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coloredinkTitle: with fear, as half-awakened
Characters: John/Sherlock
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 2200
Summary: "It's just, you know, I wasn't there," John said, trying to keep his voice level and reasonable. "So I'd like to know, that's all."
Notes: Written for this kinkmeme prompt, which requested Sherlock having PTSD nightmares and John helping him through them.
"C'mon, tell me," said John.
Sherlock cut into his chicken. "I told you what I did."
John stared. Sherlock was eating, which in and of itself was not that unusual. He'd seen Sherlock eat plenty of times, both Before and After. Sherlock's dietary habits tended towards the portable: pork pies from Mrs. Hudson's refrigerator, Scotch eggs from the refrigerator at Tesco's, the occasional kebab, anything that could be eaten whilst pacing or in pursuit or just standing 'round waiting for the next interesting thing to happen. But this, this was dinner, this was sitting at the kitchen table cutting into a baked chicken breast with a knife and fork. Sherlock had done this, oh, perhaps a dozen times since his return. Once a week, at least. John was still not quite used to it.
He picked up his own knife and fork. "Yes, you told me the basics: Tibet, China, Japan, Brazil, South Africa, I'm sure I left out a few countries, but you said you solved cases." Sherlock looked up at that word, his eyes bright and glittering. "I want to know about the case. Cases."
"Why, so you can write it up for your blog?" Sherlock sneered. "Romanticise it and turn it into another one of your fanciful little pulp fictions?"
"No!" John put down his knife with a click against the edge of his plate. He swallowed. "Well, I, yes, but--God, Sherlock."
Sherlock rolled his eyes and chewed, and John was forcefully reminded of dinnertimes with Harry in the Watson household. Had he been this insufferable as a teenager? John resolved to apologise to his parents. "It's just, you know, I wasn't there," John said, trying to keep his voice level and reasonable. "So I'd like to know, that's all. What you did. What you saw. And your readers would like to know too, I'm sure," he added, even though he knew that that, of all statements, was the most futile: Sherlock didn't give a crap about his readers.
Sherlock waved his knife. "Nothing of importance, or I would've told you already. Trifles, only trifles." He took a bite of his noodles.
But John wasn't sure of that. Because Sherlock was eating.
-----
"What was New York like?" John asked. "I've always wanted to go."
Sherlock turned the page in his newspaper and snapped it straight with a flourish of his wrists. "Like London, but taller. Brighter," he added. "The cabs are yellow."
John turned halfway around in the desk chair and curled one arm over the back. He couldn't see Sherlock's expression, as the other man's back was towards him, but he smiled anyway. "And I expect you had just as good luck hailing a cab there as you did here." Sherlock did not dignify that with a reply, so John hummed and decided to press his luck with another question. "What did you do there?"
Sherlock turned another page in his newspaper, snapped it straight with another jerk of his arms. "Took in an opera."
John blinked. He should've known better than to try and anticipate Sherlock Holmes. "You--went to the opera?"
"That's what I just said." Trace irritation; Sherlock hated it when he had to repeat himself, and he hated it even more when--from his point of view--John was purposefully obtuse.
John ran his tongue around his molars. "I was under the impression you'd spent the last year and a half taking apart Moriarty's network. I, at least, that's what you told me."
"Yes."
"And that involved the opera...how?"
"Because I like the opera," Sherlock retorted. "Now stop pestering me. I'm trying to read."
John stopped pestering him. He went back to replying to emails, pecking out the words slowly and methodically with his fingertips, because he knew that drove Sherlock crazy.
-----
He had only a few things in the carrier bag: a box of tea, a packet of biscuits, a jar of jam. John opened the cupboard to put them away, and-- "Sherlock, did you do the shopping?"
Sherlock, curled over his microscope, only grunted and waved a shut-up hand in John's direction.
John looked back at the cupboard and blinked. The shelves were bursting with tins of beans--how would they ever eat so many beans?--and boxes of Jacob's crackers and cereal bars and bags of dried fruit and tins of evaporated milk and-- "What, is there going to be a famine, or something?" John asked, bemused. He moved a jar of peanut butter aside so that he could put away his tea. He stacked the biscuits on top of it and decided the jam had better go straight in the fridge.
"If you're going to stand there like that, you can at least bring me the HobNobs," said Sherlock.
-----
John braced his hands on the back of Sherlock's chair and leaned over him. Sherlock's shoulders stiffened briefly, but his thumbs continued to fly over the keyboard of his Blackberry. "And what did you do in Geneva? Attend the symphony?"
Sherlock's typing didn't even miss a beat. "Flung a man to his death from a clifftop, actually."
John nearly fell down the back of Sherlock's chair. "Really?!"
"No."
-----
"If it was so, such a trifle, then why won't you just tell me!" John stomped away from the couch, then back again to spread his hands. "Something, anything! One of the cases you took on, or, or just, someone you saw in the streets of Mexico City, even."
Sherlock opened one eye and rolled it up at John, who stood over him, arms crossed, huffing and puffing like the proverbial wolf from the fairy story. Sherlock gave a great, deep sigh, as if resigning himself to John's exasperated behaviour, and closed the one eye in order to open both of them. He gave a languorous stretch, arching his back off the sofa cushions and stretching his arms above his head. "John, John, John," he sighed. "It's not really about satisfying your curiousity anymore, is it?" He gave John a knowing look.
John's lips tightened. He uncrossed his arms, recrossed them, and finally settled for having them akimbo, fists on his hips. "Fine," he bit out. "All right, fine. I'm--I just--if it was so easy for you, this, this globe-trotting, going to the opera and eating sushi and playing card games, then why didn't you bring me? What was so terrible, so hard about it that you couldn't tell me, that you let me think you were dead?"
Sherlock pushed himself up into a sitting position, drawing his dressing gown back into place where it'd slipped down over one shoulder. He tossed his hair. "You know I trust you. That I rely upon you." He paused, as if waiting for John to nod or otherwise give some acknowledgment, but when John didn't, he went on. "If it'd been dangerous, I would have wanted you with me. But it wasn't. It was boring. Tedious to the extreme." He ejected the words from deep in his chest like they pained him. "You would have hated it."
"I wouldn't have." At Sherlock's quizzical look, John sighed and let his arms fall to his sides. He sat down next to Sherlock on the couch and looked at his hands. "I wouldn't have hated it," he clarified. "It would've been brilliant, all the same."
-----
"Sher--" John pushed open the door to the sitting room and shut his mouth so quickly that he nearly bit his tongue.
Sherlock was on the couch, asleep.
That was actually one thing that hadn't changed very much, since Sherlock's return: the man still never slept. He was often still up or still out when John went to bed, and gone or up when John came downstairs in the mornings. He vibrated with manic energy when they were on cases and then collapsed into exhausted sleep for ten or more hours afterwards--or so John presumed, since he himself was also asleep at the time.
But it'd been a long time since he'd caught Sherlock napping on the couch like this. John closed the door behind him so that it made just the barest little click and had every intention of just making his way up to his room when Sherlock made a sound.
No, Sherlock whimpered. John froze in the act of toeing off his shoes and held his breath, watching Sherlock out of the corner of his eye. Sherlock rolled halfway over, his dressing gown twisting around one of his legs, and flung one arm out in a restless grasp, nearly smacking the floor. He'd send himself off the couch at this rate. He made another sound, louder this time, and his eyebrows furrowed as his face twisted into an expression of--fear? Sorrow? Horror? His head jerked to one side, and his mouth opened in a silent gasp.
John put down his shoes and padded to Sherlock's side in his socked feet. Sherlock's breath was now coming in quick little pants. John stood over him for an indecisive second before he made the decision he believed he himself would want, put his hand on Sherlock's shoulder, and shook him awake. "Sher--"
Sherlock came awake all at once, but fortunately John was ready and caught Sherlock's other wrist in his hand, not that he would have done any serious damage with it. His fist was clenched in an unmistakeable knife hold. Sherlock struggled for a few useless seconds, teeth bared, snarling imprecations, until John got a knee down into Sherlock's sternum and yelled him into submission. Then Sherlock slumped back into the cushions, still breathing hard, staring up at John with a blank expression. John eased his weight off of Sherlock and let go of his wrists.
"It wasn't boring, was it," John said. Sherlock didn't answer, but then, he didn't have to.
-----
They hadn't shared a bed since Sherlock's return; at first, John had been too angry to want it, and then, well, John had still been too angry to want it. But besides that, it had seemed too strange, too impossible; how could they just pick up where they left off as if nothing had happened? Sherlock might have wanted it, but he didn't ask, and so John didn't offer; he simply moved back into his room upstairs.
Now he half-carried Sherlock into his bedroom behind the kitchen. Sherlock had rearranged the furniture at some point: the bed, which had once occupied the centre of the room, was now pushed into the corner, against the wall, and the bookshelves had been relocated to form a barrier between Sherlock and the door. John swallowed the lump in his throat but said nothing as he manoeuvred Sherlock into bed, and then crawled in with him. Sherlock rolled to face the wall, presenting his hunched back to John.
John propped himself up on his elbows. "I do know what this is like, you know."
"Piss off," Sherlock grumbled. "I don't need a useless therapist."
"I wasn't suggesting that," John replies. "I was suggesting you...I don't know, talk to me."
Sherlock groaned. "This again?"
"I--" John bit his lip, then licked it and tried the words in his mouth and in his head before saying them out loud. "You don't have to do anything you don't want to do. I can't force you anyway. But I do--I do know what it's like. And you can talk to me, if you want, and I'll understand, and that'll help. You. Feel...less alone." God, did he sound like Ella? This sounded like something Ella might have said. John hoped Sherlock would be more receptive.
Sherlock didn't say anything. He didn't even move. John watched Sherlock's back and shoulders for signs of breathing. Finally, Sherlock took a deep, unsteady inhale and rolled over to sprawl on his back. He flung his forearm across his eyes and breathed out.
"Go away," Sherlock said. He pronounced each syllable clearly and precisely.
John pushed himself up into a sitting position and got his legs over the side of the bed. He told himself not to take his personally, but the leaden lump in his chest, spreading through his limbs and to his extremities, insisted otherwise. Before he could actually get up and leave, however, Sherlock's voice behind him continued: "No. Stop."
John stopped. John waited.
Sherlock said, "I don't want it to be different."
John looked over his shoulder. Sherlock had moved his arm up to his forehead, so that John could see his expression, glaring. Were his eyes red? It was hard to tell in the dark. "It was boring," said Sherlock. "It was tedious in the extreme. It was insufferable, and the parts that were good, that were exciting, you weren't there." He swallowed; John could see his Adam's apple jumping in the shadows. "And now I'm back, and you're here, and that's good. I want it to be the same. I want it to be like it was before."
John thought of those long, long days in Afghanistan, the ones spent playing cards and writing letters and drinking and telling each other dirty jokes. Those were the worst days, because they always ended in hours and hours of indescribable horror, blood all the way up to the elbows and warm guts squishing under your fingers and under your feet, blackened skin and that sickening smell of delicious char, like a pork roast, and also of burnt plastic, body armor melted to skin--
It will never be the same, he thought. It'll never be like it was before.
He wondered what Sherlock had been dreaming about.
"I know," he said. He reached back and touched Sherlock's fingertips, where they lay on the bed. Sherlock twitched. "It will be."
---end---
Characters: John/Sherlock
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 2200
Summary: "It's just, you know, I wasn't there," John said, trying to keep his voice level and reasonable. "So I'd like to know, that's all."
Notes: Written for this kinkmeme prompt, which requested Sherlock having PTSD nightmares and John helping him through them.
"C'mon, tell me," said John.
Sherlock cut into his chicken. "I told you what I did."
John stared. Sherlock was eating, which in and of itself was not that unusual. He'd seen Sherlock eat plenty of times, both Before and After. Sherlock's dietary habits tended towards the portable: pork pies from Mrs. Hudson's refrigerator, Scotch eggs from the refrigerator at Tesco's, the occasional kebab, anything that could be eaten whilst pacing or in pursuit or just standing 'round waiting for the next interesting thing to happen. But this, this was dinner, this was sitting at the kitchen table cutting into a baked chicken breast with a knife and fork. Sherlock had done this, oh, perhaps a dozen times since his return. Once a week, at least. John was still not quite used to it.
He picked up his own knife and fork. "Yes, you told me the basics: Tibet, China, Japan, Brazil, South Africa, I'm sure I left out a few countries, but you said you solved cases." Sherlock looked up at that word, his eyes bright and glittering. "I want to know about the case. Cases."
"Why, so you can write it up for your blog?" Sherlock sneered. "Romanticise it and turn it into another one of your fanciful little pulp fictions?"
"No!" John put down his knife with a click against the edge of his plate. He swallowed. "Well, I, yes, but--God, Sherlock."
Sherlock rolled his eyes and chewed, and John was forcefully reminded of dinnertimes with Harry in the Watson household. Had he been this insufferable as a teenager? John resolved to apologise to his parents. "It's just, you know, I wasn't there," John said, trying to keep his voice level and reasonable. "So I'd like to know, that's all. What you did. What you saw. And your readers would like to know too, I'm sure," he added, even though he knew that that, of all statements, was the most futile: Sherlock didn't give a crap about his readers.
Sherlock waved his knife. "Nothing of importance, or I would've told you already. Trifles, only trifles." He took a bite of his noodles.
But John wasn't sure of that. Because Sherlock was eating.
-----
"What was New York like?" John asked. "I've always wanted to go."
Sherlock turned the page in his newspaper and snapped it straight with a flourish of his wrists. "Like London, but taller. Brighter," he added. "The cabs are yellow."
John turned halfway around in the desk chair and curled one arm over the back. He couldn't see Sherlock's expression, as the other man's back was towards him, but he smiled anyway. "And I expect you had just as good luck hailing a cab there as you did here." Sherlock did not dignify that with a reply, so John hummed and decided to press his luck with another question. "What did you do there?"
Sherlock turned another page in his newspaper, snapped it straight with another jerk of his arms. "Took in an opera."
John blinked. He should've known better than to try and anticipate Sherlock Holmes. "You--went to the opera?"
"That's what I just said." Trace irritation; Sherlock hated it when he had to repeat himself, and he hated it even more when--from his point of view--John was purposefully obtuse.
John ran his tongue around his molars. "I was under the impression you'd spent the last year and a half taking apart Moriarty's network. I, at least, that's what you told me."
"Yes."
"And that involved the opera...how?"
"Because I like the opera," Sherlock retorted. "Now stop pestering me. I'm trying to read."
John stopped pestering him. He went back to replying to emails, pecking out the words slowly and methodically with his fingertips, because he knew that drove Sherlock crazy.
-----
He had only a few things in the carrier bag: a box of tea, a packet of biscuits, a jar of jam. John opened the cupboard to put them away, and-- "Sherlock, did you do the shopping?"
Sherlock, curled over his microscope, only grunted and waved a shut-up hand in John's direction.
John looked back at the cupboard and blinked. The shelves were bursting with tins of beans--how would they ever eat so many beans?--and boxes of Jacob's crackers and cereal bars and bags of dried fruit and tins of evaporated milk and-- "What, is there going to be a famine, or something?" John asked, bemused. He moved a jar of peanut butter aside so that he could put away his tea. He stacked the biscuits on top of it and decided the jam had better go straight in the fridge.
"If you're going to stand there like that, you can at least bring me the HobNobs," said Sherlock.
-----
John braced his hands on the back of Sherlock's chair and leaned over him. Sherlock's shoulders stiffened briefly, but his thumbs continued to fly over the keyboard of his Blackberry. "And what did you do in Geneva? Attend the symphony?"
Sherlock's typing didn't even miss a beat. "Flung a man to his death from a clifftop, actually."
John nearly fell down the back of Sherlock's chair. "Really?!"
"No."
-----
"If it was so, such a trifle, then why won't you just tell me!" John stomped away from the couch, then back again to spread his hands. "Something, anything! One of the cases you took on, or, or just, someone you saw in the streets of Mexico City, even."
Sherlock opened one eye and rolled it up at John, who stood over him, arms crossed, huffing and puffing like the proverbial wolf from the fairy story. Sherlock gave a great, deep sigh, as if resigning himself to John's exasperated behaviour, and closed the one eye in order to open both of them. He gave a languorous stretch, arching his back off the sofa cushions and stretching his arms above his head. "John, John, John," he sighed. "It's not really about satisfying your curiousity anymore, is it?" He gave John a knowing look.
John's lips tightened. He uncrossed his arms, recrossed them, and finally settled for having them akimbo, fists on his hips. "Fine," he bit out. "All right, fine. I'm--I just--if it was so easy for you, this, this globe-trotting, going to the opera and eating sushi and playing card games, then why didn't you bring me? What was so terrible, so hard about it that you couldn't tell me, that you let me think you were dead?"
Sherlock pushed himself up into a sitting position, drawing his dressing gown back into place where it'd slipped down over one shoulder. He tossed his hair. "You know I trust you. That I rely upon you." He paused, as if waiting for John to nod or otherwise give some acknowledgment, but when John didn't, he went on. "If it'd been dangerous, I would have wanted you with me. But it wasn't. It was boring. Tedious to the extreme." He ejected the words from deep in his chest like they pained him. "You would have hated it."
"I wouldn't have." At Sherlock's quizzical look, John sighed and let his arms fall to his sides. He sat down next to Sherlock on the couch and looked at his hands. "I wouldn't have hated it," he clarified. "It would've been brilliant, all the same."
-----
"Sher--" John pushed open the door to the sitting room and shut his mouth so quickly that he nearly bit his tongue.
Sherlock was on the couch, asleep.
That was actually one thing that hadn't changed very much, since Sherlock's return: the man still never slept. He was often still up or still out when John went to bed, and gone or up when John came downstairs in the mornings. He vibrated with manic energy when they were on cases and then collapsed into exhausted sleep for ten or more hours afterwards--or so John presumed, since he himself was also asleep at the time.
But it'd been a long time since he'd caught Sherlock napping on the couch like this. John closed the door behind him so that it made just the barest little click and had every intention of just making his way up to his room when Sherlock made a sound.
No, Sherlock whimpered. John froze in the act of toeing off his shoes and held his breath, watching Sherlock out of the corner of his eye. Sherlock rolled halfway over, his dressing gown twisting around one of his legs, and flung one arm out in a restless grasp, nearly smacking the floor. He'd send himself off the couch at this rate. He made another sound, louder this time, and his eyebrows furrowed as his face twisted into an expression of--fear? Sorrow? Horror? His head jerked to one side, and his mouth opened in a silent gasp.
John put down his shoes and padded to Sherlock's side in his socked feet. Sherlock's breath was now coming in quick little pants. John stood over him for an indecisive second before he made the decision he believed he himself would want, put his hand on Sherlock's shoulder, and shook him awake. "Sher--"
Sherlock came awake all at once, but fortunately John was ready and caught Sherlock's other wrist in his hand, not that he would have done any serious damage with it. His fist was clenched in an unmistakeable knife hold. Sherlock struggled for a few useless seconds, teeth bared, snarling imprecations, until John got a knee down into Sherlock's sternum and yelled him into submission. Then Sherlock slumped back into the cushions, still breathing hard, staring up at John with a blank expression. John eased his weight off of Sherlock and let go of his wrists.
"It wasn't boring, was it," John said. Sherlock didn't answer, but then, he didn't have to.
-----
They hadn't shared a bed since Sherlock's return; at first, John had been too angry to want it, and then, well, John had still been too angry to want it. But besides that, it had seemed too strange, too impossible; how could they just pick up where they left off as if nothing had happened? Sherlock might have wanted it, but he didn't ask, and so John didn't offer; he simply moved back into his room upstairs.
Now he half-carried Sherlock into his bedroom behind the kitchen. Sherlock had rearranged the furniture at some point: the bed, which had once occupied the centre of the room, was now pushed into the corner, against the wall, and the bookshelves had been relocated to form a barrier between Sherlock and the door. John swallowed the lump in his throat but said nothing as he manoeuvred Sherlock into bed, and then crawled in with him. Sherlock rolled to face the wall, presenting his hunched back to John.
John propped himself up on his elbows. "I do know what this is like, you know."
"Piss off," Sherlock grumbled. "I don't need a useless therapist."
"I wasn't suggesting that," John replies. "I was suggesting you...I don't know, talk to me."
Sherlock groaned. "This again?"
"I--" John bit his lip, then licked it and tried the words in his mouth and in his head before saying them out loud. "You don't have to do anything you don't want to do. I can't force you anyway. But I do--I do know what it's like. And you can talk to me, if you want, and I'll understand, and that'll help. You. Feel...less alone." God, did he sound like Ella? This sounded like something Ella might have said. John hoped Sherlock would be more receptive.
Sherlock didn't say anything. He didn't even move. John watched Sherlock's back and shoulders for signs of breathing. Finally, Sherlock took a deep, unsteady inhale and rolled over to sprawl on his back. He flung his forearm across his eyes and breathed out.
"Go away," Sherlock said. He pronounced each syllable clearly and precisely.
John pushed himself up into a sitting position and got his legs over the side of the bed. He told himself not to take his personally, but the leaden lump in his chest, spreading through his limbs and to his extremities, insisted otherwise. Before he could actually get up and leave, however, Sherlock's voice behind him continued: "No. Stop."
John stopped. John waited.
Sherlock said, "I don't want it to be different."
John looked over his shoulder. Sherlock had moved his arm up to his forehead, so that John could see his expression, glaring. Were his eyes red? It was hard to tell in the dark. "It was boring," said Sherlock. "It was tedious in the extreme. It was insufferable, and the parts that were good, that were exciting, you weren't there." He swallowed; John could see his Adam's apple jumping in the shadows. "And now I'm back, and you're here, and that's good. I want it to be the same. I want it to be like it was before."
John thought of those long, long days in Afghanistan, the ones spent playing cards and writing letters and drinking and telling each other dirty jokes. Those were the worst days, because they always ended in hours and hours of indescribable horror, blood all the way up to the elbows and warm guts squishing under your fingers and under your feet, blackened skin and that sickening smell of delicious char, like a pork roast, and also of burnt plastic, body armor melted to skin--
It will never be the same, he thought. It'll never be like it was before.
He wondered what Sherlock had been dreaming about.
"I know," he said. He reached back and touched Sherlock's fingertips, where they lay on the bed. Sherlock twitched. "It will be."
---end---
