Chapter Text
In the end, it was child’s play.
Sherlock trailed the security team of observation deck three. He watched from an adjacent hallway as they took up posts around the door, facing outward in every direction and placing distance between each other, to prevent any enemy from diving right into the middle of their formation and taking them all apart within a few moments.
They weren’t completely terrible at their jobs. Annoying.
Sherlock could not trust that these men did not have orders to shoot John, were he to show his face. This Captain was . . . human, and thus had seen the truth in his eyes, but humans reacted in odd ways when stressed, and Sherlock expected that Kirk would be highly stressed now, with his ship out of commission and an unknown portion of his crew scattered over light years of space. It wasn’t out of the range of possibility that Captain Kirk would opt to use John to control him, as Marcus had.
So, he would move fast. They wouldn’t have time to react.
Sherlock crouched down, distributing his weight equally between his hands and feet. He took several deep breaths, and moved.
-
The door wouldn’t open. John had tried speaking to it, walking toward it as if he expected it to open, and – when he lost his temper – throwing a chair and shouting obscenities. It was just like those damned chip and pin machines back home.
Oh, how John had hated trying to use those things, and now doors were just as bad.
John froze as he heard noise outside.
Shouting.
Fighting.
Great.
John moved toward the door, grabbing a chair along the way and crouching down, pressing himself against the wall next to the door, holding the chair in one hand as he waited. John could hear impacts as bodies hit the floor, and something that sounded . . . strange. Like someone’s idea of what a gun would sound like in three thousand years or so.
Hopefully that was Sherlock on the other side of the door, and he hadn’t been shot. The weapons of this time probably left behind wounds that John wouldn’t know how to treat. Sherlock had better not get shot after all this. He couldn’t handle this alone. Sherlock knew this time, and he was meant to be there, always, with his insane requests and maddening experiments and his little smiles and . . . the fighting had stopped.
John didn’t have any idea how long he waited for the door to open with a neat little swishing noise. The shadow of the man on the other side was as recognizable to John as his face in the mirror in the mornings.
It opened easily for Sherlock. Bastard. For half a moment, John considered throwing the chair on principle before he stepped into the doorframe, letting his eyes roam up and down the body of the man that he loved.
John missed the curls. Sherlock looked too . . . severe without them. He looked thinner too, and stronger somehow, like there was more muscle mass packed into a smaller space.
“No coat?” John asked. He remembered how must Sherlock had adored his coat, lovingly sending it to the dry cleaners whenever it got a stain, and refusing to work until it was back. It had usually been John’s job to pick up the coat, and bring it back to the flat. Sherlock was always waiting, even though he liked to act like he hadn’t even noticed that the coat was gone at all.
“They didn’t exactly give me the option to stop and find a coat.” Sherlock said with a smile, taking a tony step forward before he stopped himself, staring cautiously at John. He had always been afraid of rejection.
John held his arms open, and Sherlock came to him, tucking that lanky frame neatly into John’s arms, and taking a slow, shuddery breath.
“I found you.” Sherlock whispered, closing his eyes and breathing in the scent that was John as the smaller man wrapped his arms around his idiot detective.
They stood like that for a long time.