Poppies for John (Sherlock BBC fic)
Set after 'Sharing John'
FIC FOR REMEMBERANCE DAY
November 14th, 13:48 Remberance Sunday
Current Mood: grateful
Current Music: classic FM
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John wasn't entirely sure when Sherlock had started wearing a poppy - overweening attention to detail was Sherlock's thing, not his - but the splash of red against the navy of his usual coat was hard to ignore once John had noticed it. John had always bought a poppy - his whole family had long before he'd had his own experience of War, but John had never associated them with anything other than the past.
Seeing one on his flatmates coat was rather startling. Sherlock knew he was startled, but as they were in the middle of finding a forger who had kidnapped a local artist that specialised in reproducing miniature copies of well known works, the consulting detective had not addressed his confusion. That was fine with John, as he soon had bigger worries to occupy his mind, such as preventing someone from drowning him in a vat of printers ink and keeping Sherlock alive and in one piece long enough to locate and rescue the artist.
Scotland Yard arrived for the mop up - and was it wrong that he had started thinking of the men and women of the yard as his mop up team? He'd been spending too much time kidnapped by Mycroft - and once John had seen the victim safely on her way to hospital for a check up and given the facts over to Geoff with a promise to come by in the morning for a proper statement, he was too tired to spare curiosity on Sherlock's button-hole. Geoff and quite a few of the non-uniformed officers were wearing poppies, but John understood that: it made sense to him because they weren't Sherlock.
The taxi driver had second thoughts about letting him into the cab with the lower half of his trousers and shoes covered in dried red ink - it looked like he'd been wading through blood - but Sherlock had said something to change his mind. Possibly it had been a threat, John didn't care. He wanted out of these clothes, and them in the bin while he hit the shower.
"You're wondering about the poppy," Sherlock of course chose the taxi ride home as the perfect place for this conversation, possibly because he knew John was a captive audience.
"You don't care," John nodded, leaning his head against the back of the seat in exhaustion. He'd been up for thirty hours by this point, food was a distant memory and he felt oddly clumsy and fragile. A shower, sleep and food - in that order - would see him right, but for now he felt oddly unqualified to deal with Sherlock and his thinking processes.
"About events from the past? No, that's true," Sherlock sounded approving of John's insight, which only annoyed him. He hated feeling like a pet that had just done a surprisingly clever trick, "If it doesn't affect my work, the past is useless to me."
"Sherlock, I'm tired. What are you trying to say?" it was as close as John would ever get to admitting that he couldn't cope with his friend right now and needed the man to either shut up or leave him alone or possibly both.
"You wear the Poppy because it is an important symbol to you. You've been brought up to honour the dead in this way - to recognise their sacrifice and contribute to the well being of the survivors. These are things that you know I don't care about. But you see I've never had a personal reason to wear the Poppy until recently."
John felt as if cold water had been thrown over him. How had he missed Sherlock getting notified that a friend or family member had been killed in action overseas? Despite what Sally Donovan liked to pretend, Sherlock had not been accidentally, spontaneously generated in a lab. The man had family, even if he didn't talk about them. He probably - despite his protests - even had friends outside of John; people who had a relationship with him, though probably long distance ones. John wondered if it would be easier to be Sherlock's friend if they were on opposite sides of the globe instead of opposite sides of a cab? Then he felt bad about thinking that, which he knew was a function of his tiredness.
"I'm sorry, I didn't know that you'd lost someone in the Forces," John remembered to say, uneasily aware that the pause was too long and that Sherlock had probably read every thought in his head and possibly in a three block radius as well.
"No, John," Sherlock sighed, "You're not following me."
The cab pulled up and John frowned, "Are you about to call me stupid again? Because I'm warning you, I'm tired enough that this time I will punch you."
He got out of the cab, leaving his friend to pay, and shuffled across to the footpath, unlocking the door and trudging wearily inside. He plodded up the steps and set about cleaning himself up, reviving enough in the shower to know that he wouldn't sleep while he was this hungry. He got dressed again - or as dressed as a pair of jogging bottoms and a t-shirt, which would be good enough for sleeping in later and certainly he could answer the door to the delivery boy he was about to call - before going down to the sitting room to retrieve his phone and see if he could persuade or otherwise coerce Sherlock into eating with him.
He found his phone next to his usual order from the local curry place on top of a note that had a small poppy drawn quite accurately into the corner of it.
'I wear a poppy for you.' His flatmates handwriting was neat enough to be read easily for once and John had to sit down as the meaning of the note sunk in.
Sherlock Holmes, the man who professed not to care about the victims he helped, had just told his flatmate - in writing no less - that he did care.
END
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn. In the going down of the sun and in the morning - We Will Remember Them.Disclaimer: characters and setting as depicted in the BBC Sherlock series not mine. No money being made. Plot is mine.