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It takes years.
He's always been a fan of Hume's Problem of Induction, which states that it can take years of continuous observation to hypothesize a valid scientific theory, but only one piece of dissenting evidence to send it all crashing to the ground.
He sees it almost every day, in his job. There's the teary-eyed mother, the shocked husband, the brother in denial. "Jamie? Murder somebody? That's ridiculous. Jamie would never hurt a fly."
Here is what he observes: nobody is a killer until they are. Nobody murders until they get caught up in that perfect moment, emotions a swirl of passion and anger, and with just the pull of a trigger, they send years and years of predictable behavior down the drain.
Everybody is reliable until they aren't. Everybody stays until they leave.
Except for Joan, of course.
--
Well, she does leave. But just once, and it doesn't count because it was before everything had even really begun.
Her last week is, naturally, filled with drama and last-minute deductions, and, finally, a murderer behind bars. She barely finds time to pack everything up. It's nearly midnight on the day she's supposed to leave, and she's resorted to simply throwing her things into the suitcases.
"There's no rush, you know," Sherlock remarks, lounging with his feet up on her bare mattress.
"It's my policy to leave exactly on the day I'm scheduled to," she replies.
"Policy," he scoffs. "Who cares. Save the packing for tomorrow, and have a good night's sleep."
"So Gregson can call with another case that I'll have to stick around for so I can see the end? And then another one and another one? I'll never leave."
He shrugs, trying to look uncaring, and offers to help carry her bags down the stairs. She smiles at him.
The taxi's waiting outside, and they stand together at the door, for one last moment.
"Well, Sherlock, I can't lie: it's been fun."
He opens his mouth to begin some long prepared speech about how, yes, it's been fun, but he's happy that the brownstone is finally getting back to being a proper detective's office, not some place where platitudes were spouted constantly and feelings were encouraged-- but then his mouth gets a different sort of order, and it didn't come from his brain, he knows, because he didn't think about it at all.
"Stay."
"…What?"
He thinks about the now-empty guest bedroom in the brownstone. "Stay," he repeats. "You enjoy what I do, solving puzzles, helping people. And you've grown to become a very vital part of my thinking process. And I think we both know that what we have, this relationship, is more than strictly professional."
She frowns, sighs, and he knows what's coming next. She raises a hand, almost to the height of his face, but reconsiders and drops it back to her side.
"What you're feeling is completely normal, Sherlock, I want you to know. Companionship, it's a very… intimate thing, and a lot of people, develop feelings. My last client, for example, called me up a week after I left and wanted me to go shopping with her. But at the end of the day, it's just a job."
He bites his lip. She's wrong, of course, but there's not much he can do to convince her. "So… you're saying anything I'm feeling right now isn't real? That it will go away?"
She nods, and he shrugs; she'll come back, he knows, because he got her onto it. She caught a taste. It will never let her go. It didn't let him go, after all.
--
Six months later she's working in an ER in Brooklyn because the sober companion job she'd gotten after Sherlock just didn't… feel right, as much as she hated to admit it. So she'd gotten her medical license back and found a job. She still didn't like the idea of surgery, but stitching up stab wounds isn't exactly open heart surgery, so to the ER it was.
She likes the job… well, she likes the part where she helps people. But she doesn't particularly like the part where she gets bored out of her mind. Sometimes, when the patient's been stabilized, she likes to take a moment and observe the grease under a man's fingernails, the mud on his boots, and ideas start to crystallize in her head, but her jurisdiction only lies inside the hospital's walls, and when the patient walks out through the doors, she loses everything.
So many murder victims and attempted murder victims end up in her ER, that what happens next is inevitable.
She's checking on one of her patients when she feels a tap on her back, and she turns around to find a young police officer.
"Dr. Watson?"
"Yes, that's me." She tells herself not to get excited, reminds herself that the NYPD work plenty of cases without the assistance of a certain consulting detective.
"There was a patient in here yesterday who died of several gunshot wounds. His name was Gavin Dirk. You were his attending?"
"Yes."
"If you could spare the time, could you please come with me to the waiting room? There are other officers who have a few questions for you. Nothing difficult. Just about what you saw last night."
As she follows the police officer, she wonders. She remembers Gavin, remembers his fidgety friend who'd brought him in. She'd observed everything, like she'd been taught.
The police officer stops in front of her, and she walks around him to find, standing next to Detective Bell, who else?
Sherlock.
He smiles when he sees her. "My dear Watson, it's good to see you."
She smiles back, walks over, thinks about the soot in a man's hair, the gap in his teeth, the anxiety in his eyes.
Long story short, she skips several shifts at work to go play detectives with Sherlock one more time. Her observations about Gavin's suspicious friend are crucial, and, in the end, they arrest the heads of an underground cocaine smuggling ring.
She ends up back at the brownstone, a cup of tea in her hand, her back sinking into her armchair, like she'd never left.
He asks, "Remember what you said six months ago?"
"What did I say?"
"You said I'd forget about this feeling. But I haven't. And the offer still stands."
She pauses, looks down at her hands, at the steam rising from her tea. "I can't just drop everything and become a… a… detective."
"You can still work part time," Sherlock suggests. "In fact, I would welcome it."
She looks at him. "My father and I haven't been getting along lately," he explains.
"And we'd be… partners?" she asks.
"Actually I was thinking you could be more of a secretary/bodyguard fusion—"
"Sherlock."
"Joking. Yes, partners, of course." Sherlock sits down in the chair next to hers, looks at her intently. "What do you say?"
She says yes.
--
She stays. She stays through it all, through his tantrums, his rude comments, his odd hours. She even stays when she wakes in the morning to find a hunched over elderly man in their living room, in the process of removing his ratty clothes and throwing them on her floor.
Living with Sherlock has made her used to strange acquaintances dropping by at inconvenient times, but it hasn't made her any less wary. She'd passed Sherlock's room on her way down and found him still sleeping, so he hadn't let the visitor in, and this concerned her.
She coughs. "Can I help you?"
The elderly man tenses, spins around with a quickness she would not associate with him. "Who are you?" he asks, his tone of voice abnormally high and youthful.
She feels self-conscious in her skimpy pajamas, but she stands tall. "I live here. Who are you? Tell me before I call the police."
The man's shoulders slump. "I'm sure Sherlock has told you a lot about me." He reaches up to his neck, picks at his skin, and finally pulls away what Joan eventually realizes is an extremely elaborate mask.
A middle-aged woman appears in Joan's living room, grinning deviously. "He may have referred to me as the one who got away, the woman who beat him, or just plain 'The Woman.'"
Joan resists the urge to roll her eyes. "Just tell me already." These days she only has enough patience to deal with one person's theatrics.
She guesses what the woman's going to say before she does. "My name is Irene Adler."
And Joan sighs because she knows that no part of this is going to be easy.
Two hours later, she and Irene sit in armchairs while Sherlock paces back and forth, aggravated.
"You died," he says to her, like an accusation.
"I faked it, darling. Big Mike was after me. I had to. You understand."
Joan hears a very faint New Jersey accent in the woman's voice, in the slight elongation of her a's. The woman has the kind of face that is nondescript when at rest, but it absolutely lights up when she smiles. Her hair is a plain brown, tied in a tight bun above her head to fit under the mask.
"I understand Big Mike. I understand faking your death. What I do not understand is you waiting two years to inform me of the fact. Two years!"
"I'm sorry."
"Sorry?" Sherlock shouts. "You're 'sorry'?"
Joan looks at Sherlock, then Irene, then back at Sherlock, and remembers that she's not a sober companion anymore, and she doesn't have an obligation to help Sherlock through emotional struggles.
"This seems private," she says slowly, standing up. "I'll, er, just go--"
"No!" Irene and Sherlock exclaim, in unison.
And then she remembers that maybe friends, too, have an obligation to help friends with emotional struggles, and she sits back down with a huff.
"She's a master of disguise," he tells her that night when he's in one of those rare introspective moods. "The day I met her, I was working on a burglary, and already, I had also met a father of four, a homeless man on the street, the owner of a shipping company, and a ballerina, and they all turned out to be her." She recognizes the look of admiration on his face. Until now, it had been reserved only for her. "Incidentally, she turned out to be the burglar, too."
"So she's a criminal," says Joan, not bothering to remove the judgment from her voice.
"Yes. Nothing serious, though. Just a few robberies, some tax evasion, immigration fraud."
She really doesn't like the sound of that, but she sees the way he smiles when he's not paying attention, the way his footsteps sound lighter on the stairs.
"Nothing serious," she echoes softly.
They end up being the stereotypical slap-kiss relationship. Half the time they scream at each other, and the other half they scream at each other (and Joan has to cover her face with her pillow and try not to feel grossed out).
Irene tells her they were like this even before she faked her death, and Joan knows this kind of relationship is not sustainable long term, but she can't bring herself to convince Sherlock to end it. They are happy, sometimes, and Irene does happen to be the only person Sherlock has ever loved.
"You know, if you guys are getting serious, I wouldn't mind moving out," Joan says one morning after finding a naked, smirking Irene in her kitchen and having to explain to her that, yes, she is a doctor, and, yes, she does have immense respect for the human body, but that she doesn't need to see it jiggling around everywhere while she's eating her Cheerios.
"I wouldn't dream of it, Watson!" Sherlock replies cheerily. "Though it is very kind of you to offer. But the brownstone is large enough for all of us, and, after all, we are partners, in work and in life."
Irene, wearing only a shirt now, at least some improvement, Joan thinks, wraps her arms around Sherlock's neck and kisses his cheek. "You can't leave, Joan! Who else would I watch CSI with? You know how this one is, always making criticisms about continuity or accuracy. He just doesn't appreciate good television like you do."
"Good television?" Sherlock scoffs. "This 'good television' to which you refer merely consists of contrived dialogue and utterly predictable plot twists--"
"It's not about that, dear. It's about the characters, their relationships, their love lives. Haven't you got any romance in your soul?"
"I'll show you romance," Sherlock says, tipping a giggling Irene back and kissing her.
Joan watches them, wondering if she'd really meant what she'd said earlier, what she would have done if Sherlock had taken her up on her offer. But he hadn't, and it no longer matters.
The thing about Irene, about all thieves (and Joan saw this coming, and she tries not to feel too smug about it), is that she's flighty.
Joan soon realizes that Irene's abandonment of Sherlock while he was in rehab was not an isolated incident. She takes off at random times and never comes back unless at least a day has passed. Never tells anyone where or what she's doing either. Joan figures she's probably casing joints, making money, but never asks. Every time Gregson calls her and Sherlock to the NYPD station for a case, Joan stares at all of the assorted detectives and wonders if any of them are investigating a theft committed by a woman with expressions as pliable as soft clay and a voice capable of recreating twenty different accents.
She's nearly asleep when the shouting starts. She considers storming downstairs, telling them to shut up, but she hears a strange lilt in their voices, and she gets the feeling that this is going to be the last time she gets woken up like this.
"You weren't there!"
"Something came up. I had to go deal with it."
"All you do these days is 'go deal with things.'"
"Look, I need… space, Sherlock. Some things I need for myself only."
"I understand people need their privacy, and I would understand your need for space, if you didn't say the same exact thing every single day. I never know when you're going to leave, when you're going to come back. And I can't help thinking, what if it turns into two years like last time? What if it turns into forever?"
"That's just who I am. I can't change this, I can't give you any more."
"And I can't live like this."
The silence that follows is paralyzing.
"Why didn't it work out?" Joan asks Irene delicately the next morning, as she watches her pack up her things. It's a familiar image, but this time, Irene is the one leaving.
There is no bitterness in Irene's voice, in the way she throws her clothing into her suitcase. Just resignation.
"Sherlock Holmes is very rarely surprised," says Irene. "That big, scary, unknowable thing we call 'the future,' he calls 'the logical and predictable continuation of the events occurring in the present.' He can predict where you're going to go for lunch that day, which team is going to win the Super Bowl, where the murderer's going to run to. Hell, he even knows what the characters on TV are going to say next." Irene pauses. "But you knew that."
Joan nods.
"And I… just don't fit in that future of his. I wish I did, but I don't, I can't."
Joan frowns as one of her loaned blouses finds its way into Irene's bag but doesn't say anything, also doesn't say anything about the skirt she'd borrowed from Irene a week ago that she really likes. Instead, she says,
"I'll be sad to see you go. You made him happy." She shakes her head and reconsiders. "Half of the time anyway."
"Yeah… half of the time," Irene murmurs, her mind clearly somewhere else. "Can't do much with half of the time."
Irene stands up, finished, and pulls Joan into a farewell hug.
"I'd say we could keep in touch, have coffee, maybe," Joan says after they separate, "but something tells me you won't be sticking around in the city for much longer."
Irene grimaces. "And you'd be right." She looks at Joan, eyeing her like a thief eyes the security measures in a building. "I'm not like you," she says.
Joan considers asking her what she means by that, but the taxi announces its arrival with a beep, and the moment is lost.
She helps with the baggage as Irene wraps her arms around Sherlock, one last time.
"You and me, Sherly, we just weren't destined to work out," she sighs. "Ah, well, we'll always have London."
For once in his life, Sherlock doesn't roll his eyes and start spouting off criticism of Irene's overly-romantic world view.
"We will," he agrees, and Joan feels her heart break.
She and Sherlock wave goodbye to Irene, watching until her taxi disappears into another street. He sighs, and Joan asks,
"Do you think it's even possible for you to have a functioning relationship?"
He slings an arm around her, his frown lessening just a little as he does so. "The evidence seems to suggest an impossibility, but no man knows the future. Who knows. Maybe one day."
--
She even stays through the year that he would refer to afterward as the year of reconciliation with the spawn of Satan. Of course, afterward, the "spawn of Satan" remark is made in a more jovial tone.
It all starts with another dinner invitation, which Joan, for some unknown reason, seems to be adamant about getting him to accept.
"Just give him a chance," she pleads.
"I have. Multiple times. I don't see why this time will be any different."
"Because if you want things to be different, you have to first believe that they will be." Believe? No. He doesn't believe in his father. He believes in empty seats and reservations made for two, but filled by one.
She sighs. "Remember when I left you, and you gave me another chance? Why can't you do the same for him?"
"You are different, Watson, of course you are. Naturally, I would give you another chance. For you, I would give a thousand chances. I have faith in you."
She purses her lips, but there's a hint of a smile.
She doesn't make him go.
(His father doesn't show up.)
His father does show up, however, on their doorstep the next evening, bags of takeout in his hands, a sheepish expression on his face, old eyes crinkling behind thick bifocals.
"I'm, er, sorry I missed our dinner reservation."
Sherlock only blinks fiercely for several seconds, trying to determine if he'd relapsed sometime earlier and is now hallucinating. Eventually, he ascertains that he isn't, and he transitions quickly from confusion to anger.
"Which one? Because, as I recall, you've missed quite a number of them," he says flatly, then slams the door. As he walks away, the doorbell rings continuously, and he ignores it. He passes Joan coming down the stairs as he walks up to his room. She points at the door, an unspoken question in her expression.
"It's my father," he says.
"Sherlock!" she scolds. She rushes past him towards the door.
"Don't answer it," he adds over his shoulder as he continues up the stairs, but, of course Joan doesn't listen to him.
Once locked securely in his room, he bends down, removes a small piece of cork from the floor, and then looks through a small hole into the dining room. He chuckles to himself as Joan and his father's voices float up from below and notes smugly that his father's balding seems to have accelerated.
"Two sugars, no cream," Joan says as she hands his father a cup of coffee.
"Thank you." His father smiles charmingly, and Sherlock would groan, but he doesn't want to give himself away.
Joan sits across the table from his father, and Sherlock wishes he could see her face, see what she's thinking. "I must apologize about the whole 'slamming the door in your face and then running upstairs' thing. But I'm sure you're used to it by now."
His father chuckles. "Yes, I am. It's quite alright."
"Um… this is really hard to ask, but… do you have any identification I could look at? You see, last time I 'met' you, you were an actor Sherlock hired to fool me." Sherlock smirks, and feels a kind of warmth in his chest.
His father accedes to the request graciously. "Of course, Dr. Watson. I completely understand." And Sherlock sighs because he knows that Joan will be sucked right into the illusion, that she'll forget everything Sherlock has said up until now. His father's face is rather pudgy and soft, like lumpy yogurt; most people who meet him are quickly disarmed. Sherlock can't see Joan's face, but he's sure if he could he'd see all of her apprehensions disappearing.
"So, Dr. Watson," his father says after Joan returns his wallet, "I hired you to be a sober companion to my son for six weeks, and yet, here you are, two years later. Stockholm syndrome, perhaps?" He chortles, a joke of sorts.
"Yes, perhaps…" Joan murmurs humorlessly.
"Is there something wrong, Dr. Watson? You are looking at me quite strangely--"
"Yeah, actually, there is something wrong." Sherlock's heart jumps up into his throat, and presses his ear closer to the floorboards, forgoing his sight for his hearing. "I don't like being lied to."
"I have no idea what you're talking about, Dr. Watson. I haven't lied to you at all. I am Sherlock's father. I know IDs can be faked, but that's quite a lot of effort for just a joke."
"No, I don't mean about that. I mean about this whole… thing. The way you're acting. It's fake."
"I don't know what you want from me, Dr. Watson. This is me."
"No, it's not, and you wanna know how I know that? It's because I'm having a little trouble picturing the person you're acting like right now as an emotionally abusive father who was never there for his son."
"I know Sherlock must have complained to you about me, but you have to understand that children, when it comes to their parents, can have a tendency to stretch the truth--"
"You're wrong. Sherlock's done some suspect things to me over the years: stalk my boyfriends, lie to my mother, yell at my boss… but the one thing I know he would never do is lie to me about something like this."
They sit in a stalemate for several seconds until his father's entire demeanor shifts, and the air chills.
"Fine." His father's tone sharpens, and Sherlock shudders involuntarily before he can stop himself. "You want the real me?"
"Yes." Joan isn't backing down; her voice is hard.
"Well, you must know that, first and foremost, I am a businessman. The Holmes family has a long and illustrious history, and we would commonly be considered 'old money.' But the thing about old money is that, after years of idleness and an undemanding lifestyle, it breeds idiots. Idiots who become 'artists' or drug addicts--" Sherlock winces, "--or who invest their money into ridiculous internet scams. And, thus, the Holmes name fell into disrepair.
"So when control of the family estate came into my hands I did what needed to be done. I trimmed the fat, I did not accept anything less than perfection, and I educated my children. The Holmes estate is what it is today because of me. Spending most of my adult life building it into an empire cost me some things in life, but it didn't cost me any money, and that was the point. You can see why I was a very busy man, Dr. Watson."
Sherlock looks back through the hole to see Joan shaking her head sadly.
"Jesus," she breathes.
Twenty minutes later, he quickly replaces the cork in the floor, then scrambles to sit on his bed as he listens to Joan climb up the stairs.
She knocks on the door. "Sherlock?"
"Go away."
He hears her sigh. "Your father's gone."
"Oh, well, alright then." He gets up, unlocks the door, then goes to sit back down. She enters lightly, her steps cautious.
"So I talked to your father."
"And?" he asks, pretending like he hadn't actually heard every word of the conversation.
"He, uh… he wants to reconcile."
His heart falls; after his father's outburst, Sherlock was hoping Joan would recognize his father as the devil that he was, but it seems she had fallen for his father's wiles after all. He raises a finger, takes a breath, but before he can object, she continues,
"Now, I know what you're thinking because I was thinking it for a while, too. I saw your father's real personality, and I've seen what he can be like. I don't want to say I understand what you've gone through because I couldn't possibly understand what it must have been like to grow up with that as your father, but I don't want you to think I'm being fooled."
"You are."
"You didn't see the look in his eyes, Sherlock. He's changed." No, he hadn't seen the man's eyes, but he did hear the man's voice, and it was the same voice as always, the sugar-sweet voice he used to soothe troubled investors and convince them to dump their money on him.
"He most certainly has not."
"Just have one meal with him. Or maybe just coffee," she bargains.
"Surely. I would love to sit alone at a table for an hour awaiting a man who will never arrive."
"Oh, he'll come." She grabs his hand.
"How do you know?"
"Think about it logically, Sherlock. Your father became the man he is, er, was, because of money. To get money. But now he has loads of it, loads of time, and he wants to spend that time with you."
He flops down onto his bed sadly, resigned, already knowing what he's going to say because he wouldn't give his father the benefit of the doubt, but he'd give it to Joan. "Why are you pushing for this, Watson?" he asks her. "Why do you want us to make peace?"
"I want you to be happy," she says simply.
Their first meeting ends in chaos, with Sherlock and Joan being shooed out of the restaurant, after causing a scene.
"--and we all know the real reason mother didn't come home that Christmas was because she was canoodling with that bodyguard of hers in Guam!" Sherlock shouts, waving his fist in the air. But his father is sitting in the back of the restaurant, and obviously hasn't heard him.
"I'm sorry, Sherlock," Joan sighs after they've hailed a cab. "I shouldn't have pressured you into--"
"Actually, I thought that went better than expected."
Joan's face perks up, and he feels light. "Really? That's great," she says, then adds with a grimace, "What were you expecting?"
"He refrained from criticizing my struggles with addiction! Well, more than he usually does, at any rate. And he still isn't too fond of my chosen profession of consulting detective, but I can tell it's growing on him."
"You can?" Joan asks, unbelieving, but encouraged nonetheless.
The meetings eventually progress to the point where they don't end in either him or his father being escorted out of the premises and come Christmas, Joan asks Sherlock what his plans are. "You know my mother would love having you again, if you want," she assures him.
He wonders if any Christmas present in the world would be good enough for Joan, for what she's done for him, for all that she's suffered through, just for him.
"Not this year, I think."
--
Hell, she even stays when she's abruptly kidnapped walking home one Tuesday evening, held in a broom closet for two days by a man who only identifies himself as M, and then is suddenly released, only to find herself being summoned to the local county jail.
Through the glass, he can see her mouth form the word "Sherlock?" as she walks toward him. She looks too tired and disheveled, bruised in some places, and he clenches his fist so tightly that, had he not already chewed his nails to nubs, they would have drawn blood. He wants to go find Moriarty, he wants revenge, he wants to end this, but he reminds himself that it's out of his hands now. It's all up to Joan, and truth be told, there's no one he'd rather have handling it. She'll succeed, he knows it.
"Sherlock?" she says again, but he can't hear her. He motions towards the phone that she had forgotten in her rush.
"Sherlock, they're saying you murdered somebody."
He pauses, and his mind flashes back to that choice he'd had to make twenty-four hours ago.
He pulls up to the address Moriarty had given him, parks haphazardly and sprints up the stairs to the door while putting his phone back to his ear. He finds a key taped to the door, and as he begins to work on opening it, he barks into the phone:
"Okay, I've arrived, Moriarty. Now what do you want--" He stops short when he enters the building to find a grisly murder scene. A dead man lies on the floor, a hole in his skull, his brains and blood splattered on the wall. He spots the murder weapon, a small pistol, on the other side of the room. Definitely not a suicide. Murder.
"Walk to the window on the other side of the room," Moriarty orders. Sherlock can practically hear the grin on the man's face, and he feels like throwing the phone on the floor and stomping it. Of course, he doesn't. He tells himself to stay rational.
"Look out the window, at the third floor of that blue building. You probably can't see me, but I'm there. Here, why don't you hold up some number of fingers? So I can prove it. Yes, you're holding up one finger, the middle on-- aha, very humorous, Mr. Holmes. Flipping me off; I probably should have seen that coming."
Sherlock takes the time to observe the crime scene. He recognizes the body on the floor; it belonged to a man named Reese Wolcolm who Sherlock had visited earlier today in pursuit of information about Joan's kidnapping with Gregson, and--Damn! Sherlock had gotten into a bit of an altercation with the dead man. That's suspicious. Well, it wasn't his fault. The man hadn't cared at all about Joan or helping Sherlock, and tensions were high. He begins to get an inkling of Moriarty's plan.
"Now what." Sherlock's voice is flat.
"Pick up the gun."
It's a 45 caliber Colt, missing just one bullet, and completely clean of fingerprints… until Sherlock picks it up, of course.
"Now, because I am such a nice person, I'm going to give you two choices, here. Well, actually, three choices, but I know you're not going to take the third one, but I figure, why not offer it to you anyway--"
He loses his patience. "Can you get to the point already?"
There is the sound of a dissatisfied cluck of a tongue on the line. "No, Mr. Holmes, I cannot. I am in control, now, and this is such a sweet revenge. How does it feel? How does it feel to be out of control, to have the one person you care about at my mercy? When you dismantled my crime empire, you dismantled my soul. Sounds cheesy, but it's true. But I know that whatever you're feeling at the moment is much, much worse, than what I felt. And it feels great."
Sherlock stays silent, breathes shallowly.
"Now, back to what I was saying. Your first choice is to let your precious Joan die. But, no, you're not going to take that option, so let's move on. You have two choices. You can take that gun and shoot yourself in the head… or you can put it down right where you found it."
He closes his eyes, to make thinking easier. He could fake it. Moriarty's on the third floor, so the angle of his view is obstructed, there are coins and paper clips in his pocket, he could jam the gun…
But something about that plan just gets him the wrong way. He'd have to fake his death for several months, cut off all ties with anyone he cared about, while he hunted down Moriarty and whatever double agents he'd planted, and it just feels so… solitary. He's unpleasantly reminded of the time Irene faked her death and he'd fallen apart. Plus, he knows how much Joan hates it when he doesn't inform her of his plans.
"I'd like to warn you, in case you're thinking of trying something tricky, that I've got a man on the inside. I'm sure you've already figured out who it is by now, though. Come on, go ahead, hazard a guess, would you?"
When it first became apparent that someone in the NYPD was playing for the wrong team, he'd gone through thousands of pages of evidence logs, watched hours and hours of surveillance video tapes, and the only thing he could come up with was a strong suspicion, and he was a bit loathe to believe it, as it was.
"Detective Turner."
"Very good, Mr. Holmes. I'm impressed. And I want you to know that if Detective Turner catches wind of you trying anything, then he will make sure that your precious Dr. Watson will look very much like the man laying on the ground in front of you."
Involuntarily, he imagines Joan, dead, on the ground with a hole in her head, and he shuts his eyes as the nausea rolls over him. Maybe he shouldn't risk it. Maybe he should just kill himself, end this all here. But he knows that if there's one thing Joan would hate him for more than putting her in danger, it would be for offing himself.
"If it makes the decision any easier, you should know that it would be much more entertaining for me to see you in jail. But it also would be more work on my part. So whichever you pick, it doesn't matter to me very much."
"Very considerate of you," Sherlock snaps.
"So what'll it be?"
He puts the gun down.
He opens his mouth, and it's hard to spit out the words that come next because he's never been good at lying to her.
"Yes. That is correct."
He looks into her eyes; even though he's sitting in jail, wearing the orange jumpsuit, she doesn't believe any of it, he can tell. And despite himself, he smiles.
"Sherlock, come on. I know you've been framed. And I know you've got some kind of master plan to get out of this. But you can let me in on it. I can help you."
Pausing, he wonders if he can tell her. But there's movement out of the corner of his eye, and he looks to his left to see Detective Turner step out of the shadows. His heart freezes, and again, he gets that horrible, horrible image of Joan with a hole in her head.
Joan follows Sherlock's gaze and looks back. "Yeah, Detective Turner said I'm not allowed to visit you unless he comes along. Some kind of regulation."
Turner nods, acknowledging Sherlock, and the look in his eyes is malicious.
"There is no plan," he mutters."I murdered Reese Wolcolm. I'm sorry."
Joan's expression changes by not one tiny tremor of muscle. "I'm going to get you out of here, Sherlock, I promise. I'm not going to give up on you. I don't care if you have some secret plan you're not telling me about."
There is no plan. There is only Joan.
The guard behind him gives the "wrap it up" signal, and Joan stands up. Sherlock looks nervously at Turner, then decides that, at least, he's allowed this.
"Be careful," he tells Joan.
"Don't you worry about me. Worry about yourself, and what I'm going to do to you if I find out you lied to me," Joan orders, then throws the phone back onto the receiver angrily and walks away, dreadful purpose in her step.
He wonders how long it will take her to notice the evidence logs he'd left strewn on his bed, how long it will take her to go through them all, find what he found. Wonders if she'll go to the crime scene and find the evidence to exonerate him. He figures it will probably take her a few weeks, maybe a couple months.
It takes her six days.
On the way out of the jail, he passes Turner on his way in, a permanent frown stuck on his face, and Sherlock finally lets out the breath he'd been holding for a week.
Joan's waiting for him in the lobby, and he rushes out and grabs her and hugs her tight.
"You didn't give up on me," he murmurs into her hair.
"Of course not."
He's overjoyed, but he doesn't let it last long, and he soon transitions into business mode.
"Right." Strolling briskly out of the prison, he puts on his coat. "So we have to track down Moriarty. It's only been six days--Good job with that, by the way-- but he's probably long gone by now--"
"Sherlock."
"I have a list at home, on my computer, of his known hideouts and--"
"Sherlock."
"If we leave tonight, we could be in England by tomorrow morning--"
"Sherlock."
He stops, looks back at her.
"We already caught Moriarty. When we got Turner."
He's a bit ashamed about it, but for the first fraction of a second, he's rather disappointed. For the past seven days he'd been looking forward to his revenge against the criminal mastermind. Hell, he'd even prepared a revenge speech while sitting, bored, in his cell.
But the feeling disappears quickly enough, replaced with pride and relief. He reaches for Joan again, puts an arm around her shoulders.
"Oh, my beautiful, beautiful Watson. What would I ever do without you?"
--
Joan's gone to Washington to help out that old ex-boyfriend Liam with rehab, and he gets this nagging insecurity, like he always does whenever she goes away, that she won't come back. (And it's hard, because he loves that about her, the way she never gives up on anyone, but at the same time, some of the people she does not give up on are not him, and he worries.)
They're video-chatting because he's so used to seeing her face every day that he's not sure what will happen if he doesn't. He can tell from the way she talks that she's concerned about Liam, maybe considering spending a few more days in Seattle to help him settle in, and he feels nauseous. She's in the middle of telling him about Seattle's rehab facilities, when, out of the blue, he complains,
"I don't know what to do without you, Joan."
She cocks her head. The grainy computer pixels don't let him see her eyes clearly.
"I'm coming back soon, Sherlock. Don't worry--"
"But I do worry. We're flatmates, we spend so much time together, and we're friends. But that's the thing. We're just friends. Tomorrow you could get a job offer in California. You could meet a man, fall in love, move to Colorado. You could leave tomorrow, and I would be unable to do anything about it." He thinks absentmindedly about an empty guest bedroom. He thought about an empty guest bedroom years ago, but this time, he rather likes the idea.
She stares at him, an anxious look on her face. "Are you okay, Sherlock? You know I wouldn't do something like that."
He thinks of all the men and women behind bars. So many of them probably said at one point in their life that they would never murder somebody, but then the moment came and they pulled the trigger or swung the golf club, and then they had.
He thinks of Hume and the Problem of Induction. The sun rises every morning. Sometimes you wake up after it's already risen, sometimes you watch it crawl over the horizon as you finish an all-nighter of reviewing case notes with your best friend/flatmate. Every day of your life, you see the sun rise without fail. But tomorrow? Nobody can know the future. Just because the sun has risen doesn't mean it will. Perhaps tomorrow, the sun will explode. Or a black hole will swallow the Earth. How can you know, for certain, what will happen and what will not? How can you know?
You can have faith.
He looks at Joan. He would give her a thousand chances. A million.
"Sherlock?" she says.
He knows that there are probably better ways to do this than over Skype. He doesn't care; tact has never been one of his priorities.
"I love you," he says.
Her expression shows shock, then confusion, and then…
She smiles.
She flies home the next day.