-Selections from Plato's Phaedrus.

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PHAEDRUS: Once more, there are many more non-lovers than lovers; and if you choose the best of the lovers, you will not have many to choose from; but if from the non-lovers, the choice will be larger, and you will be far more likely to find among them a person who is worthy of your friendship.

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SOCRATES: A lover of music like yourself ought surely to have heard the story of the grasshoppers, who are said to have been human beings in an age before the Muses. And when the Muses came and song appeared they were ravished with delight; and singing always, never thought of eating and drinking, until at last in their forgetfulness they died. And now they live again in the grasshoppers; and this is the return which the Muses make to them - they neither hunger, nor thirst, but from the hour of their birth are always singing, and never eating or drinking; and when they die they go and inform the Muses in heaven who honours them on earth.

'Oh, I know it all sounds very cozy,' John said. 'Sherlock telling me a bedtime story - about insects, of course, thank God not about one of his cases-'

'Do you really think it was "cozy"?' Ella interrupted. She raised an eyebrow at him and he looked away. 'Well, it might have been,' John replied, 'But I bet you know where I'm heading with all this.' She hummed softly in affirmation.

'You said you're staying with Harry today,' she reminded him. 'Things really that bad?' There was a dimple in her cheek, John noticed, and her whole face looked lighter, freer, when she smiled like that at him, jokingly.

John scratched his head. 'Unfortunately, yes,' he said. 'It's just temporary, until I figure out what to do.'

'He must have really upset you,' Ella observed.

'How so?' John asked calmly.

She gave him a nod before speaking. 'You didn't move out the first time you were kidnapped, working with him. You didn't leave when you found the body parts in the fridge, or when he ruined half of your dates, or when he scared you on purpose on that case-' She paused, trying to remember the details.

'With the hound,' he prompted her. 'Or what we thought was a hound.' It had been a chimera in the end, an ordinary dog turned monstrous with the aid of a few GABA-inhibitors. The doctor knew the mechanisms of fear, was familiar with its neurochemical pathways as well as its subjective states. So, yes, he had been frightened, but the sensation was hardly new to him. And the relief, afterwards, when he learned that Sherlock was the man behind the curtain - oh, such gratitude he had felt towards him! That gratitude, as much as his fear, was behind John's anger. What right had Sherlock to deceive him in that way? And why was he so grateful that it had all been a trick of the light, why was he so relieved that Sherlock had, after all, remained in control, when that deception had made John look the fool? He felt angry at himself, then, that he still lapped at Sherlock's hand when Sherlock had ignored him and baited him and starved him of attention and praise. It was not likely that Sherlock would change, either, but John didn't know if he could forgive himself for these things.

'What are you thinking now?' Ella asked softly. 'You have gone quiet.'

John swallowed tightly. 'Thinking 'bout Sherlock. About why I kept going back to him, even when - even when -' His voice broke and he pressed his palms against his eyes, as if he could hold back the tears.

'Do you have any ideas about why that might be the case?' Ella asked. 'Why you keep following that pattern with him?'

John clenched his fists and pushed himself up so that he sat upright in the chair. He looked away and tried to regain his composure; he was not going to cry, not today, not when he needed his anger more than his tears.

'Because I'm in love with him,' John burst out in desperation.

She looked at him closely, thinking over her response.

'That may be,' she said slowly, patting at the braids in her hair. 'But might it have started before that?'

'Before I went daft over him, or before I met him?' John asked.

'Before you met him,' Ella said. 'There might have been others...'

Of course there were others; trauma and repetition, trauma and repetition, that's how it went. There was always the impulse to repeat the abuse, to return to the scene of the crime (whatever Sherlock would have said about the matter). Afghanistan; a double hotel room in the countryside; 221B; a score of other places, other dates...And what choice did John really have? All these places, all these endless variations on the same theme, only to fail again - and again and again - and trying all the while to do something differently, to make things right. And John saw how things weren't fixing themselves; no matter how many times he threw himself in front of a bullet, he couldn't mend the original wound. No matter how many people he loved - or shagged - they couldn't make up for the original absence. Was he fated, then, to go on this way, always falling into the same self-effacing, self-sacrificing role with his lovers and mates? Did he think they would leave him if he did not protect them from themselves? (Yes.) Did he think, in some small part of him, that he was above all desire, that he was ennobled because he served? (Yes.) In arduis, fidelis. (Yes.) He had been steadfast. He had served - his country, his god (when he had still believed), his family, now Sherlock. And for what? What did he have to show for it, besides a wicked-looking scar, a dress uniform that was gathering dust, and a few impressive lines on his Vita? His hands were empty.

It could have been a second chance for him, coming home from Afghanistan; he could have taken the opportunity to rebuild his life, to find a mate, settle down. Superficially, living with Sherlock had seemed like a new life, a cicada spring after the drabness of rehab and the monotony of the desert. But things were not as they seemed. He had followed Sherlock and he had ended up right back where he always was, giving himself to some who was too self-absorbed to appreciate the gift. His mother had been his first love-object, with her depression and alcoholism in his childhood; then his sister, taking on their mother's symptoms once Gertie was dead. (Harry could keep their mother in mind, best, in the shimmering minutes of the second glass of wine; Gertie was closest to her then, almost as if she had never left, and Harry felt the warmth and satisfaction of love most strongly when staring at the bottom of that second glass. She had always been a maudlin drunk.) Now Sherlock was the object of John's affections, and it had not gone any better this time around. (Small wonder.)

'Do I have to do this again?' John asked Ella, feeling weariness settle in his joints, a reminder that he had not slept well since the weekend, since Wales.

'Do what?' Ella asked, waiting. The afternoon light shone through the window and fell on her face, forcing her to shield her eyes with her hand to look at him.

'The same old bloody thing,' he said. 'This - situation I'm in with Sherlock.'

'What situation, exactly?'

'I feel like it's the same thing, all the time, my whole life. Falling in love with Sherlock is just the same as hoping that my mother will come back, as hoping that Harry will stop drinking.' He turned away, starting to cry with rage and frustration. 'I'm so bloody sick of it!' His voice rose to a shout. 'I. Just. Want. It. To. End.'

He struggled to still the tremor in his arm. It would feel good to throw something, he thought, the way it had felt good to pound the wall of the hotel in Wales. But then he thought of Sherlock, and how Sherlock would get a hold of the gun when he was in a strop, or would spray paint the wall, or any number of visible and eccentric signs of ire. No one could mistake Sherlock's anger for something else. John, on the other hand, hardly even knew the feeling of rage, so well had he disguised it with altruism and self-containment. He could calm others; himself he could not soothe, because he could not put the words to his own sorrow or rage.

And yet - and yet - he had got angry at Sherlock, a few nights ago in Wales. That was what the whole session with Ella had been about, in one way or another - John's anger - and still he was covering it up, making excuses for Sherlock and ignoring just how angry he had been at him.

John's thoughts returned to the dozen petty intrusions and evasions that Sherlock had made during that case, from 'forgetting' to mention the trip until it was nearly impossible for John to get coverage at the surgery; to refusing to drive the half hour back to Cardiff to find a hotel with two beds; to hiding the subject of the phone call when it was bloody well obvious that Sherlock was in a fuss about something. And then, to top things off, Sherlock would not talk about them, either, and had avoided John's questions with a bedtime story about Welsh entomology.

John had let Sherlock's deep voice lull him into a kind of half-sleep, populated with images of silver-green wings and throaty bird song, a sylvan world of cicadas and nightingales, until Sherlock's speech wandered to Plato and John would have slipped utterly into his dreamworld at the mention of the philosopher, had he not heard Sherlock explain, as if he had thought it out many times before, that he was not certain but that he agreed with Phaedrus' first speech, that friendship was best when not mixed with love.

Sherlock had moved quickly on from there, to consider the place of the cicada in Japanese art, to a long digression on the famous Art Nouveau café in Nantes, La Cigale, which he compared to a fashionable bar of the same name that he had frequented in Buenos Aires one antipodal summer.

But John had pricked his ears at the mention of love, felt the blood flow to his fingertips, then went still as Sherlock continued to wax upon the minutiae of cicadan lore.

'Stop it,' John said suddenly, interrupting Sherlock's flow of speech.

'Stop what?' Sherlock asked, a bit astonished.

'Stop all this,' John said firmly. 'If you want to talk about us, about friendship and love, or whatever nonsense you're spewing, then at least have the courtesy to do so when you know I'm awake for the conversation.'

'What do you mean?' Sherlock asked, turning over in bed to look at John. 'I'm talking about cicadas. Or cicadae, if you prefer.'

'Oh, go ahead, deny it,' John said sarcastically. 'Pretend you don't have the slightest idea what I'm talking about, why don't you. Make me out to be the mad one.' Sherlock grimaced. 'OK, then. Have it your way. If you're going to talk about friendship and love, I have absolutely no idea why I should think it's about me. No idea, whatsoever. It's not like I'm your only friend or anything. I mean, how could I have possibly mistaken what you said for idle chatter? Silly me, what was I thinking?' There was a rare, dangerous edge to his voice.

John sat up and moved to the corner of the bed. Light was beginning to come through the windows - had Sherlock really been talking for so long? Might have done; if anyone could entertain himself aloud for hours, it was Sherlock. And now the berk was silent, wouldn't deign to respond to John. Typical. This was the last straw.

'You know what, Sherlock?' John looked over his shoulder at Sherlock. 'I've had it. I'm not settling for this any longer. You can let me know right now if you want to talk about us, about why you kissed me the other night. Otherwise, this is it.'

He stared at Sherlock, who by now had pushed himself up against the headboard, with none of his usual grace, and was running his fingers through his tangled hair. Sherlock blinked back at John, pulled at a strand of hair, and haplessly opened his mouth.

'This ends here,' John said. 'Either you tell me what you want from me, tell me you want something more than our friendship, or I go back now.' He stood, his stance wide and certain.

'John-' Sherlock began, '-I already discussed-'

John punched his fist against the nearby wall and Sherlock went quiet again.

'We did not already discuss this,' John said, feeling a tingling in his ears that spread through his temples and his cheeks. 'It doesn't count if you have a conversation with me and I'm not there. Or if I'm asleep,' he added.

'You clearly weren't asleep,' Sherlock retorted, 'If you heard me talking about the Phaedrus.'

'That's it,' John said, walking over to his suitcase. 'You blew your chance, Sherlock.' He flung the case open and rummaged through for his pants and trousers. As John crossed the room, he noticed how Sherlock's gaze followed him, how he looked, for a brief moment, almost regretful, before his face returned to its habitual imperiousness.

Inside the loo, John dressed quickly, brushed his teeth and shaved before packing up his toiletries. He glanced at his watch - it was not yet six, and he had no idea how he would get back to Cardiff. No matter. He'd figure things out somehow, go downstairs and ask the person at the front desk to ring him a car or point him towards a bus stop. He was a grown man and he could certainly make his way back to London by himself. The rest he would decide on later.

John looked at himself in the mirror. The overhead light was harsh and made his face look even more wrinkled and pock-marked than usual, but he thought the rest of his torso looked quite fit in just his undervest. He had begun to get back some of the muscle that he had lost in those fretful months after he was shot, when he couldn't carry any weight on his shoulders and could barely open a jar of gherkins without assistance. It was so remarkable, he thought, that this was the same body he'd always had, that this same pile of flesh and blood and bones had taken him from Surrey to London to Afghanistan and back to London. And now here he was, in Wales, the same person that he always was, though the place was different. How had he lasted so long? How had his body knit itself back together, time and time again, after so many rips and rends? He knew the answer, medically speaking, and yet those scientific explanations did not account for the awe that he felt at his own unlikely embodiment.

He poked at the scar on his shoulder, ran his finger along the edge that demarcated touch and dullness. The numb patch of skin around the scar grew smaller over time as the dermal nerves regenerated and criss-crossed the knotted surface with errant sensation. It was not the same as before, not really, but nor did it hurt anymore, and he could stand the dullness as long as he could feel the occasional twitch of heat or pressure. The scar was evidence that he had let himself be touched by something exterior to himself; what similar proof could a man like Sherlock ever have, of letting the world in, of caring? John imagined Sherlock's body as a pale, unblemished extension of skin, opaque and unyielding. For the first time in months he felt some pity for Sherlock.

So then. John had let himself be touched by Sherlock, and Sherlock had not reciprocated. And what of it? John had taken a risk, put himself in the line of fire - nothing new, there - and he would go on, as he always had. He was still young, after all, and straight-limbed and self-assured and competent. A good man, as his mother always said he would become; Sherlock could not take that from him. These things he had all counted, and there was so much else about him that Sherlock could not touch.

'So what do you think you'll do next?' Ella asked.

John took a deep breath and rested his hands on his knees, leaning forward as he spoke.

'I think I'll go back to Baker Street,' he said. 'Only one of us can afford to be in a strop all of the time, and that's Sherlock.' He smiled at Ella, who smiled back at him.

'You sound certain of that,' she said, glancing at the clock behind him. They only had two minutes left in the session.

'I am certain,' he said. 'And I'm - OK. OK about it. Really.' He exhaled slowly. 'Just needed to get some things out of my system. Know where I stand. Set my own terms.'

He rose from his chair and looked down at Ella as he made his way to the door. It was probably against the rules, but he held out his hand for her to shake. She took it and smiled at him again.

'Thanks for that,' he said. 'I'll see you next week?'

The sunlight had moved across the room and her face was in the shadow, but her eyes were bright as she looked up at him and released his hand.

'Be well,' was all she said.

'I will,' he replied. 'I really will.'

THE END.

Author's Note: This is the last chapter in the three-story arc that I began a year ago. Chronologically, That Obscure Object comes before Pax Americana and after In Confidence, though I wrote them in a different order (PA, followed by IC and TOO). In the course of writing these stories, my views on Sherlock Holmes and John Watson have, of course, changed, as has my writing style.

I began the series wishing to write a standard romantic plot, with an over-the-top courtship and (for Sherlock) an exotic location (New York City, where I live), just to see if I could do it. In Pax I developed a back story for Sherlock that I became quite fond of, one that involved a Spanish grandmother and a cycling Sherlock. I became so attached to this story, in fact, that I decided to draw it out in the next story in the series, In Confidence, which takes places nine years previously and is set in the psychiatric hospital where Sherlock is undergoing drug treatment. I set myself the formal challenge, in In Confidence, to tell the story using only case notes and other written documents (treatment summaries, emails, letters) that would be generated during treatment. Writing within such limits, I became more concise and less descriptive, a far cry from the (in retrospect) excessive style of Pax. When Chapbook (songstermiscellany) asked me to write about John and trauma, from a psychological perspectives, I began a series of short stories on my tumblr blog that fit within the same narrative universe and would eventually become the story that you just finished, That Obscure Object. It is meant to fill in the time betweenIn Confidenceand Pax Americana, the exhilarating yet bittersweet months when John and Sherlock become friends and partners. If you have not yet read PA, there you will find a resolution to their romance in that story. Sherlock finally comes to his senses, and John gets swept off his feet.

I have thought long and hard about whether to revise Pax to fit my current understanding of the characters (and the craft of writing), or whether to leave it as is. For the present, I'm letting things be. Pax still has the odd epithet that I dislike (oh fandom, you have taught me to beware the epithet!), there is the extravagantly emotional dialogue that I managed to get Sherlock and John to engage in, and I would change these things if I had the time. But I also want to move on. I want to write in shorter form, to write a wider range of stories and in different fandoms, too. And I have a dissertation to work on this semester, and all that that entails. So this chapter ends, for now, the most intensive writing project I have ever undertaken, so I can have time for another one (said thesis).

I loved writing Pax and its prequels, loved the people I met along the way, the kind readers who left me notes of encouragement and have reached out to me during the past year, people with similar interests and aesthetics as my own. I have found myself in the most vibrant virtual community that I have ever dreamed of, through the Sherlock fandom and the people I met through there. But writing these stories, and beginning a tumblr blog, I have struggled to balance my time as a 'Sherlock' fan and as a fan (as I have nearly always been) literature in general, and of art, film, and music. My blog has shifted from being a place where I primarily write about Sherlock and writing Sherlock fanfic, to the place where I post things that inspire me intellectually and artistically. It seems like it will continue to be less of Sherlock and more of the other things, as I move out of such an intense writing process. This is not a good-bye, but an explanation for the change. I feel enormously grateful that I have these things (art! music! literature!) in my life, and that I can share them with you. So, thank you, for reading along and reaching out and teaching me with your comments and experiences. I'll be around.

My especial thanks to Chapbook (songstersmiscellany), who prompted this story, and to khorazir for the artwork, as well as moonblossom, syncsister, breathedout, roane, fennish_journal (frytha), persian-slipper, serissime, nympheline, adiprose, aderyn, professorfangirl, afrogeekgoddess, charliebravowhiskey, sherlockscarf, pennypaperbrain, khorazir, and many other people who have been part of the writing process, in one way or another.