Disclaimer: No, I don't own. I'm skint, so please don't sue.
Beta'd by Jeanniebird.
My first Sherlock fic and a 221B challenge.
People said that Sherlock Holmes was a great man, and that he might one day be a good one. People later said that John Watson was the catalyst for that change.
But that isn't true. A catalyst, a true catalyst, merely speeds up a chemical reaction and is unchanged by it. And John Watson was utterly, irredeemably changed by Sherlock Holmes.
If anything, the catalyst was Mike Stamford, who brought the two together that day in January, when John was limping through a park, part of him still in Afghanistan, where the piece of him that lived for adrenaline resided. Stamford was the chemist who placed the acid and the alkali together, who mixed the two reactants.
And John turned Sherlock Holmes from a machine into a man, a noble gas to a reactive, explosive element.
And Sherlock brought that little bit of John Watson home, brought him back to Britain and in turn made him into something special.
So John Watson wasn't the catalyst. He was a reactant, one of the two that mixed and turned into totally new things. They went from Sherlock Holmes and Dr John Watson to Sherlock-Holmes-and-Dr-JohnWatson.
Of course, John wouldn't have known all this if it hadn't been for Sherlock's experiments, that more than once left the flat scattered with neutralised chemicals and broken beakers.
