John isn't back by the next day but after 48 hours of observation the doctors are happy with his progress and allow him to go home with strict orders to rest and stay out of trouble.
Sadly, John muses, it is not like he can do anything else. He is to sore to do anything very active, he has no job to go to since he resigned and he is avoiding the internet like the plague since the taunts have started to arrive to his e-mail as well as his blog and it all just seems like really pointless selfpity.
With no work, no internet and no exercise he is left with little other than escapist entertainment. He tries to read but his mind is to preoccupied and in the end he spends most of his time in front of the television watching old re-runs and bad daytime TV.
The clinic has prescribed him a good dose of painkillers and he alternates between taking them zealously because it allows him to sleep, to slip away and feel very little of anything, and not taking them at all because he is terrified of the nothingness that they bring and the risk of addiction if he becomes too comfortable with the emptiness they provide him with.
And so he alternates between serene emptiness and painless sleep and mindless TV watching and complete and utter boredom and dull pain when he manages to jolt himself out of the black hole that is drug induced rest.
Gradually the pain recedes and strangely John finds that he misses it. It has been his focus and his constant in the past weeks, the one thing that brings him back from the boredom and to be quite honest the sickening self pity that drags him under as he hides from the world, and in all honesty even from Sherlock.
Sherlock, paces, he plays the violin, he experiments and he expects John to react, to shout at him tell him off for all the horrid things he stores in the fridge, but John doesn't. This more than anything has Sherlock worried.
More than anything Sherlock examines every detail of the case which apparently brought this upon them. But there is nothing there. It was a simple murder of a young child molester by the mother of his victim who also happened to be his sister. She was sent to prison for a relatively short sentence and released not that long ago. Her medical records from her time in prison are a sorry sight. The prison Doctor lists her wounds from week to week and there is no doubt that she is undergoing systematic torture from somewhere. Her inmates, judging by some of the injuries, but possibly also guards judging by the fact that there is very little record of anyone ever being punished for hurting the woman. Sherlock knows that if he shared this information with John he would be touched by it, affected, maybe even upset and so he is glad that John has stopped asking questions about what he is working on.
John, has stopped telling him off when he experiments on ungodly things. He has stopped yelling at Sherlock when he makes rude deductions about the things John watches on the incessant TV. John has even stopped forcing Sherlock to eat, possibly because he himself has all but stopped eating, and even a self prescribed sociopath can tell that these are bad signs, that as much as John protests that he is fine the slow but repeated battering of his body and mind is getting to him.
John doesn't say anything, when his phone pings with a text message from an unknown number and it reads 'What are you afraid of Doctor Watson?'. He doesn't say anything when the next day this message is followed by another one 'You don't seem afraid of being beaten Doctor Watson, are you afraid of being cut.' Or the next day when it reads 'Are you afraid of being burned' nor the next when it reads 'Or are you afraid of being violated… I can do any of these'. After that he starts to delete them even without reading them. He knows what kinds of things they will contain and he doesn't want to play into this maniacs hand… so his phone goes the same way as his social life and his internet… it gets restricted to only the most cursory and simple forms of communications.
The always likeable and kind John Watson has become a recluse. Even more so than he had been in the days after he go back from Afghanistan.
Without the blog the cases dwindle, the amount of cases that come their way is no longer as large and Sherlock is more inclined than ever to reject them. His worry for his flatmate is no longer even marginally concealed and he deems almost anything boring and takes only cases which he can investigate without leaving the flat.
They spend all their time in the flat together. Mrs Hudson takes pity and buys food, very little of which is ever cooked or eaten. They are more or less subsisting on tea, toast and irritation with the odd takeaway thrown in for good measure when Lestrade comes over and tries to ply them with cases.
Sherlock paces more, plays the violin all night and hasn't left the flat in weeks. John slowly heals, he attends his physiotherapy and finally arrives back at the flat with his knee no longer in a solid cast but in a strange hard walking boot that allows him more ease of movement. Still they do not leave the flat, they barely speak and especially not about the elephant in the room. In this case not a real elephant but rather the ever present threat from the man they have yet to name. It is driving them both mad but they are both flatly refusing to accept this fact.
By the way if anyone feels up to Beta reading me I don't have a Beta Reader... obviously.