The night air was soothing to my fight-or-flight response; I took the long walk home, wondering how many things had impelled me away from that conversation. I didn't want to listen to Greg, because I usually trusted his take on people, and there was nothing I wanted to say. The pounding from inside my ribs just told me to run. Once I was outside I could breathe, and try to think my way through the panic.

I'd been calm about this sort of thing once. I had to be, but I knew it wasn't my desires that were the problem. I was lucky enough to be certain of that.

From the time I was old enough to pay attention, I'd known there were things you didn't say, though that was changing at least in some places.

I realised very soon that if, after you had said the first unsayable thing, you added that it wasn't as simple as that, then people you trusted would pound you. People who should have known better how strange people can be, saying 'no one could be that complicated, you won't pick a side, you're confused you're wrong you're a foil for the people who hate us you're one of them—.' I'd seen it happen more than once to braver people [stupider people] and I wanted no part of it. Harry had a bad enough time simply loving women. Desire bloomed in me late enough I'd already realised that liking both men and women was just not okay with most of the people I knew.

They did seem to think diffidence and caution were good qualities: 'John doesn't rush into things, looks before he leaps.' With Harry's assertions of her personhood being measurable by seismologists in China—not just her sexuality; Harry did everything loudly and in vivid colour—anyone with sense would have developed protective coloration, caution, diffidence. My life as a kid had been unremarkable until Harry came out, when suddenly there was a lot more fighting in the schoolyard. At least when she finally explained to my parents, they understood why I'd been coming home with black eyes and notes from the headmaster. Harry wasn't best pleased that I was defending her honour, but one night I finally explained that having a gay sibling meant I had my own skin took after. She went pale, not having realised before then that anything she did might make people look at me differently. I never told her that the name-calling was also accurate enough. I don't think she wanted that kind of solidarity with me, and by some accounts I was still the enemy anyway.

Well before the army, I had enough experience to know I was as complicated as I'd feared. And known some very decent men, one of them well enough that we could laugh about the awkwardness of meeting in the on-call room alone together and then weeks later at the pub with women alongside us.
I'd believed myself in love a couple of times, with Diane when I was sixteen and with Karen, drastically, at university. I was a good boyfriend; it seemed to me that cheating was cheating, and I didn't want that to be my style. I didn't feel any more need for a man's touch than I did for that of any passing pretty woman, so for the length of those relationships I found faithfulness very possible (much more than Karen apparently did).

The rest of my life began to lose some of its caution, though. Rotation in Belfast was medically, surgically challenging, but what the gunfire and the hostility and the danger did to my cautious persona was appalling. I knew enough to keep the drink in check and I'd learned in uni to avoid gambling for money, but the pull of risking my life was more intoxicating and exciting than either. I loved the army, the closer to the trouble the better. In the moment no one was bothered with anything except survival, and it sharpened life to a point. Afterward there WAS an after, and knowing how easily I might not have had one made it sweet. Maybe attacking your own is easier when no one is attacking all of you literally, because there were plenty of men (and some women, not many, because there weren't many there in the first place) who were happy with anyone who wanted to hold them, and never said a word if you were holding someone one shape one week and another when you went on leave. There might have been people in the army with enough time to debate sexual politics, but I only knew people who were eager to vote, anytime they could.

And I'd never before felt I was on a team, part of a body bigger than my own. In the heat of the moment, an absolutely mindless, heartless, moral calculation could move someone to die for another; it was what you did for the men fighting beside you. We took chances in Afghanistan our families at home would never, ever understand, because there it was very easy to get to a place where you'd risk your life almost for fun. Almost for honour, if you like; if you think honour means not letting the other guy get away with whatever he was trying on. A footballer's honour, I think, not a gentleman's.

I'd shot the cabbie from that state of mind, not from a sudden great swelling of warmth for Sherlock—I was inclined to favour him, definitely, because such complete prats and pissants seemed to think he didn't deserve friends-but it was simpler and colder than that. Mycroft had said I'd become 'very loyal, very quickly' to his brother, but that was the way things went in the war. The teams were clear, no mind or heart required. If I looked back at that evening now and shuddered, it was because I could see now how close to the war I'd still been.

Violent death in London was different. Every murder scene was carefully searched, graphed, recorded exactly as it hadn't been in Afghanistan; every violent death carefully treated to re-enforce belief that such a thing was not normal. Despite all the hype about unattended parcels on the Tube, and exceptions like the one Moriarty had made in Glasgow, I lived in a blessed place where death did not wait inside a carton or alongside the road.

Mycroft was utterly wrong. London was not a battlefield. I'd die, happy in mind and heart, to keep it from becoming one.

And, it seemed, I would live happy in mind and heart with Sherlock Holmes. Even though he made it difficult, sometimes simply because he wanted to, sometimes because he couldn't help it, and sometimes because he couldn't be bothered not to. And I would stay because I

—because I had a lot of complicated reasons

—or maybe just because I didn't want to miss what happened next, the safety or unsafety of London or Sherlock or myself having little to do with it.

And if your team starts to become an unsafe place? "I've never seen him look at anybody the way he looks at you." Greg knew him. Greg couldn't believe I hadn't noticed. Greg had no idea how much I would never want to notice.

I knew who I was.

I knew who I had been. Oh, God, that man was dead, please be dead, please.

I knew I couldn't be anyone real without including, integrating, my past experience into my present. [Yes Ella I do listen; do you have any idea what you're asking? Does it matter? I know you're right. I don't like you, but that's not the point at all.] Integrating the man I'd been the day before yesterday, the man I'd been a month ago, the man I'd been a year ago. Almost three years ago. Two years, eleven months, and five days.

That man had wanted to die. No, like all of us, I'd wanted to live, but that explosion—it wasn't the last one, not nearly—killed the life I was living as surely as it had Neal and Arjun. As it killed Jason, though he didn't die that day. I kept the life in him because it was what I did, the values I'd accepted. I told myself while I was tying off arteries that life—any kind of life—was worth preserving, though neither he nor I had believed that when we were whole. He didn't live more than another day. He would not have liked what he had become. I told myself that while I was crying.

That philosopher we studied in sixth form said that objects obey the will of God by following the laws of physics; living things, by adapting to their environment; humans, by relating to one as other not as objects, but as other persons.

Jason was only an object when he died; no living system could adapt to such ruin. We had been people once, persons in relation. Sexual relation, if you want to be funny, but other kinds no less, which was why we were different from the other pairs of living beings, adapting to our environment, in sexual relations. In a war.
I think we were different. Some of the others were pretending they were in love. We were pretending we weren't: not to one another; just to everyone else. He was American. I don't know who he didn't tell; there must have been more than a few who didn't ask. He spent only the time that he had to with his own. We were one another's own for perhaps a month, if you added up the nights. When Jason's pulse beneath my hands was so warm, so fast because of where our hands were upon one another. Our blood where it belonged: separate, in concert, not contact.

He was one of a hundred soldiers in pieces under my hands while I was there, maybe more than a hundred, certainly no fewer. Not the only one whose body I had touched living and whole, either. The only one whose heart had touched mine.

You don't get to think about it when it happens, so I kept him alive that day. When I cried because he was dead I tried to know both my 'saving' him and his escaping from that broken life were right, were what needed to happen, that we had both done our bit.

Our bit, before it happened: patrolling.

My bit, afterward: assessing his injuries, accepting his blood all over me, trying to keep enough of it inside him.

His bit, finally: being unconscious, shutting down one process after another. At least his family didn't have to decide to turn off life-support. Biology, chemistry, physics made the decision, as if they had free will to follow the laws of nature or not to.

It was more than a year later that the bullet in my shoulder carried me out of the army. I'd ceased to be a person in relation to other persons, but I was a living thing and I was very well adapted to my environment. I'd stopped being in anything but the most superficial relationship with anyone, which was fine. It worked. I worked, very well, and no one seemed to notice.

When I got to London I no longer worked very well. I didn't adapt to my new environment. I was a Newtonian object following the laws of physics, coasting, pushed into action on occasion, having less and less impulse of my own. Wanting to come to a stop. I moved only because it would have been more trouble to resist the appointments, the assembly line for invaliding out of the army, into civilian life.

I supposed Sherlock was as Newtonian a body as anyone else. But his orbit was eccentric, his whole life was knocking people out of their usual sphere (mixing scientific paradigms, I know. Leave my metaphors alone) and I was drifting in space when Stamford crossed our paths and Sherlock captured me in his gravitational field. But somehow he made me alive again, and human, and though the relationship was cautious it was as real and personal as I could stand.

It was late and I was sober when I stepped softly into 221b. I needn't have worried about waking Sherlock, of course. He was doing something unspeakable to something inedible in the kitchen, but a moment after my muttered greeting he looked up. Then he stripped off his gloves, put the kettle on.

"Do I look that bad?" I asked.

"Usually when I reply to questions like that you tell me to bugger off." He pushed the lid onto the (new, expensive, BPA-free) plastic box (that I had bought to keep large flat leftovers in) and put it into the fridge. "I'll buy you another container. These are very useful. Umm. Sorry?"

"You're not, and I should have bought two and covered one with biohazard tape in the first place." I moved into the kitchen as the kettle shuddered to its finish, but Sherlock blocked me and warmed the teapot himself. "That bad, really?"

He shrugged and glanced at me again, his eyes colour of champagne made for robots: grey, clear, glittering. Observation. Concerned. There was no point in denying it; he could see better and faster than I could dissimulate.

"You may as well say it, then I'll know as much about me as you do," I said.

"Lestrade doesn't usually ask you about the war."

"I don't think he meant to."

He opened the cupboard and very deliberately did not choose my army mug. He picked the one with the remark about about not leaving parentheses open: I was to remember I was his blogger.

"You don't usually think about people who died. Well. Every time you read the newspaper. This person."

I nodded. It would almost've been good to have it known, to have Sherlock know who I was, who I'd been. It would've been better not to have pried the lid off at all, though. Wasn't the Kubler-Ross merry-go-round supposed to stop sometime?

Sherlock moved faster and faster among the tea things, his hands ripping through the biscuit wrapper. Oh. Food, because paracetamol before bed-time. I must have looked really rough. Was he going to ask?

"A patient?"

"Only at the end."

With that he must have known everything he needed to. And I didn't think it hadn't come as a surprise; I wondered how long he'd known. But then I saw him stop just long enough to inhale before he handed me my cup; just long enough to layer composure over the uncertainty in his bearing. An entirely different man from the one who had believed he was giving me drugged coffee a week ago.

Would I have noticed that, before what Greg had told me that day? Would I have guessed why Sherlock might be shaken?

Would anything less than that wave of old sorrow have papered over what Greg and I actually did discuss? (What Greg tried to discuss.)

Had it? Did my friend who knew nothing (and who assured us all that he cared less) about people's emotions know what had knocked me into reopening a locked room in my history? I'd believed myself in love before the army, with two different women; never more than appreciation and cheerful lust for any man. Until Jason, in an unreal life for both of us, and then a real death.

I didn't date men because they died. It was stupid, yes; women died in Afghanistan, too. And they died in London just as often as the men. But none I'd held before and after.

Sherlock, I can't be a lover. Don't ask that of me. I haven't asked it of you and I've silenced any voice that might have wanted to. Protecting myself, protecting him as well if I thought about it.

"Mrs. Hudson would hug you." He wasn't being scornful. Tentative. Apologetic? "I suppose Molly would ask if you wanted to talk about it but Lestrade did and you didn't want to—"

"It's all right, Sherlock, I'd much rather have a cup of tea than anything else. Really. Thanks."

He pushed past me, taking his tea toward his armchair. I followed. He did something on the open laptop—mine as usual-and handed it to me before he sat down. "I've sent you a link. String quartet tomorrow night?"

He had thoughtfully logged into my e-mail for me. The string quartet were four very lovely women. "They aren't playing your usual fare."

"They're technically acceptable. One of them offered me tickets and I owe her a favour. I thought you might enjoy it."

He'd sent me the link less than a minute earlier. If this was a gesture to Cheer John Up it was one of his more graceful. "I think I would."

"You have hours at the clinic tomorrow? We'll have dinner after, then we'll investigate modern appropriation of classical models where all is transposition and altered time-signatures and there'll be no silver-haired policemen to annoy us with impertinent observations."

"Unless he calls with a case." I drank the tea, and reached deeply into my gut for breath. Sherlock stood back up, found his own computer, fussed. Caution and diffidence were unusual to see in Sherlock. He was sill waiting for something, me to break into tears or... . I didn't like it. "I surprised Lestrade."

"Not hard. How in particular?"

"We were talking about Henry Knight and I said I knew something about suicidal ideation. He hadn't known how badly off I was when I moved in here."

"Lestrade is much too polite to wonder about mental health unless he feels professionally obliged."

"Did you know?" I asked.

"I didn't expect your leg to respond so well, so quickly, to a challenge. Wouldn't have taken that route if it hadn't, obviously. But I didn't know how low you had been until you began attacking my standards of experimental hygiene. When you plainly felt much livelier than before."

I remembered that evening well and couldn't help smiling. "Fingertips don't belong with the butter."

"I know that, now." He managed to look both amused and still put-upon by my provinciality.

"I don't think I've ever thanked you," I said, reading my mail.

"Every day," he answered. It wasn't the dismissal I'd expected, but he stopped fussing and drank his tea and explained why the science journalist in the Times needed remedial tutoring in O-level biology.

And the next evening, just that once, nothing happened until after the last encore. I took a picture of Sherlock with lipstick on his face from being greeted by the second violin; he wiped it off before we had to meet Lestrade. It seems there was a kidnapped banker… .

Notes: There really is a string quartet composed of lovely women, and Sherlock really does owe the second violin a favor. The philosopher John studied in sixth-form is John MacMurray, and he is very readable.