Drowning Lessons

[solsticezero]

Title: Drowning Lessons
Rating: G
Characters: Sherlock/John
Words: ~3,000
Summary: In which Sherlock nearly drowns, and John deduces the nature of a situation quite accurately.


It was fantastic for about twenty minutes, and then it all went to hell.

John loved the chase. He loved the running, and the dodging of cars and people. He loved the corners taken at speed, he loved the sound of his own heart thudding wildly in his ears, and he loved to keep at Sherlock’s heels. The blur of the city at night as they ran was better than - it was better than anything. And it was his, and he could have it all the time, and it never got old.

That night, before it went to hell, it was an organized crime ring. That was who they were chasing. Sherlock had been setting them up for weeks, winding his way slowly around the outside, laying the cord, until he could finally pull it tight and trap them all together at the center. It had worked, for the most part; a few fish slipped the net, but that was the way of it, and the running was cleanup. Two men, on foot, with Sherlock and John on their tail, running through stalled traffic on Tower Bridge, and everything was lights and beeping cars and the sound of the Thames.

Then John lost Sherlock behind a bus, when the traffic crawled a half-inch toward the Gherkin and he had to pause or be hit. And while Sherlock had a good half-foot on John, and was the only person running down the bridge in a fitted bruise-colored button-up, John couldn’t find him when the bus passed. It was as though he’d pelted around the huge red vehicle and then disappeared entirely.

John stopped, breath whistling in his throat, and bent with his hands on his thighs, neck craned to scan the lines of cars ahead of him. The air smelled of exhaust and humidity, but he pulled it in, ignoring the beeps and shouts around him, focused only on the slow crawl of senseless worry in the back of his mind as he raked his eyes back-forth-back over the lanes stretched in front of him. Nothing; no Sherlock, no sign of the men they had been chasing. He straightened up.

He heard an angry shout. Then he was running again.

In a shadowed part at the side of the bridge, past the cars, out of the glow of the structure itself, John could see movement, and he went for it, slamming a hand down on the hood of a car and vaulting over it as the man inside screamed at him unintelligibly. Three figures, two standing facing the water, one against the rail -- rake thin, tall and so profoundly stupid for getting ahead of John. They had a few meters between them, but one had his arm up, and John was panicking before a flash of headlights even hit the gun.

“Sherlock!”

He was too far away. There was a lane of traffic and fifteen meters of bridge between him and the man with the gun.

When another set of headlights washed over him, the look on Sherlock’s face was nothing but interested.

And then he was shot.

He was over the rail with a slither of fabric against metal.

Darkness, absolute and unprecedented, and pressure equal to nothing he’d ever felt before. Sherlock awoke with an automatic gasp of pain that pulled water into his mouth and down his throat. There was one second of confusion, remembering soft lights and feet on asphalt - and then the gunshot, and the impact of the water, and losing consciousness.

And there was the panic. Low, beneath the rational part of his mind still thinking about the bridge, there was the screaming in his brain for oxygen which would never come, begging for his snapped-shut mouth to open and for his lungs to inhale. It was incredible, the need, like nothing he’d ever felt before, not in hunger or addiction. It was something primitive and urgent and clawing at the inside of his mind, pushing rational thought to the side in favor of broken internal shrieking. He captured it, relegated it to the smallest space possible inside of him, and left half of his brain available for assessment.

There was no up. There was no direction; he was floating in a void, black and dead, not even the glowing bridge visible from so far down. He tried to sweep his arms through the water in some hazarded guess of a direction, and the movement of his injured arm almost caused him to pass out again. His legs were slowly growing useless, losing the power to control his extremities as quickly as his brain lost oxygen, his vision dimming, thought becoming more of a struggle. Each new word coming slower than the last.

Even as he lost consciousness again, he was profoundly fascinated. Drowning was truly an interesting way to die.

A hand closed over his arm.

John hauled himself onto the shore, dragging Sherlock after him and sending both of them sprawling into the sand. Everything inside of his head was clinical and rational and calm. Everything except the part that was caged and terrified at the very back, buried under years of medical practice under extreme duress but nonetheless present still, something he could never really get rid of.

He grabbed Sherlock’s shoulders and flipped him over onto his back - light and limp as a ragdoll, wet dark hair clinging to his cheeks, lips blue and skin pale and eyes very, very closed. He tucked his thumb against Sherlock's neck to check his pulse. In the light of Tower Bridge, John watched Sherlock’s chest and waited for it to move.

No movement. No pulse. The injury from the bullet (very badly placed, only a glimpse across the upper arm) stained Sherlock’s shirt, making the bruise color darker, but it was secondary to the fact that Sherlock wasn’t breathing, that his heart wasn't beating, and John tilted Sherlock’s head back and opened Sherlock’s mouth to make sure his airway was clear.

He pinched Sherlock’s nostrils closed, then secured his mouth over the loose, wet mouth below him and breathed out once, twice. He watched Sherlock’s chest rise as he exhaled. No response.

He sat back, wrapped his fingers together and placed the heel of his hand over Sherlock’s sternum. The calm was really settling in now, kneeling next to his flatmate, cold and dripping the Thames from his hair; this process was so familiar, and the situation faded away. It was nothing but a series of steps. Thirty compressions, two more breaths. The approaching sirens were nothing but background noise. He’d called for help, pulled off his shoes, dropped his jacket and mobile and dived over the side of the bridge. No thinking. No hesitation. Just action.

Thirty compressions. Two breaths.

The thing in the cage in the back of his mind was beginning to bend the bars. Sherlock’s face was slack, his hands limp in the sand, fingers separate and slender and long, palm-down and loose. It was taking too long. If he was going to come to, it would happen now. The words echoed in John’s head and nearly made him lose count: Continue until help arrives or until physically exhausted and unable to continue.

They never said or until the patient is revived. They were never so optimistic.

Thirty compressions. One breath.

Sherlock inhaled with enough force to surprise John into moving away, and then choked water into the sand, coughing, hands scrambling at anything as if he’d be swept away by some great tide. He grabbed the edge of John’s shirt and pulled him closer again, and John could see nothing in his eyes but glazed panic. No conscious thought, no processing, and it scared the hell out of him.

“Sherlock,” he said, going for commanding but missing and landing somewhere near squeaky. “Sherlock, calm down, it’s all right.” He grabbed both of Sherlock’s hands, trapping his fingers together to stop them from pulling further at John, his shirt and arms and face and hair. “Sherlock, it’s me. Breathe. It’s fine.”

All at once, the terrified twist of Sherlock’s body fell, and he was once more stretched limp and unconscious on the shore. But breathing, John saw. Almost normally.

The ambulance appeared nearby. John kept Sherlock’s hands trapped between his own until he was forced to let go.

Sherlock refused to sit with his feet over the edge of the bed in order to give John easy access to the dressing over his wound, so John knelt on the mattress with the new dressing laid out beside him, working at an awkward angle while Sherlock passionately ignored him in favor of the laptop perched against his knees.

“It’s coming along,” John said. “Clean, at least, and no real danger of infection despite the dip in the Thames.”

Sherlock only grunted, still staring at the screen in front of him.

John sat back on his heels, suddenly annoyed. “Look, what are you on about?”

“I don’t know to what you are referring.” Sherlock’s eyes didn’t shift. He tapped at a few keys.

John blew out a rough breath between pursed lips, keeping himself from taking the laptop and shoving it over the edge of the bed - mostly because it was his. “You’ve been angry with me for two days.”

“I am not angry with you.” Sherlock said the word with disdain, and now the fact that he wasn’t looking at John felt more purposeful.

“Then what’s the problem? And look at me when you’re talking to me.”

Sherlock looked over at John, then; there was danger lurking just behind his eyes. “Better?” he asked, in a low, deadly voice.

“Much.” Anger and bewilderment were battling for dominance in John’s head. Sherlock was being a prat, which was nothing new, really - but there was something deeply defensive about it this time.

John sighed. He dropped the anger and went for bewilderment instead.

“Really,” he urged, more gently than before. “What’s wrong?”

Sherlock snorted and looked back at the computer. “There’s nothing wrong. I’m working, and you’re distracting me.”

“I’m changing your bandage. And that’s now. You haven’t spoken to me, properly spoken to me, since I saved your life. You’re welcome, by the way.”

Another snort, this one much more derisive, and something mumbled incoherently under Sherlock’s breath.

John kept the exasperated smile carefully off of his face at Sherlock’s ridiculous childishness. “What was that?”

Sherlock let out an angry sigh and slammed the laptop lid closed. “I didn’t ask for you to dive in after me.”

John’s brows furrowed. “You’d been shot, then dropped into the water and dragged down. You had no way of finding your way back to the surface.”

“I’m aware.”

There were connections attempting to be made in John’s head, but none of his neurons were firing in quite the right succession to understand what was being said here. “You would rather I hadn’t saved your life?”

Sherlock only looked at him; serious eyes, serious mouth, serious face.

“Why?”

Sherlock rolled his eyes, as though John was being profoundly irrational. “I’d worked for weeks to get those men, John. You didn’t even spare a thought for that when you dove in after me. They got away.”

John’s mouth was opening and closing rapidly as his brain tried to find traction on the words that had just come out of Sherlock. Worked for weeks. Spare a thought. Got away. “Are you a bloody mental patient? You think I would rather catch two criminals than make sure that you didn’t die?”

“No. I don’t think that. And there is the problem.”

John stared. Properly stared, mouth open, all faculties of speech and thought jammed by the conflicting urges to punch Sherlock or to apologize or to run screaming from the room in the face of such fascinating wrongness.

But Sherlock’s fingers were tapping at the top of the laptop, an erratic, unrepetitive beat, and John had it all at once.

“You’re lying,” he said.

Sherlock frowned, opening his mouth to argue, but John honestly didn’t care what the argument was and he cut Sherlock off immediately.

“You’re lying,” he repeated, “and you want me to know you’re lying, so don’t say anything.”

Sherlock closed his mouth. He watched John with sudden, lazy interest, the corner of his mouth curling very slightly.

“And don’t smile at me like I’m a child with a puzzle.”

Sherlock carefully schooled his features.

John watched Sherlock’s face, the gears in his mind whirring. Sherlock had spent the last two days ignoring John but for the times when John was obliged to inspect the shallow gunshot wound and change the bandage. When he’d needed to speak, he’d been surly. When he asked for something, it was with a rougher demand than usual. The men who got away would be a matter of maybe four days, once Sherlock was able to move about properly again, and the chase would be interesting, the sort of thing Sherlock looked forward to. In fact, the chase on the bridge was a simple task when put next to the challenges presented him now, and that should have been a delight to Sherlock after a period where he was not allowed to leave the flat.

So his excuse made absolutely no sense. And he knew it. And he wanted John to know it. But why would he avoid telling the real reason he was annoyed at -

Oh.

John laughed.

“What?” Sherlock asked.

John shook his head, smiling, reaching back out to continue unwinding the old bandage from Sherlock’s upper arm. “You’re a thirteen year old girl. I hope you realize that.”

Sherlock blinked slowly at him. “I’m not following you.”

“I bet that feels terrible.” John leaned over Sherlock to drop the bandage into the bin beside the bed, then picked up the new one.

Sherlock followed John’s movements with his eyes. “You want to explain. You like having the advantage.”

“It isn’t a competition.”

“Good, because I would be winning by a very wide margin.”

John smiled as he began to wind the clean bandage around Sherlock’s wound. “You are a thirteen year old girl,” he said, “because you may as well have just handed me a note which says ‘Do you like me? Check yes or no.’”

Sherlock only continued to watch him, waiting.

John sighed and sat back on his heels again. “You aren’t annoyed that the men got away. You don’t care. If anything, you’re excited about it, and we’re going to go out and find them soon enough, and there’ll be all the running you can stand. You’re annoyed that I jumped in after you. You’re annoyed that I would risk my life to save you, because you aren’t used to that sort of attention, and you’re worried that you aren’t up to that sort of sacrifice.”

Sherlock kept his eyes on him, head tilted very slightly, with no real expression on his face. “That,” he said, “was a fascinating bit of fiction. I do hope you didn’t strain yourself coming to that conclusion.”

John sighed. He cut the end of the bandage off and taped it down. “I’m right,” he said.

“You’re not. Thanks for playing.”

John tucked a hand between Sherlock’s bare shoulder and neck, and Sherlock went absolutely still.

“You’re worth it,” John said quietly. He watched Sherlock’s face, watched the movement of expressions over his mouth and eyes, watched the very, very distant look of fear hidden there. “I think you’re worth it, and I would do it again a hundred times. And you would do the same for me. Have done. So stop acting like I made a mistake coming after you, and stop blaming yourself for something that didn’t happen, and may or may not happen in the future. I know what I'm doing.”

The surprised expression was not ebbing from Sherlock’s face. It was the longest John had even seen him thrown off. “I can’t be made responsible for someone else’s life,” he said, his voice made soft and cracked by the warm contact of John’s hand on his skin.

“Bit too late for that, I’m afraid.”

“No,” Sherlock said, voice louder, rougher. He grabbed John’s hand from his shoulder and held it away. “You don’t understand. I didn’t intend for you to be involved this way in what I do. I didn’t intend to develop a - friendship - with you, where I inherently care whether I get you hurt. I can’t hold myself back from the things I need to do because I know that you’re following me.”

John shrugged. “Then don’t.”

“Then don’t follow me.”

John shook his head. “No. Sorry. That isn’t how this works.”

Sherlock rolled his eyes with exasperation and released John’s hand.

John kept himself from rolling his own eyes in response, but only just. “This is mutual. It’s always going to mutual, until one of us is blown up or asphyxiated or, I don’t know, I leave because there’s been one too many human body parts in the refrigerator. Or you get distracted by something shiny and far away and I never see you again.” He smiled at the expression of distaste on Sherlock’s face. “The point is, I’m going to follow you into danger every day, and I’m going to do it gladly. And you’re going to lead me, and you’re going to do it without a second thought. And I’m going to risk my life to save yours, and you’re going to risk your life to save mine, and we’ll either end up back in the flat nursing our wounds or end up dead. It depends on how the cards fall.”

Sherlock watched him, brows furrowed, mouth pulled into a low frown. “It honestly doesn’t bother you,” Sherlock said.

“What doesn’t?”

“The fact that you’re going to die.”

John paused. Then he smiled, very wide and bright. “It honestly doesn’t.”

Sherlock shook his head. “I sincerely don’t understand you sometimes.”

“I think that’s why you keep me around.”

“The medical training helps,” Sherlock murmured, half-distracted and frowning thoughtfully at him.

John scooted back and swung his legs over the bed. “I’ll see what’s in for tea.” The answer was probably eyeballs and someone’s forearm, but a man could dream.

He heard Sherlock open the laptop again as he padded to the door, and stopped there, hand against the doorframe, to look back. Sherlock was carelessly pulling his shirt back on over his shoulder. He tugged at the collar, his fingers brushing his neck. Then he stopped. He pressed his palm, very lightly, over the place where John had pressed his own, without looking up from the screen. It was absent, and intimate, and John felt warmth wind upwards from his lower belly to his cheeks.

He hurried out of the room with a hidden, small, ridiculous smile, and breathed past the lightness in his chest.