Chapter Text
When Mary took off with the AGRA flash drive, leaving John with an infant and a letter, he knew she would not be coming back. She never did. He knew Sherlock had Mycroft look into her whereabouts or any sign of what might have happened to her.
One day, Sherlock came to the house he had shared with Mary, and John could see that he knew something about her. Where she was or what might have happened to her. He had held Rosie in his arms, bottle in her greedily suckling mouth, and shook his head firmly at his friend. “I don’t want to know,” he had said. Sherlock had opened his mouth and John spoke over him. “I don’t want to know. She left. I don’t want to know, Sherlock,” and Sherlock had closed his mouth and came inside the house. He had made tea for them, and John had finished feeding Rosie. She had been fussy and refused to be put down. When he eventually gave up trying to lay her in her cot for a nap, he had come back down and Sherlock was sitting at the kitchen table. “Come back to Baker Street. You and Rosie,” he said and John hesitated. He had stared down at his sleeping daughter in his arms, salty tear tracks crusted on her cheeks. Sherlock couldn’t want this. He hadn’t signed up for babies and dirty nappies and midnight feedings. But Sherlock looked at Rosie, then met his eyes and said “I want you both there,” and John said “Okay”, because he was a selfish man and he couldn’t imagine raising a baby on his own, not when he could have Sherlock in his life, as well. He and Rosie were moved in two weeks later and the house sold a month after that.
That was three years ago. There had been some adjustments to the flat with the addition of a baby, then a toddler, but Sherlock took it all in stride and never seemed to regret his decision to have them move in. He played his violin at reasonable hours and often to help Rosie calm when she was crying or sleepy, didn’t shoot the walls, kept body parts in a small fridge in his bedroom, kept his experiments in places a small toddler couldn’t reach when it became necessary, and often watched Rosie on his own when John had shifts at the clinic because Sherlock hated the idea of Rosie in daycare.
Sherlock had even been the one to interview nannies and find one who could meet their sporadic needs so John could continue to join him in the Work.
And he loved Rosie as much as John did. It was so obvious. The way he held her small body and fed her her bottle, the way he held her hand when she first started to walk, the way he would throw her in the air and catch her as she giggled madly in the park, the way he would sit down with her and encourage her curiosity in his experiments.
It was perfect. He had everything he wanted.
Or almost, at least.
It was enough. It had been enough and it would keep being enough.