Title: Lay Down Your Burdens
Characters/Pairings: Sherlock, John, Sherlock/John
Genre: Romance, Drama
Ratings/Warnings: R, for sexytiems
Summary: "Ever wish you had the power to take all of your friends' pain, sadness, and illnesses away, even if it meant placing all of it in your own body?" Johnlock.
Disclaimer: I do not own the BBC adaptation of Sherlock.
Lay Down Your Burdens
The fall is swift, silent. The blood paints a gruesome study in scarlet against the pavement and I am lost, unable to breathe. I cannot unsee the horror before my eyes, the sight of my best friend dashed against the pavement.
Oh, I have failed him. I have failed to do my job and protect him as a friend should. I feel the tears rise; I feel my heart beating faster and faster as I rush towards the crowd, only to be hit by a cyclist and I, too, fall onto the pavement, blinking away bright stars of pain.
"Sherlock!" I cry again and again and again. His name is a mantra upon my lips. "Sherlock, please! No!"
I reach the crowd, stumbling forward for the wrist. There is no pulse and the tears blur my vision. They pull me away, and I am lost as the rain begins to fall, as the dawn breaks above but reveals nothing but pain. Sherlock has gone where I cannot follow at last.
Or perhaps I can follow him, one last time.
It had started when I was small, this strange ability.
One morning I found a dying rabbit in a ditch near the cottage where I stayed with my family during the summers of my childhood. Those golden halcyon days are now but a memory, images distorted through the lens of time.
I picked up the rabbit and closed my eyes, wishing that it wasn't dying, that I could heal it. I didn't want to see it rot away. I didn't want to see carrion-fowl pick at it. I didn't want to see its bones or any more blood than what had been matted into its fur as I held it and cleaned it as best I could with my water bottle and handkerchief.
The rabbit thumped its foot, thumped it faster and faster as I thought and thought about it becoming better and slowly I had realised that the pain was transferring. Transferring to me. I felt weak; I felt near death. It was my stomach that bore the faint pink scars of a gash, not the rabbit's. It was healthy; I was sick, and I smiled as it bounced away; I barely managed to get home in a haze of agony.
That night, I lay awake thinking about what I'd done. With a single touch, I was somehow capable of shouldering the pain of others. I felt like one of those magical healers in those fantasy books I loved. I felt powerful.
I'd always wanted to be a doctor.
No, actually, that's a lie. I also wanted to be a writer, a soldier, an actor. I wanted to be many things. But whatever I did, I wanted to do it to help people. I wanted to make a difference.
So I became a doctor. It was second nature anyway.
I love my sister Harry.
I also hate her, too, because she's drinking herself into an early grave and no amount of treatment will ever stop her from doing that. It breaks my heart. She breaks my heart.
The morning of her wedding to Clara I caught her at a pub after the hen night, in the darkness. She was passed out, face pressed against the bar counter and beer glass half-empty in her hand. I woke her with a shake and half-dragged her out of the pub and into the waiting cab.
Harry's breath reeked of shots and beer and strange fruity cocktails but I didn't question it, only fretted about the wedding in four hours and how absolutely unpresentable my sister looked at that moment. What would the in-laws say? Our own parents had died when I was in med school; I'd attended the funeral with a heavy heart.
"Johnny, can you make it better?" Harry whimpered, eyes pleading and how could I say no to her, to her eyes? The power attracted me to the ailing like a magnet to steel, and I found my hands on her head before I even knew what I was doing.
"Shh," I murmured, closing my eyes and concentrating. Slowly Harry's hangover seeped into my head; her headache pounded at my cranium until I couldn't handle it any more. My hands snapped away from her head; she beamed at me as I rubbed my temples and wondered who turned on the sun so bright.
At Harry's wedding, I received my letter from the RAMC. I would report to the Queen Elizabeth Hospital Birmingham in a week. Harry held me and cried into my shoulder and asked me why I couldn't stay. I told her I had others who needed my help. I couldn't babysit her and take away her hangovers forever.
My abilities allowed me to excel in Afghanistan. I never did a full transfer there, like I had before with the rabbit. No, by now I could control how much was transferred, and I usually took away just the pain to make it easier for me to sew together my fallen comrades. But even that was saved for serious occasions; I had to keep up with the rest of the troops, after all.
I forgot that I was human, but my shoulder injury reminded me of that. I was hurt, yet I never shared that hurt. While I had never explored before the possibility of transferring my pain to someone else, I also considered that something I would never do. No one deserved the kind of pain I felt. I carried on in silence. I was invalided home in silence.
I wondered if I would ever be able to use my powers again.
That opportunity came much sooner than I'd anticipated.
An old colleague of mine introduced me to a veritable madman by the name of Sherlock Holmes. He'd been searching for a flatmate, and very quickly I found out that he was almost impossible to live with. Perhaps the disaster area that he called our flat was the giveaway.
I stayed, anyway.
The first time I used my powers since Afghanistan was in the middle of one of Sherlock's cases; we'd caught the criminal red-handed and he tried to shoot Sherlock but the bullet hit a passerby instead. As Sherlock gave chase, I lingered to heal the injured man.
It wasn't too fatal – it was in the leg but it didn't pass through the femur – so I set my hands on his shoulders and told him not to worry. Within moments I felt the pain of the bullet in my own leg – the same leg that Sherlock had cured when I first met him – and the stranger was whole once more, eyes wide with shock and gratitude.
Sherlock wondered why I was clutching my leg when we returned to Baker Street. He also wondered why the man who ran the local Tesco's gave us discounts whenever I did the shopping.
I left him to his deductions, so when he started paying more attention to me, I took it in stride. He would sometimes pop in to see the patients I tended to at the surgery; it wasn't too long before Sarah noticed his frequent presence and insisted that he leave.
Sherlock quickly set about to designing experiments. He brought home wounded animals and watched me stroke away their worries with a frown on his face, trying to figure out my methods. He tried to eliminate the impossible, but in the end he only became more and more stumped, which led to more frustration, more exasperation, more confrontation. I hated confrontation.
There was no alternative course. I had to tell him. But would he believe me?
When Sherlock stumbled home bruised and bleeding after a particularly gruesome and dangerous case, I set down my mug of tea and gestured for him to sit.
I didn't really want to know what he did – he seemed about to tell me, after all – and I silenced him quickly by taking his hands and closing my eyes. I could feel his eyes on me, could see his puzzled expression in my mind's eye. Cataloguing, deducing, rewriting his perceptions of the world and me.
"How's the experiment?" I asked quietly.
"Results contradict hypothesis," he replied, and I knew what he was referring to. My experiment. The Case of John Watson's Mysterious Healing Touch. I could almost see the lab notebook covered in Sherlock's scrawls, filled with doodles of observations and angry notes and crossing-outs.
"You must feel so frustrated," I remarked drily.
"Not at this moment," he admitted, and I could sense it in his voice, the awe. It was suddenly so very hard to breathe. But that could partly be due to the pain seeping out of his body and into mine. A diffusion of emotions.
"So this is what you did that day, to that bloke at Tesco's," he murmured when I was finished and opened my eyes. There he sat looking at my bruised and hurting face, at the blood dribbling weakly down my cheeks.
"Yes." I stood up and headed to the kitchen to fetch the plasters.
"Have you always been able to do this?" he asked. Looking up from my first-aid, I nodded.
"My first was a rabbit."
"This… this is brilliant," he whispered, expression awed for once. I savoured it – few people in this world had ever seen such an expression on the face of Sherlock Holmes, and to be the cause of it meant more to me than any other honour.
"I don't like to flaunt it," I warned. "Don't blab to Mycroft or Lestrade or…"
"Do you think I would?" Sherlock scoffed. "No, this is something that shouldn't be made public knowledge, and telling them would ensure that everyone else we know will know." He smiled. "It's extraordinary, what you have. What does it feel like?"
I shrugged, resuming my seat and daubing at my black eye. "It feels like I'm saving lives," I replied.
Soo-Lin Yao died far too quickly for me to save her. I could barely cope with the survivor's guilt gnawing at my innards as we left the museum. Sherlock looked at me with eyes that clearly said that he wished he had my powers, so that I wouldn't suffer alone.
It was nice to know that somehow, in some way, he cared about me.
"Have you ever returned some of the pain?" Sherlock asked me one afternoon, when the caseload was low yet he seemed content to ask me questions about my skills. I could see the gears spinning in his head as he steeped his fingers together in prayer. I'd managed to demonstrate my powers again and again on our cases, helping would-be victims and injured bystanders recover. Sherlock had to stop me once or twice, before I harmed myself. Sometimes he understood me more than I understood myself.
I shook my head. "No one deserves this kind of pain," I told him.
"You can't suffer by yourself."
"I have to. It's a burden I'm all too willing to take. You know I took the Hippocratic Oath. I can no more return the pain than I can kill a patient. It's against my morals."
"Morality," he muttered, almost scoffing, but I knew he valued it. Valued me for being his compass, his guide, his healer.
I was wrong, wrong about no one else deserving the burden of pain and regret.
I wanted to hurt Moriarty.
I wanted to hurt him more than anyone else in the world. In that moment when he wrapped me in Semtex and sent me out to Sherlock, I wanted to grab his head and force all of my pain and anguish into his body. I wanted to watch him curl into a ball, writhing. I wanted to inject into him all the agony and suffering he had inflicted upon every last victim of his, every man, woman, child. I wanted to watch him burn from overdosing on his own medicine.
"Sherlock, run!" I cried, leaping at Moriarty and wrapping my arms around him in a chokehold. Immediately I thought of everything that had ever hurt me, everything I had tucked away into the dark corners of my mind to be forgotten. All of the pain, all of the anguish. My first breakup, my parents' death, Harry's first failed treatment, the initial pain from the shoulder wound in Afghanistan – all of it spiralled to the surface now and bled into Moriarty.
I expected him to cringe; I expected him to shout and cry and beg for me to let him go because I was hurting him so badly. I expected him to let us go because I had him at the mercy of my own anguish. I didn't expect him to grin broadly, as if I was just poking him with a feather.
"Oh! Good, very good!" Moriarty cooed at me, and I froze mid-transfer, mind going blank. "I can see why you like having him around," he told Sherlock, who still had the gun aimed, still refused to run. Still refused to leave me behind, even though I'd be a goner the moment the sniper pulled the trigger.
"He's so very sweet. But then again, people do get sentimental about their pets. They're so touching and loyal."
My breath caught in my throat. In my anger I'd forgotten that Moriarty was a psychopath. I would never be able to make him feel remorse, not even if I could fill his body with all the agonies of the world. I'd also heard about masochists, too, and it seemed like Moriarty was just as capable of masochism as he was of psychopathy. Pain didn't affect him like it affected others – in fact, he seemed to enjoy what I gave him.
Disgust curled in my stomach like rotting worms. My hands loosened. The red laser sight moved to Sherlock's head. I had no choice but to step away.
It's ironic that the only person in this world whom I wouldn't mind hurting with my powers happened to enjoy pain in its many forms. I couldn't help but feel rather slighted at that, but then I caught myself – but then I remembered that Sherlock and I were about to die and that if I could do one last thing in the world, it would be to protect Sherlock until the bitter end.
Afterwards, when the danger had passed and Moriarty had called off the confrontation with a phone call, Sherlock smiled at me and thanked me for what I offered to do. I told him it was nothing.
Irene Adler was beautiful. She was everything I wasn't – smart, witty, beautiful. She was Sherlock in female form, and twice as heartless. She gave out pain, pain that I sought to take away. She dealt in deception and manipulation; she toyed with the dark side of humanity for her own gain. She was brazen in her affairs; she refused to back down from what she wanted and I knew she wanted Sherlock.
The jealousy twisted at my heart, twisted and squeezed with white-hot fury. I feared losing Sherlock to her – who wouldn't, with her track record? Irene had destroyed marriages in the past; what if she jeopardised what Sherlock and I had?
"Are you jealous?" she asked me in the empty power station, smirking like a cat.
"We're not a couple," I pointed out.
"Yes, you are." I could hear the unspoken. You're attached at the hip. He talks to you. He doesn't answer me. What is it about you, John Watson, what is it about you that makes you special in the eyes of Sherlock Holmes?
Oh, I had answers to that. I just wasn't sure how to voice them.
"Look at us both," Irene continued, smile rueful, eyes mocking. Look at us both. You and I, we're both drawn to Sherlock. Yet he chose you. He chose you.
In that moment I saw the light. In that moment I knew and I understood what people had assumed about us. There was no one else in the world for us than each other – the instant Sherlock found me, he had latched on and refused to let go. It was now far too late to let go for either of us, because against our better judgement Sherlock Holmes loved me and I loved him back.
And Irene Adler couldn't break through that.
I heard Sherlock's mobile moan and immediately my heart froze – he'd been there all this time, listening. Listening to my denials. Listening to Irene spelling it out for me in unspoken words.
If I hadn't been rooted to the spot with shock, I would have chased him down. I would have stopped him and rested my forehead against his and removed his worries with my mind. I would have told him in unspoken words that I loved him over and over and over again until there were no more misunderstandings between us.
I would have enfolded him in my arms and never let him go.
The first time I emotionally healed Sherlock, he had been in one of his slumps. He'd shot the walls, locked himself up, and hunted in vain for the seven-per-cent solution that I had discovered in his sock drawer and handed over to Mycroft.
"John!" he yelled, expression outraged as he stormed out of his room, through the disaster area kitchen, over the coffee table, and onto the couch. "What have you done with it?"
"With what?" I asked, setting down the evening paper.
"The secret stash! It's not in the slipper in the fireplace or underneath the skull or…" Sherlock paused. "By the way, you ruined my sock index again."
"Oh dear," I deadpanned. "What is it, though? What's gotten into you this time?"
"Case," growled Sherlock. "I need one. I need a case."
"Because without it your brain rots. Have you ever considered investing in a Rubik's cube?"
"Dull!"
I sighed, and walked over to him, taking his head in my hands. "Don't move," I whispered. "Do you trust me?"
He nodded. "Obviously."
I nodded as well, and burnt down the final wall.
I would never forget the look in his eyes that night, the wide Glasz eyes taking in every sensation as I ran my fingers through his dark, unruly curls and looked into those beautiful eyes, my mind working to draw out all the pains of boredom and all the sadness of monotony. His own brain seemed to whirl into action, cataloguing the experience and trying to figure out what I was doing. I smiled.
I'd never done anything this intimate, the removal of psychological or mental pain. It required complete trust; either I was too wary of the other's mind or they were too wary of mine. With Sherlock, it was as natural as breathing – for a moment, our minds were one and the emotions coming from him – emotions that he carefully masked away from the world – were overwhelming. I let myself go, let myself become overcome with this Sherlock, this hidden Sherlock.
Sherlock took my hands when it got too much – perhaps he sensed it, or deduced it by my pained expression – removed them from his head, and leaned in so close that my breath caught in my throat and my heart raced faster than the Tube. One of his hands reached out to cup my cheek reverently. I felt myself leaning into the touch almost unconsciously, mouth twitching upwards.
His lips were soft against my own, almost unfairly so.
When Sherlock moved within me, I wondered if this was what people meant by a union of souls. We had bared all to each other – our bodies, our minds – and I could feel nervousness radiating off him with each thrust, thrusts that I counterbalanced by arching my body against his, his name a breathy whisper on my lips.
I wanted more and more of Sherlock; I wanted to take every last worry of his away and tuck them into my own soul so that they would never see the light of day. I wanted to protect him with my arms alone, wanted to love him with every cell in my body. I wanted so much. I wanted to give him so much.
There would always be so many things that I want, but right now I had Sherlock and I could love Sherlock with every ounce of my strength. So I did. I covered him in my feathery kisses, touched him with my reverent fingers. I reassured him with my moans and whispers, and as our pace quickened, as our thoughts blurred into an incoherent mass and our hearts sped up to beat side-by-side, two pounding drums – and our breathing quickened against each other and everything was sweet, sweet agony – I may have told him that I loved him. I forgot if I ever did.
As I climaxed, I kissed him long and slow and savoured the fluttering in my chest.
I tried to take away Sherlock's fear at Baskerville. He wouldn't let me, didn't want me to tell him it was all made up, a delusion.
(In a way it was, but who was I to judge?)
"I don't have friends," he scoffed at me, and he could have hurt me less by driving a knife into my heart. For a fleeting moment, I wanted him to feel that, feel the ache in my heart at his words, feel the disappointment that welled in my eyes. But I kept my distance. Kept my burdens to myself.
"I wonder why," I snapped, getting up and leaving him at the hearth. The agony was unbearable; it seized at my chest and drove out those hot, angry tears. I stormed out to the moor, wanting to put as much distance between me and Sherlock as possible. I wouldn't be responsible for my actions otherwise.
The anger eventually died down to just a low smouldering resentment, and next morning, when I saw him enter the graveyard with the most apologetic look that I had ever seen etched into his features, even that died away, too. Now I was just resigned, resigned to deal with a man who would never admit how much he cared.
My heart beat painfully against my ribcage at that.
"I don't have friends," Sherlock told me, grabbing me by the arms to prevent me from running away – as if I could run away anymore. "I've just got one."
I nodded. I looked into his eyes and saw nothing but truth. An apology. Please take me back, because I cannot live without you.
"It's fine," I replied. Neither can I.
"You can't keep on taking away my pain and bottling it up inside you," Sherlock warned me after another case, another healing. He'd sprained his ankle very badly but now it was me hobbling about the flat.
"I can and I will," I replied with a grimace as I slumped into my usual armchair.
"Don't be so bloody noble," Sherlock muttered, but I could tell he was flattered by my care. Others would have readily taken advantage of what I offered, but Sherlock resisted the temptation. Protected me from causing myself too much harm.
But I couldn't help it. If I had the stamina to, I would have healed every wound in this world, saved every dying soldier and slapped a plaster on war altogether. If I had the stamina to, I would have protected everyone who needed protection, I would have restored the sight of the blind and the hearing of the deaf and the voices of the mute. I would have saved those who were self-harming. I would have rescued those who were falling.
And Sherlock could see that as plain as the words upon a book, could see it etched into the ridges of my fingertips and the lashes of my eyes. So he protected me. Prevented me from killing myself through love.
He looked at me again, eyes intent. Thinking. I had the urge to put my hands to his head and piece together his train of thought.
"Don't take away too much next time, John," Sherlock said after a long moment of staring. "I need to remember how to live."
Those words still echo in my ears, even now. Crashing against his goodbye message. Crashing against the fall.
Sherlock's body lies on a starched white bed; the doctors are doing all they can to save him and I realise that in my rush, I must have missed the pulse area because his heart is still beating. But he's bleeding to death; his heart's working faster and faster and there must be internal bleeding somewhere where his body made contact with the pavement and my breath catches in my mouth as I step into the room and take his hand.
I close my eyes.
I concentrate on the pain, the pain that he must be feeling, and I siphon it all away from him. I take his pain from him and concentrate it into my own body, like drawing water from a well. And the pain is excruciating – my knees buckle and the doctors quickly push me into a seat but still I maintain the connection between me and Sherlock, still I draw away his pain and his injuries and soon I can feel the trickle of my own blood, warm and fresh. Soon I am doubled over as I feel the impact of Sherlock's landing on my own organs. The doctors scramble to get me into the bed besides Sherlock, but I refuse to let go. I refuse to sever the ties.
The doctors cry for me to let go – Doctor Watson, you shouldn't be doing this – Doctor Watson, listen to me – Doctor Watson – but I am deaf to their cries; I am only aware of the pain that flows out of my beloved into my own; the fogginess of oblivion dances at the edges of my vision but that only makes my hands clamp on tighter. Do not let go.
I will take away all of Sherlock's pain, even if it means my own death. I will not let Sherlock go.
I open my eyes to blinding white light. I think I can see the face of God.
But I am mistaken; it's the blinding hospital lights and this time I am the one in the hospital bed and Sherlock is in the chair next to me, eyes frantic and fingers clamped with white-knuckle tightness to my wrist.
"You're cutting off my circulation," I whisper, and I'm surprised that that's the first thing out of my mouth after nearly crossing the threshold of death to save my bloody stupid brilliant beautiful friend-lover-soulmate. Sherlock laughs, probably having deduced my thoughts from the expression on my face.
"And that's all you worry about? I thought I told you not to take everything away."
"I did." I had held on to the connection until there was no pain left to take.
"No, you didn't." Sherlock beams at me before unbuttoning a portion of his shirt to reveal bruises on his chest. "I took some back."
I notice the one in the shape of a heart; when I reach out and feebly touch it I can feel his heartbeat, strong and sure.
"You took some back," I echo, frowning. "You can do that?"
"No one's ever tried until me, I presume," Sherlock replies, buttoning up his shirt again as an orderly rushes in to check up on me.
"It could have been dangerous."
"Since when have I cared about that?"
I laugh sheepishly. "Point." I can feel a bandaged head, can feel the numbness of morphine coursing through my veins. Sherlock releases my wrist only slightly; he now strokes my forearm with his long, slender fingers, tips calloused by the violin. I smile at him, feeling the drowsiness of natural sleep creep upon my eyelids.
"You should rest," Sherlock remarks, and I feel the faintest stir of movement as he leans up and kisses my forehead.
"Don't you dare do that again," I mumble. "Don't you dare die on me, Sherlock Holmes. You know what I'm capable of."
"I do," Sherlock says, and I can hear so much left unsaid. I can hear those three words that dangle in the air between us, left unsaid from his lips. I can hear a myriad of reasons for why he fell and why he was never going to fall again. I can hear my name, but that could just be him whispering it like a mantra under his breath as I succumb to waves of sleep.