Hiding Places (Harry, John, PG)
Took a little studying break, and lo, I stumble upon the holmestice reveals!!! :) I'll try to do a bigger reccing post when I have more time. Just quickly posting my own fic before returning to my books.
Title: Hiding Places
Characters: Harry, John
Rating: PG
Word count: 4,700 words
Warnings: swearing
Notes: written for eanor in the holmestice 2012 winter exchange. Thank you, as always, to the wonderful hechicera for beta'ing. <3
Summary: You're stuck with your family for life, through the good and the bad.
Hiding Places
It's rare, these days, that John will do this for her: abandon his small green soldier toys that she's not allowed to touch and go outside with her. He says it's the rules that she counts to thirty and he only to twenty, and while she's doubtful about this, because no one else has ever told her that, she doesn't mind because she can count to thirty without hesitation now.
He can, too. Easily - he's nine. Not that long ago he counted to one hundred during the night, under his breath, in the bunk bed above her, and she didn't say anything when he finished so he must have thought she was sleeping. Once when she was practicing her counting he kept saying the numbers before she could, and she, filled with a silent, impotent rage, pulled on his hair until she was holding a handful of blond hairs and mum, not angry but something else, called her “Harriet”, sat her on a stool at the kitchen table and told her she had to sit there until she'd calmed down and could tell John sorry. She sat for a long time, counting silently.
It's rare, but it still happens sometimes: he nods in silence when she asks hopefully, then traipses with her from the living room through the back door to the big oak where they always count.
The garden isn't large, but it connects to Eve and Lucas's garden through the hedge, so that's fair game. Only the shed in there is out of bounds, because Lucas's dad works with dangerous tools in there, or at least that's what Lucas says when he's not ignoring Eve and Harry for being girls and being too young to understand.
Harry hides behind the corrugated iron plates that stand against the side of the house. She's never minded the cobwebs, even rather likes spiders, which Eve says isn't okay for girls.
He knows all of her hiding places, and it's rare, these days, but he still searches all of the other ones - behind the hedge on Eve and Lucas's side, beside the mound where dad dumps the grass when he cuts it, behind the triple-trunked birch - before he comes to the iron plates. She can hear him, and doesn't breathe for as long as she can hold it.
“Found you,” he says calmly, and when she comes out, brushing dust from her hair and blinking against the sudden sun, he's smiling, with his hands in the pockets of his short trousers.
-
When Harry is thirteen, she smokes her first cigarette. The fag is a little damp and crinkled from holding it too firmly in her palm during the walk home. She's on the street corner of her street, and she doesn't know what she wants from that - if she wants mum to pass by and see her or absolutely not. Either option is exciting.
She stands, her hip (suddenly there, developed overnight, curved and new and womanly) swung out so her weight rests on one leg. This new, lop-sided way of being in the world makes something inside her tingle - and then she drags in the smoke a little further than her first careful inhales and she loses the tingly feeling in the sudden points of burning in her lungs.
“Do you like it?” Eve asks, eyes narrowed in suspicious observation.
“I - yes,” Harry half-lies, then coughs until the hot point of burning in her chest recedes a little. She takes another drag, wondering at the actually quite unpleasant bitter taste, at the feeling of smoke, at the idea of it. She manages to breathe out without coughing this time. Her throat feels like sand when she swallows, and somehow it's perfect, it's wonderful this way.
“Let us try, then,” Eve says, stepping closer, eager, biting her lip (pink and raw and shiny).
“He didn't give it to you,” Harry croaks, and angles the cigarette away, dangling between her fingers like a casual, disappearing treasure.
“Well, I gave you the lighter, didn't I?” Eve retorts, scowling. “Besides, you don't even know him. Let me.”
Harry ignores her - Eve, pink and shiny and lips bitten raw, still unable to part with her pigtails, with her backpack high on her back. She doesn't have the power on this corner, not with Harry standing there with her elbow on her hip and her uniform skirt hitched up. She feels tall and she feels good.
“Fine,” Eve snaps. “Be a - be a bitch.” She turns and stalks away, the effect slightly spoiled by the sight of her yellow backpack.
“See you tomorrow,” Harry calls gleefully after her, with a rush of unexplained pleasure, and she drops the cigarette, only half-smoked, to the pavement and steps on it to put it out.
At home, John looks up from his comic book when she comes in and raises his eyebrows at her while their mother fusses over her and tells her to never do that again I was so worried, but that's it. She can feel his eyes following her when she crosses the living room to go upstairs. Say something, she dares him, surely you can smell it.
He's silent, flips a page in his comic.
It feels like a victory, going up the stairs with the taste of smoke still in the back of her throat; it doesn't matter that she doesn't really know in what fight.
-
Harry kisses Eve when they're fifteen, and Eve giggles before letting her.
“Feels good,” she says breathlessly, and Harry has to agree; good and warm and not enough. She kisses Eve again, moistly and warmly, and feels something filling the lowest point of her belly, like she's had a cup of hot chocolate.
“Let's try it with tongue this time,” Eve says after they re-surface, and she looks flushed and keen and bright in the pool of sunlight trickling in through the shed window, murky with dust.
“Okay,” Harry agrees quickly, and lets Eve start it this time, and savours the burst of heat through her entire body when Eve's tongue comes to press at her lips. When she lets it in, it is slippery and hot and wet, and too big and not enough. Without really thinking, she tangles a hand into Eve's curls, and moves their bodies closer, and Eve makes a sound, a small sound, and curls an arm around Harry's shoulder.
They break apart, and Eve's lashes are tipped with a dusty trail of sunlight.
“This was a great idea,” Eve whispers, and Harry nods dumbly. “This is such good practice for later.”
The jolt that goes through Harry is not pleasant. When Eve kisses her again, it only feels half as good, and she doesn't know why.
-
“Come on, Harry,” John says, and he sounds more annoyed at her than anything, which makes something in her calm down a little - a wild, primal fear that had bloomed. “It's not - it's not that bad, it'll -”
“Blow over?” she asks, and angrily wipes her eyes with the back of her hand. “It'll only - blow over when - when I go back in there and tell them that - that it wasn't true, that I was just -” She stops, and bites her lip, shiny and raw, and winces at the tell-tale sting when the skin splits.
John hands her her coat, huffs when she doesn't take it and drapes it over her shoulders. “I wasn't going to say blow over,” he says, sounding almost offended, and it seems like such a stupid thing to say in the face of what she's trying to articulate through the distorting spikes of fear and anger pounding inside her skull that she almost laughs. She goes a little stiller, holds her a fingertip to her left eye and catches new tears on it. Very suddenly, she almost feels okay again, and it's a little disorienting, this sudden return of calm.
“I was leaving this place anyway,” she says. With shaking fingers, she feels around in her pocket for her cigarettes with her free hand and doesn't find them.
“You're only eighteen,” he says, frowning.
“I can stay with you in Chelmsford,” she says, and when she blinks there are more tears on her fingertip. “Can't I?”
He blinks as well, and clears his throat. His breath rises in a white cloud. “You can't just... They're angry now, but I'm sure they won't...” He trails off and licks his lips. “I have housemates, Harry. I don't have room for you.”
She closes her eyes and wishes, desperately, for a cigarette, and for different parents. The intensity of the thought, brief though it is, makes something in her chest clench painfully.
“Okay,” she says, like it doesn't feel like her last hope has just been dashed.
He's silent for a while, fidgeting lightly in that way that sometimes really rubs her the wrong way. She grits her teeth and doesn't tell him to stop, because he's the only one that's out here with her tonight. It's his only night at home for another fourteen days, and inside she can imagine with painful clarity how her mother must be complaining, tearfully, that John is only here for one night and why won't he come in.
“They think I'm doing this to wind them up,” she tells him eventually, quietly. The birches, leafless, rustle in the winter evening. “They don't even think... They can't even conceive of how hard it is for me to tell them this. They think I'm just having a go at them.”
“I don't think so,” John says after a couple of beats. “Mum asked me a couple of months earlier if I thought you were... Well.”
“Gay.” It's a bitter word, that bursts in her mouth like unripe fruit.
He clears his throat. “Yeah,” he says, has the gall to sound apologetic.
“Bet she was just terrified.” There is no joy in it.
John neither confirms nor denies, simply jams his hands deeper in his pockets. It's an answer like any other.
“So what did you say?” she asks him, and blows her breath skyward in lieue of actual smoke. It's endlessly unsatisfying. There are a lot of stars out, cold, useless dots of pinprick light.
“That I didn't know.”
“You did know,” she says.
“Not my place,” he says calmly, and she does have a passing thought about how it must be so easy, to have it not be your place, to have your place be on the safety of the sidelines, and to be able to say afterwards that you so faithfully kept a secret that was never even yours to keep, that never put any weight on your shoulders at all.
“Yeah,” she says, and watches the words freeze upwards. “I suppose not.”
-
“Be happy,” John tells Harry, smiling widely, fiddling fruitlessly with his tie.
“I already am,” she says, and looks over to where Clara is standing, a ginger-haired vision in a green wedding dress, and feels her heart expand until it overtakes all of her; and later this moment will be to blame, this moment in which she said that she was happy, in which she invited life's arrows to take aim at her.
“Thanks, John,” she says, and touches her brother's shoulder.
-
“Oh, don't, Harry, please,” John says, and he presses his thumbs briefly to the skin under his eyes (dark and heavy and raw).
“I'm sorry,” she says, wrist deep in soap and dishes, and she's annoyed that her voice sounds liquid, like water ready to be poured. She sounds drowned, which isn't fair, not now, not now she's trying so hard. He comes to stand next to her and leans a hip against the table top.
“This is a party,” he tells her, holding up a finger like an admonishing mother. Their mother never did that. “One you insisted on throwing, if I must remind you.” Inside the living room, there is the murmur of the small number of people that they share. The timbre of Clara's laugh, low and short and not tinkling and light like usual, means that someone - probably mum - has made a completely inappopriate joke that Clara will complain about later, in bed, half-offended, half-amused. Harry likes it when she does that, because she gets heated in her arguments with herself.
“It's the only way I can get you to come here, bastard,” she says, smiling a little, eyes stinging, holding between her fingertips the soapy fragility of one of the crystal wine glasses that Clara loves, even now that they only drink apple juice out of them.
He smiles at her, genuine and rare. John smiles for a lot of reasons, and not all of them are good. This is a good one, despite the complexity of this evening and of him, in this kitchen.
“I'll be all right.”
“You're going to war.”
They never contradict each other directly. It's not their way. He looks her in the eye. He doesn't seem afraid of anything, and that is how he has always looked to her, from the earliest of memories. “I'll be fine,” he says.
And she says, because she has to, because he is here to receive blessings, to receive as much goodwill as he can carry: “Okay.”
In the living room, uncle Peter sings the opening bars of God Save the Queen without words, just off-key beats of throaty song. Doo doo doo doo dedoo, doo doo doo doo dedoo. Like he's misplaced the words somewhere.
-
“Go on,” she says, baring her teeth at him. “Go and say it, then.”
John, war-stained, London-winter-washed, looks like he wants to break something. If she knows him, which she does, it's probably himself he's thinking of, because he still can't really conceive of breaking something else. They're Watsons. Underneath, they're still the same. He shoots people who would kill him and destroys himself over it. She drinks. At least there's no collateral damage in her war.
“I don't know what you're talking about,” he says from the doorframe, and lifts his chin in unspoken defiance.
“At least I'm still more of a mess than you are, right? Isn't that what you're thinking? Still ever the older brother, am I right?” she says, and it's like nails on a chalk board, she knows, she can see it in the way he bites down on nothing, on words that he must think but never says.
“Yeah, that makes me really happy, as you know,” he finally says, the words thin and bitter, pushed past the barrier of his narrow mouth, his lips unwilling.
She hooks an arm over her eyes, blocking him out. The sheets of her bed feel dirty against her; they stick to her, with her sweat and her spilled alcohol and her tears, which are the same. Clara would have a fit. Harry's insides tighten with nausea at the thought.
“Leave me alone,” she says. Behind the blackness of her closed eyelids there is still the knowledge of the room and how it spins, how the corners fold away in the glaring light of the aftermath.
He stays there for a long moment. “No,” he finally says, but he leaves anyway, and takes all of the alcohol he can find with him.
He doesn't know all of her hiding places, not anymore, and he must know this. He must.
-
John does call, every time, when he leaves without really talking. It will almost be as though the neighbours never called him and he never showed up, he never put her to bed or tried to get her out of it, he never poured the contents of her liquor cabinet down the sink as she sat at the table and hated him with such vigour he must have felt it like a physical energy.
He'll say, like that never happened: “Look, let me help.”
She'll want to say: “Why don't you ever stay? That might help.”
She doesn't, because he times his calls somehow, by some inner Watson compass maybe, and she's usually more or less sober, and more than less repentant. There is always pain in these phone calls.
She'll say: “It's not your responsibility.”
He'll disagree vehemently, so strongly she'll stuff her hand in her mouth to stop herself from crying or from getting really angry or maybe both, and he'll send her e-mails with contact information about AA meetings in her area. He doesn't offer to go with her, and there is no one else, and in the end she just can't do it, so she doesn't go.
-
“So who the fuck is this bloke?” Harry, wide-eyed with anticipation, asks John when he comes to visit and stands awkwardly in the hall, tracing where the pictures of Clara were with his eyes. “What the hell is going on with you?”
John laughs the freest laugh she's seen him laugh since he returned, scarred in different ways.
“He's... It's even a little hard to just describe him,” he says, shaking his head.
“God knows I've got time!” Harry says.
-
“So are you... doing okay?” he asks her over her birthday dinner. There's no one else in her house; all of the friends she had were more of the pub type, and she can't do that anymore. This way, though, with just the two of them, it's really starting to feel like the sense of obligation that's keeping them both there is wearing thin. They know, by now, that they're only good for each other in small doses.
“Yes,” she says, tense.
“Good,” he says carefully, and eats her vegetarian shepherd's pie like he actually enjoys it.
“You?”
“Yes,” he says, and the answer is direct and solid, which makes her smile a little in a very automatic sort of way. “I mean,” he says, because Watsons know it's bad luck to say that they're happy. “Sherlock's been preoccupied with this case. It's...” he hesitates. “It's pretty complex.”
“Well, go ahead then. I do love me a good whodunit,” Harry says, and smiles at him over her glass of mineral water.
-
“Oh my God, you're so gay for him, aren't you?” Harry says, eyes wide with mirth.
John sighs in his put-upon way. “Not you, too.”
“No, but seriously,” she says, feeling her mouth fold into a wide smile. “Listen to yourself. Sherlock this, Sherlock that, Sherlock shits fucking diamonds, Sherlock knows the secrets to the universe! You're besotted!”
John scowls deeply, takes a swig of the non-alcoholic beer he's accepted without comment, trying to be supportive. “No, okay. It's not like that at all.”
She grins at him, tapping her fingers against the metal of her beer can. “Ooooooh, Sherlock,” she croons. “Deduce me. Yes, like that.”
John slams his beer down on the coffee table with a sudden and surprising sound of anger. The smile slides off her face as he points a finger at her. “You of all people,” he says, then sucks in an audible breath. “You of all people must know how offensive it is when people just assume things,” he finishes uncharacteristically acidly.
“Hey, Johnny, it's okay, I was just teasing,” she says, frowning, wondering where she'd lost the thread of the conversation so much he could get so angry so suddenly. It's not like him.
“Don't call me Johnny,” he snaps.
“All right, John,” she says tartly. “Don't get so worked up.”
“It's exhausting to listen to this,” he says, the words clipped, and moves to get up.
She watches him as he walks over to his coat, draped over a chair, and feels the stirrings of an old anger. “Yeah,” she finally agrees, “it is exhausting. It's exhausting when people think they know things about you just because you happen to have sex that they can't imagine being real sex, or relationships that they think can only come from some sort of trauma or some mental illness or whatever.”
He rests his hands on his coat, and doesn't turn towards her, but also doesn't move to put it on.
“Jesus fuck, John,” she bites, “I'm sorry if I upset you, but this wasn't fucking malicious. I won't mention it again. You know I don't fucking care what you do, whether it's settling down with some blue-eyed clear-skinned doctor type in a house with a picket fence and having two point one children or if it's getting, I dunno, suspended from the ceiling and buggered by your frankly socially handicapped and clinically insane flatmate. I don't care. It's me, you moron.” She watches him, the tense lines of his neck and shoulders. “You have this happen to you once and you think you know what it's like.” She shakes her head. “Sorry, but you've been the one making those kinds of jokes about me for ages. I never complained. I was happy that you felt comfortable enough to joke about it, even if your jokes were terrible.” She scoffs and sits back in her armchair.
He turns towards her. He doesn't look angry anymore. His eyes are large and his mouth is thin.
“I -” he says, then seems to be at a loss.
“Don't say sorry,” she says, suddenly tired. “It's fine.”
He comes back and sits down, clearly ill at ease. He finishes his non-pint slowly, thoughtfully, and when he does finally get up he thanks her, with all of the grace of a wooden doll.
-
“Hey, look, I'm sorry, okay,” John, removed, on the phone, says, but he sounds more annoyed than sorry.
“Yeah, fat lot of good that does,” she responds angrily, squashing the desire the chuck her phone into the burning hearth. “Christmas is in two days, you wanker.”
“It's Sherlock, okay? He... I dunno. He's got this... thing. I can't really leave him alone right now.”
“Oh, yeah, right,” Harry says. “Sherlock's got a thing. Very important.”
“It is, actually,” John says, sounding strained, and she's reminded why they don't do this anymore, why they don't really call, not since he had to come and scrape her off the floor every few weeks and couldn't seem to stomach talking to her directly: because face to face they can at least grimace and frown and clench their jaws. This is stunted, this, like trying to walk with a blindfold on. It's no wonder they were never able to help each other before.
“Yeah, great. Thanks for letting me know on time and for having a totally legitimate reason,” Harry bites. “You do know, John, that he's just playing you so you'll stay with him? He hates me and he thinks you shouldn't see me.”
“Don't be ridiculous,” John says, and it's in a voice she knows all too well, a voice Clara used to call the I'm-Harry-and-I-will-belittle-your-opinion-voice. (And that was when she was still feeling charitable.)
“Yeah, whatever. Talk to you later.” She ends the call before John can respond and throws her phone onto the sofa, where it bounces and drops to the floor.
-
John whats going on
Im looking at it on
the news
Missed call: Harry
June 15 2012, 10:23
Voicemail received
June 15 2012, 10:24
Missed call: Harry
June 15 2012, 11:14
Missed call: Harry
June 15 2012, 11:16
Voicemail received
June 15, 11:16
John pick up ur
fucking phone ok
Missed call: Harry
June 15 2012, 12:57
John come on
pick up
Let me help
Missed call: Harry
June 15 2012, 13:02
Missed call: Harry
June 15 2012, 14:33
John please
If ur getting this
please pick up
Missed call: Harry
June 15 2012, 16:22
Ok fine but im coming
over tomorrow
-
“Don't you dare,” John says when she opens her mouth, and for the first time since he let her into the flat he looks her straight in the eye.
“Don't I dare what? Tell you that your friend was a fucking lunatic who tricked you? A top-class psycho?” she snarls, beaten raw with the presence of him, his huge mournful presence, sucking all of the light in the room towards him and extinguishing it.
John seems to grow, like the anger physically fills him. “Shut the fuck up,” he says, the words like lashes, and he never says fuck, it's always her who says fuck and John who rolls his eyes at it.
She shuts the fuck up and goes to his kitchen, slamming the cupboard doors, and then dropping the tea cups because her hands won't stop shaking.
-
It's strange that his headstone doesn't have any dates. Think you're too good for a date of birth, you fucker? she thinks, and jams her hands in her pocket, savouring the prickle of sudden anger.
It really is a weird sort of grave. SHERLOCK HOLMES, it says, on black mirroring stone. She remembers John telling her Sherlock enjoyed deducing details about everyone. Well then, she thinks, and lowers herself, crouching until she's looking at herself, his name branded across her forehead. Deduce me if you can.
He's dead, of course. Not that special after all. A mere mortal stepping off a ledge. The borders are closed. And stone is just stone, cold and unspeaking.
She shakes her head a little, thinking of the time he'd turned towards her in his and John's flat on Baker Street while John was in the bathroom, and had said: “I hope you realise you make life difficult for him,” and she'd lashed out, already tense from John's wariness around her and Sherlock's intense focus and complete inability to stick to normal social codes. “You can fuck right off,” she'd said.
He'd raised an eyebrow.
Bastard.
She had made things difficult for John sometimes, as had he for her. If she were a better person she might have told Sherlock that then, or John some other time. She might have said that that is what family does, and that people who don't hurt you don't usually matter that much.
“You can still fuck right off,” she tells the headstone. “Where do you get off telling me I make things difficult for him. Look at the state of you, you unbelievable dick.” There is something sharp and jagged in her throat, something that she can't swallow away. “He still believes in you, which is stupid, because there is so much evidence. I'm sure you'd tell him off for that, with your stupid scientific... stuff.” She takes a moment to appreciate that she's talking to a gravestone, and she shakes her head at herself.
She looks off-coloured in the headstone, but she can still tell that she really needs to brush her hair. Well. “Thanks, Sherlock, nice of you to let me know,” she says, barely suppressing a smile, which immediately fades when she hears the sound of footsteps on the leaf-strewn grass behind her.
John is frowning deeply at her when she turns around. He doesn't look angry. She'd prepared for some sort of anger, resentment at her for being there maybe, or just general persisting rage for this grave and this graveyard and the fact that his best friend is silent and still and decomposing where they stand. She doesn't quite know what to do now that the anger is absent.
“What are you doing here?” he asks, sounding resigned.
“Nothing,” she says, a little defensively.
He steps up next to her, and they both face the grave.
“It's an odd sort of grave,” she says after several beats of silence, and then frowns at herself. John, however, is smiling a little when he turns towards her.
“Well, he was odd,” he says, and with that the smile goes. But it's something. It's more than enough.
They stand for a while longer. “Hey,” Harry says finally. “I actually came here because you haven't been returning my calls. You're a prick, by the way.” John's mouth does an almost-smile sort of thing. “So I thought I should come here to look for you.”
They're reflected together in Sherlock Holmes' headstone, short and stocky and strangely off-coloured. Watsons through and through.
“Well,” John says quietly. “You found me.”
“Yes,” she says just as quietly, and touches his sleeve. “Found you.”
Title: Hiding Places
Characters: Harry, John
Rating: PG
Word count: 4,700 words
Warnings: swearing
Notes: written for eanor in the holmestice 2012 winter exchange. Thank you, as always, to the wonderful hechicera for beta'ing. <3
Summary: You're stuck with your family for life, through the good and the bad.
Hiding Places
It's rare, these days, that John will do this for her: abandon his small green soldier toys that she's not allowed to touch and go outside with her. He says it's the rules that she counts to thirty and he only to twenty, and while she's doubtful about this, because no one else has ever told her that, she doesn't mind because she can count to thirty without hesitation now.
He can, too. Easily - he's nine. Not that long ago he counted to one hundred during the night, under his breath, in the bunk bed above her, and she didn't say anything when he finished so he must have thought she was sleeping. Once when she was practicing her counting he kept saying the numbers before she could, and she, filled with a silent, impotent rage, pulled on his hair until she was holding a handful of blond hairs and mum, not angry but something else, called her “Harriet”, sat her on a stool at the kitchen table and told her she had to sit there until she'd calmed down and could tell John sorry. She sat for a long time, counting silently.
It's rare, but it still happens sometimes: he nods in silence when she asks hopefully, then traipses with her from the living room through the back door to the big oak where they always count.
The garden isn't large, but it connects to Eve and Lucas's garden through the hedge, so that's fair game. Only the shed in there is out of bounds, because Lucas's dad works with dangerous tools in there, or at least that's what Lucas says when he's not ignoring Eve and Harry for being girls and being too young to understand.
Harry hides behind the corrugated iron plates that stand against the side of the house. She's never minded the cobwebs, even rather likes spiders, which Eve says isn't okay for girls.
He knows all of her hiding places, and it's rare, these days, but he still searches all of the other ones - behind the hedge on Eve and Lucas's side, beside the mound where dad dumps the grass when he cuts it, behind the triple-trunked birch - before he comes to the iron plates. She can hear him, and doesn't breathe for as long as she can hold it.
“Found you,” he says calmly, and when she comes out, brushing dust from her hair and blinking against the sudden sun, he's smiling, with his hands in the pockets of his short trousers.
-
When Harry is thirteen, she smokes her first cigarette. The fag is a little damp and crinkled from holding it too firmly in her palm during the walk home. She's on the street corner of her street, and she doesn't know what she wants from that - if she wants mum to pass by and see her or absolutely not. Either option is exciting.
She stands, her hip (suddenly there, developed overnight, curved and new and womanly) swung out so her weight rests on one leg. This new, lop-sided way of being in the world makes something inside her tingle - and then she drags in the smoke a little further than her first careful inhales and she loses the tingly feeling in the sudden points of burning in her lungs.
“Do you like it?” Eve asks, eyes narrowed in suspicious observation.
“I - yes,” Harry half-lies, then coughs until the hot point of burning in her chest recedes a little. She takes another drag, wondering at the actually quite unpleasant bitter taste, at the feeling of smoke, at the idea of it. She manages to breathe out without coughing this time. Her throat feels like sand when she swallows, and somehow it's perfect, it's wonderful this way.
“Let us try, then,” Eve says, stepping closer, eager, biting her lip (pink and raw and shiny).
“He didn't give it to you,” Harry croaks, and angles the cigarette away, dangling between her fingers like a casual, disappearing treasure.
“Well, I gave you the lighter, didn't I?” Eve retorts, scowling. “Besides, you don't even know him. Let me.”
Harry ignores her - Eve, pink and shiny and lips bitten raw, still unable to part with her pigtails, with her backpack high on her back. She doesn't have the power on this corner, not with Harry standing there with her elbow on her hip and her uniform skirt hitched up. She feels tall and she feels good.
“Fine,” Eve snaps. “Be a - be a bitch.” She turns and stalks away, the effect slightly spoiled by the sight of her yellow backpack.
“See you tomorrow,” Harry calls gleefully after her, with a rush of unexplained pleasure, and she drops the cigarette, only half-smoked, to the pavement and steps on it to put it out.
At home, John looks up from his comic book when she comes in and raises his eyebrows at her while their mother fusses over her and tells her to never do that again I was so worried, but that's it. She can feel his eyes following her when she crosses the living room to go upstairs. Say something, she dares him, surely you can smell it.
He's silent, flips a page in his comic.
It feels like a victory, going up the stairs with the taste of smoke still in the back of her throat; it doesn't matter that she doesn't really know in what fight.
-
Harry kisses Eve when they're fifteen, and Eve giggles before letting her.
“Feels good,” she says breathlessly, and Harry has to agree; good and warm and not enough. She kisses Eve again, moistly and warmly, and feels something filling the lowest point of her belly, like she's had a cup of hot chocolate.
“Let's try it with tongue this time,” Eve says after they re-surface, and she looks flushed and keen and bright in the pool of sunlight trickling in through the shed window, murky with dust.
“Okay,” Harry agrees quickly, and lets Eve start it this time, and savours the burst of heat through her entire body when Eve's tongue comes to press at her lips. When she lets it in, it is slippery and hot and wet, and too big and not enough. Without really thinking, she tangles a hand into Eve's curls, and moves their bodies closer, and Eve makes a sound, a small sound, and curls an arm around Harry's shoulder.
They break apart, and Eve's lashes are tipped with a dusty trail of sunlight.
“This was a great idea,” Eve whispers, and Harry nods dumbly. “This is such good practice for later.”
The jolt that goes through Harry is not pleasant. When Eve kisses her again, it only feels half as good, and she doesn't know why.
-
“Come on, Harry,” John says, and he sounds more annoyed at her than anything, which makes something in her calm down a little - a wild, primal fear that had bloomed. “It's not - it's not that bad, it'll -”
“Blow over?” she asks, and angrily wipes her eyes with the back of her hand. “It'll only - blow over when - when I go back in there and tell them that - that it wasn't true, that I was just -” She stops, and bites her lip, shiny and raw, and winces at the tell-tale sting when the skin splits.
John hands her her coat, huffs when she doesn't take it and drapes it over her shoulders. “I wasn't going to say blow over,” he says, sounding almost offended, and it seems like such a stupid thing to say in the face of what she's trying to articulate through the distorting spikes of fear and anger pounding inside her skull that she almost laughs. She goes a little stiller, holds her a fingertip to her left eye and catches new tears on it. Very suddenly, she almost feels okay again, and it's a little disorienting, this sudden return of calm.
“I was leaving this place anyway,” she says. With shaking fingers, she feels around in her pocket for her cigarettes with her free hand and doesn't find them.
“You're only eighteen,” he says, frowning.
“I can stay with you in Chelmsford,” she says, and when she blinks there are more tears on her fingertip. “Can't I?”
He blinks as well, and clears his throat. His breath rises in a white cloud. “You can't just... They're angry now, but I'm sure they won't...” He trails off and licks his lips. “I have housemates, Harry. I don't have room for you.”
She closes her eyes and wishes, desperately, for a cigarette, and for different parents. The intensity of the thought, brief though it is, makes something in her chest clench painfully.
“Okay,” she says, like it doesn't feel like her last hope has just been dashed.
He's silent for a while, fidgeting lightly in that way that sometimes really rubs her the wrong way. She grits her teeth and doesn't tell him to stop, because he's the only one that's out here with her tonight. It's his only night at home for another fourteen days, and inside she can imagine with painful clarity how her mother must be complaining, tearfully, that John is only here for one night and why won't he come in.
“They think I'm doing this to wind them up,” she tells him eventually, quietly. The birches, leafless, rustle in the winter evening. “They don't even think... They can't even conceive of how hard it is for me to tell them this. They think I'm just having a go at them.”
“I don't think so,” John says after a couple of beats. “Mum asked me a couple of months earlier if I thought you were... Well.”
“Gay.” It's a bitter word, that bursts in her mouth like unripe fruit.
He clears his throat. “Yeah,” he says, has the gall to sound apologetic.
“Bet she was just terrified.” There is no joy in it.
John neither confirms nor denies, simply jams his hands deeper in his pockets. It's an answer like any other.
“So what did you say?” she asks him, and blows her breath skyward in lieue of actual smoke. It's endlessly unsatisfying. There are a lot of stars out, cold, useless dots of pinprick light.
“That I didn't know.”
“You did know,” she says.
“Not my place,” he says calmly, and she does have a passing thought about how it must be so easy, to have it not be your place, to have your place be on the safety of the sidelines, and to be able to say afterwards that you so faithfully kept a secret that was never even yours to keep, that never put any weight on your shoulders at all.
“Yeah,” she says, and watches the words freeze upwards. “I suppose not.”
-
“Be happy,” John tells Harry, smiling widely, fiddling fruitlessly with his tie.
“I already am,” she says, and looks over to where Clara is standing, a ginger-haired vision in a green wedding dress, and feels her heart expand until it overtakes all of her; and later this moment will be to blame, this moment in which she said that she was happy, in which she invited life's arrows to take aim at her.
“Thanks, John,” she says, and touches her brother's shoulder.
-
“Oh, don't, Harry, please,” John says, and he presses his thumbs briefly to the skin under his eyes (dark and heavy and raw).
“I'm sorry,” she says, wrist deep in soap and dishes, and she's annoyed that her voice sounds liquid, like water ready to be poured. She sounds drowned, which isn't fair, not now, not now she's trying so hard. He comes to stand next to her and leans a hip against the table top.
“This is a party,” he tells her, holding up a finger like an admonishing mother. Their mother never did that. “One you insisted on throwing, if I must remind you.” Inside the living room, there is the murmur of the small number of people that they share. The timbre of Clara's laugh, low and short and not tinkling and light like usual, means that someone - probably mum - has made a completely inappopriate joke that Clara will complain about later, in bed, half-offended, half-amused. Harry likes it when she does that, because she gets heated in her arguments with herself.
“It's the only way I can get you to come here, bastard,” she says, smiling a little, eyes stinging, holding between her fingertips the soapy fragility of one of the crystal wine glasses that Clara loves, even now that they only drink apple juice out of them.
He smiles at her, genuine and rare. John smiles for a lot of reasons, and not all of them are good. This is a good one, despite the complexity of this evening and of him, in this kitchen.
“I'll be all right.”
“You're going to war.”
They never contradict each other directly. It's not their way. He looks her in the eye. He doesn't seem afraid of anything, and that is how he has always looked to her, from the earliest of memories. “I'll be fine,” he says.
And she says, because she has to, because he is here to receive blessings, to receive as much goodwill as he can carry: “Okay.”
In the living room, uncle Peter sings the opening bars of God Save the Queen without words, just off-key beats of throaty song. Doo doo doo doo dedoo, doo doo doo doo dedoo. Like he's misplaced the words somewhere.
-
“Go on,” she says, baring her teeth at him. “Go and say it, then.”
John, war-stained, London-winter-washed, looks like he wants to break something. If she knows him, which she does, it's probably himself he's thinking of, because he still can't really conceive of breaking something else. They're Watsons. Underneath, they're still the same. He shoots people who would kill him and destroys himself over it. She drinks. At least there's no collateral damage in her war.
“I don't know what you're talking about,” he says from the doorframe, and lifts his chin in unspoken defiance.
“At least I'm still more of a mess than you are, right? Isn't that what you're thinking? Still ever the older brother, am I right?” she says, and it's like nails on a chalk board, she knows, she can see it in the way he bites down on nothing, on words that he must think but never says.
“Yeah, that makes me really happy, as you know,” he finally says, the words thin and bitter, pushed past the barrier of his narrow mouth, his lips unwilling.
She hooks an arm over her eyes, blocking him out. The sheets of her bed feel dirty against her; they stick to her, with her sweat and her spilled alcohol and her tears, which are the same. Clara would have a fit. Harry's insides tighten with nausea at the thought.
“Leave me alone,” she says. Behind the blackness of her closed eyelids there is still the knowledge of the room and how it spins, how the corners fold away in the glaring light of the aftermath.
He stays there for a long moment. “No,” he finally says, but he leaves anyway, and takes all of the alcohol he can find with him.
He doesn't know all of her hiding places, not anymore, and he must know this. He must.
-
John does call, every time, when he leaves without really talking. It will almost be as though the neighbours never called him and he never showed up, he never put her to bed or tried to get her out of it, he never poured the contents of her liquor cabinet down the sink as she sat at the table and hated him with such vigour he must have felt it like a physical energy.
He'll say, like that never happened: “Look, let me help.”
She'll want to say: “Why don't you ever stay? That might help.”
She doesn't, because he times his calls somehow, by some inner Watson compass maybe, and she's usually more or less sober, and more than less repentant. There is always pain in these phone calls.
She'll say: “It's not your responsibility.”
He'll disagree vehemently, so strongly she'll stuff her hand in her mouth to stop herself from crying or from getting really angry or maybe both, and he'll send her e-mails with contact information about AA meetings in her area. He doesn't offer to go with her, and there is no one else, and in the end she just can't do it, so she doesn't go.
-
“So who the fuck is this bloke?” Harry, wide-eyed with anticipation, asks John when he comes to visit and stands awkwardly in the hall, tracing where the pictures of Clara were with his eyes. “What the hell is going on with you?”
John laughs the freest laugh she's seen him laugh since he returned, scarred in different ways.
“He's... It's even a little hard to just describe him,” he says, shaking his head.
“God knows I've got time!” Harry says.
-
“So are you... doing okay?” he asks her over her birthday dinner. There's no one else in her house; all of the friends she had were more of the pub type, and she can't do that anymore. This way, though, with just the two of them, it's really starting to feel like the sense of obligation that's keeping them both there is wearing thin. They know, by now, that they're only good for each other in small doses.
“Yes,” she says, tense.
“Good,” he says carefully, and eats her vegetarian shepherd's pie like he actually enjoys it.
“You?”
“Yes,” he says, and the answer is direct and solid, which makes her smile a little in a very automatic sort of way. “I mean,” he says, because Watsons know it's bad luck to say that they're happy. “Sherlock's been preoccupied with this case. It's...” he hesitates. “It's pretty complex.”
“Well, go ahead then. I do love me a good whodunit,” Harry says, and smiles at him over her glass of mineral water.
-
“Oh my God, you're so gay for him, aren't you?” Harry says, eyes wide with mirth.
John sighs in his put-upon way. “Not you, too.”
“No, but seriously,” she says, feeling her mouth fold into a wide smile. “Listen to yourself. Sherlock this, Sherlock that, Sherlock shits fucking diamonds, Sherlock knows the secrets to the universe! You're besotted!”
John scowls deeply, takes a swig of the non-alcoholic beer he's accepted without comment, trying to be supportive. “No, okay. It's not like that at all.”
She grins at him, tapping her fingers against the metal of her beer can. “Ooooooh, Sherlock,” she croons. “Deduce me. Yes, like that.”
John slams his beer down on the coffee table with a sudden and surprising sound of anger. The smile slides off her face as he points a finger at her. “You of all people,” he says, then sucks in an audible breath. “You of all people must know how offensive it is when people just assume things,” he finishes uncharacteristically acidly.
“Hey, Johnny, it's okay, I was just teasing,” she says, frowning, wondering where she'd lost the thread of the conversation so much he could get so angry so suddenly. It's not like him.
“Don't call me Johnny,” he snaps.
“All right, John,” she says tartly. “Don't get so worked up.”
“It's exhausting to listen to this,” he says, the words clipped, and moves to get up.
She watches him as he walks over to his coat, draped over a chair, and feels the stirrings of an old anger. “Yeah,” she finally agrees, “it is exhausting. It's exhausting when people think they know things about you just because you happen to have sex that they can't imagine being real sex, or relationships that they think can only come from some sort of trauma or some mental illness or whatever.”
He rests his hands on his coat, and doesn't turn towards her, but also doesn't move to put it on.
“Jesus fuck, John,” she bites, “I'm sorry if I upset you, but this wasn't fucking malicious. I won't mention it again. You know I don't fucking care what you do, whether it's settling down with some blue-eyed clear-skinned doctor type in a house with a picket fence and having two point one children or if it's getting, I dunno, suspended from the ceiling and buggered by your frankly socially handicapped and clinically insane flatmate. I don't care. It's me, you moron.” She watches him, the tense lines of his neck and shoulders. “You have this happen to you once and you think you know what it's like.” She shakes her head. “Sorry, but you've been the one making those kinds of jokes about me for ages. I never complained. I was happy that you felt comfortable enough to joke about it, even if your jokes were terrible.” She scoffs and sits back in her armchair.
He turns towards her. He doesn't look angry anymore. His eyes are large and his mouth is thin.
“I -” he says, then seems to be at a loss.
“Don't say sorry,” she says, suddenly tired. “It's fine.”
He comes back and sits down, clearly ill at ease. He finishes his non-pint slowly, thoughtfully, and when he does finally get up he thanks her, with all of the grace of a wooden doll.
-
“Hey, look, I'm sorry, okay,” John, removed, on the phone, says, but he sounds more annoyed than sorry.
“Yeah, fat lot of good that does,” she responds angrily, squashing the desire the chuck her phone into the burning hearth. “Christmas is in two days, you wanker.”
“It's Sherlock, okay? He... I dunno. He's got this... thing. I can't really leave him alone right now.”
“Oh, yeah, right,” Harry says. “Sherlock's got a thing. Very important.”
“It is, actually,” John says, sounding strained, and she's reminded why they don't do this anymore, why they don't really call, not since he had to come and scrape her off the floor every few weeks and couldn't seem to stomach talking to her directly: because face to face they can at least grimace and frown and clench their jaws. This is stunted, this, like trying to walk with a blindfold on. It's no wonder they were never able to help each other before.
“Yeah, great. Thanks for letting me know on time and for having a totally legitimate reason,” Harry bites. “You do know, John, that he's just playing you so you'll stay with him? He hates me and he thinks you shouldn't see me.”
“Don't be ridiculous,” John says, and it's in a voice she knows all too well, a voice Clara used to call the I'm-Harry-and-I-will-belittle-your-opinion-voice. (And that was when she was still feeling charitable.)
“Yeah, whatever. Talk to you later.” She ends the call before John can respond and throws her phone onto the sofa, where it bounces and drops to the floor.
-
John whats going on
Im looking at it on
the news
Missed call: Harry
June 15 2012, 10:23
Voicemail received
June 15 2012, 10:24
Missed call: Harry
June 15 2012, 11:14
Missed call: Harry
June 15 2012, 11:16
Voicemail received
June 15, 11:16
John pick up ur
fucking phone ok
Missed call: Harry
June 15 2012, 12:57
John come on
pick up
Let me help
Missed call: Harry
June 15 2012, 13:02
Missed call: Harry
June 15 2012, 14:33
John please
If ur getting this
please pick up
Missed call: Harry
June 15 2012, 16:22
Ok fine but im coming
over tomorrow
-
“Don't you dare,” John says when she opens her mouth, and for the first time since he let her into the flat he looks her straight in the eye.
“Don't I dare what? Tell you that your friend was a fucking lunatic who tricked you? A top-class psycho?” she snarls, beaten raw with the presence of him, his huge mournful presence, sucking all of the light in the room towards him and extinguishing it.
John seems to grow, like the anger physically fills him. “Shut the fuck up,” he says, the words like lashes, and he never says fuck, it's always her who says fuck and John who rolls his eyes at it.
She shuts the fuck up and goes to his kitchen, slamming the cupboard doors, and then dropping the tea cups because her hands won't stop shaking.
-
It's strange that his headstone doesn't have any dates. Think you're too good for a date of birth, you fucker? she thinks, and jams her hands in her pocket, savouring the prickle of sudden anger.
It really is a weird sort of grave. SHERLOCK HOLMES, it says, on black mirroring stone. She remembers John telling her Sherlock enjoyed deducing details about everyone. Well then, she thinks, and lowers herself, crouching until she's looking at herself, his name branded across her forehead. Deduce me if you can.
He's dead, of course. Not that special after all. A mere mortal stepping off a ledge. The borders are closed. And stone is just stone, cold and unspeaking.
She shakes her head a little, thinking of the time he'd turned towards her in his and John's flat on Baker Street while John was in the bathroom, and had said: “I hope you realise you make life difficult for him,” and she'd lashed out, already tense from John's wariness around her and Sherlock's intense focus and complete inability to stick to normal social codes. “You can fuck right off,” she'd said.
He'd raised an eyebrow.
Bastard.
She had made things difficult for John sometimes, as had he for her. If she were a better person she might have told Sherlock that then, or John some other time. She might have said that that is what family does, and that people who don't hurt you don't usually matter that much.
“You can still fuck right off,” she tells the headstone. “Where do you get off telling me I make things difficult for him. Look at the state of you, you unbelievable dick.” There is something sharp and jagged in her throat, something that she can't swallow away. “He still believes in you, which is stupid, because there is so much evidence. I'm sure you'd tell him off for that, with your stupid scientific... stuff.” She takes a moment to appreciate that she's talking to a gravestone, and she shakes her head at herself.
She looks off-coloured in the headstone, but she can still tell that she really needs to brush her hair. Well. “Thanks, Sherlock, nice of you to let me know,” she says, barely suppressing a smile, which immediately fades when she hears the sound of footsteps on the leaf-strewn grass behind her.
John is frowning deeply at her when she turns around. He doesn't look angry. She'd prepared for some sort of anger, resentment at her for being there maybe, or just general persisting rage for this grave and this graveyard and the fact that his best friend is silent and still and decomposing where they stand. She doesn't quite know what to do now that the anger is absent.
“What are you doing here?” he asks, sounding resigned.
“Nothing,” she says, a little defensively.
He steps up next to her, and they both face the grave.
“It's an odd sort of grave,” she says after several beats of silence, and then frowns at herself. John, however, is smiling a little when he turns towards her.
“Well, he was odd,” he says, and with that the smile goes. But it's something. It's more than enough.
They stand for a while longer. “Hey,” Harry says finally. “I actually came here because you haven't been returning my calls. You're a prick, by the way.” John's mouth does an almost-smile sort of thing. “So I thought I should come here to look for you.”
They're reflected together in Sherlock Holmes' headstone, short and stocky and strangely off-coloured. Watsons through and through.
“Well,” John says quietly. “You found me.”
“Yes,” she says just as quietly, and touches his sleeve. “Found you.”