FIC: 'Scarlet for Me, Scarlet for You', John/Sherlock, PG-13
Title: Scarlet for Me, Scarlet for You
Author: neverfaraway
Fandom: Sherlock (BBC)
Rating: PG-13
Pairing: John/Sherlock
Words: 6750
Disclaimer: ACD, Gatiss + Moffat, BBC. No money made, no infringement intended.
WARNINGS: SPOILERS for 1x03 ‘The Great Game’. Discussion of depression/suicide = potentially triggery, but nothing particularly dark or graphic.
Summary: Living with Sherlock Holmes is tipping John Watson slowly over the edge into insanity. He's slightly worried he might be enjoying every minute of it.
A/N: Title from ‘Something’s Gotten Hold of My Heart’ by Gene Pitney, a version of which (by Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds) is on my Sherlock fanmix here.
“How old would you say he is, Mrs Hudson?”
Dr John Watson, late of the Royal Army Medical Corps, is sitting in an overstuffed armchair eating a custard cream from a chipped willow-patterned plate. He has spoken with his mouth full, something for which the subject of his question might have teased him, in that sardonic way of his, but probably would not disapprove. It is one of the perks of sharing a flat with a card-carrying sociopath that said flatmate holds a total disregard for notions of bad manners and social convention, and doesn’t seem to mind conversation muttered through a mouthful of biscuit, or feet on the coffee table at the end of a long day’s sleuthing.
“Sherlock, dear?” Mrs Hudson appears, bearing two cups of tea. “I’m not sure I’ve ever thought to ask.”
“If you had to guess?”
Mrs Hudson considers the question. John joins her in contemplation of Sherlock and his appearance, and wonders whether a haircut might go any way to making him at least look his age, though he doubts it.
“I shouldn’t like to guess - I can tell you it’s landed me in hot water before now.” Mrs Hudson takes a sip of tea, and John does not like to ask. “I spoke to that brother of his once, who told me Sherlock is a whole seven years younger than him. To look at them you wouldn’t even know they were related.”
John drinks his tea to mask a smile, suddenly imagining the fabled Holmes family Christmasses, and Sherlock and Mycroft glowering at each other over the turkey, brightly coloured paper hats upon their heads.
“I shouldn’t worry about that side of things, in any case, dear,” Mrs Hudson is saying, fishing around in the biscuit tin. “I’m sure stamina’s one of Sherlock’s strong points. I like a tall, thin man, too, you know; my late husband was built like a long distance runner. Biscuit, dear?”
John tries valiantly not to choke on the mouthful of tea he has just inhaled and gratefully accepts a chocolate digestive.
*
“You were going to take that damn pill, weren’t you?”
No, Sherlock thinks, of course not. He had known with 93% certainty that he had been handed the wrong pill - that is to say, the pill the cabbie had, in the end, hoped it was not.
It occurs to him, rather tangentially, that he has contemplated suicide. At his most petty, he’s considered it as the surest means of inconveniencing Mycroft. He has built up quite the mental repository of ways in which suicide might be achieved, is conversant with which ones will cause most and least pain, which will most satisfyingly baffle the police, and takes a professional interest in constructing a statistical analysis of cross-referenced motives and methodologies.
Suicide, Sherlock long ago decided, is not for him.
*
“Where’s Sarah?”
The question takes John by surprise while he is clearing away the breakfast things - Sherlock’s as well as his own, as he has apparently been too distracted to have taken his empty coffee mug from dining table to kitchen sink. He clears his throat, and closes the fridge door. “Why?”
Sherlock is staring out of the window, waiting for the siren and the blue lights and Lestrade’s heavy footsteps taking the stairs two at a time. “You haven’t seen her recently.”
“How do you know?” John demands. Of course Sherlock knows, but the proof of it still rankles, sometimes.
“She wears perfume during the day - something light and floral, rose and lavender - which I haven’t smelled on your clothes when you come back from the surgery for at least a week, meaning she hasn’t been coming in to see you in your consulting room while you’re at work. When you go out in the evenings she wears lipstick, blusher and powder foundation. There’s been no make-up on your collar and your clothes haven’t been removed, so I can only conclude you haven’t been to her flat for ‘coffee’ - ” Sherlock’s voice positively drips with scorn. “Would you like me to continue?”
“Oh, I’m sure you’re going to anyway.”
Sherlock turns to look at him, and his mouth twitches into a strange, grim line. “You hadn’t mentioned that you’d stopped seeing her.”
“We haven’t stopped,” John replies. He folds himself into the armchair and avoids Sherlock’s puzzled gaze. This is one situation in which John wishes that Sherlock would, for once, know exactly the right thing to say - and, indeed, when to say nothing at all.
“What happened?”
“We’re taking things slowly.” He rubs his leg absent-mindedly, an unconscious reaction to emotional discomfort which Sherlock has pointed out to him in the past. “Trying out being friends before being... anything else.”
“’Seeing other people’?” Sherlock says, smirking, eyebrows raised in lazy mockery.
John glares at him. “Is it any of your business?”
“Ah, so she wants to see other people.”
Sherlock turns back to the window with a cruel, victorious smile and John fights the urge to hurl the coffee mug at the back of his head.
*
John has continued his sessions with Ella. They’ve known each other too long - since his neurology rotation at Bart’s - not to honour appointments already made. And, in any case, it gets him out of the flat. Sherlock snorts disdainfully into a petri dish when John shrugs on his coat and announces his departure, and John ignores him.
“I’d like you to be careful, John.” Ella says after quarter of an hour’s awkward conversation, wearing her habitual expression of professional empathy, peering at him as though he might be on the verge of a nervous breakdown. “It’s very clear from what you’ve told me over our last few sessions that you’ve become very attached to Sherlock Holmes.”
“We live together,” John says, meaning I shot a man for him on the second day of our acquaintance.
“Yes.” Ella imbues a single syllable with a truly heroic level of disapproval. “How are you finding that?”
“What, living with Sherlock? Fine. Fraught, but fine. Well - fraught, infuriating, but generally fine.”
Ella says nothing, but makes a note in precise pencil, below the one stating ‘desire for confrontation’, which says ‘lack of concern re: S.H. sociopathic mania.’
John frowns and shifts in his seat. “Aren’t I paying you to diagnose me, not my flatmate?”
He is fixed with a look so carefully sculpted into neutrality that it falls just the right side of sceptical, and Ella steeples her fingers in a sure sign of an impending dressing down.
“In my professional opinion, John, you’ve displayed a comprehensive lack of interest in your own diagnosis since the first time you came to see me. The only time you’ve displayed any desire to talk to me is in discussion of Sherlock Holmes, not to mention the content of your blog.”
“What does that tell you about me?”
“What do you think it says about you, John?”
He has been asking himself the same question more or less constantly since Mike introduced them. He wonders briefly what Ella would say if he told her that Sherlock Holmes’ arch-nemesis-cum-brother had diagnosed him more accurately in five minutes than she’s managed in three months, but decides it isn’t worth earning her inevitable icy displeasure.
“John,” she says, determinedly over-using his name, “there are issues here which I think you could benefit from working on, but only if you feel ready to confront them. In all honesty, there’s very little more I can do for you unless you come to these sessions with a real desire to discuss your experiences, and your current situation, openly; it’s within your rights to come here every week and sit in glorious silence for an hour, but I’d suggest in your case that wouldn’t be the best use of your time. Or mine.”
“Are you firing me?”
“No, John, of course not. I’m offering you my professional advice. That’s what you wanted, isn’t it? A suggestion, so you can ignore it and carry on regardless?”
John gets to his feet and eyes her dubiously. “You’re not allowed to say any of these things to normal patients, you know.”
Ella smiles at him. “See you next week, John.”
*
Sherlock has read a paper on neuroscience which links increased likelihood of developing clinical depression to raised IQ. He has read fifty papers arguing the opposite, refuting the existence of any correlation between intelligence and depression, and another fifty backing up the initial hypothesis with statistics and clinical studies and all manner of things to which Sherlock is disinclined to pay any attention, unless they suddenly become relevant to a case.
As a certified genius, Sherlock has in any case already recognised his possible propensity for mental illness - other than the obvious, because he considers his being a sociopath more of an asset to his career of choice than a hindrance - and has catalogued and filed it away under the heading ‘things which might at some point become something of an issue’. Going cold turkey, which involved a locked room and handcuffing himself to a bed, in any case precipitated a tumble into depression of such severity that for several weeks Sherlock was unable to leave his flat, and found himself weeping inexplicably for hours on end.
Ultimately, it was resting control of his mind from the grasp of inadvisable pharmaceuticals which saved Sherlock from his darkest episode of instability and existential crisis. Intelligence, Sherlock has read, equips the individual to hide symptoms of depression from others, and often to think oneself out of the situation altogether. Thus far, he has found this to be true.
*
Sherlock has been working steadily at something for hours, labouring away at his makeshift lab and adding significantly to the kitchen’s already extensive gallery of unidentifiable stains. John, at the dining table and increasingly frustrated by his lack of progress with the blog, has carefully positioned himself so that becoming distracted by the mess Sherlock is making of their communal living space will pass for an excuse when he stretches, yawns, and closes the laptop’s lid with a satisfying click.
“Making progress?” he asks, as he wanders through the debris of a life lived in a perpetual state of disorganisation.
Sherlock gives a twitch, as though the question has literally jolted him out of his plane of concentration and sighs. “Potentially.”
Another alarming conversation with Mrs Hudson has been worrying at the fraying edges of John’s better judgement for some time now, and he thinks perhaps in this state of being absorbed in his work Sherlock might not react too objectionably if he picks away at the scab that’s formed since the subject was dropped so decisively at Angelo’s on the second day they met.
He decides, this being Sherlock, that subtlety will earn him nothing but a roll of the eyes and a facetious comment about his own sexual anxiety. Confrontation, then, is the only option.
“Mrs Hudson thinks you’ve had boyfriends.”
‘Other boyfriends’ was actually how Mrs Hudson had phrased it, but there’s no need to deliberately supply Sherlock with ammunition.
Sherlock puts down his scalpel with the air of a man contemplating violent crime and fixes him with an impatient frown. “Mrs Hudson is confused. If you must interrogate my landlady you could at least ask her about something more interesting than my sexual proclivities.”
“Such as?”
“Such as whether I have ever actually killed anyone. I expect if I had, Mrs Hudson would have decided against calling the police on the grounds that the business with her husband wasn’t entirely legal and I pay considerably over the odds for these poky little rooms of hers.”
“Is that a threat?”
“Absolutely not, I was speaking hypothetically.”
“Hypothetically speaking, if you weren’t completely impossible, might you have had boyfriends?”
“Ah, but I am.”
“But if you weren’t.”
Sherlock sighed impatiently and glanced up at him again over the rim of a cracked bell jar. “I don’t do business with supposition, John. The only thing of any importance to me is evidence, concrete and irrefutable.”
It probably says something revealing and distressing about John’s mental state that to him that almost sounded like a challenge.
*
John is still having trouble sleeping. Sherlock, who never seems to sleep, has a bed which, going on the single occasion John has seen it, has become something of an elephant’s graveyard for the rest of Sherlock’s belongings. John, upstairs in his dark little room, with its one casement window and its ancient, threadbare carpet, hears him shuffling about in the middle of the night, talking to himself, talking to the skull, scraping away at the knackered violin. All of it, really, is to be expected. The one thing John hasn’t heard is the thing that bothers him.
Sometimes, when John curls his hand around himself in the small, sleepless hours of the morning, he wonders whether Sherlock knows what he’s up to. He wonders whether, the next morning, Sherlock will be able to deduce his nocturnal activities, or whether it will even register in that hive-like brain of his, always buzzing with cases, details, questions.
Women are self-confessedly not Sherlock’s area of expertise. His possible interest in men - Sherlock’s interest in anyone sexually - shouldn’t be enough to unsettle John to this degree. It certainly hasn’t occurred to him that Sherlock might be self-aware enough to recognise his own loneliness. For that, John thinks he pities him.
*
Hotel Metropole, Bond Street. 10.30pm. John and Sherlock are awaiting the arrival of an unlikely looking couple - a businessman and a girl he’s picked up apparently on the street - who will ask the front desk to ensure they aren’t disturbed by housekeeping the next morning. The man will make clear his ability to pay handsomely for the privilege of an uninterrupted stay, and the pair will go together to a room, where a business deal will be negotiated. The man will be discretely armed, and the girl will say nothing; he is not a pimp, nor a client, and she is not a prostitute.
John’s back is to the pillar behind which they have concealed themselves and Sherlock is facing him, with a view over the rest of the foyer, maintaining the illusion of engaging him in conversation while scanning the face of every guest and member of staff in a rapid-fire search for their suspect. John’s Browning sits snugly against the waistband of his jeans, comforting and heavy and always a reminder that Sherlock has, on occasion, needed him to use it.
“Remind me again why we haven’t called Lestrade?”
Sherlock’s eyes barely flicker in his direction, yet his answer manages to adequately convey his disdain. “No time for tedious questions and superfluous explanations of the facts in words of two or fewer syllables.”
He nods. Sherlock is standing close enough that John wonders whether he’s deliberately trying to set up a facile disguise - the good old ‘kiss me, John, before they see us’ routine - before dismissing it out of hand. He shuts his eyes and pinches the bridge of his nose, counting the number of hours’ sleep he’s had in the past two days on the fingers of one hand.
“And remind me why we’re deliberately waiting to confront an armed man in a hotel, of all places?”
Sherlock looks at him then, as though weighing up benefit of providing an answer, before leaning closer - so close John smells washing powder on the clothes he took to the laundrette last week, the ones Sherlock didn’t even notice were missing, and then complained Mrs Hudson had put back in the wrong place in his wardrobe. “In practical terms, we’re here to prevent the negotiation of the harvesting of a vulnerable young woman’s kidney for use in an illegal organ transplant operation. I suspect you meant that question rather more philosophically.”
“I suspect I did, yes.”
“Then you know the answer to that already, John.” Sherlock glances at him sideways, as his attention slides away like oil over water to focus intently upon the hotel’s main entrance. “We’re both addicts in one way or another. Don’t we both ‘get off’ on this?”
“And by ‘this’, you mean...”
Sherlock smiles his most reptilian smile. “The case, obviously.”
“Obviously.”
Sherlock’s eyes snap to attention, and his hand grasps John’s wrist. “There, entering the lift.”
“Which floor?”
“Can’t see... going up...” John takes the opportunity to study Sherlock’s face in profile, watches his lips move as he counts the numbers scrolling on the digital display above the lift doors. “Ah. Twelfth floor. Take the stairs.”
John shoots out a hand to grab him before he disappears around the corner. “What are you going to do?”
“Improvise.”
Sherlock’s grin is far from reassuring.
*
The thing about living with Sherlock - one of the things to which John has had to learn to adapt - is that every episode of excitement and imminent mortal danger is interspersed with long numbers of days in which nothing at all happens. Sherlock always has correspondence to keep up with - emails from potential clients, forum responses, texts - and John takes what locum hours he can at the surgery, but a typical post-case come-down still results in hours spent sitting in the armchair, pretending to read the BMJ while Sherlock is in the kitchen poking at bits of dismembered corpses with the end of a pencil.
*
Sherlock hates inactivity. Given time to stare into space, his feverish mind turns to feelings of detachment from the rest of humanity, the familiar ennui and dissatisfaction at possessing the mental agility to outwit practically every single other person on the planet. John has the irritating ability to walk into their shared living room and plonk himself into an armchair just when Sherlock’s mood is at its very lowest.
He clatters about first thing in the morning when Sherlock is sleep-deprived and belligerent. Making tea generates an unseemly amount of noise and results in a chipped mug being deposited in front of him five minutes later, too milky and too sweet. Sherlock certainly hasn’t found a reason, in John Watson of all people, for living. It’s entirely plausible, however, that he’s found an excuse not to believe his own depressed propaganda on the worst of his black dog days: that the world and everything in it, including his own ridiculous existence, are devoid of all meaning.
“You know perfectly well I take my tea black,” Sherlock points out, eyeing the steaming contents of the mug. “This is verging on anaemic.” He takes a sip and grimaces. “And I didn’t realise we owned sugar.”
“You wouldn’t,” John replies, already behind his newspaper, “because you never make the tea. I’m not your housekeeper either, by the way, just in case you’d forgotten.”
“Why are you trying to give me type-II diabetes?”
“Your blood sugar’s low, you haven’t eaten anything but a prawn cracker and a chocolate digestive since yesterday lunch time.”
“It’s about time you took me out for dinner, then. Or breakfast.”
The front page of that morning’s Guardian was lowered. “What about your experiment?”
Sherlock scowled. “Inconclusive. Either I made a miscalculation with the sodium hypochlorite, or Molly provided me with a defective sample, so I’m taking the fingers back to Bart’s later. Angelo’s?”
John sighs and drops the paper, neatly folded, onto the coffee table. “Angelo’s.”
*
The next day Sherlock is out somewhere when John gets in from work. The note pinned to the mantelpiece is ambiguous - ‘Gone to see a man about a bicycle’ - and there is an unidentifiable smell lingering near the kitchen, like scorched rubber and oil of cloves. John opens the fridge and finds it empty apart from the remains of last week’s lasagne, so he resorts to the dusty bottle of whisky hidden behind the ancient jar of mixed herbs in the cupboard above the microwave, and pours himself a generous measure in a not-entirely-clean glass.
He is sitting very still in the armchair with his eyes closed and his head back against the upholstery when Sherlock arrives home an hour later and comes bounding up the stairs, sweeping into the room like a force of nature, wet from the rain and smelling faintly of formaldehyde.
“Oh good, you’re here,” Sherlock says, shrugging off his coat and flinging it onto the back of a chair. “You wouldn’t believe the trouble I’ve had talking Molly into letting me view Allbury’s body. I’ve a feeling she’s taken up with a man, likes to think I imagine she’s immune to my charms, but half a word about the colour of her earrings matching her eyes and she was falling over herself to be useful. Do you think we might go for Thai tonight? I feel like a change.”
John breathes very steadily through his nose, counting assiduously from one to ten, hoping - just this once - that Sherlock is a figment of his imagination. Sherlock, surprised by his silence, looks round at him, peeved.
“John? I said, ‘do you think we might have Thai tonight’?”
“I heard you, Sherlock.”
There is a pause, during which Sherlock frowns - not the frown he usually wears, which is the result of John disrupting his concentration with a harmless question about whether or not Sherlock ever intends to remove the trepanning drill from the cutlery draw, but a look of genuine curiosity. “You’ve been drinking,” he says eventually, as though trying to fit together mismatched pieces of a jigsaw.
“I haven’t ‘been drinking’,” John replies. “I’ve had a drink.”
With his eyes closed, he has the luxury of imagining Sherlock’s utter ineptitude in these sorts of situations - the awkwardness with which he holds himself, the sheer disinterest in the rest of humanity’s petty problems, and the associated suspicion that something is expected of him. Sherlock, it is clear, does not know what that something might be.
“A bad day at the surgery?” he ventures, and the utter discomfort in his tone is really too ridiculous.
John scrubs a hand over his face and sighs. “I had to refer a family this morning - little girl with a chest infection. Multiple bruises, a history of fractures, evidence of malnutrition.”
“And you notified the Social Services?”
John nods. “The mother’s got two other kids, Sherlock - if I’ve got it wrong...”
Sherlock looks at him shrewdly. “But you don’t think you have.”
John needs another drink, but feels Sherlock would extrapolate too much from it, so stays put. “It’s been so long since I’ve dealt with anything but trauma patients, tropical diseases - I’ve never actually done general practice, except a rotation while I was at Bart’s, god knows I’m not up-to-date with legal side of stuff GPs have to deal with these days - ”
“You treated a patient - a child - whose condition was suggestive of familial abuse, recognised a pattern of similar injuries occurring over a longer period of time, and notified the relevant authority whose remit it is to investigate the patient’s home situation in order to confirm or refute your suspicions. That all seems in order with the current legal and ethical obligations of your profession.”
John gapes at him, wondering whether the world is a simpler, easier place for Sherlock because of his inability to look beyond the certainties of ‘correct’ and ‘idiotic’, treating life like an algebraic equation. “I’m not used to making judgements like this, Sherlock - I’m not sure I’m capable - ”
“Nonsense,” Sherlock scoffs, turning away to take off his scarf. “You invaded Afghanistan.”
John considers the benefits of arguing it out, but decides there’s no point when Sherlock will never understand the concept or the complexity of his self-doubt.
Later, when he goes to bed, and he lies awake thinking about Sherlock and his apparently boundless capacity to believe in the righteousness of his decisions, he realises how reassuring it is.
*
Against his better judgement, John asks Carol, an obstetrician colleague of Mike’s, out for dinner, after meeting her at a party to which Sherlock declined his half of their joint invitation. He tells Sherlock nothing, mentioning only that he won’t be in on Wednesday night and Sherlock should therefore find something to eat by himself. Sherlock gives him a searching look, but turns back to his book without comment, and so John struggles with his own sense of guilt alone until Wednesday evening rolls around and he has a shave and puts on his second-best shirt.
He hurries round the kitchen looking for his keys, grabs his wallet from under yesterday’s newspaper, and gives Sherlock a brief goodbye.
Sherlock, seated at the dining table, ignores him until, at the very last moment, he calls down the stairs: “Give her my regards.”
John pauses on the doorstep. In the end, though, he can’t decipher Sherlock’s tone, and doesn’t know how he’d reply in any case, so he shuts the door quietly behind him and heads off down Baker Street towards Marylebone Road.
At the restaurant, John smiles when Carol arrives, five minutes late and shaking out her umbrella. She is small and curvy, has bright blue eyes and a frequent, easy laugh. She is the sort of woman the old John - John who only existed before the three tours of duty, and before Sherlock, and before Sarah - would have adored and taken back to his flat in a heartbeat. They talk about Bart’s, about Mike, about the future of the NHS, and then, after half a bottle of wine, about Carol’s plans to travel to South Asia with an aid team to set up a maternity hospital in Tamil Nadu. It’s then that John realises he’s spent the last ten minutes wishing he were here with Sherlock, because a man two tables away is having an argument with his female companion and John would bet any money Sherlock could confirm his hypothesis that they are a married man and his mistress, squabbling over his refusal to leave his wife.
It used to be that going out on a date, or going to a party at Mike’s, where he’d stand around looking uncomfortable and then leave before the conversation got round to his time in Afghanistan, was a welcome relief from Sherlock’s sometimes stifling company. Now, he realises with a start that the hollow feeling in the pit of his stomach is the feeling of missing him.
As epiphanies go, this is fairly monumental; it’s just a shame it’s happened while Carol’s smiling at him over the rim of her wine glass, waiting for him to answer a question about his consideration of joining Médecins Sans Frontières.
He clears his throat. “I’m sorry, er... what were you saying?”
Carol puts down her glass and frowns at him kindly, as though she’s about to simultaneously pat him on the hand and punch him on the arm. “You haven’t heard a word I’ve said in the past ten minutes, have you?”
It’s a sign of how exhausted he is that he doesn’t even consider bluffing. He sighs instead and puts down his empty coffee cup and decides he’d better apologise. “Sorry, no. It’s not you, it’s - well, it’s my flatmate, actually.”
And out comes the whole sorry tale, about Sherlock and the flat, the mess in the kitchen and the untuned violin at three in the morning, Sherlock’s caginess about his sexuality, Mrs Hudson’s assumptions, the permanent crick in his neck from sleeping on Sarah’s sofa - he doesn’t mention all the dinners out, or the fact that Sherlock makes him laugh like he hasn’t laughed in years, but the sentiment must be more than obvious, because Carol looks at him with an expression of exaggerated pity.
“I think it’s time you went home, don’t you?” she says, after complaining vehemently about the number of dates she’s been on recently with men who have turned out to be in the closet.
John stares at the coffee grounds in the bottom of his cup and doesn’t even bother to say ‘I’m not gay, it’s just Sherlock - ’ because he knows how repressed and self-deluded it would sound.
He apologises and attempts to pay for both their meals, but Carol fixes him with a steely glare and curtly assures him that she’s more than happy to go Dutch. He suddenly admires her to quite a ridiculous degree - perhaps this has always been his problem with women, that he idolises them to such an extent that he always feels painfully inadequate as a partner. They say goodnight at the taxi rank outside Marylebone Station, and Carol kisses him coolly and dispassionately on the cheek.
The walk home gives John the opportunity to marshal his thoughts, and he begins to think in familiar terms of evasive action and exit strategies. His life has somehow become a bizarre, unfathomable venn diagram of personal relationships, and he hasn’t a clue how to untangle himself from any one of them.
He rounds the corner onto Baker Street and looks up at the second floor window of 221B - the lights are on and the curtains drawn. Sherlock, no doubt, is hunched over John’s laptop, or lying on the sofa with his eyes closed and his hands held against his lips as if in prayer. John hopes Mrs Hudson was in earlier to take him some dinner, because he doesn’t like to think of him eating alone at the Chinese restaurant.
He lets himself in. Mrs Hudson is playing her records again, Gene Pitney drifting into the stairwell, accompanied by Mrs Hudson’s wavering, reedy soprano. John closes the door as quietly as possible and makes slow progress up the stairs because the cane, which he leaves in the umbrella stand by the front door for occasions just such as these, is missing. He expects to find Sherlock pacing about the living room, or ensconced in a chair wearing a watch and a surly expression.
Sherlock is not in the living room. Nor is he lurking in the kitchen, prodding at the kettle as though he’s incapable of making his own tea in John’s absence.
“Sherlock?” John calls, while he unbuttons his jacket. There is a half-eaten slice of toast on top of a pile of newspapers on the dining table. Does that mean Sherlock has gone out in a hurry, or that he simply couldn’t be bothered to find a plate?
Before he can speculate further, John’s phone vibrates in his pocket - he digs around to find it, flips up the screen, and finds the typical message waiting for him in his inbox.
Am at 11 Cloudesley Square. Will
text again if assistance needed.
SH.
John toys with the idea of replying to ask whether whatever’s going on at Cloudesley Square really requires Sherlock’s immediate attention, and can’t he come home instead to discuss the pressing matter of his flatmate’s sudden sexual crisis.
In the end, he types out a perfunctory ‘Ok, am at home. See you later’ and leaves it at that. He places the phone on the coffee table, makes a cup of tea, and falls asleep in the armchair with his jacket on.
*
Two days later, and the business with John Allbury, and Sherlock’s adventures in breaking and entering at residential addresses in Islington, has come to a violent conclusion. It has been a long 48 hours. John is rattled - on edge, adrenaline pumping round his body, fight-or-flight systems still engaged - and trying to pick glass out of Sherlock’s hand with a pair of tweezers loaned (rather grudgingly) to him by Sgt. Donovan.
“Next time I’ll let them cart you off to A&E,” he mutters, wincing as he draws a thin shard out of the fleshy pad at the base of Sherlock’s thumb.
Sherlock has been unusually cooperative, submitting to John’s care with a minimum of fuss. Now he is watching intently as John peers at his skin, detecting tiny, shining splinters, his breath gusting warm and damp across the back of John’s neck.
“Next time,” Sherlock grouses, “I’ll try not to break my fall into a plate glass window by sticking my hand through it first.”
John sighs and glances up at him, one finger resting lightly against the delicate skin of Sherlock’s wrist, absent-mindedly tracing its web of blue veins, reassuring himself of the solidity of his pulse. “You’re lucky it didn’t go straight through your wrist. You’re a bloody idiot,” he adds for good measure, inspecting the wounds. “I think that’s all of it - the bits big enough to see, in any case. You’ll have to see if you feel any more splinters in the next few days.”
Sherlock flexes his fingers and shoots John a brief, thoughtful smile.
Packing away Sherlock’s frankly laughable first aid kit - which had consisted of the dessicated remains of two ancient antiseptic wipes, a sticking plaster, and a bottle of thankfully unopened surgical spirit - John feels the buzz of imminent danger begin to ebb. In these exhausted hours after a near death experience he finds it impossible to wind down. In Afghanistan alcohol, cigarettes, even weed if you knew who to ask, were so ubiquitous it was like the army’s worst kept secret that half the infantry spent evenings in the aftermath of a firefight out of their heads. Sometimes John misses the mindlessness of it, the sheer mind-numbing simplicity of the company of other soldiers.
Sherlock is moving around in his bedroom, taking off his coat, probably getting ready for bed. John hears him shuffling about, the slide of drawers opening and closing, the thud of the window pulled closed against the unexpected frost.
“Sherlock,” he calls, “do you want a cup of tea?”
He waits, but no answer is forthcoming, so he sighs and takes the first aid kit with him out onto the landing. “Do you want a cup of tea, Sherlock?” he shouts on his way to the bathroom, glad Mrs Hudson has gone next door for her book club and can’t complain about the noise.
He sticks the first aid kit back in the bathroom cupboard, next to an old tube of toothpaste and an unlabelled bottle of pills. He closes the door and glances at himself in the mirror, noting with disgust the greying hair at his temples and the lines around his mouth, before turning his back on his reflection and heading back out onto the landing. He stops just short of colliding with Sherlock, whose nose is buried in a dilapidated book, and who looks up at him in surprise, grey eyes wide and for once unguarded.
“You mentioned tea?”
John looks at him and feels like laughing. Here, now, in this light - dust in his hair and his hand wrapped in a clean handkerchief in lieu of a bandage - Sherlock’s face is all shadows and cheekbones. Sherlock is frowning at him as though he’s on the verge of making a momentous discovery, and John thinks the wisest course of action would be to retreat to the armchair next door and feign sanity for at least the next few hours. The last dregs of adrenaline are still buzzing in his system. Fight or flight.
“Do you want some?” he asks, and immediately wants to swallow his tongue. “Tea, I mean. There are biscuits, if you can still stand those bourbons I bought last week.”
Sherlock’s mouth quirks sideways into one of those curious, touching little smiles of his. “Yes, biscuits. Splendid.”
*
Five days later, John comes home from another night on Sarah’s sofa to find Mycroft sitting in what he’s come to think of as his chair. The living room walls have been graffitied and shot at, and now the glass has been blown out of all the windows. The hot, tight feeling in his chest when he saw the news headline and stepped over the rubble of 224 Baker St. dissipates when Sherlock shoots an irritated glance at him over the bridge of that infernal violin.
It becomes clear to him over the course of the next 72 hours that Sherlock is not the man he has recently been guilty of building him up to be. He is selfish and infantile, and outwardly so coldly dispassionate that it makes John sick to think of that little boy and that poor, doomed old lady, left at the mercy of his mental acuities. But he watches carefully the emotions not crossing Sherlock’s impassive face in the seconds following the abrupt termination of the latter phone connection and is almost sure that, beneath the frustration and the disappointment, beats a tiny kernel of genuine concern.
John is used to combat situations. He has attended men injured by I.E.D.s while squaddies with metal detectors clear the ground a metre ahead of the stretcher bearers. There have been times, under fire and pinned down in indefensible positions, when John has made his peace with god and prepared himself for the worst. Standing at the edge of a swimming pool with a sniper’s rifle trained on the explosives bound to his chest ought to be one of those times. But he looks at Sherlock’s face, at the outstretched hand clutching his own army issue Browning - and he knows. Knows he’d die in the fragile hope of saving this man’s life, and throws himself at Moriarty with that aim firmly in mind. Sherlock’s look of grim, agonised, pre-emptive grief doesn’t really take him by surprise, and John fleetingly curses his luck, that the pair of them should come to this apparently mutual realisation now.
When Moriarty makes his threat - ‘I will burn the heart out of you’ - John barely has the wherewithal to be impressed that Sherlock doesn’t flinch, doesn’t glance his way. He is exhausted, he has two pounds of semtex strapped to his chest, and he never wants to see the unblinking red laser sight of a rifle focused anywhere on Sherlock’s person ever again. Even if ‘ever’ turns out only to consist of the next few minutes, while Sherlock and Moriarty resolve their exchange of wits and the sniper prepares to ignite John’s lethal suit of body-armour.
But then, unexpectedly, Moriarty is gone - and Sherlock is on his knees, shaking and gasping and tugging desperately at the straps to John’s vest.
“Alright?” he demands as he gets it off, rips it and the coat from John’s back, flings it the length of the pool. “Are you alright?”
“I’m fine. Sherlock - Sherlock.”
Sherlock, it is clear, is not fine. He is waving John’s gun about like it isn’t a loaded lethal weapon, carelessly pointing it at himself, at John, at the floor. “Are you ok?” John asks, from his position slumped against the cubicles.
“Me? Yeah, fine. I’m fine.” Sherlock pauses, scratches his head with the barrel of the gun, resumes pacing like a tiger in a cage. “That thing you did - you offered to do - that was... good.”
“I’m glad no one saw that.”
“Hmm?”
“You,” John says, righting his cardigan, “ripping my clothes off in a darkened swimming pool. People might talk.”
Sherlock looks at him, and John’s hopes there’s some prospect of his pulse returning to normal in the near future. “People do little else.”
John grins, laughs, and a red flickering light reappears at the junction of his shoulder.
His first thought is that it must be a mistake. An oversight. But then he looks up and sees that five similar lights dance on Sherlock’s chest, and hears Moriarty’s high, smug voice bouncing off the tiles. The cast of Sherlock’s mouth says more than John would be able to put into words, and he’s glad there won’t be a chance for either of them to foul things up by speaking, anyway.
John could have died a hundred times in Afghanistan, thirty six of those times involving home-made explosives. Sherlock looks at him - he nods.
“Do it, Sherlock,” Moriarty calls, his arms spread wide like a benevolent god offering his faithful servant a potshot. “Surprise me.”
Sherlock Holmes does not prevaricate. He decides upon a course of action and acts.
“John,” he shouts, as he aims, “get down!”
John has no time to hurl himself to the floor because Sherlock, throwing himself sideways as he fires, barrels into him and bears him to the ground, through a blue plastic curtain into one of the cubicles.
The explosion, when it comes, steals the breath from John’s body, turns the world into a nightmarish horizon of searing white light and then darkness. It bursts his eardrums, sets the world spinning, but his arms are around Sherlock - that much he knows.
***
Author: neverfaraway
Fandom: Sherlock (BBC)
Rating: PG-13
Pairing: John/Sherlock
Words: 6750
Disclaimer: ACD, Gatiss + Moffat, BBC. No money made, no infringement intended.
WARNINGS: SPOILERS for 1x03 ‘The Great Game’. Discussion of depression/suicide = potentially triggery, but nothing particularly dark or graphic.
Summary: Living with Sherlock Holmes is tipping John Watson slowly over the edge into insanity. He's slightly worried he might be enjoying every minute of it.
A/N: Title from ‘Something’s Gotten Hold of My Heart’ by Gene Pitney, a version of which (by Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds) is on my Sherlock fanmix here.
“How old would you say he is, Mrs Hudson?”
Dr John Watson, late of the Royal Army Medical Corps, is sitting in an overstuffed armchair eating a custard cream from a chipped willow-patterned plate. He has spoken with his mouth full, something for which the subject of his question might have teased him, in that sardonic way of his, but probably would not disapprove. It is one of the perks of sharing a flat with a card-carrying sociopath that said flatmate holds a total disregard for notions of bad manners and social convention, and doesn’t seem to mind conversation muttered through a mouthful of biscuit, or feet on the coffee table at the end of a long day’s sleuthing.
“Sherlock, dear?” Mrs Hudson appears, bearing two cups of tea. “I’m not sure I’ve ever thought to ask.”
“If you had to guess?”
Mrs Hudson considers the question. John joins her in contemplation of Sherlock and his appearance, and wonders whether a haircut might go any way to making him at least look his age, though he doubts it.
“I shouldn’t like to guess - I can tell you it’s landed me in hot water before now.” Mrs Hudson takes a sip of tea, and John does not like to ask. “I spoke to that brother of his once, who told me Sherlock is a whole seven years younger than him. To look at them you wouldn’t even know they were related.”
John drinks his tea to mask a smile, suddenly imagining the fabled Holmes family Christmasses, and Sherlock and Mycroft glowering at each other over the turkey, brightly coloured paper hats upon their heads.
“I shouldn’t worry about that side of things, in any case, dear,” Mrs Hudson is saying, fishing around in the biscuit tin. “I’m sure stamina’s one of Sherlock’s strong points. I like a tall, thin man, too, you know; my late husband was built like a long distance runner. Biscuit, dear?”
John tries valiantly not to choke on the mouthful of tea he has just inhaled and gratefully accepts a chocolate digestive.
*
“You were going to take that damn pill, weren’t you?”
No, Sherlock thinks, of course not. He had known with 93% certainty that he had been handed the wrong pill - that is to say, the pill the cabbie had, in the end, hoped it was not.
It occurs to him, rather tangentially, that he has contemplated suicide. At his most petty, he’s considered it as the surest means of inconveniencing Mycroft. He has built up quite the mental repository of ways in which suicide might be achieved, is conversant with which ones will cause most and least pain, which will most satisfyingly baffle the police, and takes a professional interest in constructing a statistical analysis of cross-referenced motives and methodologies.
Suicide, Sherlock long ago decided, is not for him.
*
“Where’s Sarah?”
The question takes John by surprise while he is clearing away the breakfast things - Sherlock’s as well as his own, as he has apparently been too distracted to have taken his empty coffee mug from dining table to kitchen sink. He clears his throat, and closes the fridge door. “Why?”
Sherlock is staring out of the window, waiting for the siren and the blue lights and Lestrade’s heavy footsteps taking the stairs two at a time. “You haven’t seen her recently.”
“How do you know?” John demands. Of course Sherlock knows, but the proof of it still rankles, sometimes.
“She wears perfume during the day - something light and floral, rose and lavender - which I haven’t smelled on your clothes when you come back from the surgery for at least a week, meaning she hasn’t been coming in to see you in your consulting room while you’re at work. When you go out in the evenings she wears lipstick, blusher and powder foundation. There’s been no make-up on your collar and your clothes haven’t been removed, so I can only conclude you haven’t been to her flat for ‘coffee’ - ” Sherlock’s voice positively drips with scorn. “Would you like me to continue?”
“Oh, I’m sure you’re going to anyway.”
Sherlock turns to look at him, and his mouth twitches into a strange, grim line. “You hadn’t mentioned that you’d stopped seeing her.”
“We haven’t stopped,” John replies. He folds himself into the armchair and avoids Sherlock’s puzzled gaze. This is one situation in which John wishes that Sherlock would, for once, know exactly the right thing to say - and, indeed, when to say nothing at all.
“What happened?”
“We’re taking things slowly.” He rubs his leg absent-mindedly, an unconscious reaction to emotional discomfort which Sherlock has pointed out to him in the past. “Trying out being friends before being... anything else.”
“’Seeing other people’?” Sherlock says, smirking, eyebrows raised in lazy mockery.
John glares at him. “Is it any of your business?”
“Ah, so she wants to see other people.”
Sherlock turns back to the window with a cruel, victorious smile and John fights the urge to hurl the coffee mug at the back of his head.
*
John has continued his sessions with Ella. They’ve known each other too long - since his neurology rotation at Bart’s - not to honour appointments already made. And, in any case, it gets him out of the flat. Sherlock snorts disdainfully into a petri dish when John shrugs on his coat and announces his departure, and John ignores him.
“I’d like you to be careful, John.” Ella says after quarter of an hour’s awkward conversation, wearing her habitual expression of professional empathy, peering at him as though he might be on the verge of a nervous breakdown. “It’s very clear from what you’ve told me over our last few sessions that you’ve become very attached to Sherlock Holmes.”
“We live together,” John says, meaning I shot a man for him on the second day of our acquaintance.
“Yes.” Ella imbues a single syllable with a truly heroic level of disapproval. “How are you finding that?”
“What, living with Sherlock? Fine. Fraught, but fine. Well - fraught, infuriating, but generally fine.”
Ella says nothing, but makes a note in precise pencil, below the one stating ‘desire for confrontation’, which says ‘lack of concern re: S.H. sociopathic mania.’
John frowns and shifts in his seat. “Aren’t I paying you to diagnose me, not my flatmate?”
He is fixed with a look so carefully sculpted into neutrality that it falls just the right side of sceptical, and Ella steeples her fingers in a sure sign of an impending dressing down.
“In my professional opinion, John, you’ve displayed a comprehensive lack of interest in your own diagnosis since the first time you came to see me. The only time you’ve displayed any desire to talk to me is in discussion of Sherlock Holmes, not to mention the content of your blog.”
“What does that tell you about me?”
“What do you think it says about you, John?”
He has been asking himself the same question more or less constantly since Mike introduced them. He wonders briefly what Ella would say if he told her that Sherlock Holmes’ arch-nemesis-cum-brother had diagnosed him more accurately in five minutes than she’s managed in three months, but decides it isn’t worth earning her inevitable icy displeasure.
“John,” she says, determinedly over-using his name, “there are issues here which I think you could benefit from working on, but only if you feel ready to confront them. In all honesty, there’s very little more I can do for you unless you come to these sessions with a real desire to discuss your experiences, and your current situation, openly; it’s within your rights to come here every week and sit in glorious silence for an hour, but I’d suggest in your case that wouldn’t be the best use of your time. Or mine.”
“Are you firing me?”
“No, John, of course not. I’m offering you my professional advice. That’s what you wanted, isn’t it? A suggestion, so you can ignore it and carry on regardless?”
John gets to his feet and eyes her dubiously. “You’re not allowed to say any of these things to normal patients, you know.”
Ella smiles at him. “See you next week, John.”
*
Sherlock has read a paper on neuroscience which links increased likelihood of developing clinical depression to raised IQ. He has read fifty papers arguing the opposite, refuting the existence of any correlation between intelligence and depression, and another fifty backing up the initial hypothesis with statistics and clinical studies and all manner of things to which Sherlock is disinclined to pay any attention, unless they suddenly become relevant to a case.
As a certified genius, Sherlock has in any case already recognised his possible propensity for mental illness - other than the obvious, because he considers his being a sociopath more of an asset to his career of choice than a hindrance - and has catalogued and filed it away under the heading ‘things which might at some point become something of an issue’. Going cold turkey, which involved a locked room and handcuffing himself to a bed, in any case precipitated a tumble into depression of such severity that for several weeks Sherlock was unable to leave his flat, and found himself weeping inexplicably for hours on end.
Ultimately, it was resting control of his mind from the grasp of inadvisable pharmaceuticals which saved Sherlock from his darkest episode of instability and existential crisis. Intelligence, Sherlock has read, equips the individual to hide symptoms of depression from others, and often to think oneself out of the situation altogether. Thus far, he has found this to be true.
*
Sherlock has been working steadily at something for hours, labouring away at his makeshift lab and adding significantly to the kitchen’s already extensive gallery of unidentifiable stains. John, at the dining table and increasingly frustrated by his lack of progress with the blog, has carefully positioned himself so that becoming distracted by the mess Sherlock is making of their communal living space will pass for an excuse when he stretches, yawns, and closes the laptop’s lid with a satisfying click.
“Making progress?” he asks, as he wanders through the debris of a life lived in a perpetual state of disorganisation.
Sherlock gives a twitch, as though the question has literally jolted him out of his plane of concentration and sighs. “Potentially.”
Another alarming conversation with Mrs Hudson has been worrying at the fraying edges of John’s better judgement for some time now, and he thinks perhaps in this state of being absorbed in his work Sherlock might not react too objectionably if he picks away at the scab that’s formed since the subject was dropped so decisively at Angelo’s on the second day they met.
He decides, this being Sherlock, that subtlety will earn him nothing but a roll of the eyes and a facetious comment about his own sexual anxiety. Confrontation, then, is the only option.
“Mrs Hudson thinks you’ve had boyfriends.”
‘Other boyfriends’ was actually how Mrs Hudson had phrased it, but there’s no need to deliberately supply Sherlock with ammunition.
Sherlock puts down his scalpel with the air of a man contemplating violent crime and fixes him with an impatient frown. “Mrs Hudson is confused. If you must interrogate my landlady you could at least ask her about something more interesting than my sexual proclivities.”
“Such as?”
“Such as whether I have ever actually killed anyone. I expect if I had, Mrs Hudson would have decided against calling the police on the grounds that the business with her husband wasn’t entirely legal and I pay considerably over the odds for these poky little rooms of hers.”
“Is that a threat?”
“Absolutely not, I was speaking hypothetically.”
“Hypothetically speaking, if you weren’t completely impossible, might you have had boyfriends?”
“Ah, but I am.”
“But if you weren’t.”
Sherlock sighed impatiently and glanced up at him again over the rim of a cracked bell jar. “I don’t do business with supposition, John. The only thing of any importance to me is evidence, concrete and irrefutable.”
It probably says something revealing and distressing about John’s mental state that to him that almost sounded like a challenge.
*
John is still having trouble sleeping. Sherlock, who never seems to sleep, has a bed which, going on the single occasion John has seen it, has become something of an elephant’s graveyard for the rest of Sherlock’s belongings. John, upstairs in his dark little room, with its one casement window and its ancient, threadbare carpet, hears him shuffling about in the middle of the night, talking to himself, talking to the skull, scraping away at the knackered violin. All of it, really, is to be expected. The one thing John hasn’t heard is the thing that bothers him.
Sometimes, when John curls his hand around himself in the small, sleepless hours of the morning, he wonders whether Sherlock knows what he’s up to. He wonders whether, the next morning, Sherlock will be able to deduce his nocturnal activities, or whether it will even register in that hive-like brain of his, always buzzing with cases, details, questions.
Women are self-confessedly not Sherlock’s area of expertise. His possible interest in men - Sherlock’s interest in anyone sexually - shouldn’t be enough to unsettle John to this degree. It certainly hasn’t occurred to him that Sherlock might be self-aware enough to recognise his own loneliness. For that, John thinks he pities him.
*
Hotel Metropole, Bond Street. 10.30pm. John and Sherlock are awaiting the arrival of an unlikely looking couple - a businessman and a girl he’s picked up apparently on the street - who will ask the front desk to ensure they aren’t disturbed by housekeeping the next morning. The man will make clear his ability to pay handsomely for the privilege of an uninterrupted stay, and the pair will go together to a room, where a business deal will be negotiated. The man will be discretely armed, and the girl will say nothing; he is not a pimp, nor a client, and she is not a prostitute.
John’s back is to the pillar behind which they have concealed themselves and Sherlock is facing him, with a view over the rest of the foyer, maintaining the illusion of engaging him in conversation while scanning the face of every guest and member of staff in a rapid-fire search for their suspect. John’s Browning sits snugly against the waistband of his jeans, comforting and heavy and always a reminder that Sherlock has, on occasion, needed him to use it.
“Remind me again why we haven’t called Lestrade?”
Sherlock’s eyes barely flicker in his direction, yet his answer manages to adequately convey his disdain. “No time for tedious questions and superfluous explanations of the facts in words of two or fewer syllables.”
He nods. Sherlock is standing close enough that John wonders whether he’s deliberately trying to set up a facile disguise - the good old ‘kiss me, John, before they see us’ routine - before dismissing it out of hand. He shuts his eyes and pinches the bridge of his nose, counting the number of hours’ sleep he’s had in the past two days on the fingers of one hand.
“And remind me why we’re deliberately waiting to confront an armed man in a hotel, of all places?”
Sherlock looks at him then, as though weighing up benefit of providing an answer, before leaning closer - so close John smells washing powder on the clothes he took to the laundrette last week, the ones Sherlock didn’t even notice were missing, and then complained Mrs Hudson had put back in the wrong place in his wardrobe. “In practical terms, we’re here to prevent the negotiation of the harvesting of a vulnerable young woman’s kidney for use in an illegal organ transplant operation. I suspect you meant that question rather more philosophically.”
“I suspect I did, yes.”
“Then you know the answer to that already, John.” Sherlock glances at him sideways, as his attention slides away like oil over water to focus intently upon the hotel’s main entrance. “We’re both addicts in one way or another. Don’t we both ‘get off’ on this?”
“And by ‘this’, you mean...”
Sherlock smiles his most reptilian smile. “The case, obviously.”
“Obviously.”
Sherlock’s eyes snap to attention, and his hand grasps John’s wrist. “There, entering the lift.”
“Which floor?”
“Can’t see... going up...” John takes the opportunity to study Sherlock’s face in profile, watches his lips move as he counts the numbers scrolling on the digital display above the lift doors. “Ah. Twelfth floor. Take the stairs.”
John shoots out a hand to grab him before he disappears around the corner. “What are you going to do?”
“Improvise.”
Sherlock’s grin is far from reassuring.
*
The thing about living with Sherlock - one of the things to which John has had to learn to adapt - is that every episode of excitement and imminent mortal danger is interspersed with long numbers of days in which nothing at all happens. Sherlock always has correspondence to keep up with - emails from potential clients, forum responses, texts - and John takes what locum hours he can at the surgery, but a typical post-case come-down still results in hours spent sitting in the armchair, pretending to read the BMJ while Sherlock is in the kitchen poking at bits of dismembered corpses with the end of a pencil.
*
Sherlock hates inactivity. Given time to stare into space, his feverish mind turns to feelings of detachment from the rest of humanity, the familiar ennui and dissatisfaction at possessing the mental agility to outwit practically every single other person on the planet. John has the irritating ability to walk into their shared living room and plonk himself into an armchair just when Sherlock’s mood is at its very lowest.
He clatters about first thing in the morning when Sherlock is sleep-deprived and belligerent. Making tea generates an unseemly amount of noise and results in a chipped mug being deposited in front of him five minutes later, too milky and too sweet. Sherlock certainly hasn’t found a reason, in John Watson of all people, for living. It’s entirely plausible, however, that he’s found an excuse not to believe his own depressed propaganda on the worst of his black dog days: that the world and everything in it, including his own ridiculous existence, are devoid of all meaning.
“You know perfectly well I take my tea black,” Sherlock points out, eyeing the steaming contents of the mug. “This is verging on anaemic.” He takes a sip and grimaces. “And I didn’t realise we owned sugar.”
“You wouldn’t,” John replies, already behind his newspaper, “because you never make the tea. I’m not your housekeeper either, by the way, just in case you’d forgotten.”
“Why are you trying to give me type-II diabetes?”
“Your blood sugar’s low, you haven’t eaten anything but a prawn cracker and a chocolate digestive since yesterday lunch time.”
“It’s about time you took me out for dinner, then. Or breakfast.”
The front page of that morning’s Guardian was lowered. “What about your experiment?”
Sherlock scowled. “Inconclusive. Either I made a miscalculation with the sodium hypochlorite, or Molly provided me with a defective sample, so I’m taking the fingers back to Bart’s later. Angelo’s?”
John sighs and drops the paper, neatly folded, onto the coffee table. “Angelo’s.”
*
The next day Sherlock is out somewhere when John gets in from work. The note pinned to the mantelpiece is ambiguous - ‘Gone to see a man about a bicycle’ - and there is an unidentifiable smell lingering near the kitchen, like scorched rubber and oil of cloves. John opens the fridge and finds it empty apart from the remains of last week’s lasagne, so he resorts to the dusty bottle of whisky hidden behind the ancient jar of mixed herbs in the cupboard above the microwave, and pours himself a generous measure in a not-entirely-clean glass.
He is sitting very still in the armchair with his eyes closed and his head back against the upholstery when Sherlock arrives home an hour later and comes bounding up the stairs, sweeping into the room like a force of nature, wet from the rain and smelling faintly of formaldehyde.
“Oh good, you’re here,” Sherlock says, shrugging off his coat and flinging it onto the back of a chair. “You wouldn’t believe the trouble I’ve had talking Molly into letting me view Allbury’s body. I’ve a feeling she’s taken up with a man, likes to think I imagine she’s immune to my charms, but half a word about the colour of her earrings matching her eyes and she was falling over herself to be useful. Do you think we might go for Thai tonight? I feel like a change.”
John breathes very steadily through his nose, counting assiduously from one to ten, hoping - just this once - that Sherlock is a figment of his imagination. Sherlock, surprised by his silence, looks round at him, peeved.
“John? I said, ‘do you think we might have Thai tonight’?”
“I heard you, Sherlock.”
There is a pause, during which Sherlock frowns - not the frown he usually wears, which is the result of John disrupting his concentration with a harmless question about whether or not Sherlock ever intends to remove the trepanning drill from the cutlery draw, but a look of genuine curiosity. “You’ve been drinking,” he says eventually, as though trying to fit together mismatched pieces of a jigsaw.
“I haven’t ‘been drinking’,” John replies. “I’ve had a drink.”
With his eyes closed, he has the luxury of imagining Sherlock’s utter ineptitude in these sorts of situations - the awkwardness with which he holds himself, the sheer disinterest in the rest of humanity’s petty problems, and the associated suspicion that something is expected of him. Sherlock, it is clear, does not know what that something might be.
“A bad day at the surgery?” he ventures, and the utter discomfort in his tone is really too ridiculous.
John scrubs a hand over his face and sighs. “I had to refer a family this morning - little girl with a chest infection. Multiple bruises, a history of fractures, evidence of malnutrition.”
“And you notified the Social Services?”
John nods. “The mother’s got two other kids, Sherlock - if I’ve got it wrong...”
Sherlock looks at him shrewdly. “But you don’t think you have.”
John needs another drink, but feels Sherlock would extrapolate too much from it, so stays put. “It’s been so long since I’ve dealt with anything but trauma patients, tropical diseases - I’ve never actually done general practice, except a rotation while I was at Bart’s, god knows I’m not up-to-date with legal side of stuff GPs have to deal with these days - ”
“You treated a patient - a child - whose condition was suggestive of familial abuse, recognised a pattern of similar injuries occurring over a longer period of time, and notified the relevant authority whose remit it is to investigate the patient’s home situation in order to confirm or refute your suspicions. That all seems in order with the current legal and ethical obligations of your profession.”
John gapes at him, wondering whether the world is a simpler, easier place for Sherlock because of his inability to look beyond the certainties of ‘correct’ and ‘idiotic’, treating life like an algebraic equation. “I’m not used to making judgements like this, Sherlock - I’m not sure I’m capable - ”
“Nonsense,” Sherlock scoffs, turning away to take off his scarf. “You invaded Afghanistan.”
John considers the benefits of arguing it out, but decides there’s no point when Sherlock will never understand the concept or the complexity of his self-doubt.
Later, when he goes to bed, and he lies awake thinking about Sherlock and his apparently boundless capacity to believe in the righteousness of his decisions, he realises how reassuring it is.
*
Against his better judgement, John asks Carol, an obstetrician colleague of Mike’s, out for dinner, after meeting her at a party to which Sherlock declined his half of their joint invitation. He tells Sherlock nothing, mentioning only that he won’t be in on Wednesday night and Sherlock should therefore find something to eat by himself. Sherlock gives him a searching look, but turns back to his book without comment, and so John struggles with his own sense of guilt alone until Wednesday evening rolls around and he has a shave and puts on his second-best shirt.
He hurries round the kitchen looking for his keys, grabs his wallet from under yesterday’s newspaper, and gives Sherlock a brief goodbye.
Sherlock, seated at the dining table, ignores him until, at the very last moment, he calls down the stairs: “Give her my regards.”
John pauses on the doorstep. In the end, though, he can’t decipher Sherlock’s tone, and doesn’t know how he’d reply in any case, so he shuts the door quietly behind him and heads off down Baker Street towards Marylebone Road.
At the restaurant, John smiles when Carol arrives, five minutes late and shaking out her umbrella. She is small and curvy, has bright blue eyes and a frequent, easy laugh. She is the sort of woman the old John - John who only existed before the three tours of duty, and before Sherlock, and before Sarah - would have adored and taken back to his flat in a heartbeat. They talk about Bart’s, about Mike, about the future of the NHS, and then, after half a bottle of wine, about Carol’s plans to travel to South Asia with an aid team to set up a maternity hospital in Tamil Nadu. It’s then that John realises he’s spent the last ten minutes wishing he were here with Sherlock, because a man two tables away is having an argument with his female companion and John would bet any money Sherlock could confirm his hypothesis that they are a married man and his mistress, squabbling over his refusal to leave his wife.
It used to be that going out on a date, or going to a party at Mike’s, where he’d stand around looking uncomfortable and then leave before the conversation got round to his time in Afghanistan, was a welcome relief from Sherlock’s sometimes stifling company. Now, he realises with a start that the hollow feeling in the pit of his stomach is the feeling of missing him.
As epiphanies go, this is fairly monumental; it’s just a shame it’s happened while Carol’s smiling at him over the rim of her wine glass, waiting for him to answer a question about his consideration of joining Médecins Sans Frontières.
He clears his throat. “I’m sorry, er... what were you saying?”
Carol puts down her glass and frowns at him kindly, as though she’s about to simultaneously pat him on the hand and punch him on the arm. “You haven’t heard a word I’ve said in the past ten minutes, have you?”
It’s a sign of how exhausted he is that he doesn’t even consider bluffing. He sighs instead and puts down his empty coffee cup and decides he’d better apologise. “Sorry, no. It’s not you, it’s - well, it’s my flatmate, actually.”
And out comes the whole sorry tale, about Sherlock and the flat, the mess in the kitchen and the untuned violin at three in the morning, Sherlock’s caginess about his sexuality, Mrs Hudson’s assumptions, the permanent crick in his neck from sleeping on Sarah’s sofa - he doesn’t mention all the dinners out, or the fact that Sherlock makes him laugh like he hasn’t laughed in years, but the sentiment must be more than obvious, because Carol looks at him with an expression of exaggerated pity.
“I think it’s time you went home, don’t you?” she says, after complaining vehemently about the number of dates she’s been on recently with men who have turned out to be in the closet.
John stares at the coffee grounds in the bottom of his cup and doesn’t even bother to say ‘I’m not gay, it’s just Sherlock - ’ because he knows how repressed and self-deluded it would sound.
He apologises and attempts to pay for both their meals, but Carol fixes him with a steely glare and curtly assures him that she’s more than happy to go Dutch. He suddenly admires her to quite a ridiculous degree - perhaps this has always been his problem with women, that he idolises them to such an extent that he always feels painfully inadequate as a partner. They say goodnight at the taxi rank outside Marylebone Station, and Carol kisses him coolly and dispassionately on the cheek.
The walk home gives John the opportunity to marshal his thoughts, and he begins to think in familiar terms of evasive action and exit strategies. His life has somehow become a bizarre, unfathomable venn diagram of personal relationships, and he hasn’t a clue how to untangle himself from any one of them.
He rounds the corner onto Baker Street and looks up at the second floor window of 221B - the lights are on and the curtains drawn. Sherlock, no doubt, is hunched over John’s laptop, or lying on the sofa with his eyes closed and his hands held against his lips as if in prayer. John hopes Mrs Hudson was in earlier to take him some dinner, because he doesn’t like to think of him eating alone at the Chinese restaurant.
He lets himself in. Mrs Hudson is playing her records again, Gene Pitney drifting into the stairwell, accompanied by Mrs Hudson’s wavering, reedy soprano. John closes the door as quietly as possible and makes slow progress up the stairs because the cane, which he leaves in the umbrella stand by the front door for occasions just such as these, is missing. He expects to find Sherlock pacing about the living room, or ensconced in a chair wearing a watch and a surly expression.
Sherlock is not in the living room. Nor is he lurking in the kitchen, prodding at the kettle as though he’s incapable of making his own tea in John’s absence.
“Sherlock?” John calls, while he unbuttons his jacket. There is a half-eaten slice of toast on top of a pile of newspapers on the dining table. Does that mean Sherlock has gone out in a hurry, or that he simply couldn’t be bothered to find a plate?
Before he can speculate further, John’s phone vibrates in his pocket - he digs around to find it, flips up the screen, and finds the typical message waiting for him in his inbox.
Am at 11 Cloudesley Square. Will
text again if assistance needed.
SH.
John toys with the idea of replying to ask whether whatever’s going on at Cloudesley Square really requires Sherlock’s immediate attention, and can’t he come home instead to discuss the pressing matter of his flatmate’s sudden sexual crisis.
In the end, he types out a perfunctory ‘Ok, am at home. See you later’ and leaves it at that. He places the phone on the coffee table, makes a cup of tea, and falls asleep in the armchair with his jacket on.
*
Two days later, and the business with John Allbury, and Sherlock’s adventures in breaking and entering at residential addresses in Islington, has come to a violent conclusion. It has been a long 48 hours. John is rattled - on edge, adrenaline pumping round his body, fight-or-flight systems still engaged - and trying to pick glass out of Sherlock’s hand with a pair of tweezers loaned (rather grudgingly) to him by Sgt. Donovan.
“Next time I’ll let them cart you off to A&E,” he mutters, wincing as he draws a thin shard out of the fleshy pad at the base of Sherlock’s thumb.
Sherlock has been unusually cooperative, submitting to John’s care with a minimum of fuss. Now he is watching intently as John peers at his skin, detecting tiny, shining splinters, his breath gusting warm and damp across the back of John’s neck.
“Next time,” Sherlock grouses, “I’ll try not to break my fall into a plate glass window by sticking my hand through it first.”
John sighs and glances up at him, one finger resting lightly against the delicate skin of Sherlock’s wrist, absent-mindedly tracing its web of blue veins, reassuring himself of the solidity of his pulse. “You’re lucky it didn’t go straight through your wrist. You’re a bloody idiot,” he adds for good measure, inspecting the wounds. “I think that’s all of it - the bits big enough to see, in any case. You’ll have to see if you feel any more splinters in the next few days.”
Sherlock flexes his fingers and shoots John a brief, thoughtful smile.
Packing away Sherlock’s frankly laughable first aid kit - which had consisted of the dessicated remains of two ancient antiseptic wipes, a sticking plaster, and a bottle of thankfully unopened surgical spirit - John feels the buzz of imminent danger begin to ebb. In these exhausted hours after a near death experience he finds it impossible to wind down. In Afghanistan alcohol, cigarettes, even weed if you knew who to ask, were so ubiquitous it was like the army’s worst kept secret that half the infantry spent evenings in the aftermath of a firefight out of their heads. Sometimes John misses the mindlessness of it, the sheer mind-numbing simplicity of the company of other soldiers.
Sherlock is moving around in his bedroom, taking off his coat, probably getting ready for bed. John hears him shuffling about, the slide of drawers opening and closing, the thud of the window pulled closed against the unexpected frost.
“Sherlock,” he calls, “do you want a cup of tea?”
He waits, but no answer is forthcoming, so he sighs and takes the first aid kit with him out onto the landing. “Do you want a cup of tea, Sherlock?” he shouts on his way to the bathroom, glad Mrs Hudson has gone next door for her book club and can’t complain about the noise.
He sticks the first aid kit back in the bathroom cupboard, next to an old tube of toothpaste and an unlabelled bottle of pills. He closes the door and glances at himself in the mirror, noting with disgust the greying hair at his temples and the lines around his mouth, before turning his back on his reflection and heading back out onto the landing. He stops just short of colliding with Sherlock, whose nose is buried in a dilapidated book, and who looks up at him in surprise, grey eyes wide and for once unguarded.
“You mentioned tea?”
John looks at him and feels like laughing. Here, now, in this light - dust in his hair and his hand wrapped in a clean handkerchief in lieu of a bandage - Sherlock’s face is all shadows and cheekbones. Sherlock is frowning at him as though he’s on the verge of making a momentous discovery, and John thinks the wisest course of action would be to retreat to the armchair next door and feign sanity for at least the next few hours. The last dregs of adrenaline are still buzzing in his system. Fight or flight.
“Do you want some?” he asks, and immediately wants to swallow his tongue. “Tea, I mean. There are biscuits, if you can still stand those bourbons I bought last week.”
Sherlock’s mouth quirks sideways into one of those curious, touching little smiles of his. “Yes, biscuits. Splendid.”
*
Five days later, John comes home from another night on Sarah’s sofa to find Mycroft sitting in what he’s come to think of as his chair. The living room walls have been graffitied and shot at, and now the glass has been blown out of all the windows. The hot, tight feeling in his chest when he saw the news headline and stepped over the rubble of 224 Baker St. dissipates when Sherlock shoots an irritated glance at him over the bridge of that infernal violin.
It becomes clear to him over the course of the next 72 hours that Sherlock is not the man he has recently been guilty of building him up to be. He is selfish and infantile, and outwardly so coldly dispassionate that it makes John sick to think of that little boy and that poor, doomed old lady, left at the mercy of his mental acuities. But he watches carefully the emotions not crossing Sherlock’s impassive face in the seconds following the abrupt termination of the latter phone connection and is almost sure that, beneath the frustration and the disappointment, beats a tiny kernel of genuine concern.
John is used to combat situations. He has attended men injured by I.E.D.s while squaddies with metal detectors clear the ground a metre ahead of the stretcher bearers. There have been times, under fire and pinned down in indefensible positions, when John has made his peace with god and prepared himself for the worst. Standing at the edge of a swimming pool with a sniper’s rifle trained on the explosives bound to his chest ought to be one of those times. But he looks at Sherlock’s face, at the outstretched hand clutching his own army issue Browning - and he knows. Knows he’d die in the fragile hope of saving this man’s life, and throws himself at Moriarty with that aim firmly in mind. Sherlock’s look of grim, agonised, pre-emptive grief doesn’t really take him by surprise, and John fleetingly curses his luck, that the pair of them should come to this apparently mutual realisation now.
When Moriarty makes his threat - ‘I will burn the heart out of you’ - John barely has the wherewithal to be impressed that Sherlock doesn’t flinch, doesn’t glance his way. He is exhausted, he has two pounds of semtex strapped to his chest, and he never wants to see the unblinking red laser sight of a rifle focused anywhere on Sherlock’s person ever again. Even if ‘ever’ turns out only to consist of the next few minutes, while Sherlock and Moriarty resolve their exchange of wits and the sniper prepares to ignite John’s lethal suit of body-armour.
But then, unexpectedly, Moriarty is gone - and Sherlock is on his knees, shaking and gasping and tugging desperately at the straps to John’s vest.
“Alright?” he demands as he gets it off, rips it and the coat from John’s back, flings it the length of the pool. “Are you alright?”
“I’m fine. Sherlock - Sherlock.”
Sherlock, it is clear, is not fine. He is waving John’s gun about like it isn’t a loaded lethal weapon, carelessly pointing it at himself, at John, at the floor. “Are you ok?” John asks, from his position slumped against the cubicles.
“Me? Yeah, fine. I’m fine.” Sherlock pauses, scratches his head with the barrel of the gun, resumes pacing like a tiger in a cage. “That thing you did - you offered to do - that was... good.”
“I’m glad no one saw that.”
“Hmm?”
“You,” John says, righting his cardigan, “ripping my clothes off in a darkened swimming pool. People might talk.”
Sherlock looks at him, and John’s hopes there’s some prospect of his pulse returning to normal in the near future. “People do little else.”
John grins, laughs, and a red flickering light reappears at the junction of his shoulder.
His first thought is that it must be a mistake. An oversight. But then he looks up and sees that five similar lights dance on Sherlock’s chest, and hears Moriarty’s high, smug voice bouncing off the tiles. The cast of Sherlock’s mouth says more than John would be able to put into words, and he’s glad there won’t be a chance for either of them to foul things up by speaking, anyway.
John could have died a hundred times in Afghanistan, thirty six of those times involving home-made explosives. Sherlock looks at him - he nods.
“Do it, Sherlock,” Moriarty calls, his arms spread wide like a benevolent god offering his faithful servant a potshot. “Surprise me.”
Sherlock Holmes does not prevaricate. He decides upon a course of action and acts.
“John,” he shouts, as he aims, “get down!”
John has no time to hurl himself to the floor because Sherlock, throwing himself sideways as he fires, barrels into him and bears him to the ground, through a blue plastic curtain into one of the cubicles.
The explosion, when it comes, steals the breath from John’s body, turns the world into a nightmarish horizon of searing white light and then darkness. It bursts his eardrums, sets the world spinning, but his arms are around Sherlock - that much he knows.
***