Something for Bonfire Night, set between Series 1 and 2. It ended up twice it's expected length, but I'm happy with it ~SRM.
"Fireworks, John."
Early November swirls into the flat on the tails of Sherlock's coat, the edge of bitter and the scent of rotting leaves. John looks up from where is laying with his head at the music stand end of the sofa, lets his hand holding his book flop onto his chest. He likes laying this way- it means he can see all entrances at once.
John looks up, of course he does. He never doesn't look up when Sherlock comes into the room and he doesn't care about the double negative either.
"What?" he asks as Sherlock takes off his coat and hangs it up, along with his scarf.
"Tonight. At Battersea. We're going."
"Are we?" John is not surprised that Sherlock loves fireworks; it would be entirely against John's knowledge of the man if he didn't like fireworks- coloured exploding chemistry is right up the man's street.
"Yes. Actual Guy Fawkes is on a Monday this year so most displays are tonight." Meaning today, Saturday, John gathers, and then wonders why he's thinking this over. He's been going to fireworks displays on the fifth for his entire life, bar last year when he was in that miserable bland place where the only thing that was stopping him from eating his gun was the promise of tomorrow. He knows how this works, how most displays are on the weekend before the fifth so that children can go and be delighted and scared by the bangs in turn, and eat toffee apples bigger than their fists and scrape unwanted onions off of hot dogs and get ketchup stains on their mittens and stand close enough to the fire to scare their parents and generally stay up late without the worry of it being a school night.
Thinking about it, John should have told Sherlock in advance that he is not accompanying him to any fireworks displays, possibly ever. His own plan for the fifth, and this evening, involve the prescription only strength sleeping pills he was prescribed when it became clear that for a Freshly Useless and Purposeless John, sleep without strong assistance was impossibility. The sleep produced is more similar to a low level coma and leaves him feeling just as thick-headed in the morning but they do block out all outside stimuli he would usually react to in his sleep.
"I do know what the date is, Sherlock." John shuffles up on the sofa, swinging around so he is sitting up as Sherlock flops back into his chair with all the petulance of a five year old. The sight makes John smile, because sometimes Sherlock really is nothing more than an overgrown child.
"Good, we're leaving at six thirty, taking the tube, the actual fireworks will start at eight- Kimbolton are doing them this year, it should be fantastic." Sherlock actually rubs his hands together with glee, then springs up, all jittery like the Catherine Wheels John remembers as kid, the sort that would spin something crazy and then, often, run riot across the field.
It's quite flattering to note that Sherlock has assimilated some of his vocabulary.
"You'll have a lovely time," John says, as casually as he can, and stands, retreating to his room. At least he has a rough time for when the explosions will start, and when to take the damn pills. He knows that there are other displays in the city tonight, but most of them are further out- Battersea is the closest, and therefore is going to be the loudest.
It's a shame really, more than a shame. John loved fireworks as a kid. Never really saw that many of them when he was very young- they had lived on a rundown council estate in a god-forsaken town in Northumberland. When he passed the 11+ with flying colours and after his mum had died they had moved down south to Chelmsford to live near his da's sister and her husband's garage where his da got a job as a mechanic. John was able to go the grammar school and Harry had gone to the comprehensive and been bitter about it, but the town council had put on a fantastic display every Guy Fawkes Night and John had gone every year before leaving for London to study medicine with a shiny new accent and then he had gone to the displays there.
And then he had joined the army and he had been away on the fifth more often than not and if he wasn't then he often was on duty. Anyway, he was far more experienced with different kind of explosions by that point. Fireworks hadn't lost their appeal, in any way, god no. He could definitely still enjoy them, and the colours and the patterns that were formed in the sky. He just often didn't have the time.
Now though, now, he can deal with gunfire, actual gunfire, and the danger of death on a regular basis but, like a toddler, is turned into a sleepless wreck by a few pretty lights in the sky.
John sits on his bed, digging his toes into the wool afghan Mrs Hudson had given him with a 'I know how cold it can get in that room of yours, dear, it's the window, single glaze, I would have them redone but the building is listed, you know,' He made his escape two minutes ago and is yet to hear Sherlock on the stairs. He will, it will take a moment for John's 'you'll have a nice time' to sink in and for him to question it, but he will come up, and ask, or deduce, or ask about what he has deduced. It's not yet quarter past five, if he takes the pills now he'll be awake at two in the morning; the pills only knock him out for eight hours or so.
He feels like a coward, trying to avoid this conversation that he knows will happen but, Jesus, he doesn't even like thinking about it, actively sidesteps thinking about it. How is he supposed to actually say 'Sherlock, I'm afraid I can't actually go with you on what will surely be a lovely night because you will look all sharp and fey lit up by the bonfire and the different colours and you will have a brilliant time because of the fire and explosions and I'm sorry I can't come with you to watch you enjoying yourself when you blatantly want me to because I'm too much of a damn coward and my brain likes mucking me up.' Yeah. Great. He'll just get on with forcing the words out of where they are stuck in the hollow where his voice box should be.
"You're not coming." Sherlock stands in his doorway, his tartan dressing gown, the one for during the day and cold weather, draped around him. He is far from the Catherine Wheel like state he was in five minutes ago, vibrating with excitement. Calm is not the right word though. Placid, maybe. In check.
"No," John says, and makes a point of looking out the window because he cannot look at Sherlock who has a beautiful mind that doesn't play the cruellest of tricks on him. Sherlock's mind is a sublime thing, an organ that exists with the objective of finding reason and order in everything it notes. John doesn't want to think about how mucked up his own subconscious is, that he needs to take precautions like knocking himself out in order to get through a night of the year. Just a couple of measly nights and this line of thought really isn't helping him.
"Because of your PSTD," Sherlock says, and doesn't move from the threshold of the room.
"Because, of," John grits out. "My." He shakes his head, looks down at his hands between his knees. This is unlike him. Exceedingly unlike him. "PTSD," he admits, and the acronym for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder leaves a bad taste in his mouth. Forcing it out hurts.
"Is it just the sounds?" Bless Sherlock, approaching this the only way he knows, scientifically. "Or is it the lights too? Because ear plugs..."
"No, Sherlock," and John feels entirely defeated. "The lights are fine. It's the sounds, and the ground shaking, and the kids when they get really scared. It's like the worst of it, rockets sounding like mortar strikes or those fireworks that look like burning rain. They used to sound like a heavy downpour on the tin roof of the shed that was in the garden of grandda's. They sound like a semi-automatic machine gun now. I never had a problem before I was discharged. Talk about backwards."
John feels like he used to, tired, though tired is the wrong word. Like he did when he spent days drifting in that empty space before sleep because actual sleep was trouble but being awake and aware in the doldrums of his life was worse. "Look, just because I can't go doesn't mean that you shouldn't. You'll have a fantastic time." And he will. "Take Mrs Hudson. She'll like it."
Sherlock comes into the room properly. He is inscrutable as he comes and sits on the bed beside John. John's bed is pushed in the corner, wall at his head and side; in his sleep he faces the door. They filmed him sleeping, once, when they were trying to figure out how to help him with the night terrors, and he knows that when he is trapped in the depths of his mind he sleeps on his back and acts out the most violent of his actions and that when he is drugged to the gills he sleeps like the dead: still.
Neatly plucking the bottle of tablets out of John's hands, Sherlock turns it over in his own the way John had been while they were holding the stilled conversation. "You're planning to sleep, then, even though you dislike the chemical assistance and you said several months back that sleeping pills make you feel like your brains had been replaced with molasses." He pauses, tilts his head to the side, a curious little grin on his face. "I liked that metaphor. Sometimes you come up with something almost publishable."
"Oi." John nudges him in the arm with his shoulder. He appreciates the attempt to cheer him up but it's a bit useless right now. He wants to go out and watch the sky light up but he can't. "I tried, last year."
"Mmmn." Sherlock doesn't look interested, and John knows that he will have figured out the rest of this story by the time that John has properly started to tell it, but will still listen so he can catch any details that he can't work out.
"Bonfire night was on the Saturday, but there were displays on the Friday too. I watched a bit of one out of my window, but..."John stops, and swallows and doesn't say anything about that night. In the morning he had spent an hour with his gun in his hands, wondering if the bullet would punch through the tiles on the shower wall after going though his head. It had taken all of his will power the following night, on Guy Fawkes itself, to just take the two pills necessary, and not the whole lot. "So on the Saturday I knocked myself out, and woke up after it was all over. Felt awful, mind, but it was better than the alternative."
"The alternative being?" Sherlock is not disinterested; he is as interested as any other time that John has revealed a previously unknown facet of himself, no more, no less, and John loves him for it, loves him deeply and viciously.
"I used to scream, Sherlock," John admits.
"You still do," Sherlock interrupts, and John wearily rubs a hand over his eyes, feeling the deep groves in his forehead, the chicken pox scar from scratching too hard as a kid, the pores blasted by dust.
"They called the police on me once. The only reason I didn't go for my gun was that it was in the draw of my desk across the room. You should go. Mrs Hudson will want some time to get ready and it's six already." The subject change is ungraceful, but John doesn't care.
"Come downstairs."
"What?"
"It's been proven that an unrelated environment can prevent the onset of night terrors. You associate this room with waking after. Not as much of your old bedsit, true, but you have woken here after. My room, never. So get changed and come downstairs."
John gapes at him, but decides not to argue, or kick up a fuss. He recognises this as Sherlock's odd brand of caring, and discouraging it would be both idiotic and a step backwards. Gathering up his pyjamas, the long sleeved cotton t-shirt and trousers, he follows Sherlock downstairs and through the kitchen to his room.
It is dim inside, low light and soothingly like Sherlock in composition. Sherlock is right, it will be easier in here, but it is never something that he would have asked for himself.
"Sleep well," Sherlock offers, slightly awkwardly, hovering in his own doorway.
John nods, and Sherlock mostly closes the door behind him, leaving a small chink of warm hall light across the floorboards. Sherlock's room is interesting, and John spends ten or so minutes looking around. He's been in here before, to fetch things or Sherlock or sometimes both at once but never such a lengthy period of time.
Sherlock, wonder of wonders, knocks on the frame of his own door. "We're off now. You should probably take them soon. I told Mrs Hudson that you have other plans for this evening involving the pub and probably Mike, I wasn't paying attention, was I, when she asked why you weren't coming with us." A small grin, a shared joke, a common complaint.
It is an unexpected kindness. John swallows against the knot in his throat as he stands in-between the heavily curtained window and the bed. "Thank you," he forces out. It's not that he's ungrateful, really he couldn't be more grateful, but it stings that it is necessary at all.
Sherlock carefully cups his cheek in the palm of his hand like he's something precious. The action nearly topples him. This is all backwards, usually he would be the one caring for someone like this- Harry, or a mate who's just broken up with his girlfriend, or those disillusioned teens who thought that a tour in the highlands of Afghanistan, or any of the other places they were stationed on active duty, was going to be a lark. "Take the pills and go to sleep John." It is the unspoken 'I'll see you in the early morning when they wear off' that nearly breaks John into a thousand small pieces.
John waits until the outer door shuts before he changes and brushes his teeth, taking the pills and sliding between the covers into the smell of Sherlock.
They do their job. Sleep comes quickly, and dreamlessly, all encompassing.
John wakes at 2:48, according to the clock on Sherlock's bedside, to the most heartbreaking music he has heard. There is a less pedestrian adjective than heartbreaking, but his head is full of porridge and moving feels like trying to walk forwards in custard. He pushes back to covers, fingers absently noting the smoothness of the sheet, trust Sherlock to have ridiculous linen, and makes his way through to the living room. Night is thick outside the window; each of the streetlamps has a little halo of orange around it.
"Good morning, John," Sherlock says, and then lifts the violin back to his shoulder and the bow back to the strings. The melody is plaintive, lonely really. A part for the first violin in a string quartet, it should have support, the deeper tones of the cello and the viola to do the heavy lifting and another violin to keep it company as it soars.
Beautiful, nonetheless.
Sherlock ambushes John as he is gulping down a glass of water to try and clear the cobwebs away with a series of photographs and a frankly dizzying medications list. It takes him until the sun comes up to sort through them and figure out what would interfere with what, and how the symptoms would demonstrate themselves, aside from chronic liver failure. A decent distraction and then, after delivering a verdict to Sherlock, who has been tapping away on his computer for once, starting a normal day. One seen from behind the finest muslin in terms of his mental presence, but a day none the less.
Evening creeps in through the windows. Curtains are drawn. Lights are turned on. A bedroom is offered once more.
"You didn't sleep last night, Sherlock, or the night before. I'm not kicking you out of your bed again," John protests, but not as vigorously as he thinks he should be. Waking up in that dark time of this morning wasn't jarring, or confusing, or alarming, as it usually is when he wakes after taking the sleeping pills. He knew exactly where he was, and when, and why. It was quite lovely to wake up with a misty head, surrounded by the scent of Sherlock, to the sound of the violin.
"I'll take yours." Sherlock looks up from where he is still tapping away on his laptop. "Should I be tired, I will use your bed. There. It worked last night, did it not? Don't bother to object, John, it's written all over you."
John agrees just to shut him up. He's tired, and it's the fifth tonight. One more night of this, of drugging himself to cope. He's as bad as Harry, really, no matter how he tries to twist it. Worse, probably. Definitely more mucked up. Only New Years to look forward to after this. Won't that be a picnic.
No, he can't go to sleep in this frame of mind. It will infect his unconscious mind with thick strands of unease, ruining the deep sleep he is relying on to get him through the late evening.
Instead of thinking about it, he watches Sherlock. Never stops being fascinating, that. Watches Sherlock until he turns around with an amused hum and a questioning eyebrow and a smirk in the corner of his mouth.
Well, he's caught now. He watches as Sherlock goes into his bedroom and comes back with the white plastic bottle he left in there last night. He shakes two round, pale, peach pills into the palm of his hand and offers them to John.
John looks up at him, resigned and tired of it already and heartily sick of himself.
"No, don't think like that," Sherlock says, hushed, and then his face tightens up, his brow creases. "And I would appreciate it if you would cease casting aspersions on a man I know to be of the best kind."
The more convoluted a sentence out of Sherlock's mouth, the more awkward he is about saying it, and the more he means it. John can't stand to meet his eyes, scoops the tablets out of his palm and swallows them dry before trying to escape to the kitchen. He succeeds in that he gets to the kitchen. He fails in that Sherlock follows him there.
"I hate this," John admits, leaning on the rim of the sink. "It's all up here, in my brain. I could deal with it, I think, if it was just my body, my fucking arm, but it's in my head, Sherlock, it's not right and then there is you and Jesus, your mind, I've never seen anything like it, it's the best thing about you and I am so, messed, up." He can feel the pills starting to take effect, the curtain coming down and it's mucking up his brain-mouth filter. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'll go to bed now."
He turns and head towards the stairs. Sherlock catches his arm and the warmth of the contact is shocking. "Mine," he says. "We agreed."
They did. John can't deny that.
Sherlock guides John into his room and drags the covers of his bed down. John sits down, though his rapid slide into upright unconsciousness means that it's more of a controlled fall than anything else. John puts his head into his hands, so tired in all ways, as Sherlock smoothly kneels and removes his socks and shoes. He stands again and helps John to fully lie down without flopping and jarring his neck. He pulls the covers up and does not linger, but is there when John falls completely asleep nonetheless.
John wakes once more in the small hours, full rested and chemically weary for it. Sherlock is nowhere to be seen until he climbs the stairs to his own room. Sherlock is asleep, in his bed, and John allows himself a brief moment of possessive jubilation before going back downstairs. Sherlock needs to sleep, and has been unaccountably kind over the past few days.
Talking of, Sherlock has left the fire on very low, low enough that some heat is still trickling into the room. John turns up the gas and is about to sit down with the book he set aside two days ago when he sees the lurid pink of the post-it-note atop Sherlock's laptop and his own name in large block capitals, underlined. The note also has the password written on it, and instructions to 'press play'.
He copies the needlessly complicated string of numbers and letters in key by key and presses play.
Colour explodes across the screen. Rising ball of light by flare by trail of sparks cross the sky in the video silently. The footage is not professional; it is a tad shaky as it follows the glowing explosions through the sky.
Over it all is Sherlock's voice, narrating the view on the screen: "...was strontium, John, they use it for the red colour, oh, that was a good one. Mrs Hudson likes these ones, says they're graceful and quiet, straight up and down flares. Oh, three in one, well done, for those John, they have three layer one inside the other, it's quite ingenious really and, yes, iron for that one, the rain ones..."
Sherlock had filmed the display. Silently. And then edited and added his own narration. Made John his own little Guy Fawkes Night, complete with chemistry lessons.
John could not, he thinks, ever be more in love. He starts the video again. Watches it through. And again. A forth time, and then he stops. It feels obsessive, but this is a gift that Sherlock cannot grasp the vastness of. He thought, John is sure, that he was doing something nice for John, a deed to cheer him up, in the same way that he will tell John to get his coat and then drag him to some unknown corner of the city and take up his entire mind.
There is nothing he will ever be able to give back in return for a gift of this magnitude. Nothing in return for this piece of fiery artistry without any of the triggers it formerly held. John wants to go back to the planetarium of months ago and project it wide onto the walls so he can watch it from all angles. He wants to watch it without the pre-recorded narration, with Sherlock beside him telling him about it all at that very moment.
At one point the camera pans away from the sky to show Mrs Hudson smiling up at the darkness and smoke. Near the end it wobbles as it is snatched away and Sherlock awkwardly fills the screen. He frowns and then softens, eyes glinting back at the camera in the flickering light from the bonfire. The last of the video is of Sherlock silhouetted against the riot of a finale across the heavens. Sherlock has provided no narration for this; perhaps he felt none was necessary. He looks happy, watching the blast of sparks rise and explode and fall, and it makes John smile second hand to see him so.
What though, to give back? What could possibly equal this? Can he? Should he? Should he pretend it didn't happen and carry on as usual?
A video for a video, perhaps. Yes, that would work.
"Uh, well," John squirms in the chair, still in the rumpled clothes of the night before. "Christ Sherlock, I don't know what to say. This is what you were working on, isn't it, yesterday. Jesus, you're a sneaky bastard, working on a bloke's surprise when he's in the room. The fact that you were using your own laptop should have keyed me in, I suppose, but I was a bit clueless yesterday. Probably will be today too, just warning you, anyway." John pauses, looks away, to the side. "That was really good, Sherlock. I mean, unspeakably good. You are covered for Christmas. You don't need to get me anything. Really. Just." Uncomfortable, John shifts again, twist his shoulders, steadies the screen of the laptop he's recording on. "Thanks, mate."
I wrote this pretty much in one afternoon to night, when I should have been sleeping because I have two jobs tomorrow and a fireworks display of my own to enjoy. It's unbetaed. I don't have PTSD, but I know everyone reacts differently to trauma and it affects us all in different ways.
Good evening, m'dears, and thoughts are always appreciated ~SRM.