Sarah Sawyer was a lovely woman. That thought and few others wove its way through John's head during his interview at the clinic. Just seeing the slight raise of her eyebrows over his curriculum vitae made him smile. For what felt like the first time in years he smiled over something that wasn't an inappropriate joke at a crime scene or the absurdity of his flatmate. Instead, John smiled at a pretty woman in her early thirties who admired his myriad of life experiences. How charmingly and reassuringly normal.
"How was it?" drawled Sherlock, his eyes glued to the cypher photos tacked on the wall before him. John tossed him jacket into what was becoming his favorite chair before moving to gaze unseeingly over the clues.
"Great. She's great." The consulting detective's eyes slid to his profile like flashlight beams to a fresh piece of evidence.
"She?"
"It. The job."
Sarah Sawyer was terribly understanding. She kept her humor through Sherlock crashing her date and even bashed a Chinese smuggler in the head before being held at spear-point. Her resolve, naturally, broke a little there. Sherlock untied her, John bruised his bad leg throwing the crossbow off target, and all was well for the most part.
"No Sherlock on the next date, I promise," John said on the steps up to her flat. He gave her a hug and made sure she was smiling before he said goodnight. He checked the shrubbery for circus performers once she'd gone in, just to be safe.
Sherlock must have been terrifically bored. That explanation should suffice. John pointedly ignored the tall man in the long coat skulking in the shadows at the cinema. He flipped the face of his phone, glowing with sarcastic text messages, over in his pocket so the light wouldn't show through the denim. The first three buzzes he managed to disguise with coughs before excusing himself to the loo to silence his phone. Sarah gave him an amused look when he found his way back to his seat in the pitch of the theater, but said nothing.
Later, John checked the cursed messages. All but the first few repeated the same word over and over: "Dull." Sherlock hadn't even bothered to sign them.
"Maybe next time I'll let you kip at the end of my bed," she said with a hint of cheek, flipping through channels on the telly in that infuriatingly closed robe of hers. They'd been dating two months and John had never set foot in her room. Of course he never dared to take her to Baker Street, given the sheer proximity Sherlock keeps when they were miles away.
John massaged the crick in his neck and stretched his bad shoulder. Sarah was a lovely woman, but she didn't want him all that close. How modern.
"What about the time after that?" he asked, half hope and half bitterness.
There was no time after that, what with 221b getting shrapnel and bomb threats occurring with startling regularity. Sherlock's face lit up every time the phone rang and it made John sick. It also made him run harder, examine everything with his rudimentary observation skills, and trust Sherlock. The "not-a-hero" Sherlock, perhaps the only man alive who could keep up with this mad, mad man. Various reasons for doing so made John jump the insane "Jim from IT" and hold on. The same reasons made him let go when he saw the laser sight hit Sherlock's curls. They were the same reasons he moved into Baker Street and never left. The very same reasons had him shove Sherlock's wiry frame into the pool when the bomb went off and made him not mind the bullet that grazed his arm.
It could be that those same reasons had something to do with him forgetting to phone Sarah when he woke up in the hospital.
Sarah was an incredibly intelligent woman. Being a female doctor in charge of a clinic, even in modern London, comes with challenges. Growing up with three very stupid older brothers prepared her for that. Working through college to afford tuition and London flatshare taught her prudence. Her job taught her compassion. Nothing prepared her for a relationship with a man who ran toward danger, even after he'd been sent home from war. She received a phone call from a man claiming to be Sherlock's brother and rode in the efficiently arranged car to the hospital. Her heart squeezed to see John splayed out on a hospital bed, bruised and singed around the arms and neck. He blinked open his eyes and gave her a strange, surprised look.
If there had been a camera without sound recording inside the hospital room, no one would have thought they were breaking up. No one but a competent lip-reader could have caught the phrase "just friends" on Sarah's lips. No one but a consulting detective could have caught John's sad yet relieved micro-expressions.
Luckily Mycroft had bugged the room for audio and retained powers of observation that sometimes eclipsed those of his brother. As the scene played out on the tablet before him, he texted "Grace" (formerly "Anthea") to send a Doctor Sarah Sawyer of 327c Sheffield Drive some sort of gift basket.
Sarah Sawyer was a wonderfully observant woman. She could tell when a child needed a bit of calm before a jab or when an older patient felt uneasy about a procedure. She saw within moments the connection between the Chinese symbols of the smuggling cypher. She knew that Dr. Watson would work well and help out a great deal at the clinic within moments of meeting him. She could see from the crinkle of his eyes and a shift in his posture that he'd been a tiny bit relieved about their talk in the hospital.
And, from what seemed obvious to her, Sarah knew that Sherlock was madly in love with his flatmate.