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Sherlock is sitting on the floor.
Sherlock is sitting on the floor and turning his back to the kitchen and John is making his excuses. He reaches to pluck a square napkin from the pile under the coffee table, letting the soft susurrus of the fabric overtake John’s sigh. Fold, fold, push, fold, pull. Now Sydney Opera Houses outnumber swans two to one.
He knows perfectly well they haven’t got a friend named Beth.
Sherlock is sitting on the floor planning their wedding, John and Mary’s wedding, John and Mary’s dream wedding. He knows the guest list by rote, who will come and who won’t, and how Mary will (should) assign the tables. He designed the tented name cards himself and spent hours folding their creases by hand with painstaking precision.
There is no one called Beth.
Fold, fold, push, fold, pull.
It’s a code and a poor one. Sherlock considers being offended but can’t be bothered. He is exhausted by everyone else’s efforts to walk around him as though on eggshells. It’s been eight months since he came back to London, but the fatigue of running has never really faded, reinforced by their caution around him: he is still always on edge, always ready to bolt, always waiting for a signal that is never coming. Fold, fold, push, fold, pull.
Sherlock is sitting on the floor folding serviettes for John and Mary’s wedding as they whisper about him in the kitchen as though he’s a child that requires coddling because that is the most reasonable way to deal with it.
Sherlock is getting very good at being reasonable.
John used to think he was brilliant, used to turn to him with that half-smile and say, fantastic. Now Sherlock is reasonable and John apparently thinks he is the sort of idiot who can be fooled by if-that's-Beth-it's-probably-for-me-too.
Sherlock is sitting on the floor and Sydney Opera Houses bloom around him and John’s voice carries. Fold, fold, push, fold, pull. “Why would he be scared that we’re getting married? It’s not going to change anything. We’ll still do stuff.”
John. John. Don’t you realize?
Everything is already changed.
John and Mary. Mary and John. They have their own secret codes, their own secret languages. They are a unit, a team, perfect complements. Halves of a whole. Fold, fold, push, fold, pull. They have their own flat, their own Sunday morning routines. Sherlock is the quintessential third wheel, reduced to making dioramas of dining halls and YouTubing serviettes, and when they leave they don’t wonder about what he does while they are gone.
After the wedding even this tenuous connection to them is going to sever and Sherlock can’t bring himself to care. John and Mary are suburbia personified and their news-every-night-at-eleven routines make his skin crawl. They will sink down into it, envelope themselves in the habitual-division of-chores and quiet-nights-in and must-get-things-done-this-weekend.
Fold, fold, push, fold, pull.
John’s free time will be whittled away by responsibilities. That’s the only reasonable outcome. He doesn’t fault John for that. John will have to be practical and realistic and he has no real obligations to Sherlock.
The fact that Sherlock had once assumed John would be there, eager to be at 221B, eager to go with him on cases, is embarrassing enough. Fold, fold, push, fold, pull. Sherlock is careful to make no more assumptions about John and his priorities.
John comes back into the sitting room and Sherlock turns, catches sight of his face.
His look is a flash of pained grimace and suddenly Sherlock feels horribly exposed.
He is sitting on the floor and while John and Mary were hiding in the kitchen whispering about him, Sherlock folded twenty-four Sydney Opera Houses without even realising it. The display, spilling off the coffee table and onto the floor, pooling around his ankles, shows too much of his own hand: the secret thing that lingers in the back of Sherlock’s throat, thick and choking like curdled cream.
Sherlock is constantly gagging on the threat of it pouring out, souring the air between them, and now it is dripping from his own fingertips without his permission. John has forgiven Sherlock his trespasses but Sherlock doesn’t want to add to the list, and it is clear now that his daydreams about ever forming these words in the cavern of his mouth are really only nightmares that end without even this: John with Mary at Baker Street planning their wedding.
It’s fine. Sherlock is used to the weight of it in his throat.
Instead of I love you, Sherlock says, “That just . . . sort of happened.”
John’s frown deepens and Sherlock’s stomach plummets when John looks back into the kitchen, where Mary has just told him that Sherlock is terrified, and for a second Sherlock thinks John is going to ask, what’s wrong, and he’s not sure what he’ll say.
What’s wrong. There is a scar underneath his left shoulder blade that hasn’t healed properly even now and it itches to distraction.
What’s wrong. John and Mary come by and plan their wedding, pin lists and schedules to the wall, and when they leave again at the end of the night Sherlock sits underneath the map of it alone. He thinks the aching hollow in his gut would ease a little if only he could tell someone about it, but he has neither the words nor the audience.
What’s wrong. Nothing. I love you. It’s nothing, John.
Instead John says, “Sherlock, um.”
Perhaps John can see all the things Sherlock isn’t saying. He stands, abruptly, fingers twitching for another fold, fold, push, fold, pull. He looks at John and the deductions filter into his mind, and not for the first time his spine prickles with the sensation that John can see him in just the same way: new shoes, taking a new route to the surgery past a construction site, not sleeping well but hiding it from Mary.
In the kitchen Mary continues pretending to have a conversation, laughing false and bright. John sits at the desk and gestures for him to do the same; it feels like getting a talking-to by his father when he was twelve.
“I’ve smelled eighteen different perfumes,” John says, even though there were only nine, “I’ve sampled,” he stops to think and Sherlock’s mind supplies four, “nine different slices of cake which all tasted identical. I like the bridesmaids in purple--”
“Lilac.” That slips out. John’s inaccuracies grate on Sherlock’s nerves.
“Lilac,” he repeats, and his eyes flash in suspicion but thankfully he goes on. “There are no more decisions left to make,” which is an unquestionably false statement, “and I don’t even understand the decisions we have made. I’m faking opinions and it’s exhausting, so please, before she comes back . . .”
John’s phone is open to Sherlock’s website when he holds it out. “Pick something.” Sherlock looks down at the screen, uncomprehending. “Anything. Pick one.”
Pick one. He hasn’t looked at his website in months. Has he been receiving messages about the wedding there without knowing it? Sherlock peers closer but it’s only the usual drivel of suspected infidelities and thieving staff. What decision is John expecting him to make? He reads through the titles of the messages again but doesn’t see anything relevant. “Pick what?”
John blinks and then laughs, mirthlessly, disbelievingly. “A case,” he explains. “Your inbox is bursting. Just. Get me out of here.”
Sherlock doesn’t flush with humiliation but it’s a close thing. This is the solution Mary has thought up in response to her perception of Sherlock as a fragile, terrified child: to run him, like a dog straining on a leash let loose to chase the squirrels.
He leans in closer, glancing to check that Mary is still happily chattering to no one in the kitchen, and says, “You want to go on a case? Now?”
Sherlock does not want to go on a case with John, where he can lose himself in the illusion that it’s Sherlock and John instead of Mary and John. He hasn’t been on a case in weeks, drowning himself in John’s promises to someone else; the last three cases he did alone. It was better alone. It always is, these days. Sherlock is used to alone.
But John leans in a little and begs, “Please, Sherlock. For me.”
What’s wrong.
Nothing. I love you. It’s nothing.
Sherlock takes the phone.