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John didn’t know it, but ever since the beginning, Sherlock was a fake.
Well: Sherlock was a fake sometimes.
The first time Sherlock lied to John was the first time they met.
What he said was, “I think I left my riding crop in the mortuary.”
He didn’t.
The second time Sherlock lied to John was the second time they met.
What he said was, “I can clean up, of course…”
He didn’t.
(And even though he could, he really couldn’t.)
The third time Sherlock lied John was when John returned to the flat from a date.
Sherlock was texting away on his mobile, checking it as it beeped.
You can come in an hour, Lestrade had written.
Sherlock started typing, Make sure Anderson isn’t th when John came in. “You’re back early,” he observed.
“No shit,” John said, and, “Brilliant deduction.”
“That wasn’t a deduction, John; that was an observation. They’re quite distinct.”
John shrugged his jacket off and collapsed onto the sofa.
“Your date went poorly,” Sherlock said, followed, after a beat, by, “See, that was a deduction, albeit not a terribly impressive one.”
“No,” John said, stretching out in a way that he could only have learned from Sherlock, “no, it went great. We just got takeaway and had a quickie and she kicked me out. No,” he rubbed his hands over his face, “it was awful.”
“Is this where I’m supposed to pretend like I want you to talk about it?”
“Yeah,” was all John said, and then, “No, you don’t have to.”
“I insist.”
John glanced at Sherlock through his fingers.
“But be interesting.”
He sighed. “Right, well, she left halfway through the date for another date, for one.”
“Surely she didn’t tell you that.”
“No,” John agreed. “She told me her boss called her in for an emergency meeting about a project they had to present at a conference tomorrow.”
“But…”
“But it wasn’t her boss, because she always winces when she gets a call from him, and she was overdressed for the restaurant we were in. Oh, and when she popped off to the loo before she left, she came back with a different shade of lipstick, even though she definitely still had her original one on her, because I watched her put it on in the cab.” He sighed, rubbing the heels of his hands into his eyes. “I was a backup in case the other guy fell through.”
Sherlock glanced at John. “Well done,” he said.
“Yes, yes, I get it, I can’t even keep a sodding girlfriend for more than two weeks; I fucked it up all on my own this time.”
“No,” Sherlock said, more gently, “I meant, well deduced.”
“Oh,” John said. “Right. Well. Thank you.” He watched Sherlock tuck his mobile back into his pocket and pick up his laptop. “Did Lestrade ever get back to you about that diamond theft?”
“No,” Sherlock lied, “well, he said I could take a look tomorrow.”
“Oh,” John raised his eyebrows, waiting for the inevitable diatribe against whosever fault it was this time that Sherlock would have to stave off boredom for an entire twelve hours more. Sherlock, however, returned his attention to the laptop.
“Get much of a meal while you were busy deducing your date?”
“No,” John shook his head. “We were about to order.”
“I was thinking that since I’m not on the case tonight after all you’d probably insist I eat something.”
“I probably would.”
He did.
The fourth time (or maybe the fifth—there was no one to keep count, really) Sherlock lied to John, he was ill.
Except, he wasn’t.
John knew it, too, so maybe it didn’t count—but Sherlock maintained the fiction all day long, and John never said a thing, only stood at his beside with crossed arms until Sherlock gulped down glasses of water or at least took a sip of his soup.
“You’re sick,” John said, “so you need some sleep.”
“Not tired.”
“Go to sleep, or I’ll drug you.”
Sherlock was fairly certain it wasn’t a serious threat, but he didn’t want to push his luck. At least if he went to sleep on his own, he could make sure it was only a nap. If John drugged him, he might be out for twelve hours. That was the disadvantage of his usual sleep cycle: He could stay up well enough on small slivers of sleep, until he got the taste for more, and then he was out for huge portions of the day.
He curled over onto his side. “I’m not tired, John.”
“Then maybe I should phone Mycroft back and tell him he can come by after all.”
(Mycroft wouldn’t; the idea of catching the flu perturbed him greatly. The idea of catching it from his little brother perturbed him even more.)
“I know,” Sherlock said. “Read me that blog entry you just typed up. That’s sure to put me to sleep.”
It didn’t; Sherlock merely corrected John every other sentence until John snapped his laptop shut. Sherlock sent John a repentant stare that John couldn’t see past the blankets piled around Sherlock’s head. He said nothing.
“I’ve got an idea,” John finally said, and opened the laptop again.
“One I’ve already corrected?” Sherlock suggested, and John couldn’t hold back a chuckle, no matter how hard he tried to sneer at Sherlock for that one.
He read from The Science of Deduction until Sherlock fell asleep.
Sherlock lied to John again—twice—on their way home from Dartmoor.
The night before, Sherlock hadn’t been able to sleep.
It was less a lack of willingness—because he really was tired; something about the drug, he was sure—and more an inability.
On the other tiny bed one side-table away, John had thrashed about, occasionally barking out strained shouts. Sherlock considered waking him, but thought that at that moment, perhaps Sherlock was not the person John wanted to see. John would want to wake to peace and quiet, in his own time, not to Sherlock’s face, still too tired to train into not looking guilty, guilty about a few of the things he’d done the past couple of days and guilty about the niggling fear that something was coming, and it was something that would be out of his control. Seeing Moriarty instead of Frankland’s face that evening had reminded him: something was coming.
I will burn the heart out of you.
He’d dismissed it as an empty threat—but that wasn’t right, because it was never empty. He’d dismissed it as generic, some poetic utterance by someone even madder than himself.
But it was obvious. Obvious, obvious: laser-sights obvious. Jacket-throwing obvious. Mad giggling and then somber, quiet glances obvious. John, it was John, John, John, obvious.
John would be in danger, soon, and there was nothing Sherlock could say or do about it. He would have to wait for Moriarty to make his move. He would have to keep himself, now, from crouching over John and prodding him awake, lest his face betray something more than he meant it to. He would have to keep from touching him and looking into his eyes because if anything happened to John Sherlock still had to be able to function, and somehow, it was the most impossible thought he’d had since realizing he had to get clean. But he’d done that and—well. Maybe this was even more impossible still. He kept a little box in the table beside his bed; this—John—was not something he could keep in small backup quantities beside his bed for emergencies. John was either here, or he was gone, and either, Sherlock was sure, would be for forever.
So Sherlock stayed still, and when it became clear that he wouldn’t be sleeping anytime soon, he left the room to wander the grounds.
“I think I must’ve had nightmares about all night last night,” John said quietly on their way home, as if it were a thing he could be considered guilty of, a thing he had to keep in hushed tones for even his flatmate. No, not guilt: it was embarrassment.
“You did,” Sherlock said.
“Did I keep you up?”
“No,” Sherlock lied.
“Oh,” John said, “good.” His shoulders loosened a little, and then, after five or ten or twenty minutes more, he shot Sherlock a critical look. “Think you might feel like talking about testing drugs on the sort of bloke who’s already lived through hell once before this?”
Sherlock hadn’t really thought of it—well—he had considered John’s PTSD, but, was it really, “Hell?” And before John could say anything, because with once glimpse at his face, Sherlock was sure he could deduce it all (he couldn’t), Sherlock said, “You’re expecting an apology, then.”
“Yes.”
“I performed the experiment literally in laboratory conditions,” Sherlock asserted, and then he lied again: “I don’t see what I’ve got to apologize for.”
Distance, distance. Don’t touch. Don’t look.
I’m sorry, John.
“She’s my landlady.”
Sherlock lied to John again. Sherlock lied to John a lot that day.
Mrs. Hudson wasn’t their landlady—well, she was, of course she was, but she was so much more than that.
Sherlock had been a machine before this, but that was entirely different: When Mrs. Hudson was attacked, hurt, dragged up the stairs and bound, when Sherlock came home, when Sherlock found her, he was a machine. He was a machine built for no more or less than swift vengeance. He must have been, he thought, projecting John’s mild shock onto an average human to predict a usual reaction, terrifying.
Mrs. Hudson wasn’t timid or shy. Mrs. Hudson hardly said a word about the fact that Sherlock had dropped one of her assailants out a window a number of times, despite the fact that she had to have known, for all the shouting and grunting and crashing, for the awful state of her bins the next day. Lestrade (Lestrade, who had saved Sherlock from going to prison more times than Sherlock cared to count; Lestrade, who had done Sherlock a favor he could never repay when he never once succumbed to his co-workers’ and subordinates’ whispers of psychopath and homicidal and freak and instead chose to trust Sherlock to work with him—the one thing, the one thing, that had saved Sherlock: not Mummy, not Mycroft—Lestrade), when interviewing her about the attack, had even mentioned what Sherlock had done, or alluded to it, anyway. Mrs. Hudson never shrieked at Sherlock for what he did. She understood. She always understood. She brought up tea and biscuits sometimes when John stormed out, under the pretense that if John wasn’t around to feed Sherlock, somebody had to be.
“I don’t understand,” Sherlock would say, even when he did, and Mrs. Hudson would never answer exactly, would tiptoe around what she wanted to say not out of trepidation but because it was her way, and Sherlock liked her way. He would say something like, “Why does it upset John when I organize his ties?” and she would tell a story about a bloke she’d had as a tenant once who’d spent all night rearranging his furniture, and then, it appeared when she came up the next morning, putting it all back. It was only obliquely related to Sherlock’s question, but it answered everything—or, at least, the next time Sherlock found himself staring into John’s laundry, he thought of Mrs. Hudson’s soothing words, and left it be.
Sometimes, John would spend entire afternoons with Mrs. Hudson—starting mostly after the incident with the American spies, when he, like Sherlock, had been caught completely unaware of how very painfully precious she was to him. Sherlock had no idea what they talked about, or if they even talked at all, but John always returned to the flat smelling of biscuits and a little splattered tea and the perfume that seemed to permeate Mrs. Hudson’s sitting room whether she’d worn it recently or not. When John came back upstairs, Sherlock had to pull himself away from burying his nose against John, from smelling both Mrs. Hudson and John simultaneously, from basking in their comfort. The wool of John’s jumpers and the faintly musky spice of John’s skin and the tangy sweet of Mrs. Hudson’s perfume and the essence of succor in the crumbs on John’s sleeve and the splatter of tea on his trousers—they were the smell of home. Sherlock had one of those now. He had a home.
But Sherlock lied and said, “She’s my landlady,” and watched it break John’s heart, watched it shatter his chest before it began to permeate his brain, and there, he thought, he hoped, a little, that it would bother him, this inconsistency, and stir him to question everything that had happened from that moment on. He hoped this a little: he also hoped that John would forget it, and forget all of this, and let Sherlock do what he needed to do without any guilt or tears or mourning so that he could come back and un-lie when he was ready, when he could.
But for right now, Sherlock lied.
“I’m a fake.”
It was the most painful lie he had ever told. Not for his reputation: that was never important, except that it had conveniently brought him more Work. He was glad he couldn’t clearly make out John’s face from here: seeing the way he leaned forward, inward, toward Sherlock, was bad enough.
He wanted to say true things, but he had to lie.
“The newspapers were right all along.”
Actually, they were right all along, up until that very moment: Sherlock Holmes and John Watson were inseparable, joined at the hip, possibly more than friends. (Whatever John was, Sherlock thought, it was more than a friend, because Sherlock had seen John’s friends, and John didn’t treat Sherlock the same way as he treated them.) The newspapers were right all along—not the latest ones, ready to be published at any moment; no, they were right all along, from the beginning, at least in that one way.
“I want you to tell Lestrade,” Lestrade, who had always believed him and always trusted him, despite much worse odds than these; “I want you to tell Mrs. Hudson,” Mrs. Hudson, who was home, who was something to Sherlock that no one else had ever been, like a mother except that Sherlock’s mother had never been anything like that; “and Molly,” his secret weapon, his secret, this timid, brave thing who in one whispered question agreed to trick everyone she knew and break every law she could think of just to save Sherlock, Sherlock the man, Sherlock the human; “in fact, tell anyone who will listen to you that I created Moriarty for my own purposes.”
That wasn’t a lie, either: it was a request. An order. A bit like this: “Tell that woman over there you’re with the police, John, so that she’ll answer your questions,” or maybe like, “Could you get some milk while you’re out?” Just say it, John, just tell them. You don’t need to believe it; they don’t need to believe it. Just say it. Just say it. And if they do believe it, well, fine—and if you do, that’s fine, too. It was all fine, because at the end of it, John and Lestrade and Mrs. Hudson and Molly, they would all be alive.
“Nobody could be that clever.”
That was a lie, of course. Sherlock could. And maybe, with practice and with dedication, and maybe with a little reorganization of his brain, John could be, too. He could notice a few scratches on a phone. He could notice an inscription. He could put it all together. Maybe not as quickly, or as efficiently, or with quite as much accuracy: but he could. You could, John.
John could.
“Goodbye, John.”
That one was a lie, too. It was a lie because Sherlock Holmes, sure as hell, sure as glowing rabbits, sure as pips and pools and whips and stupid, stupid fools who would try to keep them apart—sure as all that, and sure as Sherlock, too—was not going to say goodbye to John Hamish Watson for as long as he lived, and that would be a good long while indeed. With thoughts of wool and spice and biscuits and tea, Sherlock leaned forward, and fell, and thought, I love you: and that much, at least, was true.