It's early enough that there's almost no traffic, the first wave of commuters only just beginning to trickle in; the sun is a promise, not yet a certainty. Lestrade waves to the constable on the beat, passes the grate rolling up at Speedy's, comes up the stairs two at a time, trying to blend speed with stealth. The door of 221B stands open; light spills out of the downstairs bedroom.
Sherlock appears briefly. "In here," he says, returning to the bedroom before the words finish coming out.
He is fully dressed, wide awake, and agitated. It's hard to say what John is, because he seems to be a tight lump in the centre of the bed, wrapped in the crocheted throw from the sitting room and an extra duvet, holding his knees and ducking his head in an ineffective attempt to make himself invisible and invulnerable.
"He won't talk, he doesn't move. Is this some kind of army thing to protect yourself from artillery?"
Lestrade peels the blankets back from the silent man's head. John doesn't react, unless to shrink deeper into himself. "It's Greg, John. Can you uncurl a bit?" He puts his arm across John's shoulders; rock-hard with tension, unmoving.
"Foxes are supposed to roll them into water but I don't think—"
"Sherlock, your filters are completely off," Lestrade says tiredly. "For God's sake, shut up. I think he's in shock."
"Hence the blankets," Sherlock points out. "I made him tea but he'd have to uncurl, as you put it. Can he hear us?"
"Probably, I don't know. Can you hear us, John?" John gives no sign that he has heard.
Greg sighs deeply, makes himself as comfortable as he can next to John and puts both arms around his shoulders, trying to offer enough compression to be felt through John's own attempts to squeeze into the smallest possible space. Sherlock looks at them with less insight than he usually displays for spattered shoes, and cautiously follows Greg's example, leaning into his friend's side. "Is this supposed to help?"
"Maybe. It seemed to, while you were gone."
"Was he like this?"
"No. He just cried." They hold their friend. Greg can feel John breathing, a tiny irregular motion. "What happened, do you know?"
"No. He came in from work at the usual time yesterday, said he wasn't interested in eating, and went to bed. I thought it was rather early for him, but… then this morning I saw his light was on, still on, and he was like this."
Lestrade wonders about keeping confidence, decides it hadn't been in confidence—more like casual conversation. "Did he say anything to you about…sleeping badly? PTSD?"
At least Sherlock seemed to recognise the acronym. "He's been rather tightly wound ever since I returned. I've encountered him wandering around the flat in the middle of the night more than once."
"I talked with him Monday and he said something about stress, is all."
"Mmm," says Sherlock. "Well. Then, Tuesday night."
"What happened Tuesday night?"
"I got back from Inverness. That thing with Dimmock's robbery, that turned out to involve stolen bicycles and smuggled cocaine."
"It's always cocaine with you, you have a gift…what happened Tuesday night? I know John was wondering where you were on Monday."
Silence.
"You must have called him eventually."
Silence.
"Oh, for Christ's sake, Sherlock, really?"
"I didn't know my phone was off, I'm not used to having one anymore, at least not one anyone will use to call me unless we're about to go in somewhere and then John sent Mycroft's people after me so he knew I was all right and I was going home that night so I didn't—"
"You were annoyed he'd called Mycroft, and you knew you were in deep shit, and you knew you deserved to be, so instead of calling John and telling him you were a thoughtless git who didn't deserve to have friends, you thought you could sneak home and avoid the consequences, correct?"
"Substantially, yes." There was more silence. "Lestrade?"
"Words are failing me." Lestrade sighs at last. "Monday night, you're in a hotel room, you plug your phone in, you don't check for messages?"
"I wasn't in a hotel, I spent the night reading the police blotter for the past three months. I've been working alone. I know. The word 'thoughtless' has been overused."
"This is how you've been working then, all that time you were away?"
"Some of it. Hours and hours trying to see patterns. Day or night doesn't matter in a big-enough city."
"I suppose that's some excuse. But not nearly enough of one."
"I didn't have a charger."
"They're mostly standardised now."
"And I didn't know it had run out."
"So Tuesday night was loud and bitter?"
"Mostly just bitter. He left early on Wednesday; we usually have breakfast together."
Greg has been around times when John and Sherlock had been fighting: usually after the acute phase, when Greg gathered there was shouting and slamming of doors; usually in the 'still sullen and cross' phases, when unkind remarks were made with a veneer of impersonality. One of the most persuasive arguments against 221B being a love nest was the absence of anything like afterglow from makeup sex. They just stopped sniping at one another. At least, that was how it had been. It was a long time ago, now.
Greg tries running his thumb along John's spine, hard enough to feel it bump over knotted muscles. "You've been back what, two weeks?"
"Tomorrow it will be, yes."
"Has he… Have you—how long have you both been pretending everything is normal?"
"There hasn't been normal since I came home," Sherlock says. "The reporters only left Sunday."
"That's outside. What's it been like inside, here, between the two of you?"
Sherlock looks at him as though one of them is an intelligent nonhuman, perhaps a talking cow.
Lestrade considers what he knows of both his friends. On his own, even in deep grief, John had been amazingly sane and relatively open. But that was when he was a separated part talking to a good friend; not trying to talk within, part to another part, of a weird but functional system (at least at one time) with whatever Sherlock is to him: a phoenix or a meteor; or bread, salt, and oxygen.
He's fairly sure that John Watson is something in the second category to Sherlock Holmes. Neither of them had died before the other came into his life, though in Sherlock's case it had been near indeed…possibly John's as well, given the number of veterans who survived the war but could not survive after it.
And in their recent separation, Lestrade would never have gambled much that the old Sherlock could survive fourteen months without his brother and his support system (the whole of Greater London, really), let alone done useful work. But he had done so. A crash course in living with someone like John—faith, hope, endless charity, prudence (of which Sherlock had always had a potentially terminal deficit), strength, whatever the others were-seemed likely to have been what improved the odds.
No question, then, that Sherlock knows he needs John, or that John is unaware he needs Sherlock.
Considerable doubt that either would have been quick to say the other needed him, though. Actually, Greg thinks, he could very nearly hear John and Sherlock proclaiming the other one's complete autonomy, and then Sherlock would say anyone who cared about him really was at a disadvantage.
It is not _entirely_ outside the realm of possibility that they would have discussed, oh, things: death and loss and longing and the cost of carrying on; time and change and not living through them together. Gratitude and guilt and anger and resentment and fear of more loss.
Discussion is not outside of the realm of possibility, but not, it seems, anywhere near the realm of things that have actually taken place.
"Before you bollixed it up, did you make any effort to talk about what it was like—for either of you—while you were dead?"
"You're both always on me to give people 'space,'" Sherlock points out, flashing back as they do to a state of 'always' two years previous.
"True. Two weeks is long enough. Probably less than a week, if you're living with someone. If you rise from the dead again you might keep that in mind."
"You're angry, too." Lestrade isn't sure if this is a clever deduction, because Sherlock is no good at the subtleties of live humans, or a really stupid one, since-
"Of course I'm angry, and I've had some idea you might be alive for months. I bet your brother's even angry, and he was in it up to his eyeballs. We're not all angry at you, though; just angry, generally. Mostly not at you. But then, the rest of us weren't made to see you jump."
He lets Sherlock sift through this for bit. It seems as though the tight ball between them might be relaxing a little, breathing with them.
"Molly's not angry, though she says angry things," Sherlock suggests.
"No, she's so glad to get out of Wellington and back to London she wouldn't be. Not even at you."
"I didn't tell her to self-exile to New Zealand. It's done terrible things to her accent, even in such a short time."
"Did it feel like a short time to you?" The gaunt, exhausted face Sherlock wears when he's not fully engaged is answer enough. "That might be a place to start. Because you have to start. If you haven't talked about both your sides of living through this—"
"We haven't had an opportunity."
"You haven't made one. My guess is that neither of you want to deal with the feelings. It will break the two of you if you don't."
Sherlock picks at a splice in the crochet.
Lestrade sighs. "On the blog: 'changed not ended.' That was you?"
"Yes," Sherlock says. "I wondered whether anyone had seen that. It wasn't a good idea, but I wasn't in very good shape then."
"I figured it out eventually, around the time Mycroft explained what you had done, and around the time I looked hard at your suicide note, which ranks very high on a list of shittiest things I have ever heard of anyone doing in any circumstances by the way, even if I know why you had to—"
"Another county heard from, yes. Yes, Lestrade, I know it was, and I've spent parts of the past 14 months trying to see if there might have been another way, and I still haven't found one, and regretting the pain is true but so far as I can see useless. But I'm regretting it anyway, in case it isn't."
Lestrade can see Sherlock's eyes on the back of John's head, and he doesn't look superior or even weary, just unhappy. Lestrade doesn't think Sherlock talking about his regret is useless, maybe not even useless to Sherlock; definitely important to John, if John will hear it.
"I think it's important," Lestrade tells him. "Even if for you regret is like, I don't know, the sawdust left over after you make something. Hearing about it keeps people from just feeling like lumber.
"Anyway, 'changed not ended'; I still think it's true, but I don't know that either of you are working with the 'changed' part. If you want to go on being friends—whatever the hell that means to you, it's seemed both good and important from my side—you need to stop and discuss it. Honour it, if you can hear that. You can't just move the chairs in the sitting room back to the old sides of the fire and say everything is fine, all water under the bridge." Greg wonders if it would make any sense to tell them they can't step onto the same carpet twice.
"It really has been busy. And John likes talking about feelings I should have, but he likes talking about his own as little as I do."
"It isn't a choice. You'll drive one another away. And this," Lestrade points at John's back.
Sherlock sighed. "John said he was angry because I made him believe I had died, but that he was more glad to have me home. Is this 'more glad'?"
"This is 'wanting to scream', or 'overwhelmed', or 'paying dues for acting sane for the past fourteen months'. Or, most likely, 'my flatmate says everything is fine and it isn't so I'll be the identified patient and act out.' "
"Does it matter at all," Sherlock asks, in a voice so deadly level Lestrade has to stare, "that I was trying to save lives? His? Yours? The one he left me too outraged to be civil, when I made believe I was being uncaring about her?"
"Yes," Lestrade says. He tries to put all he has into his words. He tries to will the words into Sherlock's brain."Yes, it matters. It's making it worse. No, not that you shouldn't have done it, Sherlock, no; I'm glad to be alive, and I am glad John and Mrs. Hudson are as well, and I am glad about the thirty-five children in California. But can you understand that we might feel—" he looks for a word—" _uncomfortable_ about it? Even if we agree with you that it made the most sense?"
"Mycroft said you and John seemed to think it was all right as long as you thought about the other two."
"Right," Lestrade says, seeing an opening. "So you understand it was….awkward, if either of us thought you were putting yourself on the line for one of us? Unbearable, more like?"
"I understand that you thought it was, but not why."
Lestrade manages not to swear. "Guilt?"
"Don't be silly. It was my life and my choice." Sherlock watches Lestrade try to maintain calm. "I'm sorry, Lestrade, I don't see what's not good about that."
"I don't care if it's good or not, but just be aware it's not how most of us operate. Gratitude and guilt and resentment all hang really tightly together."
There was a short silence.
"I'll never understand this." And there he was again, the terribly confused boy Lestrade had first met, at least in between intervals of Ranting Abusive Coked-Up Arrogant Brilliant…terribly confused boy.
Lestrade had never yielded to the impulse then (he would have expected biting) but now he can reach over and put a hand on Sherlock's shoulder and only receive a look.
"What?" Sherlock asks, not even very sharply.
"Just—I'm sorry it's hard. Being angry at you is a lot easier than feeling guilty, or even feeling grateful. You don't have to understand that, really, just accept it as information received. Add it in when you're trying to decide whether you want to determine speed, or position."
Sherlock snorts softly, acknowledging the metaphor. And he hasn't thrown off the hand, so Lestrade ventures a squeeze before he finds the place before the digression.
"So—you said Molly had gained an accent in a short time, and I asked if it seemed like a short time to you."
Sherlock takes his time to answer. Perhaps he's realised they aren't just making conversation.
"No," he says at last. "It felt like it did at school, but I didn't know— I couldn't be sure— that the term ever would end. It started to feel like I had been gone for most of my life. Until the time before seemed like something I had read once long ago. I started to dream in Russian about two months in; that was bad. I dreamt of you and John and Mrs. Hudson drinking tea in glasses with jam and pryaniki. I was speaking English but none of you would talk to me. You kept doing that in my dreams, talking in Russian and ignoring me. And that was on the nights I could sleep."
"Were you working alone the whole time?"
Sherlock thinks about it. "Both yes and no. Do you want any tea?"
"If you're making it."
Sherlock uncoils and stalks out toward the kitchen. Greg takes the opportunity to uncover the back of John's head and smooth his hair.
"Come on now, John, it's all right. Do you need me to keep him away for a bit?" There's a faint noise he thinks is probably a negative. "Do you need me to leave?" A slightly stronger no. Greg decides not to push his luck and sighs again, provoking, as he had hoped, an echo. John breathes a little more deeply. "That's better. You could breathe some more, you know, your back's going to feel like hell when you do relax."
"No," John says distinctly, and his shoulders shake as he does breathe.
"Better to let it out? Okay, not, then." John rocks a little. Greg watches him. "Does that actually help?"
Sherlock returns, dangerously carrying three mugs too full of hot tea. Lestrade mouths at him to be quiet as he puts two of the mugs on the bedside table by Lestrade.
It does help, yes, Sherlock mouths back. He settles onto the bed again, one leg lightly in contact with John as he leans back against the headboard to drink his tea.
Lestrade looks at him enviously, takes an arm from around John's shoulders and picks up one of the mugs on the table. "All right, John, two hot drinks here; no sudden violent motions, right?"
"He's not mentally impaired, you know," Sherlock says. "There's tea for you as well, John. If I were as heartless as Lestrade believes I am I would have microwaved the previous cup I brought you, but it's a fresh one."
"Fuck OFF," John says distinctly. Sherlock looks delighted. Lestrade wonders, for the first time in Sherlock's new life (five hundredth some-odd in total) if Sherlock is aware how much people let him get past them because he's so pretty. Almost certainly yes.
John offers no further signs of communication, not even when Sherlock mentions that Lestrade is now drinking John's cup of tea; but the tight feeling of emergency and fear loosens in the room. It's calmer: two men on a bed drinking tea, flanking a third in a slowly relaxing foetal position. Not unpleasant.