At first she refuses to even acknowledge it. Sherlock leads her gently toward conversations, toward openings he whittles in the walls she had constructed long ago, but like a mason wielding a trowel she turns him away every time. Every prod from Sherlock is met with reticence at first, then curt flatness, then outright contempt.
"Leave me alone. I'm fine. I don't need to talk about it. Really"
On and on it goes. Sherlock wakes up earlier and earlier, closer and closer to the sunrise every day until he dresses in the dark, and every night Joan seems to be in her room earlier. She says she is tired, and Sherlock understands better than anyone that some people oughtn't be pushed. Clocks tick and cases float into the ether, neatly wrapped and packaged with the solutions written in orderly ink and signed by both Joan's and Sherlock's hands.
Privately, Sherlock believes the most important turn comes when Joan starts to plug in her second alarm clock again. A few days later a precisely folded notice of vacation of lease is affixed to Clyde's back with the same ribbon Sherlock had intended to wrap a mug of Joan's favorite tea with.
She flings her newspaper down, the pages hitting the table and rippling like a pond full of words. "For the last time, Sherlock, I moved away from you to have my own space. You cannot be over here all the time, you certainly cannot come over unannounced, and you must leave when I ask you to."
"Watson, do you care at all about our process?" He begins his second question before she has a chance to answer the first, drawing his final o into the clipped vowel which betrays his agitation. "Do you care at all about the victims who litter this depraved, debauched city? If you want us to solve any crimes, together, as we have up until this foolish decision of yours to move out of the brownstone, you will have to come back to me and to our methods."
Watson's hands before the ceiling lamp as she throws them in the air are near-translucent, and their veins trace blue maps beneath the skin that has felt paper-thin and crawling of late. "I had thought someone as smart as you wouldn't need me to explain this, but since you don't seem to be getting it, I'll make it clear: I do not want you here, ever, unless you at minimum text me beforehand to let me know you are coming. That gives me the length of a train ride to get ready. I will come to you. I know our methods as well as you do. We can make them work." She pauses, half savoring the stricken look in his eyes, ghosting behind his emotionlessly tight jaw. "Now get the hell out of my house."
"I expect you're waiting for me to proffer an 'I told you so,' so consider this it."
It had been a near-unbearable decision for Joan to move back to the brownstone. She didn't intend to speak to Sherlock about it yet but after the fifth straight night of waking up in a cold sweat with box cutters and bullets flying at her in her dreams she couldn't fathom being alone any longer. Mycroft had returned to London long ago and she could not bring herself to answer his emails with anything more personal than life updates. He would never understand. Daily now, however, she thinks of Sherlock in the back seat of Donna's car, handcuffed, thinking quickly and trusting her enough to leave his rescue in her trembling hands that could barely hold a scalpel.
The box cutter had never faltered — not in her dreams now, not in the stomach of the cousin (as she'd tried to think of him, without a name, without any identity beyond someone lost in time and on her table oh God oh God bring it back in, Joanie came the voice in her head which always spoke Carrie's most calming bedside manner). She had to come back to Sherlock, and so she climbs the stairs a final time to her bedroom, the room she still thinks of as hers, if bare and almost unfurnished. Sherlock had offered to help, but the boxes were almost all packed; just like her white, bare room in the brownstone, her room at the apartment she'd stayed in — not even her house — had been covered in sheets and cardboard.
"Watson," he says, and she comes to herself on the bare mattress, head unconsciously turning toward the sun outside her window, "at least let me assist you in unpacking. Perhaps if you have more of your own possessions littering your living area, you will be less inclined to pick up and leave again."
She lets him use the box cutter to slice through the masking tape on the box which has her family photos in it.
After her first week back she begins to dream.
At first she only dreams at night. Sherlock can tell when blood has flooded her nightmares because, although she tries to be quiet, he hears her feet on the stairs and outside his room as she goes to the kitchen to drink a glass of water and replenish what she's lost. She knows when he sleeps on the couch not to come down at all, and even he can't figure out how she has fine-tuned her deduction skills so precisely.
In her second week at the brownstone the dreams begin to leak. She seeps down the stairs in the morning, barely glancing up at the sun any more. Joan doesn't have the coffee ready for Sherlock's sexual encounter of the previous evening and she leaves without the kind of conversation his few repeat partners have come to expect. Neither she nor Joan misses anything as the only remaining woman sits at the table and sips tea and stares at the bust of Angus which she insists on sitting with as she eats her solitary breakfast. Sherlock pulls his shirt on and emerges into the kind of silence a poached egg cannot fill.
The next day he calls Captain Gregson while he's out getting the milk that he asked Joan to get and she agreed and forgot. "Please desist calling us on new cases," he says, and guiltily he must admit it hurts a little. He had wanted her back in the brownstone for the express purpose of protecting more people and catching more criminals, but he would never have spoken to her again if he could have preserved her from this slow and creeping terror. "However, I would like to have as many cold cases as you can give me." And of course Gregson asks what's wrong, and puts Bell on speakerphone as Sherlock tries his best to say that everything is fine and wishes that Joan was there to tell her own story. He lies for her; he would torture for her, he had said to the Listmaker (cursed be his name), and now he was torturing himself.
He arrives home, forgetting the milk himself and considering signing up for some sort of bottle delivery service, and Joan is sleeping at the kitchen table with Clyde chewing on her sweater sleeve. 100% organic cotton, no dyes his brain begins before he is doused in something he is just getting used to feeling: empathy. She doesn't wake up as he backs out of the kitchen and returns to a world with enough evil in it to knock his intrepid partner into unconsciousness, slumped next to a tortoise and a half-hardened bowl of oatmeal.
One night Sherlock solves his most perplexing problem, the one that has been troubling him longer than any of the cold cases Gregson has sent them (simple, simple, easy, a mere blip on their radar) when he wakes up to darkness and to Joan sitting on the floor with her head resting on the couch near his outstretched arm.
"Sorry to wake you," she says, and she sounds calm, but even in the dim light of the streetlamp through the curtains he'd neglected to shut before he fell asleep. "I heard you snoring and I didn't want to come down but … well, I'm sure I can't hide anything from you."
Sherlock is silent. He sits up without effort and slowly removes his rumpled cardigan and stiff button-down, leaving only the t-shirt and pants he had fallen asleep in. One of his socks has fallen off. Joan says nothing as he folds the discarded clothing, she just looks at the same spot on the floor where earlier Clyde had perambulated as their stand-in for a getaway car from 1976. She can hear him snoring from upstairs, and now from a meter away he can hear her crying. His legs hang over the side of the couch next to her, but it is with his hand that he touches her first.
It feels as though he is setting a weight down on her shoulder as his hand settles on it, then grasps it more firmly. Sherlock had been pushing her gently, so gently, on and off since Mycroft had stepped in and ruined her life and her partnership and her trust in romantic relationships, and now that she was the one trying to push him she was finally ready to admit everything. But she knows. She knows that he's figured it out and that that's why the NYPD hasn't called them, that's why Marcus keeps coming over with his eyes more gentle than ever and more smiles than she's seen on his face in the whole time she's known him, that's why Gregson and his wife banded together enough to coordinate Cheryl shyly bringing over a vegan casserole and a cloyingly sweet explanation of Gregson's absence from their lives. Joan had known then, and she knows now. She cannot hide from Sherlock. So she speaks first, praising her fortitude that she does not sound too choked-up. "Do you … ever dream about Irene? About being lied to? About never really knowing her?"
She half-expects a quip or something flippant but instead his voice is solemn. "All the time." She sighs and his hand sinks with her shoulder. "Why do you think I spend so many nights building useless photo collages over our fireplace only to tear them down? It is not because my mental process" — again with the clipped o — "demands a visual compilation. It simply … occupies my body in a way that keeps me alert and functioning." There is another pause. Joan considers speaking, but the same inclination which kept her away from the couch before keeps her from piercing the slowly-receding veil now. "I … do not enjoy dreaming of Irene." His voice is quiet and it shakes. Almost imperceptibly, in the long silence that follows, his hand travels from her shoulder, slowly, gently, like a whisper down to her wrist, where he pauses.
Joan is the one who takes his hand. Their fingers entwine. She is fairly certain they're both crying now. "I guess nightmares are just a part of our line of work," she says softly. "We're partners."
Joan wakes up marked. Her face had been pressed into Sherlock's corduroys where she had fallen asleep. Their hands still touch. She can't remember what they talked about — or even if they spoke — after her affirmation of their partnership. Gently she disengages from her partner's still-sleeping form and moves into the kitchen. For the first time in a long time, she makes enough coffee for two.