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“Of course I had an accomplice,” says Sherlock, after the memory of Mary’s services has blurred in the rearview and the flowers long withered (I hate the things, and left them on a random grave in the churchyard); after Magnussen’s death is last year’s news, and I’ve had time to sit with the knowledge that not only my best friend, but my late wife, had all along harboured the capacity to kill.
I’ve killed. You do that, when other people are trying to kill you. Or to kill the man you just met, whom you’ve suddenly realised has given you back your own life. I just never imagined there was so much of it going around. Survival, it’s a bitch.
Rosie’s in bed; he’s stayed with her while I took an evening shift. He does that sometimes, and takes his leave promptly afterward; we’re still working our way past the hugeness of Mary’s death, the depth of what I now understand was her betrayal. (It spanned more than her lies and manipulation; I’m pretty sure that Rosie’s not mine, except that she is now.)
It’s not clear how this night’s different, how it’s turned into a confessional. Usually he’s wrapped as tightly as anyone I’ve ever known. Even that rambling, adulatory best man’s speech was a ruse.
“The window was a red herring. You surely didn’t think I would have actually been capable of climbing out of it at that point, do you? Or of picking up a folding Bath chair and IV stand on my way to the cab rank, once I did? I could barely hobble to the loo. I had forty-four staples in my stomach. John, you’re a surgeon.”
He’s right, of course. I’ve been dancing away from it for over a year. A belly wound is all hands on deck, and it’s not pretty; you need to look for bleeds, bowel perforations, things that you can’t trust to laparoscopes and imaging. You go in fast and dirty, preserving the integrity of the abdominal wall as much as you can, but it’s all relative. There’ll be surgical assistants hauling interminably on retractors, bruising muscles and fascia while you spelunk through vital organs – looking for the places the gut might have to be closed or resected, where the harvest of capillaries in the spleen or liver might be leisurely seeping behind the scenes. There’s nothing dainty about it.
“I suppose I’d got used to thinking of you as… a little superhuman,” I say.
“So had I,” he answers with a mirthless smile.
“I mean, you’d already come back from the dead once. So, how…?”
“Those fan girl friends of Anderson’s aren’t the bubbleheads Magnussen’s papers made them out. They’re perfectly capable of being, for example, skilled nurses with the NHS. Perfectly capable of being assigned to a critical ward. And perfectly capable of accepting a story that there might be people who wanted me dead – that seemed self-evident – and that even with Mycroft’s security, the hospital might not be the safest place for me. A nurse pushing a patient down the corridor toward an elevator doesn’t raise eyebrows in a busy hospital. She hired a van, and Wiggins met us.” He takes a drink of his thick coffee; it smells like an explosion at a Starbucks. “He’s agreeably skilled with finding a vein.”
“She – Mary shot to kill, then.” I exhale sharply. “To kill you.” The explanation about the surgical shot had been preposterous on the face of it -- even more so, after the way she jumped on it -- but he’d seemed dead set on my accepting it; since then we’d been agreeing on a fiction, not necessarily the same one. I’d told myself that she was startled into reacting, that she shot before she saw, anything but that she meant Sherlock to die.
It’s a weird relief.
“No one shoots anybody in the midsection intending them to live. Once again, John. You’re a surgeon. Not even the best marksman in the world can predict the precise placement of organs and arteries. Even I’ve attended enough autopsies to grasp that those things are as individual as a fingerprint. I was lucky. By which I mean, I was an idiot.”
I’m not expecting this. For Sherlock, other people have always been the idiots.
“I should have imagined the possibility of more than one person with a reason to seek out Magnussen. And therefore the possibility of violence. Had I been properly on my game, I might even have counted Mary among their number. I fear my usual objectivity was coloured where you – where she was concerned. There was always… Well. Suffice it to say I awaken each day now with the reminder that I was an idiot.” Now the bitterness is bare in his tight voice, in the working of his right hand in a repeated clench. “I could have saved Mary. I could have saved you from her, before I had to collude instead in a fiction that would spare you heartbreak, until I could run the truth of her to earth. I could have saved myself this.”
He closes his eyes and his lips move silently, and suddenly I don’t want to hear what he has to say, I’m interjecting Sherlock, Sherlock, you don’t have to – what?
What he does is the last thing I expect: he lifts the working hand to that always-open collar and starts to thumb the buttons through the placket; tugs the shirttail out of the slim-fitting trousers. It’s the blue shirt today, the crosswoven one that brings out the blue in his eyes.
I can’t pretend to myself I haven’t imagined watching him do that. Just not this way.
Underneath the shirt there’s a familiar accessory, one that brings back Army hospitals and rehab wards: a broad elastic corset that rises clear to the chest, pulled tight enough that the upper edge digs a little into Sherlock’s pale indoor skin. Mary was prescribed one after Rosie, while her muscles were rebounding; it’s routine after laparotomies – a support for a healing incision and bruised tissue, for a spine that’s suddenly no longer braced by a competent abdominal wall. Sometimes those things don’t get entirely better.
Cats hide when they’re sick or wounded; Sherlock’s like that. I think of Donovan spitting freak at him and wonder how he was treated in that childhood that neither brother talks about. Children can smell blood like sharks. I wonder how young he was when he learned to show no pain.
“About five hours,” he says.
“What?”
“You were wondering how long I can go without wearing it. I don’t sleep with it, but once I’m up, about five hours, if I’m not being particularly active. Sometimes things start to hurt after two or three. I don’t… take anything for it.” We both know why, and his smile’s thin and bitter. “I miss feeling able to swing myself up onto a fire escape. Well. I have only my own incompetence to blame. At least turning over in bed requires progressively less... creativity.”
He pulls at the corner of the hook-and-loop fastening with a ripping noise that makes me jump in the night silence.
“Do you know, I’ve not looked at myself in a mirror since then?” he says. “I don’t look down.” (He said once, early on, that he considered concern for appearances to be a foolish vanity, and I didn’t believe him then, either. Have you seen how he dresses? The way his hair’s always mussed just so? ) “If I don’t, I can pretend I didn’t make that disastrous miscalculation. Didn’t have to be ripped open and gutted. You can look for me, John. Tell me just exactly how ruined I am.”
It’s a thin, meandering scar, running from the base of his breastbone down to a detour that skirts his navel but pulls it out of shape, so that it squints to the right, and disappears into his waistband. Just above that it spreads in a darker pucker; I suspect a staple or two tore out of the superficial incision there, sometime while he was AWOL from the hospital. There’s a puffy humping of flesh to the left side, where I’m guessing the skin was undermined for longer during the exploratory, but that’s the worst of it. There’s more breadth, more twisting and puckering to the starburst of exit wound where the slowing Taliban bullet dug its way out beneath the edge of my scapula, rather than shattering it.
“There’s barely anything to see, Sherlock,” I say. “And even if there were…’’
He anticipates my next words. “It’s different for you. You’re a soldier; you accepted that you might have to take a life. You also placed yourself in the line of fire in order to save lives. Your scars… are honourable. Each of mine marks me a failure.”
He’s not meeting my eyes. “Stopping Magnussen was meant to erase that. He had to be neutralised, but it should have been – clean. A victory of wits. Not a deed that said I’d grown too comfortable with killing. Doing it the easy way. Another scar.”
We haven’t talked about those two years. I want to count the scars they left on him, comfort each one of them.
“All of them” (his voice is just that little bit breathy, his hands gripping the chair arms) “remind me that I fell short of being the single thing that makes me valuable” (the shirt’s still open and I’m not looking, I’m not, at the vulnerable length of his body, the slight hollowness of his chest which he’s left exposed, as if he’s trusting me with it). “Outwitting the idiots. Staying one step ahead. Even with Moriarty, I was ahead. I had a plan.” (You did, Sherlock, I don’t say, little good it did me when I thought you were dead, and all I can remember right now is the string of endless nights I spent awake, regretting what I hadn't told him, hadn’t done.) “Each one reminds me how” – he spits it out, like a bite of spoiled food – “worthless I’ve become.”
It sounds as if he’s daring me to agree. And I remember saying the same things to Ella, daring her with the same inflection, about having to lean on a cane, feeling the clumsiness in what had been my good surgeon’s hand, and asking her what reason I had to go on existing after I’d been broken. Until Sherlock showed me.
“That’s it?” I say, and I’m surprised at how rough my voice sounds. “That’s what makes you valuable? That’s what you believe?”
“It's my job to be infallible, John," he says. "What else is there?”
“You really are an idiot,” I reply, and it’s not clear, after that, how he ends up in my arms.
Later – a good deal later – I’m awake (you learn to sleep light, with a small human in the next room); he’s not, and the bedlamp’s still burning, so that I can see the creased white of the surgical corset hanging over the chair-back on Sherlock’s side, the water-blue of the shirt tossed any old way over it.
He’s curled on himself, facing away from me, and I can see the crisscross stripes of what I guess was a flogging across ribs and sharp shoulder blades. I can see the shiny purplish dusk of a burn scar, and I’m not going to ask how that happened. He’ll tell me if he’s ready.
I will count them, I say, moving my lips soundlessly. I will revere them, these marks of what you’ve survived. I will cherish the courage that brought you through those times, and back to me.
“You great silly git,” I whisper, barely aloud. He stirs, but doesn’t wake. We’ve done nothing, really – only fallen asleep, my arm over him, after he stopped trembling – but we’re lovers, as part of me knows we’ve always been.
And I’ll tell you what you’re worth, every day.
He snuffles in his sleep, and budges closer, so that I find my lips behind his ear, and I slip my other arm beneath him and wrap him tight, tight as I dare. He smells of product and fancy body wash, this man who’s not at all vain, and he makes a little noise that’s just a noise, but I choose to take it as what?
“To me?” I say. “Everything.”