The first time it happens, he doesn’t even notice.
There’s just a moment of inexplicable tension there that doesn’t register under the storm of rage inside John; the rage drowns it out. Sherlock has gone still, completely still, doesn’t blink or visibly breathe. John doesn’t think he can even see his chest move.
The silence stretches, and when Sherlock doesn’t react after five full seconds, just keeps staring at John as if–as if–as if something, John can’t tell, but something–and John unclenches his fists automatically, and seeing Sherlock’s chest still hasn’t moved, he takes a large, deep breath himself.
The moment passes as if… nothing.
Sherlock doesn’t look at him for the rest of the evening.
The second time it happens, John notices.
It’s not because he’s suddenly become hyper-aware of himself. He has worked on himself, yes, but he still has issues–so many fucking issues, Christ–that he wouldn’t say he’s okay. He’s still shit. He’s still shit, but he lives with Sherlock again, so it’s a manageable sort of shit.
It’s because of Mrs Hudson that he notices. It’s inevitable, really: Mrs Hudson has always reacted excessively to any sudden sort of noise or movement. Clearly a victim of abuse. No wonder, with that husband of hers.
They’re alone, John and Mrs Hudson, over dinner. John accidentally lets his fork drop with a clatter, and somehow that sound aggravates him–221B has been so silent lately–that he snaps, “Damn it!” and bangs his palm flat on the table. He doesn’t even know he’s done it until his own rapid breathing reaches his ear and his eyes fly up to find Mrs Hudson having shrunk back, her hand on the back of the chair and half out of her seat.
They stare at each other wordlessly. Come to think of it, that’s something John and the people around him have been doing a lot, lately. Staring, saying nothing.
He breathes through the realisation–she is scared of me; I am scaring her–and when he’s done, he gets up and leaves her, pale and shaken, without a word of explanation.
He spends the next days walking London until his feet hurt and his chest has gone dull with the ache.
The second time it happens, John notices.
They’ve spoken more today than the last days (hell, weeks), and John feels cautiously optimistic. They’re on the couch together, watching telly. It raises feelings of nostalgia that leave goosebumps on his arm, but he’s wearing a jumper, so it goes unnoticed. They sit close. They tend to sit closely, these days. John tries not to think too much about it.
That is why, when he has a glass or two too much, he gets a bit careless. They often sit like this. Sherlock knows him; he knows him more than any other person on this planet ever has and ever will. No movement John can make will be a surprise to him.
That’s what John will think, later.
He stretches, the bottle of beer in hand, and yawns. He leans forward. Sherlock’s thigh is pressed against his. He isn’t thinking.
He sets the bottle down on the table more forcefully than usual. He isn’t thinking. He’s comfortable, off his guard. He’s had a drink too much, so his movements are more uninhibited.
He doesn’t see it happen, only feels it.
Right that very second, Sherlock’s thigh just jerks against his. It jumps–flinches–a violent tremble, as if–as if–as if shot through with something, and John stares blankly ahead, remembers Mrs Hudson’s shaken face, the pale impression of fear on her face, and he doesn’t move.
He doesn’t move for a full minute, and Sherlock doesn’t move for a full minute.
The tension is there this time, as thick as John’s anger usually. This time John isn’t angry. He was relaxed. Happy, even, if that’s something he still can be.
Now, everything inside him runs cold. Like a phantom ache, his knuckles itch. His palm. His foot, too.
(–slapped Sherlock–slapped him, and slapped him, and it was just once but felt like more–incadescent, John was burning, burning out of his skin, the guilt, God, the guilt, and the lies–and a punch, his knuckles, Sherlock’s bruised skin–another–and then a kick, vicious, vile, God, he loathed himself, couldn’t stop, couldn’t stop, Sherlock’s blood–)
It’s John who jerks away this time, full-bodied. He jumps up from the sofa and looks down at Sherlock, who is unreadable, face closed off entirely. He looks guileless, as if John didn’t just–didn’t just–
He needs to breathe, needs to breathe–
“John? It’s Mrs Hudson. Come back home, John. You know he needs you. Don’t do this again.”
John listens to one out of seven voice mails and deletes the rest.
The black car is waiting for him outside in the street. John freezes when he sees it, hand still on the entry door of the building where he works.
As he just stares and doesn’t move an inch, his phone buzzes. A text. Some variation of, Get in the car. MH, that John has ignored for the last month.
He ignores this one now, too. He walks towards the car, stares stonily at it, and makes a sharp curve away from it to round the corner.
For once, the car doesn’t follow.
One thing John had alwas feared worst was turning into his parents.
He sits on Harry’s sofa, stares at all the bottles around him, and is horrified to find that he can’t distinguish the smell between himself and Harry anymore.
Harry hadn’t asked. She hadn’t needed to. She’d pressed a bottle into his hand and willingly gone down under with him.
After four nights in a row of this, John doesn’t just feel sick of the alcohol.
At three thirty in the morning, he gets up, moves into the bathroom, closes the door behind him, turns on the light, and disrobes. He stares at himself in the mirror, nude, and forces himself to take his own reflection in. What he sees is a piece of shit, unworthy, undeserving, just–
“Cut the drama, John,” Mary says from behind him. “You know that’s Sherlock’s role.”
–despicable, vile, how could anybody love him, he’s such a bad person, God, he never wanted to–
“Seriously. You don’t even look half as good as he does when you’re theatrical. Drop it.”
”–I don’t want to be like my father,” he confesses in a rush, breathless, words so fast they almost trip over themselves. He feels light, weightless. “But I am, and I’m worthless, and I can’t ever–can’t ever…”
Mary would have let him finish, but he can’t finish. He can’t get the words out. Even in his own head, he can’t say it.
He ends up sobbing into his own shoulder, his dead wife sitting on the bathtub before him, oddly silent for once.
After forty-three days, Sherlock writes him.
John has never both loved and despised words more than these. Come home. As if he could just–!
“You can,” Mary tells him from the door.
John’s head snaps up. It’s the first time in over a week that he’s seen her since the bathroom incident. His hand is still bandaged, and Harry won’t speak to him unless he buys a new mirror for her.
“I can’t,” he snaps back, tired of these conversations. As if he doesn’t know better.
“You do,” Mary says, going on relentlessly. “You’re just too much of a coward.”
It’s really shit having a talking, walking subconscious.
John deliberately takes a deep breath and inhales and exhales through the anger, until it’s somewhat passed.
He doesn’t answer to Mary. There’s no need to.
They both know it’s true, anyway.
He can, and he does. Therapy, twice a week, with a man. He loathes it, every second. It’s hell.
He goes through it. He’s been through hell before, and Sherlock has been to hell, too, because of him. For him. He does it for Sherlock.
Sherlock’s one message is the only text he’s kept. Mycroft’s numerous texts and the odd missed call and all of Mrs Hudson’s angry voice mails, he long deleted.
Sherlock’s text–Come home–he keeps. Come home. As if it’s that easy. As if it’s okay.
But he can, and he does, because nothing ever was easy, and nothing ever was okay. Some things are unacceptable, and even sayin them doesn’t make that all right.
Working on them, though, possibly, just might.
The first time he sees Sherlock again is after three months and six days. It’s early summer. It’s much too beautiful to be having tense conversations, but here they are, in a neutral restaurant, both eating and averting one another’s eyes.
When Mary tells him the third time to, “Talk, John, Jesus Christ!” John swallows.
He very slowly puts the fork down.
“Sherlock,” he begins and doesn’t know how to go on. How do people have these conversations? This is awful. He hates this. It’s hard for him. He clears his throat, tries to get the panic out. “Sherlock.”
“Don’t be stupid,” is all Sherlock says. “It’s fine.”
John’s mouth is still open, mid-speech.
“Of course it’s fine,” Sherlock says, chances a quick glance at him and a brief smile. “I deserved it.”
Oh, hell. Oh, Christ. The coldness is back, and John wants to hurl. Jesus Christ.
“No.” There are earthquakes in his voice. They’re strong earthquakes. “No, it’s not okay. Actually. It’s not okay at all.”
Sherlock stares down at the table, brow furrowed. He looks confused.
“It’s awful,” John continues, and he feels like he can’t breathe. He soldiers on, because it’s what he does. “It’s awful, and it should never have happened, and I’m sorry. I am so sorry. I was a cock. I was an arsehole. I shouldn’t have done that.”
“I hurt you,” Sherlock says, muttering, and John almost misses it because he says it to the table. “I hurt you, so I deserved it.”
It feels so surreal, he and Sherlock sitting here in broad daylight, talking about things. It feels so surreal and is long overdue.
John takes another breath. “Maybe some of it. That one time, before Irene Adler’s house, that was–yeah, you deserved that.”
The corner of Sherlock’s left mouth quirks up.
“And maybe, maybe you deserved a bit of punching too when you came back. Because you–“ Christ, he has to say it. He has to say it. “–you–you left me, for two years. That wasn’t. That wasn’t good.”
The old familiar surge of anger and bitterness creeps up on him, but it isn’t about that now. John pushes it ruthlessly aside and continues, squaring his shoulders.
“But everything after that–Sherlock, no, you did not deserve that. You.” His throat is tight, so he coughs, tries to clear it. “You.” The itch in his throat becomes a tear, breaking his voice apart.
Bloody bodies, the lot of them. Always so treacherous.
“You did everything for me,” John says, and in the calmness of his voice, there’s a tremor. “You did everything for me, and I should have been there for you. I wasn’t.”
In his hand, there’s a tremor too. His hand is on the table.
“Please–please forgive me. I should never have done that.”
His hand is shaking badly. Sherlock is looking at it, and John doesn’t hide it, not anymore. Sherlock can see all of him now, if he wants to. If he still wants to, after all that John has done.
“It’s fine,” Sherlock says, and his voice has none of the brashness of before. It’s low but firm. “I said it’s fine, John. It’s fine.”
John forgets to breathe, does not do it and literally doesnt think of it, as he watches Sherlock’s hand cover his on the table. His large hand, engulfing John’s deficient, smaller one. Like it’s precious, even though it hurt him, even though it touched him in bad blood.
Yes, John thinks, and this time the voice is not Mary’s anymore, but his. Finally his. Yes, this has always been who he is. He’s always been this brave.
John is stuck in a limbo, staring down at their hands. Sherlock is staring too–barely breathing–and then he closes his eyes and his–
his thumb moves. Brushes, just so, over the back of John’s hand.
John jerks his hand back as if he’s burnt himself.
Sherlock’s entire beautiful open face closes off in a single second, but not before John hasn’t seen the hurt: cracked open, a vulnerability so devastating that it makes him react instinctually.
“No,” he says, brings his hand forward again and snatches Sherlock’s before he can take it back. He holds it there, pressed down into the table. “No, Sherlock. If we–”
A stab of panic in his chest, but John ignores it.
“–if we, if we ever do that, I don’t want to touch you like this. I want to…” He closes his eyes. He’s such a fucking coward, can’t look at Sherlock when he says it. “… When I touch you the first time, like this–I–”
Say it, John. Say it. Years long, now say it, get the hell on with it.
“–l want you to know only love and pleasure,” John chokes out and can’t help it: the tears slide down his face, sudden, unbidden, and ugly.
Sherlock lets him cry, as if he knows this is somethign John has to do on his own. He doesn’t move his hand, though.
When John has finished crying, their hands are intertwined. Sherlock’s fingers are holding his, tightly. Like they don’t want to let go.
Eventually, Sherlock looks up. His eyes are bright and red and beautiful.
Sherlock is so beautiful.
Maybe they will be. Okay.
2087
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