Title: Discovered In A Graveyard

Author: Still Waters

Fandom: Sherlock (BBC)

Disclaimer: I do not own Sherlock. Just playing, with love and respect to those who brought these characters to life.

Summary: Sherlock wasn't surprised to find John alone the next morning. But finding him sitting in a graveyard was a bit…..unexpected. And the unexpected was always significant.

Notes: As someone who finds peace in wandering around old cemeteries, I was surprised that it took multiple viewings of "The Hounds of Baskerville" to really pick up on the scene where Sherlock finds John sitting alone in a graveyard the morning after he told John, "I don't have friends." As soon as I focused in on it, I not only immediately felt the need to write something based around that scene, but got a very strong feeling that I needed to be in a cemetery while writing it. So on 5/28/12 (Memorial Day in the US), I found myself sitting in a rural cemetery, on a stone ledge next to the grave of Ann Maria Perkins, who was only 3 years old when she died on August 25, 1853 – 6 years before Sherlock's creator was even born – silent but for the sounds of the wind, birds, and insects, with the sun giving way to clouds and the chill of rain. I had expected to hear John's voice, figuring he was the one who called me there, to understand why he had chosen the graveyard and what it said about his character. But, quite unexpectedly, it was Sherlock's voice that spoke to me instead, and this piece was the surprising result. Dialogue quoted from the episodes does not belong to me. The title of this story comes from a beautiful episode of the British series "The Professionals", and considering how the story came to light, felt quite appropriate. I truly hope I did the characters justice. Thank you for reading.

Sherlock had expected to find John upset. He knew his words had hurt, consciously going for the harshest blow, the one gutting wound sure to have given him his solitude: denying their friendship. Neither of them had done that since John had downplayed Sherlock's incredibly significant introduction of him as "my friend, John Watson", dismissing it by holding out a hand to Sebastian with a correcting "colleague" instead. Somewhere though, on some level, John must have deduced what Sherlock thought he had hidden so well (that irritatingly unpredictable feeling of being hurt by another person's opinion of him), because it had never happened again.

Until now.

Sherlock had been drowning in a storm of unfamiliar emotions, choking on fear and doubt, spitting condescending vitriol at his shaking hand in front of a man who still clenched his fists with the reflexive, ingrained coping behavior of a soldier who had fought (and occasionally still did fight) the intermittent tremors that were war's traumatic aftershocks. And war it was, for at that moment Sherlock was at war, all rules of human engagement learned through John's patient prompting blown away in an explosion of pure, unadulterated Sherlock…as if John's "why would you listen to me? I'm just your friend" was the pin, that once pulled from Sherlock's grenade in the chaos of emotionally unstable battle, led to him exploding, reverting back to who he was before John came into his life: a self-professed sociopath who didn't care enough about emotions - those messy, often irrational, psychologically-tainted chemical reactions - to cater to those who were so filled with them or to waste the energy trying to "properly" display them himself, but who certainly understood emotions enough to manipulate them, and those they were attached to, to his needs. A manipulation that came out in the icy fire of hissed words dripping with hatred, four shards of shrapnel unerringly aimed at John's heart: "I don't have friends."

And it had worked. John may have been the master marksman with a handgun, but no one could beat the aim and destructive power of Sherlock's finely honed scornful cruelty. In his peripheral vision, Sherlock could clearly see John bleeding out in the fireside chair, the doctor tightening his muscles to stem the flow of blood from wounds the rest of the room would never see, as the soldier made a tactical retreat – whether against further damage to himself or to avoid damaging Sherlock, it was hard to say. Likely both.

Four little words and Sherlock had gotten exactly what he wanted: the comfortable, familiar protection of solitude. He had been terrified, floundering, and so very, very angry….couldn't bear the thought of anyone seeing him lose the control he valued so desperately, the refined control of genius that defined him, and so he'd had to send John away. With the same reflex that demanded that protective solitude, he also immediately knew how to obtain it; knew exactly how to wound John the deepest, using the friendship Sherlock really did value so highly, to purposefully hurt the man that Moriarty had deduced was Sherlock's heart, before even Sherlock really knew how to verbalize their connection. And not only had it had worked brilliantly, but he had been pleased with his seemingly failing mind for coming up with it, because it had meant that at least part of his identity – the ability to manipulate people using the very emotions they chastised him for not having – was intact.

When Sherlock came back to himself later that night, back to the man John had helped shape….well, he had changed enough during their association together to realize that what he had done was more than a "bit not good" and that he owed his friend, the only man with whom he'd ever thought to use that label, an apology of sorts. Perhaps not a direct apology, as he didn't want to worry John with more uncharacteristic behavior, but an apology nonetheless.

He had expected to find John alone. Not just because he had sent him away – John may not have known anyone else in the village but people always found him easy to talk to - but because that's what John did when upset or needing to work something out. He "went out for some air." So it wasn't surprising to find him outside. But sitting in a graveyard? That was a bit…..unexpected.

And the unexpected was always significant.

It was a deductive stepping stone; a sign of a particularly interesting puzzle to come. And for Sherlock, who was still trying to work out how to mend what he had callously damaged the night before, it was a gift. Something to latch onto and study.

So he did.

There was no doubt John was there for the graveyard. He wasn't sitting along the church walls or within one of the many doorways; logical since, while John's dying "please God, let me live" suggested a religious upbringing, his frequent tendency to take the Lord's name in vain during emotional conversation suggested that he wasn't particularly devout at this point in his life. No, John was angled for view of the headstones, not the church, finding the most practical place to sit within the graveyard without disturbing any of the individual plots. But why here? The quiet was fairly obvious – even Sherlock knew the joke about graveyards making for quiet neighbors – and if John wanted to be alone with his thoughts, a stretch of stone-marked land covering hundreds of buried bodies would certainly provide that silence. Surrounded by people, yet not a word spoken – better even than Mycroft's ridiculous Diogenes tradition. And it was quiet, in the sense of an absence of human noise – just the wind, birds, and insects, the brief whine of the rusty gate as Sherlock stepped inside John's refuge, the tap of his shoes on the paved path.

No….there had to be more; a greater reason. Most people, when needing solitude, wouldn't choose to surround themselves with dead bodies, as there were much more…..picturesque….places to be alone. Of course, John wasn't most people, as evidenced by his friendship with Sherlock, and Sherlock knew that John had no fear of death – he had seen plenty in his line of work, had even killed and created dead bodies of his own; had killed for Sherlock's sake, to keep his body above ground. But Sherlock also knew that didn't mean John enjoyed death – he understood it intimately, had walked its dark line with patients and comrades, had even experienced it personally courtesy of an Afghani bullet. He could ease death or cause it depending on the situation's need, could treat it with professional black humor while also pausing and briefly closing his eyes upon seeing another life lost at a crime scene…

There! The memory of Jennifer Wilson, their first case together. That moment where John closed his eyes and dipped his head silently, a second's pause before focusing back on Sherlock and Lestrade…

Closing his eyes, not to block out the image of the dead body, but as an acknowledgement of the life in front of him, of its importance. A silent sign of…..respect.

Oh. Of course. Now he was beginning to see it. Maybe. What was he seeing? Think!

Respect. Particularly, respect for people. John was good with people; was good with Sherlock, who was frequently referred to as inhuman. John was drawn to people, even within the depths of his own loneliness and a natural instinct to withdraw when hurt or depressed. When he "needed to get some air", he walked around the city (information Sherlock most certainly did not attribute to Mycroft after his brother had people follow John on his post-pool walks in an attempt to endear himself to Sherlock by offering peace of mind). He could have easily found somewhere to be alone, but instead chose to stay on the streets, surrounded by people. Why? He didn't talk or interact with anyone, so it couldn't have been for the comfort of companionship or distraction. No, when John walked, he was still alone, just walled in by people. Alone in a crowd. Hidden in plain sight. Safe. Ah, of course! The best disguise! John could be quite clever at times. Sitting alone often drew unwanted attention; in an age of technological interconnectedness, people often couldn't fathom why someone wanted to be alone, thought something was wrong with them, and intruded on that person's solitude, feeling like a rescuer, like they were "doing the right thing" by inflicting such banal platitudes as "what's wrong?" and "do you want to talk about it?" John was avoiding that brilliantly, hiding in plain sight.

But that couldn't be the only reason. John's often baffling tendency to dress in layers seemed to be an outward manifestation of the innumerable layers of his character; layers Sherlock was still discovering and studying. No one had continued to surprise and intrigue Sherlock as much as John did. He would certainly grant that John was clever enough to hide in plain sight – John was naturally good at that. People always remembered Sherlock unless he was actively disguising his presence, but they often passed John by without a second glance. No, with John it was never just cleverness. John would come here for more than quiet or hiding within humanity..…and really, when everyone else was in boxes underground, the living, breathing man above ground tended to stand out. Think! You're missing it! What are you missing? Quietness…..dead people, yet people all the same….alone….sitting…glancing at notes, but not writing…not writing because he was thinking?…because he was listening. Back straight, not hunched with emotion, but taut in military…..respect. The kind of respect given by closed eyes and a dipped head in a Brixton doorway all those months ago.

Oh. Of course this is where John would go. Stupid!

While part of the reason John took notes was because his memory was nowhere near as brilliantly organized as Sherlock's, it was largely to refer to while writing up his blog; for creating stories out of their case data. John was a medical man, trained in science. A soldier, trained to both protect and kill. And the kind of person who, when he wanted to be alone, surrounded himself with the living or the dead, because he was drawn to people's stories. John's blog had gone from reluctant, factual compliance with a PTSD treatment regimen, to an often sickeningly creative interpretation of their work together, focusing as much, if not more, on Sherlock and the people involved, than the all-important data and conclusions; all because John was drawn to people and their stories. Even in his deepest need to be alone, he thought best when listening to others. John was a storyteller now - perhaps he always had been underneath some of those other layers - and what better place to gather tales than a graveyard? Was he hearing the lives of the dead in the rustle of the cemetery's breeze the same way Sherlock deduced the deceased's history within a crime scene's underlying murmur? Did a dead child reveal a local epidemic under the buzz of insects? Or a brother recall seeing a sibling off to war in the syncopated spaces between bird calls? What exactly did John's bedside vigil reveal, in the deceptive quiet that blanketed lives condensed to stone, as he sat in this final resting place that spoke so much?

Storyteller, doctor, soldier, blogger, listener, colleague, friend. No wonder he layered so much under those jumpers and jackets. But the greater the puzzle, the more Sherlock became invested, and John was a challenge from which the thought of backing down had never occurred. Never would occur. He was determined to discover and understand every one of those layers.

Sherlock watched John's back stiffen further as his approach was noted: part preparation for the confrontation ahead, part annoyance at his solitude being interrupted by the person who had made him seek it in the first place. But Sherlock saw deeper. John was tucking the notebook into his pocket, hiding that layer of himself under a thin film of coat material, and straightening up as the soldier took over, preparing for battle. But that was all secondary, because Sherlock had recognized that first movement after his presence had been confirmed; knew that set of the spine and shoulders, even if John was sitting instead of standing, as a clear, split-second burst of "attention."

John had retained a lot of his military bearing in his movements. Sometimes he'd go "at ease" when upset or uncomfortable, reverting back to a practiced mindset, the familiar feel of order; he seemed to rely on it especially when angry, clenching and unclenching his hands as he clasped them behind his back. Other times he'd slip into it while discussing task delegation during a case; a hint of an ingrained chain of command revealing itself. But then there were moments where he shifted into it as a sign of respect: a split-second snap to attention, shoulders squared, back straight, chin up, eyes forward, hands at sides, curled lightly – a visual show of respect from a world built on that very principle. Most people didn't notice it because they were idiots. Also because it was a simple, quiet shift in body language – a whisper, not a shout. But Sherlock, while admittedly not yet as much of an expert as he would undoubtedly become, always listened to John. Even when he didn't. So he heard it today. Saw it. John had straightened in a silent "thank you" to the graves, to the lives around him, thanking them for accepting his presence and listening to him while he listened to them; a military sign of honor and respect for who they were. And all relayed in the fraction of time it took for that stiff-backed respect to smoothly transition into the stiff tension of impending battle.

But it was a battle Sherlock refused to take part in; he had done enough damage in their skirmish last night. So he allowed his honest uncertainty and regret to loosen his voice and body language; a startling juxtaposition to John's sharp lines and weary eyes. And, in his own way, in celebration of his deductions along the graveyard path today, and in honor of the man in front of him, Sherlock apologized. He recalled John's Morse code discovery, attempted humor, dismissed John's "it's fine" and went for the deeper hurt there by sharing his deductions regarding one of the most frightening experiences of his life with the one man whose help he both valued and needed. Trailing behind John's clipped stride and inner war between pain and forgiveness, Sherlock laid out a series of threads, created a story for his blogger, his storyteller, to piece together; notes for John to take, file, and pull together, scrambled sentences leading to an unwritten conclusion. It was a puzzle Sherlock knew John was clever enough to solve; to reach that ending and read what Sherlock truly meant: "I'm sorry."

And John did. Brilliant, loyal, layered John did. He verbalized it ("you were saying sorry a minute ago, don't ruin it") within a sarcastic sigh at Sherlock's unorthodox apologetic method (but understood and accepted it all the same, which no one else had ever done for him), while, in the same breath, noting Sherlock's odd-handed acknowledgement of his value ("go on: what have I done that's so bloody stimulating?").

Apology accepted. Insight given. Case progressing.

Back to normal.

Because John knew him.

So they headed back into the village, Sherlock already devising a plan involving John, Baskerville, and the sugar from Henry's kitchen. He couldn't think of a better, more reliable, test subject outside of himself. And while part of him did realize that drugging John without his knowledge or consent may, if John figured it out, be considered a "bit not good", he also knew that, even if others would insist he didn't deserve it, John would eventually understand. Because Sherlock wasn't drugging just anyone. He was drugging John. It would be safe, controlled, and if any unexpected complications arose, if John was ever in any real danger, Sherlock would do something he had never done during an important experiment before: he would stop.

A statement that left no doubt that he really had meant it earlier: he didn't have friends. He only had one. One for whom he'd stop an experiment, in order to keep him safe and at his side.

John Watson.