Odd.
There once was an odd little boy. He was dark-haired and pale and he talked when he should shut up and he'd go belligerently silent right around the time he should talk. He was smart, too, this boy, and we all know how most people feel about people who're smart.
Still and all, Sherlock got older, like all boys do, becoming tall, turning pretty, going for awhile quite quiet. Then when he was fifteen a boy touched him, and breathless and needy he moved near, but the boy moved away and that boy called him…
Queer.
It means so many things, and pretty much all of them applied to Sherlock. He was unusual: that face, all angles and upswept eye; that brain, like a book with too many pages, its covers barely able to contain it.
Queer means curious too, and oh good lord Sherlock was that. It was that curiosity that brought his words back and he used them to ask question after question, and then to give voice to what the answers helped him see. Unfortunately his vision wasn't yet truly keen, and so he walked into rooms and noticed the puzzles but not the people, he tilted his head and detected whispers but rarely tears, and so some people, they called him…
Freak.
Oh yes it's very true that on more than one occasion Sherlock's walked past a grieving husband to sift through a dead wife's things. He's asked pointed questions of weeping children, waxed rhapsodic about a crime even as the people broken by that crime are there, right there to hear.
But to be fair to the man, you try noticing a passion play taking place in the shadows when right in front of you there's a dancing bear. Which is the somewhat inelegant way of saying that for years Sherlock's brain was fine-tuned to receive one sort of data, just one, and it simply couldn't register the rest. Which made him very…
Abnormal.
Human beings fear what they don't understand. If what they don't understand barks and spits and hisses—as the years taught Sherlock to do—then instead of moving close to make sense of the thing, most move away, toward greater ignorance and a damning judgment that pronounces the thing abnormal, broken, less than.
Yet there are always exceptions. There are some who move toward enigmas, peering close, politely prodding. Elizabeth Hudson was one. Gregory Lestrade another. Each in their own way came to understand the riddle that was Sherlock Holmes, and for awhile that was good enough. And then one day something happened and suddenly Sherlock was…
Brilliant.
John Watson was small and kind of quiet and ridiculously easy to read—just like everyone else. So for moments, then minutes, maybe an hour, possibly three, Sherlock treated him as he treated them. He bossed and he bullied, he ran ahead and waited only under duress. Then quicker than Sherlock could blink that small and unassuming man was keeping up, was right there beside him, listening, helping, seeing, praising.
He was following and following and because he did, for weeks, then months…well when John Watson started to lead, in small things, in quiet ways, on instinct Sherlock turned from what he was doing and he followed. And so over time Sherlock became…
Good.
Just a little. Sort of. Enough. Just enough to elicit praise. Just enough to give John hope. But if we're going to be honest—if I, me, Rory, if I'm going to be honest—Sherlock didn't change all that much. He did as he'd always done, he did what was easy.
Well, you know what? That was about to change.
Forever.
…
But first, on the morning of the second day that John was gone, right about the time the good doctor was on his knees on cold cobblestones, Sherlock was seriously, no doubt about it, super-duper big time thinking about going from bad to worse.
Sitting on a bench in Regent's park, ducks and a few geese huddling hopefully nearby, Sherlock watched the water, his eyes moving restlessly from one fallen leaf to the next as they floated downstream. As he tracked each leaf's progress he had a strange sensation of movement, of being carried away.
I wish she was dead.
He'd thought it only once but he had thought it. And now he watched the water flowing and he tried to unthink it but thinking about not thinking is a bad, bad thing and take it from me, it never works, it only helps the worm dig deeper, it helps it to feast.
So Sherlock sat still as cold stone on that lonesome park bench and he didn't see the birds all around him, or the leaves, or the water or the weeping willows or his hands fisted on his thighs, fisted so tight he'd opened up so many little wounds and had bled right through his bandages. Alone on that bench, underdressed and frail, he looked like some lanky boxer, one who's fought against an opponent far stronger than he.
I wish I hadn't done it.
There. That thought. It was a keeper. He'd waltz long and round and round with that one. It was as self-flagellating as the rest, but it wasn't wrong, not really, not in the way it was wrong to wish away a baby.
I wish I could undo it, I wish I could unsay it, I wish, I wish, oh god I wish…
When one little part of his cold body felt suddenly, mercifully warm, Sherlock looked down and noticed two pretty pools of blood spreading across his jeans.
Red… Sherlock couldn't look away. It was such a vibrant colour staining his hands, his clothes. It was beautiful.
Here's something you may not know: Some people cope with pain by seeking more pain. I had a young patient once, every time his team lost a cricket match he'd deal with the frustration by beating himself on the chest until there were bruises.
White… Sherlock flexed his fingers. His ungloved hands seemed so thin, so delicate and pale.
I knew a woman who managed the suffering of a drawn-out divorce by walking in the park and striking herself with a birch branch until she raised welts on the sides of her legs.
Blue…most of his life Sherlock's dealt with depression by turning inward, turning on himself. Broken glass, needles, razors, they're easy to find and once you're in the habit of hurting yourself, well…
Sherlock fisted his hands tight, could feel thin skin pulling preparatory to tearing. He started breathing faster in anticipation of the blood, the pretty, pretty—
A goose honked and Sherlock looked up. He looked out. And right then, right there at that moment and a little bit apropos of nothing, Sherlock began to really and truly and quite possibly for the first time ever…
Change.
And the wonder of it is: Sherlock damn well knew it. Maybe even the little ducks knew it. Because instead of opening those wounds wider, my dear sweet terrible genius opened his hands, those big, big hands, and placed his palms carefully on his thighs.
Because here's one of the countless things John Watson's taught Sherlock over the years: Indulging the desire to hurt yourself isn't bad arse, it's not cool. There's no poetry in self-inflicted pain. It's stupid, it's messy, and if you're left with scars for your troubles well, as an American counterpart of the good doctor's used to say: fuck that noise.
Sherlock looked down. Sherlock looked out. And instead of bold and bad arse, he saw what was really there: gauze red with gore. Bruised, papery skin. And he thought they look like a dead man's hands.
Then, with a tender little clucking sound, Sherlock ran the cold fingers of one hand over the back of the other, petting, soothing the angry flesh, and as the morning of the second day turned into afternoon, Sherlock Holmes decided it was time to write a letter.
…
While epiphanies were happening in the park, Mrs. Hudson had come and gone from 221B, and on the coffee table she'd left behind several things.
Fresh gauze and flannels were there, beside a pot of hot tea in a quilted cozy. A slip of paper lay flat on the table and written on it were two sentences: I will come down to see you today at _. And below that: (Fill in the blank you great daft man and slip it under my door.)
Beside these things was a sandwich cut into sixteen tidy squares. Lizzie doesn't know why John always carefully cuts Sherlock's sandwiches into such tiny portions, but he does and so she did, too.
After Sherlock had cleaned and rebandaged his hands, after he had eaten most of the sandwich and slid the letter beneath Mrs. Hudson's door—two hours from right now or no later than 3:00 pm—Sherlock set about writing his letter.
Like most everything he does, Sherlock's plans for this letter were vast. It would change everything. It would explain, justify, it would apologize and compliment, and most of all the letter would promise.
Sherlock wasn't yet sure what he could or should promise because he wasn't certain what John might want. Some things can't be deduced, he's learnt that the hard way in the last ten years married to a man who will not be one thing. John Watson continues, from one day to the next, to be mercurial. He adapts. He waxes, he wanes.
So Sherlock would have to think hard about what he could offer that would be enough. He was completely unsure how to do that so he decided to approach the writing like a chemistry experiment. Sherlock's a gifted chemist. He knows how to gather ingredients and measure, how to add one thing to another to create something new. Sherlock understands action, reaction, catalyzation.
Pacing the sitting room he nodded to himself. The complication, of course, was that a letter isn't chemistry. It's subjective, unmeasurable, and it's made up of words.
Sherlock's never been great with those. Oh he's had a graceful moment or two over the years, he can say nice things.
He tugged a chair close to one of the sitting room windows and looked at the street below. Fingertips pressed to his lips he used that big old brain of his to recall the times he'd utter words that had the softness of grace…and hadn't been whispered into John's ear.
You look nice.
There. That. He'd said those words to Molly Hooper one Christmas, hadn't he? Back when she still lived in London? Or was that Mrs. Hudson? Maybe Mr. Chatterjee? All of them? Yes, now that he thought about it he'd said it to all of them over the years.
Quite good, but you missed a few clues, and Excellent, closer than last time. He said both of those often to Lestrade, Dimmock, and Superior at the Yard. Did those count as grace?
Sherlock pressed fingers against the window glass, watched condensation form round the tips.
Of course they didn't. They were merely damning with faint praise. Perhaps only conductors of light could bring poetry from a chemist.
But Sherlock needed that poetry needed to add one word to the other and create something new, he needed to write a letter to John that would catalyze him.
That would bring him home.
Sherlock sat up straight in his straight-backed chair and he came to a conclusion. When he wasn't sure how to start an experiment, sometimes he simply began. Line up the beakers and tubes, measure the acids and bases, tug out the notepad and timer and gloves and just…start.
He bounded from his chair and…
…paused to look at the open door.
He did that all day. Because he'd meant it when he said the door would not be locked, or closed. John's keys were on the coffee table, right where he'd last placed them. John had no way back home—in, he had no way back in—if the door was locked, so Sherlock didn't lock it, didn't close it and he didn't go from point A to point B in the flat without first glancing up, hoping something small filled that big emptiness.
Not yet.
So he yanked open his desk drawer, collected paper and pen, then threw himself back into his chair and Sherlock Holmes, who needed grace right now, just a little, enough to speak from his heart and right to the slow beating of another, he began the most important love letter he would ever write, and it started like this:
Don't come back, John. Don't come back. Please don't come back.
Heart thrumming faster than fast in his chest Sherlock stared at his words, surprised, and then Sherlock bolted upright and, Sherlock moved.
Blinking too much, breathing too hard, he paced that sitting room and he imagined.
I think people think Sherlock's no good at that, at using his imagination, but of course he is. Everything he sees with his eyes is jumbled up, twisted, then turned inside-out in his crazy head. He may see the corpse, but he has to visualize the living body to understand how it came to rest in that posture, in that place.
So yes, Sherlock's good at imagining, and as noted has a tendency toward the dramatic, and so as he paced the flat—the lounge, the kitchen, their bedroom, then up the stairs and through that dusty unused bedroom, back down, back up, back down, for twenty minutes and eleven words.
Don't come back, John. Don't come back. Please don't come back.
Sherlock's not a hero and not selfless and he's most emphatically not good, not really. He knows this the way he knows each scar on his body. He looks in the mirror most days, and he sees the lines between his brows, the ones that are deepening because he scowls. At everyone. All the time. For being stupid. Slow. Not him.
So Sherlock didn't know what to do about it when something heroic snuck up on him. Because writing those eleven words—three, they're really only three: don't come back—they were the bravest thing he'd ever done.
Loving? Loving's easy when it comes with running, sex, joy. Fights? They're fine when they're about tainted butter, forgotten laundry, or the times it's not polite to cop a feel. Dying? Dying's positively effortless. It's a one-time-only offer, there and done and the suffering's left for those who survive.
And there it is. That. Living is what's brave, doing the hardest thing you've ever done and then bearing the burden of it for months, years, a lifetime.
Sherlock's mocked bravery, he's belittled it right to a brave man's face. Then, now, probably always, the idiot is him. Bravery is lifting someone to safety as you fall. Brave is…this.
Don't come back, John. Don't come back. Please don't come back.
Sherlock stared at those eleven words because those words—begging John to stay away, telling him to run, to fly, to find joy with someone who could actually give it to him—they weren't how he'd meant to begin, not at all.
John's followed Sherlock for twelve years. Down alleys, into courtrooms, though the dark and the light. He's stood beside him again and again, he's been there, unstoppable, resolute, as certain as Sherlock's shadow—
No, no, no.
As constant as Sherlock's heart.
"Oh for god's sake."
Sherlock tore the letter in half, then in half again and he kept at it until the pieces were too small and then he pushed every last one of them to the floor.
And he started again. Because giving up isn't heroic. Pushing John away was not one small bit of brave. But opening his eyes and at last looking at himself with the same unrelenting gaze he'd turned on others? Now that was finally, after forty-seven very long years, that was at last just a little bit…
Wise.
…
John, you once wrote me a letter, Sherlock wrote.
It was a long time ago and maybe you don't remember, but sometimes I think about that letter, and I wonder what you were thinking when you wrote it. Did you believe I'd read it? Did you believe it would change things? Or did you write it because you didn't know what else to do and at least in the writing you were doing?
I want to reread the letter right now but I won't, because then these words will be yours and not mine. I know mine won't be graceful as yours—I'm not this family's chronicler, its author, its voice. And John, you're all those things. You define us, you shape us, through the years you've traced along all of our edges and in doing that you've shown me at the centre our hearts.
I don't even know what I mean but I know it's true. Can that be? Can you be confused and certain?
What I'm trying to say is that…since the very first moment we met you've shown me not only us, who we are, and who we could be, but you've shown me me. But John, John, John, you are a terrible mirror. You distort, you soften, you show me my flaws, but at the same time you magnify my strengths. For all the years I've known you, you scold more softly than you praise.
And like a weepy child punished for an infraction and then later given a teddy bear, I only remember your apology and not my mistake.
For years, for as long as you've known me, forever, that's what I've done, that's who I've been. But John, John, John, I'd like to do something new, finally, at forty-seven years old. I'd like to do something for you and for me and for us.
John, if I may, if you'll let me, I'd very much like to…
Grow up.
…
It took Sherlock no time at all to type his letter into an email.
It took a bit longer for Sherlock to make the decision to go through John's things in search of a phone number. Then a bit longer than that to find it.
But the call itself took just minutes, and the invitation came swift and at the end.
"Would you like to come visit?"
And the man who was about to grow up very fast said, "Yes, Lucy, I would."
Yes, Sherlock's letter is kind of childish. When Sherlock speaks from the heart, well, in my head canon it's the heart of a child. And yet children must grow up—and no one can do it for them. It's about time for Sherlock, don't you think? (By the way, the letter John wrote to Sherlock starts the sixth chapter of Skullduggery.
