when I love thee not,
chaos is come again.
It is not the first time she has found him like this. Sprawled across the floor, shirtless and with a distant look in his eye that tells her he is both here and not here.
Two months have not been enough, she knows this now. He needs more time and she had thought she knew that, but until today she did not truly know the extent of his heartbreak (if he could, he would argue that it isn't really heartbreak, because that implies an emotion like love and that's just a chemical imbalance in the brain, nothing more, nothing less).
Sometimes, she wants to scream because she did not notice it earlier. All the signs were there: the almost too seamless account of the death, Sherlock's refusal to talk about her, and that inscrutable twitch of his hand whenever Irene's name was mentioned, as if he was reaching for someone that wasn't there. Joan has been with him for far too long to have missed those clues. And yet she did, and it pains her.
Sherlock had known too. He may have willed himself to forget, to ignore, to move on, but he had always known the truth. Joan does not understand why he did not tell her earlier, or why he did not set out to seek Irene before all this could happen. She only knows that nobody is faultless in this. Sherlock will not admit this, but she is aware that he recognises his part in it all.
It is not yet the time to point fingers and pick brains and so Joan brews him that herbal tea he has come to love and sets it on the floor beside him. And then she walks away, because what else is she to do?
It is a week later and Sherlock is sitting on the dust-ridden sofa with his head in his hands. The monitor bristles with white noise, a half-hearted attempt at normalcy. Joan cannot help but look each time she passes the open door.
It reaches the point where she can no longer stand to watch.
"This has to stop."
They have not spoken in weeks. Sherlock looks up, his bloodshot eyes staring at her as if he does not recognise her.
"She didn't care."
"Sherlock, that's enough."
"She lied and then she left."
"You've been like this for months."
"She had hours without me, days, years. Why did she come back?"
"You can't do this to yourself anymore."
"It was so perfect. No-one would ever have doubted it. They all thought she was dead."
"I'm calling Captain Gregson."
"So why? To spite me? To break me? There was no reason for her to return."
"I'm calling Gregson and then I'm calling your father."
"No."
And for a moment, Joan thinks he is talking to her.
"No," and he is standing up and facing her and his eyes are wide like he has just discovered the missing link in a case but this is not a case, this is his undoing. "She wanted to boast."
"Sherlock..."
After months of inactivity, he is finally responding to it all and he is doing it in a way that could be industrious or counter-productive. Joan does not know which way it will go; only that she must be prepared for a relapse.
"Sherlock, it's time to let go."
He will never find her again, they both know that. She will be on the other side of the globe by now, revelling in his destruction. It is Joan's tentative hand on his shoulder that finally pulls Sherlock away from the poisonous thought of her. Before she can intoxicate his mind further, before he can allow himself to be consumed in maps decorated with pins and photo-fits of her potential co-conspirators, he must let Joan take him back to the very first day she walked through his door and they must start again.
Irene Adler may have defeated Sherlock Holmes. But Joan Watson rebuilt him.