AN: Improved, and minutely augmented new version. Big thanks to Impractical Beekeeping for helping me revise :)
Original AN: A huge "Thank you SO much" to everyone who read or put the story on their alert list, and especially to my four first reviewers EVER :-)
One Nutty Tree: You were the first :)
Chalcedony Rivers: Thanks for you praise, I hope I'll be able to keep my language as good as you said it was in the first chapter.
Miyavilurver: Here's more for you, and thanks again for leaving such a motivating review!
SimplyOut: Thanks for leaving a review, it's nice to not only have anonymous readers ;)
And now, I hope you'll enjoy the next installment.
2 - Staying sound
It had come to him after his last visit here that she – like some of the others – was not so much afraid of him but rather for him. She was unsure that he might not take the only way out of this mess – offing himself. John found he was rather shocked someone could seriously entertain the notion. Did they understand nothing at all, had they even been there when he and Sherlock had met and changed each other? They saw but didn't observe. John pushed the unwanted thought back furiously, actually glad that his therapist finally broke the silence.
"I wonder if you believe merely sitting in my armchair is therapy."
"And I am be-beginning to wonder why you all expect me to kill myself," John threw back, as snarky as he could manage.
Honestly, if there was one thing that had shown Sherlock took any interest in John at all, it had been his 'proving a point' and restoring to John the use of his leg. How could someone so seemingly detached and (self-professedly or was it assumingly?) sociopathic put his finger on the sore spot in his heart like that, with such surety, after knowing John for a few days? And take his ruined 'me' and glue the pieces together like that? How could he know and – even more to the point, why – care enough to re-invent John Watson? So, just no.
"We all?" She asked quietly right, into his thoughts, her eyebrows raised.
John's heart clenched weirdly. The others might be safer to speak about than Sherlock himself, his therapist seemed to think.
"You really don't get it, do you. None of you", he remarked, quite sounding like his old self for once. But completely avoiding answering her question, of course.
"What is there to get, then? If us all being concerned about you is so absurd, what is it we are not seeing, John?"
Sherlock had done more than anyone else ever had to make John whole, to save his body and bored-to-stupidity mind. So there was just no way he could possibly act out the one thing he knew for sure was the last thing his friend would have wanted. Which he knew so deep down it was unquestionable truth. John shivered under the awareness, heavy and so sad, that although he knew this so well, he was failing Sherlock – again – there. He managed to keep those days he could not make himself get up down to a minimum but there was no way around the fact that his hand was unsteady: positively shaking, almost incessantly now; no ignoring the slight stutter he had developed, stumbling over words like painful hurdles between himself and the connection to anyone, anything.
His therapist assumed shock was the cause. He knew it was his sodding brain once again doing that replaying thing that it seemed so prone to: Whenever he was about to use just any turn of phrase he had ever heard from Sherlock's lips, he heard the words echo through his head in Sherlock's inflection, in his best friend's voice, which had John inevitably lose the thread of whatever he was attempting to express, and stutter like an imbecile. How Sherlock would have laughed at him!
"John? Do you even listen to what I'm saying?"
He looked up at her feeling something bordering on guilt; no, he had not heard a word. Why didn't he stay at home to do his thinking? Would be less costly for everyone involved.
"No, s-sorry. I won't harm myself, if that's what you want to hear."
"Oh, really." She shot him a look of utter disbelief, maybe even mixed with unspoken black humour.
And John knew she was right this once: after all he was still able to use a mirror. And what he saw there was clear evidence of him harming himself – if only through neglect. So, he was failing Sherlock in the one last thing he might have had in his power to do to honour their friendship – letting go of what was the last lingering proof of Sherlock's presence in his life, as well. Weird, how he was able to see Sherlock's attention and interest in his well-being only now although it had been there right from the start. (But seeing Sherlock's other side was so much easier, wasn't it?) A knowledge that made what Sherlock had done in front of his eyes just that more incomprehensible. You simply can't kill yourself before your best and only friend's eyes and still expect him to... It made no sense.
But at this point he always saw, replaying in unending loops, their 'goodbye' in that lab at Bart's, which ranked in John's mind high among the most horrible scenes of his life, and that invariably left him with an ugly sense of self-loathing.
He guessed he himself might not have been all that sure of a friend's appreciation (what a good word he had come up with here) and loyalty after being called an automaton, right? He felt tears behind his burning eyes and prayed for them to fall, knowing they would not.
Looking at his days – and nights – trying so much to keep what Sherlock had restored to functioning (John H. Watson) sound, he knew that he had long since become that automaton he had accused Sherlock of being. What would he say about him now? Join me in hell, maybe? John pondered the idea of Sherlock expecting him to die and leave this 'life' behind, and still knew it was ridiculous.
As ridiculous as Sherlock jumping from Bart's. He would have sworn every oath that his best friend would never do that – but he had, killing John just as surely in the process; but Sherlock, being Sherlock, might really not have foreseen this...
"I'm not going to kill myself," he stated finally, carefully circumventing now what he had claimed before.
"See you next week, then, John."