heart in hand (if you stumble, you'll drop it) . Sherlock . One-shot
Title: heart in hand (if you stumble, you’ll drop it)
Author: pprfaith/ Faithunbreakable
Disclaimer: I do not own Sherlock.
Pairing: Gen. Ish. Slight girl!john/Sherlock, but not really.
Rating: PG-13/ R.
Word Count: A bit under 6500.
Warnings: Meandering prose, slight angsting, discussion of suicide. Genderswap and asexuality.
Summary: John Watson isn’t really sure why she’s living with Sherlock Holmes. Or: The pulse of a human heart.
A/N: This was supposed to be a fic about Sherlock’s dislike of women and where it comes from. Then it became about girl!John and her life. Then it became about Ace!Sherlock and after that, I just gave up trying to figure out what the heck I was writing. Also, there are a lot of halves in this story. I don’t know why.Thanks go to vesselandpestle for shoving me into introducing me to the fandom and to romanaorfred for looking this over and telling me it didn’t suck. All remaining mistakes are my own.
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heart in hand (if you stumble, you’ll drop it)
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John Watson enters the laboratory a step behind Mike and catches a glimpse, quick and sharp, of the potential flatmate. Pale and tall, dark hair, expensive suit.
He doesn’t look up from the microscope when Mike says, “Sherlock Holmes, John Watson.”
John makes a noise that’s half greeting, half snort, waits. Then Holmes finishes whatever he’s doing, looks up and takes John in, sneakered feet to unruly dirty-blonde hair. His expression shifts from neutral to a split second of surprise, then disdain. John has seen it before, a million times, as a doctor, as a soldier, on the faces of a thousand men as they realize that John Watson is not actually a John, but a Joanne with a funny nickname.
Someone asked her once why she keeps going by John if it causes so much confusion. She shrugged and said, “Why should I change it?”
Her friend laughed, shook her head, said, “That’s pretty much you in five words, isn’t it?”
Holmes looks at her the way most men do when they find a woman in a male-dominated world; doubtful and disappointed, mildly disgusted and confused. What the bloody hell is she doing here, short, blonde, with ovaries. They’re all the same and John watches Holmes’s expression shutter the same way she always does: half amused, half hurt.
He looks at Mike, asks, “What can I do for you?”
From Mike’s confused look and the tension in Holmes’s shoulders, John is sure that he knows exactly why they are here and plays dumb. Plays games. She sighs and shakes her head, brushing a stray hair out of her face. Always the same. Sometimes she thinks life would be easier if she just gave up, put on a skirt, like Harry, and turned gay, like Harry. Nail polish and curling irons instead of scalpels and guns. Be a Joanie, maybe, instead of a John.
She’s too stubborn, though.
“John here’s looking for a flatmate, too, as it happens,” Mike finally answers. Holmes nods, slings his scarf around his long neck, pulls on his coat.
“Ah,” he says, not looking at them. “Got to dash. Forgot my riding crop in the mortuary.”
A whirl of motion and fabric and he brushes past her, almost kicking her cane out from under her, and is gone. Obviously, he doesn’t want a flatmate anymore. Or rather, he doesn’t want John for a flatmate.
She smiles without humour because really, people keep telling her the military is a hard place for women when, really, the entire world is a hard place for women. She turns to Mike, about to relieve him of any responsibility for his friend’s rudeness, when the door suddenly opens again and Holmes sticks his head in, looking solely at Mike. “Can I borrow your phone? Need to send a text.”
Mike shrugs, shakes his head. “Sorry. It’s in my coat.”
John has no idea why, but she pulls out hers, holds it out. “Take mine,” she offers and suddenly, he looks at her like she just did a trick.
It’s the first time he meets her gaze and she finds that it burns straight through her and into the wall behind her. He accepts the phone without looking down at it and she shifts a bit, leaning back against a table, asking idly, “So is it women in general that you dislike, or just the useless ones?”
She taps her cane against the side of her shoe in emphasis and waits, patient and well-practiced in this game, this game of who’s the better sex and everything women can’t (shouldn’t) do. She already knows the answer, too, but that isn’t why she asks.
He scoffs while his fingers fly over the keys of her phone. “Don’t flatter yourself. Almost everyone is useless. However, most people wouldn’t call an army doctor that.”
She could be surprised at the fact that he seems to have her pegged, but she shoves the feeling down, chooses instead to correct, “Former army doctor. And you don’t strike me as ‘most people’. You also haven’t answered my question.”
He looks at her again, another trick, something interesting. She forces herself to hold still and wait. “Indeed,” he finally says, handing back her phone. “221b, Baker Street, tomorrow at seven. We’ll have a look at the flat.”
Then he’s gone and John isn’t sure whether to be insulted or amused, settles for somewhere in-between and knows that she’ll be there, tomorrow at seven if for no other reason that this: She’s been home from Afghanistan for almost three months and this was the first spot of excitement she’s head since then.
.
There was a man, in Afghanistan, that John thinks she was in love with. Nothing ever happened, he was a fellow soldier and there was really no time for more than a bit of friendship and some shared smiles, but she thinks she wanted there to be more.
She thinks she wanted to keep him close and inhale his scent, to know him.
She got to know him, eventually, like this: her hands holding his insides in, blood and splinters everywhere, fire overhead, screaming, her scrambling for her gun with one hand, slick fingers sliding off the dark metal, him wheezing and dying and then fire in her shoulder and silence under her hands. She knew his insides and she knew his last breath, knew the feeling of his hand finding her wrist, holding on and then going limp. She knew those things about him and she knows them still, will know them until she dies.
Her therapist thinks she has PTSD, thinks she suffers from massive trauma. John, who knows the symptoms of the disorder as well as any other doctor or soldier, disagrees in the silence of her mind. She’s traumatized, alright, but it’s not the war and the guns and the fire and the screams that fucked her up. She thinks it was the feeling of that hand, the one that was only half familiar, going limp around her wrist, sliding away.
She thinks what fucked her up was the idea that died with the man she wanted to be in love with. She thinks that makes her very… female, losing her marbles over a romantic notion rather than reality.
She thinks that you shouldn’t have to think about whether or not you’re in love with someone and that there’s quite possibly been something wrong with her long before Afghanistan.
.
Holmes - call him Sherlock - shows her the flat with the clear intention of scaring her off. The place is a pigsty. There are dirty dishes and chemical compounds everywhere, holes in the walls and eyes in the microwave.
She has no idea why he’s showing her around when he clearly doesn’t want her around but then she catches him looking at her like she’s doing a trick again, like she’s being interesting in a way other people aren’t and she thinks maybe that’s it. Maybe Sherlock is the kind of man that likes being interested.
Still, she’s not going to rent a flat with a man just to show him up, just to beat him at his own little game of prod-and-observe. Telling him no thanks means losing the game, but since she’s never really liked games all that much, she doesn’t mind.
The Inspector, Lestrade, chooses that exact moment to come running up the stairs and when he leaves Sherlock suddenly grins and jumps and yells and John finds herself reminded, utterly involuntarily, of the first time, the very first time, she saw a beating heart. A real, beating, living human heart. The surgeon she was assisting let her touch it, just for a second, let her feel the pulse of it, the life.
Sherlock is a bit like that beating heart.
.
She doesn’t delude herself into thinking he asked her to come along because he likes her. He still avoids eye contact, snaps at her and seems reluctant as hell to speak to her. He asked her along because he likes this other doctor even less than he likes her.
Which doesn’t explain why she says yes, why she follows him down the stairs, cane clunking, and into a cab. Why she lets him dissect her life down to her dirty dark family secrets with no other tools than observation and her phone.
But somehow, she does.
.
He treats Donovan, one of the few other women on the scene, like dirt. She’s not exactly friendly either, but calling her on her night-time activities in front of the entire squad is cruel. John throws the women a smile that’s sympathetic but not apologetic. She doesn’t make a habit of apologizing for strangers’ behaviour.
Donovan nods at her, civil but with anger still shining behind her eyes and John follows Sherlock upstairs, listening to him bark at and insult people willy-nilly.
He’s ruthless and brutal and he has no respect for anyone or anything, thinks he’s better than the rest of the world, thinks everyone really is useless. But he seems to reserve a special level of contempt for the women on the scene. He ignores them utterly until they open their mouths and then rips into them with the viciousness of a hungry cat.
He keeps looking at John while he rips through everyone present, living and dead, like he’s checking her reaction. Waiting for something from her. For her to scream and try to scratch his eyes out maybe. Silly her, thinking something as trivial as a serial killer would distract him from this game he’s playing with her.
But, God, he’s brilliant.
.
“He doesn’t have friends,” Donovan says, intends it as a warning and a parting shot, but John puts her free hand on the other woman’s arm, stops her.
“I know,” she says, by way of closing that conversation. Then, “Does he play games a lot?”
“What?”
“Games. Does Sherlock play games with people?”
All she gets in return is a confused look. That’s all the answer she needs.
.
She has no idea who the man in the abandoned warehouse is or how he knows all the things he knows about her. She’s angry. Resentful of his arrogance, tensed for an attack that’s more than verbal.
She expects guns, knives, fists. Anything but the absolutely annihilating, the crippling, the brutal words that come. She’s not haunted by the war, he tells her, absolutely sure of himself, of the truth of his words. “You miss it.”
You miss it.
Blood on her hands, slick between her fingers, pain in her shoulder, screams in her ears, gun metal warmer than skin in her palm, a hand going limp around her wrist and the golden-red hues of sand and fire.
A beating heart against the tips of her fingers, hot and pulsing. Alive.
She limps away from the man with her head held high and her hand perfectly steady, limps away with her lips in a thin, drawn line and has no idea who she is anymore.
.
He says ‘dangerous’ and she comes.
.
Her mother always told her she wasn’t a proper girl. “Joanie,” she said, “Joanie,” long after John made the executive decision to be John instead, not a girl trying to be a boy, but simply a girl with a boy’s name.
She liked the contradiction, liked that people didn’t know to expect anything from her name on a piece of paper. She still likes it today, which is why she never goes by anything else. She’s John.
And she’s a doctor when her mother wanted her to be a teacher, is a soldier, like her Da was. She’s not a girly girl with skirts and make-up like Harry (who no-one ever called on her boy-name because she wore dresses, not jeans).
She’s also straight where Harry is not, but that never seemed to matter either to their parents.
Harry was the girl and John was their aborted, their twisted not-quite boy, the one they didn’t know how to handle. They treated her like a boy and she hated it, they tried to stuff her into dresses and she screamed bloody murder.
Her mother died calling her Joanie and her father patted her shoulder, the last time they saw each other before the accident, said he was proud of her, no matter what she was, no matter who.
Who is she? She’s a doctor. She’s a soldier. She’s a cripple. She’s a woman with a man’s name and a man’s job, a woman with a cane, no flat, no home. She’s a woman who needs to think about whether or not she’s in love. She’s a woman with steady hands that once touched a living heart, hands that felt too many other hearts stop.
She’s in her thirties, dirty blonde and a bit dumpy, she’s at war with her shoulder length hair and likes jeans and sexy underwear and hot tea and hates her limp.
She’s unremarkable and strange and alien and confused by herself and she smiles sometimes, not entirely happily, thinking that identity crises should be over when one gets out of puberty, but hers never seemed to end.
She is the woman that comes when an arrogant, disdainful man sends her a text that reads ‘dangerous’.
She is the woman that tries to hate herself a bit for that, but somehow can’t.
What will be, will be.
Maybe it was the war that drove that apathy and disconnection deep into her soul, but she suspects it’s always been there.
.
Running through London and laughing afterwards, leaning against the wall, breathing so hard she feels like her ribcage is going to burst, John is happy. Alive.
Too happy to analyze the emotion, so she lets it rest there, in her chest, lets it lie.
Two hours later she kills a man to protect Sherlock, who dislikes her, plays games with her, looks at her like she’s an interesting wallpaper-pattern.
The feeling doesn’t disappear.
.
They have Chinese at one in the morning, Sherlock still with his ugly shock-blanket thrown over his shoulders, half as a joke, half because… she has no idea why. They are sitting on the floor of his flat because the furniture is still overturned and messed up, thanks to the pretend drugs bust and Sherlock meets her gaze head on and says, “You shot a man tonight.”
For me, he thinks and she doesn’t say. A few months ago, John Watson had a cause. Now, it seems, she has Sherlock Bloody Holmes to kill for and no idea how that happened.
She just nods and takes a bite of her spring roll. “He wasn’t the first,” she says calmly, when Sherlock seems to expect her to speak.
Something sharp moves in his gaze then, brilliant and deadly. Like a shark. She thinks it’s interest, thinks that maybe Sherlock does what she can’t: Maybe he’s actually seeing her.
Or maybe she just won this strange game of his without knowing.
“Will you be taking the upstairs bedroom, then?”
.
It takes her an entire month to realize that in the end, she does move in with a man just to beat him at his own little game.
She spends two days glowering at Sherlock and then gives up when he doesn’t even seem to notice. Anyhow, they live next to each other for a while, with John buying milk and Sherlock drinking it, violin torture at all hours of the day, fights over bathroom space and too much tea.
John feels half like someone’s wife, half like someone’s mother and a lot like screaming, some days. She does, just once. Scream, that is. A short, violent burst of sound in the middle of the afternoon, because it’s either that or her gun against someone’s temple, Sherlock’s or her own.
He looks up from her computer with a frown. “Are you quite done with your histrionics?”
She throws out every single experiment in the fridge in revenge for that and he goes silent for almost five hours with something that might be a sulk or might be guilt. If he’s even capable of guilt.
Then he goes back to needling her in small ways and she goes back to needling him in equally small ways and somehow the venom drains from their words over the course of the evening and then they just banter again and John understands that no matter how long she knows him, she will never, ever beat Sherlock at his own game because it’s his game and it never ends. He’ll play it until he’s dead, a million rounds and levels and apparently, she’s playing, too, these days.
.
John comes home to a crying young woman stumbling down the stairs and flings her bag onto the sofa, never mind that Sherlock was headed for it. There is a spread of glossy photographs and computer printed notes on the mostly cleared kitchen table and she walks over to look. A woman, mid-forties, drowned in her tub, water reddish pink around her.
One of the print-outs says ‘Suicide’ in bold letters.
“New case?”
Sherlock, who is in the process of having a staring match with her bag, shakes his head and scoffs. “Hardly. The bereaved daughter wanted me to prove that her mother was murdered. No such luck.”
John knows better by now than to remark that she wouldn’t call murder ‘luck’. She gets called dull quite enough without offering Sherlock extra ammunition. Instead she picks the safer subject. “How can you tell?”
He makes a grand gesture towards the papers, nudges her bag onto the floor with a single, extended digit and then flings himself onto the sofa with all the drama of a Victorian maiden. He ticks off his evidence. “Doors and windows locked from the inside. Authentic goodbye letter. With tearstains, too. History of depression. Went off her medication recently. Slit her wrists in the tub. Typical woman suicide.” He snorts, all disdain, all the time. “Vain.”
John stops, looks at him with a raised eyebrow. “Vain?”
“Women always are,” he shoots back instantly, quickly. “A bullet to the head would be infinitely faster and more effective, but women always pick the pretty over the certain methods. Poison. Cut wrists. Anything to preserve their vanity.”
A throw-away gesture with one hand. He’s done with this and John feels something akin to understanding prickle at the base of her spine. She fishes a portrait out of the pile of photographs, holds it up. “Look at her, Sherlock.”
He does, expression put upon.
“Does she look vain to you?”
The woman in the picture is podgy bordering on serious overweight. Her hair is in a dishevelled ponytail, quick and functional. She wears no make-up, her clothes are years out of date, her jewellery is small and obviously well worn. There’s not a vain bone in that woman’s body. Wasn’t. Before she killed herself.
“Then why would she choose such an ineffective and uncertain method of committing suicide?”
John puts down the picture, settles in the armchair and resists the urge to rub her bad leg out of habit. “Women aren’t destructive.”
The noise of disgust he makes tells her she’s boring him to death. She rolls her eyes. “They aren’t. Men like destroying things. Ripping things apart, physically, I mean.” She scrambles for something to convince him with, finds only this: “Have you ever watched people cleaning out a flat? Throwing away furniture? Women will break the furniture until it’s small enough to be disposed of. Men will smash it just for the sake of smashing it.”
She takes a breath and there is silence. When she looks at Sherlock, he waves at her to go ahead. She shrugs and does. “I think it’s biology. Women are protectors, preservers. Creators. Destroying things is against our nature. We kill ourselves with the minimum amount of damage not because we’re vain, but because that’s how we’re designed.”
“Then why kill yourself in the first place?”
She laughs. “Biology isn’t all we are, you know? I’ve killed people. That’s pretty destructive.”
“You’re not a real woman,” he brushes away her argument, callously.
She should be hurt, should be insulted, should be mortified, but a month living with the rudest person in the greater London area has given her thicker skin than even her military years left her with. All she feels now is a vague sense of triumph because for all the things Sherlock seems to know about her without ever asking, she has finally figured out something about him, too.
She stands and closes the distance between them, comes to a halt at the top of the sofa, where his head lies on the arm rest. She stares into his face upside down. “That’s why you dislike women, isn’t it? Because you don’t understand us at all. Anyone else you can think your way into, but you have no idea how a woman’s mind and body works, do you?”
He makes a noise of protest, says something unfavourable under his breath and swings into a sitting position. “The only reason you tolerate me is that I don’t act very female, most of the time.”
She looks down at her jumper and jeans for emphasis. “Ridiculous,” he snaps.
“Maybe,” she admits. “But I’m right. You can imagine being poor, being angry, being abused or violent. But you can’t imagine being a woman.” Hormones and brain chemistry, generations of rubbish societal restraints drilled into little girls. Even Sherlock isn’t that good.
She’s quite possibly gloating now. She tries to feel bad about it but… no. She’s due a win in this game of theirs.
“Utter nonsense,” he informs her sharply, condescension dripping from every syllable. He brushes past her on his way into his bedroom, slams doors and settles in for a sulk that will last three days.
It’s like living with a thirty-year-old teenager.
.
At first, looking at him jars her. Every single time. His eyes are the palest grey, only a shade darker than his marble skin and the effect is frightening. His eyes look like tiny, black dots among sharp, white angles, and all the more piercing for it.
High cheekbones, the hard slant of his lips and jaw. He looks as brutal as he looks beautiful and his gaze is like a scalpel, cold and precise, a tool for the dissection of the human flesh.
He’s a study in white and black, in grace and ruthless economy, negligence and focus next to each other.
She gets used to him eventually, to the dissonance of him, the contradictions. After a week, she can look at him without going slack at the vision he presents, even grumpy and in his pyjamas. After another week, she learns to let his casual cruelty and dismissal bounce off her, learns to hear what little harmony there is under the dissonance of Sherlock Holmes.
Learns him.
.
He fell asleep on the sofa again, curled into his dressing gown like a freezing puppy, obviously cold and obviously not noticing. Again.
She sighs and feels like his mother, wonders how his mother tolerated two of his kind for years on end without going insane. But then, John has never met Mrs. Holmes. For all she knows, Sherlock and Mycroft both got their mad, scattered genius from her. Although casual observation suggest that Mycroft is a bit better at holding himself together than his younger brother.
She pulls out the garish orange and purple blanket Mrs. Hudson brought them ‘to spruce up the place’ and unfolds it carefully, quietly, before flinging it over him. She watches as it settles in a billow of cool air and for some reason she doesn’t quite understand, she stays there, staring down at him, his face in profile.
She’s just looking, barely even seeing him beyond the abstract, the casually beautiful parts of him. She doesn’t think of anything until his rumbling voice comes from below the edge of the blanket. “I told you, I consider myself married to my work.”
She’s so surprised that he’s awake, at what he thinks she’s doing, that it takes her a moment to stop spluttering useless personal pronouns and say, decisively, “I know, Sherlock. I told you, it’s all fine.”
Because she thinks he needs to hear that. That it’s fine. That he’s fine, however he is.
“Then why are you staring at me?”
Since she has no idea, she simply says, “Just giving you a taste of your own medicine. Go back to sleep. Lord knows you need it.”
She pats the spot of the blanket where she thinks his shoulder might be and then goes back to her room, hoping for sleep without the nightmares that woke her in the first place.
.
“So,” Sarah asks, leaning back in her seat, ostensibly studying the pedestrians passing the street café they are currently sitting in. “What is it with you and Sherlock?”
John fights back a sigh as she sips her tea. Always that question, from anyone she spends any length of time with. She’s gotten into the habit of brushing people off with answers that reveal absolutely nothing. However, this is Sarah.
Who John thinks might be an actual friend in time and even if not, she’s the first person John has connected with since Afghanistan. On a level that does not include murder, at least. And really, John is still not convinced you can connect with Sherlock. On any level.
So instead of brushing the other woman off, she shrugs. “What makes you think there is anything with me and Sherlock? We’re only flatmates and half the time I don’t even know why we’re that, really.”
Sarah laughs, genuinely amused. “Then why is he following you around like a jealous boyfriend, John?”
She’s looking past John’s shoulder as she speaks and John feels the desire to hit her head against the table. “Tell me he isn’t,” she begs, not sure whether to laugh or scream.
Sarah seems to have no such trouble, because her grin is wide and open. “Oh, he is.”
John shakes her head and quietly despairs. She noticed that Sherlock tends to act strange when she mentions Sarah, but it didn’t register as important because even after more than a month, she still hasn’t managed to establish a baseline for Sherlock’s moods and habits. He’s always acting strange.
But stalking her? Why would he? She has never given the slightest indication that she wants more from Sarah than friendship and God knows Sherlock doesn’t want anything more than that from her. Some days, she’s not even sure he wants her friendship. He treats her just about the same as he does his skull, only she can obey simple commands and do tricks.
That, and she seems to be the only one capable of talking him out of his Everyone Is Stupid, We Should Nuke This Planet And Be Done With It tantrums.
She waves at the waitress and tells her, “Don’t look, but there’s a tall man with dark hair somewhere behind me. Black coat, blue scarf, pale and pretty.”
Of course the girl looks and Sarah seems amused by John calling Sherlock ‘pretty’, when really, he defies all description. “I’d like for you to get him a tea to go, two sugars, dash of milk and tell him to go home from me.”
Wide-eyed, the waitress nods and takes off, eager to comply. It’s probably the most fun she’s had today. Five minutes later, Sarah bursts out laughing again and waves. John doesn’t turn around.
Not even when Sarah says, “Look at that. He actually went.”
She sounds surprised.
.
“Is there a particular reason you’ve taken up stalking me as a new hobby?”
“No.”
“Then why were you?”
“I was simply observing mating habits.”
“Having tea with a colleague is hardly ‘mating’, Sherlock.”
“Bored then. I was bored.”
He watches her with eyes that see everything as she strips off her jacket and flings herself on the sofa with the intention of switching on the telly. He’s waiting for her to throw a tantrum about ‘acceptable behaviour’ and playing games, she realizes fifteen minutes into some inane talk show.
She doesn’t.
.
She’s trying to put away the shopping when she finds two pints of blood in the fridge.
“There’s blood in the fridge!” she calls to Sherlock, who hasn’t moved since she got home, except to throw her a look of disgust when she sarcastically thanked him for his help getting four bags up the stairs.
“It’s not mine,” he returns, his bass carrying without him having to raise his voice. It grates, that she has to yell and he still talks in normal tones. It makes her feel small and obnoxious. But then, she should be used to that by now.
“Not reassuring,” she returns, shoving the bottles into the bottommost shelf of the fridge. No body parts above anything edible. It’s a rule. There was an arm once and it dripped. John is a doctor, but even she has her limits.
“It’s for an experiment.” Testy. Any moment now he’ll call her an idiot.
“No splatter patterns on the walls. Mrs. Hudson will slap you!”
She moves while she talks, pulling milk, cheese and butter out of one bag, juggling all three as she tries to reopen the fridge door that fell shut. Her shoulder twinges with the sudden memory of a bullet wound and she yelps against her will as she butter goes skidding, tries to catch it and loses her grip on one of the packets of milk.
She’s mentally resigning herself to cleaning the entire kitchen of milk when pale hands appear out of nowhere and catch it. “Careful,” Sherlock rumbles, putting the milk on the table and taking the cheese from her. Then, “The shoulder?”
She nods as she sets down the rest of what’s in her arms, rubbing at the knotted scar tissue, cursing the bad weather and the strain she put on it, walking home with the shopping. Should have called a cab and damn the money.
Sherlock’s fingers on the scar of the exit wound on her back are so light she barely registers the touch until he ghosts up and around, brushing around her own fingers. She drops her hand and he draws a circle on her jumper with one finger, as if he can see the scar. As if he knows it, when he has never seen it. His gaze is focused on his own hand when she looks up at his face, expression one of concentration.
Then, as suddenly as they came, he drops his fingers away and takes a step back. “You should put a hot water bottle on it.”
His phone beeps and he leaves her with the shopping, unapologetic as always.
.
It takes almost two weeks for Sarah to remember that she never got John to properly answer, back at that café. So she corners her during lunch break, bullies her into her office and orders, “You and Sherlock. Now.”
John shrugs and sits in the squishy visitor’s chair, slouching carelessly in a way that looks much better on Sherlock.
“I told you. Nothing’s going on.”
Sarah, perching on her desk, doesn’t look convinced. “Nothing? He’s annoying as hell, but…” She waves a hand in a vague gesture that John takes to mean that Sherlock is insane, but hot.
But he’s also married to his work and touches her like he touches interesting experiments, carefully and with passion, but utterly distant. He sits next to her on the living room floor without space between them but doesn’t look at her at all and when he pays her a compliment it’s never ‘pretty’ or ‘smart’ but ‘interesting’ and ‘not boring’ and it’s all shaping up into something solid.
Something with a name and a description, but John doesn’t want to use that word, use that description, because she doesn’t believe that any one thing can sum Sherlock up. Ever. “I don’t think he’s interested,” she tells Sarah instead and then adds, for clarification, “At all.”
Sarah looks surprised. “Are you?”
I was in love with a man in Afghanistan.
She touches her wrist with her other hand, wanting to feel the ghost of his last touch there but feeling nothing.
“No.”
.
Nightmares again. She wishes her bloody therapist would do something about those, instead of harping on about John’s trust issues. John is pretty sure those issues would all dissolve if only she could sleep properly.
She doesn’t hear Sherlock marauding through the flat tonight, so she remains in bed, flat on her back, staring at the ceiling. No use waking him up if he’s sleeping for once. Let one of them be well rested tomorrow.
But then she does hear him, soft steps on old stairs, coming closer. She must have made some noise then. Either that, or he’s looking for a charged phone. His died at breakfast. He probably didn’t remember to do anything about it all day.
She closes her eyes and pretends to be asleep as he enters, almost soundlessly flitting through the room and finally climbing up to sit on the end of her antique bed frame, perched there like a gargoyle, or a ghost. He’s staring down at her, she knows, can feel his gaze tickling her stomach, burning at her skin.
“I understand you,” he finally says, conversationally but with some stress or strain. As if it matters. She considers the fact that she knows exactly what he’s talking about mildly frightening but has no energy to properly act on the feeling.
What will be, will be.
What is is them, in a dark flat at two in the morning, having a disjointed conversation they started over a month ago.
“Yes. But we’ve established that I’m not a real woman,” she answers, giving up any pretence of sleep. She smiles, trusting that he can see it in the dark. “This is really bothering you, isn’t it?”
He shrugs, uncharacteristically open, admits, “I don’t like not understanding things. People.”
“You could just ask, you know.”
He blinks at her, a midnight-owl, like the concept never actually occurred to him, then nods. Accepting, she hopes.
“I shouldn’t have called you that,” he finally adds, after a long silence and she holds her breath because that almost, almost sounds like an apology from the great Sherlock Holmes.
It sounds wrong.
She waves it away. “I’m sort of messed up, Sherlock. It’s okay.”
“You tolerate me,” he argues, like that is a skill. So he does possess some level of self awareness. She’s wondered.
“Have you slept?” she asks instead of anything else because nightmare or not, she’s tired.
“No.”
She sits up briefly, just enough to grab his hand and pull. He lands with a huffing sound next to her. “Then sleep,” she orders.
He tries to complain, says, “I told you, John, I don’t…”
“Sleep,” she repeats, a bit sharper. “For God’s sake, Sherlock, don’t be difficult. For once, just don’t be difficult.”
He shuts his mouth with a click and they lie there in the dark, her half turned toward him, him stiff and flat on his back. She stares at his profile against the window until her sight gets blurry, thinks of a man she thinks she was in love with in Afghanistan, thinks of Sherlock never only being one thing. Thinks that she has no idea who she is, but that maybe, she’s more than one thing, too. Thinks of his fingers against her shoulder, circling her scar, of his warmth next to hers, of Sarah asking questions that have no answer.
She thinks that she’s not Sherlock’s girlfriend, or his wife or sister or mother, but that she’s John, whoever that is, and that he’s Sherlock. John and Sherlock.
She reaches out with her left hand, shoulder stinging again, runs her fingers carefully through his unruly curls, from his temple to behind his ear. He goes stiff for a moment and then, when she repeats the gesture, only that, nothing more, he relaxes into it.
Eventually, when he has enough, he takes her hand in his, places it on the sheets between them and doesn’t pull his own hand away. He’s watching her, studying her every reaction, but John is too tired to care. Hasn’t cared in months, to be honest. Let him look, let him play games.
She simply closes her eyes and thinks that she once touched a real, beating, living, human heart and that it was hot under her fingers and ugly and all the more beautiful for it and that it filled her with giddiness and joy and awe and fear. She thinks that it was warm and slick and alive and that, in that moment, she was alive, too.
She thinks that Sherlock is a bit like that beating heart and falls asleep with the memory of its pulse still thrumming in the tips of her fingers.
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Tell me how it was. I'm biting my nails here.
And because I'm a total victim there is now a coda set a few years after the end of this story: no graceful child
Author: pprfaith/ Faithunbreakable
Disclaimer: I do not own Sherlock.
Pairing: Gen. Ish. Slight girl!john/Sherlock, but not really.
Rating: PG-13/ R.
Word Count: A bit under 6500.
Warnings: Meandering prose, slight angsting, discussion of suicide. Genderswap and asexuality.
Summary: John Watson isn’t really sure why she’s living with Sherlock Holmes. Or: The pulse of a human heart.
A/N: This was supposed to be a fic about Sherlock’s dislike of women and where it comes from. Then it became about girl!John and her life. Then it became about Ace!Sherlock and after that, I just gave up trying to figure out what the heck I was writing. Also, there are a lot of halves in this story. I don’t know why.Thanks go to vesselandpestle for shoving me into introducing me to the fandom and to romanaorfred for looking this over and telling me it didn’t suck. All remaining mistakes are my own.
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heart in hand (if you stumble, you’ll drop it)
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John Watson enters the laboratory a step behind Mike and catches a glimpse, quick and sharp, of the potential flatmate. Pale and tall, dark hair, expensive suit.
He doesn’t look up from the microscope when Mike says, “Sherlock Holmes, John Watson.”
John makes a noise that’s half greeting, half snort, waits. Then Holmes finishes whatever he’s doing, looks up and takes John in, sneakered feet to unruly dirty-blonde hair. His expression shifts from neutral to a split second of surprise, then disdain. John has seen it before, a million times, as a doctor, as a soldier, on the faces of a thousand men as they realize that John Watson is not actually a John, but a Joanne with a funny nickname.
Someone asked her once why she keeps going by John if it causes so much confusion. She shrugged and said, “Why should I change it?”
Her friend laughed, shook her head, said, “That’s pretty much you in five words, isn’t it?”
Holmes looks at her the way most men do when they find a woman in a male-dominated world; doubtful and disappointed, mildly disgusted and confused. What the bloody hell is she doing here, short, blonde, with ovaries. They’re all the same and John watches Holmes’s expression shutter the same way she always does: half amused, half hurt.
He looks at Mike, asks, “What can I do for you?”
From Mike’s confused look and the tension in Holmes’s shoulders, John is sure that he knows exactly why they are here and plays dumb. Plays games. She sighs and shakes her head, brushing a stray hair out of her face. Always the same. Sometimes she thinks life would be easier if she just gave up, put on a skirt, like Harry, and turned gay, like Harry. Nail polish and curling irons instead of scalpels and guns. Be a Joanie, maybe, instead of a John.
She’s too stubborn, though.
“John here’s looking for a flatmate, too, as it happens,” Mike finally answers. Holmes nods, slings his scarf around his long neck, pulls on his coat.
“Ah,” he says, not looking at them. “Got to dash. Forgot my riding crop in the mortuary.”
A whirl of motion and fabric and he brushes past her, almost kicking her cane out from under her, and is gone. Obviously, he doesn’t want a flatmate anymore. Or rather, he doesn’t want John for a flatmate.
She smiles without humour because really, people keep telling her the military is a hard place for women when, really, the entire world is a hard place for women. She turns to Mike, about to relieve him of any responsibility for his friend’s rudeness, when the door suddenly opens again and Holmes sticks his head in, looking solely at Mike. “Can I borrow your phone? Need to send a text.”
Mike shrugs, shakes his head. “Sorry. It’s in my coat.”
John has no idea why, but she pulls out hers, holds it out. “Take mine,” she offers and suddenly, he looks at her like she just did a trick.
It’s the first time he meets her gaze and she finds that it burns straight through her and into the wall behind her. He accepts the phone without looking down at it and she shifts a bit, leaning back against a table, asking idly, “So is it women in general that you dislike, or just the useless ones?”
She taps her cane against the side of her shoe in emphasis and waits, patient and well-practiced in this game, this game of who’s the better sex and everything women can’t (shouldn’t) do. She already knows the answer, too, but that isn’t why she asks.
He scoffs while his fingers fly over the keys of her phone. “Don’t flatter yourself. Almost everyone is useless. However, most people wouldn’t call an army doctor that.”
She could be surprised at the fact that he seems to have her pegged, but she shoves the feeling down, chooses instead to correct, “Former army doctor. And you don’t strike me as ‘most people’. You also haven’t answered my question.”
He looks at her again, another trick, something interesting. She forces herself to hold still and wait. “Indeed,” he finally says, handing back her phone. “221b, Baker Street, tomorrow at seven. We’ll have a look at the flat.”
Then he’s gone and John isn’t sure whether to be insulted or amused, settles for somewhere in-between and knows that she’ll be there, tomorrow at seven if for no other reason that this: She’s been home from Afghanistan for almost three months and this was the first spot of excitement she’s head since then.
.
There was a man, in Afghanistan, that John thinks she was in love with. Nothing ever happened, he was a fellow soldier and there was really no time for more than a bit of friendship and some shared smiles, but she thinks she wanted there to be more.
She thinks she wanted to keep him close and inhale his scent, to know him.
She got to know him, eventually, like this: her hands holding his insides in, blood and splinters everywhere, fire overhead, screaming, her scrambling for her gun with one hand, slick fingers sliding off the dark metal, him wheezing and dying and then fire in her shoulder and silence under her hands. She knew his insides and she knew his last breath, knew the feeling of his hand finding her wrist, holding on and then going limp. She knew those things about him and she knows them still, will know them until she dies.
Her therapist thinks she has PTSD, thinks she suffers from massive trauma. John, who knows the symptoms of the disorder as well as any other doctor or soldier, disagrees in the silence of her mind. She’s traumatized, alright, but it’s not the war and the guns and the fire and the screams that fucked her up. She thinks it was the feeling of that hand, the one that was only half familiar, going limp around her wrist, sliding away.
She thinks what fucked her up was the idea that died with the man she wanted to be in love with. She thinks that makes her very… female, losing her marbles over a romantic notion rather than reality.
She thinks that you shouldn’t have to think about whether or not you’re in love with someone and that there’s quite possibly been something wrong with her long before Afghanistan.
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Holmes - call him Sherlock - shows her the flat with the clear intention of scaring her off. The place is a pigsty. There are dirty dishes and chemical compounds everywhere, holes in the walls and eyes in the microwave.
She has no idea why he’s showing her around when he clearly doesn’t want her around but then she catches him looking at her like she’s doing a trick again, like she’s being interesting in a way other people aren’t and she thinks maybe that’s it. Maybe Sherlock is the kind of man that likes being interested.
Still, she’s not going to rent a flat with a man just to show him up, just to beat him at his own little game of prod-and-observe. Telling him no thanks means losing the game, but since she’s never really liked games all that much, she doesn’t mind.
The Inspector, Lestrade, chooses that exact moment to come running up the stairs and when he leaves Sherlock suddenly grins and jumps and yells and John finds herself reminded, utterly involuntarily, of the first time, the very first time, she saw a beating heart. A real, beating, living human heart. The surgeon she was assisting let her touch it, just for a second, let her feel the pulse of it, the life.
Sherlock is a bit like that beating heart.
.
She doesn’t delude herself into thinking he asked her to come along because he likes her. He still avoids eye contact, snaps at her and seems reluctant as hell to speak to her. He asked her along because he likes this other doctor even less than he likes her.
Which doesn’t explain why she says yes, why she follows him down the stairs, cane clunking, and into a cab. Why she lets him dissect her life down to her dirty dark family secrets with no other tools than observation and her phone.
But somehow, she does.
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He treats Donovan, one of the few other women on the scene, like dirt. She’s not exactly friendly either, but calling her on her night-time activities in front of the entire squad is cruel. John throws the women a smile that’s sympathetic but not apologetic. She doesn’t make a habit of apologizing for strangers’ behaviour.
Donovan nods at her, civil but with anger still shining behind her eyes and John follows Sherlock upstairs, listening to him bark at and insult people willy-nilly.
He’s ruthless and brutal and he has no respect for anyone or anything, thinks he’s better than the rest of the world, thinks everyone really is useless. But he seems to reserve a special level of contempt for the women on the scene. He ignores them utterly until they open their mouths and then rips into them with the viciousness of a hungry cat.
He keeps looking at John while he rips through everyone present, living and dead, like he’s checking her reaction. Waiting for something from her. For her to scream and try to scratch his eyes out maybe. Silly her, thinking something as trivial as a serial killer would distract him from this game he’s playing with her.
But, God, he’s brilliant.
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“He doesn’t have friends,” Donovan says, intends it as a warning and a parting shot, but John puts her free hand on the other woman’s arm, stops her.
“I know,” she says, by way of closing that conversation. Then, “Does he play games a lot?”
“What?”
“Games. Does Sherlock play games with people?”
All she gets in return is a confused look. That’s all the answer she needs.
.
She has no idea who the man in the abandoned warehouse is or how he knows all the things he knows about her. She’s angry. Resentful of his arrogance, tensed for an attack that’s more than verbal.
She expects guns, knives, fists. Anything but the absolutely annihilating, the crippling, the brutal words that come. She’s not haunted by the war, he tells her, absolutely sure of himself, of the truth of his words. “You miss it.”
You miss it.
Blood on her hands, slick between her fingers, pain in her shoulder, screams in her ears, gun metal warmer than skin in her palm, a hand going limp around her wrist and the golden-red hues of sand and fire.
A beating heart against the tips of her fingers, hot and pulsing. Alive.
She limps away from the man with her head held high and her hand perfectly steady, limps away with her lips in a thin, drawn line and has no idea who she is anymore.
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He says ‘dangerous’ and she comes.
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Her mother always told her she wasn’t a proper girl. “Joanie,” she said, “Joanie,” long after John made the executive decision to be John instead, not a girl trying to be a boy, but simply a girl with a boy’s name.
She liked the contradiction, liked that people didn’t know to expect anything from her name on a piece of paper. She still likes it today, which is why she never goes by anything else. She’s John.
And she’s a doctor when her mother wanted her to be a teacher, is a soldier, like her Da was. She’s not a girly girl with skirts and make-up like Harry (who no-one ever called on her boy-name because she wore dresses, not jeans).
She’s also straight where Harry is not, but that never seemed to matter either to their parents.
Harry was the girl and John was their aborted, their twisted not-quite boy, the one they didn’t know how to handle. They treated her like a boy and she hated it, they tried to stuff her into dresses and she screamed bloody murder.
Her mother died calling her Joanie and her father patted her shoulder, the last time they saw each other before the accident, said he was proud of her, no matter what she was, no matter who.
Who is she? She’s a doctor. She’s a soldier. She’s a cripple. She’s a woman with a man’s name and a man’s job, a woman with a cane, no flat, no home. She’s a woman who needs to think about whether or not she’s in love. She’s a woman with steady hands that once touched a living heart, hands that felt too many other hearts stop.
She’s in her thirties, dirty blonde and a bit dumpy, she’s at war with her shoulder length hair and likes jeans and sexy underwear and hot tea and hates her limp.
She’s unremarkable and strange and alien and confused by herself and she smiles sometimes, not entirely happily, thinking that identity crises should be over when one gets out of puberty, but hers never seemed to end.
She is the woman that comes when an arrogant, disdainful man sends her a text that reads ‘dangerous’.
She is the woman that tries to hate herself a bit for that, but somehow can’t.
What will be, will be.
Maybe it was the war that drove that apathy and disconnection deep into her soul, but she suspects it’s always been there.
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Running through London and laughing afterwards, leaning against the wall, breathing so hard she feels like her ribcage is going to burst, John is happy. Alive.
Too happy to analyze the emotion, so she lets it rest there, in her chest, lets it lie.
Two hours later she kills a man to protect Sherlock, who dislikes her, plays games with her, looks at her like she’s an interesting wallpaper-pattern.
The feeling doesn’t disappear.
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They have Chinese at one in the morning, Sherlock still with his ugly shock-blanket thrown over his shoulders, half as a joke, half because… she has no idea why. They are sitting on the floor of his flat because the furniture is still overturned and messed up, thanks to the pretend drugs bust and Sherlock meets her gaze head on and says, “You shot a man tonight.”
For me, he thinks and she doesn’t say. A few months ago, John Watson had a cause. Now, it seems, she has Sherlock Bloody Holmes to kill for and no idea how that happened.
She just nods and takes a bite of her spring roll. “He wasn’t the first,” she says calmly, when Sherlock seems to expect her to speak.
Something sharp moves in his gaze then, brilliant and deadly. Like a shark. She thinks it’s interest, thinks that maybe Sherlock does what she can’t: Maybe he’s actually seeing her.
Or maybe she just won this strange game of his without knowing.
“Will you be taking the upstairs bedroom, then?”
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It takes her an entire month to realize that in the end, she does move in with a man just to beat him at his own little game.
She spends two days glowering at Sherlock and then gives up when he doesn’t even seem to notice. Anyhow, they live next to each other for a while, with John buying milk and Sherlock drinking it, violin torture at all hours of the day, fights over bathroom space and too much tea.
John feels half like someone’s wife, half like someone’s mother and a lot like screaming, some days. She does, just once. Scream, that is. A short, violent burst of sound in the middle of the afternoon, because it’s either that or her gun against someone’s temple, Sherlock’s or her own.
He looks up from her computer with a frown. “Are you quite done with your histrionics?”
She throws out every single experiment in the fridge in revenge for that and he goes silent for almost five hours with something that might be a sulk or might be guilt. If he’s even capable of guilt.
Then he goes back to needling her in small ways and she goes back to needling him in equally small ways and somehow the venom drains from their words over the course of the evening and then they just banter again and John understands that no matter how long she knows him, she will never, ever beat Sherlock at his own game because it’s his game and it never ends. He’ll play it until he’s dead, a million rounds and levels and apparently, she’s playing, too, these days.
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John comes home to a crying young woman stumbling down the stairs and flings her bag onto the sofa, never mind that Sherlock was headed for it. There is a spread of glossy photographs and computer printed notes on the mostly cleared kitchen table and she walks over to look. A woman, mid-forties, drowned in her tub, water reddish pink around her.
One of the print-outs says ‘Suicide’ in bold letters.
“New case?”
Sherlock, who is in the process of having a staring match with her bag, shakes his head and scoffs. “Hardly. The bereaved daughter wanted me to prove that her mother was murdered. No such luck.”
John knows better by now than to remark that she wouldn’t call murder ‘luck’. She gets called dull quite enough without offering Sherlock extra ammunition. Instead she picks the safer subject. “How can you tell?”
He makes a grand gesture towards the papers, nudges her bag onto the floor with a single, extended digit and then flings himself onto the sofa with all the drama of a Victorian maiden. He ticks off his evidence. “Doors and windows locked from the inside. Authentic goodbye letter. With tearstains, too. History of depression. Went off her medication recently. Slit her wrists in the tub. Typical woman suicide.” He snorts, all disdain, all the time. “Vain.”
John stops, looks at him with a raised eyebrow. “Vain?”
“Women always are,” he shoots back instantly, quickly. “A bullet to the head would be infinitely faster and more effective, but women always pick the pretty over the certain methods. Poison. Cut wrists. Anything to preserve their vanity.”
A throw-away gesture with one hand. He’s done with this and John feels something akin to understanding prickle at the base of her spine. She fishes a portrait out of the pile of photographs, holds it up. “Look at her, Sherlock.”
He does, expression put upon.
“Does she look vain to you?”
The woman in the picture is podgy bordering on serious overweight. Her hair is in a dishevelled ponytail, quick and functional. She wears no make-up, her clothes are years out of date, her jewellery is small and obviously well worn. There’s not a vain bone in that woman’s body. Wasn’t. Before she killed herself.
“Then why would she choose such an ineffective and uncertain method of committing suicide?”
John puts down the picture, settles in the armchair and resists the urge to rub her bad leg out of habit. “Women aren’t destructive.”
The noise of disgust he makes tells her she’s boring him to death. She rolls her eyes. “They aren’t. Men like destroying things. Ripping things apart, physically, I mean.” She scrambles for something to convince him with, finds only this: “Have you ever watched people cleaning out a flat? Throwing away furniture? Women will break the furniture until it’s small enough to be disposed of. Men will smash it just for the sake of smashing it.”
She takes a breath and there is silence. When she looks at Sherlock, he waves at her to go ahead. She shrugs and does. “I think it’s biology. Women are protectors, preservers. Creators. Destroying things is against our nature. We kill ourselves with the minimum amount of damage not because we’re vain, but because that’s how we’re designed.”
“Then why kill yourself in the first place?”
She laughs. “Biology isn’t all we are, you know? I’ve killed people. That’s pretty destructive.”
“You’re not a real woman,” he brushes away her argument, callously.
She should be hurt, should be insulted, should be mortified, but a month living with the rudest person in the greater London area has given her thicker skin than even her military years left her with. All she feels now is a vague sense of triumph because for all the things Sherlock seems to know about her without ever asking, she has finally figured out something about him, too.
She stands and closes the distance between them, comes to a halt at the top of the sofa, where his head lies on the arm rest. She stares into his face upside down. “That’s why you dislike women, isn’t it? Because you don’t understand us at all. Anyone else you can think your way into, but you have no idea how a woman’s mind and body works, do you?”
He makes a noise of protest, says something unfavourable under his breath and swings into a sitting position. “The only reason you tolerate me is that I don’t act very female, most of the time.”
She looks down at her jumper and jeans for emphasis. “Ridiculous,” he snaps.
“Maybe,” she admits. “But I’m right. You can imagine being poor, being angry, being abused or violent. But you can’t imagine being a woman.” Hormones and brain chemistry, generations of rubbish societal restraints drilled into little girls. Even Sherlock isn’t that good.
She’s quite possibly gloating now. She tries to feel bad about it but… no. She’s due a win in this game of theirs.
“Utter nonsense,” he informs her sharply, condescension dripping from every syllable. He brushes past her on his way into his bedroom, slams doors and settles in for a sulk that will last three days.
It’s like living with a thirty-year-old teenager.
.
At first, looking at him jars her. Every single time. His eyes are the palest grey, only a shade darker than his marble skin and the effect is frightening. His eyes look like tiny, black dots among sharp, white angles, and all the more piercing for it.
High cheekbones, the hard slant of his lips and jaw. He looks as brutal as he looks beautiful and his gaze is like a scalpel, cold and precise, a tool for the dissection of the human flesh.
He’s a study in white and black, in grace and ruthless economy, negligence and focus next to each other.
She gets used to him eventually, to the dissonance of him, the contradictions. After a week, she can look at him without going slack at the vision he presents, even grumpy and in his pyjamas. After another week, she learns to let his casual cruelty and dismissal bounce off her, learns to hear what little harmony there is under the dissonance of Sherlock Holmes.
Learns him.
.
He fell asleep on the sofa again, curled into his dressing gown like a freezing puppy, obviously cold and obviously not noticing. Again.
She sighs and feels like his mother, wonders how his mother tolerated two of his kind for years on end without going insane. But then, John has never met Mrs. Holmes. For all she knows, Sherlock and Mycroft both got their mad, scattered genius from her. Although casual observation suggest that Mycroft is a bit better at holding himself together than his younger brother.
She pulls out the garish orange and purple blanket Mrs. Hudson brought them ‘to spruce up the place’ and unfolds it carefully, quietly, before flinging it over him. She watches as it settles in a billow of cool air and for some reason she doesn’t quite understand, she stays there, staring down at him, his face in profile.
She’s just looking, barely even seeing him beyond the abstract, the casually beautiful parts of him. She doesn’t think of anything until his rumbling voice comes from below the edge of the blanket. “I told you, I consider myself married to my work.”
She’s so surprised that he’s awake, at what he thinks she’s doing, that it takes her a moment to stop spluttering useless personal pronouns and say, decisively, “I know, Sherlock. I told you, it’s all fine.”
Because she thinks he needs to hear that. That it’s fine. That he’s fine, however he is.
“Then why are you staring at me?”
Since she has no idea, she simply says, “Just giving you a taste of your own medicine. Go back to sleep. Lord knows you need it.”
She pats the spot of the blanket where she thinks his shoulder might be and then goes back to her room, hoping for sleep without the nightmares that woke her in the first place.
.
“So,” Sarah asks, leaning back in her seat, ostensibly studying the pedestrians passing the street café they are currently sitting in. “What is it with you and Sherlock?”
John fights back a sigh as she sips her tea. Always that question, from anyone she spends any length of time with. She’s gotten into the habit of brushing people off with answers that reveal absolutely nothing. However, this is Sarah.
Who John thinks might be an actual friend in time and even if not, she’s the first person John has connected with since Afghanistan. On a level that does not include murder, at least. And really, John is still not convinced you can connect with Sherlock. On any level.
So instead of brushing the other woman off, she shrugs. “What makes you think there is anything with me and Sherlock? We’re only flatmates and half the time I don’t even know why we’re that, really.”
Sarah laughs, genuinely amused. “Then why is he following you around like a jealous boyfriend, John?”
She’s looking past John’s shoulder as she speaks and John feels the desire to hit her head against the table. “Tell me he isn’t,” she begs, not sure whether to laugh or scream.
Sarah seems to have no such trouble, because her grin is wide and open. “Oh, he is.”
John shakes her head and quietly despairs. She noticed that Sherlock tends to act strange when she mentions Sarah, but it didn’t register as important because even after more than a month, she still hasn’t managed to establish a baseline for Sherlock’s moods and habits. He’s always acting strange.
But stalking her? Why would he? She has never given the slightest indication that she wants more from Sarah than friendship and God knows Sherlock doesn’t want anything more than that from her. Some days, she’s not even sure he wants her friendship. He treats her just about the same as he does his skull, only she can obey simple commands and do tricks.
That, and she seems to be the only one capable of talking him out of his Everyone Is Stupid, We Should Nuke This Planet And Be Done With It tantrums.
She waves at the waitress and tells her, “Don’t look, but there’s a tall man with dark hair somewhere behind me. Black coat, blue scarf, pale and pretty.”
Of course the girl looks and Sarah seems amused by John calling Sherlock ‘pretty’, when really, he defies all description. “I’d like for you to get him a tea to go, two sugars, dash of milk and tell him to go home from me.”
Wide-eyed, the waitress nods and takes off, eager to comply. It’s probably the most fun she’s had today. Five minutes later, Sarah bursts out laughing again and waves. John doesn’t turn around.
Not even when Sarah says, “Look at that. He actually went.”
She sounds surprised.
.
“Is there a particular reason you’ve taken up stalking me as a new hobby?”
“No.”
“Then why were you?”
“I was simply observing mating habits.”
“Having tea with a colleague is hardly ‘mating’, Sherlock.”
“Bored then. I was bored.”
He watches her with eyes that see everything as she strips off her jacket and flings herself on the sofa with the intention of switching on the telly. He’s waiting for her to throw a tantrum about ‘acceptable behaviour’ and playing games, she realizes fifteen minutes into some inane talk show.
She doesn’t.
.
She’s trying to put away the shopping when she finds two pints of blood in the fridge.
“There’s blood in the fridge!” she calls to Sherlock, who hasn’t moved since she got home, except to throw her a look of disgust when she sarcastically thanked him for his help getting four bags up the stairs.
“It’s not mine,” he returns, his bass carrying without him having to raise his voice. It grates, that she has to yell and he still talks in normal tones. It makes her feel small and obnoxious. But then, she should be used to that by now.
“Not reassuring,” she returns, shoving the bottles into the bottommost shelf of the fridge. No body parts above anything edible. It’s a rule. There was an arm once and it dripped. John is a doctor, but even she has her limits.
“It’s for an experiment.” Testy. Any moment now he’ll call her an idiot.
“No splatter patterns on the walls. Mrs. Hudson will slap you!”
She moves while she talks, pulling milk, cheese and butter out of one bag, juggling all three as she tries to reopen the fridge door that fell shut. Her shoulder twinges with the sudden memory of a bullet wound and she yelps against her will as she butter goes skidding, tries to catch it and loses her grip on one of the packets of milk.
She’s mentally resigning herself to cleaning the entire kitchen of milk when pale hands appear out of nowhere and catch it. “Careful,” Sherlock rumbles, putting the milk on the table and taking the cheese from her. Then, “The shoulder?”
She nods as she sets down the rest of what’s in her arms, rubbing at the knotted scar tissue, cursing the bad weather and the strain she put on it, walking home with the shopping. Should have called a cab and damn the money.
Sherlock’s fingers on the scar of the exit wound on her back are so light she barely registers the touch until he ghosts up and around, brushing around her own fingers. She drops her hand and he draws a circle on her jumper with one finger, as if he can see the scar. As if he knows it, when he has never seen it. His gaze is focused on his own hand when she looks up at his face, expression one of concentration.
Then, as suddenly as they came, he drops his fingers away and takes a step back. “You should put a hot water bottle on it.”
His phone beeps and he leaves her with the shopping, unapologetic as always.
.
It takes almost two weeks for Sarah to remember that she never got John to properly answer, back at that café. So she corners her during lunch break, bullies her into her office and orders, “You and Sherlock. Now.”
John shrugs and sits in the squishy visitor’s chair, slouching carelessly in a way that looks much better on Sherlock.
“I told you. Nothing’s going on.”
Sarah, perching on her desk, doesn’t look convinced. “Nothing? He’s annoying as hell, but…” She waves a hand in a vague gesture that John takes to mean that Sherlock is insane, but hot.
But he’s also married to his work and touches her like he touches interesting experiments, carefully and with passion, but utterly distant. He sits next to her on the living room floor without space between them but doesn’t look at her at all and when he pays her a compliment it’s never ‘pretty’ or ‘smart’ but ‘interesting’ and ‘not boring’ and it’s all shaping up into something solid.
Something with a name and a description, but John doesn’t want to use that word, use that description, because she doesn’t believe that any one thing can sum Sherlock up. Ever. “I don’t think he’s interested,” she tells Sarah instead and then adds, for clarification, “At all.”
Sarah looks surprised. “Are you?”
I was in love with a man in Afghanistan.
She touches her wrist with her other hand, wanting to feel the ghost of his last touch there but feeling nothing.
“No.”
.
Nightmares again. She wishes her bloody therapist would do something about those, instead of harping on about John’s trust issues. John is pretty sure those issues would all dissolve if only she could sleep properly.
She doesn’t hear Sherlock marauding through the flat tonight, so she remains in bed, flat on her back, staring at the ceiling. No use waking him up if he’s sleeping for once. Let one of them be well rested tomorrow.
But then she does hear him, soft steps on old stairs, coming closer. She must have made some noise then. Either that, or he’s looking for a charged phone. His died at breakfast. He probably didn’t remember to do anything about it all day.
She closes her eyes and pretends to be asleep as he enters, almost soundlessly flitting through the room and finally climbing up to sit on the end of her antique bed frame, perched there like a gargoyle, or a ghost. He’s staring down at her, she knows, can feel his gaze tickling her stomach, burning at her skin.
“I understand you,” he finally says, conversationally but with some stress or strain. As if it matters. She considers the fact that she knows exactly what he’s talking about mildly frightening but has no energy to properly act on the feeling.
What will be, will be.
What is is them, in a dark flat at two in the morning, having a disjointed conversation they started over a month ago.
“Yes. But we’ve established that I’m not a real woman,” she answers, giving up any pretence of sleep. She smiles, trusting that he can see it in the dark. “This is really bothering you, isn’t it?”
He shrugs, uncharacteristically open, admits, “I don’t like not understanding things. People.”
“You could just ask, you know.”
He blinks at her, a midnight-owl, like the concept never actually occurred to him, then nods. Accepting, she hopes.
“I shouldn’t have called you that,” he finally adds, after a long silence and she holds her breath because that almost, almost sounds like an apology from the great Sherlock Holmes.
It sounds wrong.
She waves it away. “I’m sort of messed up, Sherlock. It’s okay.”
“You tolerate me,” he argues, like that is a skill. So he does possess some level of self awareness. She’s wondered.
“Have you slept?” she asks instead of anything else because nightmare or not, she’s tired.
“No.”
She sits up briefly, just enough to grab his hand and pull. He lands with a huffing sound next to her. “Then sleep,” she orders.
He tries to complain, says, “I told you, John, I don’t…”
“Sleep,” she repeats, a bit sharper. “For God’s sake, Sherlock, don’t be difficult. For once, just don’t be difficult.”
He shuts his mouth with a click and they lie there in the dark, her half turned toward him, him stiff and flat on his back. She stares at his profile against the window until her sight gets blurry, thinks of a man she thinks she was in love with in Afghanistan, thinks of Sherlock never only being one thing. Thinks that she has no idea who she is, but that maybe, she’s more than one thing, too. Thinks of his fingers against her shoulder, circling her scar, of his warmth next to hers, of Sarah asking questions that have no answer.
She thinks that she’s not Sherlock’s girlfriend, or his wife or sister or mother, but that she’s John, whoever that is, and that he’s Sherlock. John and Sherlock.
She reaches out with her left hand, shoulder stinging again, runs her fingers carefully through his unruly curls, from his temple to behind his ear. He goes stiff for a moment and then, when she repeats the gesture, only that, nothing more, he relaxes into it.
Eventually, when he has enough, he takes her hand in his, places it on the sheets between them and doesn’t pull his own hand away. He’s watching her, studying her every reaction, but John is too tired to care. Hasn’t cared in months, to be honest. Let him look, let him play games.
She simply closes her eyes and thinks that she once touched a real, beating, living, human heart and that it was hot under her fingers and ugly and all the more beautiful for it and that it filled her with giddiness and joy and awe and fear. She thinks that it was warm and slick and alive and that, in that moment, she was alive, too.
She thinks that Sherlock is a bit like that beating heart and falls asleep with the memory of its pulse still thrumming in the tips of her fingers.
.
.
Tell me how it was. I'm biting my nails here.
And because I'm a total victim there is now a coda set a few years after the end of this story: no graceful child