The greyscale drones of Whitehall collectively cringed on sight of Sherlock Holmes stalking in. A building lit from within by hidden fires was no place for a man who made his living in their extinction. I make them nervous. They made him cross! It was a fair trade in his estimation.

He blew through Mycroft's outer office, giving no quarter to his secretary— not Anthea-Nike-Regina, no; she is more bodyguard than gatekeeper. The soundproof door snicked fast in his wake. It won't even slam properly. The berk!

Sherlock threw himself into a stout chair, atypically winded from exertion. "I should murder you for subjecting me to that."

The 'British Government' huffed peevishly, setting aside the Meisterstück fountain pen he favoured for the signing of legal instruments. "I haven't the faintest—"

"Save your fabulist nattering for the imbeciles abroad. You got me high and had me dropped off at John's doorstep like some misbehaved housecat. He all but had his bags packed when I woke the next morning."

Mycroft was profoundly unmoved by his plight. "I warned you, Sherlock, about the consequences of your actions. I warned you clearly. Had you made any effort to cast off your thrall, this regrettable event might have been avoided."

Sherlock pitched himself forward. "It was you who gave me that syringe. You had one of your sycophants prepare it and you carried it in your pocket to give to me."

"When I had your cab intercepted, you were en route to a meeting with your second-best dealer in Berkeley Square. His supply would have wracked your body with sickness for days, maybe longer; it was that badly tainted. John would have remained long enough to see you well, and then he would have ducked into the nearest recruiting office by close of business. It is enough to be an addict in recovery; the vagaries of a life with one might have been more than he could bear."

"You were testing him." Sherlock clutched at the arm rests, prised his nails under the brass fittings.

"Naturally." Mycroft wavered, evidently spying his unease, spying much more. "You're surprised."

"The only thing I find surprising is that we still speak. John is past the stage of needing to prove his veracity to you, Mycroft." He thumped his fist on the rest till it throbbed.

"No one passes that stage until they are dead or have you completely obliterated all memory of our upbringing? Countless people have cared for you, Sherlock, but almost none have loved you for good and for ill. You cannot let slip the one who has."

There he is again, sticking his overinflated nose into my affairs. Any fool could see John wasn't going anywhere, John had promised and his word was his bond. Sherlock rocketed to his feet, sick unto death of this dance, and gathered the folds of his Belstaff around him.

"Text me when you've something of use to say, otherwise don't contact me—and you aren't to breathe a word to John. No more chats and coffees. Leave him alone."

"You're labouring under the misapprehension that I consider John an enemy."

"I don't care if you think John is your bloody 'one that got away.' If you attempt to unsettle him or try to drive a further wedge between us, I'll consider you my enemy." Mycroft took up his pen. Sherlock read the boredom in his expression. His brother would do what he liked unperturbed by any strop Sherlock might throw in his path.

"These histrionics are wholly uncalled for. My actions were without malicious intent. I needed to be sure of John. I am now."

Sherlock loomed over his seated elder, obscuring the broad middle of Mycroft's precious legislation with his hands. "I have been from the start, and mine is the only certainty necessary for this relationship to transpire."

"Yours and his, Sherlock. Isn't that what your little display was all about? Doubt? You feared John would be unable to withstand your little idiosyncrasies, so you ran away like a child." Mycroft gave his recently let out waistcoat a sanctimonious jerk. "Your equilibrium is restored. I won't apologize for my method of achieving success."

Yet he had been repentant, Sherlock recalled of his last snatches of sobriety. I could not despise you more than you hate yourself. "I won't trust you another time."

"So long as there's John, you won't even miss me."

Sherlock sensed the flytrap of premeditated rhetoric clapping around him. "Going somewhere, brother dear?" He'd aimed for sugary sweet only to land in a vat of aspartame. Mycroft wrinkled his nose in revulsion. He abhorred graceless stratagem.

"I'm scheduled for Damascus in three days."

"Not what I meant."

"Somewhere you cannot follow me, Sherlock."

"Or somewhere I should not." Rules were guidelines in Sherlock's philosophy. "What have you done?"

"More than enough by now, don't you agree?"

"I agreed when I was seven."

"Eight."

"Both and every age since. Good day, Mycroft." Sherlock made to go, his piece spoken.

Mycroft clicked his tongue in reluctance. "Very well. James Moriarty sends his regards."

Sherlock's skin rose in a chilly furore unrelated to his withdrawal. It wasn't any great shock to him that Mycroft should have known where Sherlock's elevated nemesis had made off to. That didn't mean he was pleased that his brother had kept his intelligence to himself. This confession sat harbinger of the fight to come. This isn't child's play anymore. As children, they'd been anything but normal, a trait they hadn't lost in growing.

"James Moriarty can bugger off to hell. May you travel together."

The Downing Street troglodytes did tactical somersaults to evade his notice on the way out. They were about as deserving of note as their cumulative moral offenses: government-sanctioned murder, adultery, and a dash of treason. Sherlock didn't put much stock in the turncoat seeing Bonfire Night much less midnight. Beware, little spy, Mycroft knows all. His brother's next bold move was anyone's to guess.

...

On making it outside, Sherlock grew restive, his nerves jangling in wanton abandon. If he walked in any direction, he risked wasting these last two days of exorcising his demons a fifth time. It would be no work at all.

Northwest to St. James's Park, Whitcomb Street and the Trocadero due northeast, Tottenham Court Road further on, Marylebone High Street, and Portman Square to Baker Street. Six active drop zones at which Sherlock could justify his presence for a short time. A cold case, even I have them. 'One of my informants saw something of interest and asked...' Sherlock punted the idea from consideration as too pedestrian. John anticipates madness. I can give him madness.

Sherlock prowled Parliament Square till the veloce beating under his skin slackened to an indeterminate vibrato, till the goose bumps and nausea subsided. He knew it to be a trick of brain chemistry designed to drive him toward the fix that would sustain his faded high. For years he'd considered this yearning his sole companion. John had illuminated the misnomer to reveal his crutch for what it was: a poison that, for all that it bolstered his tolerance of the world's meaningless drivel, stifled him.

He was going to disembowel his brother if he was forced to endure this yawning hunger for one minute more. He was enumerating methods for murder when suddenly, his phone sounded in his pocket, a text.

Don't kill Mycroft. JW

He snorted at his flatmate's impeccable sense of timing. Ever the optimist, his John.

Not yet. SH

Tea first. Come home. JW

Sherlock gave his back to St. James's Park and threw up his hand to hail a taxi. They'd be taking the most direct route to Baker Street. Tea and army doctors waited for no man. No other man, anyway.

...

Sherlock tore off his greatcoat on entering the flat, flinging it over his chair and launching himself at John's lap where there was room enough for Sherlock's head and for John's hand to nestle in his hair like welcoming. John scratched, absentminded, at Sherlock's scalp, blotting out the regiment of cocaine fire ants laying siege to his central nervous system and gentling his fratricidal rage for thirty seconds or so.

"What's His Majesty done to get your back up this time?"

"Mycroft is an arrogant, pompous, meddling toe rag."

John singlehandedly wagged the wrinkles out of the Guardian open above Sherlock's line of sight. "And water is wet, news at nine."

Sherlock glowered, indignant. "You're as bad as he is."

John flicked Sherlock's ear. "Play nice."

Sherlock sniffled, chomping at the indefensible censure. "What for? You should be as upset with him as I am, perhaps even more so. He gave me drugs, you hate the drugs. Why aren't you angrier with him?"

"D'you want the short answer to that or the long?"

"Have we stumbled onto a home edition of QI?

"So, you'd prefer no answer. Fine by me." John flipped to a new section. Jobs. John's had enough of wiping wet noses for a paltry sum. Sherlock fretted that his next supervisor might not be so forgiving of Sherlock's demands. He required his assistant and his friend at his side at a moment's notice.

"For God's sake, John, just tell me already." He dug a hand of fingernails into the meat John's left quadriceps femorus, snappish. John flicked him twice till he loosed his grip.

"I don't know, it might do you some good to learn a bit of patience."

Sherlock hunkered low, snarling in his insecurity. "Tell me or I'll pour battery acid over every revolting jersey, jacket, and pair of corduroy trousers you own." His shoes, coats, and shirts go without saying. The general public would give him a medal. John would end up largely naked as his wardrobe included little else. Make that two medals.

"You're planning to do that anyway, but I appreciate the warning. I'll add new clothes to the monthly budget."

"We have a budget?" This was first Sherlock had heard of it. Possibly. I seem to recall a deleted conversation entailing excess spending on bovine gall bladders, but that was for the Ipswich investigation!

"And you wonder why people mistake me for your governess?"

"I don't wonder that." Sherlock's furrowed brows collapsed into a groove. "Why should I wonder that? Anyone in possession of one or more functioning senses can see we're two adults in a committed, equitable relationship." John made a derisive sound in back of his throat. Sherlock scuttled upright, dislodging John's paper to the point whole sheets scattered to the ground. "What was that sound you just made?"

"Sorry?" He was having Sherlock on, had to be.

"That sound. I didn't make a joke, I wasn't being funny. You think there's something inequitable about our relationship."

John drummed his fingers over his knee, pretending at a calm belied by the stern, square lines of his shoulders. "I wasn't aware we had a relationship until yesterday."

"We share a home, work, acquaintances, expenses, food. You do the housework and I provide the lion's share of our income. We could be married but for trifling realpolitik."

"That's a leap. Sherlock, we've fooled around once and halfway through you backed out. That doesn't usually bode well for a romantic affair, in my experience."

"You told me it was fine, that we'd work through it." The pull remained, jailed tight behind his navel. Sherlock could give in to it anytime, like the beelike buzzing in his veins.

"I meant that and we will, but we have to face facts. You have a problem, I had one, and I'm not sure those things can coexist."

Sherlock's sympathetic nervous system kicked into gear in the name of panic, shunting adrenalin like acrid lightning into his bloodstream and setting his heart to race. He tried to remain calm for appearance's sake.

"You said you would stay. Right here, you promised you would stay. Have you had a change of heart? If Mycroft's said something..." Arsenic in his Jaffa cakes. He'd deserve it, the larder. There would be no one alive with the mental acuity to build a case against me.

"He hasn't said anything to me. This is me given time to think things over without the threat of you OD'ing in the sitting room to terrify me."

"I wouldn't. I've carefully assessed my tolerance levels." If 'recklessly injecting every substance money or sexual favours could obtain' qualified, and he thought it did, this was an unimpugnable fact.

John sat his cheek on his fist. Sherlock didn't believe in extrasensory perception or telepathy or any of that neuro-extraordinary nonsense, but he concluded instantly that John had grasped the meaning behind his selective speech. Many of his former dealers should count themselves fortunate Mycroft had got them first.

"Sherlock, barring the few instances I know about, you haven't used in years. You don't think that has some effect on what will or won't kill you?"

Sherlock reclined in sullen unresponsiveness. John ought to have more respect for his scientific process than to think he wouldn't check from time to time, to think he wouldn't know this body to its marrow.

"You don't have to lie, you don't even have to answer, but I want you to think about that."

"How long can I expect this lecture to last?" He picked at John's inglorious brown bottoms. "Only I've got a stomach perforation experiment on that wants finishing." The murder weapon looked to be a spiked designer heel: Louboutin, six inches. He was intrigued.

"Ha bloody ha. Thank you for proving me right. I never get to be right." John lurched up to go to the kitchen, dislodging Sherlock's easy destruction. "We're good friends, I enjoy that, I think maybe we're best as that. I promised you tea, didn't I?" He swiftly patted Sherlock's shoulder when he went to accompany him. "No need to get up. I'll bring it, don't worry." But Sherlock did worry.

"While I agree that our personal relationship amounts to an almost ideal friendship, our obvious mutual physical attraction and affection for one another would seem indicate we've the prerequisites for something more."

"Run that by me again." John leant on the lip of the sink, the kettle whizzing on the hob beside him. He looked befuddled. Situation altogether normal.

Sherlock scrubbed his clammy hands on his trousers. He was out of things to go for but broke. "John, ahem...I have been, I think, reliably informed that I could be 'in love' with you, in the widely accepted definition of the term. What are your thoughts?" Sherlock sat back, fingertips to lips, to see the penny drop.

John reeled, jaw unlatching in pursuit of sounds to form words that didn't come, his cheeks hollowed sharp of a startled exhale. He looked very nearly sad at what Sherlock had hoped might make him happy. Sherlock didn't like the timbre of this silence; the hair on his arms stood up at it. He pondered his gut-driven impulse to put distance between them, mystified at his recognition of a rejection he had no precedent for.

"I think, I think...you should get back to me when you know how feel, or don't feel as the case may be." John palmed his face before nullifying his previous remark. "On second thought, you won't have to say you're not. I know what that looks like."

Sherlock thought there little chance of the latter possibility bearing fruit. For all that he was a loathsome intruder in Sherlock's life, Mycroft was seldom wrong in his judgments. Irene, in their short acquaintance, had proved near as a canny. It stood to reason that John himself would be the one to doubt him. Somehow, John's unwarranted insecurity pricked at Sherlock's calluses and palms. He hardly noticed that it was his nails doing the rending till John intervened. Ever the healer-protector, my John.

Sherlock leant up as if to engender a confidence, desiring to read the answer John wouldn't give in his eyes. "Does that happen often?"

John fixed his too-small mouth into an inoffensive line. Sherlock had the urge to pitch whoever had judged him wanting into Cardiff Bay. He would if it would banish that look he was coming to hate.

"It's not important," John ultimately said, ducking to pick up the orphaned newspaper sections on the floor.

Like hell it isn't.

"Everything to do with you is important."

John's Adam's apple dipped. He made tracks when the kettle called. He'll obfuscate next.

John took down two mugs and poured. More sugar than milk in Sherlock's with a dollop of honey, the reverse and a lack in John's. He carried them back to be imbibed. Sherlock flicked an illusory contaminant out of his, staining John's shirt cuff in the offing. He settled, docile, to drink at John's combustible glare.

"Sorry."

"Right. Um, I am angry at Mycroft, very much so, and he'll feel it from me when I see him. But I'm not nearly as upset as you are because he doesn't mean as much to me. He isn't my brother, I don't love him. Simple as that. He doesn't have the ability to disappoint me like he does you because I don't love him like you do."

Sherlock's font of wry wit ran accursedly dry. Misdirection managed. "Don't be absurd. Nobody loves Mycroft, least of all me." He rifled his brain for Mycroft's damning particulars. "He lies for a living. It's impossible to 'love' anyone who doesn't tell the truth more than once in a day's time." Sherlock blew across his cuppa to cool it.

John swished a mouthful of his Yorkshire best. "I don't know. You lie all the time just because you can, and I'm still here. I haven't shoved off to Antigua for a load-off like I deserve." Neither made note of New Zealand.

Sherlock dithered and composed a ballad in his head, made no attempt to see the symmetry.

"That's what I thought. You'll need to pick up some new stones to cast at your brother when you go to the shops. I threw out the old ones with the flesh experiment." Sherlock put on a sour face, rejecting out of hand the erroneous assumption he'd voluntarily set foot inside a Sainsbury's before he died.

"Again, John? It'll take days to set up another trial. Think of the embarrassment of valuable biological tissue Molly's let me waste replicating my previous efforts."

John was exasperated. No, relieved. "Don't put this off on her. If it inconvenienced you to do it over, you wouldn't bother. You'll try it until bores you and I'll bin it as many times as it takes for you to realize that your necrotizing flesh samples do not belong in the food dishes, Sherlock."

"I like to get your medical opinion on my experiments." He wouldn't be averse to John having more input into his work—in theory.

"You never ask."

"The request is implied."

John stretched his neck, eyelids flicking in a disbelieving roll. "Because you're known for being shy about demanding what you want."

"Manners?"

"Had I not met Mycroft, I'd say you learned that word from me. Actually, having met him, I'm positive you did. Your brother isn't so much well-mannered as cordially mortifying."

"If you value your privacy, such as it is, you'll never let him hear you say that. Never has there been a man more leery of a flattering word than Mycroft. Besides, my brother hardly tips the scale at intimidating. 17 stone on the other hand..."

"He can lose that, I've been trying to feed you up for a year and you haven't gained so much as half a stone. You're as spry a beanpole as I've ever met." Wrong, Sherlock had gained some eight-point-three pounds in the months he'd had John. According to Molly, he'd never looked so well.

"Feeding me up, isn't that something girlfriends do?" He hid in his tea.

John emerged, lips shining, from his. "Best friends, too. Speaking of which, I just realized you haven't got a case on and you're mostly through with detox. That means food." He nicked Sherlock's mug just as he was getting to the sweet at the bottom, taking it with his to the sink. "Come on, get off your bony arse, we're going for Chinese."

Sherlock peeled himself grudgingly off said arse and trudged to retrieve his coat and John's, teetering only somewhat relative to his usual grace. Nausea was missing in action and the army in his brain had raised the white flag. He could breathe.

In gratitude, he guided John into his coat sleeves and tucked his lapels flat. John indulged him, knotting Sherlock's scarf on his behalf and retrieving his gloves, waiting patiently for him to slide them on. Sherlock fisted his hands to test the fit, his nerves still randomly sparking electric under him skin. John watched, ensorcelled, as he was more apt to show nowadays, with the activity of Sherlock's hands.

"You and Mycroft wear leather gloves like no two blokes I've ever seen."

"Hmm." This wouldn't be the first time Sherlock had found himself compared to his brother's grace, but this was the first time he'd cared to emerge the victor. Sherlock itched to grab John up and ravish him until he never again thought of Sherlock and Mycroft in the same lewd breath. They had the same hands, perhaps, but they were in no sense interchangeable.

He settled for drawing his encased index finger along the shell of John's ear and leaned down ever so to whisper in, "I wear them much, much better." The ragged shudder that seized John's through and through was just reward enough.

John tilted as though to catch Sherlock's mouth, only to stop himself short with a mere ounce of restraint. Sherlock believed he registered a fortifying breath to follow, but he let his flatmate free at the man's skittish sidestep. Sherlock still had too much to prove.

John slicked his lips, avoiding Sherlock's eyes. "I'll remember that."

"See that you do."

"So," John proceeded, voice gruff, "Chinese?"

"Mmm, no, I've changed my mind. Indian."

"In the mood for something spicy?"

"In the mood for more."

Here, Sherlock did what he's done since adolescence. He did the daring, he completed the circuit and kissed John first. He covered John's lips with something chaste. Not the least because he was still finding his feet in wanting this, but because John needed to believe that he was more than an irresistible thrill for the indulging. John licked a profession into the corner of his mouth Sherlock didn't think the man himself was ready to acknowledge. Kissing wasn't so terribly brilliant in and of itself. Kissing John Watson was another matter entirely. Sherlock could waste a day in the doing of it.

Sherlock's lower lip stung on sliding free of John's custody. His human heart was racing faster than the speed of deduction. John's steel core pulled at him in its ferromagnetism.

John's hand wrapped around Sherlock's wrist where sleeve and glove laid him bare. "Still hungry?"

"Ravenous." The richest biryani London had to offer couldn't have sated him now.

Although Sherlock's tempestuous digestive system would revolt against him in the aftermath, he thought some grumbling from his transport was a rather fair trade to see John turn away with cheeks so red.

...

Three days later found Sherlock lounging on John's exam table, one case in the palace and two in the bin, whilst the other man carried out his evening charting. There was a triple murder cooling in the ground floor foyer of Sherlock's mindscape, the tiny threads knotting and entwining to form an intricate tapestry of a crime worth blogging about in Sherlock's inestimable opinion. The sooner John finished the job he supposedly had to do, the faster he could share Sherlock's latest professional success with his readership. Even if it will take him days to type it all up and days more for me to make the necessary corrections. Sherlock was content in the meantime to occupy his flatmate's space, to observe him where he excelled. Where he smiles despite himself.

John yawned and signed his seventh referral slip. Serious enough to warrant a specialist yet not concerning enough to draw concern. Superficially benign lesion or abnormal thyroid activity. Thyroid is the more likely for the yawn. Weight, obesity, forward to endocrinologist and/or dietician/nutritionist. Sherlock could have guessed and been right.

Sherlock perked up once John switched to another patient folder. John had put his non-dominant hand over his heart and left it there until he needed it. Advanced cardiovascular disease. John notated this chart thoroughly, unearthing a dispenser of neon tabs to catch the attention of the cardiac specialist he'd be calling upon.

John had rubbed at his clan colours, not drummed on his heart. Not just heart disease. Scotch-Irish patient, late middle age. John did it again as he made a final notation in the chart and set it in his outbox for one of aides to retrieve in the morning. His eyes lingered on it in silent contemplation a few seconds more. He cares too much. Sherlock worried that John might one day care himself to death. It's why I never bother. All that caring won't save them. All of Sherlock's fretting couldn't any more save John from his damnable nature. Even consulting detectives had their beloved lost causes.

Sherlock counted the flecks of sparse grey in John's hair and measured them against the first sight of the man he'd had in Bart's that fateful day. John had been an old man, then, in body and in mind. Now it was the years that were catching up to him and, so, to Sherlock as well. He'd stay them as best he could by invoking those matters which brought John constantly to life: the Work and the colours he wore like pride made flesh.

"Do you plan to get any more?"

"Anymore?"

Sherlock didn't privilege that intellectual belch with a response.

"Oh, you meant another tattoo. No hard, fast plans, why?"

Sherlock wagged a shoulder. "Curious."

"Okay," John drawled, dragging the word out for syllables longer than the English language required or approved. "Should I be worried?"

Sherlock twigged a torpid eyebrow, head slung off the cushioned edge of the table. "You're always worried."

"Should I be more worried?"

"Not overmuch."

"That's a 'yes' if I ever heard one. Just don't do anything stupid to me while I'm sleeping, or while I'm awake. Or unconscious. I'll know if you do and if I'm not sure, I'll ask Mycroft."

"He won't tell you."

"Yes, he will. He wants you to keep me—like a pet or something, I think, but who knows with Mycroft? He apparently has this mad idea that I'm a good influence on you."

They shared a look, then descended into helpless, snuffling laughter. John ended up curled up in his chair, arms tight around his heaving sides. Sherlock nearly spilled off the exam table onto the floor. Mycroft always did read me all wrong. When it counted, anyway.

"I thought your brother was supposed to be the smarter one."

"That's what everyone says, but most people are idiots; you can't expect them to know any better."

"So, you promise you're not up to anything?"

"Promise."

"I suppose that'll have to do."

"Dinner?"

"You're suggesting food for, I think, the second time ever. The Mayans were right." John backpedalled at Sherlock's nascent sulk. Mayans? Need more data. "All right, I'm done. Put away the pout. I haven't eaten since lunch; you I doubt have eaten since Monday. Dinner sounds like a brilliant idea. Is that Greek place still on?"

"I'll check."

John hummed in needless reply and began the brief process of clearing his workspace. Sherlock whipped out his phone, intent on texting the eatery's the proprietor. The cook and the head waiter were colluding to swindle the man, but the waiter was skimming off the pot, thus also deceiving his partner in duplicity. Sherlock advised the owner to wait till close of business to confront his mendacious employers. He wanted to have a peaceful meal with John before all hell broke loose for pudding.

"As of now, the owner owes me another one. Let's go before I light an oxygen tank on fire to alleviate the monotony."

John shucked his lab coat and stethoscope. "Don't even joke about that. I'm still paying for the month's supply of iodine, tongue depressors, and Batman plasters you ruined last time you had one of your boredom fits at the clinic."

"You shouldn't have kept me waiting."

"It was twenty-five minutes! I met a toddler just today with an ear infection who showed more patience than that."

"Yes, but I bet he wasn't a twenty-sixth as intelligent, nor half as attractive."

John pulled the exam room door open to guide Sherlock out, his palm finding rest at base of Sherlock's spine. "I'll give you the second one, but that was a pretty quick two-year-old."

"I doubt he was toilet-trained."

John laughed into his fist, falling into step with Sherlock as they left the treatment area and passed into the reception. "You're barely toilet-trained. No points for the consulting detective who only goes or showers if he hasn't got a pig corpse decomposing in the bath." John read as apathetic to the alarmed reactions on his remaining co-workers. Sherlock took pains to mask his pleasure.

"Any sacrifice in the name of science."

John hitched both shoulders, bending to sign off his shift at the front desk. "It's your world, Frankenstein."

Sherlock filled the vacancy on John's weaker side. "Good that you understand."

John shook his head, amused. "We're going to get you caught up on pop culture references one of these days if it kills me."

Sherlock turned up his nose at the thought, shut down the probabilities before they spun out. "Heaven forbid." It mattered not which scenario he meant.

He didn't have to give the receptionist a second glance tonight. One didn't have to be a genius to see that John was out of bounds anymore. From the high, nasal pitch of giggle only Sherlock could evoke to the look in his eyes, John might not have been sure of Sherlock's veracity but he was already Sherlock's entirely. If Sherlock played his cards with care, John would see that possession for the mutual affair it was.

John bid the receptionist an amiable good night which she returned in warmth if without expectation, something immanently critical in the version she tendered to Sherlock next. Message understood. There was a world of scorn to be had for mistreating John and a line was forming. How was anyone else to know Sherlock had plans to be the first one in it?

Moderately unsettled at the blatant, though undeclared, challenge, Sherlock tucked John into his orbit and led him out in the quiet night. Sherlock sought solace in the shuffle, and in John's glad willingness to march along to his stride. His doctor revelled in London's evening the way he'd thrived in war, the way Sherlock thrived at the heart of a riddle in progress. It was its own riddle how they'd got along without each other before.

"I don't get any more interesting than this, you know."

Sherlock caught hold of his wandering attention to drag it home. "I'm not sure I follow."

"Clothes on, clothes off, this is as spine-tingling as I get. After these, you've got me right down to the ground."

"I want you right down to the ground." He wanted John to the stratosphere, in any direction and every one.

John halted in the full flow of evening, expression placid save for the notable straining of the fascia temporalis, the musculus masseter at temple and mandible, respectively. "Yeah, but what happens after you get what you want? What happens to me?"

Sherlock's mouth pulled south. "You stay and we carry on better than we were before."

"That's frightfully optimistic of you."

"I have my sentimental moments. Don't get used to it."

"Wouldn't dream of it," John murmured under his breath, not a trace of laughter in it.

Sherlock looked toward him, uninterested in the weary jeering of the pedestrians directly at his back, to see that John hadn't moved yet. His expression was nigh on indecipherable which, for a man of Sherlock's abilities, was disconcerting. He found himself abruptly at a loss to deduce his friend's new mood. His slanted lips weren't telling and the lines near his eyes told lies.

John wanted something out of Sherlock which he didn't know how to give. This was the fear that kept his hands preoccupied with the replaceable and easily breakable because John was neither, easily. Words weren't sufficient to sow certainty when the subject was emotion, not for Sherlock. This was him standing on the mouth of an oubliette in wait of a fall. He didn't know where John was going to lead him anymore, but he knew he'd follow him anywhere.

My lodestar.

He'd Googled that.

"Let's not do the Greek, hmm?" John made to cough, wetting lips. He eyed the pedestrians, unconsciously vigilant. Open air made him cringe. "There's, there's this little Afghan place I know. It's small, family-owned and all, but you're not going to have a better meal this side of the Mediterranean, and...I think we should go. I think you'll like it."

"I like everything to do with you."

"Then, I guess it's a date."

"I think it might be." Sherlock shoulders cried for the tension of it.

"It's down this way," John said finally, nodding in the direction opposite the place they'd gone months back.

"Lay on," Sherlock assented. His tongue had gone dumb in his head, snuffing out the Socratic impulse to ask what this meant. John was givinghim something, entrusting him with his passions and Sherlock was at a loss for how to answer it properly.

"People expect me to hate Afghanistan, you know. They expect me to flinch when they mention it, like I could have a vendetta against a place that gave me the best years of my life." His tone mocked. "They expect me to hate it and I don't know how to say I miss it almost every day."

Sherlock took up his flank, spoiled for pride of place beside him. John was peeling back onion-thin layers of the skin he was so prized, and all in Sherlock's name. Sherlock compressed his lips flat to keep from letting slip again something John wasn't ready to believe of him. If he could have spoken to begin with, that is. Sherlock didn't know how to say any more and he didn't have the words for less. John was...unquantifiable.

Where the spoken word failed him, Sherlock decided, then and there, that something must be said for the sting of the needle—and, for a change, his old solution didn't come at all to mind.


Chapter title from Lord Byron's Stanzas to Augusta.