Sherlock stood in the doorway of 221B in utter shock. From upstairs came the sound of the water turning on in the kitchen. John was filling the kettle. Sherlock was drawn upstairs. The same stair creaked like it used to, only a bit louder perhaps. There was a new gash in the wallpaper. There was no lab equipment on the kitchen table but the acid stain was still there and John was making Sherlock tea.
"You're making me tea." he said.
"Obviously" replied John.
Sherlock felt the corner of his own lip quirk up in acknowledgement of John's little dig.
They stood there in the small kitchen together. Sherlock was not bleeding from his face a he had expected to at that point in their reunion. John calmly leaned with his hips against the countertop as he waited for the kettle to boil. They both openly stared at one another. The silence was not overly tense nor was it comfortably familiar yet either.
"Who told you I was alive. Was it Mycroft? No, not Mycroft. He wouldn't take the risk. Was it Molly? Did she let something slip?" Sherlock asked in quick succession.
"Molly Hooper knew?" John countered with a squint and a change of stance.
Finally the first flare of anger crossed John's face. That bit about Molly did genuinely surprise him.
"Yes. It was necessary. She was not on Moriarty's radar as being someone who I trusted to that degree and she had access to certain resources at Bart's that were vital to my plan." Sherlock waved his hand in the air to dismiss this line of questioning. "No, no one told you. You figured it out, how? How John?"
Sherlock had taken two steps closer and crowded into John's space. John's momentary anger over the Molly revelation faded quickly. He took a deep breath and blinked slower than necessary. When he opened them again his eyes briefly lighted over Sherlock's face and lingered fractionally longer on his lips.
The kettle's little orange light switched on as it's power cut off.
John stood up from where he had been leaning.
"Go on in the sitting room, I'll bring it in there and we can talk."
And so John turned his back and set about making two cups of tea.
Sherlock sat down in his chair, his chair still across from John's chair. He stroked the leather and felt a fierce swell of affection for the man in the kitchen. How many people passed John on the street everyday and didn't know that John returned home to his flat every night and sat across from an empty chair. The chair of a friend who had told him "keep your eyes fixed on me" and then jumped. Most others in that position would have tossed out or burned the chair. But John Watson is not most others. John Watson is made of braver burnished metal than most.
John Watson brought Sherlock his tea. Sherlock silently lamented that John placed it on the table next to Sherlock instead of placing it in his hand. Sherlock thought back to the fantasy he had back in India and the brush of fingertips.
"You know it took me a while after…well, after…to get out of the habit of making two cups of tea." started John, pulling Sherlock back to the moment.
"I had been back to seeing Ella, my therapist, and she said it was fine and natural. She told me I shouldn't beat myself up over it when it happened. Didn't quite save those half-dozen or so mugs from getting thrown against the wall, though. I stopped seeing her when I realized the therapy wasn't really helping. But that bit stuck with me. That bit about it being okay for me to do whatever I needed to do, even those little silly things, in order to make it through."
John took a long sip of his tea. He nodded once to himself, as if coming to a decision. John placed his mug down on his end table with a solid clunk. He reached under his chair and pulled out a plain shoe box. He opened it up, hesitated for just a moment, then took out a thick stack of mail.
It was all of Sherlock's letters. Sherlock's eyes grew large and he felt very exposed for a moment before he remembered that they were just envelopes and envelopes of blank pages.
"So when I received this first one," John started again after settling back down into his chair "and I found that I opened it up a few times a day, and that it made its way into my jacket pocket when I went to work, and that it stayed on my bedside table as I went to sleep at night, I tried not to overthink it. I knew, on some level, it was just me doing what I needed to do to make it through my day."
"But how John? How did you…" Sherlock demanded, only to be cut off with a single raised finger from John.
"If it had just been one page I probably would have tossed it. Thought somebody meant to send me something and stuck in a blank page instead. But all those pages. It was a whole story. It was, wasn't it Sherlock?"
Sherlock nodded, his mouth hanging open in a terribly undignified manner. John took another drink of his tea. Sherlock mirrored the action. God it tasted like home. He closed his eyes and held it in his mouth and let his tongue swim in it before he finally swallowed it down. It was like a sacrament, only not based on myths and legend and books from the bronze age. It was a tangible truth of steeped leaves and perfectly measured milk that some things didn't change.
"I never really thought too hard about what the story was about. I never tried to deduce the real origin of the envelope and how it came to come into my hands with some stranger's writing on the envelope. And although I never even really explicitly acknowledged it, even in the quiet of my own thoughts, that I thought it was from you. It made me feel better. That long letter made me feel like I wasn't so alone."
Sherlock thought back to his last day in London. He watched John stand at his gravestone. He heard his words carried on the wind. "I was so alone and I owe you so much."
"And then other days, it gave me something to focus my anger on. Cause I was angry too. I was left behind and out of the loop and then I got these empty pages tossed at me but I'm not a puzzle-solver and I don't get off enigmatic clues like some people do. Some nights I spread them all out on the table, my side of the table, and looked over at your empty side. And I paced and cursed and slapped my hands down onto those blank pages so hard that my palms felt like they were burning. I almost ripped them up, almost burned them. But then I would calm down or just get plain exhausted. And the next day I would fold them back up again in the right order and tuck them back in my pocket."
John traced the edge of his shirt pocket. Sherlock sipped his tea and felt warmed through for the first time in what felt like years. He thought about his letter resting against John's body heat, rising and falling with his breath, the corner of the envelope trembling faintly with each beat of his heart.
John sat up straighter in his chair. He picked the second letter out of the pile and pointed it at Sherlock accusingly. "Then this one arrived, and pretty much all hell broke loose." He tapped the smaller envelope against his own temple.
John rose from his chair and paced. He took the single torn, blank, cheap book page out of the envelope. He stopped and looked at it ruefully and took several agitated breaths through his nose. Sherlock was positively enrapt.
"I may not be a genius but this letter - this note was desperate. And yes, at that point, I did start calling them 'the letters' in my head. I knew it was crazy and I didn't care because it, it just fit. So anyway, this one upset me, Sherlock." John hit the 'k' sound at the end of Sherlock's name like a cuff up the side of the detective's head.
"Why" Sherlock interjected. He was fascinated.
"Because the last one told me an adventure or was showing off or something. It was reaching out and sharing something with me. But this one," John punctuated his speech by shaking the page by one of its yellowed edges. "This one reminded me that you were alone too."
All of the malice drained out of John in one long exhale. He sat back down across from Sherlock. When he spoke again, it was softer.
"This one upset me because I felt like you were somewhere that I couldn't follow and there was no one there to watch your back. And you shouldn't have to be alone. I know you're a genius and all that but this one, this sad little ripped page, made me feel like you were out of your depth and it shook me."
"You were convinced they were from me by then?"
"No. Not really convinced. But when I held them I believed they came from you. I had little to no evidence to support that thought but once you rule out the impossible, or whatever, that thing you always said."
"Say. That thing I say. I'm not past tense, John." Sherlock corrected.
John looked up from the paper and smiled.
"No, you are present tense now. And that's brilliant."
Sherlock ventured a tentative smile back.
"So what did you do? After the second letter?" Sherlock asked after a few moments of silence.
"Well, I talked my way in and out of several mini mental breakdowns. I started incessantly searching the internet for news from the date and location stamps from where the letters came from, almost picked up the phone to call Mycroft a few times even." John paused and then added, quieter, "And I listened to a lot of your CD's"
"What?" Sherlock's head snapped up.
"What what?" asked John.
"You listened to my CD's? Why? You never listened to them when I was in the flat. Why then? And which ones?"
"Umm, I didn't listen to them when you were here because I had live concerts in my sitting room all hours of the day and night. I listened to them after I got that letter because it was kind of a weird way of me trying to be with you. I used to imagine you somewhere maniacally scouring the radio dial for 'something halfway decent, John' like when we had the rental car out in Darthmoor, and that maybe we would be listening to the same thing at the same time. But I guess I mostly just came back around to my favorite the most often because I missed y…your playing."
John finished the last of his tea as Sherlock steepled his fingers against his mouth. John lowered his cup.
"Bach's Violin Sonata No. 1" they both said in unison.