Fic post: Sherlock: Lieder ohne Worte
May. 23rd, 2011 05:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
gayalondiel_bakFandom: Sherlock (BBC)
Authors:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
gayalondiel and rabidsamfan
Title: Lieder ohne Worte
Chapter: 1/10
Character: Sherlock, John
Genre: hurt, angst, later there will be some drama.
Length: ~3,500 (this chapter)
Rating: PG for discussion of injury and possible intense situations later.
Spoilers: Follows directly from GREA
Warnings: Discussion of traumatic brain injury, hospitalisation and recovery process.
Disclaimer: The Holmes characters fall in the public domain: This version falls under the creative control of Messers Moffatt and Gatiss, and the BBC. No ownership is implied or inferred. This is done for love only.
Summary: Sherlock might have escaped the explosion at the pool with minor injuries, but John cannot say the same.
AN: crossposted to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
sherlockbbc, watsons_woes
Lieder ohne Worte
He awoke to darkness.
There were shadows in the darkness, lights that seemed to flash on and off, tinging the grey with red, and reverting to black. He heard sounds, possibly murmuring voices, but he could not make out the words. Something hissed, and there was a high-pitched noise, and the pressure of sound around him was too much, too hard. It burnt against his skin and caused him pain that he could not express without moving, and that seemed to be beyond him somehow. He struggled for words to describe his situation and first came a name, John - him, it must be - and then the echo of a bright light and terrible heat and sound, god, sound that tore through him like a shockwave, and mixed in with that were thoughts of sand and sunlight and piercing pain. There was something else, someone else, he could not place but he knew he should. He knew he was John, and he knew there were such things as light and sound and pain.
And he knew that something was terribly, terribly wrong.
Sherlock waited impatiently, drumming his fingers on the side of the bed as he watched John’s eyelids flicker and still, flicker and still. For what seemed the thousandth time he recalled to himself the consultant’s statement that John would not suddenly wake up but that it would take time and there was nothing that he could do to speed the process up. It had not stopped Sherlock from trying, and alternately he had whispered pleas and coercions into John’s ears when he was certain they were alone. He had taken John’s hand and held it with such a focus that he had convinced himself several times that he was moving, only to find that it was the pulse thudding in his own fingers that he could feel. Now he simply sat back, watching and waiting and hating every minute of it. Sherlock Holmes did not wait, he acted. He solved problems and pried solutions from the least likely of scenarios. And however much people - doctors, Lestrade, Mycroft, Sarah - told him that this was something he could not fix, he found himself simply unable to accept it.
He tried to distract himself, and others tried to distract him. Lestrade talked of cases ranging from the commonplace and absurdly simple to the intriguing, but none of them captured him. Mycroft refused to give him written information, but after his staff had scared the nurses away from the small enclosure on the ward that John resided in, had provided a detailed update on their progress tracking Moriarty, even if it had just been a long-winded way of saying they had no ideas and few clues.
Sarah came mostly at night, after her hours at the clinic. She was different in a hospital setting, brisk and efficient, full of medical jargon that he had to deconstruct from the Greek and Latin roots. Alone of the doctors, she never attempted to prise Sherlock out of the room when she wanted to evaluate John’s condition. But he could see that she was wearing her professional demeanor like armor. He resented her ease with the sounds and feel and smell of the hospital nearly as much as he resented her ability to elicit small responses from John, even though he knew she was only checking for reflexes. She did spare some attention for Sherlock at first. He had, after all, spent two nights on the same ward under observation. But her attempts to distract him from John’s condition by speculating on the histories of the nurses and technicians who came to measure and sample John’s body fluids were insufficient. He played along, sometimes, but only long enough to reassure her so that she would leave.
Whenever they were left alone Sherlock held John’s hand so no-one else could see and spoke to him until the doctors threatened him with forcible removal. It hadn’t been a problem when they could banish him no further than the next bed over, but now that he had been discharged he was sent off the premises of the hospital completely on the understanding that if he did not take some rest they would rescind the agreement which allowed him more hours by John’s side than any ordinary visitor. When that happened he roamed the streets of London until he was too tired to move, and only then did he drag himself back to Baker Street where he immediately collapsed in exhaustion, too tired to notice everything in the flat that spoke completely and irrevocably of John.
Waking up took days, maybe weeks. He wasn’t sure how long. At first the big dark blur became a big light blur, and then there were vague forms, and sounds that he could identify, words and then phrases and even whole sentences. He heard snippets of conversations and dredged through his memory until he realised that the voices were discussing him, doctors, it had to be doctors, talking in layman’s terms about comas and brain damage and the chances of him waking up, the chances of being normal when he did. John - he had remembered with certainty, that was him - John wanted to cry out, to scream, I am here, I hear you, I understand, I’m fine, I’m going to be fine; but his muscles would not obey the commands of his brain. And then he faded, and the dark blur was too much, and an indeterminate time passed before he had it in him for focus enough to understand anything.
There were several voices that came from close by, that sat with him and gripped his hand with a touch that no longer burned but comforted. He heard Harry’s voice once and then never again, but somewhere in his mind the thought of his sister connected with memories of hospitals and beeping machines and someone crying, and it seemed better that she wasn’t there. Sarah was there, and Sherlock, he heard Sherlock’s voice most frequently of all. Somewhere in his mind he was surprised, because he would have expected Sherlock to be running around chasing... someone. John couldn’t quite remember who, what, but he knew there was a Something and that Something needed to be apprehended, defeated, vanquished. But Sherlock was here, talking and holding his hand and coaxing him back towards consciousness. He had noticed a definite change. A few days ago the doctors had begun talking about signs, indicators, hope, and Sherlock had moved from resignation to an increasingly keen and slightly impatient berating tone; something John recognised very well and thought he might even have smiled at, once, judging by the way Sherlock’s voice had almost caught and then dropped so that John couldn’t hear the words, just the tone of it, but was still comforted.
It was quiet when the light blur became a mass of shifting muted colours that flickered and danced more palpably than the blur had, and he had the vague idea that his eyelids might actually be opening. For a long time - maybe a minute, maybe a day, he couldn’t tell - he waited, and finally the world focused a little and he could make out a darker shape amid the shadows, a figure curled in a chair, head nodding forward onto its chest. He couldn’t see clearly, but he could see enough to know. He tried to speak, to form a word, to exhale sufficiently to produce any kind of sound, but although he thought his lips moved there was only the tiniest gust of a whisper, and it exhausted him.
Incredibly, it was enough. The figure started, turned towards him, flicked on a light beside his bed and John winced at the sudden onslaught that made the inside of his head scream in protest. It was worth it, though, to see the sudden smile on the face that somehow snapped into focus before his eyes closed and he drifted back into vague oblivion.
Hours turned into days, then weeks, and John found his strength returning not quite in the leaps and bounds that he would like, but fast enough to keep him entertained. On the first day after waking he could not do much more than lie there blinking and murmuring nonsense, but after about a week he was sitting up, bearing considerably fewer bits of tubing, smiling at the nurses and chatting intermittently with his visitors. The conversations were the hardest part of this, as his mind seemed to be working much slower than his mouth and he was prone to stopping suddenly mid-sentence, forgetting what he was saying or unable to find the right word, stuttering or coming out with something similar but not the same, or even a completely unrelated word with shared consonants. His doctors assured him that this was normal and when he tried to dredge up the relevant information from his medical training he thought they must be right, but accessing information on demand seemed suddenly much harder than it ever had before. Which was unsurprising given the scars that he could feel under the soft fuzz of the hair gradually reappearing on his scalp. A wall had fallen on him, according to Sherlock, and John was grateful to him for knowing the answer without having to be asked the question.
He remembered enough, in patches, to be surprised that neither of them had sustained any other injuries. Sherlock filled him in on the blank passages in his memory but it seemed a brief, almost cursory account, and he could not draw more information from his friend. Sherlock assured him that there had not nearly been as much semtex in the vest as it had seemed. Certainly enough to kill the man wrapped up in it, but the blast had apparently not taken out the whole building. Only the nearest wall had been shattered, sending pieces of concrete flying in all directions. It had been too much to hope that Moriarty might have been hit, but between the two of them John figured that one injury, however debilitating, was not bad going at all. Sherlock had emerged grazed, damp and very shaken indeed, but was otherwise fine and seemed to have devoted his time to making sure John woke up and had more or less moved into John’s side room on the ward.
Sherlock couldn’t be there all the time, not when the consultants came to review and test and update their diagnoses, and John was glad because it saved him knowing in detail all the defects John now bore. With the help of the specialists John was becoming aware of a deficiency in his vision, an ignorance of his left hand side, like he had seen in stroke victims he had treated as a GP. Sherlock had got accustomed to sitting on the wrong side without knowing there was one, and John now waged a private war to keep it under control so he would not find out. If Sherlock had noticed John turning his head when he spoke despite being in his assumed field of vision, he hadn’t mentioned it. Nor did he treat John as a fool when he spoke. Words were hard. Almost impossible sometimes. Doctors and nurses would slow down their speech, as if to match John’s slowness, or finish his sentences before he had had a chance to even try. Even Sarah would do it. But Sherlock didn’t. Sherlock could be impatient while John fought for a word, but he always waited. And he still spoke to John just as he always had. John wasn’t going to risk anything that might change that.
A large number of paper clippings, files and official looking documents had made their way in with Sherlock and took up significant portions of the floor. If he ignored the presence of the drips, the machines and the nurses, it was almost like being back in the chaos of 221B, watching Sherlock pace the tiny room talking a mile a minute even though John couldn’t really keep up yet, or sitting rifling through paperwork as though his life depended on finding that one document. It made him feel settled, normal, and he almost laughed at the absurd thought that the madness of living with Sherlock had become normal.
The nurses would not be easily ignored, though. They waded through the papers, shoving them unceremoniously out of their way to access the various support machines and dumped them in disorder on the floor without a word to rearrange the bedding. John had chuckled the first time this happened at the irate look on Sherlock’s face, and waited for the nurse to leave before leaning conspiratorially forward.
“Are they about...”
Sherlock cocked his head to one side, waited a beat and raised his eyebrows. “Are they about what?” he asked, even though his eyes spoke understanding. He wanted to hear it, and John felt that he was being tested, which was horribly unfair as he was failing and couldn’t pass the silence off as intentional. He closed his eyes in frustration and cast around in his mind. A man, a man in a suit, bombs and laser sights and Westwood and pets and Molly and...
“Jim,” he settled on eventually. It wasn’t the word he had been going for and they both knew it. A shadow of disappointment crossed Sherlock’s face.
“Moriarty,” he corrected, making it sound so easy. “Yes, they’re about him.” He turned his eyes back to the page he was reading and John sat back, feeling slightly bereft and somehow guilty.
By the time he had progressed to walking up and down the ward with minimal support and without getting tired and dizzy, John had discovered three things. The first was that his coordination was not what it used to be, particularly in his hands. He could make big gestures with little difficulty, but fine actions like writing, typing or clicking his fingers were beyond him. He tried very hard not to be devastated by this, knowing that it was early days and it would come back, ignoring the voice in his head that said it might not all come back and he wouldn’t even be able to work as a GP, wouldn’t be able to keep up his blog, might not even be able to sign his name in his neat handwriting any more. It was fruitless to worry about these things, no matter how much the fear gnawed away at his insides.
The second, related thing was that his limp was back. He hadn’t taken damage to his leg, he knew, but it ached and burned when he put weight on it and he stumbled badly the first few times he tried getting around without a walking frame before he relented and took the stick that they were offering him as the next level of support. Everyone had told him that the right leg was no worse than the left, his doctors, Sarah, and of course Sherlock. He knew there was no physical cause for the shooting pains in the muscle, but he also knew that it hurt. Every time he picked the stick up, he felt Sherlock’s eyes on him without having to look, cold and hard and disapproving. Even if it was psychosomatic, he couldn’t really deal with that right now. Not on top of everything else.
The third thing he noticed was that Sarah had changed. It was inevitable, really, that she was treating him like a patient and not a fellow doctor. He was a patient, after all, and had to expect that sort of thing, even though it grated on his nerves. Sarah couldn’t be expected to ignore the tests, the symptoms. Couldn’t be persuaded to think that he was better than he really was. She was still coming. Still visiting each night. Still kind. But there was a quality in her eyes, a wariness that had never been part of her before. She was afraid. He couldn’t blame her for that. One of the last things he remembered properly was the look in her eyes as Moriarty explained that she would be safe, only locked into her closet to keep her from contacting the police too quickly, if John would permit himself to be abducted in her place. It had been a miracle she had wanted anything to do with John or Sherlock after the first time she had been kidnapped by criminals and nearly killed -- given the second time she must feel like she was treading on a tightrope. And something had to be done. John didn’t think it was fair to ask her to risk a third time. As she poked her head around the door and Sherlock made way for her and slipped out of the room, John lined up the careful words he needed. To tell her that it was all right and that he understood. That she was too busy to spend time taking care of him. That her work was more important. That he was sending her away, not that she was abandoning him. That she wasn’t a terrible person for wanting to go. He wondered if he would be able to make his brain work well enough to do this right. He hoped so. It was too important to be left undone.
Sherlock pulled the door closed, giving them some privacy. He suspected they would need it. Idly he glanced around the ward and was just on the verge of heading off to the cafe for a cup of what passed for coffee in this place when a familiar footstep sounded behind him, followed by the clink of an umbrella tip being set on the ground.
“What do you want?” he asked bluntly without bothering to turn. He could almost hear Mycroft’s insincere smile stretching across his face.
“To check on John, of course,” he said easily.
“John’s busy,” Sherlock pointed out, relenting and spinning around to face him. Mycroft was looking at frosted panel in the door that revealed a brunette blur at John’s bedside.
“Ah,” he said delicately. “The break-up, I take it. I trust John will be every way the gentleman about it?”
“No doubt,” muttered Sherlock. “What do you really want, Mycroft? I’m sure your minions can happily provide you with half-hourly reports on John’s recovery.”
“It would hardly be a necessity, and therein lies the point,” said Mycroft, deftly ignoring the description of his staff. “I have been keeping abreast of John’s progress, or his lack thereof.” Sherlock’s brows furrowed over a piercing glare but Mycroft continued, unimpressed. “You must realise, Sherlock, that he is not making as swift progress as his doctors would like, no matter what they are telling him. I am certain that he too realises it.”
“He’ll be fine in time,” snapped Sherlock. “Brain injuries are not an exact science.”
“My point entirely,” replied Mycroft. “You, Sherlock, deal in exact sciences. Solutions. Conclusions. Resolutions. You find what is wrong in a set of circumstances and for want of a better term, you fix it. John will not be so simply put right.”
“I know that...”
“He will need constant care. His discharge is not far off and upon returning home he will still be slow, uncoordinated, inaccurate in his speaking. He no longer has a complete and effective field of vision. He will need help, and tolerant help, because he will not be overly willing to accept it. His limp has returned which suggests that the psychological impact of the incident is likely to be considerable as well as the physical aspects. Can you honestly tell me that you are up to providing him with what he needs? Will you be able to put up with him around your own unique way of living?”
Sherlock opened his mouth to deny it, to tell Mycroft that it would be fine, John was his friend, something Mycroft with his minions would know nothing about, and he would be only too happy to guide him and pick up after him and support him for as long as it took. Mycroft arrested him with a glance.
“You recall what happened to your hamster?” he said.
Sherlock closed his mouth, looked away, back to the wall of John’s room where no doubt he would be holding Sarah’s hand as a friend and she would be crying softly, partly in sorrow and partly in relief. He held the moment for a long time, warring with himself whether to lie just to beat Mycroft or to go against all his instincts and be honest with his brother.
“No,” he said at length. “I won’t be able to support him. He’s going to have to manage on his own.”
Authors:
gayalondiel and rabidsamfan Title: Lieder ohne Worte
Chapter: 1/10
Character: Sherlock, John
Genre: hurt, angst, later there will be some drama.
Length: ~3,500 (this chapter)
Rating: PG for discussion of injury and possible intense situations later.
Spoilers: Follows directly from GREA
Warnings: Discussion of traumatic brain injury, hospitalisation and recovery process.
Disclaimer: The Holmes characters fall in the public domain: This version falls under the creative control of Messers Moffatt and Gatiss, and the BBC. No ownership is implied or inferred. This is done for love only.
Summary: Sherlock might have escaped the explosion at the pool with minor injuries, but John cannot say the same.
AN: crossposted to
sherlockbbc, watsons_woesLieder ohne Worte
He awoke to darkness.
There were shadows in the darkness, lights that seemed to flash on and off, tinging the grey with red, and reverting to black. He heard sounds, possibly murmuring voices, but he could not make out the words. Something hissed, and there was a high-pitched noise, and the pressure of sound around him was too much, too hard. It burnt against his skin and caused him pain that he could not express without moving, and that seemed to be beyond him somehow. He struggled for words to describe his situation and first came a name, John - him, it must be - and then the echo of a bright light and terrible heat and sound, god, sound that tore through him like a shockwave, and mixed in with that were thoughts of sand and sunlight and piercing pain. There was something else, someone else, he could not place but he knew he should. He knew he was John, and he knew there were such things as light and sound and pain.
And he knew that something was terribly, terribly wrong.
Sherlock waited impatiently, drumming his fingers on the side of the bed as he watched John’s eyelids flicker and still, flicker and still. For what seemed the thousandth time he recalled to himself the consultant’s statement that John would not suddenly wake up but that it would take time and there was nothing that he could do to speed the process up. It had not stopped Sherlock from trying, and alternately he had whispered pleas and coercions into John’s ears when he was certain they were alone. He had taken John’s hand and held it with such a focus that he had convinced himself several times that he was moving, only to find that it was the pulse thudding in his own fingers that he could feel. Now he simply sat back, watching and waiting and hating every minute of it. Sherlock Holmes did not wait, he acted. He solved problems and pried solutions from the least likely of scenarios. And however much people - doctors, Lestrade, Mycroft, Sarah - told him that this was something he could not fix, he found himself simply unable to accept it.
He tried to distract himself, and others tried to distract him. Lestrade talked of cases ranging from the commonplace and absurdly simple to the intriguing, but none of them captured him. Mycroft refused to give him written information, but after his staff had scared the nurses away from the small enclosure on the ward that John resided in, had provided a detailed update on their progress tracking Moriarty, even if it had just been a long-winded way of saying they had no ideas and few clues.
Sarah came mostly at night, after her hours at the clinic. She was different in a hospital setting, brisk and efficient, full of medical jargon that he had to deconstruct from the Greek and Latin roots. Alone of the doctors, she never attempted to prise Sherlock out of the room when she wanted to evaluate John’s condition. But he could see that she was wearing her professional demeanor like armor. He resented her ease with the sounds and feel and smell of the hospital nearly as much as he resented her ability to elicit small responses from John, even though he knew she was only checking for reflexes. She did spare some attention for Sherlock at first. He had, after all, spent two nights on the same ward under observation. But her attempts to distract him from John’s condition by speculating on the histories of the nurses and technicians who came to measure and sample John’s body fluids were insufficient. He played along, sometimes, but only long enough to reassure her so that she would leave.
Whenever they were left alone Sherlock held John’s hand so no-one else could see and spoke to him until the doctors threatened him with forcible removal. It hadn’t been a problem when they could banish him no further than the next bed over, but now that he had been discharged he was sent off the premises of the hospital completely on the understanding that if he did not take some rest they would rescind the agreement which allowed him more hours by John’s side than any ordinary visitor. When that happened he roamed the streets of London until he was too tired to move, and only then did he drag himself back to Baker Street where he immediately collapsed in exhaustion, too tired to notice everything in the flat that spoke completely and irrevocably of John.
Waking up took days, maybe weeks. He wasn’t sure how long. At first the big dark blur became a big light blur, and then there were vague forms, and sounds that he could identify, words and then phrases and even whole sentences. He heard snippets of conversations and dredged through his memory until he realised that the voices were discussing him, doctors, it had to be doctors, talking in layman’s terms about comas and brain damage and the chances of him waking up, the chances of being normal when he did. John - he had remembered with certainty, that was him - John wanted to cry out, to scream, I am here, I hear you, I understand, I’m fine, I’m going to be fine; but his muscles would not obey the commands of his brain. And then he faded, and the dark blur was too much, and an indeterminate time passed before he had it in him for focus enough to understand anything.
There were several voices that came from close by, that sat with him and gripped his hand with a touch that no longer burned but comforted. He heard Harry’s voice once and then never again, but somewhere in his mind the thought of his sister connected with memories of hospitals and beeping machines and someone crying, and it seemed better that she wasn’t there. Sarah was there, and Sherlock, he heard Sherlock’s voice most frequently of all. Somewhere in his mind he was surprised, because he would have expected Sherlock to be running around chasing... someone. John couldn’t quite remember who, what, but he knew there was a Something and that Something needed to be apprehended, defeated, vanquished. But Sherlock was here, talking and holding his hand and coaxing him back towards consciousness. He had noticed a definite change. A few days ago the doctors had begun talking about signs, indicators, hope, and Sherlock had moved from resignation to an increasingly keen and slightly impatient berating tone; something John recognised very well and thought he might even have smiled at, once, judging by the way Sherlock’s voice had almost caught and then dropped so that John couldn’t hear the words, just the tone of it, but was still comforted.
It was quiet when the light blur became a mass of shifting muted colours that flickered and danced more palpably than the blur had, and he had the vague idea that his eyelids might actually be opening. For a long time - maybe a minute, maybe a day, he couldn’t tell - he waited, and finally the world focused a little and he could make out a darker shape amid the shadows, a figure curled in a chair, head nodding forward onto its chest. He couldn’t see clearly, but he could see enough to know. He tried to speak, to form a word, to exhale sufficiently to produce any kind of sound, but although he thought his lips moved there was only the tiniest gust of a whisper, and it exhausted him.
Incredibly, it was enough. The figure started, turned towards him, flicked on a light beside his bed and John winced at the sudden onslaught that made the inside of his head scream in protest. It was worth it, though, to see the sudden smile on the face that somehow snapped into focus before his eyes closed and he drifted back into vague oblivion.
Hours turned into days, then weeks, and John found his strength returning not quite in the leaps and bounds that he would like, but fast enough to keep him entertained. On the first day after waking he could not do much more than lie there blinking and murmuring nonsense, but after about a week he was sitting up, bearing considerably fewer bits of tubing, smiling at the nurses and chatting intermittently with his visitors. The conversations were the hardest part of this, as his mind seemed to be working much slower than his mouth and he was prone to stopping suddenly mid-sentence, forgetting what he was saying or unable to find the right word, stuttering or coming out with something similar but not the same, or even a completely unrelated word with shared consonants. His doctors assured him that this was normal and when he tried to dredge up the relevant information from his medical training he thought they must be right, but accessing information on demand seemed suddenly much harder than it ever had before. Which was unsurprising given the scars that he could feel under the soft fuzz of the hair gradually reappearing on his scalp. A wall had fallen on him, according to Sherlock, and John was grateful to him for knowing the answer without having to be asked the question.
He remembered enough, in patches, to be surprised that neither of them had sustained any other injuries. Sherlock filled him in on the blank passages in his memory but it seemed a brief, almost cursory account, and he could not draw more information from his friend. Sherlock assured him that there had not nearly been as much semtex in the vest as it had seemed. Certainly enough to kill the man wrapped up in it, but the blast had apparently not taken out the whole building. Only the nearest wall had been shattered, sending pieces of concrete flying in all directions. It had been too much to hope that Moriarty might have been hit, but between the two of them John figured that one injury, however debilitating, was not bad going at all. Sherlock had emerged grazed, damp and very shaken indeed, but was otherwise fine and seemed to have devoted his time to making sure John woke up and had more or less moved into John’s side room on the ward.
Sherlock couldn’t be there all the time, not when the consultants came to review and test and update their diagnoses, and John was glad because it saved him knowing in detail all the defects John now bore. With the help of the specialists John was becoming aware of a deficiency in his vision, an ignorance of his left hand side, like he had seen in stroke victims he had treated as a GP. Sherlock had got accustomed to sitting on the wrong side without knowing there was one, and John now waged a private war to keep it under control so he would not find out. If Sherlock had noticed John turning his head when he spoke despite being in his assumed field of vision, he hadn’t mentioned it. Nor did he treat John as a fool when he spoke. Words were hard. Almost impossible sometimes. Doctors and nurses would slow down their speech, as if to match John’s slowness, or finish his sentences before he had had a chance to even try. Even Sarah would do it. But Sherlock didn’t. Sherlock could be impatient while John fought for a word, but he always waited. And he still spoke to John just as he always had. John wasn’t going to risk anything that might change that.
A large number of paper clippings, files and official looking documents had made their way in with Sherlock and took up significant portions of the floor. If he ignored the presence of the drips, the machines and the nurses, it was almost like being back in the chaos of 221B, watching Sherlock pace the tiny room talking a mile a minute even though John couldn’t really keep up yet, or sitting rifling through paperwork as though his life depended on finding that one document. It made him feel settled, normal, and he almost laughed at the absurd thought that the madness of living with Sherlock had become normal.
The nurses would not be easily ignored, though. They waded through the papers, shoving them unceremoniously out of their way to access the various support machines and dumped them in disorder on the floor without a word to rearrange the bedding. John had chuckled the first time this happened at the irate look on Sherlock’s face, and waited for the nurse to leave before leaning conspiratorially forward.
“Are they about...”
Sherlock cocked his head to one side, waited a beat and raised his eyebrows. “Are they about what?” he asked, even though his eyes spoke understanding. He wanted to hear it, and John felt that he was being tested, which was horribly unfair as he was failing and couldn’t pass the silence off as intentional. He closed his eyes in frustration and cast around in his mind. A man, a man in a suit, bombs and laser sights and Westwood and pets and Molly and...
“Jim,” he settled on eventually. It wasn’t the word he had been going for and they both knew it. A shadow of disappointment crossed Sherlock’s face.
“Moriarty,” he corrected, making it sound so easy. “Yes, they’re about him.” He turned his eyes back to the page he was reading and John sat back, feeling slightly bereft and somehow guilty.
By the time he had progressed to walking up and down the ward with minimal support and without getting tired and dizzy, John had discovered three things. The first was that his coordination was not what it used to be, particularly in his hands. He could make big gestures with little difficulty, but fine actions like writing, typing or clicking his fingers were beyond him. He tried very hard not to be devastated by this, knowing that it was early days and it would come back, ignoring the voice in his head that said it might not all come back and he wouldn’t even be able to work as a GP, wouldn’t be able to keep up his blog, might not even be able to sign his name in his neat handwriting any more. It was fruitless to worry about these things, no matter how much the fear gnawed away at his insides.
The second, related thing was that his limp was back. He hadn’t taken damage to his leg, he knew, but it ached and burned when he put weight on it and he stumbled badly the first few times he tried getting around without a walking frame before he relented and took the stick that they were offering him as the next level of support. Everyone had told him that the right leg was no worse than the left, his doctors, Sarah, and of course Sherlock. He knew there was no physical cause for the shooting pains in the muscle, but he also knew that it hurt. Every time he picked the stick up, he felt Sherlock’s eyes on him without having to look, cold and hard and disapproving. Even if it was psychosomatic, he couldn’t really deal with that right now. Not on top of everything else.
The third thing he noticed was that Sarah had changed. It was inevitable, really, that she was treating him like a patient and not a fellow doctor. He was a patient, after all, and had to expect that sort of thing, even though it grated on his nerves. Sarah couldn’t be expected to ignore the tests, the symptoms. Couldn’t be persuaded to think that he was better than he really was. She was still coming. Still visiting each night. Still kind. But there was a quality in her eyes, a wariness that had never been part of her before. She was afraid. He couldn’t blame her for that. One of the last things he remembered properly was the look in her eyes as Moriarty explained that she would be safe, only locked into her closet to keep her from contacting the police too quickly, if John would permit himself to be abducted in her place. It had been a miracle she had wanted anything to do with John or Sherlock after the first time she had been kidnapped by criminals and nearly killed -- given the second time she must feel like she was treading on a tightrope. And something had to be done. John didn’t think it was fair to ask her to risk a third time. As she poked her head around the door and Sherlock made way for her and slipped out of the room, John lined up the careful words he needed. To tell her that it was all right and that he understood. That she was too busy to spend time taking care of him. That her work was more important. That he was sending her away, not that she was abandoning him. That she wasn’t a terrible person for wanting to go. He wondered if he would be able to make his brain work well enough to do this right. He hoped so. It was too important to be left undone.
Sherlock pulled the door closed, giving them some privacy. He suspected they would need it. Idly he glanced around the ward and was just on the verge of heading off to the cafe for a cup of what passed for coffee in this place when a familiar footstep sounded behind him, followed by the clink of an umbrella tip being set on the ground.
“What do you want?” he asked bluntly without bothering to turn. He could almost hear Mycroft’s insincere smile stretching across his face.
“To check on John, of course,” he said easily.
“John’s busy,” Sherlock pointed out, relenting and spinning around to face him. Mycroft was looking at frosted panel in the door that revealed a brunette blur at John’s bedside.
“Ah,” he said delicately. “The break-up, I take it. I trust John will be every way the gentleman about it?”
“No doubt,” muttered Sherlock. “What do you really want, Mycroft? I’m sure your minions can happily provide you with half-hourly reports on John’s recovery.”
“It would hardly be a necessity, and therein lies the point,” said Mycroft, deftly ignoring the description of his staff. “I have been keeping abreast of John’s progress, or his lack thereof.” Sherlock’s brows furrowed over a piercing glare but Mycroft continued, unimpressed. “You must realise, Sherlock, that he is not making as swift progress as his doctors would like, no matter what they are telling him. I am certain that he too realises it.”
“He’ll be fine in time,” snapped Sherlock. “Brain injuries are not an exact science.”
“My point entirely,” replied Mycroft. “You, Sherlock, deal in exact sciences. Solutions. Conclusions. Resolutions. You find what is wrong in a set of circumstances and for want of a better term, you fix it. John will not be so simply put right.”
“I know that...”
“He will need constant care. His discharge is not far off and upon returning home he will still be slow, uncoordinated, inaccurate in his speaking. He no longer has a complete and effective field of vision. He will need help, and tolerant help, because he will not be overly willing to accept it. His limp has returned which suggests that the psychological impact of the incident is likely to be considerable as well as the physical aspects. Can you honestly tell me that you are up to providing him with what he needs? Will you be able to put up with him around your own unique way of living?”
Sherlock opened his mouth to deny it, to tell Mycroft that it would be fine, John was his friend, something Mycroft with his minions would know nothing about, and he would be only too happy to guide him and pick up after him and support him for as long as it took. Mycroft arrested him with a glance.
“You recall what happened to your hamster?” he said.
Sherlock closed his mouth, looked away, back to the wall of John’s room where no doubt he would be holding Sarah’s hand as a friend and she would be crying softly, partly in sorrow and partly in relief. He held the moment for a long time, warring with himself whether to lie just to beat Mycroft or to go against all his instincts and be honest with his brother.
“No,” he said at length. “I won’t be able to support him. He’s going to have to manage on his own.”
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Date: 2011-05-23 06:34 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-05-26 08:20 pm (UTC)