Archive of Our Own ^beta

If it happens, it happens when they’re driving by the graffiti-covered signboard.

Usually he avoids taking cabs, they’re expensive. But it’s raining and he’s late to work and his leg aches and he doesn’t avoid the temptation as often as he should, so he clambers into the cab and stares at the back of a head and tries not to think about eighteen months ago. But Sherlock has infected his life so thoroughly that it’s impossible not to think about eighteen months ago, and he hates himself for not being able to take a cab without feeling miserable.

The man is excessively conversational and self-centered, the kind of person who speaks for the sole purpose of hearing the sound of his own voice and exactly the type of person who shouldn’t be a cabbie. He babbles about buildings and alleyways like John is some sort of tourist and John stares out his window, only half-hearing. He knows, when they round the corner, what they are coming upon. He averts his eyes every day to the point that it is automatic, but in trying to avoid thinking about it, he thinks about it. That’s how it goes. But still, John is not expecting the cabbie to gesture out the window to the 10 meter sign defaced with the words “Moriarty was Real” and have the conversation turn to conspiracy theorists as though John’s entire life is just another section on a tour of London.

“So what do you think of this Holmes bloke, hm?” The cabbie asks, but he’s not waiting for an answer and John cannot even open his mouth before the man continues. “Seems out of his mind, to me. Maybe evil, definitely manipulative. Imagine, being obsessed with people finding you intelligent. Though he must have been clever, to come up with all those crimes—”

He keeps talking but John is not listening, he forces himself to focus all his attention on the back of the cabbie’s head. His license states that his name is Stan Haverford. Stan Haverford is excessively bald.

The car continues well past the signboard, weaving through the streets, and the cabbie keeps talking, and John begins to divide the cabbie’s head up into sections by means of dotted lines, the way it is done on diagrams of cows in butcher’s shops. He picks his way through pieces marked ‘unhappy marriage’ and ‘resentful of success’ and tries to find cuts of doubt, or reason, but he can’t, probably because he’s only been drawing invisible lines and Jesus, he’s going mad.

John’s mouth twists into a smile that looks much more like a grimace as the cab pulls up to the hospital, thinking about someone who would be extremely amused by the idea of John slicing up a head.

John tips Stan Haverford generously. He gets out of the cab and walks into the surgery and goes back to trying not to think.

He delivers the eulogy without looking at anyone. That’s the way to do it, he thinks. He uses trite phrases and feels like an idiot, trying to put together everything that made Sherlock divine and explain how that made him human to people who had always regarded him as a half-mad eccentric. He stares straight ahead and talks until he can’t anymore, and that’s worse than anything.

He doesn’t say anything about Sherlock’s suicide. Sherlock’s suicide is in everything that John does, but not here. He will not talk about why Sherlock is not here. Sherlock may have died in any number of ways, John thinks, and that is how he would like to talk about him, but simultaneously, to pretend that Sherlock Holmes has been killed by something as mundane as a car accident or heart attack makes his stomach twist almost as much as the truth of the matter. But John will not do Sherlock the dishonor of acting like there are people who need to be convinced that his genius was genuine, and this is the way that he knows how to do it. He will not talk about it. Not now, not here.

When they lower the body into the ground, John doesn’t say anything. He wants to ask someone why he’s been left here like this, what would have possessed Sherlock to do such a thing, but he thinks that voicing those questions might be in bad taste. Not now, not here.

There are reporters waiting for him at the cemetery gate. John doesn’t tell them anything.

He was my best friend and I’ll always believe in him.

John stares at the words. He forgets dinner and lies on the sofa, sleeping and not sleeping.

It is astonishing how casually people talk about someone who John knows so intimately. Sherlock Holmes becomes idle chatter. He crops up at the bus stop or in a convenience store like the topic is as commonplace as a celebrity divorce. “Oh, Sherlock Holmes, I’ve heard of him, what do you think about the business?” “Frightful stuff, frightful stuff, dangerous man, really, and to think, a nutter like that was messing about in our legal system…”

It was as though he didn’t exist beyond a figment of idle minds at play, and as time passed it became almost hard to believe that once there had been more than a game of ‘real-or-not-real’, that one there had been flesh and bone and blood and a brain where now all that remained was small talk and a puzzle. And emotions—

Sometimes John wonders if Sherlock had emotions. If he felt things beyond understanding that things could be felt, if he saw feelings as more than mere tools of manipulation. The more time passed, the harder it became to tell.

Was that it? If that was it, why would you tell me? Why say anything? Why do anything at all?

The campaign spreads through London like a virus.

Here’s how it works: for two weeks, John sees it everywhere. Scribbled on subway seats, posted on flyers that are stuck everywhere from telephone poles to fast food restaurants, spray-painted in enormous letters on a signboard that he passes every day. It ceases to be a message and becomes an order, and then a trend.

Then, the backlash. Some dead men are not meant to remain martyrs. They become small talk and conspiracy theories and symbols, and that is when the sidewalks of London become a battlefield, a conversation, an argument between Richard Brook was innocent and Believe in Sherlock Holmes.

The enormous war of propaganda peaks about one month in. Fliers with faceless men in suits paper the streets until John feels like stepping outside is an act of smearing or clearing Sherlock’s name – whether he’s besmirching or glorifying it depends on the day.

Of course, like everything, that trend also fades, and this time into obscurity: probably too quickly, but John’s not one to judge. He is happy when he sees some prisoners papering over the graffitied signboard on his way home from work one evening. He stops to watch, redoubling his grip on his cane and mind wandering briefly to Stan Haverford’s head.

John stuffs his free hand into the pocket of his jacket, waiting. The advertisement they are covering the sign with is one for cigarettes. He squints at the words as they’re painted over: “Moriarty was real.”

“If it’s any comfort at all,” Lestrade says, sipping deeply from a draft, “I still believe him. Everyone that matters still believes him.” He’s wildly guilty, he’s babbling and not letting John pay for anything, and he keeps reaching forward to touch him before thinking better of it. John’s thankful for that. Small miracles.

“You know, he told me, that night,” John says, and he’s not fully aware that the thoughts had been on his mind until he’s saying them – “right after you left, the first time. He said that he didn’t care. About what people thought of him.”

“John—”

“We almost had a row over it, really,” John says. “I think he might have meant it. That. I don’t know.”

Greg’s forgotten to shave for several days now, and his shirt’s on inside out. John almost feels bad for how little attention he’s been paying him but he squeezes his eyes shut and tells himself that he’s bloody tired of taking care of anybody.

It’s drizzling out, and a “Believe in Sherlock” flyer sticks to his shoe. He doesn’t notice that he’s been treading it around until he’s back in 221B, where he takes it in both hands and rips it to pieces.

Sherlock doesn’t follow me everywhere.

The scraps flutter uselessly around the flat for weeks.

He tries not to think about it, but he has to think about it. It’s like a poison. In the army when a man was killed, his death was straightforward. Usually he’d been shot. Usually you couldn’t worry too much about it, because if you wasted too much time thinking about it, you’d be shot, and the cycle would start over, but without you.

Suicide wasn’t a surprise either. Write it off as post-traumatic stress. Talk to everyone who brings it up about what a shame it was. Don’t worry too much about it or you’ll end up in the same boat yourself. It seemed cold, and emotionless, and dreadful, but so was war, and there was nothing to be done to change that.

But now John wanders through life trying to write things off and he can’t. He doesn’t want to. He thinks ‘why’ until it barely sounds like a word.

One day when John returns home, he researches himself. He doesn’t have access to all sorts of police archives, of course, and his name is hardly the only one in the world, but he manages. He sifts through articles mentioning Sherlock as if they’re about someone else and tries to find information collected about a year or two ago. There isn’t much. He’s mentioned in an obituary. The article says that he was an army doctor, stationed in Afghanistan. Recently invalidated for a shoulder injury. The left.

“I never guess.”

John closes his laptop.

John dreams about what the pavement would have looked like if it had been raining, if it had begun pouring the moment Sherlock hit the ground. John dreams that when they pull the body away, the dry patch that was Sherlock would still be there, and John could lie in it and take the shape of it and sit up in it, getting rained on. And when John sat up Sherlock would sit up with him, and Sherlock’s body would be John’s body and John’s would be his, and they would be wrapped around each other, and John could curl up inside Sherlock’s head if he wanted, and understand everything.

But it had not rained. John wakes up alone, curled into himself, and understands nothing.

Ransacking the flat is not nearly as satisfying as he wants it to be. All he can think about the entire time is that Sherlock must have left him something, some indicator, some piece of evidence to the contrary that explains everything, that explains Moriarty and that he wasn’t a fraud and why he left John alone and why he left in the first place. Perhaps something that gave him some sort of instruction, a clue, a direction, but he can’t find anything. Everything seems undisturbed.

What begins as a frenetic scavenger hunt – pulling books from shelves and pushing around chairs and opening and closing desk drawers with slams – becomes a quiet search, methodic, almost reverent. John pushing the door to Sherlock’s room open with a quiet squeak and slowly lifting Sherlock’s shirts out of the dresser, one by one, unfolding and re-folding, not sure of what he’s looking for but looking for it.

He sits on the floor of the living room amidst the ransacked books and opens every single one, thumbing through the pages, waiting. They had a case once where there were ciphers in books. The Blind Banker, he had written about it. That was ages ago. John had barely known him. He’d been kidnaped, Sherlock had rescued him. It had all felt so surreal, like he belonged in a novel. A fairy tale.

The worst part is when he doesn’t find anything. He sits among the books and the newspapers and the empty shelves and he stands and he puts them all back, one by one, reading the spines. Sherlock read interesting books. He read books about human anatomy and brain anomalies in Schizophrenia patients and the make-up and workings of the solar system. John pauses for a moment as he slides that one into the shelf, sandwiched between a biography of John Dillinger and an encyclopedia of eyes. Sherlock didn’t know about the solar system. John wonders when he bought the book.

He visualizes, for a moment, an infuriated Sherlock, vindictive and frustrated, storming into a bookstore, looking just as out of place as ever, and buying the most complex book on space that he could find. He can see him reading it on a park bench, open flat in his lap, scarf still tied around his neck, muttering to himself and memorizing every word just to prove John wrong. Then never saying another word about it.

John stands and stares and feels lonely and wonders why he never mentioned it. Why he didn’t parade around the flat for several days talking about String Theory like he was the world’s newest and greatest expert on the subject. He’s Mr. Punch line. He will outlive God trying to have to last word.

John lies in bed that night, staring at the ceiling, and realizes that he searched all day and he didn’t find Moriarty’s key, either.

“Do you really think there is something? That can do that?” He wonders if they can tell that he’s forcing himself to sound casual.

“A computer code that can access anything? Break into anywhere?” He’s laughing. He hasn’t even answered the question and he’s laughing. “Bollocks.”

“It wouldn’t make a bad sci-fi novel, though. Aren’t you a writer? Is that one of your ideas?”

There is a Richard Brook hospital drama airing on BBC One. John doesn’t realize what it is until he is halfway through it, when the character finally appears and all of the air rushes out of his lungs. He forgets that he is eating dinner.

He hadn’t even wanted to watch it, not particularly. Being a doctor himself took the majority of the fun out of medical shows. But the remote control hadn’t been working and a plateful of takeaway was on his lap and he had no desire to move and he liked to imagine that perhaps Sherlock had taken control of the telly, wrenching the remote out of his hands like nothing had happened, like he was still here, and had demanded for an arbitrary reason that this would be what they watched. He would then lean over and eat off of John’s plate and remark loudly on the actor’s sex lives, to the point that John couldn’t follow the plot of the show anymore for laughing.

Not that John planned on admitting that to anybody.

Brook doesn’t even look like Moriarty. Not much, not really. His hair is frazzled and he has some stubble and he’s wearing glasses and scrubs, of all things. In the right light even his eyes look the wrong color. But he hadn’t met Moriarty for very long. He had seen him from a distance in a courtroom. For about five minutes in an apartment. It had been months; John can barely remember him.

Richard Brook resembles Jim Moriarty more and more the longer John watches. He’s currently playing a clumsy doctor with good intentions, but the longer he lingers on screen the more John recognizes him, the half-mad man in the Westwood suit who had strapped him to Semtex, who had seemed so—so—

Come to think of it, the most accurate word that John can think of to describe Moriarty is ‘supervillain.’ James Moriarty is larger than life. He isn’t a man at all, John thinks, gut plummeting, he’s a spider.

The first time Sherlock had ever encountered Moriarty was the night with the cabbie. The night John had met him. How convenient. There’s a name that no one says. What if it wasn’t said because no one knew it?

Sherlock had been writing the story right in front of his face.

He turns off the telly in the middle of the show’s climax and stands up abruptly, his abandoned dinner falling from his lap and onto the floor. He gets onto his knees and he cleans it, his leg aching, and hates every inch of himself.

He walks through the streets of London and everyone around him appears to be suspended in water. They’re like organs – like they’ve been cut out of a cow and labeled meticulously and now they’re making their own horrifying home in John’s fridge. He doesn’t want to look at them, so he doesn’t. He would complain about it but he’s starting to find that he has no one to talk to.

Walking with Sherlock Holmes was like looking at a battlefield. Walking without him was like seeing the remains of one. Sherlock would have been able to see every embezzler and adulterer that crossed their path and say what they had for breakfast – not that anyone other than the man himself could verify these claims. But John believed him, because he was amazing. And when you meet someone amazing, you are supposed to take them on faith. And Sherlock was the brand of genius who lacked humility, who craved for you to fawn over his greatness, who expected it. Sherlock sees through everything and everyone within seconds.

Perhaps Sherlock had been ignorant to the fact that he might have been hurting people. Had he been hurting people. He hadn’t been hurting people, anyway. They’re not even people. They’re organs. They’re unnecessary organs. London has appendicitis and it isn’t up to John to cure it. Maybe he’ll put on his butcher’s cap. Play at consulting detective for a while.

He tries. The battlefield’s gone; he’s been invalidated. All he sees are ghosts.

When he wakes up in the middle of the night again, he creeps down the stairs even though there is no one around to hear him. He feels guilty, booting up his laptop. He checks over his shoulder twice, because a small part of him is convinced that he will find Sherlock standing there, watching him, hurt and ashamed and so very, solidly real—

He is not there. Naturally he is not there. Carefully, John opens his web browser and googles “How to tell if someone has been lying to you.” The room is lit by only the light of the laptop screen, which emits a small blue glow around the edges that hurts John’s eyes. He scans quickly through the results and realizes that they won’t be much help, as all of the articles seem to be focused around body language. It’s too late for that, and Sherlock was probably exquisitely in control of his body language anyway.

John realizes what he is doing and closes his laptop at once, disgusted with himself.

He starts dating again.

He’s not entirely positive about why he stopped dating, actually, but he doesn’t plan on putting that much thought into it. He meets this one in the library, of all places, returning the overdue books of a man that he knew once. The fees are through the roof and he’s simply sliding them onto the return desk, hoping no one will notice, when she walks up to him and asks how he is.

It’s at this moment that John realizes that she isn’t asking him this out of sympathy: no one has been, not for months. The knowledge that the world doesn’t associate John with Sherlock as much as he thought they did takes an enormous weight off his shoulders. Not everyone sees John’s and Sherlock’s atoms side-by-side. They aren’t still tied inexplicably together by handcuffs. Sherlock, like the propaganda from London’s streets, will eventually disappear.

Maybe he doesn’t even have to think about what’s real anymore.

He and Kerry go to an Italian restaurant that John has never been to and talk about mundane things, about her. She worked for an aquarium for a long time; she took care of the seals. John finds that he can’t stop checking his phone for texts he’s not being sent, and finally he turns it off and slips it into his pocket.

They’re laughing about television shows when she finally comes up with it, and it’s the relief he feels when he hears her ask that makes John realize that he’s been waiting for the question all night.

“Are you that bloke who used to run around with Sherlock Holmes?”

John pauses in eating his parmesan. He contemplates the question for the moment, and then he tells her, “No.”

People die, but atoms don’t. As Sherlock decomposes six feet under and from everyone’s memory, his atoms are spreading out to everywhere, and John leaves Kerry at her doorstep wondering if any of Sherlock’s atoms are hovering around in him.

John goes to the grave to be closer to him. He doesn’t go often, he’s not sentimental like that, Sherlock wouldn’t have wanted it. But at this point he’s not sure if he has any idea about what Sherlock really would have wanted.

It’s a short walk through the cemetery. Easy, familiar. He looks over his shoulder before he starts speaking to make sure that nobody is there.

“I don’t care,” he says quietly, unsure of what to do with his hands. “If you—if you were a magician, or a genius, or neither, I—” He coughs. A small voice at the back of his head asks him what he’s doing talking nonsense to a headstone, but John suppresses it because he has to talk to someone. “You… you changed my life. Either way. You should know that, and I—” He steps closer and lowers his voice, as if he is still here, as if he’s drawing himself close to explain the important part, signifying that these are the words that Sherlock must strain to hear and commit to memory. “I’m sorry,” he says, brushing his fingers against the headstone as if he were perhaps touching his shoulder, “I just, I—I have to stop pretending that you’re going to come out of the woodwork and explain everything like you used to.”

He almost expects, right then, for Sherlock to fall out of a tree and explain everything like he used to. But he doesn’t. Of course he doesn’t.

John zips up his jacket and turns around to start walking home.

Perhaps he should be relieved. Thankful, even. Sherlock had never put him in any real danger.

People don’t have enemies. Not in real life.

Sherlock had been a character. He’d known it from the start, really: life with Sherlock, while not ‘good,’ exactly, had always been too good to be true.

What do people have, then? In their ‘real lives.’

John really should have seen it coming.

Friends.

Perhaps Sherlock Holmes had been trying to make friends.

When Sherlock was not dead:

John would walk into the flat smelling smoke and smile against his better judgment, jogging up seventeen steps and finding himself surprised when he realized that the source of the smoke was, for once, the kitchen stove.

“What are you doing?” He is incredulous and surprised and biting his lips and trying not to laugh and Sherlock barely takes notice. He’s flapping at the smoke like an oversize bird readying itself for takeoff and still wearing his dressing gown.

“Don’t be tedious, John, what does it look like?” Sherlock peers into the pot with the air of looking at a dangerous experiment. “I’m cooking.”

“Cooking what, exactly?”

“I’m attempting pasta,” he says, so seriously that John doesn’t know whether he wants to roll his eyes at Sherlock or hug him. “You’ve been craving it. But it’s not behaving.”

The sentence is so easy and small that it is practically thrown away and swept under the carpet unnoticed, like everything else. But John’s ears prick to it and he is saying “How did you—” before he can even think about it. Asking Sherlock ‘how’ is automatic. It’s part of their never-ending back-and-forth, where Sherlock demonstrates genius and John asks about it and Sherlock explains with a smile on his face how the machine works while pretending that it’s all painfully boring for him. John asks ‘how’ because it’s part of their pattern and patterns are familiar and half the fun for Sherlock is impressing people. He asks how, instead of why, because asking ‘why’ might break what they have and what if he’s wrong and now’s not the right moment and honestly? John had thought that perhaps it would only have been a matter of time.

“Obvious. It’s half the reason why you’ve been wanting to go to Harry’s, which is ridiculous. It makes much more sense for you to stay here.”

“But how can you mess up pasta?” he says, and they bicker about it for another ten minutes and decide to go to Angelo’s and Sherlock actually eats this time, and they drink wine and can’t stop laughing and are not a couple and John sits there with his heartbeat in his ears saying Say it, say it, say it.

He had wanted to say it. To tell him. Not yet, not now, he didn’t even think about it much, but now that he looks back at it he realizes that he thought about it always, that he had wanted to wind his hands into Sherlock’s hair and say it over and over until whispers turned to moans and Sherlock was bent backwards over the kitchen table and he tries not to think about it. About any of it. He doesn’t like regretting it and he doesn’t like staring at that book on the shelf about the solar system wondering about when Sherlock bought it. Wondering if he bought it before he knew John. If Sherlock had, in fact, known everything there was to know about the cosmos.

He doesn’t like thinking about it because he doesn’t like spending the rest of his evening asking himself if all those things weren’t real, either.

Harry takes to inviting him over for dinner every Sunday, and it’s dreadful, but John goes. Routine, apparently, is good for him. They sit there silently for weeks eating terrible food and making the occasional snatches of small talk when Harry finally caves to either curiosity or cruelty, John isn’t sure which.

“You haven’t mentioned Sherlock in a while.” She focuses intently on her plate. She is trying so hard to sound innocent that John almost takes pity on her, and he almost overturns the table in order to slap her across the face. “Has the whole business calmed down, then? Are you… are you—”

“He was a liar,” John says shortly, stabbing at his steak. He can’t bear hearing Harry say the words ‘moving on.’ He even hates her thinking them. Death is more complicated than ‘moving on’, and just because Sherlock Holmes is old news to the media doesn’t mean that he can be forgotten like the mildly interesting magazine story that you flipped through the week he committed suicide. “Either he lied to me from the start or he lied to me on the rooftop. Suppose it doesn’t really make a difference.”

The steak is so tough that chewing it is a battle in itself. He feels like a fool and he’s furious. “It’s not like I’m ever going to know, anyway.”

He rejects Harry’s next dinner invitation, and all the ones that follow until eventually they stop coming altogether.

He keeps up with the Richard Brook reruns. He doesn’t know how, or why, but whenever he turns on the telly they seem to be on and he never bothers to change the channel. And no one else watches them, that’s something. At least, from what he can gather. So he sits and he watches and it feels like a quiet bridge from the past to the future, him and Richard Brook and Sherlock and nobody else sneaking into their lives, listening.

A knock at the door. It sounds vaguely familiar; the way people recognize songs they used to hum but never knew the lyrics to.

“John.”

Everything around him evaporates. “No.”

Him. Here. Him. He lied about that too, didn’t he? All his blood on the pavement. He was never going to forgive him.

His knees feel like water. Everything feels like water. Suspended in water. A diagram of a cut-up bull on a butcher’s wall. John’s pieces are floating out everywhere. His atoms. Sherlock’s atoms. He can’t think. He’s barely thinking. Sherlock’s talking. His voice fills the room like sound is solid.

“How—” Don’t say how. It’s amazing how much he’s yearning to slip back into the automatic. He’s sloshing through seawater trying to keep up with Sherlock. Again. But it’s not familiar, it’s like drowning, the smell of the salt is burning his nose.

“How? Aren’t you listening?” And he’s off again, swift and excited by his own genius, caught up in his own story. He’s so excited by his own story. He’s enamored by storytelling. He looks like a hologram. Was this supposed to be the climax? The third act twist?

He looks just like himself and nothing like himself, like Richard Brook as Jim Moriarty. Sherlock’s a character. Life with Sherlock had always been too fantastic to have been any more than a fantasy. John was just fool enough to be taken in.

He can’t breathe. He’s clutching at things. His leg hurts. Sherlock storming around the flat as though nothing has changed. Why did he tell him at all?

“So clearly the only way for me to outsmart Moriarty was to pretend to— John?”

There are words in his mouth. He can say them. He’s spent so long not talking about Sherlock that the power of it sets him off-balance again.

“You just expect me to believe you?” He reaches idly for the back of a chair to support himself and he straightens, watching Sherlock stand there in his clean suit acting as if John wouldn’t have questions. “You just expect me to stand here and swallow your—your cock-and-bull story about Moriarty while I was left here thinking that you—you—” Thinking what? What did he think? Despite everything seeing Sherlock again is like seeing the sun. Simultaneously he wants to extinguish it.

Sherlock’s face breaks. He looks as though someone he once knew had died, and he is only just now finding out about it. “No, listen to me.” He strides forward with his arms outstretched. And even the king began to wonder. “You have to listen to me.” Moriarty is playing with your mind, too. Can’t you see what’s going on?

“You did this to me,” John hisses, “even if you’re telling the truth, you left, and you—” His voice catches and he clenches his left hand.

He’s enveloped. He’s swallowed. His weight is sagging into Sherlock and he’s hugging him, they haven’t hugged before. He hates him, he hates him.

“I’m real.”

John is so used to avoiding Sherlock’s memory that for the first few days he forgets that anything has changed. His gaze skips over Sherlock’s chair and he prepares himself one cup of tea and talks to himself absent-mindedly as he butters his toast, and then he’s jumping out of his skin, seeing ghosts in his peripheral vision.

Whether Sherlock has noticed this or is simply growing more comfortable in the flat, he grows slowly noisier. He ruffles his newspaper more than necessary and makes rackets wherever he walks and causes small explosions in the kitchen at four in the morning. Or maybe this is just how it always was. Sherlock had been hell to live with.

Sherlock says nothing about the snapped bow of his violin, but he buys himself a new one, and soon John is serenaded by smooth scales and tuneless melodies that he hates himself for forgetting but is happier than he should be about finally being able to hear them again.

He keeps telling himself he’s not a fraud, he’s not a fraud, you should have trusted him, but he still can’t bring himself to believe it.

When they start going to crime scenes again, John watches him like an accusation.

Sherlock doesn’t look real. He is too thin and his cheeks are hollow and he is so pale he’s half-phantom. He whirls around the room with more aggression than grace and delivers his deductions like he’s reading off a news report. He yells at no one, and when he leaves, John lingers behind, staring at the body, picking it apart, looking closely at the shoes and the gloves and the jacket before heaving a sigh and going. He hasn’t said anything. Lestrade opens his mouth to say something, but John brushes past him and exits the room quickly because nothing is wrong.

Sherlock waits for him at the bottom of the staircase, and for the second time in his life, he looks as though he has no idea what to say.

In the cab on the way home, he ties and re-ties his scarf and refuses to look in John’s direction.

Please don’t feel obliged to tell me that was remarkable or amazing; John’s expressed that thought in every possible variant available to the English language.

“And he had a metro ticket, in his pocket,” he finally snaps out, brandishing it between his fingers as proof, as evidence, almost waving it in John’s face but restraining himself because he has to restrain himself. “I nicked it when they were looking at his shoes. Clearly he’s from out-of-town, but the ticket didn’t put him at a station anywhere near where his body was found. And look at the time,” he leans closer, holding the ticket out for John to see. He glances at it, face impassive, and Sherlock falters for a moment. “So I—I was thinking we—We’ve obviously ought to go to the station.”

John nods tightly. “You can go. My leg hurts. I think I better be getting home.”

The Richard Brook reruns are still showing. John doesn’t watch them, but he does turn the telly on, once, just to check. Brook, he realizes, is perpetually absent from the opening credits. He does not put that much thought into what this means.

When word gets out that the blogger detective is back from the dead – and word gets out, it always does – Sherlock is once again the center of attention.

The clients come rushing in again. Sherlock rejects almost all of them but deduces every fact he can about them at top speed upon their entering, trying not to look hopefully in John’s direction but looking anyway. John pretends not to notice. He apologizes on Sherlock’s behalf, or ignores them altogether. He prepares tea or does paperwork for the surgery.

Everyone is so proud of themselves, too. “That Sherlock bloke, I knew he was for real.” John hears it everywhere. There is even a small resurgence of the flyer campaign. John hates it. He hates everyone parading about with it as though Sherlock been nothing more than an idea, a casual argument. He hates that, for them, Sherlock had never died. He’d merely disappeared, and now he’s back again, for their entertainment. ‘I believed him, I believed him.’ The last thing he needs is a reminder that half of London had had faith in his best friend when he hadn’t. He tears one off of their door one morning, crumpling it up and hurling it against the wall of the kitchen. It’s hugely unsatisfying. He kicks it under the table and leaves for work.

He gets home and his shoulders hurt and he’s forgotten about it, and Sherlock is peering into his microscope. The flyer is gone.

“I don’t care, you know,” he says, twiddling the knob on the side, “about anyone. What they thought of me. Think of me.”

“What do you care about, then?” John yawns and leans against the doorframe. “Lestrade inviting you to crime scenes again?”

Sherlock looks at John with widened eyes and he doesn’t need to say anything. John’s breath catches briefly in his throat.

John comes back from Tesco with the shopping to find Sherlock in the middle of a wrestling match with a mannequin. John doesn’t ask, merely drops the bags onto the table and counter and begins loading things into the fridge. A gallon of milk is already there. He’s not used to that, suddenly the act of opening the fridge feels as foreign as opening a portal to another universe.

“You went shopping?”

Sherlock doesn’t say anything. He drops the mannequin onto the sofa and begins scribbling things in a notebook. John’s not positive Sherlock has heard him, but he assumes so.

“It’s skim.”

“Yes, well,” Sherlock says, glancing up quickly with a light smile creasing his face, “you’re getting fat.”

And they’re both laughing, and it’s the first time that John has laughed since Sherlock has come back and he’s not used to someone else having done the shopping, not even before Sherlock jumped off a building, and every inch of himself is throbbing with the urge to hold Sherlock and say “yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.”

Sherlock’s chuckle is so deep and genuine and it continues on for a little after John has stopped, and he just listens to it, savoring it, realizing that this was what he had been missing and all he had been waiting for.

Sherlock does not comment on the fact that John begins to come to every crime scene again, but he notices. He notices and John notices and Lestrade notices, and Lestrade smiles when John cannot help but say “fantastic” at one of Sherlock’s deductions because he is relieved by the prospect of things returning to the way they were.

It’s the sixth time they make it back to 221B past midnight that month, and Sarah has already scolded John for all the days that he’s been taking off from the surgery and John stands in the living room watching Sherlock step in and out of shadows. He is muttering to himself. To the room. He’d taken to doing this, hoping John was listening, purposefully not looking John’s way so it looks almost absent-minded.

“And if you looked at the ring, you would have noticed that the stains on the edges suggest that—”

“Sherlock, you—you don’t have to do that anymore.” He’s speaking too quietly and Sherlock steps closer, so light on his feet - he wears awfully nice shoes for running around London - gently swaying.

“Do what?”

“You—explaining. Explaining everything. Everything extra. I, um—you just, I trus—”

But Sherlock knows because he always knows everything, and his hand slides hesitantly around John’s waist because John’s never going to ask ‘how’ again, he’s never going to need to, he’s only—

Kissing Sherlock is the only possible way to explain how much he missed him. He weaves his hands automatically into Sherlock’s hair and fists at the curls, falling backward, pulling him closer, trying to say please, please, this is what I wanted, I’m sorry, when you were dead it was all I could do, imagine this, I had to stop believing you because it was the only way I could stop missing you, it was the only way to convince myself you would do that to me, and you were real, you were too real, you were too fantastic to be real and I don’t deserve you—

They stumble, somehow, into Sherlock’s bedroom, and it’s overwhelming, because everything to do with Sherlock is overwhelming. It smells like him. John remembers the day he locked this door.

Sherlock pulls John to the bed and this is all happening at once, isn’t it, and it was only a matter of time and he’s curious, he’s so curious, John can taste the curiosity in his mouth and the tilt of his head and God, Sherlock’s hands are gripping his sides like John is something that will slip away from him. He worries John’s lower lip between his own, humming slightly, intrigued and pleased with himself. The prat’s so pleased with himself. But John’s doing nothing but encouraging him, urging him on, because he always urges him on, this time with his fingers curling around the bottom of Sherlock’s shirt, knuckles grazing hot skin, asking to be closer, closer.

John had never planned on this, not like this, not this way, he had never thought about it, never allowed himself to think about it. Here and there, maybe. Before everything. But when he was gone he couldn’t bear to think about it, because it meant thinking about something he could never have.

And here it was. John’s cock in Sherlock’s hand and Sherlock mouthing against his earlobe, sucking and pulling and kissing down his jaw and John groans, clutching at Sherlock’s back and grinding down hard against him. Sherlock sounds like he’s saying things, whispering small noises against John’s neck and that sets John babbling, thrusting up into Sherlock’s hand and saying I missed you, I missed you between a long series of ‘oh God’s.

And when John comes, he sobs out I’m sorry, I’m so sorry , and Sherlock holds him stares at him with a look of perplexed wonder on his face.

“I should have believed you,” John says, unable to look Sherlock in the eye, shaking his head and shaking in general, wanting to collapse bonelessly onto Sherlock’s chest but not allowing himself too. “God, I’m terrible, I’m sorry—”

Sherlock leans forward and kisses John to shut up him, small and chaste and nervous, and then backs away and looks at him warily as if making sure that it was the right thing to do.

“I’m the one who abandoned you,” he says, and he wants to say sorry but he doesn’t know how, so he brushes his fingers through John’s soft blonde hair and presses John’s head to his heartbeat so he can hear it.

“You got rid of my book on the solar system.”

“Sorry to inconvenience you.”

“I wasn’t finished with it.”

“No one minds if you’re not an expert on the cosmos, Sherlock,” John says, but he only says it to distract himself from the fact that he’s so happy.

“I’m sorry.”

He had been trying to say it for weeks. John had watched it happen, the words hovering on the edge of his lips in the morning and at crime scenes and in the backs of cabs. He didn’t think it would actually happen, but didn’t mind, because all he really needed was the sight of Sherlock trying.

John is writing his first blog entry in ages, or trying to. He has been trying and failing to come up with an opening sentence for over an hour. He can’t even begin to explain all that he needs to say, all that he wants to say, all that he is obligated to say, if anything. Sherlock is in the kitchen, busying himself with something. They like to pretend that they are not always watching each other.

“What for?” John asks, giving up on the blog for now and firmly shutting his laptop. “Have you destroyed dinner again?”

Sherlock watches John bemusedly for a moment, piecing him together. John focuses intently on the bookshelf.

“You guessed correctly,” Sherlock says, even though he hadn’t. John rolls his eyes, trying and failing to stop himself from smiling.

“I never guess.”