Work Text:
He blinked into the middle of a thought, realizing that he didn’t know what had come just before it. Awake, he was awake, and they’d been talking. The jumble of medical machinery around his bed blinked and pulsed the ongoing presence of his vital signals into the air and beside him John’s eyes were fixed on his, wide and shining with something near panic, near joy.
“What have I been saying?”
John settled back into his chair; pulled in a little gulp of half-laughter. “Again? You’re really susceptible to anesthesia-induced amnesia, Sherlock. That’s a bit worrying.”
“It’s a quirk of biology, hardly a fatal flaw. What on earth have I done to you?”
“To me?” John’s expression settled into a more familiar dry disbelief. “You’re the one in a hospital bed.”
“Post-appendectomy, I remember that.”
“Yeah, you’re out one appendix, just in time. Barely in time.” John’s eyes were beginning to glitter dangerously. “Because, like a bloody-minded idiot, you thought you could self-diagnose–-that was not the flu, Sherlock–-and just carry on through what must have been quickly nearing unbearable levels of nausea and pain without calling me, or Mrs. Hudson, or 999, and if she hadn’t come home early from her party and heard you retching, I don’t know–-” He broke off suddenly, turning his head a little away. “I shouldn’t have gone, yeah? You told me not to, and I shouldn’t have–-but I don’t like to be always hovering around, and I thought, just for the evening-–”
“Hovering around?” There was more here, beneath John’s obvious terror over Sherlock’s egregious failure to recognize the severity of his condition, alone in the flat on the turn of the year. What on earth did he mean, hovering? “You don’t hover. I like it when you’re around.” He must still be a bit under the influence; that was oddly easy to say. But why did John seem guilty now over having gone to see Harry, when neither Sherlock’s scoffing (”Neither you nor she will enjoy that at all, John”) nor the days of silent frustration that had followed John’s insistence that he was going had gotten him to reconsider his traveling plans? “John, what did I say when I was waking up?”
“Ah, you, you were–-upset.”
“Angry with you?”
“No!” John sounded sure. That was reassuring, reactions during post-operative recovery of consciousness being notoriously unpredictable. He was glad he hadn’t shouted at him, but-–
“Was I frightened?”
“No, you--the drugs can cause odd responses, yeah?”
“Generally attributable to emotional disinhibition, yes. It’s all right, just--tell me what I did.”
John blushed, then. Right up to his ears, and Sherlock felt his own face grow warm in sympathetic embarrassment, even before John said, “You cried.”
“I what?”
“You cried. You said you’d missed me, and asked why I’d left you alone, when...yeah.”
John’s voice was calm, his face still flushed a low, dull red, his hand trembling on his leg.
“When what?” He was helpless with the certainty that something horribly important had been said, words he couldn’t remember. They must have been just there, under the surface of his mind, washed suddenly bare as the comfort of unconsciousness ebbed from his brain.
“You asked me,” John said, breathlessly, staring, “why I’d left you for Harry on New Year’s Eve, when you’d wanted me more than she did, and–-why I didn’t want you, and–-you cried.”
Silence. That–-that had been what put that fearful joy in John’s face not two minutes before? That horribly childish, sad little thought?
Sherlock had cried, and that had pleased him.
John’s face was slowly changing again, his eyes taking in Sherlock’s in quick sweeps, his blush lightening as he focused. His brows drew together in astonishment.
“You’re not surprised,” he said, finally, and his hand stilled; he leaned forward. “You didn’t mean to say it, but you missed me. You knew you missed me.”
Sherlock nodded, mute.
“You wanted me,” and hesitant happiness was rising in John’s face again, and Sherlock’s heart sang with longing to help the joy through, smooth the worry away and just this once–-
“Oh,” John said, and closed his eyes, and leaned the soft, heavy weight of his head a little into Sherlock’s palm as it settled reverently on the curve of his cheek. “Oh,” and then there was a glorious smile without any fear left in it at all, just before he turned his face into Sherlock’s shaking hand and kissed it.