The first thing John noticed when he woke up for good was a strangely satisfying pain in the knuckles of his left hand. He opened his eyes and was immediately greeted with the sight of Sherlock Holmes' pale face and how dramatically the deep purples and puffiness of his brand new black eye clashed against his complexion. It was hard not to, considering it dominated John's vision.
They were on their sides, facing each other. Sherlock had rested his forehead against John's, his curly hair tickling the shorter man's hairline and making it itch and tickle slightly, albeit pleasantly. He had also pulled himself as close to John as he could manage with the slightly-undersized bump of their child between them, his thin arms wrapped tightly around John's shoulders.
They each stared into the other's eyes – or, rather, John stared into Sherlock's one good eye and Sherlock peered back without the benefit of depth perception. They breathed in unison, neither saying a word.
Finally, John broke the silence.
"Let go, we need to talk."
"Can't," Sherlock replied.
"Do you remember the talk we had about a year ago?" John asked. "About how 'can't' and 'won't' are different things."
"Of course I remember, John," Sherlock huffed. "And perhaps it's a combination of the two rather than just the flat 'can't'. Besides, the same applies to you."
At that moment, John realized that he had somehow failed to recognize that his own arms were wrapped around Sherlock's bony shoulders, his fists desperately clenched around the fabric of the Alpha's shirt. He tried to force himself to let go, but his hands seemed to only want to grasp tighter. "Ah," he said at length. "'Can't' it is, then."
They lay there in silence for a while longer before John asked, "The others?"
"Cleared out about fifteen minutes ago. Probably to give us privacy, so that we can discuss… matters."
"Matters," John said, somewhat hollowly. "Right."
He took a deep breath and continued, "We aren't okay."
Sherlock opened his mouth to respond, but John cut him off. "We aren't, Sherlock. Things can't just – just slip back into how they were before. Not easily. Not without work. If I just had trust issues before, what do you think I have now? Do you know what it's been like, having spent over half a year believing that the one good thing I had left could get snatched away at any moment?"
"Yes," Sherlock answered quietly. "It seems we've led astonishingly parallel lives the last few months."
John frowned. "What kind of justification is that for letting me believe you were dead all this time?"
"The best," Sherlock said. He took a deep breath, closing his eyes as he relished John's scent and the peculiar emotions it stirred in him. "I've felt it ever since I stood atop St. Bart's, looking down at the centre of my world, also the centre of an assassin's crosshairs. And even though I made sure to identify and track down that particular would-be killer first, it wasn't enough for me to wonder every single day if another had stepped into his shoes."
John didn't want to challenge Sherlock's claim, partially because he could feel the sincerity in the words, but also because he had neither the energy nor the inclination to compare notes on who had had it worse. Just when he was content to let the issue slide, Sherlock surprised him.
"I'm not discounting what you've gone through the past few months, you know," Sherlock said. "Nor am I suggesting I've had a rougher time. My senses have been screaming at me over what I've missed since the moment I returned to the flat, and that alone is deafening. What it must be like for you, with much higher biological stakes."
"Just biologi- you know what, no, I'm going to take that as a weird statement of awed respect, even if that's not what you meant."
"How could it be taken as anything else? I thought I was very clear."
God help him, John laughed, even if it was weak and mostly took the form of a shake in his shoulders. He felt Sherlock's grip tighten around him, tilting their bodies slightly until John lay on his back with Sherlock partially splayed over him. "Do you hate me?" Sherlock asked, little more than a breath against his ear.
John rubbed Sherlock's back, marveling at the cool, smooth texture of his shirt, the jutting points of his shoulder blades, and above all else, the warmth of his skin. Warm and real and filling his head with wonderful dizziness and alive, dear God, he was alive.
"No," he sighed. "God, no. Why would you ask something like that?"
"It was a calculated risk. I knew the odds of you hating me for doing what I did would be quite high, but I'd rather have you alive but loathing than dead but loving."
"Don't know if I could hate you, no matter what you did," John replied. After a moment, he added, "But don't you dare take that as a challenge."
Sherlock burrowed his face deeper against John's neck. "Then, are we okay now, John?"
"Not yet."
"When?"
"I don't know."
"I can still hold you, though, like this? Even if we aren't okay?"
"Sherlock Holmes, if you stop holding me before I tell you to stop, I will blacken your other eye before you even know what hit you. People will start calling you the world's only consulting raccoon."
"I do have a lot of very strong opinions on the proper way to rifle through rubbish," Sherlock replied with utmost seriousness.
"At midnight, knocking everything over with a godawful noise, and then hissing when people come to chase you off? Sounds about right."
It was as if a dam broke. It wasn't long until they were breathless, first from an uncontrollable fit of giggles, later from pairs of lips rasping promises and hopes and apologies and – simply, elegantly – merely each other's names as they pressed together.
Their mutual exhaustion (physical and emotional – if Sherlock had the gall to be skeptical about the line between sentiment and biological hard-wiring during such a reunion, he wisely kept it to himself for once) must have forced them to doze off at some point because John found himself coming awake thanks to two different stimuli.
The first: a bout of tapping and fluttering from within, the always welcome reminder that the baby was still alive. Yes, always welcome, even when it was awake at 2 a.m. and moving like it expected John to be as well.
The second: Sherlock Holmes' restless fingers tapping against his collar bone. They were nearly in time with the kicks.
Not a dream. Really here. Alive.
It was a powerful thought. Beautiful. John basked in it for a moment before he allowed his eyes to open. He was still on his back, but Sherlock had shifted his position. He was reclining his side, one arm propping his chest up slightly while the other tapped away on John's clavicle. His eyes were focused on John's mouth.
"You know," John began with a smirk. "As romantic as pretty much every movie tries to paint it, waking up to find that someone's been watching you sleep is still a little creepy. Especially with the eye thing."
"Your fault about the eye thing," Sherlock grumbled, but there was no venom to his words. He continued watching John's lips for a moment before he continued, "It's moving. Your lips twitch when you feel it. More noticeable in sleep, but I can detect the tiny, subconscious flickers even now."
"Really? Huh," John replied, still with the little grin on his face. For a long beat, they continued to stare at each other with the only apparent change being an increased insistence to Sherlock's tapping. Eventually, John rolled his eyes, chuckled, and said, "Fine, go on, then. Oh, and I am impressed that you waited for permission, by the way."
Sherlock's only response was to spring up to a sitting position in an instant. He placed his pale hands on John's middle, spreading his long, thin fingers wide, as if to cover as much of it as possible. John watched Sherlock's pale grey eyes dart wildly, the same expression he used when countless facts spun madly in his head.
"Making deductions?"
Again, Sherlock didn't respond verbally. The bedsprings rocked and creaked as he rapidly changed positions again, working himself into a kneeling position on the bed. Keeping his hands on John's stomach, he gently rested his head against the swell there. John laughed at the baffled twitch in Sherlock's eyebrows.
"Hush," Sherlock mumbled. "You're skewing data."
John just laughed harder, but he could see frustration knotting up in Sherlock's shoulders and he took pity. He bit his lower lip, hoping it would be enough for Sherlock to proceed with whatever it was he was doing. Evidently it was, as the tension melted out of Sherlock's form after a few more moments of listening.
"I can hear its heartbeat. It's surreal. Yet, it can't be, can it? By definition, gestation has to be one of the most real aspects of the universe, at least from a mammalian standpoint. It's… odd to be an active participant in hundreds of thousands of years of human reproduction instead of simply being a product of it." He was quiet for a few seconds before he continued, "You can speak again, by the way. I'm through gathering information for the time being."
"Says the man who still has his ear an inch away from my navel."
"I said I was finished gathering data, not that I had any intention of moving. Besides, I'm still trying to recover the lost files on this reproduction business. I'm mostly caught up; it's just the actual birth process that eludes me at present."
John blinked. "Sherlock, had you – had you deleted where babies come from?"
Sherlock snorted. "Obviously."
"When?"
"Oh, long before we met. In fact, I only started working on recovering the information once we became flat mates. Everyone seemed to be making such a fuss about us being an Alpha and an Omega moving in together – "
"I was one of those people!"
"Only for about twenty minutes. Honestly, John, that could hardly be called a protest. Where was I? Ah, yes, so I deduced I had deleted something which society had deemed important about that particular combination of individuals. Once I discovered it was a reproductive matter, I decided refreshing my knowledge on the subject would be wise, lest a baby just suddenly fall out from beneath your jumper completely uninvited."
"That… that really, really isn't how it works. At all."
"Well, clearly I know that now," Sherlock said with a huff.
John rolled his eyes, but it was more out of fondness than frustration. His hand found its way to Sherlock's thick black hair, where he attempted to thread his fingers through some of the curls. His hair was a bit longer than he normally kept it and without a haircut to beat it into something vaguely resembling submission, it had gone a bit feral. Idly, John wondered if he'd have to contend with two heads of the stuff once the baby came.
Naturally, Sherlock picked up on the thoughts immediately. "Dark colouring and curly texture are dominant genetic traits in hair, statistically speaking. Genetics are so unpredictable as to shoot straight through 'interesting' and land back into 'tedious' territory, but even I've managed not to delete that knowledge. In any case, there are decent odds that our son will have my hair."
John froze. "Son?" he asked, dazed.
"Oh, yes, no question." He sighed. "Unfortunately, I can't tell anything about its status as an Alpha, Beta, or Omega, and we must therefore fall back on probability. And yet again, infuriating unpredictability rears its ugly head, considering I come from a family devoid of Betas and you come from one dominated by them."
"We're having a boy?"
"Yes, John, do keep u- Oh. Were you hoping to keep it a surprise? Not good?"
"No," John breathed. "Ah, I mean, no about wanting to keep it a surprise. Well, I did, but it was mostly out of respect."
Sherlock frowned. "Respect for whom?"
John gave him a Look, the kind that could peel paint off the walls if it came down to it. "The dead."
"Ah." Sherlock paused. "Well, it should be fine if I spoil my own tribute. And on the subject of ruining others' plans, our son is already throwing a spanner into the works simply by getting a mismatched set in the chromosomal lottery."
"How so?"
"Did I ever tell you that Mummy always wanted Mycroft or me to provide her with a set of nine granddaughters and name them all after the Classical Muses?"
"No," John croaked.
"'No' in the sense that I didn't tell you, or 'no' –"
"No all around, Sherlock!"
In the end, the conversation did not drift toward the subject of baby names, as it probably should have. Instead, the brief discussion on Mummy Holmes and her fixation on Greek goddess granddaughters took a right turn into whether or not there were any decent Greek take-out places in the area, as John realized he could probably kill for even a passable spanakopita.
When the disappointingly soggy spanakopita they procured was long gone, they still didn't get back to names. Instead, John finally coaxed Sherlock into going into detail over what he'd been up to for the past few months. Knowing how far Sherlock had gone to dismantle Moriarty's web was astonishing, but John still couldn't help feeling the burn of resentment at being forced out of the loop.
The deep, gnawing, aching suspicion that others viewed him as an extra wheel – and a creaky one at that – had been part of his psychological makeup for years. Maybe it had always been there, the fallout of a background burdened by everything from turning out to be an Omega in an unprepared family to being raised in the shadow of an older sibling to growing up in a household where refusing to talk about problems meant they didn't exist.
So when Sherlock, easily the most important person in the world to John, chose to settle matters on his own without his assistance, it was difficult to keep the suspicions from rolling in. Things like lying and pretending to die in order to spare John's, Mrs. Hudson's, and Lestrade's lives sounded like "You'd have gotten in the way" given a fresh coat of paint.
Irrational, maybe. But almost impossible to shake.
Almost.
"I know what you're thinking," Sherlock said, fixing John with an icy stare.
"Oh, there's a first."
"I know that you're thinking," Sherlock insisted. "That I did what I did because you wouldn't be useful. That you'd get in the way. Daft, all of it, completely. So stop thinking those things."
John shrugged. "It's not as easy as just turning it off, Sherlock. I can't."
"Can't or won't?"
John gave him a long, measured look. Before he could decide if he was touched or if he wanted to chastise Sherlock for twisting his words to his own advantage, Sherlock continued, "I didn't finish."
The vagueness of that statement made John squint in confusion. "What are you talking about, Sherlock?"
"Wiping out Moriarty's web. I didn't finish it. Mycroft sent me an infuriatingly opaque but decidedly ominous message about you, and I couldn't stop myself from dropping everything and coming back prematurely."
"So… we're having a baby in less than three months and we're all in immediate mortal danger," John said, trying to keep his voice from rising to a shout. "Ta, Sherlock. Wonderful news."
"Not immediate," Sherlock groused. "I've been very careful to make it look like the vacuum in power has caused different threads in the web to turn on each other. I don't think the remainders have even pieced together that I'm still alive, although some may begin to have suspicions shortly."
"Are you almost at the encouraging part? Wait, is there an encouraging part at all?"
"What I am trying to say," Sherlock said insistently. "Is that I'm not done. Like I told you, the goal was to keep you out of harm's way by removing myself from your life – physically through a perceived death and emotionally through my admission of fraudulence. Obviously, that plan is now out. So, we aren't done."
It took John a second to take it in. "We?"
"Of course. You know that I have always found your assistance valuable; those dusty, nay-saying corners of your brain can simply, as you might say, 'get stuffed'." Sherlock's eyes held John's for a long moment. "You're now smiling in a particularly luminous way. Wholly objective and quantifiable, anyone with even a drop of sense would agree with me. Does that mean we're okay now?"
John laughed. "We're better than the last time you asked, but I'll stop giving you straight answers if you keep asking me that. I'll tell you when we're okay." He grinned even wider at the irritated grunt Sherlock gave at that and continued, "And though I appreciate what you're offering, Sherlock, I'm on bed rest -"
"I'm not asking you to hop out of bed and fly with me to Siberia this instant, John," Sherlock said. "I'm certain there are no regulations against people in your circumstances merely discussing facts and logistics. Besides, bed rest doesn't last forever. As you said, less than three months until the big day."
As it happened, Sherlock was wrong. 'Less than three months' would actually be 'slightly over three weeks'.