(no subject)

[iagreewithyou]

Sherlock had thought he had forgotten. He pressed on like he had dealt with it all, as if he no longer cared for what had happened back in London. That much was a lie about as see-through as glass. Joan had, undoubtedly, been able to tell the way he stopped and went cold when she so much as mentioned Irene the first time. Perhaps his shut down on the topic wasn't entirely purposed. Perhaps it was just the cold shot of pain. More agonizing than any physical horror he had ever endured, the pain of loving and trusting and losing and betrayal. The pain of believing in someone and somehow knowing they would fail but still, in the pit of your heart, the heart you had potentially unwillingly gave to them, it burned.

Then came a letter stamped with a distinguishable A that could only be one person; they'd argued over it. Joan was afraid. What it would do to him, what he might do, but after the storm had calmed she was convinced and sleep took her away. Something else took Sherlock away. He thought he had forgotten this, too. It was like any other skill you'd become far too attached to, unfortunately, and it was relearned with ease. He was an addict. One clean stretch didn't clean his hands, didn't wash away all those dabbles from such youth, didn't clear away the mess he left and promises he broke and people he left down as he just drowned himself. Far too much the coward to take the gun and pull it. Some bare thread of hope still there.

He would be found in exactly the state he mentioned during one of their cases. A motel, low end, rough part of town. Cheap locks. The gear put away but the man himself so incredibly spun half naked on the floor.

Comments

[iagreewithyou]

He tilts his head to the side, watching her; listening. He hears it. More than just the upset of having a client relapse. There was something else in her tone. With a huff, he sits back and lets her finish. He doesn't say anything when she is done and sits herself back again. Hands fold into his lap. Eyes look down at them.

"Have I." - "I've." - "I disappoint you, Watson." He finally manages and looks toward her. "Like I disappointed Lestrade. Like I would disappoint Gregson; and I disappoint my Father. Do you know how many times I have actually seen my Father since boarding school?" His brows frown deeper. Here it comes, the crash. Where he can't hold anything in any longer. Where that desperate scramble for some feeling of hope takes over and he's gasping beneath the water. He might as well drown.

He seems to be speaking a little faster now. It's nerves, and it's all personal, and it's so hard for Sherlock to speak of emotions. Of what he hides. Quiet and quick. "You should avoid thinking of me as anything but human, Watson. I'm nothing better than human and my all accounts I wish I could say that was not so but it is. Imagine a human who could not turn off their mind." He swallows and leans back, looking away.

"Once you see the puzzle in things you can't stop. It either makes you a brilliant person or a dead person, often one and then the other."

[hischauffeur]

"It isn't that. I know you are human, Holmes. I've tried to get that part out so often I doubted it a few times, but..."

She keeps her eyes focused on a point. Her hands clasped together. She knows about failure. She knows about disappointment. She'd seen it in her parents eyes the day she told them she was quitting. Better stop now then live the rest of her life as a shunned and disgraced surgeon, unable to get a job in what she spent her life training to do in any decent hospital. Forced to move from home and find some low rate position in a hospital use to malpractice issues.

"I'm disappointed in how things have turned out." she worded carefully. Slowly. "Not in you. Maybe not even in me. Just-- the situation."

Every part of it. Down to the day she put on her surgical mask and walked into that room to the day he had first put a needle in his arm. What a pair they made. But in the end what frightened her the most...what made this all so horrifying was the idea that she knew he didn't want her to leave and if they knew of his relapse that was exactly what would happen. He'd be off back in the system for god knows how long away from what kept him sane and she would end her yet another career on another failure.

And she-- cared. How could she not? He was a child at best sometimes and maybe that was what made it so hard. He needed someone. He needed a friend. And she wanted to make sure he had one in Alberto or someone before she was gone.

"You are not a dead person, Sherlock." she sighed faintly, "Just- a troubled one. A troubling one. And that is very.. human."

[iagreewithyou]

"Should have been." He says so quiet it might not have been audible at all. Regret. Regret was what he read in her expression as his eyes met hers and stayed for a long moment. No, he did not want her to go. He did not want her to come in, either. Father's orders made it so but leaving was not something that came easy to Holmes. As hard as it was to get in through his armor was just as hard to get back out again.

"I never understood how people made fleeting relationships. How they could just," he uses his hands to emphasize, "let someone in. Like a window, see through and free to open and close as desired. So simple, it seems, to them."

[hischauffeur]

Joan thought for a moment, trying to come up with an answer, but she didn't have one. Not one that would be sufficient. She'd had colleagues once and friends. Boyfriends. But lately-- she could understand.

She wanted those relationships, but this way it was safe. Meeting people and making acquaintances as a sober companion. It kept distance while feigning closeness. A superficial closeness. And Holmes refused to play by those rules leaving her to contemplate too heavily the lack of relationships she had now after cutting ties.

"They don't think about how it might go wrong, they just hope it will go right." she says at last, shrugging. "You've let people into your life before... not everyone is as discriminating. Maybe they should be a little, but to be overly so is just as bad."

Joan gave a half shrug, "You might miss out on something-- something worth hoping for."

There was her best answer. A mantra she hadn't even taken to heart lately, but being around him...it made her think. Made her wonder.