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John was the one to find his mother’s body, three days after his seventh birthday.
She’d always been pretty, he remembered, in the way of dark blue eyes and long blond hair. He’d looked a lot like her. Short and warm, as Harry sometimes liked to put it.
But John’s mother, despite her stature, had never seemed small. Which was why, after the funeral, John had understood perfectly what his aunt had meant in saying that the body in the coffin wasn’t really his mother. Of course she wasn’t there, John reasoned. His mother had never looked so withered.
They said that it was suicide. Some whispered that John’s father, known for his fondness for the bottle, did have a temper about him. But no charges were pressed, and it was a known fact that Therese Watson suffered from “moods.” It was left at that.
John remembered the moods too, and he remembered the serene way his mother’s face had returned his gaze from beneath a sheet of still water. Looking back, he decided that there had been no struggle. Only her and the water, joined to create eternity.
And he soon learned there were many more painful ways to meet eternity.
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John realized that he was shaking before he realized he was awake. He blinked and recognized the plaster of his bedroom ceiling, forcing his body to still. He ran his hands over his shoulders, down his arms. He found his faded t-shirt, the knot of scar tissue, cold sweat slicked over his skin. No sign of army fatigues or the soft blue pajamas he’d worn when he was a child. John felt it was important to tell himself that.
He could hear Sherlock moving around downstairs. No violin concerts tonight. Rather, the clinking of glass and the whir of the microwave told John that there was an experiment in progress. Something in John wouldn’t have minded padding downstairs for a cup of tea, leaning against the counter and letting Sherlock explain his most recent scientific endeavors.
But something numb in John’s chest prevented him from giving action to such thoughts. He recognized the heaviness, a familiar presence from those days between returning home from Afghanistan and being shoved into Sherlock Holmes’s orbit. John hadn’t felt it in a while, even entertained the notion that he’d left it behind completely.
Apparently not.
John closed his eyes, tried to ignore it, but he already knew that such a thing was pointless. The numbness never backed away with sleep.
After about half an hour, John let the air escape him in a loud whoosh before making a decision. He got out of bed and made his way for the bathroom.
He flicked on the light and blinked hard at the fluorescent glare. He didn’t bother checking his reflection: all he’d find was a pale and lined face, starting to show the effects of age, a war, and chasing criminals across London. John instead ducked down to the sink, turning on the cold water and letting it collect in his cupped hands before throwing it over his face. John blinked at the cold and straightened.
Downstairs, the microwave beeped. John shifted at the sound and turned off the sink. He glanced towards the bathtub, aware of the thought niggling at the back of his mind.
John made the decision and went over to the stained little tub, bending down to check that Sherlock hadn’t left any biohazards. It looked clear, so he stuck the plug into the drain turned on the water. After a few minutes, thin steam rose into John’s face. He breathed it in and felt the moisture condense on his face.
After several minutes, John turned the water off, stripped himself of his clothes, then carefully stepped into the bathwater, lowering himself into it slowly.
The first time he’d done this at the Baker Street flat, he’d overfilled the tub and ended up causing a slight flood when he’d sunk into the water. Now he knew better, and as he settled down, the bathwater lapped a few inches below the rim of the tub. John exhaled loudly, then took a sip of breath and let his head disappear below the water.
It was one of those times that John could appreciate his shorter stature. He fit comfortably in the bottom of the tub, settling there like sand. Above him, the plaster ceiling rippled with the water.
It was quiet down there. Everything had been muffled into silence, save the low thud of his own heartbeat, echoed and reverberating in the bathwater. After a moment, John pushed himself up, just enough to bring his nose and mouth into open air. He inhaled sharply before sinking back down. If he hadn’t known better, he might have said the persistent heaviness in his chest pulled him down, almost gently.
This time he forced himself to remain still. He watched as the wild waves of the water settled into gentle rippling, which in turn became a perfect stillness. John stared at the glassy water surface, mesmerized by it, by the way his body grew impossibly heavy.
He sensed his lungs starting to strain with the recycled air he was giving them. He ignored them and instead focused on the way his heartbeat reverberated in his eardrums and in the water. It pounded away as a traitor to the calmness. It insisted on noise and movement, when the warm water pressing down on John’s body was doing its best to gently trap him in this place where there was nothing to do but exist.
John blinked slowly and felt the water swirl against his eyeballs. His lungs began to burn, but he knew he could hold out. And even when he couldn’t hold out anymore, he’d force himself to remain in the water. He knew it with a sharp certainty made clear by an oxygen-deprived brain.
John lost track of how long he remained under the water, not daring to move, not allowing the minute shudders in his lungs to persuade him to break the perfect stillness of his world.
Until he did.
It came without warning. Suddenly the heaviness that locked his limbs and smothered his brain exploded in a dizzying firework display of adrenaline, life, needairneedtomoveneedtoexist. John convulsed from the water surface with a wet, ragged inhale, followed by a massive gust of an exhale. He sucked in air again, then realized with a sharp lurch that he wasn’t alone.
Sherlock was busy clearing items from the sink, dumping them unceremoniously on the ground beside him. He had a plastic bag sitting by his feet, holding something pale and insect-like. A hand, John realized distantly.
Sherlock gave John a sharp glance before plugging the sink and grabbing a flask of clear liquid he’d placed on the closed toilet seat. John watched him pour the liquid into the sink before bending down and grabbing the bag. He let the hand slip into the liquid with a soft plop, leaning over the sink basin with concentration visible in his shoulders.
John realized that his stomach hadn’t even given a nervous lurch at the display.
He shifted in the cooling bathwater, still breathing heavily, before sinking slightly so the water lapped at his upper lip.
He wasn’t sure whether he ought to feel embarrassed at the moment. It wasn’t a matter of modesty; the army had squashed that out of him long ago. But he didn’t think it was normal behavior to emerge gasping and flailing from a bathtub in front of his flatmate. Then again, said flatmate had just placed a severed hand in their sink. Normalcy was relevant here.
“Nightmares again,” Sherlock said. John tilted his head up and eyed him suspiciously.
“Guessed that, did you?”
“I don’t guess. Don’t be tiresome, John,” Sherlock admonished, drawing a pipette of the liquid in the sink.
“I do use that sink you know,” John pointed out.
“It’s merely water,” Sherlock said.
“Water with a dead hand floating in it.”
“A preserved hand, sanitized by the morgue. No doubt cleaner than the sink itself.”
John thought about that for a brief moment while Sherlock ejected the water in the pipette into a petri dish. He then grabbed his laptop from the floor and sat down on the closed toilet seat, flipping the laptop open and vaulting into a flurry of typing.
John watched Sherlock’s fingers move across the keyboard, startled when Sherlock’s voice reached him.
“I’d prefer if you wouldn’t drown yourself, by the way. I’m not certain whether I could convince Mrs. Hudson to bring the rent down much more.”
John sat up straighter.
“I’m not trying to drown myself,” he said. Sherlock looked up properly, and John wondered what he’d said to merit the tightness around his flatmate’s eyes. “I’m not,” John added.
The tightness intensified, and John realized that he was being analyzed. He was used to the sensation, but at the moment it made him want to tell Sherlock to bugger off and let him get out of the tub and back to bed.
He settled for returning Sherlock’s stare.
“Well, not literally. Trying for an adrenaline high, obviously,” Sherlock finally stated more than asked.
“No.”
Sherlock lifted his chin slightly, and John had a sudden suspicion that he shouldn’t have answered so quickly, nor so emphatically. John grunted and moved to stand, unable to give a damn about propriety at the moment.
“It’s not the first time you’ve done this,” Sherlock stated. “It tends to occur in the long periods between cases, usually after nightmares or bad episodes with your sister. You thrive on danger and adrenaline, gives you a purpose. It’s logical that in times of distress you would intentionally force your body to undergo life-threatening-”
“How the hell do you know that I’ve done this before? No, wait,” John held up his hand as Sherlock opened his mouth. “Never mind. I don’t want to know whether you’ve been-.”
“Really John, these pipes positively groan when you insist on so much hot water from them. And you’re not necessarily as quiet as you think you are. It’s hardly a wild guess.“
John took a deep breath and ran his hand over his face.
“Am I correct, then?” John peered over his hand at Sherlock. He looked eager, focused, like John was a dead corpse with a story, just waiting for Sherlock bloody brilliant Holmes to figure him out.
“No,” John said, partly just to spite the bloody git, partly because no, Sherlock wasn’t completely right. Something faltered in Sherlock’s face. He did hate being wrong.
“Perhaps not in specifics,” he began, but John waved him into silence.
“I’m not discussing this, Sherlock,” he said in a sharp voice. Sherlock looked more than a little put off.
“Does it have something to do with your mother’s suicide?” he asked suddenly, perhaps with more viciousness than per usual. John stared at him.
“What?” he asked.
“You have the obituary clipping in your closet.”
“You’ve been rooting around my stuff.”
“Are you surprised?”
“No,” John admitted. He gave Sherlock a sharp glare nevertheless, just to make his feelings on the issue clear. Sherlock didn’t seem put off. Somehow, that angered John enough to stand completely, nabbing his towel and wrapping it around himself before stepping out of the tub.
“Where are you going?” Sherlock demanded, looking up at John.
“Back to bed,” John stated shortly.
He did go back to bed. He didn’t managed to get back to sleep. The numbness was still there, still dragging at his thoughts and his movement. Bloody annoying.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
It was three in the morning when John heard Sherlock enter his room, an hour after John had left the bathroom to Sherlock and his experiment. He hoped the hand had found its way back into the bag.
He stared at the ceiling, watching Sherlock’s figure out of the corner of his eye.
“Your breathing pattern’s all wrong. I know you’re awake,” Sherlock finally said.
John grunted, and Sherlock seemed to take it as an allowance to approach the side of John’s bed and stare down like some pale, alien-faced angel of judgment. John blinked at the simile and wondered if he was really that far gone.
“What?” he asked in as unfriendly a voice as he could manage.
“You’re upset.”
“Brilliant deduction.”
“Why?”
“Why don’t you tell me?”
Sherlock let out a long, drawn-out sigh. “Because, John, for someone with such distressingly transparent emotions and thoughts, you manage to remain stubbornly opaque about certain things.”
John laughed. He couldn’t help it. “You don’t know,” he translated. Sherlock didn’t answer, though he did sit at the foot of John’s bed. John sat up properly, peering at Sherlock through the streetlight filtering in through his blinds.
“I don’t appreciate you rifling through my things,” he said. “My personal things. Did you ever learn that it wasn’t okay?”
Sherlock looked legitimately thoughtful as he rested his chin in his hand. “It’s a recognized social rule, yes,” he admitted. “I only used the obituary to deduce the exact cause of death. I knew months ago that your mother had killed herself when you were still relatively young.”
“I was seven,” John said.
“I guessed ten.” Sherlock shrugged. “Long shot.”
John sighed and picked at his bed cover. “I’m not suicidal,” he said.
“Of course you’re not,” Sherlock said. “Only your idiot therapist would come to that conclusion.”
“Right. So your genius conclusion is that I’m an adrenaline junkie.”
“I don’t think I’m too far off the mark,” Sherlock said with confidence. John stopped picking at the cover and met Sherlock’s gaze.
“You can’t ever stop thinking, can you?” he asked apropos of nothing. Sherlock looked taken aback for a split second before recovering his composure.
“Some may claim that.”
John gave a harsh bite of a laugh. “No, it’s true. Your mind can’t bloody shut up. It keeps going and going and you have to keep running.”
“John, I don’t see what this has to do with-“
“Shut up,” John advised, and if he wanted to be honest, there was some pleasure in seeing Sherlock Holmes look ever so slightly invaded, and not entirely pleased with it.
“I’m not like that, Sherlock. I-“ John faltered then, because he sensed he was entering a threshold of some type, and he wasn’t sure where he was going. “Sometimes I can’t move,” he finally said, and his voice sounded uneven as it left him. “I can’t move for all the things bashing around my head. It’s like I’m paralyzed. It’s…” he shrugged in explanation and found Sherlock’s eyes in the artificial glow of the streetlights. Anyone else and John would have been expecting horror, pity, sympathy. Sherlock merely gave him focus, so John kept talking.
“I remember my mum, finding her body in the bathtub.” John flexed his hand. “She looked peaceful, like she’d finally gotten rid of all the shit that used to make her cry for no reason. I suppose the idea stayed with me. I was eleven when I first tried it, in our cousin’s pond. They thought I was drowning and I remember being mad at all of them for stopping me from finally getting rid of it.”
Silence, save a car rumbling under the window.
“I found that sometimes you have to get to rock bottom before you can start moving back up,” John said. He felt himself slump slightly as he spoke. A release, he supposed.
They sat facing one another from opposite ends of the bed. Sherlock was staring at him so much harder than he would at a corpse. Like he was the final clue in the most bizarre crime of the century. It was mind-numbingly thrilling, and John had a sudden sense that he’d never done something so intimate in his life.
“Interesting,” Sherlock finally said. He sounded thoughtful. John felt his mouth crook into a smile, a bloom of warmth spreading in his stomach.
“Only you’d have a response like that,” he said.
“Hardly,” Sherlock waved his hand, though his gaze never wavered from John. He looked as if he wanted to say something, though he remained silent.
“So you admit you were wrong.”
“What?”
“You thought I just wanted an adrenaline buzz.” John watched Sherlock make an odd expression.
“I admit,” he said stiffly after a few moments, “that there’s always something.” He hesitated before blurting, “In your case, multiple somethings.”
John blinked, trying to work out whether he’d just been given a compliment. But Sherlock was already standing and sweeping towards the door, his face ducked.
“You should sleep,” he said before disappearing through the doorway and moving down the stairs.
“Right,” John stared at the empty doorway. “Right.”
When he lay back down, he realized how much lighter his chest felt, how much easier he could breath.
He fell asleep almost immediately.