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Sherlock was quiet, which John had expected, had braced himself for, but even after all these years, John hated Sherlock’s quiet. John knew his shoulder was supposed to ache in rain or damp or something like that, but his shoulder really ached when Sherlock got quiet and John moved tensely, stiffly, around the flat, trying to think of ways to shake Sherlock out of it.
And John had got used to the flat never being quiet. For so many years now there had been Oliver, and neither Oliver nor Sherlock ever stopped talking, and so John had seldom been able to get words in edgewise. Oliver and Sherlock talked to each other in torrents as they experimented at the kitchen table together, or they shouted at each other in magnificent volcanic explosions of temper when they disagreed, and either way John sat in his chair and drank tea and listened to one of them complain about the other and then magically twenty minutes later they would be thick as thieves again and completely incomprehensible to anyone who wasn’t the two of them.
John loved Oliver with a depth and a fierceness he would never have been able to predict before being presented with a child, but Sherlock loved Oliver differently, loved Oliver with the reckless absoluteness with which Sherlock did everything, which meant that Sherlock, in a flat without Oliver, couldn’t even bring himself to indulge in a proper sulk. He sat listlessly by the window with his violin in his lap and John, who had expected all of this, hunted through the boxes of tea in their cupboard for the surprise he’d hidden there.
“Sherlock,” he said, once he’d retrieved it, walking out into the sitting room. Which looked alarmingly empty because Oliver had taken most of the stuff to school with him, which John had said was unnecessary. Sherlock had said nothing at all about it because Sherlock had disagreed with the entire enterprise of Oliver At School and had refused to acknowledge that it was happening. John had half-feared that Sherlock wouldn’t even go with them to Eton, but he had. And then John had half-feared that Sherlock would sneer about everything at Eton and Oliver would roll his eyes and ignore him because Oliver was even better at ignoring Sherlock when Sherlock was being ridiculous than John was. But instead Sherlock had said nothing and had never taken his eyes off of Oliver, staring at him as if he had to get his fill for all of the days looming ahead when he wasn’t going to see him, and that had been the worst thing of all. John could tell that even Oliver had thought that, saying, awkwardly, something about the experiment he’d left in the fridge and what Sherlock’s instructions were on that point, and instead of saying, impatiently, Of course I know all that already, why are you being repetitious and dull? Sherlock had stared at him in silent wonderment and just nodded. And John had buried him in a bear hug and ruffled a kiss over his dark curls, which Oliver generally consented to when it was John because the tendency of Sherlock Holmeses to indulge John in all things was apparently genetic, and Sherlock had not said a word, not a single word, not all the way back from Eton.
“I don’t want any tea,” Sherlock said now, which were not bad as first words breaking a silence went.
“Good, because I didn’t make any.”
Sherlock was surprised enough to look away from the window and up at John. “You were rifling through the cupboards.”
“Because I was looking for this.” He handed cross the heavily folded piece of paper.
“Do you make a habit of filing papers in the tea cupboard?”
“Only when I’m trying to hide them, because God forbid either one of you make tea.”
Sherlock was opening the piece of paper. “This is a confirmation for plane tickets.”
“Yes.”
“To Slovenia.”
“Yes.”
Sherlock lifted his eyebrows at John. “You think we’re going to Slovenia tonight?”
“I know we’re going to Slovenia tonight.”
Sherlock narrowed his eyes. “You’re pleased with yourself.”
“Because I’ve got a surprise for you.”
“A surprise for me? In Slovenia?”
“You’re going to love it.”
“I don’t want to go to Slovenia.”
“Which is exactly why we’re going. Here.” John handed across another piece of paper.
Sherlock read the note with a snort. Dad—Go to Slovenia. Love, O. “You enlisted Oliver, did you?”
“I said, correctly, that we haven’t been on holiday in a while. And I told him what the surprise was and he agreed that you’d love it, and he is you so he can’t possibly be wrong. So. Let’s go.”
“John,” said Sherlock, looking at the pieces of paper in his hands, and took a deep breath.
John was adept at reading all of the words that Sherlock Holmes could put into a deep breath. “I know,” he said, and leaned forward and pressed a kiss to the top of Sherlock’s head, where the hair was a bit grayer but just as thick as Oliver’s, and left his mouth resting there. “Listen to me. I promised him I wouldn’t let you ring him unless you were ringing him from the airport. So come on, let’s go, I’ve already packed for us.”
After a moment of silence, Sherlock drew back. “You packed for us?”
“I’ve been packing for days. You weren’t taking any notice of what I was packing, remember?”
***
Oliver told John that he wanted to go to Eton before he said anything about it to Sherlock. Sherlock was at the Met, doing paperwork and texting John and Oliver every twenty seconds about how boring the paperwork was, and Oliver was in the middle of the sitting room, with every single one of John’s old medical books open at once, working on his lifelong project of updating the information in them, and he said it in that abrupt way with which both Sherlock and Oliver delivered information near and dear to their hearts.
“I want to go to Eton,” he said.
And John, in the middle of making a dinner that he knew he would have to coax both Sherlock and Oliver to eat, took a moment to look at the carrot he was chopping, and then walked into the sitting room, still clutching the carrot, and sat in Sherlock’s chair because it gave him the better angle on Oliver, who was making notes in a book and not looking at him at all.
John did not ask why, because the why to him was obvious. Oliver had a voracious curiosity, and all of Oliver’s classmates were chattering about going off to school, and John had been going through bank statements with a growing sense of dread, worrying about the cost of the education that Oliver might want and that he deserved. They had never given a second thought to money before in the flat, because they made a decent amount of it and had for years, but they hadn’t been saving for this and John knew that they should have been, it was an oversight he was kicking himself for. Sherlock had noticed John’s preoccupation with the finances and had been perplexed by it, and John, not wanting to have the conversation before it was necessary, had muttered something about retirement, which had made Sherlock double over with laughter before taking John to bed to prove they weren’t nearly old enough to think about retirement and anyway when they did retire Sherlock was going to make an income by selling honey.
John looked at Oliver, at his dark head bent over his books, and wondered when he’d grown up and how all of that time had suddenly vanished and how much more quickly everything else would keep flying by. He thought of the conversation he was going to have to have with Sherlock.
“Okay,” he said, hearing how strange his voice sounded.
If Oliver noticed—and Oliver noticed everything—he said nothing, nothing until looking up at John, still sitting there with a carrot foolishly clutched in his hand, and saying, “Whatever you’re cooking, I think it’s burning.”
***
“I hate everything about Slovenia,” Sherlock announced, flatly, when they had got to the car rental agency.
“No, you don’t,” John replied, calmly. “Here. I’ll even let you drive.” He tossed Sherlock the keys.
Sherlock frowned, because he didn’t want to be appeased by that and he was. John slid into the car.
Sherlock followed suit after a moment, starting it. “Where are we going?”
“We have a hotel in Dvorska.”
“And what’s in Dvorska?”
“Not your surprise.”
Sherlock, grumbling, shifted the car into the flow of traffic. “Why would Oliver have ever thought that I would like it here?”
“There is nothing wrong with this place. It’s quite beautiful.”
“Yes. And we all know that I am quite bewitched by pristine lakes and breathtaking foliage.”
John chuckled. “You’ll like the surprise, I promise.”
“Is it a crime scene?”
“No.”
“A famous crime scene,” Sherlock clarified, in case John might be misunderstanding.
“No, it has nothing to do with crime.”
“A…murder of some sort?”
“What did I just say?”
Sherlock frowned. “I don’t like anything other than crime.”
“You like me.”
“I could have been with you in London. And I highly doubt that Ollie’s in Slovenia, since we just dropped him off at Eton, and he’s the only other thing I like.”
“You like Mrs. Hudson.”
“Oh, is she here, then?” asked Sherlock, pleasantly, and John laughed.
“I think you should trust me.”
“I do trust you. I always trust you. It should be bloody well obvious how much I trust you.” There was a moment of silence, and John knew Sherlock was thinking of Eton and that John had pushed him on the question of Eton and John thought that Sherlock blamed him for Eton and John tried to consider what to say. Then Sherlock said, “After all, I got on a plane and blindly followed you to Slovenia. You could murder me out here in the middle of nowhere and no one would know the difference.” Sherlock suddenly brightened. “Have you brought me out here to murder me?”
John looked at him dryly. “That would make you happy, would it?”
“Well, it would be clever of you, John. If I were going to be murdered, I would want to be murdered cleverly.”
“This is a morbid topic of conversation and we’re not going to talk about it anymore. And nothing about our trip to Slovenia has anything to do with crime.”
“I don’t see how I will like this,” sniffed Sherlock.
“How well do I know you by this time?”
Sherlock said nothing, which John knew was an admission.
“If I say you’re going to like something, then I know you’re going to like something. I wouldn’t make you do anything you hated.”
“Wouldn’t you?” asked Sherlock, so mildly that it sliced through the interior of the car.
***
Sherlock was in a terrible mood when he got back from New Scotland Yard, so John didn’t mention Eton. And then Sherlock was in an excellent mood the following day, so John didn’t mention Eton. He didn’t mention Eton for so long that finally Sherlock woke him up in the middle of the night and said, “What’s wrong?” Which was what Sherlock did when he wanted to have a discussion about something serious.
And John, sleepy, with his defenses down, because he had never learned how to stop this little trick of Sherlock’s from working, yawned, “Ollie wants to go to Eton.”
And then suddenly the bedroom light had been switched on and Sherlock, looking so genuinely shocked, said, “What?”
“He wants to go to Eton,” John said, waking up now. “He told me the other day. I’ve been trying to think of how to break it to you.”
Sherlock stood over the bed and stared at John. “That’s what you’ve been worrying about for the past week?”
“Yes.”
“Oh, for God’s sake, I thought it was nothing, as usual. Nothing that you’d made into something in your own mind.” Sherlock paced around the room, throwing his hands up in the air. “Like you’d shagged somebody else or something.”
John propped himself up on his elbows. “Okay. Sherlock. That wouldn’t be nothing if I’d done that.”
“But that I could understand, because I am incredibly annoying to live with and be married to and I wouldn’t blame you. But Eton.”
“We are going to talk about the fact that you think I’d be justified in cheating on you just as soon as we settle this Eton conversation,” John said.
“He’s not going to Eton,” Sherlock decided. “That’s it. That’s final. Good. Done. Good chat. Shall we move on to the shagging other people thing?”
“No. He wants to go. And I think he should go.”
John knew the instant he said it that it was the most painful thing he could ever have said to Sherlock. Had he said, as Sherlock had somehow thought, I slept with someone else, Sherlock would not have looked so utterly betrayed as he looked at that moment.
“You…” said Sherlock, and couldn’t even find the oxygen to finish the thought.
“Sherlock,” John began, reaching for him.
Sherlock wheeled out of his grasp. “You think he should go? You think he should leave us and go to that dreadful, horrid place where people are terrible and vicious and that’s what you think we should be doing to him?”
“Sherlock. It wouldn’t necessarily be like that for—”
“He’s not going. I can’t believe you ever put the thought in his head. We talked about this, about not sending him away to school.”
“I didn’t put the thought in his head,” John said, offended. “Do you think anyone can put thoughts in his head? Jesus, have you met him?”
“He isn’t going,” Sherlock said, flatly. “That’s it. That’s final.”
“Fine,” John had snapped, and turned off the light. “You’re going to tell him that.”
***
John had hoped that, in the morning, Slovenia would look better to Sherlock. But Sherlock was listless when John woke. John wasn’t sure he’d slept at all, and John had a sudden fear that taking Sherlock away from Baker Street to process everything had been a terrible misstep on his part. Sherlock needed to be busy, and John had taken him away from everything that would keep him busy, from all of the experiments and the crimes, all of it.
“Hey,” he said, by way of greeting, and Sherlock managed a smile at him from the window, and then Sherlock walked over to the bed and fell on top of him and basically devoured him.
John wasn’t sure it was sex so much as it was distraction but it was fine, he would take it, because Sherlock above him was alive and engaged and the whole thing killed quite a bit of time. And then, of course, afterward, Sherlock dropped off to sleep.
John shook his head and left him snoring in their bed while he showered. Then he left him a quick note—Fetching breakfast—before going to the dining room of the chateau they were staying in and piling a plate full of bread and cheese. He brought it all back to the room, where Sherlock was showering, so John sat at the room’s tiny desk and munched on the food.
Sherlock eventually emerged and collapsed back onto the bed and looked without interest at the food John showed him.
“No coffee?” he asked.
“I couldn’t carry it. We’ll stop on our way out.”
Sherlock nodded, looking very pliant and obliging, which Sherlock never was, and John almost suggested they have sex again to get Sherlock out of the mood he’d fallen into.
Sherlock’s mobile buzzed where he’d left it by the bed, and Sherlock looked at it. John was going to tell him that they were not flying back to London, no matter how interesting the crime was, but Sherlock smiled when he saw the text and tossed the mobile over to John.
Please don’t sulk about Slovenia. Papa was very excited about it. The toast here at breakfast wasn’t burnt; I hardly knew such a thing was possible. OWH
“He’s a brat,” John said, good-naturedly, tossing the phone back to Sherlock.
“He’s me,” said Sherlock, and his lips twitched into a smile, and John was relieved.
***
Sarah needed some help at the clinic, and John came in from a busy day of dealing with flu, to Sherlock sitting silent in a deserted sitting room.
“Where’s Ollie?” he asked.
“Molly rang with a body she thought would interest him. Angioimmunoblastic T-cell lymphoma, and you know how he is about lymphomas after that chapter in that book.”
“Ah,” said John, shrugging out of his coat and going into the kitchen to make tea, and then pausing and walking back out in the sitting room. Sherlock was just as he’d left him, silent and still. “You okay?”
“He wants to go to Eton.” Sherlock blinked at John, uncomprehending. “I…I asked him and he was definitive about it. It’s the only thing he wants. He wants it desperately. He’s read all about it. He’s done bloody research. He has the sodding schedule memorized.”
John moved into the room and sat in his chair and gave Sherlock a small, sad smile. “He’s you.”
“You knew this was coming. This is why you’ve been clucking over the bank accounts. You knew he’d want to go.”
“I knew he’d want to go somewhere. The day school is bad enough money-wise, but I suspected he’d want to go away, and if he was going to go away, I wouldn’t want him to go anywhere I didn’t think would challenge him, didn’t think would make him happy. And you went to Eton. And he has always wanted to be just like you.” The irony of it being, of course, that Oliver was just like Sherlock, and that Sherlock had invested a lot of time and effort into making sure Oliver wouldn’t be just like him.
“I hated Eton.”
“He doesn’t know that. And even if you told him that now, he wouldn’t believe it. He wouldn’t believe you weren’t the king of Eton, that you didn’t conquer every boy there and lead them all onto some sort of victory.”
“Victory over what? That doesn’t even make sense. And he knows me. And he’s clever. What would ever make him think I was the boy king of Eton?”
“Because you’re his dad and the best person to have ever walked the Earth, as far as he’s concerned. Do you really think Oliver sees you so clearly, so logically?”
“I’d rather save him from the things I hated, John.”
“He isn’t you, in a lot of little ways that add up to, I think, a lot of big ways when it comes to Eton. Did you want to go to Eton?”
“No? Yes? I don’t even remember anymore.” Sherlock sounded confused, and bewildered. John knew he hated to get things wrong, and he especially hated to get things wrong when it came to Oliver.
“If he hates it, we will bring him home. The next day, if he wants. We would never make him stay there and get over it.”
Sherlock looked scandalized. “Of course we wouldn’t.”
“Anyhow, it doesn’t matter,” John said, after a moment. “Unless you’re planning on never sleeping for the next ten years or so, I don’t see how we’d do it. Even if we sold everything we have, and I went back full-time to the clinic, I don’t know where the money would come from, even then.”
Sherlock answered with his gaze in the fireplace. “Mycroft. I’ve already asked him and he’s already agreed.”
***
Sherlock was in a better mood after the text from Oliver, and in an incredibly good mood on the way to the surprise. John drove them and Sherlock sat in the passenger seat and kept trying to guess, although his guesses all involved crimes, and John had to keep repeating, in fond exasperation, “It doesn’t have to do with crimes.”
What it did have to do with was bees. And Sherlock stood wide-eyed in front of the Apicultural Museum for one long moment when John relished the look of delighted shock in his face, and then he rushed in at a speed that would have been more appropriate on Oliver. Sherlock bypassed all of the painted beehive panels, settling instead on gobbling down the exhibits on the history of beekeeping, and then standing for a very long time in front of the observation beehive, watching the bees come and go. He was still standing there, utterly absorbed, when the nice attendant came and told them the museum was closing.
Sherlock was momentarily downcast at that, but his eyes were shining with joy when he followed John out to the car.
“How long are we here for?” he asked.
“We can come back tomorrow,” John told him, smiling, having already anticipated this.
“How did you know about this place?”
John glanced at him as he unlocked the car. Sherlock was looking at him in starry-eyed amazement, as if the sun rose and set on him, and John quite liked that look. “I read about it years ago, and I thought it might come in handy someday when you needed cheering up.”
John got in the car, and Sherlock slid in the car next to him, and his mood had shifted, from cheerful to brooding. He was quiet as they drove back to the hotel, and John kicked himself for having brought up Oliver, even obliquely.
Oliver rang them that night, and they put Sherlock’s mobile on speaker mode and placed it in between them on the bed. Oliver was full of eager chatter, disdainful of the intelligence of everybody else at the school but encouraged by the science laboratories. He sounded exactly like himself, happy and breezily confident, and Sherlock listening to him smiled and seemed better, even interjecting questions about what Oliver was saying.
Oliver, his breathless rush over, eventually asked Sherlock if he had liked the Apicultural Museum (John had always referred to it as the “bee museum,” and Oliver had always called it by its proper name, in all the planning they did).
“It was very interesting,” said Sherlock.
“Don’t let him fool you. He spent six hours watching the bees in the hives,” John said. “And then asked if we could go back tomorrow.”
“Papa doesn’t understand the genius of bees,” Sherlock informed Oliver, primly.
“I knew you would like it,” said Oliver, sounding casually pleased with himself. “I told Papa you would. Did you take notes?”
“No, Papa didn’t tell me where we were going, so I didn’t know to bring paper.”
“You didn’t bring paper? You should have just assumed,” complained Oliver.
“I’m bringing some tomorrow and I’ll take copious notes,” Sherlock promised.
“Good. I’m going to get them to build an apiary here. Uncle Mycroft says that I ought to learn to throw my name around, so I’m going to start with that.”
“Oh, God,” muttered Sherlock.
“Can you please behave yourself?” asked John, thinking it was a futile request.
“I’m going to ask nicely,” said Oliver. “Uncle Mycroft taught me exactly how.”
“You are spending absolutely no more time with your uncle Mycroft from now on,” Sherlock told the mobile, sternly.
“When do you get home?” asked Oliver, ignoring him.
“The day after tomorrow,” John answered.
“Will you come this weekend? They said that parents can, and I wanted to show you where I think the apiary would go. And the science laboratories. And my room. I’ve got my room set up beautifully, wait until you see it.”
John could just imagine the mess that Oliver had already made in the room.
Sherlock said, before John could say anything at all, “Of course we’ll come this weekend.”
“Good. I’ll ring you tomorrow night. Maybe earlier, if schools are deadly dull again.”
“Don’t be ringing people when you’re supposed to be in class, Oliver,” said John.
“Ring whenever you like,” said Sherlock, negligently.
John sighed and shook his head and said to the phone, “We love you and we miss you.”
“And we’ll take you to Slovenia at the first long break,” Sherlock added.
“Brilliant,” said Oliver, delightedly. “Love you, too. Bye.”
And then, with that, was gone.
John wanted to ask if Sherlock felt better now that Oliver sounded absolutely fine, and then thought that maybe it was worse now that Oliver sounded absolutely fine. He moved Sherlock’s mobile off the bed to the bedside table and turned on his side to regard him.
Sherlock rolled onto his side to gaze back at him, then said, “You knew this was coming. You read about an apicultural museum years ago and saved it for the trip you thought you’d bring me on when Oliver went off to school.”
“He was always going to leave sometime, Sherlock. We wouldn’t have done our jobs right if he didn’t.”
“I didn’t see it coming at all. It completely blindsided me. And look at you, so…so…fine, with all of it, as if we didn’t just leave him in the middle of a forest to fend for himself.”
John smiled a bit. “It’s a little better than that.”
“How are you doing it?” Sherlock asked, in wonder.
John looked across at him and said, honestly, “I’ve had a lot of practice. Because he’s you. He is…so exactly you. I know that he ought to be, I know that he is, but I forget that you don’t see yourself clearly enough to realize how unbelievably…You want to drink the entire world down in one enormous gulp, and he’s just like you. There will never be enough time for him to see everything that he wants to see and do everything that he wants to do. You think the world is boring and tedious, but really you love it, it’s why you’re so distraught when it disappoints you. I had so many years of watching the person I loved most in the world rush around headlong, having the time of his life doing mad, ridiculous things and grinning when I caught up with him. You ask how I can do it with him? Because I practiced for years on you.”
There was a long moment of silence.
John didn’t expect Sherlock to respond—didn’t know if Sherlock would know how to—so he said, “We’ll go back to the museum tomorrow and—”
Sherlock interrupted him with, “Thank you.” And John stopped talking and looked at him in surprise. “For everything. For me and for him. Really. Thank you.”
And Sherlock said it so seldom, and said it so seldom with so much meaning behind it, that John opened his mouth and couldn’t think of anything to say in response. He settled with, lamely, “You’re welcome.”
Sherlock beamed at him as if that had been the right response and said, “Do you think we let Mycroft spend too much time with Oliver?”
And, after a moment, John laughed.