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John hasn’t let go of him since it happened.
His eyes are closed, but he can smell John’s blood. It's soaked through his trousers, coating his skin. He can taste it like metal on his tongue. He sways slightly and John’s elbow shoves into his hip immediately, pushing him upright, grounding him.
He’s leaned up against the smooth side of a car with bulletproof windows. John is in the back seat, sitting sideways with his legs dangling out the open door while Mycroft's medic stitches his wound. Sherlock listens to the steady patter of the man's words as he runs through the obligatory trauma assessment. John had asked the medic to do it aloud--for him, he knows. Data, a sheltering stream of data, on the continuing life and relatively unharmed health of John Watson. John's resting heart rate is normal. No sign of shock. No damage to vital areas.
John’s thumb rubs over Sherlock's pulse point steadily, back and forth. When he’d been called aside for treatment he'd reached out to Sherlock, kneeling in a puddle of John's blood, pulled him to his feet and made him follow. Sherlock leans back, breathes through his nose, exists in the space of John’s firm grip on his wristbones, the sound of John’s voice responding to the medic’s questions. No other injuries. I’m a doctor, I can clean it at home myself. She was my wife. In a manner of speaking.
Sherlock thinks, That bullet was for me.
He’d been braced and ready, under no illusion this time that she would hesitate over any offer of mercy, of help. He hadn’t mentioned John Watson’s name. It meant too little to her for him to want to evoke it. He’d already died for John so many times. What was one more?
She’d pulled the trigger once. But two shots had echoed back from the walls around them.
When someone is shot, they don’t fly backwards. They stumble, or they just drop, depending on the place the skin splits open, the organs and veins pierced on impact. She had dropped where she stood. But beside him, John had wavered for a moment; long enough for Sherlock to twist sideways, to capture John’s collapse in his arms, catch the weight of it with his body. He’d hit the concrete floor with John held close against him, and saw his eyes flicker with surprised approval, saw his brilliant smile. And then he felt the heat of John’s blood begin to run down over his legs.
Time had slowed to nothing, the world disappearing around them under the rush of adrenaline. He’d sat up, cradling John as he pulled the scarf from his neck with one movement and pressed it to the source of the dark flood soaking through John’s jeans. Not him--not him.That bullet was meant for me.
“Hey. Hey, there,” John’s calm voice said, and he realized he was trembling when John’s hand wrapped around his firmly, helping him press deeper. He blinked against the tears, but they kept rising. “I’m all right. It’s all right; it just tore the muscle a bit. I surprised her--I was moving too fast and she wasn't ready. She was watching you.”
He remembered her eyes widening, the sudden echo of running footsteps in John's light, distinct tread and her gun swinging away to aim at something beyond him. Her single shot. Turning through the fog of terror to see John arrive just beside him, staggering. He groaned.
John took a quick breath at the sound and his other hand reached up to stroke slowly over Sherlock's face, wiping away the overflow of grief and fear. “Sherlock, look, the blood isn’t spurting the way it would if she’d hit an artery. It’s a surface wound. I’m going to be fine. You’re doing this exactly right.”
“John.” He didn’t recognize the ruin of his own voice. “Is she dead?”
“Yeah.” His eyes were bright. “She’s dead.”
The world began to tip.
He doubled over onto the living heat of John’s chest, rested his head above John's beating heart and shook, cold and sick with the adrenaline washing through his veins. “Hey,” John murmured, so gently, “hey, I’m here. I’m all right. We’re okay.”
He could hear MI6 swarming the warehouse around them, doors banging open, heavy boots moving over the floor, and John’s lungs pulled in air, again, again, again, just under his head, and finally he sat up. John's jeans were stiff with blood, but the flow had nearly stopped.
“John Watson. Can you stand?” The agent standing over them reached out a hand. “How bad is it?”
“It's pretty minor.” John’s voice was quiet. He reached out to take the hand the man offered him. Pulled himself to his feet and stood steady, holding Sherlock’s scarf to his leg.
“What about him--is he hit?”
“No, that’s all mine.” John looked at Sherlock kneeling on the floor, his lap soaked in red, and his eyes flashed something dark and lovely. “He had me well handled.”
Black-clothed men surrounded her body, commands crackling through the building over their radios. She was dead. It was done. “We’ll need you to let us look that injury over,” the agent said, and John nodded once. Reached out a hand to Sherlock.
“Come on, then.”
So Sherlock leans on the unmarked car in the back of the warehouse, breathes and waits while John is stitched and cleaned and bound up efficiently. He sees Mycroft moving through the shadows, speaking with the men, looking down at the wreck of John's wife. Assessing the outcome. He'd come himself to watch it through, then. At the end of the world, Sherlock thinks, Mycroft will be there, making sure the apocalypse goes according to plan.
When John’s leg is done, Mycroft comes to say, “Are you all right?” and he's asking John, but his hand settles onto Sherlock’s shoulder.
“All right,” John answers. He and Mycroft give each other a long look.
“Thank you,” Mycroft says finally. “Well done,” and as he moves away John smiles slowly.
His fingers press his presence into Sherlock's wrist while agents question them, while their statements are recorded and compared to their files and Sherlock hears the voices around them echo and overlap in his head with the report of two guns firing.
John's hand is on Sherlock's arm when he demands they be allowed to leave ("You know everything we know, for God’s sake!”), and he rests it on Sherlock's back as they climb into one of the black cars and the streets of London slide past and Sherlock leans his head against the window, watches for Baker Street and home.
He speaks once. "I am so very sorry," he says, and gasps a little at the weight of the words. John's head comes up.
"For what?" He sounds utterly puzzled.
"For letting her get that close to you! For missing it! Allowing her to pretend to love you! It's my fault--I should have seen."
"Sherlock, I married her. It was my wife who put a bullet in your chest. It's no one's fault but hers, but I would have been--there aren't words for how I would have been if I hadn't been there today, to stop her doing it again. I need you--" He stops suddenly and takes a deep breath. "I need you safe. With me. I need to be there when you need me."
His voice is deadly serious, and Sherlock drops his head back on the seat and shuts his eyes. When he can answer, he says, "Does that mean you're coming home?"
John exhales sharply. "Yes. Yes, of course. If you're ready for me."
"Ready for you! Yes."
"That's settled, then."
Inside, John drapes his arm across Sherlock's shoulders and they start up the narrow stairs. “Crippled again,” he says, and laughs a little, but his face tightens in pain over each step up and Sherlock pushes his shoulder further under John's weight.
When they enter the flat Sherlock closes the door behind them, takes John’s jacket off carefully and lays it over a kitchen chair and stands there, looking at him. John sinks into another chair and looks back.
“Are you all right?” John’s voice is very gentle.
“She was your wife. Are you all right?”
“I’ve had months to grieve the person I thought she was--the person she never was. That was the real woman in there, about to murder you, again, and if she had to die for you to go on living, that is more than fair. There’s nothing, not one thing I will regret about today, do you understand?” Sherlock wants to weep under the kindness of his gaze. Then John’s expression shifts, his eyes filling with a different kind of intensity. “Sherlock. How long?”
“What?” He’s soaking in John’s voice, John’s face, John's eyes, the unbearable luminosity of him. He isn't prepared.
“How long have you felt like this?”
Sherlock knows then what’s visible on him. It’s been humming all through him since the bullet caught John beside him and sent him stumbling toward the ground. But it's never far from the surface. He'd assumed John had seen it long ago. He'd thought it was meant to stay unspoken, this unreasonable need.
“Maybe always,” he says, quiet enough to hear John’s quick breath. "I thought you knew."
A wave of something, everything, rushes over John’s face and leaves tears welling up in his eyes. Sherlock had been ready for shock, embarrassment, disbelief, but tears were unanticipated. “John, what–-”
And then his hands come up to hide his beautiful face and Sherlock reaches out, pulls them away, because he has to know, has to understand the light rising in his eyes as the tears spill over. "John."
"Sherlock. All this time?"
“You know I can’t help it.” He wants to be sure John understands. “It’s you, it’s all of you; I can’t help it. I didn’t mean to. But I’m not sorry.”
John’s hands tremble in his. “Well, I can’t blame you for that.” And he smiles, and then he starts to laugh, and Sherlock had been ready for regret, refusal, bewilderment, anything but laughter. Slowly, he steps closer, grips John's shoulders, keeps watching the joy pouring out of him.
"John?"
“Oh, Sherlock." His voice is clear and sure. "Me, too. I love you, too.”