"I don't know. I guess it's hard to know what you're gonna do."
Holmes spent his days and nights trying desperately to make sense of something other than the one thing he most needed to understand. She could empathize.
By the time he collapsed into unconsciousness three days after bringing Moran to the station, he'd been awake for five and she almost as long. The quiet was soothing at first, but as the hours passed, she found she still wasn't able to relax and the few hours of sleep she managed each night did not provide any real rest. After that, after the Red Team case and the lifted suspension, they'd gone on just one case with Bell. A light load, compared to recent events. She still felt as if she were sleepwalking through her days and daydreaming through her nights.
Like Holmes, she'd always prided herself on being self-sufficient, and now when she let herself acknowledge that she needed to talk about this, she had no one to call. It was becoming clear that if she stayed with him, regardless of the circumstances, she was going to need a new therapist. Someone who didn't know her as a colleague, someone who would push a lot harder into the dark places. There were going to be more dark places.
"Watson!"
Her heart slammed into her sternum; she hadn't heard him come up the stairs. "What? Why are you yelling?"
"I texted you three times. You didn't respond."
"I didn't— I had my phone right here." She picked it up where it lay on the couch next to her and saw the messages. "Sorry; I must have been more absorbed in my book than I thought. What is it?"
"You're still on the same page you were reading yesterday." He drew his eyebrows down, frowning while staring, no, examining her. She didn't like it.
"That's what you wanted to tell me?" She closed the book without marking her place and let it drop to the floor with a sharp slap that sounded like she felt.
"You don't look well." He kept staring at her.
"That's what you wanted to tell me?" She got up from the couch. "I'm going to my room. If you actually need something, tell me now so I don't have to come back down." She glared at him, feeling irritated by his examination and hoping that irritation would get him to back off.
"No, I wanted to tell you about a promising lead in the cold case I've been perusing, but you are clearly not in a conducive frame of mind. Is it the flu? Is there any of that tea left?"
"I don't have the flu. I'm just exhausted. Some of us didn't get to sleep for two days after not sleeping for a week." Shit. Did not mean to bring that up. "I'm going to lie down for a while. An hour. Just let me have an hour."
He took a step back and gave her an ironic half bow before turning and walking away in silence, still frowning. Shit.
The dark place shadowing her now had a razor's flash and an icepick's tip and a killer's cold voice more chilling for being so familiar. She couldn't reconcile the knife-edged menace and amoral determination with the keen and curious mind she thought she knew. The dry wit that could slip into kindness without warning and exit as quickly, leaving no trace. The brilliance that illuminated her more often than it blinded. His friend was right; her life would be the poorer for not having Holmes in it, and she knew he liked having her there, which was also something of a wonder. It was not surprising she had wanted to stay, before Moran... But how could she still want to stay, after? That was another layer of darkness.
It was not a question of putting him on a pedestal; she was constantly stepping on the shards of his clay feet and attempting to clear them away for everyone else. Rather, she simply could not fathom the distance he had travelled from the person she thought she was starting to understand to the one who would send a teenager to locate a serial killer because it was expedient. The one who had bluntly confided to her what he was planning to do to that man, with no shame or dissembling. To imagine he could change so completely in an instant was terrifying; to imagine he hadn't changed was worse.
She felt foolish and betrayed. She was frightened because she had not felt physically threatened and didn't know if it was insight or more foolishness. She felt trapped, drowning, surrounded. She felt too much. She had tried fleeing to a bright place with no shadows where she could pretend for a while, just a while, that it wasn't really that bad. (Of course, bad was thinking she could escape it.) In that place, she could justify the lie to her therapist a dozen different ways. She could ask Captain Gregson what kind of apology would be enough. She could pretend that Holmes's arrogance about the value of his skills made her annoyed, not paralyzed by anxiety. She could tell him lightly that she never knew what he was going to do and tell herself she was being flippant.
The gentle knock on her door came an hour later, 61 minutes exactly, she would bet. She could pretend to be sleeping and not respond. Maybe that's what he expected her to do. Imagining the rounds of he knows she knows he knows she knows they could play made her feel even more tired.
"Come in."
The doorknob rattled as if he had trouble grasping it and when the door swung open, he held a tray in two hands with the small teapot, a mug, and a bowl covered by an overturned plate.
"I don't mean to intrude, I just observed you hadn't eaten since last night and thought you might like some soup." He set the tray down on the bed and backed out again, closing the door behind him before she could say anything.
Her personal valet.
Her sometimes psychopath.
She drank the tea and ate the soup and fell asleep.
Her first thought on waking was that he had put a sedative in either the soup or the tea. Her second was that maybe she did have the flu after all. She felt shaky and weak. Her heart was pounding as if she'd just finished a sprint after a long run and she was clammy with cold sweat. The room was dark; she couldn't see her clocks and couldn't tell if it was very late or very early. A wave of deja vu overtook her before she realized she'd had a panic attack. In her sleep, apparently. As her head cleared, she determined that she couldn't see anything because she'd pulled the covers over her head, over the pillow in fact, so they were tented over her face. Folding them back, she saw it was night, 1:16 by the closest clock. She took in a deep breath, let it out in a loud rush through her mouth. Like they tell you to do. Sometimes it helped.
"Watson?" Her arms jerked up, startled even though his voice was so low she had barely heard it. Her heart was racing again. She let out another breath. Another whisper, so quiet she wasn't sure if she imagined it. "Joan?"
She closed her eyes, fingers pressing into her forehead. What did she want? Another breath in and out.
"Yes, I'm OK. Come in."
He opened the door just a foot and leaned in, not stepping over the threshold. "I heard, it sounded like you shouted something, I wasn't sure..."
Oh god. If I called out, it was bad, it would be bad. It would happen again.
"It's OK, you can come in." He opened the door wider, took a step. He was a silhouette against the bare bulb in the hallway. "I'm sorry if I woke you," she said.
"Oh no, I was reading." He gestured with something she couldn't see in his hand. "I haven't had the heart to visit swirltheory since Zapruda died so I've been going through old issues of The Lone Gunman magazine that I had in a box at the back of the closet downstairs. Some excellent material in here... I'm thinking about a paper on the decline of alien-based conspiracy theories since 9/11."
She gave him the half-smile she suspected he was attempting to elicit. She knew he would leave now if she said nothing else. What the hell, she thought. I'm not his sober companion any more, not a professional anything, even if he doesn't know it.
"It was a panic attack. I have them sometimes. It's been a couple of years now, but... That's what happened." She noticed she was holding her breath and tried to let it go. In and out.
"Ah," he said, nodding slowly. She realized he had probably experienced something comparable during withdrawal. "From your patient...?"
It took her a moment to follow his question. "Oh, no. Well, yes, then too, but I had them long before that. There was a— Well, since I was a teenager. I got a lot of practice managing them in medical school and residency, but it's been a while since..." Since I was triggered, she didn't say out loud. She wondered if he heard it anyway, connected the dots, identified the outline of the darkness stalking her.
His face was all shadows on the lee side of the bedroom door, and his voice was soft. She didn't have any idea what he was thinking or how he was processing this new information about her. Assuming it was new. What the hell.
"Did you know?"
"Did I know what?"
"About this, that I've had a problem with chronic panic attacks."
He was quiet for a moment. "No, I did not know. But. I speculated. I had a theory." She could tell from the movement of his shadowed shape that he was looking down towards the floor as he spoke. "But the theory assumed a more recent origin, the abrupt end of your surgical career. So really it has been disproven."
They were both quiet, waiting. He would retreat if she didn't ask. She felt like she was standing on a precipice. Step forward or back? She didn't know which way she was facing. She didn't know where safety was.
She leaned over to the bedside lamp and turned it on, squeezing her eyes closed against the light and then opening them as she turned back to him. He was also blinking in the sudden brightness.
She remembered him holding an icepick; she remembered him bringing her soup.
"Would you mind... I'm—" She started to apologize and cut herself off. "If you don't mind, could you read in here for a while? I'll fall back asleep more easily if I'm not alone. I learned that in medical school too."
His eyes widened; she had surprised him. "No trouble at all," he said, moving from the doorway to walk around the bed and sit in the chair by the windows.
"Do you need more light? You can move the lamp closer." He stood up quickly and she flinched; he paused before taking a few careful steps toward the bed to pull the bedside chair with the lamp over towards his chair, as far as the cord would reach.
"This will be fine. The light won't bother you?" He sat back down as he spoke, each movement now slow and deliberate.
"No — medical school. I can fall asleep anywhere." Except when I can't, obviously. She settled back down in the bed, turned on her side facing away from him, pulled the covers up. "Thank you."
"You're most welcome, Watson." She heard him settle into the chair and flip open the magazine. "Good night."
He was the trigger.
He was the balm.
She closed her eyes, feeling her muscles slowly easing, listening to the rustle of turning pages.