Chapter 6
John awakes to the dishwater sunshine of a north London morning falling across his pillow.
He stirs slowly, allowing the conscious reality of that light to sink in. He hadn't drawn the curtains last night. He had been distracted.
It feels late.
Really, if he thinks about it, he has no idea what time they finally made it up to this room. Rousing themselves from the sofa in a jumble of limbs and attempting the long stumble upstairs; full of words and kisses and yawns.
They'd been talking for hours. God knows how many.
He lies still for a moment, listening to the noises of Baker Street below him: the traffic washing by, footsteps, the floating sound of voices stirring up from the café below. He smiles. The world is still going on untouched outside. People are still laughing and drinking and talking and working. Despite the fact that Sherlock fell, and that he returned.
He returned.
It strikes John then that he should probably have had some kind of powerful epiphany as he pulled himself from unconsciousness those few minutes before. Perhaps he should have been painfully unaware, ready to face another faceless day without Sherlock in it. Until realisation dawned and he remembered: remembered the figure in the doorway, John's own name spoken in the voice of a memory, the shouts and the accusations. The smiles and the touches and the words. So many words. More than John feels he's said in a lifetime.
Tea, John thinks. As he does most mornings. Those without Sherlock in them. Those with.
Tea will rouse him.
He shutters his eyes open slowly, focusing properly on a morning filled with sunlight not much brighter than the artificial glow of the night before. He is not surprised to find the bed beside him empty; he was more surprised that Sherlock had agreed to come to bed at all. Perhaps Sherlock had grown accustomed to sleep while he had been away, John thinks, before stopping himself. Away. Now even he was doing it: Perhaps Sherlock had grown accustomed to sleep while he had been dead.
Somehow the logistics of that sentence seem a little confused.
Covers. Floor. John pulls himself from the warmth of the sheets, finding a discarded pair of pyjama trousers and a t-shirt on the back of the chair beside the bed. He pulls them on as he wanders from the room. His bare feet descending the stairs.
He remembers shuffling up them, some indeterminable time before. Sherlock's voice:
"You do realise that my bedroom is infinitely closer John?" His tone is low, but obvious. Always obvious.
"You mean the downstairs bedroom."
"Is it not mine any longer?"
"You were dead." John states bluntly. The staircase is short; they've reached the top already, stepping shoulder to shoulder across the threshold of his room.
"I remember."
"Technically you were no longer using it…"
"Not technically or physically." Sherlock corrects as he shuffles himself under John's duvet, lying on his back and reaching for John as he slides in beside him.
"Right." John settles in close.
"So?" Sherlock asks, his warm living weight pressed all along John's side. They're both looking upward, studying the grey distance of John's ceiling.
"So?"
"Is there a point to this John?"
"Mrs Hudson." John starts, ineloquently "Her sister. She moved house. Out to the country."
"Oh," Sherlock has drawn the conclusions before John has even finished the prologue.
"Lots of bedrooms." John continues,
"She needed a bed." Sherlock offers.
"Yes."
"She asked Mrs Hudson if she could spare one." Sherlock is telling the story now.
"Yes, "
"Which she obviously could."
"Well, yes."
"Naturally she said she'd ask you, and when she did..."
"I said fine."
"It's just a bed."
"Exactly."
"That's when you started going through my papers."
"Yes," John pauses, wondering if there will ever be a time when he isn't surprised by the weight of the things Sherlock knows "How did you…?"
"You never used to go in there," Sherlock says slowly, speaking quietly upward at the ceiling in the darkness "Not at first. After you'd moved back. The curtains were never drawn nor the light ever on, not any time of the day or night. Oh at some point you must have been in there: to move the chair, it's not been in its place in the sitting room for some time, it's obvious by the way you move around the room, you're used to its absence. But then you closed the door. You worked. Not quite to the same desperate level you did when you were in Islington, but still long hours. Until something made you go back in there. Obvious. Removal men. Either they were moving something in or they were moving something out. They opened the door and you found my papers. You've barely left the flat a day since."
"Amazing." John wonders aloud,
"Just observation." Sherlock counters.
"And just how long did you spend outside watching whether or not I switched on a light?" John's tone is teasing.
Sherlock lets out a small huff of annoyance beside him, and John feels himself smirking.
But the smile doesn't take long to fade.
"You were so close Sherlock."
"Yes."
"You didn't think to just knock on the door?"
"Often."
"You were there. You saw the removal men."
"Yes."
"We had a right job trying to get that thing down the stairs."
"I saw,"
"Didn't help?"
"Naturally I couldn't."
"Did about as much as you would if you were alive."
"If you want to put it like that."
"That's cheating."
"What is?"
"You saw us move the bed – you didn't deduce it."
"It's not cheating, it's observation".
"Wait…"
"Yes?"
"That was…" John starts.
"Yes."
"That was the day I was wearing that awful jumper."
"It was a spectacularly awful jumper John"
"Mrs Hudson made it for me. I had to keep reassuring her I liked it."
"Which you didn't."
"Of course I didn't."
"She liked to see you wear it." Sherlock says.
"She liked to see me look ridiculous in it."
"I liked to see you wear it."
There's a pause. John tilts his face to look over at him, studies his dark profile against the murk of the room.
"You were there that day." John wonders aloud "You saw us."
"Yes," Sherlock's voice is little more than a purr.
"We didn't see you." John pauses, thinking, studying. "How long have you been just on the edge of things?"
"All my life." Sherlock answers matter-of-factly.
Silence.
For the first time that night John is lost for words.
Sherlock breaks the quiet, pulling his arm from between them to slip it around John, pulling him close.
"I forgive you." Sherlock says,
"You do?"
"Yes,"
"For what?" John has to ask.
"For giving away my bed."
"Yes well,"
"Though one disadvantage is that I'm no longer sure whether we can refer to it as a bedroom, whether mine, downstairs or otherwise."
"I suppose not." John finds himself smiling again at his turn of phrase, before a thought strikes him. "Hang on a minute; shouldn't I be the one forgiving you?"
"For what?" Sherlock repeats John's question, all innocence.
"For dying?!" Though the subject matter hasn't changed, their conversation has lost its weight.
"Oh that."
"Yes that."
"Well do you?" Sherlock asks
"What?"
"Forgive me?"
"I guess so."
Sherlock sighs, warm and weighty, "Good."
John comes back to himself in the kitchen. Two mugs for tea on the countertop.
This time he goes ahead and pours water over both teabags.
A smile on his face.
The mugs are heavy in his hands as he carries them through into the sitting room. Through to the books and the papers and the notes of the sitting room. The chaos and the mess.
He's disappointed to find Sherlock absent from within it. He'd expected to find him pouring over John's laptop, or dramatically stretched out on the sofa. Already bored.
Come to think of it, it is a little strange that he's not heard anything from him up to now. No elaborate morning wakeup call in the form of breaking glass in the kitchen or a request for tea when the kettle was switched on. Or even his coat and strange scarf across the sofa where John can remember him leaving them last night.
Which explains it. He must be out. A dead man walking.
Of course Sherlock doesn't understand the importance of the morning after. The morning after the resurrection. The reassurances and words the touches: the confirmation that Sherlock is in fact no longer past tense, but present. That it wasn't all some strange stirring of John's insane imagination. It wasn't.
Was it?
John casts around the room. Looking much as it did the day before. Where are Sherlock's things? He had arrived last night seemingly with just the clothes on his back. No bag. No evidence to say he was moving back in. Perhaps he has gone to fetch them.
He didn't leave a note.
This is my note.
Why would he leave a note? He never had done before.
His phone.
Finding he is still holding the mugs John sets them down amid the papers on the table, leaving his hands free to automatically pat at the non-existent pockets on his hastily constructed outfit. He realises the futility quickly, leaning to sift through the papers instead. He finds it beneath a stack of memories.
No new messages.
The blank home screen stares back at him mutely and John realises how long it's been seen he's seen Sherlock's name there. Since it was commonplace to do so. Text after text: explaining a case, informing him they were out of milk, asking John to follow him.
Did he really think it would be that easy?
His insane flatmate comes back from the dead. Appears on the doorstep and lets himself casually back into the flat and back into John's life. They talk. They talk for hours. They dissect and disassemble and explain and articulate and confuse and connect. They kiss. They touch. They moan.
He leaves.
Did all that really happen?
Perhaps.
Perhaps it was a dream.
Perhaps he fell asleep. Working so hard. All these papers: The memories. The words and the dissections and the explanations and the connections. Text careful, structured; lines following ordered steps of logic, before wild ideas, scribbled haphazardly in margins and pushed up against other text. Perhaps he fell asleep and dreamt of that voice. Saying his name.
But they had spoken. All those words. That voice saying more than just John's name, saying all the things they never had.
Would Sherlock have really said those things to him?
Would he ever…? Could he ever…?
John's stomach begins to roll.
Of course it happened. He couldn't make up words like that. Back and forth; explaining and accusing and shouting for God's sake.
But there was no one else here to hear that.
No one but a dead man.
Mrs Hudson was with her sister. Thought it best to let me shout at you with as few people as possible around to hear? John had said that. Or had he? Had he just dreamt it?
He had imagined it before. Had told Sherlock that.
Is it going like you'd imagined?
But.
He couldn't have. Could he?
He could never have imagined it all. He could never have begun to. Begun to hope…
A noise downstairs.
Key in the lock, front door swinging open. Feet on the hallway floor.
This time John doesn't pause, mug in hand. Doesn't glance around at the room, aware of the state of it. This time he's on his feet and racing to the doorway. Panic rushing him. The stirrings of his insane imagination.
Sherlock.
His name is unspoken on John's lips as he dashes across the landing and onto the staircase. Looking down.
Mrs Hudson.
She'd been with her sister for a few days.
She's leaving her bags and heading straight upstairs to tell him she's back.
The noise he makes on the stairs makes her look up, surprise on her face fading into that sing song smile.
"It's only me," She says, brightly.
John can only gape back at her in surprise.
She smiles in response, seemingly unaware of the fact that he is staring at her as if she were the last person in the world he expected to see standing in the hallway of her own house.
"How are you?" She asks with that motherly concern she does so well.
"Erm," John starts, blinking "F-fine"
"I know. It's a shock," She declares.
An expectant pause.
Something like relief trickles back into John's limbs. He can think of only one shock - she's going to tell him it hasn't all been some kind of bizarre tea-fuelled dream.
"Erm," John repeats, eloquent as always "What is?"
"That I'm back!" Mrs Hudson states, that bright melodic voice. "Back already, I know! So soon!" She's looking away from him to fuss with her bags, "It seems I just can't keep away from the place. Baker Street! Who would have thought? What was it Sherlock said? 'England would fall'!"
John's head swims with the mention of his name.
"You…?" He starts a question he's not sure he can ask.
"Yes?" Mrs Hudson looks up at him again, arms full of bags now.
"You haven't…"
"What dear?"
"…seen…?"
Her face is a picture of confusion. Innocence. Not the face of a lady who's seen life after death.
John gives up: "Nevermind."
He sighs. What should he think now?
"Oh." Her smile hasn't faded, even in the glow of her confusion. "Well, if you need anything…"
"Yes," John, lost in thought again, looks back at her "Yes, thank you Mrs Hudson."
"No problem dear, I'm sorry if I woke you." She's referring to his pyjamas; John has the strength of mind to look down bashfully at himself.
"Oh, that, no…" John starts,
"Well, if you're sure." She's letting herself into her flat. "You just go back and make yourself some tea now, wake yourself up, you look still lost in a dream"