Johnny Blue-Eyes

Chapter 15: "Telling" vs Telling everything, take 1

John was feeding Alice her breakfast of mashed bananas mixed with disgusting smelling rice cereal when he suddenly remembered Sherlock had never called or texted him back yesterday. He knew from Mycroft's call, and also Sherlock's apparent text from Mycroft's phone, that he was all right, of course. Well, not lying dead in an alleyway, at least. John shook his head as he realized that lately whenever he hadn't seen or heard from Sherlock in a while, his thoughts always immediately went to the fear that perhaps he was dead. So what did that mean about their relationship? More like parent and child than friends, that's what, he thought ruefully. Mary wasn't the only one treating Sherlock like an overgrown toddler.

While he scooped up a spoonful of mashed goop with his left hand and waved it hopefully toward Alice's mouth, he pulled out his phone with his right and dialed Sherlock's number. He was unlikely to answer, John knew, but at least he could leave him another message asking him to call. Maybe he'd get the hint at some point.

So he was surprised when Sherlock answered on the second ring, in a voice that sounded a bit scratchy, but mostly awake. "Ah, John, I was just about to text you."

"Text me? What about phone me? I've left you three messages. Why didn't you phone me back yesterday?"

"Well, it was the middle of the night before I got my phone back. I didn't suppose you'd want to be woken up at half three in the morning."

"You got your phone back in the middle of the night? Mycroft didn't give it to you right away?"

"Obviously not. I've just told you." Sherlock's voice sounded defensive now, so John reigned in his irritation and tried to take a neutral tack.

"All right, I understand. I was worried about you. Are you all right?"

"I'm fine. I just—" but John missed the rest of what Sherlock was about to say because Alice started screeching impatiently for her next bite. When it was not supplied immediately, she smacked her cereal-covered hands on the tray and wailed.

"Sorry, Sherlock, just a minute." John loaded up another bite and shoved it into Alice's mouth, whereupon she immediately spat most of it out again. "All right, love, I don't know what you want then!"

"It sounds like you're. . . busy."

"No, just hang on. I just have to—" he tucked the phone under his chin, grabbed one of Alice's flailing hands and attempted to wipe the worst of the chunks of cereal and bananas off, but succeeded only in smearing it around. At least the wailing had mostly stopped. "Don't hang up. I want to know what's going on."

"It's not important. There's—um—nothing going on. I'm fine."

"That's not what Molly said yesterday. You owe her an apology, by the way." John dropped one of Mary's homemade rusks* onto the highchair tray and stepped back. His hands were nearly as covered in mashed bananas as Alice's were. The phone was falling out from its place under his chin, but his hands were too messy to grab it, so he adjusted his shoulder and moved to the sink to wash his hands.

"I don't see why. Molly overreacted."

"No, she didn't. Her reaction was perfectly reasonable. You were the one who was out of line."

"But she—" But the rest of whatever Sherlock had to say was lost because Alice started shrieking again. When John looked back at her, he discovered that she had flung the rusk onto the floor and was fisting her tiny, filthy hands into her hair, which was stiff with goo.

"Oh, Alice!" he exclaimed. How did someone so small create such chaos? "Sherlock, I'm sorry. You know I'm here for you, right? You can tell me anything."

There was a slight hesitation before Sherlock answered. "Yes, I know that."

It was obvious breakfast was over and it was now bathtime. John tucked the phone under his chin again and removed the highchair tray one-handed while holding a squirming Alice into the seat with the other hand. "I really do want to know what's happening."

He scooped Alice up out of the seat and she immediately grabbed the sides of his head and attempted to give him a slimy open-mouthed kiss on the nose, covering his face and hair with sticky goo. "We can talk later, yeah? Alice is covered in cereal and bananas and now it's in my hair as well.

"There's no need. I'm fine."

"Sherlock. . . " John set Alice down on the floor of the bathroom and she immediately started crawling away, leaving a trail of sticky, slimy handprints across the floor. "Come back here!"

"I haven't gone anywhere."

"No, I didn't mean you, Sherlock." He caught Alice by the back of her sleepsuit and reeled her in one-handed while turning on the water in the bath. "Don't do that." There was silence on the other end of the line. "Sherlock?"

"What?"

"I said don't do that."

"Oh, I thought you were talking to Alice. Don't do what?"

"That thing you do."

"What. . . thing I do?"

"The thing where you pretend to be fine when you're not. I know the truth." Alice, who was still struggling to get away, started to howl, and John shouted over her. "Alice and I are coming by in a bit—No, you don't get to say no—Alice can hang out with Mrs Hudson while we chat."

"Alice could come with you. I don't mind."

"Are you sure? It'll be much easier for us to talk without her crawling all over your flat finding gruesome ways to kill herself."

"I haven't seen her in nearly a week, John," Sherlock said in a serious voice. "Bring her."

"All right then. Oh, and call Molly! She's worried about you."

Later that morning, John packed Alice in the front pack and took a cab to Baker Street. He wasn't coming empty-handed: he had two of Mary's famous jam tarts wrapped in aluminium in the side pocket of the nappy bag. Every time Sherlock came to their flat, his first stop was always their refrigerator to check for jam tarts. Mary claimed to find it quite endearing (and kept the fridge stocked accordingly), while John decried it as yet another example of Sherlock being treated as a spoilt child.

He heard the violin as soon as he entered the door to 221. Alice, who loved the violin more than life itself, started kicking him in the side in excitement. "Yes, love, that's Sherlock," John said distractedly. He didn't recognize the piece, but something about the key and tempo changes made the music sound bright on the surface, with sad undertones, sort of melancholy. The sorrowful music swelled and followed him as he climbed the stairs.

He knew a knock would be futile, so after a moment's hesitation, he opened the door to find Sherlock standing at the window facing away from him, wearing his coat over his pyjamas. He didn't turn, although he must have known John was there because the music changed, became the waltz Sherlock had written for his and Mary's wedding.

John looked around the flat, which had been tidied up a little, obviously in honor of Alice's visit. John could still spot at least ten ways she could wreak havoc if she weren't carefully supervised, but he supposed he could give Sherlock credit for trying. The wall above the sofa was covered with a huge map of London, which hadn't been there the last time John had been at the flat. Photos were pinned to it in various places, with a cluster centered around a section of the Newham borough. All the photos seemed to be of one man: hulking, bald, with a crooked nose and deep-set, brooding eyes.

He realized that the music had stopped, although Sherlock hadn't turned around yet. "Hey, Sherlock," he greeted him, keeping his tone light. Sherlock's response was to turn without looking at John, set the violin on the side table, and flop into his usual chair. John was amused to see the collar of his dressing gown sticking out from under his coat.

As soon as John removed Alice from the front pack, she immediately started trying to escape his arms to get to Sherlock, but John wrangled her back, patting her on the back to fend off her escalating noises of discontent at the situation. Ordinarily Sherlock would have held out his arms immediately in a silent demand for John to hand the baby over, but this time he stayed slumped in the chair, eyes fixed on the far wall.

John frowned as he looked Sherlock up and down: coat pulled tightly about himself even though the flat was warm, shoulders down, face twisted into a scowl, hair uncombed. John wasn't surprised that his eye was blackened, as Molly had told him about that, but he was curious as to how he had obtained the swollen lip that completed the look.

"All right?" he asked. That would usually draw an indignant reaction from Sherlock, something along the lines of "Of course I'm all right." But all he did was shrug, which to John spoke volumes.

"Right. Well, I've brought you something." He shifted Alice to his hip and pulled the tarts from the nappy bag, held them out of her reach as he folded back the foil, and set the package on the side table next to the violin, expecting that Sherlock would pounce as soon as he saw them. Sherlock glanced over at the tarts, but his hands stayed in his lap, where he was picking at the sleeve of his coat. After a few seconds, he appeared to remember his manners and said "Please express my gratitude to Mary."

John's lip twitched at the odd wording. "All right, I'll do that." He looked Sherlock over again and spotted the bandages wound around his feet, peeking out below the hem of his pyjama bottoms.

"Did you hurt your feet too?"

"They're fine."

"Molly said you ran out of her house without your shoes. Is that what happened to them?"

Sherlock shrugged. "It's not important. They're fine."

"And what happened to your mouth?"

"I told you, it's fine. It was an accident."

"Sherlock, what's going on?"

"Who says there's anything going on?"

"Well, you haven't bathed and you're hiding behind your coat, for one. . ."

"I'm not hiding. I'm cold."

"Doesn't seem cold in here to me," John said. Sherlock didn't answer that, so he continued. "Sherlock, you ran out of Molly's flat saying vampires were chasing you. Obviously there's something wrong. I'd like to know what it is."

"My brother didn't speak to you?"

"No, not a word."

"Oh."

John pulled over a footstool in front of Sherlock's chair and sat on it with Alice on his lap, facing Sherlock who still hadn't made eye contact. "I'd like to know what happened yesterday. Molly said you destroyed her teddy bear. She thought you were having a flashback or something."

"Hmm. . . have you seen the news today?"

John thought back. He had spent the morning covered in rice cereal with bananas, bathwater, snot, spit-up, and baby poop. No one had warned him parenting would involve quite so many disgusting bodily fluids. So no, he hadn't had a chance to sit and read the paper. "No, I was a bit busy with Alice." The subject of his comment squirmed on his lap in another futile attempt to get to Sherlock, but John held her back, bouncing her on his knee soothingly.

Sherlock picked up his phone off the side table and tapped the screen a few times, then held it out to John, who took it slowly. He wasn't sure yet what today's news had to do with Sherlock's freakout yesterday. Had he murdered someone overnight? Alice tried to grab the phone from his hand, gummy mouth open, so John pulled it up to the side, out of her reach. As he focused on the screen, he felt the baby lifted off his lap, then heard her happy gurgle.

Typically at this point Sherlock would start babbling nonsense at Alice in baby talk ("It's called Child-directed speech. It's good for her," Sherlock had told John seriously when John had goggled at him in surprise the first time he had done it), and then Alice would laugh until she spit up all over him. But this time the initial happy gurgle was followed by silence. John glanced up to see Alice chewing contentedly on the tie to Sherlock's dressing gown while Sherlock stroked her downy hair and stared blankly at the wall.

With a frown, John returned his attention to the phone. On the screen was an article from the Daily Mail, with the headline in huge bold letters, POLICE MAKE ARREST IN PAEDOPHILE VIOLIN INSTRUCTOR CASE. What the actual hell?

Under the headline was a blurry photo, of a police cruiser in the semi-dark, with an indistinct figure of a man with curly dark hair standing beside it. His face was just a white blob, but of course John knew right away who it was. Another head was visible in the back of the patrol car, facing away. John had no idea who that was. The driver of the car was turned away from the camera too, but John recognized her by her hair as well. It could only be Donovan. The caption read, "Sherlock Holmes, the renowned private detective, apparently assisted police in the capture last night of Rainer Lindt, a violin instructor arrested on suspicion of child sex assaults dating back to the 1970s." Below the photo was a smaller one, an outdated headshot of a man with slicked-back dark hair and thick black-framed glasses.

With a sick feeling gathering in the pit of his stomach, John hurriedly scanned the first paragraph of the article. Police made an arrest early this morning in the case of the paedophile violin instructor. Videotapes featuring child sex assaults had been mailed to law enforcement over a week ago, and police, with the help of Sherlock Holmes, determined tonight that the alleged perpetrator was this man, Rainer Lindt, formerly a member of the London Symphony Orchestra, who had been a local violin instructor in the Southwark neighborhood in the 1970s through the 1990s. . .

The article continued, but John had read enough to get the idea. He put down the phone and looked up at Sherlock. Alice had snuggled back into his shoulder and he was absently brushing his thumb over her arm just below her elbow, staring into space, expressionless. "This was your violin instructor?"

"Excellent deduction, Dr Watson," Sherlock said drily.

So many questions sprang to John's mind that he couldn't decide which one to ask first. Finally he blurted out, "How old were you?"

"Six, I think. That's when I started at that school."

The sick feeling in John's gut intensified and tried to crawl up his throat. "And you never. . . told anyone?"

"I didn't remember, until Molly shoved that stupid bear in my face."

"The bear?"

"He had that same bear sitting on his telly. It was always watching. I didn't know it had a camera in it."

"But you didn't remember?"

"No. I deleted it."

"Suppressed it," John corrected. "It's called dissociation."

"I didn't suppress it, John. I deleted it."

"There's no shame in dissociation. It's not exactly common, but it can be a normal way of dealing with the pain of traumatic childhood memories."

"I'm not traumatized. I wasn't in pain, I just chose not to remember, so I deleted it."

"But now you've remembered? Doesn't that indicate the memories weren't actually deleted?"

"Hm, apparently not as completely as I thought. It was that stupid bear."

"What happened when you saw the bear?"

"I remembered staring at it the whole time. And I could feel—" Sherlock suddenly broke off, eyes on the wall over John's shoulder.

John waited for several seconds for Sherlock to continue, but Sherlock just continued to stare at the wall, with his lips pressed together and his eyes distant. "Could feel what?" he prompted finally.

Sherlock blinked and focused his gaze back on John. "It brought back the memories, that's all." He flipped his hand dismissively. "It surprised me."

"That sounds awful. I'm sorry that happened to you," John said carefully, searching for the right words to get past the emotional walls that Sherlock was throwing up.

"I don't need your sympathy, John. It's a distraction. I need to focus."

"Focus on what?"

"On the McClinchy homicide case. I've been tracking Popovic's movements and I have his location narrowed down to the Newham Borough."

Sherlock set Alice down on the floor, where she immediately began to crawl toward the most dangerous thing in the room, a rack of test tubes half-full of mysterious liquids which stood next to the coffee table. John scooped her up as Sherlock vaulted himself out of his chair, stepped around John and over the coffee table, and stood on the sofa facing the London map. "See, here? He's walking west on Green Street at four in the morning, most likely heading home after a long night's work murdering." There was a hint of savage glee in Sherlock's voice.

John stared at Sherlock's back as he gestured at the photos on the map. The man seemed supremely unaffected by something John knew had to have been incredibly traumatic. And the fact that Sherlock had suppressed it (whatever what he may call it, that's what it was) meant that he had never processed it. John knew Sherlock's brain didn't work the same way as everyone else's, but he also knew that Sherlock wasn't as impervious to sentiment as he pretended to be (or maybe—wished he was?).

"John, come here and look at this. I need a sounding board." Sherlock had taken down one of the photos and was examining it with his nose nearly pressed to the paper.

"Yeah, all right. I'm coming."

*A rusk is a piece of hard, twice-baked bread, often used as a teething biscuit.