AN: This story will have both scenes from John and Sherlock's perspectives. (While I wanted to write what was going on in Sherlock's head during The Last Place You'd Look, it wouldn't have been very conducive to the case scenes.)
Unbetated and un-Brit picked. If someone wants to do either please say so.
It was pouring rain when John left the clinic that day, pouring so hard that he got soaked in the short walk to the cab stand. Normally he didn't work on Saturday, but he'd been called in to substitute for a sick doctor. It had been a trying day, and the only thing that made it look up was that his support group met tomorrow.
A funny thing to say, he thought. If you had told him a year ago that he'd be going to a therapy group and look forward to its meetings every week, he'd have laughed himself into a hernia. But a year ago he had lived in a pre-K world. No, since it was the beginning of December he had only lived in a post-K world for ten months.
K. Even now he couldn't make himself call her anything else. Sherlock, on the few occasions he had mentioned her, simply said She or Her with very obvious capital letters. When he'd been called in to talk to a child patient who the Yard suspected had been sexually abused, way back in February, John had had no idea what he was going to unleash. He just wanted to help the Yard, and no one, not even their entire team of experts, had gotten the girl to even admit to being abused, much less who did it. He had no better luck then they did.
Then he made the mistake of telling Sherlock about it.
They hadn't had a case then, not in a week or so at least, but John truly just wanted to share a story he found disturbing. Child abuse was so mundane that he figured Sherlock wouldn't be interested even though the Yard was involved. But he was very interested, and angry. John knew that keeping him away from the hospital was a lost cause, so he simply asked to come along with him. (If he hadn't John suspected Sherlock would have snuck into the hospital himself, and the resulting clash between him and the Yard wasn't worth thinking about.) He expected to have to drag him away from the scared, traumatized girl, but not only had he been good with the child, she asked to see him again. And that time she talked about her abuser she referred to as K. And so did Sherlock. Not much, but enough to make John ring Mycroft to demand answers. Mycroft reluctantly gave them. He told a horribly truthful account of how he had noticed warning signs but wasn't able to do anything about them until his brother rang him one day with a request to come home. How he'd come home and his mother informed him Sherlock was telling "horrible lies" about a neighbor, not saying who was involved but clearly saying it was a sexual issue, and that Sherlock was going away to school for the first time. Mycroft had demanded to know who it was, but she refused to reveal it, and died a few months later. How Sherlock had claimed complete ignorance about whoever it was that he'd supposedly lied about. How he still regarded it as his biggest failure.
When another victim showed up at the Yard a few days later, Sherlock talked to him as well. Sherlock even reassured him that he'd been through the same thing. Although Sherlock knew that John knew, he still maintained his silence. John wisely didn't ask. They spoke to more victims, their families, and other people they had been in contact with. It was a horrifying litany of damaged children, damaged, families, damaged adults. But no sign of the perpetrator until the victim that Sherlock had bonded with, Phillip Rodgers, had shown up at their door early in the morning with a note. The note led them to Yorkshire, and it was there they finally came face to face with K.
John almost asked the woman who came to the door where her husband was. He was eternally glad he hadn't done so, because a few exchanges between her and Sherlock revealed that not only was she the one who had abused the children, she'd also been the one that abused Sherlock. And she didn't seem to feel bad about it. She smiled the whole time. Sherlock was the one who practically had to be carried back to Baker Street. From there things had only gotten worse.
There were more questions, a long trial, and Sherlock started to use drugs again. John had been to most of the trial and was still haunted by the stories of the victims, even the ones he hadn't known beforehand. Still worse was the memory of Sherlock's testimony. He'd clutched the stuffed bee one of the other victims had bought for him the whole time, and had looked like a frightened child. The only way he kept coping was the support group. The then fiancee of one of K's victims had invited him to a support group meeting, and John was suprised to find it was exactly what he needed. He hadn't missed a meeting yet.
The therapist that ran the group, Dr. Dodson, called it "a group for family and friends of those who have been sexually abused" but currently all the members were in some sort of romantic relationship with that other person. Including John, he supposed, although it wasn't like any other romantic relationship he'd been in in the past. There was no intimacy. Sherlock had touched him before the so-called relationship had begun, but not anymore. John had a feeling it had to do with that shift in their relations - he had gone from being non-sexual (and safe) to sexual and not safe. He both wanted to discuss it with the group, since they'd understand, and yet not wanting to admit the relationship was that distant.
When the cab got to Baker Street and he got out, he wondered if Sherlock would be there. Lestrade had made it clear that if he showed up to a crime scene high on anything he'd never be called back, (and in the process implying he'd issued some sort of ultimatum on the subject before) and as a result Sherlock scanned the newspapers before pulling a vanishing and returning high (or after the high was over) act. But he hadn't stopped it entirely. He had once said that he'd rather live on the street than talk to a therapist, and John believed him. Of course John could ask him to leave, but the chance then the street would swallow him up was too great to risk. Mycroft had forced him into treatment some years ago, for what reason John had never been told, but he wouldn't do the same thing again. John knew he felt guilty for not having stopped his brother's abuse (even though there wasn't any way he realistically could have), and even more guilt at the fact he had assumed whoever was abusing his brother had to be male and thus never suspected it was the local pediatrician that Sherlock spoke so highly of.
He went up the stairs and opened the door. Sherlock was stretched out on the sofa, still in pajamas, using his stuffed bee Hamish as a pillow. This made John sigh with relief; if he had recently gotten high on cocaine he wouldn't be calmly lying on the sofa.
"You forgot your umbrella," Sherlock said without looking up.
"I assumed it wasn't going to rain." He hung up his jacket and went into the kitchen to see what he could make for dinner.
"There's still some risotto."
"You didn't eat it?"
"Wasn't hungry."
John sighed. "There's no case now. You have no excuse not to eat."
"Pardon me, Mother," Sherlock snapped back.
John paused with his hand on the fridge door. "Did Victor Trevor ring you today?" Victor Trevor had been a friend of Sherlock's from secondary school, and had been a surprise witness at the trial. He had also been the one to out K to Sherlock's mother. She, rather than being concerned for her son, burned the stuffed bee Mycroft had given him, planned to send him to boarding school, and when Mycroft himself came home she defended herself by saying Sherlock had been "telling horrible lies." She refused to tell Mycroft who Sherlock had been supposedly lying about, and had died a few months later from a stroke.
"Yes, and he left a unbearably polite message." Sherlock practically spat out the words.
"You delete his texts," John pointed out. "Is there a particular reason you want to avoid him so much?"
Sherlock's expression went from anger to fear. "None of your buisness."
John wisely didn't push the issue. Thank god for my group tomorrow, he thought.
