Chapter Six

"Sherlock"

Where the bloody hell am I? What is that dreadful noise?! Sherlock had no idea what was going on, but whoever was making that wretched noise was going to find themselves realigning their various broken body parts after he got through with them...

"SHUT UP!" Sherlock sat up violently, trapped in the confines of a blanket he had no recollection of wrapping himself up in. He promptly found himself on his arse caught between the couch and the coffee table. His mind a mess of incoherent thoughts, his eyes sore from weeping, Sherlock was at a complete loss for what was going on or why his mobile was screaming at him. And indeed it was his mobile, vibrating and screeching loud enough to wake the dead, or atleast one very tired detective. Slamming his hand down on it, he resisted the urge to toss it across the room and slid it open instead. Silencing the wretched noise, he caught himself staring at an open text message.

Mycroft will be here soon. -JW

How did John know that? And of course John wouldn't wake him before he left, annoyingly considerate was that man. Sherlock deleted the draft and dropped his phone back down next to the very cold tea service. Nevermind Sherlock wanted to talk to him. Or even just be in the same room as him, maybe awake this time and not crying like an infant. It took less than a second, but Sherlock realised that the only way for John to know that Mycroft was coming was if he had already been there, seen the unexplainable, and then left. I'll just have to pretend that I don't know he was here and hope he does the same...

Banging his head briefly on the coffee table, Sherlock stood up, not caring that the blanket fell to the not so clean floor. Stepping out of the mess, he dragged his feet on the way down the hall to the bathroom. How did John leave without me knowing? Was I really that badly off? I must have been, to start bawling like that. Oh bloody hell, I spent the entire morning crying on John Watson. He'll never let me live that down...or he wouldn't if he were coming back. Is he coming back? Snap out of it, Mycroft's coming back...

Sherlock threw open the door to the bathroom, threw the water on full blast in the shower, jumped in, and only remembered to take off his night clothes when he noticed his robe clogging the drain. Throwing the wet clothing to the floor, Sherlock rested his hands on the shower wall and just let the water rinse away any remaining angst from his emotional storm destroyed morning.

Sherlock didn't know how long he stood there in the shower, but it was long enough for the water to run cold and his equilibrium to return. Grabbing each errant thought and stray emotion, he studied it, put it in its proper place, or tossed it away to be forgotten. When he got to the explosion that had happened in John's arms, he knew he didn't know how to handle what had happened that morning at all. The entire incident had just gutted him. Sherlock pondered the implications as he stepped out of the shower and sporadically dried himself off. Having no experience whatsoever with handling crying people (in a nice way, not the trick you into revealing your nefarious plan to fake your husband's death way), he didn't even know where to start when he was the one crying!

Trying to figure out someone else's emotions was hard enough, and he rarely spared an effort unless it was someone he cared about. He recognized the irony; he didn't care about people unless it was people he cared about, and even then he denied caring at all if called out on it. John and Molly were the exceptions. John was so deeply buried into the depths of his being that Sherlock knew he couldn't focus if his doctor was unhappy. Molly had surprised Sherlock to his core. She had so blithely tossed out that she didn't count, it had shocked him. How could she believe that? She was smart, kind, and she never shied away from helping him. Sure he didn't deny using her attraction to him to get what he wanted sometimes. He was cold-hearted enough to realise that she wanted him, but he couldn't be what she needed. So he kept being himself, cold and distant but never straying towards cruel. The one time he had overstepped, Sherlock had about smacked himself. The look on her face and the defeated sound to her voice as she called him on it had finally caught his attention, and his regret. The apology he had given her was honest, and as heartfelt as he was capable of being. Sherlock still felt the sting when thinking back to that moment, and he had tried to tell Molly how much she mattered to him the night before he Fell. She had done the miraculous, pulling together the pieces of his plan that had allowed him to walk away from his confrontation with Moriarty. Without Molly, it's entirely possible that he wouldn't have made it, and that John, Lestrade and Mrs Hudson would be dead. So Molly mattered, she mattered very much. He just needed some way to tell her that.

His future relationship with John may be fraught yet with the unknown, but Sherlock had an idea of how to thank the very important Miss Hooper. But first to deal with Mycroft and his impatience.