The Moonblood Murders
John
I seem to have spent a sizable amount of my life being tired. People have always had to wake me up. I could never do it before midday of my own accord.
"John, get up, you're late for school!"
"If you don't drag your lazy arse out of bed right now you'll miss this interview!"
"Wake up, John! You're due at a lecture in ten minutes."
"John, we have to go, it's our exam today!"
BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP
"Doctor Watson, fifteen minutes until parade, Sir!"
"Oi, John, did you volunteer for this night scouting party or what?"
"John, John, can you hear me? Open your eyes; talk to me, just stay awake, yeah?"
Since that final instance of being forcibly pulled from the abyss of pain and darkness I entered when I was shot in the shoulder whilst on a tour of duty as a serving medical officer in Afghanistan everything changed. I didn't want to go to sleep because every time I closed my eyes I relived the moment when the bullet entered my flesh, simultaneously shattering my collar bone and any bravery I might once have had. Then my entire being was consumed with confusion and bewilderment and terror and a searing throb of agony that I felt as blood pumped out of the hole of gristle, torn muscle and fragments of bone that used to be my shoulder.
With the persistent, sly exhaustion came shame. It took three months for them to rebuild my shoulder but after that I received an honourable discharge from the army because I was so messed up. I had developed a limp and couldn't walk without a stick although there was no damage to my legs. My left hand was almost constantly shaking and I felt as though I was utterly alone. Nobody in my family wanted to know apart from Harry but she was still living with mum and dad so I couldn't very well ask to kip on their sofa for a bit. I had no friends. Nobody understood. I didn't deserve their kind words or their pity. They'd know if they'd been where I had, staring death in the face for weeks on end, on constant edge, the lives of so many other people in my hands. I was given a shitty little MoD flat to live in and referred to a therapist who diagnosed me with post-traumatic stress disorder, an intermittent tremor in my left hand, a psychosomatic limp and severe depression. I was a coward, a cripple, broken, popping happy pills to stop myself finishing what the Taliban started. I was a doctor. I knew which arteries to cut. I clung onto life in a constant state of despair, sitting on the uncomfortable bed in the uncomfortable flat, staring blankly at the damp running down the walls, holding my unloaded gun in both hands, finger on the trigger, aimed up from between my slack knees to my face. If I began to relax into sleep, my finger pulled the trigger and the loud click shook me into wakefulness. I only exited my flat to see my therapist. I felt stupid walking with a stick I knew I didn't need. I had failed at everything.
After one visit to my therapist I was walking through Hyde Park on my way home when I met one of my friends from medical school, David Stamford. He stopped me said he'd heard about what had happened to me and blah blah blah; I fixed a false smile onto my face and lied that I was fine, thanks for asking, all the while wishing I could shoot him for being content and for having no comprehension of what it felt like to be me. Then I wished I could shoot myself for being a selfish bastard. Anyway, David said he knew someone from the hospital where he worked who was looking for someone to share flat with and did I want to meet him and have a look around the said flat. I agreed, just so I'd have something to do for the rest of the day to keep me awake and alive.
We walked in a combination of awkward silence and small talk to the lab of St. Bart's Hospital where I met the man who saved my life. He was bending over a microscope, wearing a long coat and blue scarf. He seemed to me like a willow branch, long, slender, elegant in his concentration. David cleared his throat and the man raised his head and hooked his eyes into my own. Bright blue, piercing, penetrating, they saw me for what I was, they saw how afraid I had become and showed not one shred of pity, only inquisitiveness. They looked into my soul and cleansed it slightly. The man easily stretched his prominently boned face into a questioning, lopsided smile. He covered the distance between us in three easy strides, without ever taking his intense eyes from mine.
Sherlock Holmes offered me his pale, long-fingered hand which I immediately took and shook; his grip was firm and strong. It made me feel as if he were offering me an escape from my misery, something to hold onto. Then he posed the question that showed me how deeply his eyes had scrutinised my being.
"Iraq or Afghanistan?"
"I'm sorry?" I replied, awestruck that he knew about me to such a deep level after less than thirty seconds of being in the same room.
"You heard me."
"Afghanistan."
That was it. We were going to look at a flat together. I told Sherlock that I thought it rather forward; we didn't know each other and we'd barely been talking for five minutes. He then reeled off all the things he knew about me just by looking. He knew I was an army doctor, he knew I had been invalided home from Afghanistan, He knew I had brother (actually a sister but even Sherlock makes mistakes) who was worried about me but who I disapproved of, perhaps because they were an alcoholic but more likely because they'd left their wife, he knew that my therapist thought that my limp was psychosomatic, and he agreed with her.
Sherlock
The day started off averagely. I spent a few hours in the morning studying the development of bruises after death and being pestered almost constantly by Molly, who I could tell had had an argument with her boyfriend that morning. In the afternoon I went from the morgue to the lab and analysed some fibres found at a crime scene of a case Lestrade needed my help with. He's so stupid; I don't know how he managed to claim that position in the Metropolitan Police. He observes practically nothing and thinks even less. From looking at the fibres and cross-matching them with ones I'd taken from the clothes of the suspects I was able to deduce that the victim's sister had killed her; a conclusion I had reached the previous week but Lestrade will insist on evidence.
Someone coughed behind me, causing me to look up. I am very adverse to romance. I don't believe in destiny or fate or love. At least I didn't before I looked up and saw John Hamish Watson for the first time. Even Lestrade could probably deduce that this was a man on the edge of a metaphorical chasm of self-destruction who was already swaddled tightly in despair. It took me eight seconds to notice his limp was psychosomatic and that, therefore, he had therapist, in those eight seconds I took in the army hair cut which was just beginning to grow out which led me to deduce he had been invalided home from a war zone, although not from a wound in the leg, He was obviously at home at St. Bart's so he was an army doctor invalided home with a therapist and psychosomatic limp and a therapist. Fifteen seconds. When I shook his hand I received further evidence that he was recently returned from a war zone; his tan line stopped at the cuffs of his shirt so he hadn't been sunbathing. I couldn't work out whether he had come from Iraq or Afghanistan so I asked him and he told me. I discovered he disapproved of his brother (turned out to be sister, I should have noticed that) but that the brother was concerned for John when I noticed the inscription on the phone 'to Harry, all my love, Cara XXX' and the scratches around the charge socket. Thirty-six seconds.
We were obviously talking throughout the thirty-six seconds it took me to know John Watson. I think I liked him. I found myself wanting to share a flat with him not just to share the bills and so he could buy food and other essentials so I had had more time to spend on cases and more money to spend on nicotine patches and shoes. I wanted him for company. I wanted to help him because he seemed so alone and so afraid and so human.