For my dearest, darlingest Paula, for GGE 2015. I love you, Popo.
Thanks to Sammie for the help.
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John will never forget the first time his mother tells him about her scar. "They call them Soul Scars because they're said to bear the name of your soulmate, the one who will complete you." She rolls up her pant leg and shows him the name scarred into her knee. "I skinned my knee when I was eight," she says. "Your father's name showed up and I knew it was meant to be."
John is seven, and not yet a cynic. He doesn't yet know that his father is a drunk who never deserves his mother's kindness, nor that no matter how much his mother loves his father, it will never be enough.
He is seven years old, and he believes.
.
He is ten when he scrapes his thumb up on the pavement and the name Mary Morstan forms in the scar tissue.
He cries. Harry laughs at him. Harry, who has scars all over her body already at twelve, who had her one name by age three. Clara Spencer.
John isn't like Harry. When he gets older, he will be glad for this. At age ten, he envies her. Harry is always so sure.
.
John enlists out of secondary school without much thought for the name on his thumb. He knows better than to think the marks mean perfection, now. He's seen his parents fall apart and he's seen too many friends expect perfection only to be kept waiting and waiting, faced with a soulmate who had flaws, He doesn't want to live his life waiting or searching for something that's just as likely to disappoint as to please him.
He enlists and the military puts him through medical school and John is content.
.
He is mostly content in the sands of Afghanistan, too, as strange as that sounds. He knows what he is doing, understands his responsibilities, feels confident in himself.
He holds lives in his hands and he is all right with that, which is maybe a bad thing. But in the middle of Afghanistan nobody really gives a damn if John is an adrenaline junkie or has a God complex or whatever the hell is wrong with him as long as he does his job competently.
And then a bullet tears through his shoulder. Entry wound in the front, under his collar bone, small and mostly clean, but the bullet ricocheted when it hit his scapula from the inside and then it splintered several times. Between the exit wounds and the places they had to tear open to get the pieces out ("they" being shitty second-rate emergency medics operating on their own surgeon with limited supplies in the middle of a god-damned desert) his shoulder is not really a shoulder anymore. It's a mutilated mess of skin and muscles that don't attach where they're supposed to.
John changes the bandages for the first few weeks and then stops looking at it altogether. It's a reminder of what he's lost.
They ship him home. He can't perform field surgery when he can barely use his left hand. He practically has to relearn how to shoot without using his left hand for a bracer. They put him in physical therapy, where John keeps his shirt firmly on and won't let his therapist see the mark that must be starting to scar. Then they put him in therapy for his head. She calls it PTSD, says that's why his hand still tremors, asks if he has nightmares of gunshots.
He doesn't know how to explain that it isn't the war that's haunting him. Or at least, not entirely. He misses feeling competent, feeling needed.
His muscular function improves. His mental function does not.
.
John doesn't look for her, for Mary. Ella, his therapist, blames that on the war as well. He doesn't know how to tell her that he doesn't. He doesn't blame it on anything, doesn't think it's a bad thing that he won't push and prod at fate. John, who does so well at being told what to do, taking orders, doesn't know how to let a scar on his finger dictate his life.
Harry says their childhood has screwed him over. John tells her to go to hell. After all, Harry's just broken up with Clara, so she's not doing much better. Harry doesn't try to visit again.
John moves in with a madman because Sherlock makes him feel alive again. Makes him feel needed and necessary again.
.
Then Sherlock jumps. It's the sort of thing that divides John's life in two — Before Sherlock Jumped and After Sherlock Jumped.
Ella tries to make him talk about it. John isn't sure he's ready for that.
But Ella wants to know why it matters. She wants to know why Sherlock mattered the way that he did when John won't even look for his soulmate.
For a while, John doesn't know how to answer that.
Eventually, he tells her that he doesn't need a scar to tell him that Sherlock defined his life, if only briefly.
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Mary starts work at the clinic five months After. She introduces herself as Nurse Morstan and John freezes. Experimentally, he introduces himself as Dr. John Watson, even though he almost never uses his whole name. Mary doesn't react, but something in her eyes glints and John knows.
He catches her after his shift is over and asks her to dinner. Her smile is beautiful. "Very well," she says.
.
Mary is charming and funny and very clever. She understands John without needing explanation, which is some sort of miracle. She's not afraid to push, pestering him to go out when he doesn't want to or do things he's never done before.
She doesn't really read the news so she's never heard of Sherlock Holmes and maybe that's a relief and maybe it's a tragedy. Either way, John's not going to be the one to bring it up.
She's a bit perfect. This, this is what John dreamed of when he was seven years old and his mother told him about Soul Scars. This is what he dreamed of when he was ten and Mary's name scarred itself into John's thumb. This is what he dreamed of before all his dreams fell apart.
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After they've had sex for the first time, John lies on his stomach, almost dozing. Mary, propped up on one elbow, is tracing swirls across the muscles of his back. Her touch flutters over his deltoids, toward his left trapezius. It takes him a moment to realize she's tracing his scar tissue, because so many nerves are missing or disconnected that he can't really feel his shoulder anymore.
She lingers there, and John nearly drops off into sleep before she speaks.
"Who's Sherlock Holmes?"
John jerks upward, snapping his head to look at her.
"I thought you said you didn't watch the news," John says, because Mary, Mary has never asked about Sherlock before. And John doesn't bring him up. The ache has yet to fade away.
Mary frowns, her eyebrows furrowing. "I don't, really."
"Then how do you know that name?"
Mary blinks. "John, how long have you had this scar?"
It feels like a non-sequitur but it's Mary so it must be connected. John shrugs, the movement awkward in his position. "Since I got back from Afghanistan. A few years."
"You haven't looked at your shoulder in a few years, then. His name's right here."
John can't breathe. He can't… He can't. "What?" he gasps out, his voice high and thin.
Mary's finger traces over his scar. "So you know him, then."
John's mind is whirling out of control, trying to incorporate this new information into everything he thought he knew.
"Jesus," he says eventually. "I didn't know."
Mary lets him catch his breath. She doesn't ask, but he can hear the expectation in her silence.
"He was my best friend," John says after a pause. "He was mad as a hatter but utterly brilliant and he… died. Almost two years ago. I still miss him." He doesn't know how to explain Sherlock in words, how to make such an elusive man tangible and definable.
Mary curls an arm around his right shoulder and presses her cheek in between his shoulder blades.
"John," she says and it's only then that John realizes that he is shaking.
"I'm sorry," he says.
"You don't ever have to apologize for having more love to give, John."
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Sherlock never had a soul scar. Oh, he has scars. He is a recovering addict, of course he has scars. Track marks run up and down his arms.
But Sherlock is careful. The marks from a needle are too small to ever form a name, and he never lets himself earn a scar anywhere else. He knows when to step away from the explosions he causes.
But now he's faked his death and single handedly taken down a massive crime ring and... He has scars.
The first was the base of his palm, gained by throwing himself to the pavement to avoid a bullet flying at his head. The wound is faint so the scar is as well, but John's name is etched there.
It has been three years and Sherlock wants nothing more than to return to John.
John, who has Mary Morstan written across his finger. John, whom Sherlock belongs to but who doesn't belong to Sherlock.
Sherlock wonders if it matters. He didn't need a scar to see that John is special. John grounds him. He needs John, even if John doesn't need him.
As the bullet sinks into Moran's skull, Sherlock is already planning his way home.
.
John punches him in the face. Twice. And headbutts him. But then Mary whispers something in John's ear and suddenly Sherlock's whole world rearranges because John has his name on his shoulder. And Mary, Mary isn't mad; she isn't jealous or possessive even though she has a sort of right to be. Sherlock gave up any chance with John when he jumped off the roof of Bart's and made John watch.
But John is so much more than Sherlock has any right to expect and so is Mary and somehow, incredibly, Sherlock is forgiven.
Sherlock is welcome.
.
Baker Street feels like something was always missing before, something that isn't missing now, with John and Mary and Sherlock and a child on the way (and Sherlock has no idea how to deal with a child but John and Mary have faith in him and maybe that's enough).
Sherlock is content, more content than he ever thought he was capable of and he doesn't expect anything more from life.
Then Mary starts cursing a blue streak from the kitchen one day and John rushes in and Sherlock follows and there is blood everywhere. But it's okay because there's a doctor in residence. John fixes it and Sherlock thinks nothing more of it until over a month later when Mary asks him to sit down beside her on the sofa.
She looks like she has something to say but instead she just turns up her left palm, the one she'd cut.
Sherlock Holmes is only just legible across her lifeline.
Sherlock blinks. He doesn't know what he's supposed to do with this.
Mary shakes her head at him. "I don't expect anything from you, Sherlock. I just thought you ought to know."
Sherlock rubs awkwardly at John's name on his palm. He doesn't know what to say.
Mary stands, kisses his cheek, and walks away. She doesn't ask for anything else.
.
He burns his wrist when a drop of water hits a mix of sodium and chlorine and explodes quite spectacularly. For a while, he ignores it, but when John comes into the kitchen and finds the angry red wound, John is furious at him for neglecting his own health. John spreads burn cream with gentle fingers and wraps it tight and then smacks Sherlock on the side of the head. "Stop neglecting your health, you idiot."
Sherlock stretches his face into something sheepish.
The burn is deep. The skin peels almost a week later, and when it does, Sherlock can see what's coming in underneath. The name she's claimed as her own.
Mary Morstan.