Work Text:
An Inconvenient Truth
Disclaimer: Just playin’—just sayin’. Set after 4x9.
“You okay? You seem—I don’t know—distracted.”
Alfredo, undoubtedly trying to be helpful. Sherlock brushes off the question and the observation with a quick nod of his head. From the corner of his eye he sees Alfredo’s eyebrows rise and his lips part, but before he can comment further, a woman sitting on the last row of folding chairs in the basement of St. Paul’s Episcopal gets to her feet and makes her way to the front of the room.
A regular at the 10 AM meetings. Laurie, or Laura. Odd that he’s forgotten which, since she’s spoken to the group before. Perhaps Alfredo is right about the distraction.
Like someone turning off a series of light switches, Sherlock notes and then deliberately ignores the stimuli around him. The dampness of the basement air, with the faintest whiff of mold. The twelve people—excluding Alfredo sitting beside him—scattered on the six rows of chairs. The rhythmic tic of a dying fluorescent bulb overhead. Concrete floor gritty with scuff marks. The wooden slat of the chair pressing his back to the point of discomfort—his T6 or perhaps his T7 vertebrae. Watson would know. More than once her medical knowledge has been key to solving a case.
“Invaluable, really.” Had he muttered that outloud?
To his left, Alfredo bends down and leans toward him. “What’d you say?”
“Sorry,” Sherlock says, flushing. “Sorry.”
It’s the kind of lack of control that has tripped him up lately—not his usual bullish honesty but his words tumbling out against his will, as revelatory to him as to the astonished listener.
The most recent was two days ago, when Watson said his father had asked her to dinner. Instantly Sherlock felt his chest constrict and his face heat up. He felt his mouth open, his throat vibrate, before he understood exactly what he was saying. Like a mythical golem under someone else’s control, he heard his voice pleading with Watson in a way that made him cringe.
“I just have one request,” he said, stuttering. “There are three surviving Holmes men, and you sampled the carnal wares of one. Two would be a pattern.”
Comprehension flashed across Watson’s features. “It’s not a date!” she protested, but Sherlock’s brooded about it ever since. Not his father’s interest per se—whatever that might turn out to actually entail—but his own reaction to it.
Anger and alarm, certainly, and wariness, but something else, too. Something bordering on wounded vanity and an impending sense of loss. A possessiveness that is intensely inappropriate and all the more uncomfortable for that.
He is loathe to call it jealousy—but there it is. More troubling is that he’s felt it so often—and with such force.
And only concerning Watson.
Laura is speaking about her ex-husband and the logistical tensions of sharing custody of a daughter.
“I know it sounds crazy,” she says, “but I’m sometimes jealous of how much my daughter loves her dad. He’s the parent who’s never let her down, see? The one who isn’t an addict. She doesn’t have to worry when she’s with him. It’s easy. That’s what I wish I could give her. What I wish I could be. Someone she doesn’t have to worry about.”
Ordinarily Sherlock hears such ruminations with the detached interest of someone who lives in a different world. He wishes his fellow addicts well and is willing to sit in meetings as a mostly silent witness to their struggles.
But their stories reinforce what he has always known—that the rational brain is muddled by emotions, and in his line of work, a rational brain is key. Invaluable, really. Watson once told him that his emotions frighten him, and though he dismissed her assessment at the time, he’s come round to admitting that she’s partly right.
This jealousy, for instance. It has short-circuited his clarity more than once.
In London when Mycroft asked Watson to dinner, Sherlock had railed in prescient dismay—warning her that her brother would try to bed her.
“It’s classic transference,” he said. “You wouldn’t be sleeping with him, psychologically speaking, you’d be sleeping with me. Well, you’ve surely thought about it. You can’t go to bed with me. We’re business partners, and you’re my former sober companion. But you can sleep with a cheap knock-off version of me, and that would be Mycroft.”
His fury when he was right—and then more recently his suspicion about Marcus Bell, his mind whirling like a broken kaleidoscope and coming up with a crazy quilt deduction that even now shames him.
Yet he can’t ignore the relief he felt when he saw the exam books on Marcus’ desk and realized their import. Nor even, if he is truthful, his relief when Mycroft exited their lives, though Watson moped around for weeks afterward, her obvious sorrow wounding him again and again.
And later, her decision to move out. His grief caught him off guard and he bolted, unwilling to let her see how vulnerable he was.
Still, she knew, like she knows so much else. Invaluable, really, to have someone who knows him so well, who can hold her own against his darker moments.
He allows himself a pleasant moment to savor the memory of the hug she gave him when his solicitor called with the news that he wouldn’t be charged in Oscar Rankin’s beating. The pressure of her arms around his neck, the heat of her cheek on the side of his neck, the pillow of her bosom against his chest necessitating that he stand stock still not to give himself away. But more than that, the joy in her voice and the mock scolding later: And then we will talk about all the women you don’t need to write to.
As if she, too, were feeling…if not jealous, then proprietary of his time and attention.
He willingly gives it to her when he can, when he’s certain that his defenses are in place, that his control will let nothing slip.
Unlike the slip up when he quipped that he lets Mason sniff her hair for payment—poor Mason coloring and insistent that Sherlock was joking—which he was, and he wasn’t. Hinting blatantly about the shameful indulgence of watching her sleep before rousing her, some urgent request from Captain Gregson or to announce a breakthrough fathomed during the night giving him sufficient excuse. He’s giving himself away with such slip-ups disguised as jokes.
It makes no sense, really. He does not love Watson in the way that people love those for whom they are jealous. He is not and will not allow himself to truly consider offering himself as a lover—though he is convinced that she would not be averse to the idea.
His resolve stays his hand, makes him turn to the diversions of Athena and Minerva, to the pleasures of work, instead of laying bare anything as compromising as his feelings to Watson.
It’s a kind of torture, he told her once about the tediousness of sobriety, the long slog of recovery that has to be a reward in itself. He could have said it about his restraint with her, too—though the stakes lapsing there would be more dire than giving in to the siren call of heroin.
Laura finishes at last and walks to her seat at the back of the room.
“What about the rest of you?” the NA leader asks. “What emotions are getting in the way of your recovery?”
Sherlock feels Alfredo studying his face but he keeps his expression neutral, his eyes ahead.
“You okay?” Alfredo is no fool. Nor is he likely to stop asking as long as he senses some deception.
When the meeting ends Sherlock leads the way up the stairs, hiking his collar against the chill. Alfredo joins him on the sidewalk outside the church.
“I am, as you rightly noted, distracted of late,” Sherlock says as they walk side-by-side toward the Court Street subway station. “But I am also okay. You needn’t worry that I am about to relapse. My distraction has nothing to do with my drug use.”
Alfredo is silent until they pause at the corner to wait for traffic.
“Wanna talk about it?”
“I do not.”
“Sure I can’t help?”
“I’m certain you could,” Sherlock says. He has a flash of Alfredo asking about dating Watson shortly after she moved back into the brownstone. A jest, but Sherlock had been more than a little annoyed—though he attempted to hide it. “However, I prefer to keep this private—at least for now.”
Alfredo isn’t satisfied. His posture stiffens slightly and he steps too quickly ahead of Sherlock when the light changes. By the time they reach the subway station, however, Alfredo is himself again. For a moment Sherlock considers asking him to stop at the Vineapple Café down the street for a coffee before they wait for their separate trains. He could trust Alfredo, of all people, to keep his secrets without secretly judging him. It might, in fact, be liberating to, as they say, spill the beans.
I am jealous—he would say, and Alfredo might nod and say he understood. Not of Watson’s entertainment—he would explain—or the Andrews who pass through her life, the people she doesn’t claim as her own.
And there it is, the heart of the feeling at last—the very real gratitude that she claims him as hers—not in any quantifiable way, but in a way that matters far too much to lose.
He’ll have to think on it some more before he tries to put it into words.
The sound of an approaching train shakes the platform beneath his feet.
“Here’s my ride,” Alfredo says, and for one wild moment Sherlock imagines calling him back, asking him to sit and listen for awhile. Alfredo would, of course. And knowing that—that this moment isn’t singular after all, that Alfredo—and Watson, too, and the Captain and Bell and so many other people he’s come to know here in New York—are available to him, calms him like nothing else can, like someone standing in the very center of the hurricane, safe as long as he stands impossibly still.
Author’s note: I’ve been away from fanfiction for awhile but miss the readers tremendously! Here’s a little one-shot until I can find time to flesh out the rest of the chapters of “The Lives of Others.” Your encouragement means a lot!