Fic for Cathedralcarver: me, looking at you

[holmesticemods]

Title: me, looking at you
Recipient: cathedralcarver
Author: queenfanfiction
Characters/Pairings: Sherlock/John (with cameo appearances from everyone else and the kitchen sink Mary Morstan)
Rating: PG
Warnings: Character deaths (one real and one supposed), getting shot at (when is this not the case in this fandom?), and more semicolons than should probably be legal. (Why, yes, Charles Dickens is one of my most favorite authors, WHY DO YOU ASK.)
Summary: There is a certain feeling John gets whenever Sherlock is watching him, and it is not necessarily a bad one.
Author’s Notes: Title from the song "Unusual Way" from the musical "Nine" (as covered by John Barrowman). A huge and hearty TYSMOMFG to blue_eyed_1987 for not kicking my arse for lagging so horrifically behind schedule another awesome Britpick. <3



It didn't take long for John to realise that he was being watched.

It was all very subtle, at first. John had started spending most of his time in the flat, what with Sherlock needing him more and more to assist with cases and deal with their growing notoriety (and, more often than not, to act as Sherlock's translator with the rest of the world: "Yes, Sherlock, she was hitting on you, but that still doesn't call for telling her that she'd be better off making sure her fiancé isn't sleeping around with his secretaries—no, not even if it's true"); and increasingly John began to have a certain feeling, a sensation of something lighter than touch nudging him whenever he lingered in one place or position long enough. It wasn't a bad feeling at all, nor an uncomfortable one—it was simply there, and John couldn't help but wonder what on earth could possibly be causing it.

It wasn't from a draft in the flat, John made sure of that (to Sherlock's quiet-yet-noticeable amusement as John clambered onto chairs and tables or countertops to reach the higher potential points of leakage. He didn't completely lose his balance or his dignity, but it was a very close thing on both fronts), nor from any of the old ceiling vents that Mrs. Hudson reassured him were no longer functioning once she'd had the whole building remodeled shortly before they moved in. There didn't seem to be any other obvious, non-human explanation barring the supernatural, and so John remained stumped for another month-and-a-half until he noticed that every single occurrence took place whenever Sherlock happened to be in the same room—never before he entered nor after he left, only just then.

To test his theory, John took to keeping his eyes fixed on his work or a random point on the wall opposite, then glancing over at Sherlock the moment he started to get a twinge of the feeling. But no matter how fast or how furtively he tried to do it, he always found Sherlock focused just as intently on his own work, or busily scanning the bookshelf, or studying the pockmarked smiley-face on the sitting room wall as if he were expecting it to open its jagged grin and speak to them both on the spot. Never could John catch Sherlock in the act of doing anything at all, and after another fruitless month John decided to change tactics.

One sunny afternoon, John was pecking away at his laptop (updating the blog with another finished case, this one about an elite club for redheaded men being used as a front for an intricate bank robbery scheme—Sherlock was still sulking over the dye in his hair that hadn't yet come out two weeks later, and John would have laughed if he hadn't been saving all his patience to put up with Sherlock's foul mood) while Sherlock scrolled through the day's Craigslist Missed Connections on his BlackBerry with lazy disinterest. When John felt the heralding tingle of the feeling, he willed himself to feign no notice of it and instead kept typing as if nothing was out of the ordinary. Only when the feeling grew to be almost tangible did John stop long enough to ask Sherlock without looking up, "Yes?"

The start Sherlock made wouldn't have been noticeable if John hadn't been watching for it out of the corner of his eye. "What?"

"Oh. Sorry." It took all John's self-control not to show his smirk at Sherlock's tone, which was the exact same one Harry had used after he'd discovered her sizable collection of lesbian porn mags back when they were teenagers. "Thought I heard you say something."

"Mm." Sherlock cleared his throat loudly, as if that would be enough to straighten out the quiver in his voice, then made a show of resuming his reading. "I didn't."

"Ah. Right." John let another thirty seconds tick by in awkward silence before adding, "I don't mind you watching me work, you know. Just so we're clear on that."

This time, Sherlock dropped his BlackBerry entirely, and it skidded across the sitting room rug with a dull clatter. When John looked up, he found Sherlock staring at him outright, eyes questioning and wide. "How—?" was all he managed, and the rest of the unspoken question was the closest to admiration that John had ever heard coming from Sherlock before (which was actually saying quite a lot).

"Dunno." John shrugged, trying not to feel too proud of himself. "It's—well, it's like—I just can tell, that's all. And I don't mind it. Really."

The most surprising part of it all, John reflected as he turned back to his laptop—this time with the firm pressure of Sherlock's contemplative gaze warm on the nearer side of his cheek—was that it was completely, unexpectedly, and yet undeniably true.

* *

Over time, John came to expect (and even look forward to) the reassuring sensation of Sherlock's eyes raking him from head to foot. He never asked what Sherlock learned from watching him or why he did it in the first place, because none of that really mattered, in the end. It was just—nice, this feeling of being noticed; and while John was never one to openly preen, to move with a little more self-confidence when he knew that he had an interested audience, there were many times when he came pretty bloody close.

It even became, after a while, something of a game for the two of them. Sherlock would study John for as long as he could without being detected, John would look over the moment he noticed, and then they would grin foolishly at each other when their eyes met. Sometimes they would switch roles: John inspecting Sherlock through half-closed eyes or over the edge of the daily paper, Sherlock pretending ignorance while a faint smile played in the shadows of his mouth. They didn't usually speak during these exchanges, not even to decide who would do what and for how long; it got to the point that John knew Sherlock, simply by looking, and the fact that they were so well-synchronised suggested that Sherlock was quickly developing a similar skill, if he hadn't already had it to begin with.

But even that game grew to be too mundane eventually, at which point John came up with a new, different twist.

"What am I thinking now?" he asked Sherlock one evening, the day after Sherlock had solved a particularly-gruesome case (involving voodoo and domesticated animal sacrifice in the kitchen of one of the richest men in London—John would never look at a stray cat in quite the same way again). Sherlock, prone on the sofa in his second-best dressing gown and glowering past John as if he held the far wall personally responsible for his ennui, sat up eagerly and leaned forward with his elbows on his knees to study John better in the dim light of their sitting room.

"You were reading—"Sherlock's gaze flicked down to the still-glowing monitor of John's laptop. "Suicide bombing, Kabul, yesterday. Seven dead, two British allied soldiers and five Americans, and twenty-five injured."

"Technically, that's what I was reading, not what I was thinking," John pointed out.

"I'm getting there!" Sherlock scowled in mock indignation before turning his laser focus back on John. "Obviously you were interested in the story, but you were relieved to find that none of the British soldiers were acquaintances of yours. This led you to feel guilty for not properly mourning the ones who had died—oh, don't look at me like that, that was the easy part! I can see it still in your eyes."

"And?" John prompted when Sherlock paused for breath. "Anything else?"

"You thought first of the Americans, of whom they might have left behind. As you did so, your eyes fell on the bookshelf, and..." Sherlock got up from the sofa and, in one fluid motion, crossed the room and ran his fingers across the titles stacked directly in John's line of sight. "Vietnam, Korean, American Civil Wars. You reviewed all the wars the Americans have gotten themselves into in their relatively-short existence, and you said to yourself—much as you are thinking right now—that war is a most-ridiculously wasteful way to settle an argument, and that the Americans are all the more fools to keep getting themselves into it. A sentiment I agree with on all counts, by the way." Sherlock finished with a satisfied glance at John. "Well? How was I?"

John was prevented from answering when Lestrade burst into their flat with a box of severed human ears and all but begged Sherlock to come to Scotland Yard without delay. But later, much later and well into the early morning of the next day, John hesitated in front of the communal coffeemaker outside Lestrade's office long enough to get out his mobile and send Sherlock a text—stroking his ego, perhaps, but in this case John felt it was warranted.

Brilliant, of course. Aren't you always?

Sherlock never bothered to send back a reply, but the funny thing was that John didn't need one to know exactly what Sherlock was thinking, too.

* *

A game it had started out as, an almost-foolishly superstitious hobby that kept both of them occupied in the blank stretches of time between cases, and a mere game it would have stayed if John hadn't gone and gotten himself shot. (Again.)

The truth of it was that getting shot had most certainly not been John's fault to begin with, or so he kept telling himself. It had been Sherlock's idea to lay in wait inside someone else's house for their man, a suavely-handsome American-born con artist who was currently making his living by scamming elderly professors into getting out of their houses long enough for him to go in and redirect a decent portion of their pensions for himself. John had been less than pleased when Sherlock explicitly encouraged the latest victim, a Cambridge professor emeritus in the natural sciences, to fall into the trap set out for him—but, as Sherlock was quick to point out, how else was one to catch a criminal if he wasn't caught doing anything criminal in the first place?

All discussion on the morality of their position aside, for some inexplicable reason it never occurred to either of them that their man might have been expecting trouble (or Sherlock, since usually the two were synonymous) and might have prepared himself accordingly. Fortunately for them, their man was also either very nervous or a terrible shot, because the first bullet missed Sherlock entirely and the second only grazed John's inner leg above the knee. The man never got a chance to fire a third, once Sherlock went after him with the nearest thing handy (a butterfly net—they were in the home of a lifelong entomologist, after all); and John's newly-injured leg hardly had time to buckle underneath his weight before Sherlock's arms were around his waist, holding him up and half-dragging him to the nearest chair.

"John! John, for God's sake—you're all right? Tell me you're all right!"

John caught a glimpse of Sherlock's face, mostly blackened by shadow in the dim light of the torch their man had dropped in the struggle, and in that moment John could read Sherlock as clearly as if they were sitting across from each other in the broad daylight of 221B. Sherlock's eyes burned with green ice, his lips trembling nearly as much as his hands as he checked John for other injuries, and his heavy breathing belied his stony expression, showing him to be more unnerved than he'd been after their first night out in Dartmoor. "M'fine," John mumbled, wincing when Sherlock's fingers brushed too close to the rawness of his wound. "Just—it's only a scratch."

It did in fact turn out to be superficial (to John's great relief: if it had been otherwise, Sherlock had looked ready to commit nothing short of murder, and given what had happened to the CIA man John almost felt sorry for the poor sod in advance), but still the fire in Sherlock's eyes never completely burned out; and long after they'd returned home to recover from the ordeal, he never stopped watching while John lay on the sofa, the foot of his injured leg propped up on the armrest. Perhaps he was over-sensitised to it by now, but this time John fancied he could feel Sherlock's gaze prickle and tingle with heat wherever it rested, and after a few minutes John started to fidget uncomfortably under the imagined pressure.

"Sherlock." Sherlock's eyes flickered over John's face for the space of a breath before returning to studying John's bandaged knee. "Sherlock, I'm fine," John said (as much to reassure himself as Sherlock, if he were honest about it). "I'm—well, I'm alive."

"Alive isn't fine, John," Sherlock snapped. For all his lack of grace, John knew Sherlock enough to know that the irritation was merely a cover for how emotionally unsteady he was inside; and it was almost worth getting shot a hundred times over, John thought, if only to see once that there was truly a beating, human heart behind the great brain that made Sherlock uniquely—well, Sherlock. "He could have hit you two centimetres higher and one to the right, and you'd have bled out before even Lestrade arrived!"

Would it really have mattered? John wondered. Am I that important to you—to anyone—that my death would make such a difference? "But he didn't," he said aloud instead. "I'm still here, aren't I?"

"Yes," said Sherlock after another moment, "you are," and John's heart leapt in spite of himself at the thought that Sherlock could very well have been answering either question.

* *

And then Moriarty happened again, and soon after that Sherlock was gone, gone, gone; and for the first time in a long time, John was once again alone.

Being alone was probably the worst part of it, but so was being not-alone: the teas with Mrs. Hudson where she wept more than she talked and John struggled not to follow suit (he only succeeded most of the time), the days he saw an off-duty Donovan or Anderson as they guiltily loitered on the opposite side of Baker Street and had looked the other way rather than start a public row or punch them in the face (respectively), and the evenings when Harry came over to spend awkward, not-made-easier-by-lack-of-alcohol quality time with her little brother because she thought it would help him get over the shock of losing his best friend (it didn't, especially not when Harry asked him out of the blue if "friends" had really been all they were). Within a month, John eliminated two of the three by moving out of 221B altogether; being alone was bad enough, being not-alone was intolerable, but being in the one place that Sherlock had once considered "home"—the one place where John had learned what it felt like to be truly appreciated, truly noticed, truly loved—was more than even John (Captain John Watson of the Fifth Northumberland Fusiliers, famous throughout the division for not making a sound while his subordinate carved the bullet out of his shoulder at his direction) could stand.

Strangely enough, though Sherlock had ceased to be, the same could not be said of the sensation John had come to associate with being watched. Now, he might be walking on some nameless London street or sitting in some random Tube station when the feeling would make itself known. But when John would turn to look, there would only be a wizened old man hobbling past, or a homeless vagrant fast asleep in the corner with his cap pulled low over his eyes. The feeling was strongest near Sherlock's grave, and John found himself drawn there more and more often as the days spread into weeks, the months blending into years. Often he wouldn't say a word, just stand by the headstone and stare at his broken reflection in the depths of the black marble; and though it was only a distant second-best to what he'd felt before, it was still better than nothing, and John was willing to take whatever fleeting moments of comfort that he could get.

On the days when the feeling never came at all—those were the only times that John allowed himself to cry.

* *

Of course, in hindsight, John can finally understand why the feeling had never truly left him—because Sherlock himself had never truly left him, either.

It is three years before he learns what really happened the day Sherlock jumped off the roof of St. Bart's (a ruse intricate enough to make any conspiracy theorist proud and enlisting the help of Molly, Mycroft, and yes, even Lestrade—good old Greg who knew how to keep his secrets and always showed up exactly when he was needed without so much as a question why)—three years of learning to live his life all over again, three years before he and Sherlock find themselves waiting in yet-another ambush for their man, this time an RAF-sniper-turned-serial-assassin who had once been known to Sherlock as Moriarty's second-in-command. This time, John is not shot, and neither is Sherlock (though God knows Sebastian Moran had certainly tried hard enough for both); but for now John's relief at still remaining unscathed is quickly being shoved aside by unreasonable irritation towards his newly-resurrected former flatmate.

"You couldn't have told me," he says flatly to Sherlock once they are back in the relative safety of 221B. Mrs. Hudson had known Sherlock was alive even before John had, and she'd baked them enough scones to feed the entire street as a bit of a flat-rewarming present. John isn't having any until he's done having it out with Sherlock, and Sherlock isn't having any because—well, Sherlock. "You couldn't have at least told me. No, you had to go and swan off a roof and make us all believe that you're bloody dead, because apparently it's better to parade through all the sodding stages of grief if we believe it's really happening!"

"John, I told you already—I had to die convincingly. Moriarty was no fool, and neither were the men he hired. And even if I had—" Sherlock gestures at his own face, now gaunter and more weather-beaten than John remembered. It had been three years, after all, and John can see it in the roughening of Sherlock's skin from careless exposure to sun and wind, the faintest touch of grey just visible near his temples, and the dark hollows under his eyes and the even-more-prominent cheekbones. "If I'd told you, it would have been as if I'd never died at all. You are simply unable to lie, John. Your face gives you away before you even open your mouth."

"I'd suppose you'd know," John retorts, but this time without a trace of his earlier sharpness. He'd never been able to stay angry at Sherlock for long; it was good to know, he thinks ruefully, that some things never change.

"Yes. Yes, I suppose I would." Sherlock starts to smile, then drops it and sobers just as quickly. "I'm sorry, by the way. About your—about Mary."

John felt another pang of grief, adding yet another layer to the thrill of emotions left from the evening's adventures. Several months after Sherlock's death, Sarah had introduced John to one of her old schoolfriends when the latter had come as a patient for a routine physical with the former. Mary Morstan had been bright, brilliant, and a new reason for John to get up and live another day—but she'd also turned out to have end-stage stomach cancer. While her death the year prior hadn't been entirely unexpected, John had been forced to add her to his growing list of Good Things John Watson Once Had That He'd Be Better Off Not Remembering (But Still Does Nonetheless). "Thanks," he mumbles thickly before clearing his throat. "You get that from just looking at me?"

"No. Mycroft—I asked him to keep an eye on you while I was gone, but whenever I could, I..." Sherlock hesitates, and when his keen gaze falls on John again it's like the past three years never even happened. "I heard you at my grave, once. The first time, I think it was." Sherlock's mouth quirks into a half-grin. "You said I was the best man you've ever known."

John flushes, but he doesn't flinch when Sherlock's eyes lock with his. "I wasn't lying," he says quietly. "You'd know if I was, anyway."

Sherlock suddenly laughs, a rare expression of happiness that John hadn't realised he'd missed so much. "Yes," says Sherlock, "I know," and when he reaches out and takes John's hand something in John's world slots back into its proper place—and that is truly the best feeling that John (John Watson, the one friend of the only consulting detective in the world, who would never give up the position and all the inconvenience and danger and loss and love that came with it for anything, and certainly not if his life depended on it) has ever known.

Comments

[bk7brokemybrain.livejournal.com]

Oh, I love this! I have a current fascination for canon Sherlock looking at John, so I was primed for this fic. It gave me goosebumps when John's spider-sense tingled even after Sherlock's death, and I knew what it must be. Hee!
I want to read the next part! Lovely fic!

[yeomanrand.livejournal.com]

How sweet, really. :)

[talimenios79.livejournal.com]

This was gorgeous.

[tocourtdisaster.livejournal.com]

This is wonderful. I love the quiet intimacy of it all.

[rampaging-panda.livejournal.com]

Hmmm, that's lovely. I really like how John's sense of being stared at didn't end with Sherlock's "death" and how he was reassured by it.

[cathedralcarver.livejournal.com]

What a wonderful and nuanced glance into the intricate relationship between two complicated characters. I love how the story grows naturally and sweetly, and how both John and Sherlock are completely accepting -- and rather joyful -- about the path their relationship takes.

The most surprising part of it all, John reflected as he turned back to his laptop—this time with the firm pressure of Sherlock's contemplative gaze warm on the nearer side of his cheek—was that it was completely, unexpectedly, and yet undeniably true.

You've managed to weave the modern BBC characters together with a classic "feel" and a wonderful nod to The Three Garridebs, where John finally realizes just how much he means to Sherlock, all while keeping them in character. There are so many lovely little moments, but the line that really did me in was this one:

On the days when the feeling never came at all—those were the only times that John allowed himself to cry.

Incredibly sad and incredibly true; I completely believe that John would hold his emotions in check until the moment he truly could no longer feel Sherlock's presence in his life. Thank you for this wonderful gift! Angst and hurt/comfort and lovely UST all rolled up together in a beautiful story. Thank you!

[innie_darling]

I really liked this.

[selinabln.livejournal.com]

This is so wonderful, and perfect - in every way. I especially love your version of the Three Garridebs and how you weaved the arc of the feeling like a red thread through the whole story and events.

[missyvortexdv.livejournal.com]

Very eerie at the start but nice fic.