Sherlock watched as John stood and exited the pub, citing an early day at the surgery as his reason for leaving. They both knew it was an excuse, but Sherlock allowed the pretense because it allowed him to return home and think. There had to be a way to salvage their friendship. Sherlock knew John had every right to be angry with him, but he wanted his friend back, in a desperate way that concerned his higher thinking.
But now wasn't the time to consider his deeper emotional attachments to John. Now was the time to figure out how to undo the damage he'd done in the time he'd been away. John hadn't been using his cane, but he did maintain a slight limp, not enough to impair him daily, but enough to make Sherlock furious with himself.
He sat in 221B, silently observing, not for the first time, how empty the flat seemed without John's influence. No tea in the cupboards or milk in the fridge, no mugs waiting to be washed in the sink, and no jumpers piled by the door to be taken to the laundry. And more than that, the flat felt cold without John in it, as if it were mirroring the minds of its inhabitants and now that John's effervescent warmth had abandoned it the flat was stuck reflecting Sherlock's machine of a mind.
In the silence he tried out the words, how he would say them when John trusted him again. I love you. Come home. That's what he wanted, was for things to return to the way they were. As John had said so eloquently, he wanted to go back to that possibility.
Sherlock could still recall with perfect clarity the evening before the Fall. He'd known it was coming the next morning, and as they'd crashed back into the flat that night Sherlock couldn't keep himself from pushing John against the wall and kissing him desperately. He didn't want to die without having kissed John at least once.
Part of him had waited for John to shove him away, to be furious, and that part was shocked when John immediately returned his advances. It had been incredible, much better than any of his boring experiments during uni with the other students, so much better than he'd expected it to be. And far too brief.
A moment later John had pulled back slightly; had lifted his hand to trail gently over Sherlock's cheek. "You need to sleep," he'd whispered. Sherlock had still been reeling from the kiss and so had been easy to convince. He'd managed to actually sleep that night, confident that even if he did die the next day he'd be doing it for something –someone- worthwhile.
John was right about one more thing. Things had changed, and it was going to take quite a lot of effort to get his blogger acclimated to the new environment. But perhaps someday… well, he'd leave those daydreams for another time, when he was less focused on keeping John as a friend. Rome wasn't built in a day, after all, though it may have fallen in one.