A/N: Yes, still not British, a doctor, or a detective. At a push, you could say I have tried for all three, but alas, never succeeded. -csf
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John.
The detective sees the familiar face of the man he knows so well, and represses a deep bone sheathed shudder.
Layers.
On the surface, John was quiet, efficient, alert, as he walked out of the worn brick walls of the hospital where he'd been working long hours shifts, fighting the invisible enemy, a virus that a society tries to normalize. This is the doctor, the patient health worker who will take your hand and assure you they are doing all they can to keep you alive, breathing, and will not give up on you. Steady, reliable, determined. All John, no surprises there, as if the man had been shaped in the womb to be a medic in a war zone as easily as a London consultant in a covid ward.
Look at John then and you see the determined gaze, the indefatigable hands, the reassuring smile. He is the material angel that helps you cling onto the hope of a miracle. The familiar face that greets you every round, and incentivises you to excel for him, make yourself all better for the doctors and nurses that never give up on you. With so few visitors allowed he's the presence you yearn for to brush away the fear, the loneliness, the pain. John knows this, he knows his bedside presence, when time allows for visits, changes the day a patient is having, can positively influence the outcome. So John always tries to oblige, even when his smile strains, and he is so tired himself that he envies the attention he gives onto others.
When the shift ends, and the man sheds layers of protective equipment to some overflowing biohazard bin, Sherlock thinks he can picture the first layer of John's essence fall too. As the doctor blinks in the pale daylight outdoors, an existence he has forgotten for over twelve hours, Sherlock sees the exhaustion on the drag of John's gestures, the hours of tireless work finally allowed to take their toll.
Sherlock harbours the good doctor in their landlady's car and hastens to take the silent blond home. They park the car under fine drizzle, and walk the rest of the distance to 221B. As Sherlock unlocks the familiar front door, he catches a glimpse of the doctor's sudden cold shudder, and the way he looks around as if he hadn't noticed the rain, and can't yet tell how his hair is plastered as muddy blond streaks over his forehead, or how his eyelashes hold a surprising amount of glistening rain droplets framing those big cobalt blue eyes. Then John blinks, awkward under the close scrutiny, and the rain droplets that so aptly ornated his eyelashes join the deep dark pools under John's eyes.
As a British man, John has a comment or another about the English rain. He can be bone tired and still comment the rain. So many English words for precipitation. Sherlock is sure John is an inexhaustible source of pluvious commentary.
Sherlock absently hums in agreement to whatever platitudes John settled for this day. Instead, he hears the slur on John's words as the accent spins and shifts on tiny particulates of exotic reflection, at the end of words or a strange inflection on a question. Cockney, Northern, foreign – like the lands where he saw soldiers spill their blood. Just fragments of a man too tired to be cohesive with himself. A shattered man, no longer a consistent whole, just myriads details that Sherlock needs – loves – to dissect, catalogue, understand.
Soon that layer breaks up, disintegrates under the pressure too, eroded by the tannins of tea and Baker Street. Sherlock thinks he can see best the next layer when John broods alone in his armchair, staring darkly over his mug's welcome-home perfect tea, as if it had done him personal injury. It's a dark world indeed when not even a cuppa can make justice to John Watson. Over the dark pool of reflective surface, the soldier emerges, analysing his actions, his wins and failures, the daily battle, the lives lost and the lives frayed but hanging on. He stands still as the tea cools from cosy to unpalatable, oblivious to Sherlock's worry from behind his chair.
Sherlock pretends to have his attention captured by the work he's doing under a mounted magnifying glass, but it's John whom he studies the whole time.
Eventually the doctor shifts, stirs, takes up the old mug to his thin lips and sips a bit of the disappointing beverage. John grimaces, and puts it down at the far edge of the side table, as far as he can drop it without allowing the ceramic to shatter on the floorboards. Exiled, forsaken, denied.
Sherlock has studied the timing of this period. He has learnt, he's a musician after all, the melody of John's near imperceptible gasps, tuts, silent groans, defeated sighs. A tormented war symphony from a man who takes responsibility over the world he cannot put right.
Just drop it, John. Let it go. Come home.
If Sherlock's secret strive is to be perfect, make every puzzle piece fit, find every answer in the world; John's drive is to be strong, a solid, unbreakable and resourceful man. The doctor will not allow himself to dwell long on his choices and their consequences. Only long enough, his friend knows, to learn lessons, and fix mistakes that are still within his grasp. In dealing with life and death decisions all day, there aren't many choices that can be reversed, so John usually gets up from his chair with a groan, massaging the small of his back, and paces uneven to the kettle (that Sherlock has just ticked on for him by a stretch of his arm), internalizing another defeat, one more day where he couldn't beat disease and death.
John busies himself making tea in two mugs – silently, demons still stirring him on the inside.
Sherlock knows this, as John will (very rarely but notably) lash out, breaking character for one torment filled moment, the true reflection of the weight of the world on his shoulders right now. John will toss the teaspoon viciously away to where he first unburried it among Sherlock's mess, rousing a pandemonium of fleeting pigeons from the kitchen window sill. He then shatters his expression in a creased brow (confusion) and a curling lip (amusement) at the birds flying away, and turns to Sherlock – finally – himself at last.
'What have you been doing all day, Sherlock? Feeding the pigeons, or are you training them to carry secret messages to your brother?'
And with a simple joke, a fugue of lateral thinking, John is harnessing the detective back as well. Pinning him down to the here and now, holding out a hand to the man who is every day afraid to lose the essence of his friend to the dark shadows cast around the doctor.
Sherlock knows it's not easy for John to work every day surrounded by the threat of a highly contagious virus, strict rules patterning his actions and interactions, his routines, his responses, but none quite enough to reassure a man who knows too well this is serious business. John never shied away from the fight, but, months on, the doctor is now weary, and the soldier in him is the one marshalling him on. Duty. Discipline. Command. John spends his day detached from himself in order to provide, to cope, to give.
Sherlock is the one who demands John's return to himself.
At times it would appear kinder to allow the exhausted doctor to persist in his zombie-like state of a high performing medical man. John could certainly remain stoically locked into the efficient persona for days on end. It's Sherlock who fears John one day may lose himself to it, not know how to return. So Sherlock always ensures John's return. Welcomes him back.
With a twirl of the homely dressing gown, Sherlock demands, energetic and wild in equal measures:
'Come, John, I have successfully achieved what Mother Nature has been too shy to do. I have merged a rat skeleton with a fish spine. I call it a Rash. It's either that or a Fat. And my brother already hoarded both titles, I'm afraid, as he's irritatingly lazy.'
A bewildered, unbelieving doctor looks puzzled. Tired but wondrous eyes follow Sherlock's lanky body navigating around the kitchen table, before he propels his own rusty muscles onwards, just a touch longer, in true curiosity. Moving out of his own interest, perhaps for the first time today.
'Why would you do that, though?'
There's no reproach in John's honest voice. Only amusement. He knows Sherlock is bored more often than not these days, and meddling with Nature's ways is the proper response not to destroy the beloved flat in his exploits.
'Medieval knights brought fantastic reports from exotic lands of such creatures, I'm merely writing my own treaty on the possibility of the occurrence of lost interspecies, John.'
'A few centuries late, no?'
'I've been pressed for time.' He shrugs, then fully open his face in a sly, near predatory smile that is so Sherlock that John shivers, and, damn it, yes, that last reticence of abandoning the day's work behind him melts away. Sherlock intoxicates him with his whimsical madness, the allurement of impossible dreams made tangible. Of take away meals on the sofa, and solving long distance cases through social media.
'A Fat is a combination of a fish and a rat, you say? We'll definitely name this one Mycroft, then.'
Sherlock chuckles, delighted, John is the most excellent partner in crime at all times.
John is home, and 221B is brimming full again.
'Middle Eastern food tonight, John?'
'Sure, though a bit exotic for you. Where did you get the idea?'
Sherlock smiles and holds his tongue. He'll pass John his phone when ordering. John's basic knowledge of the restaurant's owner's first language always pays off in large, generous portions of deliciously spiced meals. The fragrant meals often bring out John's tales of his deployment in the region, and the detective will quiet down, snuggled on his side of the sofa with his arms wrapped round his knees, hearing the valiant tales of the captain. He's never bored of those stories. These are good nights, as the cold draws nearer and the fire rages on the hearth, and Sherlock and John are home.
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