CHAPTER 14 - Defeat
he shower is running. A wave of relief washes over John - if Sherlock is tending to evening routines, then he may have already got over the worst. He does take setbacks during cases as challenges, as a reason to push himself further. Since Sherlock loves his music, surely he'll have the patience and the grit to retrain his skills? Helen's right, they probably needed to go through this in order to clear the air.
It'll be fine, John tells himself. They have help, now, really skilled help, and it's going to be fine. He can leave at least this one Sherlock-related issue to someone else to sort out. God knows he has enough of them on his plate even without the violin.
Relieved, John puts the teacups in the sink and is about to turn on the television, when his ears pick up something odd. He clicks the mute button on the remote, and he strains his hearing to focus. As far as he can make out, there's just the sound of the shower running now, but a moment earlier, there had seemed to be something else mixed into it, something almost inaudible.
John shakes his head. The sound must have come from a neighbouring building It's just not possible that he could have heard what he had thought he'd heard. His nerves are clearly shot after such an unsettling evening, and his weary brain is imagining things.
The evening news flickers on as he un-mutes the television. A report is ending, and the weather will probably come next. He's about to drop his weight onto his usual chair, when suddenly, his heart leaps into his throat, primal instincts kicking in before his brain catches up with what he's heard.
There it is, again - a sound he's certain he's never heard before in this flat, but it's still instantly recognizable.
A choked-up sob, then another.
John tears himself up from his chair and hurries to the hallway, trying to avoid making any noise of his own in the process.
He leans on the wall next to the door, aware that standing behind it could potentially alert Sherlock to his presence.
The sound is absolutely unmistakable now: racking sobs that sound like there's hyperventilation going on in between, muffled by what is likely something held in front of the mouth to try and keep anyone from hearing it. Now that John is standing right outside the door, the shower is doing a lousy job hiding what's going on.
John has seen tears running down Sherlock's face before - he can easily turn on a very good impression of crying when he wants to, when it benefits a case through deceiving an eyewitness, or a victim's relative. What he has never witnessed is this. Even when at his most emotional, Sherlock Holmes does not actually cry. Mycroft had joked about it once, 'he stopped crying at the age of five, because he realized it would not get him what he wanted'. The entire idea feels preposterous to John, even now as the evidence is sounding in his ears.
Then, an errant memory floats in, and for a moment John wonders how he could have possibly forgot about it: Sherlock at the hospital, unable to speak, tears glistening at the edges of his eyes when John had returned unexpectedly to his room late in the evening after Sherlock had assumed him to have left for the night. John had chalked most of it up to pain, the drugs, being on a respirator, the sum of the hell of physical discomfort he'd been in. Being able to blame all those things were why it hadn't rattled the foundations of John's world like this.
He still doesn't even want to believe his own ears.
'When you've eliminated the impossible, whatever remains must be the truth, John.'
John really doesn't want to hear the terrifying sounds coming from the other side of the door, but he can't ignore them, either. He hasn't felt this level of helplessness since the ITU.
It tears at his heart to hear such pain, and to have so few ideas as to what he could possibly do right now to make it stop.
He understands physical pain, he understands many other kinds of discomfort, especially the sort that happens at the hospital, and he has the tools to help with those, but this is so very different. He'd been rubbish at handling his own sense of loss and pointlessness after his discharge from Afghanistan. How could he even begin to grasp what Sherlock, someone so terribly different from him in so many ways, is going through right now?
All he knows is that, at the moment, Sherlock is very much alone, when he really shouldn't be. Helen, too, had said as much.
The hot water must have run out a while ago, but the shower is still on. John hears Sherlock blow his nose, then the sobs seem to quieten down.
"Sherlock?" John asks, stepping in front of the door to announce his presence.
There's no reply. The shower continues running, but as much as John strains his hearing, no other sounds can now be heard from inside. He imagines Sherlock has frozen on the spot, mortified that John may have heard what he'd tried his best to conceal. He probably hadn't even needed or wanted a shower at all.
"Sherlock, I'd like a word." John tries not to sound too alarmed. He needs to try to not make this into the huge deal it so fucking well is.
No reply, except for the shower being turned off.
"Sherlock? I need to know you're all right." Perhaps not the choicest of words - even an idiot could tell he's not all right at all, but John knows he needs to preserve both their dignities right now.
No answer.
"Unless I hear from you soon, I'm going to assume you need help in there, and get the spare key for the door," John tells him, careful not to slip into making it sound like blackmail.
"Don't," Sherlock says. His voice, what little John can hear of it, is strained and a little hoarse. It doesn't sound much like Sherlock at all.
John waits for five minutes, ten minutes. He can hear Sherlock opening the cupboard above the sink, taking things out, moving around the bathroom. John expects to hear the sound of the hairdryer, or the tap, but nothing of the sort happens. It doesn't sound as though Sherlock is doing anything particular. John is quite certain he's trying to play for time, hoping John will grow tired of waiting, and stop manning the door.
So close, yet so far. John still doesn't know what to do, except to get angry.
The fury flashes into flame like wildfire. He isn't angry at Sherlock - he certainly hasn't done anything wrong. Instead, John now feels his suspicions and doubts about the way this violin issue is being handled hadn't been so unfounded, after all. He desperately needs someone to take responsibility, and to be reassured that irreparable damage hasn't been done.
As much as he doesn't want to leave Sherlock alone right now, the bathroom door is still closed, and John decides he needs answers. He runs to the kitchen, grabs his phone and runs with it downstairs so Sherlock won't hear the conversation even if he does decide to emerge from the bathroom.
John goes through the phone's call log, finds what he's certain to be Helen's number, and makes the call.
"Ellicott," she answers after a few rings, with the sound of traffic in the background.
"Hello, it's, um, John Watson." There's an edge to his voice he doesn't even try to conceal.
"Hello, John. I hope I didn't leave anything behind at your flat?"
"Oh no, it's not - not that," he says between clenched teeth. He wants to strangle someone and it remains to be seen whether it'll be Helen Ellicott.
"Let me pull over. I dislike the hands-free."
John drums his knee with his fingers while he waits. He tries to listen to sounds from upstairs, but all he can hear is the television from Mrs Hudson's flat.
"What is it, John?"
"Why did I have to be present?" John asks, trying hard not to sound as confrontational as he feels. Sherlock has already spent a lifetime enduring ridicule from others, and inadvertently embarrassing himself in the presence of both strangers and those few he counts as friends. What had happened tonight with the violin was bad in itself, but the fact that John had been present to hear it, had likely made everything infinitely worse.
"You're his witness. Your presence ensures that he can't blame it all on me, or gloss over what happened. The second reason is that he's going to be upset, and unless you were actually there, he perhaps wouldn't think you'd understand why."
John is taken aback. "That was all deliberate? I mean, does this happen a lot, the first session ending in complete disaster?" he asks in a biting tone.
"It often needs to. My clients rarely try out their instruments or really test their abilities until the first lesson. They're too afraid. I used to be gentle, I really was, but I found that it slowed down the progress."
John doesn't reply, the embers of his anger still glowing.
"If you weren't present tonight, he'd spend precious time and energy trying to hide from you how things are, when he should be spending that energy in recovery," Helen says calmly.
John thinks she sounds a lot like Mycroft. "What if it was too early, what if he's he's too out of sorts, still, for something like this?"
"Do you think it's helping him to stay in denial and fear? The longer he waits, until finding out what his current state is, the more daunting the whole prospect will become in his head. Those of my clients who have contacted me early after whatever happened to them, tend to do well. Those that delay longer are a different matter. His brother seemed to think this was urgent."
Of course Mycroft thinks it's urgent. Mycroft always knows best, doesn't he? John makes a mental note to punch him hard on the nose sometime. "It's just that it was, well, so embarrassing for him," John laments, still wanting to call Helen out on what had felt like quite brutal treatment.
"It's going to be embarrassing and upsetting, no matter when or how it happens - isn't it less cruel to get that phase over with cleanly and quickly? Before I started conducting the first session like this, I had several clients who never showed up for a second one. They continued pretending things weren't so bad, hiding said fact from everyone else, and as far as I know they never played again."
This does make a modicum of sense to John, but still. He can't seem to shake the second-hand mortification just yet. "Still, that was- he's- I think this is a huge deal for him, bigger than most of the other stuff he's been going through."
"I'm sure it is, John, but he needs to stop competing with his old self. If he wants to play, he'll need to try and stop focusing on what it was like before."
John doubts that's something Sherlock would be able to delete.
"He needs to learn how to enjoy it again - enjoy how playing feels, and he's never going to do that if he tries going back to the pieces he was doing before he fell ill, and stubbornly trying to pummel them into submission."
John realizes this is exactly what he'd expect Sherlock to do on his own. The frustration would undoubtedly bring the entire Baker Street to the ground.
"I do realize the fragility of the situation, John, but we don't have a lot of options: this is something that's important to him, and that's why it needs to be addressed. He's in for a rude awakening sooner or later. And, until he's gone through it, there's no way we could start actually doing the work."
John swallows. "What happens to those who don't get the help they need or who don't continue after the first session? You never said what happened to your ex-husband."
Helen is quiet for a moment. "You have to keep in mind that I usually only work with professional musicians. Clearly Sherlock has other things in his life he enjoys besides the violin, things he might possibly enjoy even more, since he hasn't pursued music as a career. That's a very good thing. A very, very good thing." Her words are encouraging, but her tone is not. "Some of the people I try to help haven't had anything else in their lives for decades, and when they lose it all, it can be too much," she explains, and then pauses before continuing.
"Andrew killed himself. As I said, there wasn't a support system back then. This is why I got into doing this, John," Helen tells him pointedly, "letting it be won't help, it'll just make the whole issue bigger. For some, it becomes too much."
"I hope you know what you're doing," John says, but it's not a threat. Just a reminder.
Helen doesn't reply. Maybe she's been here before - addressing the fears of someone else, someone close to the person she's trying to help. Come to think of it, she's actually been in John's position, and that time there was no one like her around to say these things out loud.
They bid a polite goodnight and John sits down on the stairs. This is possibly the same stair he'd found Sherlock sitting on the night when this whole nightmare had begun, months and months ago. When he even thinks about that moment, his insides twist with residual shock and worry. Sherlock, looking exhausted and haunted, leaning on the banister, looking up at him, then the terrifying sentence, the likes of which Sherlock never utters: 'there's something wrong with me'.
Sometimes John feels as though they're still sitting on that step, still trying to come to grips with the fact that something has gone terribly wrong.
Maybe Helen is right, that tonight needed to happen, so they can move on: 'get this phase over with'. Nothing John could do or say could possibly take away the pain and the loss, only delay it. He can't fix this, and it fucking hurts. But if Sherlock needs to go through this, then John perhaps might need to take a step back - to be there for him, but not sugarcoat the whole thing, or try to protect him from every new upset and disappointment. God knows John's empathy, and attempts at consolation and denial of how bad things actually still are in some respects, clearly haven't been helping at all. Has he just been enabling Sherlock's illusions, that once back at home, he could try to pretend none of it had happened? Helen had said something about Sherlock spending a lot of energy in trying to keep up appearances for John. The way he'd behaved during John's visits to Harwich had been theatrical, showoffish, and he'd appeared exhausted and miserable on those rare glimpses that John had had of him when Sherlock had thought John wasn't watching. Who has Sherlock been doing all of this for; John or himself?
He needs to go upstairs and pick up the pieces. The overwhelming urge to storm the bathroom and somehow magically fix everything, has now turned into apprehension and hesitation of his own motives, but he can't afford to be wrapped up in his own feelings right now.
Maybe he doesn't actually need to know what to do right now. Maybe he needs to just play it by intuition.
John returns upstairs.
The flat is quiet. The kitchen and sitting room lights have been turned off, and the bathroom door is ajar, the room dark and damp.
He hears footsteps from the direction of the bedroom. A lamp is lit, and judging by the soft light reflected onto the hallway floor, it's the one on Sherlock's bedside cabinet.
Sherlock couldn't possibly be headed to bed yet, is what John thinks first out of habit, until he remembers that this new version of Sherlock does, in fact, sleep. It's the so-called fatigue's fault, mostly. On several mornings John has left him in bed snoring so loudly that he could probably wake the dead. Many cups of morning tea had grown cold while Sherlock slept in. Sherlock had told him this had gone on since Harwich, and John wonders if his inner clock has now been permanently set to the sleep requirement of most other people, or if a case might flip the switch back to his old regime.
John kicks off his shoes in the foyer, and takes off his jumper, leaving it hanging on the back of a chair in the kitchen. From the living room he grabs something, on a whim, to take with him to the bedroom.
Sherlock is sitting on the bed, lost in thought. His curls are still damp.
He looks up when John arrives, but says nothing. In the soft light he looks younger than his years, skin even paler than usual, his eyes slightly bloodshot.
"Hey. Ready to turn in?" John asks.
"Might as well," Sherlock replies resignedly and stands up with the intention of shedding his dressing gown, but then he notices John is holding something behind his back.
John steps closer, not yet revealing what he's concealing. He's tempted to tell Sherlock to forget tonight, that it doesn't matter, that it's all fine, but he holds his tongue. Instead, he gently grabs Sherlock's hand in his, and unites it with the neck of the violin he swings out from behind his back.
Sherlock tries to tear away his hand as though scalded. "John- what-"
John holds on tighter, and with his other arm tugs Sherlock closer so the violin and their adjoined hands are trapped between them. "This belongs with you."
"I doubt it," Sherlock says and sidesteps, leaving John holding the instrument. He puts it down on the bed and Sherlock sits down next to it, slightly turned away from it.
John takes a seat behind him so he can wrap his arms around Sherlock. Sherlock touches the back of his hand with his palm before using it to lean on the duvet. "I had a dream back at the National about selling it to someone more worthy of it," he says in a detached tone.
As far as John knows, Sherlock never puts any stock in dreams, 'just reorganizing and discarding of data, no deductive value whatsoever', he had once said. Is this his way of telling John that he'd feared this for a long time, all the way from the worst days of the illness? He must have - it's logical that such a thing would have occurred to Sherlock very early on. John wants to kick himself for not realizing such an obvious issue earlier. He tries not to think about Sherlock at the ITU, alone, worrying about this, without being able to say anything. This is not the time for John to wallow in his own guilt - it's not about him.
"Over my dead body," John says, and leans his chin on Sherlock's shoulder.
Sherlock flinches. "Please don't, it's sharp," he hisses.
John removes his chin and straightens his back. "Sorry. Oversensitized?"
They haven't discussed this, the way in which the sense of touch might still be getting its messages mixed. Helen mentioning it had been a rude awakening indeed. This could have consequences for a great many things, and John knows should have realized the risk of something like this lingering of the GBS earlier.
Sherlock mumbles something vaguely affirmative, and glances at the violin next to him. He gently runs his forefinger along a string, which elicits a raspy whisper from the instrument.
"I've seen how much you love your music, and how much you adore that thing. If that doesn't make you worthy of it, then I don't know what does. I know it's valuable, but I doubt the guy who built it only meant it for posh people at the Royal Albert Hall. And even if he did, nobody cares, because he's long dead by now," John says determinedly.
Sherlock's lip quirks up just the tiniest bit.