Chapter Text
i.
They’re in Baker Street, in the living room.
It is enormous, it is far too small for them all. John’s body is agonisingly heavy and the ground under her unsettlingly light. Everything is wrong. Molly is on the ground, arms wrapped around her; Sally’s hands are gripping a chair arm tightly; Mrs. Hudson is standing very straight, fingers moments from the wall in case she should need the support.
Moriarty is not dead. She’s standing, surrounded by them all, blood trickling from her temples, and of them all only her eyes are focused. Furious. She moves before any of them can react, a snake turning, vaults herself clean through the window with a glittering cascade of glass that in John’s confusion sounds like a scream. It’s unbearable. Not one of them manages to move to follow her; their bodies are still lost to them.
Janine – lying face down on the ground, slowly pushing herself up on shaking arms – is the first to remember how to talk. ‘Nice one,’ she says, blearily, and John thinks she knows what those words mean. Her own name has come back to her, and those of the people around her. She wonders what else is still to come back, and whether she’ll notice if it doesn’t.
‘We won?’ Molly says, lifting her head from her arms then immediately letting it drop. ‘Yes, we did, didn’t we? Something or other.’
‘People will think we’re hungover,’ Janine said, and giggled. Hungover? Oh, yes. John stroked her own hair, finding it vaguely soothing, then forced herself to snap out of it. Only do things John Watson would do. Remember who she is, now she’s not being told and has to write herself again. That’s the thing now.
‘Can you all go?’ Sherlock says, then adds, ‘That is to say, it isn’t a question of ingratitude, it’s only –‘
‘Don’t,’ Sally cuts in quickly. ‘We’ve had too many shocks, we won’t survive you thanking us. I think we could all do with getting home. Though I don’t think any of us should be alone just yet.’
John watches them form groups; Mary and Janine, walking close, studying each other. Sally, brushing a gentle thumb past Irene’s flickery eyelashes, Irene smiling with a softness John didn’t know her mouth had in it. Mrs. Hudson’s arm around Molly.
And then it’s just the two of them again.
‘John,’ Sherlock says, and John’s stomach swoops, because the name’s a reminder, of course, that not everything that happened in the stories was a lie.
And John wonders if perhaps she knows what Sherlock’s about to say.
‘I know this isn’t what matters,’ Sherlock says. ‘And that it’s unlikely to be the first thing on your mind at the moment. But it…’
‘Matters to you,’ John says. Her hands are stiff and all her muscles are sore; she’s been moving differently, her body not quite her own. She’s worn down in every way she can imagine being worn, but she can’t walk away from this.
‘Yes,’ Sherlock says. ‘Enormously. I don’t want to think of anything between us having been…damaged, by anything that occurred. I know it was just a story.’
‘And I know it wasn’t,’ John says. ‘And come on, Sherlock, so do you.’
Sherlock shakes her head, and folds herself into her chair. ‘I think it would be better if we thought of it that way,’ she says.
‘Is that what you want?’ John asks.
Sherlock looks miserable, openly, unguardedly miserable. It’s…sickening, actually, and John doesn’t know what her own face is doing in response but it can’t be good. And yet – and yet – the openness of it is – and Sherlock isn’t answering, of course. Until at last she does: ‘You say it wasn’t just a story. Maybe not just. But it was a story. You know it’s not that neat here. Things hurt differently, and we can’t just – yes, all right, perhaps I’m in love with you, but what does it matter? That won’t stop me doing you harm; it never did. And it certainly won’t repair what’s already been done.’
And John’s swooping again, giddy, lost, almost certainly not making rational decisions. And yet what other decision is there? ‘Get up,’ she says, and Sherlock does, and that is…’I don’t know if I can say what you just said,’ John admits. ‘But I have thought about it. I think we should…you know. Go on with what we were doing, in the story. All of that.’
'Could be dangerous,' Sherlock says, without taking her eyes off John’s face. 'Could be exhausting, brutal and ultimately emotionally devastating.'
‘I know,’ John says, and despite it all she’s walking towards Sherlock. ‘I know, but the alternative’s worse, isn’t it?’
‘I’ve been dealing with the alternative for months,’ Sherlock says. She hesitates. ‘Years.’
John can’t think about that right now, or she doesn’t know what she’ll do. So she takes another step forward, and says, ‘So then you know it’s worse.’
‘Worse than what?’ Sherlock says. ‘Living happily ever after? You saw what that means –‘
‘No,’ John assures her. ‘I don’t think we’re cut out for that. But are we really not going to –‘
Sherlock lets out a tight, painful-sounding breath and says, ‘No. My self-control in this area is – I haven’t had to refine it, if you don’t stop it I won’t –‘ and that’s it, that’s the end of it; tomorrow they’ll talk again and maybe John will say the things they both know she needs to say and maybe she won’t. Maybe it’ll get worse and not better. She hopes not, but it doesn’t matter, because not kissing Sherlock now is unthinkable and Sherlock thinks John not kissing her is unthinkable too and there aren’t any words for what that means or does to John anyhow so why go looking for them, why do anything but –
ii.
Discipline was always Mycroft’s word, but that doesn’t mean Sherlock’s not aware of its value. Discipline and, within that, disciplines, for knowledge control, to make the vast pounding plurality of the world tolerable.
[And so she comes to this, to a woman looking at her and a bed and the artificial light of the bulb snapped out, leaving only the artificial light of the streetlamps outside, and knowledge pouring into her unchecked. She has to hold it together somehow, or fall apart herself.]
One might approach this in terms of Biology. That, of course, is the obvious way. Here are my limbs and here are hers and this is the name for where her fingers are and this is the name for where my mouth is and here are the words for what we are doing to each other and why. But it’s no good, that becomes obvious quickly. What about the slightly too-hard press of John’s fingertips into Sherlock’s hips? The contrast of the tentative, gentle positioning of them, fingertips only and nothing else on her, and how they push as if trying to get through her skin, how they hurt, perhaps Biology could help, perhaps there are words for that and for breath on the ear shaped like the word extraordinary but soundless and for the infuriating tickle of hair across the neck, but she can’t remember them, she can’t even remember whether they exist.
Chemistry? Always where she’s most comfortable, she should have started there, with oxytocin and adrenaline, and here she does better, knows where she is, there are always words for the alchemical tricks and transformations the body plays on itself with no regard for the consequences, but then again perhaps Physics would be better in its grim acceptance of the smallness and vastness the world is capable of, that this is about the same things everything else in the world is about, energy and mass and violence between particles. It doesn’t worry over this feeling of having a warm body in your arms and feeling sick with affection for every damn thing about her, for getting lost in the unnecessarily exhausting fact that her eyelashes are separate from her bravery and Sherlock is in love with both of them.
[Then, of course, she has to consider that they aren’t separate at all, that that is rather the point, and that could break her if she let it. Better to think about atoms and force. But discipline of any kind is rapidly running out.]
To be touched like this outside a story – John’s mouth moving from place to place on her body, she means to see if she can predict where it’ll land next but for a terrible, addictive moment all she thinks is a sound – to be touched like this by John who previous calculations made clear would never do this – to be held and touched – to think of this and very little else, her thoughts almost linear, like a ribbon like a banner like a current of water, but then she never needed metaphors like this.
To touch is another thing entirely, and harder to think about, even though of course she’s thought about it all but nightly for longer than
[She won’t think about that now. John would see it on her face.]
but how can she think about touching while doing it without shattering entirely? John’s skin has texture and temperature of its own, Sherlock cannot hold it in her head and against her body, she keeps them separate and the shock of the connection now is hurting her and John doesn’t like to see her hurt and Sherlock doesn’t mind most kinds of pain necessarily but this is new which makes it most more interesting and admittedly more painful. There’s too much and too many and too – her mind becomes a sound again, it becomes
[It’s like – is it like anything? Like sitting in the back of the car on a long drive twenty, thirty years ago and the light was a certain way and she understood for the first time that she could look at the sky or look at the fields and whichever she chose she would never be able to look at the other at this precise time under these precise circumstances again. Or not like that, because the car carried her away before the end of the thought, and she never had to decide?
{If my hands are on her hands they aren’t on her chest, and if my mouth is on her mouth it’s not on her neck. So far, so obvious. But I can’t contain it; I imagine it only takes practice, but then of course the question becomes whether I want it to get any better or would rather it kept getting worse}
Does it need to be like anything? Finding connections is what she does, this because this therefore this and this, and when there’s nothing left to find the world goes dull and she thought John at first a live-in mystery, a beautifully contradictory and self-concealing thing who’d provide a thousand hours of not-boredom but it’s rare to be so wrong without technically a single in accuracy, nothing but the truth and an awful lot she didn’t and still doesn’t understand left over, spilling over the top of the calculation and leading, eventually, here. But no, she won’t say they were always going to end up here, she knows very well the fragility of this, how unlikely it was. Perhaps one day she’ll tell John how lucky she feels, naturally with an aside about how embarrassing it is to say such a thing. Perhaps she should save it for a day when she needs to apologise; she knows there’ll be a lot of those.
{Here I am, already planning what to do about hurting you later. I don’t think that would surprise you, but I have been wrong so many times where you’re concerned. With you here with me like this it’s easy to forget that I ever want anything else but of course I want things that hurt you and even wanting you isn’t safe, but you’ve made it clear so many times that safe is intolerable to you whether you want it or not.
‘Sherlock,’ you say. It’s the first word you’ve said in a while, though perhaps some of what weren’t words meant the same thing, a thought that has me saying your name in return, and that makes you loud again, and smiling between gasps.
I tried to tell you once about the sky, about appreciating the useless, about the necessity of separating knowledge and desire, rational and irrational. I looked down from the sky and there you were. You’d killed for me and giggled about it, you’d called me extraordinary, you’d moved in with me and stayed. I looked at you and didn’t understand yet that the walls of my compartments were dissolving, that the borders I’d made between the stars and the work, between poisons and music had always been flimsier than I thought and you would walk through them without ever even noticing they were there. I knew I was trying to tell you something, and wasn’t half as troubled as I should have been by the fact that I didn’t know what.
Later I was amazed by how many stars we’d been able to see, how odd that was for London, and more amazed by how I hadn’t even thought of that at the time. No stars tonight, but light pollution is beautiful in its own grubbier clutching way, light that means people and not space. The lamp outside our window is part of it, and the one down the street. In a way that makes the lamplight on the bed more appropriate than starlight. When I finally have to shut my eyes it remains behind them, pressed there by the weight of your mouth against my eyelids.