John by any other name
Fluffy 285-word one-shot with implied Sherlock/John. Sherlock ponders John's name.
John.
Ever since Sherlock got to know him, that name just seemed not so commonplace, not so plain and boring and predictable to him anymore. It was as if the doctor had called up the editors of the Oxford English Dictionary and redefined those four letters lined up just so.
Moriarty, sure, with that flourish of a name, could mock John's name all he wanted and still wouldn't be worth a sliver of what John was worth. And his own name, Sherlock, just seemed so cumbersome, so pretentious, that it didn't quite fit with John.
But he knew he fit with John, so very well, tight like two interlocking gears. That was all the motivation he needed to stay as Sherlock.
Every time he enunciated that syllable, "John", it felt so right, the word so simple and yet so pleasing. Whether he said it with ennui, or pleading, or husky, or gasping, didn't really matter. What mattered is that he had someone to say it to, and he could and would and did and must say it, over and again.
Everything that John meant to him had gradually, without his notice, been infused into the name, like the essence of tea and bergamot oozing out into scalding water — loyal, reassuring, comforting, safe, proper, and warm.
And all past instances of that name he had come across, catalogued in that vast library that was his faultless memory cache, be it John Smith, John Doe, John Brown, the repetitious names of this suspect and that victim, they had paled and faded and gone away into the wallpaper of his mind, herded away by the blossoming, ever-expanding pleasantness in the foreground of his mind that John Watson occupied.
Author's Note: First fanfiction piece. It demanded to be written and fleshed out. Side-effect of reading too much fanfiction is wanting to actually write some. :D