Welcome to Baker Street

76. Delivery for Sherlock Holmes

Two weeks later – Mid-February

It's been two weeks since Sherlock's release from the hospital, and things feel different at 221 Baker Street. For starters, it has taken John two full days to stop staring at Giulia whenever she walked into the flat. It wasn't an inquisitive gaze or an accusatory look, not at all. He was just looking at her, struggling to picture all the challenges she had encountered over the past year, trying to figure out how she must have felt after the explosion, how she had coped with her grief and the shattering discovery of being herself a target in the attack against her family. However, being an army man, John had dealt with loss and suffering before—more than he wanted to admit. And Giulia was secretly grateful for his politely detached demeanour towards damaged people that he had honed over the years on the field as an army doctor. At least, he never looked at her with the slightest hint of compassion in his eyes. He could tell that the last thing she wanted was the pity of her flatmates.

Still, she knew it would take John some time to digest the whole truth and the overdue account of her past. It turned out he needed precisely 48 hours of a spaced-out expression to overcome his surprise and put to rest any trust issues. Now, their relationship was going back to its friendly normalcy.

As for Sherlock, it was impossible to say how he had truly reacted to finding out the truth about her story. Giulia had barely seen him since he came back home. From the very moment he had stepped back into the flat, he had holed up in his room under the pretext of his convalescence, and she hadn't met him for almost a week, except for a chance encounter, late one night.

It was four a.m., and she had just woken up from a nightmare. She went looking for a glass of water in the kitchen and was walking head down when she bumped into Sherlock, that was crossing the threshold with a cup of tea. He had immediately deduced the reason she was up at such an hour but had tactfully avoided inquiring about her nightmares. He knew most of her demons by then.

It had taken Giulia a little longer to understand he was restlessly roaming in the middle of the night for the very same reason: Sherlock, too, was haunted by nightmares. It would have been an obvious conclusion for anyone else; he had been shot and almost died. Some kind of PTSD was to be expected. But he was Sherlock Holmes—the prince of his mind palace, the lord of pure cold reason. It was hard to imagine he would let his brain play tricks on him. And yet, as much as he ruled over the rational part of his mind, his subconscious still slipped from his grasp, painting the blackest dreams that polluted each of his nights. He never spoke a word about it, let alone with Giulia, but in that brief encounter on the kitchen threshold, she could read it on his face, in the dark circles under his bloodshot eyes, in the deep shadows of his hollowed-out cheeks.

And there they were: two lost souls in the dead of the night, standing face to face, each one with their universe of monsters to run from. Each one alone. By choice, by a silent spell that would have taken so little to break. There was a moment of awkward silence, which had never happened between them. Over the months of cohabitation, they had spent a lot of time together in the living room, neither of them uttering a single word for hours on end, and it never felt weird or unnatural. Around her, he felt comfortable enough to plunge into his mind palace without an explanation, knowing that she would understand and respect his quiet. Now there they stood, in the doorway, their breath caught in their throats as if they were both about to say something, yet no one dared to speak first. In the end, Giulia had flashed him a crooked smile and excused herself, diving back downstairs and leaving Sherlock to his voluntary exile.

After that, he had reappeared slightly more often in the shared spaces, and the two of them had exchanged a couple of sentences, mostly about Sherlock's recovering health. Then, their conversations had trickled back to their habitual banter, yet something was missing. Neither of them ever raised the topic of what had happened in Sherlock's hospital room.