Chapter 7
John has turned and retreated back into the flat before he is fully aware that he has moved. His head crowded with thoughts he doesn't particularly know how to begin to address.
Sherlock is not here.
Mrs Hudson has not seen him.
John saw him. Talked to him. After a long day spent pouring over page after page of notes so imbibed with the spirit of him they seem to sing with his presence.
Perhaps John hasn't got the talent for consciousness he previously thought. Could he have fallen asleep? Dreamt? Dreamt of words?
No.
John whirls around, as if the doorway will hold the answers to the questions his mind refuses to stop asking. Sherlock had stood there. In that doorway. All coat and cheekbones and collar. A red scarf. John didn't know Sherlock owned a red scarf.
Why would he make up something like that?
John needs evidence. Evidence that Sherlock had stood there. What had he touched? John casts around wildly, before realising the answers won't be scrawled on the physical.
He closes his eyes. Sees Sherlock standing in the doorway. Moving into the room.
I'll stand.
Sherlock's voice. He didn't stand forever, perched himself instead on the sofa. The sofa. John's eyes are open again, roaming the cushions in the ridiculous hope of any tell-tale sign that the world's only consulting detective had sat upon it.
But that's hopeless. He tells himself. They would have undone any mark Sherlock had made on it later in the evening. When they had fallen there: an amorous heap of desperate touches. Sherlock's hands on him, his mouth, his tongue. What had he touched? He had touched John.
John heaves in a breath and lets it out slowly.
But this wasn't the only place they had laid.
He turns suddenly and rushes upstairs: feet on the floorboards.
He comes up short in the doorway to the bedroom. His shoulders falling as he surveys the mess: bed unmade, the duvet and pillows in such disarray it's impossible to tell how many figures had slept there. John remembers doing the damage himself: Covers. Floor.
He stares for a moment.
Searching his mind.
Before another thought. This time of Sherlock's foot, reaching out from his perch on the sofa, tapping at a broken shard of plate glinting in the bright dark of the London night.
Stop talking about the crockery.
The plates.
Did he break them?
If he'd been asleep he could never heard the noise in the hallway downstairs. Could never have stood from his chair and collected the plates from their positions beneath the coffee table. Could never have dropped them dramatically on the appearance of a man who may never really have been standing there.
But this time the evidence seems so damning that he doesn't race to confirm it. John could not have failed to notice the scattered pieces of broken china across the carpet of the sitting room when he stood there previously.
He isn't wearing any shoes.
It's a slow trudge that takes him back down the stairs, to the sitting room: to the books and papers and notes, to Mrs Hudson's nice wood floor and to memories and to death and to rage and to secrets and agreements and experience and things unspoken and broken promises and no broken plates.
Misdirection John… Seeing what your mind wants you to see.
He has to lower himself onto the edge of the sofa before his knees give out beneath him.
That was what he had wanted to see. He had even asked for it once. Right out loud. Standing beside a gravestone.
Of course he could summon those words. Spoken in a voice he's heard in a dream he won't admit to having.
He's a writer.
Sentiment.
It was all a dream.
This place, these memories. Had won.
His imagination really was insane.
Where the hell do we go from here?