keep_counting | Fic: All Things Considered (Sherlock BBC)

Title: All Things Considered
Characters/Pairings: John, Mrs. Hudson, Clara, Lestrade, Harry, Mycroft, Sarah, Sherlock
Rating: PG13
Warnings: Spoilers for the Great Game, faked character-death
Genre: Angst, Hurt/Comfort, Friendship (pre-slash if you wish to interpret it as such)
Word-count: 1,506
Disclaimer: I own nothing in this
Summary: The skull can be replaced. I find it's a bit harder to replace you. Sherlock is dead, and John is coping. Only, he doesn't really have to.

All Things Considered

It’s easiest on the noisy days.

When the traffic of London seems worse than usual and people are shouting and motors rearing and it’s hard to make out if someone is crying or laughing. When work is busy and the phone keeps ringing and Mrs. Hudson turns on the radio or television in the apartment, as loud as possible.

It feels like drowning in sounds and the colours they bring, a smear of pink as his landlady smiles at him, brushes of soft orange when Clara stops by, sterilized white of Sarah and a silver-grey that shapes the figure of Lestrade.

John is very surprised at the last one, to be honest. Not that he never liked Lestrade, but apart from the cases, the work, he didn’t know him at all. Didn’t think there was that much to know.

But of course there is. Everyone has a history and even if Sherlock would whisper ‘boring’ in his ear was he present, it’s a relief and a comfort to talk to someone sane for once. Someone who isn’t his landlady or his life-long friend or his ex, if Sarah can even really be called that.

Harry is there too, for a short few days and John manages to make a cutting remark about how she never managed to pull herself together and take care of anyone when their parents died and is that wine he can smell on her breath? - but she doesn’t retaliate with the usual remarks (oh shut up Johnny, like you’re such an angel yourself) and stays until her work calls her back home (‘Work? You got your job back?’) and there’s a strange sense of his mother having visited. When she’s gone back home, he pulls out an old and dusty photography of a young girl ruffling the sandy-blonde hair of a younger boy and puts it in a frame, placing it in the living-room. He removes it whenever there’s a knock on his door, but it’s still there for him to stare at, mostly on the noisy days.

It’s the quiet days that draw it all out. The days when Mycroft stops by and drinks tea and doesn’t complain about the fact that John puts as much sugar in it as he used to do in Sherlock’s cup, which is enough to give anyone diabetes and when he’s gone there’s an odd sense of no-one having been there at all.

If the older Holmes-brother had been good at covering up his tracks, the younger was less so. But maybe that’s just because the apartment used to be his as well, and is still riddled with animal-bits and acid in the refrigerator and a skull that sits on the mantelpiece and stares at him with hollow sockets where the eyes should be.

“Caucasian male, right?” John says to it one day, and rushes into the bathroom, too scared that it might answer him back. It doesn’t, even though he finds himself talking to it again, an oddly soothing feeling of knowing that this is what Sherlock used to do.

“A head… there’s a head in the fridge.”

“Sarah is a sweet girl,” Lestrade says one day, using the same tone of voice that he did when John had woken in the hospital, alone and still covered in crusty blood. His own, mostly.

“Yes,” John agrees and wonders if he’s just given his permission for Lestrade to date her. Not that either of them need it, he doesn’t really care anyway. There doesn’t seem to be a lot to care about these days.

He takes a deep breath and suddenly six months has passed and Mycroft is sitting in front of him again, dutifully drinking tea with the pile of sugar that crashed the Titanic in it.

“Dr. Watson, you must be wondering why I’ve come to see you.”

John can’t help but roll his eyes. “Not for the tea. Can I guess? The liberating and refreshing company.”

Mycroft’s eyebrows hit his hair-line in surprise and John smiles sardonically. Life’s simple pleasures.

“Ah, no.” The other man says, putting the cup aside with a small clink of wood meeting the smooth surface. “I have some news to bring you, news that I think you will find most joyous.”

John’s breath hitches in his throat, words doing the cancan on his tongue. “You’ve caught him?” He finally asks, explosions flashing in his mind, lefts of debris and Lestrade’s voice pronouncing only John and Moriarty to be survivors of the incident at the Pool.

The always-present umbrella is gently tapped on the floor. “More or less.”

“What do you mean ‘more or less’?”

“John,” It’s unfathomable how much an expression can give away when it’s owner allows it to and John knows what is going to be said before the words are uttered. “Sherlock isn’t dead.”

“He’s my friend.”

“Friend?”

“Colleague.”

Amidst someone shouting and Mycroft leaving in a hurry, John manages to throw the skull against the wall, hitting just beside the horrible, yellow smiley-face and watching the former human shattering into a thousand pieces.

It’s a very fitting metaphor and the only thought in John’s head as he grabs jacket and wallet and takes the train all the way to where Harry lives.

He’s pretty sure he was the one doing all the shouting back there.

Harry is nice to stay with, asking no questions since she knows enough about demons of the past. There is some surprise though, at how hard he’s taking all of this, but that’s simply because she doesn’t understand. Anyone would be crushed if the man who’d made you walk again had suddenly died.

Only, he isn’t dead and the anger that made him destroy the skull and possible at least one chair is slowly dissipating to make room for something very much akin to joy.

John is also very much aware that he can’t stay at his sister’s place forever, that he has a life and friends back in London and that he should really get back and apologize to Mrs. Hudson and maybe also Mycroft, though the latter he is less inclined to do.

He knew.

Someone has to take the first step though and for once it’s Sherlock. Well, if sending a hundred texts about nothing and everything every day is considered a step in the right direction.

John thinks that, when it comes to them, it might be.

Before the week is over he is completely updated Sherlock’s latest experiments, on the case he’s currently undertaking and why is there no more sugar in the house?

He doesn’t writer back, doesn’t answer, but that doesn’t seem to persuade Sherlock to stop texting. Another three days pass and John discovers that he is simply too tired to still be angry.

You’re a jerk, he writes and presses the send-button before he can regret it. Almost ten minutes passes and he finds himself in a limbo between guilt and annoyance at said guilt.

Sorry I broke your skull

Skull can be replaced. I’ve found that it’s a bit harder to replace you

It takes the blink of an eye for him to be back at Baker Street and if the black smoke coming from the window and Mrs. Hudson distressed cries are any inclination, Sherlock is still at home, cuddled up with one of his experiments.

It takes a bit more courage to go in through the front-door, but all he has to do is remind himself that he actually lives here and that he never felt so much reservation about bursting into enemy-camp back in Afghanistan.

The silence is only tense from his point of view, and actually it’s not silence at all, because Mrs. Hudson is still busy scolding Sherlock for setting fire to something that really shouldn’t be set on fire and Sherlock is too busy mumbling calculations and explanations, while his eyes are trained on John, intently focused and a grey that cuts through the smoke and the months separating them.

It’s easier on the noisy days. When something explodes in the kitchen and the fire-alarm starts ringing and Sherlock is ranting about what went wrong or what went right and John joins Mrs. Hudson in yelling at him and Mycroft is somewhere in the background (because that’s where he always hovers), chuckling quietly. When a new murderer is in town and there’s running and racing through dimly-lit streets and smokes and alleys and shots are fired and John’s aim is as sure as the amount of sugar he pours in Sherlock’s tea.

The silent days are getting around to it. When all there is are the creaking of boards under his own feet and a light, strangling noise from Sherlock’s violin and the tapping of fingers against a keyboard.

The silent days wins in favor when Sherlock turns around and mutters an apology that should be too short and incomplete to satisfy anyone, but leaves John with a warm, soothing feeling and a smile that won’t seem to go away again.