the unresolved case of dabda.

DENIAL


Therapist: John, it’s your third time here and you’ve been awfully quiet so far. Do you want to share what’s on your mind with us?

J. Watson: Not particularly, no.

Therapist: That’s alright, of course, but as you can hear, everyone here knows what you’re going through.

J. Watson: Yeah, it doesn’t really feel that way to me.

Therapist: And why is that?

J. Watson: Because -- no one seems to be asking themselves how it can be true, how it isn’t some -- magic trick of the mind.

J. Miller: We’ve all been there, John.

R. Brown: I used to think it had to be a bad dream.

S. Smith: Yes, like a living nightmare.

Therapist: You see, John, everybody knows exactly how you’re feeling, they’ve all been in the same position, but it’s only the first stage. There is a way forward.

-*-

The way forward is really a question of what degree of stalling he reaches on any given day. The first week John finds it difficult getting out of his chair in the living room (let alone the flat) that still carries Sherlock’s scent and is cluttered with all his stuff, books, chemistry equipment, old specimen jars, petri dishes, the list could go on... He touches none of it and scares Mrs Hudson away with his unapproachableness, so she can’t either (though she keeps coming back, finding new things that would be easily dealt with, John, if you’d just let me, it’ll be gone in a flash). But John doesn’t want it gone, any of it. Just as he doesn’t want Sherlock gone, but there you have it, it wasn’t his call to make and he’s accepted the terms for what they are.

-*-

At night, he alternates between being unable to sleep, starting himself on sleeping pills in the 63rd hour of almost compulsive wakefulness -- and then continuously waking up from detailed, gory nightmares about Sherlock’s body on the sidewalk. They are dreams of enough blood to form rivers, of the other man’s smashed in head, his unrecognisable face (the way his wrist had been deadly quiet and unresponsive beneath his fingertips).

John wakes up in a pool of sweat, tears running uncontrollably down his cheeks and he can’t even find it in himself to go shower, because there was that time on the bathroom floor, right? The blowjob, the everything.

Not too long ago.


ANGER


Therapist: So, John, how are you feeling today?

J. Watson: Honestly? I’m feeling pretty angry.

Therapist: That’s a very natural emotion to have, considering what has happened, don’t you think?

J. Watson: Probably, yes.

Therapist: Do you care to elaborate?

J. Watson: Because it was his decision. Everything was always Sherlock’s decision, but this one -- he shouldn’t have called. No matter the alternatives, I’d have preferred it to what actually happened.

-*-

After a couple of months, he finally replies to one of Harry’s texts. She invites him over for dinner and he accepts, mostly because he’s in no mood to cook for himself (or be alone yet another night). She makes lasagna and they eat in a relative quiet, both of them sipping water, because that’s the wagon she’s on once more. For the fifth time in a year. It won’t last, John knows, but appreciates her efforts even so.

“I’m sorry about what happened to your friend,” she says later as they’re doing the dishes (her dishwasher is out of order, has been for a month). The line of his jaw tightens considerably while he wonders what she’d say, if she knew. The truth about Sherlock’s and his friendship.

She looks tired and worn out with her short hair hanging into her eyes. John puts the last dish aside and clears his throat.

“Sherlock and I --”

“I know,” she replies when he doesn’t finish the sentence, searching for the right words to properly describe them (nothing comes to mind, because that’s what they are currently, nothing, a thing of the past, until -- someday). He doesn’t ask her how she knows or if she’s even sure what he was going to say, it’s probably a gaydar thing, right? A sister recognising her brother, apparently. Would be the first time, for the two of them.

He wants to punch her. Well, he wants to punch something, at least. He wants to take it out on the world.

-*-

A couple of days later, he is punching the wall next to Sherlock’s stupid smiley face. He hits the wall again and again, until his knuckles are raw and bleeding, his breathing ragged as he finally collapses into Sherlock’s chair (still there, still very much there). He stares at his hands, discoloured and with abrasions across the backs of them. He’ll need to clean them properly in a moment, but for the time being he just looks at the small droplets of blood, the broken skin, the bruises that begin to appear.

Of course, he knows -- he’s been on the other end of this, been the one deployed, been the one away, but the waiting game is killing him. They aren’t married, he isn’t Sherlock’s little wife, yet he agreed to wait for his eventual return, no given date, no fixed time, just this.

This unbearable sense of not knowing.


BARGAINING


Therapist: You said you had good news today, John?

J. Watson: Well, I’ve -- just applied for a job.

R. Brown: Congratulations!

S. Smith: Good luck!

Therapist: You’ve been unemployed for a long time, John. Why now?

J. Watson: Can’t afford the flat on a pension and don’t want to move out, don’t want anyone else to move in, either. Besides -- it feels like nothing will really change, unless I make some changes myself.

Therapist: That’s the next step in the process, definitely.

-*-

It’s a small clinic, covering only a single neighbourhood and it doesn’t take him awfully long to find his feet in the practices of it, though the administration requires a bit more work. It’s not the most exciting job he’s had (then again, once you’ve chased after criminals with Sherlock Holmes, nothing will ever compare), but it pays the bills and keeps Mrs Hudson happy as a clam.

Besides him, there’s another doctor, Dr. Johnson, a few years his senior and specialised in pediatric medicine. They don’t get on all that well, the man’s set in his ways and acts like the (second) most arrogant person John’s ever met, but the rest of the staff is nice and accommodating. The head nurse is called Mary, the first to greet him when he showed up for the interview.

“You here for the locum?”

“Yes,” he’d replied, shrugging out of his jacket.

“I’ll be keeping my fingers crossed for you, then,” she’d said, her eyes sparkling, “we’re awfully underrepresented in eye candy around here.”

He’d just raised an eyebrow at her, a slight smile on his lips.

-*-

A couple of months later, Mrs Hudson comes down with tea, a habit she has otherwise abandoned after Sherlock --

John invites her to have a cuppa with him which she agrees to, obviously this was her plan with dropping by in the first place, he’d known from the moment she stepped in with her full tray of teapot and fine china, milk in a jug, lemon slices and no sugar in sight. They sit down at the kitchen table, these days devoid of microscopes and petri dishes.

“You seem happier, John,” she tell hims. He doesn’t like the word happy in this context (he doesn’t feel as much happy as determined to move forward, but who knows, maybe one leads to the other).

“I’m doing okay,” he replies without touching upon the specifics. It’s nice doing something constructive again, actually having something to get out of bed for, people who know him as a professional, not as John Watson, Sherlock Holmes’ personal blogger. It’s nice defining himself, it feels like it’s been a long time since he last did. “I’m slowly turning things around.”

She nods and pours them another cup of tea.


DEPRESSION


Therapist: And how are you today, John?

J. Watson: I’ve been -- thinking, I guess. Does anyone else -- ever get the feeling that you’re waiting for the damage to be undone? That you’re just waiting -- for them to come back?

J. Miller: Every day.

-*-

Six months pass before Mary catches up to him after work, sitting on the secretary’s desk in her uniform and watching him zip up his jacket. He puts on his leather gloves and turns to tell her good evening.

“Do you want to come over for dinner sometime, John,” she asks.

John pauses. He’s neither as stupid nor as unobservant as Sherlock always said he was, he’s seen how she has been following him with her eyes. His thoughts return to the first case he worked with Sherlock, how they’d gone out for Chinese afterwards -- like they’d continued to do ever since. Dinner in dingy little places, all over London, sometimes beyond. Well, until. Until they stopped.

“Listen, Mary,” he begins and she cocks her head, a strand of her blonde hair falling into her eyes. Sighing, he shakes his head. “I’m only going to say yes, if you’re alright with it being a completely platonic affair.” He doesn’t say I’m not ready or I’m taken, he says if instead. Presents her with certain conditions.

“Of course,” she replies and they share a quick smile of mutual understanding, before he leaves the office with a you’ve got my number, feel free to use it.

-*-

That night he lies awake for the first time in months. Staring up at the ceiling, he listens to the silence downstairs, the abandoned living room, Sherlock’s empty bedroom that he hasn’t slept in since Sherlock stopped being there.

Mary wants him to come by for dinner and a movie the following Friday and since John Watson no longer has plans that extend beyond work, he said yes. He thinks about Mary for some time, about her sense of humour and the way she makes him laugh, like he hasn’t actually forgotten how to, when all comes down to it.

Then, he thinks about Sherlock. Just some casework first, their first case, their second, after which he starts thinking about Sherlock naked and gets hard in the midst of reminiscing. Making a noise like it’s a bother, he reaches down and starts jerking himself off to still fainter memories of Sherlock and him having sex, because it’s been a year and a half since the man disappeared and before that, the last thing John said to him face to face was, friends keep people safe. At least the final memory he has of him isn’t the puddle on the sidewalk, that’s only the second to last and the last doesn’t count...

Because the last one is secret.


ACCEPTANCE


Therapist: Does anyone want to start? Yes, John.

J. Watson: So, I’ve concluded something. Reality is what it is. I can’t change that. It happened -- and here I am.

-*-

They’re sitting on Mary’s sofa, watching a really stupid action movie that they’re mostly staying awake to, because they’re both providing running commentary to every scene. She’s made popcorn and is eating more of them than him which he eventually notes, laughing.

“I’m eating them completely platonically, so you should shut your pie hole, Dr. John Watson,” she retorts, making him laugh even more.

“Eat away,” he says, giving her the bowl.

“But not stay away?”

“No, don’t stay away.”

They descend into a comradely silence for a while. John watches her out the corner of his eye as she continues stuffing her face, in the most secret compartment of his mind cursing Sherlock for leaving him in this position, as the one who has promised to wait without knowing what he’s waiting for, life passing by around him. For the most part, without him, too.

He could have fallen in love with a woman like Mary, he knows. Now all he can do is to simply draw the conclusion and move on without actually going anywhere.

He’s not a soldier anymore, but he’s a soldier’s family.

-*-

He starts seeing Mary regularly, as friends, of course. Museum exhibits, the movies, the theatre, they do everything while he starts telling her about Sherlock, bit by bit, the devil in the details. She doesn’t ask, she doesn’t judge, she just listens and he’s thankful. Weirdly enough, Harry is the first to catch on to it, asking him one night when he drops by to fix her dishwasher for the umpteenth time, “Are you seeing someone new?”

“We’re just friends,” he replies, thrown momentarily back to when that was the answer he’d give to people assuming there was something between Sherlock and him.

“Okay,” Harry replies, then adds a moment later, “but apparently a friendship with potential.”

Something inside the dishwasher says clink as he screws on some bolts and he sits up, careful not to hit his head. He doesn’t reply. He doesn’t say no or maybe. He lives with the knowledge that he -- well, that he just doesn’t know, right? That was the deal he made, he couldn’t know and he promised to wait, regardless.

That part of it is solely on him. John just hopes Sherlock is managing his part equally well, wherever he is, staying alive, even if barely.