Author: tigersilver
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: None
Word Count: 3500
Summary: What Sherlock wants is not necessarily what is. Or...so the evidence suggests. Fluff, post-return.

BBCSH 'Clueless'

Sherlock pounds up the steps of the new flat where John's been living, this last year. Debriefing had been cursory and of necessity (his own necessity) extremely brief, Mycroft knew everything anyway and Sherlock was in a hurry. Hurry!

He pounds on John's door as well, leaning on the doorbell for ages at the same time, nearly pressing through the blank boring panel with his tall frame. It's been so long and he can't wait another moment. He's something to say to John Watson. Something to do, something to ask, to demand of him; it won't keep, can't wait.

When the door opens at last he nearly falls through it, and is greeted by the sight of a dapper doctor, dressed out in his uniform trousers and a crisp shirt, tucked without creases.

"John! John, it's me! I'm back," he gasps and tries to take advantage of his inelegant stumble by simply propelling himself straight forward across the mat and into his frowning friend's arms. "John, I'm alive!"

John, maybe not all that unexpectedly, hurriedly steps back, retreating before Sherlock can embrace him properly. Sherlock sees his shoes are polished to a brilliantine brightness, and his hair, too—slicked back from his dear familiar face and obviously tamed by some product. He looks glorious to Sherlock's eyes, and especially the tiny spit-curl that's gracing one graying blond temple.

"John." Oh, but it is a prayer answered, it's a huff of pure unadulterated pleasure in life, finally; it's his life, returned to him again and Sherlock cannot help but feel exultant. "I'm here."

"I—what? Sherlock?" John goes pink and then pale and then stills into a frozen sort of statue, his arms falling down slowly at his sides and his beautiful hands curling into loose fists. "But? I thought you were…I was sure you were…"

He trails off, never quite finishing, and only stares at Sherlock, up and down and all over, as if he simply cannot believe the evidence of his own eyes.

Sherlock tosses his head, impatient. None of that matters in the slightest. His brain is quite active, his eyes can see, and what they see as he glances over John fiercely and moves onto the environs of the flat nearly send him straight into shock. That doesn't stopper his mouth, though—he must needs speak, to move this along.
He can't wait.

"I know, John, but I wasn't; it was all a trick, I had to do it—John, John, where are you going? Why are you all spiffed up? What's going on?"

It's a curious sort of sensation, a bit like falling, and the whole of the world has finally, finally chosen this particular moment out slide out from under Sherlock's assured feet.

"What's happening, John—John?!"

It strikes his senses like a giant blow, all the details he's not quite computed fully, all the tell-tale signs in the flat, settling into a pattern that's purely appalling.

There's a fresh bouquet of flowers set just so on the dingy kitchenette table, and a boutonnière pinned to John's uniform coat where it's hung up on a hanger on the hall tree, just waiting to be donned. There's a scent of cologne in the air—John's old lovely aftershave—but underlying that like a serpent in Sherlock's quivering chest, writhing with fangs gaping, is the trace of something else: perfume, meant for a female, a youngish one but not too, too young. Not Mrs Hudson, then; of course not Mrs Hudson—this is John's new flat. There are ruffled curtains drawn wide open over the kitchenettes' tiny window, the one that gazes out on an equally tiny unkempt back garden area; there are two brand new throw pillows tossed haphazardly on the sofa, neither of them a familiar old, friendly old Union Jack. The flat's tidy and reeks of attention being paid to it: furniture polish, Fairy liquid, lemon-scented laundry powder, lashings of bleach used in the loo with regularity. The flat, for all its smallness and drabness and air of being old and weary in its bones, just as the neighborhood John now dwells in, is at the same time neat as a pin and well-accustomed to the touch of a caring female, and not a housekeeper.

Girlfriend, then, the thought clicks over into Sherlock's sights, and not a new one. John's gotten himself another woman. Established, from the looks of it. What would Sherlock find if he could but see past the closed door that must lead to John's bedroom? Condoms in the bin? Knickers on the floor?

His heart flips within the bounds of his heaving ribcage.

But John's had plenty of those and they never last, do they? But then again…a girlfriend, and as his wide shocked eyes travel the spaces, mentally picking up small details and putting them back down again (new novel on a table by the sofa, not the sort of book John would read; a lampshade perched on a standing brass lamp the John Sherlock knows would never choose willingly, the brass-and-glass far too modern; the knitted afghan throw, handmade, in a neat pile on a footstool; the newish flat screen telly mounted on the wall above the miniature hearth where by a rights a cow's skull should be stuck; discarded tea cups for two—

…Two—

Two! Two people, drinking down their tea, of an evening before the telly, nice and cosy, and one of them not Sherlock. Lying unnoticed, shoved down by the far end of the sofa, a largish square of a silk-blend scarf, paisley and lavender hued, and not a man's scarf, not at all, but more a wrap, thin and stylish in a light shade, nearly invisible where it's stuffed between cushions—

Cushions indented with marks of the arses of two people, John's and some other person's, seated close upon each other, touching each other maybe intimately in their implication, and even with the fabric smoothed down by someone's hand (not his John's but the blasted woman's), it's ever so clear what's gone on here, in John's flat, while Sherlock's been missing. Domesticity.

Leading to marriages, a proposal, a wedding. John's uniform, his hair, his bright eyes gleaming.

Sherlock sways. The world's gone all wobbly.

"Sherlock?"

John's voice, thin and high, cutting out at the ends of consonants drags a bewildered Sherlock back from his reveries with a start.

"Sher—er, ahem—Sherlock! You're all right? You were—what in the bleeding hell do you think you were doing, Sherlock? I thought you were dead!"

"I!"

He tries again; his stupid voice had failed him for a moment.

"I wasn't, was never; that doesn't matter, John—John, John, where are you going?"

Sherlock brushes aside the story of his absence as so much tedious wealth of detail it's not worth the oxygen it would require to explain. Not now, at least; as of right now it's far more urgent to discover what this mystery is, this new one that reeks of John having some sort of more permanent companion, and quite possibly being quite attached to her. Frighteningly, terrifyingly, mortifyingly attached.

"Where is it you're in such a rush to get to? And with whom?"

Mycroft, Sherlock thinks, with a swell of anger. Mycroft should've warned him, given him some sort of head's up. Mycroft had to have known he would go straight here, to John's flat, to pick up the pieces, to reweave the thread of their connection—to ask John to take him in, to lay his hands and his lips and his exhausted hungry starving psyche all over John's good nature, his undoubted forgiveness, his sturdy body and his brilliantly loyal much-beloved heart.

"What?" John blinks across the space between them for a second. "Oh, it's—a wedding, Sherlock; marriage; you know, when two people who love each other get—but—but?What?"

"Whose? Yours? No—don't tell me—John!"

"Sherlock!"

"John—John, no!"

Sherlock stumbles a second time in as many moments, his knees failing him abruptly, gone all noodly below (the refrain is that Mycroft is a cruel bastard, a rat bastard, not to have said something, anything, a warning, but then what would protect his little brother from a blow such as this?)

"Please don't say it. Not aloud."

He's vaguely aware of his hands grabbing desperately at John's beautiful shirt, taking up great folds of it, of feeling like a benefice the warm living skin beneath, and his nose is filled with the smell of aftershave freshly slapped on and starch and just John (John), and he's falling down, down, down, his brain gone haywire with a black-winged buzz, a swarm of bees winging at odd angles, for the world's falling down, his whole entire world's gone insane, and his John Watson is to be married today, to some woman Sherlock has known nothing of, and his hopes are dashed and shattered on the rocks of cold reality, and it's all ended, that dream he had—he should have just died for real—on the pavers outside of St Barts.

"Don't make it true, John—please?"

He can almost envision the headlines. Kitty Reilly would have a field day: 'Confirmed Bachelor Dr John Watson to be married. Married, Mr Holmes! In your eye, you arrogant sod.'

(When the two of them, Watson and Holmes, finally meet again it is bloody ironic, but Sherlock's the one who faints. Dragging his grasping greedy hands down the front of John's body, nose buried against warm belly through the cloth, nostrils dragging painfully as he goes, mouth howling silent and sobbing dryly, without even a trace of tears to alleviate the pain—the pain. The pain of his existence, it is so fundamentally great. He is lost, and not found, not at all. This is how it would read. This.)

For real. "Sherlock? Sherlock!" Sherlock hears John in the distance. "Oh, hell."

"Keep your eyes on me, John, please. Eyes on me, always," he thinks he says, but John doesn't seem to hear him. John's an idiot. "You promised you would."

"…Sherlock….come on, Sherlock…Sherlock, you wanker, wake up! Come 'round for me. Sherlock."

Everyone is.

Sherlock comes awake reluctantly and laid out on the small sofa in an untidy sprawl, to find John Watson in full doctor mode, glaring down at him and patting at one sharp-set cheekbone with a firm insistent hand. He spies a fresh cup of tea placed on the little side table, steaming and sweetened to counteract shock, likely, but his wondering eyes are filled almost entirely with John's assessing navy gaze, the beautiful concern that blooms there, all unguarded, and then, too, the old familiar fond sort of anger peering from just behind the 'doctor', and ever so gratefully Sherlock takes that regard to himself.

Until it strikes him again, and it's a discordant shriek across the strings of Sherlock's nervous system. He's gutted alive, all over again.

"…ngh."

"Stop that!" John barks, when Sherlock closes his eyes, defeated. "I'll be late, Sherlock, and I can't be late, not today, so now come on. Wake up, please, just come round for me, all the way now—ah, there's a good chap. Very good."

Good? What's 'good' about it? His John, his own, the one he'd been waiting all this time to see…is to be married. This morning. Sherlock is—once more, and it's always something, isn't it? he thinks bitterly—too late to change the world, too slow to alter an ugly reality. Into something good, something he dearly needs, and plainly only existed without. Too…sodding late. Mycroft?

He opens his eyes, though, because it's John, ordering him. He opens his eyes and uses all his flagging energy to drink up the sight of John Watson, up close and hovering over him.

"Finally. Shit," John swears, pink cheeked and frowning. "I thought I'd have to call an ambulance, Sherlock! When did you last eat? Here, take your tea, and drink it for sodding once."

"What—why? What does it even matter?" Sherlock asks idly of the walls of the flat, of the frown on John's face, of the uncaring world in general. "Why should I care? Why should you?"

"What—jeezus, Sherlock, what is it you're going on about?" John frowns down at him severely. "Now, sit up—gently, gently, you great arse—take it easy. Sit up properly and drink down your tea; don't choke! I have to make a call—at least let me warn them all—oh, shit, I can't really even believe—"

Sherlock sips once, as directed. The tea's bitter, but perhaps that's his own tongue.

John descends to an irritated mumble and pulls a mobile from his pocket, punching in a text with an angry flourish. It beeps as he sends off what he's typed, and is cast summarily aside. It's not the one Sherlock knows, it's not Harry's old one. This is new and shiny bright—another gift, then? Sherlock's eyes follow it with venom as it disappears on the other side of John, cast behind him with a faint clatter.

He hates the mobile he doesn't know, the text sent to the woman he doesn't know—can't know. Can't have run off already.

"To that woman? You're texting her now?"

Sherlock can't help but be short, to speak in clipped bursts, and each sharp sound a gout of black acid bile pouring out of him. He's consumed by fumes, drowning in jealousy.

"That bloody woman? Why? So you can tell her an old mate turned up and you'll be late? Hold the wedding, dear—placate the guests, darling? I'll be along in a moment?"

He sings-songs the words as they come streaming out, gesturing with sloshing-wet cup and fluttery fingertips, and feels ancient and wrung dry and hung out to dry, a cast-off in the acrid wind of the desert. He's all sneer, he's all about embitterment, and despair, and defeat, and it does not sit well. Not when he'd had such hopes, such grand hopes, bouncing up the steps not fifteen minutes before. Now all shattered by a woman's forgotten wrap and a flower bud pinned jauntily to a uniform lapel, nestled up to the medals he's always been so proud of.

"Preposterous."

The unwanted tea cup is slammed down upon the table; Sherlock glares at it with the strength of a thousand burning constellations.

"Sherl—"

"Oh! But don't fret, my love—Do not fret. it's only my old flatmate, my old colleague, returned from the dead. No matter, my sweet—not to worry your pretty little, darling little,completely vacant head!" he concludes with a flourish and descends rapidly. There's no place like 'down', and Sherlock knows it.

"Sher—shit!" John's still huffing and scarlet-cheeked. "What—for Chrissake—you moron!"

"Oh, god." Sherlock groans, subsiding. "John."

"Oh, for chrissake, drink your damned tea down, Sherlock. You're completely off your nut, aren't you? Are you drunk? Using?"

"No! I'm not, John. I. Am. Not."

Sherlock clenches his teeth and shuts his eyelids against the cuppa John's pressing upon him. He takes it up again, if only for something to do with his fingers that doesn't involve cutting his own palms to ribbons with the half-moon cut of his own nails. He opens his eyes wide at John Watson and growls, literally growls. His chest is too tight to even think to take a decent breath.

"It's you who has—please, no. Oh, god—just don't. Please….don't. You can't. I forbid it, John."

If he allows it to continue then there's no coming back from this; this is John, his John, leaving him behind, and it's too cruel, all of it, to have arrived on John's doorstep the very morning of his wedding to someone else.

"Stay here, John. Don't go out." He demands, but it's not, really. It's more a plea.

"John, no."

Far too cruel. Making Sherlock Holmes beg. Could care less about that.

"Stay in. Stay."

"Sherlock!"

"You have to, don't you?" He crows it, assumptive. "I've gone and ruined it, haven't I?" Sherlock doesn't dare say what he hopes he's ruined. Today's plans, at the very least. He hopes. "Your suit. Your wedding. Made myself a nuisance again—have I not? You can't go, not like that. Atrocious."

"Sherlock?" John sits back on his heels, his jaw dropping, rocking to-and-fro just a bit, and Sherlock takes a second's worth of guilty pleasure in noting he's the one who's destroyed John's handsome shirt completely.

"Sherlock, you don't need—there's no need. What are you even thinking, coming here like this?"

There's a button hanging by a single thread at the collar and wrinkles everywhere and it will delay his John for a just a few more precious moments, won't it, whilst he changes? If he even has another shirt to change into? And these are moments that will belong solely to Sherlock, before his best friend (his beloved) goes trotting off to marry someone else.

"Serves. You. Right. Hah!"

Someone else…

"Bloody arse." He's bound and determined to have the last word, for that's all the satisfaction he might have.

"Wh—"

Sherlock drops the cup without caring, doesn't care either that it rolls away with a tea-staining splash and John is cursing at it, scrambling on his knees to shift his well-pressed trousers out of the way of the hot liquid.

"Traitor."

"Hey! You—fucking—bastard, Sherlock! Watch out!"

"Piss. Off."

He doesn't mean a word of it; not really, it's only that his John is already gone away.

"Piss off, John Watson. Go to hell, for all I care."

Or will be, soon enough. One can't mistake the signs of another woman. One can't misread the clues of John's uniform, his debonair hair, now tumbled about from where Sherlock must have thrust a quick palm through it, just a little moment ago. One cannot lie to oneself that this is nothing, just an aberration, an anomaly. John looks so well, so hale and hearty, so happy beneath the anger, and it was never any of Sherlock's actions that put that beautifully open honest air there upon that handsome face, that thrill that comes of being born into the world for the purpose of meeting just the one especial person, and the sure knowledge that special person is right at this very moment waiting, just for one, at an altar somewhere, and will wait patiently, even now. Now John's been made late.

"Pardon?"

John's teeth flash white and sharp, set straight and tight-clamped, and his nostrils flare. Sherlock moans, slumping.

"Oh…god."

It smells horribly of lemon, the flat, and worse still of a foreign perfume (never Mrs Hudson's), and Sherlock's truly swaying again even as he's struggles to sit upright, his eye balls rolling wildly in his head, for it really is all too much to bear, not and remain conscious of his loss, and how profound. He'd rather sleep, or be passed out, and maybe the morphine's already calling him; he can feel the insidious crawl of it.

What he wouldn't give to be dreaming, somewhere in an alley, and have hope, yet.

"Sherlock, Sherlock."

John's voice is soft and seemingly emanating from a very far place, somewhere Sherlock is actively in the midst of divorcing himself from. This is not how it was supposed to be, and not a place he wants to dwell in. Even if John is here, and brilliantly alive and breathing—no, huffing, indignantly, at him; John's angry—no, it's not a place or time where Sherlock can cope with being. Mycroft should've said—just a hint—Sherlock never would've come, nor dreamt of it. Would have stayed far away, so he wouldn't have this last cruel memory of John under his fingertips, ready to steal away altogether, or his eyes, steadily boring down into the grey dull mists Sherlock's retreating into, all anger forgotten, all fight spent.

His eyes, and they are rather hypnotic, yeah?

"Sherlock, you stupid, blind, idiot, git-for-brains."

How can someone cursing him sound so fond, always?

"It's not me, Sherlock. I'm not the one getting hitched today. For god's sake, wake the fuck UP. Don't pass out again, you stubborn twat—it's not like that, I'm telling you!"

Sherlock, teetering on the verge of yes, actually passing out again, cocks one eyebrow and cracks open one red-rimmed eye more fully. He peers, disbelieving. Cringes back against the cushions. He feels he can't push himself in much further than he already has, but then there's little left to him, with all the stuffing knocked askew.

"What?" Curiousity saves him. "…What?"

"I'm the best man, Sherlock. The best man. I'm not the one."

John inhales heavily, blowing out his cheeks as he sighs the gulp of air out slowly, patiently.

"Bugger. Right, then."

He shifts up on his knees and begins the process of clambering onto the couch to seat himself next to Sherlock's sagging form. Sighs again as he settled himself, nudging right up against Sherlock's lengthy droop.

"Getting married, idiot. That's stupid, stupid. Why would I ever do that? Confirmed bachelor, remember? My arse, you such a—shit!"

"…No? Really?"

Sherlock, abruptly, discovers that he might actually manage to live again; the relief flowing through his veins is very real and absolutely monumental. He's been handed a new lease on life.

"Y-Yes, John?"

"What, you don't remember the papers, Sherlock?" Sherlock is treated to a widely disparaging glare. "Did you delete that whole disaster already? Silly wanker. Just come here, now. You're an absolute mess. Lean on me, get your breath back. God!"

Sherlock allows his whirling head to be pressed down upon John's shoulder. He opens his mouth to say something more to John but can't think of a thing to say, in the end.

Words fail him, but they don't fail his blogger. Who is carping, and that, at last, convinces Sherlock he is the correct universe, after all. This one has John in it and it's good. Accordingly, he leans a little harder into John's side, and hums. Is elbowed gently for his trouble, which is also good.

"…Excepting…" John pulls a jeweler's box from his one pocket and lays it upon his lap, where he eyes it consideringly. "I've got the rings, naturally, still with me, right here. That's a bit of cock up, no lie. Not what's needed, and you? You would do this, wouldn't you? Coming along and messing things up, Sherlock. I swear, it's your modus operandi, sometimes; you exist to disrupt."

Sherlock's saved from making his excuses, not that he would. Ever. There's a knock on the door, and John heaves himself up to answer it, not without a scowl at Sherlock in passing and the whispered injunction to 'stay put, you dizzy tosser. Don't shift a bloody inch.'

He doesn't, and gratefully. Neither of them are to go anywhere at all. And Mycroft didn't warn him, Sherlock at last understands, because there was nothing to warn him of. His brother's assistant is on the stoop, hand extended for the ring box, eyes on her keypad and her flying thumb.

"Thank you, John; I'll just take that along and make your apologies. Oh, and—?"

Her gaze lifts from the mobile in her hand for one second, travelling over to Sherlock with a very knowing glint.

"Happy homecomings to you. Both."