soldier
"Afghanistan or Iraq?"
It's one of the first things he says to John, the tall, gangly mop of hair who wants him for a flatmate, and it's the first one that John notices.
John blinks, but only once.
"Sorry?"
"Which was it," Sherlock asks, and this time he looks up over his phone at John, "Afghanistan or Iraq?"
Later, when the shock has worn off and he has had time to reflect, John will wonder at it all: wonder at how this man, this Sherlock had managed to know about his service (had Mike told him? Oh God, it was Mike after all, wasn't it –), will wonder at the chemicals coupled with the lack of gloves and manners – but, most of all, will wonder at himself, at the answer that would have taken so many sessions in Ella's office to produce but which now comes so easily:
"Afghanistan."
There.
It was not something you were supposed to admit – not something, even, that you were supposed to feel. It was wrong (so wrong wrong wrong said the chorus in his head), unnatural and unheard of and simply simply wrong.
He wasn't supposed to miss the war. He was supposed to hate it, abhor it for the blood and lives it had cost, and he did, he did, hated it for the things seen and the friends gone –
And yet, there it was. Unspeakable, unmentionable, but unquestionably, undeniably there. An ache, a loneliness, a want.
The war had been hard, had been bloody and brutal and beyond painful to fight it, but it had also, in a way, been easy. It had given him direction; it had given him purpose. In the heat of battle, there were no thoughts of what and why, no questions of but after – there was no deliberation then, only the knowledge that if you didn't shoot, then the man at your right with whom you had laughed and drank could fall dead (you could fall dead), only that knowledge and a need, burning need to stop it from happening. The war had been easy, in that way, concentrating all of time to a single instant, a single pinpoint in time – if you do not shoot now, then he will be dead and he will be dead and he –
But that had been in Afghanistan. And this was England, civilized England with no mountains or deserts or need for constant guard –
They thought so. He had, too.
Only there was Sherlock, and there was the man who had killed so many before with nothing but poison and gilded words, and there was Sherlock, just standing that, not reacting at all even as John shouted his name, and there was the pill right between Sherlock's fingers.
And John shoots without thinking.
(later, in a hundred dreams and nightmares, he will see it all again – the empty classrooms, the dim lights, the leer on the cabbie's face. The calculation in Sherlock's eyes, the pill between Sherlock's fingers – and that look, that burning desire, the almost unnameable lust for something just almost there – in Sherlock's eyes.)
colleague
They work well together; everyone can see that. Sherlock, for all his bright-edged brilliance, needs someone to bounce off of, someone to hone and direct all his light, someone willing to fill in the forms and buy the milk once a week – needs someone, really, like John. Everyone knows it; everyone sees it.
It's the other part of the equation they all have trouble with.
Sherlock, oh Sherlock they can all see – brilliant, talented Sherlock who occasionally forgets to eat or pay the rent – Sherlock needs John, would be lost without someone to mind all the mundanities and to mind him. John, though – John doesn't need someone like is, is perfectly capable of buying his own groceries and paying his own bills without prompting. John is Capable; John is Reliable. John could do it, alone.
That's what they all think. And they're right. John doesn't need Sherlock, doesn't need someone to order and drag him around and occasionally drug his tea – he doesn't, could do just as well on his own, could do just as well alone. They know that. John knows that.
Only John knows about the other things, too. Knows about empty rooms and the hours so quiet you begin to long for two am violin strains, knows about pills and sessions and quiet and guns kept under lock. Knows about loneliness, and knows about emptiness.
Sherlock needs John. Everyone can see that. And John, well, John needs Sherlock.
And that's enough.
blogger
Sherlock doesn't like the blogs, says they're melodramatic and theatrical, everything stretched and exaggerated to the point where they're hardly cases anymore, are more fairytale than fact –
"And?" John asks.
"Then they're not science anymore, John! They're stories!"
"And?"
Sherlock huffs at that, and then rises and stalks outside.
"Be back at seven," John calls, a little too late—Sherlock is lon already out of the flat by that time, so John has to content himself the knowledge that Sherlock has already had two good meals today.
John understands, though. Understands because this is Sherlock, the man he'd been living with for six months now, ordering him around and dragging him along and yes, occasionally saving his life, knows because he knows this is Sherlock, Sherlock whom he has lived with and known and nearly died multiple times for since half a year ago. He knows, because this is Sherlock; he knows, because he knows Sherlock.
And Sherlock likes facts.
Facts have never been, for John, easy – cushioned by what seems an endless layer of deceit, whys, and what ifs, they have always been something elusive, hidden and dusty and nearly impossible to find – but for Sherlock, they have always been simple, always been easy. Facts didn't speak. Facts didn't roll their eyes at you, couldn't get angry because you forgot to knock before in, couldn't breathe and speak and disdain – were clean, neat, as cool as mathematics or the square root of pi. Fixed, cold. True in the most true sense of the word, and thus the epitome of everything he had fought his life for.
Stories, though – ah, stories weren't like that, weren't something that could be solved with a few clever moves and algebraic gymnastics, weren't simple, weren't fixed, were instead messy and human and flawed and very, very rarely true. And for someone like Sherlock, stories were worse than untrue – they were fabrications, deliberately warped fakes of the truth. In the most true sense of the word, stories were lies.
Ah, John thinks, but that's where Sherlock goes wrong.
Stories, ah yes, in the truest sense of the word, stories were indeed fake, deliberate untruths – fake, events and places all stretched, exaggerated, sometimes even fabricated whole cloth – were, as everyone knew, false and phony and fake .
Except the thing Sherlock didn't understand that they also weren't.
Because while yes, factually all the words were false and untrue, there was another, deeper layer beneath that veneer – one that did not exist in the world of truth and lie, black and white, simple dichotomy and cold reason – one that was messy, was irrational, breathing and ungrateful and angry and alive. One that was human. And the thing Sherlock doesn't understand – the one thing that he can observe, yes, comprehend and take apart with endless ease but never, truly, understand – is that in this world, there are facts that can be in every external way correct but also deeply, deeply wrong. Here, there are facts that bend and lies that stay, truths that are hollow and broken and truths that are truer than true. And sometimes, the only way to understand them was through lies: through myths and religion, legend and fantasy, fables and fairy tales. Through stories. In stories, you were not the person you appeared to be, but the person you truly were. Facts were justice, law, order; stories were mercy.
And so John gives him stories.
Because John understands, oh yes he does, understands all of Sherlock's complaints and arguments, emphasizes and comprehends and understands, understands truly and beyond truly – understands, but disagrees. And so, keeps on writing.
friend
It was never supposed to end like this.
Of course, he doesn't know how it was supposed to end – hunting criminals had never been an easy task, and the number of times John had ended up with a weapon to his head could attest to its safety – but no matter all the paths, all the things that might have been, John knows that this was never supposed to be one of them.
Sherlock is dead. John is alive. And there is something terribly, terribly wrong in that.
There is a funeral, after. It is a small ceremony, nothing at all like the flowered and beribboned affair it would have been when Sherlock had still been in favor with the press, and somehow, through the haze that was his mind, John finds himself very, very suddenly angry about that.
Because this wasn't how it was supposed to go, wasn't how it was supposed to, supposed to, supposed to –
(end, that was the word, he knew, knew it like the taste of blood, salt and copper in his mouth as he ran towards the prone figure on the ground –)
He had buried friends before, during the war, bunkmates soldiers friends, people he had laughed with and ate with and fought with, men and men and boys and children, so so many bodies and names, faces and names (the one with the soft smile, the one with the infectious laugh, the one –)
It had hurt, burying them, every single time. He hadn't wanted to do it again.
(And now here he was).
He visits the grave with Mrs. Hudson a few days afterwards – visits it and finds it empty, deserted. One grave among many. And that angers John, angers him just as much as it did that first awful day at the empty funeral –
– but now the pain is more known, more familiar, and it aches in the way an old wound will hurt, months after injury.
It has only a few weeks since The Fall, but already, the grass is growing over the grave.
(Because Sherlock is dead–dead, even though it wasn't fair and wasn't right, it was fact, fact cold and lifeless and dead dead dead–and John, John, well John –)
(John is alive.)
(But as he stands there, the sun filtering through in dappled shadow and only sound that of the rustling grass, he's not sure, anymore, if he wants to be.)
Credit where credit due: "the almost unnameable lust" comes from Anne Sexton's poem, Wanting to Die. The rest of this horrible thing is my fault ;w;