Harry meets Sherlock in a touristy part of London because she is up for the day and he is a persistent son of a bitch. They've had parts of dinner together twice in the last 18 months, both times with John, both times excruciating because John was nervous and Sherlock was insufferable and angry at her for relapsing (once) and it was Christmas week (once), and really no one was more relieved than Harry when they were interrupted both times by calls from Lestrade, whom she suspected Sherlock of texting.
"I don't like you," she tells him as they settle down with overpriced varietal coffees.
"I don't care," he replies. "I'm in love with John."
Harry is not expecting anything like this. She's intelligent enough to have noticed she has no idea what she was, in fact, expecting. She still doesn't like Sherlock, who has always seemed, both from the press and John's blog, to be a poster boy for White Male Privilege; but it matters to hear he's less bulletproof than he seemed. They are both old enough to know that Silence Equals Death and that someone oppressed by my oppressor is my ally. But Harry resents having to give Sherlock any sympathy at all, so she answers at once with the traditional war cry of the oppressor.
"John's not gay."
"Why do both of you persist in saying that?"
And like a silent echo ringing between them, they both know that though John's orientations and inclinations are important, and the reason for the conversation, it really doesn't make any difference to Sherlock. He doesn't approve of his heart any more than any other part of his endocrine/neurochemical system; he's learning rather slowly that it's unscientific to deny their importance. Sherlock's love has nothing to do John's sexuality, whatever that might be, anymore than it has to do with the composition of the sarsen stones on Salisbury Plain.
And about as moveable.
This echo is the reason Harry will eventually find a seedling of affection and sorrow in the rock of her dislike for the detective, despite his Harrovian vowels and the frankly immoral prices of his clothing.
Not that that will make him any easier to talk to.
It speaks for the intelligence of the (possibly doomed) Watson genome that Sherlock's question actually makes her think. "Because he's always said so," Harry answers slowly. She scarcely needs the scorn on Sherlock's face to know this is not much of a rebuttal.
"I think we can agree, with him, that he's no higher than a two on the Kinsey scale, but defaulting to a straight/gay binary is idiotic."
"You really talk like this, don't you?"
"When I think there's any hope of being understood, yes, of course."
John or Lestrade would realise the compliment at once; Harry is less acquainted with Sherlock, but she gets the drift. "You know you should be discussing this with him, not me. You do know that?"
A lesser man would be dissecting his paper napkin. Sherlock Holmes has only his mind to fiddle with. Harry gives him time.
"It's important," he says at last. "And I'm inexperienced."
Harry waits for the adjective to be filled in.
"In considering love. Or sexuality. Or John in connection with either." The word 'love' comes from his mouth with the freight other people would give to 'terrorism,' or 'meteor impact.'
"You thought I could do better?"
"You're an articulate lesbian, out for decades, had long-term relationships, and you're his sister. I hoped."
"Honestly, I'm just as happy not thinking of my brother in bed with anyone."
"Boring. You are concerned for his happiness, even if you dislike admitting it."
"What about you?" Harry asks, trying for time to bring her brother into the world of consenting adults. "Gay? Something less binary?"
"Much less binary. Say a 3.5. But it doesn't matter."
"Of course it matters, why not?"
"I don't do anything about it. The Kinsey scale needs another axis for activity; I'd land toward the inactive end. As far as one can define a norm; for my age, perhaps."
"Inactive, or uninterested?" she asks. Sherlock's eyes flicker.
"Not a distinction I've made."
"You really haven't looked into this, have you?"
"I haven't needed to."
"Wanted to," says Harry.
"It's the same thing."
"Maybe for you." Harry yearns to get him to a friend of hers with a psych degree and a Masters in social work and a speciality in confused teenagers. But she's read John's blog, and she's grasped that it's not in anyone's best interest to try labelling Sherlock Holmes. "If it's low activity, it's existential, completely dependent on circumstance. If it's low interest, you may mean you're 'grey,' where the Kinsey level of interest is a white line and complete uninterest is a black point." She sketches the AVEN triangle. He regards it with distaste.
"Because, really, society needs more colour stereotyping, don't you think? Far from value-neutral. Another linear axis would be more useful."
Harry has no horse in the AVEN race. "A to Z? where A is not interested at all, and Z is polymorphously perverse? No, that'd be a spike off the Kinsey. Where Z is either in rehab or dead. Hmm. Will we end up in calculus if you allow for change through time?"
"Sex drive — all drives— are dependent on a host of factors from embryo to adulthood: experience, hormones and nutrition. These are terrible models."
"And you're defensive about it. But you're obviously posh so you're doing well to discuss sex at all."
He is faintly amused. "Circumstances beyond my control. I assume you want to know about my sexuality because you wonder what a relationship would be like between your brother and myself."
She really would rather not think about it. "You must have had relationships before?"
Sherlock regards her levelly.
"Or, not."
"No activity since I left university, when I was doing rather a lot of cocaine."
"Bad standard for comparison. Men or women?"
"Both. I don't think they count as relationships, since I didn't actually like them."
Hatesex with a wired Sherlock was not something anyone should contemplate sober, she thought. "Being celibate as long as you've been clean isn't really the best recommendation. Will having sex —"
"I don't think that's going to be a problem."
"Breaking up with him might be."
"You _are_ quick. But it's the least of my worries." That seems unsound to her.
"How long have you been clean?"
"Eight and a half years." He answered her, but he didn't ask, which put another star in his column. She passed him her mobile phone. He observed the lack of scratches on the plug-in socket and handed it back without comment.
"Eleven and a half months." It wasn't something she talked about. But he knows her (many) previous attempts at sobriety lasted less than half that time and something he does with his eyebrows indicates support and respect. Which she doesn't want or need, because he is a superior bastard and no one could be good enough for John. Pretty and intelligent though. And John, despite his binary misapprehensions, obviously loves him very much.
"Do you have Asperger's?" Everyone who knows him must wonder.
"It depends on whom you ask. Probably not, certainly subclinical." He met her eyes again, consciously making the point. "Inadequately socialised, or I just don't care."
She has the feeling he would show her his teeth or his tax records if he were asked. It might be better than talking about her brother with this arrogant, desolately proud man. "You sound like you're asking me for permission to court him. He'd cheerfully shoot both of us if he thought my permission was involved. Or did you just wonder if he had had any boyfriends?"
"I gather he has not."
"You _were_ asking, then."
Sherlock doesn't bother to deny it, just looks at her over his coffee.
"I was the identified queer in the family," Harry says finally. "If our parents weren't happy about it, at least they weren't unkind. I don't know what it's like where you come from, but I think in my family it mattered less that I was gay because I was a girl. 'Only' a girl. So John would probably have more baggage about being a poof than I do about being a lezzie. He had girlfriends. He had friends who were boys. I don't know if anyone was even out in his school. He was quiet and got on with things; I was the one making dramatic gestures and having meetings with the headmaster. I think he had friends who were gay at university or medical school, but we wouldn't have talked about that at Christmas dinner and our parents were dying around then. Is this helping at all?" It damn surely isn't encouraging, she supposes.
"Yes," he says. "Knowing things always helps. I don't like being in a situation I can't—"
"Control?"
"No, you have it wrong. Control is all but an illusion, Harry; I thought they made you give that up in those meetings."
"I'm more of a Rational Recovery girl, not AA. I think radical helplessness is toxic, to women particularly."
She has no idea how rarely anyone surprises him.
"I beg your pardon," and in his mouth it's not a shallow pleasantry.
"From what John says, you're all about control."
"Of myself, yes. But I can't expect it of the world. Knowing things helps. I don't like being in a situation I can't describe."
She has a moment, a minor epiphany, of what it must be like. One of those toys that keeps its balance, continuously trying to bob upright in a sea of flotsam and icebergs of various sizes. Sherlock Holmes as Zen master. Zen student, perhaps. A nice clean mirror for years and her brother pops up and there Sherlock is, having to observe himself.
"What is it you can't describe about this?" Does he know she's parroting her therapist? Would it matter?
"If I knew—"
"You could describe it. Blind man with an elephant?"
"Someone to whom plate tectonics has always been irrelevant, possibly heretical, and I want to build a house. Someone to whom metaphors have always been imprecise and detestable and I want to catch a falling star." He says it as though he knows it will burn his hands.
Harry wants to tell him to keep his heart under his coat; she doesn't deserve to see it like this. "I know you have friends. You don't need to have coffee with someone who starts the conversation saying she doesn't like you."
"It's refreshingly honest, actually. The people to whom I would conceivably speak about anything like this—No, I would not. The people you mean are friends of both of us, I suppose. I couldn't trust their advice. But I know you'll stick up for John.""
"No, no, usually you talk to someone who'll be on your side—"
"That doesn't seem very objective. The last thing this needs is someone who's worried about my feelings." He looks at her, trying to understand her expression. "When John looks like that I know I've said something terrible. Not good?"
"A bit not good, yeah," she says, thinking back to whether the coffee shop sold chocolate. The sudden expression of unalloyed warmth on Sherlock's face leaves her more deeply in need of theobromine. No one's need should be that naked.
"You resemble him a great deal more than I do my brother. Just as well."
And he loves her brother, and she's aware John's always been straight rather than narrow, but… .
"I need chocolate," she says. "I'll be right back. Please?"
She's gone for less than three minutes; he hasn't moved. Harry puts a chocolate croissant on a plate in front of him and one for herself. He looks at it as though it's a particularly vivid metaphor, which she supposes it might be. How completely better than a double Scotch. "If you were another woman this would be a pint of ice cream. You're not on a case?"
"Obviously."
"Then I know John wants you to eat more, and it's discourteous to make me have chocolate by myself. Think of it as fuel for the emotions you're unaccustomed to having."
He eats elegantly; she gets crumbs on her blouse. He's staring into space.
"What is it you're afraid of?"
"What?"
"About John." She's hauled him back from somewhere very far. "Are you afraid you'll break his heart?"
"Not the usual way, going off with someone else. I think he's safe enough, there."
"I have some idea what the two of you do. Being with you isn't safe at all."
"You know he's healthier when he's regularly in danger."
"I know he feels better. I saw him when he came back from Afghanistan, and I've seen him since he's taken up with you. If you're in love with him I suppose that means you'll be more careful."
"My life for his," Sherlock says very quietly. "But it's not the same thing as careful, not at all."
Well. Fair enough. "Sorry. We were talking about hearts. Are you afraid he'll break yours?"
That was a stupid question. He's terrified it's happened already, or he wouldn't be afraid to speak.
"Sorry," Harry says. "It's the whole thing, isn't it? You're afraid you'll break whatever the two of you are already."
And there it is, the elephant at the next table has joined them. The thing that must not be said, as awful as Voldemort. Everything stops, and her heart catches a whiff of the fear in the man across from her. She doesn't want the sympathy she feels. Who is Sherlock to have made her care about him and John? Besides the man who gave John back his joy in life, which is all well and good but not really Harry's business. (Caring about John's been impossible for about the past fifteen years; she's done better not to.)
"That's what I don't understand," says Sherlock Holmes, from an infinite distance away across the little table.
"What, exactly?" Harry tries to move out of the sense that she's somehow made the sun go into eclipse. He isn't any paler (as if), but he's a thousand miles from the infuriatingly articulate man she's tried to have dinner with.
"Why I need to take the risk. Sex has never been important, and love is about what you do, isn't it? Why should it matter so much that I want him to know?"
It's been a long time and thousands of miles since Harry was fourteen and started to find words for her longings. And many, many long talks, usually late at night, with friends coming into consciousness of their sexuality: women and men and trans, gay, straight, what-have-you (some of those had been particularly tough). It has in fact been a while since she'd had one, and never with someone so tall, so chiselled, so entirely used to being the cleverest person in the room. If not the country. Harry sighs.
"You support my right to marry, don't you?"
"I don't see that it's anyone's business. I support equality under the law, of course."
"Not just to make the paperwork easier," she says, trying again. "If I want to go for a walk in the park with Clara, or go stay at a B&B for a mini-break — it's not because I want to make some LGBT point, even if that's inescapable. You're not understanding any of this, are you? It doesn't matter who you love, you want to be able to be known for who you are. Straight or anything else. John the way he is makes it harder on you, but there must be thousands of people in Central London alone who want what you want, and have the same fear they'll ruin the friendship they have with their best mates, wrong sex or wrong age or not, people who know each other one way and want to know each other a different way."
"You're telling me this is normal?" Return of the Insufferable Prep-School Boy.
"Not in that tone of voice I'm not. It's the human condition; neither apes nor angels, is that scientific enough for you? And I know you don't like it, no one does. And of course you never have to tell him anything." She looks at Sherlock. He looks like marble. She wants to see him reanimated, so she continues. But it's the hard stuff.
"Except that it's costing you plenty to keep silent: you're desperate enough to get in touch with his sister the alcoholic and ask for advice just because you want talk to someone else who loves him. And finally, because the longer you know how much you care and don't let him know, the more you'll be lying. The more you'll be saying one thing and doing another, making him distrust his own senses. He'll know you're hiding something. Lying's not good for addicts, Sherlock."
"It's not good for anyone."
"When you were in rehab didn't they tell you you were only as sick as the secrets you keep? I'm telling you that lying to other people about who you are is just as destructive as lying to yourself; it amounts to the same thing. You wanted advice from someone who's been out for years? That's what you get."
"And you take this advice yourself, of course?"
"Don't be defensive with me. This was your idea. Neither of us wants John to be unhappy. Don't make me go back to thinking he's fallen in with a bad crowd."
Sherlock says nothing. It can't be good.
"Do you really think he'll pack up and go, stop being your friend, if you let him know he means a lot to you?"
"No…," he says. "Perhaps. It will depend on too many factors that I can't really prepare for. But I don't want him to stay and worry I'll try to see him in the shower, either."
"I don't think you'll go anywhere you're not welcome."
"I don't want to make a mistake about something because I might greatly desire it. I end up detecting people who've acted out of that kind of misplaced conviction fairly often. But no, I don't think he would leave right away. I'm afraid he would leave after I hurt him badly, after I prove that I don't know how to be anyone's …boyfriend. Lover."
"Partner?"
"In what other sense aren't we partners already?"
"'Civil?' But I know what you mean."
"I don't think by most standards I'm doing a good job being his 'best mate' as it is. Lestrade yells at me for mistreating him. My not-sister-in-law can't stand me."
"You might be growing on her. It's flattering to be asked for advice, or your brother's hand or… whatever it may be." It's flattering to get the small smile he gives her, even if he had been fishing quite openly.
"How do people learn all this? You can get books on looking after your pets, or even your ageing parents."
"There are books about maintaining your boyfriend's heart, too."
"The ones I looked at are awful."
"Not all of them, I'll send you some links." The surreality of the conversation broke in upon her. It obviously wasn't likely to break in on him. "You looked. At books. On relationships."
"There's nothing I'd trust on the Web."
Harry has a glimpse of how strange it must be for Sherlock, after what, thirty-five years? to come suddenly to the edge of a minefield everyone she knows has been learning to negotiate since childhood. And no experience in picking up the pieces and moving on. "This isn't like learning English as a foreign language, is it?"
"No. I believe I am supposed to feel like I was blind but now can see. I gather that can be a difficult adjustment too."
"And now you suddenly have a heart, among other things, and it's not much good?"
"I have always had a heart, among other things, but it's never mattered whether I wanted anyone else's. Or whether I wanted to give anyone mine."
"That thing that wasn't good, before the chocolate?" Harry says. "You can't look after anyone unless you look after yourself. You need, you're entitled to someone who will stick up for you. And you won't be doing him any favour if you don't stick up for yourself. If anything comes of this I will send you both a book about fighting fair. I can't imagine that either of you would."
"No," Sherlock agrees. "I'm manipulative and he's stubborn. It's dreadful. Send me a link to it regardless."
Harry's phone goes off. "I'm supposed to be at the Tate in half an hour."
"Then you should leave, and I'll turn my phone back on." He does, and it chitters at him. Harry drains the cold end of her coffee.
"Anything interesting?"
"It might be. Shall I tell John you send your…?"
She's surprised he's going to mention meeting her to her brother, but she was surprised he had silenced his phone, and it has been a completely surprising morning. "Tell him I send my love. Or give him a hug for me?" Which he recognises as the mischief she intends.
"Thank you, Harry."
"I hope it was some help."
"I think so," Sherlock says. "I am sure you'll hear if anything, as you say, comes of this." So she rises on her toes, pecks him on the cheek as she should her brother's partner, and leaves him among the café tables.
"Not a bad day," John says that afternoon. "Mostly summer-camp exams and vaccinations to go on exotic holidays."
"Dull."
"Easier for the patients when it is, Sherlock. How was your day?"
"Much as usual. I had coffee with your sister. She was up for the day and we ran into one another."
John is looking as though he expects the worst.
"Don't look that way, honestly John. We were quite civil. She sends her love."
"How is she?"
"Very well. Clara should be moving back in with her in a couple of weeks."
"That's great! Did she really say that?"
"Not in so many words."
The Tate is wonderful, as always, but when Harry and Anna get to the Turners it's a bit of a shock to find a big ugly landscape that has a press release next to it with her not-brother-in-law's name all over it. "Isn't that your brother and his toff boyfriend?" Anna asks, pointing to the photo.
John cleans up well, these days. Harry nods. "Toff, yes. Boyfriend, no, unless John's loosened up." Which is what she would have said the day before.
"Have you met him? What's he like?"
It's a very long story, Harry thinks. She gives a quick answer so they can go on and see the The Fighting Temeraire. "Very... human."
Author's note:
The Kinsey scale is oversimplified as
0 Exclusively heterosexual
1 Predominantly heterosexual, only incidentally homosexual
2 Predominantly heterosexual, but more than incidentally homosexual
3 Equally heterosexual and homosexual
4 Predominantly homosexual, but more than incidentally heterosexual
5 Predominantly homosexual, only incidentally heterosexual
6 Exclusively homosexual
X Non-sexual
The AVEN triangle is here:http colon/en dot wikipedia dot org/wiki/Asexuality
if you're like me and need references.