A Study in Floodgates, Balance and the Art of Tipping Scales

by SincerelyChaos

It's not pathological, but it's not healthy either, thought John, as he pondered on why let this mess of (perhaps) a relationship continue to make them both even more absurd and rabid. We are more than the sum of our symptoms, and this is perhaps a love story, but it's also a story in which each chapter illustrates a term or diagnostic criteria related to psychiatry.

1. Interlude

Of balance...

1,5 years after John and Sherlock become flatmates, there's an odd sort of balance in 221B.

There're things that are shared; the Work, John's laptop, the flat and a rather unique friendship, or partnership, if you rather.

There're also things that are not shared; the household work, the skull and, most importantly, a pretty extensive list of personal issues.

There's a balance in this, but a balance is only working until something tips the scale.

And without that balance, all that remains are two persons that might be rather bonkers, a bit damaged from life and maybe just a bit unused to intimacy, but also quite madly in love with each other.

...and the art of tipping scales.

If the frail balance of their life together was to be measured by a scale, there would be several things that would need to be in appropriate amounts in relation to each other in order not to tip the scale.

For one, there would have to be a balance between the things they shared (which were quite a few since they both lived and partially worked together) and the things they kept to themselves.

There would also need to be a proportionate amount of things in their respective lives that revolved around the each other and things in their lives that wasn't dependant on the other one of them.

Last, there they would need to make sure that they put the same weight on some issues, on some emotions and on the importance (and definition) of who they were to each other.

One and a half year after they first moved in together in the cozy, yet sometimes biohazardous, flat in Baker Street, they seemed to have found that delicate balance. It was not normality as other people would define it, but it was some kind of predictability even in the unpredictable lives they led. John learned not to be shocked over things he found in different and increasingly more inventive places in the flat, Sherlock learned to deduce part of what made John go from cozy-jumper-wearing food-nagger to determined soldier (loyalty, sense of justice or protectiveness seemed to be three things that induced this blink-of-an-eye-fast change) and they both learned which limits not to cross when it came to personal integrity in order to keep their partnership strangely intimate and hard to define, but still platonic.

But none of the things that needed to be in balance was fixed in either weight or measure, and therefore it perhaps was unavoidable that the scale would, one day, tip to one side. It was however not entirely expected that the balance would be so upset that the scale would not only tip to one side, but completely tip and fall over, spilling all that it used to measure all over the walls and the floor.

Somehow, that was still what happened, although it at first would not seem to be so dramatic as it later turned out to be. And it happened, as it seems to be with so many of those life altering events , because of a few words that didn't really seem so important at the time, but planted some kind of idea or thought and then... grew to take over the entire metaphorical green house of thoughts.

Later, Sherlock would think of the day they first began to touch each other, little by little, without the pretext of pure platonic partnership, as The Opening of the Floodgates, which was a metaphor he could truly use, since the feeling of drowning was very notable during the time that followed after that first touch.

Note;

So, basically, this was the interlude.

From next chapter on, every chapter will be titled with a reference to psychiatry, and illustrating, in more or less pathological ways, the term or criteria in the title. Some of it might be light and some of it might be a little more on the unhealthy side, just like these terms and symptoms are in real life.