Fic: Unrepentant - Chapter 1 - Hurt is a Hungry God
Ladies and gentlemen, prepare for your hearts to be angsted out.
Special thanks to Ariane De Vere for being the brave one in the first line of fire.
Sherlock comes back from the dead, reveals himself to John, says sorry - well, after he realises that John is not taking the news in the same lighthearted manner in which it was delivered - and is thrown on the floor and half-strangled.
He explains - well, tries to - why he had to go away, and is punched in the face.
Explanations seem to have the same effect as apologies; that is, none whatsoever. The past is in the past, they say, so perhaps focusing on the future will help matters along. Sherlock invites John on his case and gets a bloody nose.
“John, I want to apologise-”
“Fuck off.”
“John, I’d like to-”
“Stop calling me and fuck off.”
Eventually, Sherlock stops calling John, no matter how Mrs. Hudson insists that he should. There are little cases, satisfyingly intricate and obscure, to keep him occupied while he lies low and waits for the rats to move on the one big case for Mycroft. The empty half of the flat hurts, but the pain is so small and so steady that he can ignore it if he wants to: it’s not worse than the inexplicable feeling of void he lived with for the past two years, and he’s already got used to that. It’s true he didn’t expect it to continue even after his return - but it’s also true that he didn’t know what to expect from his return in the first place. Getting back to things as they were?
Seriously, Sherlock?How much more of an idiot can you be?
Slotting seamlessly back into his old life, into his shared flat, with his friend-
What friend?John Watson has moved on with his life.
*
There’s John standing in the middle of the living room of 221B, hunching his shoulders and shifting his feet as if he doesn’t belong to this place any more- oh yes, he doesn’t. He chose not to. Sherlock finally closes the door after his fussing mother.
“Did they know, too?”
Sherlock doesn’t want to talk about this again. What more can he do than apologise and what more will John do than get angry? It’s not as if he tried to understand, even once. John doesn’t want to understand. On the contrary, he clearly wants Sherlock to understand something else, and Sherlock has no idea what that is.
“That you spent the last two years playing hide and seek.”
Hide? Yes, Sherlock thinks absently. Seek? Not so much. Were you looking for me? Would you have looked for me?
John is clearly waiting for an answer, for another reason to get angry. For another confirmation of his belief of how much he didn’t matter, less than Mycroft, less than Molly Hooper, less than the homeless network. For another opportunity not to relent, not to soften towards forgiveness, for another piece of the barricade he’s building between them. “Maybe.”
“Ah! So that’s why they weren’t at the funeral.”
“Sorry, sorry again!” Sherlock throws up his arms. What more does John expect? Sherlock can’t turn back time, and even if he could, he wouldn’t. He doesn’t even understand why he should be sorry, he can see it’s expected of him but why? Everyone keeps saying that John has every right to be angry with him but Sherlock simply doesn’t see why. Sherlock did what had to be done. He acted in John’s best interest.
John makes a move for the door. Cold November light filters through the curtains and adds years to the face Sherlock once knew so well that he could draw it with his eyes closed. The hideous moustache is gone but the layer of ancientness somehow remains, the bags under John’s eyes heavier, skin tone greyer, the light in his eyes duller. His temple and the side of one cheek are scratched from the bonfire, and his whole face looks swollen, badly fitting, less expressive, like a mask.
Sherlock watches him and draws a breath, searching for words that will have the power to redeem him, but there are none. None other than Sorry, Sorry again, only ever Sorry, and suddenly Sherlock can see a future cracking open in front of his mind’s eye, a narrow slice of a life where he accepts the blame without really understanding it. A future filled with apologies, with tokens of penance, of altering his personality, becoming softer, more vulnerable, more human, his spine crippling under the weight of paying attention to other people’s feelings. Every day another instalment of a debt which can never be paid off, endless atonement of this one mistake, and for what? For crumbs of the life he expected to get back in full.
Because John is already half gone. Sherlock did notice that he was about to propose to Mary when he interrupted their dinner, and Sherlock can see himself being guilted into attending his wedding, what a horrible idea, so many people, and perhaps even giving a speech in which he will apologise again, because that’s apparently a sign of being a good man. And John will accept all that as his due, because Sherlock has hurt him once and so now it’s his duty to make him happy forever. All that dedication, all that devotion, and John will never see it as a gift but only as a repayment, he will never really let go of his hurt, feeding on the apologies like a hungry pagan god feeds on the smell of the offerings, never sated, never content.
Sherlock doesn’t know if he deserves anything, but he’s sure he doesn’t deserve this.
“In fact, I am not sorry.”
The sarcastic grimace on John’s face freezes.
“Taking down Moriarty’s network was a job for which I was the most suited. I did what I had to do in order to succeed. It was an operation, not an adventure. You may be used to war but you aren’t a trained MI6 operative, you don’t know a thing about undercover missions, you would do me no good out there. Securing your safety by leaving you ignorant of the plan was part of it, and seeing as you were targeted and almost killed barely a week after I returned from the dead, it was not a superfluous measure. I rid both England and several other countries of a number of bad people, I may have saved the lives of people I shall never know, and you are alive and well. I shall never be sorry for that.”
For the little fraction of time it takes for the light to crawl through the dusty window and land softly on another layer of dust on the shelves across the room, John just stands there, eyes scrunched tight, colour rising on his face, nails digging into his palms-
-then Sherlock is slammed against the fireplace wall, the mantelpiece digging painfully into his back, into the worst gashes where he’s still not done healing, and John has one hand fisted in his collar and the fingers of the other clawing into a fat welt that runs over Sherlock’s shoulder as he grips him, hard, and the pain flares up so bright that Sherlock doesn’t even feel that John is shaking him, shaking him like a rag doll against the mantelpiece, and John is going to hit him and tell him to fuck off and it’s okay because this time it won’t be for trying to be nice, this time it won’t be for trying to say sorry.
*
The fabric of Sherlock’s shirt is solid and real under John’s fingers, various things are falling off the mantelpiece and scattering and rolling away on the hearth rug, and John wants to shake some sense into that bastard, into that fool who thinks that John is alive and well because of him-
“Go ahead, hit me.”
Sherlock’s voice is flat, as if he doesn’t care, as if he’s bored, and the only reason John doesn’t hit him right there and then is that he’s not sure if he would ever be able to stop.
“I wish…” he gets through gritted teeth instead and pushes Sherlock harder into the mantelpiece, “I wish there was a way… to make you feel what I felt. All that needless pain. Because hitting you? That doesn’t even come close.”
He shoves again, head bowed, like a bull ramming into a fence, and laughs into his own jacket. “I wish you had a bloody idea about how it can hurt.”
John breathes in, out, in. The red dots in his vision disappear, one at a time, and at last he can focus again. He notices Sherlock’s arms: held stiffly at his sides, white knuckles on balled fists. Sherlock is not fighting back, he’s not even trying to make John stop.
It’s odd. Why isn’t he fighting back?
John lifts his head and squints at Sherlock’s face, half expecting to find the familiar, haughty, bored expression to match the tone of voice from before. But there is-
Sherlock’s eyes are tightly closed, there are little wrinkles around the corners of his eyes and a tiny double line between his eyebrows. There are sunken shadows beneath his eyes, and his lips look thinner because he’s pressing them together. John blinks and blinks again. He knows this expression. He’s seen it a thousand times, in various forms and permutations, in his waiting room. Migraine, arthritis, menstrual cramps. It’s the face of a person in pain.
He abruptly lets go, hands falling uselessly. “I didn’t hit you that hard.”
He watches as Sherlock peels himself off the mantelpiece and straightens, and this time he doesn’t miss the wince Sherlock fails to suppress.
“What’s wrong?”
“It’s nothing.”
But John is really looking this time, really listening, and he realises that the voice is not flat with boredom. It’s purposefully toneless to keep out any breaking of tone, any slight hiss on the intake of breath.
John observes. The way Sherlock holds his head, the line of his shoulders as he takes a few steps away from him, closer to the window.
“Sherlock, what happened to your back?”
There is a momentary flicker in Sherlock’s face, something uncertain, the same second of distant calculation John saw just a moment before Sherlock said that he was not sorry. Then Sherlock lifts his chin.
“I’ve been caught, imprisoned and interrogated a couple of times, usually on purpose. Last time, in Serbia, Mycroft interrupted the proceedings prematurely in order to get me to London to solve a threat of terrorism. My back hasn’t had time to heal.”
John feels the blood drain from his heart. “Interrogated. You mean…”
Sherlock laughs. It isn’t a merry sound. “They weren’t particularly imaginative. And I made sure to get out before they started breaking bones.”
The room is suddenly so very cold. Out of the corners of his eyes, John sees his hands shaking, but he cannot feel them. He opens his mouth for breath, but the air doesn’t seem to reach his lungs. His heart constricts around a sudden emptiness, all his blood frozen somewhere in his legs, heavy as stone. He watches and observes and wishes he could just bloody stop, stop seeing what he sees, but the diagnostic part of his brain has finally caught up with him and it’s making up for the time lost, presenting him the facts with raw, brutal honesty.
He observes the way Sherlock keeps circling the room as he speaks, wandering in a seemingly mindless pattern but in fact never really turning his back on John, and when he stops, it’s only in such places where John won’t be in the way between him and the nearest escape route. He observes Sherlock’s gestures, his body language - God, this man used to be so eloquent in his gestures, grandeur and flourish in every move, and now he’s almost mute in comparison, closed-off and guarded.
John has seen these silenced bodies before, these strange dances designed to keep people at bay and always, always to stay close to the door. He used to meet them outside the group therapy rooms at the clinic where Ella Thompson works. Victims of violent assault. Victims of… John’s mind recoils from any further thought.
Regret stings like a loop of barbed wire around his throat, self-reproach cuts like broken glass between his teeth. Somehow, by some fucking miracle, John forces his feet to carry him into the bathroom so that he won’t throw up on the living room floor.
*
Sherlock swallows as he listens to the sounds of retching from the bathroom and feels a little sick himself. His eyes sting and he swallows again. He tastes salt. Interesting.
He miscalculated. He shouldn’t have told John about his injuries. He’s still not sure why he did tell him; an effort to honour John’s wish for honesty? Or a misjudged act of spite, a slap in the face for the hide and seek jibe?
It doesn’t matter. He should have predicted that John’s reaction would be unpleasant. Is it any wonder? John has always - well, at least before Sherlock jumped - seen him as something otherworldly, brilliant, perhaps incomprehensible, but definitely indestructible. But now Sherlock bears physical marks that prove he failed, that he wasn’t always in the position of power, that there was a time when he was at the mercy of nameless sadists who made him scream, and these marks won’t ever go away, he’ll be forever carrying their signature, a visible reminder of his humiliation.
Sherlock remembers what one of the gun sellers back there, somewhere in Ukraine, told him during one of their sessions - Torture dehumanizes. Tomorrow you’ll look in a mirror and see nothing but me, and some day your friends will look at you and see nothing but a pitiful, off-putting thing.
The look of disgust on John’s face before he ran away was clear enough.
Sherlock doesn’t wait to see it again.
*
When John first went to visit Harry after his discharge from the hospital, he was a decorated war hero, he no longer needed to keep his arm in a sling and he couldn’t take a step without the bloody cane; and the first thing Harry did upon seeing him was slap him across the face.
She didn’t apologise even after she’d had time to think about it. “You deserved it, Johnny. You’re the only one left, after Dad’s- you’re the only one I’ve got now, and you can’t just- you can’t. Don’t you understand?”
He did understand. But that didn’t make the slap any less wrong.
Now John stands in front of the sink in 221B’s bathroom and doesn’t dare to meet his own eyes in the mirror.
You’ve attacked, punched, thrown on the floor, a man returned from-
You’ve intimidated and traumatised a-
A war veteran.
Sherlock has no medals for bravery under fire. He doesn’t need a cane. His spine carriage is as proud as ever. But that doesn’t make his battle scars any less real.
Game of hide and seek. The worst thing is that for Sherlock it probably was a game, a game of wits, his only reward being the secret knowledge that he’s won. The public will never acclaim his taking down a criminal network whose existence wasn’t known to them in the first place.
But John knows that no matter how well suited for danger you are, the war always gets under your skin. You can be cheerful and above-it-all during the day but the nightmares come after nightfall, sucking the life out of you. It was not the battlefield of London where Sherlock spent those two years, not the stage of their crazy adventures. It’s different when you’re risking your life in a city where the ambulance will always arrive in time to save a life, and when you’re in a foreign country, undercover, on your own...
John shudders when he recalls the way Sherlock was speaking about his... interrogations. As if it was a... routine. He imagines himself alongside Sherlock in whatever trap they fell into, some criminals catching them both and using one of them as leverage so the other would talk.
You would do me no good out there.
John touches the scratches around his eye and a hazy memory floats up from the buzz of emotions in his head - the expression of relief on Sherlock’s face when John was dragged out of the bonfire. The drugs blurred his sense of time and place, he doesn’t really remember how he got out, but he remembers that Sherlock was there. Even though the last thing John told him was to fuck off.
John hopes there’s a way to take it back. The fact that Sherlock made him watch his own faked suicide and didn’t see fit to let him in on the secret for two years is still a poisoned sting wedged in his heart but he can see to it later, when he sorts out the mess he’s made out of Sherlock’s return. He splashes his face with cold water and goes back to the living room.
Sherlock is nowhere in the flat.
*
-We need to talk. J
...
“Sherlock, it’s me. Would you pick up your bloody phone?”
...
-Just let me make this right. Please. J
-You did nothing wrong, John. I understand completely. SH
“Like hell you do,” John growls, and dials again, but the number is no longer available.
*
Sherlock deduces the existence of the forgotten Underground station and disappears into the tunnels, alone. He finds the missing carriage and discovers the bomb. The clock’s ticking down, Sherlock watches the numbers go backwards, and for a moment he thinks how easy it would be to end like this. Ignore the off-switch and burn. His heart has been burnt out anyway, two years ago.
He wonders, if John had come down here with him, whether he would have forgiven him before they died together. Good man John with his belief in God, he would want to step before the face of the Almighty without any burdens on his conscience. Sherlock could make it easy for him. Get down on his knees, soak his voice with fake tears. Of course John would forgive him.
But it wouldn’t change anything. Sherlock would still be an unwanted misfit, an item buried and mourned over long ago, a dinosaur who survived his own extinction frozen under ice while the rest of the world changed around him. John has moved on with his life, he’s got a fiancée and a future, a future that doesn’t account for Sherlock in it.
At last, one number on the display catches his attention and Sherlock stops the count-down. The digits freeze for a moment, one minute and twenty-nine seconds to go. 1:29. Sherlock scoffs at himself. Sentiment.
As if the bomb didn’t want to give up, the numbers keep flickering - the programming battling with the off-switch.
1:28. 1:29. 1:28. 1:29 again.
January the 29th, the day he met John.
January the 28th, no John in his life.
Sherlock wishes he’d stopped the clock a second later.
Special thanks to Ariane De Vere for being the brave one in the first line of fire.
Sherlock comes back from the dead, reveals himself to John, says sorry - well, after he realises that John is not taking the news in the same lighthearted manner in which it was delivered - and is thrown on the floor and half-strangled.
He explains - well, tries to - why he had to go away, and is punched in the face.
Explanations seem to have the same effect as apologies; that is, none whatsoever. The past is in the past, they say, so perhaps focusing on the future will help matters along. Sherlock invites John on his case and gets a bloody nose.
“John, I want to apologise-”
“Fuck off.”
“John, I’d like to-”
“Stop calling me and fuck off.”
Eventually, Sherlock stops calling John, no matter how Mrs. Hudson insists that he should. There are little cases, satisfyingly intricate and obscure, to keep him occupied while he lies low and waits for the rats to move on the one big case for Mycroft. The empty half of the flat hurts, but the pain is so small and so steady that he can ignore it if he wants to: it’s not worse than the inexplicable feeling of void he lived with for the past two years, and he’s already got used to that. It’s true he didn’t expect it to continue even after his return - but it’s also true that he didn’t know what to expect from his return in the first place. Getting back to things as they were?
Seriously, Sherlock?How much more of an idiot can you be?
Slotting seamlessly back into his old life, into his shared flat, with his friend-
What friend?John Watson has moved on with his life.
*
There’s John standing in the middle of the living room of 221B, hunching his shoulders and shifting his feet as if he doesn’t belong to this place any more- oh yes, he doesn’t. He chose not to. Sherlock finally closes the door after his fussing mother.
“Did they know, too?”
Sherlock doesn’t want to talk about this again. What more can he do than apologise and what more will John do than get angry? It’s not as if he tried to understand, even once. John doesn’t want to understand. On the contrary, he clearly wants Sherlock to understand something else, and Sherlock has no idea what that is.
“That you spent the last two years playing hide and seek.”
Hide? Yes, Sherlock thinks absently. Seek? Not so much. Were you looking for me? Would you have looked for me?
John is clearly waiting for an answer, for another reason to get angry. For another confirmation of his belief of how much he didn’t matter, less than Mycroft, less than Molly Hooper, less than the homeless network. For another opportunity not to relent, not to soften towards forgiveness, for another piece of the barricade he’s building between them. “Maybe.”
“Ah! So that’s why they weren’t at the funeral.”
“Sorry, sorry again!” Sherlock throws up his arms. What more does John expect? Sherlock can’t turn back time, and even if he could, he wouldn’t. He doesn’t even understand why he should be sorry, he can see it’s expected of him but why? Everyone keeps saying that John has every right to be angry with him but Sherlock simply doesn’t see why. Sherlock did what had to be done. He acted in John’s best interest.
John makes a move for the door. Cold November light filters through the curtains and adds years to the face Sherlock once knew so well that he could draw it with his eyes closed. The hideous moustache is gone but the layer of ancientness somehow remains, the bags under John’s eyes heavier, skin tone greyer, the light in his eyes duller. His temple and the side of one cheek are scratched from the bonfire, and his whole face looks swollen, badly fitting, less expressive, like a mask.
Sherlock watches him and draws a breath, searching for words that will have the power to redeem him, but there are none. None other than Sorry, Sorry again, only ever Sorry, and suddenly Sherlock can see a future cracking open in front of his mind’s eye, a narrow slice of a life where he accepts the blame without really understanding it. A future filled with apologies, with tokens of penance, of altering his personality, becoming softer, more vulnerable, more human, his spine crippling under the weight of paying attention to other people’s feelings. Every day another instalment of a debt which can never be paid off, endless atonement of this one mistake, and for what? For crumbs of the life he expected to get back in full.
Because John is already half gone. Sherlock did notice that he was about to propose to Mary when he interrupted their dinner, and Sherlock can see himself being guilted into attending his wedding, what a horrible idea, so many people, and perhaps even giving a speech in which he will apologise again, because that’s apparently a sign of being a good man. And John will accept all that as his due, because Sherlock has hurt him once and so now it’s his duty to make him happy forever. All that dedication, all that devotion, and John will never see it as a gift but only as a repayment, he will never really let go of his hurt, feeding on the apologies like a hungry pagan god feeds on the smell of the offerings, never sated, never content.
Sherlock doesn’t know if he deserves anything, but he’s sure he doesn’t deserve this.
“In fact, I am not sorry.”
The sarcastic grimace on John’s face freezes.
“Taking down Moriarty’s network was a job for which I was the most suited. I did what I had to do in order to succeed. It was an operation, not an adventure. You may be used to war but you aren’t a trained MI6 operative, you don’t know a thing about undercover missions, you would do me no good out there. Securing your safety by leaving you ignorant of the plan was part of it, and seeing as you were targeted and almost killed barely a week after I returned from the dead, it was not a superfluous measure. I rid both England and several other countries of a number of bad people, I may have saved the lives of people I shall never know, and you are alive and well. I shall never be sorry for that.”
For the little fraction of time it takes for the light to crawl through the dusty window and land softly on another layer of dust on the shelves across the room, John just stands there, eyes scrunched tight, colour rising on his face, nails digging into his palms-
-then Sherlock is slammed against the fireplace wall, the mantelpiece digging painfully into his back, into the worst gashes where he’s still not done healing, and John has one hand fisted in his collar and the fingers of the other clawing into a fat welt that runs over Sherlock’s shoulder as he grips him, hard, and the pain flares up so bright that Sherlock doesn’t even feel that John is shaking him, shaking him like a rag doll against the mantelpiece, and John is going to hit him and tell him to fuck off and it’s okay because this time it won’t be for trying to be nice, this time it won’t be for trying to say sorry.
*
The fabric of Sherlock’s shirt is solid and real under John’s fingers, various things are falling off the mantelpiece and scattering and rolling away on the hearth rug, and John wants to shake some sense into that bastard, into that fool who thinks that John is alive and well because of him-
“Go ahead, hit me.”
Sherlock’s voice is flat, as if he doesn’t care, as if he’s bored, and the only reason John doesn’t hit him right there and then is that he’s not sure if he would ever be able to stop.
“I wish…” he gets through gritted teeth instead and pushes Sherlock harder into the mantelpiece, “I wish there was a way… to make you feel what I felt. All that needless pain. Because hitting you? That doesn’t even come close.”
He shoves again, head bowed, like a bull ramming into a fence, and laughs into his own jacket. “I wish you had a bloody idea about how it can hurt.”
John breathes in, out, in. The red dots in his vision disappear, one at a time, and at last he can focus again. He notices Sherlock’s arms: held stiffly at his sides, white knuckles on balled fists. Sherlock is not fighting back, he’s not even trying to make John stop.
It’s odd. Why isn’t he fighting back?
John lifts his head and squints at Sherlock’s face, half expecting to find the familiar, haughty, bored expression to match the tone of voice from before. But there is-
Sherlock’s eyes are tightly closed, there are little wrinkles around the corners of his eyes and a tiny double line between his eyebrows. There are sunken shadows beneath his eyes, and his lips look thinner because he’s pressing them together. John blinks and blinks again. He knows this expression. He’s seen it a thousand times, in various forms and permutations, in his waiting room. Migraine, arthritis, menstrual cramps. It’s the face of a person in pain.
He abruptly lets go, hands falling uselessly. “I didn’t hit you that hard.”
He watches as Sherlock peels himself off the mantelpiece and straightens, and this time he doesn’t miss the wince Sherlock fails to suppress.
“What’s wrong?”
“It’s nothing.”
But John is really looking this time, really listening, and he realises that the voice is not flat with boredom. It’s purposefully toneless to keep out any breaking of tone, any slight hiss on the intake of breath.
John observes. The way Sherlock holds his head, the line of his shoulders as he takes a few steps away from him, closer to the window.
“Sherlock, what happened to your back?”
There is a momentary flicker in Sherlock’s face, something uncertain, the same second of distant calculation John saw just a moment before Sherlock said that he was not sorry. Then Sherlock lifts his chin.
“I’ve been caught, imprisoned and interrogated a couple of times, usually on purpose. Last time, in Serbia, Mycroft interrupted the proceedings prematurely in order to get me to London to solve a threat of terrorism. My back hasn’t had time to heal.”
John feels the blood drain from his heart. “Interrogated. You mean…”
Sherlock laughs. It isn’t a merry sound. “They weren’t particularly imaginative. And I made sure to get out before they started breaking bones.”
The room is suddenly so very cold. Out of the corners of his eyes, John sees his hands shaking, but he cannot feel them. He opens his mouth for breath, but the air doesn’t seem to reach his lungs. His heart constricts around a sudden emptiness, all his blood frozen somewhere in his legs, heavy as stone. He watches and observes and wishes he could just bloody stop, stop seeing what he sees, but the diagnostic part of his brain has finally caught up with him and it’s making up for the time lost, presenting him the facts with raw, brutal honesty.
He observes the way Sherlock keeps circling the room as he speaks, wandering in a seemingly mindless pattern but in fact never really turning his back on John, and when he stops, it’s only in such places where John won’t be in the way between him and the nearest escape route. He observes Sherlock’s gestures, his body language - God, this man used to be so eloquent in his gestures, grandeur and flourish in every move, and now he’s almost mute in comparison, closed-off and guarded.
John has seen these silenced bodies before, these strange dances designed to keep people at bay and always, always to stay close to the door. He used to meet them outside the group therapy rooms at the clinic where Ella Thompson works. Victims of violent assault. Victims of… John’s mind recoils from any further thought.
Regret stings like a loop of barbed wire around his throat, self-reproach cuts like broken glass between his teeth. Somehow, by some fucking miracle, John forces his feet to carry him into the bathroom so that he won’t throw up on the living room floor.
*
Sherlock swallows as he listens to the sounds of retching from the bathroom and feels a little sick himself. His eyes sting and he swallows again. He tastes salt. Interesting.
He miscalculated. He shouldn’t have told John about his injuries. He’s still not sure why he did tell him; an effort to honour John’s wish for honesty? Or a misjudged act of spite, a slap in the face for the hide and seek jibe?
It doesn’t matter. He should have predicted that John’s reaction would be unpleasant. Is it any wonder? John has always - well, at least before Sherlock jumped - seen him as something otherworldly, brilliant, perhaps incomprehensible, but definitely indestructible. But now Sherlock bears physical marks that prove he failed, that he wasn’t always in the position of power, that there was a time when he was at the mercy of nameless sadists who made him scream, and these marks won’t ever go away, he’ll be forever carrying their signature, a visible reminder of his humiliation.
Sherlock remembers what one of the gun sellers back there, somewhere in Ukraine, told him during one of their sessions - Torture dehumanizes. Tomorrow you’ll look in a mirror and see nothing but me, and some day your friends will look at you and see nothing but a pitiful, off-putting thing.
The look of disgust on John’s face before he ran away was clear enough.
Sherlock doesn’t wait to see it again.
*
When John first went to visit Harry after his discharge from the hospital, he was a decorated war hero, he no longer needed to keep his arm in a sling and he couldn’t take a step without the bloody cane; and the first thing Harry did upon seeing him was slap him across the face.
She didn’t apologise even after she’d had time to think about it. “You deserved it, Johnny. You’re the only one left, after Dad’s- you’re the only one I’ve got now, and you can’t just- you can’t. Don’t you understand?”
He did understand. But that didn’t make the slap any less wrong.
Now John stands in front of the sink in 221B’s bathroom and doesn’t dare to meet his own eyes in the mirror.
You’ve attacked, punched, thrown on the floor, a man returned from-
You’ve intimidated and traumatised a-
A war veteran.
Sherlock has no medals for bravery under fire. He doesn’t need a cane. His spine carriage is as proud as ever. But that doesn’t make his battle scars any less real.
Game of hide and seek. The worst thing is that for Sherlock it probably was a game, a game of wits, his only reward being the secret knowledge that he’s won. The public will never acclaim his taking down a criminal network whose existence wasn’t known to them in the first place.
But John knows that no matter how well suited for danger you are, the war always gets under your skin. You can be cheerful and above-it-all during the day but the nightmares come after nightfall, sucking the life out of you. It was not the battlefield of London where Sherlock spent those two years, not the stage of their crazy adventures. It’s different when you’re risking your life in a city where the ambulance will always arrive in time to save a life, and when you’re in a foreign country, undercover, on your own...
John shudders when he recalls the way Sherlock was speaking about his... interrogations. As if it was a... routine. He imagines himself alongside Sherlock in whatever trap they fell into, some criminals catching them both and using one of them as leverage so the other would talk.
You would do me no good out there.
John touches the scratches around his eye and a hazy memory floats up from the buzz of emotions in his head - the expression of relief on Sherlock’s face when John was dragged out of the bonfire. The drugs blurred his sense of time and place, he doesn’t really remember how he got out, but he remembers that Sherlock was there. Even though the last thing John told him was to fuck off.
John hopes there’s a way to take it back. The fact that Sherlock made him watch his own faked suicide and didn’t see fit to let him in on the secret for two years is still a poisoned sting wedged in his heart but he can see to it later, when he sorts out the mess he’s made out of Sherlock’s return. He splashes his face with cold water and goes back to the living room.
Sherlock is nowhere in the flat.
*
-We need to talk. J
...
“Sherlock, it’s me. Would you pick up your bloody phone?”
...
-Just let me make this right. Please. J
-You did nothing wrong, John. I understand completely. SH
“Like hell you do,” John growls, and dials again, but the number is no longer available.
*
Sherlock deduces the existence of the forgotten Underground station and disappears into the tunnels, alone. He finds the missing carriage and discovers the bomb. The clock’s ticking down, Sherlock watches the numbers go backwards, and for a moment he thinks how easy it would be to end like this. Ignore the off-switch and burn. His heart has been burnt out anyway, two years ago.
He wonders, if John had come down here with him, whether he would have forgiven him before they died together. Good man John with his belief in God, he would want to step before the face of the Almighty without any burdens on his conscience. Sherlock could make it easy for him. Get down on his knees, soak his voice with fake tears. Of course John would forgive him.
But it wouldn’t change anything. Sherlock would still be an unwanted misfit, an item buried and mourned over long ago, a dinosaur who survived his own extinction frozen under ice while the rest of the world changed around him. John has moved on with his life, he’s got a fiancée and a future, a future that doesn’t account for Sherlock in it.
At last, one number on the display catches his attention and Sherlock stops the count-down. The digits freeze for a moment, one minute and twenty-nine seconds to go. 1:29. Sherlock scoffs at himself. Sentiment.
As if the bomb didn’t want to give up, the numbers keep flickering - the programming battling with the off-switch.
1:28. 1:29. 1:28. 1:29 again.
January the 29th, the day he met John.
January the 28th, no John in his life.
Sherlock wishes he’d stopped the clock a second later.