Two weeks.
Well, at least your collarbone's healed.
It really didn't make these last two weeks any less useless.
John had taken to sleeping in- very, very much in. It was nearing noon by the time he'd finally woken up, dragged himself out of bed, showered and dressed. Years in the army had instilled in him a preference to rise with the sun, but as the days wore on he realised that the less time he had to be awake, the less bored he would be.
They weren't even letting him outside.
They would be the 'cleaners-' people hired by Mycroft to keep his childhood home in a state of immaculate cleanliness. They came in at eight to start dusting- dusting, vacuuming, polishing. There were no plastic covers on the sofas- Holmes Manor rested in an eternal state of potentially, maybe, one say soon being lived in.
The room that he'd been given was comfortable- extremely so- but there was only so much enjoyment John could get out of sitting around an old manor and reading leather-bound medical texts. The food was delicious, the cleaners friendly, but the house looked almost unchanged in one hundred years and that set John on edge a little. He felt like he was living in a museum. He couldn't imagine how a child could grow up here.
Well, he guessed he could imagine how a child could grow up here and end up like Sherlock.
He'd spent the first few days in a respectful sort of daze, wandering tentatively through the halls and showing up in the wide, empty dining room when he was called. He ate with the rest of the cleaners who, like him, seemed a little wary about his presence at first but slowly warmed up to the situation.
By the end of the first week, however, he'd gotten a little more daring- he'd fixed himself a snack in the kitchens, took the stairs down to the ground floor and spent some time in the huge sitting room, flirted with a maid or two.
There was just so much room in here. You could get lost in this house- no, John had gotten lost in this house. He'd found himself in a wing of unused bedrooms that, while dusted and clean, had that lonely feeling of a home with no soul. The entire house felt that way- he wondered if anyone actually lived here, or if Mycroft just kept the servants in a job and with a place to stay because you never knew when you'd need to hide your younger brother's best friend at a moment's notice.
It was jarring, how well the place was preserved- there were no nicks on the wall, and if there had been, they were quickly filled in and painted over. No spots on the tablecloths, no coffee rings on the night stands- It was the easiest thing to forget that this wasn't a hotel, or a business room, or just a place with no people in it. John had become itchy with a very Sherlockian desire to break a vase, scratch the table- anything to make this place feel less like a museum.
It wasn't until the second week that he'd found any sign life from the place.
There was a stain in the library. On one of the chairs- someone had spilled tea (or coffee, he couldn't tell) on the plush arm. He wouldn't have noticed it if he hadn't sat in it, trying to milk as much enjoyment out of he could out of eighteenth century surgery techniques all while killing an hour or two. It took his attention- he'd closed the book and set it on the side table, peering closer to inspect the stain. So, someone had lived here. A house this old and it had taken him ten days to affirm that- Someone had sat in this chair, reading these books in this library.
After that, his days had been filled with the hunt for old life.
There were books with pen marks in them- yellowing pages published in the nineteenth century rendered valueless by a toddler, tracing over words and scratching over whole passages.
Deep under many coats of paint, a faint etching of TH 1943 on the windowsill of an unused bedroom on the fourth floor.
And there were stickers on the dining room table- not on the face of it, but underneath, stickers that appeared on fruit and old, old postcards and even a cluster of seventies-styled Superman stickers near the centre. Sherlock would have been about- five? Four? John didn't even know how old he was. Younger than himself, definitely. But not by much.
It was hard to imagine a toddler Sherlock, hiding under the tablecloth and sticking superheroes up next to his fathers' father's stamps.
And until today, that was all John had to go off of. Four little accidents that had not been polished over throughout the years that gave evidence to the fact that this was a place that many people loved and lived in throughout the years. How was that even possible?
Though, if the rest of the Holmes' were anything like the ones he'd already known, their manor was most likely chock full of nostalgia induced by wobbly chairs and discrepancies in the wallpaper.
They probably spent their Christmas dinners correcting each other about the nature of the hairline cracks in the pictureframes.
He had started becoming bored of exploring, longing for action, information, a little contact with the outside world- anything- when he'd wandered into a wing he hadn't seen yet. That wasn't out of the ordinary, the manor was huge and there were many wings John hadn't come across yet, and he'd set about poking into rooms and opening drawers as if there'd be a folder titled MORIARTY for him just as long as he kept looking.
He realised something was different when he opened a door to find a room coated in a visible layer of dust. The servants here cleaned every day- the other rooms in the wing were clean, even the outer door handle had been polished- and yet, it looked as if this room had often been skipped.
A feeling of secrecy swept over John, and he would have felt the need to back out of the room and keep on in a less intimate place if it wasn't for the familiar-sized rectangle sunstained onto the wallpaper.
There were old paperbacks on the bookshelves- three of them, floor to ceiling and orderly, overstuffed with books on the legal system, the digestive system, the Huston, Texas Public Transportation System.
He didn't open the closet, but he was sure to find immaculately-tailored suits a few sizes smaller than he was used to, maybe a spectacular coat and a few pair of expensive shoes.
John found himself sitting on the edge of the full-sized bed, hearing springs groan under him from disuse.
He'd been dead for three weeks. Give or take. He didn't mind the 'being dead' part as much as he hated being cut off from the rest of the world- He had no access to a computer, television, even just a newspaper. He had no idea what was going on with Moriarty, where he was, what he was up to.
Moreover, he had no idea what was going on with Sherlock.
Was that Mycroft's way of telling John that prospects were bleak? That he didn't want John to see just how close Sherlock was to being charged with kidnapping, fraud, murder, whatever else they were pinning on him, because if he did Mycroft thought (knew) that John would do something brash? Was it the opposite, that there was really nothing of mass importance to tell him and therefore nothing to tell him at all? He couldn't predict Mycroft like he could predict Sherlock. He had absolutely no idea what the older Holmes would do.
He found himself pulling open the nighttable drawer, curious even after he'd promised himself he wouldn't snoop, not after he'd realised that this room was different from the others, dustier and dirtier and a hell of a lot more personal. An old, dead flashlight. A wooden yo-yo (really?). A tiny brown notebook.
No. I am not going to read Sherlock's teenage diary.
Of course he was going to read Sherlock's teenage diary.
John rustled through the pages, rigid and yellowing with age, surprised to see more or less exactly what he'd expected. It was a calandar for the year 1992, though most of the dates were unused. There were, however, newspaper clippings shoved next to each full date- notes on cases that this young Sherlock probably never got the chance to work on. Criminals that he never got to catch. Innocent people that he never got to vindicate.
He'd spent his entire life (literally so- how old was he when Carl Powers died?) helping people and yet acted like a machine.
You machine.
He thought John was dead. He watched him jump- probably saw him fall. Even Sherlock wouldn't be able to see through the trick- how could he? John jumped from a seven story building. There were no lines to hold him up, no trampoline on the sidewalk. John himself wasn't entirely certain how it was pulled off, seeing as he was in the process of being drugged even as he spoke to Sherlock. There was no way Sherlock saw through it.
He thumbed through the pages written by his friend, probably twenty years prior to their meeting. He wondered idly when the last time Sherlock had even set foot into this room.
He didn't know what gave him the idea, and he certainly wouldn't be able to justify himself were you to ask him about it afterward, but in that moment John pulled himself off of the bed and crossed the room to the desk, grabbed a pen and turned to today's date.
Thurs. 21st May, 1992
It was an empty date- There had been a triple murder the day before and arson later that week, it seemed, but nineteen years ago this day had, to Sherlock at least, not been noteworthy.
He turned the pen a few times in his hand before biting his lip, pressing the tip onto the paper and writing, just under the date, in his boxed, uppercase handwriting:
JOHN WATSON
He frowned at the name, wondering if he should have written something a little more… Showy, or maybe less; he didn't know how many people looked through this room, but if Mycroft popped in here even for a bit he was sure that the man would know exactly what he did. The chances of Sherlock even getting his message were- well, they were abysmal.
He still felt as if he had to try.