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If you have made mistakes, even serious ones, there is always another chance for you. What we call failure is not the falling down but the staying down. - Mary Pickford (1893 - 1979)
When Sherlock emerged from his bedroom, John was already on his third cup of tea and second newspaper. Sherlock knew John had been up since three-sixteen, had come down from his room at four-fifty-eight and had been going through the papers since the first one would have gone through the door downstairs between five-fifteen and five-thirty. While John had never shed his military schedule completely, that usually meant he was up between six and seven, even when there was no pressing reason to be; so this was early, even for John. It was especially early compared to the few weeks between The Woman and their break in at Baskerville. The few weeks where they mostly spent the nights together in Sherlock’s bed and John would sleep in a little later and Sherlock would make it worth his while to stay in bed until Sherlock woke up too.
But in the week since Baskerville, John had started sleeping upstairs again. The first night back they’d both been pretty damn tired and Sherlock had been okay with the fact that they both wanted their undisturbed sleep. He wasn’t quite sure how the whole sleeping-together-when-sex-wasn’t-involved thing was supposed to work, and with the stresses he’d put on their relationship recently, he was pretty sure that their first night home wasn’t the time to ask. The second night John had headed up and Sherlock had asked if should follow when he finished with his experiment, but John had said that he really just wanted to be alone. Sherlock hadn’t asked again and John hadn’t come in with him, even though Sherlock had dropped what he’d hoped were several subtle hints that he was welcome to.
But no, for the past week, John had gone up to bed alone. Sherlock wasn’t sure what to make of it. John was civil with him at the very least, friendly even. Squeezing Sherlock’s shoulder when he passed from the kitchen as Sherlock bent over his microscope. Leaving tea and toast when he’d gone out early on Tuesday. Sitting arm-to-arm and hip-to-hip with Sherlock as they tried to solve cases based on the evening news reports and then seeing how quickly they could gauge the culprit on whatever crime television series happened to be on after the news finished.
And today, Sherlock noticed, John looked like hell. He’d looked a little tired, a little peaked all week, but this was something else entirely.
Sherlock knew why. It wasn’t hard to deduce. The much more challenging puzzle was trying to figure out if there was anything he could do about it.
Sherlock pulled his dressing gown around himself, neglecting the tie as usual, and went into the kitchen where he took the last cup of John’s tea. He went into the living room and flopped into his own chair and set his mind to the problem of John’s current state.
There was a reason he preferred the cold hard facts of cases than the emotional entanglements most people sought. They were messy. There was too much margin for error when trying to deduce what the best way to restore someone’s emotional well-being was. If John had lost his watch or if his sister had gone missing or if John had been framed for murder, Sherlock would be able to do something. But with this… he was hardly any kind of expert. He was barely even familiar with more than the names and textbook definitions of a fair number of the concepts involved.
“What? If you took the last cup of tea, you can bloody well put on more. I’m not doing it for you today,” John snapped as he straightened the paper he was combing through for either possible cases or mentions of their recent work.
Sherlock raised his eyebrows at the remark. John was always honest with him, never forced either of them to deal with more pleasantries and soft talking-around-a-thing than was absolutely necessary, but he didn’t usually bark at Sherlock until Sherlock had done something egregious. It was far too early in the morning for that to have happened yet. Even taking the last cup of tea usually only merited an eye-roll and a demand that Sherlock put on a fresh pot, which Sherlock traditionally turned into a challenge: how fast could he get John to put on the second pot? Which led him to a second thought: John wanted to keep up the pretense of their usual morning banter, but was too caught up in his own emotions and his own preoccupations to invoke his own social filter for Sherlock’s sake. Not that Sherlock cared much about how polite John was; he didn’t expect manners any more than he used them. However in this case John’s lack of them was a good indicator of there being more pressing issues on John’s mind than simply an empty teapot.
Deciding that for this one morning, discretion was the better part of not having John throw his skull at him or come after him with his own harpoon, Sherlock got up and put on the tea.
With the kettle on, Sherlock returned to his seat and his study of John’s body language.
Without looking up from his paper, John finally asked, “Sherlock, why are you watching me?”
“I have a quandary,” Sherlock told him, wondering how this would go.
John lowered the paper. “What is it?”
“You know that I dislike dealing with emotional issues.”
“The whole of bloody London knows that, Sherlock.” John went back to his paper.
“There’s too much… gray. Too much unpredictability,” Sherlock continued. “For example, when we go to a crime scene and there is a family member or friend of a murder victim there, you invariably ask them if they are ‘alright’. They invariably answer ‘yes’, don’t they?” Sherlock asked.
“More often than not.”
“And then you move on to questions that are actually useful to the case.”
“It’s good manners, not to mention it helps the proceedings, to make sure the person you’re speaking to is in a frame of mind where they can answer coherently,” John told him patiently.
“Yes, but when they say they are, in fact ‘okay’, you take them at their word and move on. Yet, yesterday when it was obvious that Molly Hooper was upset over her most recent attempt at having a love life when she said she was okay, you pressed until she confided in you. Well, in you, me, Lestrade, that irritant Sally Donovan and three corpses.”
“Please, Sherlock, if you have a point, get to it.” So much for patience.
“How do you know?” Sherlock asked, uncharacteristically doing what John asked.
“Know what?”
“When do you just accept people’s initial answer and when do you keep pushing until they tell you everything you want to know?”
John set the paper on the table next to his chair, turning to look at Sherlock. His expression clearly said, “You actually want me to teach you compassion?”
“I mean, the wife at that construction site murder said she was ‘okay’ when she clearly was not, but you didn’t make her explain herself. Yet forty-two minutes later when Molly said she was ‘okay’ you did press her into telling the long, tedious story of yet another relationship that never should have even started,” Sherlock continued when John just continued to stare at him. “Both explanations were obvious. The wife was upset at the death of her husband. Molly was upset because, once again, she made a terrible decision about who to date. You didn’t need to have them tell you that in order to satisfy your own curiosity. So why press Molly to talk but not Mrs. Evers?”
“It’s a judgment call, Sherlock. A gut feeling. When it’s someone you know well, and you know they’re upset, sometimes you feel like it’s your obligation to get them to talk to someone about what’s bothering them. To… try and help if you can. Sometimes it’s enough to ask if they’re okay – to show that you’re concerned for them - time or circumstance may keep you from digging further, but you can always go back and talk to them later if you’re still worried.”
Sherlock steepled his fingers, clearly trying to absorb what John was telling him.
“Look, Sherlock, no one expects you to… to be that person. How about if you trust me to let you know when you should or shouldn’t take someone’s ‘I’m fine’ at face value? If I could give you an equation or a flow chart or something, I would, but emotions don’t really work like that.” John shifted in his seat. Sherlock couldn’t help but notice that John was trying to shift his weight so that he was taking the pressure off his right hip and leg. Upon closer inspection he could see that the way John held his teacup had more to do with steadying the fine tremor that ran through his left arm and hand than just resting the mug on the arm of the chair and tapping the rim idly.
“What if I can’t trust you?” Sherlock asked, knowing even as he said it that this would be one of those times where John would give him the ‘how you say something is at least as important as what you say’ lecture.
Instead, John stood up and said plainly, “Well, then you’re screwed, aren’t you?” as he set his empty cup on the sidetable and shuffled into the kitchen to turn off the teakettle that had just started to spit and whistle.
Sherlock closed his eyes and took a deep breath, knowing that speaking carelessly was what had pissed John off in the first place. Well, the second place, since his mood had been suspect since at least when Sherlock had woken up. “John, I didn’t mean it like that. I’m sorry.” Sherlock realized he’d used those words more in the year he’d known John than in the entire ten before. Even more oddly, he found that he usually meant them and wasn’t just saying them as emotional manipulation.
He listened as John banged around in the kitchen, not pissed off enough to go upstairs or outside to get away from Sherlock, but obviously wanting a few seconds to regroup. Sherlock could tell by the way John’s foot dragged against the linoleum and the way the new mug he pulled down (obviously not wanting to come back in after the one he’d already been using that morning) banged against the counter and the way cabinets slammed more from being swung shut to make sure John didn’t have to stand longer than necessary more than the type of angry slamming Sherlock had been the cause of more than once, that John’s leg was bothering him again.
Sherlock wondered if the limp hadn’t been entirely psychosomatic, as he’d initially believed. John had ditched the cane not long after moving into Baker Street, but once in a great while Sherlock noticed that he still favored that leg. And the last couple of days had seen them on a heavier than usual caseload. And one that meant a fair bit of running and climbing and, in one truly disreputable pub, fighting. And there was no telling how he may have wrenched it in that secret military lab. Maybe there really was something wrong and it was catching up to him.
A few minutes later John came back in, his limp more pronounced than Sherlock could ever remember seeing it, and yet John seemed barely conscious of the change in his gait.
“Your leg seems to be bothering you again, are you alright?”
“Fine,” John said curtly as he dropped back into his seat, cradling his new mug to his chest.
Sherlock remained silent until John looked at him and then said quietly, “And this is why I found your judgment in this particular matter suspect.”
John scratched his head as he tried to work out Sherlock’s comment. “You can’t trust me to tell you when you should trust someone who says they’re fine because… I said I’m fine?”
“If Lestrade called us to Scotland Yard right now and I needed to ascertain whether or not it was worth pushing a witness or a suspect on the validity of their ‘fineness’, I would trust you without hesitation. However I know that last night you had two severe nightmares and that after the second you decided not to go back to sleep. This is the sixth night in a row that your nightmares have kept you from getting at least seven hours of sleep – and you are never quite completely alert when you have less than six in a night. Your leg is bothering you for the first time since you moved in here with me over a year ago and you haven’t updated your blog in almost two weeks, despite the fact that we’ve had no less than four cases you would classify as interesting and a total of nine cases altogether. The fact that you swore at me about the tea this morning, despite the fact that I almost always take the last cup, leads me to deduce that you are not at all okay. Yet I knew that if I were to simply ask if you were ‘okay’, you’d tell me that you were, since that seems to be our sociological pre-programmed response to that question, regardless of the truth –“
“Sherlock!” John interrupted, scrubbing a hand wearily over his eyes. “If you’re about to deduce that I have PTSD and that it’s been… problematic lately, let me remind you that three psychologists and psychiatrists have already gotten there, so shut the hell up about it, would you?”
Sherlock stopped, still not sure how this ‘I don’t want to talk about it; I’m fine’ thing was supposed to work. According to some of the extremely pedantic television John favored, friends kept pestering friends who were clearly bothered by something until the bothered party confided in the first party, at which point everyone felt better. But apparently that was one of those thousands of fallacies of television that never worked in the real world. Sherlock pulled his knees up to his chest, wondering how he was supposed to help.
“I’m sorry, Sherlock. I am. I’m fi- I will be fine in a few days. This happens once in a while – the nightmares getting worse than normal, my mood going to hell for no good reason… I’m sorry I snapped about the tea.”
Sherlock frowned. John had admitted he wasn’t truly okay, which was sort of the point, but now he was blaming himself for the symptoms of his condition. That certainly wasn’t his fault. “I don’t know what to do to make it better,” Sherlock finally admitted. “You always seem to know what to do for me when I injure myself in an experiment or when I get frustrated with a case, or when I make an entire room stop and stare at me by saying something they obviously feel was inappropriate. You… find ways to fix it. I don’t know if I can fix this for you.”
“You can’t Sherlock, so please don’t make yourself crazy trying,” John said tiredly.
“And it’s not ‘no good reason’, is it?” Sherlock pressed. “This is my fault. Right?” There. He’d said it. John hadn’t been acting like he was angry for what Sherlock had done, and John had absolutely no qualms when it came to letting Sherlock know when he’d fucked up, so he’d thought he was forgiven. He’d apologized back at the moor and John had even said it was all right now. Something in the back of his head where those annoying feeling-things were shelved, though, had made him wonder if one little explosion followed by a simple apology at the moor would really put things right between him and John. It had always felt just a little too easy.
John sighed and slouched further into his chair. “I’m done being angry at you for drugging me if that’s what you’re asking.”
Sherlock wanted to know how John could just decide to be ‘done being angry’ like that, but he wasn’t sure it was a good time to ask. “But this past week… the nightmares you’ve had since coming back from Baskerville. The fact that you… are avoiding me.”
“There’s no point in me keeping both of us up,” John answered quietly. “And… you didn’t mean for this to happen. Sometimes it amazes me how much of an idiot you can be for someone so smart, but you’re rarely, if ever, just cruel. Once I remembered that it just became a matter of pushing a lot of this stuff back into its box.”
It nagged at Sherlock that he could do all this damage and John could just accept it. That John would try to shield him from the fallout of his own disaster. He couldn’t imagine that he actually deserved someone who actually understood that it wasn’t that he was heartless… he just didn’t always think through the full ramifications of his experiments.
“You could try… therapy?” Sherlock suggested, the word barely making it off his tongue, as if he couldn’t believe he was suggesting that a soft-science might be useful.
“Both you and your brother were of the impression that my therapist was useless and that I should fire her, if you recall.”
“No one said you shouldn’t find one who is competent. I merely observed that if you former doctor couldn’t deduce that your limp was psychosomatic and wasn’t treating you for that, then she wasn’t doing a very good job.”
John gave Sherlock a half-smile, conceding the point.
Sherlock wondered if there was a bit of a door opened at this juncture and decided to see if maybe he couldn’t be that television-friend who got the bothered-party to talk after all. As much as he hated it, as much as it was messy and illogical, he owed John to try and help him, as he’d said, shove these issues back in the little mental box he kept them in. Apologizing again for drugging him probably wouldn’t actually fix anything. Sherlock traced the conversation back in his head trying to decide what it was most probable that John needed to talk about in order to stop the nightmares, to have him sleep with him again, to get him walking right again. “Why a limp?” Sherlock blurted out before he could think through the ramifications of that question. In a year he’d never asked that question. Even before he knew John at all well, he knew that wasn’t the kind of question he could just casually toss out. He tried to soften the question, even though he knew he wasn’t much good at ‘soft’. “Why was that the way your mind dealt with your experiences in Afghanistan? You were shot in the shoulder, it wasn’t like you didn’t have a real injury to contend with.”
John’s eyes squeezed closed and his hand started shaking so hard he was forced to put his mug on top of the newspapers.
“John?”
No response.
Sherlock began to worry that he’d done his egregious thing for the morning, possibly a second egregious thing, and this was going to be way harder to fix than the fish eyes in the teakettle that John hadn’t found out about until after he’d poured his first cup and it had stared back at him.
“John, I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have –“ Damn he hated being bad at anything and making this worse was making him crazy and he did understand that really, the worst possible outcome from all of this, was both of them falling into their individual neuroses.
“I was held hostage for a little more than three weeks,” John finally said.
Sherlock didn’t respond. He wasn’t sure how much more John wanted to share, but he quickly realized that this was the time to shut up and let John talk, as much as he wanted and no further, and to let it take as long as it took. Perhaps that was the crux. Perhaps what John needed from him was a lot more listening and a lot less talking.
“I was with a NATO humanitarian aid convoy and we were ambushed. The seven of us who survived were held captive. It felt like months. We were in an interior room with the electric light on all the time. We had no watches or even routine that we could mark the time with. When the rescue team finally found us and assaulted the compound, the men holding us grabbed an automatic weapon and began firing. They didn’t intend to leave anyone alive to …” Another pause, John was gripping the edges of his armchair and Sherlock could almost hear John mentally counting to five as he breathed in and again as he let the breath out slowly.
“They weren’t going to leave any of us alive to tell about the way we’d been treated,” John finally finished his thought.
“You were shot in the shoulder,” Sherlock put in quietly.
John nodded. “There was an American soldier, guy named David Sullivan, who realized what was happening about five seconds before I did. I was shot in the shoulder because he pushed me out of the way. It would have been a center-mass shot for sure if I’d been standing where I was when the bastard started firing.”
Another long set of breaths as John pieced together the words he felt would allow him to tell the truth of what happened without forcing him to choke on the memories. “When he pushed me down, he turned to cover me and he was shot… the bullet that went through his head…”
When John stopped this time, Sherlock wondered if John was actually fighting down the urge to vomit. He was completely white and there was a green tinge creeping across his skin. His hand shook, even where it was curled into the furniture and his eyes were still closed, still focused on the past.
Sherlock had no idea if there was anything to do for John now. He’d done this to his one and only friend and he wasn’t sure there was any way to undo it. He thought through the things he’d seen John do for the various trauma victims they’d encountered. He moved slowly, careful to let his dressing gown rustle and his feet slide across the floor as he approached him. The last thing he needed to do was to startle him. He knelt next to John’s chair and carefully unwrapped John’s hand from the arm of the chair, letting John’s fingers wrap around his and squeeze back. Hoping like hell that he was making it better.
“The bullet that went through his brain ultimately lodged in my thigh, near my hip,” John finally finished. John pounded his thigh gently with the side of his fist. “It was superficial damage. Flesh wound, really. Little muscle damage, but nothing lasting. But it… never felt right after that.”
Sherlock had seen a number of shootings. It struck him, now, as both odd and fortunate that he’d never seen someone shot in the head. He supposed John was lucky that a limp had been the worst of the outward signs of the trauma of having someone’s brains explode all over him. Sherlock had seen a number of case studies that involved catatonic or psychotic witnesses to similar murders. He hadn’t, since the first case, considered John weak, even once. Not even when he was still dragging that cane around with him. But for the first time he began to realize exactly how strong John really was.
No wonder fish eyes in the teakettle and thumbs in the produce bin didn’t do more than annoy him about wasted tea and the fact that John had nowhere to put the apples and grapes.
“The thing of it all is… I’m not entirely sure that was the worst thing that happened to me during that month.”
Sherlock looked up to see that John had finally opened his eyes. His lashes were just a little wet and John’s fingers were still gripping his tightly. “Not sure?” he finally asked when it seemed like John had gotten sidetracked by something inside his head.
John let out a huge sigh. “There are… spots… places… spaces of time that I can’t remember. I have tried and tried, but I absolutely can’t remember it all. I have a feeling that’s what the nightmares are about… but I don’t really remember.”
Sherlock felt his face wrinkle up. “I can’t imagine what it would feel like to forget something.”
John let out a little laugh. “You mean that exactly, don’t you? It’s not ‘forgetting something important’ or ‘forgetting something traumatic’. For you it would be distressing to forget anything. You can remember everything you’ve ever experienced, can’t you? Well, other than primary school science lessons.”
\
Sherlock couldn’t help but return the tense half-smile John gave him. Yesterday he would have bragged that of course he could. How could he do all those things John found so remarkable if he ran around forgetting things? Today even he could tell that that would be the stupidest thing he could say. He just shrugged.
“I forget things, Sherlock. It’s usually not a big deal. I forgot where I put my keys. I forgot to pick up bananas. I forgot what size denims my sister wears – which turned into a horrible debacle at her last birthday. Apparently women find it an insult when they tell you what size they wear and you forget so you try to guess and end up guessing three sizes bigger than they say. Who knew?”
Sherlock smiled. “Your sister is a size –“
“Not the point, Sherlock,” John cut him off. “The point is, I’m used to forgetting things that, in the grand scheme of things aren’t vitally important.”
“Was your sister very drunk when she took exception to the overly-large trousers?” Sherlock asked, sensing that John needed a break from the heavy emotional topics so early in the morning.
“Exceedingly. Her ex, Clara, is American and has somehow gotten Harry in the habit of saying ‘pants’ for ‘trousers’, so here’s Harry hollering at me in her bedroom at the top of her lungs about me getting her ‘pants’ and all the problems with both brothers and ‘pants’ and any place the two intersect and there’s a house full of her friends trying to figure out why I would buy her underwear. It was quite an evening.”
“I can imagine,” Sherlock said, realizing he genuinely wished that he had been there with John, despite his general avoidance of the typical obligatory celebratory occasions in life.
The immediate tension broken, John took another slow, deep breath. “Anyway, I’m used to forgetting things that have little importance at the moment. It doesn’t bother me. And… I remember someone’s head exploding all over my uniform… so what could have been so bad that my brain decided it had to hide it from me to let me stay moderately functional?” John looked at his hands, his eyebrows going up in surprise as he realized that he was no longer shaking. He used the hand that wasn’t still clutching Sherlock’s to grab his now lukewarm tea.
“I could spin you ‘round again, if you think that would help?” Sherlock asked.
John almost spit out his tea at the reference. “Yes, because that proved so useful the first time,” he said flatly.
“How was I to know, back then, that you were clever enough to have taken a photograph?”
John gave a small genuine smile at the implied compliment. He folded himself over his knees, the need for sleep that had eluded him for the past week suddenly overwhelming him. This had the effect of putting his head nearly on Sherlock’s shoulder. He couldn’t help but shiver just a tad as Sherlock ran his long, thin fingers through his hair.
Sherlock raised an eyebrow at John’s reaction. All this time he’d been thinking John was pulling back; rethinking their relationship. It didn’t occur to him that perhaps John missed the closeness too and was waiting for Sherlock to initiate things. Perhaps that was what John needed. For a little while, at least, he needed Sherlock to look after him. Sherlock had always been vaguely aware of the fact that John made sure he wasn’t starving himself or doing too much damage to himself in the name of science. And more importantly, especially after The Woman, Sherlock had learned that John had been looking out for his emotional wellbeing too. They’d been in bed one night when John had told him about how he’d confronted the thought-dead Irene and how he’d threatened her if she didn’t at least tell Sherlock she was alive. For all that Irene Adler wasn’t intimidated by him, by Mycroft, by royalty, she’d done what John had insisted on and texted him.
Sherlock studied John. He knew that bouncing around the flat, rejoicing in a deduction well done would not help John. John needed calm. He needed to know that Sherlock was trying to learn how to navigate the messiness of emotions and that he would take the risk of Doing It Wrong if there were a chance that Doing It Right would help John. John needed to know that while, yes, Sherlock was the bastard who’d drugged him, had done this to him, that he was also the one who would be there for the messy, messy emotional aftermath.
Sherlock closed his eyes and let out a sigh as he realized that John was too tired, too emotionally drained to expend much energy on something like being angry at Sherlock, something he didn’t seem to like too much even on a better day. John needed Sherlock to do the heavy emotional lifting for a while. He wasn’t sure he’d be absolute bollocks at it, but something told him that John would find his inevitable blunders ‘endearing’ or some other such trite term.
He let go of John’s hand and tried to restrain his movements as he crossed the room to the sideboard full of books, the last week or two’s mail and a few other things long neglected.
Sherlock watched John watch him as he tossed a stack of manuscripts and journals onto the floor, retrieving a large tome on the use of pollen identification in forensics. He brought it back over to John. “I’ve been meaning to read this for weeks,” he said as if they’d been having that discussion all along.
John shook his head, clearly trying to figure out what tangent Sherlock’s brain had gone off on.
“Perhaps if you wanted to try to catch up on some of the sleep you’ve missed lately, I could sit upstairs with you and get through it.”
John sniffled and scrubbed his eyes before he could get a good look at the book in Sherlock’s hands. His voice was a little choked as he asked, “That thing has to be at least eight-hundred pages long. How long do you think I’ll sleep?”
Sherlock stood and held a hand out to John. “Let’s find out.”