Sherlock 100: 060. Drink

Title: 060. Drink
Rating: G
Disclaimer: I do not own any of the BBC's characters or plots. The dialogue that you recognize is obviously not mine.
Warnings: minor angst
A/N: I really don't know where this is going... I don't want to end up simply rehashing the show. I'll call it... an experiment.

He asked what had happened to her, and then let it drop. He was startled, curious, probably felt sorry for her, but he didn't make a spectacle about it, no profusions of sorrow or sympathy, no incredulous wondering what she was ever going to do with herself now. He asked her how long she'd been over there, and how long she'd been back, and if the answer to the second question seemed like a long time with respect to her lack of recovery, he didn't show it. They talked about other things; they went to get coffee, and he didn't mention her limp, didn't ask if she wanted to wait while he brought something back for her.

That was the first kindness Mike Stamford did her. He'd always, she remembered, been kind-- mild-mannered, but observant.

Her hand curled around the paper cup, steady for the moment. She tried to remember what she'd heard from or about Mike, if anything, since she'd been a student. “You still at Bart's, then?”

“Yeah. Teaching, now.”

She nodded. He'd always been patient, too, and good at explaining things. It made sense.

“Bright young things like we used to be. God, I hate them.”

Memories: late-night revision sessions with endless buckets of coffee, getting the highest grades in a decade on a particularly misanthropic, resentful (and misogynistic) lecturer's exams, a certain incident with the cadavers... she pictured Mike in place of the professor who'd been nominally in charge during the cadaver incident, and smiled, and it was nearly a real smile.

“What about you? Just staying in town until you get yourself sorted?”

The casual assumption that she had something to move on to, the faith in her abilities indicated by the question: it hurt, but it was genuine. And it was the second kindness Mike Stamford did her.

“Can't afford London on an Army pension,” she said non-committally. He could make of that statement whatever he wanted, and if he chose to assume she had a future elsewhere in England, she hadn't lied.

“And you couldn't bear to be anywhere else. That's not the Joan Watson I know.”

“I'm not the Joan Watson,” she snapped, and then cut herself off before she said anything more. Wasn't it obvious, to him? Was he just being kind? Or cruel? Or what? Couldn't he see what she'd become?

Of all the things he could have chosen not to let go, this was at least one of the less painful. “Couldn't Harry help?”

She snorted. She hadn't changed that much-- and, more to the point, neither had Harry. “Yeah, like that's going to happen.” Harry'd stopped sending cheques, at least, but she'd forced her old mobile phone, with its own ghosts, on Joan. That was fine; they weren't Joan's ghosts, and they didn't bother her. The phone was still under contract, and Harry had refused to give her the billing information, insisting on paying it. Joan had, reluctantly, acquiesced.

“I don't know... get a flatshare, or something?”

He seemed determined to try to solve her problems-- or this one, at least, which was admittedly the most understandable of them all. She gave him a sidelong look, a mild one, because he'd always been kind to her and he was trying now, even if his persistent belief that she had a future was bewildering. “Who'd want me for a flatmate?” If he asked “what do you mean,” if he could really see that little, she thought she might walk away.

But he didn't, just smiled a little, and then tilted his head as if he were thinking about something.

“What?” she demanded.

His eyebrows furrowed slightly. “How would you feel about rooming with a bloke?”

She frowned, and took a sip of her coffee. “Depends on the bloke.”