A/N: I cannot explain the sea reference inside, except that I grew up by a harsh tempestuous sea and a salt washed shore. I can't quite help it, when Sherlock's colour shifting eyes constantly remind me of the moody sea, dangerous yet magnetic and alluring.
Warnings for long sequences without dialogue – is that the style of this plot sequence, or am I a lazy writer? – and overall excessive co-dependance of the two protagonists. -csf
9.
Sherlock abstains from commenting as the blond army doctor sits cross-legged on the bedspread and organises the half-dozen wooden models of diseased organs with slow, careful consideration. The detective actively repressed that thought that John would have been an adorable child, biting his lower lip in concentration as he played with his toys.
Lestrade is also there, pacing the exposed carpet and looking gloomily in John's direction, under the cover of John having his back to him. Sherlock didn't need to be a world renowned detective to deduce that Lestrade is less than convinced about John's case solving in the only way that absolves his grandfather and gives the man's grave digging escapades a higher purpose.
Sherlock ponders that Hamish's hobby is one he could entertain for himself, and Mrs Hudson would appreciate the neatness of model body parts, and John the lack of need to refrigerate them by exiling food.
John would require some persuasion before trying such a hobby – at which he'd excel (he can identify organs by feeling the musculature and tissue density, after all). Lestrade would go very green and refuse to try it out.
At least John is open to trying all sorts of new things for Sherlock. The same can't be said for even the best at Scotland Yard.
After that case that Sherlock solved for the Yard in Camden last year, well, surely Greg now believes there are psychopathic killers out there with a body parts fetishism. And if they exist this side of the turn of the century, why not the other side?
Sherlock wonders if Greg Lestrade can see it. That he himself is conflicted, torn between offering closure to his best friend, and pursuing all leads in the investigation before declaring the end of the case.
No, John doesn't get to do that. John is not the famous detective here. Not even the hard working Yarder in the room.
John is just the client, and clients don't get to dictate to Sherlock Holmes when to stop when they see the case ending satisfactorily then and there.
Sherlock is a tidal wave unleashed over crime, that can't be reigned in once the waves are pleasantly pounding the shore. If there's a storm at sea, Sherlock must crash the sands with a vengeful force, all salt and iodine and static electricity crackling in the air as the seagulls take shelter and the fish swim in the deeper denser waters. Sherlock will revolve the coastal shores, will toss up old wood, deep algae, molluscs shells and glass beaded from rolling on the sand, and somewhere along that hauntingly beautiful landscape of devastation and warring elements he will find his answers, and peace will return, as all falls back into the ancient scheme of things and justice returns to the land and the sea. No pebble stone left unturned.
Sherlock doesn't usually give up until he succeeds, no matter the cost.
Yet—
This is the peace John had eagerly sought. Does Sherlock want to jeopardise a peaceful, grounded, wholesome John Watson for a truth lost in time, generations ago? Sherlock owes nothing to John's father, the man who lashed out against his son when he lost his temper. The man who feared neighbours finding out his wife's father was digging up fresh infant graves in the parish graveyard. The man who was forced by his wife's demands to keep in their home an old man tainted with blood and fresh soil. It'd be her – John's mother – who'd keep her dysfunctional family together. And John misses her too much to talk about her; he's not truly ready yet. She's a ghostly figure, present in every tale in the background, but never coming to the forefront. Was it her, who asked her father to save her boy's life, to keep him safe from this strange illness? Was it her, handing job ads to her husband in towns where the fresh bodies piled up and Hamish would concentrate his next investigation? Was all this crisscrossing England – that gave John Watson a taste for living life on the move, that ultimately took him to foreign lands at war without a moment's hesitation – to save John from a possible fatal illness, or was she an accomplice for her father's compulsion to scavenge the dead?
Sherlock looks out of the window to the wasps swarming around the roof's gutter, where they've just started nesting. A disorderly mess, so unlike the bees with their stratified society and their collective thought processes. He's got a decision to make. Give John his peace of mind, or risk it all in the pursuit of the full truth.
.
DI Lestrade is a welcomed presence among the finely attuned duo. Never quite a part of their unity, lacking the uncanny ability to read Sherlock and John's minds the way they do off each other without a moment's thought, but nevertheless not a stranger, and never treated as one. In a short amount of time, he's dug up John's reasons to hand Sherlock one of the most precious cases he's ever had to investigate, he's supported John through some grim discoveries (his stomach was still a bit unsettled too), and they've reached what seems to be the logical end of the case.
And yet, Sherlock isn't convinced. Not that the consulting detective needs to say so, it's obvious for anyone who knows him. No elation, no euphoria, no arrogance in victory. All the hallmarks of success are conspicuously missing. And it's not because it was John, and not Sherlock, who called it. No, it's rare, but it has happened before. Sherlock never reacted with anything but a proud smile over John, and how far his "assistant" had come. Granted, usually it was some medical mystery or some battlefield knowledge underlying John's success, two areas where his expertise is clearly higher than Sherlock's. The detective took John's deductions in his stride and embellished them through a complete, eloquent speech, laying out the case completion to a baffled inspector.
And now the detective remains oddly silent, staring out of the window.
It won't have escaped Sherlock's notice how much this wishful case resolution works for John. And, despite Greg's reservations, it could be the correct resolution to John's grandfather's mystery.
Which will weight out the more in Sherlock's needs? Will he accept John's offer to end this right here, or will he insist on pursuing fully his life's call?
Anyone looking in on those two, and their Baker Street home, can see how compromised Sherlock is when it comes to John Watson. The man absolutely dotes on the army doctor. From a pushy flatmate acting like an entitled teenager brat to an understanding man walking on eggshells to preserve John's memory of his grandfather, Sherlock has come a long way. The shift in balance has long changed, the pivot point centred on Bart's rooftop. Right now, the scale falls onto John's side. Sherlock would bend over backwards to accommodate John's needs, all the while John is unbelievably unaware of this power shift.
Luckily, John is no Jim Moriarty, and John can be trusted to have Sherlock's best interests at heart.
Perhaps this power shift was meant to be, the scale's arms swaying backwards on their way to a perfect balance. Their first attraction to danger and each other was fiery and explosive, all consuming and dangerous. It couldn't last. Now it simmers like inextinguishable fire pits deep within, and waits patiently for the other to make the first move out of the stalemate. Greg believes they will, sometime soon, redefine their balance once again. So he keeps close, wanting to ensure those two mad men don't go about it the wrong way, don't ruin a good friendship over pride, stubborn silences or misunderstandings.
But before any of that, Sherlock has a decision to make. Close the case with an insufficient explanation, or pursue the ultimate truth no matter the consequences. John, or the Work.
.
Outside the bedroom window, the scrapping noise of a ladder being propped against the outside wall. Slowly, unhurriedly. The wasp's nest. Sherlock vaguely wonders why bother the wasps that haven't bothered the humans, but files it away, focusing his concern on John instead.
The detective knows he needs to help John, but John is making himself scarce, present but hiding in himself, and Sherlock has little help to handle an emotionally charged case. John's obliterate from his friends nearly criminal in itself.
There's Lestrade, of course, but Sherlock is just going to get mocked if he asks for help, isn't he?
.
John restlessly rearranges the wooden models collected from the shed's hideout. He can't believe he didn't remember it earlier. His mind is playing tricks on him, eclipsing old memories to favour moving on, still trying to protect him from something bad – whether a real threat or a perceived one. Handling the formaldehyde preserved biohazard sparked the long lost memories of glass jars glimmering in the dusk from tall shelves. It would be amazing that a child growing up among such things wouldn't contemplate becoming a doctor themselves. Or an undertaker.
Somehow, John has never wanted to become an undertaker. It's been more about fixing, solving patients illnesses, rather than respectfully delivering the dead to a final resting place. Speaking of which; yeah, granddad, a bit not good. Grave robbing. No wonder whole town's turned on Hamish. They haven't forgot it either, granddad, not even after all these years. Of course, going after John is utterly stupid and useless. Nevertheless it has alerted John that there definitely was something worthwhile investigating around his grandfather, and not just flickers of memories worming their way into fevered dreams when his shoulder really hurts. (His shoulder doesn't usually hurt, it just throbs to remind him it's got a personal dislike to high calibre bullets, something John can sympathise with.)
Those two criminals – one of them surely sporting a bad headache, in the end they had to leave him behind in recovery position – were useful in a certain way. Without them, John might have never unlocked those repressed memories from his childhood.
Repressed, yes, what is a child to do from seeing a makeshift autopsy in a garden shed? Or body parts decorating shelves in jam jars?
John doesn't think he'll ever want jam again, thanks.
Little wonder John is so used to putting up with Sherlock's macabre experiments back in 221B.
John groans to his thoughts, and his too sensitive stomach, and leans his forehead into his cupped hands, and tries to block the outside world from his overstimulated mind, looking for a moment's peace.
'John?'
'Sherlock, I—'
His blond hair strands strain further between his fingers, standing on edge. For a moment it's like there are only the two of them in the room; raw, unguarded, deeply honest. John growls to his demons, as he opens metaphorical door to set them free, prepared to hunt them down and finish them off once and for all.
'Sherlock, will you finish this case for me? I need to know.'
A pause of a few beats. John doesn't surface, he doesn't want to see the concern lines undoubtedly etched in Sherlock's face. The way he will be exchanging knowledgeable looks with Greg Lestrade.
'Naturally, my dear John', he hears the agreement and commitment soon after. Is that concern in the familiar voice, alongside relief, masked by the odd phrasing, nearly derived from Victorian propriety and gentlemanly honour?
John almost laughs, a bitter tasting laugh that comes up to his lips, poisoned and raw. When has he ever stopped Sherlock from being all he is?
Sure he asks for a more sanitary 221B, and to not be left behind at crime scenes, but he has never curtailed the other man's genius.
John doesn't intend to ever do so.
All the doctor needed was a little break, some time as he was reeling, before diving back in the game.
.
The blond army doctor looks up to the bright room, the winter sun filtering bravely through the window. He looks haggard, and circles nestle under his tired eyes, making them look dark, a bruised blue tinge to those irises. His hair stands on edge from where his fingers teased, and under the pale daylight Sherlock sees deeper hints of grey. The detective shudders as he sees his friend's shine so dulled, the natural gold polish almost gone now. It's odd. It makes John look like a stranger, someone Sherlock could have known in a different lifetime, in a parallel universe.
It's in those hands, those fighter hands with the softness of healing and caresses as negative spaces among the landscape of callouses and scars, that Sherlock focuses to recognise John Watson, at a moment where John is so obviously lost that he refuses to acknowledge himself.
That won't do. It just won't do. Sherlock will not lose his best friend to the monochromatic whims of a toned down John Watson.
.
The sudden smash of glass from the window panes comes as a surprise attack. It probably is, John realises first, as a metal can rolls menacingly over the threadbare carpet, hissing dark wisps of smoke. Enemy manoeuvres, likely a narcotic agent, infiltration will follow. Damn, they were too complacent, sitting ducks, easily traced by the men after them.
John thinks he curses mildly; later, others will inform him that his profanities would have made a life sentence convict blush. John is unaware of the surprise he elicits even of those that know him best, as he's moving first, out of muscular memory. He knows he's shouting at his friends to leave, to go. Could be English, could be an ancient language of selflessness whose writings wrap around mountains and sandy plains. John himself is wrapping the bedspread around the smoke bomb. Wooden blobs clank all over the thin carpet, vital case clues scattered across the room. The army doctor blinks through the acrid smoke puffing through fabric and padding, that he presses against his chest, he himself one last insulating layer designed to buy his friends the time they need to achieve safety.
John shouts once again for Sherlock to go, to get to safety, was there someone else there too? He can't think; smoke billows across his mind too, like dry heat stroking over sand plains, and he succumbs to the chemical haze.
.
John is not left behind. His orders to his friends – no, his military commands to those he will always protect before himself – all but a preposterous self-serving, pseudo-heroic notion. John is never to be left behind again. Sherlock holds on to the deceptively heavy soldier slung over his shoulder in a fireman's grip, John went slack the very moment he was perched into safety, his heroic smothering of the smoke bomb the only reason why Sherlock and Lestrade remain awake and running for safety right now.
Sherlock shudders as he painstakingly tries to file away the elation caused by the sight of the heroic soldier taking control during the insurgency. The blond hair, still dishevelled and wild, finally catching the sunlight from the shattered window just at the right angle and positively sparking as John shouted tight, sharp commands with the economic efficiency of leadership. The blue eyes, deep and strong, lost of the lost undertones they had been carrying for days. The man Sherlock carries to safety, the man he grabs over his shoulder, is the returned essence of John Watson, the selfless, courageous idiot with a core of solid gold, that Sherlock has missed, so much more than he had known. A bit not good, this is hardly the moment to gloat over the return of his John. Sherlock holds him tighter nonetheless.
Lestrade opens doors and yells instructions down the corridor with the nonchalance of authority. Sherlock carries the precious load, while trying to keep himself upright. The both of them are hacked by cough and breathlessness, still they refuse to be defeated.
They are the panicked wasps now, smoked out of the room into the open, fluttering away for freedom – an easy target. Even through his blinding panic over John (incapacitating the army doctor first, John would appreciate the war tactics here), Sherlock realises they can't follow the quickest path out. They are expected. His hands tighten their grip around John's waist, his possessive grip sure to leave bruises soon. He'll never let them get John, of course he'll never surrender this man who has changed his life forever.
'This way!' someone swoops in to advise helpfully.
Lestrade relaxes his face in relief, Sherlock squints hard at the newcomer. Their good samaritan is the other of the two men at the train station attack on John. Sherlock glares at the dubious heroic figure urging them through a back door of the B&B.
Is this a miraculous rescue, or an elaborate trap? Are these answers incoming, or the end of the line? Sherlock glances at Lestrade, before making up his mind.
.
TBC
