It seems silly to say this, given the chapter format, but this chapter will probably make very little sense without having read the previous chapter. So, like, you might want to do that if you haven't already :)

Also, this is not a particularly happy chapter. There was a lot of dark music this month. Nobody dies except that poor guy at the crime scene, though, so don't be afraid.

"Sherlock?"

"Watson?"

"The top hat and monocle on my desk."

"The shoe and the napkin under the sofa."

"..."

"I apologize; I thought this was an exercise of some sort."

"Let me rephrase: why did you leave a top hat and monocle on my desk?"

Sherlock looked up from his spot on the floor. "Accoutrements to go with your cane," he answered promptly, his expression open and benevolent. "Now you'll have them on hand to fulfill any particularly dapper whims or sudden costuming needs."

"He wanted to get you a cape and a spyglass for the opera," Moriarty added dryly without looking up from her phone, legs draped carelessly over the arm of her chair. "Just imagine, you could have been a pirate with superpowers as well."

Joan looked back at Sherlock, whose cheeks had gone slightly pink. "Obviously you wouldn't wear them all at once," he pointed out, the coolness in his tone clearly directed back Moriarty, who waved languidly in response.

Joan bit back a sigh.

"Thank you," she offered, deliberately trying to wipe the petulant expression off of Sherlock's face and defuse the beginnings of a pointless fight between him and Moriarty. "A cape would be...incredibly unnecessary, though, so I think I'm all set."

Sherlock sat up straighter. "Try them on first before you decide either way," he called after her as she headed back toward the stairs, cane thumping on the floor with each step. "You may decide that a cape is just the thing your wardrobe has been missing, Watson."

Joan smiled. "I doubt it," she called back over her shoulder, only pausing to switch the cane to her other hand in order to grasp the railing.

Although who knew; maybe a superhero pirate would make a good Halloween costume.

Barring Sherlock and Moriarty's disastrous first run in with the doctor, Joan's physical recovery had been going relatively smoothly. After two weeks of home visits, Joan was deemed sufficiently mobile to continue her appointments at the practice itself, which Joan was heartened by, especially since the increased amount of equipment available at the PT studio more than made up for the inconvenience of traveling back and forth.

(Moriarty and Sherlock were less pleased by the new arrangement-at least in part, Joan assumed, because the lack of proximity made it more difficult for them to put the fear of God into Joan's doctors. Not that it stopped Moriarty from going into a murderous fugue the second time Joan came back from the office, despite the extra care Joan had taken during the cab ride home to fix her tear-streaked makeup, or Sherlock from offering to set up any and all of his home equipment wherever Joan chose, certain that he could suitably replicate the PT studio and save Joan the trouble.

"I don't want to know how or why you have any of that just lying around," Joan had responded frankly, "but I'm not using anything that you or anyone else has been naked on unless it's been sterilized by a professional since then."

Sherlock had delicately retracted the offer.)

Between appointments, Joan's mobility continued to improve. Sherlock, in contrast, continued to swing erratically back and forth between anxious to please and irreverently obnoxious-sometimes several times a day-but as that was essentially Sherlock's usual behavior dialed up to fifteen, Joan wasn't particularly concerned for his sanity.

Moriarty, after the case that had resulted in Joan's injuries was finally solved, quickly went back to her usual self— aggravating and unsettling Joan in turn, with momentary flashes of the woman that Sherlock must have loved slipping in almost unnoticeably. The day that Joan went an entire morning without relying once on her cane, Moriarty left half a dozen organic, pink champagne cupcakes in her room. When Joan woke up two hours later, however, only marginally less exhausted than when she'd fallen asleep, only three were still in the white bakery box.

Joan didn't mind-she didn't much care for either cupcakes or annoying, apparently hypoglycemic geniuses, organic or otherwise.

Four weeks after the accident (Sherlock had called it an attack the first day and Joan had known that he was right, but had paled so significantly anyway that nobody had referred to it that way in front of her again) and one week after Detective Bell had called Joan with the news about the Sam Maroney case, Joan was back at work.

Sort of.

"I'm sorry about this," Detective Bell apologized for the second time as he knelt on the pavement in front of Joan outside the crime scene, fitting the end of Joan's cane with an uncooperative shoe cover to keep her from accidentally contaminating the evidence. Sherlock had ducked under the police tape minutes before at her insistence-he'd clearly been torn between loyalty to Joan and desire to see what the police had been calling a 'virtual bloodbath', and Joan had taken pity-and she could see him gesticulating wildly at Captain Gregson already from where she stood.

"Don't worry about it," she answered, not looking away from Sherlock as he pointed to the remains of the victim's right arm. "From what I can see on the ground...let's just say I'd rather not spend tonight washing viscera off the end of this thing."

Bell grimaced. "Tell me about it," he agreed with a huff, securing the final band around the cane. "One of the techs already found a molar fifteen feet from the body-whoever did this has a major screw loose. And no prizes for guessing who's already got an opinion on the crime scene."

Joan followed his gaze back to Sherlock, who had dropped to all fours, his nose inches away from the pavement. "There rarely are," she agreed. "Am I all set?"

Detective Bell nodded. "Let me get that for you," he offered, leaning forward and lifting the police tape well over Joan's head with one arm, holding out the other to help steady her. Joan took it, more to let him feel useful than because she needed it, and together they made their way across the parking lot and around the worst of the spatter.

"So," Joan asked, giving a coned-off section of the scene a wide berth. "I can't help but notice that everyone is still staring at me, right up until the second that I look back. No luck, then?"

Detective Bell, who had been guilty of the same thing for nearly two weeks before Joan had lost her patience and told him in no uncertain terms to knock it off, had the good grace to look embarrassed. "I've told them that they need to stop treating you like spun glass, but they feel bad," he admitted as they reached Captain Gregson, Sherlock, and the body. "I know we've had this conversation before, so I know what you're going to say, but you wouldn't have been anywhere near Maroney's men if it hadn't been for us. You can say what you want, but everyone here still feels guilty about what happened to you."

"You have had this conversation before, and the fourth iteration is even less compelling than the first," Sherlock pointed out as he stood up, sparing Joan from having to answer. "If they wish to assuage their guilt in some quantifiably useful way, instead of forcing Watson to bear the brunt of their emotions as well as her lingering physical trauma, they may join the dinner roster. I can provide takeout menus if needed; Joan prefers Indian on Tuesdays."

Much to Joan's chagrin, the dinner roster was a real thing. It had started, fairly predictably, with Sherlock and Moriarty's micromanaging of Joan's life immediately following the accident. Food from several of Joan's favorite restaurants, the majority of which she knew didn't do takeout, had begun showing up in the refrigerator, and every medication-induced nap that Joan took seemed to coincide with a new culinary experiment of Sherlock's appearing on the table. Ms. Hudson contributed several dishes, which had met with a blanket approval from everyone in the brownstone, but when Marcus had turned up on the porch with his arms full of Tupperware, presumably trying to return the favor from his own bout of long-term physical recovery, Moriarty and Sherlock had initially joined forces to bar him from entering the kitchen.

("Your cooking skills, while not abysmal, rate a mere five out of ten," Sherlock had apparently told him, Moriarty staring coolly at him with her arms folded dangerously across her chest. "I can assure you that we are indeed capable of keeping Watson fed at a far superior level. If you must make a useless gesture, however, Watson enjoys Thai." Moriarty had, reportedly, chosen that moment to wordlessly thrust a stack of annotated takeout menus at Detective Bell, who had bemusedly taken and made use of them-much to Joan's mortification when she found out a few days later.)

Weeks later, it wasn't any less embarrassing. "That's really not necessary, Marcus," Joan told him, stepping back to let Captain Gregson through after another detective signaled him over. "In fact, I really can't stress enough how much I don't want everyone on the force showing up at the brownstone with greasy orange chicken."

Detective Bell grinned at her. "Are you sure? Trip over something before you leave today and I bet half of them would spring for extra fortune cookies."

Joan, responding in the only way that Bell's comment deserved, made a face at him.

His smile grew.

It took Sherlock, Joan, and the police three days to solve the case, but in the end they were able to catch the murderer before he managed to track down his next intended victim—the initial victim's ex-girlfriend, as it turned out. Joan's hand was growing tough with callouses from her grip on the cane, despite getting cleared by her doctor to stop using it around the brownstone unless she felt she needed it. It ached in a way that Joan knew was more psychological than physical, and except for rubbing extra lotion made from Sherlock's beeswax into the palm of her hand before going to bed at night, she ignored it-the pain was temporary, it would pass, she would get better.

She would.

Joan's physical recovery was going very well.

Her mental recovery was…taking a bit longer.

Everything was slowed down. Cold, it was cold, everything was-

Light. Beams-car headlights swept across the ground, and-

Something was wrong. Pain, sudden, intense; everything hurt, everything was pain and blood and screaming and-

"Joan!"

Joan snapped awake, skin blistering hot and lungs on fire, and everything still hurt, why did everything-

"Joan...all right….safe now...home-"

Something grabbed her arm and Joan instinctively lashed out, backing up until her skull whacked the headboard with a sharp crack and—

Oh.

Joan was in bed, chest heaving with exertion and muscles poised and ready to snap, skin slick with sweat and sheets kicked to the floor.

She raised a violently shaking hand and raked it through her hair, pulling at the strands that were plastered to her face until they were no longer in her eyes. The door had been flung open and both Moriarty and Sherlock were in the room, Moriarty kneeling on the mattress to her left with a hand on each of Joan's arms, Sherlock standing rigidly on her right, his expression openly stricken. He was saying something, eyes wide and imploring but Joan couldn't hear him, couldn't concentrate, couldn't hear anything but the harsh, heartwrenching sound that was filling the room and making her ears ring painfully. The sound grew sharper and Joan twisted under Moriarty's grasp, trying to cover her ears and search for the source of the sound at the same time-if she could just turn it off, then she could-

"Joan, please, it's all right," Moriarty was shouting at her, letting go of Joan's left arm in order to grip Joan's wrist and pull her hand away from her ear. "Please, you need to calm down before you hurt yourself."

Her hold on Joan's forearm tightened, and some of what she was saying was starting to break through the haze until suddenly Joan realized that that awful sound was coming from her; a rough, panting exhalation that must have started out as screaming but had lost some of its power, even as it was tearing Joan's throat to shreds.

Her vision was starting to swim and, vaguely aware somewhere in the back of her mind that she was hyperventilating, Joan pulled her knees in and curled in around herself, taking slow, shaky breaths and trying desperately to force her lungs back under control.

"Good," someone was encouraging, and Joan could feel a hand sliding up her arm and squeezing her shoulder. "Better now? Just a nightmare."

Just a nightmare.

Joan's entire body was sore, but she didn't trust herself to speak. She forced herself to nod instead, knowing that Sherlock and Jamie would read it as "I'm fine" and "Thank you" and "I'm sorry" all at once.

They were wrong, though, at the same time that they were right-the details were incomplete and they drained away like rain through a sieve whenever Joan woke up, but the fear and the pain and the visceral dread were all real, a real-life nightmare that Joan was forced to relive almost every night since the drugs that had kept her solidly sedated at night after the accident had been weaned away; since Marcus had called to tell her how she'd nearly died in an alley because she wasn't a cop, because she was expendable to a group of career criminals who hadn't even known her name . She had been waking up night after night for nearly two weeks, shaking and terrified and drenched with sweat, only able to drift off into a fitful, dreamless sleep after lying awake for an hour or so. The terror and sleep deprivation were taking their toll on her, and it had been taking increasing amounts of mental energy, coffee, and makeup to hide it. But she had hidden it, not wanting to alarm Sherlock or Moriarty and inspire them to new, greater heights of smothering and disregard for her personal space.

Of course, that had only worked when she'd woken up on her own, without screaming down the brownstone.

She shuddered violently, and the mattress tilted slightly as Moriarty shifted closer to her.

Out of the corner of her eye, she could see Sherlock rocking back and forth nervously on his heels. "Watson, are you-are you, is there anything you require?" he asked.

A lump formed in Joan's throat. "No," she managed to choke out, "I'm fine, I-"

She stopped talking. Swallowed.

Out of nowhere, tears were pouring thick and fast down Joan's face-the question, the hope and fear in Sherlock's voice, that she had put in Sherlock's voice, had cracked something inside of Joan that had been holding her together by a thread. "I'm fine," she tried to say again, but her voice broke and she gave up, gave into the raw, desperate sobbing that she was too tired to fight anymore.

Moriarty's hands were on her arms and in her hair and Sherlock was crowding close, gingerly touching her back and looking back and forth from her to Jamie helplessly, uncertain what to do in the face of Joan's sudden but inevitable breakdown, and Joan in between them, exhausted and scared and terribly, horribly alone, tucked her face into her knees and was lost to them both.

Joan was asleep, and then she wasn't.

It was still early when she opened her eyes, the dawn light only just beginning to filter in through the windows and into her room. Blinking muzzily, Joan arched her back, stretching her aching muscles just a little.

Then she paused, holding very still as she looked around her.

Moriarty and Sherlock were curled around her on the bed, still fast asleep on either side of her. Moriarty's hair fell in waves across Joan's pillow, a few of her soft curls spilling over onto Joan's shoulder. Joan could feel the gentle warmth radiating off her skin where it grazed her own: an elbow brushing just below her ribcage, a knee barely touching her thigh.

Sherlock, either naturally or out of his very particular sense of propriety, had kept more to himself on Joan's other side, but his hand had wrapped itself around Joan's bicep so firmly that Joan would have been surprised at herself for not noticing it sooner, had she been awake enough to think that hard. As it was, she was too exhausted to care. Her throat and eyes were red and raw from her meltdown the night before, and both her body and spirit felt battered and worn out. The fact that Sherlock and Jamie had stayed with her not only until she'd fallen back asleep but the whole night through-her own possessive, twisted honor guard—probably should have caused Joan some concern, or at least woken her up more fully, given the body count of one and the extreme reticence of the other when it came to physical affection.

Instead, Joan lay her head back down on her share of the pillows and let her eyes close. I'll freak out about this later, she managed to promise herself, right before sleep dragged her back down into black nothingness.

When Joan did freak out, its expression took a different form than she had expected.

"Could you please just, stop? Please."

Moriarty looked up at Joan in surprise, eyes wide and almost hurt, the breakfast plate she'd been bringing over to Joan tilting slightly in her hands. Joan immediately regretted her outburst, feeling her stomach sink guiltily.

After composing herself and getting out of the shower that morning, Joan had reopened the email that Marcus had sent to her after she'd come home from the hospital. Half a dozen phone calls later, she had found a doctor that specialized in career-related trauma and PTSD who was both accepting new patients and was on her insurance. She had an intake appointment scheduled for the end of the week, and she was anticipating it with the same undercurrent of dread as a pending root canal-painful and unwanted, but necessary in the long run.

The reality of needing actual psychological help beyond her token attempts at therapy wasn't sitting well with Joan, and it was making her less serene than usual.

None of it was Moriarty's fault.

"I'm sorry," she sighed, letting her head fall forward until her hair spilled over her shoulders, shielding her from Moriarty's gaze. "It's not-I appreciate you and Sherlock wanting to help, I do. But I can't stand the way you look at me, like…"

"Like?" Moriarty prompted, when Joan trailed off.

Joan swallowed. "Like I'm something fragile," she admitted, looking out the window opposite Moriarty, giving herself an excuse to turn away that Moriarty no doubt saw right through.

She didn't care. "Like I'm going to break."

There was a pause. Then, Joan felt the floorboards shift and heard the heavy sound of the porcelain plate being set down on the table.

"As I recall," Moriarty said slowly, her voice deliberate as Joan had ever heard it, "you once performed emergency surgery at gunpoint, on a man who wished to harm you, with nothing but the contents of a toolbox. All this while being held captive by a large contingent of murderers who had kidnapped you off of the street."

Joan didn't flinch at the memory, not anymore.

She wondered what that said about her.

Moriarty wrapped a hand around the back of Joan's chair. "You, my dear," she said pointedly, "are anything but fragile."

Joan, feeling inexplicable tears pricking her eyes and a lump forming in her throat, didn't respond.

Behind her, Moriarty sighed. "Is it so hard to believe that we care for you, and wish to spare you additional pain where we can?" she tried again, her restless shifting barely visible in the corner of Joan's eye. "We are capable of love-you know we are, perhaps better than anyone else in the world.

"For all that you may forget it on occasion."

Joan felt Jamie's hand on her shoulder and the press of her lips to the edge of her temple, and she squeezed her eyes shut, forcing the hitch that had suddenly begun in her breathing to even out. It took a while, and by the time Joan turned around to look at Moriarty, she was alone.

Joan knew it was childish, but she locked her door that night for the first time in months.

When she woke up in the middle of the night, sweating and shaking from a dream that she couldn't remember, Sherlock and Moriarty were waiting in the hall for her when she stumbled out of bed and opened it.

For the first few days after Joan's episode (ironically, it was Joan this time who was willing to call it what it was, but everyone deferred instead to Sherlock's gentle euphemism) Moriarty and Sherlock reverted to their previous degree of unnecessary coddling. Most of it was unwelcome-"Seriously, the next person who knocks on that door is getting shampoo to the eye, and nobody will blame me in the slightest," she threatened, after being interrupted mid-shower for the third time in a week-but not all of it was obnoxious or overwhelming, and Joan was pleasantly surprised, turning on the TV one evening out of restless boredom, to find that their sports package had been significantly upgraded just in time for baseball season.

Of course, she lived with the type of people who were less inclined to watch baseball and more inclined to watch her watch baseball.

"This is getting weird, guys," she pointed out from the couch, after catching the pair of them staring at her less than subtly from the doorway for the second time. "Either sit down and watch the game, or find something else to do that doesn't involve lurking."

Both Sherlock and Moriarty took an instinctive step backward, as if trying to distance themselves from Joan's suggestion-slash-accusation. Moriarty, in particular, looked entirely underwhelmed by the idea. "What would be the point, when the ending is already a foregone conclusion?" she pointed out with a nod at the television, where the score was tied in the bottom of the fourth inning. "It's obvious that-"

"Allow me to interrupt you are offer you the benefit of my previous experience," Sherlock cut her off, hands laced behind his back. "Watson does not take kindly to having her national pastime spoiled in advance, despite the additional waking hours and potential gambling spoils it would gain her by knowing the outcome at the start of play."

He pursed his lips, clearly disapproving of Joan's irrationality.

"Besides," he added as an afterthought, looking back at Moriarty, "you're wrong-the third baseman's fumble in the coming play will gain his opponents two additional 'runs batted it', as they're called."

Moriarty scoffed. "Obviously," she counted derisively. "But the first baseman's catch and subsequent pass will end the next inning prematurely, you do realize."

Sherlock frowned at her. "Extremely unlikely," he disagreed. "I can only see this going one way, and it is entirely without a miracle play from a substandard player with a dormant calf injury."

Moriarty glared back at him. "We'll see who's wrong," she said archly, stalking over to the couch and folding herself petulantly into the corner of it right next to Joan, who had been watching the back and forth between them with something approaching incredulity. "Fetch the popcorn, sit down, and prepare to humble yourself to my superior intelligence; we're doing this properly if we're doing it at all."

Sherlock, affronted, whipped around and stomped out of the room. "It'll be you," Joan could hear him call loudly from the stairs down to the kitchen. "Your conclusion is staggering in its ignorance, and I am embarrassed for you in advance."

Moriarty and Sherlock spent the entire game, and evening afterward, yelling at both the television and each other.

Joan, seated between them on the couch with her Mets hat and her bowl of popcorn, couldn't help but look back and forth from one face to the other with a small smile.

Yeah, she thought to herself, when a wild pitch in the eighth inning caused identical howls of frustration from either side of her, followed by shouting, an upended glass of water, and an accidentally flung remote almost breaking the television screen. Maybe this is love.