Chapter Text
He’d chosen the destination by closing his eyes and pressing the pad of his right index finger to a map of the United Kingdom that’s been pinned to the wall since the Cubitt case two weeks ago. He’d landed somewhere in the English Channel, and so slid said finger a bit to the right, to the first coastal town that caught his eye. A place called Hope. Hope Cove, to be precise.
He pulls up the Wikipedia page. Beaches and fisherman and tourists. Pubs and cafés and holiday houses. The setting of a terrible eighties comedy film that he’d found on YouTube and scoffed at for four minutes before closing the tab.
Perfect.
John, naturally, had assumed it was for a case. He hadn’t once questioned the sudden departure from their everyday London life. He doesn’t question much these days, does not say much at all. He hadn’t uttered a word about the four hour train ride, the rented Jeep waiting for them at the station, the tiny cliffside cottage they pull up to now, overlooking lapping waves and endless sea. A case, always a case. But not this time.
Sherlock hadn’t corrected him.
Never before has he felt this profound need to flee their beloved London, to go go go, for no reason other than to be away, together, for a while. Somewhere new.
“This is nice,” John says quietly as Sherlock parks the Jeep on the dirt path leading up to the old stone cottage. Sherlock hums his agreement, wondering if John will feel the same once they’ve stepped inside.
It’s a one-room cottage. One bed, off to the left. A small kitchenette in the front right corner. A ridiculously tiny loo. And against the back wall, two massive windows that look out to the sea, framing a fireplace and a single leather sofa.
It feels as though it exists in a world of its own. Like it’s been misplaced in time.
And Sherlock knows he’s pushing it. Pushing John. He knows.
That—is the point. A push. A place like this will encourage them both to confront what Sherlock suspects (hopes) is a long-desired but ultimately unobtained intimacy, giving them no choice but to be proximally close, to exist inside the same small bubble for a few days in a way that simply isn’t possible anymore within the familiar walls of 221B. Not when one of them has made a habit of fleeing up the stairs whenever the air around them becomes a bit too heavy with all things unspoken and the other can’t seem to say anything of value at all.
It’s not ideal. It’s not how he’d imagined things unraveling between them once the dust had settled and John had moved back to Baker Street. He’d thought they would talk. He’d thought John would talk—would rant and rave about betrayal and loss and the death of a wife who’d never technically existed and a child who never came to be. He’d hoped it would bring them closer.
But it hasn’t. They haven’t. John hasn’t said a word. He’s followed Sherlock around London as he’s always done—but passively now, barely present at all until the adrenaline kicks in and he has to be, for a while. He spends his days at the clinic and his evenings wandering around the flat, reading or sipping tea or staring into the void, more often than not just retiring early, up the stairs to his own room. Up and away.
But Sherlock is fed up. Fed up with John’s stubborn stagnancy and with his own inability to begin a conversation, to begin inching back toward the man he considers his best friend and most trusted ally, to find the closeness they had once shared. Maybe (he can hope) even more than they’d had before. After everything, after all they’ve been through together and all that John has lost—something has got to give.
So he’ll push, a bit. Only a bit.
“I’ll take the couch,” Sherlock drawls, effortlessly slipping into an impeccable impression of boredom while in reality he stands scanning the back of John’s form obsessively for clues as to how he feels about this carefully chosen space. John turns to face him.
“Don’t be an idiot,” He says, tipping his head slightly toward the bed. “We’ll share. It’s fine,” Matter-of-fact. No hesitancy, but no subtle undertone for Sherlock to grasp onto and mould into something resembling insight either. Inscrutable as ever. Sherlock says nothing, just tosses his small suitcase onto the burgundy plaid duvet and moves to stand in front of one large window. It’s beautiful, he thinks. The sheer scope of the horizon makes him feel pleasantly sanguine, makes him stand a bit taller. “Are you going to tell me?” John asks as he steps up to take his place, as ever, at Sherlock’s side.
“Tell you?”
“What we’re doing here. Not a case—you’d’ve said something show-offy by now if it were.”
Sherlock smiles, despite himself. He gives John a sidelong glance, quickly returning his gaze to the foaming sea. He realizes rather abruptly that he isn’t ready—isn’t prepared for this conversation. Not at all. Not yet.
“Dinner?” He asks instead, feeling slightly fidgety.
It’s still early, but they’ve had a long trip and John’s stomach does tend to rule his pedestrian brain. Sherlock can feel his eyes on him. He has always been able to feel the weight of John’s mighty blue gaze. After a moment, he turns to meet it head on.
He swallows, throat going a bit tight.
The swell of fondness—perhaps a bit of exasperation—in the unshuttered depths staring back at him knocks him a bit off-kilter. It occurs to him now that he hasn’t really looked at John, has been afraid to, for quite some time. Not like this, at least—not so openly, without his walls.
Now he sees the man who followed him here, to a place unknown, without question or concern. He sees the only person who has ever made him feel so wholly accepted, trusted—so fully recognized and understood. Sherlock softens, allowing a wave of tenderness to rise up through his chest, further clogging his useless larynx, causing a slight prickle behind his stupid eyes.
Before he can overthink it, he reaches out, squeezes John’s shoulder, quickly letting his arm drop back to his side. John smiles, clears his throat.
“Yeah all right,” He says, eventually, smile fading but eyes still alight. “I’m starving.”
◓
They climb back into the Jeep and wind their way down into town. They find a pub that hasn’t yet been sullied by modern aesthetic, claim a battered wooden table in a quiet corner and order two pints of stout, brewed on site. They share a basket of buttery garlic ciabatta and a plate of perfectly seasoned mussels from the very sea they’d spent the last half hour staring at.
Neither of them has said a word.
Sherlock tears at a piece of bread and steals a glance at John, who’s tucking in enthusiastically as he is wont to do when there’s food within his reach. When John notices Sherlock looking, he swallows the bite of mussel he’d been chewing and finally speaks.
“Reminds me of our first case, this place. Hope,” He seems to roll the word around on his tongue, as though he’s never uttered it before in his life. It takes Sherlock a moment to grasp what John is saying. Hope. Jeff Hope. The man who’d convinced Sherlock to gamble his life. Well, one of them. John hadn’t given this one the chance. “I think about that day sometimes, you know. I’ve never understood, not really, why I followed you there. Why I—” He cuts himself off, stares back down at his plate. “You’d have been fine.”
“No,” Sherlock says this so quickly, so vehemently that he surprises himself with the ferocity of his response. John looks at him, waiting. “No,” He repeats. “It was only pride, John. Stubbornness and pride. I hadn’t a clue what I was doing, hadn’t the faintest idea if I’d chosen correctly. I still don’t,” They’d done tests. One harmless, one deadly. Lestrade had offered to inform him which pill held his fingerprints—but he had realized then, after grasping the rare gift he’d just been given in the form of John Watson, that he no longer wanted to know. “I didn’t especially care, at the time.”
They stare at each other, John realizing, perhaps for the first time, the depth of what he’d done for him that night.
They’ve never spoken of this fragile thing, of the state they were both in when they’d found one another. Sherlock had known with one glance that John had spent his evenings contemplating his gun and the myriad ways he could use it. It’s one of the reasons he’d felt an instant kinship with the wounded soldier that had stood before him in that lab, accepting his eccentricities with amusement as no one had before. John couldn’t have known that Sherlock—newly sober for the eighth time in his life and unsure why he ever bothered—had been in a similar state.
Reckless. Joyless. Done.
“Sherlock, I—”
“Anything else I can get you, lads? Tempt you with a lovely panna cotta?” Their round, frilly-aproned waitress hovers at the table’s edge, stacking their empty plates in one hand and gesturing enthusiastically toward the dessert case with the other.
“Ta, but no,” John says amiably, gracing her with a small, genuine smile. “But could we get a sixer of the stout to go?”
◓
It takes them all of three minutes to tromp down a well-trodden path behind the pub that leads straight to a sprawling, sandy beach. There are quite a few people roaming its sands: couples huddled together on blankets awaiting the sunset. Children clustered around a miniature model sailboat in the shallows. Families gathering their things to head back home before dark.
John leads the way, a determination that Sherlock has rarely seen in him of late now present in his step. He scans the beach, then marches off to their right, clutching his six pack of stout and heading for a secluded space set back beneath the base of a rocky cliff, far from the reaches of the rising tide. He hesitates for only a moment before dropping right down into the sand, cracking open a bottle with his key to 221B and taking a long pull. Sherlock can’t help but grin.
When John looks up at him, something unmistakable passes between them. An acknowledgement, he thinks, that things could change between them— are changing. Will change, right now, if only they’ll let them.
Sherlock intends to.
He sets his arse down in the sand beside John, reaching for a bottle of his own as he simultaneously pulls a neon green Bic lighter out of his trouser pocket. He glances at John, already knowing the indignant look he’ll find on his hopelessly expressive features. That’s the one. Sherlock smirks, then deftly pops the cap off his bottle and repockets the lighter.
“Not going to ask why you’ve got that bloody thing on you,” John grumbles, eyes following Sherlock’s fingers to his pocket to try and catch a glimpse of a pack of Benson & Hedges. He won’t find one. Sherlock hasn’t smoked once since John moved back home.
“Useful,” He shrugs and nods to his freshly opened bottle, feeling incandescently buoyant with possibility as he takes a cold, bubbly swig.
They sit in silence for long moments, watching the sun begin its descent into the horizon as the light slowly fades to a glorious gold. Their arms brush occasionally as they sip their stout, and Sherlock feels each touch like an open flame, waiting. For what, he’s not sure.
Finally, John speaks.
“I knew there was no case from the start,” He says quietly, and when Sherlock turns to ask him how, he finds himself entirely speechless.
John is watching him softly, his features illuminated by a halo of bright, fiery light. His silver hair glows and his dark eyes beckon like the farthest reaches of the sea in this final hour of daylight. He is breathtaking like this, so open and free. He wants to be here, Sherlock thinks, hopes. He wants to be here, with me.
“No case,” Sherlock breathes, unable to look away. “But you came anyway. And you don’t seem upset,” He searches John for any sign of annoyance at his deception, but John only shrugs.
“Upset that my favourite person wanted to whisk me away to the sea?” He smiles and Sherlock’s heart begins to soar. “It’s lovely here, Sherlock. I’m grateful for it. Been a bit—” He exhales loudly, searching for the word. “Lost.”
“Yes, I—I’d noticed,” Sherlock nearly whispers. He takes a deep breath of salty air, shivers a bit in his thin silk shirt as a chill begins to creep in with the breeze. “You’ve seemed—” Tired? Apathetic? Heartbroken and utterly shattered? “Uncertain.”
“You’d be surprised at my degree of uncertainty,” John breathes, a somber little smile on his face.
“Ah,” Sherlock returns his gaze to the glittering sea, heart sinking a bit. He shouldn’t have gotten his hopes up. All this—all that’s between them. John still doesn’t want it. Doesn’t understand it in its entirety. Uncertain.
“What I mean—” John huffs out another long breath, a bit fidgety where their arms brush. “What I mean, Sherlock, is that I don’t know where I stand with you anymore. You’re impossible to read on a good day and since I’ve moved back in you’ve been more distant than ever. I don’t—blame you. I’ve been horrible to you,” John swallows and Sherlock meets his eyes again. What? “And I’ve kept my distance as well. I regret everything that happened after you returned. Everything. I did it all wrong every bloody step of the way and now we’re—we—” He shakes his head, looks at Sherlock as though willing him to read his every thought. But Sherlock can’t. He never could. “It isn’t the same. It hasn’t been.”
“No,” He agrees, feeling burned. It hasn’t been the same. He isn’t the same man he’d been before their two miserable years apart. So careful now, so cautious with John. He’s been hiding from him this whole time, really. He looks down, digs a half-submerged seashell out of the sand and twists it nervously between his fingers.
“I miss you,” John says quietly, his voice cracking miserably as though the words themselves are painful to say. Sherlock’s head snaps up, surprised. He tosses the shell.
“I miss you too, John.”
John watches him with somber eyes before returning his gaze to linger across the darkening waves. He seems to be steeling himself for something, working up the courage for whatever comes next. Sherlock leans into him a bit, lips twisting into a small smile—seeking to reassure, to remind him that he’s here, he’s listening. John returns the pressure, closes his eyes firmly—and then all at once lets his head fall gently to Sherlock’s shoulder, wraps an arm around his narrow waist and pulls him in until they’re pressed together completely.
Sherlock’s heart nearly stops dead in his chest. He reminds himself to breathe.
“I’m glad you brought me here,” John says softly, as though he hasn’t just tilted Sherlock’s entire world on its previously unalterable axis. John’s palm slides up to his ribcage, then back down to rest against his hip. The length of his arm is a warm presence against the small of his back. Sherlock breathes. John continues. “I want to try harder with you, Sherlock. I’m not sure why it’s taken me so long to acknowledge that.”
“You’re grieving,” Sherlock rumbles, taking a deep breath and finally letting his own head tip to the side, cheek resting carefully against John’s soft silver crown. He can feel John’s smile against his shoulder. He picks idly at a fingernail, still nervous and quite unsure what to do with his hands.
“No,” John whispers, and Sherlock closes his eyes, trying to hold onto the comforting warmth of stout-scented breath on his skin, to commit this moment to memory. “Not grieving. Not anymore. Wallowing in self-pity, maybe,” His voice is a pained rasp. “Sherlock, I’m bloody full to the brim with regret,” He sounds like he might cry.
Something inside Sherlock shakes loose, breaks free.
“John,” He whispers, and without a thought finds that one long arm has wound its way around to clutch at John’s back, the other following to wrap him up entirely—needing to comfort, to protect, like it’s somehow second nature to just reach for him. Like this is somehow easy for them. John accepts the embrace immediately, turning his body inward and tucking his legs up under him as he snugs up against Sherlock’s chest. “You can let it go,” He whispers fiercely into John’s hair. “It’s in the past.”
“I’ve let you down,” John sobs quietly into his neck. Sherlock holds on tighter, deeply unsettled by the revelation that he’s felt this way, evidently for a very long time.
“No,” He breathes, dipping his head until his lips meet the soft shell of John’s ear. He needs him to hear this, to believe it. “You haven’t. I want you with me, John—always—I don’t care about the past,” With John’s heaving body in his arms, John’s fingertips digging urgently into the small of his back, John’s tear streaked face pressed into his neck—tangible, indisputable proof that they both feel this devastating pull, that Sherlock hasn’t gone entirely mad—he utters a series of words he never thought he’d speak aloud to another human being. “I need you.”