Nature and Nurture (18/?)
Jul. 25th, 2013 12:06 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
earlgreytea68Title - Nature and Nurture (18/?)
Author -![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
earlgreytea68
Rating - Teen
Characters - Sherlock, John, Molly, Mike
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 - The British Government accidentally clones Sherlock Holmes. Which brings a baby to 221B Baker Street.
Author's Notes - Thank you to hobbitts for permission to use the art in the icon, and to everyone on Twitter who helped name the baby, and to everyone on Tumblr was who was supportive and encouraging while I was going crazy over this, and to arctacuda, who's been reading this over for me and making sure it works and I'm not going crazy, and to flawedamythyst, who took one for the team and made sure that my British sounded, well, a bit more British.
Chapter One - Chapter Two - Chapter Three - Chapter Four - Chapter Five - Chapter Six - Chapter Seven - Chapter Eight - Chapter Nine - Chapter Ten - Chapter Eleven - Chapter Twelve - Chapter Thirteen - Chapter Fourteen - Chapter Fifteen - Chapter Sixteen - Chapter Seventeen
John was at St. Bart’s when they got there.
Sherlock wanted to pretend that he’d expected him to be there, but the reality was he’d spent a little while fruitlessly pacing the sitting room floor in 221B, worried that he’d never see John again, and all for the transgression of what? Moving too quickly? After being so patient for so many years, now he’d moved too quickly?
Oliver picked up on Sherlock’s mood and fussed over everything and did not stop crying for the entire cab ride, no matter how much Sherlock tried to comfort him. In fact, Oliver did not stop crying until the moment he saw John, sitting in the lab at St. Bart’s and chatting with Molly. Oliver reached for John immediately, squirming out of Sherlock’s grasp toward him, and John took him and pulled him in close, pressing his nose into Oliver’s soft curls and meeting Sherlock’s eyes as he did it.
“There, there,” he soothed, and Oliver stopped crying.
“I’ll just,” said Molly, not even bothering to pretend there was anything that might come after that, and scurried out of the lab.
“I wasn’t sure you’d be here,” said Sherlock, even though that was the exact opposite of what he’d intended to say.
“I’m sorry,” said John. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to…To either one of you.”
Sherlock decided that this was awkward, and Sherlock despised awkwardness. His preferred method for dealing with awkwardness was not to acknowledge the awkwardness. So he slid out of his coat and draped it over a stool and said, “I think we should tell Molly.”
John looked wary, still cradling Oliver to his shoulder. “Tell Molly what?”
“The truth about Oliver.”
John blinked, obviously surprised. “Really?”
“She can be trusted. And it would be helpful if she knew, so she wouldn’t advertise the tests we run on him.” Sherlock was rifling through drawers, looking for a needle and vials for Oliver’s blood.
“Why would she advertise them?”
“She might do it innocently, without knowing there’s any reason to be less than forthcoming about Ollie.” Sherlock succeeded in locating a needle small enough, straightened and turned back to John.
John looked…exhausted. And he’d slept well the night before, Sherlock had lain beside him whilst he’d snored all night, so there was no reason for John to look so very tired. “Can we not do all this today? Can we tell Molly some other time?”
Sherlock studied him critically, trying to determine the source of John’s exhaustion. He wasn’t getting sick, was he? “Are you alright?”
John nodded. “Just not looking forward to this.” John looked grim. “Do you want me to draw the blood?”
Sherlock hesitated. He decided to drop his pursuit of what might be wrong with John. He also decided against having John draw the blood. John could do it quite competently, but it would be cowardly on Sherlock’s part to have John do it. He shook his head. “No, I’ll do it. He’s going to need comforting, and you’re better at that.”
“You could comfort him.”
Sherlock ignored John, because John frequently spouted nonsense like that. He took hold of Oliver’s arm and looked for the vein and told himself to treat this like he would an unknown baby. He was not normally squeamish about doing things, the idea that he might be now was ludicrous.
Oliver for a moment looked at him with interest, curious as to why Sherlock had hold of his arm, and then Sherlock stabbed him with the needle and Oliver absolutely howled with panicked displeasure. Sherlock had had lots of experience with needles—lots more than John would have liked to have known—but he had no experience with needles on unwilling live participants. He was unprepared for how much Oliver twisted in an attempt to get away from him, screaming with something that sounded very much like terror.
“Hold him, would you?” Sherlock snapped, trying to get everything over with as quickly as possible.
“I’m trying,” John responded, between gritted teeth, and pressed a hand against Oliver’s head, pressing a kiss to the other side. “Shhh,” he breathed out, softly. “Shhh. It’s almost done.”
Oliver cried. Actually, Oliver didn’t just cry. Oliver sobbed, heartbrokenly. Sherlock was familiar with Oliver’s cries by now, and there was a plethora of them, but Sherlock had never before heard one so sincerely hurt. If Sherlock let himself listen to that cry one more second, he was going to be in a puddle on the floor, weeping and begging Oliver to forgive him. To forgive him for drawing blood to try to save his life. This was absurd.
Having drawn enough blood, Sherlock fastened gauze to Oliver’s arm with a bandage and turned from him swiftly. He sensed rather than saw Oliver turn more fully into John, as if he were trying to burrow as far away from Sherlock as he could get. Sherlock could well imagine the betrayal that would be written all over Oliver’s face. He remembered the feeling vividly from the first time he was flung into a mysterious hospital and poked and prodded at.
Which was why he said, as he carefully dated the sample, “He’s being melodramatic. It doesn’t hurt that much.”
“It isn’t the pain, Sherlock.”
No. It was the betrayal. It was the person who was supposed to keep you safe abandoning you to the very opposite of safety. Sherlock’s numbers were vicious slashes of black on the label.
Oliver was still crying, although the sobs were muffled, and Sherlock deduced that he must be pressed against John’s shoulder. John said, “I’m going to track down a stethoscope. I might as well give him a proper examination while we’re here.”
Sherlock said nothing in response, pretending to be lost in the piece of paper he was staring at, although he had no idea what the piece of paper even was. All he knew was that John left the lab, the door closing behind him, and Sherlock sank onto a stool and put his face in his hands and leaned heavily against the lab bench and just did not move for a little while. He fancied he could still hear Oliver wailing against him from down the hall.
The door opened, and Sherlock lifted his head and sat up abruptly, furious that he’d let John startle him in such a position.
Except it wasn’t John. It was Molly, looking at him with frank and open concern.
“Everything okay?” she asked, hesitantly.
Sherlock considered. “No,” he decided. “Everything is not okay.”
Molly looked frightened. “You’re not going to have to die again, are you?”
Sherlock supposed that that was a legitimate fear on Molly’s part, but Sherlock also wasn’t in the mood. “No,” he responded, shortly.
“Well, that’s good,” said Molly, cheerfully, with her nervous little giggle, which faded when she saw that Sherlock was definitely not amused. “Oliver sounded unhappy,” she ventured.
“Understatement,” Sherlock dismissed, because he didn’t want to think about Oliver. And also because it had occurred to him that Molly might be of some use with his other issue. “I may have upset John.”
Molly blinked. “John?”
“Yes.”
“Oh, I’m sure you didn’t. You never really upset John. He loves you too much for that, you know that.”
Sherlock ignored this ridiculousness. “I said we should get married.”
Molly stared, looking shocked. Why should she look shocked? Wasn’t this obvious? “You said that to John?” she clarified.
“Yes. Of course. Obviously. And it upset him.”
“Are you…a couple, then?”
“Of course we’re a couple. We’re raising a baby together.”
“That’s not…I mean, yes, I see your point, but I’m not sure John would think—”
“And we’re having sex,” Sherlock confirmed, impatiently, “which everyone, for idiotic reasons, seems to think is the most important part about being a couple.”
“Oh,” said Molly, and clearly wanted to ask several follow-up questions, but merely said again, “Oh.”
“So I told him we should get married, and he’s angry about it. Why should that be?”
Molly lifted her eyebrows. “You told him?”
Ah, thought Sherlock. Okay, that may have been a good point. John hated to be bossed around, and possibly he had interpreted that statement as bossing.
Not that Sherlock wanted to admit that he’d possibly, from a certain perspective, ordered John to marry him. “Well,” he said, and shrugged a bit.
Molly looked as if he’d suddenly started dancing naked around the laboratory, such was the comical expression of shock on her face. “You can’t just tell people that they’re marrying you. That’s not how it works. It’s not like telling him to get milk on his way home, just another item on his grocery list.”
And he had basically put it on their grocery list, hadn’t he? He had buried it with other chores and errands, just one more thing to get out of the way. He had assumed that John wouldn’t stand on ceremony, wouldn’t need it, would recognize the practical value of having their relationship legally recognized, for Oliver’s sake, for their own sake. But maybe, given the evidence of John’s behavior in the wake of it, he’d been wrong about that.
He was getting a lot of things wrong lately. It was irritating.
He drummed his fingers on the laboratory bench and looked at the vial of Oliver’s blood.
“Ollie’s okay, isn’t he?” asked Molly, tentatively.
Oh, he’s brilliant for a clone baby, thought Sherlock, but John had seemed reluctant about confiding in Molly and Sherlock didn’t want to upset John at the moment any more than he already had. He said, brusquely, rising to his feet, “He’s fine. Just a little routine blood work I’m going to do.”
Molly looked less than convinced about this, but just bit her lip and nodded her head and looked up at him. “I think John will say yes. Eventually.”
Sherlock almost didn’t realize that she was talking about the marriage thing. But, of course, John would say yes because Sherlock was supposed to have asked him a question about marriage instead of just announcing it the way he had. How had he made such a mess of things?
Sherlock said to Molly, faking a bravado he did not at all feel, “Obviously.”
***
It should have occurred to John, as he walked down the hallway with Oliver still wailing in his ear, that he was likely to encounter Mike Stamford. But it didn’t, until the very moment Mike rounded the corner and abruptly stopped walking, staring at John with the baby in his arms.
“Ah,” said John, jovially, as if this were all a perfectly normal situation, walking down the hallway comforting your flatmate-slash-lover’s clone baby. “Mike. Hello.”
Oliver kept crying, but it was starting to grow half-hearted now. Oliver, John could sense, was beginning to suspect that he’d made his point.
“John,” Mike replied, eyes riveted to where Oliver was pressed against John’s shoulder. He clearly wanted to demand what was up with the baby, but he merely said, automatically polite, the same way he’d been that day in the park so long ago, “How are you?”
And John, thinking about that day in the park, smiled suddenly. One day Mike Stamford had called his name, and that had somehow led to the bundle of baby in John’s arms. John was out-of-sorts with Sherlock’s obtuseness in dictating marriage to him and miffed at the lack of comfort Sherlock had displayed toward the distraught Oliver, and still he thought that he would not have wanted his life to have turned out any other way. John could not bear to think of what might have happened had Mike Stamford not called his name that day.
So John said, turning Oliver so that he was facing Mike, feeling a burst of pride over how clever and beautiful Mike would see that the baby so obviously was, “This is Oliver.”
Oliver sniffled, catching his breath, and regarded Mike with what, to John, were unmistakably Sherlock’s sharp, gray-green-blue eyes.
Mike looked back at Oliver and said, clearly unsure how he was supposed to be reacting, “Hello, Oliver.”
An explanation was warranted, John knew. “He’s mine and Sherlock’s,” John continued, and it was the first time he had said it so very bluntly, the first time he had felt entitled to say it so very bluntly, but that’s who Oliver was, and now it was probably time for everyone to know.
Mike lifted his eyes from Oliver to John and smiled at him, warmly and acceptingly and not a bit surprised. “About time,” was what he said.
John acknowledged that with a small smile that he half-buried against Oliver’s head. “This is Mike,” he told Oliver. “Mike introduced Daddy and me.”
“So I suppose that makes me, in a way, responsible for your existence,” Mike told Oliver, solemnly.
Oliver looked skeptical about this claim.
“You used Sherlock as the donor, I see,” continued Mike. “He’s a carbon copy, isn’t he? I suppose I can’t fault you the choice, but maybe you’ll go for the matching set eventually?”
“Maybe,” John said, because it sounded better than, I don’t want to be cloned.
“What are you doing here with him? Trying to get him to want to be a doctor when he grows up? Or are you already taking him along on investigations?”
“Routine blood work,” John told him. “We’re waiting for Sherlock to finish up with everything.”
“An opportunity to catch up,” Mike decided. “You’ve clearly got a lot going on.”
Which was how John found himself in Mike Stamford’s office. To try to distract Mike from Mike’s unerring interest in John’s relationship with Sherlock and the ins and outs of Oliver’s existence, John borrowed Mike’s stethoscope to listen to Oliver’s heart and lungs, all of which sounded absolutely perfect. John thought he’d have to do this more often at home, now that they were monitoring Oliver more closely.
John was just finishing up, giving Oliver the stethoscope to examine more closely in response to Oliver’s swipes at it, when Sherlock drew to a stop in the doorway.
John looked over at him. He looked stiff and awkward, unsure of himself, and John hated for Sherlock to get like that. As annoying as Sherlock’s arrogance could be, John preferred it to all the vulnerability that lurked there when you scratched the surface. John hated when he scratched the surface. Sherlock had mentioned marriage the wrong way, but John had lost his temper perhaps a tad too easily. John put it down to his heightened emotional state lately.
“Ready to go?” John asked him, striving for the casual comfort with which he and Sherlock usually conversed.
Sherlock looked at him warily, as if certain John was going to bite Sherlock’s head off if Sherlock got any closer. “Yes,” he answered, slowly.
“Congratulations, Sherlock,” Mike told him, heartily.
Sherlock’s eyes shifted from John to Mike. “For what?”
“Oliver, of course.” Mike gestured to the baby, just as John rescued Mike’s stethoscope from being bashed against the desk.
“Ah,” said Sherlock, still looking blank about why congratulations should have been necessary under such circumstances. “Yes. Of course.”
“Well, we should be off,” John announced, handing Mike back his stethoscope. “Say good-bye, Ollie.”
Oliver mumbled around the fist he stuck in his mouth.
“We’ll pretend that was ‘good-bye,’” said John, and glanced after Sherlock, who had already darted off down the hallway without a word of farewell to Mike.
“It was good catching up,” Mike told him. “And, really, congratulations on all of it. Fatherhood suits you, you look delighted with the universe.”
As John had actually been in a terrible mood when he had first encountered Mike, he found this to be an extraordinary assessment, but he just smiled in response. He mused on the comment as he hurried to catch up to Sherlock, wondering if he really did look that delighted, if, even at his most irritated, he still looked more delighted than the average human being. He looked at Sherlock, who had just behaved infuriatingly rudely and yet John still adored him. John adored him always, even when he was angry with him. And John thought Oliver was probably in the same boat.
“Are we going home?” John asked, as he and Sherlock walked out of St. Bart’s together.
The hitch of Sherlock’s hesitation would have been nonexistent to anyone who wasn’t John. “Are we?” he asked, and hailed a cab.
John said, firmly, “Yes.”
***
Sherlock excelled at a lengthy list of things. One of the things not on that list, however, was “apologies.” He sat in the cab next to John and felt the weight of every wrong word that had come out of his mouth recently, and he didn’t want to make it worse by adding more wrong words, so he sat drowning in silence and wanting to fix things but frightened of ruining everything more.
And that was just his situation with John. That didn’t even take into account the fact that Oliver was clinging to John, burrowed tightly against him, watching Sherlock with wide, accusatory eyes. Sherlock had managed to alienate the two most important people in his life, all in the course of a single disastrous morning.
They reached Baker Street and Sherlock followed John up the stairs and debated what to say, and then John turned to him, holding out Oliver.
“He’s had an exhausting morning,” John said. “He needs a nap.”
Oliver looked at Sherlock distastefully. Sherlock looked at Oliver fretfully. “I’m sure he’d prefer you—”
“He wouldn’t,” said John, and pushed Oliver into Sherlock’s arms. Sherlock caught the baby instinctively to keep him from dropping to the ground. “You’re his father, and he loves you, and he needs you right now. Go and comfort him.”
Sherlock had no idea what that entailed. He juggled Oliver and felt more awkward holding him than he’d ever felt before. “You’re the one he wants, I—”
“Listen to me.” John put his hand on the back of Sherlock’s neck, and it was the first time John had touched him since their argument, and Sherlock stilled so as to keep the pressure there for the longest time possible. “That’s not true. We are the two most important people in his life. We are. Together. We’re his parents. He wants both of us. He is always going to want both of us. He’s had me for a while just now. Now he needs you.”
Sherlock stared at John’s dark blue eyes, feeling helpless. John always thought Sherlock could do anything, and Sherlock always dreaded splintering that illusion. “I don’t know what to…” Sherlock trailed off. He didn’t even know what he didn’t know. What to do? What to say?
“Yes, you do,” John said, an annoyingly cryptic and useless answer, and then John disappeared into the sitting room.
Oliver made a sound of displeasure, and Sherlock looked down at him. He was looking up at Sherlock with stricken, heartbroken eyes. Sherlock felt his own heart quiver in response to that look, which was either impossible or alarming, neither of which was good. He took a deep breath and tried to steel himself. If John was going to force him to take care of Oliver right now, then he would do an excellent job of it, because Oliver deserved it.
“A new nappy,” Sherlock told Oliver, ducking into his bedroom. “And then Papa says you’re due for a nap.”
Oliver protested that.
“I know, he insists you sleep far too much, I’ve already had that discussion with him.” Sherlock went about changing Oliver’s nappy with brisk efficiency.
Oliver complained.
“Maybe,” said Sherlock, “if you’re very quiet, we can just sit in here together and pretend to be napping.” Sherlock sat on his bed, propping himself up against the headboard, and settled Oliver into his arms.
And made the mistake of looking down at him.
Oliver looked back up, his opal eyes bewildered and hurt and sad.
And Sherlock hated himself.
Sherlock could remember the first round of doctors he’d been inflicted with. He’d been three at the time, and he remembered echoing hospital corridors and musty offices with huge, ugly desks. He remembered strangers peering at him, poking him, prodding him, speaking to him with annoying overenunciation as if he couldn’t understand what they were saying otherwise. The doctors were his earliest memories. He couldn’t remember what had come before them. He couldn’t remember what had made him resolve not to speak for as long as he could, but his determination settled into stubborn single-mindedness after the doctors kept trying to coax him into saying something.
He couldn’t remember, either, when he had started feeling lonely, because he had felt it for so long that he hadn’t recognized it for what it was until he’d met John and stopped feeling that way. The loneliness had been a part of him from the very beginning, and he had come back from unsatisfying appointments with doctors and he had not really understood what had been going on and there had been no one to explain it to him, no one to care that he had been frightened. No one to tell him it was all going to be alright.
Sherlock hadn’t spoken because there had been no one to speak to.
Sherlock looked down at Oliver and thought of all the words he’d wanted said to him. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
Oliver blinked his eyes and took little hiccups of trembling breath.
Sherlock pulled him closer, up against his shoulder, burying his face against Oliver’s soft, warm hair, the tiny jut of his shoulder. “I’m so sorry. I had to, to keep you safe, I had to, I had no choice. I’m just trying to keep you safe, that’s all. Because I love you the most ridiculous amount and I can’t let anything happen to you and I will protect you, from everything that could ever hurt you, as long as I am alive. I promise you, everything I ever do will always be because I love you. You will never be alone, you will always have me, always, and I will love you no matter what, no matter who you turn out to be. That is how I love you. Do you understand me?”
Sherlock held his breath, feeling ridiculous after the outburst, as if Oliver was really going to respond. But Oliver said, “Da.” And Sherlock knew it wasn’t Oliver saying Daddy, no more than Oliver had really said skull that day, but Sherlock also knew better than to turn his back on a good sign like that. And an even better sign was that Oliver snuggled against him, catching his fists in the cloth of Sherlock’s jacket and settling his head into the curve of Sherlock’s neck, close and trusting.
Sherlock closed his eyes and let out the breath he’d been holding. Maybe he hadn’t destroyed every important relationship in his life that day. “So am I forgiven?” he asked Oliver.
Oliver didn’t respond, but that was okay, because Oliver stayed tucked contentedly up against Sherlock’s shoulder, his breaths growing heavier and heavier as he drifted toward sleep, and Sherlock held him and reveled in him and considered the other problem of John.
John loved him. John had said as much. And John had stuck by him through much worse than the bungling of a marriage proposal. (Or the inability to notice that it should have been a proposal in the first place.) But John was old-fashioned. Sherlock knew that, and had somehow managed to ignore that, because he’d been stupid. John was adorably old-fashioned, with all his queen-and-country-ness and idealized loyalty, like a code of chivalry. And John was, moreover, a romantic. He had a soft spot for the idea of things like soulmates, like cuddles on the sofa, like lazy sleepy kisses, like walks in the rain. And Sherlock had said, to a man such as this, We’ll get married. That’s it.
Sherlock was astonished by the depths of his stupidity.
Oliver was clearly sleeping against him now, so there was nothing for it but to lay Oliver down and try to make things right with John. He’d apologize, the way he’d apologized to Oliver. And he’d ask this time. Nicely. Politely.
He settled Oliver in his cot and headed from his bedroom into the sitting room.
Where the curtains had been drawn. In the dim imitation of twilight this produced, candles were scattered throughout the room, flickering distorted shadows everywhere. Momentarily disoriented, because he had not been expecting this, Sherlock paused, blinking against the candlelight.
“John?” he asked, cautiously, curiously, unsure what to expect.
John walked out of the kitchen, holding two flutes of champagne. “Is he sleeping?”
“Yes.” Sherlock answered the question automatically, the same way he accepted the champagne flute. “Where did you…How did you…?”
“I ran out to the shops while you were in with Oliver.”
And Sherlock hadn’t noticed, because Sherlock was an absolute wreck today. “John,” he began, firmly, gathering his courage around him like a mantle.
“No. Me first.” John took Sherlock’s flute away, which was silly, because Sherlock hadn’t even drunk it yet. He put both of the flutes down on the coffee table and turned back to Sherlock, catching his hands between his own. “Are you in love with me?”
An easy question to answer. “Yes.”
“Do you want to spend the rest of your life with me?”
Another easy question. “Yes.”
John burst into a smile and then sank gracefully to one knee, still clasping Sherlock’s hands. “In that case. Will you marry me?”
Sherlock stared down at him, floored into a moment of silence. After everything that had just happened, now John was proposing to him? “Yes,” he answered, finally.
“Good.” John stood back up and caught Sherlock’s face between his hands and kissed him, tenderly, adoringly, lingeringly.
Sherlock drew back and rested his forehead against John’s and drew a shaky breath. “You have to think about this,” he forced himself to say.
“Really?” John sounded amused. “This morning you were ordering me to marry you, and now I’ve proposed and you tell me to reconsider?”
“That’s exactly why you should reconsider. I am rubbish at this, John.”
“Rubbish at what?”
“At…proposing marriage.”
“I noticed. That’s why I did it for you.”
“No.” Sherlock was growing progressively frustrated. “That’s not what I mean. I’m rubbish at all of this. I’m rubbish at being…I’m…I didn’t even know why you were angry with me this morning. I had to ask Molly.”
“You told Molly that you ordered me to marry you this morning?”
“Yes,” Sherlock responded, sulkily. “There was no one else to ask, and I had to fix things with you.”
John kissed him again, brief and achingly affectionate. “I’m sorry that you panicked so much about this. I’m sorry that I overreacted this morning. This is all still very new to me. You’ve had a ridiculous amount of time to get used to the fact that you love me, but I’ve just realized it and I may be a little of an idiot about it sometimes still. I can’t help it. But you’re better at this than you think. Just like you’re a better father than you think. Now.” John said the word as if that ended the entire disagreement. And maybe, Sherlock admitted, it did. “You’ve just had a rather lovely marriage proposal from an incredibly dashing man who’s poured you champagne. Do you know what you do next?”
“Drink the champagne?”
“Forget entirely about the champagne because you’re much too busy with other occupations.” John slid a hand into Sherlock’s trousers, clearly concerned that otherwise Sherlock might miss the point.
Sherlock definitely didn’t miss the point. “Oh,” he said. “Delightful.”
Next Chapter
Author -
earlgreytea68Rating - Teen
Characters - Sherlock, John, Molly, Mike
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 - The British Government accidentally clones Sherlock Holmes. Which brings a baby to 221B Baker Street.
Author's Notes - Thank you to hobbitts for permission to use the art in the icon, and to everyone on Twitter who helped name the baby, and to everyone on Tumblr was who was supportive and encouraging while I was going crazy over this, and to arctacuda, who's been reading this over for me and making sure it works and I'm not going crazy, and to flawedamythyst, who took one for the team and made sure that my British sounded, well, a bit more British.
Chapter One - Chapter Two - Chapter Three - Chapter Four - Chapter Five - Chapter Six - Chapter Seven - Chapter Eight - Chapter Nine - Chapter Ten - Chapter Eleven - Chapter Twelve - Chapter Thirteen - Chapter Fourteen - Chapter Fifteen - Chapter Sixteen - Chapter Seventeen
John was at St. Bart’s when they got there.
Sherlock wanted to pretend that he’d expected him to be there, but the reality was he’d spent a little while fruitlessly pacing the sitting room floor in 221B, worried that he’d never see John again, and all for the transgression of what? Moving too quickly? After being so patient for so many years, now he’d moved too quickly?
Oliver picked up on Sherlock’s mood and fussed over everything and did not stop crying for the entire cab ride, no matter how much Sherlock tried to comfort him. In fact, Oliver did not stop crying until the moment he saw John, sitting in the lab at St. Bart’s and chatting with Molly. Oliver reached for John immediately, squirming out of Sherlock’s grasp toward him, and John took him and pulled him in close, pressing his nose into Oliver’s soft curls and meeting Sherlock’s eyes as he did it.
“There, there,” he soothed, and Oliver stopped crying.
“I’ll just,” said Molly, not even bothering to pretend there was anything that might come after that, and scurried out of the lab.
“I wasn’t sure you’d be here,” said Sherlock, even though that was the exact opposite of what he’d intended to say.
“I’m sorry,” said John. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to…To either one of you.”
Sherlock decided that this was awkward, and Sherlock despised awkwardness. His preferred method for dealing with awkwardness was not to acknowledge the awkwardness. So he slid out of his coat and draped it over a stool and said, “I think we should tell Molly.”
John looked wary, still cradling Oliver to his shoulder. “Tell Molly what?”
“The truth about Oliver.”
John blinked, obviously surprised. “Really?”
“She can be trusted. And it would be helpful if she knew, so she wouldn’t advertise the tests we run on him.” Sherlock was rifling through drawers, looking for a needle and vials for Oliver’s blood.
“Why would she advertise them?”
“She might do it innocently, without knowing there’s any reason to be less than forthcoming about Ollie.” Sherlock succeeded in locating a needle small enough, straightened and turned back to John.
John looked…exhausted. And he’d slept well the night before, Sherlock had lain beside him whilst he’d snored all night, so there was no reason for John to look so very tired. “Can we not do all this today? Can we tell Molly some other time?”
Sherlock studied him critically, trying to determine the source of John’s exhaustion. He wasn’t getting sick, was he? “Are you alright?”
John nodded. “Just not looking forward to this.” John looked grim. “Do you want me to draw the blood?”
Sherlock hesitated. He decided to drop his pursuit of what might be wrong with John. He also decided against having John draw the blood. John could do it quite competently, but it would be cowardly on Sherlock’s part to have John do it. He shook his head. “No, I’ll do it. He’s going to need comforting, and you’re better at that.”
“You could comfort him.”
Sherlock ignored John, because John frequently spouted nonsense like that. He took hold of Oliver’s arm and looked for the vein and told himself to treat this like he would an unknown baby. He was not normally squeamish about doing things, the idea that he might be now was ludicrous.
Oliver for a moment looked at him with interest, curious as to why Sherlock had hold of his arm, and then Sherlock stabbed him with the needle and Oliver absolutely howled with panicked displeasure. Sherlock had had lots of experience with needles—lots more than John would have liked to have known—but he had no experience with needles on unwilling live participants. He was unprepared for how much Oliver twisted in an attempt to get away from him, screaming with something that sounded very much like terror.
“Hold him, would you?” Sherlock snapped, trying to get everything over with as quickly as possible.
“I’m trying,” John responded, between gritted teeth, and pressed a hand against Oliver’s head, pressing a kiss to the other side. “Shhh,” he breathed out, softly. “Shhh. It’s almost done.”
Oliver cried. Actually, Oliver didn’t just cry. Oliver sobbed, heartbrokenly. Sherlock was familiar with Oliver’s cries by now, and there was a plethora of them, but Sherlock had never before heard one so sincerely hurt. If Sherlock let himself listen to that cry one more second, he was going to be in a puddle on the floor, weeping and begging Oliver to forgive him. To forgive him for drawing blood to try to save his life. This was absurd.
Having drawn enough blood, Sherlock fastened gauze to Oliver’s arm with a bandage and turned from him swiftly. He sensed rather than saw Oliver turn more fully into John, as if he were trying to burrow as far away from Sherlock as he could get. Sherlock could well imagine the betrayal that would be written all over Oliver’s face. He remembered the feeling vividly from the first time he was flung into a mysterious hospital and poked and prodded at.
Which was why he said, as he carefully dated the sample, “He’s being melodramatic. It doesn’t hurt that much.”
“It isn’t the pain, Sherlock.”
No. It was the betrayal. It was the person who was supposed to keep you safe abandoning you to the very opposite of safety. Sherlock’s numbers were vicious slashes of black on the label.
Oliver was still crying, although the sobs were muffled, and Sherlock deduced that he must be pressed against John’s shoulder. John said, “I’m going to track down a stethoscope. I might as well give him a proper examination while we’re here.”
Sherlock said nothing in response, pretending to be lost in the piece of paper he was staring at, although he had no idea what the piece of paper even was. All he knew was that John left the lab, the door closing behind him, and Sherlock sank onto a stool and put his face in his hands and leaned heavily against the lab bench and just did not move for a little while. He fancied he could still hear Oliver wailing against him from down the hall.
The door opened, and Sherlock lifted his head and sat up abruptly, furious that he’d let John startle him in such a position.
Except it wasn’t John. It was Molly, looking at him with frank and open concern.
“Everything okay?” she asked, hesitantly.
Sherlock considered. “No,” he decided. “Everything is not okay.”
Molly looked frightened. “You’re not going to have to die again, are you?”
Sherlock supposed that that was a legitimate fear on Molly’s part, but Sherlock also wasn’t in the mood. “No,” he responded, shortly.
“Well, that’s good,” said Molly, cheerfully, with her nervous little giggle, which faded when she saw that Sherlock was definitely not amused. “Oliver sounded unhappy,” she ventured.
“Understatement,” Sherlock dismissed, because he didn’t want to think about Oliver. And also because it had occurred to him that Molly might be of some use with his other issue. “I may have upset John.”
Molly blinked. “John?”
“Yes.”
“Oh, I’m sure you didn’t. You never really upset John. He loves you too much for that, you know that.”
Sherlock ignored this ridiculousness. “I said we should get married.”
Molly stared, looking shocked. Why should she look shocked? Wasn’t this obvious? “You said that to John?” she clarified.
“Yes. Of course. Obviously. And it upset him.”
“Are you…a couple, then?”
“Of course we’re a couple. We’re raising a baby together.”
“That’s not…I mean, yes, I see your point, but I’m not sure John would think—”
“And we’re having sex,” Sherlock confirmed, impatiently, “which everyone, for idiotic reasons, seems to think is the most important part about being a couple.”
“Oh,” said Molly, and clearly wanted to ask several follow-up questions, but merely said again, “Oh.”
“So I told him we should get married, and he’s angry about it. Why should that be?”
Molly lifted her eyebrows. “You told him?”
Ah, thought Sherlock. Okay, that may have been a good point. John hated to be bossed around, and possibly he had interpreted that statement as bossing.
Not that Sherlock wanted to admit that he’d possibly, from a certain perspective, ordered John to marry him. “Well,” he said, and shrugged a bit.
Molly looked as if he’d suddenly started dancing naked around the laboratory, such was the comical expression of shock on her face. “You can’t just tell people that they’re marrying you. That’s not how it works. It’s not like telling him to get milk on his way home, just another item on his grocery list.”
And he had basically put it on their grocery list, hadn’t he? He had buried it with other chores and errands, just one more thing to get out of the way. He had assumed that John wouldn’t stand on ceremony, wouldn’t need it, would recognize the practical value of having their relationship legally recognized, for Oliver’s sake, for their own sake. But maybe, given the evidence of John’s behavior in the wake of it, he’d been wrong about that.
He was getting a lot of things wrong lately. It was irritating.
He drummed his fingers on the laboratory bench and looked at the vial of Oliver’s blood.
“Ollie’s okay, isn’t he?” asked Molly, tentatively.
Oh, he’s brilliant for a clone baby, thought Sherlock, but John had seemed reluctant about confiding in Molly and Sherlock didn’t want to upset John at the moment any more than he already had. He said, brusquely, rising to his feet, “He’s fine. Just a little routine blood work I’m going to do.”
Molly looked less than convinced about this, but just bit her lip and nodded her head and looked up at him. “I think John will say yes. Eventually.”
Sherlock almost didn’t realize that she was talking about the marriage thing. But, of course, John would say yes because Sherlock was supposed to have asked him a question about marriage instead of just announcing it the way he had. How had he made such a mess of things?
Sherlock said to Molly, faking a bravado he did not at all feel, “Obviously.”
***
It should have occurred to John, as he walked down the hallway with Oliver still wailing in his ear, that he was likely to encounter Mike Stamford. But it didn’t, until the very moment Mike rounded the corner and abruptly stopped walking, staring at John with the baby in his arms.
“Ah,” said John, jovially, as if this were all a perfectly normal situation, walking down the hallway comforting your flatmate-slash-lover’s clone baby. “Mike. Hello.”
Oliver kept crying, but it was starting to grow half-hearted now. Oliver, John could sense, was beginning to suspect that he’d made his point.
“John,” Mike replied, eyes riveted to where Oliver was pressed against John’s shoulder. He clearly wanted to demand what was up with the baby, but he merely said, automatically polite, the same way he’d been that day in the park so long ago, “How are you?”
And John, thinking about that day in the park, smiled suddenly. One day Mike Stamford had called his name, and that had somehow led to the bundle of baby in John’s arms. John was out-of-sorts with Sherlock’s obtuseness in dictating marriage to him and miffed at the lack of comfort Sherlock had displayed toward the distraught Oliver, and still he thought that he would not have wanted his life to have turned out any other way. John could not bear to think of what might have happened had Mike Stamford not called his name that day.
So John said, turning Oliver so that he was facing Mike, feeling a burst of pride over how clever and beautiful Mike would see that the baby so obviously was, “This is Oliver.”
Oliver sniffled, catching his breath, and regarded Mike with what, to John, were unmistakably Sherlock’s sharp, gray-green-blue eyes.
Mike looked back at Oliver and said, clearly unsure how he was supposed to be reacting, “Hello, Oliver.”
An explanation was warranted, John knew. “He’s mine and Sherlock’s,” John continued, and it was the first time he had said it so very bluntly, the first time he had felt entitled to say it so very bluntly, but that’s who Oliver was, and now it was probably time for everyone to know.
Mike lifted his eyes from Oliver to John and smiled at him, warmly and acceptingly and not a bit surprised. “About time,” was what he said.
John acknowledged that with a small smile that he half-buried against Oliver’s head. “This is Mike,” he told Oliver. “Mike introduced Daddy and me.”
“So I suppose that makes me, in a way, responsible for your existence,” Mike told Oliver, solemnly.
Oliver looked skeptical about this claim.
“You used Sherlock as the donor, I see,” continued Mike. “He’s a carbon copy, isn’t he? I suppose I can’t fault you the choice, but maybe you’ll go for the matching set eventually?”
“Maybe,” John said, because it sounded better than, I don’t want to be cloned.
“What are you doing here with him? Trying to get him to want to be a doctor when he grows up? Or are you already taking him along on investigations?”
“Routine blood work,” John told him. “We’re waiting for Sherlock to finish up with everything.”
“An opportunity to catch up,” Mike decided. “You’ve clearly got a lot going on.”
Which was how John found himself in Mike Stamford’s office. To try to distract Mike from Mike’s unerring interest in John’s relationship with Sherlock and the ins and outs of Oliver’s existence, John borrowed Mike’s stethoscope to listen to Oliver’s heart and lungs, all of which sounded absolutely perfect. John thought he’d have to do this more often at home, now that they were monitoring Oliver more closely.
John was just finishing up, giving Oliver the stethoscope to examine more closely in response to Oliver’s swipes at it, when Sherlock drew to a stop in the doorway.
John looked over at him. He looked stiff and awkward, unsure of himself, and John hated for Sherlock to get like that. As annoying as Sherlock’s arrogance could be, John preferred it to all the vulnerability that lurked there when you scratched the surface. John hated when he scratched the surface. Sherlock had mentioned marriage the wrong way, but John had lost his temper perhaps a tad too easily. John put it down to his heightened emotional state lately.
“Ready to go?” John asked him, striving for the casual comfort with which he and Sherlock usually conversed.
Sherlock looked at him warily, as if certain John was going to bite Sherlock’s head off if Sherlock got any closer. “Yes,” he answered, slowly.
“Congratulations, Sherlock,” Mike told him, heartily.
Sherlock’s eyes shifted from John to Mike. “For what?”
“Oliver, of course.” Mike gestured to the baby, just as John rescued Mike’s stethoscope from being bashed against the desk.
“Ah,” said Sherlock, still looking blank about why congratulations should have been necessary under such circumstances. “Yes. Of course.”
“Well, we should be off,” John announced, handing Mike back his stethoscope. “Say good-bye, Ollie.”
Oliver mumbled around the fist he stuck in his mouth.
“We’ll pretend that was ‘good-bye,’” said John, and glanced after Sherlock, who had already darted off down the hallway without a word of farewell to Mike.
“It was good catching up,” Mike told him. “And, really, congratulations on all of it. Fatherhood suits you, you look delighted with the universe.”
As John had actually been in a terrible mood when he had first encountered Mike, he found this to be an extraordinary assessment, but he just smiled in response. He mused on the comment as he hurried to catch up to Sherlock, wondering if he really did look that delighted, if, even at his most irritated, he still looked more delighted than the average human being. He looked at Sherlock, who had just behaved infuriatingly rudely and yet John still adored him. John adored him always, even when he was angry with him. And John thought Oliver was probably in the same boat.
“Are we going home?” John asked, as he and Sherlock walked out of St. Bart’s together.
The hitch of Sherlock’s hesitation would have been nonexistent to anyone who wasn’t John. “Are we?” he asked, and hailed a cab.
John said, firmly, “Yes.”
***
Sherlock excelled at a lengthy list of things. One of the things not on that list, however, was “apologies.” He sat in the cab next to John and felt the weight of every wrong word that had come out of his mouth recently, and he didn’t want to make it worse by adding more wrong words, so he sat drowning in silence and wanting to fix things but frightened of ruining everything more.
And that was just his situation with John. That didn’t even take into account the fact that Oliver was clinging to John, burrowed tightly against him, watching Sherlock with wide, accusatory eyes. Sherlock had managed to alienate the two most important people in his life, all in the course of a single disastrous morning.
They reached Baker Street and Sherlock followed John up the stairs and debated what to say, and then John turned to him, holding out Oliver.
“He’s had an exhausting morning,” John said. “He needs a nap.”
Oliver looked at Sherlock distastefully. Sherlock looked at Oliver fretfully. “I’m sure he’d prefer you—”
“He wouldn’t,” said John, and pushed Oliver into Sherlock’s arms. Sherlock caught the baby instinctively to keep him from dropping to the ground. “You’re his father, and he loves you, and he needs you right now. Go and comfort him.”
Sherlock had no idea what that entailed. He juggled Oliver and felt more awkward holding him than he’d ever felt before. “You’re the one he wants, I—”
“Listen to me.” John put his hand on the back of Sherlock’s neck, and it was the first time John had touched him since their argument, and Sherlock stilled so as to keep the pressure there for the longest time possible. “That’s not true. We are the two most important people in his life. We are. Together. We’re his parents. He wants both of us. He is always going to want both of us. He’s had me for a while just now. Now he needs you.”
Sherlock stared at John’s dark blue eyes, feeling helpless. John always thought Sherlock could do anything, and Sherlock always dreaded splintering that illusion. “I don’t know what to…” Sherlock trailed off. He didn’t even know what he didn’t know. What to do? What to say?
“Yes, you do,” John said, an annoyingly cryptic and useless answer, and then John disappeared into the sitting room.
Oliver made a sound of displeasure, and Sherlock looked down at him. He was looking up at Sherlock with stricken, heartbroken eyes. Sherlock felt his own heart quiver in response to that look, which was either impossible or alarming, neither of which was good. He took a deep breath and tried to steel himself. If John was going to force him to take care of Oliver right now, then he would do an excellent job of it, because Oliver deserved it.
“A new nappy,” Sherlock told Oliver, ducking into his bedroom. “And then Papa says you’re due for a nap.”
Oliver protested that.
“I know, he insists you sleep far too much, I’ve already had that discussion with him.” Sherlock went about changing Oliver’s nappy with brisk efficiency.
Oliver complained.
“Maybe,” said Sherlock, “if you’re very quiet, we can just sit in here together and pretend to be napping.” Sherlock sat on his bed, propping himself up against the headboard, and settled Oliver into his arms.
And made the mistake of looking down at him.
Oliver looked back up, his opal eyes bewildered and hurt and sad.
And Sherlock hated himself.
Sherlock could remember the first round of doctors he’d been inflicted with. He’d been three at the time, and he remembered echoing hospital corridors and musty offices with huge, ugly desks. He remembered strangers peering at him, poking him, prodding him, speaking to him with annoying overenunciation as if he couldn’t understand what they were saying otherwise. The doctors were his earliest memories. He couldn’t remember what had come before them. He couldn’t remember what had made him resolve not to speak for as long as he could, but his determination settled into stubborn single-mindedness after the doctors kept trying to coax him into saying something.
He couldn’t remember, either, when he had started feeling lonely, because he had felt it for so long that he hadn’t recognized it for what it was until he’d met John and stopped feeling that way. The loneliness had been a part of him from the very beginning, and he had come back from unsatisfying appointments with doctors and he had not really understood what had been going on and there had been no one to explain it to him, no one to care that he had been frightened. No one to tell him it was all going to be alright.
Sherlock hadn’t spoken because there had been no one to speak to.
Sherlock looked down at Oliver and thought of all the words he’d wanted said to him. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
Oliver blinked his eyes and took little hiccups of trembling breath.
Sherlock pulled him closer, up against his shoulder, burying his face against Oliver’s soft, warm hair, the tiny jut of his shoulder. “I’m so sorry. I had to, to keep you safe, I had to, I had no choice. I’m just trying to keep you safe, that’s all. Because I love you the most ridiculous amount and I can’t let anything happen to you and I will protect you, from everything that could ever hurt you, as long as I am alive. I promise you, everything I ever do will always be because I love you. You will never be alone, you will always have me, always, and I will love you no matter what, no matter who you turn out to be. That is how I love you. Do you understand me?”
Sherlock held his breath, feeling ridiculous after the outburst, as if Oliver was really going to respond. But Oliver said, “Da.” And Sherlock knew it wasn’t Oliver saying Daddy, no more than Oliver had really said skull that day, but Sherlock also knew better than to turn his back on a good sign like that. And an even better sign was that Oliver snuggled against him, catching his fists in the cloth of Sherlock’s jacket and settling his head into the curve of Sherlock’s neck, close and trusting.
Sherlock closed his eyes and let out the breath he’d been holding. Maybe he hadn’t destroyed every important relationship in his life that day. “So am I forgiven?” he asked Oliver.
Oliver didn’t respond, but that was okay, because Oliver stayed tucked contentedly up against Sherlock’s shoulder, his breaths growing heavier and heavier as he drifted toward sleep, and Sherlock held him and reveled in him and considered the other problem of John.
John loved him. John had said as much. And John had stuck by him through much worse than the bungling of a marriage proposal. (Or the inability to notice that it should have been a proposal in the first place.) But John was old-fashioned. Sherlock knew that, and had somehow managed to ignore that, because he’d been stupid. John was adorably old-fashioned, with all his queen-and-country-ness and idealized loyalty, like a code of chivalry. And John was, moreover, a romantic. He had a soft spot for the idea of things like soulmates, like cuddles on the sofa, like lazy sleepy kisses, like walks in the rain. And Sherlock had said, to a man such as this, We’ll get married. That’s it.
Sherlock was astonished by the depths of his stupidity.
Oliver was clearly sleeping against him now, so there was nothing for it but to lay Oliver down and try to make things right with John. He’d apologize, the way he’d apologized to Oliver. And he’d ask this time. Nicely. Politely.
He settled Oliver in his cot and headed from his bedroom into the sitting room.
Where the curtains had been drawn. In the dim imitation of twilight this produced, candles were scattered throughout the room, flickering distorted shadows everywhere. Momentarily disoriented, because he had not been expecting this, Sherlock paused, blinking against the candlelight.
“John?” he asked, cautiously, curiously, unsure what to expect.
John walked out of the kitchen, holding two flutes of champagne. “Is he sleeping?”
“Yes.” Sherlock answered the question automatically, the same way he accepted the champagne flute. “Where did you…How did you…?”
“I ran out to the shops while you were in with Oliver.”
And Sherlock hadn’t noticed, because Sherlock was an absolute wreck today. “John,” he began, firmly, gathering his courage around him like a mantle.
“No. Me first.” John took Sherlock’s flute away, which was silly, because Sherlock hadn’t even drunk it yet. He put both of the flutes down on the coffee table and turned back to Sherlock, catching his hands between his own. “Are you in love with me?”
An easy question to answer. “Yes.”
“Do you want to spend the rest of your life with me?”
Another easy question. “Yes.”
John burst into a smile and then sank gracefully to one knee, still clasping Sherlock’s hands. “In that case. Will you marry me?”
Sherlock stared down at him, floored into a moment of silence. After everything that had just happened, now John was proposing to him? “Yes,” he answered, finally.
“Good.” John stood back up and caught Sherlock’s face between his hands and kissed him, tenderly, adoringly, lingeringly.
Sherlock drew back and rested his forehead against John’s and drew a shaky breath. “You have to think about this,” he forced himself to say.
“Really?” John sounded amused. “This morning you were ordering me to marry you, and now I’ve proposed and you tell me to reconsider?”
“That’s exactly why you should reconsider. I am rubbish at this, John.”
“Rubbish at what?”
“At…proposing marriage.”
“I noticed. That’s why I did it for you.”
“No.” Sherlock was growing progressively frustrated. “That’s not what I mean. I’m rubbish at all of this. I’m rubbish at being…I’m…I didn’t even know why you were angry with me this morning. I had to ask Molly.”
“You told Molly that you ordered me to marry you this morning?”
“Yes,” Sherlock responded, sulkily. “There was no one else to ask, and I had to fix things with you.”
John kissed him again, brief and achingly affectionate. “I’m sorry that you panicked so much about this. I’m sorry that I overreacted this morning. This is all still very new to me. You’ve had a ridiculous amount of time to get used to the fact that you love me, but I’ve just realized it and I may be a little of an idiot about it sometimes still. I can’t help it. But you’re better at this than you think. Just like you’re a better father than you think. Now.” John said the word as if that ended the entire disagreement. And maybe, Sherlock admitted, it did. “You’ve just had a rather lovely marriage proposal from an incredibly dashing man who’s poured you champagne. Do you know what you do next?”
“Drink the champagne?”
“Forget entirely about the champagne because you’re much too busy with other occupations.” John slid a hand into Sherlock’s trousers, clearly concerned that otherwise Sherlock might miss the point.
Sherlock definitely didn’t miss the point. “Oh,” he said. “Delightful.”
Next Chapter
