Sherlock is in a Snit (Poor John)
Sherlock sat at the kitchen table and stared blankly at the experiment in front of him. He hated being distracted, but he'd had a rotten morning and it was currently all he could do not to fume.
What the hell had gotten into Molly?
He'd thought that the little outburst a few days ago had been exceptional. A one-off, never to occur again. And he knew Molly well enough to know that she'd be embarrassed by it, and so had decided for both their sakes to just pretend that it had never happened.
But today she'd done it again. Sherlock hadn't even said anything to her this time! He'd arrived at the morgue before she started her shift and so had let himself into her office to get the files on a poisoning victim (son did it), a perfectly reasonable thing to do as it had saved him time and had meant that he didn't have to pester her for the key as soon as she turned up. But no, she'd been furious at him for picking the lock, and had gone on another tirade about over-stepping boundaries.
He'd picked the lock! The boundary had been removed! How could he possibly over-step something that wasn't there any more?
And of course, in that mood, she was far less susceptible to Sherlock's usual manipulation techniques than she was normally, which was highly inconvenient. He had made a mild but positive comment on the blouse she was wearing, which would usually illicit blushing acquiescence, but today she'd told him to shut up.
It didn't seem like she was angry with anyone other than him though, so it couldn't be that a general bad mood had turned her against him. It was more like she had shed some of her nerves. Become more assertive, even. But what could have had such an effect? In most cases in which a person was a victim of a kidnapping they became more ill at ease, especially when returning to the places in which the crimes occurred. But somehow, despite her usual uninspiring predictability, Molly had had the opposite reaction.
How? And why? Had there been some aspect to the crime that Sherlock hadn't been aware of? That thought rankled, but sadly it was possible. He'd been far too distracted by John that night, far too unsettled to hear that he had disappeared after shooting the criminal who'd hidden in the morgue. He'd been worried, and it had made him sloppy. Shameful.
Though perhaps John could make it up to him.
Sherlock turned off the valve on the top of his gas canister and the flame on the Bunsen burner went out with a whoosh. He rose and, leaving the rest of his equipment on the table for later, walked into the living room. John sat at the table with a pile of newspapers at his elbow and a large, blank book in front of him. He'd developed the habit, recently, of cutting out articles that mentioned Sherlock or, indeed, John himself, and keeping them in a scrap book. It was a pointless pass-time, Sherlock felt, but John seemed to find it satisfying. When questioned, he'd said that it felt like an extension of how he used his blog, documenting Sherlock's career. Again, pointless...but Sherlock found it hard to deny John anything that he found such obvious enjoyment in. And perhaps it was just a little flattering, not that he'd ever admit to it.
He stood over John's shoulder until John snapped out of his Pritt-Stick-and-clipping daze and twisted to look up at him.
"Experiment going okay?" John asked casually. "Managed not to singe your hair on the burner again, I see."
Sherlock swept that unnecessary comment away with a one-handed gesture. "It's fine, John. I wanted to ask you about Molly."
John's shoulders tensed, and Sherlock became more certain than ever that John's behaviour the night of the shooting had been due to some silly thing she'd done. "I want to know what's happened to her," he demanded, more force than was probably necessary in his voice. "She's becoming unmanageable, and I think it might have something to do with the time she was with you."
John coughed suddenly, scattering bits of newspaper around the table. Sherlock leaned down to peer at his face, and saw that he'd turned quite red.
"What's the matter?"
"Um...Sherlock, when you say the time she was-"
Sherlock interrupted. "I mean when you were walking around the grounds with her. Did she seem..." he wasn't sure what he wanted to ask, exactly. 'Did she seem like she wanted to expunge frustration at me' was a ridiculous question.
When he fell silent, John turned properly in his seat and looked at him steadily for a moment, before his eyebrows lifted. "Did Molly tell you off again?" he asked.
Sherlock scowled. "She shouted at me for picking the lock on her office door, even though I've done it often before now, and she's never complained."
"Well, I think you deserved that one," John opined, a mean little smile quirking the corners of his mouth. "She's finally realised that she doesn't have to let you get away with all your usual performances. Good for Molly, I say."
Sherlock gritted his teeth. "What has caused her to become like this, John," he said firmly, dragging them back to the important topic. "Did you say something to her after the incident in the old morgue?"
John shrugged and started gathering his scattered bits of paper back together. "Not...no, I don't think so. Nothing relevant to this situation with you."
Sherlock sighed, scratched at his hair a bit, then stepped around to the other side of the table and dropped into the chair.
"Could it be, perhaps, the fact that she came so close to death? I've heard tell of people becoming fearless after such experiences."
John stared at him for a few seconds, his hands stilling among the little stacks of paper. Then he pursed his lips and frowned in a way that Sherlock recognised meant he was trying to work out how to phrase something.
"Well," he began after a few moments of consideration, "I don't think fearless is the right term. It's more like...imagine you'd been frightened of a specific thing all your life, then one day you encounter this thing that you were scared of, and find that actually, it's harmless. Not even frightening in appearance, and it can't actually hurt you or intimidate you the way you expected it to."
Sherlock nodded, recalling with clarity the first time he had held a grasshopper, Mycroft's voice in his ear telling him that there was no way it could get all the way up to his bedroom window, and even if it could, could he see any teeth? No, he couldn't.
John continued; "Well, instead of that specific fear, an experience like this...it sort of takes those formless fears, the ones people experience every day - accidents and injuries and humiliation – whatever they might be, and puts them all into context. The worst happened, and you came out of it alright, and...yes, perhaps it's that she feels more self-assured now, rather than fearless. She's been tested and knows that she can cope."
John's eyes, which had been far away while he spoke, focussed on Sherlock, and Sherlock nearly gave a start. As irrational as it seemed, something appeared to have changed in John in those few moments. Something that Sherlock was certain was more prominent in John-the-soldier had now found it's way into John-the-flatmate and it jarred discomfortingly.
"Is that what happened to you when you were shot?" he found himself asking, and John surprised him by shaking his head.
"No, not really. I was too immured to the danger we were in all the time for that to really come as a shock. I mean, obviously I was frightened, and the pain was incredible, but that wasn't what really tested me. It was after that."
"The depression?" Sherlock asked, and this time John nodded.
"It...I didn't expect it, and it hit me so hard," John said, his voice flat. "I couldn't make sense of it at all, it was like something in me had been switched off. But not all at once, gradually. Which made me feel like I'd done something wrong, like I'd let it happen, or even invited it. And it was just...my life was just this great, blank, grey thing, stretching ahead of me for far too long a way."
Sherlock shifted uncomfortably in his seat and nodded, hoping it would prompt John to go on.
"So, that was my test," John concluded. "And really, I don't know if I can count myself as having passed it or not. Because you came along, being all...mad, and snapped me out of it. But perhaps that was how I passed," he continued, his voice becoming strangely closed, as if he were speaking to himself. "Maybe it didn't just come down to pulling myself up by my bootstraps or...or..."
"What?" Sherlock asked.
John shook himself, as if cold. "I mean, maybe there was a third way, not just pass or fail. Maybe just giving in to all the mad stuff was my way out." He shrugged and turned his attention back to his scrapbook as if trying to put the conversation out of mind.
"You think that Molly feels changed by her experience then?" Sherlock asked.
John shrugged. "It's a possibility," he said. "But one possibility of many. It could be that...something else happened that just cheered her up a bit, and she gathered the nerve to tell you what she thought of you."
"That isn't helpful," Sherlock told him.
"Well, that's life," John replied, and he managed a little mischievous smile up at Sherlock from under his lashes, as he took the lid off his Pritt Stick and settled back in with his clippings.
Sherlock watched him for a while, chewing over what John had told him while he watched those dexterous, square hands carefully sticking all the little odds and ends of stories into place. John's face was composed but not quite calm, and Sherlock wondered if talking so frankly about his traumatising experiences had made him...what? Uneasy? Sad? Upset?
Emotions had always been difficult for Sherlock. As long as they were confined to statistics and profiles he could understand them, but this...
Every now and then he envied John his...perhaps not his feelings, no, more like his empathy. His understanding. And maybe, he had to admit, he would have found certain aspects of his own life easier if he had been able, as John was, to look inside himself. He wondered if the value of that introspective ability offset the pain it could no doubt bring.
::
I really thought that this was going to be a fun, silly story. But then, when I started off writing The Orchard, I thought that that was going to be all angsty, so it just goes to show that my muses are dickish and also, possibly, drunk.
I'm not sure where the idea for John keeping scrapbooks came from, but it just seems like the sort of thing he'd do. Maybe not long term, but while he and Sherlock are at this point in their career, it sort of makes sense. I think Sherlock will squirrel those scrapbooks away somewhere and, when they're old and grey, he'll whip them out every once in a while and tease John about what a saddo he was, sitting at the table for hours on end, putting them together. Then he'll apologise and they'll snuggle and look at photo albums of their grand-kids or whatever. Aw.
Also, a snit is an English phrase meaning a bout of bad temper, or even a tantrum. I like this word and use it a lot.
BTW, Pritt is copyright to...whoever owns the copyright. It's the name of a brand of glue that's common in the UK and, I think, most of Europe. A Pritt Stick is a glue stick that winds up from the bottom of the tube and that sometimes Greek exchange students who you share a house with in uni find on your desk and mistake for lip balm and there's a big fuss and you have to drive them to the doctor's surgery. But only sometimes.