He perplexed her. She wasn't used to being perplexed. As a surgeon it had been her job to take the pieces of a puzzle, in this case the beautiful facets of the human body, and piece them together in a way that would make something broken whole, save someone's life even. As a sober companion she had done the same: make people whole again; fill the gaps in their hollow existences that narcotics had occupied.
Sherlock wasn't the first client she'd become attached to. Empathetic by nature, Joan Watson had always found goodbyes difficult, but this one especially so. There was something about him; something she'd never seen in the others – a depth. It was a depth she'd never experienced; not in her deepest explorations of the human cadaver; not in her sojourns with recovering addicts willing to bear their souls to her for the price of a cup of tea and a willing ear. And it made her feel alive. This unpredictability, this restless energy that infused his very being – it ignited her. It ignited something inside of her that she'd kept buried deep within the loneliest corners of her being. It fulfilled a longing; a longing for something more than she had hitherto allowed herself to be.
Working with Sherlock was like being alive on a totally different level from the rest of humanity, and just knowing that was the most exhilarating thing she'd ever felt. They might share their knowledge with Gregson and his team on an almost daily basis, but they were not like him. It was a kind of superiority, yes, but a superiority for the greater good. Not for money or for personal gain of any kind, but just for the peace and preservation of that beautiful race that was humanity.
She knew that Sherlock didn't see it that way of course, cynic that he was. His view of humanity had always been a dark, morose one; more so since the death of Irene. He couldn't imagine the world as Joan saw it, and she could never see herself inhabiting his mind-set. Maybe that's why they gelled so perfectly together: no questions, no judgments, no limitations.
And then there was Irene; one of the many corners of his mind to which she would never truly be allowed access, and certainly the most fascinating. The truth was that Irene was his humanity… or she had been. She was what brought the omnispective Sherlock Holmes down from the lofty heights of his psychological prowess to the stark reality of earth as it really stood. And what a descent it had been, all flames and burning needles laced with sedatives to dull the pain and searing emotional torment. Irene's death had broken him; Joan Watson, the surgeon, had put him back together. Not with her needle this time, though they both would have relished the irony of it, but with her mere being.
Joan Watson had fixed a man without her surgical toolkit. She had traversed the spectrum of the human psyche and found what it was that he most needed; what it was that he would never ask for. A friend. And the truth was that for all this glorious friendship, this companionship without the need to map out the broad contours of human sexual relations, that still, in the secret corners of her heart she felt something else tugging insistently at her consciousness. Maybe she was just the slightest bit in love with him.