Chapter Text
Fourteen red half-centimetre lines.
Well, fourteen half-centimetre lines and two dots, to be more precise.
Though “half-centimetre” is really just a guess. Not even a very good one since it’s obvious that three-quarters-of-a-centimetre is likely a much more accurate measurement, but it’s a bit of a mouthful—“three quarters of a centimetre”—isn’t it? Seems easier just to call it a half-centimetre and be done with it.
Not that it matters.
In the space of sixty seconds it will change, and then he’ll count the number of lines that make up this new slice of the night that glows at him from the clock next to the bed—and whether he calls them "half-centimetre lines” or “three-quarters-of-a-centimetre lines” during the following minute he’s still not sleeping is largely irrelevant. Even if the entire conversation wasn’t taking place inside his head in the dead of night, whether there are fourteen half-centimetre lines in the digital representation of one minute to midnight or fourteen lines that are three-quarters-of-a-centimetre long makes no difference at all.
There’s a slight shift of the mattress beneath him, a soft puff of a sleepy sigh against his neck, the tightening grip of the slender arm draped over his chest as his sleeping wife stirs and he stiffens beneath her. He wills himself not to move, not to further disturb the slumber of the woman asleep next to him—and when her arm relaxes and she falls limp against his chest once more he slowly releases the breath he’s been holding, concentrates on letting it out slowly and then drawing in another.
He remembers a time when the warmth of her small body tucked next to his was a comfort, a constant reassurance that he wasn’t alone, a reminder that the gaping hole in his chest might yet be refilled with her soft touch and gentle affection. He longs for the days when the steady thrum of her pulse lulled him to sleep, when her arms were the only safety to be found in the midst of despair.
Before his blood smeared hands felt for a non-existent pulse, before sirens and speeding ambulances and stark hospital lights and hushed voices and the stern face of a surgeon approaching him from down a long hall.
He’s a very lucky man, Dr. Watson. Just a quarter of a centimetre to the left and he wouldn’t have had a chance.
How much difference does a quarter of a centimetre make?
All the difference in the world.
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“Hullo, Poppet,” John says gently, bent over low and resting his lips against the thin fabric of the flowing night gown falling in soft folds over skin stretched taut and pushed out round. Calloused fingers catch slightly on the delicate cloth as he presses his palms into the roundness beneath his hands. “Got a kick for your old man this morning?”
An answering nudge against his grasping fingers manages to startle him, it always does, then his lips stretch into a grin just as warm fingertips brush lightly above the collar of his dressing gown, trimmed nails skittering softly over the skin of his neck and he freezes—goes stiff and tense a moment before the hand touching him does the same. John feels the seeds of panic rising within, closes his eyes and wills them to recede, forces a calm he doesn’t quite feel to settle back over his shoulders as a signal to his wife that this normal touch, this casual intimacy, is welcome. Because it should be. Because it is. Of course it is. After a moment the message is transferred, and the fingers resume their gentle glide over the back of his neck and then come to rest at his nape.
“She always moves when you ask her to,” Mary says, a hint of playful accusation in her voice. “Already such a Daddy’s girl.”
“I’d better enjoy that while it lasts,” John says, then looks up into his wife’s eyes and smiles. “Soon enough she’ll want nothing to do with me I expect.”
Mary smiles warmly. “Don’t be ridiculous, John. Little girls always love their fathers—no matter how old they get.”
“Did you?” John asks, looking at her expectantly.
It takes him a moment to register the alarmed flash in her eyes as surprise, it’s there and gone almost before he noticed it at all, her face settling quickly back into as close an approximation possible of the happy smile it had been wearing seconds earlier.
“I did, yes.” Mary clears her throat with a quiet cough, then turns toward the mirror and reaches for her toothbrush, then twists on the tap.
He’s broken the rules, of course. Slid a toe over that invisible line between Mary Watson and whoever this person was before he’d stood in front of a church full of people and vowed to love her, to honor her, to cherish her. They’ve agreed: it doesn’t matter who she was before.
Before he married her. Before she was carrying his child. Before she’d put a bullet in his best friend to keep her secret.
John watches her for a moment longer, examines the profile she cuts there in front of the sink in their bathroom—at her sleep mussed hair, her upturned pixie nose, her soft, full breasts swaying slightly beneath her night gown as she brushes her teeth, at the swell of her belly full with the daughter they’ll welcome into the world in mere weeks. After a moment he reaches for his own toothbrush, stripes a bit of paste over the bristles, then sets to work cleaning his own teeth. He extends his arm to lean against the counter and his hand brushes against the one his wife has propped there as well, a soft slide of flesh against flesh, a snapshot of the everyday casual intimacy that makes up a marriage, a familiar touch that is so common he rarely ever notices it anymore.
Shifting his weight a bit John readjusts his stance, his hand sliding the slightest bit away from Mary’s in the process. Not enough to be noticeable, surely. Hardly any difference at all.
Barely a quarter of a centimetre.
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“I’m off.”
John looks up from his book, shifts a bit in the overstuffed armchair that Mary deflected his objections to purchasing for the sitting room of their unfurnished suburban home on the grounds that it wasn’t particularly comfortable to sit in by assuring him that he’d get used to it.
He hasn’t.
She’s standing in the doorway, the buttons of her bright red coat straining over the bump she rests her small hands atop, late afternoon sun from the window reflecting off the diamond on her finger and setting small fireflies of light shimmering across the bright fabric and up over her face.
“Are you?” John asks, confusion warring with a hint of disinterest he’s not sure he’s ready to admit is there at all. “Where?”
“Late lunch and a bit of shopping with Kath,” Mary tells him, good natured exasperation wrinkling her eyes at the corners as she rolls them at her husband. “I did mention it, you know.”
“Did you?”
“Three times,” Mary replies with a smile, shaking her head as she winds her scarf about her neck and then crosses to stand before him. “I expect I’ll find you right here when I get home, nose still in that book.”
She extends a hand to his shoulder and leans over for a kiss. John lifts his head to meet her half way as she presses her face toward him, then tilts his neck a bit and her lips slide next to his then press softly into the corner of his mouth, half against the chapped skin of his lips and half against the late afternoon stubble on his cheek. A kiss, to be sure, but just slightly off centre—a centimetre or so from being a direct hit. Not a great distance. Hardly even noticeable really. Mary pulls back and looks at him for a moment, then puts on a grin that doesn’t quite extend to her eyes.
“I won’t be late,” she says, her fingers squeezing gently where they still grasp his shoulder, then turns and walks toward the door.
“Have fun,” John says as she steps through it, throwing a small wave over her shoulder as the door snicks softly closed behind her and quiet fills the room.
“I’ll be right here,” John says into it.
The silence that descends in her wake is like a living thing, John thinks, a warm blanket of absence that slinks around his shoulders and settles against his skin and muffles the discordant noise that lingers just below the surface of the soundtrack of his days now, and his nights, and even his dreams.
He used to notice it, this hum that fills his ears and sets his teeth on edge and chafes against his skin, this constant barrage of second guessing and indecision and what the hell have I done that underlies every moment since that plane touched back down on the tarmac nine weeks ago. He recalls the moment he first felt it, the initial sting of it against his skin as Sherlock descended the stairs and disappeared into the sleek black sedan waiting for him without so much as a glance in John’s direction, the sharp slap of it as it pushed through his clothing and under his skin and seemed to settle into his very bones like a brutal, frigid gust.
Like an east wind.
He’d taken Mary home and then sat down in this chair he hates and waited for Sherlock to contact him. Looking down anxiously at his phone anticipating that the summons would come at any moment, he waited.
And waited.
Well into the night he’d dozed off in his chair, awoken by the soft patter of Mary’s stocking feet coming down the stairs, warm hands and sad eyes beckoning him to come to bed. He’d nodded sleepily, told her he’d be along in a moment, then clumsily typed out a text to Sherlock:
What do you need me to do?
He’d stared dumbly at the phone waiting for the response that came several minutes later.
*ping*
Nothing. Stay where you are. –SH
John read the response twice. Then a third time. Then a fourth before typing out:
I want to help.
The response was immediate.
*ping*
Will contact you should assistance be required. Look after your family. –SH
John had felt it then, the warm heat of anger pooling low in his belly, an indignant rage at being excluded (again) from the battles Sherlock had promised he wouldn’t shield him from any more and his short fingers were flying across the keyboard to tell the lanky arsehole exactly what he could do with his condescending mollycoddling when…
*ping*
Please, John. –SH
And so he had stayed out of it.
Not because he’d wanted to (he hadn’t), or because he was angry at Sherlock for excluding him (he was), or because the safety of his wife and unborn child should be his priority (of course). He’d stayed away because Sherlock had asked him to.
And so instead of haring off into the night to run behind the flapping coattails of his best friend in the race to defeat (again) their greatest foe, John had climbed the stairs, peeled off his clothes and slipped between the cool sheets to lie next to the woman who had given him the life that Sherlock had sacrificed himself (again) so that he could live. Because that’s how it was. How it always had been. How it always would be.
Sherlock Holmes had said please, and John Watson had complied.
And six long weeks later, when it was all over and the “return” of Moriarty had been exposed to the world as an elaborate hoax and the culprits identified and brought to justice, John had breathed a deep sigh of relief that his isolation had finally come to an end, that Sherlock would be along any minute now to rescue him from his voluntary exile…
And he hadn’t come.
He’d texted him, once, a perfunctory notification that the crisis had passed, and that Sherlock would be in touch soon.
Soon.
Such a deceptively small word, it takes up so little space on the page or the tongue—in his head he knows that the space of three weeks’ time can fit nicely within the borders those four letters create, but in his heart the word spans kilometers, countries, continents. And with each passing day, the distance grows greater in his mind, dulls his defences and chips away at the carefully constructed wall he’s built around this latest absence of Sherlock from his life, a dam that keeps the cumulative grief from breaking free and destroying everything its path. It’s an impressive piece of architecture, really. Necessitated in the time it took one man to leap six stories to his death, constructed over months in the wake of that event, and then fortified and strengthened by the steady healing hands of a love that was found in the midst of that chaos.
And so he prepared himself for soon, kept a watch over his phone and his eyes on the front door and as each minute turned to hours turned to days he’d felt the thick walls begin to bow from the pressure, thin cracks appearing, springing slow leaks that dripped like tears. He had acted out of instinct—turned to the place he’d found healing and refuge when he’d lost Sherlock the first time. The voice had been familiar, the arms had been the same, the soft smile of comfort one he’d seen countless times before. But what he saw in her eyes, what lingered just beyond the reassuring words…he didn’t recognise. What he saw now—the steel and contempt and exasperation held in check so impressively that it might never have been noticed by someone who hadn’t spent so much time repressing his own darker feelings? That was someone he’d never met. Someone new.
Or someone old, to be more precise.
And in that moment John realised that whoever she’d been before she became his Mary, that person wasn’t gone—she was always there, just below the surface. And whoever she was—she wasn’t his at all.
John shivers involuntarily at the memory, heaves a deep sigh against the wave of familiar disappointment that starts low in his gut and spreads slowly to numb him from the center out. Shaking it off he squares his shoulders, sits up straight, then he reaches into his pocket and retrieves his mobile, taps open the messaging app and composes a simple text:
Anything on?
He stops for a moment, the pad of his finger poised just above the screen, and purses his lips considering…then hits send.
He attempts to settle into his uncomfortable chair to wait, pressing his spine into the back of it where the angle is all wrong, then winces in pain as the top seam of the ridiculously over stuffed cushion digs into the tender skin below the scar on his shoulder--and in an instant he is up on his feet, wheeling around to face the hateful piece of furniture before bending low and grasping it along the bottom edge of the frame and flipping it up and back until it tumbles over the rug and onto the polished wood floor and hits the wall with an impressively loud BANG for something so fucking padded. Breathing heavily, lips curled in a snarl, he stalks toward the hateful chair where it lies and pulls his foot back in preparation to kick it as hard as he can when:
*ping*
Double murder, locked room. Heading to the scene now. –SH
John reads the text and the rush of anger induced adrenaline that still courses through his body begins to slow, his heart rate evening out and the slight tremor in his hand steadying while his breathing does the same as he composes his response, walking to the door and shrugging into his coat as he types.
I’m free. Where?
He’s reaching for his scarf when the reply comes in.
*ping*
Minsk. Plane just touched down. –SH
Not exactly a cab ride away. John stares at the screen for a moment, then hangs his scarf back over the hook and lets out a resigned sigh before replying:
Well, some other time then?
*ping*
Of course, John. Soon. –SH
John slips off his coat, hangs it neatly, and puts it away. He slips his now silent mobile into his pocket and turns back toward the sitting room, pausing for a moment before crossing to the upturned armchair and bending down to right it before dragging it over to its place beside the couch. He wrestles the overly large beast back to an approximation of where it had been before, then turns and sits heavily into it.
He wonders, idly, how far it is to Minsk. Not that it matters, really. Sherlock’s gone away, and he can’t follow.
Might as well be the moon.
He shifts a bit in his chair, pushing himself down into the ample cushions as comfortably as he’s able, then picks up the book he’d set down earlier, finds his place, and begins to read.
If Mary walked in right now, she’d think he’d never moved.
Unless she happened to notice that the divots in the thick rug beneath him, the depressions created by furniture set into and kept in place, no longer line up perfectly with the legs of the chair he’s sitting in. It’s not a significant difference, particularly. Just a centimetre or two to the right of where it stood before.
Barely noticeable at all.