Posted originally on the Archive_of_Our_Own at https://archiveofourown.org/
works/10913946.
  Rating:
      Explicit
  Archive Warning:
      Graphic_Depictions_Of_Violence, Rape/Non-Con, Underage
  Category:
      M/M
  Fandom:
      Sherlock_(TV)
  Relationship:
      Sherlock_Holmes/John_Watson
  Character:
      Sherlock_Holmes, John_Watson, Original_Male_Character(s)
  Additional Tags:
      Implied/Referenced_Torture, Past_Rape/Non-con, Angst_and_Hurt/Comfort,
      Post-Episode:_s04e03_The_Final_Problem, Post-Episode:_s02e03_The
      Reichenbach_Fall, POV_Sherlock_Holmes, Hurt_Sherlock, Rape/Non-con
      Elements, Fix-It, Post-Canon_Fix-It, Canon_Divergence_-_The_Reichenbach
      Fall, Episode:_s03e01_The_Empty_Hearse, Sherlock_Is_Not_Okay, Sherlock_is
      a_Mess, Comforting_John, Established_Sherlock_Holmes/John_Watson, Forced
      Rape, how_is_that_not_a_tag?, Implied/Referenced_Suicide
  Series:
      Part 13 of Open_Your_Eyes
  Stats:
      Published: 2017-05-15 Words: 5353
****** Open Your Eyes ******
by I_am_lampy
Summary
     Sherlock only has to hold out until Mycroft can manufacture an
     extraction but Mycroft's first hurdle is playing the political game
     with the three people in all of England who can actually override
     Mycroft to explain why his younger brother is 'unofficially' using
     MI6 resources on what is technically a personal vendetta.
     Mycroft's next hurdle is finding Sherlock.
Notes
See the end of the work for notes
===============================================================================
 The first kiss and the first time
That I felt connected to anything
The weight of water, the way you told me
To look past everything I had ever learned
The final word in the final sentence
You ever uttered to me
was love
"Make This Go On Forever" Snow Patrol
===============================================================================
Sherlock paced the flat, unable to sit still while he waited for John. He'd
taken a shower, shaved, rubbed some taming cream into his hair to keep it
smooth rather than frizzy. It was raining outside, one of those rains that
wasn't bad enough to require an umbrella but wet enough to make one very
uncomfortable. It wasn't doing his hair any favors, that much was true. But he
loved London and that included the smog and dreary weather.
Sherlock had spent a long time standing in front of his wardrobe trying to
decide what to wear and had settled on wearing cotton twill trousers – dark
gray – and a very dark burgundy shirt. He rolled up his shirt sleeves to give
himself a more casual air. His usual suit and jacket was the armor he wore for
the rest of the world and he didn't want to be armored in front of John. Well,
he wanted to be armored but he knew he shouldn't. This was about being open,
about sharing the memories that haunted him.
It was almost two in the afternoon when he heard John's steps on the stairs.
Sherlock counted them as John came up. His steps were slow and heavy. Was he
tired? Maybe just hesitant. Or maybe he didn't want to be here. Of course, that
was it. Sherlock was grateful that he'd been willing to come at all.
John hesitated on the last step before the landing outside the flat and
Sherlock couldn't stand the suspense anymore. He rushed to the door to meet
John.
"John," he breathed when he saw him.
"Sherlock," John said and licked his lips.
The way John licked his lips had been the fuel of many masturbatory fantasies
from the very beginning. Better than the licking, though, was when John would
rub his fingers across his lips, especially when he tilted his head when he was
looking at Sherlock. It always made Sherlock feel like John was imagining all
the dirty things he could do to him. Sherlock would flush when John looked at
him like that and frown and say something insulting to hide how easily John
affected him.
Sherlock had made notecards for this meeting. He had practiced his thoughts
over and over again in front of the mirror and desensitized himself to the urge
to cry. He wouldn't allow any unnecessary emotions to give John the impression
that Sherlock was trying to elicit sympathy. The notecards were currently
sitting in the pocket of his trousers. They felt like a weight Sherlock
wouldn't be strong enough to counteract. John would see how weak he really was.
Who wanted a man as broken as Sherlock was?
"I, uh – let me make tea. Would you like to sit down?" Sherlock asked, then
winced at his overly formal behavior.
Sherlock had to imagine his feet were glued to the floor to prevent himself
from running to John and wrapping him in his arms and showering him with kisses
and begging for forgiveness. Sherlock's mouth opened, closed and then he fled
to the kitchen to make tea. He watched out of the corner of his eye as John sat
down in his chair. It wasn't the chair that had been sitting there for seven
years. This chair had been brought down from John's old room after Eurus blew
out the front of the flat.
Neither one of them spoke while Sherlock made tea. Sherlock considered using
the actual tea tray but decided against it. Everything was awkward enough as it
was. He did grab some chocolate biscuits, though, more for him than John.
"Here," Sherlock said and handed John his tea.
"Ta," John said.
Sherlock's chest contracted and he almost couldn't breathe. When John first
moved in and Sherlock would hear him say ta, he would scoff inside his head –
it was such a plebian thing to say. Now, of course, he adored John's ta and all
of his other middle class Sussex peccadillos. Like saying theTesco instead of
Tesco or I was sat back in the chairrather than I was sitting in the chair.
His love for John had come on so gradually and so silently that Sherlock had
already been four months out from his fake death before he could admit to
himself that he was in love with John. He had tried but failed to pinpoint when
respect, admiration and friendship had tipped over into love and then into
being in love. Sherlock had since decided that he had probably been falling in
love with John Watson from the moment he first heard John say he was
brilliant. He knew John would one day fall in love. He would move out and get
married. There was nothing to be gained by confessing his love.
Besides, unrequited love was pathetic. How could John respect him after he'd
spent so much time denying he had any need for sex or romantic relationships?
So Sherlock kept his secret close to his heart – so close, in fact, that he
hadn't even known himself until it was too late to say anything.
"Sherlock?"
Sherlock looked down at John, sucked in a deep breath and nodded his head. He
went and sat in his own chair. Then he remembered his notecards and sat up
again and fished them out then sat back down again.
"Sherlock," John said in a chiding tone when he saw the notecards.
John had so many ways he said Sherlock's name. It was just a name but John had
filled it up with meaning.
"I, uh – I made notecards so that – I don't want to take up any more of your
time than you – "
Sherlock gasped. He couldn't breathe; he realized with horror that he was about
to cry. He saw John get up with that look of tenderness on his face that he'd
heard in Mycroft's voice the day before. He hated the way it looked on John's
face. Pity. They all felt sorry for him and why shouldn't they? Wherever
Sherlock went disaster followed. He was too much; he consumed people and left
them emptied out, like a vampire without any control. He wanted John so much
that it left him staggering and dizzy.
"Excuse me," Sherlock choked out and ran for his bedroom but, in a panic,
veered off towards the back stairs and took them two at a time up to John's old
room. He slammed the door, locked it and then backed up, staring at it as
though something lethal was about to come bursting through.
It was too much to tell John what had happened in Serbia in the first place,
but to tell him now, when there was no guarantee that John wouldn't just say
thanks for being honest and walk out the door? It was too much. He couldn't do
it. He would fall apart. He was already falling apart and he hadn't even told
John anything.
There was a knock on the door. Sherlock ran his hands roughly through his hair
and paced in a circle around the room.
"Sherlock?" John's voice came through the door.
Sherlock saw John trying to open the door and finding it locked.
"Sherlock, let me in," John said sharply.
Sherlock said nothing. He covered his mouth with his hands and realized his
cheeks were already wet. He shook his head back and forth.
"Sherlock, you know I can break down this door," John growled.
"I'm sorry I faked my death! It was a miscalculation on my part. I didn't take
into account that you might feel more for me than I assumed!" Sherlock shouted
without realizing he'd planned to say anything. "I loved you completely and
utterly but it blinded me to – I felt so ridiculous and weak for feeling like
that about you that it completely blinded me to the idea that you could love me
the same way. I thought you would get over my death quickly and when I came
back, you would be so impressed at how clever I was."
Sherlock had moved closer to the door without realizing it. He sat down on the
floor a few feet away and drew his knees up, wrapping his arms around his
thighs.
"Sherlock," John said, his voice tense and pained.
"Can we just do this – can I just tell you through the door, please? I can't
look at your face. I can't bear to see the pity on your face. It's – only
Mycroft knows this. And the people involved, of course, but they're all dead
courtesy of my overprotective older brother. I'm a genius but I'm prey to the
same – I've met victims of rape and domestic abuse, you know, Mycroft even made
me go to a rape support group when I got back but I don't know how to talk
about those things to strangers. I was so broken down by the time it happened,
you see. There just wasn't much fight left in me."
"Sherlock Holmes," John said, his voice shaking, "If you force me to break down
this goddamn door, I will shoot you in the fucking foot, do you hear me? I
don't feel any goddamn pity for you, you idiot! There's a difference between
compassion and pity. I thought you were supposed to be a genius."
"Would you really shoot me in the foot?" Sherlock asked.
"Have you met me?"
Sherlock got up and unlocked the door and then immediately turned around and
strode to the furthest point away from John. He could hear John's ragged
breathing behind him before John took a deep breath.
"I can see you don't want me to touch you and you don't want to have to say
these things to my face and I can respect that. I will allow you your space but
if I start to feel like it's doing you more harm than good to do so, I will
cross that line. Are we clear?"
Sherlock, with his back still to John, nodded and wiped his face.
"I'm going to sit at the desk and keep my eyes on the wall. You can sit
wherever you want, yeah?"
Sherlock nodded again. He saw John out of his periphery move towards the desk.
The chair scraped across the floor in a sound that was soothing to Sherlock
because he'd heard it so many times from one floor down.
"Okay," John said.
Sherlock got on the bed – the only other place to sit in the room since
Sherlock had dragged the armchair downstairs to replace the chair in the
sitting room that Eurus had destroyed. He squeezed himself into the furthest
corner he could and pulled his legs up again and wrapped his arms around his
knees.
He began. 
===============================================================================
 
Sherlock is in Serbia to wrap up the last of the human trafficking ring that
Moriarty's people were responsible for. At this point, Sherlock's vision has
narrowed to one thing – one person, actually. John. Every time Sherlock gets
the shit beaten out of him, barely escapes getting shot, lives rough, goes a
day without food – he pictures John sitting in his chair at the Baker Street
flat in his chair, drinking a cup of tea and waiting for Sherlock to come home.
As far as taking down the last of Moriarty's web, Sherlock has come full
circle. His first mission as an unofficial representative of MI6 was to
infiltrate the trafficking ring in New Orleans, where women from Serbia,
Romania and the Czech Republic ended up in the expectation of receiving
American citizenship in exchange for two years of unpaid labor. The women, of
course, don't realize that the labor in question is prostitution.
Even though the FBI and MI6 have dismantled the hierarchy of the trafficking
enterprise, they have yet to cut it off at the source. The people responsible
on the European side, headquartered in Serbia, are looking for other buyers in
Western Europe now that the American market is closed. This is Sherlock's last
mission. The man at the top, the one responsible for the entire scam, is an
important political figure, beloved by the armed forces of Serbia. Sherlock is
so deeply undercover that not even Mycroft knows where he is. He knows where
Sherlock is supposed to be but has no timetable for when. Sherlock lost all
contact somewhere on the Adriatic sea about the time he snuck into Montenegro.
Sherlock is bone weary. He's been away from home for six hundred and fifty-nine
days and not one of the faces Sherlock has seen in all that time has been a
friendly face. He misses London. He misses his flat and Mrs. Hudson and
Lestrade and even Mycroft. Most of all, of course, he misses John. He carries
John with him every second of the those six hundred and fifty-nine days. He
doesn't remember what John's laugh sounds like anymore but he remembers the
look on John's face when he tells Sherlock he's brilliant or when he watches
Sherlock play the violin or when he stares Sherlock down when he's misbehaving.
John is all that Sherlock sees anymore.
While trying to gather information on the top man in the trafficking ring,
Sherlock is found out. He's pegged as an assassin sent to take down this man –
who even now, Sherlock isn't allowed to name. Because this man is bald,
Sherlock calls him Lex Luthor, after Superman's nemesis.
Sherlock runs. The army follows and the Serbian army isn't a slapdash affair
like they were in the nineties. They have infrared devices, highly trained
strike teams, including canine search teams with dogs that can follow a trail
for days at a time.
Sherlock knows the choice is between getting shot and surrendering. He still
values his life in part because he lives in fear that there's something he's
missed, that Moriarty has one last trick up his sleeve even after death and
that someone will get to John and make him pay for nothing more offensive than
being Sherlock's friend.
So Sherlock surrenders.
He's tortured, as he knew he would be. The army doesn't believe him when he
says he's there to stop a human trafficking ring. They want to know why he's
trying to assassinate Lex Luthor.
Sherlock only has to hold out until Mycroft can manufacture an extraction but
Mycroft's first hurdle is playing the political game with the three people in
all of England who can actually override Mycroft to explain why his younger
brother is 'unofficially' using MI6 resources on what is technically a personal
vendetta.
Mycroft's next hurdle is finding Sherlock.
Sherlock can expect to be here for months. He knows Mycroft will devote every
second to finding him and getting him out of there. In the meantime all
Sherlock can do is endure. He puts his usual sarcasm and arrogance away. He
makes himself as unthreatening as possible. The more cowed they think he is,
the less fun they'll get out of hurting him.
Sherlock tells them everything, immediately. There's no point not to. They'll
get it out of him anyway. Holding out against torture is impossible, no matter
what the movies tell you. It's not the pain necessarily. It's the daily
indignations.
Never being allowed to bathe and living with your own stench and the lice that
inevitably find their way into your hair. Having to shit in a bucket. Having
food or water or sleep withheld unless he begs.
There's several weeks in a row where he's forced to drink his own urine. He
does, right away, because he's just going to get thirsty and they're just going
to enjoy it more when he gives in. He's just grateful they don't make him eat
his own shit because there are really no bounds to their imagination and he
can't imagine anything more inclined to strip the last of his dignity and
strength away than that.
Apparently they have an obsession with urine and feces though because there are
several occasions when his body is used as a human toilet. Being shit on is the
worst. He isn't allowed a bath so he throws his clothes into the shit bucket
and uses some of his drinking water to clean as much as he can so he doesn't
die from e. coli but doesn't risk dying from thirst either.
These are the things that break Sherlock down. The beatings are a gift in
comparison. This is how psychological torture works – you become grateful for
the things that most people would contemplate with horror.
At least when they're beating him, the pain gives him the opportunity to
disconnect from his body. It's during these beatings that he has enough
presence of mind to create the cupola at the top of his mind palace where he
sits with John, who begins to take on the mythos of a god to Sherlock. The
source of all good things is John. He is a deity. He is Sherlock's higher
power.
The first time he's raped is after being deprived of sleep for forty-eight
hours. Sherlock is hallucinating. Moriarty is everywhere. He sees him stick the
gun in his mouth and shoot himself but he doesn't die. He taunts Sherlock –
'even with a hole in the back of my head, Sherly, I can still burn the heart
out of you. I can make your pet dance.'
He actually dozes off while being fucked. This, he thinks later, is what my
life has been reduced to – I can take a nap while being raped.
Raping Sherlock isn't nearly as interesting as they thought, clearly, if he's
going to sleep through it. So they decide to give him a few luxuries – a bath,
a shave, a decent meal. Sherlock accepts the bath and the shave but he can't
eat knowing that something new and horrific is coming.
It's not the pain so much as the psychological agony of being violated. Rape is
not a crime of passion. It's not about sex. It's about power, which is why
heterosexual men like these guards can get an erection in order to wield power
over Sherlock. Like Sherlock says, it's the indignities that break you down.
There's three of them. They don't even bother spitting on their dicks to ease
their way in. The first one just thrusts into him and complains about the
resistance of Sherlock's passage. If that one had ejaculated inside of him, it
would have acted as lubrication, a small mercy for Sherlock. But of course, he
doesn't. He pulls out to ejaculate onto Sherlock's back. The other two do as
well. Then they smear their fingers in their semen and try to force Sherlock to
eat it. At that point, he's bleeding freely and offers no resistance, thereby
denying them their fun.
They leave him to bleed slowly. Sherlock estimates he loses a liter of blood, a
fifth of his blood volume. He's too malnourished and physically abused to be
able to afford to lose even an eight of that and for days after he's dizzy and
confused. They leave him alone for a while. It's no fun to torture someone
unless they can appreciate it.
Then two things happen back to back. The first thing is Zivko.
Sherlock sees the young guard when they're carrying Sherlock to the room where
they do most of the torture – particularly the beatings. It's in the middle of
the complex where there are no windows and only one door. The boy is the one
who stands outside the door, although Sherlock's not entirely sure why they
need someone to guard it. Likely, it's a sinecure. Perhaps he's the son or
nephew of someone important.
Sherlock discovers his name is Zivko when one of the guards insults him,
calling him a 'pussy' because he's listens to music through his earbuds so he
doesn't have to listen to Sherlock scream. His heart is too soft, the hulking
brute tells him. How will he ever become a man if he has the heart of a woman?
Sherlock sees the tears that shimmer on the edge of Zivko's lashes. He doesn't
want to be here, Sherlock can tell. He has dark circles under his eyes and his
hands tremble slightly.
The brute continues to harass Zivko with such enthusiasm, his hold on Sherlock
loosens. A true Serb, he says, would enjoy hearing the sounds of an enemy of
the state being tortured. They would be music to the ears of a true Serb, not
the Western shit Zivko listens to. A Serbian soldier will do anything for his
nation. The other guards join in on the fun.
These guards are old enough to have been young men during the civil wars of the
1990s. They are old enough to have lost brothers, fathers, and friends to
Croatia's brutal ethnic cleansings. They are old enough to have mothers,
sisters, girlfriends, and friends who were raped and brutalized by Croat
soldiers. These men have lived through the worst atrocities one human can
effect upon another.
They have had to harden themselves so much that they have, in turn, become
copies of the people who brutalized them.
Zivko, though, is just a boy. He wasn't here in the nineties. He doesn't seem
older than sixteen to Sherlock. He's got the usual high cheekbones and almond
shaped eyes of ethnic Serbs but his skin is pale. Sherlock can see Russian
ancestry in Zivko's blushing cheeks and startlingly green eyes.
Zivko is constantly baited and mocked without mercy. Sherlock almost feels
sorry for him. Eventually the taunts turn to Zivko's lack of sexual experience
– what kind of Serb is Zivko if he's never had sex with a woman? How can he be
a true son of Serbia if he's not man enough to tumble even a lowly barmaid?
"Here," one of the brutes tells Zivko in Serbo-Croat. "We'll put some lipstick
on this English man here and you can lose your virginity to him. He's pretty
enough. We can find him a dress to wear and maybe some panties. We'll stuff his
cock and balls up inside the panties and all you have to do is fuck the hole."
All the guards think this is such a funny idea that it soon becomes a plan.
Sherlock can see the horror in Zivko's eyes but Sherlock's not in a position to
help anyone when he can't even help himself. At least they're giving him a
bath, Sherlock thinks. At least Zivko is attractive, something he finds amusing
for all of about thirty-five seconds.
They allow Sherlock a bath and a razor. He has to put on a dress they've found
for him somewhere. And, as they promised, Sherlock is required to put on red
lipstick. Then they put him and Zivko in a room with a two way mirror. Zivko
looks terrified. For the second time, Sherlock almost feels sorry for him. The
mic from behind the blacked out glass is on and the guards start hissing and
cat-calling. Zivko is trembling.
"Just get it over with and they'll leave you alone," Sherlock says impatiently.
"They're watching!" Zivko says. "How am I supposed to get it up when I don't
like boys?"
"Pretend I'm a girl," Sherlock says with a glare. "Nobody outside of here will
know."
"God will know!" he says indignantly.
The guards heckle Zivko. "Take off your clothes!" they shout. "Get on with it!"
Sherlock can hear the guards congratulating one another on this clever scheme.
They kill two birds with one stone – their prisoner gets tortured and this poor
boy who can't detach himself from his mother's breast gets his dick wet. Then
the big brute – the one who gets a mean look in his eye when he harasses Zivko
– says that neither of them can leave the room until Zivko has sex with
Sherlock.
Zivko looks at Sherlock, pleading. Sherlock beckons him closer.
"If I can help you get an erection, can you do this?"
Zivko shakes his head.
"For God's sake, you don't have the option not to do it."
Sherlock tells him he will use his mouth to help Zivko get hard and bring him
close enough to orgasm that when Zivko penetrates him, he won't have to do it
for long. He tells Zivko to use lots of spit.
"Okay?" Sherlock asks.
Zivko nods and undoes his trousers. Sherlock drops to his knees and takes
Zivko's flaccid penis in his mouth and in just a few minutes, Zivko is hard.
When he starts to grab Sherlock's hair and his legs begin to shake, Sherlock
pulls off. The lipstick that the guards made Sherlock wear looks like blood on
Zivko's penis.
"Push me over the table roughly," he tells Zivko.
"Why?"
"Because if you're kind to me, they'll treat us both worse."
Once Zivko is inside him, it's over in less than a minute.
The guards congratulate Zivko, slapping him on the back and telling him he's a
man now. The boy actually smiles at their congratulations, but Sherlock can see
the big brute, the sadistic one, calculating how best to use this against
Zivko. Sherlock has probably just made things worse for Zivko.
Zivko's psychological abuse at the hands of the guards accelerates. Sherlock is
all but ignored as a result. They call Zivko every creative name for homosexual
they can think of. They threaten to tell his mother. They ask him if he wants
to have alone time with his 'boyfriend' meaning, of course, Sherlock himself.
They'll set up a date for him and Sherlock, they say. Has Zivko gone to
confession yet? Is Zivko going to help Sherlock escape so they can run away
together?
Three weeks after Zivko is forced to rape Sherlock, he kills himself.
It turns out Sherlock was right about Zivko being related to someone important.
He's Lex Luthor's son. Because of Zivko's suicide and the resultant furor,
Mycroft is able to pinpoint Sherlock's location. Because of Zivko's suicide,
Sherlock is lifted out of the hell that is Serbia sixty-one days after being
captured.
Several weeks after he's brought back to London, when he's still in the very
private wing of the very private hospital Mycroft has put him in, Mycroft comes
to tell him Zivko's father is dead as are all the men who had a hand in
torturing Sherlock. Sherlock doesn't care about that. Sherlock asks how old
Zivko was. Mycroft hesitates but he's never been one to coddle his brother, not
even in the aftermath of what Sherlock has endured.
Zivko, Mycroft tells him, was fifteen.
 
===============================================================================
At some point, night had fallen and the rain had begun to fall in earnest.
Other than that and the usual sounds of the flat, it was silent. Sherlock
wasn't sure when he and John ended up in bed together, nor when he laid his
head on John's chest but they were and it was. John was holding him tightly.
They were both crying.
After there was silence for about ten minutes, John spoke.
"I have to go make a few phone calls. Get Rosie squared away and get us
something to eat. I'll grab some pajamas for you while I'm down there, okay?"
Sherlock nodded his head in acknowledgement and John left the room. He was gone
for about thirty minutes. Sherlock could hear the murmur of John's voice on the
phone one floor away. He took a deep breath and let it out. He had come up with
all kinds of scenarios for what would happen if he ever told John any of this
but pajamas and Indian food were not in any of them.
John came back with pajamas, a glass of water and a box of tissues.
"Let's get you into something comfortable, yeah?" John asked.
Sherlock allowed himself to be cared for. His throat hurt and his nose was
congested and his eyes burned. The only thing that felt good right then was
John's hands guiding his feet out of his shoes and John's hands undressing him
and John's hands pulling up his pajama bottoms and John's hands pulling the t-
shirt over his head.
Thinking about Zivko – which he avoided as much as possible – never failed to
sink Sherlock into a depression, however brief. It was the very worst thing he
had done in his life, convincing that boy to have sex with him.
"You didn't convince him of anything," John said. "You did the most humane
thing you could think of under duress and in abhorrent conditions. The guards
are the ones who drove the boy to it."
"I didn't know I said that out loud," Sherlock answered, squinting up at John.
John smiled a little with the corner of his mouth and Sherlock's world tilted
right side up again.
"Drink that," John said, handing Sherlock the glass of water.
"I don't need it," Sherlock said, waving it away.
"Drink it," John said.
Sherlock drank while John shucked all of his clothes except for his pants and
t-shirt. He climbed into bed with Sherlock and wrapped him back up in his arms.
"Do you forgive me?" Sherlock whispered.
John turned on his side to face Sherlock and laid his hand along Sherlock's
cheek.
"What do you think I need to forgive you for?" John asked, cupping Sherlock's
face.
"Telling you I didn't want to see you anymore. Letting you think I was dead.
All of it – all the things I did wrong."
"Sherlock," John said in the same way he had said Sherlock's name the day
they'd kissed for the first time, in the way he'd never said Sherlock's name
before. "I forgave you the minute you walked out the door."
"Why?" Sherlock asked.
"Because I love you. Because I know you. I realized you were running from
something and it wasn't that I slept with someone else in your bed. No amount
of jealousy would have made you walk away from our friendship and that
realization knocked me right out of the self-righteous strop I've been in since
you came back.
"You trusting me with these terrible memories, showing me your pain – it's
opened my eyes. I blamed you for all the pain I endured when I thought you were
dead. I blamed you for the shameful way I treated Gerald, who was a good man
and who loved me. And when I was brutalized by other men, I blamed you. I was
never raped but close enough and more than once and I blamed you. I kept
repeating the same thing in my head – if Sherlock hadn't died then I wouldn't
be here or I wouldn't be doing this.
"What you went through makes those two years of my life look like a lazy lie-in
and breakfast in bed. I thought you were selfish for denying me those years but
I'm the one who's guilty of being selfish. So you don't need my forgiveness.
"The only reason I didn't try to get in touch you with after you left is
because I was trying to give you the space to breathe. I love you and I've been
in love with you for more than five years and I'm still in love with you after
all the crazy shit you and I have been through."
"Well," Sherlock said, tipping his head back and forth. "When you put it like
that."
John snorted.
"Nothing could keep me away from you, Sherlock Holmes, not even you," John said
and punctuated it with a quick kiss. "By the way, I saw you bought a new bed."
Sherlock rolled his eyes and John started laughing. Sherlock ducked his head
under John's chin and wrapped himself over John.
"Don't get too comfortable, madman. I've got to answer the door when the Indian
food comes. Then I'm all yours."
"All mine?" Sherlock murmured.
"Always," John answered.
 
End Notes
     A round of applause to two wonderful readers who, despite their full
     time jobs, agreed to beta for me. Y'all know what that means, right?
     The less time I have to spend on proofreading, the more time I have
     to write. See how that works?
     Three cheers for Boonchandi and StarlingGirl!
     *\o/*
     Any mistakes are mine and are a likely result of me adding stuff in
     AFTER Boon and Star have edited the "final" draft. (I have to learn
     to stop fiddling).
     I always welcome emails from readers. Hit me up at
     archiveofMYown@gmail.com. You're never bothering me and I'll always
     reply. It is an HONOR to hear from you.
     Teddy
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