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On Paper
He stood out because of his utter lack of anything that drew attention to himself. He was quiet, calm. He watched. An unassuming wallflower that observed, retained, and learned far more than people would have guessed.
He was modest to a fault and too polite for his own good. He had a temper to him, twisting and curling onto itself just below the surface of his demur demeanor; it just was so rare for someone to incur his wrath that people tended to forget that there. True, he stood up those that he cared about because of loyalty that was just as much a part of his personality as it was the very fiber of his being, but he was never one to raise his voice in order to protect himself.
He was honest, lying only when he thought that he was protecting someone that he loved. And even then, the guilt of the lie leaving his lips was always there.
He was quiet, cool, collected. Easily slipped into the background, almost like he could dim the sunlight when it hit his golden hair or ghosted against his tanned skin; almost forcing your eyes to skip over him.
His bravery is a scar from a bullet that is hidden under his jumper. It's in the way that he is unshakable.
His intelligence, he is a doctor after all, is hidden behind calm blue eyes as deep as an ocean, and a quiet disposition.
But that was what Sherlock loved about him most. All those things made John wonderful, incredible, loyal, loving, kind, brave and true. And all his.
John hid all these things from the world; hid all the things that made John John. He was so successful of hiding himself from everyone, but even he knew that one day, someone would look a little closer. One day, someone would look a little deeper and see that there was a lot more to Doctor John Hamish Watson than he let on.
Chapter One
Sometimes I Just Don't Like You Very Much
(Because You Broke My Heart)
Things were different now, as he knew they would be; as they should have been. You can't have a partnership stay the same when you were so close so quickly, and your friend, your partner, the other half of your soul, takes his own life right in front of your eyes. It can't be the same when the last things he told you, the important things, the special things, the things that he felt the need to tell John with the few precious lasts breaths that he would ever draw, were a complete load of shit.
And then he just appears almost three GOD DAMNED years later, all cheekbones and cool, saying TA DA I'm not dead.
Sherlock will always wonder if he should have expected to get punched in the face before being drawn into John's arms. And if he was expecting it, he surely would have expected John to avoid his face again. Luckily John was very adept at straightening broken noses. He always seemed to forget just how much strength John hid. But that was Johns fault. He made it to bloody easy for people to underestimate him.
John will always wonder how in the hell things could go pear shaped enough that he would meet, move in with, and befriend the stupidest smart person on the face of the planet. But maybe he just attracted dumb. Looking back on his buddies in the military and some of his ex-girlfriends, maybe he needed to put some serious thought into how selective he is about the company he keeps, but that was a thought for later.
During that time, cold dark alone always alone, John moved. He couldn't stand being the flat on Baker Street that forever smelt of the metal tang of copper nitrate and the earthy smells of young mold spores. It was too silent without the heart rendering early morning violin renditions of Tchaikovsky. He didn't have the heart to clear away the organized chaos that was Sherlock's things. Sometimes John would try to imaging Sherlock's Mind Palace, the ruthless organization that must have gone into it in order to know exactly where a certain piece of information was out of all the facts and figures that were the enormity of Sherlock's brilliance. Then he'd look around the flat and chalked it up to laziness, because seriously, what the hell?
The rooms felt too big without Sherlock's overly loud thinking taking up so much damned room that John, in rare moments, would feel claustrophobic.
Even the skull looked lonely without Sherlock's incessant chatter.
He would still see Lestraude. Not nearly as often as he figured that he should, after all, they actually did get on amazingly well despite Sherlock's best efforts. They'd go to a pub and watch a football game every now and then. More so when Greg was going through his divorce, but that was a connection that he still had that didn't hurt nearly as much as the flat did.
Sometimes when the hurt would get too much, the pints to frequent and his pistol like to much of a friendly face, John would go and sleep on Greg's couch just so that he wouldn't be alone with his stupid thoughts.
Sometimes when Greg was feeling alone, all of his earthly possessions barely making a dent in making the new, smaller, flat look filled, he would crash on the couch in John's new flat because he wasn't quite used to not having another living body shuffling around. He tried the skull thing. He just ended up returning it to evidence because he felt it staring at him and it just ended up giving him the creeps.
For a while there had been Mary in his life. Sweet Mary, wonderful Mary. Mary would have been his perfect partner if they had but met before Sherlock. But he had tried; God knew that he tried to make it work with her. He wanted so badly for it to work with her, but after a while even she saw that the part of him that she wanted most he couldn't give her. John simply didn't have any part of his heart left to give.
She had the last of her bags packed and by the door; most of her belongings already had been removed while John was at the surgery for work. Her engagement ring she left by the toaster. Yes, she knew that technically he could marry her.
Sherlock Holmes was dead. At least, he was on paper.
But as he stood in the door to the flat that they had shared for nearly a year and a half, a look of sadness and surrender, but not surprise on his face, she knew that he could never marry her.
She gently cupped his face in one hand as the other drew the leather cord out from under his shirt that he never took off of his neck except to bath.
In that look, that look of utter resignation, she knew. She knew that he could never marry her.
She gently kissed the matching gold bands hanging on that cord.
Yes, she knew that Sherlock Holmes was dead.
At least he was on paper.
She knew that as certainly as she knew that the earth revolved around the sun,, and as much as she knew that John Hamish Watson could never marry her.
Then she gently kissed his cheek before whispering in his ear, "goodbye, my dear John."
Yes, she knew that Sherlock Holmes was dead. Just like she knew that John could never marry her because, dead or alive on paper, Sherlock held onto parts of John that he never got back; parts that he could never give her.
He could never marry Mary because it wasn't just Sherlock that came back from the dead, so John's husband.