Sherlock 100: 002. Middles

Title: 002. Middles
Rating: PG
Disclaimer: I do not own any of the BBC's characters or plots.
Warnings: Discussion of suicide, rape, and violence
A/N: lyrics taken from "Gravedigger" by the Dave Matthews

gravedigger,

Most people assumed it was rape.

It was, she supposed, a valid assumption: bright, friendly doctor goes off to war, comes home grim and taciturn, with an unexplained limp and a marked lack of ability to get herself sorted. She guessed she was supposed to be grateful, or something, that sexual assault in the military was no longer the willfully ignored topic it once was, but she couldn't tell if it was openness or ghoulishness that drove the assumptions, and anyway, it didn't help her one bit.

She hated it, the way their gazes took her apart, first trying to figure out what was wrong with her, then trying to figure her out at all. Too much of a contradiction to move smoothly through the world, apparently: woman and doctor could be permitted, but woman and soldier seemed to halt more people in their tracks than doctor and soldier. That she was young, or at least not obviously middle-aged, and fit, and yet clearly had a disability, was another contradiction. She was short and plain, but she wasn't what they expected, any of them, under any circumstances, and so she attracted attention anyway.

Getting shot constituted pretty damn unwanted penetration with a phallic object, too, but no one ever seemed to get it, to get that there didn't need to be any other answer besides the bullet slowly sliding into her shoulder and taking half her life with it.

when you dig my grave,

There was another answer, of course, it wasn't nearly that simple. Some days, she wished it was. Some days, she wished it was just PTSD, not PTSD and this strange... yearning, this feeling of walking the streets of London as a ghost for all the surreptitious second glances she got. Her birthday had fallen not long after her release from Selly Oaks. Harry had phoned and asked what she'd wanted. The words had left her mouth without thought: “Bungee-jumping.”

“Sorry, what?” Harry had sounded a little stunned.

She'd adjusted her grip on the phone and licked her lips. “I'd like to go bungee-jumping,” she'd repeated firmly after a moment.

“Joan, I... I don't think that's very appropriate. You're not walking very well, you know.”

“Yeah, you'd know about appropriate,” she'd retorted, stung.

There'd been a long silence. “Joan--”

“I have to go.”

can you make it shallow so that i can feel the rain?

Of course she hadn't gone bungee-jumping. She hadn't had the money. She didn't have it now. She told herself, and Harry, that that was why she lived like she did, in a drab extended-stay hotel on the edge of London, keeping to herself and rarely going out. She refused Harry's offers of money, and ripped up the cheque she sent. She didn't send any more.

Her weekly appointments with her therapist were one thing she dragged herself out for, because everyone expected her to fall apart, take to her bed and never leave it perhaps, and she'd be damned if she'd give them the satisfaction of doing it visibly, of letting the spiderweb of hairline fractures drop the roof in. She'd be damned to bloody hell if she justified their pity, these people who didn't know what to make of her. They looked at her and saw a woman alone, at the age when other women had husbands and toddlers and homes in the suburbs, and they supposed she wanted the same thing, didn't realize that the loneliness was fundamentally deeper. Too old to be a girl, too young to be an old lady, too useless to help anyone, too stubborn to give up and die... caught in the middle of her life, in the middle of the mess of contradictions that defined her identity, in the middle of an endless series of identical, monotonous, colorless days. She thought about the illegal gun in her right-hand drawer, and wondered how long her stubbornness would hold out.

“Joan? Joan Watson!”