Dinning with Frogs

17. Epilogue

John can feel a faint draft coming in from the bathroom, making the door creak in the wind. He sticks his head inside and what he sees makes him smile to himself, and roll his eyes.

"Sherlock!"

Sherlock is on the stairs conferring with Mrs Hudson about something or other. He looks up as John approaches, expression inquiring.

"I think you have a visitor."

Sherlock looks at John uncomprehendingly for a moment before his brow unfolds, eyes brightening. Without a word he pushes past John to bound up the stairs.

"Look at the boy," Mrs Hudson says affectionately. "She's back, then?"

"Seems so." John says.

"Now, I don't know why the girl can't use the front door. If I'd known she was here I'd have offered her a cup of tea."

"I don't think tea is what she's here for." John says.

Irene's visits always seemed to be preceded up a break in through the bathroom window. Sherlock describes it as a security measure, but John suspects the gesture has sentimental value for the two of them. It's the second visit Irene's paid them this Spring which is good news for Sherlock's mood. It's nice to see him happy – letting someone else make him happy, even if it doesn't last long. Irene's departures are usually followed by several days of brooding silence, but by and large John thinks the brief periods of sunshine are worth the storm clouds. The moody bouts seem to be getting shorter and less intense, especially since Sherlock seems to have realised that although Irene leaves, she always comes back.

"Do you know," Mrs Hudson says, pleasantly. "I think I need new earplugs." John glances up at the ceiling above them.

"I think I might too." He says. Sherlock and Irene's reunions tend to be enthusiastic in nature and neither of them seem particularly concerned with keeping quiet for their neighbours. John's one tactful suggestion that the walls were perhaps thinner than they realised had been met with a broad smile from Irene, who had apologised insincerely for disturbing him and pointed out that he was always more than welcome to join them.

She had been joking, of course. At least, John hoped she had been joking.

"I'll pop out to the shops." John says. "Pick you up something."

"You are a dear," Mrs Hudson says, and pats his cheek. "You should find yourself a young woman too, you know. Or a young man. If Sherlock can do it I'm sure anyone can."

John makes himself smile back at her. "Oh, I'm all right."

The truth is, John thinks, as he heads off down Baker Street, however glad he is that Sherlock has discovered a brand of idiosyncratic happiness, it does make him feel oddly small sometimes. Sherlock has had a sort of serendipity in these things, John thinks, casting his mind back over his own history littered with failed relationships and unsatisfying dates. Sherlock had been interested in precisely one person his entire life, as far as John can tell - and it had worked out, straight away.

John has got too used to thinking of himself as the knowledgeable one in this area. Sherlock was the logical one, the socially oblivious genius who didn't feel things like others did. John was supposed to be the one who understood people, relationships. Apparently not.

When John gets back, several hours later, Sherlock and Irene are in the kitchen and Sherlock is trying to deduce Irene's latest mission. Another little shared tradition – Sherlock copes with his resentment against the fact that his brother employs his girlfriend by trying to deduce as many state secrets out of her appearance as he can.