Chapter One:
AN: Ok so before you read this, just a heads up: the reunion is very different. Most notably Joan's reaction to it is very different to that of her male equivalent. I like to think that she would have processed it in a more rational way, being a woman (no I am not being sexist, please don't take that the wrong way). Not to say that Joan is not any less of a violent and emotional character as that of John, but, let's be honest here, she doesn't have a Mary equivalent to hold her up, and she would have suffered a lot more. Suffering changes people and their habits. I ask you only to take this into account as you read my very changed chapter. More to come on the reunion in the next instalment. Thanks for reading!
Joan Watson was in hell. Or, rather, it felt like hell, though it strongly resembled the bleak wasteland of the Afghanistan Desert. The Denizens of this pit strongly resembled her army comrades, though, at the same time, they did not. She couldn't remember Alex having a gaping hole in the middle of his head where his face used to be. She couldn't remember Peter having no arm where one should be hanging. She heard their voices though, clear as the day those words had been spoken, just before all the world had been shattered by a spray of bullets and screams.
"Get down Jo!" Alex had called. She vaguely wondered how he managed to do that though, as his holey face had no mouth. Suddenly there was a bang, a shatteringly loud one at that, and a great spurt of blood. She felt it hot and sticky on her face. She could taste it in her mouth. She turned toward where the sound had come from and she saw Alice. Alice was her friend. Alice had been with her from the very beginning. Alice had two children. She had three dogs. She had a cat. She also had a hole in her chest the size of Joan's fist. That was when the world had exploded. A fiery stab of pain fanned out across her shoulder, bringing her to her knees in a scream of agony. There was so much pain. Then darkness. Nothing but empty blackness, a place devoid of feeling. Whether it was preferable to the fire in her shoulder, Joan could not say. There was something inherently terrifying about nothingness.
Joan heard screaming. Laughter. Something was moving in the dark. She screamed, but there was no sound. It was engulfed in the darkness that descended upon her with such a weight that air was forced from her lungs. She tried to move but there was too much weight upon her. She couldn't breathe. Their faces swam before her eyes. Their empty staring eyes. The comrades who had fallen. They were dead. It was her fault. Why was she not dead?
"Sherlock!" Her own voice echoed in her ears. A vision swam before her eyes. It was Bart's. No. No. No. Not this. Not again.
"Sherlock!" Again her voice. Screaming. Desperate. She struggled harder against her invisible bonds. She had to get up there and stop him. She couldn't let him fall. Not again. She couldn't move. Panic built up in her chest and gurgled up her throat. She felt sick. She couldn't speak. She couldn't breathe. She screamed, but still no sound. No sound in the world as she watched him fall. Down… down… down… There was so much blood. Blood… Sherlock's blood. His life bleeding out of him and onto the pavement below. Too late.
Too Late.
Joan was jerked out of her sleep by the sound of a slamming door. She was tangled in her sheets and drenched in sweat, her dirty blonde hair plastered to her cheeks and forehead. She coughed as she drew air into her dry throat, looking around desperately into the darkness of the room around her.
It was just a dream.
She forced herself to breathe deeply and evenly. She couldn't afford to panic. She must not show weakness. Not with him downstairs. She couldn't handle that right now.
She pushed her tangled sheets aside and stood up. Her muscles ached with stiffness, and she winced as she stretched them, working the blood back through them. She used a towel to dap at the sweat on her face. She was going to need a shower.
Joan pulled a sweater on over her head and attempted to run a brush through her tangled hair, though ultimately failed, gave up with a sigh, and opened her bedroom door and descended the short flight of stairs. Sherlock was already up.
He sat at the kitchen table with his head buried in a microscope. He was wearing pyjamas and a dressing gown. It was all he ever seemed to wear these days. He didn't leave the house much.
Joan said nothing to him as she walked past the table and over to the kettle. Disregarding the mess of beakers and tubes in the sink, she filled the kettle up with fresh water and put it on to boil. Sherlock said nothing. She said nothing. It had become their routine, to dance about each other like one was a bomb waiting to explode. She supposed, in a way, that she was. But that was no excuse. She had every right to be he had, after all, been dead for the last two years. She had every right to be angry, didn't she? Of course she bloody well did. But so far, she hadn't been. That had surprised her, and him. No doubt he had been expecting violence. Perhaps a couple of punches, a bit of screaming and the breaking of things. She hadn't given him that satisfaction. He could suffer through her tense silence like she had suffered from his absence for two years.
When he had walked through the door a week ago, she had done nothing. He had stood there, tall and exactly as she had remember him, minus a curious but slight stoop in his posture that he no doubt thought she would miss. He had rattled off explanations at her. "I did it to protect you… I had no other alternative… Moriarty's web was too complex…" Less than curiously enough, he had not apologised. She seemed to recall that at some point that he had said that he ought to, but he hadn't. She wondered if this heartless Holmes had ever said a genuine apology in his life.
She had been sitting down, silent, unmoving and unblinking before him as he was speaking. Eventually she had stood up. He had trailed off as she had done so, no doubt expecting some sort of assault to follow. She had been angry. So angry. But so numb. Her anger had gathered itself into a small compact little ball and had jumped into a river, and was now fast sinking to the bottom. What remained was numbness. Just nothing. Nothing at all. Numbness was worse than anger.
"Joan…" he had said, stepping forward so that he stood over her. "Joan?" She couldn't look at him. She felt like she was going to be sick.
Joan from two years ago would have jumped on him at that moment, tackled him to the ground and would have either beaten him or hugged him. But present Joan, Joan who had spent the last two years thinking that her best friend was dead, and that it was her fault, and who had lapsed back into the depression she had wallowed in before she met him, regained her psychosomatic limp and disinterest in life Joan, had done nothing.
She walked around him, up the stairs and to her bedroom, locked the door and had preceded to spend the rest of the night lying on the floor, staring up at the ceiling. He had knocked and called to her, bargaining with her in an attempt to gain entry. He could have broken the door down easily. Even thin and hobbling, the thin sheet of wood was no match for this madman's determination. But he didn't. She briefly wondered why, but found herself unable to adequately process the thoughts. She was drowning in a cesspit of accumulated emptiness. At one point she thought that his voice had broken a little, and she could have sworn that she heard him slide down the door to sit behind it. Eventually he had left, leaving her to lie there in silence. She hadn't slept. She had merely lain there staring at the ceiling, her mind floundering. She didn't care how he had done it. She didn't care about the bloody mechanics of it. She cared why. Why? Two years. Two fucking years.
The next day she had gone down stairs for tea and had found him lying on the couch, deeply asleep. She had been as quiet as humanly possible, desperately wanting to avoid the confrontation that she knew was inevitable. It was too early in the morning. He had woken up anyway. Blessedly he had just sat there in silence. He had looked at her, with a sad glint in his eyes, but he had said nothing. That was a week ago. They had barely said three words to each other since. Partly because Joan had no idea what she wanted to say to him, mostly because she knew that once she started talking the anger would return, the sadness, the desperation, the agony, and all at once it would overwhelm her and she would do something that she would regret. She could not lose him again, although a part of her told her that no matter what she did to him, he would probably stay. Unless she killed him.
She suspected he was waiting for her to make the first move. No doubt he was anticipating some sort of emotional explosion. That made her angry. This calm and obedient silence was so contradictory to his nature that she wanted to scream at him. But that would only lead to the inevitable confrontation she was actively avoiding.
He coughed, and Joan was brought back to the present. She jumped a little as she realised that he was standing beside her, looking down at the screaming kettle. Funny, that she had heard the smallest noise that he had made, and not the much louder noise of the complaining kitchen appliance. That made her angry. Most things made her angry. Fuck.
"I could… do that" he said, awkwardly. That took her by surprise.
"You make shit tea, Sherlock" the abruptness of her reply made him frown a little.
"That was one time, and it was coffee, and the drugged sugar was what made it distasteful, not the manner in which I prepared it" she stifled a sigh and pulled a mug out of the cupboard above the stove.
"I wasn't referring to the time that you drugged me" This was the first conversation they had had in two years, and it was about tea. Fitting, perhaps. Nothing about their relationship made any sense anymore.
Sherlock stood there, awkwardly, doing nothing and possessing a mildly pained expression. It was the 'Joan I'm confused what did I do wrong why are you angry what are you feeling Joan" expression that she had come to know so damned well. It took a concerted amount of effort to ignore him and continue making the tea. She wondered what he thought he would gain by doing this task for her. Most likely it was a gesture of goodwill or friendship. A peace offering perhaps. Where once that would have made her smile and appreciate him, now it only pissed her off. Why? Fuck only knew.
Sherlock was still standing there awkwardly, brow furrowed and mouth slightly ajar, when she had finished a few seconds later. She watched the tea leaves dissolve into the hot water, their misty brown colour leeching into the water and turning it a pleasant black. She normally took milk. Not today.
She turned away from Sherlock and went to sit by the table, a notion which she quickly abandoned after seeing what lay atop it. She sighed internally and sat on the couch facing away from the kitchen. She would have gone to her room, but something about that seemed so very horribly cruel. She would prove the same message in a much nicer way by sitting away from him.
To her surprise, and slight dismay, Sherlock suddenly appeared before her and sat down in his chair, legs spread and elbows leaning forward onto knees, fingers steepled beneath his chin and his brown deeply furrowed. He took a deep breath, as though readying himself for something, before he spoke.
"What do I need to do?"
The question was unexpected. In this certain context, indeed in most any context, that question had never been uttered by him.
"What do I need to do to make this right?" His brow knitted together as he looked imploringly at her. He was genuinely lost, she realised, with a strangely unpleasant feeling. He was really and truly lost.
"Please, Joan, tell me what I have to do to make this right"
What was she supposed to say to that? How the hell was she supposed to respond? Why was this up to her? He was the one that had jumped off the fucking building. He was the one who had made her think that he had been dead for the past two years. This was on him. This was his fault. Why was it up to her to make this right?
"Jesus fucking Christ Sherlock" she knew that once she started on this path, there was no going back. But, right at this moment, Joan Watson did not give two shits. "How the fuck can you say that?" Sherlock frowned in confusion, leaning back a little as he processed this.
"I'm trying to…"
"Two years. Two… years… And I thought…" Joan's head shook from side to side as she tried to process the words that would not form in her brain. "You let me grieve. You let me grieve..." It was all coming back now. All the pain, the hurt, the agony, the terror, the panic, the loneliness, the blame, all of it. And he just sat there, confused. He didn't understand. And in that moment, in that horribly real and deadly moment, Joan realised that he never would. That he never could.
"How could you do that?"
"Joan…" he reached out, as though trying to calm her or shut her up long enough to inject his response.
"Don't" Joan sat back from him, an ugly grimace on her face, one she applied every time she suppressed the uncontrollable sensation of shattering that occurred in her heart. "Don't touch me Sherlock or I swear I will break you" Cursed were those who felt too much, she thought as an all too familiar ache tugged at her eyes. And yet, cursed were those that felt not enough. Would Sherlock ever see that? No.
The look of blank shock on his face was the last straw. The glassy emptiness that invaded his eyes, the confused twitch of his eyebrows as he suppressed the emotions that Joan found herself unable to. He was feeling and he didn't know why or how or what it was. And he never would. Joan was not here to help him decipher his emotions this time. She was the cause of them. He didn't understand that. He thought he had explained to her why he had done it. He thought she had understood, despite her withdrawal. He had assumed for the first few days that it was a part of her acceptance process. How wrong he had been. What had he done wrong now? There was not enough comparative data to draw upon for this circumstance. No previous experience to draw upon.
"Come now Joan…" he tried to adopt a reasonably humorous tone to his voice, lightening his expression despite the fact that it felt so horribly misplaced on his face. "Don't tell me you haven't missed this… the thrill of the chase, the blood pumping through your veins, just the two of us against the rest of the worl…" She threw her tea at him. For a moment, Sherlock was struck dumb. He froze, quite literally, the skin on his face burning and dripping with boiling hot tea. Joan didn't look angry. She didn't look sad or shocked or any of her usually blatant emotions. She looked dead. She looked as though the world had crumbled down around her and stripped her bare of that which she once so passionately and wonderfully felt. She looked broken. But for the single tear that slipped unheeded from her eye, Joan Watson might just as well have been a plastic moulding of a human. Empty. Nothing. A strange strangling, squeezing feeling settled over Sherlock's heart. He was momentarily short of breath, and a strange ache pervaded the muscles of his upper lip. He didn't understand. What had he done?
Joan said nothing. She didn't have anything to say. What was she supposed to say to the man she loved so fiercely and deeply, but whom she could not look at without feeling dead and empty? There was nothing. Nothing to say at all.
She dropped her cup as she stood up, but ignored the shattering as it made contact with the ground below. Sherlock flinched, but otherwise did not move. Only his eyes followed her as she made her way to the door and blindly grabbed a coat from the hook before tearing down the steps and out of 221b. He remained unmoving as she pulled the coat over her shoulders on the pavement beneath the window and began to walk away, as fast as her legs would allow. She could not stand to be near him a moment longer for fear that she would explode. She couldn't bear any of this bullshit.
It was only ten minutes later that she realised the cloak around her shoulders was Sherlock's, and that the scent of him was stamping on the pieces of her shattering heart.
