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”If you’re going through Hell, keep going.” ━ Winston Churchill
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And he had been doing well, very, very well, until his flatmate and best friend had taken a flying leap off a hospital rooftop and cracked his skull on the pavement. That, John supposes, was around when he started doing it again.
It isn’t about hurting himself. It never has been.
But if he’s being honest with himself, he doesn’t really know what it is about. All he knows is that he started doing it in high school when everything that could possibly go wrong did, and he did it every time he had a really difficult exam to pass or essay to write at uni, and he did it that night after coming back to London, after seeing the horror that was war, after being reminded of the look and feel and smell of blood, and he did it when Sherlock Holmes threw himself off a building, and he’s been doing it ever since.
Old habits die hard, he figures. Should have guessed they could come back to life.
John doesn’t know why he does it. When something in his brain gets triggered and he decides to start doing it again, there’s no discernable pattern. Sometimes, he’ll do it after a terribly long day, and sometimes he’ll do it after a nice date night with a pretty girl, and sometimes he just does it in the shower or before bed, like it’s part of his grooming ritual.
John does it tonight. He watches, tenses during the brief moment when the shallow cut produces nothing, relaxes when suddenly there is a line of crimson on his forearm, sighs as the blood beads up at one corner, then the other, then in a few places in between. Another: deeper, this one, and there’s something to show for it when the blood actually drips, not much, just a single drop of redness travelling very slowly to his inner wrist, eventually hitting the heel of his hand.
Perhaps the reason he does it is this: it’s mesmerizing. And Sally Donovan thought Sherlock was the freak. What if, in the moment that she had told John to stay away, he’d turned to her and said that he used to enjoy drawing a razor across his body just so he could watch the blood? What would she have said, done? Sherlock had possessed a genius-level intellect to acquit him of his idiosyncrasies. What’s John’s excuse?
John counts the six new lines on his forearm. Then he tries to count all the other lines ━ some are scabbed over and angry, those are from a few nights ago; some are brownish and smoother, those are probably from the night Sherlock killed himself; and countless are small and white and untextured, those are from quite a long time ago.
Two weeks earlier, he would have looked at those little white lines with a strange sense of pride. He’d managed to abstain from his sick little habit for years. Now, looking at them, he feels... indifferent. Unaffected, because here he is with a blade in his hands and the blood is mesmerizing and slashing up his wrists again for the first time in years feels so very familiar.
And best of all, he doesn’t think about Sherlock Holmes for a second while he does it.
Now he’s lying on his bed, looking up at the ceiling, wearing only a pair of pants, which means that every cut he’s ever made is brazenly displayed to the darkness, lines of red and brown and white marring his arms and hips and thighs.
John Watson lies in his bed, thinking about blood and pain and war and most definitely not about his dead best friend.
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He doesn’t try to get better. He doesn’t think that stopping the cutting will make anything better.
(Neither will the cutting, for that matter. But he is tired, and it’s a paradox he’s not prepared to dwell on.)
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Sherlock could never have caught him in the act, because John hadn’t done it in 221B until after he died. But the genius knew everything. Even if he never saw a blade or a scar, he could probably deduce it from John’s walking pace or the way he held his mobile phone or a certain hair that stood out of place on his head. Sherlock was like that, John knows, and there’s a very distinct possibility that he had known about John’s old habits from the moment they met at Bart’s.
John wonders if Sherlock ever would have said anything, had their friendship not been cut short. He would probably have taken it the wrong way. John can almost hear him jeering, dull, idiot, transport.
Would he be concerned, or would he brush it off? Perhaps he would assume that it kept John from boredom the same way chasing criminals did. The same way cocaine did, once upon a time, for him; although John wasn’t too keen to draw that comparison.
In his mind’s eye, John sees his friend’s handsome features twist into the same look he’d seen on his sister and parents and some of his girlfriends. First surprise, then confusion and horror, and then, worst of all, pity. He hates the pity the most. He hates it.
Would Sherlock pity him? Would he even care? Some people, John had found over the years, didn’t really care. Said it was a phase. A ploy for attention. What would Sherlock think? If he saw me doing it, would he just tell me to put my coat on, we’re going to Angelo’s? Lestrade’s got a case? Would he continue his nicotine patches, and I continue my cutting, and we both just accept the other’s vices and just carry on?
No. He wouldn’t want John to hurt that way. Beneath the sociopathic exterior, he had learned over the years, was something different, something more. There had to be. Underneath the “freak,” the “psychopath,” there was a different man, a man with a brain and a heart. The look on the detective’s face when he saw John strapped to Semtex with a sniper trained on him... there had to be something more there.
John decides he is giving altogether too much thought to a dead man’s potential reactions, and gets up off the couch, discards his shirt that’s gained a lovely new burgundy design on its sleeve, throws it in the wash and goes upstairs to have a shower, to wash the blood off, to wash Sherlock off.
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