A/N: So a lot of the beginning of this is my take on John's POV of a scene from the show. I know it frustrates me a bit when people take dialogue straight from the source material (and I've paraphrased bits of it, which will frustrate some people even more) so I thought I'd just warn you beforehand. Thought of other ways to do this scene but they didn't work quite the same way.

Also, I might come back to this story at some point in the future and add more to it, flesh out bits of plot, maybe add more interludes. I think there's a lot of potential here that I didn't get a chance to explore. For the meantime, enjoy the epilogue!

-for you

St Bartholomew's Teaching Hospital, 2010

Sherlock was speaking, and John was listening rather than simply staring at his friend's lips as they moved.

He'd tried to tell himself that living with Sherlock Holmes wasn't getting harder, but he wasn't entirely sure that it wasn't. These last twenty-four hours, since the explosion and the message from the bomber, had been quite possibly the worst experience that John had had since coming back from Afghanistan, and that included the night before he met Sherlock, when he'd sat for an hour with his eyes travelling between his empty blog and his loaded gun. The challenge of the bomber, with whom Sherlock claimed to have so much in common, had thrown the detective into a new state of sociopathic mania, and every time he made a flippant comment that showed his apparent disregard for the fates of other human beings John couldn't help but think it was his fault.

He'd realised who Sherlock was mere moments after being introduced to him. Well, of course he had – the name Sherlock Holmes had been floating around his subconscious looking for something to connect with ever since he'd had that memory on the operating table in Afghanistan, of the swimming pool and the look on Sherlock's face when they'd said goodbye. His new flatmate, however, did not appear to have noticed at all, and John still hadn't decided whether this was a good thing or not. On the one hand, he didn't have to face the inevitable scorn and disgust from Sherlock – who appeared to have become something resembling asexual in their years apart – when he remembered the incident and deduced, because of course he bloody would, that John wanted to relive it. On the other, his frequent flashbacks to that afternoon whenever Sherlock touched him and almost nightly wonderings whether the man would still make those little gasping noises when John stroked his cock were really distracting him from his new, normal relationship with Sherlock.

The computer in front of Sherlock began to beep triumphantly; instantly, the detective was distracted from the thoughtful stare he'd been giving John and instead turned to examine the machine's findings.

"Any luck?"

John would have liked Molly were she not so blatantly trying to get into Sherlock's designer underwear. He knew he had no right to be so possessive and jealous over his flatmate, but whether or not they were actually sleeping together John couldn't help but believe that he had more of a right to Sherlock's underwear than she did, especially considering that he had to wash the damn things every week.

Sherlock nonetheless gave a positively sexual "Oh, yes," in response to her question. John bit his lip and weathered the collaboration between the two scientists in silence until the door swung open behind Molly.

The small, dark-haired man who had opened it blanched at the sight of them and backed out again with a hasty, "Sorry, I didn't realise anyone was…"

Molly, however, halted the man's progress. "Jim!" she said in flustered surprise. "Hi! No, come in, come in!" The latter part of the greeting was said with an air of expectation, as though something very momentous was about to happen; John was puzzled until her next sentence was to introduce Sherlock. Of course. She had spoken to this Jim about Sherlock and promised to introduce them at some point. The young man had probably followed her into the lab knowing exactly who was in there and hoping for just this to happen.

Unsurprisingly, Molly had to pause and ask him his name when she went to introduce him; John introduced himself with barely a second glance at the man and had almost dismissed him when his murmured 'Hi' in return betrayed the tiniest hint of an Irish accent and he suddenly realised why the man had looked so familiar.

"Hang on," he said quickly. "Jim? Islington High, 1992?"

The man looked at him as though he had interrupted something vitally important. "Yes," he said, recovering quickly and smiling, politely puzzled. "John Watson – oh! John!"

John grinned. "Fancy seeing you here," he said brightly, glad to have taken the spotlight away from Sherlock for a moment. "You look good, how's life treating you?"

In truth, John was rather shocked at Jim's appearance. The introverted way that he was holding himself, the way he had had to revert to such obvious subterfuge to be introduced to Sherlock – at school John remembered a Jim that had enormous potential. He remembered the boy with the impish smile who would pick the lock on the kitchen door so that John and Bill could fetch a midnight snack, and almost sighed aloud. He had always wondered what had happened to Jim after they had left him at Islington High. They had been the boy's only friends, and he had been worried that the bullies who had stayed in the background while John and Bill were there would start picking on Jim once they had gone. Apparently something had happened to him: the spirit that John had so admired was not visible in this timid man at all.

"Good," Jim replied, the attention that John had earned from him evaporating. "So," he said instead, clapping his hands together awkwardly. "You're Sherlock Holmes. Molly's told me all about you."

The Great Detective, in true Sherlock fashion, looked his friend's new boyfriend up and down and then dismissed him with a casual remark of, "Gay," that didn't seem to be directed at anyone in particular.

John thought back to following Jim from Islington to Bloomsbury just to discover that he'd gone there for some bizarre hookup with a burly blond boy he'd met at the inter-school swimming competition. Yes, the Jim he'd known had definitely been gay, and wouldn't have pretended otherwise for anyone. Apparently high school on his own had knocked that out of him, too.

Molly looked shocked. "What?" she stuttered.

Sherlock seemed to realise he had made some sort of social faux pas. "Oh, nothing, um… hey," he covered lamely.

Jim nodded, rubbing his hands together awkwardly. "Hey," he replied, and then promptly proceeded to knock a dish from the table and allow it to clatter noisily to the floor. "Oh! Sorry," he said, with the air of the habitually clumsy. John narrowed his eyes; he had remembered Jim as possessing an enviable sort of natural grace. When Jim replaced the dish on the bench, John thought he caught a glimpse of a business-card-shaped piece of paper. His dislike of this new, pathetic Jim increased tenfold: was Jim trying to flirt with Sherlock?

"Well," he said eventually, doing the awkward clapping motion again. "I've got to go. I'll see you at the Fox, about six-ish?" he said to Molly, patting her sweetly on the lower back. "It was nice to meet you," he directed at Sherlock, managing to sound almost wistful.

Sherlock, satisfyingly, didn't reply. John left him hanging for a moment, just to show him how not interested his flatmate was, then dismissed him with a conciliatory, "Nice to see you again, Jim."

His high-school friend barely looked at him.

"What do you mean, gay?" Molly asked as soon as her 'boyfriend' had left the room. "We're together!"

Sherlock finally emerged from the microscope only to say something scathing to the pathologist; John almost felt sorry for the girl. "He's not gay," she protested, sounding on the verge of tears. "Why do you have to spoil – he's not."

The look on Molly's face was so pathetic during Sherlock's rebounding flood of observations that John stepped in to defend one of his points; all the same, she gave him a look plainly intended to be pure fury and then ran out of the room. John sighed. "Charming," he said, forcing himself to sound resigned and frustrated rather than secretly thrilled that Sherlock had shut down two hopeful suitors without blinking. "Well done."

"I was just saving her time, isn't that kinder?" Sherlock asked, looking genuinely puzzled at her reaction.

John snorted. "No, Sherlock, that wasn't kind."

The detective let out a huff of frustrated breath. "He was gay, though," he maintained.

"As a picnic basket," John agreed. "I went to school with the bloke. But he's obviously fighting it, so it was extremely rude of you to point it out when his girlfriend was in the same room, not to mention crushing poor Molly's dreams." Sherlock merely rolled his eyes, pushing the microscope aside and picking up his phone instead. "The Jim I knew at school wouldn't have tried to fight or hide being gay, though," John mused. "It's sad, isn't it, what the world can do to people. I always thought that if people would stop bullying Jim he could be an amazing person."

Sherlock sighed in that manner that told John he had stopped listening when John first started speaking. John tried not to throw his arms in the air like a despairing housewife and watched instead as his flatmate shifted in his chair, fiddling with the shoes and looking up at John, his expression almost shy.

"Go on, then," Sherlock said softly. John raised an eyebrow at him, tempting as it was to simply agree to everything he said. "You know what I do, off you go."

John folded his arms. "No. I'm not going to stand here so you can humiliate me while I try to disseminate what –"

"An outside eye," Sherlock interrupted. "A second opinion is very useful to me."

John snorted. "Yeah, right."

"Really," the detective insisted. John wondered, as he looked at those impossible grey-green-blue eyes, whether this was the entire reason Sherlock kept him around: because John trying and failing to do what came so naturally to Sherlock himself was relentlessly amusing, like a monkey at a circus.

Inevitably, though, John let out a tiny noise of frustration and picked up the shoes. Sherlock practically led him through a series of embarrassingly simple deductions – like a toddler trying to walk, John's mind supplied – before John got fed up and proclaimed that that was it.

"How did I do?" he asked, wondering if it was a stupid question.

Sherlock smiled encouragingly, the way one might smile at a child who was showing off a drawing. "Well, John, really well," he said brightly. "I mean, you missed almost everything of importance, but you know…"

John tried not to smile as he handed over the trainers and let the consulting detective do his job.

"The owner loved these," Sherlock observed, staring at the shoe intently. "Scrubbed them clean, whitened them when they got discoloured, changed the laces three – no, four times." John rolled his eyes at his friend's lazy precision. "Even so, there are traces of his flaky skin where his skin's come into contact with them, so he suffered from eczema. The shoe's well worn, more so on the inner side, which means the owner had weak arches. British made, twenty years old."

He flicked the laces nonchalantly out of the way and put the shoe down again. John knew this was where he was supposed to compliment him, but the childish part of him refused to give his flatmate the satisfaction. "Twenty years?"

Sherlock nodded shortly. "They're not retro, they're original. Limited edition, two blue stripes, 1989."

"But they look new," John protested.

The detective made a lazy humming noise in the back of his throat. "Someone's kept them that way," he agreed. "There's quite a bit of mud caked on the soles, analysis shows it's from the Islington area, with Bloomsbury mud overlaying it."

"How can you know that?" John asked.

"Pollen," Sherlock said, gesturing to the computer. "Clear as a map reference to me. So, the kid who owned those trainers was from Islington, he went to Bloomsbury as many as twenty years ago and left them behind."

John frowned at him, still reeling over the fact that his computer program could distinguish the mud from Islington from that of Bloomsbury. "So what happened to him?" he asked.

Sherlock shrugged. "Something bad," he mused dramatically. "Well, he loved those shoes, remember, he'd never leave them filthy, wouldn't leave them behind unless he had to. So, a child with big feet gets –"

Suddenly the detective fell silent; John looked at him, startled, to see that he was staring off into space with his mouth hanging open. When a soft oh fell out of it, it was all John could do not to grab the man and press their lips together. "What," he asked instead.

"Carl Powers," Sherlock breathed, low and reverent.

John's ears rang. "Sorry, who?" he asked softly. He'd been thinking it slightly since Sherlock had mentioned the boy came from Islington, but he'd thought that it was only because he'd just seen Jim and he'd been thinking about that incident for months from being constantly in Sherlock's presence.

Sherlock drew a breath in through his teeth, still not looking at him. "Carl Powers, John," he repeated softly.

John gritted his own teeth together and forced himself to ask, "What is it?"

A tiny smile crossed Sherlock's face as he shook his head minutely. "It's where I began."

"You really don't remember, do you?" John looked over at the detective, smiling sadly. The taxi ride so far had been filled with Sherlock's retelling of how he'd read about the story in the newspaper and thought it was suspicious – but nothing of what had happened once he'd got to Bloomsbury. Strange as it was that he remembered such detail about immediately before and after, his flatmate really didn't seem to remember. Perhaps, John thought bitterly, he had deleted the information.

Sherlock smiled back without looking away from the window. "Remember what?" he asked. "That I met you at that swimming pool the day after Carl Powers died, and I kissed you and we…" John blinked. Sherlock smirked.

"Why didn't you say anything?" he asked indignantly. "I've been sitting here for months now thinking I was the only one who remembered, feeling guilty for standing you up that day and thinking that maybe if I hadn't, things would have been different, and that whole time you knew?"

The detective snorted and shook his head, finally looking back at him. "They wouldn't," he said softly. "I didn't go either. If you'd gone you would have just sat there. I was too… it wasn't anything like what I'd told myself I wanted. We just weren't ready." He looked down at his gloves, fingers toying distractedly with the hem of the leather. "You didn't say anything either. I thought you… I knew you remembered, but I thought it just didn't leave as much of an impact on you as it did on me."

John shifted in his seat until he was facing his flatmate, his heartbeat loud in his ears. "Didn't leave as much of an impact on me? Sherlock – I spent twelve years dating men who looked like you without knowing why. I came back from Afghanistan because I remembered you and I wanted to find you, just to see if you still remembered, and then when I got here I chickened out because how could you still remember? I felt awful for not turning up when we'd agreed to meet, and that was something that I regretted for years. And I always thought that it was so stupid, that an hour's encounter as a seventeen year-old could have such an impact on the rest of my life, but the fact is that I wouldn't be the same person I am now if I hadn't met you."

Sherlock stared at him. "Neither would I," he said eventually, his voice small. "When I met you I thought the entire world was dull and boring and that in order to get any kind of occupation, anything to fill my mind with sense instead of noise, I'd have to struggle my way through absolutely everything by myself and I wouldn't be able to rely on anyone else." John could feel his heartbeat in his throat now, forcing him to swallow thickly. Sherlock was looking at him with this expression on his face, as though he were right back there in that swimming pool, staring at John for the first time. "And then I met you, and you didn't get angry when I deduced everything about you, and you called me brilliant and amazing and you were willing to fight for me even though I'd only just met you. If I'd never met you back then, John, I'd be a bitter and lonely drug addict who'd never trusted anyone or let anyone in."

John smiled at his best friend; Sherlock tilted his head as though considering. "Or dead," he amended.

"All right, enough," John told him, slapping his arm lightly. Sherlock smiled softly, but there was no amusement in the expression. "If I meant all of that to you, why didn't you come to meet me?"

The detective shrugged lightly, looking away again. "It didn't even occur to me not to go for that entire afternoon, and then… a friend of mine laughed at you wanting to meet me, like there was no chance that I would go. And then I realised that it was entirely uncharacteristic of me to want to date someone, to want a conventional relationship, and it scared me that I'd accepted without even thinking that I wanted it with you." Staring out of the window, Sherlock snorted out a slightly derisive laugh. "I was completely smitten with you, John, I didn't think of anything else for days. In the end I didn't go because it unsettled me, and I didn't know how to slot the way I felt about you into the rest of my life. There were things I wanted to do, and I couldn't do them if I had you. And I thought it was so likely that you wouldn't go, because you looked so shocked when I left you. But… after that I sought out people I could talk to the way I wanted to talk to you."

John's mouth had fallen slowly open throughout the speech; he closed it. "That's exactly what I thought! You were such a big personality, even then, even after only knowing you for an hour, I couldn't think about anything other than you and I thought… if I spent more time with you I'd be completely consumed by you. It scared me that all the reasons I had for not meeting you were about things like not being able to enlist in the army if I had someone as important as you waiting at home, so I didn't go."

Sherlock smiled softly, but he had turned his face away again and was fiddling with the corner of the plastic evidence bag with Powers' shoes inside. "We were such different people," he said eventually. "If we had tried to make something work it wouldn't have lasted long. We were in our last year of high school, we wouldn't have had more than four months before all the things we were frightened of, making all the big decisions with someone else in our lives, came true. I wouldn't have been able to deal with that, and I don't think you would, either."

I would have given it all up for you, John wanted to protest. But the part of his mind that was beginning to sound like Sherlock rebutted the argument straight away. He would have, but then he would have resented Sherlock for taking away his dream, and it wouldn't have lasted anyway. And then who would I be?

He shook his head. "I hated myself for not going. The moment I realised it was too late to change my mind I knew I should have gone. I was the first person you'd ever wanted, you said, and when you trusted me I stood you up."

"We just weren't ready for each other," Sherlock said quietly. His grey-green eyes flickered up to John's face for a moment before darting shyly back to the window.

John leaned forward, his heart thumping in his chest. "Are you ready now?" he asked, holding his breath in case the answer was no.

Sherlock pressed their lips together in a sweet kiss, just a shift of lips on lips until John pressed timidly forward with his tongue and Sherlock just as timidly received it, his hands taking root in John's jacket and holding there until the cabby thumped on the partition to separate them. The younger man panted out a laugh into John's ear. "I've wanted to do that for months," he confessed.

"Why didn't you?" John asked, feeling slightly indignant. They could have had this for months and the Great and Powerful Sherlock hadn't noticed?

The detective smiled sheepishly. "I was so afraid you wouldn't want me to," he admitted shyly. "I didn't want you to leave."

John kissed him again. "Never."

Sherlock smiled, a gloved finger sweeping across John's cheek and pressing gently on his bottom lip. "We fit together so perfectly, John," he said, his voice breathless and almost childishly excited. "I feel like one of those utterly ludicrous people in made-for-telly romances."

"I think," John mused, grinning stupidly, "people in made-for-telly romances don't have psycho bombers dumping evidence from personal cold-cases in their laps."

The detective grinned back. "Don't they?" he asked. He picked up John's hand and slid his long fingers between John's stubby ones. "That sounds a bit dull."

THE END