John Watson's 12 Things Happy People Do (3/3)
Title - John Watson's 12 Things Happy People Do (3/3)
Author - earlgreytea68
Rating - General
Characters - John, Harry, Mrs. Hudson, Mycroft, Lestrade, Sherlock
Spoilers - Through "The Reichenbach Fall"
Disclaimer - I don't own them and I don't make money off of them, but I don't like to dwell on that, so let's move on.
Summary - In which John Watson follows the advice of a website.
Author's Notes - I am about to disappear into Mardi Gras and a house full of visitors, so I figured I'd give you this last chapter before that happened. Please excuse the delay that is going to happen before I can respond to comments.
You don't need to have read "Scotch" to follow this story, but, if you're wondering why Mycroft and Lestrade are a couple here, then "Scotch" would be the story that answers that question.
Thank you to harpinred, who tweeted the link to the website and sparked the idea for this; to arctacuda for the beta and encouragement; to L, for cheerleading; and to sensiblecat, for making sure everyone sounds British.
Chapter One - Chapter Two
Chapter Three
9. Savor Life’s Joys
This was another impossible one, and John frowned again at the website. Savor Life’s Joys. What joy? This would have been advice to give him when Sherlock had been alive. Savor every irritating moment of frustration. You won’t have him long, and you’ll miss him so much more than you’ll be able to comprehend. He agreed. He should have savored life’s joys more. But what was there to savor now?
He liked London, so he tried to savor London. He wrote up a list of his favorite things to do in London, but every single thing on the list reminded him painfully of Sherlock. Sherlock had loved London, too, although he’d never said it in so many words. But John knew it was true because Sherlock had permitted John to nudge him out into the city when Sherlock was in particularly terrible moods, and it was always true that a dose of London did Sherlock good. Wherever they went-whether a quiet café or King’s Cross Station-Sherlock observed and deduced, telling John everything he could about every person who passed them by. It was endless stimulation, the city of London, which was what Sherlock Holmes needed, and John cherished the memory of every minute, even the times when he was convinced Sherlock was merely making things up to test the limits of John’s credulity. John had especially loved to choose crowded places for them-Piccadilly Circus or Trafalgar Square-because, in a crowd, to keep up his running commentary, Sherlock found it necessary to stand that much closer to John, head bent and lips at his ear, breath on his skin, as he murmured in that sinfully rich voice just for John. Sometimes there was even a warm, surprisingly light hand on his shoulder or arm, easy to mistake for a caress if you so desired but more likely intended to keep him still, as if John had any inclination to move away from him, ever. If he were going to admit it, he had probably been most effectively seduced by Sherlock Holmes in the middle of London crowds. So how could he possibly savor a London crowd without him?
Savor Life’s Joys.
John thought. Before Sherlock, what joyful moments had he had? What did he remember?
Eventually, he took a deep breath and, with finger shaking only slightly, dialed his sister’s number.
This was an enormous risk. The last time he’d spoken to his sister she’d been very obviously drunk, and he’d been an emotional wreck, and it had been impossible for him to think of any way to deal with her when he could barely deal with the act of having to brush his teeth, so he had tried to ignore her.
He was still an emotional wreck, and if she was still drunk this was just going to invite more guilt to topple down on him. As if he did not have enough from watching his best friend leap to his death during a telephone conversation with him. But, prior to Sherlock, Harry had been the source of joy in his life. His adored and adoring little sister. And it had all fallen into terrible pieces, and John tried not to let himself think about that, but it would be nice, if she were okay, if he could have a source of joy, someone who loved him who was not dead. That would be nice.
She answered with, “John,” and she sounded, all at the same time, fragile and shaky and steely and determined.
Which was a huge relief to him, because she sounded sober. “Harry,” he said, and thought he was going to collapse into undignified sobs at the idea that maybe one thing in his life was moving in the right direction.
“I’ve been meaning to ring you,” she said, “but I didn’t…I didn’t know what to say. John…”
“It’s okay,” he said, fervently. He had never meant anything as much as he meant that. “It’s all okay.” He would forgive her anything in the world if she would be okay from this point on. Maybe he was finally Learning to Forgive, he thought. “Can we have coffee?”
They met at a café. Harry looked small and thin, and it was a bit painful, because he had remembered her as a round-cheeked girl, laughing at him when he teased her, and now she had become a sad and ravaged adult. But, then again, so had he, and they were quite the pair, these Watson siblings.
She stood up and hugged him when he entered, and he hugged her back tightly and kissed the top of her head. Then they sat opposite each other, and Harry shredded a serviette with nervous fingers.
“How are you?” he asked. He tried to keep his eyes sharp, to think like Sherlock, to be objective and catalogue anything telltale to show that Harry was slipping, that the sobriety was leaking away from her, that the next time he spoke to her she would be back off the wagon and he would be all alone again. But he couldn’t. He was rubbish at that. It was why he’d needed Sherlock. He looked at her and saw his little sister, and his heart swelled with love, and he wanted more than anything else to believe everything was okay, and if he didn’t look too hard, he could convince himself of that.
He very much lacked Sherlock’s courage to see the world as it was, he thought. He always had.
“I’m okay,” said Harry, hesitantly.
“Are you?”
She attempted a bright smile. “Getting there. I think. Yeah.”
“Good.”
“John.” She reached her hand across the table, took one of his in hers and squeezed. Her eyes were filled with tears. “John, I’m so sorry. You needed me, and I wasn’t there, and I-”
John stared at their intertwined hands, because if he looked at her he thought he might start to cry. “It’s okay. You’re here now.” He forced himself to look up at her.
She was smiling at him, a watery, but loving smile. “We can get over our addictions together,” she said.
He half-laughed. He didn’t know how long it was going to last, this rare sober persona of his sister, but, just now, he wasn’t going to worry about that, he was just going to let her be there, now. Savor Life’s Joys.
10. Commit to Your Goals
This was another ridiculous one. What had he been doing for the past nine steps if not committing to the goal of being a happier person? Getting over Sherlock? He was beginning to think it was impossible, an exercise in futility. But he was Committed to His Goal.
He looked around his flat and decided that there was one thing he could do to show his complete devotion to moving on from Sherlock: He could decorate.
He rang Mrs. Hudson. “I’m going to buy some things for my flat,” he told her. “I thought you might want to help.”
Mrs. Hudson was only too eager to help. And if he ended up with a bunch of knick-knacks more suited to a woman of Mrs. Hudson’s age than a bachelor of John’s age, well, that was fine with him. Truthfully, John no longer had any inkling what his taste or style might be. Sherlock was his taste and style. The accessory his flat needed was Sherlock Holmes, draped on the sofa with petulant grace.
He didn’t think there was a store where you could buy a Sherlock Holmes, so he let Mrs. Hudson pick out fussy pink-rosed china and tried not to envision the look on Mycroft’s face should he ever stop by for tea. The thing was, Mycroft himself probably possessed fussy pink-rosed china, but he would still manage to look disapproving of John’s.
“You should paint,” Mrs. Hudson told him. John noticed she didn’t suggest wallpaper, and John agreed with the obvious reasoning behind that. “And put some things on the walls. It would help.”
Help what? John wanted to ask her. But he chose a paint color, a yellowish creamy color that the expert at the store said was guaranteed to provoke cheerfulness in the inhabitant of the room. John asked if it was a money-back guarantee, which made the shop assistant falter.
His new yellow walls did not provoke cheerfulness, but he supposed they were committing to his goal. He considered things to hang on them. Mirrors? Paintings? Photographs?
In the end, he gave in and allowed himself to frame one photo of Sherlock and himself, in amongst the impersonal seaside landscapes he put on his walls. It was his favorite one from their newspaper days. It had accompanied a standard and unremarkable story about Sherlock Holmes, ’Net Detective, but John had seen no other newspaper run that particular photograph, and he had eventually written to the photographer and asked if he might have a copy. This had been before Sherlock’s death, and he had never been quite sure what he’d intended to do with the photograph, other than that he liked it and wanted to have it.
He found it now, tucked in a medical textbook he’d been carrying around with him needlessly since his school days, and framed it and hung it on the wall. He contemplated it during his lonelier moments, examining every aspect of it. In it, he was speaking to Sherlock, his eyes squinted at the sun and one of his arms extended, pointing into the distance at whatever point he was trying to make. He looked unremarkable in the photo. He liked the photo because Sherlock, in his scarf and coat, with his hands in his pockets, was smiling at him. Not a sneer or a mockery but a genuine smile, his pale eyes alight on John’s face. Whatever John was saying in that photo, it had, unbeknownst to him, caused Sherlock to smile at him.
John wished desperately that he knew what it was.
11. Practice Spirituality
John hadn’t been to church in years.
He did, most of the time, believe that there was a God. This was either habit or genuine belief, he wasn’t sure which. Sherlock had called it “unimaginative.” He still remembered the first conversation they’d ever had about it, over breakfast shortly after John had shot the cab driver. “Did you really ask God to let you live when you were shot?” Sherlock had asked, sounding as if it were too impossible to believe. “Yes,” he’d answered, briefly, not wanting to get into it. “But why?” Sherlock persisted. “What does ‘God’ have to do with it?” He had a way of pronouncing God as if it were an alleged name, an alias for something entirely different.
Sherlock had never understood the elemental thoughts that might flit through one’s brain in the moments before possible death. A childhood of turning to a Higher Power, and it had been automatic for him to do it, powerless and terrified, for him to pray to a God he was sure he’d stopped believing in until that moment. And that moment had betrayed him, forced him to acknowledge that he only stopped believing in God until he thought he needed a God, and then he was convinced there must be one. He thought of Jennifer Wilson, who had been leaving them a message, but John had genuinely thought that she had just been thinking of her dead baby daughter. The regrets of a lifetime, the desperate pleas that betrayed exactly what you were and what you found important…
Sometimes John wondered what Sherlock had thought as he was falling, but he never let himself think about that for long because that way lay madness.
John went to church. Not to a service-that seemed too much-but to church. He sat in the church’s chilly dimness and listened to the way the sounds outside were drowned while the sounds inside were amplified. He looked way up, to the ceiling high above him. It was a gray dreary day, and only a half-light fell through the long, narrow windows. He looked at the flickering candles, glowing feebly all around him.
He tried to feel as if there were a God, but the church seemed empty to him. Life had been emptiness lately, and it yawned ahead of him, and John did not understand, could not comprehend, how he had been shot and survived and Sherlock Holmes had leaped off a building to his death. In any universe conceived by a divine being, what sense did such an exchange make? To deprive the world of Sherlock Holmes and leave the world with John Watson? What was John supposed to make of that, other than a confirmation that in this, as in all things, Sherlock had probably been right, and there was no God. He had survived because of modern medicine, not because of divine intervention. And Sherlock Holmes had died because he had deliberately placed himself beyond the abilities of modern medicine.
John closed his eyes and bowed his head and curled his fingers around the pew and listened to emptiness.
Which was when the church bells began to ring.
And that was nothing more than timing, Sherlock would tell him. He had subconsciously wanted to be at church when the bells would ring, and so he had sought church near such a time. That was what Sherlock would say.
What John heard, though, was bells ringing, and he heard them through his childhood, through dazed pain in Afghanistan, through his current frozen state. They beat with his heart, a rhythm to accompany him, a little less emptiness, a little less loneliness.
John squeezed his eyes shut a bit more and prayed the most impossible, audacious prayer, a dare of a prayer, a slap across God’s face. If I am right and Sherlock is wrong about You, prove it: Bring him back.
Satisfied that he had practiced spirituality, John walked out of the church. His steps timed, unconsciously, with the ringing of the bells.
12. Take Care of Your Body
Mycroft had been out of the country on an unexpected trip during which he had not slept, and when he got home he kissed Greg hello absently and fell immediately into bed. Which meant that when the mobile chirped with a text message, it was still in his pocket and woke him.
It was the Sherlock-emergency-only mobile.
John has joined a gym.
Mycroft frowned, rang Sherlock, and left him a voicemail. “And?”
He dozed until the mobile chirped again. Why has he joined a gym? And then, after another second, Did I wake you? Why are you sleeping in the middle of the day?
Mycroft deleted the second text and rolled himself out of bed and went in search of Greg.
He found him in the drawing room, sitting on the floor by a roaring fire. Greg always made the fires too big. Mycroft was convinced he was going to burn the house down eventually. He had a pen clamped in his mouth and was surrounded by crime scene photos. The drawing room was where Greg always worked. Originally, he had commandeered the dining room table, until Mycroft had politely asked him where they were supposed to eat. The table, Greg had said, seats twenty; they could surely eat at one end of it. Mycroft had been unconvinced, which Greg had immediately seen, which was why Mycroft loved Greg.
Except that then Greg had moved himself into the library, which was a nice idea, that they could work at the same time, but Greg’s encroaching piles of paper had made Mycroft half want to tear his hair out. Another thing Greg had immediately seen, without Mycroft having to say anything, and the drawing room had been his compromise. Mycroft didn’t mind this. He associated the room with Greg, so the mess seemed acceptable here.
Greg glanced at him as he sat in the chair by the fire and took the pen out of his mouth. “Are you sick?”
“What?” Mycroft hadn’t expected that question. Because he’d taken a nap? “No, I was tired. I didn’t sleep on my trip.”
“You’re in a wrinkled suit. You never wear wrinkled suits.”
“I had a text from Sherlock,” answered Mycroft.
“Bad news?”
Mycroft handed the mobile to Greg.
“John has joined a gym,” Greg read out loud. “Why has John joined a gym?”
“Do you know anything about this?” asked Mycroft.
“Yes.” Greg handed the mobile back. “It’s part of John’s get-over-Sherlock program. He’s moved on to ‘take care of your body.’”
“Ah.” Mycroft rang Sherlock and left him a message. “Don’t worry, he’s still all yours.”
The end.
Author - earlgreytea68
Rating - General
Characters - John, Harry, Mrs. Hudson, Mycroft, Lestrade, Sherlock
Spoilers - Through "The Reichenbach Fall"
Disclaimer - I don't own them and I don't make money off of them, but I don't like to dwell on that, so let's move on.
Summary - In which John Watson follows the advice of a website.
Author's Notes - I am about to disappear into Mardi Gras and a house full of visitors, so I figured I'd give you this last chapter before that happened. Please excuse the delay that is going to happen before I can respond to comments.
You don't need to have read "Scotch" to follow this story, but, if you're wondering why Mycroft and Lestrade are a couple here, then "Scotch" would be the story that answers that question.
Thank you to harpinred, who tweeted the link to the website and sparked the idea for this; to arctacuda for the beta and encouragement; to L, for cheerleading; and to sensiblecat, for making sure everyone sounds British.
Chapter One - Chapter Two
Chapter Three
9. Savor Life’s Joys
This was another impossible one, and John frowned again at the website. Savor Life’s Joys. What joy? This would have been advice to give him when Sherlock had been alive. Savor every irritating moment of frustration. You won’t have him long, and you’ll miss him so much more than you’ll be able to comprehend. He agreed. He should have savored life’s joys more. But what was there to savor now?
He liked London, so he tried to savor London. He wrote up a list of his favorite things to do in London, but every single thing on the list reminded him painfully of Sherlock. Sherlock had loved London, too, although he’d never said it in so many words. But John knew it was true because Sherlock had permitted John to nudge him out into the city when Sherlock was in particularly terrible moods, and it was always true that a dose of London did Sherlock good. Wherever they went-whether a quiet café or King’s Cross Station-Sherlock observed and deduced, telling John everything he could about every person who passed them by. It was endless stimulation, the city of London, which was what Sherlock Holmes needed, and John cherished the memory of every minute, even the times when he was convinced Sherlock was merely making things up to test the limits of John’s credulity. John had especially loved to choose crowded places for them-Piccadilly Circus or Trafalgar Square-because, in a crowd, to keep up his running commentary, Sherlock found it necessary to stand that much closer to John, head bent and lips at his ear, breath on his skin, as he murmured in that sinfully rich voice just for John. Sometimes there was even a warm, surprisingly light hand on his shoulder or arm, easy to mistake for a caress if you so desired but more likely intended to keep him still, as if John had any inclination to move away from him, ever. If he were going to admit it, he had probably been most effectively seduced by Sherlock Holmes in the middle of London crowds. So how could he possibly savor a London crowd without him?
Savor Life’s Joys.
John thought. Before Sherlock, what joyful moments had he had? What did he remember?
Eventually, he took a deep breath and, with finger shaking only slightly, dialed his sister’s number.
This was an enormous risk. The last time he’d spoken to his sister she’d been very obviously drunk, and he’d been an emotional wreck, and it had been impossible for him to think of any way to deal with her when he could barely deal with the act of having to brush his teeth, so he had tried to ignore her.
He was still an emotional wreck, and if she was still drunk this was just going to invite more guilt to topple down on him. As if he did not have enough from watching his best friend leap to his death during a telephone conversation with him. But, prior to Sherlock, Harry had been the source of joy in his life. His adored and adoring little sister. And it had all fallen into terrible pieces, and John tried not to let himself think about that, but it would be nice, if she were okay, if he could have a source of joy, someone who loved him who was not dead. That would be nice.
She answered with, “John,” and she sounded, all at the same time, fragile and shaky and steely and determined.
Which was a huge relief to him, because she sounded sober. “Harry,” he said, and thought he was going to collapse into undignified sobs at the idea that maybe one thing in his life was moving in the right direction.
“I’ve been meaning to ring you,” she said, “but I didn’t…I didn’t know what to say. John…”
“It’s okay,” he said, fervently. He had never meant anything as much as he meant that. “It’s all okay.” He would forgive her anything in the world if she would be okay from this point on. Maybe he was finally Learning to Forgive, he thought. “Can we have coffee?”
They met at a café. Harry looked small and thin, and it was a bit painful, because he had remembered her as a round-cheeked girl, laughing at him when he teased her, and now she had become a sad and ravaged adult. But, then again, so had he, and they were quite the pair, these Watson siblings.
She stood up and hugged him when he entered, and he hugged her back tightly and kissed the top of her head. Then they sat opposite each other, and Harry shredded a serviette with nervous fingers.
“How are you?” he asked. He tried to keep his eyes sharp, to think like Sherlock, to be objective and catalogue anything telltale to show that Harry was slipping, that the sobriety was leaking away from her, that the next time he spoke to her she would be back off the wagon and he would be all alone again. But he couldn’t. He was rubbish at that. It was why he’d needed Sherlock. He looked at her and saw his little sister, and his heart swelled with love, and he wanted more than anything else to believe everything was okay, and if he didn’t look too hard, he could convince himself of that.
He very much lacked Sherlock’s courage to see the world as it was, he thought. He always had.
“I’m okay,” said Harry, hesitantly.
“Are you?”
She attempted a bright smile. “Getting there. I think. Yeah.”
“Good.”
“John.” She reached her hand across the table, took one of his in hers and squeezed. Her eyes were filled with tears. “John, I’m so sorry. You needed me, and I wasn’t there, and I-”
John stared at their intertwined hands, because if he looked at her he thought he might start to cry. “It’s okay. You’re here now.” He forced himself to look up at her.
She was smiling at him, a watery, but loving smile. “We can get over our addictions together,” she said.
He half-laughed. He didn’t know how long it was going to last, this rare sober persona of his sister, but, just now, he wasn’t going to worry about that, he was just going to let her be there, now. Savor Life’s Joys.
10. Commit to Your Goals
This was another ridiculous one. What had he been doing for the past nine steps if not committing to the goal of being a happier person? Getting over Sherlock? He was beginning to think it was impossible, an exercise in futility. But he was Committed to His Goal.
He looked around his flat and decided that there was one thing he could do to show his complete devotion to moving on from Sherlock: He could decorate.
He rang Mrs. Hudson. “I’m going to buy some things for my flat,” he told her. “I thought you might want to help.”
Mrs. Hudson was only too eager to help. And if he ended up with a bunch of knick-knacks more suited to a woman of Mrs. Hudson’s age than a bachelor of John’s age, well, that was fine with him. Truthfully, John no longer had any inkling what his taste or style might be. Sherlock was his taste and style. The accessory his flat needed was Sherlock Holmes, draped on the sofa with petulant grace.
He didn’t think there was a store where you could buy a Sherlock Holmes, so he let Mrs. Hudson pick out fussy pink-rosed china and tried not to envision the look on Mycroft’s face should he ever stop by for tea. The thing was, Mycroft himself probably possessed fussy pink-rosed china, but he would still manage to look disapproving of John’s.
“You should paint,” Mrs. Hudson told him. John noticed she didn’t suggest wallpaper, and John agreed with the obvious reasoning behind that. “And put some things on the walls. It would help.”
Help what? John wanted to ask her. But he chose a paint color, a yellowish creamy color that the expert at the store said was guaranteed to provoke cheerfulness in the inhabitant of the room. John asked if it was a money-back guarantee, which made the shop assistant falter.
His new yellow walls did not provoke cheerfulness, but he supposed they were committing to his goal. He considered things to hang on them. Mirrors? Paintings? Photographs?
In the end, he gave in and allowed himself to frame one photo of Sherlock and himself, in amongst the impersonal seaside landscapes he put on his walls. It was his favorite one from their newspaper days. It had accompanied a standard and unremarkable story about Sherlock Holmes, ’Net Detective, but John had seen no other newspaper run that particular photograph, and he had eventually written to the photographer and asked if he might have a copy. This had been before Sherlock’s death, and he had never been quite sure what he’d intended to do with the photograph, other than that he liked it and wanted to have it.
He found it now, tucked in a medical textbook he’d been carrying around with him needlessly since his school days, and framed it and hung it on the wall. He contemplated it during his lonelier moments, examining every aspect of it. In it, he was speaking to Sherlock, his eyes squinted at the sun and one of his arms extended, pointing into the distance at whatever point he was trying to make. He looked unremarkable in the photo. He liked the photo because Sherlock, in his scarf and coat, with his hands in his pockets, was smiling at him. Not a sneer or a mockery but a genuine smile, his pale eyes alight on John’s face. Whatever John was saying in that photo, it had, unbeknownst to him, caused Sherlock to smile at him.
John wished desperately that he knew what it was.
11. Practice Spirituality
John hadn’t been to church in years.
He did, most of the time, believe that there was a God. This was either habit or genuine belief, he wasn’t sure which. Sherlock had called it “unimaginative.” He still remembered the first conversation they’d ever had about it, over breakfast shortly after John had shot the cab driver. “Did you really ask God to let you live when you were shot?” Sherlock had asked, sounding as if it were too impossible to believe. “Yes,” he’d answered, briefly, not wanting to get into it. “But why?” Sherlock persisted. “What does ‘God’ have to do with it?” He had a way of pronouncing God as if it were an alleged name, an alias for something entirely different.
Sherlock had never understood the elemental thoughts that might flit through one’s brain in the moments before possible death. A childhood of turning to a Higher Power, and it had been automatic for him to do it, powerless and terrified, for him to pray to a God he was sure he’d stopped believing in until that moment. And that moment had betrayed him, forced him to acknowledge that he only stopped believing in God until he thought he needed a God, and then he was convinced there must be one. He thought of Jennifer Wilson, who had been leaving them a message, but John had genuinely thought that she had just been thinking of her dead baby daughter. The regrets of a lifetime, the desperate pleas that betrayed exactly what you were and what you found important…
Sometimes John wondered what Sherlock had thought as he was falling, but he never let himself think about that for long because that way lay madness.
John went to church. Not to a service-that seemed too much-but to church. He sat in the church’s chilly dimness and listened to the way the sounds outside were drowned while the sounds inside were amplified. He looked way up, to the ceiling high above him. It was a gray dreary day, and only a half-light fell through the long, narrow windows. He looked at the flickering candles, glowing feebly all around him.
He tried to feel as if there were a God, but the church seemed empty to him. Life had been emptiness lately, and it yawned ahead of him, and John did not understand, could not comprehend, how he had been shot and survived and Sherlock Holmes had leaped off a building to his death. In any universe conceived by a divine being, what sense did such an exchange make? To deprive the world of Sherlock Holmes and leave the world with John Watson? What was John supposed to make of that, other than a confirmation that in this, as in all things, Sherlock had probably been right, and there was no God. He had survived because of modern medicine, not because of divine intervention. And Sherlock Holmes had died because he had deliberately placed himself beyond the abilities of modern medicine.
John closed his eyes and bowed his head and curled his fingers around the pew and listened to emptiness.
Which was when the church bells began to ring.
And that was nothing more than timing, Sherlock would tell him. He had subconsciously wanted to be at church when the bells would ring, and so he had sought church near such a time. That was what Sherlock would say.
What John heard, though, was bells ringing, and he heard them through his childhood, through dazed pain in Afghanistan, through his current frozen state. They beat with his heart, a rhythm to accompany him, a little less emptiness, a little less loneliness.
John squeezed his eyes shut a bit more and prayed the most impossible, audacious prayer, a dare of a prayer, a slap across God’s face. If I am right and Sherlock is wrong about You, prove it: Bring him back.
Satisfied that he had practiced spirituality, John walked out of the church. His steps timed, unconsciously, with the ringing of the bells.
12. Take Care of Your Body
Mycroft had been out of the country on an unexpected trip during which he had not slept, and when he got home he kissed Greg hello absently and fell immediately into bed. Which meant that when the mobile chirped with a text message, it was still in his pocket and woke him.
It was the Sherlock-emergency-only mobile.
John has joined a gym.
Mycroft frowned, rang Sherlock, and left him a voicemail. “And?”
He dozed until the mobile chirped again. Why has he joined a gym? And then, after another second, Did I wake you? Why are you sleeping in the middle of the day?
Mycroft deleted the second text and rolled himself out of bed and went in search of Greg.
He found him in the drawing room, sitting on the floor by a roaring fire. Greg always made the fires too big. Mycroft was convinced he was going to burn the house down eventually. He had a pen clamped in his mouth and was surrounded by crime scene photos. The drawing room was where Greg always worked. Originally, he had commandeered the dining room table, until Mycroft had politely asked him where they were supposed to eat. The table, Greg had said, seats twenty; they could surely eat at one end of it. Mycroft had been unconvinced, which Greg had immediately seen, which was why Mycroft loved Greg.
Except that then Greg had moved himself into the library, which was a nice idea, that they could work at the same time, but Greg’s encroaching piles of paper had made Mycroft half want to tear his hair out. Another thing Greg had immediately seen, without Mycroft having to say anything, and the drawing room had been his compromise. Mycroft didn’t mind this. He associated the room with Greg, so the mess seemed acceptable here.
Greg glanced at him as he sat in the chair by the fire and took the pen out of his mouth. “Are you sick?”
“What?” Mycroft hadn’t expected that question. Because he’d taken a nap? “No, I was tired. I didn’t sleep on my trip.”
“You’re in a wrinkled suit. You never wear wrinkled suits.”
“I had a text from Sherlock,” answered Mycroft.
“Bad news?”
Mycroft handed the mobile to Greg.
“John has joined a gym,” Greg read out loud. “Why has John joined a gym?”
“Do you know anything about this?” asked Mycroft.
“Yes.” Greg handed the mobile back. “It’s part of John’s get-over-Sherlock program. He’s moved on to ‘take care of your body.’”
“Ah.” Mycroft rang Sherlock and left him a message. “Don’t worry, he’s still all yours.”
The end.