John's way of talking about it is to make tea.
Sherlock lets him, sitting on the couch with his violin and his bow clasped loosely in his hands. He doesn't play the violin. Nor does he turn on the television, still tuned to John's latest foray into reality shows. He sits and listens to the sounds of John's movements in the kitchen, quiet clink of ceramic, hesitant step back and forth between the cupboards and the counter and the stove. Deducing John's thoughts should be easy, but it isn't, not this time.
Eventually, John runs out of things to do in the kitchen, so he comes to a halt in the doorway, mug clasped in both hands. Sherlock, seeing him at a loss, raises an eyebrow and gestures to the armchair that has long since been designated in both of their minds as John's. It takes a moment, but John manages to will his feet to move, one step, two steps, and he sits in the chair and tries to set his cup down. His hand is shaking, though, and he nearly spills his tea on top of the acid stain that Sherlock has already provided as a convenient marker for "where teacups go" and "where Sherlock's latest experiment in fingerprint removal is never allowed to go again."
He's out of excuses not to talk.
They sit for long minutes like that, while Sherlock watches John struggle for something to say. He isn't sure what's going on in John's mind – not yet – but he knows that it's important and he knows it isn't something he's going to want to hear.
"John," he begins.
It seems like that's all John needs to find his words. "Sherlock, I'm sorry."
"Why?"
"Because, well. Because – " he gestures awkwardly at the stairwell, implying everything that happened in the corridor below.
"Did you not want it?" Sherlock is fairly sure he would have been able to tell if that were the case; he's kissed without wanting to before, and it didn't involve heart rates increasing and hands doing that, and it certainly didn't involve repeating the experience.
"No, I… I did."
They sit in silence for another long moment. John is digesting the fact that he has just admitted to Sherlock that he wants to kiss him. Sherlock ought to be digesting that same fact, but he is too busy waiting for John to continue his explanation, because they were alone in that corridor and they were laughing and they were happy, and there was no reason for them to have stopped. And Sherlock, though he won't put it to words, hadn't wanted them to stop either.
He tries something else, because John is searching the air in front of him for a better explanation and not finding one. John's face, there, in the corridor, pale, eyes wide with –
"Were you afraid?"
John sinks down deeper into his chair, crossing his arms over his chest in a protective gesture. Frightened, then. But why frightened of something they both want?
"I don't understand," he says again, though John must know that by now.
"No," John agrees.
He's doing this wrong. That must be it. He's asking the wrong questions – he never asks the wrong questions – or he's missing some vital piece of evidence – or something. His deductions are never this difficult, and why now, when it actually matters?
Running. They've done that a thousand times, ending up at the same place, desperate for breath. Laughing. Kissing, and they haven't done that before, but John has already said he wanted to, and Sherlock believes it. John's fingers twisted in his hair. The buttons of John's shirt, falling open.
And John, in the corner, pulling it closed around him, folding in on himself like he had been hit.
"Your shirt."
John's look is wary; Sherlock is too close to something.
"Were you… afraid?" The second time that question has been asked, but this time he already knows the answer, and he wants to hear the why.
A sigh; a deeply indrawn breath; a hitch at the end; a look of pain. "Sherlock, I can't."
"Then let me."
Sherlock is next to John in the blink of an eye, gaze locked on his friend's, mouth set in a serious line. He raises his hands deliberately, placing them on John's shirt, and waits.
He can feel John trembling through the thin fabric.
When John doesn't say anything, doesn't tear his gaze from Sherlock's, Sherlock slowly unbuttons the shirt – one, then the next, then the next, and then John's hands are over his, stopping him, and it was this button in the corridor, too, Sherlock remembers for some reason.
"Sherlock. I don't… want you to see this."
"See what?" he asks, trying his hardest to remember what John does with his voice and his face when gentleness and compassion are called for. He is fairly certain that this is one of those times.
John struggles for a moment with the words, but Sherlock can see that he is tired, tired of not being able to explain, tired of sitting there with Sherlock's eyes on his and no way to say what he means, tired of this, because this has happened before. Sherlock's deductive skills can tell him that much.
Instead, John just closes his eyes and takes his hands away from Sherlock's.
Sherlock has never been so careful as he is now, undoing the rest of the buttons and sliding the shirt gently from John's shoulders. He sees the scar on the left, thinks Afghanistan, and runs his hands along it, then back, down along the shoulder blade, eyes half-closed as he searches for the edge of the scar and the smooth, warm skin beyond it that is John, just John, pure and unmarred by the war.
He doesn't find it.
Something grows in him as his fingers explore blindly down the landscape of John's back, textured with a hundred tiny hills and valleys where there should have been nothing, just an uninterrupted expanse of skin. He feels it rising in his throat, cutting off the questions he should have and the words that never fail him, knowing what his hands are telling him, but still not understanding, and John is suddenly not the only one who looks sick.
"I thought… your shoulder…"
Speaking coherently has never been this difficult.
John says, "What?"
"You didn't tell me all of this… I thought it was just your shoulder."
Another slow, deep breath from John, held just a fraction of a second too long, and Sherlock feels his shoulders slump as he gives up his tenuous hold on whatever it is he has been trying to keep from Sherlock, because it isn't just the scars.
"This isn't from the war."
Sherlock isn't sure what's happened to his insides. The ice-water feeling is new to him. John is scarred, John is scarred all over, and it isn't from the war, so something happened, somewhere, somehow, someone hurt John.
Someone hurt John.
Sherlock isn't oblivious enough for this to be the first time he realizes that the thought of John in danger makes him react in unexpected ways. But John isn't in danger now; these marks are old, and yet Sherlock's anger is new and bright and knife-edge sharp.
"Then where?" Who did this to you, John, so I can go and find and punish –
John is shaking his head. "You can't."
For once, it is John guessing what Sherlock is thinking.
Sherlock has to see, to know exactly where his horror and his anger are originating, to understand the fear in his friend's eyes. He presses, gently, on John's good shoulder (he doesn't have a good shoulder; both are marked with scars), and John leans forward slightly.
Sherlock averts his eyes immediately.
It's easier with his hands, somehow. Easier not to have to look at every tell-tale twist and knot and furrow in the skin that should be smooth. Easier not to have to take in every moment of pain written across John's back, marking every muscle and every bone, labelling him everywhere, damaged, broken. Easier to let his fingertips see for him.
"John, who?" The cracking of his voice is unexpected.
"My…" but John has given Sherlock all of his secrets today, and there is no sense in keeping this last one. Still, the words don't come easily. "My… father…"
If Sherlock's silence before was anger, his stillness now is murder.
"It… he – " The words catch in John's throat, but he swallows them and tries again. "If he hit me… he left Mum and Harry alone."
Sherlock couldn't answer John even if he knew what to say. Rage, it seems, leaves him wordless.
"They mattered more, and they… so I… and they let him…"
Mattered more?
They let him?
They knew? They knew, they knew and let it happen?
Sherlock's mind is ticking over at that statement, looking at John, quiet John, kind John, wonderful John, and how is it possible that someone could… that a father could…
… and they let him…
… and somehow, even after they let him, John thinks they…
"Mattered… more?" His disbelief is as clear as the tremor in his voice.
John's face has been even until Sherlock speaks, but now it cracks, and Sherlock cracks with it. He has never felt so many things at once, didn't even know there were so many things to feel – grief and pride and incredulity and pain and love and gnawing, gnawing sadness, and John is the one they did this to, not him, so why are the tears on his face and not on John's?
His hands close helplessly around nothing as he reels back. He wants to be holding John, he wants to be pulling him in tightly and telling him how wrong he is, how no one matters more than John, how no one ever has, but John pulled away last time and Sherlock is afraid now, in a way he's never been before, of hurting him.
Somehow, even with the shoulder and the leg, he has always thought of John as unbreakable.
"Sherlock," John says, and the three steps between them might as well be a hundred miles or a brick wall, the way Sherlock is standing frozen, the way John's voice is swallowed by the distance between what Sherlock knows now and what he thought he knew. He forgets to react for a minute before he realizes that the word John has said is his name.
He meets John's eyes. The thing in his throat is back and cutting off his breathing, and words would be too much to ask.
"I never wanted you to have to know."
To have to know.
The rush of clarity to Sherlock's mind as he realizes – John has been keeping this secret as much for Sherlock's sake as for his own.
All John has ever done is protect everyone around him. A bullet, fired without a second thought to save a man he'd known for only hours. Fired from a gun left over from a war, a war where John picked up the pieces of the broken men beside him and put them back together, saved them, too. And now this thing that Sherlock's deductions have not ever touched (and what good are they, if the only person he can never save is John?), this younger John who stood in the way of one monster to save two others from his pain.
Monsters, all of them, because what else could you call a man who etched his anger indelibly into the skin of his child, over and over again until there was no place to lay another scar? And what else could you call a mother and a sister who watched it happen every time, offering up their son and brother as a sacrifice to save themselves?
The taste of bile in the back of his throat brings him back to the room and to John's face, crumpling at the revulsion in Sherlock's expression.
"I'm – " he chokes out, scrambling out of the chair and as far away from Sherlock as he can get, horrified stare from the top of the staircase as Sherlock realizes he has somehow done this wrong, let John think he's the reason for the shudder that runs through Sherlock's body and the bitterness twisted into his features.
"John!" he manages, but it comes out hoarse and barely audible, and the muscles in John's shoulders tense under the shirt he has pulled back around himself.
"I'm sorry," thickly, from the top step. "I should have told you… I wanted to feel like I was… good, just for a while, worth something… wanted you to… I should have…"
And John is gone, down the stairs, door swinging shut, and gone, before Sherlock can choke and swallow and find breath for the shouting in his head, no, no, come back, you're wrong, it's wrong, it's all so wrong.
You're good.
You're worth anything. Everything.
Come back.