WATSON
They'd told her almost everything – almost. Returning to 221b after an unimaginable game of cat and mouse and the arrest of Sebastian Moran, he and Sherlock had been caught up in a flurry of floral-scented attention as Mrs H had demanded a play-by-play account of themselves. Once again he was embarrassed to feel envy twisting in his chest as their landlady clasped Sherlock's face and mussed his curly hair, chastising him for the dangers he courted. The cardboard cut-out of Sherlock's profile had lain bent and forgotten on the floor under the broken window, and he remembered staring at the neat hole in the neck of the preposterous decoy. Then, when she'd left them, Sherlock had retreated to his bedroom, closed the door, and left him standing in the empty sitting room, chilled by a draft from the bullet hole in the window snaking across his bare feet on the gritty Persian carpet. He mounted the stairs to his own tiny bedroom listening the strains of Sherlock's violin, heeding the old sign of his flatmate's desire for solitude. John remembered thrilling with a sudden thought: could he, should he, call this man his 'flatmate', or even his 'friend', now? He couldn't say. He really couldn't. What had happened there, across the road? Momentatily the sound of the violin had fixed him to the floor as it fixed Sherlock's presence again in the flat, in his life, into the very fabric of reality. He even recognised the piece, though he couldn't name it.
The next morning, though John rose early, Sherlock was already gone. Half a pot of coffee and a clean mug on the counter helped alleviate the pang of anxiety he felt at finding himself alone in the flat again. The coffee was strong, and fuelled him into action. He saw the kitchen and sitting room with the eyes of the living for the first time in months, and what he saw horrified him.
He'd never been so domestic. Perhaps he drew on a store of energy that had been slowly banking up over months of mourning; the desire to do, to fix, to create order out of chaos overwhelmed him and he couldn't work fast enough to satiate it. Only rarely did he stop, and that was when the memory of Sherlock's hand on his waist the evening before, the press of his thumb – a memory so potent that it became real sensation – overwhelmed every other thought and action. He'd pause and let the recollection wash over him.
Of course, he was careful not to work himself up for nothing. Sherlock had learned something new, and for Sherlock, that was an end in itself; it wouldn't occur to him that it mattered much, that it changed anything. He isn't wired that way, he kept reminding himself. It meant, Christ, too much to me, nothing to him. Leave it. What did it matter that he felt as though he'd handed Sherlock a gun, opened his arms, and invited him to shoot where he liked? But he was determined: if he couldn't be with him, he would be a part of him. He could at least be more than just a friend, couldn't he? He took a long drag on the dust-laden air of the sitting room, scenting life returning. True to form, when Sherlock came back to the flat after checking in with Lestrade at New Scotland Yard, about mid-morning, they'd settled into their old routine with every appearance of ease. They never spoke about it, and in a way, he was glad.
Sherlock had been gone long enough that the news had moved on. Fortunately for them, the parliamentary elections were approaching, and these overshadowed his return, which barely made it into the papers at all. Sherlock's reappearance in the world of the living wasn't to be a sensational one, but like a seed sprouting in the dark earth. He was able to get the blog back up and running and requests for Sherlock's help began to trickle in. They weren't the national crises that had been his making in the years before his disappearance, but as Sherlock himself was always insisting, it was the minor, personal cases that often held the most interest for him, and Sherlock was ready, aching to work again.
The first case worthy of writing up for the blog, that of 'The Three Gary Debbs' was an odd one which turned out to be far more interesting than it had promised to be at first glance. It cost one man his sanity, another his freedom, and it cost himself the price of a shirt and a trip to the A and E. Yet there was certainly an element of comedy, and a bit of tragedy, and a bit of… well, perhaps not everything ended up in the blogged version of events: almost everything – almost.
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