thecapitol | (no subject)

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(no subject)

Who| John Watson and open
What| Venturing out after waking up in the Capitol
Where| Tribute Tower, possibly other locations later
When| Before date auction

It hadn't been a particularly glorious or sensational death, and John was almost glad of it. He woke in the Capitol as if from a particularly vivid nightmare, but his leg would no longer reliably support his weight no matter how hard he sat in his room and hated himself for being unable to just think through the psychosomatic injury. He'd had to accept the arm of an avox to get himself safely there, and he hadn't left since.

He'd have to get a cane, again. Sherlock would hate it.

Speaking of Sherlock- he hadn't avoided him exactly, but he hadn't sought him out either. Hours seemed to slip past like breathing until the idiotic futility of it all was too much and he knew that he'd never, ever get out of his room unless he forced himself to, right now. Right this instant.

Asking for a stick was one of the hardest, most humiliating things he'd ever had to do in his life. Once he had it, he heaved himself upright, took a deep, steadying breath, set his jaw- and stepped out.

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John swallowed, pausing as they were brought their coffees. It was a good reason as any to buy himself some thinking-room.

"They don't need me," he pointed out, curling his fingers around his mug. "They don't need a doctor with my skillset, Sherlock. They bloody clone people and put memories from the dead body into a new one. You think they need an invalided army doctor?"

"They clone us." He pointed out, clearly. "Whatever technology works on us doesn't extend to their population, and even then, they don't use it on the victors. They have some advanced methodology, true, but hardly anything you wouldn't learn to work with, or around." He reached out, found his cup, tapping along the edge of the rim.

"You're more useful to them out of the arena than you are in it, and that is the extent of the requirement. I'm sure they would actually see having a tribute doctor to work as a liaison between the tributes and the Capitol as a boon."

"No, actually, I'm more useful in," he said with a slow, artificial calm. "As long as I have a medkit, and even without, that's what I'm good at. Field medicine. I'm completely useless out here."

"More useful to what. Prolong the game?" The question was blunt, his eyes hard. "It isn't a team sport, John, Katniss and Peeta winning together was an anomaly and not one they are like to repeat. They don't want doctors in the game. They want death."

"So what. We all go in and kill ourselves in protest to stop them from having their Games? I suppose that would make it a team sport, too."
He put his coffee down, staring him straight in the eyes.
"Being a doctor is always useless, in the end. You can't win forever. Everyone dies. But that doesn't mean you don't try, alright? It means you do your damnedest to make sure that day isn't today, for anyone who asks you, whoever, wherever they are. I'm a doctor, Sherlock, I'd go on being a doctor in Hell itself, and I am not going to run away from this. No."

"You say that as if the Capitol isn't just as dangerous a place to be," He said bitterly. He flashed his bracelet, just to remind him. Death, out here, was permanent. Unlike in there.

"But don't you lecture me about death," He said darkly, his knuckles tightening on the grip of his coffee mug. "When you're forced to watch me die right in front of you multiple times then you can lecture me about the 'inevitability of death.'. This is not 'Everyone dies'. This is 'Everyone is brutally murdered, repeatedly, for the sake of entertainment'."

Edited 2013-08-16 22:06 (UTC)

"I'm sorry, alright?" he hit back, raw and irritable with shame. "I'm sorry. I'm not doing it to you on purpose, Sherlock, it's not like I've been deliberately getting myself killed to spite you. I'm doing my best."

"I'm not asking you to be sorry," He hissed, glowering over his coffee. "I simply don't see why you would want to continue a pattern where both of us inevitably die. Since I don't exactly see you becoming a stone-cold killer in the arena, and nor am I about to, the chances of either of us winning are effectively 0."

He sucked in a breath, his eyes hard. "Dying in there is pointless and inevitable. I am never getting out of them. They've made that all too clear. Even if they did have work for me they would never trust me to touch it. But you have a chance, John. And if you honestly believe that the tributes need more help in the arena than they do here, then you are less perceptive than I thought."

The frown deepened, but his eyes dropped, glaring into his coffee. "I pride myself on my general ability to be unaffected by death, but even I have limits."

"I'm not letting you go in there alone," he said, simply. "I can't, and I won't. You can't ask me to do that. So either we both get out or we both stay in, and that's final."

"It's not like I haven't done it on my own before," Sherlock said petulantly, convinced that John was missing the point completely. "What's the point of all of this if I can't even--" But he cut himself off, abruptly, biting down on his own tongue and looking firmly out the window.

"Fine."

He recognised that tone and didn't like it at all.

"We were both coping on our own before, Sherlock. We're just better together. So you'd have to give me a damn good reason before I'd go back to working alone."

"We were better together."

It was a quiet statement, a stark contrast to the sharp bitterness and petulance that came before. A quiet, solemn statement as he kept his eyes on the street outside.

"We were. When we had the work."

He finally turned his gaze back, hollow, resigned. A fight he wasn't going to win but couldn't help but keep fighting anyway. "I am worse than useless to you, now. The best I could possibly do would be to save you from the Games, and it would hardly be a flawless victory. Beyond that, all I can do is watch everything deteriorate."

John breathed out, slowly. So there it was, the core of it all.

"I don't agree with you," he said, quietly. "I don't think it was the work that made us what we were. And I don't think that just because your work isn't here that we can't-- I'm your friend, Sherlock, and that's not because we solved crimes together. That's what we do. It's not what we are."

"It is what I am." Sherlock stated bluntly. "I was very careful to rid myself of anything that wasn't the work. There is no possible way for me to be the man that you knew, back home."

"Alright," John said, simply, the quiet disappointment in his voice something he no longer had the reserves to try and hide. "Alright. You're the work, you can't do your work, you don't exist. Alright."

This conversation had not gone how he had meant it to. John had been meant to see reason, not... Not whatever this was. Hadn't realised he had completely meant what he had said until after he had said it, and then there was nothing left.

He pushed the cup away from him, completely uninterested. Whatever little apatite he had before was gone, replaced by the awkward, hollow knowledge that he had broken something he could not replace. So he said nothing.

"I don't know what I'm supposed to do, if you really believe that," he said after a long, miserable moment, getting steadily more and more angry. "Because I'm pretty sure, Sherlock, that the work doesn't give a damn about John Watson. Sherlock Holmes, my friend, my best friend, is sitting right in front of me and if you're going to be a complete idiot about this--"

He cut himself off, fingers curled into fists on the table.

"I don't know what you're playing at, Sherlock, but you'd better bloody stop it. Right now."

"Don't be an idiot." It wasn't quite a snap - the tone too resigned to be a retort, but it was hard anyway.

"If what you've taken from everything that has happened is that I don't give a damn--"

"Right. So you're a human being with feelings and emotions, no matter how hard you'd like to pretend otherwise, and there's a lot more to you than your work. Glad we've got that one sorted out."

"You are missing the point." Sherlock said, but was starting to get honestly flustered and so could not explain the point if he tried.

The point where he knew what he had been like, before the work. Before John.

When the only way to cope with the boredom was to fill it with anything he could get his hands on, anything that would take the edge off for a moment or more.

Knew that the work gave him the only piece of value that society actually wanted. That the Work is why he was tolerated. He even knew why.

Because, even now, despite the precarious nature in which he found his dearest friendship, his brain was still calculating how to twist it. Telling him to say 'feelings that I'm not allowed to have' in a bitter tone.

But something held him back.

Edited 2013-08-17 00:22 (UTC)

"Yeah, I think I probably am," he agreed, his anger cooling and a mixture of confusion and weariness washing in to take its place.
"I just don't know how to help you, Sherlock. And I want to. That's all."

Sherlock bit his tongue rather than let the bitter retort out, staring down into his cup.

"I'm fine." He said instead, quite done with feelings and the mess associated with them. There was no point arguing. John had already turned him down romantically, which was the only way he could see them being allowed to win as a pair in the games, and he'd also turned down the only mission that Sherlock had managed to create for himself.

No matter how hard he worked, he would never be able to petition for John's removal without his cooperation.

Edited 2013-08-17 00:37 (UTC)

John didn't know what to do with that lie.
"Sherlock," he said, quietly. "Tell me the truth. Not what you think I want to hear, or what you're supposed to say. Tell me what you need me to do."

Sherlock raised his eyes to meet John's, and held them.

"Exactly what on earth could there be that you could do?" He asked, quietly, but firmly. "Every plan I've devised to somehow make it better isn't suitable. I need something on which to focus and the only thing offering itself is endless, pointless death, and I'm fairly sure that can't be healthy in the long run."

He cleared his throat and straightened up.
"Alright, so plan A was to petition me out of the Games. Which- I'd rather not be in them, all things being equal, but I'm not ever going to be okay with me being out and unable to help you. So we need a plan B, or you need to tell me the second half of plan A."