “Thank you,” he said cowardly.
John smiled weekly, not absolutely understanding, but warm as ever, “It’ll be here in a half hour, don’t whip yourself up too much.”
And Sherlock’s eyes lit.
My order, only mine, takes a mean fifteen minutes. Mine and his takes a mean of thirty.
“Are you running down to fetch it?” he asked brightly.
John snorted, “Not a chance, let them take the walk up.”
”Quite so,” Sherlock glowed and then John couldn’t help but understand. So he fell back into his chair and they listened to his phone ring with the light headed mutual healing of when someone exhales a gush of air that had just begun to burn in their throat, and see the stars when the new oxygen rushes in, and the slightest thrill of a very temporary contentment. Emboldened, John snapped at Sherlock as he lifted the receiver to his ear, and he whispered, “Sherlock, Bond disks!”
~~~
They ate more Chinese food than strictly necessary on the sofa and watched movies on John’s laptop past the point where its owner passed out castrate in its corner. Now it was exactly 1:23 in the morning, and Sherlock was made to pause Casino Royalle for the loathsome buzzing in his pocket.
He slinked off his spot on the couch and answered it, the conversation went as transcribed:
”Mary?”
”Hello, Sherlock!”
“…hello.”
”You sound groggy, late for you?” This jabbed at Sherlock rather like a twig, by the way.
”Isn’t it for you?”
”Ah, different time tables, I see.”
Here Sherlock pressed his lips into a flat line and made sure his voice was even. “Yes,” he agreed, acidic as it was in his throat. Truth was, he was quite proud of how long he could go without sleep.
Mary, of all things, then began to giggle.
“What?”
“Don’t torture yourself, it’s rather sweet.”
”What is?”
”A domesticated Sherlock. Delicious, actually, you and my husband both.”
“Right,” his hand flew up to his chest and he peered back to the sofa to check her husband still there.
“Pretty pair you make.”
“Mm too pretty, you’ll be wanting him back soon, won’t you?”
She chuckled to herself. “He’s sleeping, yeah?”
“Yes.”
“I’ll bet it was the movies, that always does it.”
”You should’ve been the analyst.”
“I know. Tell you what, darling, you can keep him for the rest of the night and we’ll trade back at lunch time.”
”Generous of you.”
”I know, all right, sleep well.”
“You also. Bye.”
”Bye!”
Then the air was quiet once more. Dismal and lonely like a desert which can sense bomb testers coming.
John was still on the couch with his head lolling over one shoulder, the rest of him slumped up and curled like a used tissue. John got neck pains whenever he slept that way, so Sherlock stole to the couch to lay him out better, and thought little of it. Then he adjusted him, took a step back and decided it wasn’t good enough, so he tried again, and that sequence he thought a little more of. Like what John might think if he knew he was getting so worried over, and studied like a pinned butterfly while at it.
That simile doesn’t particularly do him justice either, it implies statism, but he’s not, not at all. I can see his thoughts rolling over like cloud cover and the microcosms where his breath rolls out, and it’s very impossible to ever study him to the depth one may a single still of a butterfly but I will.
He was deeply asleep (been suffering deprivation for the past few months)(sorry), and Sherlock Holmes set himself up on the floor like a child (elbows on the sofa, head in his hands) and did nothing but watched (wrong and bad and scary but I’m also a known enemy to the state and famously anti-social and still legally high and never get the things that I want so let me them now, please. Let me look at the painting if I promise not to touch or to steal, it does you no harm to let me pour over something I cannot possess anyway.)
(Oh, John, you should’ve been inside a frame somewhere in Venice.)
(I thought they burned up the last of you in Alexandria.)
(John, why won’t you let me die for you? Is it because you know I would? Because I did already, does it mean less? I’d die as many times as you’d asked.)
The entire conscious stream was befuddling to an eavesdropper, but he himself didn’t pay them much mind, he never did. They would run often enough, a lot like this, when he was looking quite intently at John, but also sometimes when he wasn’t. Sometimes they came when John wasn’t there at all. But they always entered on goat’s feet and striking or seizing him, finding some way to mingle as to leave him limp or twitching or sore, like now with his face contracting like it is. It’s because he’s thinking, and I’d live for you, too, John. If you asked, if it transpired to be some kind of medal or monument I could make out in your name I’d live for as many years as you’d want me.
~~~
Alright, now look at the next morning, which wasn’t at all bad for late December, and John decided to walk. Sherlock had been moaning about his head, the flat was apparently barren, and John liked walking a great deal so he happily zipped down to fetch supplies from the shop on the corner. His coat was good and anyway the sun was out, grey and watery, and seemed as good a sign as anything else.
Then his phone rang.
”Hi Mary.”
“Hi John, how did you sleep? In the arms of your friend while your wife went through Braxton hicks by herself?”
He did one of those small, angry smiles that flexed on and off again, and simply replied, “Funny.”
”Thanks.”
”You’re okay now?”
“Yeah of course I’m fine, I am a nurse, you know.”
“I know.”
”I do sort of miss you, though.”
There was a slight pause as he exhaled, then answered, “I know.”
She snorted from her end of the line. “Alright.”
”No, I’m sorry, I—“ he looked at the sidewalk behind him and tried breathing a bit more, “I’m sorry. I’m only, I’m worried.”
”About her?”
”Who?”
“Brunette with the cheekbones and the curls? On her period at the moment, I believe.”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake, Mary—”
“I’m sorry,” she giggled nervously. “Sorry, that was rude, wasn’t it?”
”Mary, he—“
”I only said it since I talked with him last night.”
John paused, a little surprised. “Did you?”
”Yeah, I thought he sounded fine.”
He laughed dryly, “Must’ve talked to him more than me.”
”Yeah,” she lingered a bit on the end, trying to think. ”He said it’s my turn with you next.”
John laughed a little louder, and still with a marked lack of humor. “I’m starting to think you didn’t talk to him at all.”
”Why? Because—” Mary trailed off. Both of them decided to not finish the thought, so she shifted to an obviously new one. “He’s been so needy, hasn’t he?”
John made a noise, and didn’t say anything else.
She dropped her voice softer, and asked, “Will you be back soon?”
John shifted his weight from one foot to the other and grunted his agreement.
“Alright then,” then she paused, as though calculating what to say next. “I love you.”
”I love you too,” he said, and then she hung up. John was left staring ahead and rather with the mad urge to see his phone kiss with the pavement. But he didn’t. He pocketed it and took another three laps around the route, walked until the sun went away and his coat started feeling worthless, and walking wasn’t fun anymore.
When he finally got back to 221B, he was snatched inside by a set of trembling hands, and utterly startled by it.
“Ah! John!” The voice connected to them (equally excited and nearly shaking too) cried, “What serendipity you arrived, did you get my texts?”
“Didn’t see them,” John rather gaped back as he was manhandled into the chair at the desk. “And I didn’t ‘arrive,’ I returned. From the, oh damn!” he smacked the desk, “Your head—“
”Oh, stuff and nonsense,” the detective batted his hand, “don’t lend it another thought.”
“Why don’t I go back—“ John felt as though he’d only thought about getting up when Sherlock slammed him back into the chair.
Then his voice went low enough to trip on, and he warned him, ”Good try, Watson.”
John swallowed hard.
Sherlock made a sound through his nose to indicate John turn his attention to the anxiety inducing mess on the desk in front of him. The latter turned back to him, “I know you need it, but you will not get free cleaning labor from me.”
”Oh John,” he rolled his eyes, “actually look.”
He did. It was covered in stacks and stacks of battered paperbacks and Manila folders worn nearly to rags, freckled with paper clips, and all topping a country map with pins marking towns down. A couple pins actually had popped loose, properly elevating the desk to a hazard, but somehow between the lot there was a theme.
“It’s a case?”
Sherlock smiled excitedly, the angular one without any teeth, “Good, yes. Little slow, though, even for you, get your head out of its subjective cognitive dysfunction.”
Brain fog, just call it brain fog, John thought as he sighed a long suffering sigh and resisted the urge to lay his head on the tack desk. His internal monologue went on bitterly another line, I think I taught you that term, too, wanker, and his eyes traveled up to the wanker in question, which quickly flipped his stomach. His face was pale, of course it was, always, but to see it this pale, it bordered on disturbing. It looked as though the blood had been washed out of it, wan and narrowed with his eyes incredibly dark, and his hair uncharacteristically erratic, like he’d just recently clawed his way into from underneath a grave. He watched Sherlock read the thought process through his face and sigh irritably, “Really, John, I’m fine.”
John didn’t say anything, only looked for another awful moment more, and sigh back, “I really do wish you’d sleep.”
“Sleep is for the weak,” he dismissed.
John chewed the inside of his cheek, deciding very carefully the angle to hit upon.
“I know the Moriarty thing is, scary—“
”This isn’t related.”
”No?”
Sherlock shook his head awkwardly so that all his hair sprung too. John met his gaze evenly, before exploding “The what in the sodding hell are you doing with it?”
“Playing! John, what does anyone do with anything?”
”Realistic, wellness, self preservative things.”
”Don’t make me heave, I haven’t the stomach today. Look at the picture.”
John kept looking ant him instead, eyes locked like an Iron Maiden, and sent a bolt sufficient strong enough to induce shame, even in the most isolated of Holmes. Though, the visible effect was not as intended. Rather than weaken his resolve, the look only gave it a more pettish, spiteful, and present backbone than before, and he now returned his eye contact like a raring bull. He huffed, “Really, John, this needn’t be such a sticking point, unless there’s other things you’d better be doing.”
John all but backed down. “I did have a few things on the docket, actually.”
”Like what?”
Mr. Watson’s eyes narrowed, “Stuff regarding my wife and child to be, because in case you’d forgotten, I actually have those.”
Sherlock smirked. “I was starting to think you’d forgotten you actually have those.”
”My God, Sherlock!” John fumed, but before he could rhapsodize on people not orbiting Sherlock, of everyone having their own gravity and their own white picket nuclear three piece lives, Sherlock slammed a photograph down on the desk.
”Fine! Look at the picture!”
”No!”
“I need a doctor’s opinion,” Sherlock tried, playfully, “you wouldn’t deny me a doctor’s opinion, doctor? You’re very nearly to be returned to your pretty little dollhouse, you wouldn’t deny an ailing man consultation now?”
Grasping at straws and tired, the doctor assented, and the detective beamed at having won. Then he drummed his fingers down on the selected photograph, a victim dragged out from a river.
”How long?”
The seated one bent over the picture, his friend counted the hairs on the back of his neck (143) and stooped down to take a breath of the place they stood (he smells fresh from the cold outside, obvious, but buttery from where his jacket’s rubbed up against it too)(morning). At the sound of his subject’s voice, he snapped back.
”There’s only so much I can get from a picture—“
”Oh, c’mon, there must be some available clue to the great John Watson M .D.”
John leaned back in the chair. ”She was lying face down, yeah?”
“Obviously,” the other scoffed in a tone that bordered on contemptuous. That earned him a glare.
”She probably spent 2-3 days in the water. Yippie.”
“Very,” Sherlock snatched the photo back and held it quite close to his face to study, his face knotting slightly (wrong and stupid me, I undershot it by a day like a commoner of a sports bar)(wrong and stupid as ever)(oh, I need him, I need him on an IV and otherwise every place or else I fall to ashes and rags whenever it turns midnight, which seems to occur more frequently by the day, oh, I need him to set the clocks back and fix me and make me more than right but more than what I am, better than what I am), which John wondered at.
He only asked, ”You’ve been working all night?” to which Sherlock nodded without moving his eyes from the paper. He paid John no mind when he got up from the chair, nor when he walked across the room, or even when he walked back. Not until he felt a quilt from the couch fall over his right shoulder. Then when he looked up, it was to see John settling into his chair with the matched one they kept.
”Whatever it is, tell them they can wait.”
~~~
By the time Sherlock woke up (how long’s it been?)(oh, I’m slipping, I’m losing the hours, I know they’ve gone), John was toeing on his shoes in the most valiant effort to be quiet, stealing glances to the sofa (me) as he did. Sherlock couldn’t help but grin at the scene, being rather domestic in the picturesque way he never thought about with John’s other house. The doctor saw him and smiled, “Damn, my efforts wasted.”
”They were,” (I just had the word) ”valiant.”
He chuckled to himself as he got the laces. “Let it never be said that chivalry’s died, so long as John Watson’s around. Or, what was it you said before, John Watson M.D.?”
”Yeah.”
”Yeah I quite liked that, that was a good one.”
”I’ve had better.”
He shrugged. “A winner’s a winner.”
”Hm—“
”Just, take it.”
By the time John had finished the second lace, the smile had disappeared entirely from the detective’s face, and the easiness there had disappeared.
John cleared his throat and spoke again, his voice much softer, “You know I’ll be around, right?”
“Of course I know.”
His friend smiled rather sadly. “And I’ll be back tomorrow too, we could go then if you’re up to it.”
”I am now.”
”I’ve already had a word with Mrs. Hudson to man all the exits.”
”Bugger.”
He laughed and dawdled in the doorway. “And,” he began, “you know you can call me anytime.”
“I know,” Sherlock answered cautiously, aware that a a wrong move now could send crumbling the towers and dams. “What of it?
“Just that I’m here when you need me, okay?”
“Need you, why would I need you?” he asked, blinking, and very nearly defensive, and John’s smile grew sadder.
“No reason at all.”