Nineteen
Reassurance

John's eyes widened at my question.

"That's why you're here, isn't it?" I continued, not releasing his wrist. "You were worried about me because it's been two months and he hasn't noticed my absence nor done anything about it."

It took a moment for John to react to this. He clearly hadn't been expecting me to show so much vulnerability in his presence. His next challenge was to attempt to answer something he hadn't prepared for.

"He…" he started and never finished.

I looked away, my fingers slipping from his arm and falling limply onto my own lap. I was embarrassed enough already, having displayed the chink in my armour so boldly, I didn't need him struggling to come up with the statement that would do the least amount of damage on top. I knew already why he couldn't tell me directly what was going on.

"Melanie," he said, back to his normal comforting voice, "it isn't that. Sherlock's… well, he's Sherlock. Even if he had noticed then he wouldn't do anything."

I narrowed my gaze and peered at him, parroting back at him, "Even if he had?"

John pinched the bridge of his nose. "That's not what I meant."

I turned my attention away from him again, muttering to myself, "I know what you meant."

"I meant," John spoke sternly, "that Sherlock would never let anyone see what he was actually feeling. He thinks it makes him weak."

I raised my eyebrows in a swift jerking motion, rolling my eyes in the process. "Except for the joy he feels at gruesome murder cases, of course."

There was a short exhale of laughter from the other occupied chair. "Yeah. Except for that."

My lips tugged upwards, but the smile was disappearing before I had the chance to catch it. I should have been able to trap it, should have been able to hold onto my mask for a bit longer, but I couldn't – not with John here. He was too much of a reminder. Becky was my life before the detective. John was my life since meeting him. He was my life since everything had turned upside and been ripped from the inside out.

"He was hurting, Melanie." I blinked at the words John was saying, unsure at first of what to make of them. "He didn't say anything, but he was."

I took a deep breath and straightened my back, pulling all the calm I could muster to my face as I looked at the man opposite me with what I hoped were stoic eyes.

"When?" I asked simply.

John frowned, clearly confused. "What?"

"You said 'was'." I explained. "When was he hurting?"

John looked as if he was trying not to roll his eyes at my constant negative pedantry. "I did-"

"Ok, ok," I interrupted, raising a hand to signify my defeat, "When was he visibly hurting?"

John paused, contemplating how to respond to that. I could see the gears turning in his brain again, inspecting each sentence he could voice and calculating their emotional implications. That very fact told me his answer. He didn't even need to speak it aloud.

"After you left." He told me needlessly.

My head subconsciously bobbed up and down, taking it in and re-examining it from every possible angle. Whatever I tried, however, I could only come to one possible conclusion. "So after Irene Adler died – or after she pretended to or whatever."

John opened his mouth to argue, but no sound was forthcoming. My neck swivelled as I turned away from him. I couldn't look at him when I was like this. I was just like Sherlock in that respect – I never wanted to show my emotions to anyone. Bottling it all up was easier to deal with; at least then you only had yourself to handle, you didn't have to cope with someone else at the same time.

Sherlock had been upset. I should have been happy about that. Yet, somewhere in my mind I knew that it couldn't be over me – not entirely, anyway. Even if it were, there would be no way of telling. Sherlock wouldn't confide in John just which woman he was most sorry to lose. And that was assuming he had realised I wasn't there in the first place.

I lifted a hand and rubbed my temples in an action that was partly to hide my eyes from my guest, sensing the lurking moisture somewhere far too close to the surface for comfort.

"I'm such a mess." I let out, surprised by just how steady I was sounding when my insides were in turmoil. All those months of practice must have finally been paying off.

John rested a hand on my knee, speaking softly as he did. "No, you're not. Well, not when compared to the people I talk to most days."

A breathy chuckle escaped my lips. "Somehow, that does little to reassure me."

I glanced at John. His face twitched into a joking acceptance. "I see your point."

The smile lasted longer this time, but even then it began to wane. John seemed to spot this and attempted to reconcile the situation.

"If it makes you feel any better," he said lightly, "Sherlock's ruining all my relationships too. Dumped last night. Again."

I lowered my hand from my face and met his gaze. "You know what? That does make me feel a little better."

John glared at me. "Sadist."

I laughed – not a full, heat-felt laugh like I used to be able to conjure, but a laugh nonetheless. I reached for my still hot mug of tea and sipped at it, knowing that the momentary happiness couldn't last, but wanting to savour it for as long as possible. It was nice, being able to joke about these things once more. For some unknown reason, my other friends weren't quite up-to-speed on sociopathic detective and vicious crime humour like I was. They should read the papers more often.

"Do you love him?"

I balked.

John's gentle question had popped up so absolutely out of the blue that I couldn't recognise what he had actually said for at least twenty seconds. It was… It was… a bizarre thing to ask. It was an especially bizarre thing to ask someone like me.

When I finally got my head together, all I could think of doing was to sigh heavily, staring at the grain of the wooden table.

"I don't love, John." I told him evenly. "I'm not capable of those kinds of strong emotions. It was one of the reasons Sherlock was interested in me in the first place – my inability to connect to other humans on that level."

"That's not what I asked." John responded instantly. "Do you love him?"

I froze for a moment. How on earth could I feasibly answer that? Hadn't I just said that I couldn't love anyone? Why should Sherlock be an exception to that rule? Why would…

I shook my head firmly. "There's no point in thinking about it now, is there? It doesn't make much of a difference anymore."

My gaze roamed the surface of the table, searching for some unknown answer to a question I sincerely did not want to ask myself. I needed to just let it lie. Then, maybe, I could get my act together and move on. I might actually be able to find a proper job and get my own apartment again. I could become a real grown up, probably not before I turned thirty, but soon afterwards anyway.

John interrupted my wishful thoughts with a solitary, hideously simple sentence. "You should come back."

I was silent for a second and when I at last spoke, my voice broke. "I can't."

"Yes you can." John told me strictly, his military persona leaking through his shell. "It's just your and Sherlock's bloody idiotic prides that are stopping either of you from sorting this mess out. Both of you are equally stubborn."

I pouted. "Am not."

"Yes, yo-"

I gave up, reeling my head back and shutting my eyes tightly. "I know I am, John. I know. I know this isn't just Sherlock's fault. I should have at least tried to talk to him about it rather than just running away, and I also know I'm being a pathetic, whining fool right now, but I have the right to be, so shut up. I can't just go back though. I can't deal with him anymore – he's too cold and ambivalent. I should like that, I should find that one of his best traits, but I guess it's been getting harder and harder to cope with it and it's stupid and I should just grow up, but I haven't had to face something like this before and I just don't know how. What the hell am I supposed to do? Please tell me, because I seriously have no idea."

Somewhere along my rant, although I have no idea exactly where, my body curled and I slouched forwards, my head lolling downwards pathetically. Sometime after that my palms had grasped at my cheeks, my fingers spreading and shielding my eyes from view. Something happened then. For the first time, in no doubt my entire adult life, I began crying, without holding anything back, without worrying about where I was, in front of another human being. And when I started, when the sobs started breaking through in an effort to recapture some of the lost oxygen in my lungs, I knew that I had passed the turning point. There wasn't a chance of me turning back now, no chance in hell of me being able to hide my feelings any longer. It was all coming out and there was nothing I could do to stop it.

I felt rather than saw the arm being wrapped around my shoulder as I was pulled into a supportive and comforting embrace.

"Look," John whispered caringly, "it's really not that bad. You're not being stupid. You're just new at this, that's all."

My sobs turned into a mocking scoff, but the tears kept on pouring. "Yeah, of course that's it; it's not that Sherlock and I are seriously screwed up in the head or anything."

"Well, that probably helps." John said, returning to his joking tone in an attempt to cheer me up.

It didn't work. I was too far gone now for a single joke to make everything better. The floodgates had opened, and just as in the proverb, now they wouldn't stop.

"Why can't he just grow up?" I exclaimed in what would have been a scream if I hadn't been so broken at the time.

John's grip on my shoulders tightened as he muttered soothingly, "I know. I know."

It was all such chaos. I should have been able to hold my head up high and walk away. It wasn't meant to turn into something that would bring me to tears. It was meant to be a mere exploration of our curiosities. Just a little expedition, nothing more. How had it turned into something more? How had I let myself become so goddamn vulnerable? I wasn't supposed to be vulnerable. I was supposed to me Dr Melanie Hunt – the work-focused historian without emotional baggage or distractions. I was supposed to be strong.

John continued to mumble calming words into my ear over the following five minutes, stroking my upper arm and hushing me whenever my sobs became excessively loud. After that time, they began to lose their strength, an exhaustion taking their place inside me, my smoker's lungs being unable to keep up this exercise.

At last, I pulled my head away from the doctor's shoulder, although I didn't have nearly enough strength to retract completely.

I forced a small smile onto my mouth and made out in a tiny voice, "Thank you."

John returned the smile, although it did little to cover the continuing worries behind it. "No problem."

He leant forwards and placed a friendly kiss upon my cheek, probably not knowing what else he could possibly say at this moment.

And that's when it happened. The barely-there graze of his lips against my skin lingered a second too long. My emotions must have been running too high at this point. Our emotions must have been too worn out by my breakdown.

We shifted; a movement that would have been almost imperceptible if we had been standing on other sides of the room. John's lips landed a centimetre lower than they had been. My own caught the crease where his smile-lines began.

In what was probably no more than five seconds, they had found each other, a desperation behind the gentleness of the touch, my fingers reaching up and clasping at the side of his neck.

It stopped suddenly. Both of us reeled back at the same time, eyebrows positively embedded in our hair lines.

"Uh," was apparently all John could articulate. He immediately dropped his arm from my shoulder, jolting to his feet in a motion that caused the chair he had been sitting on to swerve backwards a good foot.

"Uh," he repeated, his eyes darting around the room and settling anywhere that wasn't me, "I should go."

I blinked, still too shocked to actually move from where I was.

"Yeah," I managed to make out. My head snapped around fervently as I lurched out of my astonishment, following his lead and not daring to peer upwards at the man. "Err, you should."

"Yeah," John agreed, checking his pockets. "I'll see you."

"Yep." I said, hearing the footsteps getting further away from me, no doubt towards the kitchen door and away from this terrifying moment. "See you."

Somewhere that seemed far too far away for it to be real, the front door opened and shut. I sat there, not knowing what to do with myself, for what seemed like hours, although it was probably nowhere near that long. My brain still hadn't gotten itself into gear yet. It was still too much of a blow. Because, really, how the hell was I supposed to process something like this?

Had I…

Had I just kissed John?

Boom.

Don't be too worried now. As I stated last a/n, I haven't gone completely insane – just a little bit.

We'll have to wait and see what becomes of this interesting situation, won't we? Well, I won't. I already know what's going to happen. But I thought using 'we' might be a bit more polite.

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