Two People That Love Each Other
Joan is angry, so very angry. She cannot believe that he has done this, has willingly confessed to a crime that he has not committed, is willingly extraditing himself to the UK, away from his life and the city that he loves. Away from Joan.
"You thought I was throwing my life away, so you decided to throw your life away instead."
She spits the words out. It feels like her body is on fire. Can't he see? Can't he see that we can have it all? After all they've been through, she can't believe that he is still doing this. Still overriding her choices because he thinks he knows better, like she is a child that cannot think for herself. Still willing to set himself on fire to keep Joan warm.
"Well, in point of fact, I've sacrificed very little." Sherlock is angry too. But where Joan exudes it, stalking after Sherlock like a panther after its prey, Sherlock is stock-still; his twitching fingers are the only sign of his passion. "With respect to my freedom, that is. MI6 owed me. Not you. Not the captain. Me."
His words are short, sentences clipped. They fly across the room like bullets across a warzone. They hit their target and Joan explodes.
"We could have fought this together! We should have fought this together!"
They met one day six years ago and Joan began to walk down a path without knowing where it would lead. She stood behind Sherlock as they hunted Moriarty, cradled him to sleep at night as his body was wracked with sobs and a grief so heavy that Joan thought that it might crush him. Ever since then Joan has not considered herself in the singular. Where Sherlock walks, Joan follows. Where he stands, so does she, shoulder by shoulder. Facing down whatever the future could throw at them. Together. Together. The word seems to linger between them.
"We could have failed." Together.
"That doesn't sound like us."
Her anger is giving way to a sense of futility. She realises that this is already over, that he has already set the wheels of his plan – because it's only ever and always his plan – in motion. Now Joan can only wait and see what happens.
"I wanted to thank you."
"Don't." She cannot bear this.
"I wanted to thank you for everything you've done for me over the last six years."
Joan doesn't want to hear this, because it sounds like an ending and she never wants this to end.
"I didn't realise how much," Sherlock stutters over his words. It's so very unlike him. "How much work I would have to put in and how much time it would take. But most of all, I didn't realise that things could get better. I was dying."
Joan glares because if she doesn't glare then she is going to cry and once she starts she doesn't think that she will be able to stop. She thinks that is what loss feels like and she never wants it to stop.
"And no one could see it but you. You saved my life, Joan."
"We're partners." It's the only thing that she can think to say. We're partners. It means you were supposed to have my back in this and in all things. It means you are mine and I am yours and how can that be now? It means I am falling and I need you to catch me.
It means please don't leave me.
Joan means I love you.
"No. We're much better than that." He looks her in the eye and both of them are shedding sad, angry tears. "We're two people that love each other. We always have been."
Scotland Yard isn't the same as their precinct back in New York. There's more tea drinking for a start and the detectives are far more reluctant to work with Sherlock. His reputation has preceded him and it isn't flattering, because why would it be? The Sherlock of Scotland Yard had been brash and mocking, viewing detectives as an obstacle and as a means to an end, rather than as people in their own right. He had been volatile and addicted to heroin and Scotland Yard was hesitant to take the pair on, despite multiple glowing recommendations from New York.
Whilst Sherlock is still the better detective, Joan seems to be Scotland Yard's first point of call for an interesting new case. It's her phone that buzzes at 3am when a body shows up unexpectedly and Joan arrives on the scene, Sherlock striding behind her, coat flapping dramatically. She'd be a liar if she said she didn't feel flattered, didn't enjoy being acknowledged for her work and her own strengths, but part of her missed the dynamic they had before.
She's drinking a cup of tea (a strong stiff brew of English Breakfast – that's the only kind detectives know how to make) and she's making small talk with Detective Tomlinson, an older man who had been around when Sherlock had first worked there. He pauses in their conversation, eyes on Sherlock in the corner of the room, tapping away on his phone as he waits (somewhat) patiently for an officer to finish a task for him.
"He's changed, y'know." Tomlinson tips his mug at Sherlock. "He's still a straight up git, but he's different." The man takes a gulp of tea, thinking for the right words. "Still passionate, still excellent, but less of a dick." Blunt and to the point.
"He has changed." Joan agrees, her voice soft. She knows Sherlock can probably hear their conversation.
"You must be some sort of miracle worker."
Joan smiles. "No. I'm just somebody that loves him."
Sherlock looks up from his phone at her and Joan raises her mug to him and winks. That sets rumours flying but neither of them care, because they know the truth: Joan Watson and Sherlock Holmes are two people that love each other and there's nothing anyone can do about it.
Sherlock's trying to get her to hurry up, her coat in his flapping hands as he chivvies her out the door, tapping his foot like she's a child. Joan snatches her coat from him and tugs it on, taking unnecessary care to do up all the buttons, just to infuriate him. It works.
"Watson!" He admonishes her. "We are going to be late! This is a very important meeting and I have my professional image to maintain." He gives her the dreaded eyebrow raise, like he can't believe that she's being so inconsiderate.
"Sherlock!" She gives him an equally level look in return. "We aren't late." He opens his mouth, no doubt to give her numerous pieces of information about the state of London traffic and the quickest route to their destination based on their average foot stride length.
"We're two people that love each other."
His jaw slackens infinitesimally. "I'm really starting to wish I'd never said that, Watson."
She laughs and swans past him. "Are you coming or not?"
He's got a bullet in his shoulder and Joan is furious. It had been a home intruder – a hired hit man, Sherlock hypothesises – and Sherlock had beaten the man off with a cricket bat (heaven knows why he even owned one) but not without a bullet grazing across the muscles of his shoulder.
He greets her at the door and Joan feels like she's stepped backwards in time, to coming back to their brownstone one night and finding Sherlock with a bullet still in his back and Moriarty's name on his lips. She doesn't like the feeling.
"Hospital." She says and it's an order not a request. Age and experience has made Joan Watson far less of a pushover than she used to be.
"What," Sherlock huffs as he gathers some light reading material to peruse as they wait, no doubt for several hours, in A&E. "Is the point of having an ex-surgeon live next door if she won't even stich me up instead of making me wait for hours." Joan ignores him. "Don't you know that the NHS is overburdened, Watson? And yet you willingly contribute to the overworking of their underpaid staff?"
"I am not your personal medic." Joan flings the front door open and steps out onto the pavement to hail a taxi. "I'm somebody that loves you and because I love you we are going to the hospital. So get in the bloody car."
The sun has barely risen in the sky and there's heavy rock music blasting downstairs. Joan sits up in bed, her hair in disarray and half the duvet on the floor. They'd been working on a head-scratcher of a case and she'd fallen asleep at the kitchen table, slumped over scattered sheets of paper. Sherlock had tried to rouse her and had only got a mumbled "go away" for his efforts.
He'd scooped her up and easily carried her upstairs, tucked her into the bed in the spare room. That explained why she was still wearing her comfy "going to be up all night doing the job" clothes and wasn't in her own bed. Or her own house, for that matter. They didn't technically live together anymore but Joan figures that it is only a matter of time before Sherlock takes a trip to Ikea and installs a door into the wall between their two houses. He does own both properties after all.
Joan sighs and lets her head thunk backwards against the headboard. She changes into some fresh clothes that Sherlock keeps here for her and heads downstairs into the carnage of paper, coffee mugs, and pumped up music.
"Ah, Watson!"
Sherlock's eyes are slightly manic. He is a different man to the one she met all those years ago, Joan thinks. That man tried to drop her at crime scenes, tried to pay a man to imitate his father at a dinner with Joan just to make his life easier, tried to insist that he could navigate this wide, wild world by himself. This man before her now is different in many respects, Joan reflects, but he still has a few too many unhealthy habits for Joan to sleep easy.
"Yes?" She grumbles, still sleep-weary.
"I've solved it! I was looking over these bank statements when it came to me!" He plucks pieces of paper off the floor without looking. "I shall explain it to you. But first, some tea if you wouldn't mind!"
Joan plonks herself down in an armchair and gives him a steely glare.
"I'm not your tea maker, Sherlock Holmes. I'm just somebody that loves you. Make your own damn tea."
They are older, years older and their youth is fading behind them. Yet still Joan finds herself chasing Sherlock down a seedy alleyway, a single stick clutched in her hand for protection and the thrill of the case gleaming in her eyes. She wouldn't change it for the world.
They're panting, tucked away into the shadows and peering around the corner of a wall. Sherlock's hairline is receding and Joan's own locks are shot through with steely grey. She chooses not to dye it (despite the protestations of her mother). Several months ago she'd been looking at her hair in the mirror, running the charcoal strands between her fingers and wondering when the years had started ticking by so fast. Sherlock had stepped up behind her.
"You look as beautiful as the day we met, Joan Watson." He touches her shoulder gently. "More so, perhaps."
She resolves then and there never to dye it. In their job, age is a badge of honour and she wears it with pride.
Back to the alleyway. They're hunting a man that is entangled with some bizarre plot involving a middle-aged women's book club, the Leave the EU campaign, and a half dozen so-called Nigerian princes. Joan doesn't quite understand all the details. They hear something move, out there in the darkness.
Sherlock looks at Joan and twitches his eyes. It looks a little bit like he's about to have a seizure, but Joan knows better: Sherlock has devised his own emergency-eye language for situations where silence is absolutely necessary. He'd woken her up at five in the morning to teach it to her. She'd thrown a pillow at him. His eyes are saying he's over there; she rolls hers back. The meaning of that is obvious and requires no translation.
They catch the man and they're back in Sherlock's home before the sun can properly rise. London is bathed in the light of the new dawn and Joan's body sings with the joy of it: the case, the hunt, and the success. The time spent with the person most dear to her.
They sip tea in the garden, looking out over the beehives. The world is still quiet.
"I've been thinking, Watson." Sherlock sets down his teacup on the rickety garden table. She waits in patient silence – when he's ready to talk, he will. "About the future."
She's been expecting this talk for a while.
"I want to move to the Lake District. I want the mountains and the fresh air and a luxurious wild landscape for my bees to roam. I want to take long, brisk walks and be away from the bustle of the city. Not now, but soon. Within five years, I expect." Joan nods. She looks straight ahead at the bees, flying in their purposeful patterns. Clear trajectories. Her own path has never looked clear.
"Watson." She turns to look at him and for a moment it seems like all the years hang between them. He bridges the gap with a hand that cups the right side of her face. "I want you to come with me."
Joan is both surprised and yet not surprised at all. They are Joan and Sherlock. Watson and Holmes. Did she truly think that he might leave her behind? Did she truly think that she would let him?
"Are you sure?"
"Of course." His hand moves from her face to interlace with her fingers. "We're two people who love each other with everything we have. Whatever would I do without you?"