My Heart Shall Not Reproach Me

[starfishstar]

MY HEART SHALL NOT REPROACH ME

Fandom: BBC Sherlock

Summary:

John had been his compass then; now it is John who is lost, and Sherlock tries to return that kindness in what small ways he can.

A remix of ancientreader’s “The Thing Which I Greatly Feared Is Come Upon Me.” Scenario and all dialogue by ancientreader.

Characters: Sherlock/John

Words: 2,200

Notes: A somewhat belated Holmestice treat for ancientreader, whose Holmestice sign-up request for a remix of “The Thing Which I Greatly Feared Is Come Upon Me” caught my imagination immediately. Thank you to pipmer1 for betareading!


Read on AO3, or here below:

 

There is a noise, and Sherlock wakes.

Even from within sleep, even through the walls of the flat, the reflexes of his body are irreversibly attuned to John, and to Rosie now as well. John cries out, and already Sherlock is awake. It requires no conscious effort; it’s simply how he is.

Sherlock slides from his bed, listening. The floorboards are cold as he swings his feet to meet them. His bedroom is dark and still.

Upstairs, John’s steps are unsteady. He pauses at Rosie’s cot to check on her: his instinct, always. Then he stumbles down the stairs, attempting to be quiet but clumsy, disorientated. The bathroom light clicks on.

John had nightmares before, as well. But those were old familiar enemies, treading the same fears each time. This, tonight, is something new, and it’s shaken John.

Sherlock waits to determine whether John would prefer company or to be alone. Water runs in the bathroom: John washing his face. Then again: John cleaning his teeth. Then: silence. John still hasn’t left the bathroom.

Therefore: John is not yet ready to climb the stairs and return to the lonely darkness of his own mind.

So Sherlock sweeps his dressing gown from its hook and goes to John.

John blinks up from where he’s sat on the closed lid of the toilet, as if he were the one who’d just now walked into the harsh glare of the bathroom, not Sherlock.

John says only, “Yeah,” a sound of utter weariness, as Sherlock seats himself on the edge of the bath.

It is the benefit and the curse of a memory like a palace: all versions of John are present to Sherlock at once. John is giggling at a crime scene; John is weeping for Mary into Sherlock’s shoulder; John is in the mortuary, his face twisting with rage. And, Sherlock hopes, somewhere in the future there is also a John who is lined and grey and at peace with himself. All these are as real to Sherlock as the John before him, the present-day man whittled down by guilt into something small and still.

“It’s not either of the nightmares that you used to have,” Sherlock says, but he allows it to sound somewhat like a question. John is often more comfortable with it that way, when the deductions Sherlock makes are about him.

John looks at him, perpetually surprised when Sherlock shows he’s paid the least attention to the patterns of John’s life. “No, not one of those,” he agrees. “What, do I make different –” There John breaks off. His face scrunches up with frustration, but it’s frustration with himself, not Sherlock. Sherlock longs for the days when John’s frustrations were uncomplicated and directed at him. You can’t say that, Sherlock. Not good, Sherlock. Now John’s despair turns inwards: Everything I’ve done is wrong, so how am I still here?

A tremor shudders through John’s body. He’s had them intermittently since awaking from the dream, though the frequency is decreasing now. They both sit in silence, waiting out this betrayal of John’s body, this physical reaction that speaks of the emotions John fights so ferociously to hide during daylight hours. The overhead light is garish for this time of night, but beyond its sharp edges there’s a greater peace that cocoons them, the warm stillness of 221B at night. Rosie is asleep above them, Mrs Hudson below. All is right in the world. Except…

John takes another ragged breath, then exhales through tightly pursed lips. His hands are tucked into his armpits as though staving off a chill only he can feel.

Abruptly, he asks, “Do you ever wish you hadn’t killed Magnussen?”

It is the easiest question in the world, of course. Sherlock shot Magnussen to protect John and he would do it again, and again, and again. But he knows what John is really asking: Did it change you? Did it reveal a part of you that you’d prefer never to have known?

But Sherlock was not changed by killing Magnussen. Sherlock was changed by meeting John.

In John’s presence, he has changed from someone who didn’t mind hurting people (the cabbie crying out in pain beneath his foot) to someone who minded but did it anyway, for the sake of the man he’d vowed always to save (John gasping, “Christ, Sherlock. Oh, Christ.”) It is a calculus he has made, and he is satisfied with it: Sherlock never wanted to be a killer. But he wants to be the man John made him. So he did what he had to do, to be that man.

But there are ways of saying this without laying a further burden of guilt at John’s feet. John should feel no culpability for Magnussen’s death. Sherlock’s choices have always been his own.

To John he says, “Not exactly, no. How can I put this? It seemed necessary, so I did it, and I would do it again; but if I could both have done it, and be someone who had not done it . . . Useless imaginings. There are any number of things I would rather not have done. But I did them, and here I am.”

John breathes. Out, in. “My father beat my mother.”

“Yes.” It’s a truth Sherlock has always known, but one John never speaks of by the light of day.

“And he beat Harry. He didn’t beat me. But I beat you. Why . . .”

John is hunched over himself, his fists clenched, his face tight. John can’t see the most fundamental difference between himself and his father. One man who snapped under great pressure and did something very bad for very comprehensible reasons. And one man who lashed out in violence habitually, predictably, from a fearful desire to control what was uncontrollable in his own life by terrorising those weaker than himself. Sherlock hasn’t the least worry that John could ever become that second man. John Watson, adrenalin junkie, is also the fiercest defender of the defenceless Sherlock has ever known.

Indeed, watching John in fatherhood has been a marvel.

All that is best in John emerges when he looks at Rosie, and Rosie herself is an expression of the best of John. Boundless in her laughter, tenacious as a bulldog in pursuit of what she wants, uncomplicated in her affections, a fearless explorer of the world around her. Sherlock calls the baby “Watson” because she is such a pure expression of all that is good in John.

Sherlock wishes John could see himself as Sherlock sees him. But at least he can catch a glimpse of it in his daughter.

John clears his throat a couple of times then says, hoarse, “We both knew you didn’t kill Mary. Even I knew it, even when I wouldn’t see you or talk to you, I knew it. So why did you say that to Smith, that I had the right? I didn’t have the right. Not any more than my father had the right.”

“Culverton Smith was present,” Sherlock explains.

John’s forehead wrinkles; he doesn’t understand.

John thinks Culverton Smith was his father writ large, the same small-minded bully only with a wider reach for ensnaring his victims. But that’s not true. Culverton Smith was Sherlock writ large, the cold-hearted thrill-seeker not caring whom he harmed as long as he got to have his fun. Oh, Sherlock would never have turned serial killer, of course. Even before he met John, he’d had his limits. (Hadn’t he?) But his own particular thrills – the cases, the puzzles, the glory of being right – those had been everything, the only thing.

John had pointed him towards a kinder shore, when he’d been adrift in a sea of his own making. John had been his compass then; now it is John who is lost, and Sherlock tries to return that kindness in what small ways he can.

“Consider why you beat me, John,” he says gently. “You were ill with grief, and terrified, and you felt betrayed. Whereas Smith killed people to amuse himself. He could never have felt betrayed by anyone, because he didn’t love anyone, do you see?”

John’s eyes widen – is it Sherlock’s boldness in making the comparison with Smith explicit, is it his use of the word love, is it something else entirely?

“He was not to lord it over you,” Sherlock says. “No matter what you had done.”

Sherlock remembers the mortuary, dispassionately, as though it’s security footage he’s watching of someone else. John slamming him against a cabinet door. John punching, Sherlock crying out, bleeding, falling. The fire of pain that rips through his gut as John kicks. Blood patterning the floor.

Sherlock forgave John even as John’s unerring fists and feet were detonating bomb-bursts of agony in Sherlock’s face, his chest, his belly. Does that make him a fool? Or only human?

“I’m a violent man,” John says quietly. It’s his deepest fear, the one that underlies all others. That this violence is the truest core of himself, that his love and his intelligence and even his bravery can be peeled away, but the violence always remains.

“Yes. Sometimes you are a violent man. So, for that matter, am I. It’ll be all right, John.”

It isn’t, but it will be. It will be.

Because unlike Culverton Smith, John is capable of remorse. And of love, such great and selfless love. It is John’s great heart that will allow him, in time, to claw his way back out of this darkness to which he has consigned himself.

“Do you think we can take care of Rosie?” John asks, then flinches at the presumption inherent in that word we.

As if Sherlock had not told John to bring his daughter and move back home to Baker Street – issuing the invitation first by baby-proofing the flat as they reconstructed it, then again explicitly in words, when John failed to understand the first time.

As if Sherlock hasn’t explored structural principles with Rosie through the stacking of wooden blocks, as if he hasn’t practised colours and shapes with her on long afternoons with sunlight streaming through the curtains of the newly refurbished living room, and explained to her the distinguishing points between objects which are good to put in one’s mouth and those which are not.

As if he hasn’t quietly slipped upstairs to lay Rosie in her cot and soothe her to sleep with bedtime stories, on nights when John is slumped in his chair, too tired to move.

“Yes,” Sherlock answers, because John seems to need to hear it said out loud.

It is quiet. Sherlock can hear the subtle sounds of the flat at night – the settling of floorboards, the ticking of a clock downstairs in 221A, the whoosh of traffic in the street outside. It is never entirely silent in London, but there is a peaceful quality to these hushed noises, these sounds that so strongly evoke the sense of home.

And John has eased a little. Weariness still rests heavily on him, but he’s no longer clenched around himself like a fist.

Looking at him, Sherlock smiles. How can he not be glad? John is here.

And Sherlock would sit on the hard edge of the bath all night, if that were what John needed of him. But John is exhausted. He’ll be able to sleep, now that he’s worn himself out with this unaccustomed talk of emotions.

“It’s rather crowded in here,” Sherlock offers. “Will Watson sleep through the rest of the night, do you think?”

John’s nod and his murmured “yes” are quiet and weary.

“Then come to bed with me now. Sleep.”

Sherlock rises to his feet and offers a hand. John stands, slower, and like a child allows himself to be led. Out of the bathroom, Sherlock clicking off the light as they go, and down the hall to Sherlock’s room. John doesn’t protest.

Sherlock turns down one side of his duvet and John slides beneath it with a sigh. The darkness cradles them and wraps them up in the soft sounds of the night, while the peaceful quiet from upstairs says that Rosie is sleeping and safe and well.

Sherlock takes the other side of the bed. He curls on his side, one arm propping up his head and the other stretched above the duvet, and he watches John. They don’t touch, but Sherlock can feel that the possibility of it is there. Or it will be, with time.

They have plenty of time.

There will still be nights when John jolts awake from nightmares, heart pounding, haunted by demons that may never entirely rest. This is who they are; they bear scars.

But for now, on this night, John’s breath is evening out. He mumbles something, already sliding towards sleep. Sherlock watches over him until the last of his body’s tension finally drains away.

Only then, when John makes no noise but the regular in-and-out hush of his resting breath, does Sherlock sleep.

 

~The End~




End note: As with ancientreader’s original, the title here comes from the Book of Job.

 

 

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