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It was almost noon on a crisp fall day, but Sherlock still hadn’t emerged from his room. Sherlock had never been fond of lie-ins, so John decided to take advantage of the rare silence. He took out his laptop and created a blog entry for a case they had finished weeks ago but he hadn’t had time to write up yet.
It took a good three hours for him to finish and post it. He made himself some tea and a sandwich, then went back to sit in his chair and read, enjoying the fresh air coming in through the window.
By the time late afternoon rolled around, Sherlock was still in his room. John was starting to worry that something was actually wrong.
John walked down the hallway, pausing at Sherlock’s door. It was cracked open, but there were no signs of life within. John glanced back down the hallway, wondering if Sherlock had gone out without him noticing, but his Belstaff was still hanging on its hook.
“Sherlock?” John knocked on the door tentatively, but there was no response. He pushed it inward cautiously, stopping on the threshold.
Sherlock’s back was to him and he was under all the blankets, which were pulled up to his ears.
“Sherlock, are you okay?” John asked tentatively.
“Go away.” Sherlock’s voice was raspy and low.
“What’s wrong with you?” John took a couple of steps toward his bedside.
“There’s nothing wrong with me,” Sherlock said, but it was without his normal snark. He sneezed, which turned into a hacking cough.
“Right, nothing at all, obviously,” John said, sitting on the bedside and reaching over to feel Sherlock’s forehead. It was clammy but feverish, and his hair was plastered to his forehead.
“You’re burning up,” John observed.
“Mmph,” was the only response. He was trembling slightly, probably from the chills.
“I’ll be right back,” John said. Sherlock just closed his eyes again, and concern spiked in John’s chest. Sherlock was obviously very sick; he wasn’t even making any of his normal sarcastic remarks.
He got up and strode through the ensuite door to the bathroom, grabbing his medical kit and walking back into Sherlock’s room.
Sitting on the bedside again, he grasped Sherlock by the shoulders and pulled him gently onto his back. Sherlock didn’t protest, but he did wince slightly as if his joints and muscles ached at the movement.
John took the penlight out of his kit and held Sherlock’s eyelids back, one at a time, to flash the light into them. They were equal and reactive, though a bit more dilated and glassier than usual.
John felt Sherlock’s cheekbones and nose, then took out his stethoscope and lifted up Sherlock’s shirt. He tried not to think about the intimacy of all this--as if Sherlock were just any another patient--as he listened to Sherlock’s chest. “Breathe,” he said. Sherlock obeyed. “Again.” Sherlock’s deep breath turned into a hacking cough this time.
“Well, you don’t have pneumonia yet, so that’s good,” John said, replacing his stethoscope in his kit. “It seems like you’ve got the flu. I’m not even going to bother asking whether you got your flu jab this year.”
“Don’t ask questions--” Sherlock sneezed again, cutting himself off.
“--to which I already know the answers, right,” John muttered. He took out the bottle of paracetamol and shook out a few pills. “Here, take these.”
“This is unnecessary,” Sherlock said. He sniffled slightly, but his nose was so congested that he couldn’t really get any air through the passage.
“Just take it, please.”
Sighing as if it were a huge inconvenience, Sherlock opened his mouth and John placed them on his tongue. He grabbed the glass of water on Sherlock’s bedside and helped him drink.
“That should help,” he said, replacing the water.
Sherlock tried to sniff indignantly, but because he was so congested he couldn’t quite manage it.
John chewed his bottom lip. “You need to open up your sinuses and get some of the congestion out. Bath or shower, you choose.” Sherlock groaned and tried to turn over again.
“Don’t even think about it.” John caught him, hefting him up to sitting position on the side of the bed, then slinging Sherlock’s arm over his shoulder to help him toward the bathroom. “I promise you’ll feel better.”
“This is cruel and unusual punishment,” Sherlock said, going into another round of coughing. “I’m not even sick.”
John just rolled his eyes, helping him sit on the side of the tub. Sherlock leaned his head against the wall, breathing heavily, as if those few steps had exhausted him. John leaned over and ran the bath, turning it up hot enough that the room started filling with steam.
“Arms up,” he said, peeling Sherlock’s clammy sleeping shirt up off his chest. Sherlock tried to sit up, swaying slightly, and held up his arms high enough that John could pull the shirt off and throw it in the hamper.
“Okay, now bottoms,” John said. “You’ll have to stand up to get in the tub anyway.”
Sherlock looked up at him blearily, but he obeyed, placing a palm flat on the side of the wall and standing up enough that John could slip his pyjama bottoms down and off.
John hadn’t seen Sherlock naked since he’d been back, except when he’d been in the hospital after he’d been shot, but that was only from the waist up.
It felt different, somehow, to look at Sherlock’s body now. They weren't really simply flatmates anymore, but they weren’t really something more, either. John tried to keep his gaze at eye level as he helped Sherlock down into the tub.
Sherlock sighed, settling into the warm water, while John grabbed a washcloth and some soap. He sat on the side of the tub, soaping the cloth, but when he saw Sherlock’s back, he froze.
There were criss-crossed white lines up and down his back, dozens of them. There was no mistaking what they were. John hadn’t seen someone being tortured firsthand, but he knew what whip marks looked like.
“Sherlock,” he said, his voice not quite even. He reached over and touched one of the scars with his fingertips.
Sherlock was leaning forward slightly, his eyes closed and breathing ragged. John wasn’t even sure he’d heard him until he said, very quietly, “Serbia.”
John paused. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
Sherlock opened his eyes, but he kept his gaze forward. “It happened not long before I returned, and once I was back, it didn’t seem… relevant.”
John's jaw clenched as he tried not to imagine the amount of pain that would have had to be inflicted to cause those deep gashes. Feeling the raised skin under his fingertips was as painful as if his own flesh had been flayed.
“It happened right before you came back?”
Sherlock didn’t reply, but he nodded, once.
“You let me… I…” He had punched Sherlock over and over again, wrestling him to the floor onto his back. He must have ripped these wounds open anew, and Sherlock hadn’t said anything.
“I deserved that reaction,” Sherlock said simply.
“Sherlock--”
“It doesn’t matter anymore, John,” Sherlock interrupted, coughing again.
John felt like something was lodged in his throat. “You were going to go back there. Back to Serbia. Before Moriarty showed up. Would this have happened again?”
Sherlock turned his head to look up at him, his eyes still glassy, as if he were having trouble focusing. He tried to take a deep breath through his nose and coughed again. Instead of talking, he squeezed his eyes shut, nodding again.
John’s stomach dropped out. He had suspected it, he’d known it, even, deep down--but he hadn’t really let himself fully grasp it. They hadn’t talked about that day, not really, because they weren’t good at this stuff. They never talked about the fact that Sherlock had only shaken his hand and then walked off to his own execution.
Sherlock wouldn’t have come back. He would have died there, all alone, surrounded by enemies.
John’s knuckles were turning white from clutching the soap. “You would have actually given up your life so that I could stay with... her?” He couldn’t say her name, still, apparently. Not that it was her real name anyway.
Sherlock simply looked up at John with a bone-deep exhaustion. The condensation in the air was beading in his hair in a sort of halo. “I should think that, by now, it should be fairly obvious that I would do anything for you, John,” he said hoarsely.
There was nothing other than the sound of the running water, and neither of them looked away. John saw a world of pain in Sherlock’s eyes, pain he’d never let himself see before. It was the ghost of a thousand times he’d seen Sherlock look at him with Mary.
“Sherlock--”
“I’ll wash myself,” Sherlock interrupted, breaking the gaze and holding out his hand for the soap and cloth.
John hesitated before he obeyed, then reached over to turn off the tap.
“Let me know when you’re done, I’ll help you out. I’ll go change your sheets,” he said, standing up.
“Mmph,” Sherlock said, a noise of ambivalence.
Trying to keep some semblance of composure, John walked out of the bathroom. He closed the door behind himself, leaning back against it and closing his eyes. There was a tightness in his chest, not that different than what he’d felt on the day Sherlock had left him standing on the tarmac. Back then he’d had a tiny sliver of hope that Sherlock would pull a deus ex machina and return to him again. He hadn’t known that Sherlock was going willingly to his death.
John rubbed his eyes with his left hand, feeling exhausted. One thing at a time.
He stood up straight and went to heat up some chicken broth, wondering if he had some spare sheets in the linen closet.
Sherlock emerged from the bathroom just as John was finishing up with putting new sheets on the bed.
“I told you I would help you--” he said, straightening up.
“I managed,” Sherlock said with attempted bravado, but he seemed exhausted. He dropped the towel from around his waist and slid back into bed, wincing as if it were a herculean effort. He sighed, closing his eyes. He seemed to be breathing a little easier, if only marginally.
John felt his forehead, but he still felt very warm. “I have some soup heating up in the kitchen, I’ll be right back.”
“Mmph,” Sherlock huffed.
John went back into the kitchen and ladled some soup into one of the only clean mugs they had left, taking it back into the room.
“You’ll have to sit up a bit again.”
Sherlock cracked an eye open, but didn’t move further.
“It will help,” John said. “Your body is weak, it’s fighting a battle internally right now. It needs some sustenance.”
Sherlock sighed, letting John help him sit up enough to drink some of the broth. After a few sips, he shook his head, and John helped him lay back down.
John brought one of the chairs from the kitchen into the room, sitting next to Sherlock’s bedside. Sherlock seemed to drop into a doze almost immediately. John brought a book into the room so that he could read as he sat vigil.
After a while, John felt Sherlock’s forehead again. His fever seemed to be going down, which was a good sign. The rest of the symptoms would just have to run their course. At least he’d be here, in case Sherlock got worse.
He sat back in his chair, watching Sherlock breathe--his chest rising and falling with a steady inevitability. He tried not to think about the scars, but it was like trying not to think about the elephant in the room.
Sherlock had killed Magnussen, knowing full well what it would mean. Then he’d left on that plane knowing it would end in torture and death. And it had all been so that John could stay with Mary--the woman who had nearly killed him not six months before--just because he thought it was what John wanted.
There was a kind of sickening lurch in John’s stomach. Mary. She’d let him think the child was his, but she had disappeared with the child once it had been born. All that he had left of her was a DNA test she’d left on his pillow, telling him that the baby wasn’t his.
John put his head in his hands, trying not to think about how massively he had fucked everything up. Sherlock could have died, and it would have been his fault. He would have ruined both their lives.
It wasn’t too late. They could still be together, if that’s what Sherlock really wanted.
John rested his elbows on his knees, folding his hands over his mouth and looking at Sherlock again. Sherlock basically had sacrificed everything for him, more than once, more than anyone would. Even without all the things he felt when they looked at each other…
They had already waited for far too long, and wasted too much time.
John must have fallen asleep at some point, because the next thing he knew he was being awoken by Sherlock thrashing back and forth on the bed, his eyes still closed. The moonlight was now streaming across the floor and highlighting Sherlock’s face, which looked ghostly white.
“Sherlock?” John said, standing up and rubbing his eyes. He sat on the side of the bed, catching one of Sherlock’s flailing arms.
“No,” Sherlock moaned. “Please.”
John frowned, taking Sherlock’s pulse and feeling his forehead. His temperature had gone up again.
“Dammit,” John muttered. “I’m going to get you some more paracetamol, hold on.”
Sherlock grasped at his arm. “Please,” he said, his eyes still closed.
“I’m right here,” John said, smoothing his hand over Sherlock’s forehead, pushing the sticky curls upward.
“Please,” Sherlock coughed again, his eyes shifting behind his eyelids. “Mycroft.”
Mycroft?
“Sherlock, it’s just a dream,” John said soothingly.
“Don’t let her…” Sherlock coughed, his voice raspy. “When I’m dead… keep… him safe.”
John felt something tug in his chest again. He pressed his lips together.
“You’re not dying, Sherlock. That happened months ago.”
“Promise me,” Sherlock rasped, his eyes still closed.
John gulped. “I promise,” he whispered.
Sherlock sighed, as if relieved, and John smoothed his hair back again a few times. He thought Sherlock had fallen asleep again, but then he spoke once more.
“I love him,” Sherlock he said, his breath a puff of warm air.
John felt as though he’d stopped breathing, and his head was spinning.
“I know,” he whispered. As the words came out, he realized… that he did. He’d always known, in a way. He took a deep breath, feeling as if his whole life had been leading to this moment, his heart pounding.
“I love you, too, Sherlock.”
Sherlock’s brow furrowed, as if his brain was trying desperately to comprehend those words despite the fever. John leaned down and brushed his lips against Sherlock’s forehead.
“Don’t worry, I’ll never let you leave me again,” he whispered into his skin.
John blinked his eyes open to sunlight streaming into the bedroom and his head resting against the headboard at an awkward angle. He glanced down to see that Sherlock’s head was half-resting on his chest, and he was breathing evenly, his arm flung over John’s waist.
John reached over with his free hand to feel Sherlock’s forehead, gently. He sighed in relief, as Sherlock’s fever seemed to have broken. He was still warm, but not burning up anymore.
He contemplated briefly that he should extricate himself from Sherlock’s grasp and go make some tea, but for now it was too pleasant to be in this position. It was a stolen season, though.
As soon as the thought crossed his mind, Sherlock shifted slightly against him, and John froze.
“John,” Sherlock breathed.
“Yeah.”
Sherlock smoothed his fingertips over John’s hip, and John relaxed into the feeling.
“Am I still dreaming?” His voice was raspy, but at least he wasn’t coughing anymore.
“No,” John said, softly. He slid downward a bit so that their heads were level.
Sherlock’s eyes were a bit sleepy, but no longer glassy and fever-ridden.
“I had a dream that you said…” Sherlock said thickly, as if his mouth was dry. He paused, swallowing.
John pressed his lips together, understanding instantly what Sherlock was talking about.
“I’ll get you some water,” he said, starting to get up.
“No,” Sherlock said, fisting his hand in John’s shirt to keep him on the bed.
“Sherlock--”
“Was it a dream?” Sherlock asked more urgently, his eyes insistent.
John paused a second longer, but then he reached up to brush his fingertips over Sherlock's cheek.
“No, it wasn’t a dream,” he whispered, and he leaned inward to capture Sherlock’s lips in a kiss.
He felt Sherlock’s sharp intake of breath in surprise, as if after all that had happened it was still unlikely that this was the inevitable outcome of all the events leading up to this, after what felt like a lifetime of wondering what could be and what might have been.
It was just a press of closed lips at first. Then Sherlock’s lips parted and he was snogging him, full stop, Sherlock’s fist twisting in John’s shirt to pull him closer.
Everything else in the world dimmed completely. There was no sound, no touch, nothing other than Sherlock.
“John,” Sherlock breathed into his mouth, like a whispered prayer.
“I’m here,” John said. He needed to get closer. He rolled over until he was half on top of Sherlock. God, it felt good, it felt amazing… like jumping into a cold lake on a hot summer’s afternoon, like the taste of a snowflake on his tongue, like listening to a lone violin’s melody. He was home. There was nothing else to it.
“You did say it,” Sherlock said, while John kissed down his throat.
“Of course I did.”
“Say it again. Please.”
John raised his head to look into Sherlock’s eyes. After all this time, he was finally going to say it, for real.
“I love you, Sherlock Holmes. I always have, and I always will.”
Sherlock looked like, for once in his life, he had no idea what to think or say. Instead, he reached up and ran his thumb over John’s bottom lip.
“Now you’re going to get sick, too.”
John laughed, a new, rare joy in his chest. “I don’t mind,” he said, leaning in for another kiss.