Chapter Text
It was good. It was all good. They had survived; bruised and bloodied, physically and mentally, but they’d come through. The Holmeses, sons and parents, were working towards, if not peace, at least acceptance of the mistakes made and their terrible consequences. John was feeling more like a real father every day, and thinking very seriously about moving back to Baker Street.
It was all good. Really. But—
It started small. Waking up to wails over the baby monitor, and realizing it was half-eight and he’d slept through the alarm, again. Staggering out to care for his daughter, aware of a raging headache and a mouth that tasted like he was storing her used nappies in it. Swearing it wouldn’t happen again, only to wake three days later in the same state.
Then there was the forgetting: forgetting what he had for dinner the night before. Forgetting, until the next morning, that he had promised to go help Mrs. Hudson move furniture the previous evening. Worst of all, most frightening of all, forgetting to set up a childminder for Rosie until he was actually picking up his keys to go out the door.
It was almost as bad as the period just after Mary died. When he had left Rosie at the neighbors one evening and didn’t remember she was there for two days.
Nearly repeating that horrible history stopped him. For a while.
One of the only good things that had come out of the whole horrifying affair (no, bad choice of words, or at least painful choice)—the events of Sherrinford, had been John’s reconciliation with his sister. They would never be truly close—too much water, too much alcohol, under that particular bridge—but John had found, down in that well, that he didn’t want to die estranged from his only remaining family member.
They started slowly, carefully, meeting up. Coffee at midday, quick lunches—nothing that required long periods of time together, but long enough to make tentative steps towards connection. By the time two months had passed since Eurus Holmes had tried to drown him, John was heading over to Harry’s for dinner at a restaurant once a week or so (since Harry never, ever cooked), or she would come to his.
Harry was sober—bitterly so, as it happened. She was quite blunt in her feelings—she resented sobriety, when you came right down to it. Resented the loss of chemical calm, especially when she acknowledged that she could never have it again. But she had stuck grimly to her program for more than six months now, even after release from the 60-day inpatient detox that she’d never mentioned to John.
John had been—not hurt, exactly, but saddened that she’d never told him. “Why not, Harry? I could have visited, could have helped you—”
“Nope,” Harry barked. “You couldn’t. You’re good at coping with emergencies, Johnny, but you’re pants at long-term support. Especially when that support requires you to not judge the recipient.” Her face softened. “And you had too much else on your plate. I’m not…I don’t blame you. I never have.”
“For what, Harry? For your drinking? Not to blame for that one, ta,” John said, just a tad too harshly.
“No,” Harry said. “For your being too much like Dad. It’s not your fault, just like the drinking isn’t entirely my fault. Genetics doesn’t fuck around. Both of us can attest to that.”
“I’m not—I’m nothing like Dad,” John sputtered. “I’ve never hit you, or any other woman. I would never hit Rosie. And I don’t drink too—well, I don’t drink like Dad.” He found himself nauseous and fighting off a surge of red-hot anger.
“But you hit Sherlock. Hit him a lot, from what you’ve said,” Harry said quietly.
Before Harry could say anything more, John stood and left her sitting in the folksy restaurant. They didn’t speak again for a week. When Harry did finally call and ask if she was welcome for their usual dinner the following night, John gave her a brusque, “Of course”. They never discussed Dad again, or hitting, and especially not drinking.
Not even after Harry found the empty bottles in the bin. She cut her eyes at John, looked back, while he stood frozen at the kitchen sink, then moved away and started talking about Rosie’s new tooth.
But John had seen, and thought, and agonized. He’s been through a version of this, an ugly version, after Mary’s death, and managed to stop. He never wanted to hurt anyone like he’d hurt Sherlock again, and he didn’t want to drink himself to death.
So, he changed—well, somewhat. He bought no more hard liquor. Beer, that was the thing. Harmless, even in fairly large quantities. Not that he’d use large quantities.
Gradually, though, he did.
About the time he started purchasing beer a case at a time, he noticed another familiar, troubling symptom. He was angry again. So very angry, and often for no discernible reason. He was angry at shop girls; he was angry at patients who failed to fill out forms properly; he was angry when his favourite show wasn’t on telly when he expected it.
He reduced the beer purchases. It didn’t help, so he bought more. Because he was still angry (and terrified, honestly)—angry, now, that the anger had become independent of his drinking.
It hadn’t been, once upon a time. Now, granted, in retrospect it seemed like John had always been angry, to one degree or another. He had a reputation as a hothead throughout school; being a small kid didn’t help, of course, but his classmates learned the hard way that “small” didn’t mean “helpless”.
But he really hit his stride, in a lethal kind of way, once he discovered alcohol in his late teens. Up to that point he’d avoided it—the influence of his father, and his father’s heavy drinking, made John determined to avoid the same pitfalls. But at uni, and then going through military training, he fell in with a group of hard-drinking, hard-partying friends, who laughed at his concerns and promised to tell him if he ever stepped over the line. He tried it; he liked it; he kept doing it.
He never fully crossed that “line”, but he danced along it for a number of years. And in those same years, the anger that he’d somewhat learned to control roared back. John was the one who, though he rarely started fights, could always be called upon to end them. Usually one of the smallest men in the room, he was nonetheless the one who virtually always walked away the victor. Once he got angry enough, he had no care for potential consequences. He spent more than one night in the drunk tank, waiting for his friends to sober up and bail him out.
What he never told anyone (and, when sober, hated) was how good that anger felt—how cleansing. Using his fists to prove his worth. And, when he was drunk enough, being fiercely proud of being feared.
It all came to a head in Afghanistan. John loved it, at least at first: loved combat surgery, loved doing field triage, loved the adrenaline rush, followed by the surge of accomplishment for saving a life. But he didn’t love the losses; wasn’t prepared to accept that not every soldier could be saved, or that his own skills sometimes just weren’t enough. And, after one too many losses, John marched into one of his fellow surgeon’s tents, grabbed the bottle of whiskey he knew resided in a spare pair of boots, and proceeded to drink himself insensible.
When he awoke, one of his friends stood beside his bunk, paracetamol, water and a bucket at the ready. John spent a miserable 12 hours, then went into his next shift as if nothing had happened. No one said anything about it.
Until it happened again. And again. Until finally, John was starting his day with beer and toast. And the anger came roaring back, and John gained a reputation, once again, as a hothead.
The end, when it came, was utterly predictable when looked at from a distance of almost 10 years. John never showed up for his shift drunk, never worked drunk (since, by now, his morning beer or two didn’t impair him to any significant degree), never drank during a shift. But, every night that he had nothing else on, he would head back to his tent and drink until he could no longer reliably fill a glass.
The night that changed his life, then, he had had roughly a quarter of a bottle of whiskey, followed by at least two beers. He was on his bunk, snoring away, when an alarm rang through the camp, alerting them to incoming wounded on helicopters.
He slept through the alarms. He slept through the landing. He didn’t wake until a corpsman burst frantically in and began dragging him bodily to the showers. While John leaned, soaked, sputtering and furious, against the side of the shower stall, James Sholto came in, grabbed John’s head and shoulders and shoved a finger down John’s throat. Once John had vomited up everything he’d eaten and drank for the past two days, Sholto washed away the results, handed John a large bottle of water, a towel and a set of scrubs.
They spent the next 11 hours side-by-side in surgery. John didn’t kill anyone. That was the best he could have hoped for.
They could have court-martialed him. John knew it. John was pretty sure he deserved it. But James Sholto, thankfully, disagreed.
After their marathon surgery shift, Sholto ordered John back to his quarters, with a command to present himself, appropriately groomed and clad, in eight hours. John staggered to his bunk, sure he’d never sleep, and woke to his usual alarm six hours later, with no memory of lying down.
He presented himself, miserable and stone-cold sober, twenty minutes before his appointed meeting. Sholto looked up from his desk, noted John’s attire and shaking hands, and proceeded to ignore him until the previously-set hour.
As an alarm chirped from his watch, Sholto put aside his work, stood and closed the office door. Then he came back and sat on the edge of his desk, directly in front of John. He leaned forward and looked directly into John’s eyes.
“Can you quit?” he asked. “Do you want to?”
“Yes,” John said, his eyes filling and overflowing, knees threatening to go. “Oh, God, yes.”
And he did. Oh, he had a bit of help—Sholto insisted on it, made John attend counseling once a week for the next six months. John went, and talked, and hated every damn minute of it. But it worked—John never drank anything stronger than tea for the next three years, and the anger bled out of him as if someone had poked a hole in the place where he stored it.
By the time his second tour in Afghanistan ended at the end of a sniper’s rifle, John had been able to transition to a cautious relationship with alcohol—the occasional beer or stout, even a finger of whiskey now and again, without ever triggering the urge for more. The anger, for the most part, stayed away, and John was almost happy.
Then he got shot. And then he met Sherlock Holmes. And then the two of them met James Moriarty.
Very early on in his relationship with Sherlock, alcohol had re-entered the picture, but not to a worrying degree, certainly not in an abusive way. The anger, too, crept up, but not in an alarming fashion, considering their circumstances.
As time went by, both alcohol and anger seeped into John’s life. He wasn’t quite the hothead yet, but he ended many evenings with a finger, or two, or three, of the fine whiskey Sherlock’s brother gave them as gifts periodically and Sherlock never drank. His temper flared, but he hadn’t hit anyone who didn’t deserve it (criminals didn’t count). He shouted at Sherlock, but Sherlock both deserved and expected it, most of the time.
By the time Sherlock “died”, though, John could feel things slipping away from him again. In retrospect, his chinning the Chief Inspector was a triumph—he wanted to keep hitting the man until he never got up. He stopped himself--but, in the darkest hours afterward, hated himself for having done so.
John suspected, months later when he was finally able to think, that people would have assumed that a tragedy like theirs would have released the shaky hold John had on both his drinking and his temper. But nothing could be further from the truth.
Through the long, grey months, then years, of Sherlock’s absence, John wasn’t drinking (much—although there were exceptions) and wasn’t angry. Wasn’t anything, actually, once the initial appalling pain faded. John faded, in fact, until, by the time he met Mary, there was very little left.
And then there was Mary, and a returned Sherlock. John found himself again; he also found alcohol, and at least some of his anger (mostly at Sherlock—initially, in one of those moments when the anger took over, and John scared himself a bit). But it was manageable. It was fine. It had to be fine, once Sherlock’s own damage started to reveal itself, and John found himself acting as both friend and counselor to a deeply traumatized, frighteningly fragile consulting detective. Something, maybe the renewed purpose, made him temporarily whole.
He lapsed on alcohol as the wedding approached—realized, as he prepared to go on Sherlock’s Sherlock-y idea of a stag night, that he couldn’t get through it sober, and that beer wasn’t going to do it. But it was fine, again—not John’s first night in the drunk tank, after all, and he was fairly sure Sherlock had spent his time there as well, though certainly not for alcohol.
The wedding itself was madness, of course, but John kept his even keel—the excitement outweighed any need for chemical assistance, and he simply hadn’t the time to be angry. And the honeymoon—it had been grand, and reading Sherlock’s highjacked blog comments had him (and Mary) laughing till they cried.
Then the shooting, and the reveal, and months of pain and estrangement and rehabilitation capped by that horrible, horrible Christmas. It seemed they’d boarded a runaway roller coaster, that took them from highs to lows without slowing down. John held things together, mostly because Sherlock’s physical weakness gave him no choice—he couldn’t be a caretaker and angry. Or, at least, he couldn’t ever express that anger, and that meant that alcohol was off the table again.
After the debacle of Magnussen, and the false Moriarty broadcast, they fell into a No Man’s Land—in retrospect, it was a false spring of a sort. They were like children in a candy store—running cases with Sherlock, who worked with a feverish dedication, bouncing from one ridiculous scenario to another, never slowing for a moment (which, looking back, was probably a bit of a red flag—Sherlock had seemed intent on not giving himself a chance to stop, as if idleness was dangerous).
The baby came—the wonderful, beautiful baby, along with the flurry of christenings, and child minders, and complete lack of sleep. It was terrifying, frustrating, but marvelous all the same.
And then Mary disappeared. And then Mary died. The alcohol came roaring back, in full control, and brought the anger, the searing, burning, heart-stopping anger, with it. And most of that anger was directed at Sherlock. Because (or so the alcohol insisted) it was all his fault.