Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

On every last day of the month, he visits her.

John understands. Surprisingly, because after everything she put them through, there would be enough base for the argument that going back near her general vicinity would be nothing more than foolish on several levels, those being the emotional ones and the factual ones. John also saw her after he had been collected from the well, briefly, but enough to realise how her consciousness had shut itself in. She wasn’t merely unresponsive, she was reconstructing her state of mind, so that it could work through a completely foreign set of data. The plane had landed. Technically speaking, a crash was a landing. She had been peaceful, for lack of a more befitting adjective.

John understanding probably shouldn’t have been surprising, given what they have been through - meaning what they have put the other through, yet coming out with their attachments unscathed. Understanding really wasn’t ever the problem. It was often why John would be getting so furious or frustrated, because he could connect the dots. The first time he stated “I need some air”, Sherlock looked mildly puzzled. A general lifelong need for oxygen didn’t merit mentioning, surely not right now, in the middle of an intense argument? John left. And came back, eventually. It became a rare pattern, and sometimes they would continue the argument, calmer, or talk through it, or they didn’t (need to). Sherlock translated “I need some air” to “I understand, but I need some time to work through it (and so do you), I’ll come back when I have, and when I do, you better listen to what I have to say”.

Mostly, Sherlock would be brought to Sherrinford in a helicopter on his own. Mycroft always watched the tapes, but physically nobody accompanied him but his violin, the Stradivarius Eurus gave him in this very room, since his beloved old one became a victim of her drone attack of 221b’s living room. Sherlock didn’t know where the one came from which always lay on her side of the glass now, but he heavily suspected that it was due to Mycroft’s need to make everything appear as if all that hadn’t happened. All that being the most visceral evidence yet, what might happen if Mycroft made a calculated mistake. Failure is something none of them ever handled in an elegant way, though Mycroft certainly aspired to a dignified one, even when he had to face their parents.

The Holmes family assembled only for special occasions, and Sherrinford somewhat replaced Mummy’s yearly ambitions to gather her boys shortly after winter solstice. Or Christmas, as it is colloquially called. Silver linings…

John never followed him to Sherrinford, and Sherlock is grateful for that. Especially his first visit was important to be alone, because while he and his sister are having conversations, they had to…define their language in private. The medium was obvious enough, it could only be music and it would only be the violins. Everything else was for them to decide on. Sherlock was vaguely reminded of a client some years back, who only used ASL, himself only really knowing BSL, and their resulting communication in something that was a bit of both, but essentially neither. It had its difficulties, and a mistake in translation almost cost him the use of his left thumb, but it would hardly compare to what Eurus and he were doing now, because up in the air is a necessary feature for their kind of talking. And they were talking. They were finally playing together. He meant what he had said to her at Musgrave.

Of course, they tried to evaluate her again, after her apathy was broken and she had reached for the instrument for the first time. Sherlock cringed inwardly about their bumbling efforts when he was taking an (unauthorised) look at their notes. They weren’t arriving at any definite conclusion and never would be, which was something he appreciated almost gleefully, because a Holmes defying definition was somewhat par for the course. None of them, however, defied labelling, according to the recent and much older notes. ‘High functioning’ was one of the familiar terms he found, hateful, this one, as apt for being used as a shield it might be. Although in his experience, it was used as such both by the labelled person as much as the labelling ones.

John was unquestionably right about returning to Sherrinford being dangerous. Eurus could leave anytime, take control over the island again and do her own little human experiments. Even Mycroft harboured no illusions in that regard. One doesn’t send a prisoner in the same cell he just leisurely broke out of, not recognising this fact. But she doesn’t want to kill guards or be cruel. She is not Moriarty. Yes, she lacks empathy and what people call an inherent moral code, but as impressively cerebrally focused her whole being might be, even she is affected by simply being human. To land the plane was what was driving her to do all that, and it did. Meanwhile, Sherlock gets to know his sister in a way even Mycroft can’t fully comprehend, but John, in an odd, passive kind of way, starts to.

On the way back to London, Sherlock often wishes he would remember the past in which Eurus taught him to play the violin. They must’ve had played together back then occasionally, surely? Or was there only one violin? If so, would Victor still have died, had there been two violins?

Regardless of how much in depth their musical conversations could be, these are questions she wouldn’t answer, and Sherlock these days stays clear of Mycroft for his own peace of mind.

John says he is much more ‘in his own head’ each time he returns, more than the rest of the month. Also, that he listens to him more carefully. Sherlock, who always has the urge to cuddle a happily blubbering Rosie close when he steps through 221b’s door, doesn’t comment on this, but at every evening of the first day of the month, he makes tea for a comfortably by the fire sitting John and plays a certain melody he did remember.

That he plays it right there, is for John.
That he plays it so softly, is for Rosie.
That he plays it accurately, is for his sister.
That he plays it at all, is for himself.

Chapter Text

221B was almost set to rights again. The smell would take the longest, but it wouldn’t return to how it was before the last instance of shattered windows and smouldering books the building could count under the events it survived. Rosie’s overnight stays had brought with them a constantly fluctuating fragrance of her shampoo (rose), her toys (cheap plastic), John’s occasional tin can originating meals (the unsuccessfully ravioli-imitating kind) and whichever she had touched in the time she wasn’t here, most notably Molly’s kitchen potpourris (cloves, tangerine peel, lavender) and of course the laundry detergent of her other tiny bed linens, the ones that weren’t here (awful and not worth distinguishing, Mary had certainly been more interested in cleanliness and not the possible olfactory clashing of detergents).

It was the second day of the month and apparently one of a weekend, according to the traffic on Baker Street (the clocked busses, more pedestrians due to the weather but less hurried, Speedy’s absent front door jingle, the beeping of a reversing collection company lorry in the earliest hours of this morning) and the flat was silent within all this susurrus of the early afternoon. John wasn’t here. He would come back in a few hours. Rosie was with Mrs. Hudson, not because Sherlock wouldn’t or couldn’t look after her on his own, but because Mrs. Hudson had wanted to, very much. There had been a slightly hushed conversation in the stairwell two days ago, in which she had asked John if she could bring Rosie with her, visiting Marys grave this Sunday and going for a nice walk after, and possibly a hot chocolate. John acquiesced, he had no reason not to, he himself only wouldn’t let his own visits to this convoluted yet boring place be dictated by an anniversary. (Not again.) It has been two years…
This makes today a Sunday, supposedly.

Sherlock knew he had some hours left to his own devices, and there has been something very specific on his mind, he wanted to devote his mental prowess and capacity to. He had to try. One doesn’t learn that one’s brother had overwritten years of ones’ memory without at least trying to rip the unasked for veil to pieces. Or at the very least some sizable holes into it. Mycroft had strongly advised against any such measures, but Sherlock unsurprisingly couldn’t let it go and threatened his brother nonverbally with a well-deserved punch in his smug face, should he show any indication of interfering with his younger siblings’ psyche again or hindering him in any capacity of dealing with that delicate state in whichever fashion Sherlock deems fit. It was his mind. Yes, it answered, to an extent, why he had never trusted Mycroft, on some level his consciousness would naturally rebel against being made malleable in any sort of way. It was somewhat helpful to have a clearer answer than ‘I just never liked you, for some reason’, because they both knew that was not the truth, looking a few decades back. Additionally, liking someone and trusting someone are very different things.

He was lying on the sofa, hands steepled, fingertips at his lips. As the creature of habit that he was, he uses every element he knows helps his concentration, including the thinking pose. Some things don’t change. But usually the picture he is currently making indicates his sorting through an array of data, filtering the keys out of the pile of rubbish if there’s too much evidence, too much superfluous detail, wandering through memories because they give an answer to a specific question or he simply likes them – generally accessing his mind palace.
This time, the method wouldn’t help. Of course he hasn’t sorted something away that was overwritten. What is not part of the filing cabinet, is not in the filing cabinet. He has to go around the paths he created for efficiency, the complicated, beautiful connections, which were his pride and joy, not his second nature but his first, which had become his salvation in more ways than one during his entire life.
What picture do you get, if you don’t look at the stars, but the space in-between?

His heart rate finally slowed down a few points, and his awareness of 221B did not entirely fade. The smooth leather under his naked heels, the coarse fibre of the pillow case at his neck, the faint aroma of the by now tepid cup of tea next to him on the coffee table.
He also wasn’t there anymore. His brow crinkled as he forced his mind further into the non-structured part of itself, away from the familiarity and certainty of knowledge. After all, the worst thing that could happen would be, if he didn’t find anything for his efforts.

/////////////////////

He was very young, four, but almost five. There was a cat he sometimes saw when he was sitting on the window sill in his room. He liked to sit there to read or draw or look at the early autumn’s leaves with his magnifying glass and sorting them according to a factor of his choosing. Colour. Form. Age. Species of tree. Structural similarities.
The cat didn’t belong to Musgrave Hall. It didn’t have a name or an owner, and last year it had produced a shocking amount of fuzzy little ones in a corner of an old shed on the other side of the field. The bunch of kittens grew up in a matter of a few weeks and then went their own way. How do they know where to go? Sherlock wondered.
The cat stayed, content with what she found around Musgrave. Mycroft said not to touch her, straying cats were dirty and full of fleas, and then you will get the fleas and their excrements will make you itchy and ill and all that wasn’t worth stroking a furry stranger. But the cat wasn’t even seeking out to be touched by anyone.

One warm evening, dawn only started and Sherlock opened the window wide, which always made Mummy nervous if she caught him sitting in the open first floor window. The cat was sitting near the bushes, waiting to ambush its prey. Its little body was motionless but tense, save for the triangular ears. Sherlock couldn’t see that much detail, but he has observed the cat organising its meals several times by now. What he hadn’t watched so far was his sister watching the cat watching its prey.
Eurus sat in the middle of the bushes, in her dark blue dress she wasn’t giving up wearing outside yet, never mind the temperatures slowly having left the summer behind. She again has stolen his red boots, Sherlock noted, instead of taking her own green ones. Yes, the left one has a hole in the front, but she sat amidst the bushes, not the water…

The cat pounced. Eurus leaned forward. The slightly startled cat hopped a few metres away and started devouring her meal in haste. She must have been hungry or feel her meal threatened, then. Sherlock watched Eurus watching the cat kill and eat. Slowly, she scrambled towards it. She must know how to read the cats subtle body language, or she would have made a mistake by now. One of the bushes took one of her hairbands out, but she didn’t care if she only had one pigtail left. The cat finished and eyed Eurus sceptically, who didn’t reach out. They just sat there in the middle of the lawn, waiting. Sherlock tapped his fingers impatiently.
The cat left.

The next day, the scene repeated, in a different corner of the garden. And then again. And a few days later, again. Sherlock began to look for them. Eurus always did the same, but the cat didn’t. It came to expect its meal companion, until finally, it gave up its ambush and greeted Eurus by stroking lightly against her crossed knees. Eurus stared.
Sherlock resolved to ask her later, if she had fleas now, and if so, if he could have one to put under his magnifying glass or possibly Mycroft’s pillow.

The cat-game continued with the cat getting increasingly attached to his sister, greeting her when she was near, and once even bringing her a dead bird. The bird she graciously presented to him. She didn’t much care for dead things. She was fascinated by the living ones. She stroked the cat, comparing its short fur on the forehead with the long hairs on the back and the soft ones on its belly. She listened to the different purrs, with one ear to whichever part of the cat was currently ‘upwards’ at those chances.

Then, one day, the cat was gone. It was never seen again. Eurus sat alone in the garden, waiting, not caring that winter had arrived. She wasn’t looking sad, just like she always looked when she waited for the cat.
Before mummy lost her patience, Sherlock took Eurus by the hand and practically dragged her inside. He still had the skeleton of the bird in a shoe box in his room. He would tell her how the wings worked.

/////////////////////

A honking from outside the window made the pictures swim together and questions instantly rise.

Why was everything so imprecise and blotchy. How could he have been ‘almost five’, if it had been autumn? Hadn’t they talked, or didn’t he remember?
It was easier to let himself sink back, once he has just been there.

/////////////////////

“Play with me, Sherlock”, she says in her unsmiling but enthusiastic manner. It was early morning, almost still night, and Sherlock blinked at his nightgown clad sister, standing in the doorframe of his room. Or rather, at the thing she holds.
Nobody in his family plays the big violin, not his parents, not Mycroft. Eurus has a tutor, but her instrument is, for one, of a seize suitable for her, and secondly its always brought by (and taken away by) the tutor.
Nobody plays the big violin.
Least of all him. Instead of telling her that or asking how, he says just “Okay.” Eurus almost smiles.
She hoists the instrument to her shoulder, assumes the correct posture, and pulls at the strings. One by one, from the middle to the pegs. She did not bring the bow. Then she thrusts the violin in his arms. And waits.
He mirrors what she did, trying to sort out the awkward posture and the big instrument, which somehow feels right and not quite right simultaneously. Then he pulls the strings. After he is done with that, Eurus says “No. Play with me, Sherlock.”

She takes the violin back, repeats what she did before, and he hears the difference.
On his second try, he gets the intervals right.

After she takes the instrument back again, she calmly walks to his wardrobe, opens the drawer where his socks are perfectly ordered, and lays the violin on the top, before closing the drawer. A few seconds later, they hear slow steps from the corridor, and then dad peeks blinking sleepily in the room through the door that wasn’t closed.
“You two are up early”, he states the obvious and smiles down at them. “Are you listening to music? I heard something.”
“Yes”, says Eurus. Sherlock nods, because…they did.
Dad yawns. “How about you help me make breakfast, and then we’ll see if I can get the old record player to work, hm?”

“I make coffee!”, Sherlock hastily states, before his sister has the chance. He wasn’t allowed coffee, but he loved the smell of the instant coffee pulver. And the gradually boiling water. Eurus only raced out of the room, followed by Sherlock, who was bound to overtake her in the corridor due to longer legs and a competitive nature.

Mr. Holmes followed his two pale, dark-haired children downstairs at a much wiser pace. Sometimes they talked a mile a minute, and sometimes not at all. And not necessarily to each other or anyone. As long as they’re happy…

///////////////////////

The door to the flat falls closed behind John, the sharp sound ripping Sherlock from his inwardly focused state. He abruptly sits up and stares at John as if he were a ghost from the past, instead of the pictures he just saw. The doctor, for his part, was somewhat used to Sherlock coming back to the present from the inside of his head with a bit of difficulty. He himself also wasn’t in the habit of slamming doors without a good reason, but his hands were quite full at the moment. “Sorry”, he says to his visibly startled friend. “Though I did yell from the base of the stairs.”

“Pizzicato”, states Sherlock, as if it were the answer to a question.
“What?”
“Pizzicato. The first technique I learned to play.”

John sets the box down beside the sofa, eyes the still full, stone cold, cup of tea he had left for Sherlock at an arm’s reach distance, and sits down at the now free end of the sofa with the slight groan of someone, who was on their feet for several hours without pause.
He has been away for more than half of the day, it starts to get dark outside. He clicks on the lamp beside the sofa, while Sherlock lets himself lean back down, his neck now comfortably supported by John’s thigh instead of the pillow. It’s an immeasurable improvement.
“It’s important”, John asks, without the inflection of someone asking. He softly lets his right hand rest at the crown of Sherlocks head. The strange mixture of careful und familiar and protective.
“Probably”, Sherlock mumbles, still blinking himself to the here and now, and turns to roll his whole body towards the back of the sofa, his nose buried in woollen fabric, of which he knows the composition to its microscopic level. John silently strokes through his curls.

John knows, theoretically, what he tried to do, but does not ask right now. There will be time for that later. After all, Sherlock isn’t sure how elementary the puzzle pieces he remembered are, exactly.
There was only one violin, after all. When did this become a problem? When did they stop playing together? …when Victor entered the picture?
Would it have made a difference? Likely so.
A second violin, no lonely Eurus, no death in the well, no incarcerated sister, no rewriting of memories.
Sherlock gives himself some time to collect all the possible outcomes of a slightly different past. Just for the hell of it. It doesn’t escape his notice how ironic it is, that this timeline, Eurus’ loneliest one, also could be the loneliest possibility out of his own. Not anymore, yes, but in the past. He escaped this particular darkness and its consequences via sheer dumb luck. Considering his late twenties…

After about three minutes, he sits up, leaning his back next to John’s and sees the big box.
“It is done, then?”, he asks. Almost reverently towards the innocuous box.
“Yes, these are the last things.”

Rosie’s bedding, the last of the toddler books, a few files of Johns older NHS documents and financial records. The boring stuff he hadn’t brought with him previously. This is the last of it. Today was the final sorting and ‘breaking up camp’ at the house.
When Rosie will return, every minute now, with Mrs. Hudson, they will both step through the front door of their home. Incontestable and final.

“Have you brought dinner?”, Sherlock asks with the expectant undertone he knows annoys John. Then he pulls John’s mobile out of his trouser pocket and lets it fall in the lap of the man. He doesn’t say ‘You order in’, but it is distinctly possible to hear anyway.
“Git”, murmurs John dazedly, just loud enough. Sherlock grins and leans back into John’s shoulder.
No tin can ravioli this evening.
The door downstairs gets opened.

Now, 221B was finally set to rights again.

Chapter Text

“How did you do it?”, asked John.

“Mh?”

“How did you do it, this whole sudden remembering of lost memories. You snapped your fingers and got access to a past you didn’t even suspect you had, for three decades? How does that work.”
“…it’s called remembering, John.”

“You know what I mean.”

He sighed. Of course he knew, there was no way he could not know what he was being asked by what was essentially a conjured up image he employed to get to the crux of this matter. To see further than the grains of sand and realize where the shore actually ends.

Technically, he was asking himself.

The problem was, that he was rather good in leading himself astray in this conversation. Possibly because he hadn’t employed this approach for years, lest it had been for a case, a time-sensitive one, and he meant by that ‘oh dear, surely the kidnapper remembered to convert the mentioned time from NFT to GMT, otherwise we have about forty minutes to find the diplomat’s parents, the bomb, or, preferably, both’. (As it turned out, not every bomb has a – manual – off-switch. Also, for once the daylight-saving adjustment of England’s clocks has had a practical benefit, instead of simply derailing the populations biorhythm.)

Not-John looked at him patiently.

What use was this endeavour, if by definition he currently couldn’t arrive at a clear-cut conclusion. For now, it was merely a dissecting of hypotheses according to probability and perception, of…what would fit in-between the few puzzle-pieces he can be sure of. There are a few. The circumstances of his discovery of his having a younger sibling, of having met her and continuing to do so, somewhat, what was left of her, and what little Mycroft or their parents had divulged, before everything around this topic calmed down. But none of it answers his further questions regarding his own, personal, early childhood memories.
Bloody Mycroft. The sheer arrogance of going along and rearranging his little brothers conscious landscape (in secrecy!), as if it were a bouquet of flowers he could pick and choose from, to match a certain colour scheme. How condescending can one get?

Yes, it was all in the name of saving little, fragile Sherlock from the darkness. He actually appreciated the concept, somewhere in the depth of his proverbially overworked heart.

But that hadn’t worked out well enough through the course of his life, now, has it. Of all the things and phases, that one would not have been his choice to forget. Not even in the top 10.

If Sherlock has a scenario of his personal hell, it would be losing agency over himself. The mere idea of having been so very much at his brother’s mercy, under control, formed to better fit the proverbial box assigned to him, leaves him bristling and rapidly tapping his hands on his knees in lieu of fraternal revenge plans or seeking out whichever in this world comes closest to black magic shielding him from another such attempt.

Not. Helpful.

Not-John pushes a cup of tea in his hands. He doesn’t drink it, that would be going a step too far in this sphere, but he curls his fingers around the warm mug. His tense shoulders drop a fraction.

“I really was remembering. ‘Lost’ isn’t accurate though, Mycroft had overwritten them. Which means they are still there, like the original text under a layer of tip-ex. However much he undoubtedly would love the power to literally delete other people’s memories as he wishes, it is not a skill even he can possibly master.” If so, he would already have done. On the other hand, at present it wouldn’t have made much of a difference if they had been deleted – case in point Sherlock’s struggle to excavate them. This one successful attempt so far only serves as a glimpse, answering less than it questions.

John looks thoughtful.

“Why those two? The cat and the violin? Why are they important?”

“They likely aren’t”, Sherlock huffed, slightly strangling the tea mug, sloshing the contents around. “It just finally happened to work, this wasn’t my first try, and I did apply a variety of promising strategies regarding orchestrating one’s psyche beforehand.” In other words, he tried from meditation techniques to guides on putting oneself in a state of trance, and everything else that, quite verbatim, just didn’t hurt to try, at this point, but he didn’t intend to be terribly detailed on that stuff even towards not-John, nor to ever bother the real John with this notion. Had he been having this conversation with John, there would have been an inquiry about associated risks to his mental stability about now (which was not incandescent on the best of days, but Sherlock does make a habit out of perfecting the ‘work with what you’ve got’-method, even though it might cut both ways, as his days when cocaine were firmly in the ‘what you’ve got’-category of things, lectured him sufficiently).

“I can only assume that these were two of the less vigorously tainted memories, not important in the grand scheme of things. They were only part of this assembly due to them featuring Eurus. There is no mentioning of Victor, as Redbeard or otherwise, no games resulting in actual death or other calamities. She was just…herself.” Kind of sweet, really. But he couldn’t say that, not even here.

“Do they help?”

He still had no definitive answer to that. In a way, yes. Tauntingly little. The absence of absolutes was maddening.

“I had hoped I would be able to view my own memories through the lense of today. Deduce Eurus’ reason to pick up the violin or continue to wait for the cat, that kind of thing, at least. But there is not more to deduce then what I saw back then.” Didn’t work that way. Story of his life, to insist on his rules, but this, his own past, proved stubbornly likewise. He really should have expected it.

And a young him meant an even younger Eurus. The cat thing had been when she was three and he four. The violin thing, that was when he had been five. Maybe that was where his warped perception of his age had stemmed from.

Which answers could he derive from those blurry scenes? It gave credibility to the claim of her teaching him to play. It underlines that she had reached out to him, back then, too. That she had liked him, particularly. She had described him as her ‘favourite’, at Sherrinford. He must have liked her too, given his taking initiative when she was giving no indication of ending her cat-related vigil.

Eurus had also said that she never had a best friend. Never had anyone. Why didn’t he count?
Another piece that doesn’t fit, yet. It’d going to be interesting, to musically convey his progress to Eurus. Sometimes she liked him talking about her, for a short while. Recognising her as a human entity, underlined with a question or an emotion they shared, such as curiosity.

Sherlock tipped his fingernails against the mug, creating cold, tiny tea-waves.

“Hey”, John said softly, coming into the kitchen – the real John and the real kitchen. He had nodded off earlier, after tucking Rosie in, and Sherlock had decided to let the man sleep, it might help with the constancy of those hints of shadows under his eyes, belying his true sleep deprivation. It had been a few short-ish nights, recently, plus the final moving of belongings and a rather interactive oriented toddler and the good doctor, who wasn’t getting any younger, last time Sherlock checked, needed rest.

That had been about two hours ago, which explained John’s blotchy countenance. Not enough rest, then. According to the lines on his face, he had been slumbering half-way on the book he was reading to Rosie for bed-time currently. The beloved one, with the pirates and the flying.

“You here?”

“Mmh”, he concurred.

John knew that he was a bit preoccupied with the memory theme, but had only commented, that he expected that month ago. He even thought, it might be healthy. “As long as you’re being patient with that big brain of yours. Please do. I like it functional as it is and I’m patient with it, too”, he had said.

That could have sounded incredibly patronising, but they did know each other long enough for Sherlock to see John’s vague worry. Trapped between his dismay regarding Sherlock ‘experimenting on himself’ and acknowledging that Sherlock has the right to do with his own head as he pleases, especially if it promised mental peace. It would be the last step in taking back control over his faculties from the interference when he was seven. He wouldn’t have needed to know Sherlock for long to get it, that control and his own brain are priorities.

Before now, there had been John and Rosie to settle in, but that was done.

John slumped down across from him at the kitchen table. Sherlock had been sitting there when John had absentmindedly placed his own fresh cup of tea in front of the detective and then proceeded to carry a not quite awake looking Rosie upstairs. Which is where the real mug in his hands originated from.

“You’ve been asking useless question”, Sherlock accuses without heat, but John knew he wasn’t talking about him.

“To be fair, it is what I do to help you at crime scenes, most of the time.” He yawned unapologetically. “Maybe you projected my nosiness on the me in your head?”

“Could be. You’re not nosy, though.”

“What am I, then?”

...oh, what a question. He could hold lectures for a solid week, answering this one.

“Tired.”

“Yeah. Think we both are. Tea?”

Sherlock shakes his head. “I don’t know if it makes any difference, that Mycroft wasn’t there and probably doesn’t know about them. The cat and the violin memories. And even if it does, there must be more of them. Why those two, were they important to me? Can I only solve this, knowing exactly what a sixteen-year old Mycroft did? I know what he did. I had to reacquaint myself with every kind of mental manipulation strategies for the time I was dead. One should think that the knowledge of the occurrence of the manipulation, its focus and consequences, would help resolving the issue.” He rambled and tried to stab the mug with his fingers.

John blinked owlishly, not having a chance to follow these thought trains, because as of yet Sherlock hadn’t told him about the revelations from his little introspection session this evening (which he had forgotten, it seemed). He only saw one of the two people most dear to him beginning to agonise over something that wouldn’t be getting easier with steamroller tactics. There were many aspects factoring into this. Bruised pride, the intensely…weird…relationship Sherlock had managed to forge between Eurus and himself, …

“Alright, come with me. We are going to sleep, and then you can talk me through…all that. And if you want to try again tomorrow, I take Rosie for a long walk at Regent’s park so that you have silence for a few hours. She’ll like it. There are black swans.”

John had stood up, but instead of walking on towards the bedroom or bathroom, he came round the table, putting his hands on Sherlocks shoulders and slightly digging his fingers into the tense trapezius muscle, as he knows the detective is likely to convulse it, without even noticing.

Then, with a deliberate air, he plants a kiss among Sherlocks curls. They stay like that for a while.

Sherlock then snakes his fingers to his shoulders, where he can wrap them around John’s, leaning his cheek against the doctor’s wrist. Smells faintly of Rosie’s rose shampoo.
“Is it frustrating you?”, he asks, sounding a tad more hesitant than intended. He means the memory business. Not the fact, that kisses in whichever form are mostly initiated by John. Sherlock likes them. Very much. It just doesn’t come naturally to him, and never will.

They should talk about that, sooner or later, not that either of them likes to, but better that than operating under two different assumptions that may clash after hurt feelings or misunderstandings has built up. They don’t need that.

From what Sherlock can tell, John seems quite content, being the initiator of affection, though he does still tread softly, trying not to presume anything. Sherlock doesn’t have words to convey his gratitude for that.

John had rested his chin sideways on Sherlocks hair. He must smell that Sherlock had pilfered Rosie’s shampoo again, hours ago.

It took a few minutes more, until the last two awake residents of Baker Street found their way under downy covers.
It were the same covers, obviously.

Chapter Text

The nail of his left pinkie almost scraped the fingerboard with every wailing h’’ he coaxed out of the violin's compact wooden body, floating through the floorboards of 221B. A ridiculous, needlessly complicated instrument only ridiculous, needlessly complicated people could ever love, drifts the utterance of one of his tutors back to him through time. He didn’t have many of those, tutors, and not for as long as could have been expected, considering the range of capabilities one can be taught in regards to stringed instruments, and how long those usually take to establish in one’s repertoire. After a certain point, Sherlock had strained to educate himself further, free of a tutor with a strict regime he had to follow, knowing month in advance which piece would be the next one to tackle. He didn’t play a violin purely out of the ambition to master the highest technical skill level, to be able to echo the heftiest musical equivalent to the heaviest weight in a gym, that could be stacked on a bench-press appliance. For him, despite his naturally having ambitions in everything he does and deemed worthwhile, it wasn’t a competition, primarily.

It could be one, as it was for a few months during his time in that school’s orchestra…but it wasn’t initially and isn’t today, just has he liked to ice skate as a child, on a lake nearby to home, when the world seemed to have stopped, frozen, white, solid and still. He did it, because he liked it. It just so happened, that he was really good with the ridiculous, needlessly complicated violin, out of a circle that fed itself: honest interest in the subject, enjoying the hell out of it, and a healthy dash of talent.

And why wouldn’t he enjoy it. Basically, he’d found a medium that could finally express all the things he never found the words for, didn’t, up to this point, realise, that he even had so much to convey that yearned to be defined and set free, but simply defied the limits of linguistics. Verbal speech had a vast assortment of possibilities on a horizontal level. One could put ‘happy’ on one end, and ‘sad’ on the other and fill the space between with all the variations of all the approximately 6000 spoken languages of the world, until there is a gradual flow from one description of state to the other. Still, there would be open spaces. And then there is the complication that ‘happy’ and ‘sad’ could apparently exist in the very same spot.

It somewhat described his feelings whenever he stood in front of Eurus and had to eventually set his violin down.

The notes provided him with the opportunity of superb clarity of expression, because they lent every linear point on the linguistic’s scale a depth and the fluidity of combination, and that, or the lack of it, pinpointed what he really wants to say. It had become second nature to him. A necessity, even.

The question of who listened to his expressions, and who understood, were a different can of worms entirely.

He certainly didn’t consider himself to be needlessly complicated, but out of all the barbs and labels he had endured over the years, this could very well have been the most unintentional and polite one. Although, about the former he couldn’t be quite sure. The intent behind comments was sometimes hard to reduce to one word, even though he had worked hard on exactly that skill of his, especially after his humiliating years of late pubescence. After his physiology had suddenly decided to aesthetically find a common ground among itself, the comments differed, becoming oddly specific. He got compliments for the shape of his lips, and got mocked for the size of his hands. Sherlock's reaction had involved a high count of angry h’’.

John never did that, focusing on one specific part of him to dissect with words, at least not regarding his appearance. It was still obvious where the doctor’s gaze favourably tended to land, without him outright saying so, and his actions spoke volumes, for example his (welcome, oh so welcome) predilection for running his fingers through Sherlock’s hair, or along the back of his hands – a surprisingly sensitive area, for them usually being exposed to the rough world around the clock.

This sort of physical contact – affectionate, appreciative, allusive - was a daily thing now, even more so during the last few weeks. It had been a very slow, gradual process. Sherlock enjoyed the closeness they denotated immensely, his creeping insecurity didn’t stem from the touches themselves at all, rather from the line they inadvertently spelled out. The stroking of scalp, the rubbing of shoulders or wrists, the kisses to the crown of his head, or, rarely, knuckles. Wasn’t all this terribly…limited, from John’s perspective.

He hadn’t yet decided if he even wanted something different, he was clearly happy with what they had, whatever that was, but what if John saw this merely as a transient situation, a plateau phase in his usual relationship development roster, that simply took a bit longer with Sherlock than it normally was. A 'where we are' in order 'to go there'. Could that be…?

On the other hand, Sherlock was a lot, but not blind, he saw that John was happy. The warm smiles, the soft chuckles, the seeking of contact without ever keeping score who initiated what. The not flinching when Sherlock didn’t react. Happiness had taken time and quite some bumps in the road for John Watson. They weren’t a couple, in the ordinary use of the term. But they were, indisputably, together. And they were happy.

Could they keep that? Could Sherlock possibly keep it?

Please, please.

Behind him, almost under the kitchen table, Rosie gave up her token protest of her shoes being tied. She was nearly ready to acquiesce to visit her favourite animals, the black swans in Regent’s Park.

It was time to pull the bow downwards, after the upwards stroke of h'’. Sherlock listened to Rosie’s babbling and switched to a calmer a’.

Chapter Text

How long has he been doing this now?

He was lying on the sofa in a largely silent flat, just like yesterday, but so far, his efforts to return to the same mental balancing act of dragging something from the depth of his own mind to easier accessible levels, without actually directing the whole thing, were for naught.

The old problem of his brain not shutting the hell up!

Sherlock kicked the pillow at the far end of the sofa, tried not to pull at his own hair in frustration, while his perception seemed to delight in bombarding him with non-conductive bits and pieces about his current situation, which, admittedly, it does all the time, but generally less insisting.

The quilt hanging over the back of the sofa hadn’t been washed in two month, the untouched cup of tea from yesterday was still standing in the same spot on the coffee table, with an additional fly amongst the sweetened, cold contents, two of the pins holding up case notes from last Wednesday on the wall above him were barely winning the fight against the gravitational pull, because John had been distracted by Rosie’s demand for getting picked up, as he pushed the pins down, the chances of rain will shorten the Watson’s outing by a considerable amount of circa forty minutes, cutting their usual route short, which resulted in the impression of being pressed for time, which didn’t make the least bit of sense, since Sherlock’s memories didn’t unravel in real time, so if his brain could kindly get on with it, that would be brilliant, and he wouldn’t waste hours. Again.

Sherlock kicked the pillow some more, with more force. Now his left foot was hanging more on the sofa’s back than resting on the arm rest.
He groaned. He wasn’t used to having nothing to direct his thought process with, to having to strain towards something he wasn’t sure about what it was. The novelty of excavating overwritten memories – to tug them out of Mycroft’s control, one by one - should be exciting, fun, or at least fuelling his enthusiasm to engage in this exercise, not curbing inspiration and destroying his meagre but existing bouts of patience.

He wished John would be home, sitting in his chair and drinking tea or coffee or reading to Rosie or thinking aloud about a receipt he wanted to try or a possible case he found in the papers or complaining about the weirdness of a TV show Mrs. Hudson made him watch or…something. But John is at the same time the worst distraction of all, the mere topic of him lures Sherlock’s thoughts at any hour of the day or night in several directions containing him, even if just peripherally. The thematic bridge from John to them to him leads him often to his own insecurities and the frailty of the them, and then he can’t decide if he wants to seek John out wherever he might be just this second and bare his soul to him or safe them both the pain and pretend nothing out of their established ordinary is happening and Sherlock’s far-away gaze is due to case-calculations, not possible scenarios of himself inevitably being disappointing.

It still does make sense, ’alone protects me’.
Tempting.

He doesn’t prefer it, though, even with his shortcomings in stark relief by his own choice and the walking in the dark, in terms of the relationship, that isn’t one, yet is. He would rather forever give up the violin, his voice, the depth of his linguistic, than John. In the secure knowledge that it would drive him seriously mad, had he to do such a thing, such a choice, but still.

Thinking about John was somewhat of a default setting, but John had nothing remotely to do with his childhood-past. Probably thinking about Eurus or Mycroft or Victor or his parents would help his current case of scattered thoughts…

Eurus had played a very long game, indeed. Talking to Moriarty years ago, while that very well might not have been the first domino to tick.
They have saved each other from a plane now, he and his sister. She did it first, with the miss-me?-message. She also couldn’t have been happy with Mary shooting him, almost sending him six feet under before she finalised the last stages of her…game, experiment, reach out, cry for help, entertainment, lecture, confession, she had managed to put everything into one.
The contradictory nature of who she was, what she could to, still being tied to being human as a frame of reference was captivating. There is a distinction between the coldness of someone being cruel despite knowing better, a desire to hurt because it hurts and the utter lack of morals and barely functioning ability of distinguishing one of the vague, fluttery emotions that serve as the driving force of humanity’s majority from the next one. How alien that must feel, seeing one’s own race falling into step with each other, like a foreign dance, giving and taking, following unquestioning, being petty and barbaric and generous and so easily, easily happy.

On second thought, Sherlock knows precisely how that feels. Intimately.

But where he sees what a person is, their state of affairs, their habits, their loved ones, their job ambitions, their dietary choices, Eurus sees everything they could possibly become, based on the accumulated set variables that is presented to her in the form of a specific human being. It is how she ‘recruited people, since she were five’, as Mycroft put it.

”I never had a best friend.”

“Stop me killing him!”

“Which one is pain?”

And still, she had, literally, burned everything bad that could befall her slightly older brother, burning the pictures of him dead and missing and hurt and afraid.

She had wanted him to solve the song, the riddle, of which the solution was save my soul, seek my room. Directed at him, because, somehow, he had functioned as an anchor. Of what, he wasn’t certain.

She repeated it numerous times, had based it on the dates of the gravestones, because she knew how obsessed he had been with them, and had he been going to her room, back then, and not looking for Victor in the fields, digging, calling and running, she would have told him the solution just as she had as an adult. Her interpretation of playing. She hadn’t intended for Victor to drown, or John for that matter, had he wanted them dead, they would have long since been and never connected her to it. Sherlock himself knew how easy that would have been, murders being somewhat of a speciality of his. Mycroft mentioned, that after the fact of Victor’s fate, it was her, who came to him, trying to rouse him from his misery, pushing the big violin in his hands so that he could terrorise the house with the angry-sad-helpless result of someone doing anything harmonically unspeakable to a stringed instrument.

It was no show of remorse, on her part, that would have been-

With a sound the unholy combination of a grunt, a surprised yell and a groan, Sherlock fell from the sofa and landed in an undignified heap next to it, his head barely missing the coffee table’s edge by centimetres. His restless shenanigans had pushed him more and more to the edge, until gravity won at least this battle, with much more mass to fling around than the pins on the wall would be. His wrist hadn’t been so lucky, striking not the table but the fly-tea-mug, sending it hurtling to the floor with him and a sharp pain flickering through the joint of his wrist.

He wasn’t ready to give up, but it seemed wise to maybe postpone his memory-session to a time where things came more naturally, less wilfully steered like this.

The door to the flat opened and in this moment of bruised pride, bruised wrist, and infuriating defeat by nothing but a lack of focus, burst a stomping, wet John with a relatively dry Rosie in tow. Possibly, the doctor wasn’t stomping so much as Sherlock’s ears were unusually close to the vibrating floor boards.

“What the hell happened?”, was the slightly incredulous, completely anticipated question.

“That should be obvious even to you, I should think”, snapped Sherlock in a much sharper tone that intended, but honestly, what did it look like. He sorted his limbs out. At least he was correct about the rain, he simply didn’t keep track of time himself, but that hadn’t been a special, noteworthy prognosis in the first place. Sherlock made no indication of sitting up. What was the damn point. A bit of the old tea dripped from his cheek.

John, still dripping water, looked on unimpressed in an ‘I don’t even want to know’ fashion and set Rosie on the sofa, who was fascinated by the few drops that had managed to hang on to a few strands of her hair, but also unhappy about the abruptly cut short swan-visit, oscillating between the two.
“Don’t you want to get up?” John reached out to grab the nearest of Sherlock’s hands to hoist him up, but Sherlock only cradled his wrist closer to his chest, suddenly suffering a flashback he had not wished to see, and hadn’t expected to be presented with, ever. He lay like he did on the floor of 221B, but on cold linoleum, something else was dripping from his face and John bent over him with his hand toward him didn’t promise help but pain.

Sherlock blinked wildly, shaking his head, blood pounding in his ears as his heart rate spiked.
He shoved the picture away, angry about them appearing, angry that they still hurt, that he let them hurt.

He must have found the right switch in his brain, or his head shaking accomplished, what his short fall hadn’t, and he finally hit his head on the coffee table, because everything went fading and black.

////////////////////////

Sherlock was five and sat at the kitchen table, because Mycroft had his school stuff all over it.
They play deduction, and if Mycroft wins, which he always does, Sherlock has to cease criticising the history books and let his brother work at his whatever-boring-thing-it-is in peace.

They are deducing someone, a woman. Victor’s mum? A neighbour?

“…and she is writing her thesis, is very late on it, in fact, which is evident in the state of her fingernails, the wine stains, and the recurrence of her nervous habit of stroking her hear behind her ears”, Mycroft says just now. His tone is plummy and self-assured even back then.

“Her pigeon loft”, Sherlock throws in the arena of observance.

“Quite”, Mycroft nods to him.

“She will fail”, their four-year-old’s sister’s voice rings out next to Sherlock.

The brothers look at her with matching expressions of surprise. Eurus has never interfered in their competitive deducing. Not that they have ever asked, if she wants to play.
“Why?”, Sherlock wants to know, because he didn’t see that on Mrs. Trevor. Mycroft only stares at Eurus, so maybe he didn’t either?
Did Eurus simply state an assumption, without being able to back it up?

Eurus teeters on her feet, eyes shining with the undivided attention she receives. In her hands she holds a part that belongs inside the printer. “She has changed her subject three times. She doesn’t like her topic, that is why she is late writing her thesis.” Mycroft looks like he wants to point out that they have moved already past the thesis. “But she likes the project behind it. The people, the measuring, and the growth. That’s why she is always on the phone, the markings are still on her cheek. But she will fail because of the wine and the salt.”

Salt? Except from the salt, Sherlock could follow.
Mycroft looked…stunned. It wasn’t a good look on him.

Did Eurus win over Mycroft?
Sherlock tapped his heels against the chair’s legs he was sitting on. “She didn’t name a price, so it’s a draw!”, he informs him and then proceeds to pick apart the peculiarities of the War of the Spanish Succession from 1702 to 1715.

//////////////////////////////

He feels rough fingertips at his unbruised wrist and on his scalp. The movement there is methodical, searching for a bump, bleeding, a wound. Not a new sensation, that, and strangely calming, giving the fact that it typically indicates that something is wrong.
“Do you hear me?”
It sounds as if John has formed the words several times already.
Sherlock blinks his eyes open. Does his other wrist hurt more? No, it is just shoved unlucky against one of the table’s legs. Wonderfull.

“There you are.” Relief in John’s voice, and on his face. The man in kneeling half on him, trying to ascertain vitals and the rest a doctor does if his friend ostensibly blacks out. The fingers haven’t stilled in their quest.

“I’m alright”, Sherlock insists, hoping to stop the fretting John is prone to in its baby steps. “I got a flashback. That is what I’ve been trying to accomplish, after all.”

“About. What? About your past? You sure you haven’t hit your head? It looked like…something frightened the hell out of you.”

Ah. Yes. The other flashback. That must have made a confusing picture.
“I’m fine. Apparently, my sister beat Mycroft at deductions at the age of four.” He snorted. That was funny, and likely a step in the direction of answering the question why Mycroft seemed so…creeped out by Eurus, for lack of a more academic ringing term.

What the John-related flashback was about, Sherlock could only guess. He wasn’t afraid of John, or holds grudges about that…episode or anything of the sort. This is not an issue at all. It merely serves as a reminder that every time John did get violent towards him (that being in the restaurant after he returned from the dead and in the morgue with a serial killer and his daughter) he was held back by others, ultimately. In the restaurant, he had been too weak to hold John off, but had tried to defend himself. Nothing much came of that evening. In the morgue, however, he had done nothing. No verbal protest. Not against the punches flying his way, not even after he went down. He would have tried, at the point where John was viciously kicking him, because there had been a line of self-preservation, but he hadn’t had enough air to. And time, it all went down rather quickly.

Sherlock doesn’t like this part of John. He also knows that this particular course of events has smarted John much longer than the duration it took for Sherlocks cuts and bruises to heal (which doesn’t excuse anything, remorse, but it’s definitely important nonetheless).
This whole chapter they are over and done with. It’s not an issue. He enjoys physical proximity to John, not fears it.

Sherlock grabs John by his wet Jacket and pulls him down to him. If John is surprised by this turn of events, he doesn’t mention it. Sherlock snuffles against John’s neck.

“You’ve been standing in line for a hot dog when the rain hit.”

“Hmm…”
John relaxes, lying more than half on top of him like, well, the wet mass that he is. “I’m still not convinced that you haven’t hit your head. Gonna keep an eye on you.”

“I am not going to contest that.”

John kisses his wrist. It tickles.

“I only hit my wrist across the teacup”, Sherlock admitted mumbling. John’s lips freeze where they are, skin on skin, motionless but warm. Then he kisses it again, much softer. And sighs.

“I get the kit. Probably fresh tea is in order too, and dry clothes…” John gets up and goes to do just that.

Sherlock is so frustrated with the world, that he simply stays lying next to the coffee table. He also feels warm of the non-temperature kind. Cared for, but not smothered. After a while, Rosie slides from the sofa down to him, having wiggled out of her shoes long ago. John must have opened them while still going up the stairs. Rosie curls up next to Sherlocks waist.

“Oh dear”, grins John, halfway between amusement and endearment and his consciousness of manners, when he comes back, bearing goods in form of the kit, the tea and a plate of reheated takeaway which is much too big for him – obviously wanting to tempt Sherlock into ‘stealing’ some. “Let’s not make a habit out of that.”

Why not, thinks Sherlock.

Chapter Text

The case was solved. This wasn’t a painstakingly planned murder, it was simple rage that had culminated over years and bubbled up over a certain critical point for a split second, and that had been enough. Not a crime of passion, but one of sheer stupidity.

At least the conditions had been vaguely interesting.
The massive warehouse, rented out by one single company, housed beyond other things quite a number of chemicals that were prone to react unfavourably to changes in temperature, meaning flammability and tendency to result in explosions, especially if stored in masses. Oddly enough, completely legal as long as the requirements for appropriate safety measures, warning signs, distance to private premises, et cetera were met. Since a mere fire alarm would be somewhat too late to deflect a disaster, the company had installed a system that was triggered when the temperature spiked or fell in too short an amount of time to become potentially dangerous. Not exactly unique, that, and the system could even be navigated from the company’s headquarters’, but Britain being what and where it is, the whole thing was more a cosmetic measure, because the alarm had never been triggered. Until now, which is how the body (male, 47, Caucasian, divorced twice, self-righteous vegan, continually stressed-out without reason, power-complex, catholic), was found in the first place.

Neither the occurance of death nor the body itself had anything to do with the chemicals, though. Also in the warehouse was one of those enormous industrial crushing machines, that can devour complete furniture, tractor tires or a small car in one go. That’s where the body was. Mostly. Half-way, basically. Which meant that the other half…wasn’t. The scene didn’t endear itself to the forensic team via the fact that whatever exactly happened here, had been days ago. A fantastically gruesome sight, inspiring to slasher film enthusiasts.

Fate must have had a morbidly humorous day regarding the poor, moronic soul of the murderer, letting the machine stop quite literally in the midst of things. The industrial crusher would have had no problem at all with human bones, though it wasn’t intended for the variety of consistency found among a body, flesh, fluids and all.
So far so convenient.

The man - the murderer, not the victim, who hadn’t been all the way dead just yet at the time, but unconscious - at that point had evidently panicked (well, again) and tried to clean up the then surely extremely bloody scene with multiple cleaning agents somehow found in here, which lead to the realisation that bleach doesn’t mix well, lest it results in much more toxic fumes than it is by itself already, especially if one kicks over the canister. The murderer eventually bolted and was kept away from the place by his own fear of a) not knowing if the corpse had been found already, b) his fear of getting caught read-handed and c) his non-existent imagination of how to actually get rid of the rest of Roland Ruther in the crusher and d) …guilt? Possibly e) consequences of inhaling all those chemicals for at least half an hour, judging by the progress he had made on the blood.

He didn’t even close the gate, which was what made the alarm go off, after the weather got a bit cooler some days later, and the system couldn’t keep the temperature as stable as before.
An idiot of an impressive calibre. Ruther hadn’t been dead when he was shoved in the crusher, albeit being well on his way, all this could have been avoided, had the murderer only known to accurately check vitals.

What made the case apparently so mysterious for New Scotland Yard had been the evidence they still could find despite the murderer’s best efforts, namely gold-dust on the on-button of the crusher, instead of recognising it for being the key that made this case even simpler.

Sherlock texted Lestrade the address of the murderer (male, 31, originally Indian, but living in England for at least twenty years, unhappily married, hard-working, agnostic, proud, homophobic tendencies, liked by his neighbours, …stupid), who had worked as a low-wage earner four years previously for the company who had rented the storage hall, which is how he knew about the location and the grinder. Since then he had started to work for his father’s tiny company - a goldsmiths. Ruther, prone to letting his stress, marital problems and frustration with life out on whoever he sees as the least likely to fight it, had made Malik Yunnau’s life hell, back then, also working for the company via interim staffing, but in a higher position.
They had crossed path’s again and Ruther had tried to continue old habits.

“Being a shit boss should be made more easily contestable, but this is just…dramaturgic.” John’s comment to the now closed case. Or it will be closed once Lestrade drives by Yunnau’s address and collects the man obviously hiding in the attic. He won’t even argue, the human bundle of nerves and paranoia.

Sherlock didn’t answer. They had just left the house and their company of Yunnau’s wife, Marami…Naremi? Something with -mi. Unfortunately, something with -mi had proven not all that interested in a gruesome crime potentially committed by her husband, but definitely interested (and clingy!) towards a certain empathetic doctor, because, oh, how could she be expected to be alone if her husband was found by the police and sent to prison. That had been a decidedly awkward – though infuriatingly delicious – cup of tea, considering the culprit hiding upstairs.

They had to walk a bit to get to a corner that will be more frequented by cabs, in order to leave South Bank, but at least there were almost no other people about. Sherlock gripped the inner pockets of his coat.
“You flirted with her”, burst it out of him, in typical non-sequitur fashion.

“What?”

“You smiled and…looked at her.” Ugh, the ineffectiveness of words. He could feel John’s gaze, searching for indicators of his suddenly dark mood, but didn’t react.

“I smile and look at you all the time, doesn’t mean I’m flirting.”

How uncharacteristically emotionally blunt. Sherlock blinked a few times, feeling cold. He doesn't say ' I know'.

“What. No, shit. Hold on. I mean, I didn’t mean to flirt with her.”

“I know how you flirt.”

“Do you, now?”

“Yes.” And you don’t do it towards me. Which is probably for the best, considering the high probability of me not noticing or feeling uncomfortably out of my depth with it, but still. I've been informed in the past that it is a form of appreciation, if meant affectionately, rather than lecherous.

With a hand to his elbow, John forced him to stand still on the largely deserted pavement. “To make that perfectly clear”, he starts, with stubborn eye contact in order to convey honesty, because for some reason that is a thing people trust, “I don’t want to flirt with anybody else, except for cases or…as a distraction to a kidnapper that holds a gun to your head.” He exhales. “Okay?”

He meant that. John’s lies were laughably easy to pick apart, the problem is mostly inconspicuousness or imprecision of statements. “So. You want to flirt with me?” Just to be clear. Or why chose the words ‘anybody else’.
John chuckles silently. “Yes, I want to flirt with you. I am flirting with you. The…non-flirty kind, I guess. The steal each other the newspaper kind, or the bringing each other tea kind, or the staring at you wrapped in a bed sheet kind. That one.”

Oh. But… “…we did that pretty much from the beginning, not just a few weeks or month prior to now.” Sherlock himself hadn’t had romantic intentions with any of his antics, but he also wouldn’t have done the same thing - intent-wise or at all - with any other flatmate. Except the sheet. Some days were sheet days.

“Yeah…”

Sherlock now finally holds John’s gaze, and they stare at each other silently for a few moments. Then, still smiling, John takes Sherlock’s gloved hand into one of his and they resume their way towards the corner. “I saw a cab drive past, come on. They are like bees, where there is one, there are many.”

“That is patently untrue.” Sherlock launches into a lecture about the species of bee-kind around the world and all the different scenarios one might come across a lonesome bee. He was still talking when they climbed into one of the black cabs, and John listened, quietyl, consistently, having freed his hand while getting in.

“Angelo’s?”, he asked, as the car left the curb. “We still have almost two hours until the day-care closes.”
This has been a day and case reminiscent of much earlier ones, which always seems to invite the trip to the Italian restaurant and its burly, well-meaning owner. Luckily, the day-care at the clinic didn’t give two hoots if the parent is actually standing in an OR or a lab, or wherever medical professionals else tend to stand around all day, or a crime scene on the other side of London, as long as they are registered as clinic employees and pick their kids up on time.
“Angelo’s”, Sherlock agrees silently, and they redirect the driver.

The flirting had been a spontaneously cleared up topic, Sherlock mused over his plate of lasagne while John contemplates possible blog titles for this case, but they should probably continue stating what they want or didn’t like, that the other currently does or seems to be doing. This had been helpful. John must have a veritable list of things, in this regard, and if he at least knew them, it could at the very least be stated officially how hopeless they really were.
Sherlock would not insult John or himself by trying to pretend to be different. He could, for a time, but within the frame of human relationships, it would hurt him every time, being instantly reminded of what he lacks. What is wrong. Because it is ultimately him, that somehow is at fault. He didn't agree with all such past assessments, but the experiences by itself had this aspect very much in common, which holds a certain weight to a scientific mind. Somehow, Sherlock doubts that it is something everyone experiences.

His sister must have a similar reason to stay (inofficially) out of her own free will at Sherrinford, in her grey little cell. She proved beyond doubt, that she can perfectly play roles, all the little nuances of social interaction, but why should she. Sherlock finds it to be draining his energy levels, Eurus doesn’t even see the point, if it isn’t to get to a specific part in a plan, much like him. It’s not about proficiency, it’s about identity.

Additionally, John knows him rather well, comparatively, and would notice completely off behaviour. It’s one reason, why they rarely if ever hold each other’s hand. Sherlock dislikes it, as a rule, its impractical, and someone else’s sweaty palm against his is disgusting even as a concept. He doesn’t have an aversion to touch in general, though, not even to kisses, as long as everyone keeps their tongue to themselves.
He leaves himself a mental note to inform John of the fact.

Chapter Text

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They are six and seven years old. It had snowed this year, not for the first time, put finally properly, with the crystals not instantly melting upon the impact that defined the end to their silent, wind-governed journey downwards to land on this Earth in an arbitrary place. Sherlock goes outside to study animal footprints in the field. Especially the tiny ones are much clearer to distinguish in the snow than it would be on brown earth or sand, even if flattened beforehand. Eurus is also outside, but he doesn’t know why, he has a mission of his own, and besides, it is likely that she is simply still studying the sky, as she is wont to do in intervals he hadn’t yet been able to determine a sensible pattern of.

Near the shed turned greenhouse, he finds an alive bumblebee queen, that must have been lured here by the warmth inside the greenhouse. She doesn’t put up a fuss as he lifts her up, although she is alive, and he knows they can survive temperatures below zero, but this one isn’t hibernating in the ground, but sits lethargic on the surface of a snow-covered leaf, now on his left, gloved, palm. He pulls his right glove from his hand with his teeth, and carefully taps the orange-black striped abdomen with the tip of his index finger. It’s very soft. The animal doesn’t react to it essentially being stroked by a giant odd creature, possibly bathing in the warmth radiating from the palm it sits on. The bumblebee is big, for its kind. He wants to take it inside and measure it. Mummy hadn’t liked his bringing the injured barn owl inside, four month ago, but a bumblebee queen? It’s tiny and fluffy, not dirty or prone to shed bloody feathers or leave claw marks on the book cases? Either way, it’s easy to hide. The barn owl had been a challenge to even contain with bare hands without damaging it further, to even get to the house.

As he slowly trudged the way back he came from, he saw Eurus’ violet parka through the sparse trees. She must stand right at the edge of the lake, but she didn’t seem to do anything, just look out over the greyish-white frozen surface. Sherlock altered his path, while the bumblebee seemed to come back to life, little by little. It clambered among the lower knuckles of his fingers.
Eurus wasn’t standing on the edge, he saw, as he arrived, and uncharacteristically sensibly, didn’t follow her. She was standing only a meter or so from the edge where ice met snow covered pebbles. Just the span of an adult’s normal step, He could almost grab her shoulder if he leaned forward as far as he could, without having to step on ice himself. She didn’t turn around, but obviously has heard him. And she must have changed her stance a bit, because the ice under her crackled slightly.

They both knew well enough, that while it was finally cold enough for the lake to freeze over, it hasn’t been like that long enough for it to have come very far. Conclusion: Thin ice. Not stable. Not safe.

“Why are you standing there? It’s bound to break.”

“It’s a test.”

“Of the ice?” Of her bravery? Of him? She doesn’t answer without delay.

“Of improbability.” Her words almost stumble over the first b in there, but he knows her tone of voice. She is almost delighted with whatever she had found. He wants to see, too. The ice, that by all accounts really shouldn’t still be holding, keeps protesting with its near silent signs. It wouldn’t hold both of them.

Which improbability. Of the ice holding, of her stepping on it, of his coming here? Is he supposed to say something? That she should get back?
Eurus, calmly, steps another step out onto the lake, but where her foot now lands, the ice breaks smoothly through, and her shifting her weight also leads to her prior standing position to give up its hold. Sherlock doesn’t’ even have time to stare, as his sister plunges from one breath to the next below the water. Which shouldn’t be possible, it’s not that deep, she must’ve landed on her bum, making it barely possible for the water’s surface to reach over the top of her head. It also should have made it possible for her to simply stand up again, she would be standing in water that reaches her ribs, but not higher.
She doesn’t.

There are instincts to survival, to the shock of cold and wet and loss of air, that should have kicked in for her, forcing her to scramble her way back. In the four seconds Sherlock doesn’t react, he could have sworn he saw her just sitting there, in the water, looking up with her nose just under the surface. Then he crashes the now laughably weakened ice by getting a move on, immediately feeling as if his feet and calves and shins are burning with the cold that accosts him and drenches his clothes up to his hips. If he is currently swearing in French and a high-pitched voice he didn’t know he could produce, at least there is nobody around to scold him for it. He grabs his sister by – something, a sleeve, the middle of the scarf? – and drags her up and toward him, wading the three steps back onto just as cold but dry land without letting go. He distantly registers, that he hasn’t let go of the bumblebee queen in all this, either.

Eurus looks pitiful. Dripping, pale, violently shivering. Her eyes, however, look at him calmly. Doesn’t she feel the cold? That would be a severe warning sign for hypothermia, but could it have happened that fast?
“You d-idn’t t-hell me to get b-back”, she forces out, sounding…happy?
Unimpressed and still feeling as if he is being tested, Sherlock busies himself with getting her waterlogged parka and scarf off her and forcing his own onto her with stiff fingers, for which he sets the queen temporarily in the snow. Eurus’ shivering doesn’t help. The rest of the clothes – well, theirs are equally wet, but the house isn’t far away, and he doesn’t want to waste time by sitting in the snow and peeling resisting socks off feet, they are not currently feeling anyway.
“Inste-d you got me back. W-why?”

Sherlock decides to just leave her parka here, but take the bumblebee queen with him.
Why did he fish her out? Someone else would have said ‘because it’s the right thing, of course! I had to!’

“Because I wanted to. Now keep your stupid fingers from shivering.” He sounded almost petulant, because he didn’t want to reveal how frightened he had been, not for himself, but the image of her, sitting under the crashed ice, wasn’t leaving his head anytime soon.

“Loss”, she stated, as if now understanding something she hadn’t before. Sherlock sighed at his inability to rub his legs, still feeling like they are burning, as long as they made their way back and entertained the hazy notion, that Eurus would have regarded him with one of her incredibly rare shy smiles, if her facial features weren’t so frozen. He gave up his wrestling with the mittens.
They did make it back in under ten minutes, their arrival resulting in a parental uproar, followed by hot baths and itchy woollen socks and weird, strong teas and still they came down with heavy colds, and Sherlock tried not to strangle anyone who told him that this hell of not being able to do anything without interrupting himself via sneezing or coughing, was only ‘lucky’. And the headache, the sleepiness, and the raw throat and miserable ugliness of it all, ugh, what is the point! No, Mycroft, he didn’t want to tell what happened, ‘step by step’.

Nobody noticed the bumblebee queen.

/////////////////////////////

/////////////////////////////

He was five and didn’t like being interrupted, not even by himself, which lead to him keeping his nose buried in a book, even if he changed locations. Sometimes, he even wandered aimlessly about, the walking not impeding his concentration on the text in the least, until he dropped down somewhere he liked, which so far had been the pantry, Mycroft’s pillow, on one memorable occasion the roof, or, rather often if it was dry enough outside, amidst the gravestones. This habit didn’t halt before stairs either, but he navigated them with ease – until he didn’t.

Just to steps before ground level, something in the kitchen crashed to the floor, metallic, heavy, not sliding or rolling anywhere, also not breaking. The cast-iron pan, then. The awful sound sneaked up his spine, and would he have fur, he would be bristling like a cat. He definitely missed the step, could avert falling forwards and slamming his face on the tiles, but lost his balance nonetheless and flattened himself onto the stairs, his book went flying and made almost more noise than him. Meanwhile, he slid the rest of the steps down the stairs, like a sack of potatoes and with the same defeated air of one.

He hasn’t fallen far, but his left hip had crashed just so into the edge of the step. He gritted his teeth and groaned, not wanting to alarm the house. He would get up, he just needed to sort out his sense of up and down and ignore the pulsating pain in his back. Then, he heard hasty steps, and before he could school his features to its ‘nothing happened, I intended to be here like this’ norm, Mycroft stormed around the corner, with Eurus not far behind.

“No”, Sherlock said, preemtively, not to answer an assumed question, but to convey his displeasure with the situation to the world. Not that it helped his cause, in the end.

“Sherlock, I told you to look where you’re going. Is this another of those…door incidents?”
There may or may not have been, in the very beginning stages of his wandering-while-reading habit, some door-related unintended sudden stops to his journey, and one or two little bumbs…

Sherlock growled in warning, still often giving non-phonemic-based responses in order to convey his emotional state. Mycroft rubbed the bridge of his nose, which was one of the few tells he hasn’t yet got rid of, and then proceeded to gingerly pick up his little brother, who floundered wide-eyed, but curbed his struggle, as the wild movements made the pain worse. He disliked being picked up or behaviour towards him that spoke of mollycoddling a small child on the best of days, because he may be five, but that didn’t mean he had to accept everything that was done to his pint-sized person without protest.
“No!” He only fell half a meter, picking him up like a toddler was not on!
It was frustrating, how little it worked to push someone away, one at the same time holds on to. Mycroft had no choice but to hold him tighter, lest he would become fast friends with the floor a second time within two minutes. It calmed him down a bit.

Mycroft deposited him on the next table, stretching his limbs out, as if he were a doll. Eurus, silent as a ghost, still followed and looked on, mildly interested. She was holding her practice violin’s bow and one of the cloths one fights dust on a delicate instrument with.

His brother seemed to have activated his instincts to when the threat of a well-aimed sherlockian kick to the face was imminent, because he stopped manhandling him, and instead prompted him to move one limb or bend another. It soon became apparent, that apart from that hefty bruise on his lower left back, he had come away unscathed, but to him, it didn’t feel like a bruise. The hard surface of the table with what felt like most of his weight focused on that spot, left him blinking back tears.
Mycroft diplomatically pretended not to notice, but Eurus didn’t.

She left the white cloth next to Sherlock’s hand, and then wandered off.

Mycroft helped him up and placed him on his own two feet, out of the learned knowledge that Sherlock would have tried to jump from the table out of principle. He then leaned down to pick up the book, eying it surprised, which Sherlock read as derisive on his brothers young, but somehow already stern features.

“Fiction? Is that what had your head up in the clouds?”
Sherlock felt humiliated under Mycroft’s gaze by the whole scene, his fumbling fall, his almost losing his countenance on the table, the book. Which was a children’s book.
He could say it’s for variety, for research or that Mycroft should be able to grip one bloody pan sufficiently with his big, fat hands, but he only miserably bit his lip and snatched the book back out of Mycroft’s grip, who held it a bit elevated, like a foreign wild animal he wasn’t sure had had its vaccinations. He knew Mycroft read loud and clear his attachment to this book, without him saying anything.
He gripped the cloth in one fist, pressed the book under his chin and raced up the stairs, as fast as his slightly hobbling gait would allow.

“Pace yourself, you’ll fall again”, Mycroft called after him and he hated that he had to hear the ‘again’ now likely for the rest of his days.

/////////////////////////////

/////////////////////////////

The three of them were sitting in the library. At least Mycroft was sitting, in a corner farthest from the fire, working on something boring Sherlock had already forgotten the title of. Eurus sat nearest the fire, directly in front, cross-legged, in an apparent staring-contest with the flames. Sherlock himself was sprawled over half of the length of the plush sofa, as dramatically as a six-year-old can, looking at the ceiling while not really looking at it, with one of the astrophysics textbooks half over his face. Him, Eurus and Dad had just ended a discussion about something pertaining to the book, and now Dad had left the room on his mission to fetch something of that cake that has been enticing them all with its freshly-baked smell for the last half hour.

/////////////////////////////

Beep beep beep…

/////////////////////////////

The scene wobbled at the corners and seemed to have hopped to a point slightly forward in time. Mycroft, Eurus and him were engrossed in the ambition to out-deduce the other two present. It was somehow levelling the playing-field a bit, that this time, they weren’t deducing someone else or an object, but each other.

“You have to explain how you got to this point”, Mycroft admonished Eurus, flustered because of…something she said.

“As long as she, the deducing one is right, and you as the deduced would know, she doesn’t have to”, Sherlock heard himself say, never letting an opportunity slide to argue with Mycroft. He had implemented the rules, after all!

“This time, she does!”

Eurus answered, “I –“

/////////////////////////////

Beep beep beep b-

Chapter Text

Eurus answered, “I am the smart one, then?“

/////////////////////////////

Beep beep beep b-

What a familiar choice of words. Why had it never rankled somewhere, something in the depth of his lately cluttered feeling mind, whenever Mycroft used them, always keen to regain the title. But then, if playing the violin hadn’t accomplished this feat, how should an old phrase stand any chance.

Beep bee-
A dull knocking sound, then slight grumbling.

Why the beeping. Is he in hospital? Has he been shot. Again? Or did he once more succumb to old habits…wasn’t precisely an easy task, to break it the last time he had to put on the charade, which technically speaking hadn’t been a charade, because he had been high, so very, very high, blissfully, dangerously, …
The kidney failures hadn’t boded well then. His primary reaction being not surprise but rather exasperation, didn’t either. Shouldn’t he be in pain, if he is in hospital? Shouldn’t it stink, the biting and cloying stench of all hospital, and the noise-

He hears the 2 pm bus shuttle hurry its way down the street, it must be the 2 pm one, because the others don’t stop at the corner, and judging by the light beyond his closed eyelids, it must be past noon.

Baker street then.

The brief sensory flashback has put him off temporarily, but now he recognises all the little things that each scream home at him, in the most comfortable fashion one can be figuratively screamed at – the thread count of his sheets, the familiar detergent, the angle the light hits his still closed eyes, the tiny noises of 221B, its wooden, chemical, food-Mrs-Hudson-brought-up-yesterday-evening base smell and all the finer fragrances, more susceptible to variants, e.g. who has visited that afternoon or if Rosie or John had stayed in all day, if the fire had been lit, if something had exploded, if Rosie had decided to colour the underside of the table with her pens, if John had been pressed for time and thus ended up brushing his teeth in increments while running though the flat, until he remembered the toothbrush in his mouth when he eventually got to the entryway.

His living alone in the flat had not nearly disrupted the olfactory balance of it this much, in its entirety, it may simply have gone a bit stale at times, when he didn’t return for days, didn’t cook, didn’t do the laundry, didn’t open the windows in the evening on mild weathered days while playing a beloved stringed instrument.
221B had still been home, surely, just…less tethered, less lively, much more prone to reflect his state of mind in all its fluctuating bold extremes, because he was the only one there to shape the landscape.

Landscape. That brought him back to the not-dreams he had just been taking in. That was new, that they snuck up on him, while he was not even trying to reach them. Point for him, then, his subconsciousness, that went against the walls or undefined masses hiding away what he had reached for, in…other parts of his subconsciousness. Point, still.

What the memories had in common so far, was that he had seemed to be operating as some kind of directing quantity for his sister, regarding emotions. (Oh, the irony.) When to give up (the cat), when to not heed warnings or danger to avert loss (under the ice), when to hide pain (from tumbling on the stairs). They weren’t exactly positive things, and he wonders what sort of manifesting groundwork this may had caused for Eurus, what had she read out of it and applied to her worldview.
(Not unlike what she had done at Sherrinford, in a way, but without instigating the scenes herself. Much.)

He hadn’t known, he just barely starts to see some things even now, connections, possibilities, impressions. It likely wasn’t even about him per se, he had just happened to be the direct source regarding the most obvious emotions, back then at Musgrave Hall, in comparison to their parents and Mycroft, something he always felt keenly and learned early to loathe, since transparency makes it laughably easy to get hit where something resides to get hit.
Additionally, they were rather close in age, Eurus and he.

Still his mind seems to only access pretty tame memories, so far.
He feels as if his mind throws cats and bees and playing deductions at him, to possibly distract him from what he was originally searching for. And it must be there. Be it formerly treasured memories of being very close, understood, accepted, maybe even loved, that would have caused the immense hurt later on. Those dark times too hadn’t yet surfaced, when Eurus had been taken away and Victor was long gone, even Mycroft had been away for schooling, and he was left behind with nothing, no explanation, nobody, and then finally an odd void in his past, that simultaneously defied awareness and lured him down the proverbial rabbit hole of self-destruction.

He had memories about his childhood, bad ones, that couldn’t have been ‘written in’ by Mycroft, for one, because it wouldn’t have made the least amount of conceivable sense for his brother to have undertaken that endeavour and the bureaucrat detests everything he had to do that isn’t based on leastwise four rather convincingly practical reasons, and secondly, they had nothing to do with Musgrave or family life.

There had been intense bouts of bullying, his younger self couldn’t help but react viscerally to, because it broke his otherwise grey monotony. He hadn’t prided himself on being an outcast, but he incited things from nasty looks and name-calling and stolen books or clothes to mean notes, to tripping him in the corridors, to locking him in a bathroom stall, to throwing rubbish at him in class behind a teacher’s back to outright having to fight off a group of classmates after school and being chased from the grounds more times than he cares to count. He learned to climb the pipes for the water channel or the odd tree quite fast, in year three. But there always were the times he lost, were he wasn’t fast enough, or - less often, but still - not clever enough, resulting in him being punched or kicked - during which he didn’t know to primarily shield his head or his violinists hands or his midsection, where most physical violence seemed to be aimed at -, with random wisps of his hair cut off or all his pens broken, with getting dunked in dirty water and his scarves hidden in winter or with notifications from a teacher to his parents for something another student did, but his word had stood against that of all the others.

The thing about this was that, yes, he had suffered in these situations, but it also hadn’t been a train he couldn’t see the direction of where it was headed. On one day, he just didn’t care, and on the next, it was the one thing he could manipulate. To not back down and give nasty looks and cutting comments in return, which is where it must have started at some point, to unapologetically be different, be himself, or at least as insufferably superior at maths as he could possibly be.
It hadn’t even been many people who actively had disliked him, actually. Just enough. The right ones, so to speak.

In his twenties, it had him mildly surprised, that loneliness hadn’t crushed him long ago.
Those memories had stayed with him all his life, at least those he hadn’t deleted. Some for the off chance of running into some old acquaintance again, some for lecture purposes. Two or three were to ingrained to be deleted, much to his chagrin. Mostly those, that had gone downhill after he actually had tried. His memorable one occasion of joining the drama club that had cured him of showing openly interest in anything, lest it be attacked without regret or mercy, or the day he tried to help Laura Banks, that had cured him of showing manners and lending an ear, just because he could, lest he be attacked with ridicule and disgust. Childhood, what a joy that had been. At least the mandatory socialising aspects of it.

Beep beep beep beep b-
A groan, then the incessant, awful, useless beeping finally, mercifully stops.

A five-minute interval. Phone alarm. Old-fashioned and highly effectively annoying. Evidently, John hadn’t yet managed to sort out the standard sound choices in his new mobile, even though he must have accomplished to wrestle the alarm function into submission. The man was rather hopeless with unfamiliar technical appliances.

Sherlock stretched luxuriously under the covers, unfolding and straining all limbs in one exaggerated motion, then, while still keeping his eyes closed, rolled onto his left side and furled the long lines of his body loosely towards himself, creating the C-shape assumed by sunbathing cats all over the world. Or it would have been a C-shape, had his knees not bumped into John’s lumbar area, eliciting a sound from the doctor Sherlock read as 5% pain and 95% being startled.

John had been reaching to the nightstand, now he likewise changed his position towards the centre of the bed.
“Morning.” He sounded tired, and of lingering annoyance with the technical culprit why they were awake. It had been well after five am until they could fall into bed, hence why he had forgotten to cancel the alarm that would normally indicate he should start getting ready for a shift at the clinic. Late change of schedule, yesterday.
He also sounded affectionate.
“Mmh”, hummed Sherlock and lazily opened one eye to blink his answer, which was the most one could get out of him most days, regarding useless arbitrary greeting traditions.

Judging by situations like these, he must have mastered some level of socialising over the years, compared to his fumbling in early school years, if not an inherent understanding of relations, then at least a profound plenitude of experiences serving as a roadmap, sometimes more, sometimes less vague.
It also wasn’t a result or conclusion of his aptness regarding manoeuvring the trickier areas of human nature, that John and he hadn’t done anything other in this bed than sleep side by side, comfortably, sometimes even with an ankle or a wrist crossed over one of the other’s limbs, but largely very platonic. There was no hurdle or complication holding them back, no injury or illness, no confusion of the underlying sentiment why they were where they were. Are.

Reminiscing about his own reticence to change something about the tentatively accomplished status quo, Sherlock found himself repeatedly stuck between the same reactions and possible enticements. Academic interest was on the list, a curiosity merely around the question if he could do it. Not the…technical parts, obviously, but – and he didn’t mean quantity, here, at all - if a deeply physical, sexually rooted relationship would be something he would be able to uphold. Admittedly, he does lack the drive, which could be balanced with certain efforts, but emotionally speaking, he had his doubts that something like this wouldn’t long term leave him raw to the point of inevitable retreat. Which would hurt them both. Sherlock tried to have faith that they could deal with it, they had weathered a lot, after all, but he had never been a blindingly trusting person.

Sometimes it was just an exciting prospect, something new, and it didn’t have a deadline, they could do or not do as they pleased. Then it just felt like a senseless social convention, like handshakes, derived from the human-ingrained yearning for proximity or safety of commitments, and then facts about the unsavoury environment that is a human being’s mouth meandered to the so called ’front’ of his mind.
Under all of that always lingered the persistent ‘…why?’, as in, why should they. It wouldn’t serve a purpose, it would lead to figurative and literal mess and just…why.
Except…John might expect it, at some point, to try it on for size. Sherlock always came back to this point holding him back to simply make his peace with the topic and leave it be, until it may or may not really does pop up and then discuss it like the adults, who know each other well, they are.

John wasn’t even a very sexual person, not at his core. He might be experienced and made efforts to date for decades, but a good chunk of that originated from an internalised norm of ‘how things work and ought to be’ John had adopted from some conveyed societal behaviour Sherlock had never understood, but often noticed as something making him uncomfortable (and not only because of his inability to fathom it). It was the same reason John had dated exclusively women for the majority of his past. John is clearly not asexual, but in terms of priorities, it didn’t actually rank very high, which anyone should realise who spends one hour in a good conversation with the ex-soldier. Loyalty, closeness, shared humour, integrity…it was ludicrous to think John might kick him to the curb because of an active sex life no being part of the convoluted and elaborate package Sherlock came with, Sherlock knew better than that and it wold be utterly unfair to presume such a thing.

But they hadn’t talked about it. At all, as of yet, and despite knowing better, he was too afraid of bad surprises, because he had everything to loose, here.
This stupid roundabout he couldn’t break away from, how preposterous. It must be written so clearly all over him. Even Eurus’ non-sequitur deduction ‘have you had sex’, wasn’t derived from the music and the notes per se – which is why the choice of this particular piece hadn’t mattered in that regard - , but rather the way he held the bow and how he executed the first stroke across the strings. One could draw the parallel to the act of sex itself, which is primarily about dynamic, not audio, but that isn’t quite all.

They still lay in bed, facing each other, about twenty centimetres apart, gazing upon the other’s morning midday rumpled features and letting their thoughts wander. Had they crossed paths?

“There you are”, John murmured. “Were you far away, just now?”
Sherlock, who had opened the second eye, looked at the space between them. Not far away by any interpretation.
“No.”
John smiled a calm I-like-waking-up-with-you-smile.

It was warm in the room, but not stuffy, nothing pressured them to get up and start the day for need of meeting an appointment or another. They didn’t make a habit of lazing around in bed, which would have been a difficult feat with a toddler in the house anyway, but sometimes, it occurred and those instances were coded via calm cuddliness or serene contemplation.

“I know you don’t”, John said slowly, and it didn’t sound like an answer to his negation. Sherlock looked up to see John eying the same spot on the sheets he himself had just directed his answer to.
“I don’t what?”
John half-shrugged a bit helplessly. “Well, some things. And they might be a reason for your increasing…going far away, lately?”

Was that a question or a statement. Sherlock’s short silence seemed to be answer enough, because John continued as if he had gotten an affirmative one. “Is it a reason why you explore the abyss of your own mind so much lately, because it’s…I don’t know, something you can answer things for yourself?”

Sherlock grimaced. “No, it’s because, after things finally settled down regarding our – personal housing arrangements and associated perceived unity, I intended to rid myself of all mysteries of the past which have the potential to muddy the path forward, including what you so becomingly termed ‘the abyss of my own mind’, since I have been aware of its existence for quite some months now.”

John looked as if he needed to dissect this sentence for a few seconds.

“Right. Good. ‘Mysteries of the past with the potential to muddy the path forward’. To be honest, I think I have a few of those too. Just not as impressive as traumatic childhood memories my older brother hypnotised me out of remembering.”

Sherlock expectantly lifted a brow and leaned back against the scrounged-up pillow behind him. He sometimes seemed to engage in a nightly wrestling match with his bedclothes, which sometimes resulted in his pillow being found in strange places and states.

“I think we should clear them up, those mysteries of the past”, John stated, and with that sentence addressed what Sherlock had been haunted by for weeks, especially since John had started sleeping here and softly stroking his temples and their decision to join households once more with feeling.

“Oh?”, Sherlock managed, not nearly as relaxed as he had been, picking meawhile at the seams of the pillow-ball.

“We haven’t been exactly up-front about…all this. We just…did.”

“I propose to make pro and contra lists of what we expect from each other out of this, depending on what we view as something that ought to be addressed in this regard”, Sherlock blurts out, because, finally this was a chance on a golden tray, if he didn’t pounce on it now, he wouldn’t get it again, and he would explode in some fashion with all those conflicting bottled up emotions inside of him, of which none seem to know their proper place and timing and conduct, like a bunch of…oh no. Not that boring, romanticised phrase. Ugh.

John looked at him, probably not having expected such a specific request. “Lists. You mean, as in pro and contra, what we like, what we don’t like and would like to try? Like that?”

The relief of proverbial millstones falling from his heart in simply having the issue out there, ought to be audible. “Yes, probable issues. And be specific.”

A thump! through the baby-phone heralded Rosie’s return from the land of dreams.
“How is she still doing that”, muttered John to no one, referring to his daughter’s talent to escape the confines of her bed in spite of repeated reinforcements, and sat up, stretching his shoulders in preparation of getting out from under the covers himself and starting the already hopelessly late day.

“Write it down until tomorrow evening.”
“Hm? Oh, okay.”
John seemed not in the least daunted to put his honest and blunt hopes to paper, he looked…happy, relieved, good-natured, ready to take the world on with a glint in his eyes. “You are already compiling one in your head as we speak, aren’t you?”

“Maybe”, Sherlock conceded.
The doctor smiled softly and leaned back to him for a quick peck just to the left to the corner of his lips – how, well, cheeky – and then proceeded to swing his legs out of bed, with the rest of him following and leaving behind the bathroom door.

Sherlock rolled over and flopped face down onto John's pillow.
Now he did have to write the list, too. Specific.
What could possibly go wrong.