holmestice | Fic for tyleet27: how we swallow the sun

holmesticemods posting in

holmestice

Title: how we swallow the sun
Recipient:

tyleet27
Author:

falling_voices
Characters/Pairings: Sherlock Holmes/John Watson, Irene Adler, mention of Sebastian Moran and Mycroft Holmes.
Rating: R.
Warnings: Discussions about sex, and a couple of non-graphic mentions of murder and suicide.
Summary: Sherlock Holmes goes to pieces, and then he goes home.
Notes: The title is taken from The National’s gorgeous The Runaway.

Let’s say you’ve swallowed a bad thing, and now it’s
got its hands inside you. This is the essence of love and failure.
— Richard Silken.

2012, August, and Sherlock Holmes is a madman, entrapped in a low-ceilinged apartment in Manhattan, and he hasn’t found Irene Adler yet. August, and he is looking for the right place, for the right man, the right woman, the one who once talked with Jim Moriarty in a bar in India and then moved all the way across the world to play sniper in a swimming-pool. Sherlock only has a name and ten dollars to it, the kind that gets him into train stations but not onto trains, nor onto planes; that name finds its way into the newspapers, far too soon, and so he discards it, discards ratty jeans and t-shirts for expensive jackets, ginger sideburns, dark lenses.

He discards old apartments, seedy downtown cafés, hotel rooms starkly lit, discards violin concertos and blond dye and nail polish, discards the three weeks he spends as an assistant librarian near Central Park, the two nights he loses in the New York City Subway, close and loud and the trains rattling at his bones, stinking of sweat and liquor, discards lives upon lives upon new lives, each new name and identity fraying from him, erupting into bright short-lived fire, and fizzling out.

The newspapers come across his names far too often for comfort, too many breaks-ins and missing hard drives that attract attention, at least two unreported deaths. That summer he is always ducking out of photographs, and New York is too hot, too crowded, far too little and too much like London. New York beats a different rhythm, a scorching cadence that pounds through its avenues, its backstreets, its fire escapes. He hasn’t found Irene Adler yet; there’s a chance she doesn’t want to be found.

Sherlock Holmes happened in fractures, afterwards, dislocated body split apart on the sidewalk — had to build himself back, slowly, shaking in a room in Bruxelles afforded by Mycroft’s watchful care, rearranging his brain to fit his body around the absence of London against his shoulderblades, his back, his ribs — making categories for his organs, for his limbs. Hands, lockpicks, fingers, cigarettes, fingertips shuddering over the digital screen of a stolen phone; then legs, trousers, starched clean and impersonal, sprawled apart on an unfamiliar duvet as he came down from the high of three days’ chase and the sun in his eyes on St Bart’s rooftop and crackling static in his phone against his ear that may as well have been John’s voice.

So: Sherlock Holmes was flesh and blood, after all. Sherlock Holmes took a fall from the top of the highest building a mile around and didn’t die for a single second, but he bruised something, nonetheless.

There are things he took from that morning, and held onto; he took Moriarty’s blood and brain matter on the concrete of the rooftop, and the tinny sounds of Queen whistling through the headphones of a dead man’s phone; he took the brush of his coat’s inner lining against his ribs with his arms rising; he took John’s stuttering fingers on his wrist and John’s buckling breathy murmurs of denial. He took his name on a Le Monde headline ten hours after, in a newspaper kiosk in Paris; he took away Kitty Reilly’s jubilant column, Lestrade’s reported breakdown in the corridors of the Met, John’s tired eyes, and his mouth, dark like a bruise, in a papparazzo’s picture.

In Russia, he searches for a man throughout winter, living off stale, gas station-bought coffee and sleeping badly, only allowing himself a few hours of unconsciousness every night, passports and gun held closely to his chest, one hand curled in the filthy backpack he’s bought months ago, now, in a town north of Belgium whose name he’s forgotten, deleted, speaking stilted Flemish from a filched phrasebook. He reads Cyrillic until English words start to blur together in his head; his Russian is poor, but it improves, and he improves, as well, at detecting the footfalls outside his room’s door, disappearing in town, getting on the right train at the right moment. Springs brings him to Scotland, and he walks around Edinburgh for six hours without stopping, purging his brain clear of foreign alphabets and different vowels, rs no longer rolling in his mouth exactly right, mouth catching on his ks and cs.

Scotland is familiar, closer, warmer. Better. Ireland speaks English. Scotland reminds him of Cambridge, strangely, because it was never as sunny either here nor there as he remembers it, as he makes it out to be now, heat careening towards summer, and he secures a position as an IT assistant for two months, which — the irony does not escape him. He feels, just slightly, knocked out of his balance, as though a place so closely related to normal had become unfamiliar: he moves forwards to accommodate a body that is not there, leans towards John’s voice, John’s hand on his arm, on his back, in a way that he never did before. New York did not make surface memories of John’s laughter; India’s spices were not reminiscent of eating red roast duck curry on the couch in Baker Street; his gun in Russia did not remind him of barrelling shots through windows and John’s silhouette standing at attention in revolving police lights.

Edinburgh, golden brown and stone-walled, is abrupt and unrepentant in its dissimilarity to London, and makes John’s mislaid warmth somehow that much sharper, more cleanly defined. Sherlock, categorizing, tracing trails back up to their source, finds fragments and scraps of John in unexpected places.

In the end, the changes Irene left in John were small: one peculiar tightening of the mouth, something harried in the eyes, protests dying in his throat in Dartmoor. There is a margin of error; but Baker Street felt stifling in the weeks after the Baskerville case, as though she had taken all the oxygen out of it, had left them both reeling under the shock of her, watching each other with guarded expressions. He let Sherlock catalog the bones in his hands, his wrists: scaphoid, lunate, triquetral, pisiform, — trapezium, trapezoid, capitate, hamate; and higher up: radius, ulna, humerus. — Sherlock thought he would let him catalog all of the bones in his body, if Sherlock only asked. He didn’t, though. He didn’t ask.

Scotland turns out to be a red herring, unsurprisingly, but it contains traces, pieces of Jim Moriarty that other places, even Ireland, did not have: it gives him a name, finally, a gender, a face, as though Sebastian Moran had built himself together here, from English and Indian parts — in the same way that John has established himself back into London with a fractured shoulder and a cane and a blog, and just enough money to afford half the rent in Baker Street.

Months ago, and this is an image that lingers with Sherlock, afterwards: he fell into the Thames one night — again — and John dragged him out by the lapels of his jacket, Sherlock grinning like a lunatic and coughing up dirty water; so John bundled them both into the shower at Baker Street, leaving their soaked clothes piled and tangled on the bathroom tiles, and turned the hot water all the way on, until Sherlock’s teeth stopped chattering, and the muscles in John’s back and shoulders relaxed, slowly. They were too close, then, pressed together uncomfortably; the shower was cramped, designed for one, and they bumped elbows and bony knees, but the water darkened John’s hair, slicked Sherlock’s in black wet curls to his cheeks and neck.

John was half-hard, less, Sherlock guessed, from any kind of arousal than out of a purely physical reaction to close and wet skin; he seemed too tired to act on it, or apologize, or feel self-conscious, and Sherlock didn’t raise an eyebrow, didn’t comment, asked for the soap instead.

“Yeah,” John muttered, exhaustion cresting the corners of his eyes. “Yes, okay.”

They staggered down the corridor and tipped themselves in Sherlock’s bed — John’s was too far away, too high up the stairs, his legs too heavy to carry him there, and Sherlock didn’t care — and it swallowed them up: it felt huge, pigeon-grey, its duvet rising on either side of John until Sherlock thought that he would keep sinking, deep and blissful. Sherlock, half-blind, made a soft, panting grunt as he peeled on pyjamas, and followed, crawling underneath the mess of fabric that’d eaten John up and wrapping his body into it, a long coil of legs and wet hair; the soft, faded cotton of his t-shirt stuck slightly to his chest, in the places where the skin was still damp.

Sherlock curled into him without a moment’s single hesitation; his feet sought the warmer backs of John’s calves. John slung one arm carefully over Sherlock’s back, and touched his face — his nose, his cheek — to the side of his shoulder, breathing in: skin and soap and laundry, Sherlock thought. He didn’t quite know whether he fell asleep before John, or after — perhaps at the same time, breaths evening out in unison.

Close on six o’clock, he surfaced to find himself covered around John’s side, hand anchored over John’s hip, and John awake, uncertain of Sherlock’s awareness, breathing hot against Sherlock’s temple. It was an odd position, very near spooning — not quite, and Sherlock was radiating warmth, pressed against John’s back like an electric blanket, every single inch of him blazing warmth.

John’s mouth against Sherlock’s cheek was open and wet. He snorted, softly, as though just waking. His nose pressed in Sherlock’s hair, and he said, “Go back to sleep, Sherlock.”

2013, and January, and Sherlock, mildly drunk on the minibar of his motel room in Prague, freezing his bollocks off and half-sick with fever, hacks into John’s blog with alarming determination. He doesn’t know what he expected — isn’t quite sure what he finds, either.

John is — John, doctor, writer, blogger, Boswell, Boswell, Boswell, no longer living in Baker Street, living in some hovel closer to Barbican, and then returning, four months later, because Baker Street is home, Baker Street is homely, is golden and red and brown and sits in Sherlock’s chest as a palpable ache. John is demolishing himself out of grief. John Watson has lost his best friend eight months ago to St Bart’s rooftop; John has lost his best friend eight months ago to the London tabloids; John Watson has lost his best friend eight months ago to Kitty Reilly’s montage of a lie; and everybody knows Sherlock Holmes’ name in London — suicide and genius and fraud and criminal, caught in four words in John’s journal entries, he was my best friend, he was my best friend, he was my best friend.

He has written Sherlock’s stories. He’s writing Sherlock’s cases, old ones, ones that no one should care about, anymore, and yet, and yet, another comes up on the second day of the weekend, and Sherlock crawls across the duvet to catch at his listing laptop.

He’s dead, John writes, and Sherlock breathes through his nose, hangs his head, nearly coughs his lungs out.

John writes, this one entry five months old and private-locked, I went out with a nice girl tonight; and Sarah allowed me to take on more shifts, so. That’s good; and Saw Greg down at the pub again, we had a pint, didn’t watch the match and ended up talking about Sherlock for four hours — did Greg know about the cocaine that early on, then? I didn’t — I didn’t know, Christ, Sherlock; and he wonders what passes for loss, then, in Baker Street. Sherlock misses John in his body, deeper, in his muscles, perhaps his bones, which is the least coherent metaphor — and that is what John has done to him, has reduced him to, to, to thinking in metaphors — images and similes crowding his brain — but John’s absence, when it comes down to it, happens as a physical thing, while Sherlock’s must be shaped around familiar places, familiar objects, the kitchen in Baker Street where (allowing for time zones) John must now be making breakfast: does he make tea for two, then, or sit in Sherlock’s armchair? Does he watch evening telly explaining the deeper intricacies of EastEnders to a dead man?

Sherlock doesn’t, can’t imagine Baker Street outside of John — the coziness of the place residing less in the patterned wallpaper and bulky sofa than in his flatmate’s tendency to make tea obsessively when upset and to stitch up Sherlock’s hands at two-thirty in the morning by the light of the stove — and so it is jarring, after all, to imagine John Watson in Baker Street outside of Sherlock Holmes, outside of the familiarity and routine of eighteen months’ domesticity. It isn’t the same. Loss necessarily must be felt in two different ways, in two such disparate places as Baker Street and Prague.

There’s an incontrovertible fact: John is in Baker Street, and John is mourning, and there’s nothing Sherlock can do to change any of it, not any faster than he is already is. There’s another: John misses him, sixteen months on, and Mycroft’s carefully crafted reports that come every four months have not informed him of that fact as certainly or irrevocably as eight sparse blog entries in between two of John’s romanticised narratives of Sherlock’s old cases. There are facts in this situation, factors, features that come together and make sense, and Sherlock should not be aspiring to alter them, any more than he is capable of changing the DNA in his cells or the value of mathematics.

But John isn’t like this — isn’t like him, doesn’t think like this, in observations and categories and calculations; John is a writer, and John thinks in metaphors and colours and bright, overblown moments, fraught with emotion. And this is what John has done to him, then: that Sherlock is not thinking of metaphors but in metaphors, and that emotion (which isn’t the fever, because the fever is physical, somatic, warmth in his head and neck and shoulders, and this — isn’t), emotion, all of things, is making him hack into John’s blog, when he should, by all accounts, be avoiding coming in any kind of contact with John.

It doesn’t help, even after he has x’d out of the page and shut the laptop down. His fever spikes that night, and he vomits what little food he could ingest, hunched over the toilet seat in his cramped, bright-lit hotel bathroom. He is aware, logically, physiologically, that his symptoms have nothing to do with John and John’s fierce mourning and John’s fierce, absurd devotion; that he has taken cold from a stint at a stakeout in Vienna, a night spent shaking in an open-air train station; that his lungs are damaged, now, from cigarettes and icy air, his throat raw and red and searing hot. He falls back upon facts with gasps of relief even as he heaves from the stomach.

And yet this point in time is established: Sherlock Holmes is in Prague vomiting his guts out, eyes tearing from the effort on his muscles, from the hangover pounding in his head, and John Watson is in London, making breakfast, making tea. John is in Baker Street, and John is in London, and Sherlock is fiercely, astoundingly jealous for about half an hour, leaning against the toilet seat, blinking hazily through the strands of hair plastered to his sweaty, fever-damp skin.

Sherlock Holmes, pre-Baker Street, pre-John Watson, was a perfectly calibrated human being. He subsisted on spare, late-evening takeaway and what little sleep he happened to catch, in a dreadful dump on Montague Street; he was balanced, stable; he’d once calculated the spaces between his vital organs. He had made charts for his body. He knew himself down to the inch. He always waited for the exact right moment to start using, however recreationally — waited for the exact right moment of world he wanted to pause in all its awful, ghastly affairs, its exhaustive detail of colour and taste and smell, paralyzed and cramped, in the narrow space between his mattress and the door.

Which does not begin to explain this:

2013, a hotel room in Hollywood, ten days after Prague, and Sherlock Holmes is unravelling, unspooling, and this is the birth town of cinema except when it isn’t, it isn’t, and Sherlock Holmes isn’t a real man at all, anymore, Sherlock Holmes is fictional, a suicidal genius captured in the words in John’s blog: a consultant, a martyr, a fraud, a criminal escaping his own trial by throwing himself into the air, it’s just a magic trick.

When he is in a state like this, thinking of electricity and entropy and careening towards a crash, his skin doesn’t fit him straight, stretched too-tight over muscle and bone. His body feels two sizes too small, organs reorganizing around organs around organs. He thinks — can’t help himself, it’s strange, physicality seems to have become essential — of volcanic baths shared with John, which never happened. Kissing with their mouths open. He wants John to keep the searing marks of Sherlock’s heavy, straddling thighs on top of his, palms burning from the sides of Sherlock’s body sprawled across his.

He has to tell himself that it didn’t happen. His body tends to forget that.

“You’ve got it all backwards, darling,” Irene tells him, though, in a bar in Berlin, and spins spindly fingers around her whiskey glass. Her accent is American, her name foreign, Italian, warped around listing vowels. He’s starting to regret telling her about Prague.

By then they have been shamming as a married couple for the better part of three weeks. Irene’s hair is cut short, close to her head, black stands of hair slick and smooth against her neck and cheeks; Sherlock’s is dyed brown, to match the rims of the glasses he’s wearing, the ring on his right hand. They have never looked so alike. They have been touring Germany for weeks now, bullying their way into violin concerts and opera recitals, shoulder to shoulder, and they are draining off on one another.

He smokes, because he can, and because she does, and he takes care not to think of John. He misses London like a spare limb, and he can’t afford to think of either, London and John, John and London, both inextricably linked in his mess of a brain; it doesn’t, he’s found, come from any logical place, this awful kind of longing.

“I’m very aware of that,” he tells her, and Irene says, succinct and blunt,

“Bullshit.”

The word is well-rounded in her mouth; she should teach him how to do that. Accents he can fake tolerably well, but voices, voices are about intonation and attitude and disguise, and Irene knows how to fake herself, how to slip on new skins and new names as dresses and hairdos: Irene is too often endangering herself to be a poor actress. If she were less of one, there are even chances she would be a great deal more dead.

“When I was younger,” Irene tells him, stubbing out her cigarette, lighting another, “I used to make code, out of this, out of this,” and shows her hands on the table between them, all flash and jazz. “And — no, listen,” she tells him, cigarette drooping at the corner of her mouth, and her fingernails are cut fine and clean but not too long, her palms tender and red and her wrists long, thin: “Alphabet code, radio, morse, every cipher I could find, because I had a body and I was sixteen and I liked girls far too much for my parents’ liking, so I gave everything different names, I gave them different names, so we could talk on the phone and I would speak of eating her out with my family in the other room,” and Irene, he’s learned, left home at age twenty, disappeared from university overnight, fell in love with New York state and New York City and a girl living on twenty dollars in a garret in Brooklyn.

This — her fascination with him as it was staged by the two of them, months ago, in London, with John as their rapt, awed audience, well. Infatuation doesn’t hold up much when she knows that he drools in his sleep, that mornings find him flawed and fractured until he has taken a half-hour shower and rearranged his body around his surroundings; but he’s seen her fall in love under half an hour with a dark-skinned, dark-eyed cellist in one orchestra in Dresden. It was a physical thing, gravitational and glaringly obvious, and she shaped herself up into it, made her mouth softer and fuller, her stance gentler for love of her. It made his throat close up, his swallow tangible, palpable.

“You’re backwards, though,” Irene tells him: “most people, not all, most, me included, and your John too, most people enjoy physicality because they enjoy sex, or beside sex, or along sex. But you’ve got it the wrong way round.”

“You think it’s about dominance,” Sherlock says, snappish. “It isn’t.”

“No,” Irene says, “I think it’s about control, which it is. All your little brackets and categories about anatomy and language and pleasure, you damn fool, what do you think he’ll have to say about that? You’ve London, though,” she adds, wistful, eyes lush and bright with alcohol and too much nicotine, and Irene has Chicago and Buenos Aires and Stockholm at her feet, New Jersey blood in her veins and a name as golden as Rome rolling in her mouth, but London has become something of a strange animal between them. “For heaven’s sake, Sherlock, get yourself back there and then shag the man, he’s been gagging for it since he saw me naked on your lap.”

And that’s similar, but it isn’t it, isn’t close, not exactly. Irene is smart, and she’s experienced, but she doesn’t live in Sherlock’s ribcage; she’s partly right, but also partly wrong. Sherlock knows this, just as he knows that within the next two months she will be gone, a note in lipstick on his mirror one morning, and Sherlock will move hotels or towns or continents until he finds Sebastian Moran, and then he will come back to London and quite possibly touch John Watson all over. Irene is a well contained body, and Sherlock’s organs feel like they’re failing him.

Another moment: late one June night, 2011, in Baker Street, and they were catching a blackmailer. Sherlock was clever and brilliant all over then, two patches affixed to his left wrist, feeling lighter with every whirl he took between his laptop and the cluttered kitchen and the bookshelf and the window; his brain was screaming like an engine, thrumming and shivery with agitation. The world was vibrant on its edges.

He had confined John to an armchair with a cuppa and a stash of newspapers and an injunction to root for anything, everything extraordinary — “Blackmail, John, blackmail leaves traces, blackmail is inexplicable suicides and undercover marriages, an auction that didn’t go to the highest bidder, a story that makes sense when it’s upside down;” — and the creases on John’s forehead had deepened: he was lovely like this. He looked lovely like this.

It was nearly one in the morning; Baker Street felt like a very round, very bright, very very purring animal around them, and the kitchen was flaming with yellow fire, every object sharply-defined against one another. John was very still, and Sherlock was pacing, black hair and pale hands and very conscious of his own body, long dark lines of shirt, one second out in the street and the next dashing up to his bedroom, his coat falling off his shoulders and hips upon the landing. The fabric was thick and very warm, and he heard John pad heavily across the kitchen to pick it up, the parquet creaking under his shoes.

“John.” He leaned out of his bedroom door, both hands braced on the frame. “Stop fondling my coat.”

“I’m not fondling your anything,” John said, alarmed. He looked tired, the lines on his face grown deep and dark with the late hour. Sherlock’s smile slipped, for a second, and he felt fond and deprecating, strangely enamored of the man standing hunched in the square of the door.

At two twenty John walked down to the twenty-four hour Vietnamese restaurant on Marylebone, and they sat in 221b’s living-room and ate roasted rice and deep-fried shrimp buns with the radio left on at John’s elbow, crackling with fake laughter and late-night stations. Sherlock refused to eat much but sipped at his tea, sulky and hot, and stole the green pepper from under John’s rice.

It was a peculiar evening. More peculiar still was how it ended: John’s hand clasped in his, damp palm to dry, as they watched from behind a curtain a woman who’d lost her wife to a razorblade put four bullets in Milverton’s brain. Sherlock kept the scorching heat of John’s body that evening where it pressed at Sherlock’s, their flanks, their chests, shoulders, arms, their throats; he took away John’s jagged breathing, and his hard swallow with every heavy of air into his lungs. He took away John’s cold nose snuck up under his jaw. He took away his open mouth, and his arm braced against Sherlock’s ribs. He felt each gunshot barrel through John’s body.

2013, November, and London, London, which is where it always comes back to, all of it, his cases and John and Jim Moriarty himself, and Sebastian Moran, too: Sherlock has been wasting his time, wasting it on embezzlement fraud and computer hacking and small-time criminals, but this is the focal point. This is the bright star in his maps, his charts, the trails he’s traced for sixteen months, the point of origin.

So: Moran is in London.

He gets on Bus 23 from St Bart’s Hospital to Baker Street every evening at six-forty five, Mycroft’s email informs him. Try not to give the poor man a heart attack, Sherlock, do.

He gets on the bus when it comes, six-fifty-nine and two stops from St Bart’s. And, yes, John is inside, standing about halfway down in a coat Sherlock has never seen, brown, not second-hand — good quality, warm enough for November but too thin for February, so not newly-bought, probably sometime earlier in the year, presumably March or April — he was in Budapest then, tracking Moran down close to two days between them, and John was in Marks & Spencer or Debenhams or John Lewis, buying a winter coat. What is startling is this: John looks no different.

He’s, he looks, tired, yes, as much as anyone is at the end of a day’s work — months, Sherlock thinks, months of work and Prague and Budapest and Hollywood and Moscow — but John’s posture is not sunken with grief, and the bags under his eyes don’t indicate anything more than some lack of sleep, natural, too many shifts at the surgery, at least two sickly children in daycare: one of his patients has chicken pox, and a woman somewhere in London is pregnant with complications, went to see nice Dr. Watson today, that bloke who was in all these newspapers two years ago, very kind man. Sherlock makes his way towards him slowly, working through assorted commuters; John is half-turned away, clutching one handhold overhead as the bus shakes on, looking out the window with the kind of disinterest that one normally assumes on one’s way from work. Sherlock reaches out, touches his sleeve with two very steady fingers, and tugs slowly.

He says, “John.”

He sees John’s throat work as he swallows, and follows the creases in John’s jawline and neck when his head shifts, two inches perhaps, to the side. John’s eyes meet his in the windowpane on their left, and they don’t widen at all.

“Don’t say my name,” Sherlock says, low. John takes a breath, holds it in, nods once, sharp and well-controlled. “Good.” He curls his hand around the bones of John’s wrist, under the sleeve of the brown coat John bought last March or last April, and brought home, and had no one to show it to.

“You’ve a sniper after you,” he says, speaking almost against John’s cheek, and John’s faces twitches minutely towards him, his wrist turning in Sherlock’s grip, bone shifting under his skin, not yet pulling away. “He might be waiting in front of Baker Street right now.”

“Okay,” John says, very, very calm. He works his hand down from the hold over his shoulder, flexes it twice over Sherlock’s sleeve, and catches Sherlock’s wrist in an answering grip, over-sleeve rather than under, but so earnest that Sherlock has to swallow, the circle of their hands gripping onto their respective wrists hot as a vice between them.

“When we get home,” he says, and John’s throat catches onto something that is very nearly a sob. “When we get home,” Sherlock says, pushing his nose into John’s still-blond, still-short hair, “do not go into the living-room. Avoid the windows. Go straight into my room.”

“My room,” John murmurs, and that’s — jolting. Bruising, somehow.

“Oh,” says Sherlock, stupidly, realizing for the first time that John, John, one best friend down and mourning, must have made his own the spaces Sherlock has left vacant — filling them with his own absences, his own bones, his own empty spaces. And then, “yes. That.”

John shivers visibly, and then says, “Fine.” His hand contracts on Sherlock’s sleeve, but Sherlock has pulled himself tighter, straighter, and John sighs, pushes back on his heels and moves away from him. They separate drunkenly, leaning slightly against each other, pulling back against the crowd. John looks at him for a moment, then looks out the window. “This our stop, then?”

John sticks him in a bath as soon as they come through the door, stumbling past the kitchen into the corridor, far out of reach of the windows; — “You’re filthy, filthy, Sherlock,” — and strips Sherlock naked with stern, military efficiency, and dumps half a bottle of shampoo over his hair. Sherlock catches himself against the porcelain sides, slipping slightly in the soapy water, and then stretches, suddenly relaxes, the heat of the bath catching into his bones and seeping into his muscles.

“Thank you,” he says, voice croaky, match-dry.

John sits, distinctly, puts one hand over his mouth, looks at him.

And then he takes his hand away, puts it down in his lap; his eyes are blue, and wet, but he doesn’t look as though he is about to cry. His face is pinched, wrinkled, suddenly worn out. What he does look like is as though his throat has clogged, has closed up, when he swallows, and Sherlock follows the curve of his neck, of his bobbing Adam’s apple.

“Jesus Christ,” John says, finally, shakily, and then, brilliant and fogged in his mouth: “Sherlock.”

“Yes,” says Sherlock. And then, wounded and absolutely irrational: “John —”

“Shut up,” John says, “oh, god, don’t. Sherlock, Christ, look at you.” And Sherlock has, has — has done nothing but for the past sixteen months, and, at the same time, feels as though he has not looked at a mirror in just as long; there’s one over the sink now, fogging slightly under the rising steam from the bath. John creases one hand over his own knee, rubbing slightly, looking down and away at Sherlock’s long, thin shin against the side of the tub. His mouth twists.

“I,” Sherlock says, articulately, and stops.

"You're dead, Sherlock," John tells him, tight and closed-off, "you're dead, you're dead, you're dead—"

“I know.”

"I said you were dead on my blog," John says, "oh, Christ —"

"I know," Sherlock says, low.

John's back snaps at attention. "I. You've read it."

"Yes," Sherlock says. John considers him for a long moment. He folds his hands over his face again, then pulls them away, folds them together, fingers gathered and strained between fingers, palm to palm.

“How —” he said, and then pauses. “You. Are you staying?”

“Presumably,” Sherlock allows, formal and guarded until John looks at him again. “There was a man, John,” he says, and sits up in the bath, heedless of the water, of the heat, of the soapy slides of his skin against porcelain: John is sitting on a stool twenty inches away from him, and Sherlock has left London and Baker Street and John, and twenty inches are nothing, nothing, are everything, John’s hand against his other hand in the clearest detail, John’s shoulders, John’s face, “there was a man with a rifle on you, from the start, from the second I stepped on the rooftop;” John makes a low noise at this, and Sherlock talks over him instead: “and I thought, I assumed, he had to be, he —”

“Calm down,” John says, eyes wide now with what Sherlock distantly recognizes as concern. “Sherlock, god. Have you eaten anything today, have you taken — ”

“Cigarettes,” Sherlock dismisses, impatient, “two packs, yesterday, at the airport, you’re not listening. I assumed, John, that, I surmised that he couldn’t be the focal point of Moriarty’s system, of Moriarty’s gang, the point man, the sniper, the one at the pool, the red light on your forehead, and I was, God,” he growls, “I was wrong. I was wrong.”

“That’s. Fine,” John says. “I was wrong, too,” which throws Sherlock off-track, makes him pause. “Just — I took your pulse, Sherlock, I checked to see and I — god. God, how did you do that?”

“Irrelevant.”

“Not to me.”

“He was on you the whole time,” Sherlock says, “all those months, John, sixteen, when you didn’t know anything. And I didn’t, I didn’t guess, I assumed that he must not be in London because I couldn’t be in London because you were in London, so that he had to be elsewhere.”

John catches his breath. “Emotion.”

“Sentiment,” Sherlock agrees. “It’s disgraceful,” and John huffs out a laugh, looking mildly shell-shocked.

“You’re in my bathtub,” he says. “And, I —you’re insane. You’re bloody bonkers. There was a sniper, and, and, you didn’t think to tell me.”

“Well, I was dead,” Sherlock drawls. “I had to, to remain dead, John, that was the provision for you not being dead as well.”

“Just me. I was the only one,” John clarifies, at Sherlock’s puzzled look. “The only one who had a tail, and that’s why you stayed dead.”

“No,” Sherlock admits. “Mrs Hudson. Lestrade, too.”

“Right. Right. Just, then. — Next time, Sherlock. Next time a bloody madman tells you to throw yourself a rooftop and you disappear for sixteen months — sixteen fucking months, Sherlock. You jumped off a fucking building and you bloody well made me watch, because you couldn’t let me go into the building before staging your own performative little suicide—”

“Couldn’t,” Sherlock says, and John’s mouth snaps shut. “You’re a writer. No, no, it’s more than that — you’re my blogger. If anyone was going to believe I was dead, they had to go by you.”

“And I couldn’t have written the tale better if I’d known you weren’t dead,” John says, low and dangerous.

“You’re hardly the most consummate actor.”

“No. Oh, but you are. Your act on the rooftop. A magic trick, Christ, it was, wasn’t it. D'you know," John snarls, "that Mycroft — bloody Mycroft, he knew, didn’t he, had to send you passports and cash and — he told me to stop trying your clearing your name, months ago. Not worth it, he said, his own brother.”

“Did you,” Sherlock says, quietly, and John's eyes snap further open.

“Not one day. Not one day.”

This starts a slow burn in Sherlock's stomach. It feels like Prague, fever roaring under his skin, in his ears, but stronger. Fiercer. “You’re in love with me,” he says. John stares at him, then says,

“Yes. Yeah.”

That’s unexpected. John looks at him dead-on, smiling slightly, deprecating, and looks a little as though he is burning from the inside. Sherlock reaches out and plucks the side of his shirt from his trousers. “Get into the bath,” he tells him.

“Not bloody likely.”

“Take off your shirt, then.”

John does, slowly, his movements bruised and jagged. He looks — well. He looks bruised himself, jostled, gone past the point of exhaustion and back again, though Sherlock can’t tell if this is due to his night shifts at the surgery, catching too little sleep between two patients, or. Or. He swipes his hand across John’s chest, paw-like and childish, and the muscles in John’s stomach quiver.

“I would like to go down on you, I think,” Sherlock informs him, and John’s body actually jerks.

“I, just. God, you can’t tell me that, Sherlock,” John tells him, “just — get out. Get out of there. I’ll get you clothes.”

When Sherlock emerges from the bathroom and into the kitchen — clean, wet-haired, wearing very old, very faded jeans and a jumper of John’s, which is soft and huge — the door to the living-room is bolted shut, and John is making tea. John Watson makes tea when upset. John Watson makes tea when upset but does not usually pour scotch into it, which makes this, what, then? Extraordinary. Which makes him a little more than upset.

“What’s his name?” John asks, handing him a mug, and Sherlock catches the bottle in his other hand, removes it from John’s fingers, and tips half of the remaining scotch in his tea. It’s hot, in the kitchen; Mrs Hudson must have turned on the heater at some point earlier in the day.

“Moran.” He looks down at their mugs, and then sets his aside, plucks John’s away from him and puts it down on the table; he takes John’s face in his hands and kisses him properly, until John’s fingers catch at his hipbones, slipping under the fabric of his jumper to thumb at the softer skin of his lower stomach.

“He’s in the building out front,” John says against his mouth. His teeth latch onto Sherlock’s lower lip as he speaks, tug gently, and then let go. “He’s — I couldn’t see right, I think. We’ll have to go out back.”

“That’s fine.” Sherlock touches his fingers to his, underneath the fabric. He pushes his mouth against the corner of John’s lips, and John’s face is hot, tight, pressed burning close against his cheek, the slope of his nose brushing his hair, his ear, lashes blurred and soft in the outer corners of Sherlock’s eyes. Sherlock’s mouth is open against John’s jaw.

“You haven’t apologized,” John tells him. Sherlock nods against his face.

“I know.”

“I don’t even think you will,” John says, pinched and unhappy and horribly warm, and Sherlock nods, again, says, again,

“I know,” and presses his face harder against John’s, pushes their mouths together, lips open, teeth bared, until John snarls, then snarls his hands in Sherlock’s wet hair, then snarls his mouth to fit against Sherlock’s, gasping.