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From the time he was old enough to be read to, John’s favorite book was “Peter Pan.” He made his mum read it over and over and over again until the pages of the small book began to wear under the oils of her fingers.
John wanted nothing more, with all his small heart, than to be Peter. He wanted Neverland, to fly away from the mess that was his house with a father who never came home and a mother who’s breath stank and a sister who pushed him down stairs sometimes and never waited for him to catch up to her as they walked, even though she had longer legs by far.
But mostly John never wanted to grow up because from what he’d seen of adulthood, it was rather awful and full of yelling and cursing and broken things.
“All children must grow up, John,” his mum told him after he’d confided in her his dream. She took a long drag on her cigarette before she continued, clutching the small white thing between her fingers. She had worn hands, with pink chipped nail-polish and nicotine stains.
“Christ knows you should get started,” she advised and then got up, leaving John on the sagging couch, lost between the overstuffed cushions in a leftover cloud of cigarette smoke.
***
John hated Year One. He stood out, like he usually did, in his hand-me-down clothes and his unbrushed hair and general skinniness. But nobody teased him like they had in nursery because of Sherlock.
Sherlock was stranger than him by far, with messy curls and perfect clothes and the way he rolled his vowels on his tongue. He knew the whole alphabet, and words besides, and could count to two hundred. He could even do math.
He never talked to anyone more than he could help it and John wondered if he might be lonely. But then one day he saw Sherlock clambering up to the top of the playground jungle-gym and standing there like a small bird and he realized Sherlock wasn’t just odd. He was fantastic.
When their teacher asked all the children in the class what they wanted to be when they grew up, John said he wanted to be a doctor.
Sherlock had simply looked at the teacher with unfathomable eyes. “I’m not going to grow up,” he told the mousy woman in no uncertain terms. She’d seemed baffled by it but had moved on, asking Megan what she wanted to be. She’d said a dancer.
John ran up to Sherlock at recess. The strange boy always sat alone, cross-legged on the ground near the chain-link fence that separated the playground from the outside.
“Hey,” he asked awkwardly and Sherlock had looked up from whatever he was doing. “Are you really not gonna grow up?”
Sherlock tilted his head and John felt like one of those butterflies in the glass cases at the museum, spread open and dissected. “Obviously,” the boy had said and John wasn’t sure what that meant but he thought it was a yes.
“But my mum says everyone has to grow up,” John asked. He’d hoped against hope she was wrong because then he could be Peter. All he really wanted was to be Peter.
Sherlock sighed like John was the stupidest person he had ever seen. “Growing up is for idiots too stupid to realize the potential of childhood,’ he explained and John really was confused but he knew whatever the raven-haired boy was saying was smart and so he nodded.
“How do you know so much about growing up?” he asked.
“Because my older brother grew up and now he’s stupid,” Sherlock told him and John nodded again. Harry had grown up and had stopped playing with him too. She said toys were stupid. He never wanted to get so old that toys became stupid.
“You say a lot of really smart things,” John said, tugging on the hem of his jumper. It was Harry’s, two sizes two big, and it itched.
“It’s cause I’m really smart,” Sherlock explained and that made sense. John didn’t know a lot of smart people. His mum always said his dad was an idiot and Harry did bad in school. Suddenly, he really, really wanted a smart friend.
“Do you wanna play with me?” John asked hesitantly, his right arm clutching at his left elbow, rubbing up and down as he stared at the ground.
“No,” Sherlock said immediately and John looked up to find the boy smiling at him. “But I’ll suffer through it if I must.”
***
When they were seven, John showed Sherlock “Peter Pan.” Sherlock could read, better than anyone in all of Year Two, but he’d looked at the book skeptically. He liked to read books about smart things, with words John didn’t understand.
“You’ll like it,” John promised.
“It looks stupid,” Sherlock said but he read it anyway because John was really good at figuring out what Sherlock might like. He’d made Sherlock try plums and Sherlock had loved those, smearing red juice all over white skin.
Sherlock loved “Peter Pan.” He loved it almost as much as John. He read it once, and then twice, and then John asked his mum to buy him another copy because he knew he was never getting that one back from Sherlock.
One day, Sherlock called him Wendy Darling. They were sitting on the swings in the park two blocks from school. Now they were older and recess was mostly spent avoiding the bigger boys who liked to rough them up, and so they came here after school for a few stolen moments alone. John didn’t like being home any more than he could help it and he knew Sherlock felt the same.
“Why do I have to be Wendy Darling?” he complained, clutching at the metal chains, rocking back and forth on his toes, sending the swing inches in place.
Sherlock sighed. “Because I’m Peter, obviously,” he explained. He’d taught John what that word meant, which was good because he liked to say it whenever John was being stupid, which was often. “Also, you tell stories.”
John did, spinning small tales as they contorted themselves on the jungle gym, Sherlock’s hair brushing the park sand. Sherlock listened, which was as much as he could ask for. Sometimes he even said he liked them. But John was still put out.
“I don’t want to be Wendy,” he said, unhappy.
“Don’t be upset,” Sherlock brushed off, reading his mind. “Nearly everyone is.”
Sherlock really was Peter though, and that was what made it all so wonderful. He ran reckless around London, finding adventure in the most mediocre and John followed him devotedly, a proper Wendy. He was caustic like Peter too; a bit too bitter and honest for adults to handle, and it thrilled John that he could watch someone as wonderful and real as Sherlock.
They split their time between the swings in the park and behind the library shelves. Sometimes, if John was really quiet and handed things nicely to Sherlock when he asked, Sherlock would read to him, on the floor between the biographies and the non-fiction. Sherlock’s voice had a soft sort of rumble to it that made the world come alive in his mind, made the characters dance before his eyes.
Everyone told Sherlock he’d have a beautiful voice when he was older. John never told him that when he finally learned to read, he read things with Sherlock’s voice in his mind.
***
John was thirteen when he decided Wendy Darling was not such an unfitting nickname because everyone knows all Wendy really wants is to shag Peter’s brains out.
And Peter is oblivious, laughably oblivious, and John always wondered how Sherlock managed to notice that their teacher was having an affair by the stains on her coat but never realized how much time John spent just staring at him. Puberty seemed to be a bitch to everyone save Sherlock, making him taller and elegant when it just made John gangly.
He knew it wasn’t normal, really, to wake up sticky and wet from dreams of your best mate. He knew he had as much chance with a tree for all Sherlock was interested in him, or anyone really. He’d heard it from the horse’s mouth itself.
“You don’t fancy anybody?” John had asked him incredulously after that particular revelation. The concrete behind school was hard beneath his feet, rough behind his back. Sherlock lounged next to him, hands in his pocket, not meeting his eyes.
“Sentiment is absurd,” Sherlock told him, looking out into the parking lot. The bullies hadn’t gone away in secondary school, only gotten bigger, and they’d taken to hiding here during recess. It wasn’t much aesthetically, but it made due.
“So not for sentiment then,” John pushed, rather desperate. “Just to get off.”
Sherlock laughed. “Like you’re doing particularly well in that department,” he teased and John pushed him, trying to pretend every contact with Sherlock’s skin didn’t find its way into his dreams at night.
“Piss off,” John laughed back and that had closed the book on any chance John’s snowball might have had in hell.
Year Eight was when John stopped going home altogether, preferring to spend it on street corners and park benches with Sherlock, or by himself if the boy couldn’t be bothered. He rarely was alone though; Sherlock had no reason to go home either.
That was year John mastered sneaking into his own home, climbing the tree outside his house, tumbling into his bathroom window. Not that anyone would have asked him why he was coming home at three a.m., but because it reduced his chances to running into his father asleep on the couch or smashed plates on the floor, or broken bottles on the stairs.
That was also the year John starting dating Julia Mathers. They went to the cinema together and he held her hand and she let him kiss her two blocks from her house one night after he walked her home. If she had short, curly black hair and gray eyes, who was say that meant anything?
Sherlock hated her. “She’s dull,” he complained, grinding his heels angrily into the sand beneath their swings.
“You just don’t like her because she takes me from you,” John laughed. He reached out and took Sherlock’s hand from where it angrily gripped the chains and squeezed it. “Don’t worry,” he promised. “You’ll always be my best mate, no matter what happens.”
“I wasn’t worried,” Sherlock shot back, yanking his hand away. But he smiled at John after, tiny and fragile, and John kept it deep in his mind.
Year Eight was the year Sherlock started solving cases. Small things, like who had stolen someone’s book bag and what the cafeteria food was really made of. John was his trusty assistant, following two steps behind, running to catch up as his mind ran four paces ahead of everyone.
“Oh, the cleverness of me!” he crowed and John could only smile and call him brilliant and inflate his already dangerously-sized ego.
“Come over tonight,” Sherlock asked him the day they started summer vacation. “My parents are away and Mycroft’s in France getting fat.”
John had never been to Sherlock house before, but it all fairness the boy had never been to John’s house as well. It was too big for four people, even if Mycroft was as fat as Sherlock claimed he was, and John could understand why someone wouldn’t want to spend any more time there then they had too. It had a habit of making its inhabitants feel rather lonely.
Sherlock room was a mess, naturally. But his bed was huge and he seemed confused as to why John refused to share.
“It’s big enough for the two of us to not even touch, and the guestroom’s at the other end of the house,” he explained reasonably, sitting cross-legged on the gigantic thing, like some wild Indian out of Neverland.
John didn’t think he could even bring himself to explain that he didn’t trust his body not to betray him in the night with some graphic dream, or worse, to wake up curled around the genius. So he swallowed and agreed.
They put off sleep for as long as humanly possible, watching terrible movies and reading terrible novels and building forts out of pillows even though they were both too old for that. But soon enough, they were forced to climb into that monstrous bed and John thought that might be the end of his miserable life.
Sherlock’s voice echoed out of the darkness, a small lump on the other side of the bed. “Do you ever think,” he asked, wavering and fragile, “you might not be quite normal?”
John understood immediately because he’d been Sherlock’s best friend for seven years and they knew each other blind. “Yeah,” he admitted. “But normal’s boring, right?”
Sherlock wrapped around him like some magnificent octopus and John only had a moment to freak out before the boy nestled his head in the crook of John’s neck and murmured, “Never leave me, Wendy Darling. I'll teach you how to jump on the wind's back.”
“- and then away we’ll go,” John finished softly, letting his arms wrap around the boy. If only you knew where I wanted to go with you.
They spent nearly that whole summer in the Sherlock estate, running through the halls and building things in the garden and eating ridiculous amounts of food. The rest of the time they spent running around London and making general nuisances of themselves, claiming street corners for their own and finding trouble where it hid.
When Year Nine started, Sherlock started smoking and none of John’s complaints would make him stop.
***
When John was sixteen he realized with a sort of finality that he was never going to have Sherlock Holmes. And so he set off on the singular mission to shag every girl in their year, the year above and below who resembled the boy.
The boys called him “Three-Grades Watson,” and the girls dyed their hair black and got perms. Sherlock just rolled his eyes and never realized all of John’s exes could be his twin.
“Watch yourself, Wendy,” Sherlock cautioned, pointing with a lit cigarette as they lounged against the brick parking-lot wall. There was no recess and no bullies to hide from, but Sherlock was remarkably good at getting John to skip class. “You’ll grow up if you’re not careful.”
“I won’t grow up,” John laughed, bringing one knee up to his chest and wrapping his arms around it. “Promise.”
Sherlock smiled, brilliant and electric, and it made John feel alive the way nothing else could. “What’s it like?” he asked, brimming with scientific curiosity. “Sex?”
“Messy,” John confessed. “And brilliant, sometimes. If you’re lucky. You could try it, you know. Molly’d go for you.”
“Dull,” Sherlock clicked, all sharp tones. “Besides, that’s what I have my dear Wendy for.”
“I hate when you call me Wendy,” John sighed, letting his head hit the wall behind him. The sky seemed endless on days like this and John thought he might just float away. There wasn’t much to anchor him here anyway.
“No you don’t,” Sherlock told him and John nodded because Sherlock knew him better than himself.
Year Eleven was the year John made the rugby team and his life became a mess of practices and matches. It was the year John made a brand new set of friends, ones who wanted nothing more than to grow up and get jobs and buy cars. Sherlock hated rugby with the passion of the uninterested, but he sat on the metal benches through every practice and read his book so that as soon as John finished showering, they could leave together.
That was also the year of broken jaws and cigarette burns, of purpling bruises and sleeves pulled down. If Sherlock noticed John stopped wearing t-shirts during practices, he didn’t say anything. But he started inviting John over for supper more and stopped turning his mobile off at night.
Two rings meant Sherlock should throw a dressing-gown on and run downstairs to open the door and let John in. He’d stopped asking if it was okay for him to sleep over after the third time it happened. By mid-year, John stopped going home altogether. Most of his clothes took up residence in Sherlock’s closet. They learned to share the giant bed, which had gotten progressively less big the larger they got. They also learned to leave the house a good hour before school started so the maids didn’t notice the extra person in Sherlock’s bed. They didn’t worry about his parents noticing.
One day, John walked onto the rugby pitch for practice to find the stands empty. He ran to the front of the school in time to see Sherlock get into a black car, followed by a tall, ginger-haired man with the same cheekbones.
His mobile rang the second practice ended. “Don’t come over tonight,” Sherlock instructed and hung up before John could ask why. And so John slept in his own bed that night, cold and unfamiliar, and shoved a chest of drawers in front of his door when he heard his father’s car in the driveway.
He walked into school the next morning with dark circles under his eyes and Sherlock winced before refusing to look at him altogether.
“Mycroft’s come home,” he explained, perched on top of the brick wall on John’s corner like a cat, one leg dangling over as he smoked. “He sees everything. He’ll ask questions.”
“I won’t go in a foster home,” John said, sitting next to him, hands gripping the stone edge hard. It wouldn’t even take a competent social worker to walk into his house and make that judgment call.
“He’ll only be here for a month,” Sherlock tried to reassure but John felt condemned. “Do you want me to-“ he tried and John shook his head.
“I cannot fucking wait to get out of this place,” he muttered instead and Sherlock offered him the cigarette. It tasted like the inside of his father’s palm and he spit on the grass behind them.
“Second star on the right, and straight on till morning,” Sherlock agreed and John wished against hope that if he kissed Sherlock, Sherlock might kiss him back.
The night they graduated secondary school, they got drunk on the floor of Sherlock’s room with a bottle of wine they found in the Holmes’ basement. They had two months until sixth form started but those months felt endless and John felt endless too, laughing on the soft carpet on Sherlock’s floor, staring up at the ceiling with wonderment.
The room felt transformed. In a fit of madness, they’d draped the duvet and bed-sheet over the higher surfaces and with the night wind blowing in, it felt like they were in a tent, soft silk and Egyptian cotton flowing around their punch-drunk heads.
“Wendy,” Sherlock teased, sprawled out on the floor, his fingertips brushing John’s. “Oh Wendy, oh the cleverness of me.”
“I don’t want to be Wendy,” John said boldly, made brave with alcohol.
Sherlock looked at him, turning his head so their eyes could meet over waves of carpet. “But you must be Wendy,” Sherlock told him seriously. “You will always be Wendy and I will always be Peter. That’s how it’s supposed to be.”
“I could be Peter if I wanted to be,” John pressed and Sherlock laughed as though he’d told the funniest of jokes.
“You are Wendy,” Sherlock reminded him. “You are Wendy Darling, and you are going to grow up and marry another Wendy Darling and have a bunch of little Wendy Darlings.”
“I can be Peter,” John said defiantly, sitting up, and Sherlock just laughed. “If I want, I could be Peter.”
Sherlock kept laughing and it was making John unreasonably angry, the sight of Sherlock flushed and laughing, black hair leaving ink stains on the carpet, that he rolled over and grabbed Sherlock by his open collar and kissed him, dragging him up to meet his lips.
Sherlock tasted like the wine they’d drunk, and the cigarettes he refused to stop smoking and something uniquely Sherlock that it took John a minute to realize Sherlock was not kissing him back. He let go with a shock, leaning back to look at him, and their pants filled the air, short and desperate.
“John-“ Sherlock said softly, properly sobered now, and John’s heart was pounding in his chest like a drum.
“Sherlock- I’m so sorry, I don’t-“ he excused, frantic and Sherlock just stared at him as though he’d been punched.
“John, you know I can’t-“ he said fragilely and John nodded, mortified. “I don’t…feel that way-“
“I know, god Sherlock, I know,” John begged, apologizing, and Sherlock shook his head.
“Wait here,” he ordered, and stood up, rushing from the room and leaving John numb and broken on the floor. He came back after a moment, hands behind his back, and sat down next to John, long legs crossing beneath him.
“I can’t…give you…that,” he tried and it was the most inarticulate John had ever heard him. “But here-“
He gave up, simply thrusting the object in his hands at John. It was a small blue thimble, barely big enough for John’s pinky, and he took it with shaking hands.
“A kiss,” Sherlock explained, as if they didn’t both understand, and John held it tight, letting it make marks into the inside of his palm.
“Thank you,” he said breathlessly, and convinced himself this wasn’t so bad. As long as Sherlock was his friend.
They slept in the rather normal-sized bed now, curled up in each other, and the next morning John found a string and threaded it through the thimble, wearing it around his neck. Sherlock had never looked so pleased.
***
In the middle of Lower Sixth, Sherlock took his A levels early and went to Uni two years too young. John never forgave him for abandoning him in this tiny version of hell, even though Sherlock called him every night and came home every long weekend. And even though John never took the thimble off.
The weekend Sherlock came home with faint tremors in his hands and slightly wider eyes, John socked him in the jaw.
“No,” he said, watching Sherlock as he flushed the bag of cocaine down the toilet. “Don’t you ever do that again.”
Sherlock had nodded, hugging John tight, and promised he’d stay clean. But John had grown up with addicts and he wasn’t an idiot besides.
“Hello?” he said groggily, answering his phone at three a.m. in the middle of Upper Sixth.
“Hello, is this John Watson?” the voice at the other end said, the sort of posh voice that made John instantly worried.
“Yeah, who’s this?’ he asked, sitting up in bed. He could faintly see the outline of his dresser-drawers in front of his door, could faintly hear screaming downstairs.
“This is Sherlock’s brother, Mycroft Holmes,” the voice introduced himself and John was well awake now.
“Is everything alright?” John asked, knowing that if Sherlock was behind him, he would be sighing, clicking his tongue at such a stupid question.
“I thought you might want to know Sherlock’s in hospital now. He’s had an overdose,” Mycroft explained and John was already pulling on his shoes.
“Which hospital?” he asked, tying his trainers.
“John, visiting hours don’t start for another several hours-“ Mycroft tried but John only growled “Which hospital?”
Forty minutes later, John found himself in the waiting room of London Bridge Private Hospital, pacing nervously until a night nurse brought him a danish and told him a man named Mycroft had arranged for him to be allowed to see Sherlock now.
Sherlock looked incredibly small, dwarfed by large white machines and plush white blankets. One wire attached him to an IV, another to an oxygen mask, and his skin looked near translucent, black hair spilling onto the large pillows beneath him. John sat in the chair next to his bed, holding his hand until he woke up.
Sherlock blinked his eyes open close to ten, after John had been sitting in that small chair for nearly five hours. “Oh Sherlock,” John breathed, suddenly aware of the painful knots in his chest, desperately trying to hold him together.
Sherlock gestured for John to move his oxygen mask so he could speak and John did, sliding it down a bit, never letting go of Sherlock hand.
“Hello Wendy,” Sherlock smiled weakly and John wanted to punch him again, like he had that first time.
“You idiot,” he settled for yelling instead. “You could have died!”
Sherlock sighed, a smile playing around his eyes. “To die would be an awfully big adventure,” he said and it was because John knew he meant it, and because John loved him, that he burst into tears, burying his head in Sherlock shoulder, soaking his thin hospital gown through.
That was also the first time he properly met Mycroft, not just at a distance or over the phone, but in the hospital cafeteria. The ginger-haired boy, man really, was clutching a cup of terrible coffee as though it was the only thing keeping him upright.
“Did you know?” he asked John as the teen stared at a tray of food, willing himself to be hungry. John nodded weakly, not looking up.
“He told me he was getting clean,” he whispered and Mycroft just shook his head and John realized where Sherlock learned his you are all idiots expression.
“And you believed him?” Mycroft laughed bitterly and John’s heart felt like it was shattering.
“He never lied to me before,” he confessed and Mycroft rested one hand on John’s shoulder, a mockery of comfort, but John was grateful for it anyway.
***
When Sherlock was in his junior year of college, and still in rehab, John joined the army. Sherlock never forgave him for abandoning him for a larger version of hell, even though he wrote letters home every week and visited on major holidays. And even though John never took the thimble off.
It sat, awkwardly, next to his dog tags and they jangled against each other as he walked. The first day of training, someone laughed and asked if his grandmother had given it to him. John punched him in the jaw. That was how the Northumberland Fusiliers learned not to mess with compact, not small, John Watson.
The first patient John ever treated on his own grabbed at the thimble with spasming hands and John let him grasp it as he performed surgery. He spent the next night painstakingly cleaning the blood out of the small holes and grooves where it had accumulated. After that, he stopped cleaning it altogether and let the baby blue color fade to a dusty red.
The first leave he came home, Sherlock was waiting for him in the airport. He was skinnier than he’d ever been; and as he held John impossibly tight, John could hear his heartbeat thudding in that large, empty chest.
“I’m clean now,” he whispered softly in John’s ear, fingers tightening in the folds of his clothes. “You can come home Wendy.”
John bent Sherlock forward a bit to kiss his forehead, still bitterly in love. “That’s not how this works, love,” he said and Sherlock bit his lip, holding back very real tears.
John didn’t have anywhere particularly to stay, so he stayed in Sherlock’s apartment, sleeping on the ridiculously expensive and ridiculously uncomfortable couch. He was strikingly aware of how pathetic this was, the fact that he couldn’t even raise any sort of response from his family, and if Sherlock heard him yelling into his pillow late at night, he never mentioned it over breakfast tea.
When John left, Sherlock drove with him to the airport.
“Goodbye Sherlock,” he said gently as the airport loomed large in the cab’s front window
“Never say goodbye because goodbye means going away,” the genius murmured into John’s coat as they hugged in the backseat, “and going away means forgetting.”
“Like I could ever forget you,” John laughed and let go, walking inside the glass doors. He stopped coming home on leave after that.
***
When John had been in Afghanistan for longer than any sane man should be and Sherlock had finally met a man named Lestrade after his ex-dealer was murdered, a bullet should have shot John in the heart.
It was meant for his heart, that much was obvious, but it went wide and hit his shoulder. That was what John told everyone, because what the doctors in the hospital in Herat told him beggared belief.
“It grazed the thimble around your chest and hit your shoulder instead,” they explained to him after he’d emerged from his morphine haze. “We’ve never seen anything like it. It’s a miracle.”
It didn’t feel like a miracle. It felt like someone had snatched from his hands the only career he’d ever trained for. And wasn’t that just bloody Sherlock, keeping him alive when most nights he wished he hadn’t been wearing his thimble at all.
They airlifted him to London for better care and Sherlock visited him in the hospital after hours. He climbed in through the window to John’s room at night like a ghost and John nearly laughed out loud.
“Peter?” he called out from his hospital bed but Sherlock refused to come closer, standing by the window as though afraid John might hurt him. John flipped on the lamp by his bed and he could have sworn the genius gasped at the lines on his face and the hard set of his eyes.
“John,” Sherlock whispered and moved no closer.
“I’m old Sherlock,” John said gently, aware of what held him back. “I am ever so much more than twenty. I grew up a long time ago.”
“You promised not to,” Sherlock said, petulantly, but the hurt was near audible.
John held out one shaking hand and Sherlock took it, sitting by his bed. “I couldn’t help it,” he sighed and Sherlock squeezed down, very present and very real. His fingers moved to the thimble that still hung around John’s next, crushed and bloody as it was, and tightened around it like the boy dying in Afghanistan. No one spoke.
John moved in with Sherlock after his release. And when they solved cases together, it was like magic.
***
John thought they were happy.
Their life wasn’t normal, in any sense of the word, with them running after criminals at four in the morning and heads in the fridge and cold curry before they crashed on the sofa. But they were happy, even though John couldn’t hold a girlfriend and Sherlock sometimes forgot they needed to pay bills.
Sarah was the first girl he tried to date who didn’t look like Sherlock. That did not last long and not for the first time in his life, John wished you could make yourself fall out of love. It didn’t help that everyone and their mother thought they were together, the yarders included.
That had been the best part of coming home, walking onto the crime scene of The Pink Lady with Sherlock.
“Who the hell is this?” Lestrade had asked as John tried to appear as inconspicuous as possible.
“Friend of mine,” Sherlock said casually and John flashed him a small grin. They never mentioned John was Sherlock’s only friend; for a genius the man had a very fragile ego when it came to seeming normal.
“C’mon, who is he really?” Sally laughed and John stepped forward to shake her hand.
“Captain John Watson, of the Northumberland Fusiliers,” he introduced, using his most brilliant smile. “Sherlock and I have been friends since primary.”
John would have paid money for those expressions. Not the ones on the yarders’ faces, though those were lovely too, but the one on Sherlock’s face. If pure elation could’ve been photographed, that would have been the time. John had never felt prouder of himself.
So yes, John thought they’d been happy. Happy sorting out rancid milk from contaminated jam, happy sharing tea duties, happy pretending John wasn’t hopelessly in love with Sherlock and Sherlock pretending not to notice.
But then he had swept into their lives and John, John who knew Sherlock better than his own parents had, realized the self-professed asexual had fallen in love. He’d fallen in love with his clever bombs and his cleverer plots and Sherlock was running himself ragged, chasing shadows alone.
“Be careful, Sherlock,” John said gently after Connie Prince, after everything exploded in their faces. They were sitting on the sofa, Sherlock’s head in his lap, as John combed through his curls with lazy fingers.
Sherlock yawned, a long stretch, and relaxed into John’s lap like a heavy cat. “It’s all a game, Wendy,” he murmured, ridiculously young and untouched. “Just one great game. And I am the king of games.”
It was hardly a game when they stood by the side of a pool, semtex anchoring John to the ground, a gun pointed at Jim Moriarty.
“I’ll burn the heart out of you,” Moriarty snarled and Sherlock just laughed, loud and vicious and ridiculously proud of himself.
“Don’t you know Jim?” he crowed and Moriarty’s eyes widened, unsure. “All children are heartless.”
The mad genius stepped back, for the first time realizing his mistake. “Sherlock, who and what are you?”
“I’m youth, I’m joy!” Sherlock cackled, his eyes brighter than stars. “I’m a little bird that has broken out of the egg.”
He stepped forward, blocking John from view, and the implications were obvious. “And you are just a bitter, old man.”
When the phone rang, it was almost a relief and John thought they might actually survive this intact.
So yes, John Watson thought they were happy.
***
The Sherlock on the roof proved they weren’t.
“Keep your eyes fixed on me.”
He always had, hadn’t he, ever since they were children. He watched him dangle from monkey bars, climb trees in dress shoes. He’d never looked away and he wasn’t about to start now.
For long the two enemies looked at one another, Moriarty shuddering slightly, and Sherlock with the strange smile upon his face.
"So, Sherlock," said Moriarty at last, finally grasping the plan, finally realizing how badly he’d failed, "this is all your doing."
"Ay, James Moriarty," came the stern answer, "it is all my doing."
"Proud and insolent youth," Moriarty said at last, "prepare to meet thy doom."
"Dark and sinister man” Sherlock answered, "have at thee.”
But the face above him now was ethereal, touched with sun and stars, and John thought he might never have made friends with that boy on the playground if he’d have known how colossally stupid that boy could be.
“This is what people do, don’t they? Leave a note?”
“Sherlock-“
“All the world is made of faith, and trust, and pixie dust, John,” and it was the first time he’d called him John in years. In public yes, always in public, but never between the two of them. Between the two of them he was always Wendy and now he was John because Wendy Darling is just John without her Peter.
“If you do this,” John said slowly, painfully, “I will never forgive you.”
“Never is an awfully long time.”
When he jumped, John half expected him to fly. Half expected him to spread his arms and think happy thoughts. But Sherlock was never Peter Pan any more than he was ever Wendy and the boy crashed to the ground like a bird with broken wings and so it ends.
***
“You’re still in love with him.”
He looked at Ella with the disdain he saved for Sherlock on his bad days. “I’ve been in love with him since we were thirteen, I don’t think I’ll be stopping now.”
“He’s given you an opportunity,” she said calmly, as though she wasn’t upsetting the very foundation of his world. “A chance to move on and find love. Take it.”
He didn’t take it, not at first. At first he fired her.
But one year stretched into two and two years stretched into a coffee shop where a woman behind him dropped her purse and he helped her pick up her belongings.
“I’m so sorry,” she brushed as he bent to get her phone. “Thank you so much.”
“My pleasure,” he smiled, reaching out a hand. “John Watson.”
“Mary Morstan,” she smiled back and shook.
She was a lovely lady, with a romantic mind and such a sweet mocking mouth. Her romantic mind was like the tiny boxes, one within the other, that come from the puzzling East, however many you discover there is always one more; and her sweet mocking mouth had one kiss on it that John could never get, though there it was, perfectly conspicuous in the right-hand corner
They built a house together in Notting Hill and had children; two beautiful children. Sherlock should have known then, for two is the beginning of the end. But he stood outside their window on Christmas morning and watched Hamish Watson open his presents with chubby fingers while his sister, Alice, lay soft and warm against her mother’s shoulder.
There could not have been a lovelier sight; but there was none to see it except that lost man, a little boy still, who was staring in at the window. He had ecstasies innumerable that others could never know; but he was looking through the window at the one joy from which he was forever barred.
John looked up and saw him there and his face went so white, Sherlock feared for a moment he’d killed his only friend. But then he stood and opened the door into the cold snow, waiting for Sherlock to move from the window to the door. He did.
“You’re alive,” John said quietly, not quite believing it.
“Brilliant deduction John, you were always fast on the uptake,” Sherlock said briskly because he didn’t know what else to say.
John looked like he wanted to punch him, and if not for his small children, Sherlock was sure he would have. Instead, he snarled, “You let me believe you were dead all these years.”
“No,” Sherlock insisted, wide-eyed, because while he’d done countless horrible things, that was untrue. “I tried to tell you, on the roof.”
He watched John replay that moment on the roof, their conversation that he must have replayed a thousand times, and winced inwardly. And then John’s eyes shot open and he looked near close to tears.
“I’m an idiot,” he whispered and Sherlock grinned. “You told me the world was made of faith-
“-and to have faith, is to have wings,” they quoted together and John burst into tears, hugging Sherlock tighter than he had believed he ever could.
When he pulled back, he let his hands play in the hair of the tragic boy. John was no longer a little boy heartbroken over Sherlock; he was a grown man smiling at it all, but they were wet-eyed smiles.
Mary came over then, Alice asleep in her arms, and looked Sherlock over. “I have wanted to meet you for so long,” she said gently, watching him. Sherlock realized he had met his match, in this woman, who desired to keep his John forever.
She leaned forward and he let her kiss his cheek, baby Alice warm between them, and she smiled as she stepped back.
“Will you stay for Christmas dinner?” John asked but Sherlock shook his head.
“I have to tell Ms. Hudson,” he excused, not meeting the careful eyes of Hamish, who peeked out from behind his father’s legs. “And Lestrade.”
Mary did not move her own eyes. “Do come for lunch tomorrow then,” she asked and he nodded, unsure of himself.
He left shortly after that, heading down the snow-covered road alone. He took Mary’s kiss with him, the kiss that had hid in the corner of her mouth; the kiss that had been for no one else, Sherlock took quite easily. Funny. But she seemed satisfied.
***
Sherlock did come for Christmas lunch and, after much coaxing, Hamish agreed to sit on his lap, back warm against Sherlock’s chest. Sherlock had never held a child before, and it felt fitting that the first should be John's, born innocent and gay and perfectly heartless.
Sherlock told them about Budapest and Moscow, about New York and Paris. He censored parts, for Hamish mostly, but John understood what was left unsaid. John spoke too, of meeting Mary and a wedding in a church hall. He laughed at how he’d half expected Sherlock to burst in and stop the wedding. Sherlock did not mention that at the time he’d had his hands deep in the chest cavity of a near-dead assassin, demanding information.
Later, after Hamish moved on to play blocks and Alice had been set down in a bassinet, the adults moved to the couch. John and Sherlock faced each other, as if no time had passed, and Mary watched them carefully from a chair. She knew, in the way all good wives know, when someone meant to take her husband away. She refused to let that happen.
“I’m moving back to Baker Street,” Sherlock said and the implications were obvious.
“Who will make sure you eat?” John worried and Sherlock smiled reassuringly.
“Mrs., Hudson will check on me.”
“Mrs. Hudson can’t even make it up the stairs these days.”
“So come stay with me,” Sherlock said suddenly, in a rush, and he knew immediately it was a bit not good.
John held his hands sadly. There was a time, not long past really, where he would have dropped the world to be with Sherlock. But now Hamish played three steps away and Mary sat warm behind his back, anchoring him to the ground. He would never fly again.
“Don’t waste your fairy dust on me, Sherlock,” he said softly and it was then that Mary spoke up.
“Well, I’m sure you could come over every spring cleaning or so,” she suggested and both men turned to her as though she’d given them the world. “After all, what would the criminals of London do without Peter Pan to stop them and his Wendy to blog about it.”
John had never told her of their childhood nicknames for each other and yet she knew instinctively, as one who has grown up with fairy tales knows when they are standing before one’s own eyes.
It was then that Sherlock’s mobile buzzed and he flipped it open to read the message, eyes moving impossibly fast. “There’s been a case-“ he started, but John expression stopped him, the quick glance to his children on the floor and his wife behind him.
“There will be other cases,” he promised and John smiled ruefully.
“I know,” he said and the two men, one grown and one still clinging to childhood by the fringes, parted. John watched Sherlock walk away, receding into the streets of London until he was as small as a star. And then he closed the door.