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Sherlock comes back on a day that isn’t quite the same sort of normal and ordinary it usually is. That might have given you an idea, but to be fair it starts off normally and ordinarily enough.
You wake up from a restless sleep in your bedroom to an overcast sky and Mary holding onto your hip. The morning passes as usual: two, three shared kisses over the bathroom sink; over coffee; over songs in the radio no one listens to because the station is crap but which no one bothers to change because of things like habit and casual indifference. (Later, you will laugh at this particular phrasing, thinking of analogies and preliminary warnings.) You go to work, see a couple kids with the flu, give some vaccinations, deal with your regular favourite hypochondriac. At lunchtime, you meet up with Mary and make small-talk (needs must), eat a sandwich, return to work. The afternoon is a repetition of the morning with some sliders adjusted, of which ‘boredom’ is still broken and continuously remains on the highest setting. Mary disappears just before you leave, claiming to have a friend to catch up with, promising she’ll be on time for the Landmark.
You’ll propose. That’s where the day becomes a bit not so normal and not so ordinary: people don’t propose every day, after all. You certainly don’t. In that, the day differs from all others.
Except for you being nervous and battling a persistent stomach ache, though, it feels remarkably like any other normal, ordinary evening on which you invite Mary out for dinner and a chat. You decide not to think about things so you can instead focus on the things normal, ordinary couples do, even as you feel slightly feeble.
You look appraisingly at Mary, who, clearly having relied on her button nose to tell her something fishy is going on, is beautiful in a dress with her hair clipped back when she joins you at the table.
You try not to bumble too badly through your proposal and start off by snatching the box off the table again. “Er, so… Mary. Listen—I know it hasn’t been long, I mean, we haven’t known each other for a long time…” You try hard to look into her eyes and fail. She tells you to go on, and you take a breath. “As you know, these last couple of years haven’t been easy for me.” Even as your throat closes itself against the words, you force them out. You don’t usually mind talking about Before with Mary, but today feels different. Precarious, somehow. “And meeting you…”
Your eyes find hers again, and you take another breath. One breath stretches, becomes two, becomes three. You remind yourself again not to think about things, shove the feebleness away, and nod.
“Yeah,” you say then, in confirmation. “Meeting you has been the best thing that could have possibly happened.”
Never one to be flattered easily, Mary says, “I agree.”
“What?”
She smiles at you over the table, sweetly. “I agree I’m the best thing that could have happened to you.”
Her cheek startles a laugh out of you, and it feels a bit like a reminder as to why you asked her out tonight. You try to come to the point, to propose, and you set your eyes firmly on Mary, thinking, now, I’ll do it now—
—when the waiter from before suddenly shows the worst sense of tact in the world.
He almost shoves the wine bottle into your face. “Sir, I ‘sink you’ll find ‘sis vintage to your liking,” he says in that terribly prim French accent of his. “It ‘as all ‘se qualities of ‘se old, with some colour of ‘se new.”
You ignore him. “No, sorry, not now, please.”
“Like a gaze from a crowd of strangers,” the man continues, totally oblivious to Mary grimacing at you and your lack of interest, “suddenly one is aware of staring into ‘se face of an old… friend.”
“No, look, seriously,” you begin, voice a bit more forceful now. You feel like squaring your jaw as you raise your head. “Could you just—”
The glasses are off the waiter’s face now. The next words never make it out of your mouth.
Sherlock.
-
Sherlock, who comes back as a French waiter drawling about vintages, at least has the sense to admit his defence (“It’s funny”) is a weak one.
So weak, in fact, that you experience a dangerous sense of panic, vertigo, breathlessness, and a sensation in your chest like an iron fist wringing your heart dry—before the incredulous fury begins. Restaurant one is a sincere attempt at throttling that white, long neck that remains (un)fortunately unsuccessful. Restaurant two is when you’re told Mycroft, Molly, and about a hundred tramps knew Sherlock was alive before you did and results in another physicalized demonstration of your momentary regard for Sherlock. Sherlock is large as bloody life, triumphs over his own dickishness as he is even more of an arsehole than before, and is oddly roguish with the cut on his lip. He pisses you off to no end—can’t he give the bloody moustache a rest—and gets you shouting, “Swear to God!”
But even through all this, you’re quite calm; your emotions and thoughts are carefully bottled up, and only the bare minimum escapes you in rough words and tight smiles against your will. You’re operating on emergency mode, all possible entrances barricaded against Sherlock’s presence.
But then Sherlock miscalculates, and he smiles through the blood on his lip as he comes closer, and says, “You have missed this, admit it. The thrill of the chase, the blood pumping through your veins, just the two of us against the rest of the world…”
You hear those last words—those last words, just ten words, really—and that’s when everything completely goes to shit.
Well, it goes shittier: because it’s been shit ever since Sherlock stopped to think—or showed he never thought that at all, maybe—that it was never the fucking two of you against the rest of the world.
Christ. He jumped off a fucking roof. How is that for you being with him, against the rest of the world? There wasn’t a you, plural, then: there’d been Sherlock on the roof, you before that damn building, nothing but a phone line between you, and nothing you said made a difference, as if it ever could have. You’d been nothing to Sherlock, obviously, or at least not enough for him to not feel alone, because he’d gone and thrown himself off a roof like that’d do nothing to you, like that’d been nothing to him, and you’d felt so guilty, because what if you hadn’t said, “You machine,” to him, would that have changed anything? And you felt so pissed, too, because while you weren’t childish enough to think you had something as silly as a suicide pact or anything—God, no—you’d thought the same way he’d saved you through the sheer force of his personality, you’d saved him too in some small but significant way, but that obviously hadn’t been the case.
There wasn’t a you, plural, then: there was Sherlock, and there was you, and the two of you were singular in every single way that counted, and all the things you thought that’d made you plural had only been in your head. You’d seen that afterwards. You’d spent two years trying to get over that, and failing.
You’d have given everything for it to be the two of you against the rest of the world.
So, yes, it is only when you hear those last words, ten words only, that all these things shoot through your head in the space of a second—two—and three—like short-circuiting in flashes of white and red—
and you’re on him again, your forehead right into his nose, and it has to be his nose this time, you don’t know why, it just has to be, and it’s the same as it was in the first restaurant with you on the floor above Sherlock, your hands gripping his throat, his white, long throat, trying to strangle him for all the things he did to you.
It’s as it ever was with Sherlock, ambivalent, ambiguous, fucking paradoxical really, awful and beautiful both, and you couldn’t stop if you tried because you’re touching him and he’s alive. Your ghosts aren't ghosts anymore. Your hallucinations have materialised in physical form.
Your second miracle has actually fucking happened.
It’s your first meeting all over again, you shooting the cabbie for him: it’s violence. It’s intimate.
It doesn’t strike you once on the way in the cab home—or all throughout the night, or the next day—that you completely forget to propose to Mary.