Work Text:
“Jesus fuck!” John leaps up from the couch and reaches for the nearest blunt object—a book that isn’t particularly large or menacing—and waves it in a way he hopes is threatening. The terrifying creature who’s just floated in through the open window doesn’t even deign to react. You better not sting me, he thinks, tamping down a strange, simmering burst of anger.
John watches as its wings carry it to the mantle, perching atop the skull that’s lived here longer than he has. It’s a bee—no, a wasp—with a skinny little abdomen and a bulbous arse. Its long legs and buzzing wings made it look utterly insane in flight. Now that it’s landed it seems…less. Less jarring. Less of a threat. He sets down the book: a copy of Queen Rearing Essentials. How apt. Something to do with bees, a topic in which his overly curious flatmate has dabbled.
He’d teased Sherlock about the bawdy title last week. And now Sherlock is dead.
“Fuck,” John whispers again. He pulls out his phone and searches wasp with skinny waist. A mud dauber, apparently. He’s never even seen one. Can’t remember the last time anything larger than a fly made its way through the window. A solitary creature. Harmless to humans unless provoked.
He leaves it alone.
𓆤
“Shit!” Tea sloshes over the brim of John’s mug as he jerks away from whatever just zoomed past his face. “You again?” He sets down the mug and goes for the kitchen roll, sopping up the puddle, eyes following the wasp all the while. It lands on a glass slide containing something probably toxic. There is a scattered pile of them all over the table, beside the microscope John has barely glanced at in eight days.
It seems to watch him right back with its big black eyes.
He looks away.
᠁
It’s a trick.
It’s all he thinks about some days.
Just a magic trick.
But it doesn’t change anything.
᠁
He finds the beginnings of a nest in an eyesocket.
Just a single tube-shaped cell, open on one end. He’d watched the wasp fly in through the far-left window that now remains permanently ajar with a glob of something grey clutched in its little arms. It disappeared into the skull and for the next hour he’d listened to it buzz.
Evidently he’s acquired a new tenant.
᠁
“Bloody—fucking—goddamnit!” Lestrade flaps his hands in the air and flings open the door he’d been about to shut behind him. “You’ve got a bloody bee infestation?”
“Wasp,” John deadpans, rolling his eyes when the wasp ignores Greg’s antics and takes its place on the skull instead of choosing the open door. “Just the one. Leave it.”
“Just the—You’ll have a swarm on your hands in a week if you don’t evict it.”
“No,” John says, uninterested in elaborating on its solitary nature. He isn’t really interested in what Greg might have to say about this or anything else. Still, he isn’t a complete prick, not yet anyway. He unearths two bottles of Strongbow—the only thing he could ever get Sherlock to drink—from the fridge and hands one to Greg.
“Right.” Greg eyes him in a way John has quickly come to hate. A mix of pity and something like suspicion. For two weeks he’s been a man with a dead flatmate, and no one seems to know what to do with that. They settle at the kitchen table, now cleared of its scattered slides and microscope by the always hovering Mrs. Hudson. For a very long time, they sit in silence. “I want to ask you something,” Greg eventually blurts out, and John sighs.
“I know what you want to ask.”
“And will you answer? The papers—”
“I know what the papers have said.” WAS IT ALL A LIE? Suicide Scandal Leaves 'Partner' Penniless and Alone—and that’s just the latest. THE BLOGGER HE LEFT BEHIND: Watson's Lonely Vigil in Holmes’ Shadow—always the implications. Never subtle. Like it’d have been so goddamn scandalous if it were true. “It wasn’t like that.”
“What was it like?” Greg asks. John glares at him, but the question is genuine. Fuck. It’s too much. He doesn’t want to think about this at all.
“I don’t know.” He scrubs a hand over his face, pinches his brow. What was it like? Perfect. For a while. And then it was hell. “He shut me out,” he finds himself admitting, staring blankly at the wasp as it lands on his untouched bottle of cider, interested in its sugary, fermented contents. He wonders, vaguely, if insects can get drunk. He nudges it away with a single finger and it buzzes at him as it flies off. You’d die, he thinks in response. “He’s dead,” he says aloud, and Greg shuts up.
᠁
I think I’m going mad. He doesn’t say it, but the wasp seems to hear him. It floats in front of him for a moment before taking off out the window, probably in search of a puddle to source another glob of mud.
It’s a trick.
John curls up in a bed that never belonged to him and inhales the scent of a man who’s long gone.
᠁
The nest has grown. Six cells now, side by side, five of them closed.
“There’s an egg in each one,” Molly says, her voice thick with fascination. “And a paralyzed spider or two.” John knows this, of course. He, too, has access to the internet. The wasp's entire life purpose is this work—injecting spiders with venom and building these little cones for her kin. But he lets Molly gaze at it all with her usual levels of wonder and doesn’t break the spell. “What are you going to do?” she asks.
“Nothing,” John shrugs. But he knows he can’t really leave it there. Come spring, her offspring will break free of their cells and he’ll have the swarm Greg had warned about to contend with. “For now.”
“No, I mean—” Molly turns to face him. He can hardly look into her probing eyes. “What are you going to do? Stay here? Move out? Move on?”
Move on? John swallows. He opens his mouth to respond, but nothing emerges.
“He’d want you to be happy,” she says gently, and he tamps down the fury he has suppressed for all this time.
If that were true, John thinks, he’d be alive. “Right.”
“He wants—” she begins, but shakes her head and falls silent. He watches a little crease form between her brows: frustration, probably with herself. She always says too much. Everybody does now. “No, it’s—I’m rambling. Ignore me. Sorry. Sorry.”
᠁
There’s a chill in the air. Still, he keeps the window open. Just a crack.
I was happy
with you
He texts the words to an out of service number. No reply ever comes. Christ, it’s getting sad.
A magic trick.
The wasp watches him from the mantle, eventually crawling back into the socket to finish what she’s started. He slips down the couch and curls up in a ball, drifting off to the buzz that accompanies her work.
᠁
Nobody could be that clever.
You could.
᠁
It’s quiet. It’s been quiet.
He circles the flat, cup of coffee in hand. The wasp wasn’t around yesterday, but that isn’t unusual. She’ll pop in and out with little balls of mud. Sometimes absent for a full twenty four hours. He’s yet to catch her with a spider in her grasp, but he imagines her as a formidable force out there.
He turns on the telly just for the noise, staring at the cracked open window.
᠁
He tries for a joke, comparing the insect in his flat to the man he once shared his life with. It doesn’t land.
“But you don’t think—” Harry begins warily, voice crackling over the line. “—that it’s actually him. I mean, should I be phoning your shrink? Is this like mum with the butterflies after dad died?” For fuck’s sake. Now his sister is about to have him sectioned. “John.”
“Forget I mentioned it.”
“Are you good?” She knows he isn’t. He wouldn’t have called her if he was. “I can come and stay for a while.” He can’t imagine anything worse.
“All fine, yeah.” He picks at the seam of his jeans, pulling at a loose thread. “Look, I better go. Lots to do. You know how it is.”
᠁
It’s been four days of silence.
He stares at the nest, at its nine tidy cells. The last remains open, waiting for her to deposit a spider, lay an egg and seal it up. It’s been her entire focus—her singular task.
He wonders what is taking her so long to come back.
᠁
Goodbye, John.
No—don’t—
᠁
Six days.
He shivers as he opens the window a bit wider. It’s a move of desperation he knows damn well is likely futile.
᠁
He’s my friend—my friend.
Nevermind that he’d built his entire life around him.
᠁
“Oh!” Mrs. Hudson jumps, and John sighs. She’s aware of the nest, has been kind enough to leave it be and say nothing. Evidently she’s forgotten about it since her last cleaning spree. He might finally have to answer for his own ongoing oddities.
She sets her feather duster down and turns to meet his gaze. “What?” he asks, setting two cups of tea on the desk by the window.
“John,” she says carefully. He moves to stand beside her, bracing himself for whatever demands she makes about pest control and immediate removal, retorts already forming in his head. He glances at the mantle where she’d been dusting, eyes falling on the space behind a stack of books now gone from where they usually rest.
Oh.
God, no.
Fuck. There she is. Her little body now a hollow husk, dry and nestled in a layer of dust. Her legs are curled up beneath her, wings spread as though her very last act was a misguided attempt to fly.
She’s been here all this time.
The sob that crawls up his throat nearly chokes him. His eyes fly to her nest, to the single unfinished cell. Her life’s work, incomplete. She’d fallen before she had the chance.
He has to get out of here. John flees to the bed he now considers his own, dragging the covers over his head and gasping out a fucking aeon of suppressed emotion. The sense of loss sucks him under, chest heaving beneath the pull of it. Tears sting his eyes and the hull of his heart crumbles all over again.
He knows what this really is. He is finally ready to face it.
᠁
The light is blinding when he shuffles into the kitchen, and he squints against the morning sun. He feels like he’s been twisted between two fists and wrung out, his whole body wobbly and ruined.
He makes coffee and wanders to the mantle with it. Mrs. Hudson has cleared away the wreckage, but she’s left the nest alone. John drops his eyes shut, swallows thickly as a few more errant tears slide their way down.
It’s fine. Christ, he needs to get a grip. It was never about a bloody wasp. Was it?
With a sigh, he glances around for his phone, finding it abandoned on the desk. A missed call from Harry and two new texts from god knows who. He opens his messages, feeling the pinch of his own brow as he scans them.
I was happy, too.
Forgive me.
John’s heart slams through his chest. No. This—it’s—
His mind spirals in a thousand wild directions, from insanity back to logic.
It’s just a prank. A trick. The number isn’t even his. Anyone could have sent them.
He falls back into Sherlock’s old chair, sinks into its familiar divots. He pulls his knees up to his chest and presses his forehead against them. What is this? Anger bubbles up, a frothing hot lot of it, and before he can think it through, he’s dialed the number, phone pressed against his ear, ready to unleash unknown furies onto whoever’s at the other end.
“Dr. Watson.”
“Mycroft?” John stumbles. He isn’t sure what he’d expected but it wasn’t this.
“I see he’s been…in touch.”
Oh, fuck. “Start talking.”
᠁
John paces the floor, his hands in fists. He walks and walks and walks and never gets anywhere.
Nobody could be that clever.
Jesus!
Mycroft, of course, had told him fuck all. Yammered on about secure lines and maintaining patience. Now John is waiting for a contact from a corpse, and he doesn’t actually know what to do with that.
He takes himself to bed—to the space he’s claimed and intends to keep. As the adrenaline seeps out of him he slides into sleep.
᠁
He jolts awake to a soft clatter from the lounge. And he knows—he just knows.
He lies still and holds his breath, only letting it slip free when a tall shadow appears in the doorway. Sherlock lurks for far too long, and they stare at each other in the half-dark room. John doesn’t move. He refuses to be the first. Not now.
When Sherlock finally climbs into the bed, John turns his back on him. He is acutely aware of every facet of his presence: his quiet breaths and palpable uncertainty, the shape of the space John thought would never be occupied again. They were so close to this, before—he knows they both felt it. But then Sherlock shut him out.
I’m a fake.
After an endless, awkward series of minutes, he feels a shift, gasping softly when he finds himself enveloped, long limbs pulling him in, the hard press of a broad chest against his spine. He tries to breathe but it comes out strangled—too fast, too harsh. Too much. Too much.
“Forgive me,” Sherlock whispers, hooking a leg over John’s. His breath brushes the back of John’s ear and he nearly shakes himself apart. “It had to be done.”
“No,” John chokes out, his traitorous fingers digging into Sherlock’s arm.
“Yes,” Sherlock says evenly. “I’d have lost you.” In a steady drone, he explains the whole fucking shitstorm. John can hardly believe what he’s hearing, can hardly fathom how he pulled it all off.
“So why are you here,” he rasps. “Now.”
“It isn’t working,” Sherlock finally admits, with a sigh that vibrates through John’s entire frame. “I am failing.”
“Oh.”
“I need you.” He breathes it like a secret and John shivers with the weight of the words. “Come with me.” He turns in Sherlock’s arms, presses a hand to his chest and just looks at him.
His hair is short, face covered in a stubble he’s never once seen on him. His eyes are tired. He looks like shit. John kisses him.
It is hard and harsh, the uncertainty still there. They don’t know what they’re doing, christ—neither of them. When John tries to pull away, to think it through, to gasp in air, Sherlock hauls him back in in an instant. The kiss gentles, gradually, slowing into something raw and heavy. John gives him everything he has—his grief, his heart, his inevitable yes.
᠁
John fills the kettle and flips it on. He’s switched to coffee in the mornings but Sherlock will pitch a fit without his over-sugared English breakfast. Though maybe his month of hell has taught him patience. Appreciation.
Maybe not.
“Is there tea?” Sherlock glides into the kitchen and without missing a step, fuses himself to John’s back. He hooks his chin over John’s shoulder and settles right in.
“No,” John lies, sinking back against him. They’ve got a few hours before they’re whisked off to whatever’s next, and the least he can do is provide caffeination. His eyes seek out the skull on the mantle, and he can just glimpse the edges of the nest, with its single unfinished cell. Perhaps they’ll be back by the time the next generation claws its way out.
Perhaps not.
The window is open wider than before, one of the mugs he’d abandoned ages ago knocked to the floor, its cold contents in a splat across the rug.
“Did you come in through the window?” John asks, imagining the wasp, floating in with her steady confidence. Sherlock wouldn’t have been nearly as graceful.
The silence that follows is damning. “No,” Sherlock mutters belatedly and John laughs so hard he cries.