"The poison interests me," Sherlock was saying. They were walking toward Hyde Park to catch a cab home from the victim's neighbourhood. "Whoever murdered David Rodgers didn't want the police to find it, hence the stabbing. Such an obvious cause of death wouldn't require an autopsy. Might have worked if they were dealing with the usual idiot circus at Scotland Yard. There's something about that poison they don't want the police to see."

They turned a corner, taking what was presumably a shortcut through an alley. Sherlock had every street and alley of London mapped out in his mind. John had learned never to question the directions when Sherlock was leading the way (which was always).

"Do you think this could somehow be connected to Moriarty?"

"The thought had occurred," Sherlock said. "Anything out of the ordinary could signal his next move."

"I thought you said he was dead."

"He probably is."

"Probably? You said, 'no question' before."

"There's no question that he's probably dead."

John huffed in frustration. "You said you saw him shoot his brains out the back of his head."

"I did," Sherlock shrugged. "But then you also saw me jump off a building and hit the ground."

John flinched and Sherlock stepped toward him. "Sorry," he said using the same concerned puppy-eyes he'd used in Dartmoor when John figured out Sherlock had tried to drug him. No wonder Sherlock was so successful at manipulation; anyone who could manage puppy-eyes like that—

"The point is, it hardly matters if he's dead or alive," Sherlock continued. "He would have arranged his plans to be carried out by someone within his circle. If he didn't come back from the roof that day his plans would still go forward."

"So this murder, you think it could be the work of Moriarty, or one of his men?"

"It's intricate and odd enough to make it a possibility."

John took a deep breath. "Ok," he said, "so we'll just have to be more careful."

"Oh, careful. Dull."

"Sherlock, you spent two years tearing apart everything he worked to build." John crossed his arms. "If he's back, or if one of his psychotic followers has taken over, I imagine he'll have a thing or two he wants to say to you, and he'll probably want to say it with the sharp end of a knife, not a fruit basket."

Sherlock laughed. "Maybe a fruit basket stuck through with knives. That seems their style."

John grinned in spite of himself. He resumed walking and Sherlock followed. John looked over at his friend who had regained his meditative expression. It turned to a scowl as he said, "It's unacceptable to have to wait until Monday for the autopsy results. Lestrade said he won't be able to push it through without proof of urgency. It's preposterous that they expect me to catch criminals while they keep me waiting around…"

And Sherlock's voice quieted to a blur of background noise as John caught the slightest movement out of the corner of his right eye. His awareness zeroed in with military acuity. A fire escape. A man. Dark clothes, almost impossible to see in the shadow of the building. It was his arm that moved. Just his arm moving toward his jacket. It was years of training and experience that alerted John to such soft, soundless movement. His eyes shot to the man's neck. He needed visual confirmation. The head turned, looking into the jacket where his arm was reaching and there they were: Two aces, diamonds and spades. Carl Reeves.

John's senses automatically re-geared to focus on two priorities. One: protect Sherlock. Two: neutralise target. In the span of a second, John did two things at once. With his left hand, he grabbed Sherlock (who had been walking slightly in front on John's left side) and pulled him hard behind him, hard enough that he was vaguely aware of Sherlock falling to the ground. At the same time, he reached his right hand around to the back of his jeans, pulled out his gun, and shot. He heard two gun shots and knew Reeves had fired at the same time.

He only waited an instant to see Reeves fall from the fire escape (confirming he'd hit his target and there was no danger of a third shot) before whirling around to check Sherlock. The panic that had seized him when he heard the other shot dissipated when he saw Sherlock looking up at him, startled, before leaping to his feet, clearly unharmed. John had pulled Sherlock aside in time; Reeves had missed his mark.

Sherlock grabbed John's arms. "Are you hurt?" he asked, eyes running fast over John's body. He'd heard the second shot as well. "Your arm," he murmured, whipping off his glove to gingerly twist John's upper left arm.

John looked down and was surprised to see a small gash in his skin through the ripped fabric of his sleeve where the bullet had grazed him. He hadn't felt it at all. "It's fine," he said quickly, looking up at Sherlock who was surprisingly pale for someone who was almost regularly shot at. "Come on, let's check him," John said, starting to turn. Sherlock let him go reluctantly.

Reeves was lying on the pavement with a bullet hole in his head.

"Good shot," Sherlock offered.

"Thanks," John said, tucking his gun into his jacket. He knelt down and checked for a pulse: none. He furtively moved the man's arm, checking for a squash ball (just a nervous habit he'd picked up): none.

"How did I not see him?" Sherlock asked plaintively.

"You weren't looking for him," John said, standing.

"And you were?"

"Yeah, I was," John said, looking at Sherlock seriously. "One of us has to mind whether you live or die, and since you can't be bothered I guess that's my job."

Sherlock had the decency to look sheepish. "Mycroft sent me his picture; I didn't delete it, I was distracted by the case…" Sherlock rubbed the back of his neck. "Thank you," he said, looking at John uncertainly.

John's expression softened. "I suppose I don't mind reminding you why you keep me around every once in a while." He started to walk. Someone would have heard the shots; he'd be surprised if the police weren't already on their way. As good as Mycroft was at cover-up he'd still rather not be standing over the dead body when the public arrived.

Sherlock followed, putting on an air of grave sincerity. "One never needs reminding why one needs one's blogger."

John's mouth quirked to a half smile as he pulled out his phone and found Mycroft's name in his contacts.

"Now, if you could write as well as you shoot…"

John shot Sherlock a warning look. As usual it went unheeded.

"At least let me install a cliché counter on your blog."

"Remember I mentioned a while ago I was thinking of changing the blog's title? How about The Incredible Tosser: London's Most Annoying Detective?" John put his phone to his ear.

Sherlock narrowed his eyes. "You wouldn't."

"Try me."

"John," Mycroft answered abruptly, had probably been expecting the call.

Sherlock muttered, "I'm only saying it wouldn't hurt to treat the spellcheck function with a little more deference."

"Reeves is down," John said to Mycroft, glaring at his soon-to-be ex-flatmate, who adopted an innocent expression. "Your brother lives to irritate us all another day."

Sherlock smirked.

"You're certain he's dead?" Mycroft asked.

"Confirmed"—he glanced at Sherlock—"I guess he chose the wrong target."

He was glad Sherlock had been on his left, and that he was able to reach for Sherlock with his left hand. He could shoot with either hand better than most marksmen, but he'd received more training with his right and preferred it in a crisis.

"Indeed," was Mycroft's response. "It'll be taken care of." The line went silent and John frowned. Of course he hadn't expected a pat on the back from the elder Holmes, but sometimes, even after all these years, he was still taken aback by Mycroft's coldness.

"If you expect nothing from Mycroft, you'll never be disappointed," Sherlock said, reading John's thoughts again. He raised his arm and a taxi pulled to a stop in front of them.

"221B, Baker Street," Sherlock said to the driver when John shut the door behind them. He turned to John. "You've thought about that blog title before. You didn't just come up with it now."

"I have others."

"I'll bet."

A pause.

"The Adventures of a Pompous—"

"Finish that sentence and consider your toothbrush donated to science."

Silence.

John Watson was being impossible.

"Come on, Sherlock," he said, knocking his hands away, "lay off; I told you I'll do that myself later."

Sherlock, holding the bottle of disinfectant, thought it would be useful to remind John of the rate at which bacteria multiply.

"I know," he said tetchily. "I'm a doctor, remember? There's nothing catastrophic bacteria can do just in the time it takes me to type up these notes."

"Considering your average typing speed I wouldn't be surprised if your whole arm had gone septic by the time you finished."

John sighed in defeat. 'Persistence' was one of Sherlock's many fine attributes, and John seemed to have learned early on that his quality of life was much improved when he allowed Sherlock to have his way.

John shut his laptop and stood from where he'd been sitting in his chair. He unbuttoned the light blue shirt that now had a tear in the sleeve. He was wearing a white t-shirt underneath. The bottom edge of his left sleeve had absorbed some of the blood from where the bullet grazed his arm.

"This way," Sherlock said, walking toward the kitchen.

John followed, grumbling, "I can do this myself; I don't need you to—"

Sherlock put his hand on John's arm, below the wound, and tugged him sharply toward the sink. John glared, and Sherlock took the opportunity to start cleaning the cut.

John, he knew, would attribute this behaviour to guilt—Sherlock being the indirect cause of the injury. It wouldn't be the first time John was wrong.

Sherlock understood that whenever John went home to Mary after their rougher fieldwork, Mary would tend to any injuries John might have sustained. Whatever else she was, she was also a nurse. Sherlock didn't want John to miss anything from his life with Mary. While he hadn't influenced John's decision to come back to Baker Street, it didn't mean he couldn't influence whether or not John stayed. He wasn't unbiased in the matter.

And just because John was a doctor didn't guarantee he would take care of himself properly. He probably wouldn't even have looked at the cut until later that night. Idiot.

Sherlock felt John's eyes on his fingers as he disinfected the cut and wrapped gauze around it. It was deeper than it had originally looked through the tear in John's sleeve. John murmured some instructions about fastening the gauze and put his hand to it when Sherlock finished and stepped back.

"Thanks," he said, not meeting Sherlock's eyes. Odd.

"John," Sherlock started. His voice was probably lower, or coarser than he meant it to be because John's gaze snapped upward with questioning eyes.

Sherlock hesitated. He'd been glib before, in the alley when John had shot the assassin and had almost been shot in return. Glibness was his natural response to situations that had the potential to become Emotional, but this time he felt he'd got it wrong. No one would ever mistake Sherlock for a tactful communicator, but somehow mocking John's blog had dropped even below his own standards for expressing the sickening panic he'd experienced when he heard the second shot, before he knew John was all right, and the amazement he'd felt at once again witnessing John's reflexes and shooting.

In all fairness John's amateur writing—with his overly romanticised perspective of their cases and his questionable use of punctuation—was an easy target for mockery, and by all means Sherlock would continue to do it. But that wasn't what he'd meant to say. Not then, anyway.

He'd said he needed his blogger, and he meant it. But what he hadn't told John, and what he hadn't said again today, was how unlikely and unbelievably efficient it was to have a blogger, doctor, soldier, and best friend condensed into one person. But 'efficient' wasn't the right word. Of course it was efficient to have four such valuable abilities combined into one rather pleasing person who walked around 221B in striped jumpers making risottos with peas and things, but it was more than 'efficient.' Advantageous? Yes, but also not enough…

'Invaluable' was closer. Because if something happened to John, the way it had almost happened today… Sherlock's eyes flicked down at the bandage and he found he didn't have the words to finish the thought. If something happened to John… Usually entirely eloquent, Sherlock had discovered soon after meeting him that for some reason 'John' was one of the only topics for which the words seemed to vanish even as he reached for them.

But it didn't matter, Sherlock decided. All of these fumbling and inexact words wouldn't mean anything. They would probably just make John uncomfortable, and Sherlock didn't know what the rules were anymore. Did John's choice not only to leave his wife, but to come back to Baker Street constitute a shift in their relationship? Was John going to want to talk about Feelings now that he didn't have Mary as an emotional support? Sherlock doubted it. (He hoped not.) He imagined that one of the perks of leaving a woman would be the cessation of the necessity for emotional blabbering. If that was the case, and as it occurred to him he became convinced it was, Sherlock wasn't going to disappoint him. John didn't want to hear about his invaluableness.

In the beat of the few seconds Sherlock paused, John's neck had flushed red and Sherlock realised how intensely he must have been staring. He blinked a few times to rectify the situation and said, "I need to go to the lab tonight."

John didn't respond, probably thrown by the contrast between the intensity of Sherlock's hesitation and the innocuousness of his statement.

"I left a project half-finished before I left for Switzerland and Anita's threatened to throw out my cultures if I leave them there another night." Sherlock had a complicated relationship with the Barts cleaning lady.

"Yeah, ok," John said. "I, erm, yeah, run."

"What?"

The flush at John's neck deepened and he cleared his throat. "Me, I meant. Er, running." He shook his head, closing his eyes as if to focus on getting the words out in the right order. "I meant, I think I'll go for a run."

"Are you all right?" Sherlock asked, eyes flicking again to the bandage and wondering if his friend hadn't broken.

"Yeah fine," John said. He turned away and walked toward the living room. "It's just… adrenaline. You know how it is, killing people…" Sherlock quirked an eyebrow at his delightful killer/doctor. "Extra energy. Think I'll run it off."

Sherlock heard the squeak of the stairs as John went up to his bedroom. He supposed killing people and going for a jog wasn't an altogether alarming combination of behaviour, but nevertheless he thought about it and concluded that he would still like John even if he went mad.

His flatmate was gone by the time John came back from his run. When he undressed for a shower he felt almost a pang of regret as he undid the gauze Sherlock had wrapped earlier. He smiled as he remembered the detective's careful concentration as he followed John's directions. As flippant as Sherlock had been in the alley after the shooting, the cautious gentleness of his touch as he cleaned the cut suggested the concern that had been missing from his words. It had been… nice.

After the shower John redressed the cut and pulled on pyjama bottoms and one of his more comfortable long-sleeved shirts, resolving not to go anywhere for the rest of the evening. It had been a long twenty-four hours beginning with tackling Sherlock in Ireland and ending with shooting an assassin through the head. But standing in the empty living room he suddenly felt uncertain about what to do. He realised he'd been unconsciously looking forward to a night in with his flatmate. Thanks to both Switzerland and Ireland they hadn't actually spent any time together at Baker Street since he'd left Mary's house, and he found he was eager to fall back into the old routine he hadn't yet acknowledged how much he'd missed.

Of course he enjoyed being out on a case as much as Sherlock did, but whenever he had missed Sherlock—when he thought Sherlock was dead or while his marriage was unravelling—it was the memories of their quieter nights in that came back to him the most frequently.

Sherlock had a surprising affinity for children's games. (John had been absolutely floored the first time Sherlock had walked into the living room, stopped in front of his chair, clasped his hands behind his back, and asked, "Do you want to play Battleship with me?") Sherlock typically preferred strategy-based games like draughts or chess or Sequence, but on occasion would suggest something sillier like Operation (John was pleased to play at least one game at which he could regularly beat Sherlock) or even Go Fish. Sherlock had no interest in resource/money accumulation games, refusing to play Monopoly and being decidedly uncooperative on the night John and Mike Stamford had tried to explain Settlers of Catan to him. (They needed a third player and John had mistakenly thought Sherlock might like it.)

"I don't want wheat, wheat is boring," he'd said.

"Ok, I'll trade you wheat for wood," John replied patiently.

"John, if there was anything more boring than wheat it would certainly be wood."

"Brick?"

"Is this a joke?"

And of course there was always Cluedo.

But often the appeal of evenings at 221B was just sharing the space. Out of all the hair-raising, life-threatening, bizarre and incredible events they had been though, interestingly the clearest memories—in his years away from Baker Street, the memories that came back to him with the strongest sensory power—were an array of seemingly banal moments from the 221B living room: Watching Sherlock's intense concentration on a microscope from over the top of a medical journal; Sherlock leaning over his shoulder to look at something he'd found on his laptop; Sherlock proudly announcing a pleasing experiment result or flinging a disappointing one out the window; Sherlock berating the telly; Sherlock laughing out loud at his comments about certain members of the media or Scotland Yard; finding new places to hide Sherlock's cigarettes; Sherlock's stunned expression when, after whinging on for an hour, John threw a packet of biscuits at his head.

John never thought he would feel so at ease living with such a difficult personality. He'd been shocked to recognise how well he and Sherlock got on. There was a calm comfort (which paradoxically included blowtorches and the occasional appearance of murderers) in 221B that he'd missed sorely since his falling out with Mary or, perhaps more accurately, since the night he'd returned to an empty flat after Sherlock had jumped off the roof of Barts.

But John supposed something like 'Our First Night Back as Flatmates' would fall under the 'sentimental' category, and therefore wasn't something Sherlock was likely to acknowledge. So he set about typing up the rest of the notes from their newest case, ordering a takeaway, and then hooking his laptop up to the telly to watch some old Flying Circus episodes. The absurdity and general silliness of the Monty Python series was a welcome familiarity and pleasant contrast to the relentless drama of his real life.

He couldn't believe how much had happened since Sherlock arrived in Ireland the day before. Being around Sherlock was a consistently stressful, dangerous, exhausting experience, and he thought—as the clock read midnight and he felt his eyes getting heavy and he shifted to a more horizontal position on the couch—that he wouldn't trade it for anything.

When Sherlock walked back into the flat around four-thirty in the morning he was surprised to see John sleeping on the couch.

Sherlock had almost forgotten what it was like to come home to a flat that wasn't empty. He regarded John, who was curled on the couch wearing a long-sleeved shirt and pyjama bottoms. He took a step closer and John stirred.

"Sherlock," he said with his eyes closed, pulling himself up to a sitting position. He blinked, attempting to focus through the haze of sleep. He looked dazed—the kind of confusion that results from being jerked directly out of REM. "Are you leaving?"

"Just got home," Sherlock said, tilting his head to the side. John seemed to still be half-asleep.

"You should stay," John mumbled, standing unsteadily and walking toward him.

Before Sherlock could respond John's hands were on his scarf, pulling it free from his neck. His fingers tugged at the buttons of Sherlock's coat as he endeavoured to pull it off. Sherlock stood motionless as John dropped his scarf and coat to the floor.

"Don't leave," he said, gazing disoriented at the floor. With mussed hair and soft shirt he looked like the warmth and comfort of sleep.

"I'm not going to leave," Sherlock said, entranced by his flatmate's unordinary behaviour.

"Ok," John mumbled, walking off toward the stairs. "Ok."

Sherlock watched John half-sleepwalk (fully sleepwalk?) up to his bedroom and remained standing in the living room after he'd gone.

He'd been right before. If John went mad he really would still like him.