A/N: This was written for the Summer 2012 Commfest at the sherlockbbc community on livejournal. I combined three prompts from my anonymous requester: "unrequited love with lots of angst," interaction between Sherlock and Harry, and a bit of Doctor!John. The title is from T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land," lines 420-421; I also considered titling it "the awful daring of a moment's surrender," from the same poem.
x
When spring comes the gardens will be beautiful and green and full, but now they are grey rock paths and brittle tree branches and frost. Their footsteps crunch over the grass. "Just five minutes earlier," Sherlock is muttering. "Just five minutes. We could have—"
He blames himself. He ripples with anger, the sort John usually feels and rarely sees. He tries to tell Sherlock he can't feel guilty like this, but Sherlock only cuts him off and sinks down into a crouch like he doesn't know how to stand anymore, like this standing thing, it's impossible, and jams the heels of his hands against his eye sockets. John rests his hand gently on Sherlock's shoulder. Sherlock jerks away from the touch.
Sometimes Sherlock looks like some overgrown ragdoll, flopping across furniture, inventing new pretzel positions for his body, bored with it, tired of its limits—he looks like something unreal. A boneless bloodless person, an unidentifiable creature. But right now he looks human, as he always does most in those moments when he is trying to be above the simplicity of emotion, of failure. John doesn't dare speak.
Later Sherlock insists, "This never happened," and straightens his cuffs, buttons his coat as if he were cold.
x
Usually John diagnoses sniffles or treats the flu but today he is setting a broken arm, a clean divide of bone that will, slowly, slowly, knit itself together once more. All into one piece. If he just sets it on the right path. If he just directs it on its way.
The boy with the broken arm is sniffing back tears and John, John is thinking about his sister, about Harry drunk and laughing, she is often drunk and laughing in his memories, trying to sing, but mostly yelling. My brooooother. My brother Johnnnnn. Such a healer. Always fixing people. Putting them back togeeeether. Yes. That's what he doooooes.
It's true there is a power in putting things to right.
He keeps his touch gentle but definite, sure, and the boy wipes his nose with the back of his sleeve and pulls himself together as best he can. John gives him directions, tells him to be careful, caps everything off with a professional smile—this is different than an everyday smile; it is thin and shallow; it holds his place while he waits, to see what his patient will say next.
"It was pretty dumb of me," this one says, as if he hadn't been listening, as if he were speaking to himself. "Falling off my bike like that."
"Just count yourself lucky that you broke your arm and not your head," John tells him.
"Lucky," the boy sniffs, disdainful and disbelieving. He's about a second from screaming, John thinks, John realizes, with the slight bright jolt that comes with realization, and what could have upset him so much, he doesn't know, but it brings up all at once two separate memories, clear and sharp like cut glass pieces. Sherlock in the garden, holding his head together with two hands. The first moment that John knew. And Sherlock's wrist, trapped beneath John's fingers, the hard knob of bone that settled against John's knuckle, the hint of thin delicate bones beneath John's fingertips. The first moment he dared.
x
He lets the moments grow before he takes one. He's careful like that. Smiles that no one else sees, touches that linger, under-breath giggles at private jokes in public places, and once, even, Sherlock's head on his lap while John pretended to watch some crap show on the telly, while John ran his fingers through Sherlock's curls.
He gets into the habit of taking long walks. He catalogues features. Stupid things, silly things, how Sherlock takes his tea, the lines of his face when he first wakes up, the flick flick of his eyes over a face or a body as he gathers it up, every insult he's ever levied against one of John's dates. How he made John jump, when John didn't even think he could walk. And the day the girl died on their watch. How morbid of him, he knows, to think of this, but: how Sherlock's body gathered down into itself. It is not that he cared about losing, and there's no doubt in John's mind that he did, that not being good enough this time tore at him. Nor is it that he mourned for the person they'd failed to save, though John believes he did. There was a time he would have doubted, but—
What haunts is that he let John see.
It was a loss, a tragedy in its way, but one moves on even from tragedies. Sometimes they bring people together: isn't there some common-knowledge wisdom like that? Harry used to say that was crap. Loss multiplies.
x
Sherlock has been impossible to reach for days. He lies on the couch or the floor, drags himself to his room, curls up in corners sometimes. John doesn't touch him, because Sherlock warned him not to touch, please, but he leaves him food, and tea, and collects and washes the dishes when he finds them, later, abandoned, Sherlock's body slung elsewhere, but the mug empty, the plate dusted with crumbs. He has stopped asking if there's anything else he can do to help. Some people, sometimes, you can't put back together.
He gets back from work, stepping in from under a grey Tuesday sky that threatens rain, announces he's "disgusting" and "off to a shower," and gets halfway down the hall before Sherlock calls back, "I made tea."
Disconcerting what that voice does to him, not because it is deep and familiar and pit-of-the-stomach gorgeous, always, but because he has not heard it in half a week, and he did not realize he missed it this viscerally until now. He turns back.
"No sugar," Sherlock says. "Bit of milk."
John takes the mug, then sits down, tentatively, next to him. "Thank you," he says. He takes a sip. It's good, just how he would make it, and he's surprised and confused and he wonders what's behind the gesture, because Sherlock isn't usually like this, even after one of his moods. He just gets up one day as if he had never slipped under, announces his return with some sudden demand, or catches John's arm as he walks through the door and leads him out again, sputtering details of their new case. This, this subtle floating up into the light, is strange and disorienting. It makes John wonder if perhaps this time the darkness was worse, harder to shake.
"Got a new case?" he asks.
"No."
"Oh."
He runs his fingertip around the edge of the mug. Royal Army Medical Corps, it says. Faithful in adversity.
He tries to think of something, anything, he would not do for this man, but he draws blank after blank.
"I started talking to you about an hour ago," Sherlock announces.
"Yeah?" John asks. "What'd I miss?"
"We're going out to dinner." It isn't a question, but John would hardly expect it to be. "I made reservations. If you have other plans, you should break them."
"No." He hasn't gone on a date in a long time. He's stopped keeping track of how long. "No, I would…love to have dinner with you." The words come out on an exhale, and he caps them off with a trying-too-hard smile, because the phrase is a bit of a test, one he wasn't sure he was ready to try.
Sherlock looks back at him, lips parted, gaze, John notes, increasingly distant. Where does that mind travel, when he gets that expression on his face?
"It's like a date," John says.
"Where two people who like each other go out and have fun," Sherlock recites in his turn. His voice is as remote as his stare, and when he stands up, an instinct flashes lighting-bright through John's body and he just has to stop him, just has to look into his eyes one more time, as if looking at someone's eyes really taught you anything; he has maybe a bit of a romantic streak like that; so he reaches out his hand and grabs Sherlock's wrist.
Such a delicate part of the body, really. So many small and fragile bones.
Sherlock turns, looks back at him. Their gaze holds for several long moments. If John wasn't sure of his feelings before, he is now, knows them like he knows the feeling of a coming storm when his shoulder aches, knows them like he knows the trigger of his gun, the feel of it beneath his finger, or the pound-pound rhythm of his feet against the London streets. These are bright sharp cuts of feeling, want to fuck against the wall feelings, want to grab on and not let go feelings; he wants to seize like he's been seized; he wants to invade because he's been utterly invaded, and it's a painful terrible tragedy because a person doesn't make his way back from need like this. Need like this is why John Watson doesn't fall in love. He plays at love because the words are fun and the slick press of skin against skin is fun and the chase is fun, the game is fun. But this could undo him.
Sherlock pulls his hand away. "John," he says, voice cracked and broken, not Sherlock's voice at all. John doesn't want to hear this. "I don't—I'm not—"
Sherlock always has words.
"I thought you knew I don't—"
"Yeah. Course. Of course I know, yeah."
He could vomit. He wants to vomit.
"Right," Sherlock says.
And "right," John repeats, as if this could put them on the same page, as if this repetition could link them, as if.
x
Before her wedding, Harry told him that he didn't know anything about love, which he thought was a right good laugh. "You just don't know how to trust people," she'd said. She was teeth-deep in arrogance then, and happiness, and optimism, thought she'd really found the one and John believed that, at least, true. Clara was amazing. They thought they were going to be in love forever. It was easy to want that for them.
John didn't answer her accusations. He didn't say much of anything, just helped her fix her tie, fix her hair. Years later a man in a suit told him he had trust issues and he bit back the words that came up like bile in his throat: and you think you're the first person to see that in me?
x
Sherlock Holmes, that mad genius, with his insufferable brilliance, the way he needed the same things that John needed, the way he needed John and John needed him and they hadn't even known about this need until it was filled and then it seemed a miracle they'd gone on this long without—he stepped right into John's life and became every exception to every rule. It wasn't a question of trust, with him. It was a question of instinct.
John knew right away that Sherlock Holmes was a man he would kill for.
He knows now that Sherlock is a man he would die for, too.
This is the sort of love that people think is beautiful and pure and deep but which John knows is like war, worse than you could have imagined before you enter it, but once you're there you need it, even though you know it's ugly and even though it hurts.
x
They do not speak of it again. Not the garden, not the girl, not John's hand clutching at Sherlock's wrist. They do not speak about feeling, nor about desire, nor about want.
x
One day he comes back from the shops and he hears his sister's voice coming from inside his flat. She is saying, "I worry about him sometimes."
"This is a conversation you should be having with John," Sherlock's voice answers, a low rumble voice, low rumble words, but he isn't dismissive and he isn't bored. John can tell. He sits down on the steps to listen to them. It's childish, eavesdropping, and he feels just like he did when he was young and he used to hide on the landing just past the curve in the staircase and listen to his mum and dad argue.
"John doesn't talk to me. Not about anything important, anyway."
She sounds so bitter. Like he's wronged her.
John hears the squeal-scratch of a chair pushed back, of footsteps, and his stomach seizes briefly—then the clink of dishes.
"You're lonely," Sherlock says. "You've been lonely since your divorce and it's not getting better. You're still drinking, and you don't want John to know. You want him to be concerned about you, so you are showing concern about him. That is all. There is no reason to worry about John."
John pictures Harry staring at Sherlock, right at his back between his shoulder blades, imagines her imagining stabbing him in the back. Harry likes her life unexamined. She hates being analysed. This, at least, they've always had in common.
"You think that," she says, sharp and cross and loud, John has no trouble hearing her, "because you're as bad as he is. I thought—well whatever he says of me, I did worry, when he was in Afghanistan—I thought at least when he came back he was safe. But—you drag him along like you're both invincible. It's—" She's biting her lip, eyes darting, he pictures it all. She doesn't mean half the things she says. "It's absolutely brilliant, adventuring. I understand. But—he's so attached to you—"
Bitter. Jealous. When she was with Clara she styled herself a romantic. He was sceptical, and jealous in his turn.
"And I to him," Sherlock interrupts curtly. "Surely you hear that you are bordering on incoherent. This conversation is becoming quite tedious."
Harry's on the verge of a storm out, so John stands, collects his bags again, prepares to act like he's just come in. She's saying something about "you're just stringing him along" when John opens the door, loud, and starts calling out pleasantries and practicalities, pretending he's heard nothing, pretending that later Sherlock won't tell him he's a horrible actor, did he know?
x
In the morning, when he doesn't want to get out of bed, he rolls onto his back and runs his hands up and down his torso, just feeling his own skin, and he thinks about Sherlock, and everything that he wants of him. Sometimes his fantasies are filthy. (Those lips, that tongue—gorgeous—his impossibly long and thin fingers wrapped around John's cock—he wants to see Sherlock's scars, he wants to scrape his teeth against the pulse at Sherlock's neck, he wants to be inside him.) Sometimes they are not. He imagines domesticity, and these thoughts are more shameful to him, more difficult to face and to admit. He wants to grow old together, if both of them manage to live long enough. He wants there to never be anyone else. He wants, and he could never say this, never, even if Sherlock did—even if it went both ways, this feeling: he wants to be the one to take care of Sherlock. He wants to hold him close at night.
x
"You're sick," Sherlock tells him, when he wakes up sniffling.
"I'm not."
"What's that saying—that doctors make the worst patients?" He asks the question with a stress on the rhetorical, an exaggerated rise of his voice at the question mark. "No, John, you're sick, and you're staying home." His decree made, he turns back to his laptop. Discussion over.
"No," John answers, as he turns the kettle on, as he resolutely does not look at Sherlock, as he does not listen to the intermittent clatter of his fingertips against the keyboard. "No, I am going to work." There's a hard edge of misplaced anger in his voice, the sharp hint of warning that comes before fists, that comes before a storm out, that comes before a fight. His target might be the sore red tonsils he saw when he stuck his tongue out at the mirror this morning, or it might be the kettle, or it might even be Sherlock, for no other reason than he's there in target range. "I'm going to work because everyone is sick and the doctor you call in to work when everyone else is sick cannot be sick. No. That does not happen."
"It's happening right now. Call Sarah and tell her you can't come in."
"No."
He grips the edge of the kitchen counter; he pretends there are not stars on the periphery of his vision.
"Stop acting like a child."
"Stop—stop being reasonable. Fuck."
This last, because he's not sure he can stand. Sherlock hears it in his voice, hears it and is up and at John's side faster than John would have thought possible, and then there's a hand at his elbow and an arm around his waist and someone—Sherlock, yes—is leading him down the hall.
He falls down heavily into a tangle of sheets and blankets. It takes him a few too many moments to realize he's not in his own room.
"You're in no condition for the stairs," Sherlock tells him, reading the question in his face perhaps, or in his disoriented movements. "It's fine. Stay here." He has his hand on John's shoulder, steady and comforting and John wants to grab his arm and pull him down and curl around him, but he doesn't. He shifts and contorts under the touch. He's giving in already, falling under his fever and his stuffed sinuses and his aches and chills.
"I would ask how you feel," Sherlock says. "But I think that's quite obvious."
"Not much of a challenge for your huge brain, I'm sure," John mumbles in answer, shifts onto his side. He has this vague impression that Sherlock is petting his hair. Also an even more fleeting thought that Sherlock is joking back at him, murmuring clues in low bedtime story tones.
He's wanted this a long time, not the angry pain of his throat or the tight pain of his muscles, but the rest, this, Sherlock climbing into bed with him. He makes noises of protests. "You can't," he says. "I'm contagious. You'll get sick," he says.
"Consulting detectives don't get sick," Sherlock answers quite simply, quite matter-of-factly, as if John would believe him—as if John would believe anything now, and he almost would. "It just doesn't happen."
"It happens sometimes," John argues. He has his arm wrapped around Sherlock's stomach. "I'm a doctor. I know these things."
Sherlock doesn't answer. He settles his body against John's body. This is an old fantasy, well worn; he's not sure it's real but it must be real, not a fever dream, but flesh and bone and muscle and the soft hum of a true human voice in his ear, nonsense words. He knows it is real because there are too many details, too many small things like the ache of his shoulder and the sound of Sherlock breathing, which never happen in dreams. Also he knows because fantasies don't hurt like this.
"Why are you being so nice?" he murmurs, wondering why Sherlock's arm is around him and why they cannot always be this way and when it happened that he came to want this, a quiet soft space for them to share in between cross-city chases and breath-catch stakeouts, after the perfect circle of the end of a gun pressed into his flesh and he's waiting for it go off and Sherlock says no it's John, his words all slurred like that John should die is impossible—he wants those moments because they stop the shakes but he wants these moments too. John Watson doesn't trust easy and he doesn't talk easy either. But he needs this man. There is no way in which he does not need him.
"I'm not heartless," Sherlock answers. He sounds put out. He sounds bothered. Like John's words were an accusation and that accusation hurt him. But John remembers that he said once he had no heart, so this, he thinks, is a step. He's not sure toward what. So he puts his hand over Sherlock's heart.
"Nope, nope, nope," he says. "Not heartless; you're right. You're right because I feel it right here."
x
A/N: The subtitles for Scandal in Belgravia tell me that Sherlock is actually saying "No stop" not "No it's John" but I swear that's what I heard, and, well I sort of like it…? Sorry for the bit of hearing-fail on my part there.