CHAPTER 4 - Compromises


On his third visit to the Manor stables, Sherlock's muscles are beginning to cope better with the balance issue, but he's still unsteady. Now he finds Jane's walking pace and that wretched lead rein to be a continuous reminder of the slowness of his recovery.

He's been prescribed painkillers, three types, all of which seem utterly useless. The mild anti-inflammatory one does at a pinch when he needs something to stop his fresh bruises from aching after a physiotherapy session. The tramadol, a mild opiate, is akin to pouring a thimble of water on a bonfire. The neurologists had insisted he wouldn't be completely cross-tolerant to it based on his heroin use, but it's still such a mild drug that he may as well go without. Then there's the third one, the pregabalin, which supposedly somehow prevents chronic pain, but he isn't fond of that, either. He had been on it after his discharge in 2007, and although there's no way of knowing which of the several drugs he'd been forced to take then had caused the most side effects, it doesn't change the fact that it's an unknown factor that can potentially cause of exacerbate many of the things that now seem to be off kilter. It had been prescribed back then with the purpose of curbing his anxiety. He had meant to argue against it at the National, but John had been present during those conversations, and he hadn't wanted to raise the subject of 2007. Even asking for John to step out would have lead to questions he wouldn't have wanted to answer. Since he has a past history of drug use, the staff insist on watching him take all his tablets. Yet another condescending thing he has to put up with. Once he returns home he hopes to be less under scrutiny, but there's a nagging doubt that John might be as keen as keeping tabs on his recovery as the Harwich staff are.

On the bad days, all he wants to do is sleep. The doctors call it fatigue and tell him it's a common feature of the so-called post-intensive-care-syndrome, and also a common feature of the recovery period from severe Guillain-Barré. To Sherlock the word 'fatigue' sounds like nothing but another arbitrary blanket term for a set of problems he is claimed to have, a box to fit into, so proper treatment can be initiated.

It's a box that is likely modelled after normal, ordinary people. He has never fitted into the boxes the medical establishment has presented to describe his challenges, and he doubts that'll change anytime soon.

He sleeps surprisingly well at nights. The fatigue ensures this. There's a mural on the ceiling that he likes looking at if and when he wakes up in the middle of the night: geometrical shapes and floral patterns. It's a major improvement to the bleak yellowish white of the hospital, and a nice instant reminder of where he is in that moment of disorientation that always happens right after his mind returns online.

His brain is rotting here, and he knows it. He tries to adapt, tries not to become apathetic from the sameness of the days, but even at home tedium had been a corrosive rust that set into the cogs and grated at his intellectual abilities. Here he doesn't even have the distractions of John, his books, his chemistry equipment or his viol- no, mustn't go there. He's never been a poster boy for routine, and now he's practically choking on it. Wake up, breakfast, physiotherapy, collapse into bed, lunch, more physiotherapy, collapse into bed, riding or group therapy, collapse into bed, ignore evening text from John and a pointless call from Mycroft, fall asleep. He doesn't answer those calls or texts, because he doesn't know what to say to either, and somehow their polite enquiries after his health irritate him no end. It's a relief that no one else has tried to visit, Harwich is far enough from London to make it cumbersome. Lestrade and Molly have messaged him, and Mrs Hudson always sends food with John. Their communiques feel much less laden with expectations than John's, although Lestrade's do act as a grating reminder of the Work, which isn't what Sherlock should really be thinking about, not yet. Not for some time.

He withdraws his feet from the stirrups, even though there are still a few steps left before they reach the edge of the courtyard. Thankfully Hestia's gait is exemplary in its steadiness, and he doesn't need to grab onto the front of the saddle to keep himself from falling during the last few feet of the ride.

As Jane ties up the lead rein, John comes around the corner of the stable block.

His presence startles Sherlock, since he had said nothing about coming to visit. Mycroft doesn't usually give prior notice, either. Why? Do they assume Sherlock doesn't care, since it hardly matters in terms of his daily schedule what the date is, or whether it's the weekend or not?

It is actually easier this way - when he knows John is coming, he tends to worry how he is expected to be, and frets about whether he will be able to live up to expectations John is bound to have about his returning abilities. It seems to make John so happy to hear about all he's been doing, all the imaginary milestones he's supposedly reaching, that he tries to plaster on a smile and list his daily schedule. During a visit, they will get something to eat. Watch television in his room. Take walks - as long as Sherlock's energy level allows. Sometimes it's just once around the Manor's garden maze, when it's a bad day.

Before John reaches the side of the horse, he glances up at Sherlock with a smile. "God, you look gorgeous on that thing," he comments, probably not having realised Jane is on the other side of the horse and thus very much within earshot.

Sherlock sees her mouth quirk up to a grin.

"It's not a thing, it's a her," Sherlock corrects John.

"Sorry," John says with a sheepish grin and pats Hestia on her flank.

Jane disappears into the stables, presumably to fetch a brush. Sherlock expects John to get him the high stepladder with wheels that allows easy mounting and dismounting. It's embarrassing having to use one. At Eton, Sherlock remembers being able to get his right foot into the stirrup from the ground to step on for mounting, or simply leaping up, leaning over the saddle and swinging his leg over a horse, no matter what the animal's height was.

Instead of making a move to get the stepladder, John extends his arms upwards in invitation. "Come on," he says, smiling playfully, "I'll catch you."

Sherlock looks down towards the ground at John's feet. Hestia is a horse of significant height. John is four inches shorter than Sherlock, but currently much stronger. In all honesty, John has always been much stronger than he looks. He has easily hoisted Sherlock up over fences and given him a boost up to reach windows. John has never failed in his attempts to render this sort of assistance.

John is perfect. John is the way he's always been.

It's Sherlock who's broken.

"Get the ladder," he says firmly.

In the golf cart, which Sherlock needs to get back from the stables to the Manor house since the walk is too long for him, neither of them talk, as if both of them are unsure how to begin even a casual conversation. Sherlock tries to snap open the chin strap on his helmet, but of course his fingers fail him again. Without a word, John does this for him, briefly ruffling his curls which have been flattened by the helmet.

It's obvious that John likes doing such things. Long before the GBS, Sherlock had fallen asleep on the couch, and woken up to something bothering his hair. His sleep-addled brain had first suspected a fly, but then he had registered movement on the side of his head - a hastily retreating hand, having stolen a feel. It's not the only thing that belonged in the land of things not spoken but which had happened anyway, from the earliest months of their acquaintance. Sherlock had thought nothing of it, blaming his own inexperience and difficulty in interpreting social cues. Men of John's age did touch each other when social convention offered a fervently heterosexual context to do - clapping a hand on someone's shoulder, as was Lestrade's habit, arms on shoulders when playing sports, hugs at family functions. Sherlock had hated all that with a vengeance, since many of those intrusions into his space happened without warning.

John had always been the exception to the rule. The reason for this Sherlock had fully realized only recently. Obvious, in hindsight, but so very strange and unsettling, as long as it remained unrequited.

Once back at the main building of the Manor, Sherlock focuses his energy on climbing up the three steps from the foyer towards the west wing, and then the long walk down the corridor to the library. When John offers an arm to steady him, Sherlock shakes his head. "I'm not supposed to - I need to re-learn without relying on someone else; holding on changes my balance."

There is a little sigh of frustration from John, who steps a little further away as Sherlock starts out.

The childish mantra the PT therapist keeps repeating appears in his head like an earworm: B.O.T.H.E.R.

Breathe. "If you don't get enough oxygen into your system, your muscles will swap to producing lactic acid instead of burning glucose. You need to breathe properly." Gerald Glusko, the psychical therapist who he still refuses to call Gerry, is quite certain that this lies at the heart of Sherlock's problem. "You had to let a ventilator do the heavy lifting for you for so long that you've switched your breathing to manual; it's no longer on automatic," Glusko had theorized, which is so physiologically preposterous that Sherlock doesn't even bother correcting the man. Breathing is among the most primitive, most automatic functions human bodies have - even deeply unconscious people will attempt doing it for themselves, unless the breathing center in the medulla oblongata in their brain has been overridden with medications, toxins or brain injury. The problem is that the machinery of his breathing - the muscles - that have suffered due to a lack of function in the nerves governing them.

During a normal day at Harwich there are times when he gets positively light-headed, with spots dancing in front of his eyes. On more than one occasion, his vision has completely tunnelled, signaling an imminent fainting, and Sherlock had been forced to sit down quickly. Head between his knees, he would drag in oxygen and the room would steady. His blood pressure has always been on the low side of normal, and what the doctors are calling autonomic dysfunction caused by the GBS is the likely culprit. The regulation of his bodily functions still refuses to return to normal - what used to work in terms of his Transport doesn't seem to anymore. Everything about his body is unreliable, and no doctor seems to have anything useful to tell him about it these days. They had probably lost their interest once he no longer manifested any interesting symptoms. At the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery's Intensive Treatment Unit, he had been quite popular among medical students. He was lucky to escape without permanent harm to his patellar tendon from their overenthusiastic testing of his reflexes practically every day at teaching rounds. Idiots.

Open, is the explanation for the second letter in Glusko's little rhyme. Sherlock can feel John putting even more distance between them, as he broadens his shoulders, straightens his back and lets his arms swing in unison to the strides he is taking down the corridor to the library, which is where he prefers to go when he has visitors. Taking John to his bedroom feels uncomfortable—it makes him feel like a patient, and the bed in the room takes on a suggestive meaning that he is not quite ready to entertain. He finds his physical appearance distressing these days; he keeps wondering what John will make of the thinness. He's lost so much muscle while lying inert on the hospital bed. What flesh he has feels soft and squishy. The thought of undressing in John's presence, of feeling those warm strong hands on this damaged body downright repulses him. He's not going to indulge in anything that takes their relationship to a more intimate level while he feels like this: too self-conscious, too aware of the chasm between before and now, too preoccupied with the minutiae of how to even breathe and move.

Toes come next in Glusko's inane rhyme. The therapist had been happier with his heel strike yesterday, and also commented on the improved roll of his foot. "Now you have to dig in with your toes. Don't let the shoes stop you." It is a sore point. Sherlock wants to wear his usual leather oxfords, but the staff here won't let him. 'You don't have the dexterity in your fingers yet to tie the laces properly,' he had been told. Because of this he is forced into wearing slip-on trainers, and they are hateful.

The clothes he has to wear are equally strange. He's no longer confined to a hospital gown or his own pyjamas, but in the first days after his arrival, his new-found sensitive skin couldn't deal with the rasp of even his finely woven cotton dress shirts, and with the weight he's lost, a leather belt to hold up proper trousers ends up making him feel like he's wearing a corset. None of his old clothes fit any more. Mycroft has brought in a selection of casual clothes: trousers with tie waists, soft jersey long sleeved tee shirts, a cotton fleece zip cardigan in boring, muted brown that he'd expect to see John wearing. No doubt, the doctor in charge of his case here had informed his brother that he wasn't able to do buttons up yet. All in all, this damaged body can't manage to wear clothes that Sherlock associates with who he is. Not good enough for those clothes, might never be again.

His annoyance at that thought makes his stride falter, and he loses his rhythm. Is this punishment for never appreciating how many muscle groups were required to work in unison in order to produce a normal, balanced, bipedal gait? He can sense John raising a protective hand to steady him, but he shakes his head. He has to concentrate. Hips, Glusko says in his head, like it's a magic word in a children's book. He has to rotate them, roll without an exaggerated swagger that could lead to him over-balancing. The whole thing feels so bloody awful: contrived, artificial. He feels hideously conspicuous doing this beside John's natural military gait, and the man doesn't have to spare a single thought about the process involved when producing it.

Exercise and repeat are the last two elements of BOTHER. Non sequiturs, self-evident buzzwords. This is his daily life, now, listening to such nonsense. It will end, of course, but that notion hardly consoled him at the hospital, either, when everyone kept repeating it about the GBS.

Just when is any of this going to be feel normal? He is left feeling so useless, having to pour all his energy into himself instead of doing something worthwhile with his time. Weeks and weeks of him serving The Transport, when it should be the other way around, like it used to be. When will he be able to stop wasting his limited brain power on thinking about something as mundane as walking?

By the time they get to the library, all Sherlock can do is collapse into a wing-back chair by the bay window. There is another one facing it, with a small table between the two. He leans back and tries to catch his breath. He's sweating and that annoys him. In fact, just about everything feels annoying right now. If he only had the breath for it, he wishes he could just scream his frustration. He keeps his eyes closed.

John busies himself with making them a cup of tea. There is a hot water urn in the library and a full range of tea bags on offer- even chamomile and ginger. Sherlock hears the clink of the cups, the sound of the tea bag wrapper being torn, the gurgle of water being released from the spout. His acute hearing can tell the difference between cold water, and the effect that steam makes on the sound. His hearing had never been so desperately important to him as in hospital, when touch was so profoundly affected, sight limited by his inability to move his head, and taste eliminated by GBS affecting his cranial nerves and the nasogastric tube bypassing his tongue and making his nostrils stuffy. Only hearing had been unaffected.

"All mod cons here," John snarks, peering at the label of the cardboard box he'd dug two teabags out from. "Better choice than most five star hotels. You'll have to get used to my bog-standard Yorkshire Gold when you get back."

"Hmm." It's about all Sherlock has the strength to offer.

As John settles in the chair opposite, Sherlock imagines the visuals to accompany the sounds: the tiny splash as the tea bag is caught on the teaspoon, then the quick twirl to use the string to pin it against the spoon and squeeze. Then three quick circles of the teaspoon in the mug, to help dissolve the two teaspoons of sugar, the tap against the top of the cup to dislodge the last vestiges of the liquid, and then the clatter as it was laid to rest on the saucer. John always makes his tea first, and only then does he tend to his own. The same routine is repeated for John's cup, only minus the stirring. John never has sugar in his tea. Not in his coffee, either.

Most things taste wrong, now. There's a metallic undertone that makes enjoying food difficult - the effect had been even stronger when he was still at the hospital, and it lingers even now. His neurologist had said that it's not an uncommon GBS symptom in severe cases. 'This should resolve', the neurologist had told him. Another vague promise with an in-built bail-out: should. Whose fault will it be, if and when it never does?

"Tea's ready when you are," John reminds him.

Sherlock almost groans at the choice of phrase. Will he ever be ready again, in the grander scheme of things? Or is this as far as he will ever get? He still feels totally winded and almost too tired to open his eyes.

"You're walking much better," John says casually. "You've put in a lot of work into it, haven't you?"

Mere weeks ago, the best Sherlock had been able to do was walk a few steps between two parallel bars, assisted by a PT therapist, as part of his discharge process. A final exam of sorts, to make sure he was ready to leave the hospital ward for the rehab unit. He'd arrived at the hospital almost unable to walk, and he'd left in a wheelchair.

To John it might seem like progress has been made. To Sherlock, it doesn't, not at all. It feels like a painful reminder of the fact that he is decrepit. Incapably damaged. The problem is not just the muscle strength - it's everything. His fluidity, his restless energy, his posture - all gone, all needing to be relearned. The patterns are there in his brain, of course, but the damage to the myelin sheaths of the nerves that control his muscles means that he needs to reconnect those patterns in order to execute them. He had naively assumed that once the nerves began to function again, the connection would still be there. Muscles don't have memory, and his brain is arguably intact, so how has so much been lost? Why is it taking so long to recover?

"Drink up before it goes cold."

Sherlock opens his eyes but lowers them immediately to evade John's gaze, fixing his line of sight, instead, on the teacup. Can he manage to pick it up without a tell-tale tremor; will he be able to control his fingers, so that most of it will not end up on him, instead of in him?

In the mornings, when someone delivers his breakfast tray to his room, the tea is placed onto a table that slides over the bed. Once they've left the room, he can bend over it and slurp the level down low enough that it doesn't end up spilling when his shaky hand brings it to his mouth. He can't do that here. Not in front of John.

"I'm not thirsty." He decides that he'd rather risk dehydration than make a mess in front of an audience.

He knows he has become risk-averse. That makes him wonder, as he watches John looking at him with concern, whether this self-consciousness is the result of not just his current physical state, but also due to the fact that their relationship has changed. Before their conversation in the winter garden, he had never spent a great deal of time worrying about what John thought of him. There was a steady supply of 'amazings' and 'brilliants' and other such reactions that stroked his ego; they counter-balanced the 'bit-not-goods' and hissed comments about 'timing'. John used to be his weather-vane, his social compass helping him sort out what was or what wasn't appropriate. He finds he now wants to practically hide behind the effortless social competence John has always had, because he seems to have lost the pitifully small reserves he'd painstakingly gathered. Does he now care far more about what John feels about him than he used to, because he's become so disgustingly reliant on other people?

He certainly hadn't told John of his feelings at the hospital's winter garden because of a need for a caretaker. He'd shared them because he had realized how close he'd come to being robbed of the chance to ever act upon them. Had he never recovered enough to come off the ventilator, he would have been abandoned in some care home while John moved on with his life, perhaps sometimes visiting on Sundays. He had wanted John to know, so that John could make an informed decision about what John himself wanted out of all this.

Or maybe he just likes to think his motives had been that charitable. In all honesty, the reason why he had told John everything was that it was the simple truth he'd held onto over a year now: he wanted this man, in every sense of the word, and seeing John head off to a date without being able to control the scenario, to prevent disaster, had made him panic. He had been able to derail the attempts of all the previous suitors, usually just by being present, but it's hard to ruin dates when lying on a hospital bed with an intubation tube stuck down one's throat.

Emotional investment - the thought is unnerving. Worse than Moriarty. Worse than his emergent phobia of falling, which is likely caused by his balance issues. It gives him nightmares. It's not solely about making a fool out of himself in front of others - at the moment he's clearly at risk of seriously injuring himself. Scarcely a night has passed at the Manor without his dreams dealing with something connected to falling. Stairs, rooftops, bridges. Some of it seems very irrational - he's hardly going to go anywhere near those places or try some balancing act on the edges of them anytime soon, now is he? It's as though his body is preparing for every possible scenario that could go wrong, and his brain is being dragged along for the ride.

Working out his anxieties in his sleep is understandable in a way that his fear of embarrassing himself in front of John is not. He cares what John thinks of him, now, in a novel way, which means that when John had asked him during the last visit if he was having any problems with sleeping, he had lied and said no. There's a fierce desire to stop being so pathetic. There is no way he can tell John that last night's version of the night-time entertainment his brain keeps cooking up had centred on a memory of falling out of a tree when he was nine. He couldn't wake up, and the sensations were so vivid that he could feel the panic, the inability to brace his body for an impact that never came. Maybe, somehow, all this falling has something to do with being trapped, being unable to stop what's coming. He had been in an unresponsive body on that hospital bed, waiting for death, or news of a forever in that state. In a way, it had been like falling down a bottomless proverbial chasm.

It could happen again. He's going to be wary of every stumble, every bit of numbness, every flu, every harmless gastroenteritis for the rest of his life. Anything could detonate his immune system for a second time, and it could happen years from now. It might not even require a new infection as a trigger. Anything that feels off with his body could be the first sign of a relapse. Relapses are rare, but they do happen. If he can be unlucky enough to get GBS in the first place, surely he could be unlucky enough to succumb again. The thought terrifies him. He doesn't think he could put John through that again, not to mention himself. He knows that his sanity would not survive.

His slow recovery could also mean that this wasn't Guillain-Barré to start with, after all. It could also be CIDP, a chronic form of demyelinating polyneuropathy, and they just don't know it yet. Sherlock has used some of the idle time at the Manor to do his research.

"I'm an idiot." John's comment interrupts Sherlock's train of thought, and he watches as John gets up, collects the tea cup he'd made for Sherlock, and goes over to the urn again. He pours out about a third of the tea into the collection tray under the spout. Then he returns and stands in front of Sherlock's chair. He holds the cup out, close to Sherlock's chest, handle now carefully turned to face outwards.

"No, you're not." Sherlock forces a smile that doesn't quite reach his eyes, takes hold of the cup and drinks deeply.