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“Are you alright, John?”
“Hmm? Yeah, fine. Why?”
Sherlock observed his flatmate. “Your attention seems to be elsewhere. You’re speaking approximately 60% less than your personal average, you haven’t reminded me once today about eating, and that’s the third time you’ve rubbed your leg since we sat down.”
John chuckled, surrendering. “Yeah, I’m okay. It’s just… this was Harry’s scene, you know? She came every year after she—” John swallowed. “After she came out. And just… I never came with her. It was her thing, you know, it never even crossed my mind to offer, or ask, or whatever. But looking around at all these families here together, all these ‘free dad hugs’ and ‘proud sibling’ shirts…? I just can’t help wondering if it would have changed things if I’d been… I dunno, more vocal somehow.”
Sherlock nodded, wanting to help his friend but feeling entirely out of his element. His first instinct was logic, of course — that John should let himself off the hook because Harry apparently never invited John either so it wasn’t all his responsibility, because John was in Afghanistan for most of those years anyway, or because it’s a waste of energy to wonder what might have been in an unchangeable past — but John and Molly had spent years teaching Sherlock that that kind of reasoning didn’t help most people. Logic was infuriatingly detached from emotion in the typical human brain. At a loss for how else to help, Sherlock put his hand over John’s trembling one and squeezed once. John exhaled, and Sherlock was relieved to see the man’s shoulders relax a few degrees.
“John, I know we’re here for a case this time,” Sherlock offered a minute later, “but, uh, if you wanted to come back next year on our own, I’d support you. You know, to honor Harry. If that would help?”
John paused a moment, then nodded. “I think Harry would like that. Would have liked that.” He swallowed. “But I didn’t think you’d be into—” John gestured at the eye-popping array of rainbow glitter all around them, “all of this.”
Sherlock smiled and replied sincerely, “It’s fine, John. It’s all fine with me. I may not understand most of it, but I have no objection to people being unapologetically themselves. Honestly, straight romance doesn’t make any more sense to me than any other combination, so who am I to judge? And if there’s one thing you’ve taught me, it’s the value of companionship in one’s life. I see no reason to begrudge other people their happiness together.”
John smiled and flipped his hand over to give Sherlock’s a grateful squeeze.
Sherlock squeezed back. “Of course if we do start coming, that means I’ll need to add a new section to my Mind Palace to properly catalog all these flags. How many do they need?!”
John chortled. “There are 8 billion people in the world, Sherlock. I could say that means there are 8 billion life experiences and we should be grateful they’ve agreed on a few dozen flags to categorize what some of them have in common. I don’t know all of these identities and symbols, of course, but I’ve learned a few over the years.” John went on to explain the 6-color traditional rainbow, the 8-color inclusive rainbow, the trans and bi and lesbian flags, as well as the more recent Quasar progress pride flag with the rainbow and trans and multicultural stripes all combined.
“If they have that one to represent everyone, why do they need so many individual subcategory flags too?” Sherlock asked.
“If people know what ‘detectives’ generally do for a living, why does it matter that you’re specifically a ‘consulting detective’?” John countered.
“Hmm, point taken.”
Ever the keen observer, Sherlock soon spotted a flag John hadn’t identified yet. Across the street, a woman dressed in a zebra-striped shirt, glittering silver tutu, and purple leggings was holding a flag with a split heart — the left half matched the colors of her outfit and the right half had a similar color palette but with two shades of green instead of purple. Sherlock asked, “Did they run out of colors so they had to start using combinations instead? Because if so, the number of possible combinations is enormous and will necessitate a much larger database entry…”
John chuckled. “I doubt if they ran out of colors, but that’s not a flag I recognize, so I don’t know.”
“That’s the Ace/Aro flag,” a voice chimed in. The teenager standing on the corner beside their bench turned to face the pair. He — xe, John mentally corrected himself upon reading the teen’s pronoun pin — was dressed in a gold vest, black skinny jeans, and stacks of rainbow beads halfway up xir forearms. “The purple side is for ace — asexual — meaning someone who doesn’t experience sexual attraction toward any gender. It’s like the ‘none of the above’ option on a multiple choice test. The green side is aro — aromantic — which is basically the same but for romantic attraction instead of physical. They’re two separate flags, but you often see them together because they overlap for a lot of people. Like, a lot of people who are ace are also aro, and vise versa, but it’s possible to be one without the other.”
With that, the light turned green and the teenager stepped off the curb. John watched xem cross the street and embrace the very person whose sign had prompted Sherlock’s question. John glanced at Sherlock, expecting the man’s keen gaze to have resumed scanning the scene. Instead, Sherlock was staring blankly toward the spot where the teen had hugged xir friend, even though the two had already walked away. John recognized Sherlock’s “data processing” face and gave him a minute, but when the man appeared to have forgotten how to blink or even breathe normally, John grew concerned.
“Sherlock?”
No response.
“Sherlock?” John tried again, placing a gentle hand on the detective’s shoulder.
Sherlock blinked rapidly, coming partially back to himself but still staring into the middle distance. If Mycroft Holmes had shown up dressed in an inflatable rainbow dinosaur costume to march as the parade’s Grand Marshall, John thought, Sherlock could not have looked more thunderstruck.
“You okay?” John asked.
Without turning, Sherlock quietly said, “Ace Aro.” His voice was simultaneously cautious and entranced, almost like he was uttering a prayer. “Did xe mean that those two words are types of Pride? That… feeling that way… is an LGBTQ thing?”
Now it was John’s turn to blink a moment before realizing what his friend had apparently heard in the teen’s definition. Oh. “Yeah, I suppose so. I mean, it kind of makes sense, right? If all the other flags amount to varying degrees and types of attraction to some or all genders, then it makes sense that ‘none of the above’ would be an equally valid option. It’s just as natural as any other way people can be wired, isn’t it?”
Sherlock blinked again, looking down at the curb now. “Wired,” he echoed in that same wonder-struck tone. “So this is a… this is a real thing? There’s a word for it? For… us?” He looked like he was trying out the last word, unsure how it would taste on his tongue. Then more quietly still, he added, “For people like me?”
John’s first reflex was to escape this suddenly highly personal conversation with a joke (“If there’s a word specifically for throwing a person out a window, I’m pretty sure they’ve come up with a word for everything by now…”) but he checked himself. Sherlock was clearly having a moment and John didn’t want to mess it up. This time, his brain unhelpfully amended.
“Sure,” John offered gently. “You may be one of a kind in many ways, but you’re not alone in feeling that way. Or, I suppose, in not feeling that way, as the case may be. See? There’s another person holding an ace flag. And that person’s bandana looks like the aro colors. And there’s another. Geez, it’s even right here on the flyer for today’s parade. I never even noticed. You’re definitely not the only one, Sherlock. If that’s…” John paused, not wanting to overstep. “If that’s how you identify.”
Sherlock said nothing, but John could tell the idea was still processing. Had his friend truly never realized there were others like him in the world? Was he so accustomed to feeling like an alien among humans that his detachment from romantic experience was just par for the course, just another of Sherlock’s many anomalies, so he’d never looked into whether others might feel the same way? Was “married to my work” just another layer of his armor?
Sherlock continued quietly, as if still just thinking out loud. “I never imagined… I just assumed… I mean, there are so many things about relationships that have always eluded me, I just figured this was part of that whole. Growing up, the other children would talk about their ‘crush’ or how ‘hot’ someone was, and it felt like they were speaking a foreign language. The more ‘detailed’ their comments got, the more repelled I felt. My parents called me a ‘late bloomer’ and said I’d ‘understand when I was older,’ but I’m 33 years old, John, and it’s never happened. I just don’t feel that way about anyone, men or women or anyone else. I’ve also never understood the appeal of trading salivary microbes with another individual, let alone any other… anatomical contact,” he shuddered and wrinkled his nose. “Classmates used to call me dreadful names because I was the only boy in our year not interested in such things, but they called me names for so many things, I learned to tune them all out. But now to learn that they were actually wrong all this time? That I’m not…” Sherlock swallowed and finally turned to meet John’s gaze. “Not defective?”
John’s heart broke at the 14-year-old Sherlock shining so plainly through his adult friend’s eyes. He squeezed Sherlock’s hand again and held his gaze as he replied sincerely, “There is nothing wrong with you, Sherlock. You hear me? Nothing. Even if you were the only one in the world, that wouldn’t make you defective, just unique. But in this case, the way you experience love is not actually unique at all. The ace and aro flags communicate that much — there are plenty of others who feel the way you do. And unfortunately I’d wager many of them grew up hearing the same things you did before they learned the right vocabulary to express themselves. And not just express, but celebrate their identity. It is ‘pride,’ after all, right? It’s not just ‘fine’ like it’s not a bad thing — it’s ‘fine’ like it’s actively wonderful because it’s part of who you are, and you are wonderful. The way you’re wired is every bit as valid as anyone else. Nothing in you is missing, or lacking, or less than, just because you don’t feel physically or romantically attracted to other people.”
Sherlock nodded once and looked around the scene as if seeing it all for the first time, a genuine smile spreading across his face like a sunrise. He squeezed John’s hand and said, this time with a newfound quiet confidence,
“Pride.”