Author's Note: This can be read as a stand-alone or as a companion piece to my earlier fic "I'll Be Mother," about the childhood of Sherlock and Mycroft Holmes. This piece is simply a series of short scenes detailing the lives of Harry and John Watson through the perspective of Harry, and will consist of eighteen chapters covering the first eighteen years of John's life.
John Watson was born in the turbulent wake of a dead soldier. A father, a war hero, who was meant to be home in time to see the birth of his second child, his first son. But he never made it back.
Harriet was four years old at the time. She understood very little and was not even present at the hospital until it was time to take her new brother home. She had spent the past two months surrounded by people wearing black and strangers giving her hugs and grown-ups crying and an entire existence filled with visits from obscure relatives and meals that were always casserole made by someone other than Mum. She'd been sent to see a man a few times who talked to her about Dad and how she was feeling and asked her to draw pictures about it. Sometimes she cried about Dad, but then again, she didn't fully understand how long "never" was going to last.
When she did finally see the baby, she was enthralled with him. She wanted to inspect his tiny fingers and toes, touch the soft little hairs on the top of his head, hold him on her lap, peek at the funny little toothless gums behind his lips. John was Dad's name, so it followed, somehow, in her mind, that the Dad who had gone away forever was being replaced by this new John, this little crying bundle of blankets and soft skin.
"When will he learn to walk?" she asked eagerly, as Mum held her up over the edge of the crib so she could peer down at him. "When will he talk? When can he play game with me?"
"He's only a baby now, Harriet. He'll have to get much bigger before he's strong enough and smart enough to do all that."
"Feed him extra milk," the toddler suggested, and Mum smiled. It was a sad smile, like all of the smiles these days. Then something enormous occurred to Harriet and she gasped.
"Mum!" she cried, distraught and wriggling out of her mother's grasp. "Who's gonna teach him about catching frogs and building castles and all the places of the map!"
Mum gulped and caught a tear at the corner of her eye before it dripped down her cheek.
"I don't know, sweetie," she said. "Dad's not coming back. I guess someone else will have to do it."
Harriet did not feel that she was good enough at catching frogs and building castles and knowing all the places of the map, at least not good enough to teach Baby John when he got big enough to learn. And she didn't think Mum knew how. So that night, laying in her bed with the zoo animal sheets, she cried, because the man who helped her draw pictures said it was okay to cry, and then she got up and tip-toed into John's room and promised she would learn to be better at all those things so by the time he got big enough she could teach him.
Frog-catching, after all, was important to know.
