In this chapter:
"It had been two days since the party, two days since Sherlock had run away from him with a broken hand, giving no explanation.
John still asked himself how the detective had gained that injury. Had he been tortured?
For how long?
And where the fuck had Mycroft been when Sherlock had needed him?"
CHAPTER 6
John sat up on the couch and breathed deeply. His head pounded and his body seemed to be trembling with the intensity of it.
Nightmare, again. If he could even call it that.
Despite all the darkness in the living room, it was still early afternoon.
He stood up and walked to the window, looking down at the street and trying not to feel like a prisoner. It was a ridiculous notion. It was just food poisoning, for Christ's sake, not the end of the world, but he couldn't help the angst that curled in base of his spine every time he woke up from a nightmare.
He straightened his back and tried to will away the reminiscences of it. He always woke up jittery after that kind of nightmare, and all his worst thoughts ricocheted inside his skull. Every time he was asleep felt like a summary of the two years he had spent thinking Sherlock was dead. Every time he opened his eyes he had to follow the ritual of remembering and forgetting, almost crying and almost laughing hysterically over the fact that Sherlock had died, and then he hadn't.
The thought that Sherlock being alive still caused him that much pain made John more confused than he could begin to face while treating his damned food poisoning. That should have been his first concern at the moment – not his own never ending monologue about Sherlock and his death, Sherlock and their life and just... Sherlock.
John's mind was playing tricks on him. For the past two days John had been dreaming about conjectures, making assumptions about what had happened to Sherlock while he was away. He had tossed and turned in his sleep, while his brain supplied him with distorted imagery of what Sherlock could have endured, and John had no possible way of knowing for sure.
Sherlock would never tell him, he knew that much.
Sherlock always appeared bloodied and beaten in John's dreams. But now his bruised and broken form stood in the middle of a dark room while a group of unknown faces laughed at his suffering and abused his body. In John's nightmares, Sherlock never let out a word.
He tried to shake off the feeling that Sherlock might have done exactly that.
John would never know. He hadn't been there to help Sherlock in real life, just as he could never change the inevitable outcome of his nightmares.
Death. Over and over again.
John felt nausea remembering the violence he had inflicted on Sherlock on the day he had reappeared.
In some ways, John felt like the culprit in those nightmares because he could never do a damn thing. It made him want to crawl out of his skin, to dream of Sherlock's pain and be the one to have caused it. His stomach turned and turned, clearly trying to climb out of his mouth.
John swallowed hard and breathed deeply but shakily.
It had been two days since the party, two days since Sherlock had run away from him with a broken hand, giving no explanation.
John still asked himself how the detective had gained that injury. Had he been tortured?
For how long?
And where the fuck had Mycroft been when Sherlock had needed him?
John came back over to the couch and dropped his body heavily on it.
It wasn't his fault, John told himself for the thousandth time. Sherlock working alone for Mycroft wasn't John's fault, just as those two years hadn't been his fault. Sherlock had left him alone, John couldn't have known – that had been exactly the point, apparently. Mycroft, Molly, and every tramp in London had been allowed to know, but not John.
John would have got in the way of the great Sherlock Holmes.
He drank what was left of the lukewarm glass of water on the coffee table. It went burning down his throat like a mouthful of sand.
John looked at the fabric samples Mary had left for him in the morning. Wedding stuff, as they got used to calling them. A dozen tones of pink that looked exactly the same. For the life of him, John couldn't see any difference between salmon and baby pink. John only knew one shade of pink – the pink-lady pink – and that one wasn't among the samples.
He didn't know what Mary could possibly gain from waiting for his opinion, but he understood that she needed him to assist her. Mary didn't have a mother to help her choose one dress from the other, or to help her pick the best flowers. In a way, she and John were the same. John didn't have any one else either. He could relate.
Mary at least had her friends. John, on the other hand...
He picked up the pieces of different fabrics and rubbed them between his forefinger and thumb, pretending he had some idea of what he was doing. They kind of felt all the same, and John wasn't the one who was going to wear any of it anyway. He was completely hopeless at wedding stuff.
He tried to get to the point and selected two random pinks that looked just as pinkish as all the others, but were nearer him. It was as good a criteria as any, he supposed. He rubbed them in his hands again and thought that maybe one was smoother than the other. He would pick that one.
There, he thought. Checked.
He still had cake samples and all kind of pastries to try out – which he couldn't do. Just the thought of all that sugar in his stomach was more than he could bear. John had looked at the fluffy frostings and creamy fillings once, and it had turned his stomach in revulsion. He suspected they all tasted the same, since he didn't really have a sweet tooth. Mary could eat a whole cake and be good to go, but John could only eat a thin slice and that was that. Funny enough, his time at Baker Street had been when he had enjoyed more cakes than ever in his life. Mrs Hudson's goodies were simply irresistible, and they had had the unbeatable appeal of not have being baked in Sherlock's kitchen.
John snorted to himself remembering the time he had tried to use their oven. One could trust Sherlock to leave two different species of poisonous spiders living freely there – 'It's for experiment, John, obviously'. John had given up complaining and had sat on the floor laughing until tears of mirth had ran down his face. Frankly, with Sherlock it was the only possible outcome sometimes.
Other times, all John wanted to do was to curl in a ball and pretend Sherlock had never happened to him.
He sighed and laid down on the couch, turning on his side. He could feel the beginning of a headache – or maybe it was the middle of it, since he had been feeling it intermittently for days. Thinking about all the Sherlock drama didn't help at all.
His whole body ached. His insides were still fighting the damn caper sauce. Nobody else had presented any reaction to it, but John's immune system had been failing him for quite some time. He asked himself how Sherlock, of all people, had known exactly what caused John illness. Of course he had known, he was Sherlock Holmes, but how had he not deleted John's choice of sauce? John himself still didn't know why he had had that reaction. Apparently he would have to call Sherlock about his own medical history, and how fucked up was that?
It made him feel silly. There had been a time when he had been that person to Sherlock too. Now Sherlock sustained injuries and John was the last one to know.
John tried to clear that cloud of thoughts. He was getting more and more tired of denying the first instinct of being there again for Sherlock each day.
After the party, John had been left wondering what to do if Sherlock didn't accept to be his best man.
It shouldn't have been so surprising, but John was suddenly presented with the obvious fact that he didn't have anyone else who could possibly play the part. John had some rugby mates, sure. He still had contact with old army friends, of course. But not a single one of those people was that important.
No one had been as important as Sherlock.
Still was.
Sherlock was important. John was torn between the obvious realisation and wanting to deny it, even if uselessly.
Sherlock was damn important. So much so that John could barely forget the fact that he had sustained a broken hand and John wasn't around to help him.
John might have been pretending that he didn't see that, but it was the truth.
Sherlock had changed everything in so many ways – good and bad – and John couldn't just sit in the dark and will their story away. It wasn't as simple as that. His own mind was having none of it, his own body reminded him again and again that Sherlock would always be there.
It was infuriating – it really was. After everything John had gone through, he had to admit to himself that he didn't have anyone else.
And it wasn't because other people in John's life weren't worth it, but because John had never felt the need to have anyone else around while Sherlock was there.
Lying in the darkness, John looked at his own feet and sighed at the admission.
Girlfriends had come and gone, and John had met his other mates now and again, but Sherlock had been there every day, right in front of him, being obnoxious and brilliant in a way that had left John out of breath from day one.
John had immersed himself in it – with the life they had, the crimes, the blog, the flat. John had coated himself in Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson. He had done that, he had been the one to let his whole life float around a mad bastard in a dramatic coat. And he had fucking loved it, had basked in it, had cherished it.
John had had a fine little bubble that had been destroyed in the most cruel and excruciating way. It was to be expected that John still didn't have anyone else. Two years later and he still didn't have anything else apart from Mary – beautiful Mary who had saved him from a life of oblivion.
John rubbed his hands together and looked at his own fingers. He instinctively soothed his trigger finger.
What did it say about him that he had laced himself in that life so completely that now it glowed red in his memory whenever he dreamed about it? Most important of all: what did it say about him that he still couldn't see himself having a life disconnected from it?
John had to be honest. He lifted his head and looked at the ceiling. He had never been a coward, he had to accept the inexorable truth.
Sherlock wouldn't go away. He would never be away from John's life. Not only because he was a git, but because he was John's best friend. He had been John's whole world when John had needed him the most.
Sherlock wouldn't go away because John would never tell him to. There, that was the truth. He would never really want it, never mind how many damn hours he spent on the couch willing his nausea away.
Sherlock was a train wreck, sure. He had always been, and he had run John over a long time ago.
The inexorable truth was that John wouldn't change him for the world. He had to admit that for the sake of any shred of mental stability he could still hold for himself.
If Sherlock didn't accept to be John's best man, John would simply not have one. There wasn't anyone else for the job, John did not want anyone else for best man.
Obvious as it could seem, the thought actually felt a bit freeing. It was like accepting death, like stopping praying for a miracle.
John laughed out loud at the analogy. Only Sherlock could be so traumatic that John could compare him to dying and not feel inappropriate in the least. Maybe John was so fucked up that he had a death wish or something. That was one way of explaining the inevitable pull he always felt towards Sherlock and the mad possibilities that came with him.
John tried not to worry about Sherlock not accepting to be his best man. Even though it was possible.
John hadn't been around in the last months and had refused to come along to the crime scenes Sherlock had dared to invite him to. It was possible that after being repelled, Sherlock had simply given up on working with him for good. Maybe doing Mycroft's legwork was Sherlock's way of showing that he didn't need Doctor John Watson as his partner anymore.
Well, screw him, John thought. His broken hand clearly spoke otherwise. He needed John. Maybe he had never needed John's friendship or comfort or partnership, but he certainly needed John's gun and John to pull the trigger. John would never hesitate to do it if Sherlock was in danger.
John didn't know what he would have to do to be around Sherlock again and maintain his emotional defences, but at that very moment, he discovered that it didn't matter. Trying to stay away wasn't doing him any good - that much was obvious – and John was about to take a giant step in his life, he was about to get married, he didn't want to do it without Sherlock. He had to be there at the wedding with John. It was the only possible way.
Oddly enough, just now John was realising he didn't want his life to be divided between the time he was the blogger and the time he was a married man. Sherlock had accepted John as the veteran army-doctor John would always be, they would work it out this new dynamic. Of course they would, John thought.
Because if Sherlock was John's best friend, John was Sherlock's.
He wasn't the only friend Sherlock had anymore – John had a feeling that those two years had changed more than Sherlock would be comfortable admitting. But John was still important. Of course he was.
Of course Sherlock would accept to be his best man.
Sherlock... The Hat Detective, the lunatic genius, the high-functioning sociopath, the undead man.
John swallowed thickly and felt his heart sink with woe. Sherlock might not accept it. John hadn't really asked anything, he had let Janine do it, for Christ's sake. Maybe Sherlock had run away from the boredom of the oh-so-normal life John now lived. Sherlock might not want any part in it. Maybe that talk had been Sherlock trying to turn it down smoothly.
John was getting angry at himself. Now he was thinking of Sherlock as some reasonable human being with any notion of social convention. Sherlock would never let an opportunity to tell John not to be boring or to roll his eyes at John's outdated sense of adequacy. It was just how things were. Sherlock hadn't been trying to turn John down. If he eventually did that, he would be spirited and cunning, obnoxious and hateful. John would take all of it.
He walked to the guest room and opened the door of wardrobe. Mary had hung Sherlock's coat and scarf pristinely and suggested that John took them to Sherlock at Baker Street. John had refused to do it, but now he thought that maybe they would be his best excuse to pop at Sherlock's flat unannounced.
Sherlock's flat. The thought still rang on his own brain like a siren. He made a mental note of never saying that out loud.
Without a second thought, John smoothed the lapel of the coat, feeling the rough fabric and acknowledging the fact that he could tell Sherlock's coats from any other coats by touch alone. It had been a surviving technique and it had helped them more times than John could count. It didn't matter how many ridiculous posh and unnecessarily flipping coats Sherlock had – and he did have too many – John would always be able to tell them apart. It had apparently been so obvious that Sherlock had deemed necessary to make John see a bloodied coat to make the lie more credible.
If John were Sherlock, he would be able to tell where Sherlock had been by simply sniffing the coat and the scarf.
John wish he could do that. He asked himself if Sherlock had used this coat and this scarf wherever he had been beaten or had broken his arm. Sherlock would probably be able to tell in which country the coat had been. Definitely. He would definitely be able to do it. If the coat was John's Sherlock would be able to tell the mood John was in when he had put it on.
The thought made John snort, but it was humourless. John had always been so plain and simple. Sherlock had played him as he had saw fit. He would always do it, John would have no illusions about it anymore.
He took the scarf of the hanger and squeezed it between his hands, then brought it to his nose, taking a deep breath, trying to sharpen his mind and be Sherlock for a minute. He tried to associate the smell with any clue he could gather, but it was obviously fruitless.
The only thing John could scent was Sherlock. And maybe Baker Street. Or maybe one and the other were so intrinsically connected in John's olfactory channels that John could not tell them apart. There could never be one without the other – not to John, anyway.
He hung the scarf again and closed the door of the wardrobe. He would return it and the coat to Sherlock personally.
Maybe he could trick him into being his best man in the process.
Tricking Sherlock Holmes...
Yeah, right.
Hey guys. As you might have noticed, I haven't posted my little heartbreaking fic yet. Blame my beta and her feelings for that. Hahaha. Anyway, I have to thank Archie for being the Sam to my Frodo in all writing things, for always having a word to cheer me up and for coming along with me on this.
If you'd like to chat about this plot, or about of the show, come talk to me on tumblr: sureaintmebabe . tumblr . com or leave me a message!