Fic for marcal_92: A Mixed Metaphor (But One That Works)
Title: A Mixed Metaphor (But One That Works)
Recipient: marcal_92
Author: bananahater336
Characters/Pairings: John/Lestrade, Sherlock
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: some references to blood/injuries, doctor stuff, possibly slight mental illness issues in the form of PTSD
Summary: John never expected the war to end. He just sometimes felt he deserved a reprieve.
Thank you to thesmallhobbit for betaing!
In 221B, John was always an army doctor and always a soldier.
He slept with his hand curled around his gun, index finger snug against the trigger. He constantly scraped bits of Sherlock off the walls and floors and tables: blood and hair and frustration and melancholy, and sewed them back together like he was stitching the hem back into an unraveling shirt.
(Sometimes, he held Sherlock together with his hands pressed against his skin, holding his insides inside where they belonged, and Sherlock stared up at him with eyes the color of nothing, and his eyebrows lifted with surprise - So this is what death feels like - and then he would come back, and John scrubbed brown blood and peeled back skin from beneath his fingernails for days, and they never spoke of it.)
If 221B was his warzone, and Sherlock was his war, Greg was the drink at the end of the day, the shot of whisky that kept his hands from shaking. He was the book of Robert Frost poetry that the bloke one bunk over sometimes read aloud, and everyone grumbled half-heartedly that they didn’t want to hear it, even though they took heart in the soft images of snow and cool breezes and autumn leaves falling - and the desert fell away for a while.
The first time they kissed, a crush of teeth and tongues, with Sherlock’s blood on Greg’s shirt and gunpowder on John’s fingertips, something went quiet in John’s chest, even as a fire lit in his throat and his belly and the palms of his hands. He felt he could fight this war for the rest of his life, if he was called to.
Then Sherlock died, and John’s war was abruptly over. So he left his warzone. He abandoned the feel of that carpet and the smell of chemical mixtures and coffee in the kitchen and Sherlock’s violin standing in the corner. He left behind all those relics of a war fought and lost. He bandaged his wounds and he went home to recover.
He never expected life in Greg’s kitchen and living room and bed to be quiet. He expected a new war: he expected wounds to mend and blood to scrub from Greg’s skin, and bruises and scrapes to press his mouth against, to breathe in the warmth of them as signs Greg lived and breathed and remained here.
But quiet it was. Greg left the war behind when he came home. He toed off his shoes and loosened his tie and drank the tea John pressed into his hands and kissed him hello with his fingers curled around his jaw. John relished it. He exalted in peeling him out of his clothes and finding him unmarked, ready for him to kiss and touch. He grew to love being able to fold himself over Greg’s back, to fuck him with his forehead pressed between his shoulder blades and his breath huffing against his skin, and to know that neither of them hurt.
And then Sherlock came back from the dead, and the war that John thought was over began anew.
He tried so hard to hate Sherlock. He hated him for abandoning him in the first place to lose a war that wasn’t his. He hated him for coming back, to make him fight all over again. He especially hated him for putting Greg on the front line, right beside John: a two-man army ready to fall for a cause that seemed futile at best.
John found himself back in 221B more than he liked: scraping Sherlock off the walls again and molding him back together. And there was something bitter and sharp about the scent of blood that had begun to follow him: It was a grave injustice that he was still taking care of a man who had already died.
And then he came home to find Greg, who was prudent and careful and devoted to the idea of goodness in the world, where Sherlock only seemed to care about rightness, and Greg was still whole and wonderful and waiting for him to press his mouth to his skin, and Greg ran his hands over his arms, gripped his elbows, kissed his forehead.
“It’s not your responsibility to take care of him anymore,” he said from time to time. “It was never your responsibility in the first place.” But as much as John knew that was true, he still went to his side whenever he needed him.
Greg still walked through their door, separate from the war they were fighting outside. He rarely had more than a bruise. He was stable and sure and solid, and John’s back and shoulders ached from the tension, the surety he felt that one day, Greg would come home torn apart or wouldn’t come home at all, and John had had about enough of body bags to last him a lifetime.
When Greg did get hurt, it was almost laughable.
The upstairs window of their house had come loose in its frame and refused to be fixed from the inside. So Greg, the determined handyman he claimed to be, pulled out the ladder from the garage and climbed up to see what he could do about it. John was reading the newspaper when he heard the crash, the cry of his name.
The ladder had slipped its footing in the grass, and had come crashing down, Greg with it. He lay on the lawn, all but sobbing, and John knew with one look that his leg was broken. Four hours later, they were home from hospital, and Greg was laid up on the couch, and John was laughing.
Greg didn’t find it at all amusing, of course, but the rather strong painkillers kept his irritation at a fuzzy, vague level. “You didn’t find this at all funny when you had my hand in a vice-like grip in the ambulance.”
John sat on the couch beside him, rubbing his chest soothingly. He smiled so hard, his face hurt. “That was because I didn’t know what the damage was. But a minor concussion and an even more minor leg fracture? I think I can make do with that.”
Greg squeezed his wrist, smiling at him in that way that made his eyes go soft at the corners, where his crows’ feet were getting more prominent by the day. He didn’t say anything, but he didn’t have to. They both knew the alternative: the ugly things it could have been, and still could be: the exit wounds and knife scars and hurried stitches done at the bathroom sink and the yellowing bruises that never quite seemed to fade.
Something as domestic and soft as falling from a ladder, something that made it possible for John to keep him safe at home, where he could make him tea and argue with him about taking his paracetamol and help him to bed and out of bed - well, he’d take it. And if he had to go out and stand beside Sherlock and face a war he believed in, even if he didn’t know if they could possibly win it, in the end, he could do so, if Greg was whole and right and soft beside him.
He would probably always have to sew Sherlock back together when he got himself blown apart. But that was okay.
It turned out Greg was pretty good with a needle and thread himself.