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There were very few things that John wouldn’t speak about, very few things that John kept deep down and under lock and key. Details like the minutiae of his break ups, the words his ex said that cut him like knives and the imagery his mind created in the depths of his flashbacks and nightmares.
“What are you doing for Father’s Day?” Mariana asks the room at large. She’s with Sherlock and John in 221B watching a movie, one hand holding her phone and the other scratching Archie’s head.
And there it is.
The dragon in the deepest depths of his memories, tail wrapped right round his heart and blowing flames at each relationship, burning him at each opportunity. His younger self had felt consumed by it, bubbling up like lava in his stomach, always ready for the fire to grow into an inferno. He’d learnt to firefight, to recognise the flames growing and which extinguishers to dampen it down. The dragon had been subdued, shackles around its neck but remained ruthless and untamed. So he’d do everything to avoid the topic. Mariana’s innocent question felt like someone opening the gates, like Sam Neil’s character holding out a lit flare, calling a great beast to him.
“I don’t have a dad.” He keeps his voice level but he feels his body temperature rise, his ears reddening. Mariana had been in the middle of a sentence he couldn’t hear through the blood rushing in his ears.
“Oh. Okay.” She says it so bluntly, and when he looks over at her, he’s expecting the typically pitying look, and had his explanation of ‘I never needed a Dad’ and ‘My mum did a great job raising me’ and ignoring the scars scattered through his behaviours. But Mariana was looking at her phone again, scrolling. His eyes flick over to Sherlock, who was in one of his silent, sullen moods, and he catches Sherlock’s eyes flick away.
He thinks nothing more of it. He swallows the embarrassment and the fire burns down to embers. And secretly, on Father’s Day, when there’s a card on the kitchen table for him, signed with Archie’s paw print, a message written in Sherlock’s handwriting and smelling faintly of Mariana’s perfume, he pretends that it doesn’t make him cry. And that his inner child, deep down, sleeping soundly under a dragon’s wing, isn’t - in a small way - a little bit happier.