"Stop." John takes a deep breath. Lets it out again.
Sherlock pauses, his gaze piercing. "If you don't want to hear this right now, we can resume at a later time, but I do think you should know all the facts," he begins.
The doctor shakes his head slowly. He finally brings himself to meet his flatmate's eyes and is surprised to see something akin to remorse there.
John makes up his mind. He doesn't want to hear more about the history of the war, however. He's heard most of it before, from his father. "Go back. Tell me about your parents – and you."
The detective exhales, glad at least that John has started speaking. His next words fall out quickly. "My parents met in the year 1974. My mother was Mary Holmes, English. She worked as an engineer at a corporation called Undershaw Cryogenics. You wouldn't have heard of it. It was one of the many businesses closed down after the Wars due to suspected connection to the Augments.
"She met my father at a cryogenics research convention. I don't know the details of what happened after that but I do know that a couple of months later Mary found that she was pregnant. She'd only known Khan for a week or so before he'd been called off urgently on business. She contacted him only when she gave birth to Mycroft, and he started spending more time with her, taking a small part in Mycroft's upbringing. Apparently that small part wasn't enough, however, and our parents decided that if Khan would be busy too often, he wouldn't be a part of my childhood at all, to avoid any… problems. This was decided six years after Mycroft's birth, when they discovered that my mother was with child again.
"Mycroft had developed mostly as a normal human child would. His intelligence is, as you know, off the charts, but his physical and psychological state was average for a boy his age. It has remained so for his entire life thus far. But Mycroft inherited mostly from our mother. I… did not. When Mycroft was seven, Mary gave birth a second time. My father played little part in my life. However, despite this, or perhaps due to it…" here he pauses cautiously, "I was a difficult child.
"I didn't like other people. Well, neither did Mycroft, but he was always a bit of a manipulator. He was good at keeping other people from knowing how he felt about them. I, on the other hand, never cared what people thought, as you know. Unfortunately, I didn't like anyone, and no one liked me. I made enemies early on in life. Everyone has schoolboy rivalries, of course, but most boys' enemies don't end up in hospital with a fractured skull and two broken arms after a schoolyard fight." He stops, scrutinizing John again.
Who is blinking abnormally fast. He's not sure he wants to hear the details of Sherlock's amoral childhood, and yet he's morbidly fascinated. He's heard — and seen — worse. And he'd asked for it, hadn't he?
He really does want to know the truth, and all of it, but he doesn't want to hear absolute confirmation that his friend really isn't human.
But he listens, anyway. He nods for Sherlock to continue.
"I honestly didn't know what I was capable of, at that point. I was ten years old; I knew that I was cleverer than all the other children, and I didn't know who my father was. But all children, those days, grew up knowing who the Augments were. Most people alive today actually knew a lot about them before Tabula Rasa — I'll get to that later," he says when John opens his mouth to ask a question.
"So I knew who, or rather, what Khan was when he visited our flat a couple of weeks after. I didn't know his name, and I didn't know who specifically he was. The visit was coincidence, but the schoolyard incident was still fresh in my mind.
"He just showed up on our doorstep one day. I still don't know why he came. I'd never seen an Augment before, but I knew what he was, and it was the first time in my life I'd ever frozen in fear. When I closed the door, I told my mother, and then Mycroft and I were sent on a walk around the city. When we returned half an hour later, the stranger was leaving and our mother was still inside, devastated by something that we never really found out. I later discovered whom he was through a bit of research on my own.
"And those were the two most memorable points of my childhood, spaced within weeks of each other," Sherlock concludes.
John takes some time to process everything, holding Sherlock's gaze all the time. He finally nods, slowly. Sherlock flinches and looks away.
John makes his way over to Sherlock's chair. His flatmate starts again when John touches his shoulder.
"Sherlock."
The other man looks up. "John," he says, in response.
The doctor takes a deep breath. "Sherlock," he repeats. Suddenly he realizes that he doesn't know what he's going to say. "Er. Look. I was re-taught about the Eugenics Wars by my father, years after I forgot. I guess you know that already. He fought against the Augments. Obviously. He and my mother were both killed because of them. So I suppose I have some kind of justification in hating them."
Sherlock pulls away at this point and stares at the window, but the drapes are closed.
John says his name again to get his attention. "I don't hold you accountable for the Eugenics Wars, or the actions of your father and his comrades, or for being who you are. I don't hate you, Sherlock. I know that you're capable of love and I think your father was, too, and I think that you are the most brilliant and best and most human human being that I have ever met. And nothing you tell me will ever convince me otherwise."
Sherlock is looking at him again, with wide eyes.
"I'm bloody angry with you, still," John says, before Sherlock can open his mouth. "I can't live with secrets like that hanging over you and I don't want anything so terrifyingly huge like this popping up again, so you are going to tell me everything."
The world's only consulting detective is perfectly happy to oblige.
John pre-empts him again. "Not right now. Not everything right now. But you can start with Moriarty, and why he's involved in all this, because I know he is. And then you can explain about this tabula rasa thing. Tomorrow."
Sherlock agrees quickly.
John realizes then that his hand is still on Sherlock's shoulder. He's putting too much weight on it, so he removes it. It suddenly registers that Sherlock is covered in his own blood, from his fall from Bart's, but he doesn't seem to be too bothered by it. John is a doctor, however, and so he pushes him to the bathroom to stick his head in the shower, at the very least.
But first, on an instinct, he brings him to standing and pulls him into a hug.
Sherlock is so surprised that he wavers and nearly falls back into the chair, and something in the back of John's mind realizes that the only time he's seen Sherlock embrace anyone was on the second day that they'd known each other, when they were entering 221B for the first time. He'd hugged Mrs Hudson, and since then, years ago, John can't recall a specific incident when his best friend had hugged anyone else.
Sherlock is an awkward hugger, but perhaps he hasn't got much practice. He's tense at first, but finally relaxes and melts into John, if that is possible of the taller man.
They get to the bathroom after a bit of persuasion on John's part. Sherlock protests quietly, saying that the only thing that had broken completely was his shoulder blade, and that it's setting already. John can already see that, under the blood, the skin wounds are mostly closed. They don't even scar; the skin just smooths out over everything. But he wants to look at Sherlock's head, because his face and hair are laced with red.
After a few minutes of hot rinsing, John can see the very thin ridge on Sherlock's skull where the bone had fractured. He probes it tentatively and finds that it is actually healing itself, slowly, as he watches.
It's a medical marvel, but he'd expect this of someone with Khan Noonien Singh's blood.
He tells Sherlock to wash completely, then walks out of the bathroom with some surprising reservation.
=-o
Ten minutes later — Sherlock showers quickly — John does a full examination.
The entire experience is clinical. John is the doctor, Sherlock is the patient. Or this should be the case, but Sherlock's sitting on his bed in just his underwear and John finds himself distractedly noticing that in all the time they've spent together, he's never seen Sherlock this undressed before.
It isn't even be that unusual for two flatmates to have seen each other at least slightly unclothed for the simple reason that they live together. John's been shirtless in 221B, after all. But he guesses that Sherlock would be reluctant to show too much skin due to the fact that every single pale inch of it is pristinely smooth. John can't find a single blemish. Augment skin, he thinks, briefly.
By now, the fracture in Sherlock's skull is barely noticeable. Half of his left shoulder is still a bit out of place but the rest of Sherlock is as Sherlock usually is.
"Satisfied?" Sherlock asks impatiently, once John has examined him.
John finds, surprisingly, that he is more than satisfied. He's pleased, but with what, he isn't sure.
o-=
The afternoon — it's afternoon by now — passes quickly.
They spend it having an astonishingly civilised conversation regarding what to tell their friends.
John finds it interesting that Sherlock is actually using the word "friend" freely, but he can't fathom what has caused this sudden change.
They also need to figure out what to tell the public. People had seen him fall from Bart's. Presumably, people had also seen him get back up after the fall, which should have been fatal from that height.
"Look, it's not up to me, but I think you should tell Molly and Lestrade and Mrs Hudson, at least." John lays out his opinion.
"It's not something you just tell people, John." Sherlock is back to his previously agitated state.
John, on the other hand, is the calm one for once. "I'm not proposing we let Anderson know, Sherlock. Or the general public, for that matter. But those three, they need to know. Anyway, there isn't anything that you can't tell someone. You told it to me, didn't you?"
"You watched me fall off of a building and survive," Sherlock says, then winces again, as if this reminder of his heritage will suddenly cause John to walk out.
"You made me watch," John points out.
Sherlock blinks. "I did. I did, didn't I?" He almost sounds surprised. "Why would I do that?"
"You tell me," John says quietly.
Sherlock doesn't answer.
They get back to the question at hand.
"So what about the general public? That crowd that saw you?"
Sherlock shrugs. "I'll say it was some sort of trick. Not many of them were in actual view of the pavement at the time that I hit. That ambulance station blocked a lot of the area."
"And the few people who could see the whole thing?"
"We'll say the same thing. It was a trick. People will believe anything," Sherlock says dismissively. "They'll eventually convince themselves that they didn't see what really happened, that it happened too fast for them to really see what was going on. That's the way normal peoples' minds work."
And that's when John understands that he's not "normal people". Not to Sherlock. He says this out loud.
Sherlock is surprised again. Today has been a record day for surprises, even for Sherlock and John.
He is solemn when he says, "John. There are ten million Johns in the world, and ten million doctors, and fifty million soldiers, but Doctor John Hamish Watson, formerly of the Fifth Northumberland Fusiliers, is the least pedestrian man I have ever met."
And at this point public announcements and medical marvels are banished from the mind.
Author's note: This fanfic was originally published on Archive of Our Own. I have not written anything new in this story for several months. I have several WIPs currently, and I'm having problems with pacing and such, so have decided to focus solely — only for now — on one of my fics, Seasons of Strangers. For the rest of the multi-chapter fics that I am planning on developing further, I am posting this notice to let any and all readers know that there will not be any chapter updates any time soon. That said, this post is also a guarantee that I will be continuing the story, no matter how long it takes. It simply means that I will no longer be focusing any notable part of my attention on developing the storyline, but on continuing and finishing Seasons of Strangers.