"But I'm not staying with him for some grand adventure."
Watson didn't like telling her therapist anything she didn't already know about herself, so she said the gunman "was incapacitated" without making clear she'd done the incapacitating and redirected Candace's attention to her subsequent vital but entirely conventional actions to keep Rhys alive until the paramedics got there.
She was surprised to discover that telling the story was a thrill; it became something exciting in a way it wasn't, quite, while living it. She was honest in reply to the questions: she didn't feel traumatized, no changes in sleep patterns or startle reflex or mood. Well, that wasn't completely accurate, but she suspected the anxiety was about the other scolding she was getting from Candace these days, not telling Sherlock about her true status as no-longer sober companion.
Anyway, the point was that the experience of being held at gunpoint was completely different from what she might have imagined. A quiet voice inside wondered if this was the whole story of her reaction to the upheavals of the past few weeks. Seemed unlikely she would emerge not only unscathed but energized. Possible, but unlikely. However, until she figured out a bit more, she wasn't ready to share it with Candace.
Proposal. Partner. These words had undeniable romantic undertones. Overtones. Hell, direct connotations. Those weren't impossible outcomes; they lay low as wisps of cloud on the horizon that might drift out of sight or... But now, for now, she knew that was not what he offered, not what he hoped she would accept, and honestly not what she wanted from him.
As sober companion she helped people and benefited from the satisfaction she got from that. It wasn't unalloyed selflessness by any means, but it wasn't truly reciprocal. It couldn't be equal. There was potential for equality in this new arrangement, in redrawing the lines separating and connecting them. The proposal was for something she hadn't known she wanted. That wasn't quite right. Part of her had recognized what might be possible; it was why she hadn't left or confessed or moved out. But she hadn't articulated it to herself before he laid it out. It was an undercurrent she had let pull her along. Now she had the choice, the chance to steer in the direction she wanted to go.
He sought a companion who would help him hone a sharper focus. (She understood it went deeper than that.) What did she seek? She wanted to work with, not for. She wanted a common goal and alignment of effort if not identical approaches. She wanted the challenge and the give and take of partnership. And she wanted to tell stories. That was something new.
When he had described his work as finding the puzzle in everything she was intrigued. But when he later described it as discovering and telling a hidden story, well, that became irresistible. That was the start of it for her. In retrospect, she could see that she got so upset over his prank with Alistair in part because it sent her to a dead end, raised false hopes about the story she wanted to follow. She took it personally, not as the predictable frustrations of a client acting-out but as a betrayal of desires she hadn't yet acknowledged. That she was able to turn the tables on him and pick up the real lede... Maybe someday she'd be able to share the satisfaction she had felt then, with him.
She wondered if he'd thought that part through, that she'd continue to come after him with the skills he planned to teach her. Perhaps that's exactly what he did want to have happen.
It was 2:30 in the morning, a couple of weeks after she started working with him as an investigator. They'd spent the previous five hours reviewing surveillance video to determine whether any of the three suspects had entered either of the two buildings where the thefts had taken place. Her thighs were burning from the last round of squats she'd done but their effectiveness was waning. She was past admitting to herself that her body didn't quite have the energy reserves it'd had when she was 25, but she wasn't ready to admit it to Sherlock. At least not out loud; no doubt he'd read 20 studies that outlined the same conclusion.
"You never told me, Watson. Why do you want to do this?"
She looked over at him, confused. He was sitting on the floor cross-legged, pages of text and photographs and time sheets and travel projections arrayed around him. She had just started collating the notes they had made together from the video, in preparation for entering them into the database he used for pattern analysis.
"Do you mean collating the surveillance data specifically, or shaving years off my life through sleep deprivation, or—?"
"No, no," he waved his hand impatiently. "Not this case. Detective work. You said you found my work 'fascinating' and rightly so, but what made you decide to accept my proposal?"
He had that puzzled look on his face she didn't see very often. Usually only when he'd run out of avenues of detection or couldn't find a way to link disparate data. Most of the time it was just a brief grimace at coming to an unexpected halt in unravelling the tangle that would be swept away once the next revelation made a necessary connection clear.
She stared back at him, speechless.
His face softened, and he gave her a half-smile. "I'm sorry. That wasn't meant to be a trick question."
"No— It's just—" She stopped and looked down at her hands making fists over the keyboard. "I figured you'd already deduced it all by now."
"Deductions are all well and good, but at some point confirmation is required to accept or refute them."
This shouldn't be hard, she thought. Why was it so hard?
"I'm not very good at— Maybe it's ironic for a counselor—"
"Former counselor."
"For someone trained as a counselor to be so reticent, but I've always been this way. Maybe it's not ironic at all; keep the focus on the other person. Surgery's the same way. Hell, this work is too. I guess that's one reason it felt so comfortable: the work keeps everyone's attention on the trail and the outcome rather than on the investigator."
He gave her an appraising look. "Very interesting that you see it that way. I'm not sure everyone else does."
She laughed. "Perhaps it depends on the investigator. I'm pretty sure it's not me anyone pays attention to when we work on cases."
"And there it is. Took me much longer than it should have to notice when you do that." He nodded his head toward her. "We were talking about you, Watson."
Candace still hasn't noticed when I do that. I don't even notice most of the time.
"It would be easier if you just told me what you deduced and I could tell you if you're right or wrong."
"Hmm."
They sat quietly for a minute. Literally: She watched the seconds tick over on the computer screen. She would give herself one minute to find the answer. A cramming trick from medical school, a bit of pressure that sometimes forced the correct response to the surface.
"The stories," she said. He looked up at her, eyebrows raised and firmer smile showing, but he remained silent, waiting.
"It was that plane crash case, and you were unusually agitated at the scene, fretting over sand. It made no sense to me. You said then that the job was to find the story hidden in the debris, figure out what was going on and tell the story. And of course by the end that's what you did and the sand was key and even though I know you didn't know how it fit together at the start, you found the fit in the end. I want that. I want to be able to do that."
She'd been staring at the floor while she talked, following the whirls of the wood grain with the thread of her narrative. When she stopped and he still hadn't said anything, she looked over to see his eyes closed, face and body and hands still, as still as she'd ever seen him.
He opened his eyes to meet hers. "You don't think it would be easier to be a novelist?"
She shook her head. "Some days, absolutely. Not sure it'd be as much fun, though. Predictable. Probably not as much exercise. And definitely not the same kind of company."
"Ah, stories and company, with a modicum of unexpected exertion."
"Good stories and good company, Sherlock. That's why I'm here."
"Thank you for telling me, Watson."