Chapter Text
November 2020
Sherlock presses himself more firmly against Sanjay’s body and sighs, feeling the stress of the day slowly ebbing out of him with each rise and fall of Sanjay’s chest. They are sitting curled up against each other on Sanjay’s sofa, Sherlock’s head buried in the crook of Sanjay neck, breathing in his soothing scent.
“Are you going to tell me what brought this on?” Sanjay asks gently. Sherlock showed up at his doorstep and essentially manhandled him into a cuddle, barely saying a word, and Sanjay, kind and understanding as always, just let Sherlock do whatever he needed and find the comfort he required before asking questions. Sherlock is incredibly grateful for that. The revelations he had during the case he worked on today left him in dire need of Sanjay’s easy presence and a proper cuddle. He remains silent for a moment longer, revelling in the feeling of Sanjay’s fingers carding through his hair as he puts his thoughts in order and makes sure he can speak in a composed manner.
“The case I had today was an attempted murder,” he says, his voice mercifully level. “Utterly boring, barely a five, I had it figured out in no time, but I had to interview the suspect’s girlfriend.” Sherlock pauses briefly, swallowing. “She… it was immediately obvious that Barnes – the suspect – was in the habit of beating her.”
He sees the young woman, Jennifer Ashton, in his mind’s eye again: tall and beautiful with honey-blond locks and a an elegant profile, but appearing much smaller as she sat hunched at the kitchen table, pulling the sleeves of her jumper down over her wrists in a nervous tick. Everything about her would have been incredibly easy to deduce even without the black eye and split lip hastily covered with make-up.
“Oh no,” Sanjay says, his arms tightening reflexively around Sherlock. “That’s awful.”
Sherlock agrees with the sentiment, but he can’t let that distract him now. He forces himself to continue.
“But she… she defended him. She thought she deserved to be hit because she wasn’t good enough. And I listened to her say these things and I realised…” Sherlock struggles to complete the sentence. It’s just as difficult to say it as it was to first think it, but he absolutely needs to share this with Sanjay. “That could have been me.”
“He lost his job because of me, he’s entitled to be angry with me,” Jennifer said, and it felt like an echo of the words that left Sherlock’s lips together with drops of blood years ago in a mortuary: He’s entitled. The memory makes Sherlock’s blood run cold.
“I’m not sure what you mean,” Sanjay says slowly, and it sounds like he has idea but wants to be wrong. He touches Sherlock’s chin gently and makes Sherlock look up at him and meet his concerned eyes.
“I told myself the same things, when… John hit me,” Sherlock says very quietly, as if hearing it said too loud would just be too much. He’s never actually said the words before, he realises. He holds Sanjay’s gaze, his soft chocolate eyes like a balm on Sherlock’s rattled nerves. “I would have let him do anything he wanted to me.”
This is hardly the first case involving domestic violence Sherlock has come across in the course of his career, but the first one where he made this connection. His legs nearly gave out under him when the realisation formed itself in his mind in Jennifer Ashton’s kitchen. It’s terrifying, to think about the precipice where his relationship with John found itself at the time, what dark path it could have taken from then, without Sherlock being aware of it at all. John has never laid a finger on Sherlock since then, but if he had, if, instead of trying to get his anger in check he’d given it free rein… Or if Sherlock hadn’t met Sanjay but someone else instead, someone with a short fuse and quick temper… as desperate for any scrap of affection as Sherlock had been back then, can he be sure he wouldn’t have decided a few moments of gentleness were worth any amount of pain? Many people go through their lives just looking for targets for their anger, and a shiver runs down Sherlock’s spine at the thought of how easily he could have fit someone’s criteria.
Sanjay’s features are drawn as if in pain, and there’s a sheen of unshed tears in his eyes.
“Oh, love. My darling.” He sounds heartbroken.
Sherlock blinks and feels a drop of moisture run down his own cheek, but he takes a deep breath and continues, because it feels incredibly important for Sanjay to know what he has to say next. “It could have been me, if I hadn’t met you. You’re kind to me and you make me believe that I deserve it. That I’m good enough, worthy of being loved by someone like you.” It sounds trite and cheesy, but it’s the truth, and Sherlock needs Sanjay to know it more than he needs to sound dignified. “I’ve never been more grateful for that than I am now.”
Sanjay pulls Sherlock in and crushes him against his chest.
“Sherlock,” he says in a choked whisper. “I hate that you had to go through all that, I hate that you ever felt unworthy or undeserving or anything like that, but I’m so, so glad that you don’t feel like that anymore. You have no idea how much that means to me.” He pulls away slightly to look Sherlock in the eye and cups his face in his hands tenderly, his eyes intent.
“I love you,” Sherlock says simply. He’s told Sanjay this many times since that first time in Scotland, but it has never felt more meaningful than now. “And I feel so incredibly lucky to have you.”
Sanjay leans in and kisses him, hard and desperate. Sherlock kisses back with all the overwhelming emotion that today has aroused in him, shock and horror and compassion relief and deep, deep love.
“I love you,” Sanjay gets out between kisses, breathing the words against Sherlock’s skin. “So much, Sherlock. And just so you know, you’re not the only one who feels lucky. You make me so much happier than I ever thought I could be.”
Despite all the less than pleasant feelings still roiling inside him, Sherlock can’t help but smile. Making Sanjay happy is the single best thing he could ever hope to achieve in his life.
They kiss again, softer this time, lips and fingertips drying tears, smoothing worry lines, soothing, calming. They eventually settle back into their cosy embrace on the sofa. Sherlock hopes fervently that in time, Jennifer will be able to find the same level of safety and care that he feels in Sanjay’s arms. Barnes will spend a nice amount of time behind bars for his botched attempt to kill his stepfather, Sherlock has made sure of that, and in the meantime Jennifer will hopefully make use the contacts Donovan has provided her with and eventually meet someone who will be good to her.
They stay like that for a long moment, cocooned in each other’s warmth, and Sherlock lets Sanjay’s embrace ground him to the present, where things have, rather unexpectedly, turned out for the best for him. No need to dwell on painful might-have-beens for too long.
“You don’t think…” Sanjay says haltingly after a while, “there’s a chance John would do anything like that again, do you?”
The question catches Sherlock off guard, as if his brain had been shying away from this particular matter. He hates thinking of John as an abuser even more than he hates thinking of himself as a victim. But it occurs to him now that Sanjay probably doesn’t have that problem, and that it’s possible he’s been thinking about John in these terms ever since Sherlock told him how he came to the scar in his left eyebrow. Perhaps that question has been on his mind for all this time.
“No,” he says firmly. “It’s been years since it happened. He went through an anger management course, actually, though he doesn’t know I know that. He’s much more level-headed now. I don’t think there’s any reason to worry.”
Sanjay regards him seriously for a few seconds, then nods. “Good,” he says, and it’s clear that while he accepts Sherlock’s reasoning, he’ll absolutely not stand for it if John ever steps out of line. For someone so naturally gentle, he can definitely pack a lot of steel in one syllable. Sherlock can’t really blame him – he can’t imagine he’d be very forgiving if someone harmed even just a hair on Sanjay’ head. He kisses Sanjay’s forehead until he stops frowning.
“Well,” Sherlock says after a moment, straightening up. He needs to shake all this gloom off. “This emotional upheaval has been rather exhausting. Let’s go dancing.”
“I think you meant ‘lie on the sofa and eat pizza’,” Sanjay counters, stretching languidly.
“Dull. I need to do something energising. A mood booster. Like salsa.”
He gets up and shimmies his hips, making sure that his arse is directly in Sanjay’s line of sight.
“Sherlock, I’d love to, but I’ve got a ton of papers to grade, there’s no way I can go out tonight.”
“What if I help you grade them?” Sherlock offers. Dancing with Sanjay is always guaranteed to make him feel better.
“Yeah, no way,” Sanjay chuckles. “I think we’ve established that writing ‘moron’ all over the page does not constitute grading, and is very difficult to explain to students.”
Sherlock rolls his eyes but lets it slide (there is after all a very slight possibility that he was out of line that time he decided Sanjay’s students were all too stupid for Sanjay to waste time on them).
“What if I order pizza and we dance here before it arrives? And then I’ll walk the dogs so you can work in peace.” He loves hanging out with Jess and Kip, so this would be in no way a hardship, as long as he gets his dance.
Sanjay grins at him and stands up to join him, taking Sherlock’s hands in his. His touch, as always, is gentle and soft.
“Sounds like a plan.”