When Harriet Watson was a child, she had a favourite toy. It was a plush dog, a gift given out of duty by an aunt who visited only when necessary. The dog had received the best of care, but still had the occasional rip or stain, an occupational hazard that Harriet (not Harry yet, not for a while) accepted.
When she was three years old, her younger brother John came into the world. The first personal offense he committed against his sibling was trying to ingest the leg of Harriet's dog when she loaned it to him for his first night out of the hospital. By the time she rescued it the next morning it was soaking wet and John was spitting out bits of fake fur.
Harriet's yells brought their mother, and she consoled the barely-coherent child the same way her mother had done for her.
"With some things," she said, petting her daughter's hair, "you laugh or cry, Harriet. Laugh or cry."
Harriet looks at her brother's disgusted face as he tried to remove the offending articles from his mouth, and starts to laugh.
The answering toothless grin from John makes up for the time she spends later painstakingly drying the dog's leg.
It would be a mantra that Harry (no longer Harriet, too many disappointments and too much life lived to go by that childish moniker) repeated to John after Mum died; when he'd managed to get himself stuck in a tree or ripped his pants while playing rugby. Laugh or cry, she'd say, because she didn't know much else.
John laughed; laughed at ruined toys and rude people and at their dad when he was drunk and Harry wondered if she'd done the right thing.
When John went to Afghanistan, the words that Harry used to say became his lifeline. They ran through his mind, reminding him of a not-so-ideal childhood and that if his father hadn't broken him then, the war wouldn't now.
He stitched up a gaping shrapnel wound in the leg of a boy –and John meant a boy; he couldn't have been older than 20- and (laugh or cry, Johnnie, laugh or cry) tried to find something to say, something nice when it was obvious the boy would probably get his leg amputated, and at best never walk again. John finally commented on the phallic nature of the stitching, earning a harsh, choking laugh and somewhat of a reputation.
When soldiers were wounded, they asked for John Watson. The doctor who did his damndest to get a laugh out of a lad, and never cried. Not after he'd been wrist deep in organs for nothing, not when an aid worker was blown up by an unfortunately placed charge, not when the hospital was full of more dying than living. John Watson was good for a laugh, and that was a rare thing in their own version of hell.
After he was shot, after he'd been sent home and moved his meager possessions into the claustrophobic flat, John sat in front of his barely-there window and laughed. He laughed long and hard about how the one soldier who didn't want to go was the one sent home, for the pointlessness of going to a therapist and giving textbook answers to textbook questions, because he had nothing else to do, and at the melodrama his life had become. John stared at the ordinary people walking on the street, living their ordinary lives, all with their own petty problems and small victories, and laughed.
Then later, after meeting a madman and moving in with him, after chasing a taxi throughout London, after shooting a not-very-nice man who really did deserve it, John laughed. He laughed long and hard at the circus his life had become, and because Sherlock didn't seem the type to put up with crying, even if they were tears of joy at a life with a purpose once more.
But there were moments that John didn't have an answer to (shaking voices over the phone, innocent people dragged into a game they had no idea they were a part of, a psychopath playing games with his flatmate) so he settled for pursing his lips, shaking his head and setting his teeth against something he didn't quite understand. He knew it would disappoint Sherlock, that their odd world views weren't meshing, but there were some things John wouldn't let himself laugh at. He helped Sherlock embroil himself deeper, though, and tried to make up for it by cracking a joke on the semi-homoeroticism of the situation after he'd been strapped to Semtex for what really amounted to a cock-off between two geniuses.
John grins because he can't let himself cry, and he thinks it's the right thing to do, but at this point he's not sure anymore.
He was never really sure, he supposes, as he watches Sherlock lower the gun to aim at the vest, and vaguely hopes that Sherlock's aim is better than when he was firing wildly at the Golem earlier. John keeps his chuckle deep in his chest, because even he knows it's not socially appropriate to laugh when your insane flatmate is trying to save your life.
He thinks he hears his mom –or is it Harry- saying something as his world goes white and gray and as he launches himself at the only thing who matters anymore, his heart beats to the rhythm of one two three, Sherlock Holmes, laugh or cry, laugh or cry.
This was meant to be about the way John views the world, but somehow morphed into a quasi-ending to TGG. Can't say I'm surprised, really.
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