# # # - In The Back, In The Closets Of My Mind
When I see John again, he does not know me.
Carting groceries in his grasp, he paces the length of the sidewalk and turns a corner, out of sight. I am across the street from him, down a ways, perched at a bus stop in clothing not my own. He would not recognize my build, my height. He would not, because I am stooped low, faking a limp, with aging makeup on my face.
No, he does not know me. He wouldn't even if I spoke to him, looked him in the eye. I'm wearing brown colored contacts. No, he would not know me at all. I am still in hiding. I am still hunting. I am no one to him, and rightly so. Being invisible will protect him. Being invisible is all I have right now.
I don't even have my Guilty Pleasures. I have been too busy to sit down and craft one. The last one I partook in was over a year ago. There has been so much to do. So much. And this is my first time in a long time being out and about in London in the daylight. The first time in a long time I have had to fully disguise myself, not merely in clothing and voice, but all over. It's itchy. It's tiring.
It's beyond upsetting.
Because I could hike all the way up to where John is, pretend to bump into him, and perhaps swipe something he bought to use as an excuse to follow him home and 'return' it to him ("Oh, now, m'lad, you seemed to 'ave dropped this when we bruised by one 'nother. 'Ere, 'ere, lad, take it; wouldn't wan' to be without beans, now, would ya?").
It would be so easy. I could do it just to see his face up close again, just to hear his voice again, just to catch a whiff of his familiar, homey scent again. Even with my new phone, I still know his number. I could even send him an anonymous text, just to give him a scrap of hope.
But I can't do it. I can't put him through any unnecessary pain it might cause if I sent him a text, or if I accidentally gave myself away, even while in character, under the guise of an elderly man in a plum trench coat.
Sighing to myself, I wobble on and go about collecting the last of my data. It's all I need before I set a trap to capture Colonel Sebastian Moran, the last of the fiends I have had to track down. The killer meant, in fact, for John's head. The most important of the entire web.
And without the spider – for a while I have thought he faked his death, like I had, but no, Moriarty is truly dead; it would take my brother to cover it up cleanly enough if he were still alive in secret, but my brother wouldn't do such a thing, so Moriarty must, then, truly be gone – the web is disintegrating, going wild without the control and repair the spider brought. His men are turning on each other, and it has only aided me thus far, and I am praying it will aid me further to catch Moran.
#
Cornered. No, no, this won't do. No. Need an out, need an out…
My eyes search wildly. I am in my Mind Palace for a moment. The streets of London. The roads, the alleys, the most likely places the police will be, the nooks and crannies where cabbies wait and people are in larger crowds.
I need to disappear.
I slip out from my place behind a dumpster and wind around bins. He hasn't seen me yet; good, good. Need a decoy. Need an out.
I follow the preferred route I have established in my head and come out of an alleyway into a crowd waiting for a bus. I slip through them, unnoticed, and Moran has lost me. I shrink my size and flip up my collar.
I'm gone. I hear him pace angrily away, cursing viciously under his breath.
Too close. Far too close. I need a plan, something more stable. A decoy, a decoy, to lure him out to where I want him, instead of him catching me by surprise.
Oh, but he's seen me now. He knows I'm alive. Shit, shit. He could go after John. Use John as bait. Kill John. There are no others to alert, not anymore, but Moran still has his guns. He still is the best sniper Moriarty had. He can and will find a way to kill John, because I lived, and then kill me.
No. That won't happen. I just need –
Ah.
I'll go to him. To John. He can help me. More importantly, I can keep him near, keep him safe. I must go to him now, before Moran gets to him. Oh, this is not as planned, not at all, but it will have to do. It is the only way.
The only way.
#
I don't make a fuss of it. No tricks. I wind my way through back alleys to Baker Street and knock on the door. Mrs. Hudson answers and starts to tremble and cry. She ushers me in. She holds me tightly at the bottom of the stairwell, doesn't move from the entranceway. She blubbers a few things, the expected: "Oh, Sherlock! You tricky man, you're alive! How? Why?" and so on.
I shush her and ask her, gently, if John is in. I know he is. I know she gave him some slack with the rent because this is his only home, and while it's difficult to afford by himself, he has a stable job at Bart's, now, full-time, and can pay for most of it, but for the bit he can't manage, she lends him without expecting it to be paid back, because she doesn't want to force him out, and he doesn't want to leave. I can read it all by the wear of the rest of the flat, in the state it's in, unrepaired in at least two years or more.
"Yes, he's in. And oh, I can't begin to imagine how he'll react when he sees you, dear," Mrs. Hudson tells me as she dabs her eyes with her sleeve and sniffles loudly. Her wailing will have gotten John's attention, and he will be calling down from the top of the stairs any moment now, asking if she's all right.
Right on cue, "Mrs. Hudson? Are you okay? I thought I heard you crying," comes John's voice from above, and his steps on the stairs.
Halfway down, he must see my hair. Or my coat. Either way, he slows, and Mrs. Hudson looks up with pink eyes. She pats my arm. "I'm alright, John, dear. Please, come down."
John timidly takes the remaining steps to see us in full view. He blinks. Swallows. He stares at me with those dark blue eyes of his, stony and steely after three years. He looks the same as I remember. Time has hardly passed. My breath catches in my chest and I puff up from lack of oxygen. I can't seem to remember how my lungs function.
"Sherlock," he murmurs, and he sways for a moment. He grabs hold of the railing to stabilize himself. He swallows again, dryly this time. His blinks are slow, his eyes wide. "You – you…"
"I wish there was time for pleasantries, John," I say on autopilot, my tone much sterner and colder than I would have liked. To him, I must seem as though seeing him affects me little, if at all. But that is far from the truth. This is my default. This is how I am when I, too, am stunned. God, I've missed him so. And seeing him in the familiarity of Baker Street brings back memories, ones of us panting after I cured his limp and ones born of my Guilty Pleasures. I shake off both and stand up straighter, hands seeking my pockets. "But you are in danger. I have brought it upon you again, and there isn't time to lose. I must correct my mistake before it harms us both."
"Oh, my," Mrs. Hudson gasps. "Always getting him into trouble, you are! First thing back from the dead, and –"
"Please, Mrs. Hudson," I say lowly, a bit threateningly, keeping myself from snapping at her (she doesn't deserve that). "You can reprimand me all you like later, but this moment is crucial. It's the moment before he is upon us. We need to make the most of this time to create a decoy of some sort, something to fool him so we may sneak out the back and surprise him."
She sighs. But, bless her, she nods. "Very well. Is there something I can do, Sherlock?"
"Yes, in fact," I reply. "Do you have any sewing dummies?"
"Oh, in fact, I do. I have to hem all my own clothes, you know. I am so short," she chuckles nervously, turning and hobbling into her flat. "One moment." She doesn't even question what I need it for. She knows it must be more important than making a hem. It will be female-shaped, unfortunately, but I am slim in build and I can stuff the clothes I will need to put on it, and hopefully that will give it a more masculine appearance.
I turn to John. He is still frozen on the stairs. I begin to ascend, and he takes a few steps backward, keeping his eyes fixed on me, like I told him to do three years ago.
"Now, John," I say as gently as possible as I continue pacing up the stairs, and he continues stumbling back, "I need you to go back into the flat, but avoid the windows. Keep to the kitchen if you can. We are dealing with a well-trained sniper. Do you have the curtains already closed, by chance?"
"O-one of them, yes," he informs me. "Sherlock –"
I shake my head, and thankfully, he withholds his questions, ones I know he has. How I survived, how I planned it, where I've been, what I've been doing, why I left him behind. They are all the standard questions I expect he would have. And then some.
He nods once, curtly, like a salute. He turns and heads upstairs as directed. John, always ready to trust me, ready to obey.
I shiver unexpectedly, and I don't know why. Adrenaline? Anticipation? Nerves in general? Or is it something subconscious, a moment from a fantasy slipping through? I can't tell; my head is racing too much, trying to save our skins, to begin to fathom why my body is reacting the way it is, with my tone of voice and movements and gooseflesh. It could all mean nothing. It's pointless to dwell on it. Everything is transport, I remind myself.
Mrs. Hudson brings up the sewing dummy. I dress it as best I can in my clothes; John kept some of them. I don't ask, and he doesn't say. He simply hands them over to me, and I manipulate it to look like my silhouette. It has no arms, no head, so I improvise. Rolled blankets, other clothes; vegetables; anything lying around that I can use. I add the hat, the deplorable deerstalker; Moran will recognize it from my photos in the paper all those years ago.
I set it up near the open window without giving myself away. I have John stay back; Mrs. Hudson, too. I move it slowly into place.
A bullet goes straight through it after fifteen minutes of making it appear natural, moving about and the like.
"He's out there," I announce, standing up in some of the safe zone and stretching my limbs. Fifteen minutes of crouching can't be good for my legs. I think there is a cramp in one of them. I try to work it out as I rattle off instructions to Mrs. Hudson and John. "He will need confirmation somehow that he succeeded in shooting me. But we don't have time to wait for that. We need to move. He could already be leaving the building across from us, and we need to catch him. Mrs. Hudson, ring the police; tell them there's been a shooting. Make sure to sound panicked. –John, grab your gun from where you've stashed it, and come with me. Hurry!"
It takes less than a minute to assemble, for Mrs. Hudson to frantically speak to the emergency operator. Then, within what feels like the shortest of moments, we are upon him.
And Moran doesn't go down without a fight, but once the police arrive, he's surrounded.
He spits at my shoes. He says a string of curse words so vile I never thought they could be put together. And then he goes silent. Deadly silent. And they cuff him and put him into a car, and I watch him in the rear window as he's driven off.
And then… That's it. I've done it. I've won.
Lestrade saw me. Donovan, too. They were among the police force that arrived for the arrest. They know I'm alive, now. I can begin my life anew, take back what I lost. Like John. Like my residence in Baker Street. The whole shebang. It can be mine again.
I believe it will take a great deal of time for that to sink in.
#
John surprises me once again.
He doesn't ask any of the questions I thought he would. None of the ones he ought to ask, anyhow. Instead, he asks things like, "Are you okay?" and "That was some adventure, wasn't it?" and "Aren't you glad to be alive again?" and "Did you miss me?" all said in odd tones.
He asks if I'm okay in a sincere tone, like usual, but the 'adventure' one is rhetorical and a tad exasperatedly spoken. Asking if I'm glad to be alive is said bitterly, sarcastically, because John feels hurt. And then, in a tone I have never heard him use before when directly speaking to me, he wonders if I've missed him, and if I didn't know any better, I would say his tone for it is just shy of being like the sort a lover would use.
I'm dumbfounded by each and every remark. They are the only things John says to me within the first thirty-seven hours of my return. I've noted each one in my head, written them down after he's gone to bed, pouring over them, wondering what they mean, their categorized tones following the quotes with a dash mark.
I put down my pen and steeple my hands. I press them to my mouth and nose, breathing measured, and close my eyes. I dive into my Mind Palace.
I take a few turns here and there, looking for John's corridor. He has the majority of the east wing in my palace, and it isn't difficult to navigate myself there, sifting through information about John to try and place what underlying meaning he's slipped into those phrases by using those specific tones.
At the time, I answered them literally. I said, "I'm fine;" I said, "It was quite the adventure, yes; like told times;" I said, "Yes, I am very glad, in fact;" and I said, "Of course I did, John. You are my blogger, remember?" (which implied the reference to what I told him before, in jest: 'I'd be lost without my blogger.' But I was lost without him. I hope he inferred that. I meant to infer it).
My Mind Palace fails me, for once. It cannot give me the proper deductions regarding John's word/tone choice, not for all of them. The 'okay' question is simple enough. Even the 'adventure' remark is. But the last two… I cannot place those.
Sighing, I walk my way toward the entryway of my Mind Palace, about to leave, when I hesitate. John is asleep at the moment. He wouldn't know if I weren't doing the same. If I stayed at this table, hunched over it, elbows on its surface, my hands pressed to my face. He wouldn't know I was thinking. He wouldn't know if I dipped into my underground sanctuary for a passing moment. He wouldn't know if I indulged in a quick fantasy, the briefest of Guilty Pleasures.
A slight smile quirking one end of my lips, barely noticeable, I pivot on my heel in my mind and pace down, down, down: beyond the cellar and all my skeletons and other chambers until I locate my imagination.
Ah, the room is just as I left it so many months ago. A blank, white slate. Perfect. I drag a memory from earlier today, but I throw out the level of danger into the dustbin and place Mrs. Hudson in her flat. It's just me at the bottom of the stairs; I let myself in. And it proceeds like this:
I pace slowly up the stairs. I skip the one that creaks. I knock on the door to our flat. I'm nervous, but excited, happy. I am bubbling with energy, my innards lighting up and filling my chest with fuzzy anticipation. John doesn't answer at first. I know again, casually.
Finally, John's calling out, 'All right, all right; hold your horses.' And his footsteps approach, and I rock on my heels, my hands clasped behind my back. He swings open the door.
I smile minutely at him. He gapes. He blinks once or twice, then tears pool in his eyes, but they don't spill over, only make his eyes a little pink. He squeezes them shut and shakes his head. 'This can't be real,' he says, and I step forward and touch his face with the lightest of grazes of my fingertip to his cheek.
'It is real,' I assure him. 'I've come back, John. I'm sorry for keeping you waiting so long.'
(And I am aware that John would never do this. Never be this way. It is almost demeaning, thinking he would be like a movie's rendition of a war bride waiting for her soldier to return, but I want to think of him this way, just this once. I want a scenario where I am welcomed back into his life with open arms and kisses. I want to pretend that this could be real. Just this once. It's my indulgence, after all.)
And he opens his eyes and presses his face into my chest and wraps his arms around me, murmuring how glad he is that I'm back. He doesn't care why I did it, he trusts my judgment, and he wants to know all about how I did it. He ushers me inside and takes my coat for me. Then he turns back to me, his eyelids lower, and in a moment of passion and relief and joy, he crashes into me, standing on his toes, and kisses me with tender force, saying –
"Sherlock."
Yes, saying my name, but telling me he realized, in my absence, that he loved me, and still does love me, and –
"Sherlock?"
(No, we're past that bit, why isn't my mind cooperating? I know I enjoy hearing my name on his tongue, but there's no need for –)
"Sherlock!"
My eyes snap open.
I blink, torn from my meditation, the fantasy ripped like a sheet of paper from a sketchbook, the image gone in seconds.
"John?" I say, looking up from my hands, readjusting my eyes to the light of the room.
"It's after two in the morning, Sherlock," he informs me, his voice groggy, slurred. He's tired. Something woke him; there is water lingering on his hands, near his wrist. Bathroom break, then. He stirred from sleep to pee, just emerged now after washing but not fully drying his hands, and noticed the light I left on, came in to check on me.
"Is it?" I say, aloof. I slide out my chair and stand, pushing it back in as I gather my coat from off the back of it. "I hadn't noticed."
"Were you asleep like that?" John frowns.
I nearly smile. "No. I was thinking."
"What about? You've no cases. We caught that Moran fellow the other day. Is there something on your mind you want to talk about?" he insists, and God, I must love him, because the way he's worried about me, even with how quiet and irritated he's been with me the past day or so, fills me with a kind of happiness I have never felt before. I like that John worries about me. There's a certain kind of high that comes with it.
"Nothing of the sort," I assure him. It's so easy to lie to strangers; I can't seem to formulate this lie and look John in the eye at the same time. So I say it, but I avoid his gaze. "Goodnight, John," I say as I take my coat over my arm and walk past him, headed for my old bedroom.
Mrs. Hudson made my bed for me this afternoon with some old, but clean, sheets. Gave me a few of her extra blankets. Told me I could move back in as soon as I wanted, although I might have to buy a few things over again, seeing as how she donated a lot of it, like my lab equipment. Understandable. It's just good not to have to hide any longer, not to have to be apart from John.
John follows after me and catches my arm. I stiffen on contact, halting my steps immediately. "Hold on, would you? You lied just now, didn't you? You always look me in the eye, but just then, you didn't."
"I'm tired. It's difficult to focus on anything at the moment. My brain has run itself out, and is on backup fuel. I need to sleep, John. We can talk in the morning," I say in a rush. I spare him a glance and force one of my smiles.
John doesn't like it, but he doesn't fight me on it, either. He sighs like he's disappointed in me, and releases my arm. "Fine, then. Have it your way." And he retreats to his room.
I don't know how long my eyes linger to where he's gone. But when I finally blink, I remember to move my legs and slip into my bedroom, closing my door mutedly behind me. I hang up my coat on the hook behind me and enter the bathroom through the joining door. I scrub my face with cold water and recount what just occurred.
John just found me while I was fantasizing. That has never happened before. I'm not sure how to react, what to say. I don't even know, at the moment, what I can tell him tomorrow that will around logical.
I should have said that I had been sleeping. It wouldn't have prompted this.
Sherlock, you bloody fool, I scold myself with an outward scowl as I yank back my bedclothes. You're losing your grip, your control, your precious thought processes. You should have heard him in the bathroom, or down the hall. You should have foreseen this scenario and planned for it. Why didn't you?
I sigh aloud and drop to sit on the edge of my bed. I murmur to myself, "Why didn't I?" before throwing myself down, rolling onto my side in the darkness, and curling up. I am still in my day-clothes. But it doesn't matter to me.
I touch my lips with two fingertips, my eyes falling shut. I could revisit the fantasy, recreate it. I could even change how the moment with John just now played out.
But there is no point, no logical sense to it.
I feel lonelier than I have ever been as I tug up the covers over my body and close my eyes to sleep. Except Sleep seems to be on vacation, and I am left alone in the quiet dark of my familiar – but changed, I can see even in the dimness by how much – room.
#