Part 6: Of Freshly Laundered Shirts

The rooster was still crowing when John woke up. It was, he felt, profoundly unfair that that of all things should be what followed him out of the dream – that, and, as he found when he got out of bed, the sticky mess on the sheets. Strongly feeling the need for a shower or at least a damp flannel, John pulled on a pair of pyjama bottoms (odd that – he was almost certain that he'd at least worn his boxers to sleep), a t-shirt, and his dressing gown, and he went downstairs to investigate.

He fully expected to find an actual cockerel, its plumage aglow with gold and gray silver, emerald greens and ruby reds. Instead, he came upon one of the builders in the foyer who was swearing colorfully as he stabbed at the keys of his mobile, which in turn was emitting noises like a henhouse in distress.

"Sorry," said the man sheepishly when he noticed John blinking at him from the stairs. "My kid got his hands on this last night. Now it goes off like a bleeding barnyard whenever I get a text."

"Ah." John scrubbed at his eyes. He really had been hoping for something more fantastical. "I get it," he said, trying not to be unfriendly. "Someone did that to a friend of mine once. As a prank. Made his phone make a rude noise whenever she texted."

The man brightened. "And how'd he get it to stop?"

"He, er, didn't, actually. I don't think he minded."

"Well, I mind," said the builder sullenly as the crowing finally died down.

"Yeah, so did I." John drummed his fingers on the bannister. And because it was what you did when you had company, he offered the man a cup of tea, or coffee, if that was what he liked. He was more than a little relieved to be told that Mrs. Hudson had taken care of that particular social responsibility (with biscuits), and went back upstairs to wash up, followed by shouts from downstairs demanding to know if Gary had managed to make his idiot phone shut up yet.

There was nothing more unusual than that in the sitting room or the kitchen or the bathroom, and John went so far as to peek into Sherlock's bedroom after his shower. He knew there was something coming, there had to be, he could feel it in his teeth and in his bones, a heady anticipation sparking through his nerves so that he could hardly breathe.

Still, there continued to be a distinct lack of somethings when he returned to his bedroom. The sheets were as he'd left them, all crumpled and creased, and the rest of his things were exactly as they had been last night – except for the golden microscope, which was nowhere to be found, but then John had expected that.

It was disappointing, of course, and John might have gone back to bed, if only to wait for the woefully misdirected sense of fizzy anticipation to dissipate, but his bed was not a good spot for moping in its current state, and beyond that, it definitely wasn't the sort of mess he'd leave for Mrs. Hudson. (It would have given him some measure of comfort to know that it wasn't just his stains that would make the sheets light up like a Christmas tree under black light, but he knew no practical way of determining that – pestering Molly Hooper to do a DNA test may have been practical for consulting detectives, but it didn't seem to be a feasible option for ex-army doctors.)

As he stripped the bed of its sheets, something soft fell to the floor, and John stooped to pick it up.

It was a shirt – a white dress shirt, heart-stoppingly familiar to John in all aspects from the designer on the label to the slightly singed cuffs. It even smelled familiar, though John stopped short of clutching the shirt to his face and inhaling. In fact, the only thing about it that he didn't recognize were the three greasy tallow stains on the front of it.

John sat on the half-bare mattress and rubbed at one of the stains with the tip of his finger. There are rules and there are rules, and John thought he knew how this was supposed to go. Besides, he reasoned, he was going to do laundry anyway.

While the sheets tumbled in the washer, he googled grease stains (searching specifically for tallow stains didn't yield much), and grease stains on cotton, and the care of fine cotton dress shirts. And as the sheets spun around in the dryer, he rubbed at the stains with some lard he'd begged off of Mrs. Hudson to loosen the tallow, and he rubbed at the marks left by the lard with chalk he'd found in a drawer in the sitting room, slightly scared that he might be overdoing it, but even more concerned that he would only substitute one kind of grease stain for another. But he need not have worried, for no sooner had John dipped the shirt into the warm sudsy water in the kitchen sink than it was white as driven snow, and even whiter than that.

He hung the shirt up to dry on a line in the bathroom (one of the articles he'd found said that tossing it in the dryer would damage the points on cuff and collar). While he waited for it to become merely damp instead of dripping wet so that he could iron it, he made his bed with the clean sheets, and he took the skull downstairs to keep him company while he had a cup of tea – it was looking as restive as John felt, and it seemed a little more content in its old spot on the mantelpiece.

Lunchtime came, and the shirt was still heavy with water, so John went to get himself fish and chips from the shop down the street. Sherlock had been friendly with the owners, and there were sometimes extra chips to look forward to, which was always nice.

There was somebody in the flat when he got back. (Damned if John could tell how he knew – perhaps it was the crooked knocker on the front door, or maybe the subtle difference in air pressure on the first floor landing?) His first thought was that it was one of the builders come to do something more to the windows, and he was, by turns, guilty that he had lunch while whoever was in the flat didn't, annoyed that he'd have to wait until they left to eat it, and then guilty again at feeling annoyed and thus prepared to share his lunch, if necessary, as a sort of vague apology for an almost-offense.

But it was not a builder at all.

Sherlock Holmes was standing at the window. He turned as John stepped slowly into the sitting room, his heart hammering so loudly in his chest that he would have sworn that that was what had made Sherlock turn.

"John," he said, much as he had in the dream, and his smile was small and rueful and relieved. His hands were in the pockets of his Belstaff coat, his blue scarf was around his neck, and beneath those, he had on a dark suit jacket and a brilliant white shirt. "I let myself in," he went on. "I don't think Mrs. Hudson heard me."

"She probably thought you were one of the builders. You've probably noticed. They're making 221C fit for – whatever it is 221C is fit for. Hiding mysterious trainers, I expect." John took one cautious step forward, then another and another until he could put his greasy parcel of food on the desk with exaggerated care. He'd said all of that in a rush, on autopilot, because he had to do something and talking seemed about right, even if it was the sort of talk that would have made Sherlock sneer (or burrow deeper into the cushions of the sofa if he was in the middle of a particularly good sulk). This was all gloriously real, but, at the same time, dangerously fragile: at some level, John half-believed that if he so much as suggested that anything was out of the ordinary, Sherlock would vanish and he would wake up alone in the upstairs bedroom. "I wish I'd known you were coming," he heard himself saying. "I could have gotten you lunch. It's fish and chips from that shop you like. Didn't get the mushy peas, though. I'd have gotten the mushy peas if I'd known you were—"

"…not dead," finished Sherlock. Now that John had stopped speaking, it became apparent that Sherlock had been talking as well, explaining things, because explaining things was what Sherlock did, and because, apparently, people didn't just come back to life through means eldritch and arcane and obviously illogical. There'd been something about little blue rubber balls and Molly Hooper and the great scene for street theater that was London and danger, great danger to John and…

And it didn't matter. Or, rather, it did matter, but was important now was that the two of them were moving closer to each other by degrees, as if drawn together by the irresistible gravitational force that is supposed to exist between two bodies of matter, until John had his arms around Sherlock's waist and Sherlock was clasping John to his chest, squashing his nose against his freshly laundered shirt.

Much later – after fish and chips, and tea, and more talking, and dragging Sherlock to Mrs. Hudson for confirmation, and yet more talking after that – John would find that the shirt he'd washed had disappeared from the bathroom. And later still, after Adair and Moran, a dumbfounded Lestrade, and a late night Chinese dinner, John would wonder if it was his imagination that had him remembering the shirt Sherlock was wearing as slightly damp to the touch.

But that would come later. Sherlock was still talking, crisp words tripping out of his mouth in a barely coherent torrent, about the prudence and necessity of disassembling Moriarty's network from the top down, and his long fingers gripped the back of John's jacket as though he was afraid that John would vanish if he let go. That made John laugh. Sherlock looked confused at that, and the perfect consternation on his face only made John laugh harder.

"I'm sorry," he said. "I'm afraid you'll have to go over all that stuff about Moran again – I didn't catch all of it, you were going too fast. But tell me," he continued, spreading his fingers wide to take in the texture of Sherlock's coat. "Tell me, while you were away, did you have any strange…dreams…?"

The question sounded funny now that he'd said it out loud, and Sherlock wrinkled his nose at him in a look that broadcasted a baffled What? across all significant wavelengths. John searched his eyes as if he could find memories there, of long empty corridors, of glass hills, of strange tokens, of sweat and tangled sheets…and Sherlock blinked.

"I might have," he said, "though if I did, I've deleted most of it. Utter rubbish. I think I was talking to the skull last night, if that means anything to you. What does it matter?"

Put like that, it didn't seem to matter at all. If he'd had time, John might have half-suspected that that might not have been the entire truth (that was a thing Sherlock did, no getting around that), but there was that gravitational pull again, and they were kissing, quite frantically, as though they'd looked at each other a little too long and simply couldn't help it any longer.

When they pulled apart, Sherlock looked dazed, like he'd been struck between the eyes and found it agreeable, and John was grinning all over his face. They could talk about Thursday dreams and tallow-stained shirts afterwards, when he was done yanking on Sherlock's coat to pull him down for another kiss – though that could just as easily have been Sherlock leaning down of his own volition a little too quickly.

"I knew you'd get there in the end," rasped the skull on the mantelpiece.

"Oh, sod off," said John Watson, smiling against Sherlock's lips.

The End

A few final notes:
1. I don't think I've said yet, but the title comes from the fact that East of the Sun and West of the Moon starts on a Thursday - a Thursday evening in autumn, with wild weather outside, to be precise. I liked that little factoid.
2. If there were to be a song rolling for the credits of this fic, it would be Elton John's "Someday Out of the Blue". I had it on a loop while I was editing this last chapter - though watching a cartoon Elton John wander about through El Dorado might have made me take a little longer than I would have otherwise. *guilty look* It felt appropriate.
3. A disclaimer: I read up on tallow/grease stains, but my practical experience is limited to blood stains (cold water + hydrogen peroxide) and henna stains (abandon all hope once they've set in, especially if they've got that awful blackening chemical additive).
4. Again this fic is for Batik. Thank you very, very much for your contribution to the relief efforts for Typhoon Haiyan victims, and I hope this is a satisfying enough happy Johnlock ending. :)
5. Shamefully enough, I am only now wrapping up my post-Reichenbach fic. I did love working on this one, though. It gave me an excuse to dredge up all sorts of stories that I didn't realize I missed, and, well, C.S. Lewis had all these brilliant things to say about the timelessness of fairy tales for people of all ages, and, of course, the man was right.
6. Thank you all for reading!