The first thing Loki wanted to do with his powers restored was to see Asgard and his mother again. The first thing Loki did with his powers restored, however, was fling open the window, transform into an enormous bird with inky black plumage, and spend four hours flying over the city. The creature's joyful cries echoed across New York and above the city traffic sounds. For a while, Stark Tower's windows were thrown wide open, and the Avengers repeatedly looked up to the sound of wings fluttering. Just when Thor began to worry his brother might make a run for it he returned, breathless and ruffled and laughing like none of them had never seen before, a man freed from more than a year in shackles.

With promises to return soon and a long kiss for Jane, Thor joined Sif and his brother on the roof to return the lost prince home that very night. John followed because he'd never actually seen the process before and was curious. It seemed Sherlock was thinking along the same lines. Before they left, Loki looked at John a long time. Even his eyes seemed a bit lighter.

"When I was first captured, the agents would have had me killed, but you appealed to their humanity," he stated thoughtfully, memories seeming to tumble around one another behind his neutral expression, and John nodded. "I suppose that I owe you my thanks."

He shrugged. "I was only doing my job, looking after these yahoos," he argued feebly, and shook the hands of the gods before him. Never thought he'd be seeing that day.

Stepping once again onto the circular platform, they waited only moments and golden light flooded them. Then Loki turned and said, "Let go or choke," to Sherlock just before they vanished. His parting words echoed and quickly died.

The silence stretched thickly between them as it had done every time they were left alone together. Sherlock had told John everything that happened to him over the past years, but even that couldn't make up for lost time. They were both too different from how they'd been before. in his years away Sherlock had seen too much, felt too intensely to be constrained to one lifetime, so many ideas and thoughts and fears building up into a physical weight hiding just behind his sternum, pulling like a magnet back to John. Always John. But it seemed the Avengers' pull was stronger, and really, it wasn't all that surprising. SHIELD provided John with the adrenaline required to support the lifestyle he'd grown accustomed to with the familiar camaraderie that had drawn him to the army as a teenager.

That did not, however, mean that it was fair, or that Sherlock didn't feel a touch of envy. Yes, he jumped off a building for Mrs. Hudson and Lestrade, but the hunt, the years of isolation, the hoards of dead men rotting in his path, two gunshot wounds, eight stabbings, countless beatings and nights spent in sleepless agony, those had all been for John. Every poisonous breath and ill-uttered prayer were in the effort of returning to the life he'd once known on Baker Street.

"Alright?" asked John long after the Asgardians and Jötun were gone.

Sherlock blinked. He didn't know. Being in a foreign country - even being in New York - wasn't an unfamiliar sensation after his years on the run, but being away from London with John was an entirely new and off-putting experience. Had he wanted to travel with John? Of course. Had he been glad for the invitation? Only a bit, because Stark still got on his nerves and Banner seemed to have a personal vendetta against him, that was not-so-subtly disguised behind his polite facade. Did he want John all to himself? Absolutely. But that wouldn't be fair either. And what had Loki meant by 'let go or choke' anyway? Shouldn't someone be letting go of him to prevent such an end?

Looking at it from a different angle, though, doing what he was best at, Sherlock could understand. He would never have John all to himself, John was human, he needed a social network that Sherlock couldn't provide and would be selfish to deny. As long as he was in New York he would be a buffer separating John from his newer, better friends, and their friendship would crack apart to dust under the pressure. This fool's dream of life returning to what it once was had to end.

Let go or choke.

"I'm fine," he replied, hands deep in his pockets as he turned to go inside. "I just think I ought to come back from the dead, now."

It was time to wake up.

Within days Sherlock was gone and the news of his miraculous return had reached America. Mycroft's hand in the publicity of such an event was clear to John: in interviews and press conferences, every other word from Sherlock's mouth - every other lie - was accompanied by a roll of his eyes. By only the second day of press, news personalities were actively wondering whether it was a nervous tick or habit Sherlock picked up in response to PTSD. The speculation made John grin to himself. Then he would look around for someone to grin at and find his apartment empty once again. It made the most curious sensation of a jackknife digging in between his ribs, like he'd lost Sherlock all over again.

Mrs. Hudson, on the other hand, made the lucrative decision to collect the insurance money from her house on Baker Street and, rather than return to London, take up a little building in New York. She'd apparently always dreamed of living there, but fully intended "to live, Mister Stark. Your tower is very nice and all, but I enjoy working for my supper and plan to do so until this old hip gives out. Maybe I'll find some nice boys to rent the room upstairs and indulge me once in a while." She smiled sunnily at John as she said it, but he felt as though he were losing someone else as well. It shouldn't matter, he'd hardly seen the woman other than over webcam in two years, but in only seven weeks he'd become firmly reattached to his old landlady.

Missions continued, villainy was never quite as defeated as they hoped, and John was happy. Or, he was as happy as he could be while the living ghost of his best friend continually stared out at him through the television screen. Poor Sherlock had to suffer through interview after press conference after interview, at his brother's cajoling, of course, to make the public understand that faking one's death was not a fun or wise decision to make. He rarely looked at ease in front of a camera, even ended more than one interview with the reporter in tears because he wouldn't stop shouting how stupid everyone was. John had no idea why he put up with any of it. Then some overeager young reporter would call him brilliant or fantastic and he would get the oddest faraway look in his eyes.

"So, Mister Holmes, where's your faithful blogger in all of this?" one had playfully asked.

Sitting back in his chair, Sherlock stuck the woman with a hateful glare. "We aren't sewn together at the hip. He has his life and I have mine."

"Friendship gone sour, then?"

"We're still close, though it's really none of your business."

"Speaking of yours and Doctor Watson's closeness-"

"If you really desire to continue your career, I suggest the immediate arrest of that question."

And so the wheel turned on.

Two months later John was with Natasha and Clint in Berlin. Their improvised target was the same vanishing police box that had had Natasha in such a foul mood after the brief fight with Thanos, but the trouble with it was they never knew when or where the bloody thing would show up. The first target they'd been assigned to neutralize somewhere around Kiel was long forgotten, since the unidentified craft was so erratic that when they spotted and scanned it - confirming its identity as the proper box - they had barely had enough time to call Fury before Natasha took initiative and called it a priority.

"I just want to know what's in the fucking box, okay?" she fumed, glaring down the handset scan of the box. "I know it's alien tech, it has to be with this interior; they might know something about Thanos."

Grinning, Clint crossed his arms and asked, "I thought Thanos wasn't a priority at present, Agent Romanoff? Just admit you thought you saw a hot, humanoid alien in a trenchcoat climbing inside and want to trap him in your thigh-squeeze of sexy death?"

"I did not need to hear that," sighed John with a saintly roll of his eyes, while Tasha shoved Clint's cackling face into the dirt. "I don't know why you don't just try opening it, if you saw someone get in." Just in case he was wrong, John wasn't about to admit he thought he'd seen the exact same thing, only with more tweed.

Clint threw Natasha off of his back with a well-devised twist of the hips and tried clawing his way to the box while she dragged at his uniform. "Yeah, Tasha, why don't we just open it?" he choked, eyes tearful with suppressed laughter.

"Cut it out, Barton! If there is intelligent life in that box, then we don't want to scare the shit out of it!"

"I can't, I need to know what's in the box!"

"This is unprofessional! We - are - on - a mission!"

"What's in the box, Tasha?! WHAT'S IN THE BOX?!"

"I WILL KILL YOU!"

Suddenly sitting up, Clint grinned and pressed his smiling lips to Natasha's. "You couldn't if you tried," he sweetly said, much to her annoyance. He was much more relaxed when not on a formal mission. If it were official he would have been the face of professionalism, but this had apparently been a years-long running joke between the two assassins. With ease, he reached up behind his head and swung open the door of the box. Natasha craned her neck to see around Clint, and John took another step nearer to get a good look inside. Their eyes widened and mouths fell open as they stared.

And stared.

And stared.

And someone familiar stared back.

"Coulson?!"

It had been many years since John had seen his cousin, but the scraggly gaping man in civvies dashing about the innards of an alien spaceship was definitely Phil Coulson. He dropped the controls and made a move, as though considering slamming the door in their faces, before letting out a gusty sigh and stepping out of the ship. "Agent Romanoff," he resignedly acknowledged. "Agent Barton. And..." He frowned. "John? Hamish and Joan's son?"

John nodded. Probably, he should have been desensitized to the point that nothing surprised him, especially after Sherlock, but he was utterly gobsmacked.

"It's Agent Watson now," Natasha casually said as she rose up from the dirt road, hand at her hip-holster. "Something you'd like to tell us about your loyalties, Phil?"

Coulson shut the box's door behind him and locked it with a key kept around his neck. "I'm not a spy, if that's what you're worried about," he mildly said. "I wasstabbed, but the EMTs managed to revive me on the helicarrier and quickly isolated me for surgery. SHIELD kept it hushed up because they weren't sure I would survive, and when it became clear that I would, Fury contacted me. There was a mission to be done, one that could only be done by a dead man, and since you already thought I was dead I seemed the natural choice. After my target was neutralized, this box showed up, one thing led to another, and, well..." He shrugged with a crooked smile.

It was the first time Natasha had hugged anyone within visual memory, and John and Clint quickly looked away to avoid threats of dismemberment. Then Phil went limp with one of her hands on a pressure-point under his ear. "Fuck the box. Let's get him the hell back to New York," she scowled, but there was a distinct lack of heat to it. They left the key to the box in the dirt.

Reactions to Phil's return were largely more fair, due to a wider population that cared, compared to John's reaction when it came to Sherlock's. Natasha was quietly furious, Steve guilty, Tony elated ("No, Pepper, seriously, you need to get on the first flight back to New York and see this!"), Bruce mildly surprised but otherwise unfazed, and Clint oddly proud. There were a lot of hugs. Even one for John, accompanied by Phil's thanks for "looking after these yahoos for me."

"So I'm not the only one who calls them that."

Phil grinned. "Have you tried tasing? It always worked wonders for me."

"You never tased me, Coulson!" Tony shouted across the room.

"Doesn't mean I didn't daydream about it, Stark!"

They were laughing, still clapping hands on shoulders and begging Phil to spill about his adventurous life post-mortem. John still felt like there was something missing, something big and menacing and important. Tony and Bruce were sequestered on the couch, so close their shoulders sometimes touched and Bruce would blush, crouched together over a tablet and trying to piece together how to make a dimensionally-transcendent hideout of their own. They had a small "eureka" moment and Tony smacked a kiss to the side of his curly head, only making him blush so hard his glasses fogged up. Across from them Clint and Natasha were sharing the big chair usually reserved for Thor. Natasha was sour because she still hadn't caught the alien in the box, and Clint was trying to make her feel better by suggesting it had been a succubus and was even then attached somewhere to Coulson, sucking out his life-force. In the center, Steve was listening like an enraptured child to the returned agent's stories, the man of the hour himself looking awed and pleased that his childhood hero now looked at him with something like belief.

And then it hit John, because it always hit John last, that belief was the thing. In all his years, all the strife, all the worry and pain and crushing responsibility, every sleepless night, every firebombing, each sticky child crying with a tummyache or grown man crying for his mother's voice one last time, never had John Watson had something to believe in so strongly as his belief in Sherlock.

That man, that strange, wild man who could achieve the impossible with a flick of the wrist, he was still larger than life after Earth's Mightiest Heroes had been reduced to friends and humans with their own set of demons to wrestle. After big sister stopped looking so big. After the government he served lied to and abandoned him. After hope fled somewhere dark and quiet. Always, always, there had been Sherlock. Even when there hadn't been, even before that maniac had allowed John to stumble into his life, there had been a tang to the sea air that signaled something more over the horizon. Even when there hadn't been, even after that man who craved to be a god had given up everything to save someone as tiny and meaningless as John Watson, he had still believed, the world had still believed in heroes.

John needed someone to believe in again.

While everyone celebrated and basked in their happiness, John retreated into the cold, dark place within himself. But before he could go too far, before he could go where no one could follow, he pulled out his mobile and stepped into another room for privacy.

To: Sherlock Holmes
How would you like to get back
in business?
JW

From: Sherlock Holmes
Lestrade still won't speak to me.
SH

To: Sherlock Holmes
Then solve some American
murders for a while. He'll
miss you eventually.
JW

From: Sherlock Holmes
What, really? You know I can't
decipher tone in texts.
SH

To: Sherlock Holmes
Of course I'm serious, you
twat. Get on a plane.
JW

From: Sherlock Holmes
Are you sure, John?
SH

To: Sherlock Holmes
Obviously. You need to get
away from your brother
for a while and I need a
flatmate.
JW

From: Sherlock Holmes
Strange, but I've been looking
for one as well.
SH

To: Sherlock Holmes
Oh? Any ideas?
JW

From: Sherlock Holmes
I'm afraid most candidates
in London are unsurprisingly
lacking.
SH

To: Sherlock Holmes
Lacking what? Jumpers and
the ability to nag at all hours?
JW

From: Sherlock Holmes
You know.
SH

To: Sherlock Holmes
I suppose I do. There's an
opening on 48th & Bunker.
Some old lady looking for
tenants. Interested?
JW

From: Sherlock Holmes
Well, who would want me
as a flatmate?
SH

To: Sherlock Holmes
Come home.
JW

From: Sherlock Holmes
Isn't London technically my
home?
SH

To: Sherlock Holmes
You bloody well know it
isn't. COME. HOME.
JW

From: Sherlock Holmes
No need to shout. I'll be on
the next flight to JFK. Have tea
ready.
SH

From: Sherlock Holmes
Please.
SH

John smiled to himself and put the phone away. Let Sherlock stew without a response for a while. Finally, finally, he was going home. Or maybe home was coming to him, this time.

THE END

SO! That was an adventure, wasn't it? Thank you everyone for reading and leaving me such wonderful comments, they really made it fun. The next fic I plan on posting will be up Monday- or the first part of it will. To tide you over, I'll give you the title: Not Your Momma's Breakfast Club. I know, I know, what's with all the club-related titles, but it's purely coincidence that these two happened back-to-back and both titles seemed appropriate. I also might be writing some deleted scenes somewhere down the line, but I'll make a separate "story" out of it if I do. Keep an eye out!

I feel like I had more to say.