Fandom: Sherlock (BBC)
Title: Symbiosis
Summary: John rarely sees what Sherlock sees. Sometimes, John is chagrined by this. Sometimes, it's a good thing.
Characters/Pairings: John Watson, Sherlock Holmes
Rating: G
Genre: Gen
Word count: ~1,900
Spoilers: Mild for S2.02, "The Hounds of Baskerville"
Warnings: None
A/Ns: I almost forgot I had this waiting in the wings to polish up and post for Amnesty. Last minute FTW! Written for the fan_flashworks amnesty challenge: "photo" and the watsons_woes prompt, the picture "The Piano Tree" below (click for larger version):




As the popularity of John's blog soared, so too did the amount of email he received.  Seemingly overnight, he'd gone from having a depressingly empty in-box, with only the occasional offer of male "enhancement" products to break the monotony, to one teeming with all manner of curious correspondence.

The bulk of the messages, not surprisingly, were requests for Sherlock's help in solving the writer's problems--the majority of which were so prosaic that John knew that Sherlock would never consider them. John still answered each email personally, thanking the author for their interest and then politely declining, though he was considering drafting a generic “thanks-but-no-thanks” letter that he could send out in bulk, as he was quickly getting overwhelmed by the sheer number of requests. Last night it had taken nearly him nearly two hours to reply to them all, and his mouse-hand had been tingling and sore when he was done.

Then there were the fan letters. John was always surprised by how many of these included scantily-clad photos of the author, or even, in a few memorable instances, extreme close-ups of unclothed body parts. (Most of these were addressed to Sherlock but not all!) John duly forwarded the ones addressed to Sherlock to his private email account (though he suspected that Sherlock routinely deleted them without opening them) and saved the ones addressed to him in a folder, unsure as to what to do with them. It seemed rude not to reply, but he didn't really want to encourage their writers, either. Some of these fans didn't come across as all that... stable.

The most intriguing messages that weren't actual cases were what John thought of as the “Curiosities”--photos and articles about strange phenomena from around the world. Some of these, John suspected, were sent in the hopes that Sherlock might solve the mysteries surrounding them (crop circles and yeti sightings were popular themes). Some were obviously Internet memes; amusing but probably faked occurrences that were making the rounds that week (they tended to show up in batches and were addressed to multiple recipients). And some, John decided, were just sent for his amusement. His best explanation for them was that since he wrote about investigating mysterious crimes and odd occurrences, his readers must have decided he enjoyed that sort of thing and wanted to share them with someone who would appreciate them.

Such was the case, John supposed, with the photograph of the Piano Tree. There was no note enclosed; merely a photograph of an old, broken-down piano with a tree growing through the middle of it. Something about it caught John's attention, and instead of deleting the email, as was his wont when there was no identifying information included, he downloaded the photo to his desktop instead.

“What's that that's got you so enthralled, then?” Sherlock intoned from right behind John, startling him. He hadn't heard Sherlock approach. “Please say it's a decent case for a change. Nothing remotely interesting has come from the readers of your blog since Bluebell the Rabbit went missing. And that was ages ago. I'm starting to wonder if there's any point to your keeping a blog at all.”

John resisted the urge to point out that it had been less than a fortnight since they'd made the acquaintance of Bluebell at Baskerville, and that the blog was meant to be therapy for him, not a lead-gathering tool for Sherlock. A fortnight without a case was ages to Sherlock, and since Baskerville, his mood had been plummeting as his restlessness had grown. Sherlock would probably welcome a little dust-up to break up the monotony, but John was in no mood for an argument.

He turned the screen so that Sherlock could see it too. “No new cases yet, I'm afraid. But I thought this photograph was interesting. The subject line said, 'The Piano Tree'. There was no note included."

Sherlock glanced at the picture and flinched.

“It's awful. Get rid of it.”

“Awful? Really? Isn't that being a bit harsh?”

“No. I think it's being rather generous.” Sherlock took another look, shuddered, and stalked over to his armchair in a swirl of blue dressing gown. He sat down with a flounce, crossed one ankle over the other knee, and turned his face away from John.

“That's... not what I thought you'd say,” John admitted.

“Really? Did you think I'd enjoy that?”

“Well, I thought you might say that it was a fake. But I didn't think you'd despise it to the core of your being, no.”

“It is a fake. Obviously. But that's not what wrong with it.”

“So what's wrong with it, then?”

“Everything.”

“That... doesn't really clear things up. Care to elaborate?”

Sherlock huffed. “Not really.”

John glanced up at Sherlock, who was staring resolutely ahead, then back at the photograph on the screen.

“I think I know what's bothering you."

“Oh you do, do you? Go on. This ought to be interesting.”

John took a deep breath. "I think you look at this and you see the senseless destruction of a what was once an expensive musical instrument," John said, slowly, choosing his words with care. "As a musician yourself, and one who takes better care of your violin than anything else, including your own body, this offends you.”

Silence from the direction of Sherlock's armchair.

“But it's not just the destruction of the piano,” John realized. "It's how it's being destroyed that's the real problem.”

John couldn't be sure in the lamplight, but it seemed like Sherlock cocked his head, just a little, in John's direction. He was suddenly glad that he couldn't see more. Sherlock had more facial expressions that said “You're an idiot” than anyone John had ever met, and each expression was more withering than the last. He was playing a hunch here, and didn't need Sherlock to shut him down before he even got started.

“The piano is being torn apart from the inside, by the tree. By nature, in other words. Fierce, untamed nature. This picture depicts the classic battle of 'Man vs. Nature', and Man lost. Now you, Sherlock Holmes, you're the epitome of the modern, civilised man. You live in the city, you never leave it except for for a case. And you've devoted your entire whole life to the pursuit of reason and logic. As such a person, this triumph of nature disturbs you.”

“Mm.”

As responses go, it was rather noncommittal. It could have meant “I see where you're going with this”, or it could have meant “I stopped paying attention before the end of your first sentence.” John felt encouraged all the same. He continued on.

“But that's not what I see when I look at this, Sherlock. Do you want to know what I see?”

“What do you see?” Sherlock finally asked, his voice a deep, thoughtful rumble. That Sherlock was deigning to answer him in words made John suspect that his analysis had hit close to the mark. Or at least it had not been as stupid as Sherlock had been expecting it to be.

“O.K. When I look at this, I see it from the tree's point of view. I see it encountering obstacles that it can't escape from, and still finding a way to push through them. Even though it's forced to compensate in ways it never anticipated, it still survives and grows. It's like they say in those pop psychology books that you're always leaving in the loo, 'the way out is the way through.' It's literally true in this case."

Sherlock rose from his chair and padded over on bare feet. As he drew near, John shifted in his seat to make room and realised that he'd been rubbing his injured leg without being aware of it. He let his arm fall to his side. After the terrors of Baskerville, he thought he'd wanted a month off from casework, maybe two. Clearly, his body, which was starting up with complaints he thought it had forgotten since he had moved in with Sherlock, had other ideas.

“I read pop psychology books because I need to know how normal people think. The platitudes of the self-help movement, insipid as they are, are nearly as instructive as the advice columns in women's magazines in that regard,” Sherlock stated, moving to stand in front of the computer and taking up even more of John's personal space than anticipated. He was so close now that is John turned his head, his cheek would brush against the side of Sherlock's unbelted robe.

Sherlock bend down to peer at the screen again. “It appears I may have overreacted a little,” Sherlock conceded.

“A little?”

“Yes. Clearly I allowed my indignation at the--how did you put it--'senseless destruction of a musical instrument' to cloud my judgement.” Out of the corner of his eye, John could see the corner of Sherlock's lip quirk upward. “Now I observe something that I missed the first time--this piano was never a functioning instrument at all. It was merely a prop that that was taken apart and reassembled around the tree.”

John squinted at image of the piano, which still looked genuine enough to him. “Is that so.”

“Yes. Though the tree continued to grow after the piano was attached, there are four distinct details that clearly indicate that the piano is a fake, in addition to the ones that show that it has not been there in the elements as long it appears. Though I knew at once this was a staged scene, I only noticed the latter at first.”

“Huh.”

“You sound disappointed.”

“Maybe I am. A little.”

“Cheer up John. This photo might yet have story to tell. In fact, I believe you have helped me to see it in a whole new light.”

“Did I? How did I do that?”

“Well, at first, as you observed, I saw only an attack—one entity destroying another. But now I see two entities that aren't violently opposed to each other at all. Despite their outward appearances, at their most basic level they're actually the same--they're both made of wood, after all.”

Sherlock reached out and ran a fingertip across the screen as he continued. “In fact, I would go so far as to say that they complement each other. Over time, they've become so intertwined that that neither can exist without the other. Whatever they might have been before, today the piano would simply fall to pieces without the tree holding it up. Similarly the tree has grown around the piano in such a manner that removing the piano would probably kill it. They need each other."

Sherlock turned his head and looked at John. John, suddenly aware of just how close Sherlock's face was to his, kept his eyes fixed on the screen.

“Together, they are extraordinary. Something unique in all the world,” Sherlock finished softly, then straightened up.

“Sherlock. I don't know what to say. That's... that's beautiful.”

Sherlock shrugged and then headed back to his chair. “Don't read too much into it. Staged scene, remember.”

“Don't read to much into it? A bit too late for that,” John thought, as he closed the document and moved it into a folder on his desktop for safekeeping.

It was one of the nicest things that Sherlock Holmes had ever said to him.