Disclaimer: See first chapter.
A/N: This is John. Examining his flatmate. As a doctor I imagine he spent some time dealing with psychiatric care in his studies, and might have gotten a crash course in how people deal with emotion from his fellow soldiers. So I'm cobbling that bit of information with my bit of information gleaned form various personal experiences with similar phenomena to add to Dr. Watson's attempt to figure out how infuriating and profoundly weird new flatmate: Mr. Sherlock Holmes.
Who'd have thought that John would be harder to write? I certainly didn't. I think part of the problem is that since Sherlock wasn't thinking of himself, I didn't have to use names very often to distinguish which He I was talking about. I did here, so it started to feel a little repetitive by the end. I did my best. Since nobody expressed interest in an alphabet series, I am posting this as a separate story, and any future oneshots for the fandom will also be posted individually.
Hope you all enjoy, and please let me know what you thought.
Beneath
His new flatmate was without a doubt incredibly odd, fantastically brilliant, and stunningly energetic when he was happy. This was not exactly hard to spot; if there was one thing Sherlock was entirely crap at it was hiding himself for any length of time. Though he was fantastic actor when the case called for it, he simply didn't care what others thought, and so the face he presented to the world was entirely him.
But the question had been raised in John's curious (for yes, he did have a healthy dose of curiosity, it was just far enough below the level of Sherlock's that his sort of faded into the background) mind was why? What made his flatmate so very... him?
When it came down to intelligence, John knew he himself was smart. Very smart, actually, if he did say so himself. One does not make it through medical school without a brain, a good one. Sherlock, however, was about four times as brilliant as anyone he'd ever met before, and that was saying something. Sherlock, of course, gave John little credit for intelligence, since his all encompassing view of his work, from the broadest strokes of the criminal mind to the minutiae of a crime scene, was decidedly not John's forte. It didn't help that Sherlock had been working with the police for years, and they tended to resent being told they were entirely wrong in Sherlock's uniquely blunt manner simply because they were not up to his exacting standards.
During university, John had taken several classes with the intention of possibly becoming a psychiatrist. It hadn't much interested him in the end, but he did remember one thing that a professor had said that related to his current position:
"The more intelligent a person is, the harder it becomes for them to process non-logical ideas, such as emotion or social interaction. That is not to say that they don't feel; on the contrary, many feel more deeply simply because they don't acknowledge the feelings. They are incapable of processing emotion because they cannot understand it logically, and so their minds essentially partition it off, so that they may appear to be entirely uncaring. They may only show superficial emotions, those they can rationalize away. It is impossible to truly help these people without making them understand that they feel."
The description fit Sherlock perfectly. Brilliant mind, probably off any testing scale, with no social skills to speak of or visible emotional reactions beyond excitement at a new puzzle or frustration with others' inability to keep up. He called himself a sociopath, but John knew that there was a whole world beneath Sherlock's precisely analytical mind.
His biggest proof of that was himself.
Sherlock did not have friends. He was more worried that John had claimed to have met one than he was about John having met an enemy. He antagonized everyone he came into contact with, from Anderson to Donovan to Lestrade, often on purpose just for the hell of it, and he didn't much care for their opinions of him. Even Mrs. Hudson was a sort of professional acquaintance, who tried in her own odd way to mother him, despite his constant dismissal of her efforts. And yet, John would wager that Sherlock considered him to be a friend, no matter what he might say if asked.
He knew that Sherlock had been describing the shooter to Lestrade while sitting in the back of that ambulance, ridiculous blanket wrapped around his shoulders and annoyed look on his face. It wasn't in his nature to ignore the puzzle of an anonymous savior. But then he'd met John's eyes, and he'd trailed off. There'd been dawning realization, and then he'd had a brief argument with the Inspector, before making his way to the edge of the police tape to confront John with his conclusions, which he had obviously not passed along to the police.
There were a million other things, such as Sherlock's pleased expression over John's enthusiasm for his work, his attempt to clean the flat, his checking with John when faced with a room of disapproving and disbelieving stares rather than ignoring them, his trying to let John down gently in that ridiculous and embarrassing restaurant conversation, and his attempt to cure John's apparently psychosomatic limp.
It was entirely out of character for Sherlock Holmes to have a friend. A friend was someone whose opinions mattered, whose emotional state was to be considered (sort of), who could be depended upon for support when it came down to the wire.
John had certainly proved the last one. He'd not only backed Sherlock up when the man had gone off in a car with someone he knew to be a serial killer, he'd actually killed for him. Sherlock had, amazingly, shown some concern over the impact that would have on John, but John had waved it off with a joke and a smile. He'd killed before, and, knowing Sherlock's complete disregard for his own personal safety, would likely be called upon to do so again.
It was the least he could do for a friend.