A little ficlet, courtesy of Social Distancing Creativity Time.
Sherlock's hip digs through the thin foam slab to the spring below. He grunts and rolls onto his back, feeling blood seep back into pinched flesh. His discomfort isn't caused only by the bristly blanket or his preference for side sleeping. It's not even about the reality that he had blown a man's brains out a few hours earlier. Almost as soon as that was done, he'd known how readily he could live with it.
What persists in wriggling around under his skin like Vaseline maggots is a single sentence spoken by Charles Augustus Magnussen. No, not the words themselves. Of course he cares about John Watson. John is his oldest and, in some ways, only friend. Why shouldn't that be his obvious pressure point?
It was the way he said it. Look how you care about John Watson. Laced through the usual unctuous, oleaginous tone was an insinuation. Of what, he's maddeningly in the dark, but he doesn't like it one bit. Coming off that tongue, there was something much too... intimate about it.
Why does he care anyway? All of this is that repulsive reptile's fault. Well, at least he won't be destroying any more lives. Sherlock curls up on his side, finds a spring-free cranny for his hip, doubles up the pillow under his head and thinks about how soon he's going to be high as a satellite.
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Funny how much more pleasant he'd imagined being high as a satellite would be. Instead, he feels keyed up and vivid recollections won't stop bobbing to the surface of his mind. Like that oddly cold look Mary gave him right before he boarded the jet. His left knee jiggles uncontrollably. That was a fine way to treat him, considering he forgave her for shooting him and killed a man to protect her secrets. He dwells on his aggrievement as the the jet taxis down the runway and takes off, bearing him away to his fate in Eastern Europe. Maybe his well-deserved fate.
No, goddammit! What he did benefitted everyone; every single person Magnussen victimized and everyone those people's lives touched. The very woman who had sentenced him to this exile lost her husband to the monster. And John! John could have at least provided a token defense. Look how you care about John Watson. He shakes his head and squeezes his eyes shut, pressing a hand down on his knee as if quieting his body will quiet his mind by extension.
It's no good to linger over thoughts of friends he's never going to see again. He knows this, and yet the face that sweeps away John's, taking that creeping insinuation with it, is Mary's. Such a curiously unreadable expression. If she knows his decision wasn't made entirely for her benefit (as she likely does), he doesn't consider her the type to resent it. Yet there she is in his mind's eye, stonily looking back at him from beyond her husband's shoulder as they share a goodbye hug and he feels-
Sherlock's eyes pop open. "Shite," he says.
The MI5 functionary sitting in the aisle across from him turns her head, which in no way discourages a second "Shite". The twinge in his chest has just reminded him of what happened the last time he got between Mary Watson and her husband.
And then his phone rings. It's his brother.