You ain't giving me no quarter.
I'd rather drink sea water,
I wish I'd never had brought you,
It's gonna be the death of me.

The Rolling Stones, Soul survivor

After that whole experience which, incidently, did nothing to appease my intermittent PTSD, I was pretty set on hating Jim Moriarty for the rest of my life. So what if for a moment he'd been the soft and playful man I'd fallen for all those years ago, so what if he'd done everything he could to protect me, so what if he'd let us go in the end ? What he'd done was unforgivable and I wasn't going to give in to him this time.

Spoiler alert : this state of mind didn't last very long.

It lasted exactly three months, actually. After the unsolved case which I never failed to remind Sherlock of every now and again, my dear flatmate had been particulaily restless, grumpy, obnoxious and... Well, good thing I had a job to go to because otherwise I probably would have bashed his skull in at some point. Between the experiments that ended in kitchen fire twice, the violin at three in the morning and the near constant "Jaaawwn !"'s shouted from across the room, my already thin nerves were pretty tried.

It didn't help that I kept imagining I could smell Jim on my pillows, either.

I was leaving work one day when a black car stopped in front of me and the same goons from that trip to the pool got out. I didn't even try to fight or even look scandalized. I just let them push me into the car and put the hateful hood on my head, vaguely hoping it had been clean in the interim.

A few minutes later I was dragged inside a building and up a flight of stairs. I stood there awkwardly for a moment before the hood was pulled off of me, and I had to resist the urge to laugh as I recognized Jim's living room. It seemed hilarious at the time, all the precautions they'd taken to make sure I wouldn't know where I was, when that house had been my home for over a year. I could set the journey from there to Baker Street and back to music.

The coffee table was covered with medical equipment – disinfectant, thread, needles, gause, bandages and so on – and the men left the room silently, thought I heard their footsteps stop down the stairs, probably blocking any attempt to escape. I almost called out to them to demand what was going on when tired footsteps came shuffling from the kitchen and Jim's voice filled my ears. "Caucasian male, 38, bullet wound to the side. Only a graze, but it definitely needs stitches."

I turned around to see a battered Jim smile at me as he slowly made his way to the sofa, his left arm wrapped around his body, keeping pressure on the wound. The blood had done a right mess of his white shirt, and he was using his bunched up suit jacket as a compress. His face was ashen and clammy, but he was looking at me with his crooked grin, for all the world looking like he was laughing at a private joke.

I cleared my throat in an attempt to control my own voice. "What the hell am I doing here ?" I asked, foolishly proud of the fact that I'd managed to sound more annoyed than worried.

He feigned surprise and pointedly looked down at his wound, then back up at me, "Isn't it customary to call the doctor when you're, ah, indisposed ?"

I scoffed at him, still rooted on the spot, "I'd have thought master criminals had their own private doctors.

- Oh but they do," he answered with a cheeky grin. I briefly weighed the idea of letting him bleed to death just to teach him a lesson, but I decided the satisfaction of spiting him wasn't worth a bullet to the head.

I steeled myself, slipping easily into my role of doctor, and went to sit on the floor in front of him – I definitely was not going to kneel. I pushed his hand away to inspect the damage. He was going to have quite the scar from this, but he would live. I asked him to take off his shirt, studiously ignored the eyebrow wriggle it got me and started cutting at his undershirt to expose the wound.

I asked him to keep his arm up and out of the way, and wasn't really surprised when I felt the weight of that arm rest upon my shoulders. I applied the disinfectant before getting to work. "I don't suppose you're going to tell me how it happened ?" I said after a moment, purely to distract myself from our proximity.

I heard him chuckle above me. "I don't kill and tell, John." My movements stuttered at that and he hissed at the extra pinch it gave him. "I was only joking," he grumbled sulkily.

I resoluted to silence then, knowing anything he would say would inevitably piss me off. But after a while, the elbow on my shoulder shifted and the hand attached to it slid up to play with the hair on the back of my head. My heart rate picked up immediately and I froze again. "Please stop that," I said, my voice cold and professional. I felt the breath of his huff in my hair more than I actually heard it, but his hand stayed in place. "I mean it, Moriarty," I said firmly, "If you don't remove your hand right now I'll make sure you never need stitches again."

We stayed still as statues for a handful of seconds before his hand slid back down to rest on my right shoulder. "The Army made you extra feisty,"he said, "I like it." But all his bravado couldn't quite mask the disappointment in his voice.

Another round of moody silence started, but this time he was the one to break it. "How are you doing, John ?"

The question startled me so much that I pulled a bit too hard on the thread and he hissed. "Kind of you to ask," I said, letting the sarcasm take the wheel, "After you've threatened to have my best friend killed if I refused to act as your puppet."

I could hear his eye-roll as he answered with a bored, "You're not still mad at me for that."

I 'missed' the spot on my next stitch and he yelped. His right hand clenched into a fist and he gave my shoulder a punch. I could have laughed at how childish we were being, but at the time all I felt was resentment. He must have sensed it because his hand opened and his open palm came down to rest on the spot he'd just hit, rubbing at it absentmindedly. I didn't have the energy to tell him to stop this time.

When I was done patching him up, I stood up and he gingerly put his shirt back on. Then suddenly I reached out and put my hand under his chin, gently tilting it up to make him look at me. He froze, his hands still on his lapels, his brow furrowed as I stared into his eyes. I leaned in a bit, getting closer to his face, my gaze never leaving his. I could hear his breath quicken but he sat completely still, waiting for my next move. My right hand came to rest on his shoulder and I felt him shiver as I removed my left from his face, leaning in impossibly closer to him. The silence between us was so thick I could almost taste it. His breath was stuttering in anticipation...

And then I shone my penlight in his eyes and he yelped and flinched, trying to bat my hand away. I scoffed, my hand tightening on his shoulder. "None of that," I said in my best doctor voice, "I think you may have a concussion, so I need you to follow the light with your eyes."

He snarled at me but did as he was told, albeit grumpily. "You play dirty, Johnny-boy," he said, and I'm sure he wished his voice had been steadier than it was.

I smirked at him, "You wanted me to be your doctor, I'm being your doctor. Don't blame me if you don't like it," I replied lightly. I could still feel his heart hammering in his chest and felt extremely satisfied for it. It wasn't often that I managed to be one up on Jim so when I was, I found it really hard not to gloat. "You have a mild concussion," I said finally, straightening up to put away my penlight, "You might want to have someone ask you questions regularly to make sure your memory hasn't suffered from it, and-

- Yeah, yeah, I know the drill," he interrupted with a dismissive wave of his hand.

I nodded, almost chuckling to myself. Apparently I really had got him going. He was way too eager to be done, suddenly. I asked him if there was anything else he wanted me to check, but he answered by a negative. I gave him his prescription form along with a few extra advices which I knew he wasn't actually listening to, and made my way to the door.

"My men will escort you back to Baker Street," he said, coming to stand next to me, holding his hand out. I shook it and he smirked, holding on a bit longer, "I'll see you soon, Doctor Watson," he said darkly, "And be sure to give that lovely flatmate of yours my best."

The trip to Baker Street was pretty much identical to the one that had taken me to Jim's, though I almost told them not to bother with the hood. When I got to the flat a sense of dread filled me when I remembered the mood my mad flatmate had been in. To my utter relief, though, everything there was intact, and Sherlock was fast asleep in his bed. Good. I really didn't feel like dealing with his nonsense just then.

At this point the idea of telling Sherlock about my relationship with Jim was far from my mind. As far as I was concerned, I hadn't done anything wrong. I had dated the man then, upon learning about his past, broken up with him. I had nothing to do with his crimes past, present or future, so what could my testimony possibly bring to the table ?

See how good I am at that game ?

I fixed myself a cup of tea and went up to my room, replaying the day's brief reunion in my mind. Yes, it had been satisfying to wind Jim up for a change. I remembered the way his breath had picked up, his heart hammering and his body shivering. I remembered the look in his eyes as he thought I was going to kiss him. I was weirdly thankful he'd been concussed, though. Because if he hadn't been, he probably would have noticed that all these little reactions were mirrored by my own body.

The next day, Sherlock had gotten a call from Greg but since he was actually sleeping for once, I decided to go to the scene myself and call Sherlock if the case turned out interesting. As it turned out, he's the one who called to know where I was – because no one had made him tea, imagine that – so I ended up raiding the countryside with a laptop, Skyping the world's only consulting detective.

When he mentioned something he'd told me the day before, I had to make an excuse for my absence and the first thing that came out was "I was in Dublin." See what I did there ? Dublin ? Because Jim's- yeah, you probably get it. The great thing when you live with someone like Sherlock is that he very often assumes that whatever you did without him was boring so he doesn't ask. Over the next few years, "I was in Dublin" became code for "I was with Jim", just like "People will talk" was code for "Jim will be jealous".

Did I get you with that almost-kiss?

Thank you for reading, and an even bigger thanks for the reviewers!

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