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Sherlock Fic: Heavy Heart (1/3)
Fic Title: Heavy Heart
Chapter Title: My Last Confession
Author: papernpen
Pairing(s): Sherlock/John, Mycroft/Anthea, mentions of John/Sarah
Rating: PG-13, rising in later chapters
Warnings: Mild descriptions of violence, general angst.
Disclaimer: Sherlock Holmes and John Watson belong to Arthur Conan Doyle; the BBC adaptation belongs, unsurprisingly, to the BBC, and all the actors and writers and anyone else belong to themselves.
Summary: John finally knows what he's got, but it's gone missing. Set roughly a year after The Great Game.
Author's Note: Titles taken from 'Heavy in Your Arms' by Florence + the Machine. Yes, technically from the Twilight soundtrack, but I reject all associations (I've never seen the film or read the book) and stand by my opinion that this is an excellent John/Sherlock song. No, really.
It is March. The twelfth, 2011. 2 a.m. There is the sound of careful footsteps on the stairs and a tentative knock on the door. At this hour it ought to be Lestrade or Mycroft but even John can tell it is neither of them.
‘Come in.’
Mrs Hudson pushes open the door quietly and steps in. She is holding a weak torch which barely illuminates a circle around her own, slippered, feet. She gives him a look of pity.
‘I couldn’t sleep, dear, and I thought you might like some company.’
John turns to look at her. He has been sitting hunched up in the gloom for hours, not even bothering to try and sleep. She looks so, so... ordinary, in her fluffy dressing gown and hair curlers. John hasn’t been in the presence of ‘ordinary’ for some time. It looks warm and appealing and cheerful, words and sensations he has learned to go without. But now, now the cause of their absence is gone, he thinks he might need them. Desperately.
‘Yes. That might be nice.’
John is familiar with Mrs Hudson’s cosy flat: rooms full of floral print and a country cottage style kitchen. He has spent many a tea-drinking, biscuit-nibbling hour here, in between cases and before starting work at the surgery. He takes a seat at the ruthlessly scrubbed wooden table, bare except for a tidy pile of placemats and coasters. Mrs Hudson bustles about setting the kettle to boil and preparing some bread and cheese on cheerfully floral plates. John stares at the grain of the table and considers the past few weeks and months. In here, in this domestic kitchen with its tea cups and cutlery and distinct lack of body parts lurking in the fridge, his life seems unreal. Just over a year ago, a madman he’d just met got him to text a murderer and then they chased his cab across London. A week after that he took Sarah on a date which was rudely interrupted by a fight with the circus performers and culminated in her nearly being nailed to a chair by a two foot crossbow bolt. Three weeks after that , nearly exactly a year ago, he was kidnapped and dressed in Semtex by another madman, who was dangerously obsessed with the first. Two madmen. Three, if he includes himself, and he probably ought to at this stage. Two too many, by all accounts. But now there’s just him. And one is far, far worse than two.
Mrs Hudson sets a mug of tea in front of him and puts a plate of assorted crackers and cheeses on the table.
‘There you are, dear.’
‘Thank you.’
She sits down with a sigh, opposite, and gives him a sad look. Abruptly she reaches a pale, careworn hand across to rest on top of his.
‘He’s a clever young man. You mustn’t worry, I’m sure he’ll be alright.’
John cannot say anything to that. He finds himself blinking back tears.
‘I used to think you were a couple, you know. Then I thought perhaps not. But you are, aren’t you?’
John swallows, makes a bigger effort to blink away the dampness in his eyes.
‘We are now, I think. We weren’t then.’ Oh God, how had it happened?
It was December. The awkward gap between Christmas and New Year. A few days before, John had given Sherlock a jumper. It was a joke, a present for the man who had everything else. John had seen the beige, woollen jumper in a shop a few days earlier and, ignoring his initial inclination to try it on himself, had been unable to resist buying it: another move in the extended game of chess living with Sherlock entailed.
He fully expected Sherlock to hate it, to chuckle at it and cast it into a corner, from thence never to return. But that evening, returning to the living room from showering he found Sherlock. Curled up on the sofa. Wearing the jumper. John had made Sherlock agree to watch ‘White Christmas’, largely because he thought it would be hilarious, and they’d nothing else to do. But now... The beige on white skin does something to John. He does his best to ignore it.
Watching White Christmas with Sherlock is, however, still hilarious.
A few days later he had realised that Sherlock wasn’t just wearing the jumper. He was wearing any and all of John’s jumpers.
‘That’s mine!’
‘Is it? I can’t tell.’ Smirking. Of course he knows which are which, the smug git.
‘Give it back.’
‘No.’
‘Why are you wearing it?’
‘I got blood on mine.’
‘... How?’
‘I was conducting an experiment.’
‘... I don’t want to know.’
That night, as John folds away his clothes, he finds the several jumpers that have been missing. They are all slightly stretched: Sherlock is thinner, but taller. John huffs and picks one up. And then another. They all smell faintly of Sherlock. John sits down heavily on the bed and rubs the thick woollen material between his fingers. He breathes deeply.
It is in this moment, while holding his transformed wool-wear, that he is seized with an all-consuming desire for the wild and beautiful creature downstairs.
‘It was Christmas.’
Mrs Hudson jumps slightly at this sudden end to his reverie.
‘What was, dear?’
‘When... when it started. Well, actually, no. Not officially. That was later. Just... just a fortnight ago...’ He looks down at his rapidly cooling tea. Mrs Hudson squeezes his fingers.
It was February. The twenty-third. The first ever case without a drop of blood spilt. Sherlock has just successfully located the missing tiara in the very box it was supposedly missing from. They are walking down a quiet residential street in North West London, in search of a cab. It is early evening, and the frosted pavement and trees are being lit by the yellow glow of street lamps, the bluer hues of televisions through large bay windows, and by Sherlock. He is incandescent after the case, his eyes lit from within and the frosted glass of his skin showing pink on his cheeks and his lips. He has never looked quite so beautiful and John should know, John has made a study of this. Of him.
‘I have something to tell you, John.’
‘ Oh?’
‘Three words.’
‘Three words?’
‘Yes. Little ones.’
‘...Oh.’ Smile. ‘Go on then.’
‘Dear God, don’t actually make me say it.’
‘But I want to. I want to hear you say it.’
‘... You do?’
‘Yes. Jesus Christ, yes, yes, I do. Bloody hell, you don’t half pick your moments. Two months I’ve been waiting in hope.’
‘Why didn’t you say anything?’
‘Because, of the two of us, I’m not the world’s only consulting detective.’
‘Of the two of us, you’re not the sociopath.’
‘High functioning.’
‘Yes, alright. I’m still not very good at... this.’
‘I’ll be the judge of that.’
And John kisses him, hard, on the mouth. They stumble back until Sherlock collides with a wall and their unsteady motion knocks crystalline flakes of ice off the branches of the hedge and into their hair.
For a few, fleeting moments, it is deliriously wonderful.
Then they are staring at each other and, suddenly, Sherlock is turning away.
‘Oh, God.’
‘What?’
‘Mycroft.’
Terror. Horror. Lead, in the stomach.
‘Will he mind?’
‘No. It means he was right.’
Horror vanishes. Lead melts. Terror evaporates and leaves a giddy rush. John feels a smile break out on his face. Seeing it, Sherlock is smiling too, the real smile that makes his eyes crinkle at the edges.
This is the memory John clings to three hours later and for the next two weeks, when Sherlock disappears.
Mrs Hudson pats him on the arm affectionately. He should find this comforting, he knows, but it is actually anything but. Here, in these peacefully domestic surroundings, where his recent life seems an impossibility, it feels as though it never happened. As though all of it was a dream and now he’s woken and he can never go back. This world of Laura Ashley furnishings and daytime television can surely have no contact or transaction with a world where geniuses are stolen away at gunpoint and vanished beyond the reach of loved ones, the police, or even, it seems, the British Government. He’s really gone, if he ever even existed, and there is nothing I can do about it.
The thought makes his stomach turn over. Even tea repulses him. He pushes the mug away. Enough. Enough comforting, enough waiting, enough moping. Enough, enough, enough. He stands up and the scrape of the chair sounds jarringly in the tiny, cosy room.
‘I’m sorry, Mrs Hudson, but I can’t stay here. Thank you, though.’
She smiles sadly up at him. It is not her usual cheerful smile, blind to the horrors of life that routinely go on over her head. It is knowing.
‘You will be careful, won’t you dear? I couldn’t bear to lose both of you.’
‘I’ll try.’
It’s all he can manage. A few eager bounds and he is back in the flat. It is cast in greyscale, it is full of clutter, Sherlock’s clutter, and the kitchen is still rendered mostly unusable by the proliferation of test tubes and glass retorts. But it is mercifully not ‘ordinary’. It represents a world where bad men do terrible things to unsuspecting and suspecting people. Cutlery is a luxury. Laura Ashley is wholly unwelcome. Tea cups are functional, only. In here, his reality asserts itself. His reality asserts itself and that is what John needs, right now. That and sleep, if he expects to be any use in the morning.
He pushes open the door to Sherlock’s room. The floor is mostly covered with boxes and files and the room smells of paper. John has taken to sleeping in here, instead of his own room. It’s pathetic but no one else knows and doing so makes it feel less like a sacred memorial to the dearly departed, and more like something they share. Would have shared. He crawls into the bed, pulls the sheets over himself and sinks slowly into sleep.
After spending longer in the gap between the wall and the dividing hedge than was decent, they found a cab and passed the entire journey home trying not to look as though they’d just spent the past ten minutes kissing each other senseless in a hedge. Stepping back into the chilly night air at 221B reminds John of the fridge and how there is nothing in it.
‘I’m going to buy milk. And some food.’
Sherlock stares at him as though he’d just suggested skinny-dipping in the Serpentine.
‘Now?’
‘Yes. Are you going with me?’
Sherlock appears to consider this. John has never seen him doing any sort of shopping but he must have bought food before John arrived and he owns clothes, so presumably he has.
‘Alright.’
John has never been shopping with a precocious seven year old, but that is how he would describe the experience. Sherlock puts things in the basket without mentioning it and removes others. He refuses to carry it or get one of his own. He analyses the contents of other people’s baskets and in his strong, clear voice announces facts about their personal lives to the aisle in general. Occasionally he gives people advice or tells them why they don’t need one thing but do need another. One woman actually bursts into tears when Sherlock informs her that buying slimming pills and a one kilogram bar of chocolate is the dumbest sight he’s ever seen.
Once they are finally at the till and the experience is mercifully nearly over, Sherlock, obliged to stand idle while John packs the bags, begins to interrogate the check-out girl. She stares at him disgusted.
‘Are you retarded or something?’
‘No. How can I be mentally retarded if I can tell where you were last night just by looking at you?’
She mutters something under her breath which to John sounds uncannily like ‘Just a weirdo then.’
Once they are outside and the automatic doors have shut behind them, John lets out a breath.
‘What?’
‘Remind me never to take you shopping again.’
Sherlock just smiles.
They are hardly back in the flat when Sherlock’s mobile rings. John starts putting the shopping away and tries to manoeuvre the milk, bacon and fruit juice into the fridge around the hand and the Unpleasantly Coloured Petri Dish. Sherlock’s voice, as always on the phone, sounds flat and uninterested. John hears him end the conversation and then there is an explosion of noise in the living room.
‘A case, John! A case! Two dead men with gunshot wounds, found in a basement room with no window, a locked door, and no gun!’
He appears in the kitchen doorway, alight, grinning.
‘I suppose there’s no point in me telling you to leave it till the morning?’
A look of uncertainty fades across Sherlock’s face. He looks suddenly subdued, dimmer.
‘I can, if... if you’d...’
The words don’t come easily and John thinks he must be fighting himself, his entire being, at every syllable. And John realises, with a twinge in his heart, that however much he wants to peel away the designer clothes from the divinely white skin and drag Sherlock into bed, to do so now would be a pyrrhic victory. His mind is elsewhere and nothing short of another, better case is going to bring it back. John swallows and accepts the bitter pill that, despite the last hour, Sherlock is still married to his work.
‘No, go. It’s fine. I’ll stay here though, I could do with a nap.’
Sherlock catches fire again, darts across the room and kisses him.
‘Thank you’ he breathes against John’s mouth and then ricochets off, out and away.
This is the last time John sees him.
John wakes with a dull ache in his head and the sensation, as usual, of disorientation. For one blissful moment he thinks he will hear a crash from downstairs, a shriek from an enraged Mrs Hudson discovering further damage to her property, or the sound of Sherlock’s voice telling him to get up and get dressed, because John we have a case and I need your expertise. Even though he never really does.
But he is already downstairs, in the bed where Sherlock ought to be and nothing has changed in the flat for a fortnight. He’s been dreaming, again, not nightmares of Afghanistan, thank god. Something far, far worse. Treacherous dreams which turn into nightmarishly mocking memories upon waking. John twists his face into the pillow and shuts his eyes, but the memories keep coming, it’s all he can think about and he has thought of nothing else for two weeks.
Two hours later and John had long since given in to eating dinner alone and watching the rubbish on television. His phone rings and the fact that it’s Lestrade doesn’t even make him anxious because Sherlock’s probably too busy, too involved and too indolent to phone him himself.
‘John?’
‘Hi.’
‘John, are you sitting down?’
His mouth dries up, cold water starts to boil in his stomach.
‘Yes. Why? What’s happened?’
‘John, please, keep calm. It’s Sherlock.’
‘Of course it bloody is. What’s he done?’
‘He’s... He’s been kidnapped.’
‘What? Who by? When? How?’
He’s standing up, fighting on his jacket around the phone pressed to his ear.
‘We don’t know, exactly. We can’t get much sense out of Molly, just yet. I think you should come down.’
‘Of course I’m bloody coming down.’
He spends the journey to Bart’s unable to breathe, unable to think of anything for more than a second at a time. There are police cars outside the hospital and Sergeant Donovan is waiting to meet him.
‘This way.’
She doesn’t make a joke, no snide comment or ‘I told you so’. It makes John feel sick. She leads him to the morgue lab. Lestrade is stood beside Molly, who is sat on a stool, hunched and white and shaking. He looks up as John enters. His face is drawn and drained.
‘What the hell’s happened?’
Lestrade looks down at Molly.
‘Do you want to tell him?’
She nods, choking back tears and sniffing. Her eyes are red and puffy; her cheeks shine.
‘For God’s sake what?’
His voice is broken even to his own ears. He can feel himself sagging despite his anger. Sally motions him down onto a stool with a gentleness that he would not have believed her capable. Molly sniffs and begins talking, quietly, hesitantly.
‘I was showing him Mr Grant and Mr Paulson. It was just us.’
‘I’d phoned him from the Yard, and then I got kept back by another case so I didn’t get here until...’ Lestrade trails off. He pats Molly on the shoulder and she continues.
‘He was... just talking to himself really. And then... then the door opened and...’ She begins to cry again, coughing and gasping for air, but though she manages to recover herself she starts to shake even more than before, her words coming out in a rush, as though she needs the momentum to say them at all.
‘The door opened and these men came in with guns, three of them, and it was just us and I’m not very strong and I was so frightened and there was such a fight. I was screaming for help, but nobody came and they dragged him away and knocked him unconscious. They threw this at me as they left.’
She holds up a slightly battered looking envelope. It is addressed to Dr John Watson. John holds onto the metal bench for support. Lestrade passes the envelope to him but he can only stare at it wordlessly.
‘Would you like me to open it?’
John nods, mute. Lestrade carefully tears it open and slides out the card inside. On the front is a picture of a bunch of flowers. Lestrade opens it, reads in silence and appears to choke on something.
‘What does it say?’
Wordlessly, Lestrade hands it to him. John looks.
Sorry for your loss
Love Jim x
John feels the bile rise into his throat and he coughs and drops the card to the bench from cold, numb fingers. It is not possible to feel this cold and yet still live, surely to God, it can’t be. The ice creeps into his brain, trickling into any and every crack until he feels paralysed with dread at the sight of a name he hoped never to see or hear again. There is only one ‘Jim’ in John Watson’s world, and John wishes him burnt out of it.
‘John, I’m so sorry—’
‘Can you give me a minute?’
‘Of course.’
The police file silently out, leaving John and Molly alone in the room. After a moment she clears her throat.
‘May I?’
She gestures to the card and John nods. She reaches across for it and reads the inscription. Spluttering on another round of helpless tears, she puts it down. They sit in appalled silence until she clears her throat again.
‘I didn’t tell them, because I didn’t think it mattered to them. But it matters to you.’
‘What?’
‘He said something. When they dragged him out of the room he shouted something back at me.’
John swallows. It hurts more than it ought to.
‘What did he say?’
Molly gathers herself together as though this is the most difficult part of her entire ordeal. She releases a shuddering breath before she can speak.
‘He said: Tell John I love him.’
John shuts his eyes, drops his head forward and clenches his hands together. He has nothing to say. It is exactly what he wanted, and yet didn’t need, to hear, not right now. He hears Molly shift off her seat and come over to him. She places a small hand on his shoulder. He lifts his head and she is looking directly at him and he realises that she knows, she understands, like no one else on earth, and so he lets her wrap her arms around him in silent sorrow.
There is a gentle knock on the door and Molly releases him and they both turn. Lestrade is showing in the only other person on earth who understands.
‘Mycroft.’ John swallows the lump in his throat, tries to pull himself together, although Mycroft almost certainly knows about them already. The other man nods his greeting.
‘John.’
He sits down opposite. His mouth is pressed into a thin, straight line. He looks pale and wan and more worried than John has ever seen him.
‘It is definitely our old friend Mr Moriarty, then?’
His voice is thin, flat, lacking its usual rich, luxurious quality. John passes him the envelope and card. Mycroft reads them in silence and then shuts his eyes, massaging the bridge of his nose with his fingers. ‘Anthea’, who has entered silently behind Lestrade, steps over to him and places a hand gently on his shoulder and squeezes. Mycroft looks up at her and smiles a watery smile.
‘Detective Inspector Lestrade?’
‘Yes?’
‘I will, of course, authorise all the most exceptional procedures. I hope my department will find yours willing to collaborate?’
‘Certainly.’
‘Excellent. And now, I think I will take Dr Watson and Miss Hooper home. In the meantime, Anthea will assist you.’
Mycroft stands and motions John and Molly to follow him. Molly goes without a word, Donovan draping a blanket over her shoulders as she passes her. John pauses in the doorway.
‘I think I should stay here.’
Mycroft looks back at him. The corner of his mouth twitches.
‘I think you would be considerably more useful tomorrow morning after a rest.’
‘He’s right, John. I’ll call you tomorrow as soon as we know anything.’
‘We’ll find him, John. Freak doesn’t get to drop us in the middle of a case this easily.’
Donovan attempts a smile and it’s a truly courageous effort. John can only nod and, grudgingly, allows Mycroft to lead him to his car.
This time on waking he forces himself to wash, to shave, to dress. To do rather than think, to live in the real world rather than the broken record of memories that fill his endless days and restless nights.
He will eat something, be normal, have breakfast. He will hold himself together enough to leave the flat and he will hail a cab and he will go to Mycroft and then, in the civilised surroundings of Mycroft’s town house or Whitehall office, he will throw down his life to do something, anything that will bring him back.
He opens the fridge and the milk is sour and the blackberries Sherlock insisted they buy have started to grow mould. John views the withering hand, the rotting berries and the frankly offensive milk dispassionately. If he starts down the road of ‘Sherlock touched this before he was taken’ he will drive himself mad. He shuts the door and decides he will pay Mycroft a visit earlier in the day than expected.
Chapter Title: My Last Confession
Author: papernpen
Pairing(s): Sherlock/John, Mycroft/Anthea, mentions of John/Sarah
Rating: PG-13, rising in later chapters
Warnings: Mild descriptions of violence, general angst.
Disclaimer: Sherlock Holmes and John Watson belong to Arthur Conan Doyle; the BBC adaptation belongs, unsurprisingly, to the BBC, and all the actors and writers and anyone else belong to themselves.
Summary: John finally knows what he's got, but it's gone missing. Set roughly a year after The Great Game.
Author's Note: Titles taken from 'Heavy in Your Arms' by Florence + the Machine. Yes, technically from the Twilight soundtrack, but I reject all associations (I've never seen the film or read the book) and stand by my opinion that this is an excellent John/Sherlock song. No, really.
It is March. The twelfth, 2011. 2 a.m. There is the sound of careful footsteps on the stairs and a tentative knock on the door. At this hour it ought to be Lestrade or Mycroft but even John can tell it is neither of them.
‘Come in.’
Mrs Hudson pushes open the door quietly and steps in. She is holding a weak torch which barely illuminates a circle around her own, slippered, feet. She gives him a look of pity.
‘I couldn’t sleep, dear, and I thought you might like some company.’
John turns to look at her. He has been sitting hunched up in the gloom for hours, not even bothering to try and sleep. She looks so, so... ordinary, in her fluffy dressing gown and hair curlers. John hasn’t been in the presence of ‘ordinary’ for some time. It looks warm and appealing and cheerful, words and sensations he has learned to go without. But now, now the cause of their absence is gone, he thinks he might need them. Desperately.
‘Yes. That might be nice.’
John is familiar with Mrs Hudson’s cosy flat: rooms full of floral print and a country cottage style kitchen. He has spent many a tea-drinking, biscuit-nibbling hour here, in between cases and before starting work at the surgery. He takes a seat at the ruthlessly scrubbed wooden table, bare except for a tidy pile of placemats and coasters. Mrs Hudson bustles about setting the kettle to boil and preparing some bread and cheese on cheerfully floral plates. John stares at the grain of the table and considers the past few weeks and months. In here, in this domestic kitchen with its tea cups and cutlery and distinct lack of body parts lurking in the fridge, his life seems unreal. Just over a year ago, a madman he’d just met got him to text a murderer and then they chased his cab across London. A week after that he took Sarah on a date which was rudely interrupted by a fight with the circus performers and culminated in her nearly being nailed to a chair by a two foot crossbow bolt. Three weeks after that , nearly exactly a year ago, he was kidnapped and dressed in Semtex by another madman, who was dangerously obsessed with the first. Two madmen. Three, if he includes himself, and he probably ought to at this stage. Two too many, by all accounts. But now there’s just him. And one is far, far worse than two.
Mrs Hudson sets a mug of tea in front of him and puts a plate of assorted crackers and cheeses on the table.
‘There you are, dear.’
‘Thank you.’
She sits down with a sigh, opposite, and gives him a sad look. Abruptly she reaches a pale, careworn hand across to rest on top of his.
‘He’s a clever young man. You mustn’t worry, I’m sure he’ll be alright.’
John cannot say anything to that. He finds himself blinking back tears.
‘I used to think you were a couple, you know. Then I thought perhaps not. But you are, aren’t you?’
John swallows, makes a bigger effort to blink away the dampness in his eyes.
‘We are now, I think. We weren’t then.’ Oh God, how had it happened?
It was December. The awkward gap between Christmas and New Year. A few days before, John had given Sherlock a jumper. It was a joke, a present for the man who had everything else. John had seen the beige, woollen jumper in a shop a few days earlier and, ignoring his initial inclination to try it on himself, had been unable to resist buying it: another move in the extended game of chess living with Sherlock entailed.
He fully expected Sherlock to hate it, to chuckle at it and cast it into a corner, from thence never to return. But that evening, returning to the living room from showering he found Sherlock. Curled up on the sofa. Wearing the jumper. John had made Sherlock agree to watch ‘White Christmas’, largely because he thought it would be hilarious, and they’d nothing else to do. But now... The beige on white skin does something to John. He does his best to ignore it.
Watching White Christmas with Sherlock is, however, still hilarious.
A few days later he had realised that Sherlock wasn’t just wearing the jumper. He was wearing any and all of John’s jumpers.
‘That’s mine!’
‘Is it? I can’t tell.’ Smirking. Of course he knows which are which, the smug git.
‘Give it back.’
‘No.’
‘Why are you wearing it?’
‘I got blood on mine.’
‘... How?’
‘I was conducting an experiment.’
‘... I don’t want to know.’
That night, as John folds away his clothes, he finds the several jumpers that have been missing. They are all slightly stretched: Sherlock is thinner, but taller. John huffs and picks one up. And then another. They all smell faintly of Sherlock. John sits down heavily on the bed and rubs the thick woollen material between his fingers. He breathes deeply.
It is in this moment, while holding his transformed wool-wear, that he is seized with an all-consuming desire for the wild and beautiful creature downstairs.
‘It was Christmas.’
Mrs Hudson jumps slightly at this sudden end to his reverie.
‘What was, dear?’
‘When... when it started. Well, actually, no. Not officially. That was later. Just... just a fortnight ago...’ He looks down at his rapidly cooling tea. Mrs Hudson squeezes his fingers.
It was February. The twenty-third. The first ever case without a drop of blood spilt. Sherlock has just successfully located the missing tiara in the very box it was supposedly missing from. They are walking down a quiet residential street in North West London, in search of a cab. It is early evening, and the frosted pavement and trees are being lit by the yellow glow of street lamps, the bluer hues of televisions through large bay windows, and by Sherlock. He is incandescent after the case, his eyes lit from within and the frosted glass of his skin showing pink on his cheeks and his lips. He has never looked quite so beautiful and John should know, John has made a study of this. Of him.
‘I have something to tell you, John.’
‘ Oh?’
‘Three words.’
‘Three words?’
‘Yes. Little ones.’
‘...Oh.’ Smile. ‘Go on then.’
‘Dear God, don’t actually make me say it.’
‘But I want to. I want to hear you say it.’
‘... You do?’
‘Yes. Jesus Christ, yes, yes, I do. Bloody hell, you don’t half pick your moments. Two months I’ve been waiting in hope.’
‘Why didn’t you say anything?’
‘Because, of the two of us, I’m not the world’s only consulting detective.’
‘Of the two of us, you’re not the sociopath.’
‘High functioning.’
‘Yes, alright. I’m still not very good at... this.’
‘I’ll be the judge of that.’
And John kisses him, hard, on the mouth. They stumble back until Sherlock collides with a wall and their unsteady motion knocks crystalline flakes of ice off the branches of the hedge and into their hair.
For a few, fleeting moments, it is deliriously wonderful.
Then they are staring at each other and, suddenly, Sherlock is turning away.
‘Oh, God.’
‘What?’
‘Mycroft.’
Terror. Horror. Lead, in the stomach.
‘Will he mind?’
‘No. It means he was right.’
Horror vanishes. Lead melts. Terror evaporates and leaves a giddy rush. John feels a smile break out on his face. Seeing it, Sherlock is smiling too, the real smile that makes his eyes crinkle at the edges.
This is the memory John clings to three hours later and for the next two weeks, when Sherlock disappears.
Mrs Hudson pats him on the arm affectionately. He should find this comforting, he knows, but it is actually anything but. Here, in these peacefully domestic surroundings, where his recent life seems an impossibility, it feels as though it never happened. As though all of it was a dream and now he’s woken and he can never go back. This world of Laura Ashley furnishings and daytime television can surely have no contact or transaction with a world where geniuses are stolen away at gunpoint and vanished beyond the reach of loved ones, the police, or even, it seems, the British Government. He’s really gone, if he ever even existed, and there is nothing I can do about it.
The thought makes his stomach turn over. Even tea repulses him. He pushes the mug away. Enough. Enough comforting, enough waiting, enough moping. Enough, enough, enough. He stands up and the scrape of the chair sounds jarringly in the tiny, cosy room.
‘I’m sorry, Mrs Hudson, but I can’t stay here. Thank you, though.’
She smiles sadly up at him. It is not her usual cheerful smile, blind to the horrors of life that routinely go on over her head. It is knowing.
‘You will be careful, won’t you dear? I couldn’t bear to lose both of you.’
‘I’ll try.’
It’s all he can manage. A few eager bounds and he is back in the flat. It is cast in greyscale, it is full of clutter, Sherlock’s clutter, and the kitchen is still rendered mostly unusable by the proliferation of test tubes and glass retorts. But it is mercifully not ‘ordinary’. It represents a world where bad men do terrible things to unsuspecting and suspecting people. Cutlery is a luxury. Laura Ashley is wholly unwelcome. Tea cups are functional, only. In here, his reality asserts itself. His reality asserts itself and that is what John needs, right now. That and sleep, if he expects to be any use in the morning.
He pushes open the door to Sherlock’s room. The floor is mostly covered with boxes and files and the room smells of paper. John has taken to sleeping in here, instead of his own room. It’s pathetic but no one else knows and doing so makes it feel less like a sacred memorial to the dearly departed, and more like something they share. Would have shared. He crawls into the bed, pulls the sheets over himself and sinks slowly into sleep.
After spending longer in the gap between the wall and the dividing hedge than was decent, they found a cab and passed the entire journey home trying not to look as though they’d just spent the past ten minutes kissing each other senseless in a hedge. Stepping back into the chilly night air at 221B reminds John of the fridge and how there is nothing in it.
‘I’m going to buy milk. And some food.’
Sherlock stares at him as though he’d just suggested skinny-dipping in the Serpentine.
‘Now?’
‘Yes. Are you going with me?’
Sherlock appears to consider this. John has never seen him doing any sort of shopping but he must have bought food before John arrived and he owns clothes, so presumably he has.
‘Alright.’
John has never been shopping with a precocious seven year old, but that is how he would describe the experience. Sherlock puts things in the basket without mentioning it and removes others. He refuses to carry it or get one of his own. He analyses the contents of other people’s baskets and in his strong, clear voice announces facts about their personal lives to the aisle in general. Occasionally he gives people advice or tells them why they don’t need one thing but do need another. One woman actually bursts into tears when Sherlock informs her that buying slimming pills and a one kilogram bar of chocolate is the dumbest sight he’s ever seen.
Once they are finally at the till and the experience is mercifully nearly over, Sherlock, obliged to stand idle while John packs the bags, begins to interrogate the check-out girl. She stares at him disgusted.
‘Are you retarded or something?’
‘No. How can I be mentally retarded if I can tell where you were last night just by looking at you?’
She mutters something under her breath which to John sounds uncannily like ‘Just a weirdo then.’
Once they are outside and the automatic doors have shut behind them, John lets out a breath.
‘What?’
‘Remind me never to take you shopping again.’
Sherlock just smiles.
They are hardly back in the flat when Sherlock’s mobile rings. John starts putting the shopping away and tries to manoeuvre the milk, bacon and fruit juice into the fridge around the hand and the Unpleasantly Coloured Petri Dish. Sherlock’s voice, as always on the phone, sounds flat and uninterested. John hears him end the conversation and then there is an explosion of noise in the living room.
‘A case, John! A case! Two dead men with gunshot wounds, found in a basement room with no window, a locked door, and no gun!’
He appears in the kitchen doorway, alight, grinning.
‘I suppose there’s no point in me telling you to leave it till the morning?’
A look of uncertainty fades across Sherlock’s face. He looks suddenly subdued, dimmer.
‘I can, if... if you’d...’
The words don’t come easily and John thinks he must be fighting himself, his entire being, at every syllable. And John realises, with a twinge in his heart, that however much he wants to peel away the designer clothes from the divinely white skin and drag Sherlock into bed, to do so now would be a pyrrhic victory. His mind is elsewhere and nothing short of another, better case is going to bring it back. John swallows and accepts the bitter pill that, despite the last hour, Sherlock is still married to his work.
‘No, go. It’s fine. I’ll stay here though, I could do with a nap.’
Sherlock catches fire again, darts across the room and kisses him.
‘Thank you’ he breathes against John’s mouth and then ricochets off, out and away.
This is the last time John sees him.
John wakes with a dull ache in his head and the sensation, as usual, of disorientation. For one blissful moment he thinks he will hear a crash from downstairs, a shriek from an enraged Mrs Hudson discovering further damage to her property, or the sound of Sherlock’s voice telling him to get up and get dressed, because John we have a case and I need your expertise. Even though he never really does.
But he is already downstairs, in the bed where Sherlock ought to be and nothing has changed in the flat for a fortnight. He’s been dreaming, again, not nightmares of Afghanistan, thank god. Something far, far worse. Treacherous dreams which turn into nightmarishly mocking memories upon waking. John twists his face into the pillow and shuts his eyes, but the memories keep coming, it’s all he can think about and he has thought of nothing else for two weeks.
Two hours later and John had long since given in to eating dinner alone and watching the rubbish on television. His phone rings and the fact that it’s Lestrade doesn’t even make him anxious because Sherlock’s probably too busy, too involved and too indolent to phone him himself.
‘John?’
‘Hi.’
‘John, are you sitting down?’
His mouth dries up, cold water starts to boil in his stomach.
‘Yes. Why? What’s happened?’
‘John, please, keep calm. It’s Sherlock.’
‘Of course it bloody is. What’s he done?’
‘He’s... He’s been kidnapped.’
‘What? Who by? When? How?’
He’s standing up, fighting on his jacket around the phone pressed to his ear.
‘We don’t know, exactly. We can’t get much sense out of Molly, just yet. I think you should come down.’
‘Of course I’m bloody coming down.’
He spends the journey to Bart’s unable to breathe, unable to think of anything for more than a second at a time. There are police cars outside the hospital and Sergeant Donovan is waiting to meet him.
‘This way.’
She doesn’t make a joke, no snide comment or ‘I told you so’. It makes John feel sick. She leads him to the morgue lab. Lestrade is stood beside Molly, who is sat on a stool, hunched and white and shaking. He looks up as John enters. His face is drawn and drained.
‘What the hell’s happened?’
Lestrade looks down at Molly.
‘Do you want to tell him?’
She nods, choking back tears and sniffing. Her eyes are red and puffy; her cheeks shine.
‘For God’s sake what?’
His voice is broken even to his own ears. He can feel himself sagging despite his anger. Sally motions him down onto a stool with a gentleness that he would not have believed her capable. Molly sniffs and begins talking, quietly, hesitantly.
‘I was showing him Mr Grant and Mr Paulson. It was just us.’
‘I’d phoned him from the Yard, and then I got kept back by another case so I didn’t get here until...’ Lestrade trails off. He pats Molly on the shoulder and she continues.
‘He was... just talking to himself really. And then... then the door opened and...’ She begins to cry again, coughing and gasping for air, but though she manages to recover herself she starts to shake even more than before, her words coming out in a rush, as though she needs the momentum to say them at all.
‘The door opened and these men came in with guns, three of them, and it was just us and I’m not very strong and I was so frightened and there was such a fight. I was screaming for help, but nobody came and they dragged him away and knocked him unconscious. They threw this at me as they left.’
She holds up a slightly battered looking envelope. It is addressed to Dr John Watson. John holds onto the metal bench for support. Lestrade passes the envelope to him but he can only stare at it wordlessly.
‘Would you like me to open it?’
John nods, mute. Lestrade carefully tears it open and slides out the card inside. On the front is a picture of a bunch of flowers. Lestrade opens it, reads in silence and appears to choke on something.
‘What does it say?’
Wordlessly, Lestrade hands it to him. John looks.
Sorry for your loss
Love Jim x
John feels the bile rise into his throat and he coughs and drops the card to the bench from cold, numb fingers. It is not possible to feel this cold and yet still live, surely to God, it can’t be. The ice creeps into his brain, trickling into any and every crack until he feels paralysed with dread at the sight of a name he hoped never to see or hear again. There is only one ‘Jim’ in John Watson’s world, and John wishes him burnt out of it.
‘John, I’m so sorry—’
‘Can you give me a minute?’
‘Of course.’
The police file silently out, leaving John and Molly alone in the room. After a moment she clears her throat.
‘May I?’
She gestures to the card and John nods. She reaches across for it and reads the inscription. Spluttering on another round of helpless tears, she puts it down. They sit in appalled silence until she clears her throat again.
‘I didn’t tell them, because I didn’t think it mattered to them. But it matters to you.’
‘What?’
‘He said something. When they dragged him out of the room he shouted something back at me.’
John swallows. It hurts more than it ought to.
‘What did he say?’
Molly gathers herself together as though this is the most difficult part of her entire ordeal. She releases a shuddering breath before she can speak.
‘He said: Tell John I love him.’
John shuts his eyes, drops his head forward and clenches his hands together. He has nothing to say. It is exactly what he wanted, and yet didn’t need, to hear, not right now. He hears Molly shift off her seat and come over to him. She places a small hand on his shoulder. He lifts his head and she is looking directly at him and he realises that she knows, she understands, like no one else on earth, and so he lets her wrap her arms around him in silent sorrow.
There is a gentle knock on the door and Molly releases him and they both turn. Lestrade is showing in the only other person on earth who understands.
‘Mycroft.’ John swallows the lump in his throat, tries to pull himself together, although Mycroft almost certainly knows about them already. The other man nods his greeting.
‘John.’
He sits down opposite. His mouth is pressed into a thin, straight line. He looks pale and wan and more worried than John has ever seen him.
‘It is definitely our old friend Mr Moriarty, then?’
His voice is thin, flat, lacking its usual rich, luxurious quality. John passes him the envelope and card. Mycroft reads them in silence and then shuts his eyes, massaging the bridge of his nose with his fingers. ‘Anthea’, who has entered silently behind Lestrade, steps over to him and places a hand gently on his shoulder and squeezes. Mycroft looks up at her and smiles a watery smile.
‘Detective Inspector Lestrade?’
‘Yes?’
‘I will, of course, authorise all the most exceptional procedures. I hope my department will find yours willing to collaborate?’
‘Certainly.’
‘Excellent. And now, I think I will take Dr Watson and Miss Hooper home. In the meantime, Anthea will assist you.’
Mycroft stands and motions John and Molly to follow him. Molly goes without a word, Donovan draping a blanket over her shoulders as she passes her. John pauses in the doorway.
‘I think I should stay here.’
Mycroft looks back at him. The corner of his mouth twitches.
‘I think you would be considerably more useful tomorrow morning after a rest.’
‘He’s right, John. I’ll call you tomorrow as soon as we know anything.’
‘We’ll find him, John. Freak doesn’t get to drop us in the middle of a case this easily.’
Donovan attempts a smile and it’s a truly courageous effort. John can only nod and, grudgingly, allows Mycroft to lead him to his car.
This time on waking he forces himself to wash, to shave, to dress. To do rather than think, to live in the real world rather than the broken record of memories that fill his endless days and restless nights.
He will eat something, be normal, have breakfast. He will hold himself together enough to leave the flat and he will hail a cab and he will go to Mycroft and then, in the civilised surroundings of Mycroft’s town house or Whitehall office, he will throw down his life to do something, anything that will bring him back.
He opens the fridge and the milk is sour and the blackberries Sherlock insisted they buy have started to grow mould. John views the withering hand, the rotting berries and the frankly offensive milk dispassionately. If he starts down the road of ‘Sherlock touched this before he was taken’ he will drive himself mad. He shuts the door and decides he will pay Mycroft a visit earlier in the day than expected.