"Stop," said Sherlock.
But John, engaged in his blog-writing, just cast him a glare that said, "You're mad as a hatter and make no sense" before plunging back again into the depths of his recollection. He squinted against the light of reality that threatened his carefully-formed sentences, like a tide threatened a child's sand castles.
He heard Sherlock again say, "John, stop, this is getting out of hand," but it was too unpleasant to be drawn from the imaginal world by Sherlock, of all creatures. Since when was he an expert on getting too wrapped up in a project? He himself was a prodigy at ignoring people who were trying to interrupt him.
So John closed his eyes against his computer screen and roommate, daring his flatmate and lover to try and distract him one more time.
Not that it was particularly pleasant where he was trying to be, he noted sourly. Because the place he was trying to be was all tension, clouds, vapor, and chaos. It was not a place of peace but of creation, of new life, of birth and of resurrection, affected by a volcanic, primordial fire that singed every man who dared to show his face there.
There was only solemnity and the cackling laughter of manic inspiration in this underground place of unconscious stirrings, and John existed there with these feelings, as jarring and stirring as any he had ever experienced. He felt things, ideas, visions he couldn't give a nme to or identify, and they were pressing against the walls of his head. He was at once enraptured by the beauty of the place and very aware that he could possibly become mad if he stayed there too long.
"This. Ends. Now."
Sherlock slammed the laptop face down and wrenched it out of john's numb grasp.
"What the hell are you doing?" cried John, only more plaintiveness in his anger once before, when he'd arrived home to find Sherlock shooting up the walls.
Sherlock's answer was concise, brilliantly on-target, and exactly the least pleasant thing John wanted to hear.
"Your blog-writing is a maladaptive strategy you use to put off doing the things you know you ought to be doing," said Sherlock airily, flopping onto the couch with a cup of cold tea to his lips.
"Oh, and obviously since you've got back from Mars, that's something you're an expert on, is it?" replied John hotly, standing up and, inadvertently, proving Sherlock's point by tackling the dishes in the sink.
"I wasn't on Mars, dont be silly," replied the detective with a shrug. "I couldn't have given you more details about where I was in the time-"
John interrupted sarcastically. "-Yeah, details like, 'John, I spent several months in a country where a delicacy is stewed monkey brains turned into a pudding."
"Exactly," returned Sherlock, "With that information alone someone less good intentioned than my brother would be able to trace my whereabouts to at least three murders in east Asia - you see why it is so difficult to say more?"
A cry of aggravation arose from John's throat and he groaned heartily. "God, why I even put up with you..."
But Sherlock didn't respond for a moment, and John just continued to scrub dishes, noticing Sherlock's silence immediately. But first he denied the possibility that the silence was the symptom of a problem, so he waited, just listening. He reluctantly acknowledged, after five minutes of silence, that every second he waited the problem was festering in Sherlock's heart, growing like a sick snowball of pathogens, getting worse and worse every moment he didn't confront it.
That image didn't make John move any faster. Indeed, it made him work slower, putting off the inevitable damage control efforts he would have to make momentarily.
So when the sink was divested of dishes, he looked up reluctantly, his eyes lingering on the faucet. He saw Sherlock standing noiselessly at the sitting-room window, head bent with glumness.
"Ok, what did I say?" asked John, and without further words he advanced upon Sherlock and drew the creature into his embrace.
Thereupon Sherlock weakly resigned himself to the hug, returning it but remaining numbly transfixed by the view of the street even with his head on John's shoulder.
A slight movement of the jaw indicated that Sherlock was preparing to say something, his tongue forming his words around the syllables he wanted to say.
John suggested, "Go on then, say it."
"I don't tolerate being put up with," Sherlock said at last. "If you are going to put up with me, it would be better that you do that elsewhere and not in the place I live and consider a safe space."
"Oh, god, Sherlock, you know I was joking," said John. Though as much as he denied it, he knew there was a grain of truth in Sherlock's problem.
"Aside from the fact that jokes don't exist, John, because all so-called jokes are reflections of unconscious desires manifesting in awkward or unusual ways...nonetheless, this phrase put up with is altogether too highly relied upon in your vocabulary." Sherlock spoke daintily, stringing his words together with precise care. "MYCROFT can put up with me, but not you, John. It's important that you don't think of me as something you have to put up with."
"Oh, of course I didn't mean it," said John again, feeling guilty and also angry because he felt his guilt was unjustified.
"Ah, but if that's what you keep saying to yourself, John, you'll never get at the truth," said Sherlock in reply. "The more you insist it was a joke, the more you're trying to convince yourself of your own innocence."
Finding Sherlock's own vehemence to be amusing, John replied barely without laughing. The whole thing seemed so ridiculous. "I'm trying to convince you, you stupid berk," retorted John warmly, with false pettiness, pressing his cheek against Sherlock's neck and rocking the other man gently.
"I swear, are you doing this to irritate me, or are you genuinely being an unyielding prick?" asked Sherlock bitterly, not taking this in a humorous light at all.
"Oh, the prick, definitely the prick," answered John laughingly, but there was a subtle tinge of why do I put up with this in his voice.
Sherlock picked up on it immediately.
"Ah, there it is," said Sherlock with menace. "That attitude is most unbecoming, John, and I wish for you to let go of me if you are going to repress yourself in this way."
And instead, John tightened his hold on the detective, which made Sherlock squirm and try and get away.
"No," replied John to this effort with a small, childish voice, "Mine."
"And therein is the whole problem of the matter," said Sherlock in a dry tone, and like a cat he ducked out of John's arms and raced across the room to retreat to the farthest corner, as if he expected John might chase him.
Realizing the enormity of whatever was amiss here, but not sure how much of it he could take rightly on his shoulders, John sat in the armchair and closed his eyes against Sherlock's pale, hunted look.
"I'm not 'yours,'" spat Sherlock, "And you never will be. I am not a woman - said only because women continually seem to disavow themselves of their own human rights even in this enlightened twenty-first century for the sake of men - or a possession, as much as you imagine otherwise. I do not, have never, and will never subscribe to the suppressive social models of repression that dominated in the 19th century. Nor will I let myself be subject to anything less superior than my own mind. I am ruled by my own self alone."
"Ok," said John in response to this tirade, feeling like a cad, but also feeling like Sherlock was just trying to make him feel like a cad. "But I do think you're blowing up this situation a little bit."
"There's nothing wrong with me," replied Sherlock savagely. "Look at it from my view, John - I see that your unconscious is so primitave and inaecure that it has to label its things with a mark of possession. When these things cause you difficulty, you do not accept the trials of the other person as some trial they are experiencing but you see it as a conspiracy against you and your person and your satisfaction and your balance and your place in the world. The things that bother you are things that go against your preferred reality, and they threaten you because you have no control over them and the reality they come from.
"Hence, when I have a legitimate issue of concern, you dismiss it and act put upon - it is easier than accepting you have no relevance in the equation, to inherently believe that my hesitance to speak is exclusively to confuse you. And it is easier to respond to this feeling of inadequacy that as much as you shove it away still exists with excessive assertion of control such as that hideous screeching 'mine' you displayed earlier."
John was dumbfounded by this stream of information, and he sank down onto the couch, defeated, while Sherlock advanced towards him.
"Ok," said John, "Sometimes I forget how much you've changed, and moments like this make it all come back to me."
At Sherlock's look of patient, carefully muted concern at this statement, John added, "It's just as I have said before - gone is the puerile creature who couldn't even speak the word love, and what's left is a maturing masterpiece that has brought together everything in the world that I know and that I think is beautiful."
He dared not say the deepest feeling he was having, however - it's clear you've been learning a lot over the years. I could use every word you used just now to describe me to describe your past self.
But maybe some part of that feeling got communicated to Sherlock, whose eyes lit up suddenly with a nuance of enhanced understanding.
And then Sherlock bounded over the back of the couch and embraced the doctor readily. It was as if they were speaking the same language again. "I like when you say that sort of thing," said Sherlock, as he brought his forehead against John's.
"Then are you okay?" asked John, deeply relieved that his roommate and lover was balanced again. He felt like he was getting too old to deal with Sherlock's temper any more.
"Are you okay?" asked Sherlock with a merry laugh, pressing a gentle smiling kiss against John's relaxed mouth, and they let their tongues communicate physically against each other, patting and caressing in their own microscopic version of their world.
Some time later, Sherlock leaned his head onto John's shoulder and the doctor decided he wanted to finish his writing task.
"I acknowledge that it might be a maladaptive habit, but can I finish that blog post?" asked the doctor.
Whereupon Sherlock slipped off John - and the couch - like an eel onto the floor, where he rolled half under the coffee-table.
"Your therapist did tell you to do it," said Sherlock from this hiding place. "I guess it's better than World of Warcraft."
"Oh, you," said John with a gentle smile, kicking his partner playfully with stockinged toes.
As he sat down to finish his documentation of The Adventure of the Blue Card Barnacle, however, John was struck deeply as he began to slip into the unconscious world that he accessed for the purpose of writing.
There was so much, he realized with sadness, that Sherlock was right about when it came to emotions - and so often he wanted to deny Sherlock's rightness just because John wanted to call emotionality his area.
The greater fool, he.
Sherlock's feelings were just as important as his own, and however Sherlock expressed them should be respected.
Filled with shame that he promised to examine further later, he ignored it for the present and went deep into his memory work.
Fin
Reviews please?
Also now am on Tumblr - my username is Lady Heliotrope!