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It’s been months since we’ve done this. Since before the wedding. I never think of it as MY wedding. Not since before she shot him.
In the month since Sherlock’s been back from his four minute exile, he’s been practically impossible to see, bunkered down with Mycroft and working with MI6, Home Office...and I’ve been just waiting. Every day a tedium, going to work, having nightmares at night again, trying to make it work with Mary, through the tension and the anger. I wonder - often - if I love her at all anymore. If there’s even a her to love. I try to be pleasant, but I can hardly bear to be in the same room with her most of the time. I take a lot of walks. Greg and I go to the pub. I avoid her.
But finally, Sherlock’s been allowed to go home, to have a break from this hunt for Moriarty. He texted me immediately.
I’m at Baker Street. Dinner? SH
I’ll be there in an hour. JW
And now here I am at Baker Street, sprawled on the floor in front of the fire, stuffed to the gills with take away, and feeling - for the first time in forever - relaxed and happy. Sherlock’s stretched out with his back up against his chair across from me, his socked feet resting next to me, against my chair. He smiles at me.
“Glad you suggested this, Sherlock.”
“Agreed.” We stare at each other a long moment, grinning like idiots.
“I think the fire needs another log.” Sherlock jumps up and steps over my legs, throws another log on and walks into the kitchen. “Want a drink?”
“Sure, yeah. Feel like I could always use one of those these days.” My laugh is bitter, though I didn’t mean it to be.
I hear glasses clinking around. I stretch out, my back bending comfortably over the cushion of my chair. Back where it belongs. I can’t help feeling possessive over Baker Street, even though I really have no right to be anymore. It’s still home to me, more than any other place I’ve ever lived. It’s the place where I found myself again, after being lost for a long, long time.
Sherlock comes back into the sitting room with two small tumblers filled with scotch and ice, and hands me one. He sinks back down onto the floor, straightens his legs, and his feet end up against my hip, just lightly. I don’t bother to say anything, and he doesn’t move. It’s fine.
“How are things with Mary?” Sherlock takes a sip of his drink and fixes me with a questioning gaze.
“I honestly don’t want to talk about it. I don’t think it’s going to work.” I startle myself, voicing that aloud. I’ve said it to myself plenty, but saying it out loud to another person makes it a much more solid idea. “Yeah, I just...I thought I could...overlook things, but I can’t. I think about...it...all the time.”
“About what, precisely, John?” Sherlock’s swirling his ice in his glass, not looking at me.
“This.” I lean forward enough to press my fingers against his shirt, over the scar on Sherlock’s chest that my wife put there. That almost took him away from me, again.
“I’m alright. I’m here. You don’t have to…”
“I do have to. I do. You left me once, and it...it wasn’t good. And she KNEW that. She KNEW what I was without you. And she was more than willing to take you from me again. How do you...how do you forgive that? I don’t know how to forgive that. I thought I did. I thought I wanted to. But...I just can’t.” I take my hand away from Sherlock’s shirt and gulp my drink, burning and searing down my throat. “Sorry. This fun night got morbid quickly.”
Sherlock laughs, throws me that genuine smile that I sometimes feel is just for me. “Doesn’t that always happen with us? We try to have fun, and somebody dies.”
“Or abducted.” I’m laughing, too.
“Or thrown into a bonfire.” Sherlock looks at me and ticks an eyebrow up, mouth twitching.
I nearly snort scotch out of my nose. “Or tosses himself off a building.”
We’re howling with laughter, both of us doubled up, holding our stomachs. Our life is so ridiculous. God, how I have missed it. Missed him. I feel I’ve barely seen him since he got back from being gone, it’s all muddled and mixed up. Things used to be so clear, before he left, before the fall, before Mary.
I take a few deep breaths, my stomach cramping from laughter. “Fuck, I have missed you.” What I meant to say was ‘this’, but ‘you’ just comes out.
He stops chuckling, and looks at me, his mouth doing funny things that mean he can’t figure out what to say. I’m having one of those moments where I can’t stop looking at him.
Finally, he opens and closes his mouth a few times before speaking, trying to sort out whatever is going on in that big brain. “I have missed you, too, John. Very much.”
“Why did you move my chair?” All kinds of things I’ve never meant to say are just flying out of my mouth tonight. Maybe I should lay off the scotch.
“What?”
“My chair, all those months ago. Before… Why, why did you move it?” Instead of laying off, I take another big gulp of icy cold fire.
Sherlock looks away from me, can’t seem to say anything. He blinks a few times, fixes his eyes up on the mantle. “I. I couldn’t bear to see it empty. It just...it was...excruciating to look at every day.”
I expected that was the answer, but hearing him verbalize it is difficult. I remember sitting in my chair, after the fall, looking at his leather one, still rumpled, cushion crooked from the last time he had leapt out of it, and barely holding in my crushing grief. It was excruciating.
“Okay, okay. I get that. But I was HERE, Sherlock. It was you that wouldn’t talk to ME. I texted you, constantly. And you wouldn’t even reply. I called you. You wouldn’t see me, you wouldn’t talk to me.” Why is this all coming out of my mouth? We do not have these conversations, Sherlock and I. We laugh, and we make morbid jokes, and we yell at each other and fight, and get take away, and work cases and watch telly. We don’t say all these things that swim in your head at night before you fall asleep, the things that keep you from falling asleep, or wake you up, sweaty and panting.
We just don’t.
“I told you, I was on a case.” He still won’t meet my eye.
I spit out a laugh. “A case, right. Magnussen. You were using, Sherlock. And you didn’t want me to find out.”
His lips retract, teeth biting into the end of his tongue. “Well, this escalated quickly. What happened to laughing and scotch?”
“I don’t know. I just want things to be right between us, and they haven’t been since you’ve been back. Not even before Mary...did what she did. And we need to...clear the air. And I’m a little drunk now, and it feels like the time to get this shit out.” I finish my scotch in a gulp, and wiggle my glass at Sherlock. “Anymore of this?”
He waves at the kitchen, nodding. “Going to get properly pissed, John?”
“Maybe. Can I sleep it off here?”
“Of course.” Sherlock sounds slightly offended I would even ask. “There’s always a place for you here.”
“Except when you move my fucking chair out of the sitting room and fill my bedroom with boxes.” That came out MUCH more angry than it sounded in my head. I pour my drink and walk back into the sitting room, flop in my chair, sloshing a bit of scotch onto my hand. I raise my hand to my mouth to lick it off, and see Sherlock watching me. His eyes quickly dart away.
“Sherlock, I’m sorry. I don’t want to fight.”
“Nor I, John.” Sherlock’s feet tap against my ankle. He looks up at me, verdant green eyes shining.
A wave rolls over me, memories of looking into those eyes every morning over a cup of coffee, of them peering at me from behind a newspaper, watching me while I typed up the latest case, shining at me with pride when we were on a crime scene. When I knew how I felt about him, when I knew what I wanted, and I thought we had all the time in the world to get it right.
“I don’t want to go back to Mary tonight.” I slip out of my chair, back down on floor next to Sherlock, allowing my legs to rest up against his, just lightly, like it’s an accident.
“Then don’t. You should text her, though. Not make her worry.” Sherlock’s voice has gotten incrementally deeper. Why does the air in the room feel thicker?
“I will. In a bit. She’s not expecting me for a while anyway. You know...I would never...things would never have gotten serious with her if you hadn’t been gone.” I actually cannot believe I just said that. I little shiver of anxiety runs through me, and I take another drink. I have no idea what my intention is here. I didn’t tell him in three years of spending twenty four hours a day together...why would I tell him tonight?
Sherlock’s head snaps up, his eyes intense and dark, fixed on mine. “Don’t you think I know that?”
That is NOT the answer I was expecting. “What?”
“Don’t you think I blame myself every single day for leaving, and thinking you would wait? That we could have what we had? It never leaves my mind, John.” A muscle in his jaw is jumping.
“That I would wait? Wait for what? You were DEAD. YOU knew you weren’t, and apparently half of fucking London knew that, too, but I certainly fucking didn’t! I was just your best friend, and your flatmate, and your partner, but no, don’t tell John, he might cock it up! Fuck, Sherlock.” I swig my drink and glare at him.
“I...I have already apologised for that, John. I wish I had told you. I wish so, so desperately that I had told you.” His voice breaks, sounding both angry and on the verge of tears.
“Yeah, well, me too. But you didn’t. Couldn’t trust me.” I sniff, hard, one of my little tics to deal with stress. Kick at a take away container.
“I trust you more than anyone I’ve ever met. It was nothing to do with not trusting you, I promise you that. Can you just accept that I’m so very sorry? Please.” Sherlock so rarely says please. He knows exactly how it affects me, and even though I know it’s probably a bit manipulative, I can’t help but feel less angry.
My voice calmer, quieter, I say, “What *did* we have, Sherlock?”
“What do you mean?” Sherlock gives me a look that says he knows exactly what I mean. But he’s going to make me say it. Because I’m the one who’s married. I’m the one with a baby on the way. It’s got to be my choice.
“I mean…” Fuck, am I really going to say this? My eyes wander over his face. I’ve never known anyone’s face the way I know his. Every freckle, every laugh line memorised. How he has a hundred different smiles, and they all mean something radically different. How he has one that’s only for me, that no one else has ever gotten to see. The colour of his eyes when he’s angry, when it’s raining, when he’s looking at me like he wants to press me back into the floor and make me forget everything except his weight on top of me.
I take the deepest breath I can remember taking in my life, and let it out through my nose, willing myself to be calm. The magnitude of this moment is overwhelming, and once I say it, it will forever redefine us.
“I mean...we were never *just* friends. Were we, Sherlock?” I feel like my chest is squeezing my lungs shut. I can’t get a proper breath.
His eyes go incredibly soft. He moves forward, just a little, far enough that he can reach up to my face, which he does, his fingertips tracing my jaw. Oh god, I can’t breathe.
“Not since the moment I saw you.” He whispers. I’ve never heard his voice so gentle, vulnerable. We’ve never spoken to each other this way.
I try to breathe, to swallow. I close my eyes. All I can feel are his fingers on my face, now moving around to the back of my neck. “I used to think...think that we didn’t have to rush. That one day, it would just happen. That one day, we’d run into Baker Street, all high from some case, or we’d be laying on the sofa watching telly, and we’d look at each other...and we’d just know, that the moment was now. And then…”
I open my eyes, and Sherlock’s face is inches from mine, a half smile playing on his lips. His thumb is passing over the soft spot behind my ear, sending shivers down my spine. “And then, John?”
I fight to get enough breath to speak. “And then you died. And when you came back...I didn’t know how to feel. I didn’t know what to do with you, and there was Mary. I tried...on my stag night, I tried to let you know I still...but you didn’t get it.”
He laughs. “I got it, John. I knew what you were up to. But it was two days before your wedding. I wasn’t...I wasn’t going to let you ruin that. What kind of friend would I have been?”
“But now... She shot you. And I can’t forgive it. It’s different now. I can't be with her after what she did to my...you." I run my hand up his sleeve, over his shoulder, fingers in his hair. I’ve always wanted to feel his hair wrapped around my hands, always wanted to touch it this way.
He leans farther forward, the ends of our noses connecting. Oh my god. This is everything I’ve thought about for five years, and everything I’ve tried to not let myself think about. I can feel Sherlock’s breath on me, we’re breathing each other in. My skin is quivering.
“John, have you ever…” He trails off, tipping his head forward, so our foreheads are touching.
“Ever what? Thought about this? About us? Wanted this? God, all the time. I thought I already made that clear.” I draw my hand down to his waist, a place I’ve never touched him. It feels shockingly intimate, even through his shirt. I can feel his stomach muscles contracting under my palm.
“No...have you ever...done this...with a bloke?” Sherlock sounds so nervous, I have to laugh.
“Yes...Sherlock, I have.”
“But, you always said…”
“Can we have the detailed discussion about my past relationships later? You’re kind of killing the mood here.” Hand to his mouth, drawing my thumb over that lower lip. That lip that’s kissed down my whole body a hundred times in my dreams.
“Sorry.” Then he looks up, and our eyes meet. Oh god, I want this so badly. He very deliberately and slowly presses his lips to my thumb.
I tilt my head forward, pulling him to me. Our lips meet, his soft and receptive, parting mine. And in that electric moment, as my arms slide around his waist and his hands come to rest alongside my face, I see in my mind’s eye every single moment that’s defined our life together - us laughing against the wall downstairs, us running down Baker Street in the middle of the night, a thousand dinners at Angelo’s, laughing and talking, me setting a cup of tea down next to him at four am while he relentlessly works a case, him falling in slow motion before my eyes while I shout his name and try to run; him, chest wrapped in white, unconscious, and me, gripping his hand in the hospital, begging him to be alright, him sinking to the floor right here where we’re sitting, clutching my jacket, dying in front of my eyes, him shooting Magnussen in front of me before I even knew what was happening, that stupid fucking handshake on the tarmac, because if I’d let myself, I would have kissed him until he couldn’t get a breath, so I had to hold it all in until I felt like I was dying inside...all the sadness we’ve been through together, the heartbreak. And here we are, still able to laugh until our stomachs cramp, and eat in front of the fire, and be ourselves in way we never are with anyone else.
We’ve been fire tested, and we’ve made it. After all we’ve been through, here we are. Still together. And now this, this moment, our lips hungry, our bodies sinking into each other, the warmth from the fire heating us...this moment slipping in alongside all the others, defining us. The moment when we became something wholly new.
I nip at his lip with my teeth, and separate from him a bit, leaning back against my chair. But he doesn’t let me. He leans over, arms clutching at me, and lays his head against my chest. “Oh John. That was amazing.”
I laugh a little, pulling him close, smoothing his hair with my hand. “Isn’t that my line?”
He laughs, turns his face into my neck. “I want to stay like this forever.”
“Then let’s do just that. This was a long time coming, let’s just take it in.” I press my lips to his hair, breathing him in. “You’re everything to me. You know that, right? I want you to be very sure of that. I just thought before, I never said, because...I thought we had all the time in the world.”
He raises his head, looks at me with eyes wide. “Do we now, John?”
A slow smile spreads across my face. I breathe deep, nudge my lips against his again, feeling him inhale sharply. “Yeah, we do now, Sherlock. We do now.”