From boxoftheskyking, for my writing commentary meme:
I love this bit. From Point Blank:
When Sherlock gets the door open, John is holding a gun on him.
It’s not really a gun, of course. It’s his electric torch. But from the way John’s hands are wrapped around it, he clearly believes otherwise. It’s a strange thing to know that your friend is pointing a deadly weapon at you, even if only in his own head. Something deep inside Sherlock’s chest curls into a painfully tight coil at the sight, but he can’t spare thought for that just now. If John is this far gone, then he needs to be stopped before he gets in a position to do real damage to someone.
Sherlock holds out a reassuring hand, murmuring John’s name and soothing nonsense, and steps slowly towards him the way he’d approach a high-strung horse.
John’s finger twitches. Sherlock flinches.
It feels like he’s just been gut-punched. It hurts, irrationally, because it’s only an imaginary bullet. But John just shot him. In his mind, John just shot him, even if he thought Sherlock was someone else, and that hurts. For one eternal, horrible, stomach-churning second, Sherlock doesn’t know what to do. Because John is dangerously strung out and prepared to become physically violent if approached, and because he just shot Sherlock.
Which is the second in which John drops the torch like it’s just gone red-hot and collapses to the floor with a retching scream like his stomach has just turned itself inside out.
He is hyperventilating, trying to inhale and exhale and sob and speak all at the same time. His face…
…Suddenly the hound is not the most frightening thing Sherlock has ever seen. If he ever sees that look on John’s face again, he will put a bullet in the head of whomever’s responsible. Even if it’s himself.
“What did I do?” John chokes. It doesn’t sound like his voice; more like air tortured into the shape of words. He holds his hands up as though he’s expecting them to be covered in blood. “Oh Christ. Oh Jesus.”
I took a summer enterprise technologies class during my master’s, where the class members consisted of a mixed bag of young students, professionals, military folks, and we had one woman from Palestine. At one point during the class, the professor started talking about cyber-warfare (which, for those who haven’t heard the term, is the name for the international game of hacking, computer viruses and other cyber-shenanigans that governments and other organizations of the world now engage in online). The prof made a comment to the effect of ‘The damage from a cyber-attack could be even worse than a physical one.’
The Palestinian woman objected. “I’ve been in a war,” she said. “I had my home shelled. There is no comparison.”
We talked about it a bit because, hey, how can you not? The military guys agreed with her, and I think the rest of us felt a little bit shaken. Because you get an image of war, right? From movies and books and things. Sure, most of it is crap, but every so often you get something that makes an effort, and after a while you start thinking you have a clue about it.
But that talk reminded us all that we really don’t. The chaos, the damage, the pain and fear and loss, the scale—it’s honestly not something that you comprehend if you haven’t had a foot in that world.
There’s a tendency to make Sherlock kind of omniscient, I think. Which, well yeah (Sherlock + the internet = a nigh-unstoppable thinking machine). But I think that there are—there have to be—certain facets of the human experience that’re impenetrable to even his imagination. Despite Mycroft’s comment about ‘London’s battlefield,’ I don’t think Sherlock’s capable of comprehending war without seeing it for himself. Because look, war is the total antithesis of everything he is and does. It’s mayhem. There’s no thread of reason to catch or a bad guy to find or clues that, if only you put them together, will make everything make sense. Could he survive in a war? Sure, Sherlock’s got mad skills. But what it does is in a whole different sphere from what Sherlock does. You can’t get there from here.
So yeah, I think that bit of John is something he can’t really access. He can understand what PTSD and flashbacks are, sure, but—well, he’s only ever seen John have the occasional nightmare. I don’t think John has the full-immersion kind, except here when he’s been triggered by the chemical. And see, Sherlock’s very methodically going through his priorities—minimize physical damage, draw John out of it, etc. He’s got the scientific angle locked down; he could tell you all about the switches flipping in the brain and the cause/effect and predict what a given individual is likely to do in a situation. He could probably even deduce the nature of John’s flashback. But he’s totally unprepared to confront the human experience underlying all that—the things he can’t imagine, the pain and war and loss John locked away in his mental closet along with this memory.
Probably it wouldn’t work if it weren’t John, but since it is, Sherlock’s forced to not only see, but care. Honestly I’m not entirely sure whether he’s more gut-punched by the guilt or by facing John-as-soldier and being forced to admit he can’t reach him there—and that it matters to him that he can’t. John’s alone in this place in his head, and Sherlock both hates, quite selfishly and egotistically, to admit that anything he wants is beyond his reach, and also wants John not to be alone, because Sherlock understands loneliness very well and he doesn’t want John to have to endure that.
I’m not even sure Sherlock is entirely clear on what he’s feeling, to be honest. It’ll probably take him a while to parse it all out. What he knows right now is that he accidentally backed John into a position where he more or less forced John to shoot him, and Sherlock feels both hurt that John did so and hurt that he’s responsible for the devastation it left in John’s eyes, because…okay, Sherlock does have friends whether he likes to admit it or not, but what John is, is the one person in the world Sherlock can’t pretend not to care about.
And that, I suppose, is why I still want to write a sequel to this. Because this penny hasn’t dropped yet. One day…