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The window is always open when John comes in to the room. The blinds are pulled up and the view of the city is as cold and imposing as it ever is but John can feel the wind on his face as he slides into his chair. He tilts his face into the breeze, clenches his fists against his knees and looks everywhere but at Ella’s carefully schooled expression.
It’s late afternoon and he can see the sun jutting out amongst the London skyline. He lets out a breath, stretches out his legs because he’s going to be here for a while. He might as well get comfortable.
“Tell me about home,” Ella says, shifting in the periphery of his vision, but he keeps his gaze locked on the window.
She never gives him time to get his footing and think, just slides straight into her topic of choice and watches him as he never misses a beat, slips effortlessly into his deflection like he’s been born to it. He shakes his head, wondering if she forgets where he’s been and what he’s done; he’s been trained to divert attention, to fight against interrogation. She asks about things that have nothing to do with what happened before. On some level, he’s grateful for it. He sighs, long and drawn out, and crosses his arms, relishing the tight pull of bandages on his injured wrist. The pain reminds him that he can still feel and that he’s alive.
“It’s the same. Mrs. Hudson is still under the impression that she’s not our housekeeper.” He smiles, thinking of the way she always come by with food and tea and friendly conversation. It falls just as quickly when he thinks of the other occupant of their flat. “Sherlock’s still blowing things up and taking cases.”
Ella raises an eyebrow. “Does that bother you?”
“No,” John says a little too quickly. He doesn’t want to think about Sherlock right now. He shifts on the seat as Ella purses her lips and scribbles into her notepad. John watches a cloud roll past the window, its shadow falling on the carpet, and he rolls his shoulder. He wants to escape, wants to lean against the door and roll his eyes. He wants to tell her You only ever get what I want to give you.
He should give her something to chew on, something to mull over between sessions but a throwaway line would only invite more questions that he doesn’t want to answer.
He runs a hand over his jaw, stubble catches on the pads of his fingers and he sighs internally. He’s forgotten to shave again. His therapist is watching him, all hawk eyes and interest. She won’t catch him out. She never does.
The day John gets back from the hospital, it’s a Friday.
Sherlock hovers around him like he’s going to break into a million pieces and John grits his teeth against the urge to tell him to fuck off. It’s endearing, but it hurts and John doesn’t quite know how to tell Sherlock to leave him alone without Sherlock misinterpreting (again) and leaving for good. Mrs. Hudson is waiting on the stairs, eyes dark and haunted and John knows he’s going to be apologising for things far out of his control for months to come. He gives her a soft smile as she takes his arm, squeezing gently.
There’s a wealth of warmth and even, fuck, love in her smile and John wonders, not for the first time, how many people had been present when the first video was sent.
They help him up the stairs and he swallows down hysterical laughter to see the sofa made up for him, everything in the right place so that he doesn’t have to move too far to get it. It’s probably Mrs. Hudson because Sherlock doesn’t have foresight enough but John leans more heavily against him anyway, not missing the brief tightness around his eyes or the way his grip tightens on John’s shoulders.
They have a long way to go and John’s still not quite sure how much is broken between them.
Sherlock hovers in the doorway, pacing backwards and forwards. The doors are wide open and Sherlock’s taken to leaving the windows open as well. John narrows his eyes and thinks about telling Sherlock to sit the fuck down, but there’s more hand waving and Sherlock breezes off down the hall, leaving John with his thoughts.
If you were better, John thinks nastily at Sherlock’s retreating back, you’d realise I don’t want to be alone with them.
John leans forward in his chair and presses his fingers against his chin, glancing up at Ella from under his lashes. She’s staring at him intently but John doesn’t break because he’s been trained not to.
He thinks about his military training; the exact amount of time it takes to break him under pressure, the press of a gun against his shoulder the wrong way round, the sound of a million shouts in his left ear and the endless spread of desert before him. He thinks of the way it all coalesces into a small four by four room, a bed, no windows and the sound of silence ringing in his ears. Such a contrast but enough to drive him insane, condition him to that environment until he’s standing in the open air, sirens and cars and Lestrade and Sherlock and no fucking clue where he’s supposed to go.
“We’re not talking about him,” John says at last. Ella raises an eyebrow but he doesn’t pretend for one minute that she has no clue what he’s talking about.
“He’s a part of the life you’re trying to reacclimatise to.”
John inclines his head in acquiescence. “That doesn’t mean he’s something that I want to deal with right now.”
Ella gives him a brief look that he can’t decipher. He looks past her shoulder and stares at the stain on the wall.
“He wonders why I even bother coming at all.”
It’s a lie; they haven’t spoken to each other in eight days, seven hours and fifteen minutes. John idly scratches at the bandage on his arm and smiles a little. Sherlock’s trained him well after all; the passage of time means nothing. He tips his head back a little and strokes the inside of his wrist for every day he was stuck in the room with no windows. “They starved me the first four days.”
The pen is back on the paper but it doesn’t move. He forces himself to stare at the mess of red scribbles she’s littered across the page.
“They always gave me water. They didn’t want me dead just yet.”
John’s getting tired of staring at Sherlock’s blank face. “You don’t have to watch me.”
Sherlock doesn’t move. With a put upon sigh, John pokes at the food on the plate and tries to ignore the way his stomach flip-flops over the thought of eating. Sherlock is staring at the skull over his left shoulder and scrapes a fingernail idly over the table.
“When a person doesn’t eat for extended periods of time their stomach shrinks and they can no longer ingest the same amount of food in one sitting.”
John pauses, holds the fork halfway to his mouth. Sherlock’s not looking at him but that doesn’t mean anything. “Right.”
“Eat your dinner,” Sherlock says to the skull.
For a brief moment, John thinks about throwing the fork down and ignoring Sherlock for the rest of the night. Instead, he shovels in so much food that he feels the rush of nausea before it spills over and he’s stumbling for the bathroom, hunching over the bowl as he throws up.
Sherlock hovers in the doorway like he’s not sure what to do and John thinks it’s the worst fuck you he’s ever given anyone.
“The box was barely big enough to lie in,” John says, hands flat on the desk.
Across the table, Lestrade’s face is a cool mask but it’s not the same disconnect that he feels with Ella; Lestrade’s trying to be professional but he’s still John’s friend. “You tried to escape.”
John smiles, scratching idly at the wood and he thinks about doing it harder; thinks about blood under his fingernails and breaking them and the pain. “There’s only so much a guy can do against a wooden box.”
Lestrade slides photos across the table and John doesn’t want to look at them but does anyway, traces the letters with his fingertips. They look almost identical even if he knows they’re from two different pieces of wood, two different cases. He’s a case and he knows that for most of these officers, that’s all he is. Lestrade knows better and curls the second photo in his fist, lets it drop back on his side of the table. “Why did you write Rache?”
There’s a click and whir of the tape recorder and John looks at the Plexiglas behind Lestrade’s head, knows who’s watching on the other side. He stares at his own reflection and almost doesn’t recognise the person looking back. “Because Sherlock would understand.”
He tilts his head, doesn’t wait for Lestrade to ask another question.
“He was right, you know. It does hurt.”
John remembers very little about being pulled from the rubble. He remembers flashes of things, images coalescing into shapes not unlike his dreams after Afghanistan. This time, they’re mostly comprised of Sherlock’s face. The pale, drawn features that haunt John’s every moment. As John stood in the middle of the pavement, paramedics and police all around, John had sought out Sherlock only to find him hovering at the edges of the crowd, like he didn’t belong there.
Lestrade was talking to him, one hand on Sherlock’s elbow and the other waving in John’s direction but Sherlock was looking anywhere but at the scene before him. John wanted to call out for him, to shake the hands off of his shoulders and leave.
Sherlock’s gone before he can so much as breathe.
Lestrade comes around every Friday. He still has tired lines on his face and John doesn’t envy him his job. With Sherlock, he gets to chase down criminals but they don’t do things the conventional way; he thinks about the paperwork and bureaucracy and how much red tape must be strangling Lestrade on a daily basis. They sit down with a beer and try not to notice the Sherlock-shaped hole in the room.
John doesn’t know where he goes and doesn’t ask. He feels the absence like a stab in his chest but he swallows it down with a gulp of Budweiser and lets Lestrade fill the silence. It’s all shit and pointless and John likes it because it’s normal and he gets precious little of that.
“Have you told your parents?”
There’s an edge to Lestrade’s voice that John can’t decipher and he’s once again startled by the change; he used to know, used to be able to tell. “I rang Harry.”
Harry cried for fifteen minutes and spent the rest of the phone call eliciting promise after promise out of John that he knows he can’t keep. He felt the press against his chest like he was going to stop breathing and fought down the urge to go and see her, to hold her and tell himself that he’s still here, its fine, he’s not fucking dying. Instead, he let her cry herself into exhaustion and made her promise to call their parents. He doesn’t want to know if they’ll give a crap this time around.
Lestrade looks at him over his beer bottle but thankfully doesn’t say anything else.
John likes the evenings with Lestrade; he doesn’t have to fight to make them normal. He doesn’t have to fight to start a conversation. There’s no fight at all.
John sleeps on the sofa, the windows thrown open and a mug of tea on the table beside him. He slurps at it like he’s never going to taste it again, drowns in the duvet that Mrs. Hudson smuggled in from her own flat and lets the sounds of the city flood his senses.
He tries not to think about the sounds of Sherlock pacing in his bedroom, muttering and angry.
John picks at the hole in his jeans. He needs to go shopping, get new clothes. He thinks about asking Mrs. Hudson to go with him and almost snorts at the idea. Maybe he’ll ask Sally. When he says this to Ella, she taps her pen lightly against her notepad.
“Why Sally?”
He remembers her face hovering above his own, her hands the first to touch his face, his shoulder, his back. She held him all the way to the ambulance and after, something tight and almost vengeful in her expression when she’d told him they’d got them and he didn’t ask why. He knows all about that kind of loyalty, the kind earned in battle. “I think she’d like it.”
Ella writes something else and for the first time, John’s bothered by it.
“Definitely not,” Sally says, tugging the jacket away from him.
John’s starting to get a headache from the thousands of jackets and shirts and jeans that she keeps pressing against him but he’s decided the more deferent he is to her expertise in this area, the faster he’ll get back to the flat. Sally guides him down another aisle and it’s not until they’re hidden amongst the safety of the button down shirts and the waistcoats that she starts to talk to him about anything non-shopping related.
“How are you?” The words spill out like she’s not quite sure she wants to be asking.
Normally he plays ignorant but he doesn’t think Sally will appreciate the run-around. Sally was there and she deserves better. “I’m not going to break.”
Sally snorts and holds out a jacket that he takes out of self defence. She pulls a face but doesn’t make him put it back so he counts that as a win. “You can’t fault people for caring unless you want to act like a complete bastard.”
Startled, John doesn’t reply. Sally just rests her hands against the jumble of hangers and jackets. “Five people were present for that video. It’s not easy to imagine what you went through but watching it happen was bad enough for most of them.”
She was included in that five, he knows, but he doesn’t quite know how to reconcile that knowledge with her question. How can he be sorry for them when he was the subject? How can he acknowledge that they all worry and care when he can’t even stand closing the curtains at night? Sally’s still staring at him. Before he can say anything she sighs and turns back to the jackets. “They’re doing what they can. You’re a moron if you think that they’re going to stop just because you don’t want to be coddled.”
When she lifts her head there’s a glint in her eye and she’s smirking a little. “Let them help you, Doctor. You’ll be grateful for it when you can’t get it from the only place you want it.”
It’s the first time that he’s wanted to tell her to shut up but he fights the urge. He knows that she’s not the only person to think that way and he doesn’t know what he has to do to prove that he’s fine, that he has it under control because he’s a doctor and he’s lived this, he’s helped people through this and he’s not going to get down on bended knee just because he’s suffered a setback.
Admittedly a setback that lasted fourteen days and saw him suffer through injury after injury, but a setback that he’s determined to recover from either way.
It’s not until he’s safely back in the flat, bags of clothes that are probably never going see the light of day around his feet, that he realises Sally never once brought up Sherlock by name.
“The second time I woke up, I was in the room you found me in.”
Lestrade’s knuckles are white against the edge of the table but his voice is even when he speaks. “Tell me about that.”
John presses the heels of his palms against his eyes and takes a deep breath. This should be easy, he thinks. “It was small and cold but at least there was a bed. I made a mental inventory of everything the room had to offer, including the minimal gaps under the doors – not big enough to pass anything through – and the lack of windows.”
“They were professional.”
Nodding slowly, John drops his hands to the table and taps an idle rhythm against the surface. He looks Lestrade in the eye. “The door was bolted shut from the outside, both top and bottom. It opened inward but nobody ever came in. They passed food along the floor. Well,” John added with a wry smile, “When they bothered to pass anything through at all.”
Lestrade nods.
“Even with my training, I wouldn’t have been able to take them.”
“Nobody expected you to,” Lestrade says firmly, holding his gaze across the table. John looks away first.
“I thought about shooting them all more than once.” The steady tick tick of the clock is the only thing John can hear apart from his own voice. “There were so many different ways to take them down and I thought of every single one. I was never once trained to take down civilians.”
“It’s a natural instinct to battle against the oath you took as a Doctor.”
John snorts. “It never bothered me in Afghanistan. I cared about it even less, here.” He sits back in the chair and meets Ella’s eyes for the first time since he arrived. “I’ve worked with Sherlock a long time. I’ve seen the horrific things people can do to each other. I thought about some of them, thought about what I would do if they ever let me loose.”
Ella shifts on her chair but it isn’t from discomfort. “You suffered something few people have. We can’t know how we will react until we-“
“You don’t understand,” John says, absently – like he isn’t discussing the many ways he came up with to mutilate and kill his captors if he ever got loose. “It went both ways. They tortured me to get to him and tortured him to get to me. The things they were saying about Sherlock were things I would have made them pay for.”
He’s often wondered about the way people think of him, when he can stand next to Sherlock and not be affected by some of the things that they’ve seen. He’s sure their expressions would mirror Ella’s. He’s never considered himself to be a terrifying person but then he’s never considered himself a bargaining chip either, a twisted and broken prize for the great Sherlock Holmes to come and claim when he’s ready.
Standing abruptly, he paces the floor and runs a hand through his hair. “Everything’s the same, to him. Nothing’s changed.”
Ella runs a finger over the notepad and tilts her head. “I thought it didn’t bother you?”
John turns on his heel and stares at her. He wants to be angry with her but it’s mostly with himself. “Sometimes,” he grates out, hands clenching into fists by his sides. “Sometimes it does.”
“John, John, it’s brilliant,” Sherlock says, striding into the room. He has a smile on his face that John hasn’t seen in a while and he tilts his head, wonders if it will drop off when John opens his mouth.
“What?”
Sherlock rants on, pacing the floor of the living room and he leans down, hand on the back of the sofa and the other resting dangerously close to John’s thigh. “We have him.”
John swallows thickly and turns his head, sinking back into the cushions. Sherlock takes a step back and John can see his mind working, can see all the knowledge folding in on itself like he can take everything and bottle it up and it hurts because he never can and John knows that.
“Right.”
“Sherlock-“
“Don’t wait up,” Sherlock says, turning on his heel and leaving the room in a flurry of hand gestures and loud words.
John stares down the hallway long after he hears the slam of the front door.
“Tell me about your flatmate.” Ella says, tugging at the hem of her skirt. “Do you talk about what happened?”
“I thought we agreed that this subject was off limits.”
“You asked,” Ella says. “I never agreed to anything.”
John stares down at the scuffed knees of his jeans and wonders, not for the first time, why he’s even bothering to come. “There’s no point,” he says, carefully. “To him, it’s been and gone. Another case swept under the carpet, another challenge solved.”
He’s not being fair, he knows, but then Sherlock’s never believed in fair.
“Is it like that for you?”
“If it were,” John snaps. “I wouldn’t be here.”
He’s sitting opposite Sherlock once more.
There’s a half-abandoned experiment on the table between them involving the toaster and something that smells distinctly like rotting flesh but John ignores it, stares at Sherlock’s face over the top of the toaster and lets everything spill out. “Fourteen days and not once did I ever think you would leave me there.”
Sherlock’s eyes are dark and hard and angry but John thinks that’s a flicker of surprise crossing his face and he’s thrilled by that. “John.”
It’s meant to stop him but John doesn’t let it because it’s been so long and he’s never going to stop wanting this man, in any way, and he doesn’t even know what that means for either of them. “There were no windows. No escape routes and no way for me to even measure the passing of time but I knew you were looking. I knew what their twisted reward system for you was and I let them do it because I knew the worse off I was, the closer to them you were.”
There’s something in Sherlock’s face, like he’s almost shaken by John’s absolute trust in him. John doesn’t doubt before that Sherlock’s ego would have pulled John’s adoration in and coveted it like a prize. Now, after everything they’ve suffered over the last month, something’s shifted inside of Sherlock and John’s trying hard to find out where he fits alongside this man now that Sherlock knows what he has to lose – and came so close to losing it.
John thinks that of all the reactions Sherlock can give him, it’s the silence he fears the most. He’s had so much of that and he just wants to hear him talk, about the mundane, about his boredom, about cases and stupidity and everything and nothing. He just needs noise, and he wants it. “Talk to me.”
Sherlock relaxes his grip on the table and John’s half afraid that Sherlock is going to walk away but he doesn’t. He nods tightly, pokes at the toaster like he expects it to do something soon and talks.
He fills the room with his theories and his deprecation and his anger and John soaks it up, stores it somewhere deep and careful and protected because he can’t help but think just in case, not anymore.
Ella watches him as he crosses the room and shuts the window, gripping hold of the handle as he pulls it tightly into place. He doesn’t let go for a few minutes, taking time to steady his breathing and glare at his hand until it stops shaking. When he turns back to face her, Ella is still watching him carefully, the pad and pen sitting on the desk next to her. “How do you feel?”
It’s such a broad and stupid question but John answers it anyway. “Fine. I don’t feel like the walls are closing in, if that’s what you’re asking.”
“I wasn’t,” Ella assures him but he doesn’t believe her. He doesn’t know if that’s just because he doesn’t want to believe her or if everything Sherlock’s said about her is starting to ring true. When they’re together, neither of them pretend that John finds it necessary to see and speak to Ella – it’s required because Lestrade says it’s required and until he tells John otherwise, he’ll keep attending no matter what Sherlock says.
When he bothers to say anything at all.
John sits down and finds his usual distractions, the clock and the painting, are missing from the room. John wonders why she hasn’t taken his mobile phone. If it goes off, it’s all the distraction he’ll need. “I just think I should be able to sit in a room without needing the window open.”
“You can’t force it. When it comes, it will come.”
“I don’t work the same way as normal people,” John snaps. He thinks about Mycroft and what he said that first night, about John being wired differently – finding combat in a place where there shouldn’t have been any. He often thinks about how transparent he must have been, but he’s long since resigned himself to it.
“And how do you think you ‘work’?” Ella picks the pad back up and John grinds his teeth.
He doesn’t answer because he doesn’t know. He doesn’t know how to put into words what it’s like with Sherlock, how they work and how they don’t work and how he can’t find the right words to tell Sherlock everything that he wants to because he doesn’t know what Sherlock saw, doesn’t know what it was like on the other side. Sherlock must be the same but he won’t admit it and he’ll never tell John any of it. They’re stuck at an impasse and he just wants it done.
He wants to say, I don’t work without Sherlock but he hasn’t said it to Sherlock yet.
“John.”
Sherlock’s standing in the doorway and John doesn’t quite know what to say. He thinks about Sherlock’s face when he’d been pulled from the room, too much blood on his hands and Lestrade’s arm around his shoulders. Sherlock had a split second to make a decision and John still hates him for making the wrong one; he’d walked away, back stiff and hands clenched into fists.
Now, Sherlock steps into his room and John knows the expression on his face. He’s working through things a mile a minute, cataloguing and remembering and when he reaches for John, John doesn’t hold back. He thinks you should have done this then but doesn’t say it because he’s been choosing his words carefully. They’ve hurt each other enough, he knows, and he doesn’t know what it was like to be Sherlock; to know the further you get, the better you solve a puzzle, the worse the damage done to your prized possession, your best friend, your heart.
John catches his fingers in Sherlock’s robe and lets Sherlock breath against his neck. He’s shaking and he knows that Sherlock has to feel it but there’s a feather light touch of a kiss against his neck and he closes his eyes; feels.
“Tell me everything,” Lestrade says, hands flat on the table. Sherlock is next to him because John needs him here. He can’t tell him everything he wants to in their flat because it’s theirs and he doesn’t want it tainted with what he’s been through – what they’ve been through. It’s somewhere for after, when John needs to just - not be inside his own head.
John remembers everything; Rache, the cold steel of a gun pressed to his temple, pistol whipping, punching and kicking and biting, everything and anything until it’s all rushing forward like a tide, a wave that rolls over Lestrade and Sherlock both and at the end of it, Sherlock’s pacing the floor and John’s just sitting, trying to get a grip on everything he feels.
“They would show me the video feed afterwards, show me what you saw and I never once thought that I would rot there. I never believed that I would die.”
Lestrade looks shaken but Sherlock’s meeting his eyes and John thinks it’s fucking brilliant. “Every time-“
“I knew,” John presses. “I knew when you’d done something right, when you’d found something, because the punishment would be worse.”
“You’re something else,” Lestrade says, eyes bright but he’s impressed and grateful and pleased. John nods tightly because he doesn’t know what to say to these two men who were tireless and careful in their operation, getting away with more than John could have dealt with had his captors known everything.
“I still don’t know how you found them.”
Lestrade’s face shifts and Sherlock blinks steadily. “Moriarty.”
John thinks for a brief moment that Sherlock means he was behind it but as he opens his mouth, as he starts to ask, he realises that’s not what Sherlock meant at all. Nobody else knows the happenings in the criminal underground like Moriarty. Nobody could have led Sherlock to the clues faster than Moriarty and nobody would have cared enough to help. Moriarty, out of arrogance or insanity or both, is the only person who could ignore the warnings of a gang of criminals willing to risk the wrath of Sherlock Holmes. Moriarty’s never claimed to want anything but to beat Sherlock - better to exploit John as a weakness himself than to sit back and watch someone else do it.
“I can’t believe you,” John says, because he doesn’t want to be indebted to Moriarty in any capacity. A debt Sherlock owes is a debt John owes, after all. There’s no malice in his tone and Sherlock smiles the same he does when he’s done something brilliant and John’s told him so. It should be frightening but John feels something slot back into place and he thinks, finally.
Lestrade ends the tape and taps a hand on the table. He looks pale and shaken but he gives John a smile and his eyes look clearer than they have in days. “John.”
He pulls the tape from the machine and John thinks about all the things he could say, how sorry and thank you will never be enough but Lestrade leaves the room quickly, like he knows they have things to work out.
John keeps staring at Sherlock and he can’t take it anymore. He slides out of his seat and rounds the table. He crosses the floor, grips Sherlock’s arms and just stays.
Sherlock comes apart under his fingers and they don’t even need to say anything because Sherlock is breathing against the side of his face, another feather light touch and John is shaking again but this time they’ll fix it because Sherlock has John and John has Sherlock and it’s not right, it will never be right, but John feels okay.
He’s grounded and home and there’s nothing better.
.the end