When Mycroft's caller I.D shows up on Sherlock's phone barely a week after he's left England – he's now in Liechtenstein, in a tiny village on the outskirts of Vaduz that's just invented running water – Sherlock doesn't answer.
About half a minute later he receives a text, and curses satellite phones.
It's about John. Don't hang up.
MH
The next time his ringtone, movement 1 of Vivaldi's Winter, sings out, Sherlock cuts it off before the second note.
"What happened?"
Sherlock wishes later that he could have cut the call short, could have thrown the phone to ground and crushed it beneath his feet.
He'd told John once that he didn't bother with unnecessary information. And this is unnecessary; more than that, it's irrelevant. It won't inspire him to move faster or work harder (not when he's doing the best he can, more than he thought was possible even for him.)
But Sherlock also once told John that he didn't care. Not about people. Not about anyone.
Sherlock can lie to anyone, but he refuses to lie to himself.
Mycroft calls again while Sherlock's on the roof of a train, nursing second-degree burns and carefully not feeling guilt over the ten thousand who are dead now because he happened to walk into their town.
I'm a fully-functioning sociopath- LIE.
LIE.
I don't care.
LIE.
Moriarty tried to kill me. Seriously tried to kill me.
TRUTH.
He doesn't need amusement anymore-
LIE.
He's got something else to give it to him.
TRUTH.
"It wasn't your fault."
"Lie," Sherlock answers tonelessly; both about the fact that Sherlock signed the death warrants of ten thousand people, and about Moriarty having anal intercourse with Sherlock's former roommate on Sherlock's bed.
Irrelevant(TRUTH)Idon'tcare(LIE.)
He can almost feel Mycroft's shrug through the phone. "Perhaps."
"Definitely."
Mycroft sighs, a sigh that says overworked, frustrated, reluctantly scared with barely the most minute of tonal inflections differentiating it fromSherlock's being a little twat again. "He's not going to leave John alone."
"I know."
"And it's not because of you anymore."
"I know."
The train pulls into Haifa late in the afternoon, but Sherlock's long gone by now, stowed away in the back of a convoy truck that's just been cleared to cross over into Jordan.
John; it's a word, a single word that says too many other things that make Sherlock's head hurt. It won't go away, and so he rebuilds his mind palace around it, a throbbing ache that makes him restless to get off the truck, to do what he's got to do, to get back home before it's too late.
To tell John what he'd been foolish enough to think he could do later.
One of the cameras in 221B (that Mycroft planted and Moriarty is smugly, frustratingly aware of) captures in stark, haunting detail the image of John driving a knife through his leg, blank and unflinching.
Mycroft has to physically stop Sherlock from throwing everything to waste.
The next morning, he's stopped two streets away from Baker Street, pull-pushed into a car by polite-but-toostrong men and forced into the backseat next to Anthea or Andrea or whatever Mycroft's little pet's name is.
And so he watches from a cell of gold-red walls and silk sheets, a reluctant voyeur to John Watson's fall.
He's going to win.
He's going to save John, the way John always saved him.
He's going to win.
Moriarty is at 221B again.
MH
It's not a Tuesday.
That night, ensconced in a room in Bathurst, Australia, he breaks two of the strings on his violin (G and E, symmetrical and impossible) and half the bow hairs.
He's almost done.
Two years and three months and he's almost done but it's not fast enough.
Mycroft still throws veiled insults his way via text or during the few phone conversations they have, but they're not the same, not now that nothing he says can do more to Sherlock than is already happening to him. Despite everything, Sherlock knows Mycroft cares about John, or at least respects (respected) him for who he is. He knows this frustrates Mycroft, that he can't do anything, can't make a move till Sherlock's finished and I can't give up I have to win-
John.
John.
Moriarty promised once, long ago (so long ago it's a dream, something he has to rummage around in his mind palace for) that he would burn Sherlock's heart right out of him.
"I'm sorry," John whispers into the empty apartment, "I'm sorry, Sherlock," and that's a last record for Mycroft's cameras as he clutches a box in his hands, a box of photographs and sweaters and Sherlock's scarf and a lonely gun for an ex-soldier. His clothing was moved the day before while John was at work, by faceless men and Moriarty grinning victory into the camera.
But it's not true. Moriarty hasn't burned the heart out of Sherlock.
It's just on fire, and it's a fire that isn't going to go out until John is safe.
Two years, nine months and twenty days; that's how long it's taken for Sherlock to realise, really realise, that anything about John isn't irrelevant, because if John isn't Sherlock's heart.
He is Sherlock, and Sherlock is going to save him.