Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

“You can enjoy the pool from 5:00 a.m. to midnight.  It’s on the ground floor to your left.  Details for all the hotel amenities are on the hotel app.  Elevators are around that corner.”  The concierge waved her hand behind them about four o’clock to their right.  “The wifi password is…”

Having gotten directions to the lifts, John was halfway there before the young lady finished her next sentence.  Dragging a wheeled case behind him and hoisting a suit carrier by his good arm, he left Sherlock and the concierge without a word.  It was unlike him not to listen for details about their stay.  Moreso, it was unlike him not to exchange parting pleasantries; in other words, to be what his mother would've considered rude. 

(But it wasn’t like he deduced the concierge’s love life out loud with ten people waiting in line behind them, like a certain partner might have done – has done - in the past.)

For not observing a traditional courtesy, he felt mom-shame from childhood replay in his head like an old telly rerun: “Manners, John Hamish!”

He turned that voice off, with enthusiasm.

John was getting faster at Taming the Shame.  It only took almost 40 years to overwrite the guilt-inducing strictures from childhood about who he was allowed to love.  Leaving the lobby without wishing someone a nice day was nothing compared to almost marrying the wrong person because the parental homunculus in his head said the one he really wanted to spend his life with didn’t have body parts compatible with permanent commitment. 

Mum had been his bedrock through a sinkhole of a childhood and, for many years, it felt like a betrayal to even come close to thinking she was wrong about anything.  Years and traumas and therapy later, John accepted the idea that she was justifying her own choices about marriage.  Eventually, he even believed it.  Loyalty and gratitude to Mum had made him a slow learner about himself, but he’d finally admitted consciously and out loud that Mum was wrong, at least in relation to her son.  

Once he figured himself out, his discovery was almost lost in an abyss without ever having been able to tell Sherlock. 

Certain things reran the near tragedy of that night for John and he hadn't yet learned to simply turn it off, like Mum's voice.  Pool stench, for one, reminded him of being on the verge of unfulfilled oblivion.

A few minutes ago, when they walked from the kerb into the shadow beneath the hotel portico, John smelled it in the artificial atmosphere ballooning out from the maw of the outer lobby doors automatically retracting to receive them.  Though very faint because of air purification systems, the musty odor from chemical-laden moisture wafting from the hallway on their left was still detectable.  Part of a brightly coloured mural of green palm trees, cyan skies, and a white sand beach could be seen giving the lie to what was really down the corridor.

Even more than the fetor of human remains decomposing in a car trunk on a tropical day, pool odor was the smell of death for John Watson.  He could feel himself standing at the edge of life, dressed for his and Sherlock’s funeral in Semtex evening wear… 

John shook himself away from the brink as he marched in the opposite direction from that fucking pool. 

Being impolite was nothing compared to losing his composure from the tang of chlorine pulling his mind back towards that awful event horizon. 

Chapter Text

Waiting in front of the lift call button, John saw Sherlock’s impassive reflection in the shiny doors as he strolled over with the room key cards in one hand and his own luggage in the other.  He stopped two paces behind John, physical space signaling he understood the need for mental space right now.  John knew that Sherlock knew what was going on inside his partner’s head.  It was a sign of trust that Sherlock had learned to give John a chance to wrestle with his thoughts without assistance.  That is, until and unless John showed signs of falling too far down a rabbit hole. 

For a fleeting moment, the slight funhouse mirror effect of the lift doors allowed John to see Sherlock’s miniscule resemblance to Mycroft.  Thank goodness the universe decided on a do-over in the looks department.  If the man he loved looked like the man who almost got his love killed – and the man who almost destroyed his love’s legacy – John wouldn’t have needed Semtex for his head to explode.

(John still felt old anger try to rise up every time he saw the berk, even after Mycroft’s reluctant apology.  John restrained himself out of respect for Greg.)

Mycroft was wrong about John from the first time they met in that 1950s gangster movie warehouse.  John didn’t miss the war.  It was familiar, but he didn’t miss it.  John didn’t long for bullets, bombs, and blood.  The thrill he got whilst dressed as a human IED at the pool wasn’t the good kind. 

The one who got off on bullets, bombs, and blood was Moriarty.

Mycroft was wrong about him too.

Sherlock hadn’t been able to resist playing the game and Mycroft, supposedly the smarter one, wasn’t above being seduced by the allure of a puzzle either.  It was the Holmes brothers’ Achilles heel.  Moriarty knew all he had to do was package his motivations into a mystery and those two geniuses would open Pandora’s box to solve it.  The intellectual elitists were so enamored with seeing a feint within a feint within a feint that they couldn’t see Moriarty as the plain and simple terrorist that he was. 

This terrorist just so happened to be a white guy in Westwood. 

To John, who had seen terrorism in a war zone where there was no posh pretense, it was obvious that Moriarty had the same goal as a guerrilla – to create chaos out of someone else’s order, which would create fear, which would create more chaos.  Upsetting the board made Moriarty feel all-powerful.  He hated the Holmes brothers because they were order personified, systemisation incorporated into their very beings with Sherlock’s mind palace and whatever the fuck Mycroft’s internal filing system was. 

The bombings had made Moriarty’s nature clear to John.  Standing next to that stinking pool in a terrorist's version of fancy dress, John could see the ultimate goal too.  It was as transparent as the water and as sharp as the odor of the chemicals that kept it that way.

At the time, John had no illusions that he personally rated high enough to be Sherlock’s heart that Moriarty claimed he was going to burn.  No, Moriarty was going to rain fire on Sherlock’s pride and joy: the profession he’d fought to create for himself, his reputation as a detective.  John was just extra petrol for that fire. 

Moriarty also wanted to incinerate society, create fear that British institutions were breaking down.  That was his way of burning the heart out of Mycroft.  Sherlock’s burning would be accelerant for that greater conflagration.

After the pool, as things spiraled towards the final confrontation, John knew with terrifying certainty that Mycroft would screw Sherlock over to take another turn in the game.  Big brother would tell himself that Sherlock could handle the next round and it would teach little brother a lesson along the way. 

Sure enough, Mycroft took Moriarty’s bait and broke his own rule about not negotiating with terrorists.  He tried to appease the bastard because he couldn’t see Moriarty for what he really was.

For someone who supposedly worried about Sherlock constantly, Mycroft fucked that one up royally.

Ding!

Even the lift agreed.

Chapter Text

When the lift doors opened, John strode to the back corner opposite Sherlock, plopped his suit carrier on top of his case, and about faced to the doors.  Better defensive position and free hands. 

Sherlock pressed a button on the panel and stepped back to let John see which one was lit.  Tenth floor.  Their room wasn’t at the top, but possibly high enough to look down on the roof of a nearby building or two, if they kept the room curtains open.  So, closed they would stay.

Because John hated roofs almost as much as pools.

Almost, but not quite.  He remembered more detail about the pool than about the roof because the brain needs proper blood flow from the heart to do things like encode memories.  Blood flow was in short supply after the roof.

(From their first week as flat mates, John kept telling Sherlock that the body is more than just transport for the brain.  It wasn’t until self-starvation during a case led to a loss of balance that led to a fall that resulted in a severe concussion which affected his mind palace for months afterward that Sherlock accepted medical fact.  Idiot.)

John didn’t have a mind palace, but he did have experience with various terrorist tactics.  Moriarty was the kind who wanted his game to end in mutual assured destruction.  His death would appear to be a noble sacrifice in order to rid the world of a scourge named Holmes.  A force of his pre-set choosing would fill in the subsequent power vacuum.  By the time of the confrontation at the pool, he’d already strategized his steps, calculated the reactions, and dismissed the unimportant elements, like pets named John Watson.

That was his mistake.  Moriarty didn’t heed the old warning “beware of the dog.”  He didn’t see Sherlock’s pet as anything other than extra leverage. 

It was fine.  It was all fine. 

John didn’t mind being considered a pet when it meant he was deemed domesticated and, therefore, underestimated.  Moriarty evidently didn’t see the wolf inside Watson, the drive to protect his pack and rip his rival’s throat out. 

And the Army had taught him how to do it professionally, how to stalk until it was time to take out the enemy.

The satisfying part, aside from the fact of Moriarty’s death, was seeing the genuinely astonished expression on the fucker’s face when John burst through the rooftop door, right before putting a bullet in that scrawny neck.  Moriarty stumbled back against an air handling unit, in shock in more ways than one, hands flailing in a useless attempt to clutch at his collar, which was instantly dyed crimson from his carotid artery spewing its contents. 

John didn’t watch the rest of the show.  He grabbed Sherlock and took advantage of the element of surprise by knocking his legs out from under him.  Of course, his nibs never knew when to stop.  Because of their relative heights, John had to stay more upright than was advisable in range of a sniper as he tried to keep Sherlock down.

That’s when John took a round in the chest.

Chapter Text

Whoosh…

Engrossed as he was in the mental replay of those events, John equated the slide of the lift doors opening with the sound of the wind across the roof of St. Bart’s.  Sherlock’s movement out of the lift pulled John out of his own head.  He realised his right fist was clenched around a phantom handgun grip. 

Sherlock turned and braced his long arm against the frame to keep the door open.  He allowed John time to gather his thoughts, then his things, and join him in the hallway before taking the lead in the walk to their room.  He’d been a lot more tolerant of John’s…pauses...since that day.

This hotel was newly remodeled, with brightly lit, off-white corridors and colorful-but-uncomplicated artwork placed at regular intervals on the walls.  If it weren’t for the carpet, John could've been back in the Reichenbach Rehabilitation Centre, where he spent some time recovering after the roof incident.  Unlike the first time in medical rehab, he wasn’t there for recovery from a penetrating gunshot wound, despite once again having been in the sights of a sniper. 

John's acting skills as a good dog must've been up to snuff (up to sniff, his cynical mind supplied), because Moriarty’s flunky didn’t take as much care with the shot setup as he should've.  Later statements by former minions under questioning by MI6 said the consulting criminal just wanted a red dot laser light show for Sherlock, to emphasise that John, Lestrade, and Mrs. Hudson could be sniped at any time.  The boss did not expect a savior to show up and Moriarty's underlings did not question the boss.

Moriarty paid for his assumption that John was the same breed as his own pets.

When he popped through the roof access door, John had no illusions about his chances of survival, but he’d given himself the best odds possible.  He took advantage of Moriarty’s hubris in the same way that Moriarty took advantage of the hubris of the Holmeses to continue the game.  Since the pool incident, he played into the ordinary bloke persona while gathering his own resources.  John used those resources to obtain up-to-date military grade ballistic shields that he wore underneath his jumper on the roof. 

The doctor accepted that, if he survived, a sniper bullet’s being stopped by material laying against his body would feel like being hit in the ribs by a sledgehammer and do the same type of damage.  He was right.  

All he could do until help arrived was lay atop of Sherlock and gasp at the git to stay down with breath he didn’t have to spare.  That’s when John’s memory got fuzzy from oxygen deprivation.

Days later, Sherlock described the emotional (yes, emotional) impact of discovering John's preparations.  Months later, he admitted to being impressed at John's cleverness, which made John feel like he'd won a Nobel Prize.  Stunned and shaken, Sherlock called Mycroft from the roof, only to find out MI6 was already well on its way to securing the sniper, getting John medical attention, and cleaning up the consulting corpse - all because of a message from John himself.  Now furious, Sherlock took John’s phone from his pocket and saw the message to Mycroft, sent seconds before his big reveal, leaving too little time to be stopped.  The text described his self-assigned mission, how he’d taken care of Lestrade and Mrs. Hudson, and provided a link to an electronic file of the intelligence he had gathered during his preparations.  Sherlock’s anger became positively stratospheric when he saw a simultaneous photo message to himself, picturing an envelope, presumably containing a hand-written explanation and just-in-case farewell, propped against the kettle in 221b. 

John couldn’t remember the first Wrath of Sherlock lecture about interference and ruining months of planning and endangering himself and others delivered on the way down the stairs whilst agents transported John in a rescue litter.  It must have been one for the ages since MI6 people still alluded to it.  Unfortunately, a second Wrath of Sherlock lecture awaited John in the hospital ward when he was transferred out of critical care, where he'd been for three days post cardiac valve surgery. 

Although the bullet didn’t penetrate John’s body armour, the force of its impact had left him with the consequences of a condition called contusio cordis, a bruised heart.

After Sherlock finished venting, John pointed out that a bruised heart was better than the broken one he would’ve had, if Sherlock had gone through with his original plan. 

Chapter Text

John stood on tenterhooks in the hotel hallway as he waited for the door to room 1042 to be unlocked.  He felt the same cold anticipation of his hospital bed almost three years ago, whilst awaiting an answer to his confession about the depth of feeling for his flat mate he’d realized at that hated pool. 

Sherlock swiped a key card.  The lock mechanism deactivated with a beep that threw John back in time.  He followed his partner across the threshold and into the past.  

      A bedside cardiac monitor punctuated John’s declaration about his heart. 

      Sherlock stared, taking his turn at standing at the edge of their lives.

      Beats counted out eternal seconds.

      Time stretched.

      John looked down at his open hand, laid out in Sherlock’s direction.

      It remained empty. 

      Maybe his heart wasn’t broken, but it would scar from having hope stripped away…

      As he began to close his fingers, longer ones covered and curled around them.  

The residual sense-memory of that warm hand pulling him back from the brink of surrender merged with the actual, grounding sensation of a warm hand on his shoulder to bring John back to the present.  He found himself standing in the middle of the hotel room, between the two beds, smiling to himself.  Before he could look up at Sherlock in gratitude, his companion rushed to the open curtains and pulled them closed.  (A rooftop was in the field of view, then.)  A lamp came on automatically, bathing the room in a soft glow.  Instead of immediately hanging his suits in the closet and indexing his socks in the dresser, Sherlock stepped over to the hotel room coffee/tea service, poured water from a bottle into two mugs, and put them in the microwave to heat.

Hold on. 

Sherlock’s considerateness, wonderful as it was, had gone way beyond the usual for helping John through one of his triggered moods.  Making tea was something he almost never could be arsed to do, even on one of John’s bad days.

“1042 means something, doesn’t it, Sherlock?”

“Yes, John.”

“A thousand days for two.”

“Obviously.” 

Sherlock pulled a small packet of Mrs. Hudson’s gingernuts from inside that TARDIS he called a coat, opened and laid them on a tray, and smiled like the cat that got the cream at John’s open-mouthed surprise.  A buzz from the microwave signaled the water was hot enough to put teabags in the mugs, which Sherlock actually did.  Whilst tea was steeping, he breezed across the room to hang his coat in the closet, pulling a draft of air from around the brewing tea and aromatic biscuits.  The familiar bouquet from home saturated John’s sense of smell in that small space.  It drowned out any lingering memories associated with pools and terrorists and roofs and foreboding.  His tension, which had started in the lobby and followed him here, evaporated.

Spurred into action, John took a turn at the closet, hanging his jacket.  He removed his shoes, shoving them between the bed and the nightstand, because a visit to A&E from tripping over footwear would definitely spoil the weekend.  Then he invaded Sherlock’s personal space to look into those mesmerizing eyes. 

“The best days of my life,” he said, the intensity of his meaning made clear in the timbre of his voice.

Sherlock gazed down at John, like he was the most precious thing ever beheld.  Then, with a sleight of hand to match his subtle mind, he made a ring appear seemingly from thin air, held between his right forefinger and thumb.  With his left hand, he took John's right, turned it over, and laid the ring in his open palm.  Sherlock continued to touch the ring, as if prepared to take back something unwanted.

That beautiful baritone said softly, like velvet, “Want to have some more?”

Leaving no doubt, John captured those elegant fingers and their contents with his own.

“Oh, God, yes,” came the breathless answer from lips that moved in for a kiss.

With a perfectly good bed at their disposal – and a spare one to sleep in – they certainly didn’t need a pool to enjoy themselves.