Disclaimer : Sherlock belongs to MM. Conan Doyle, Moffat, Gatiss, etc - in his case, I'd advise collective baby-sitting.
A/N : first written to fill a prompt on the sherlock_bbc kinkmeme and posted on my LJ as a birthday gift for Karadin. Harry is quoting from St Exupéry's The Little Prince, every French child's staple diet though it seems to be fairly well known abroad.
A rose is a rose is Eros
By the time they are out of the house, Mike has fallen into a not-not routine – « not London of course but not what I'd call countryside either, train schedules a bit shaky but a car wouldn't be much use, not up to cottage standard but the drains are not a problem » while John holds staunchly if dispiritedly to his trademark line.
« It's not as if I could afford... oh. You have a backgarden !"
His evident pleasure draws a smile from his new landlord. « Wouldn't have pegged you as a greenthumber, John Watson. As I recall, you were more of a... birdwatcher in our younger days ? »
But Mike's chuckle addresses the crisp March air as John limps onto a strip of lawn as evenly cropped as his own puddingbowl haircut. His eyes take in the close knots of flowers hugging the border hedge – begonias in the pink of youth, virgin primroses and chick-yellow tulips, with the usual sprinkling of forget-me-nots in between. All to the norm, altogether a healthy, not-not English garden, neither too gaudy nor too subdued, the picture of its genial owner.
« And there's the rose by the compost pile. Bit of a loner, that. Seems to have formed an exclusive attachment to dead plants, but if you could remember to water it now and then... »
John's gaze shifts to the small compost heap at one end of the hedge. There's the rose indeed, so odd and unforeseen as to give its own name a wide berth. John looks at the pale green stem flaring up into a riot of dark petals, their purple a sharp foil to the pastel assortment of its peers. The rose is tall and still, but as John looks on, the March air morphs into March wind and the rose sways imperceptibly towards him.
« Won't hob-nob with the bright young things » Mike's hearty voice is saying in his back. « But if you don't mind keeping an eye on it... »
The words trickle on in the cool of evening as John gazes at the dark sharp rose.
« I've done my research. » John sits carefully on the lawn, stretching his shoulders after the long day and the longish ride home against a stiff headrest. « According to that nice woman from Hudson's Snax'n Sarnies, you're a purple tiger rose. Except you're way too purple and more thorny than a rose has any call to be. » He reaches out a hand to the long stem and takes it back instantly, looking at the red dot on his thumb. « Whoa, Sher Khan. Is that what the Flower Power's come to ? Well, I've just spent eight hours speaking sugar and spice and all that's nice to my fellow sufferers, so a prickly rose makes a nice change. And the name is John. »
« Here, brought you some tea. You look the type that makes a sip of rain go a Tiperary way, but Mrs Hudson says black tea's proteins to roses so here you go. Don't get too high on it, you're stringy enough as it is. Is that why you're so haughty ? Because of the height ? What's it like, having a bird's-eye view of your peers ? That's something I gave up on early, you know. You'd think doctor rhymes with healer, or director, or fighter even, and in the end you turn out a sodding plodder like everyone else. I don't mind the plodding but – all right, sometimes I miss the view. »
« What could rhyme with plodder, Sher ? You know, when I'm lying here flat on my back, it's like I'm watching the sap fuse up your stem, straight to that dark head of yours. And the funny thing is, I feel I can see things better - after. There was that young bloke today, light rash on both arms, standard allergy case history, and suddenly I noticed... »
Once again he has watered the kindergarten, as he calls it now, before stepping back into the house for the two ceramic mugs filled with warm Lapsang Souchong, his favorite. He sets them on the lawn – one is to cool for Sher - and lowers himself in the same easy motion.
He is telling Sher about that morning in Helmand when the clouds were so low on the mineral plain it looked as if the plain was churning in billows of white unquiet smoke, and Private Ginslow's pulse with it, when a shadow falls across the rose.
« She was right, then. » Harry's voice booms over him, clotted with sarcasm and a tinge of glee. The glee means that she has reached the razor edge of soberness, making a bloody mess of introspection, and anything will do to take the edge off - anything being usually a choice between John and Guinness. « That old biddy at the station café. That's why you never answer your phone, nice way to show appreciation for a gift, might as well have got you a bloody pigeon. All you do is sit here, all the time, blabbing to a rose. And I'm the one freaking out ? »
Harry's laughter keels back and forth with her as John struggles to get up. « Is it she who is your rose ? D'you listen in when she complains, or boasts, or is simply silent ? D'you feel responsible for her ? Fuck, but I'm waxing jealous, Johnny Boy. »
He had forgotten that they shared this one trait, a mnemonic facility to recall entire sentences. Once it sealed their bond, when she made him recite whole medical treatises ; now it calls up his own anger that she should quote from the one book Dad read to them when he was sober, before they grew to fight their separate wars, and then their common war. « Shut up » John says, his mouth dryer than Helmand. « Let's just – let's go inside. » But there is no shutting up Harry.
« What will you do next, John ? Go back to your desert and find yourself an Air Cop man ? And ask him to draw you a sheep ? » Her eyes graze his lambswool cardigan – the April nights are still this side of fresh.
Later on, when John turns from the garden gate, the mug has grown cold with waiting. John hugs his cardigan closer to his chest and lies down by the silent rose. « I'm sorry » he whispers, closing his eyes. Is he out of his mind ? Private Ginslow spoke to his own left hand two hours long before he died. « It is the time you have wasted on your rose » John recites tacitly, stubbornly, « that makes your rose so important. »
Something catches softly at the curve of his jaw, causing him to raise a hand. The petal is both heart-shaped and curl-shaped, and so purple that it looks almost black in John's cupped palm. John smiles.
He couldn't have known. He is not a knowing person, never knew how to spot a blast in his Aghan days - when a doctor was prescribed to wait until others had taken the brunt before he ran in to assess the waste.
He couldn't have known, because he leaves so early and unfocused that he never does more than perk an ear at the news headlines. Because Sher is too tall to be kept under a tarp or glass cloche. Because the chirpy young voice on Radio 4 mentioned « strong rains » instead of half the Atlantic rising up against his train window and punching the glass from a quasi-horizontal angle while he stares at it, helpless, hoping that each station will prove a dyke to the flood, knowing that it will not –
At last he is plodding into the garden, the water everywhere, falling on the headless tulips, on the house walls, on him, flatly falling furiously on the compost heap as it pools into the mud and is gone. John pushes the water out of his face and looks, but the mud cannot be told from the lawn and no straight line meets his eyes.
He is prepared to ride out the storm out if it gives him back his rose, but there is nothing – no stem, no tiger, not one curl of soft dark flesh. The water has sucked in Sher to the roots and when John checks for damage under a convalescent morning light, the waste is everywhere and the rose is gone.
He tells Mike that he has found a better-paid practice and moves to a bedroom flat in Bexley.
By the end of June, John is fully resigned to being a bit out of his mind. Why he still grieves for the five inches of thorns and splendid non-human cells he has known less than two months is beyond him, but he will mute the grief, not deny it. If he mentioned it to his therapist, she would speak of trauma displacement and beg him to indulge in free association, but John does not feel much like associating, freely or otherwise.
He turns off Harry's phone after a while and either registers for early shifts or comes late – the patient flow is quiet enough in summer. He cannot avoid one or two communal lunch breaks but is generally left alone on the assumption that he is something of a bore, or a bear, or possibly both. Mike mails to say the insurance people have dealt with the broken aerial and John should feel free to use the house for a week-end out if he likes. John doesn't reply.
The first of August looks as if specially ordered for P. G. Woodehouse, a thing of sky-blue skies and chortling sunrays. John has seen his last patient out by five and is stretching his arms by his office window when his office door whips open, letting in a tall young man with dark hair and, of all things, a cashmere muffler. « I need a flu shot » the man announces with a sharp wave of the hand which leaves him pitching slightly forward. John blinks. Then, taking in the hoarse voice and slim, probably undernourished body, he grabs a chair and hurries to the center of the room.
Forty seconds later, he pulls off his sthetoscope and stares at his patient's pallid face under its tumble of curls. « A shot will not be any help, Mr — »
The young man produces another incautious stroke of hand. « The name is Sherlock Holmes. It's unimportant. What's important is that I can't wait for paracetamol to have an effect. The flu is giving me a sore head. The soreness tampers with my neuronal voltage. When I'm dizzy, I cannot think as clearly as I'm used to. I cannot see, I cannot observe all the things. It's very important that I observe them all. D'you understand ? » The explanatory speech might run on for a while if it was no interrupted by a fit of jagged cough. The young man's head sways a little but his chest and shoulders remain taut, unsupported by the back of the chair.
John doesn't answer at once because he is fighting his own dizziness, summoning the joint forces of an ex-soldier's mind and the Hippocratic oath. Holmes's – Sherlock's – sentences come to him across an expanse of blurred air, as if they were something John had once had read aloud to him, unforgettably. « Not the flu » he finally articulates. « Incipient pneumonia, Mr Holmes. How on earth did you manage to catch pneumonia in this weather ? »
Sherlock looks back at him for a moment. Then, unexpectedly, he begins to smile. The smile shapes small quotation marks on each side of his mouth as he answers. « I have been under a waterfall. »
John's dizziness, curiously, disappears at the last word to be replaced by a rush of lambent, clear-headed euphoria. Amazing. « Can't be pneumonia » Sherlock is carrying on. « Chronic bronchitis, perhaps. I can still recognize the signs. »
« Can you ? » John says urgently, not quite knowing what he's asking, yet knowing he has to ask while he reaches behind for his pad and begins to fill a prescription for antibiotics.
Sherlock's Siasmese eyes narrow a little as if appraising the new undercurrent, the new flow threading their talk, other than medical diagnosis. « Yes. » As the eyes move around the sparsely furnished cabinet, Sherlock rises from his chair and John, instinctively, follows suit.
« You've been in London for five or six months now » Sherlock enunciates slowly « back from the Army, stationed abroad. You lived in a rural suburb until recently but chose to leave it because of something that happened to you there, a loss or an accident, so now you live in a much more cramped space, a recluse, and you like Lapsang Souchong. » Sherlock frowns and suddenly dips his head, ruffling his dark curls with both hands.
John's gaze flicks from his solid unpolished country shoes to the non-medical books crowding his shelves and Harry's phone on the desk, its inscription still legible under the dust. « How do you know that I prefer Lapsang ? » he asks, not quite trusting his voice.
Sherlock's pupils are dark and more than a little dilated as he raises a flushed face to John. « I don't. That's just it. I – » He shakes his head. « There's always something. But normally, it's something that I miss. » The hoarse young voice is a mix of annoyance and wonder. John smiles.
« Well. As to that. If you feel like – testing your hypothesis, one day or another, there's a Starbucks down the street. Next to the chemist. For today, I'd advise the chemist and a quick ride home. »
Sherlock pockets the prescription and heads for the door. He is three-quarters into the hall when he turns his head, peers at John intensely and mutters « I always test my hypotheses ».
And since there is no replying to such an answer, it is only a matter of time before the two of them are stepping out of the empty building, straight into Highfield Gardens and its light-flooded streets.
FINIS