Sherlock Fic: Arcana 2a/4
Title: Arcana
Fandom: Sherlock (BBC)
Rating: Mature
Characters: Joanna (John) Watson, Sherlock Holmes, Harriet Watson, Mycroft Holmes, Anthea, Mrs. Hudson, Lestrade, James Moriarty, Original Characters
Summary: Sometimes, her grandmother has said, in the simplest, strongest of magics that’s all that’s required - a sacrifice and an intent. Her blood, and his words: I want to forget.
In which Joanna Watson is a witch, Sherlock Holmes is himself, and every spell has its price.
Chapter One
After the war, her dreams are always the same.
“It really can help, you know,” Thompson says, tapping her pen idly against the edge of her notepad. “Talking about them.”
Joanna rather envies Thompson’s soothing, carefully neutral tone - hers has always been quite good, but Thompson’s is of another class altogether. There’s some inescapable thread of calm in her low-pitched therapist’s voice that makes Joanna want to respond to her questions, no matter how invasive.
If she had answers, maybe she would.
The handle of her cane has warmed beneath her white-knuckled grip; she relaxes her fingers, one by one. “I was shot,” Joanna says. “Sometimes I dream about it. Sometimes, after I dream about it, I come here and tell you how it made me feel.” She raises her trembling left hand. “I talk about it. It isn’t helping.”
Thompson is unfazed. “You understand that healing takes time, Joanna.”
Joanna chuckles, looking away. There’s little humour in the sound. “Well, then,” she says, “I suppose it’s a good thing I’ve plenty to spare.”
There’s a silence. Thompson makes a note - Stress, exhaustion aggravates tremor. Avoiding sleep to avoid dreams of traumatic event? She looks up again. “Joanna, why did you join the army?”
No one has ever asked the question quite so simply before. It throws her off balance for a moment, and she frowns. “We’ve discussed that already, haven’t we?”
“No,” Thompson says, undeterred. “We haven’t.”
The first time Joanna fired a gun, she was twenty-four years old. Her grandmother had been dead for six years, and her sister a drunk for two. The man she was seeing - a surgeon with a surgeon’s vanity who, while not technically one of her instructors, was close enough to raise eyebrows - had surprised her with a trip to his shooting club. She’d refused at first (you’re meant to teach me to patch up bullet wounds, Philip, not create them) but he was persuasive and she was still young enough to be persuaded, so when he stood her in front of the target and gave her the gun, Joanna raised it and fired.
Beginner’s luck, Philip called it. She quickly proved him wrong.
Not long after, she threw over the surgeon and joined his club. They were happy to have her.
“Joanna,” Thompson says, not for the first time. “What were you thinking of just now?”
She shrugs, ignoring the twinge in her shoulder. “Nothing important.”
“You were smiling.”
“Yes. Well.” She tries a smirk. “I am still capable, you know.”
She must look ghastly - Thompson’s gaze flicks down to the notepad in her lap. “You haven’t answered my question.”
Joanna stretches her fingers over the handle of her cane, watching the bend and flex of her knuckles. Her fingernails are growing too long; she needs to clip them. “I like being useful.”
“You were a talented surgeon. You could have been of use here.” Joanna looks away, and Thompson leans forward, persistent. “It wasn’t enough for you. Why not?”
Her temper lives too close beneath the surface, these days. Joanna clenches her jaw, keeping silent until she’s sure she can speak without being unkind. “I’d rather not talk about that today,” she says. “If you don’t mind.”
Thompson sits back in her chair. “Of course.” She writes something on her notepad, but Joanna doesn’t bother to read it. When Thompson looks up again, her expression is perfectly composed. “So,” she says. “How’s your blog going?”
Joanna thinks of the blinking cursor and the empty page. Of her gun, lying loaded at the bottom of a drawer.
She forces a smile.
++
The next day her sister is waiting for her when she leaves the physiotherapist’s office. Harry’s eyes are hidden behind sunglasses, despite the winter clouds overhead; she has a large Burberry shopping bag in one hand and her mobile phone in the other. “I’m buying you lunch,” she says. “Don’t try to argue.”
Joanna’s shoulder is a knot of pain, and her leg is little better. She leans heavily against her cane and sighs. “Harry-”
“You’ve been avoiding me for weeks, Jo - you’ve left me no choice. I’m kidnapping you and feeding you at least one meal that isn’t served freeze-dried in a packet.” She drops her mobile into the handbag over her shoulder and snakes her arm through Joanna’s, leaning close to take some of her weight. “Come on. It isn’t far.”
Joanna tugs her arm free. “Christ, I can still walk by myself. I don’t need-”
“Don’t need what?” Harry bites out. “A crutch?”
Joanna looks away. “Harry-”
“If you’re so fucking independent, I suppose you can do without this.” She snatches the cane out of Joanna’s hand and walks off, weaving her way into the crowd of pedestrians passing by.
There is nothing wrong with Joanna’s leg - nothing at all, aside from the fact that whenever she tries to walk, it won’t bloody work. It is somehow the worst of the many ways her body has betrayed her since her return to London. Her shoulder will heal in time, but she is helpless against the vagaries of her own mind. She closes her eyes, listening as her breath hitches through her teeth, and takes a step forward.
Harry catches her just as the leg buckles, one wiry arm looped around Joanna’s waist. “Sorry,” she says, pressing the cane back into Joanna’s hand. “I just - fuck. I’m sorry, Jo.”
Joanna clutches the cane’s handle, breathing through the humiliation and pain. “Make it up to me,” she says. “Buy me lunch.”
“Well, if you insist,” Harry says, still sounding a little shaken. She walks at half her normal pace as she leads the way to the restaurant.
It’s absurdly posh, of course, though not quite as bad as Joanna expected - the menus are bound in leather, but the daily specials are written in chalk on a sign above the bar. Joanna chooses the cheapest pasta on the menu. Harry orders the soup and a glass of red wine. When it arrives she takes a neat sip, sets the glass on the table again and says, “I’ve left Clara.”
Joanna closes her eyes, briefly. “When?”
“Last night.” She takes another delicate sip of her drink - not her first of the day, then. Possibly not even her second. “It was a preemptive strike. She’s been threatening to leave for months; I just beat her to it.”
“I can’t really imagine Clara threatening anyone with anything,” Joanna says. Harry’s hands are steady, her face perfectly smooth. Joanna wonders what her eyes look like behind the sunglasses. “Are you all right?”
“I’m gorgeous,” Harry says. “I’m single for the first time in a decade, my sister’s home from her suicide mission in a desert hell, and my weekly Pilates has done simply amazing things for my arse. I’m fan-bloody-tastic, is what I am.” She spreads her napkin across her lap and says, “Now eat your pasta. You look like a fucking skeleton.”
I feel like a fucking skeleton, Joanna thinks, and forces down her first bite of pasta.
The sauce sticks a bit at the back of her throat. It’s richer than she’s used to, heavy and sweet. They eat in silence as the restaurant moves around them, humming with the afternoon rush. When they’ve finished, Harry pays before Joanna can reach for her wallet. “Don’t even think about it,” she says, passing her card to the waiter. “I know exactly how skint you are.”
“London isn’t cheap.”
Harry gives her a bright smile. “Which is why you should move into Gran’s until you get back on your feet.” She glances at the cane, and her smile dims. “So to speak.”
“We’ve talked about this, Harry. You have tenants-”
“So I’ll kick them out.” She leans across the table, her thin face suddenly serious. “The house should’ve been yours all along, Jo, and you know it. If you won’t leme give you a percentage of the rent-”
“Enough.” Joanna doesn’t raise her voice, but she’s never needed to - not when she uses this particular tone. Its effect is dramatic and immediate. Harry’s mouth closes with an audible click of teeth, and Joanna sighs into the silence. “I know you’re worried, Harry, but I’m sorting this out on my own. End of story, end of conversation.”
Harry sits back in her chair, scowling, and for a moment looks about fourteen years old. “That’s cheating, and you know it. Using Gran’s voodoo voice tricks - it’s a rotten way to win an argument.”
Joanna rubs her hand over her eyes. “That wasn’t - I don’t do that sort of thing anymore, Harry. I haven’t for a long time.” She looks up. “And don’t call it voodoo. It makes you sound like a moron.”
“Well, excuse me, Miss Glinda. For some reason no one ever bothered to fill me in on the proper terminology.” Harry heaves her handbag into her lap and pulls out her mobile. She slaps it onto the table between them. “Take it. It’s 2010; no one uses a landline anymore.” She stands, folding her coat over one arm. “You know, if you end up dying in a gutter somewhere I’m going to be terribly annoyed.”
“I probably won’t be too chuffed either,” Joanna says, but Harry’s already walking to the door, her sunglasses glinting in the milky afternoon light. She pretends not to hear.
The Burberry shopping bag is still sitting beside Harry’s empty chair. Joanna reaches for it, ready to limp after her, but she stops when she sees what’s inside.
In the bag she finds her grandmother’s leather sewing case, her wooden cane, and the recipe book. A yellow Post-It clings to the cardboard cover of the book, just over the tall, robed woman’s worn face. Found these in the house, it says. I thought you might want them, now that you’re home.
“Right,” Joanna says softly, to herself. “Home.”
She closes the bag.
++
She’s known Sherlock Holmes for little more than twenty-four hours when she kills for him the first time.
“Doesn’t seem to have affected your appetite much,” he says, just before shovelling an enormous bite of sweet and sour pork into his mouth. She’s hardly surprised that he goes without during cases, if he eats like this between. He takes a drink of water, and she watches the muscles of his long throat move as he swallows. An answering heat stirs low in her stomach, and it’s entirely, wonderfully absurd, like everything else about him - like everything in her life since the moment she set foot inside his flat.
Joanna tries very hard not to laugh. If she starts again, she might not stop. “Well, now you know,” she says. “Your new flatmate is a cold-blooded killer. Shoots a deranged cabbie one minute, devours a double order of beef with broccoli the next.” She leans forward, her arms folded on the table. “And so you ask yourself: what fresh terrors lie beneath her mild-mannered exterior? What will she do next?”
Sherlock grins as if she’s said something perfectly delightful. There’s a bit of bok choy stuck in his teeth. “On the contrary - I know exactly what you’ll do next.”
“Oh? Enlighten me.”
He leans close over the table, his fingers steepled in front of him. “The adrenaline high you’re riding now will dissipate in approximately fifteen minutes. The crash will hit you particularly hard, given how little you’ve slept in the past few weeks and the frankly outrageous amount of food you’ve just eaten. You’ll come back to the flat and sleep on the bare mattress in the upstairs room for no less than five hours, more likely six or seven. When you come downstairs in the late morning I’ll be in the midst of my current experiment, and though you aren’t easily put off by such things you will begin to question the wisdom of sharing digs with a man who makes a habit of scrambling human eyes on his stovetop. You’ll move in anyway, though, because you feel at once indebted to me and personally responsible for my well being - irrational, but a typical enough reaction in someone of your pedantically moral bent. Over time, however, this sense of obligation will erode under the strain of my selfish, eccentric, and increasingly antagonistic demands on your patience and time, and once you’ve found some outside source of stability - either in the form of steady employment or a romantic relationship - you will leave Baker Street for good.” He sits back in his chair and gives her a close-lipped, self-satisfied smile. “It shouldn’t take more than two months. Three, if you’re feeling unusually stubborn.”
“Wow,” Joanna says after a brief, stunned silence. “That was...thorough.”
“Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.” She looks down at her plate, picks up a piece of broccoli with her chopsticks, and flings it neatly at Sherlock’s face. It bounces off his forehead and lands in his lap.
He blinks at her, a brown smudge of sauce between his eyes. “That, I imagine, was an attempt to make some sort of point.”
She nods. “I don’t claim to be the most mysterious of potential flatmates, Sherlock, but I’m a bit more psychologically complex than you give me credit for.” She passes him a clean napkin. “Even dull people can be unpredictable.”
His lips twitch. “I’ll keep that in mind.” He wipes the sauce from his face, wincing slightly. “I think I’ve got broccoli in my eye.”
“You do not.”
“I do, and it stings.” He stands a little, bending across the table and pulling at his eyelid. “Look,” he says, “you’ve blinded me with a bud of broccoli.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Joanna says, but she can’t help but lean close to look. “I don’t see-”
A wet slice of sweet and sour pork slithers past her collar and into her shirt, and she shrieks a bit, before she can stop herself. The half-drunk couple at the next table turn and stare; Sherlock is already back in his seat, picking at his food and looking disturbingly angelic. “Problem?”
“Not at all,” she says, and flicks a clump of rice into his hair.
The waitress kicks them out before they have time to do much damage, and they stumble out onto the street, breathless with laughter. Sherlock slouches elegantly against a lamppost, smirking as she tries to shake the bit of pork free from inside her top. It involves an embarrassing amount of hopping on her part, and he starts to snicker.
“Oh, shut up,” she says. “You have oyster sauce on your face.”
He reaches out and plucks a leaf of bok choy from the hair behind her ear. He holds it up to the light, studying the green-edged glow of its veins. “It bothers you more than you let on. Killing.”
Joanna stills. Looks up and meets his eyes, their colour ethereally pale in the streetlight. “Of course,” she says. “Of course it does.”
“But you’ve killed before.”
“Twice. Both times to defend a patient from an immediate threat.” She looks away, easing her weight off her leg. Her fingers twitch, reaching for the cane she no longer needs to carry. She forces a chuckle. “You were right about one thing - I’m definitely about to crash. Mind if I kip on the sofa for a few hours?”
“It’s as much your sofa as mine.” Sherlock tugs sharply at the hem of her jumper, and the slice of sweet and sour pork drops to the pavement with a soft splat. He steps back, his hands slipping into his pockets. “Joanna Watson,” he says, as if trying out the sound of it. “You’re more of a mystery than you think.”
She smiles. “Probably not for long,” she says, and follows him back to their flat.
++
Joanna learns quickly that the surest way to draw Sherlock’s attention to a thing is to hide it.
Her Browning is easy - she isn’t hiding it from him, and she doesn’t bother to try. It fits nicely beneath a loose floorboard in the upstairs bedroom, along with two boxes of ammunition and a rather passive aggressive note reminding him of the basics of gun safety and maintenance. She keeps her journal in the locked drawer of her nightstand, knowing full well that he’ll read it the first chance he gets. She hasn’t written in it since she returned to England, and most of it is irrelevant nonsense, dry recitations of the daily minutia of war. She figures if he sticks it out through that, he’s earned the right to the few secrets buried amidst the drivel.
The trouble lies in the things she genuinely wishes to hide.
The sewing kit is the least suspicious item of the three. It’s old and many times repaired, an heirloom with a practical use. Joanna cleans the silver sewing needles, replaces a nearly empty spool of black thread, and tucks the kit away in the cabinet beneath the bathroom sink - a perfectly natural place to keep such a thing. If Sherlock ever gives the sewing kit so much as a second thought, he never mentions it.
Her grandmother’s cane, on the other hand, was bound to draw his attention. She hasn’t lived in Baker Street a week when she comes home from the shops to find him perched on the back of her armchair, balancing it between two long fingers.
“This,” he drawls, “is a fascinating piece.”
A fascinating piece of what? she wants to ask. Instead she sets the shopping down on the worktop with a clatter. “Is it?”
He huffs. “You know it is. You wouldn’t have left it out for me to find, otherwise.” He steps off the armchair and down to the floor. “Yew is an unusual wood for a cane. Not unheard of, but irregular and therefore significant.” He curves his fingers beneath the handle and lets it swing before him in the air. “It was hand carved for its original owner no less than forty years ago. Expertly made and tailored exactly to the owner’s tastes and needs - simple, sturdy, hardwearing. Elegant yet utilitarian. It belonged to your grandfather.”
Joanna smiles.
“Oh, hell. Your grandmother, then.” Sherlock scowls and sits down hard in one of the kitchen chairs. “She would’ve been tall for a woman. I hardly could have predicted that, given your own considerably below-average height.”
“I’m not that short.”
“You really are.” He raises the cane in front of him, the dark wood splitting his long features in two. His eyes cross a bit as he studies it. “Like you, she carried it with her non-dominant hand to support the leg on the same side - her right. She remained active late into her life despite her infirmity, as is obvious from the soil stains on the lower third of the stem and repeated denting from a high set of stairs.” He looks up, his focus shifting to her with a sudden, exacting intensity. “You must have lived with her for some time. You have a tendency to overstep when climbing a staircase, as if you unconsciously expect a higher riser - a habit common in those who’ve grown accustomed to old houses with tall, narrow stairways.”
Joanna nods. When she’s sure of her voice, she says, “My parents died when I was twelve. I lived with her until I left for university.” She sits in the chair beside his, slipping the cane from his suddenly loose grip. “But then, you already knew that.”
He looks away, avoiding her eyes. “Mycroft sent me a file the morning you moved in. I didn’t read it.”
“You hardly needed to. I’m sure there’s something in the way I butter my toast or clean my teeth or tie my bloody shoelaces that gives me away. As far as you’re concerned, I may as well have the word orphan stamped on my forehead in red ink.”
“It’s an automatic process,” Sherlock says, his voice deliberately cool. “My mind can’t help but draw conclusions from the data presented by your appearance and behaviour; it’s not something I can control. I thought you understood that.”
Her fingers are clenched around the cane. “I do.”
He meets her eyes, watching her without the slightest flicker of emotion. “Then why are you angry?”
I’m not, she wants to say, but she feels the futility of the lie before she can so much as open her mouth. She looks down at the cane - the garden stains on the stem and the marks left by years of climbing the same tall staircase. She hasn’t been inside the house in years, and Sherlock sees her still trying to climb its steps. “How did you know about my parents?”
He hesitates, but only for a moment. “Small things, mostly. There are indications in your relationship with your sister, the way you dress, your independent habits - particularly concerning money. And then there’s your hair, of course.”
She reaches for the long plait hanging low over her shoulder. “My hair?”
“A decidedly old-fashioned style, one rarely worn by women of your age. Short hair would better fit your limited interest in the more time consuming aspects of personal grooming, but instead you grow it long - unusually long, and despite its relative health and thickness you never wear it loose. Every morning you wash, comb, and plait your hair, and every evening you plait it again before going to sleep. It’s more ritual than habit, and one you’ve kept for a very long time.” He pauses. “Since the day your mother was no longer able to do it for you, I imagine.”
For a moment she feels cracked open and exposed, as if she’s found herself suddenly naked in front of him. His face is impassive, unreadable, and there’s nothing like judgment or pity in his eyes. She looks back, laid bare, and wonders at the part of her that wants to show him more.
She holds out the cane, and he takes it.
“Short hair is just as much trouble as long, sometimes,” she says. “Or so I’ve been told.”
It’s subtle, but she sees some of the tension bleed from the still muscles of his shoulders. “Perhaps, but you’d take less time in the shower if you cut it.”
She stands and begins to put away the shopping. “Sherlock, even if I only spent half the time primping in front of the bathroom mirror that you do-”
“I do not primp. As I’ve explained before, I’ve a number of sensitive experiments that require-”
“What?” she says, grinning at him over her shoulder. “A rigorous skin care regimen?”
At that Sherlock launches into an irate and excruciatingly detailed account of the various flora and fungi in the cabinet above the bathroom sink that require his constant attention, an account which continues uninterrupted as Joanna passes him the items that belong in the higher kitchen cabinets. When she blocks out the words and only listens to the drawling rise and fall of his voice, it’s almost soothing.
“Honestly,” he says, dropping a bag of sugar beside the empty jam jars on the top shelf, “when one takes into consideration your dismal observational skills and the compulsive nature of your ever-burgeoning adrenaline addiction, it really is a wonder that you’ve survived as long as you have. I commend you.”
Joanna closes the cabinet doors. “Coming from you, that’s perilously close to a compliment. I’m flattered.”
Sherlock snorts. “Don’t be.”
She elbows him gently away from the sink and turns on the tap. “I’m making soup and sandwiches for dinner. You eating today?”
“No.” He pauses, considering. “Maybe. Soup from a tin or-”
“Not your housekeeper, dear,” Joanna says in her very best Mrs. Hudson. “Nor, for that matter, am I your wife, mother, or personal chef.”
Sherlock grins. “Homemade, then. Excellent.” He leans over her shoulder as she washes her hands, speaking close in her ear. “Without onions, if you don’t mind. I find them gastronomically distracting.” He gives her shoulder a pat. “There’s a good girl.”
She raises a wet hand and flicks water at him, laughing when he recoils from the spray like a startled cat. Some things, she thinks, will just never get old. She shuts off the tap and dries her hands on the cleanest tea towel. “Pass me that recipe book, would you? The one with the cardboard cover.”
Still scowling, Sherlock shakes the last drops of water from his hair and slips the recipe book neatly from its place between her tattered copy of The Physiology of Taste and his Alkaloids and Molecular Methods of Plant Analysis. He drops it onto the worktop. “Also your grandmother’s, I see.” He frowns at the worn cover, tracing the blurred silhouette of the woman pictured there. Her cornucopia and her scythe.
Joanna waits, careful not to hold her breath.
Sherlock’s teeth worry absently at his lower lip. “You’re very sentimental about her things.”
“Am I?”
“Yes. For a person not sentimental about much else.” He gives her the recipe book, shifting its weight into her hands. “My mother died when I was sixteen.”
Joanna holds the book to her chest. “I’m sorry,” she says.
Sherlock meets her eyes evenly. “Yes,” he says. “So was I.” He turns and leaves the kitchen. A moment later, she hears the click as he opens his violin case.
She prepares dinner quietly, careful of the clatter of pots and chipped ceramic plates as she waits for him to take up the violin and play. She expects plucking or screeches or, if she’s lucky, the random, indecipherable snatches of melody that will haunt her for days. She waits, but tonight there’s nothing.
She listens anyway.
++
The next morning Joanna limps downstairs to find her grandmother’s cane mounted by hooks to the wall above the sitting room fireplace, just below the mirror. When she looks closer, she sees that the cane’s been polished, the yew wood gleaming almost red in the morning light. The skull grins widely at her, and she grins back.
“‘The moment of the rose and the moment of the yew-tree,’” she tells it, “‘are of equal duration.’”
“Ugh,” Sherlock groans from the sofa, hidden beneath a blanket of books and open files. “Eliot.”
“Yes,” she says. “Eliot.” She crosses to the sofa and lifts an empty file folder from his face. It has the words Metropolitan Police: Confidential printed on it in large, forbidding letters. “Tea?”
He blinks up at her, squinting in the light. “Tea,” he agrees, his voice rough from lack of sleep. “And silence.”
“Long night?” He fixes her with a bleary sort of glare. “Right, sorry,” she says in an exaggerated whisper. “Tea. Silence.”
“Insufferable woman,” Sherlock murmurs, and rolls over until his face is squashed against the back of the sofa. She has a sudden, inexplicable urge to reach down and ruffle his hair. “If you do,” he says, somewhat nasally, “I shall bite you.”
“If you bite me, you won’t get any tea.” She drops the file folder back over his head and retreats to the kitchen. The dishes from yesterday’s dinner are still piled in the sink, and the equipment on the table seems to have spawned an ominous number of new experiments in the night. Her grandmother’s book sits alone on the worktop, open to a recipe for beef broth. Just as she’d left it the night before - hidden in plain sight.
Joanna slips it back onto its shelf, fitting it neatly between her books and his.
++
Thompson looks up from her notepad, pen dangling between her fingers. For all her careful neutrality, she seems less than pleased. “Joanna,” she says, “do you consider yourself a lonely person?”
Joanna frowns. “Is this about Sherlock?”
“This is about you,” Thompson says. “Though we can talk about Sherlock, if you like.” She rests her chin on her open palm, a posture of deliberate interest. It’s more irritating than it should be. “Has sharing a flat made you feel less isolated from - what did you call it - the ‘real world’? Life after the war?”
“The war was real.”
“I never said it wasn’t.” Thompson watches her for a long moment. “You had a lonely childhood.”
Joanna takes a deep breath. The fingers of her right hand clench around a cane she no longer carries. “I had Harry.”
“You’ve told me that you haven’t been close with your sister since you were small. Since your parents’ deaths.” Thompson leans forward slightly in her chair, and the silver charms on her bracelet catch the light from the office window. The two of the charms touch, and the sound is like a bell chime. “Your grandmother took you in after the accident, is that right?”
Joanna nods.
“You never mention her.”
“She died when I was eighteen.” Thompson’s never worn the bracelet before, not during one of their sessions, but it isn’t new. An heirloom maybe, or rediscovered favourite - Sherlock would know which, and a thousand other things besides. “I don’t remember much about my childhood.”
Thompson makes a note, the bracelet chiming with each sway of her wrist. Head still bent over the paper, she says, “Joanna, did your grandmother walk with a limp?”
The anger is sudden, immediate. A bile at the back of her teeth. “Yes.”
“Which leg?”
“You know which leg.”
Thompson sits back, her hands folded in her lap. The bracelet stills. “Sherlock can’t cure you, Joanna, not completely. I think you know that.” She gives Joanna a small, encouraging, infuriating smile. Let me help you, the smile says, and rage clenches like a living fist in Joanna’s chest. “Tell me one thing you remember about your grandmother.”
“I remember that she didn’t believe in therapy.”
“Joanna,” Thompson says. Her tone is scolding, familiar, and something in Joanna breaks.
“I remember that when she was sick - when she was dying, and she lost three stone in as many months and the pain was so terrible she couldn’t eat or sleep or stand, I remember hating her for leaving me.” Joanna looks down at her lap. At the gentle tremor in her left hand. “The morning she died, I almost brought her back. I’d promised myself I never would, but she was gone and I needed her. I didn’t have anyone else.”
Joanna doesn’t need to look into Thompson’s eyes to see the pity there. “You would’ve revived her against her wishes, so you wouldn’t be left alone.”
“I would have given my life for hers,” Joanna says. “But I didn’t. I passed her last test.” She smiles, thin-lipped and strained. “I haven’t used the things she taught me since.”
Thompson looks up, at the clock on the wall. The session is over. “We should continue this next week,” she says.
“Yes,” Joanna says. “We should.”
She fires Thompson by phone the next morning.
chapter 2b
Fandom: Sherlock (BBC)
Rating: Mature
Characters: Joanna (John) Watson, Sherlock Holmes, Harriet Watson, Mycroft Holmes, Anthea, Mrs. Hudson, Lestrade, James Moriarty, Original Characters
Summary: Sometimes, her grandmother has said, in the simplest, strongest of magics that’s all that’s required - a sacrifice and an intent. Her blood, and his words: I want to forget.
In which Joanna Watson is a witch, Sherlock Holmes is himself, and every spell has its price.
Chapter One
After the war, her dreams are always the same.
“It really can help, you know,” Thompson says, tapping her pen idly against the edge of her notepad. “Talking about them.”
Joanna rather envies Thompson’s soothing, carefully neutral tone - hers has always been quite good, but Thompson’s is of another class altogether. There’s some inescapable thread of calm in her low-pitched therapist’s voice that makes Joanna want to respond to her questions, no matter how invasive.
If she had answers, maybe she would.
The handle of her cane has warmed beneath her white-knuckled grip; she relaxes her fingers, one by one. “I was shot,” Joanna says. “Sometimes I dream about it. Sometimes, after I dream about it, I come here and tell you how it made me feel.” She raises her trembling left hand. “I talk about it. It isn’t helping.”
Thompson is unfazed. “You understand that healing takes time, Joanna.”
Joanna chuckles, looking away. There’s little humour in the sound. “Well, then,” she says, “I suppose it’s a good thing I’ve plenty to spare.”
There’s a silence. Thompson makes a note - Stress, exhaustion aggravates tremor. Avoiding sleep to avoid dreams of traumatic event? She looks up again. “Joanna, why did you join the army?”
No one has ever asked the question quite so simply before. It throws her off balance for a moment, and she frowns. “We’ve discussed that already, haven’t we?”
“No,” Thompson says, undeterred. “We haven’t.”
The first time Joanna fired a gun, she was twenty-four years old. Her grandmother had been dead for six years, and her sister a drunk for two. The man she was seeing - a surgeon with a surgeon’s vanity who, while not technically one of her instructors, was close enough to raise eyebrows - had surprised her with a trip to his shooting club. She’d refused at first (you’re meant to teach me to patch up bullet wounds, Philip, not create them) but he was persuasive and she was still young enough to be persuaded, so when he stood her in front of the target and gave her the gun, Joanna raised it and fired.
Beginner’s luck, Philip called it. She quickly proved him wrong.
Not long after, she threw over the surgeon and joined his club. They were happy to have her.
“Joanna,” Thompson says, not for the first time. “What were you thinking of just now?”
She shrugs, ignoring the twinge in her shoulder. “Nothing important.”
“You were smiling.”
“Yes. Well.” She tries a smirk. “I am still capable, you know.”
She must look ghastly - Thompson’s gaze flicks down to the notepad in her lap. “You haven’t answered my question.”
Joanna stretches her fingers over the handle of her cane, watching the bend and flex of her knuckles. Her fingernails are growing too long; she needs to clip them. “I like being useful.”
“You were a talented surgeon. You could have been of use here.” Joanna looks away, and Thompson leans forward, persistent. “It wasn’t enough for you. Why not?”
Her temper lives too close beneath the surface, these days. Joanna clenches her jaw, keeping silent until she’s sure she can speak without being unkind. “I’d rather not talk about that today,” she says. “If you don’t mind.”
Thompson sits back in her chair. “Of course.” She writes something on her notepad, but Joanna doesn’t bother to read it. When Thompson looks up again, her expression is perfectly composed. “So,” she says. “How’s your blog going?”
Joanna thinks of the blinking cursor and the empty page. Of her gun, lying loaded at the bottom of a drawer.
She forces a smile.
++
The next day her sister is waiting for her when she leaves the physiotherapist’s office. Harry’s eyes are hidden behind sunglasses, despite the winter clouds overhead; she has a large Burberry shopping bag in one hand and her mobile phone in the other. “I’m buying you lunch,” she says. “Don’t try to argue.”
Joanna’s shoulder is a knot of pain, and her leg is little better. She leans heavily against her cane and sighs. “Harry-”
“You’ve been avoiding me for weeks, Jo - you’ve left me no choice. I’m kidnapping you and feeding you at least one meal that isn’t served freeze-dried in a packet.” She drops her mobile into the handbag over her shoulder and snakes her arm through Joanna’s, leaning close to take some of her weight. “Come on. It isn’t far.”
Joanna tugs her arm free. “Christ, I can still walk by myself. I don’t need-”
“Don’t need what?” Harry bites out. “A crutch?”
Joanna looks away. “Harry-”
“If you’re so fucking independent, I suppose you can do without this.” She snatches the cane out of Joanna’s hand and walks off, weaving her way into the crowd of pedestrians passing by.
There is nothing wrong with Joanna’s leg - nothing at all, aside from the fact that whenever she tries to walk, it won’t bloody work. It is somehow the worst of the many ways her body has betrayed her since her return to London. Her shoulder will heal in time, but she is helpless against the vagaries of her own mind. She closes her eyes, listening as her breath hitches through her teeth, and takes a step forward.
Harry catches her just as the leg buckles, one wiry arm looped around Joanna’s waist. “Sorry,” she says, pressing the cane back into Joanna’s hand. “I just - fuck. I’m sorry, Jo.”
Joanna clutches the cane’s handle, breathing through the humiliation and pain. “Make it up to me,” she says. “Buy me lunch.”
“Well, if you insist,” Harry says, still sounding a little shaken. She walks at half her normal pace as she leads the way to the restaurant.
It’s absurdly posh, of course, though not quite as bad as Joanna expected - the menus are bound in leather, but the daily specials are written in chalk on a sign above the bar. Joanna chooses the cheapest pasta on the menu. Harry orders the soup and a glass of red wine. When it arrives she takes a neat sip, sets the glass on the table again and says, “I’ve left Clara.”
Joanna closes her eyes, briefly. “When?”
“Last night.” She takes another delicate sip of her drink - not her first of the day, then. Possibly not even her second. “It was a preemptive strike. She’s been threatening to leave for months; I just beat her to it.”
“I can’t really imagine Clara threatening anyone with anything,” Joanna says. Harry’s hands are steady, her face perfectly smooth. Joanna wonders what her eyes look like behind the sunglasses. “Are you all right?”
“I’m gorgeous,” Harry says. “I’m single for the first time in a decade, my sister’s home from her suicide mission in a desert hell, and my weekly Pilates has done simply amazing things for my arse. I’m fan-bloody-tastic, is what I am.” She spreads her napkin across her lap and says, “Now eat your pasta. You look like a fucking skeleton.”
I feel like a fucking skeleton, Joanna thinks, and forces down her first bite of pasta.
The sauce sticks a bit at the back of her throat. It’s richer than she’s used to, heavy and sweet. They eat in silence as the restaurant moves around them, humming with the afternoon rush. When they’ve finished, Harry pays before Joanna can reach for her wallet. “Don’t even think about it,” she says, passing her card to the waiter. “I know exactly how skint you are.”
“London isn’t cheap.”
Harry gives her a bright smile. “Which is why you should move into Gran’s until you get back on your feet.” She glances at the cane, and her smile dims. “So to speak.”
“We’ve talked about this, Harry. You have tenants-”
“So I’ll kick them out.” She leans across the table, her thin face suddenly serious. “The house should’ve been yours all along, Jo, and you know it. If you won’t leme give you a percentage of the rent-”
“Enough.” Joanna doesn’t raise her voice, but she’s never needed to - not when she uses this particular tone. Its effect is dramatic and immediate. Harry’s mouth closes with an audible click of teeth, and Joanna sighs into the silence. “I know you’re worried, Harry, but I’m sorting this out on my own. End of story, end of conversation.”
Harry sits back in her chair, scowling, and for a moment looks about fourteen years old. “That’s cheating, and you know it. Using Gran’s voodoo voice tricks - it’s a rotten way to win an argument.”
Joanna rubs her hand over her eyes. “That wasn’t - I don’t do that sort of thing anymore, Harry. I haven’t for a long time.” She looks up. “And don’t call it voodoo. It makes you sound like a moron.”
“Well, excuse me, Miss Glinda. For some reason no one ever bothered to fill me in on the proper terminology.” Harry heaves her handbag into her lap and pulls out her mobile. She slaps it onto the table between them. “Take it. It’s 2010; no one uses a landline anymore.” She stands, folding her coat over one arm. “You know, if you end up dying in a gutter somewhere I’m going to be terribly annoyed.”
“I probably won’t be too chuffed either,” Joanna says, but Harry’s already walking to the door, her sunglasses glinting in the milky afternoon light. She pretends not to hear.
The Burberry shopping bag is still sitting beside Harry’s empty chair. Joanna reaches for it, ready to limp after her, but she stops when she sees what’s inside.
In the bag she finds her grandmother’s leather sewing case, her wooden cane, and the recipe book. A yellow Post-It clings to the cardboard cover of the book, just over the tall, robed woman’s worn face. Found these in the house, it says. I thought you might want them, now that you’re home.
“Right,” Joanna says softly, to herself. “Home.”
She closes the bag.
++
She’s known Sherlock Holmes for little more than twenty-four hours when she kills for him the first time.
“Doesn’t seem to have affected your appetite much,” he says, just before shovelling an enormous bite of sweet and sour pork into his mouth. She’s hardly surprised that he goes without during cases, if he eats like this between. He takes a drink of water, and she watches the muscles of his long throat move as he swallows. An answering heat stirs low in her stomach, and it’s entirely, wonderfully absurd, like everything else about him - like everything in her life since the moment she set foot inside his flat.
Joanna tries very hard not to laugh. If she starts again, she might not stop. “Well, now you know,” she says. “Your new flatmate is a cold-blooded killer. Shoots a deranged cabbie one minute, devours a double order of beef with broccoli the next.” She leans forward, her arms folded on the table. “And so you ask yourself: what fresh terrors lie beneath her mild-mannered exterior? What will she do next?”
Sherlock grins as if she’s said something perfectly delightful. There’s a bit of bok choy stuck in his teeth. “On the contrary - I know exactly what you’ll do next.”
“Oh? Enlighten me.”
He leans close over the table, his fingers steepled in front of him. “The adrenaline high you’re riding now will dissipate in approximately fifteen minutes. The crash will hit you particularly hard, given how little you’ve slept in the past few weeks and the frankly outrageous amount of food you’ve just eaten. You’ll come back to the flat and sleep on the bare mattress in the upstairs room for no less than five hours, more likely six or seven. When you come downstairs in the late morning I’ll be in the midst of my current experiment, and though you aren’t easily put off by such things you will begin to question the wisdom of sharing digs with a man who makes a habit of scrambling human eyes on his stovetop. You’ll move in anyway, though, because you feel at once indebted to me and personally responsible for my well being - irrational, but a typical enough reaction in someone of your pedantically moral bent. Over time, however, this sense of obligation will erode under the strain of my selfish, eccentric, and increasingly antagonistic demands on your patience and time, and once you’ve found some outside source of stability - either in the form of steady employment or a romantic relationship - you will leave Baker Street for good.” He sits back in his chair and gives her a close-lipped, self-satisfied smile. “It shouldn’t take more than two months. Three, if you’re feeling unusually stubborn.”
“Wow,” Joanna says after a brief, stunned silence. “That was...thorough.”
“Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.” She looks down at her plate, picks up a piece of broccoli with her chopsticks, and flings it neatly at Sherlock’s face. It bounces off his forehead and lands in his lap.
He blinks at her, a brown smudge of sauce between his eyes. “That, I imagine, was an attempt to make some sort of point.”
She nods. “I don’t claim to be the most mysterious of potential flatmates, Sherlock, but I’m a bit more psychologically complex than you give me credit for.” She passes him a clean napkin. “Even dull people can be unpredictable.”
His lips twitch. “I’ll keep that in mind.” He wipes the sauce from his face, wincing slightly. “I think I’ve got broccoli in my eye.”
“You do not.”
“I do, and it stings.” He stands a little, bending across the table and pulling at his eyelid. “Look,” he says, “you’ve blinded me with a bud of broccoli.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Joanna says, but she can’t help but lean close to look. “I don’t see-”
A wet slice of sweet and sour pork slithers past her collar and into her shirt, and she shrieks a bit, before she can stop herself. The half-drunk couple at the next table turn and stare; Sherlock is already back in his seat, picking at his food and looking disturbingly angelic. “Problem?”
“Not at all,” she says, and flicks a clump of rice into his hair.
The waitress kicks them out before they have time to do much damage, and they stumble out onto the street, breathless with laughter. Sherlock slouches elegantly against a lamppost, smirking as she tries to shake the bit of pork free from inside her top. It involves an embarrassing amount of hopping on her part, and he starts to snicker.
“Oh, shut up,” she says. “You have oyster sauce on your face.”
He reaches out and plucks a leaf of bok choy from the hair behind her ear. He holds it up to the light, studying the green-edged glow of its veins. “It bothers you more than you let on. Killing.”
Joanna stills. Looks up and meets his eyes, their colour ethereally pale in the streetlight. “Of course,” she says. “Of course it does.”
“But you’ve killed before.”
“Twice. Both times to defend a patient from an immediate threat.” She looks away, easing her weight off her leg. Her fingers twitch, reaching for the cane she no longer needs to carry. She forces a chuckle. “You were right about one thing - I’m definitely about to crash. Mind if I kip on the sofa for a few hours?”
“It’s as much your sofa as mine.” Sherlock tugs sharply at the hem of her jumper, and the slice of sweet and sour pork drops to the pavement with a soft splat. He steps back, his hands slipping into his pockets. “Joanna Watson,” he says, as if trying out the sound of it. “You’re more of a mystery than you think.”
She smiles. “Probably not for long,” she says, and follows him back to their flat.
++
Joanna learns quickly that the surest way to draw Sherlock’s attention to a thing is to hide it.
Her Browning is easy - she isn’t hiding it from him, and she doesn’t bother to try. It fits nicely beneath a loose floorboard in the upstairs bedroom, along with two boxes of ammunition and a rather passive aggressive note reminding him of the basics of gun safety and maintenance. She keeps her journal in the locked drawer of her nightstand, knowing full well that he’ll read it the first chance he gets. She hasn’t written in it since she returned to England, and most of it is irrelevant nonsense, dry recitations of the daily minutia of war. She figures if he sticks it out through that, he’s earned the right to the few secrets buried amidst the drivel.
The trouble lies in the things she genuinely wishes to hide.
The sewing kit is the least suspicious item of the three. It’s old and many times repaired, an heirloom with a practical use. Joanna cleans the silver sewing needles, replaces a nearly empty spool of black thread, and tucks the kit away in the cabinet beneath the bathroom sink - a perfectly natural place to keep such a thing. If Sherlock ever gives the sewing kit so much as a second thought, he never mentions it.
Her grandmother’s cane, on the other hand, was bound to draw his attention. She hasn’t lived in Baker Street a week when she comes home from the shops to find him perched on the back of her armchair, balancing it between two long fingers.
“This,” he drawls, “is a fascinating piece.”
A fascinating piece of what? she wants to ask. Instead she sets the shopping down on the worktop with a clatter. “Is it?”
He huffs. “You know it is. You wouldn’t have left it out for me to find, otherwise.” He steps off the armchair and down to the floor. “Yew is an unusual wood for a cane. Not unheard of, but irregular and therefore significant.” He curves his fingers beneath the handle and lets it swing before him in the air. “It was hand carved for its original owner no less than forty years ago. Expertly made and tailored exactly to the owner’s tastes and needs - simple, sturdy, hardwearing. Elegant yet utilitarian. It belonged to your grandfather.”
Joanna smiles.
“Oh, hell. Your grandmother, then.” Sherlock scowls and sits down hard in one of the kitchen chairs. “She would’ve been tall for a woman. I hardly could have predicted that, given your own considerably below-average height.”
“I’m not that short.”
“You really are.” He raises the cane in front of him, the dark wood splitting his long features in two. His eyes cross a bit as he studies it. “Like you, she carried it with her non-dominant hand to support the leg on the same side - her right. She remained active late into her life despite her infirmity, as is obvious from the soil stains on the lower third of the stem and repeated denting from a high set of stairs.” He looks up, his focus shifting to her with a sudden, exacting intensity. “You must have lived with her for some time. You have a tendency to overstep when climbing a staircase, as if you unconsciously expect a higher riser - a habit common in those who’ve grown accustomed to old houses with tall, narrow stairways.”
Joanna nods. When she’s sure of her voice, she says, “My parents died when I was twelve. I lived with her until I left for university.” She sits in the chair beside his, slipping the cane from his suddenly loose grip. “But then, you already knew that.”
He looks away, avoiding her eyes. “Mycroft sent me a file the morning you moved in. I didn’t read it.”
“You hardly needed to. I’m sure there’s something in the way I butter my toast or clean my teeth or tie my bloody shoelaces that gives me away. As far as you’re concerned, I may as well have the word orphan stamped on my forehead in red ink.”
“It’s an automatic process,” Sherlock says, his voice deliberately cool. “My mind can’t help but draw conclusions from the data presented by your appearance and behaviour; it’s not something I can control. I thought you understood that.”
Her fingers are clenched around the cane. “I do.”
He meets her eyes, watching her without the slightest flicker of emotion. “Then why are you angry?”
I’m not, she wants to say, but she feels the futility of the lie before she can so much as open her mouth. She looks down at the cane - the garden stains on the stem and the marks left by years of climbing the same tall staircase. She hasn’t been inside the house in years, and Sherlock sees her still trying to climb its steps. “How did you know about my parents?”
He hesitates, but only for a moment. “Small things, mostly. There are indications in your relationship with your sister, the way you dress, your independent habits - particularly concerning money. And then there’s your hair, of course.”
She reaches for the long plait hanging low over her shoulder. “My hair?”
“A decidedly old-fashioned style, one rarely worn by women of your age. Short hair would better fit your limited interest in the more time consuming aspects of personal grooming, but instead you grow it long - unusually long, and despite its relative health and thickness you never wear it loose. Every morning you wash, comb, and plait your hair, and every evening you plait it again before going to sleep. It’s more ritual than habit, and one you’ve kept for a very long time.” He pauses. “Since the day your mother was no longer able to do it for you, I imagine.”
For a moment she feels cracked open and exposed, as if she’s found herself suddenly naked in front of him. His face is impassive, unreadable, and there’s nothing like judgment or pity in his eyes. She looks back, laid bare, and wonders at the part of her that wants to show him more.
She holds out the cane, and he takes it.
“Short hair is just as much trouble as long, sometimes,” she says. “Or so I’ve been told.”
It’s subtle, but she sees some of the tension bleed from the still muscles of his shoulders. “Perhaps, but you’d take less time in the shower if you cut it.”
She stands and begins to put away the shopping. “Sherlock, even if I only spent half the time primping in front of the bathroom mirror that you do-”
“I do not primp. As I’ve explained before, I’ve a number of sensitive experiments that require-”
“What?” she says, grinning at him over her shoulder. “A rigorous skin care regimen?”
At that Sherlock launches into an irate and excruciatingly detailed account of the various flora and fungi in the cabinet above the bathroom sink that require his constant attention, an account which continues uninterrupted as Joanna passes him the items that belong in the higher kitchen cabinets. When she blocks out the words and only listens to the drawling rise and fall of his voice, it’s almost soothing.
“Honestly,” he says, dropping a bag of sugar beside the empty jam jars on the top shelf, “when one takes into consideration your dismal observational skills and the compulsive nature of your ever-burgeoning adrenaline addiction, it really is a wonder that you’ve survived as long as you have. I commend you.”
Joanna closes the cabinet doors. “Coming from you, that’s perilously close to a compliment. I’m flattered.”
Sherlock snorts. “Don’t be.”
She elbows him gently away from the sink and turns on the tap. “I’m making soup and sandwiches for dinner. You eating today?”
“No.” He pauses, considering. “Maybe. Soup from a tin or-”
“Not your housekeeper, dear,” Joanna says in her very best Mrs. Hudson. “Nor, for that matter, am I your wife, mother, or personal chef.”
Sherlock grins. “Homemade, then. Excellent.” He leans over her shoulder as she washes her hands, speaking close in her ear. “Without onions, if you don’t mind. I find them gastronomically distracting.” He gives her shoulder a pat. “There’s a good girl.”
She raises a wet hand and flicks water at him, laughing when he recoils from the spray like a startled cat. Some things, she thinks, will just never get old. She shuts off the tap and dries her hands on the cleanest tea towel. “Pass me that recipe book, would you? The one with the cardboard cover.”
Still scowling, Sherlock shakes the last drops of water from his hair and slips the recipe book neatly from its place between her tattered copy of The Physiology of Taste and his Alkaloids and Molecular Methods of Plant Analysis. He drops it onto the worktop. “Also your grandmother’s, I see.” He frowns at the worn cover, tracing the blurred silhouette of the woman pictured there. Her cornucopia and her scythe.
Joanna waits, careful not to hold her breath.
Sherlock’s teeth worry absently at his lower lip. “You’re very sentimental about her things.”
“Am I?”
“Yes. For a person not sentimental about much else.” He gives her the recipe book, shifting its weight into her hands. “My mother died when I was sixteen.”
Joanna holds the book to her chest. “I’m sorry,” she says.
Sherlock meets her eyes evenly. “Yes,” he says. “So was I.” He turns and leaves the kitchen. A moment later, she hears the click as he opens his violin case.
She prepares dinner quietly, careful of the clatter of pots and chipped ceramic plates as she waits for him to take up the violin and play. She expects plucking or screeches or, if she’s lucky, the random, indecipherable snatches of melody that will haunt her for days. She waits, but tonight there’s nothing.
She listens anyway.
++
The next morning Joanna limps downstairs to find her grandmother’s cane mounted by hooks to the wall above the sitting room fireplace, just below the mirror. When she looks closer, she sees that the cane’s been polished, the yew wood gleaming almost red in the morning light. The skull grins widely at her, and she grins back.
“‘The moment of the rose and the moment of the yew-tree,’” she tells it, “‘are of equal duration.’”
“Ugh,” Sherlock groans from the sofa, hidden beneath a blanket of books and open files. “Eliot.”
“Yes,” she says. “Eliot.” She crosses to the sofa and lifts an empty file folder from his face. It has the words Metropolitan Police: Confidential printed on it in large, forbidding letters. “Tea?”
He blinks up at her, squinting in the light. “Tea,” he agrees, his voice rough from lack of sleep. “And silence.”
“Long night?” He fixes her with a bleary sort of glare. “Right, sorry,” she says in an exaggerated whisper. “Tea. Silence.”
“Insufferable woman,” Sherlock murmurs, and rolls over until his face is squashed against the back of the sofa. She has a sudden, inexplicable urge to reach down and ruffle his hair. “If you do,” he says, somewhat nasally, “I shall bite you.”
“If you bite me, you won’t get any tea.” She drops the file folder back over his head and retreats to the kitchen. The dishes from yesterday’s dinner are still piled in the sink, and the equipment on the table seems to have spawned an ominous number of new experiments in the night. Her grandmother’s book sits alone on the worktop, open to a recipe for beef broth. Just as she’d left it the night before - hidden in plain sight.
Joanna slips it back onto its shelf, fitting it neatly between her books and his.
++
Thompson looks up from her notepad, pen dangling between her fingers. For all her careful neutrality, she seems less than pleased. “Joanna,” she says, “do you consider yourself a lonely person?”
Joanna frowns. “Is this about Sherlock?”
“This is about you,” Thompson says. “Though we can talk about Sherlock, if you like.” She rests her chin on her open palm, a posture of deliberate interest. It’s more irritating than it should be. “Has sharing a flat made you feel less isolated from - what did you call it - the ‘real world’? Life after the war?”
“The war was real.”
“I never said it wasn’t.” Thompson watches her for a long moment. “You had a lonely childhood.”
Joanna takes a deep breath. The fingers of her right hand clench around a cane she no longer carries. “I had Harry.”
“You’ve told me that you haven’t been close with your sister since you were small. Since your parents’ deaths.” Thompson leans forward slightly in her chair, and the silver charms on her bracelet catch the light from the office window. The two of the charms touch, and the sound is like a bell chime. “Your grandmother took you in after the accident, is that right?”
Joanna nods.
“You never mention her.”
“She died when I was eighteen.” Thompson’s never worn the bracelet before, not during one of their sessions, but it isn’t new. An heirloom maybe, or rediscovered favourite - Sherlock would know which, and a thousand other things besides. “I don’t remember much about my childhood.”
Thompson makes a note, the bracelet chiming with each sway of her wrist. Head still bent over the paper, she says, “Joanna, did your grandmother walk with a limp?”
The anger is sudden, immediate. A bile at the back of her teeth. “Yes.”
“Which leg?”
“You know which leg.”
Thompson sits back, her hands folded in her lap. The bracelet stills. “Sherlock can’t cure you, Joanna, not completely. I think you know that.” She gives Joanna a small, encouraging, infuriating smile. Let me help you, the smile says, and rage clenches like a living fist in Joanna’s chest. “Tell me one thing you remember about your grandmother.”
“I remember that she didn’t believe in therapy.”
“Joanna,” Thompson says. Her tone is scolding, familiar, and something in Joanna breaks.
“I remember that when she was sick - when she was dying, and she lost three stone in as many months and the pain was so terrible she couldn’t eat or sleep or stand, I remember hating her for leaving me.” Joanna looks down at her lap. At the gentle tremor in her left hand. “The morning she died, I almost brought her back. I’d promised myself I never would, but she was gone and I needed her. I didn’t have anyone else.”
Joanna doesn’t need to look into Thompson’s eyes to see the pity there. “You would’ve revived her against her wishes, so you wouldn’t be left alone.”
“I would have given my life for hers,” Joanna says. “But I didn’t. I passed her last test.” She smiles, thin-lipped and strained. “I haven’t used the things she taught me since.”
Thompson looks up, at the clock on the wall. The session is over. “We should continue this next week,” she says.
“Yes,” Joanna says. “We should.”
She fires Thompson by phone the next morning.
chapter 2b