You are more than allowed to get mad at me for my tardiness; I promise you I'm trying to do better. Thank you for your patience, my dears!

Painful Awareness

The scale of a Holmes Christmas Morning was smaller than John thought it would be, considering that David and Anita roomed over half the family in their home during the holidays.

"Where is everyone?" asked John incredulously when he went into the kitchen, toting his purchased gifts under his arm, and saw Anita in her bathrobe, grating a bar of chocolate over the whipped cream in her coffee.

"Hullo, John," she said, glancing up at him, tucking shadowy hair behind her ear. "They clear out pretty early to head over to Grandma Holmes's house for breakfast. We're a bit insistent that the immediate family spend some time with each other on Christmas morning." She tightened the rope on her bathrobe (a very fluffy, soft-looking bathrobe, John noted a bit enviously) and asked, "Can I get you something? Tea, coffee, cocoa?"

"Tea would be lovely. Whatever you've got." John sat down at the island in the middle of the kitchen, rubbing his eyes.

Anita filled the kettle and pulled a container of tea leaves from the pantry and looked at the clock above the sink. "David will be up any minute now, and Sherlock."

"Mycroft?"

"I don't think he sleeps."

"This seems like something that you should know, being his mother."

"I still have a great deal of influence over Mycroft, but if I tell him to go to bed, he'll give me a dirty look and insist that the fate of the country is more important than his rest."

"Seems awfully dramatic," remarked John, leaning on his hand.

"Don't let him hear you say that," Anita told him, a fox grin lighting her face. She sat back down in her chair and gazed at John inquisitively. "You haven't told us why you're here."

"What do you mean by that?"

"Am I allowed to ask why you aren't spending Christmas with your family?"

John hesitated, staring at a saltshaker. "My family has some…difficulties. I love them, but I wouldn't want to spend Christmas with them."

Anita didn't prod him for more, and John was grateful for that, but he found that he could trust her. "My dad walked out on my family when I was ten years old. He'd lost his job and fell into a rut taking drugs, and wasn't supporting us- monetarily, emotionally. We wanted him to stop shooting up, of course; we didn't care about the money as much as we cared about him. We were having a rough time of it, though. He left one day. I came home from school to find my mother piss-drunk on the floor crying, and my dad's clothes were gone from the closet, along with a few other things of his. I haven't seen him since. My mother is an alcoholic who cries and gets drunk every time I see her, but she's been getting better since I left for college. Probably because I look so much like my dad and she doesn't have to see me anymore. My sister's having an emotional breakdown following a failed marriage and doesn't want to see me. Or Mum. I respect her space; she was always someone who was strongest when she dealt with things herself before she opened up to others. I love my family, but…Christmas with them would not be happy. Right now, we're healthiest left to our own devices."

Anita pursed her lips in concern. "John, you need family. People to rely on."

John reached up and massaged the bridge of his nose, feeling a little embarrassed. "I have someone to rely on."

Anita looked blank for only a second, before her face broke out in a soft smile. "John, you are always welcome with our family. Sherlock cares about you immensely, and so do we. You're the first person he's ever been so fixed upon that he actually brought you home to meet us. He trusts you, which is more than what most people can say."

"Does Sherlock have many friends?"

"I can only think of a few, maybe one or two outside the family. Mike Stamford and I like to keep in touch. Other young men that Sherlock's managed to befriend are few and far between. You're the first that Mycroft has noticed, for instance. He called me quite soon after you and Sherlock met and said that you were going to be here for Christmas."

John could have smacked his forehead. "Mycroft…"

"You called?" asked Sherlock's older brother daintily as he came into the kitchen. "I heard my name. All good, I hope."

"Mycroft, I didn't meet you until a few months after Sherlock and I started living together; how is it that you knew I was going to be coming for Christmas?"

The kettle was boiling and Anita poured him some tea, handing him the tin of tea leaves and a strainer. Mycroft smiled foxily at him (an expression, John noted, that had crossed Anita's face earlier) and said, "I'm rather good at guessing these things."

"Were David and Sherlock up and moving about?" asked Anita as John let the tea leaves steep into the hot water. He recalled something she'd said to him only the day before: "It's rather like tea leaves in water. You have water- versatile, universal, unique in its own way- but when you add tea leaves, what once was just water suddenly becomes tea. It's completely saturated with the flavor and it changes, often for the better."

He felt his face flushed (for goodness' sake, why?) as he looked down at the wrapped gifts in his lap. Sherlock's was sitting on the bottom.

John stood and went over to the tree in the other room, placing the gifts gently underneath the tree. He turned when he heard a familiar voice say, "For all that I'm good at getting answers, I was never good at guessing what Christmas gifts were."

Sherlock stood there with an easy expression on his face, halfway between a smile and a pensive look, his hair messy with sleep and his bathrobe sitting gently over his clothes. He smiled a little more when John made eye contact with him and suddenly John was aware of a warmth in his throat, but sincerely hoped it wasn't due to the one emotion he'd so often coupled it with.

Prompt was from Javien Deluke, and it was: fox grin