London. Home.

No one told me going into the Army that it takes more bravery coming back.

Over in Afghanistan, every choice you made meant something. Pack extra gum and toothpaste instead of extra bullets, Zeds could run you over "In a Heartbeat" as the song goes, but pack the extra bullets instead and get cut off for months without proper hygiene, you could lose a jaw from the simplest of dental infections.

Nothing means anything back home. You climb out of bed at noon, nothing happens. You're late for the tube and have to wait for the next one, there's no difference from the one you missed.

It doesn't even look different. Whole world taking a swan-dive down the rabbit hole, you'd expect to see things that would've been unusual. Daily life looking exactly the same as it always did feels more like a Stepford mockery than any sort of comforting.

I cross the street and walk up to St. Thomas Hospital. They don't want a surgeon who can't stop herself from shaking, why would they do? Just because I don't have any other skill-sets doesn't mean they'll give me a job, it just means everybody else won't. My walking stick is more useful than I am.

I should probably tell my therapist that I'm having those thoughts again. The thoughts about how I'm more lifeless over here than the Zeds were over there. About wishing they'd just shot me immediately instead of waiting to find out I was immune. About wishing I had the courage to pretend I'm still over there, that it just happened, and that I don't know about the potential for immunity either.

Most women fail because they try something delicate instead, like slitting their wrists or swallowing a bottle of pills, but the Army are letting me keep my gun for as long as my trick cyclist tells them I have these thoughts under control. I should probably tell them that's a bad idea, that it's not working anymore.

"Jane?"

Well, bloody hell if it isn't Dr. Michael sodding Stamford running out the door in his scrubs and lab coat. "Dr. Stamford!"

I walk over to meet him. We briefly share an embrace, then he half-heartedly smacks the back of my head. "Jane, if you still can't call me 'Mike' or at least 'Michael' to my face –"

I laugh. Hopefully he'll think it's genuine. "Michael, I'm sorry, I couldn't resist."

He laughs too. "And when the hell were you going to tell me you'd made it back? Penny and the kids have been asking every night about their 'Aunt' Jane!"

Oh, lovely. Here come the complexes again. "Do you have time to walk and talk? I'm told it's harder to be overheard when you're walking."

"Jane Hannah Watson, after all the thousands of hours you spent getting me through university, I would have time to walk with you across the Pond and back if you'd wanted."

I start walking, trying to enjoy the view of the park and the bike-sharing station across the street. "And that's the problem. If I told you that I needed a place to stay, you would offer me a spare room in a heartbeat –" I try to hold back a bitter laugh at the choice of words.

It doesn't work. "I just wanted to find a flat for myself first."

"How is that a problem? Of course I have an extra room!"

"And that just makes it worse."

Mike mouths "What." Did he try to say that out loud?

"I assure you that I appreciate the gesture and that I would love to be healthy enough to accept, but until I get things sorted out with my therapist, I'm afraid that feeling like a parasite to you would only make my situation even more painful."

Mike bursts out laughing.

And then slaps his mouth shut. "Oh, God, Jane, I am so sorry."

I can't help but laugh with him.

Now he's not trying to stop himself either.

I needed this. Everything I'd just been thinking gone, evaporated into nothingness. Not sure how long it will last before the train of thought comes back, but at least I have some glimmer of emotion to look forward to for when I get my life back on track.

I force myself to breathe. "So what exactly did you think was funny?"

Mike takes a few second longer than I'd done. "So you're saying that you know you need help, but won't ask to impose changes on the life of a friend who already has everything sorted out?"

Of course not. At least, not yet, anyway. "And you have another option?"

"Yes, as a matter of fact I am going to leave the practice to go and take Tarot classes."

Wait, what? Is he serious? He's not serious, is he?

"Clearly, fate and destiny are more powerful than I'd thought and I should be learning as much as I can about fortune-telling rather than wasting my life on mere trifles like saving lives."

All right, fine, so he wasn't serious. "Go on?"

"You're the second person today to tell me that you need a place to stay, but that you'd be too much of a burden on anybody else's home life."

… I should say something. Something profound. This is the most perfect turn of events I've ever seen in my life, and this deserves so much better than the run-of-the-mill talking points we'd shared before. "Huh?"

Really, Jane? That's the best you can come up with?

Mike turns around and starts jogging.

Is he going back to St. Thomas?

"Come along, you can meet him right now!"

Wait, this new friend of Mike's is right here?

Maybe Tarot classes aren't the worst idea in the world.

…

We turn the corner. AMT Coffee is still open.

How could I have ever forgotten how beautiful the smell is right between the crispness of the hospital swirling into the sharpness of freshly ground coffee beans? "Mike, do you still remember all the times we'd have Jack make us coffee to get us through the late study nights –"

"– And you'd always tell him that the discovery of coffee was more important than that of penicillin?"

"So no you don't then?" God, I have missed when sarcasm could be playful and not have to be cutting.

Then again, I also miss being in control of my own body. Blasted twitching is coming back.

Mike smacks the back of my head again. "Hey, there he is." He runs over to some scrawny man facing us, but sitting at the table furthest from us. "Dear God, Sherlock, what are you doing?"

Do I even want to know?

Sod it, why not? I walk over.

The man "Sherlock" – not a name I've heard before outside of Monty Python – is swirling his coffee with his bare finger.

A rather reddish coffee, I see as I get closer. I didn't know they made coffee in reddish flavours.

Wait, is that a bloodied pin on the napkin in front of him?

The man doesn't look up at Mike. "Seeing how concentrated the blood can become before the drink becomes unpotable."

Is this man a vampire or a lunatic?

No, wait, a vampire wouldn't consider any mixture of coffee and blood to be undrinkable. The man must be a lunatic instead. Mike thought I would want him as a flat-mate?

Still, beggars can't be choosers. "Pleased to meet you, Sherlock, my name is Jane Watson."

Sherlock looks up. "Welcome back from Afghanistan, Doctor."

What.

Mike struggles to hold back a laugh.

Sherlock shakes his head. "Before you ask, I despise fortune-tellers as much as it appears that you do, and I wouldn't want your consideration of myself as a potential flat-mate to be discoloured by the mistaken impression that I respect the practice."

I stand there with my mouth open for what feels like minutes. "And –" I force myself to finish the thought. "– Why would I believe you?"

"Because were a psychic to suffer a psychotic break in the middle of a ritual, how would he know which of the information planted without context into his head was from the magic and which was from the illness? The only information that matters is the information gleaned from logical analysis. I did not call you 'Doctor' because I took a potion that popped the word 'Doctor' into my mind, I called you 'Doctor' because I observed that you are as comfortable – psychosomatic tremors from your service notwithstanding – in a hospital as my colleagues on the force are comfortable in a police station. You are either a nurse or a doctor, and given that nurses and doctors require different educations, it didn't seem likely that a woman who'd spent years in nursing school would've had the time to become as personally acquainted with a man who'd spent his educational years in medical school as you appear to be with Dr. Stamford."

Bloody hell.

"Michael's face tells me that you are one of the most important friends in his life – again, notwithstanding the years you've been out of the country – and therefor, medical school."

That's actually not bad. "So what about my being out of country?"

"You carry yourself as a soldier, and your tan suggests that you'd spent a great deal of time in the Sun, yet in uniform rather than sunbathing. The only two places in the world that the Crown are deploying to for active duty and which receive that much Sun are the Middle East and the southern United States, yet before the Masquerade was broken, you had spent your entire life studying medical science at the same reputable universities as Michael here. No one with that educational background would be comfortable with how much of the world cannot be understood objectively –"

The man sighs and pauses. Is he struggling as hard to adapt to the revelations of the past few years that I have, not just about fortune-telling specifically?

"– And so you would've insisted on going to the Middle East to fight the hordes of undead, rather than help the US to crack down the mages who'd originally created them. You would not be able to force yourself to study the purely mystical techniques of combat, but you would be willing to take up arms against a foe that can be killed with normal firearms, and you would be willing to lend your medical expertise to those willing to do the same. It didn't work perfectly –"

Well I certainly wouldn't call almost being eaten alive "working perfectly" either. "And how did you know that my tremors were psychosomatic rather than physical?"

"You have not yet taken a seat, that means that part of your brain is able to forget about this."

Very well then, let's see what else this man can do. "Can you tell me where I got them?"

"I see a hint of disgust in your face, that tells me that your injury was different on a fundamental level from what most soldiers are trained to deal with, presumably to do with your discomfort with the existence of magic. You do not seem like the kind of person who would've accepted magical treatments, thus it had to be a magical injury that you could recover from without magical aid. Are you one of the 1-in-3000 who are immune to the bite of the undead?"

The man's hands may as well be cutting through my chest and pulling my heart out. I need to sit, I need to breathe, I need to not fall over and cause a scene.

The man gets up. "My apologies, I should not have –"

I put my hand up as I take a seat. I force myself to breathe. "This was the first time we'd run into one of the Zeds that had eaten enough to become a much larger monster, this one able to spray powerful acid. I got sprayed and had to remove my uniform, and then once we'd dealt with the large one, some of us were dead or injured, I wasn't the only one who'd had to lose the uniform, and so many smaller ones swarmed around us that we ran out of bullets and had to get in close with the knives."

"And you got bitten?"

"Over a dozen times before I lost consciousness, and I'm told another dozen after that. When I woke up, they had to sedate me all over again, I was making such a scene about how the rescue team should've left me behind. The second time I woke up, I was told that there had been plausible yet unconfirmed reports about a small fraction of people being immune, but this had been after 5 years of believing that a single scratch was a death sentence."

I feel myself breathe again. How had I just said that much so easily? Was it just the feeling that this man could already decipher everything about my life the second he wished to do? And that he didn't even need to use magic to do so? Was it that he seemed to be struggling with the world turned upside-down as much as I've been? Was it that being in a proper hospital again was making me feel safer than an emergency tent in a Zed-damned desert ever could? Was it just that any friend of Mike's would be a friend of mine?

Sherlock lifts his hand a centimetre or two above the table, then pulls it back. Let's try a bit of analysis of my own: he sees how uncomfortable I am and wanted to take my hand to reassure me that he was a friend and that I was safe, but is almost as uncomfortable making physical contact with other people as I am remembering It happening?

Sherlock shakes his head. "Perhaps let's just take a breather to look at a flat first and save any more discussions as heavy as this one for a later time?"

How the hell did he – really, Jane? He just deciphered everything about your military service in a single glance, and you're surprised he knows you're looking for a flat-mate? "And how exactly did you know I was looking for a flat?"

"I'd just told Michael this morning that I'd been kicked out by my last flat-mate, but that I'd rather impose on my own family than on Michael's, and now he's introducing me to an old friend of his who's just returned home from Afghanistan. Clearly she needs a flat-mate as much as I do, and I should be looking at list of flats that I'd found for the chance that I would be able to share the rent instead of the list that I would try to afford on my own. Will you be needing directions to 221b Baker Street?"