Chapter Text
Lilly lets go of Joan almost immediately and pushes her across the elevator. She staggers and catches herself. Stands, brushing hair out of her face. Lilly pockets his knife, a glint of metal, and jabs the Down button on the elevator wall beside him.
“No offence,” he says to her nastily. “But I really have not the time for this nonsense.”
“I understand,” says Joan. “I know you would not have hurt me,” she adds.
Lilly looks alarmed. “Don’t bet on it,” he says, but Joan does not believe his threat.
“You won’t,” she says calmly. “And I can give you a couple of reasons.”
Lilly opens his mouth to speak but she interrupts him. “First,” she says, “that’s not a knife. I know the ambient temperature of steel in a normally heated office building, and what you threatened to stick me with was nowhere near cold enough. It’s a cheap alloy, nickel plated brass at best. I'm guessing a pen, or a very shiny metal phone case which you held in your hand in such a way to show the flash of metal but not the shape of the implement. Am I right?”
“Shut your face,” says Lilly. He lunges at her and his punch lands on her cheek as she flings herself away. In such a small space it is an uneven fight, and she is quickly overpowered, his right hand twisting viciously in her hair as he forces her against the elevator wall. Her head is numb from his blow. Her cheek has split and hot blood is trickling down onto her neck. But life with Sherlock has shown her how to roll with the punches, including the literal ones, and she already knows what she is going to do
Lilly is panting, tugging her hair, his eyes wild. Joan kicks his shins with her spike heeled boots and he yelps and shoves her hard against the wall. “Bitch.”
She makes a face at him. Her face is throbbing but she does not care because she is now where she wanted to be. She puts one hand down into her pocket and tries to ease away from Lilly’s grip on her hair, edging along the wall of the elevator towards the controls. “There’s also the second thing,” she says, and slams the Emergency Stop button on the wall beside her.
The lift jolts, Lilly is momentarily surprised and that is all she needs to take her hand out of her pocket and blast him with the pepper spray. He lurches back, clawing at his eyes, and she knees him in the groin, still spraying, and pummels him to the ground. She gets a firm grip on him, pins him, and pockets the spray.
“Sherlock!” she yells. “Sherlock!”
A creak behind her makes her whirl round. The lift doors are being forced. Still crouched, holding down a struggling, half blinded Lilly, Joan sees daylight, and the ground floor foyer, through the bottom half of the door. She had pressed the Stop button four feet from the end of the journey.
Sherlock is there, breathless, the receptionist and an overweight security guard peering in too. "Are you all right?" Sherlock calls, his eyes anxious.
"Yes - help me get him -"
Lilly surges to his feet and tramples Joan aside. She falls sideways with a moan. Lilly launches through the open lower half of the lift door, legs first, punching Sherlock's chest and sending him staggering back. Lilly lands, sprawled onto Sherlock for a second, then springs up and smashes his forehead into the security guard's face. The guy drops like a sack of cement.
Joan is struggling to move, to get out of the lift, to see if Sherlock is Ok.
Lilly takes the guard's gun and waves it around. He opens his mouth as if to deliver some smart line, then thinks better of it and sprints away across the gleaming marble, clatters through the glass revolving doors and onto the plaza outside.
Joan sees Sherlock, through the gap, haul himself upright and start after Lilly.
"Sherlock!" Lilly has a gun. He is desperate. This is not a good combination.
Joan climbs awkwardly out of the lift as Bell, and then Gregson appear. Gregson bends to the security guard; Bell says, "Which way?" and Joan points. Bell races for the door and Joan follows him into the lunchtime throng.
She and Bell are outside on the crowded plaza, when two shots ring across the busy space. There are shrieks, and people scatter to the sides.
Joan feels the chill in her heart before her mind can truly process what she has heard. Bell did not fire - would never fire in a crowded public place - and Sherlock does not have a weapon.
The crowd parts and there is a body on the ground. Lilly is disappearing into a melee of office workers. They leap back as he approaches, unintentionally easing his path.
Joan sprints. Every day she runs, measured paces around the block or along the edge of the park overlooking the water. She runs like clockwork, even, steady, regulating breath and muscles, keeping her arms tucked and her legs in tight stride.
This is nothing like those morning jogs. She is flying, flailing, stumbling over the patterned paving with arms flung out and her scream leading the way. And ahead of her Lilly is vanishing and the figure on the ground in the red white and blue sweater lies very still.
She drops to her knees beside him, trying to think CPR, blood loss, trauma but her world is full of Sherlock, no, not you, no, no, and she has not even reached out to touch him as Bell pounds past her, pauses, and fires his weapon. More screams and then a collective gasp, and then a New York silence, not quiet in absolute terms, but only a well of stillness in the midst of hubbub and motion.
Sherlock is still. There is no blood. This fact reaches Joan's brain only after she has wrapped her arms around his fallen form and is shrieking, sobbing, saying his name over and over. There is no blood, says the deductive part of her mind, and whatever felled Sherlock, it was not a gunshot.
She lifts her head, gasping, and see Sherlock fling out his right hand. In it is clutched Lilly's gun.
"Safety on Watson," says Sherlock faintly. "Put the... safety on..."
Gregson says behind her, "I got it." He bends with a handkerchief in his hand and takes the gun. "You ok?"
Sherlock grunts. Groans. Gregson says, "Bell got him," and heads off, with the gun, in the direction of Bell.
The moment of stillness has passed and now the noise is increased, shriller, brimming with adrenaline.
Sherlock opens his eyes, inspects the sky, levers himself upright. He stands swaying for a moment and then Joan attacks him.
Unknown words fall from her mouth. She hammers him with her fists, shrieking outrage and horror.
Sherlock steps behind her and pins her with his arms around her waist. He is strong. All that single stick. She cannot free herself. "Watson," he says. "Watson, stop. You're safe. I've got you. Joan."
She is sobbing and thrashing and she cannot calm down. "I thought you were dead," she says, and it comes out with an undignified squeak. She struggles and tries to turn around and carry on hitting him, battering him into the understanding of what he did to her.
He just stands holding her steadily, saying "Joan, I've got you, the gun went off as I grabbed it, I'm just winded, it's all right," until she subsides.
She takes breaths and wobbles as he releases her.
He sets her feet on the ground but his arms are still round her - to stop her running or maybe just to keep her uptight.
"Joan," he says into the back of her neck, and this time there is pain in it. "I will never hurt you, I will never hurt you."
She stops. She has heard those words before.
She wriggles round in his arms and looks up at him. He is pale and as breathless as she.
"Are you ok?" she asks. He is not dead but is he hurt? Her heart pounds as she realises he could have been bleeding this whole time, trying to cure her hysteria.
"I'm fine."
He searches her face. His eyelids flicker as he takes in her tears, her torn cheek, her messed up hair. He lifts his right hand and smooths hair from her forehead.
She feels his rough palm on her skin. Oh. He strokes her hair back again, and again, and then she is pressed against his chest, her face in his sweater as his hands cradle her head, and his warm breath against her scalp. He says, "Joan. Joan. You have misunderstood me all day."
"What do you mean?" But she knows.
"Like we were before," he says.
"I thought you meant before we - had sex," she says. She will not be afraid of those words, as bald as they are.
He cannot possibly be afraid either, but he winces as she speaks so bluntly. "That was not what I meant when I said it," he says. "I was talking about earlier in the evening. Before the power came back on. I wished we had not stopped."
"Oh."
He smiles ruefully. "I knew at once that you had misunderstood me. But when you said you couldn't, I -"
He falls silent.
He takes her hand and leads her to a sculptured bench, the one he leapt, the night of the blackout. They face each other. He still has her hand.
"I had hope then," he says. "Hope that you, that you had the same feelings I do."
She feels her eyes widen. She cannot stop looking at him.
"You thought I wanted to go back to before ...we..." He is stilted, frustrated with himself.
"Sex," she says. Brutal. Still feeling a need to punish, why, why is she so awful at this when he is being so nice? Suspicious, she realises. She just can't believe his words can be what she wants to hear so much.
"Before we made love," he says.
He purses his lips and looks at her - daring to question his use of that phrase.
She feels the fight drain out of her, leaving only exhaustion, and her throbbing cheek, and ... promise. "I never expected a euphemism from you," she says weakly.
"It is not a euphemism," he says softly. "Love can be created by the generation of certain chemicals... bonding occurs... but also," seeing her eye roll begin, "also, when you engage in sexual activity with someone you care for deeply. When you fall in love, when you can share your feeling for someone through touch and taste and smell, that is making love, maintaining love, and that is not a euphemism. Is it?"
"No," she says.
There is a pause. There is no one nearby. The stone bench is hard and narrow. Joan remembers Sherlock's stream of words. Were they true then, and known?
She has never told him anything of her feelings.
"You said - you couldn't," she says. Couldn't have a relationship, couldn't... love.
His hand tightens around hers, relaxes and becomes soft. His eyes dart side to side. "That may not have been empirically true." At the last word he meets her gaze.
Her heart beats rapidly.
"We should go home," Sherlock says. He does not move. The plaza hubbub ebbs and flows around them.
"Yes." Joan curls his fingers into her palm. "Love," she says.
She has been with him in well lit spaces all day and has not seen him at all.
She longs for darkness, where things become clear and the truth burns brightly.
"Say nothing you are not sure of, Watson," he says quickly. "I am not a child."
She smiles a little. It is the start of the smile she knows she will have all day, and for a long time. "I never told you,' she says.
He is staring. Quivering. His hand in hers is hot.
"I thought it when I held your hand as we crossed the bridge at midnight," she says. "I thought it when you used your hand to stop me bashing my head into the wall. I thought it when you went back for that boy's mother. -I - I thought it when we were in the thirty thousand dollar bed." Touch and scent and taste and gasps and cries.
She is bad at this. "Sherlock -"
"The words are not the point," he says quickly. "What prompts them, is the point."
She owes him more than that. She lets go his hand and puts her hands on his shoulders, leans towards him so that her mouth is beside his left ear. "I love you," she whispers, and his arms slide around her and hold her tightly, strong and sure, and she rests her palms on the back of his neck and knows calm certainty.
She leans away, and rummages in her pocket; finds the bundle of glowsticks. Picks one, and snaps it to set off its dim apricot glow.
"That's as much light as I want," she tells Sherlock. " Any more and things start to get fuzzy."
She puts her hand to his jaw, drawing his fingers over his bristles, brown mixed with silver, evidence of his years. She touches his left eyebrow, wiry hair there too, then trails her fingers down his jaw and throat and to the rough round collar of his sweater, and rests her hand on his chest with her fingertips just touching his skin.
His eyes are huge. "Can you see me now?" he whispers.
She smiles. "Yes." She pauses, his heat transmitting to her skin, and hers to his. "Let's go home."
There is a thing he does, holding her hand crumpled in his, completely enclosed, and rubbing her knuckles across his lips, kissing, nuzzling, really. He does it sitting up in bed, watching TV news, or he does it while eating cereal with his other hand, careless of the fact that this leaves her struggling with her spoon in the wrong hand. Sometimes he does it sitting in front of Gregson’s desk, listening intently, nodding, making sarcastic comments and then his hand is warm on hers and she feels his lips on her fingernails and she has to stare straight at Gregson, or out the window because Gregson still cannot cope with public displays of affection from Sherlock to Joan. She wonders what Gregson would do the other way around. One day she will have to find out, but for now the PDA is all on Sherlock's side, astonishing but true.
He likes to hold her hand as they walk. It helps him think, he says. A steadying contact, he calls it. She gets that. His calloused palm against her own, a reminder all the time of reality, of love, of hope in a world where crime and distress can come in at any moment to wreck what you have built. And sometimes she feels heat rising from his skin, and stops, and he stops too and turns to her with a look of such longing that she leans across and kisses his cheek, and he grabs her hard and begins an exploration of her back and bottom, and she pushes him away and says, Not here, later, and he complains but knows that it is a promise as well as a deferral, and satisfies himself with a little ear nibbling and perhaps saying into her ear what he expects them to do later on in return for her making them wait.
And at home, in the kitchen, she will sometimes walk up behind him and kiss the soft back of his neck, and he will not even look up from what he is reading, but wave his hand at her in acknowledgement. Or maybe she will pull his feet into her lap on the couch and sit stroking them, his silly socks, his elegant, sensitive feet which are as sensual as every other part of him once bare. If there is no case or it is time for them to sleep in the middle of a case, she will reach for him and pull him down beside her on the couch and kiss him until the blankness goes from his eyes and he is here with her in the present moment, kissing her too, shoving his notes away and manoeuvring to get a better grip on her sweater. He pulls it off and when her arms are free she undoes his belt, all in the name of becoming more comfortable for sleep, and then jeans are removed and underwear disappears to be found days later in the back of the couch, and goodnight kisses become deep and slow and extend beyond passion into whole realms of wordless communication, and after a tussle for protection, which either of them has available in an instant these days, they arrange themselves for sleep, that is, not to sleep at all but eventually there is the possibility of sleep with him panting into her neck and saying “I love you,” and her hands clenched on his shoulder blades, dragging him closer, so precious, and kissing her reply because she is the repressed one and finds love, the three words about it, too hard to express most of the time. And finally there is sleep, on the couch with a blanket thrown over them both, and it is not perfect sleep, but better than none, and at least this way they are on hand for the case, or at any rate, more non-sleep in the morning when they wake up and one or both of them is feeling keen.
It cannot last, of course, this wonderful period of exploration and learning and permanent excitement. But he seems determined to keep surprising her, and she will do whatever it takes to make this continue to work, and so even when one day the newness has worn off and they are established as some kind of regular couple, however that will work, Joan has hope that she will always be able to see him, to know him, and he her, no matter what, and even, especially, perfectly, in the dark.