Sherlock: In Arduis Fidelis
Title: In Arduis Fidelis
Author:
mad_maudlin
Fandom: BBC Sherlock
Characters: Jane Watson, Sherlock Holmes
Pairing: Technically it's gen, but in practice there's just as much slashy subtext as the actual program.
Warnings: Genderswap AU
Spoilers: "Study in Pink"
Summary: Jane Watson likes to think of herself, deep down inside, as a good girl. She is not a drunken mess like Harry. She did not get fat like Mike. Unlike 327 British soldiers and contractors, she is not dead. She got top marks and she served her country and she has not got a selfish bone in her body.
That may actually be part of her problem.
A/N: For a "Make Me A Monday" request on Sherlockbbc.
In Arduis Fidelis
by Mad Maudlin
She isn't supposed to be here. They all think it; some of them even say it. Never mind the whorl of scar tissue in her shoulder or the steel pins holding together her thigh; these are things that should not be. She isn't supposed to be here because women don't serve in front-line positions, because women don't get hurt.
Nobody explained that to the Taliban, of course.
"You volunteered to travel with the convoy," Ella says, one of those goading not-a-questions that are supposed to make people feel at ease.
Jane Watson shifts, winces at the position it puts her knee in, shifts again. "A doctor had to go," she says. "Some of those patients were unstable. The convoys get delayed sometimes. If they won't let us evacuate by helicopter we send a doctor to make sure the patient actually makes it as far as Kabul."
Ella flips back to look at her notes. "You volunteered for that duty fairly often, actually."
"Yes, I did." It wasn't even a proper question but Jane needs to affirm it: she volunteered, she chose this, not just when she got in the truck but fifteen years earlier when she took an oath to queen and country. She knew what she was getting into the moment she put the boots on.
Ella is more put together than Jane has ever managed, all the colors coordinated and hair exactly where she means it to go, and she has a way of looking at people that only contributes to the illusion that she is a store mannequin come to life. "Why did you travel with the convoys, Jane?"
"Because I'm a doctor." She watches Ella's pen crawl across the notepad in beautiful, well-ordered loops. Deep need for validation vs. professional insecurity. "What d'you mean, insecure?"
The next thing Ella writes is still has trust issues.
///
The Army did not teach Jane to shoot. That was her dad, a gun enthusiast who didn't see why the gender of his children should stand in the way of a little father-son bonding. When Jane was five, he taught her how to hold pistols and rifles, how to put the safety on, how to load and unload. By the time she was ten, they went hunting together, and the peaceable hours spent sitting in the blind were just as much fun as the minutes and seconds it took to aim and fire.
(Harry had never been interested in the guns, or the hunting, or anything else that Jane liked, really; she was always more about makeup and dolls, never the one with the stain on her dress. No wonder people were usually surprised at which of them was the lesbian.)
The Army did not teach Jane to shoot, because their instructor only demonstrated things right-handed, and he looked past her like she didn't signify because she couldn't serve in combat positions. The Army taught her how to kill, though, how put the same sort of holes in a man that she was supposed to patch, how to fire one-handed while applying pressure to an artery, how to calculate a flesh wound from a hundred yards away. That didn't mean they let her do it, except sometimes when they did, when the front decided to come to her; and later they seemed baffled as to what to do with her next. Women didn't serve in front-line positions. Women weren't marksmen. Women didn't get shot.
(Jane will never tell anyone this, especially not Ella with the beautiful handwriting: when she was pinned down behind a burning truck with a broken femur and an SA80 on full automatic, she felt wonderfully, horrifyingly alive.)
///
Sherlock Holmes is more put together than Jane has ever been in her life, or ever will be: she wears slim-cut men's suits, silk blouses in jewel tones and makeup in neutrals, and her hair falls in effortless curls above cheekbones that could slice potatoes. She has known Jane for all thirty seconds before she asks, "Afghanistan or Iraq?" and leaves her stammering in a lab space, Mike snickering into his coffee the entire time.
"She's always like that," he assures her while she's trying to sort out what's just happened. "Don't let it scare you too much."
Jane glares at him; they had dated fitfully in medical school mostly out of a lack of anything better to do, so she can tell he's only joking, but still. "I'm not afraid of...skinny bitches with ESP or whatever that was. Does she work here?"
"She's some kind of consultant.," Mike says. "Saved us from a malpractice suit a few years back, so we do her a good turn now and again."
"And the riding crop in the morgue?" Jane asks. (She's not afraid of anything, just...cautious.)
Mike shrugs. "Hasn't tried it on any live ones yet, so we mostly let her be."
///
Harry never cared about guns, hunting, schoolwork or boys; she started styling her own hair when she was twelve and started falling out of clubs by the time she was seventeen. Jane spent a lot of time rescuing her, driving Dad's car without a license, holding the bowl while she puked up her guts. She once came up from medical school the night before an exam to sit with her and check her pulse, make sure she hadn't actually drank herself to death no matter how many time Jane had accused her of trying.
(She failed the exam because of that, the only one she ever did; passed the resit with the highest mark in her class.)
Fifteen years on it's all been turned around, though, so that Harry's the one with the brilliant career, the fancy phone, the flashy clothes, the gorgeous wife; things she so takes for granted that she throws them aside without thought. She's still a drunk, but she can blame it on a homophobic society or Tony Blair or genetically modified rice and somehow it's a charming quirk; she can call Jane's war a joke and a crime and still look offended when she moves out the same night.
Jane doesn't drink, doesn't even take the Percocet she was prescribed for her injuries; Jane was at the top of her class as a medical student; Jane wears practical jumpers and no-nonsense plaits; Jane was decorated and congratulated and politely shown the door.
Sometimes at night, she lies awake and grits her teeth and wants to cry unfair, unfair, unfair.
///
"Have you ever been sexually assaulted?"
That was Ella's idea of getting to know you, along with polite inquiries about suicidal ideation and substance abuse. Jane had glared at the curtains, willing them to catch fire. "Despite what some people believe, the Army aren't a gang of violent sex maniacs."
"But sexual harassment and violence do happen within the services." Ella could've been talking about the weather for all she seemed to care. "Surely you've endured unwanted attention, comments--"
"I went to medical school," Jane reminded her. "And got mistaken for a nurse at least once a week."
"And you've pursued a career in a male-dominated and often times rigidly sexist organization."
"No," Jane said, every syllable distinct. "I have never been sexually assaulted. I have never endured harassment more intense than idiotic jokes and the occasional drunken grab. If you're digging for something--"
"I'm not digging for anything, Dr. Watson." (It had started as 'Dr. Watson;' she wasn't sure when Ella had reduced her to 'Jane.') "I'm simply trying to cover all my bases. Female service members often complain that their unique needs aren't addressed by traditional forms of institutional support."
"My 'unique needs' are all in hand, thanks," Jane said, and patted the handle of her cane.
"I just want to ensure that you're getting the sort of help you need," Ella said, which, yeah, didn't that turn out to be a laugh?
///
Sherlock Holmes is a long, elegant streak of nothing with a moldering library and a pet skull. She brushes past people and things with an icy sort of charm, or looks at them with the precision of a laser sight, and it's not that Jane fancies her, exactly; more like she looks at Sherlock and sees something of the woman she wanted to be, had thought she was before bullets and bone fragments. She sees that confidence. She wants it back.
Sherlock has known Jane all of twenty-four hours before she asks, "You're an army doctor...any good?"
Jane forces herself to her feet, heart pounding oddly, like this is an inspection and there's a spot on her uniform. Sherlock's eyes are very pale and do not waver, do not even blink. "Very good," she says firmly.
"Seen a lot of injuries, then?" Sherlock pulls on leather gloves that mold to her hands, moves like a panther into Jane's personal space. "Violent deaths?"
Jane's voice is steady. "Yes."
Sherlock's is steadier; her smooth contralto slides into something almost intimate, just barely teasing. "Bit of trouble, too, I bet."
"Of course, yes." Burning petrol, blood on stone, the shock of recoil and adrenaline that tastes like copper and gold. Enough for a lifetime. Far too much."
One corner of Sherlock's mouth twitches, like she's fighting down a smile, like she's seeing something more than Jane's past in her words. "Want to see some more?"
"Oh, god, yes."
///
(Jane did not lie to Ella: she has never been assaulted. She might let the rest of it pass, the jokes and the touches and the slurs and the silences, because her father always said living well was the best revenge-steadfast in hardship, that was Jane-and because standing up was the best way to get labeled troublemaker, complainer, bitch; and she knew plenty of women who had never spoken up, never explained why they were bleeding out behind their eyes. But Jane would have said something, fought back with words as good as bullets. At least, she likes to think so.
Instead she got shot, and Ella can't seem to get past the fact that Jane volunteered to ride with the convoy. That she'd passed her personal weapons test with a 65 or better every year when only needed a 49. That when the bombs had started going off, Jane had leapt down from the truck to defend herself and her patients like the officer she was. Ella acts like Jane was trying to get shot, and Jane will have no problem canceling all her appointments when she realizes that she doesn't need the help.)
///
At one point she'd thought about naming it-the cane. Despite the claims of her physiotherapist, the limp seemed likely to be with her for the long haul. She had turned it over in her hands, the gray plastic and the cool aluminum, and thought about naming it Fido or Theodore or Gladstone or Stick, and painting it, and using it to trip irritating people. She thought about replacing it with something elegant and made of wood, something that she could match to her jewelry if she was the sort of person who matched things. She thought about hitting the damn thing against a wall until it bent.
It was her cane, her faithful supporter, the only one she had; and she'd thought about naming it because she'd thought it would be with her until the day she died, holding her up and holding her back, and if she named it then she might be able to stop hating it.
///
Sherlock's self-professed arch-enemy has a sing-song voice that makes Jane want to clean out her ears, as if she's going to find them coated with oil or slime. James Bond act aside, she thinks he's a bit ridiculous at first, and bit of a bastard on second thought: when he first offers her money she thinks he means prostitution, and she turns out not to be totally wrong.
There is no universe in which Jane would help him, but when he starts quoting Ella's beautiful handwriting, something inside her goes very cold and still. Her fingers curl in search of a trigger. "Are we done?" she asks briskly.
He looks into her and there are words in his eyes, professional inadequacy and trust issues and maybe even death wish. "You tell me."
Jane walks away from him; there are many things she can say and none that are constructive, none that will work with a man whose weapon is words. He could be many things, so many things, so dangerous, and she's not armed and she can't run-probably couldn't run-but she decides that if he meant to hurt her he'd have done so already, could have done easily. She is unarmed and alone and can't even run, but she can hold her head high as she walks away and maybe it'll feel like a win.
"I imagine people have already warned you to stay away from her," the man says, and Jane thinks of Mike's friendly cautions, of Anderson's poisonous expressions, of Sgt. Donovan saying freak, sociopath, she gets off on it-- "but I can see from your left hand that's not going to happen."
Left hands and mobile phones and for a moment Jane thinks oh, dear God, there are two of them. She shouldn't turn around, shouldn't take the bait, should just leave the bastard, shouldn't... "My what?" she demands.
"Show me," he says-orders, really, like a man used to being obeyed. That alone makes her want to walk away again. He comes to her and reaches out, ready to grab a wrist, grab a forearm--
"Don't." The word is low and a little bit hoarse, and he dares to look amused, avuncular, like she's a toddler who's just learned the word. Like touching her is his right. One good whack with the cane would probably break his kneecap, but she doesn't do it, just pulls her hand back when he's done with it and thinks maybe she could run after all, just a bit, if she had to.
The man with the umbrella turns away and says in a grandiose voice, "Most people blunder around this city, and all they see are streets, and shops, and cars...when you walk with Sherlock Holmes, you see the battlefield." He turns back to look at her with gimlet eyes. "You've seen it already, haven't you?"
"What's wrong with my hand?" she asks.
"You have an intermittent tremor in your left hand." Of course she bloody did; that was the side that got shot. But he continues: "Your therapist thinks it's Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. She thinks you're haunted by memories of your military service, that your delicate female psyche has been abraded by war."
"Who the hell are you?" she asks, because these words hurt, worse than when she reads them up-side down in a sunny office; when this man says them in a sing-song voice, they suddenly turn into knives. "How do you know that?"
"Fire her," the man says earnestly, and he's still looking at her with amusement. "She's got it the wrong way round. You're under stress right now and your hand is perfectly steady. You're not haunted by the war, Dr. Watson...you miss it."
And he leans in close, as tender as a lover and unwelcome as infection. "Welcome back."
He leaves her standing in the warehouse for a bit, shaking inside even if she knows how to hide it; leaves her alone and unarmed and unable to run, because she wants to say no and fuck you and stop, she wants this to stop, wants it to be as easy as a gun in her hand and a target on the other side of the range, on the side of the road--
Could be dangerous, Sherlock says.
And Jane's hand is perfectly still.
///
When she dreams about Afghanistan, it's never the quite times, the long waits between actions, the card games in the officer's mess. It's never the surgeries, either, no matter how sloppy they were, how rushed, how many explosions were happening around them or which ones didn't make it. It's always the convoy, or the snipers before that, or the helicopter evacuation before the snipers-it's always sound and fury and bullets and slurred Pashtun and running, she dreams about running and the bark of a gun in her hand, and when she wakes up hoarse and shaking she can't tell if it's fear or loss.
She always wakes up with an ache in her thigh and tingling in her arm and she's frustrated to tears and she wants it to stop. But she's also a little afraid of the day it does, the day she forgets she was ever a soldier. These wounds are important, they mean something: in arduis fidelis, steadfast in hardship, and nothing in Jane's life has ever been harder than this: but she was once a soldier, and no one, not even the army, can take that away.
///
Donovan called Sherlock a freak, looked at her with a poisonous expression; Donovan predicted Sherlock would become a murder and Sherlock seems almost flattered at the sentiment. "Statistically speaking, most murderers are male," she will tell Jane with a gleam in her eye. "Particularly the violent ones. A proper female serial killer would single-handedly revolutionize the field of criminology."
Sherlock will say things like that; will engage in fistfights with strangers; will risk her life to prove she's clever. Sherlock will play the violin at three o'clock in the morning and not speak for days and shoot at the walls when she's bored. Sherlock will turn Jane's world upside down. People will keep telling her Sherlock is unstable-dear, sweet Dr. Watson, that horrible woman will be the death of you--
And yet when they say "dangerous," that is where Jane will be.
///
In her first proper conversation with Sherlock Holmes, she makes the mistake of asking, "So...'Sherlock.'"
"Yes," she says, without looking away from 22 Northumberland Street. "Always."
"Sorry?"
Sherlock spares Jane a glance. "'Sherry' is something you cook with. 'Shirley' is half of an non-alcoholic cocktail. My name is Sherlock."
Oh. Of course. "No wonder you didn't guess about Harry, then," she says.
Sherlock makes a grunting sound, sort of like an angry cat. Jane will someday learn that this signifies quite dire contempt.
"People don't have archenemies," she adds after her food arrives, hoping it will clarify what the hell had happened with the umbrella man. "In real life. Doesn't happen."
"Doesn't it? Sounds dull." Sherlock twists, jacket sliding open to show the deep V of her blouse, almost down to her barely-there cleavage. She is very obviously not wearing a bra. Something about it makes Jane tug on her own jumper, the one that falls past her hips, that hides more than it reveals. "What do real people have, then, in their 'real lives'?"
Jane knows she's being mocked, but answers anyway. "Friends. People they like, people they don't like, boyfriends, girlfriends..."
"Dull," Sherlock repeats decisively.
"You don't have a boyfriend, then," Jane says, just to clarify, though it would hardly surprise her.
Sherlock's still staring out the window. "Boyfriend, no...not really my area."
"Oh, right..." Jane can't think of a better way to say this. "D'you have a girlfriend? Which is...fine, by the way."
"I know it's fine," Sherlock says, and suddenly turns her laser sights on Jane, eyebrows slightly lowered.
Jane waits, awkwardly, for her to elaborate and she doesn't. The candle on the table flickers. "So you've got a girlfrie--"
"No."
"All right. Okay." Jane looks back at the food, which is actually rather good, even if Angelo does think she's a lesbian. She has to admit the jumper and the boots are probably not helping her out on that front. "You're...unattached. Just like me. Fine."
Sherlock actually squirms for a moment; some day Jane will realize how rare that is. "Jane, erm. I think you should know I consider myself married to me work, and while I'm flattered--"
"No," Jane says, "no, I'm not-no," and when she realizes it sounds a little too shrill, adds, "I'm just saying-it's all fine."
"Good," Sherlock says, and it's the first time she gives Jane a certain look, slightly bemused and slightly pleased, as if Jane has just done something rare and wonderful and yet is to dense to know what it was. It will not be the last. "Thank you."
Jane plays back the conversation in her head, wondering how the hell that had just happened. Later she will realize that this kind of conversation usually ends in words like frigid or freak or real women, just the like deductions usually end in piss off. She will feel hot flashes of indignation on Sherlock's behalf, more than Sherlock ever seems to feel for herself, and will be horrible to Anderson for a week with no provocation.
In the present moment, though, there's a cab on Northumberland Street. And turns out that Jane can run.
///
Jane Watson likes to think of herself, deep down inside, as a good girl. She is not a drunken mess like Harry. She did not get fat like Mike. Unlike 327 British soldiers and contractors, she is not dead. She got top marks and she served her country and she has not got a selfish bone in her body.
That may actually be part of her problem.
Sherlock Holmes desecrates corpses and investigates murders and keeps eyeballs in the microwave. She is probably a former junkie and definitely a current one, with mystery being her drug of choice. She is rude and improbable and a little bit sociopathic, and has probably never compromised once in her life.
That might be part of her problem.
Someday she will realize: this is why they fit.
///
In the end, she walks around without direction until her heart rate has evened out, then doubles back around to where the police have set up a cordon. She can see Sherlock just inside the line of tape and police cars, bundled in her coat plus a garish orange blanket, talking quietly to Lestrade. If Jane is very very still, she can even hear what they're saying.
"The bullet they just dug out of the wall is from a handgun. A kill shot over that distance, from that kind of a weapon, that's a crack shot you're looking for, but not just a marksman-a fighter. His hands couldn't have shaken at all, so clearly he's acclimatized to violence. He didn't fire until I was in immediate danger, though, so strong moral principle. You're looking for a man, probably with a history of military service, nerves of steel..."
From across the lines, Sherlock's eyes suddenly meet Jane's. Narrow, just a tiny bit. She pretends she hasn't been eavesdropping and looks over her shoulder.
"...and tall," Sherlock continues slowly. "Very tall."
"Tall?" Lestrade demands.
"Yes, tall," Sherlock says. "Have you looked at the angles of the bullet holes? The man you are looking for is extremely tall, possibly suffers from a endocrine disorder, shoe size of at least thirteen."
"Really." Lestrade sounds unimpressed.
"Really!" Sherlock snaps. "There, I've solved it for you. Put out an alert to detain any giants spotted in Greater London. Now go away, you're annoying and I'm in shock."
By the time she gets free of the inspector and the blanket, Jane has managed to stop her hysterical giggling. "Sergeant Donovan has just been explaining everything," she said, admirably straight-faced in her own opinion. "Dreadful business."
"Good shot," Sherlock says quietly. "I may even forgive you for causing me to make the same mistake twice."
"You're admitting you make mistakes, then?" Jane asks, feigning surprise.
"Only if you admit to the powder burns on your fingers."
Well, there went that idea. Jane breathes deep and waits for the other shoe to drop, the judgment, the biting commentary.
"Are you all right?" is what Sherlock asks instead, and she even sounds genuinely concerned.
"Yes, of course I'm all right," Jane says quickly.
Sherlock raises one eyebrow. "You have just killed a man."
"Yes, I know." She killed a man, she may have saved Sherlock's life, she fired a gun and it was awful and glorious and and even Sherlock thinks she ought to be bothered by this, god. Later she will be able to unpack this in her head, much later, while she's giving the cane a proper burial; for now she pushes it down and stammers, "But...he wasn't a very nice man."
"No, he wasn't," Sherlock says, still a bit concerned, also a bit...something else.
"And frankly, a bloody awful cabby."
And then somehow they're giggling-Sherlock looks good when she laughs, good and relaxed and human. They're giggling like teenagers even though it's a crime scene, a war zone, even though Jane has just killed a man, and of course Sherlock is mad and reckless and possibly a bit sociopathic, but it appears that Jane is really not one to judge.
Steadfast in hardship, that's her. If she can survive this, she'll survive anything.
Author:
mad_maudlin
Fandom: BBC Sherlock
Characters: Jane Watson, Sherlock Holmes
Pairing: Technically it's gen, but in practice there's just as much slashy subtext as the actual program.
Warnings: Genderswap AU
Spoilers: "Study in Pink"
Summary: Jane Watson likes to think of herself, deep down inside, as a good girl. She is not a drunken mess like Harry. She did not get fat like Mike. Unlike 327 British soldiers and contractors, she is not dead. She got top marks and she served her country and she has not got a selfish bone in her body.
That may actually be part of her problem.
A/N: For a "Make Me A Monday" request on Sherlockbbc.
In Arduis Fidelis
by Mad Maudlin
She isn't supposed to be here. They all think it; some of them even say it. Never mind the whorl of scar tissue in her shoulder or the steel pins holding together her thigh; these are things that should not be. She isn't supposed to be here because women don't serve in front-line positions, because women don't get hurt.
Nobody explained that to the Taliban, of course.
"You volunteered to travel with the convoy," Ella says, one of those goading not-a-questions that are supposed to make people feel at ease.
Jane Watson shifts, winces at the position it puts her knee in, shifts again. "A doctor had to go," she says. "Some of those patients were unstable. The convoys get delayed sometimes. If they won't let us evacuate by helicopter we send a doctor to make sure the patient actually makes it as far as Kabul."
Ella flips back to look at her notes. "You volunteered for that duty fairly often, actually."
"Yes, I did." It wasn't even a proper question but Jane needs to affirm it: she volunteered, she chose this, not just when she got in the truck but fifteen years earlier when she took an oath to queen and country. She knew what she was getting into the moment she put the boots on.
Ella is more put together than Jane has ever managed, all the colors coordinated and hair exactly where she means it to go, and she has a way of looking at people that only contributes to the illusion that she is a store mannequin come to life. "Why did you travel with the convoys, Jane?"
"Because I'm a doctor." She watches Ella's pen crawl across the notepad in beautiful, well-ordered loops. Deep need for validation vs. professional insecurity. "What d'you mean, insecure?"
The next thing Ella writes is still has trust issues.
///
The Army did not teach Jane to shoot. That was her dad, a gun enthusiast who didn't see why the gender of his children should stand in the way of a little father-son bonding. When Jane was five, he taught her how to hold pistols and rifles, how to put the safety on, how to load and unload. By the time she was ten, they went hunting together, and the peaceable hours spent sitting in the blind were just as much fun as the minutes and seconds it took to aim and fire.
(Harry had never been interested in the guns, or the hunting, or anything else that Jane liked, really; she was always more about makeup and dolls, never the one with the stain on her dress. No wonder people were usually surprised at which of them was the lesbian.)
The Army did not teach Jane to shoot, because their instructor only demonstrated things right-handed, and he looked past her like she didn't signify because she couldn't serve in combat positions. The Army taught her how to kill, though, how put the same sort of holes in a man that she was supposed to patch, how to fire one-handed while applying pressure to an artery, how to calculate a flesh wound from a hundred yards away. That didn't mean they let her do it, except sometimes when they did, when the front decided to come to her; and later they seemed baffled as to what to do with her next. Women didn't serve in front-line positions. Women weren't marksmen. Women didn't get shot.
(Jane will never tell anyone this, especially not Ella with the beautiful handwriting: when she was pinned down behind a burning truck with a broken femur and an SA80 on full automatic, she felt wonderfully, horrifyingly alive.)
///
Sherlock Holmes is more put together than Jane has ever been in her life, or ever will be: she wears slim-cut men's suits, silk blouses in jewel tones and makeup in neutrals, and her hair falls in effortless curls above cheekbones that could slice potatoes. She has known Jane for all thirty seconds before she asks, "Afghanistan or Iraq?" and leaves her stammering in a lab space, Mike snickering into his coffee the entire time.
"She's always like that," he assures her while she's trying to sort out what's just happened. "Don't let it scare you too much."
Jane glares at him; they had dated fitfully in medical school mostly out of a lack of anything better to do, so she can tell he's only joking, but still. "I'm not afraid of...skinny bitches with ESP or whatever that was. Does she work here?"
"She's some kind of consultant.," Mike says. "Saved us from a malpractice suit a few years back, so we do her a good turn now and again."
"And the riding crop in the morgue?" Jane asks. (She's not afraid of anything, just...cautious.)
Mike shrugs. "Hasn't tried it on any live ones yet, so we mostly let her be."
///
Harry never cared about guns, hunting, schoolwork or boys; she started styling her own hair when she was twelve and started falling out of clubs by the time she was seventeen. Jane spent a lot of time rescuing her, driving Dad's car without a license, holding the bowl while she puked up her guts. She once came up from medical school the night before an exam to sit with her and check her pulse, make sure she hadn't actually drank herself to death no matter how many time Jane had accused her of trying.
(She failed the exam because of that, the only one she ever did; passed the resit with the highest mark in her class.)
Fifteen years on it's all been turned around, though, so that Harry's the one with the brilliant career, the fancy phone, the flashy clothes, the gorgeous wife; things she so takes for granted that she throws them aside without thought. She's still a drunk, but she can blame it on a homophobic society or Tony Blair or genetically modified rice and somehow it's a charming quirk; she can call Jane's war a joke and a crime and still look offended when she moves out the same night.
Jane doesn't drink, doesn't even take the Percocet she was prescribed for her injuries; Jane was at the top of her class as a medical student; Jane wears practical jumpers and no-nonsense plaits; Jane was decorated and congratulated and politely shown the door.
Sometimes at night, she lies awake and grits her teeth and wants to cry unfair, unfair, unfair.
///
"Have you ever been sexually assaulted?"
That was Ella's idea of getting to know you, along with polite inquiries about suicidal ideation and substance abuse. Jane had glared at the curtains, willing them to catch fire. "Despite what some people believe, the Army aren't a gang of violent sex maniacs."
"But sexual harassment and violence do happen within the services." Ella could've been talking about the weather for all she seemed to care. "Surely you've endured unwanted attention, comments--"
"I went to medical school," Jane reminded her. "And got mistaken for a nurse at least once a week."
"And you've pursued a career in a male-dominated and often times rigidly sexist organization."
"No," Jane said, every syllable distinct. "I have never been sexually assaulted. I have never endured harassment more intense than idiotic jokes and the occasional drunken grab. If you're digging for something--"
"I'm not digging for anything, Dr. Watson." (It had started as 'Dr. Watson;' she wasn't sure when Ella had reduced her to 'Jane.') "I'm simply trying to cover all my bases. Female service members often complain that their unique needs aren't addressed by traditional forms of institutional support."
"My 'unique needs' are all in hand, thanks," Jane said, and patted the handle of her cane.
"I just want to ensure that you're getting the sort of help you need," Ella said, which, yeah, didn't that turn out to be a laugh?
///
Sherlock Holmes is a long, elegant streak of nothing with a moldering library and a pet skull. She brushes past people and things with an icy sort of charm, or looks at them with the precision of a laser sight, and it's not that Jane fancies her, exactly; more like she looks at Sherlock and sees something of the woman she wanted to be, had thought she was before bullets and bone fragments. She sees that confidence. She wants it back.
Sherlock has known Jane all of twenty-four hours before she asks, "You're an army doctor...any good?"
Jane forces herself to her feet, heart pounding oddly, like this is an inspection and there's a spot on her uniform. Sherlock's eyes are very pale and do not waver, do not even blink. "Very good," she says firmly.
"Seen a lot of injuries, then?" Sherlock pulls on leather gloves that mold to her hands, moves like a panther into Jane's personal space. "Violent deaths?"
Jane's voice is steady. "Yes."
Sherlock's is steadier; her smooth contralto slides into something almost intimate, just barely teasing. "Bit of trouble, too, I bet."
"Of course, yes." Burning petrol, blood on stone, the shock of recoil and adrenaline that tastes like copper and gold. Enough for a lifetime. Far too much."
One corner of Sherlock's mouth twitches, like she's fighting down a smile, like she's seeing something more than Jane's past in her words. "Want to see some more?"
"Oh, god, yes."
///
(Jane did not lie to Ella: she has never been assaulted. She might let the rest of it pass, the jokes and the touches and the slurs and the silences, because her father always said living well was the best revenge-steadfast in hardship, that was Jane-and because standing up was the best way to get labeled troublemaker, complainer, bitch; and she knew plenty of women who had never spoken up, never explained why they were bleeding out behind their eyes. But Jane would have said something, fought back with words as good as bullets. At least, she likes to think so.
Instead she got shot, and Ella can't seem to get past the fact that Jane volunteered to ride with the convoy. That she'd passed her personal weapons test with a 65 or better every year when only needed a 49. That when the bombs had started going off, Jane had leapt down from the truck to defend herself and her patients like the officer she was. Ella acts like Jane was trying to get shot, and Jane will have no problem canceling all her appointments when she realizes that she doesn't need the help.)
///
At one point she'd thought about naming it-the cane. Despite the claims of her physiotherapist, the limp seemed likely to be with her for the long haul. She had turned it over in her hands, the gray plastic and the cool aluminum, and thought about naming it Fido or Theodore or Gladstone or Stick, and painting it, and using it to trip irritating people. She thought about replacing it with something elegant and made of wood, something that she could match to her jewelry if she was the sort of person who matched things. She thought about hitting the damn thing against a wall until it bent.
It was her cane, her faithful supporter, the only one she had; and she'd thought about naming it because she'd thought it would be with her until the day she died, holding her up and holding her back, and if she named it then she might be able to stop hating it.
///
Sherlock's self-professed arch-enemy has a sing-song voice that makes Jane want to clean out her ears, as if she's going to find them coated with oil or slime. James Bond act aside, she thinks he's a bit ridiculous at first, and bit of a bastard on second thought: when he first offers her money she thinks he means prostitution, and she turns out not to be totally wrong.
There is no universe in which Jane would help him, but when he starts quoting Ella's beautiful handwriting, something inside her goes very cold and still. Her fingers curl in search of a trigger. "Are we done?" she asks briskly.
He looks into her and there are words in his eyes, professional inadequacy and trust issues and maybe even death wish. "You tell me."
Jane walks away from him; there are many things she can say and none that are constructive, none that will work with a man whose weapon is words. He could be many things, so many things, so dangerous, and she's not armed and she can't run-probably couldn't run-but she decides that if he meant to hurt her he'd have done so already, could have done easily. She is unarmed and alone and can't even run, but she can hold her head high as she walks away and maybe it'll feel like a win.
"I imagine people have already warned you to stay away from her," the man says, and Jane thinks of Mike's friendly cautions, of Anderson's poisonous expressions, of Sgt. Donovan saying freak, sociopath, she gets off on it-- "but I can see from your left hand that's not going to happen."
Left hands and mobile phones and for a moment Jane thinks oh, dear God, there are two of them. She shouldn't turn around, shouldn't take the bait, should just leave the bastard, shouldn't... "My what?" she demands.
"Show me," he says-orders, really, like a man used to being obeyed. That alone makes her want to walk away again. He comes to her and reaches out, ready to grab a wrist, grab a forearm--
"Don't." The word is low and a little bit hoarse, and he dares to look amused, avuncular, like she's a toddler who's just learned the word. Like touching her is his right. One good whack with the cane would probably break his kneecap, but she doesn't do it, just pulls her hand back when he's done with it and thinks maybe she could run after all, just a bit, if she had to.
The man with the umbrella turns away and says in a grandiose voice, "Most people blunder around this city, and all they see are streets, and shops, and cars...when you walk with Sherlock Holmes, you see the battlefield." He turns back to look at her with gimlet eyes. "You've seen it already, haven't you?"
"What's wrong with my hand?" she asks.
"You have an intermittent tremor in your left hand." Of course she bloody did; that was the side that got shot. But he continues: "Your therapist thinks it's Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. She thinks you're haunted by memories of your military service, that your delicate female psyche has been abraded by war."
"Who the hell are you?" she asks, because these words hurt, worse than when she reads them up-side down in a sunny office; when this man says them in a sing-song voice, they suddenly turn into knives. "How do you know that?"
"Fire her," the man says earnestly, and he's still looking at her with amusement. "She's got it the wrong way round. You're under stress right now and your hand is perfectly steady. You're not haunted by the war, Dr. Watson...you miss it."
And he leans in close, as tender as a lover and unwelcome as infection. "Welcome back."
He leaves her standing in the warehouse for a bit, shaking inside even if she knows how to hide it; leaves her alone and unarmed and unable to run, because she wants to say no and fuck you and stop, she wants this to stop, wants it to be as easy as a gun in her hand and a target on the other side of the range, on the side of the road--
Could be dangerous, Sherlock says.
And Jane's hand is perfectly still.
///
When she dreams about Afghanistan, it's never the quite times, the long waits between actions, the card games in the officer's mess. It's never the surgeries, either, no matter how sloppy they were, how rushed, how many explosions were happening around them or which ones didn't make it. It's always the convoy, or the snipers before that, or the helicopter evacuation before the snipers-it's always sound and fury and bullets and slurred Pashtun and running, she dreams about running and the bark of a gun in her hand, and when she wakes up hoarse and shaking she can't tell if it's fear or loss.
She always wakes up with an ache in her thigh and tingling in her arm and she's frustrated to tears and she wants it to stop. But she's also a little afraid of the day it does, the day she forgets she was ever a soldier. These wounds are important, they mean something: in arduis fidelis, steadfast in hardship, and nothing in Jane's life has ever been harder than this: but she was once a soldier, and no one, not even the army, can take that away.
///
Donovan called Sherlock a freak, looked at her with a poisonous expression; Donovan predicted Sherlock would become a murder and Sherlock seems almost flattered at the sentiment. "Statistically speaking, most murderers are male," she will tell Jane with a gleam in her eye. "Particularly the violent ones. A proper female serial killer would single-handedly revolutionize the field of criminology."
Sherlock will say things like that; will engage in fistfights with strangers; will risk her life to prove she's clever. Sherlock will play the violin at three o'clock in the morning and not speak for days and shoot at the walls when she's bored. Sherlock will turn Jane's world upside down. People will keep telling her Sherlock is unstable-dear, sweet Dr. Watson, that horrible woman will be the death of you--
And yet when they say "dangerous," that is where Jane will be.
///
In her first proper conversation with Sherlock Holmes, she makes the mistake of asking, "So...'Sherlock.'"
"Yes," she says, without looking away from 22 Northumberland Street. "Always."
"Sorry?"
Sherlock spares Jane a glance. "'Sherry' is something you cook with. 'Shirley' is half of an non-alcoholic cocktail. My name is Sherlock."
Oh. Of course. "No wonder you didn't guess about Harry, then," she says.
Sherlock makes a grunting sound, sort of like an angry cat. Jane will someday learn that this signifies quite dire contempt.
"People don't have archenemies," she adds after her food arrives, hoping it will clarify what the hell had happened with the umbrella man. "In real life. Doesn't happen."
"Doesn't it? Sounds dull." Sherlock twists, jacket sliding open to show the deep V of her blouse, almost down to her barely-there cleavage. She is very obviously not wearing a bra. Something about it makes Jane tug on her own jumper, the one that falls past her hips, that hides more than it reveals. "What do real people have, then, in their 'real lives'?"
Jane knows she's being mocked, but answers anyway. "Friends. People they like, people they don't like, boyfriends, girlfriends..."
"Dull," Sherlock repeats decisively.
"You don't have a boyfriend, then," Jane says, just to clarify, though it would hardly surprise her.
Sherlock's still staring out the window. "Boyfriend, no...not really my area."
"Oh, right..." Jane can't think of a better way to say this. "D'you have a girlfriend? Which is...fine, by the way."
"I know it's fine," Sherlock says, and suddenly turns her laser sights on Jane, eyebrows slightly lowered.
Jane waits, awkwardly, for her to elaborate and she doesn't. The candle on the table flickers. "So you've got a girlfrie--"
"No."
"All right. Okay." Jane looks back at the food, which is actually rather good, even if Angelo does think she's a lesbian. She has to admit the jumper and the boots are probably not helping her out on that front. "You're...unattached. Just like me. Fine."
Sherlock actually squirms for a moment; some day Jane will realize how rare that is. "Jane, erm. I think you should know I consider myself married to me work, and while I'm flattered--"
"No," Jane says, "no, I'm not-no," and when she realizes it sounds a little too shrill, adds, "I'm just saying-it's all fine."
"Good," Sherlock says, and it's the first time she gives Jane a certain look, slightly bemused and slightly pleased, as if Jane has just done something rare and wonderful and yet is to dense to know what it was. It will not be the last. "Thank you."
Jane plays back the conversation in her head, wondering how the hell that had just happened. Later she will realize that this kind of conversation usually ends in words like frigid or freak or real women, just the like deductions usually end in piss off. She will feel hot flashes of indignation on Sherlock's behalf, more than Sherlock ever seems to feel for herself, and will be horrible to Anderson for a week with no provocation.
In the present moment, though, there's a cab on Northumberland Street. And turns out that Jane can run.
///
Jane Watson likes to think of herself, deep down inside, as a good girl. She is not a drunken mess like Harry. She did not get fat like Mike. Unlike 327 British soldiers and contractors, she is not dead. She got top marks and she served her country and she has not got a selfish bone in her body.
That may actually be part of her problem.
Sherlock Holmes desecrates corpses and investigates murders and keeps eyeballs in the microwave. She is probably a former junkie and definitely a current one, with mystery being her drug of choice. She is rude and improbable and a little bit sociopathic, and has probably never compromised once in her life.
That might be part of her problem.
Someday she will realize: this is why they fit.
///
In the end, she walks around without direction until her heart rate has evened out, then doubles back around to where the police have set up a cordon. She can see Sherlock just inside the line of tape and police cars, bundled in her coat plus a garish orange blanket, talking quietly to Lestrade. If Jane is very very still, she can even hear what they're saying.
"The bullet they just dug out of the wall is from a handgun. A kill shot over that distance, from that kind of a weapon, that's a crack shot you're looking for, but not just a marksman-a fighter. His hands couldn't have shaken at all, so clearly he's acclimatized to violence. He didn't fire until I was in immediate danger, though, so strong moral principle. You're looking for a man, probably with a history of military service, nerves of steel..."
From across the lines, Sherlock's eyes suddenly meet Jane's. Narrow, just a tiny bit. She pretends she hasn't been eavesdropping and looks over her shoulder.
"...and tall," Sherlock continues slowly. "Very tall."
"Tall?" Lestrade demands.
"Yes, tall," Sherlock says. "Have you looked at the angles of the bullet holes? The man you are looking for is extremely tall, possibly suffers from a endocrine disorder, shoe size of at least thirteen."
"Really." Lestrade sounds unimpressed.
"Really!" Sherlock snaps. "There, I've solved it for you. Put out an alert to detain any giants spotted in Greater London. Now go away, you're annoying and I'm in shock."
By the time she gets free of the inspector and the blanket, Jane has managed to stop her hysterical giggling. "Sergeant Donovan has just been explaining everything," she said, admirably straight-faced in her own opinion. "Dreadful business."
"Good shot," Sherlock says quietly. "I may even forgive you for causing me to make the same mistake twice."
"You're admitting you make mistakes, then?" Jane asks, feigning surprise.
"Only if you admit to the powder burns on your fingers."
Well, there went that idea. Jane breathes deep and waits for the other shoe to drop, the judgment, the biting commentary.
"Are you all right?" is what Sherlock asks instead, and she even sounds genuinely concerned.
"Yes, of course I'm all right," Jane says quickly.
Sherlock raises one eyebrow. "You have just killed a man."
"Yes, I know." She killed a man, she may have saved Sherlock's life, she fired a gun and it was awful and glorious and and even Sherlock thinks she ought to be bothered by this, god. Later she will be able to unpack this in her head, much later, while she's giving the cane a proper burial; for now she pushes it down and stammers, "But...he wasn't a very nice man."
"No, he wasn't," Sherlock says, still a bit concerned, also a bit...something else.
"And frankly, a bloody awful cabby."
And then somehow they're giggling-Sherlock looks good when she laughs, good and relaxed and human. They're giggling like teenagers even though it's a crime scene, a war zone, even though Jane has just killed a man, and of course Sherlock is mad and reckless and possibly a bit sociopathic, but it appears that Jane is really not one to judge.
Steadfast in hardship, that's her. If she can survive this, she'll survive anything.