Title: No Words for This (Yet You're Still Listening)
Spoilers: TRF.
Pairings: S/J-ish
Rating: K+/T for language
Warnings: none
Wordcount: ~2400
Summary: Sherlock's not a dead man anymore, and John doesn't know what to do with that information, at all.
A/N: Beta'd by Kitkat and Penguin and britpicked by Helen, all lovely people. Written for its-only-forever-not-long-at-all on tumblr for the johnlockchallenges fic exchange: her prompt was "the admission".
It's a crisply sunny morning when John comes out of Tesco and looks up only to freeze in place, the breath rushing out of his lungs.
This isn't the first time John's seen a long-coated man across the street, stood and clamped his jaws shut to keep desperate words from spilling out, to viciously remind himself, "Sherlock is dead." This isn't even the tenth time, or the fiftieth time, and perhaps he'd have time to feel more pathetic if he weren't worrying about his leg threatening to give out from under him, the shopping slipping from his shocked fingers.
And he's so tired of this, that Sherlock's ghost is still following him around like he has some kind of claim, when the truth is this: Sherlock jumped off a fucking building and John sort of hates him for that, as much as he misses the man so much it aches, in his bones and his blood and in his lungs like tiny pieces of shrapnel that won't stop burning.
He tightens his hold on the shopping bags and starts off again, and wouldn't you know it, the man turns right then. His cheekbones are a sharp slash on his face and his hair's too short but the eyes are still piercing; and John feels himself go numb all over again.
Something cracks, sending liquid to seep into his shoes. John doesn't care.
Sherlock.
He's dead I saw him fall – jump – and there was too much blood on the pavement, red on grey and it was garish on his pale skin, streaking across his forehead and sticking to his hair and there was no pulse underneath my fingers and he – he —
Sherlock's lips curl up slightly at the edges, like he's trying to smile but forgotten how, and John can't think, can't breathe, his brain screaming it's Sherlock over and over again like a scratched CD and—
Sherlock takes a step towards him, but John's head shakes "no" of its own accord; and he comes to an abrupt stop, framed by a shop window with hands tucked in his pockets.
"Don't," John says, the hoarse sound torn from his throat, and he's not even sure if Sherlock can hear him. "Don't."
Sherlock says something. It might be, "John."
The shopping's a shattered mess on the pavement. John leaves it and runs.
—
A couple of days later John turns on the telly to find Sherlock on the evening news and a reporter taken aback by rapid-fire words, rough and unfettered, almost cruel. It only takes a moment to change the channel, but he's still thinking about a familiar face wearing an unfamiliar snarl when the dinner starts burning and sends dark clouds drifting through the kitchen.
"Fuck. You," John says with as much venom as he can muster, under his breath and the screech of the smoke alarm. He climbs onto a table and jabs at the button but the alarm doesn't stop shrieking until he prises out the battery and drops it to the floor with an audible thunk.
His eyes are still stinging from the smoke. He wants nothing more than to sink to the floor and there's no-one around to see him do it.
So he does.
—
He gets stupid signed texts. They say things like "Baker Street" and "Angelo's, 8pm" and "Scotland Yard" and "John" – over and over again until he flicks the power button and watches the screen fade from a white back-lit square to a soft dull grey. He leaves his phone on his dresser and goes to work, doesn't think about it until that evening when he's showered and surrenders, blinking, to the memories flooding back and twenty-two new messages.
He doesn't want to read them but he does, like some sort of masochistic ritual, scrolling through pixels to the next and next until he hits the beginning of his inbox: "I'm sorry". It's incredibly absurd and John has to bite down on hysterical laughter at the thought of Sherlock, contrite.
He drops the phone as another vibration shudders through it, another pointless message. He lets it rattle on the floor, the sound insistent, grits his teeth and ignores the urge to pick it back up until it comes to a rest, eventually.
He's still awake long after the silence becomes too loud.
—
At some point, Sherlock switches to leaving voice mail, cool, explanatory words spoken in a careless baritone, and the last time John heard that voice was a cold windy day on the pavement looking upwards, hand reaching out and the flap of a coat, Sherlock—
No—
He can't stop listening to them, though he's not even gleaning any meaning from the syllables – like language has been broken when it comes to him and Sherlock. All he knows are the sounds soft and harsh, round and clipped, and he clutches onto that like it's a lifeline, reluctantly lets the curve of vowels and consonants slide into his ear and melt into his bones.
Sherlock's not a dead man anymore, and John doesn't know what to do with that information, at all.
—
"John," Sherlock says, "please," and then John wakes up and remembers that they have not exchanged those words (yet) (that they will not have that conversation, ever), because that would require him to sit down and keep breathing while a ghost solidifies on the other side of the conversation and that's too much to ask of a man, even one who has seen explosions and lived screams and swallowed prayers.
—
John closes a gash on a palm — three stitches, carefully knotted — presses gauze against yielding skin and that's it, the end of his shift. He de-gloves in an easy motion, brushes panic and emergencies off his clothes and slips out of St Mary's; then he looks up from the pavement pooled with light and sees a smear of black leaning against a lamp-post: black coat and disarrayed curls and eyes darkened with a feral sort of hunger.
"Get the fuck away from me." Only when Sherlock straightens to his full height does John realise he's shouting, the words burning their way out of his throat. He takes one shaky breath, and then another, fingers curling so tightly that his short-cut nails are digging hot crescents into his palm, and it's so wrong to see Sherlock here, trying to bleed back into his world. "You don't have the right—" he starts, only just yanking his voice back to acceptable levels, "I can't believe—what the hell makes you think that you can just come here like this—"
"You're working at an A&E but you won't return my calls," Sherlock interrupts, completely ignoring John's words, and his voice is thin and urgent like some crucial detail hangs upon it.
The beginnings of several sentences crash in bewilderment inside John's head. "What?" he forces out eventually. "What does my job have to do with anything?"
"Yes, your job," Sherlock snaps impatiently. "You began looking for one after you moved out of Baker Street. Mycroft offered you a practice in Wellington but you refused categorically. Stamford suggested a job teaching, but young idiots who don't know their musculature and circulatory systems wouldn't have appealed to you. At the time, two surgeries near your newly acquired flat were hiring. One of them was Sarah's – understandable that you'd want to avoid the awkwardness. But the other was perfectly suitable, yet you never even applied."
"How the fuck did you—what, were you spying on me?" Something hot and bitter surges after those words, which he belatedly recognises as outrage – of course the bastard would want to know everything, even as John hadn't even known the most important thing of all, that Sherlock was alive—
Sherlock goes on, inexorable. "Instead, you sent your CV to every A&E with a position open in the London area and ended up here, even though the commute is longer. You work nights often, which is when the more dangerous cases come in – do you find it thrilling that a patient may pull a knife on you at any moment? Of course you do, look at you. The way you stand, light, alert; the loose tension in your shoulders: you don't just react, you enjoy it. So, then, John—"
Just that one syllable, lips wrapping softly around the J and drawing out the oh, and the familiarity of it slices into John's chest, because it's not fair, the easy way Sherlock's doing that, the way he's sliding back into life and into London and into the broken spaces he'd left behind.
"You miss it. You miss the crimes and the chase, all the things that remind you that you're a soldier. And you, with your ridiculous propensity towards sentimentality, must have missed me." Sherlock says, decisively, but John hears the tiniest waver at the last few words, and he hates Sherlock for it and hates himself for catching it, hates that the cadence of Sherlock's voice has mapped itself inside his brain. "Surely you see that the obvious course of action now would be to move back into 221B."
In retrospect, it's the word "obvious" that does it. Because Sherlock's laid everything out so neatly, lines flowing to an inescapable conclusion like some sort of damn mathematical proof, but if there's one thing John knows as an unshakable truth it's that logic is no shield for death. "Yes, of course I missed you!" John snaps. "Every fucking day, I'd wake up and you wouldn't be there. But now it turns out that you were, what, fucking around in France and Japan and wherever you please, so don't you dare pretend like nothing's changed, because you. Were. Dead."
Sherlock's nostrils flare white and for a second he looks like he's just been punched. The sight is inexplicably pleasing.
"Stop calling," John says, as firmly as he can, and then he turns, doesn't even pretend he's not running away.
The only things following him are the sound of his own footsteps, the thump of his heart.
—
Sherlock calls, just once more, before he stops completely. John leaves the message unheard and tries not to think about it.
It should be a good thing – because he's moving on now, no more mad detectives to chase after – but he almost misses the vibration of it in his jacket, or the screen lighting up a split-second before beginning to clatter off his dresser. He takes to keeping the phone in his back pocket and feels it buzzing constantly, but it's always phantom, some sick parody of psychosomatic pain.
He can't stand that he keeps checking, compulsively curling his fingers around the mobile like a smoker would cradle a cigarette, but the need hooks into his stomach and tugs at him; and something has to break. So he gives in and pulls the phone out and all the while he despises himself.
There are still no new texts, no more missed calls.
—
The truth comes out in bits and pieces; and, in a fit of bitter irony, it peels off hot presses, black ink smudged onto newsprint, sold on street corners for a pound fifty each. John avoids it all at first, letting his gaze slide right off grainy pictures and exclamatory headlines. But then his phone stays silent and the absence of messages starts to gnaw at him like a physical ache; so he replays the messages he couldn't make himself delete and he buys one paper, and then another.
In the end there's a stack of clippings spilling off John's kitchen table, each story twisted to fit an editor's grand vision. John reads the lines, between the lines, reads until all the words blur together in dreary sameness, until they smear themselves onto his fingers – as if the only way to understand is to etch them indelibly on his skin.
"It was unavoidable," Sherlock says, his slightly distorted voice wobbling out of the speaker on John's phone.
Three snipers are dead in London. John imagines the sight of his head through cross-hairs.
The last message in his voice mail only says, "John, I—" before the call disconnects.
John, I—click.
John, I—click.
He looks down at his hands and remembers how the pistol felt, solid and steady, the night he killed a man for Sherlock Holmes. Thinks about what he might do if the cross-hairs were centred on Sherlock instead.
"Jesus, Sherlock," he breathes, sitting half-surrounded by papers in a near-empty flat. "I didn't know."
—
The door to 221B is not locked. John gingerly pushes it open to find Sherlock crumpled up on the sofa. Three nicotine patches have been smoothed onto his forearm and what might be the curve of a fourth is cut off by the sleeve of his dressing gown.
Sherlock jolts to his feet, a line of uncertainty around his mouth that's quickly straightened. "I...thought you might need a bit more time than that," he blinks.
"You should have told me," John says, slowly picking out words from a still-simmering heat. "Taken me with you. I would have helped."
He watches Sherlock's mouth curve into an "o" before his teeth click together. "No." Sherlock shakes his head rapidly. His gaze flicks up and down John's body, once, before skittering away along the floor. "You—would have been a liability," he says. "Slowed me down. It would've been inefficient." He tugs at a sleeve and doesn't quite make eye contact – and perhaps he'd be more convincing without the faint desperation staining his voice.
John takes a sharp breath and says, "You're a terrible liar."
Sherlock's lip twitches in discontentment. "I—" he starts, radiating frustration, "it's only—" and the line of his shoulders tightens. "It was dangerous," he says, head rising up defiantly, and John can see a sliver of raised scar tissue that streaks across his throat down underneath the collar of his shirt. "I didn't need to—want—" he stops in a mess of confusion, frustration roughening his voice, and then, finally, "You might have died," in hurried, tumbling words.
I didn't want you to die, either, John thinks, but all he says out loud is, "I can't believe you, you idiot"; and then in a blurred moment Sherlock's too-bony frame is pressed against his.
"I'm glad you're back," John says, muffled, into Sherlock's shoulder.
Sherlock only tightens his fingers around John's arm in response, clumsily, almost painfully; and that's enough for now.
Wow, these idiots are never going to be able to talk to each other properly. Concrit is always appreciated, so drop me a review!