Chapter Text
It isn’t even Christmas.
The holiday had come and gone with little fanfare beyond a string of fairy lights foisted upon his windows by his tenacious and offensively festive landlady.
Betwixmas, John supplies helpfully—or he would, at least, if things were anything like they used to be. These days John Watson visits solely within the shields of Sherlock’s psyche, echoes of the man who remains so ingrained in his memory.
And if they were—(like they used to be)—he’d have gifted Sherlock his most disarming grin, knowing full well he’d get one in return. Not because it’s a particularly amusing way to title an otherwise ordinary series of days—but because Sherlock could never quite help himself. It’d always felt so bloody good just to be with him.
He shakes off this doleful thought—half memory, half fantasy—a line of thinking that his mind slides into much too bloody readily. He’s been back in London for a month—nearly two, actually—and beyond a dead-eyed stare and a swift punch to the cheek, John hasn’t wanted anything to do with him.
And it isn’t even Christmas.
Yet, he finds himself in a dimly lit pub, surrounded by the mostly-unfamiliar faces of Yarders and their partners. The Met’s annual yuletide do always seems to be a woefully cheerless affair, and this year they couldn’t even manage to host it before the bloody holiday. But he is here, staring out into a sea of nameless faces—because he couldn’t bring himself to turn Molly away, when he owes her so much and she had that look on her face.
“Have you seen him?” she asks, hissing over the muffled sounds of Slade’s Merry Xmas Everybody trying to break through the incessant drone of voices. For one wild second, Sherlock thinks she means John, immediately chastising himself for what has become an inconvenient (pathetic, aching) habit (obsession) —looking for ill-fitting jumpers and a head of grey-blonde hair in the most unlikely places. Sighing, he scans the room and nods toward a door in the rear of the pub, where Lestrade is kicking snow from his boots and rubbing his hands together in an attempt to find warmth. Just gone out for a clandestine cigarette, obviously, despite declaring loudly and repeatedly his determination to stop. He doesn’t really want to. He’s only doing it for her and her nagging concern for his health.
“Promise me you’ll stay for a bit,” Molly says lightly, failing to conceal the jittery spark that’s been swimming behind her eyes from the moment she’d shown up at Baker Street and pried him from the couch. (disconcerting) But when Sherlock rolls his eyes and nods, she shoots him a timid smirk. He watches her weave her way through the crowd, sees Lestrade’s face light up when she reaches him, followed by a comical potpourri of guilt and defiance when he realises she can most definitely smell what he’s been up to.
Turning his back on their budding relationship, Sherlock strides toward the bar and orders an overpriced whiskey. Make it a double.
The thing is, he’s accepted it.
He’s accepted the pining, the longing, the loss of the uncaring facade he’d once kept. And he’s accepted the fact that the man he had died for seems to prefer he stayed dead.
Still, he scans streets and sidewalks, crime scenes and shops. He’s thrown himself headlong into the work in an attempt to clear his stinging thoughts. But part of him has waited. And part of him has watched.
He should leave.
He should leave this party; he does not belong amongst this crowd. He should leave this city. After two miserable years abroad, London has lost her charm.
Well, no, she probably hasn’t. He’s just lost his spark.
Sherlock stifles a flinch when someone lightly touches his wrist. Deliberate, not a brush from a passerby. Molly, again. No one else would dare touch him. But when he turns around to greet her with an inelegant sigh and the overdue announcement of his imminent departure, he stops short.
“Hi,” John breathes, the word indecipherable through the sudden roaring in Sherlock’s head. Because this is really happening. (isn’t it?) He is not imagining this. Still, the towering pall of uncertainty hanging over the man standing before him obscures his form into near nothingness. A spectre. A wraith. Not the seething soldier who’d swung a fist in his face. The crowd around them dims in an instant. Sherlock’s heart thrums wildly, ears ringing out their incredulity as the very air he breathes turns thick, pressing from all sides in a threat to crush his bloody skull in.
And this phantom wears the same gingham-print shirt he’d worn the day they’d met.
Hey, woah, he hears someone say as his legs begin to fail him. He doesn’t crumple to the ground as expected, only stumbles back, caught instead by a band of arms he’s spent two long years yearning to be wrapped up in. Okay. Okay. And he can feel a hundred prying eyes on him, but he doesn’t give a fuck who sees them. He clings to the body before him, twisting his arms around a frame much more diminished than he’d remembered it. I’m sorry. The words are breathed against his temple when he tucks his face against John’s neck. I’m sorry.
When he’d come back full of hope, full of relief and expectation—he had sought out John before anyone else, before anything else, before everything else. But when John had held up a shaking hand (no—no—) , when he had stumbled back instead of surging ahead—when his eyes had shifted, gone cold and dim— (devastated, betrayed, stricken)—
It had all come crashing in. He’d finally understood what he had done—what he had done to him.
He’d gone straight home and crawled into bed, retreating deep into his mind’s abyss. He’d sealed up all the hurt, the regret—tucked into a trillion diminutive glass baubles, fragile and delicate in his blood, beneath his skin. It’s the best he could do, in the state he was in, to constrain all that threatened to overwhelm him.
But a bauble would break, every now and again, and a rush of remembrance would in turn break him. It was in these moments he’d find himself looking for him—for the man he’d left, and lost. The man who’ll forever haunt him.
“I’m sorry,” John chokes out again, pulling him close, closer, surrounding him. The crush of his arms is a purge, a catharsis, as a trillion fragile baubles burst beneath the weight of all this. He would fall to his knees if John weren’t carrying him through it, and they hold on through a merciless flood—of stifled grief, of smothered affection—
“Me too,” Sherlock whispers, once his voice returns to him. He rests his chin on John’s shoulder, but makes no move to step away from this. “John,” he sighs, sliding a hand up his back, over the gingham-print shirt he’d had on when they’d met. “God, I’ve missed you.”
When he looks up, he’s reminded that they have a bit of an audience, half the pub gone quiet, surreptitiously glancing toward them. He catches Molly’s gaze where she stands amongst the masses, notes the tears on her cheeks, the jittery spark from earlier now absent from her eyes.
“Can we talk?” John asks quietly, his breath hot against Sherlock’s neck—a comfort, a balm for the insufferable distance he’s been living with. He’s made no attempt to let go either, having settled in against Sherlock’s chest, arms still tight across his back. Sherlock sighs and lifts his head.
“Come home with me.” For good, he means, but he does not say it.