Back at Baker Street, John sighed. "It looks like it'll need stitches. Or at least steri-strips. Sit down." John gestured towards the stool at the kitchen table. Wracking his brain, he couldn't recall any particularly toxic experiments being done in the last few days, so the kitchen was probably safe to use.

Sherlock rolled his eyes. "You and your doctoring. Rather unnecessary if you ask me," he grumbled.

"Yeah, well, no one asked you. Now take your shirt off."

Sherlock smirked. "Let's just hope Mrs Hudson didn't hear that."

"Shut up. Just do it."

Sherlock glared at him. "No."

"No?" John repeated.

"No," Sherlock replied. "Are you having difficulty understanding?"

John rolled his eyes. "I'm not sure what the issue is. You've wandered around the flat many times wearing nothing but a sheet. You even went to the palace wearing nothing but a sheet! And barely that..." he trailed off, remembering with a grin.

Sherlock smiled too. "That was different," he declared.

John stopped smiling. "No, it wasn't," he said firmly. "Now remove your shirt on your own or I will rip and or cut it off of you. Considering this is your favourite purple shirt, I'd be going with the first option if I were you."

"I have other purple shirts, of course," Sherlock retorted.

John raised an eyebrow. "I think you're bluffing. Do you really want to risk it?"

Scowling, Sherlock undid the buttons of his shirt and shrugged the sleeves down his arms, leaving the material collected around his wrists and lower back.

"Well," John said begrudgingly, "I suppose that will do."

With practised hands, he examined the wound to Sherlock's upper arm.

"I'm going to have to clean it so I can see it better," he told Sherlock.

Sherlock made a humming noise.

John turned to get a cloth, wetting it in the sink, and praying it wasn't used to wipe up exploded body parts or something equally gross.

He turned back to Sherlock and began gently cleaning the blood from the wound.

Sherlock shifted slightly, probably trying to avoid getting his shirt wet. Silk isn't it? And silk can't get wet. I don't know why he didn't just take his shirt off completely. Just to be difficult? John sighed and continued wiping. When he was finished, Sherlock shifted again, and John caught a glimpse, a flash really, of something. Something shocking.

"Sherlock?" John said, reaching out to his wrist hesitantly.

Sherlock snatched his arm away, out of John's reach.

"What," he snapped.

"Nothing. Sorry. I just thought..."

"Thought what?"

John shrugged. "I thought I saw something. On your wrist."

"Well, you'd be correct," Sherlock replied, not looking at him, clutching his arm to his chest like a broken wing.

"Okay," John said gently. "So... I guess you don't want me to see it," he said more to himself than Sherlock. "Okay," he repeated. "But I don't know what the big deal is," he said, shaking his head. "Most people have them. Lestrade, Harry, Donovan, Anderson, most of the people at the yard in fact, Sarah, Mrs Hudson..." he trailed off, seeing Sherlock's face grow more stormy rather than clear.

He stuck down the next steri-strip with slightly more force than was probably necessary.

He glanced at Sherlock, but there was no reaction indicating pain. He placed the last one more gently.

"There. Done," he announced. "You don't have to cover it up you know. There's no reason to be ashamed. I've got one. I'm not sure what you think the big deal is."

"Because it's there. Displayed to everyone," he hissed. "I don't want it there for the world to see. Why do you think I work so hard to hide it?"

John scanned his memory, looking for a time, anytime really, that Sherlock's wrists and arms had been exposed in a carefree way that wasn't carefully calculated or used to prove a point.

"Oh," John said faintly. "Yeah..."

"And the light comes on," Sherlock added, rather bitterly.

"Can I see?" John asked. He expected Sherlock to refuse.

I'll show you mine if you show me yours. Right. Like that'll work. He probably already knows.

John hesitated. But he had to ask. "Have you seen mine?"

"No," Sherlock said flatly. Oh. This could be good. John opened his mouth to speak. "I don't have to," Sherlock continued.

John snapped his mouth shut. Of course.

"And seeing as you're a doctor, you really shouldn't need to see my wrist to know."

John rolled his eyes. "You're an excellent actor Sherlock. It's kind of hard to tell. With your intellect, you could pretend whatever you wanted."

Sherlock considered this for a minute. "True, but keeping up the facade all the time would be immensely tiring. So when we go out..." he shrugged, "and at home... not so much. So. Hazard any guesses?" Sherlock looked towards John, expectantly.

"No," John replied, rather firm in his answer. Sherlock looked shocked at this. "Because whatever I guess, whatever my rationalizations are for my answer, you will get upset. So. I do not want to guess, I just want to see."

Sherlock pondered this thoughtfully for a moment. "I would not have gotten upset," he said finally, but bitterly.

John rolled his eyes and gestured towards Sherlock's shirt, still crumpled around his wrists. Sherlock lifted his arms out of the sleeves, allowing the bloodied shirt to fall to the floor. He kept his left hand wrapped around his right wrist protectively.

Slowly, like a butterfly stretching its new wings, Sherlock uncurled his long fingers from around his wrist and uncovered the letters.

They weren't elegant like John's or angry like the man they'd met tonight's were. No, these letters were bold and blocky, like written by a child. But they were a shade of gold that John hadn't seen before, a shade that stood out on Sherlock's pale skin like sunshine.

Letters that made a word that Sherlock hadn't wanted John to see, but John had suspected from the beginning, from that first night when they went out to dinner (not on a date), from the first time Sherlock asked John "not good?" and from that first meltdown during the drugs bust. John had always suspected, and now he knew. Asperger's.

Of course, Sherlock could see it on his face that it was confirmation to what he believed.

John felt Sherlock glare at his face, then he yanked his arm back, clutching it to his chest.

"I suppose you knew this all along," he spat.

John sighed. "See, this was why I didn't want to guess. Because you'd get in a mood about me noticing things, then you'd get defensive, and then you would get like... this." He sighed. "And yes, I did suspect this. But I'm a doctor Sherlock. I have experience in this sort of thing, and besides, I live with you. I'm going to notice things that others won't if that's what you're worried about. And you do hide it exceptionally well."

John looked at Sherlock, and Sherlock looked back for a brief second of eye contact before looking away again, back to his experiment.

"Of course. Mummy made sure of that."

John could see it. Sherlock as a little boy, told to look at people when they were talking to him, that saying those things was not acceptable, even if they were true, that jumping about was not acceptable, even if you were thrilled beyond belief, that hand flapping and twirling were also not acceptable. He imagined a young Sherlock examining the word on his wrist, looking it up in the dusty dictionaries John was sure he owned, and reading about his definition. Hearing words said about him, limitations placed on him because of one simple word on a little boy's wrist.

"Don't do that," Sherlock said, snapping John out of his thoughts. "Don't pity me."

Sherlock rolled his eyes and headed towards his room.

John watched him retreat (because, really, that's what it was, a retreat) and rubbed his eyes, sighing. Sherlock was impossibly complicated, and it really didn't help anything that he seemed to take pleasure in either withholding information or feeding John false information about... well, everything about him. Sherlock could have been a triplet who was born in a barn for all John knew about him. Unlikely, he knew, but one could never be sure.

But the writing on his wrist, John had often wondered if Sherlock had anything, because most people did (not that Sherlock was like most people) but he'd never really seen Sherlock's bare wrists.

"Sherlock, come back," he called, exhausted once again. "I didn't... I wasn't..."

Sherlock skulked back out to the kitchen a moment later, in his arms a new non slashed or bloody shirt.

"I don't want to talk about it," he said flatly.

"Fine." John hesitated, but felt he had to ask. "What about Mycroft?"

"What about him?"Sherlock asked shortly.

"I've never seen his wrists. Does he have anything?"

"Not yet."

John nodded.

"But," Sherlock added, "I think I see the beginnings of 'type II diabetes'. So..."

He smirked, and John couldn't help but smile along with him.

"Hang on," John said after bandaging Sherlock and putting his supplies away. "Your shirt was ripped and slashed from the injury," John said slowly. "So my ripping it off of you wouldn't have made any difference whatsoever."

He looked at Sherlock suspiciously. "So why did you give in?"

Sherlock shrugged. "People would talk if you started ripping my clothes off."

John rolled his eyes. "You don't care what people say," he pointed out. "So it seems that you do have some shreds of consideration for self care left."

"Right," Sherlock replied, already distracted with planning a new experiment.

They sat in silence for a while, Sherlock scribbling down notes, John pecking away at a new blog post.

"It doesn't matter, you know. What it says."

Not even looking up from his microscope, Sherlock replied. "Of course not. They're only words."

John nodded, feeling that Sherlock wasn't really listening. "Which is fine, by the way," he said, echoing what he'd said on that first strange night together.

"I know it's fine."

Sherlock looked up at him and they smiled. It's all fine.