Author's Note: John Watson may not trust easily, but I've always imagined he's had a few very close friends before Sherlock, people who manage to earn their way past that barrier. This is a soft piece of writing, rather like a shade of grey. The character of Dan Henderson came to life very quietly during a roleplay with a friend, and has been lurking in the back of my mind every since, as the friend, however briefly, before Sherlock Holmes.

I must once again send out a grateful thank you to StillWaters1, whose stories greatly inspired me during the writing of this one.

Thank you for taking the time to have a peek, and your comments are always appreciated. :)

The Paper Memorial

On the morning of November third, John Watson is very quiet.

Pale sunlight streams onto his face, stark and unwelcome. He awakens with the feeling of one who has hardly slept at all, or at the very least, one who has drifted in and out of sleep many times over the long course of the night until rest is little more than an illusion, mocking him. Luckily, he's too weary to put up more than a token defence, and doesn't end up expending energy he doesn't have on a mental battle he doesn't want to fight. He opens his eyes, blinks, and finds himself biting his lip a moment later. Now, why is he doing that?

Oh. He remembers.

He lays there for longer than usual, staring with a particularly blank expression toward the soft shadows melting along the corner between wall and ceiling. His eyes drift slowly from one edge of the room to the other, purposelessly, as though searching for something that isn't there. Well, it isn't, he tells himself, and abruptly runs a rough hand over his hair, which is still tousled from sleep. He needs a distraction. He also knows he's not going to get one.

Still, the silence is comforting, in its gentle, encouraging way. John closes his eyes again, briefly, losing himself in the stillness until it starts pulling at his thoughts, and then he carefully detaches himself from it before it becomes too much.

There is no panic in his mind, however; no rush of disbelief, no loss of control. He sets his jaw in a manner that is quietly defiant, and if there is anything odd in his behaviour, it is merely that he moves with slightly more care than usual, like someone who tiptoes to avoid waking another in the same room. Eventually, he rises, pulling back the sheets with a low sigh and touching his bare feet to the rug. It's quite cold against his toes, and he shivers.

His morning shower takes longer, too, but he isn't much bothered by that. The warm water is soothing against his skin, a continuous stream to massage away the aches that are half physical and half only in his mind. He tips his head back, letting the water flow over his face. They're stubborn little things, those aches. It will probably take all day, perhaps even until evening, for them to recede again—but, well, he's resigned himself to that. For now, twenty minutes of the steady sound of water rushing in his ears is enough to keep him braced, and he runs his hands over his head and lets the feeling carry all other apprehension away.

When he finally makes it downstairs, he finds Sherlock already awake; the detective is flipping through a pile of newspapers littering the coffee table, his hands flicking and shoving, sending the articles flapping in protest onto the floor. He's muttering something under his breath, something about "saw it here" and "just last week", but instead of giving Sherlock a word of reproof, John merely shakes his head and leaves his friend to it.

It's coffee this morning, not tea. John sends the coffee maker on its way, then picks his way back across the sitting room and manages to find a few pages of today's paper that have been flurried into a corner by the desk. He settles down in his usual armchair to the incessant murmurings of Sherlock's voice somewhere in the background, but by the time his eyes have reached the end of the page, he realises he hasn't taken in a word of it.

Of course, just because Sherlock is distracted doesn't mean his senses are switched off. They almost never are. Slowly, the rustle of papers dies down, and then, for a moment, there is absolute silence.

"You're making coffee."

John flips the top half of the newspaper down to look at his friend. "Yes," he says shortly.

Sherlock is looking at him with that intent, deductive look, the one that gives you the feeling you're being peeled layer by layer like a particularly vulnerable onion. John shifts a bit in his chair, the paper crackling once or twice between his fingers, but he returns the look with one of his own, which is cool and unperturbed even if he himself is far from that state. Go on, the look says. Have at me, Sherlock.

But he's not really worried, not really, only faintly annoyed. Because he knows how to close his expression even to Sherlock, and he already has, without regret. Today is not for his best friend's eyes.

A grin almost flits across his face. Sherlock is going to hate that.

"But you're not working today."

"Nope."

"And even if you were, coffee is only for the days you expect will have a high stress level." Sherlock's tone is verging on bewildered; John can almost see the connections being made in his friend's head, all of which are bound to meet dead ends. "You take tea on any normal day; you prefer it. It soothes you. But coffee is a stimulant—additional, not necessary."

John keeps quiet, letting the monologue play out as it will. Without a word, he puts the newspaper down again and goes back into the kitchen.

"So, why," continues Sherlock, raising his voice slightly from the other room, "why, John, are you making coffee?"

"Maybe I just feel like it," John says, knowing that neither of them will believe that for a second. He is pouring his coffee a moment later, into the well-worn medical corps mug he keeps on the top shelf, and he has just turned around again and nearly brought the thing to his lips when he finds Sherlock's nose about half an inch away from his own—sniffing.

"What the hell—Sherlock, stop. Go away—"

"It's not only coffee, it's cheap coffee," Sherlock mutters, apparently still determined to get his face as close as possible to the steam rising from the mug. "Why would you drink—?" He breaks off and spins on the spot, gaze darting with unnerving zeal from one surface to another.

John presses a hand wearily to his forehead. "Oh, for God's sake..."

He should have known, really, that today's road would not be smooth with Sherlock around, especially not with a very-bored-of-late Sherlock who was apt to seize on anything remotely unusual and turn it into the next victim of his deductive process. Unfortunately, John's altered breakfast patterns appear to fall quite neatly into that 'remotely unusual' category.

"Sherlock," he interrupts loudly, "leave it."

The rest of what he can only loosely term a conversation makes no visible progress; mostly, it involves Sherlock repeating and rephrasing his question in various forms, as though he hopes one will eventually trip John up, and John merely pressing his lips together and sipping silently at his coffee. An image has been growing steadily in his mind since the first taste—a lean, tanned face, warm with laughter under an untidy field of dusty brown hair. His thoughts begin to drift, so much that he barely hears Sherlock speaking anymore, and it takes the strong aftertaste of the coffee to make him realise that he's run out.

Ignoring both breakfast and the rather sulky expression on Sherlock's face, John sets his mug back down and is soon pulling on his jacket. It's quite warm in the lower rooms of the flat, but he knows he'll be glad of the thick fabric by the time he has walked a little ways outside.

As he turns toward the door, he catches the look of puzzlement still flickering behind Sherlock's eyes, and feels a wall of his mind give way slightly. Perhaps, he thinks, perhaps this time it's been long enough. Perhaps... well, he'll see. He'll know, by the end of the day.

John has only a vague idea of where his steps are taking him. He walks almost without thinking—along the pavement, across a street, through a crowd full of strangely empty faces—and there is a silence to the city of London he is sure has never been there before. Which, he realises, probably means it's in his head, somehow. He walks and walks, on to a place he doesn't know, but that doesn't matter in the end. Not really.

It's the walking that matters. The journey, the rhythm, the pulse of his own footsteps and his own blood coursing through his veins in an effort to counteract the chill November air. The walking fills his mind, and for now even brushes a curtain over the laughing countenance in the back of his thoughts. Not for long, something seems to be telling him, not for long... But he's alright. Every once in a while, he breaks into a quick, easy jog, just to feel the sudden rush of wind beside his head and to hear the rapid pounding of his shoes along the curb. His pace is steady and unfaltering under the greying sky.

Only when he begins to feel his breath catching painfully in his chest does he stop; he finds himself along the edge of a small park, where couples are walking and children, bundled in hats and jackets and scarves, are running and laughing despite the clouds overhead, which continue to darken with the threat of imminent rain. A wind springs up, slicing against John's downturned face, but instead of instinctively shielding himself, he turns his head into the force of the cold, dry air. For a few seconds, it leaves him even more breathless than before.

He finds an empty bench, far enough away that he won't have to look up every time he hears footsteps passing on the path in front of him. The bench sits in the midst of a deep, soft-edged shadow cast by a wide-spreading sycamore tree above his head. He sits down slowly, once again coming to that state of careful movement he had awoken with.

There is a piece of paper in John's wallet that he never looks at—never, except once, every year, on the third day in November.

Today. Today he will look at it again.

With the familiar hesitation, he pulls his wallet from his pocket, flips it open, stares at it for a long moment. There is a creak and rustle of bare tree limbs overhead. Then, with a low breath that freezes into mist in the air before him, he digs his fingers into one of the smaller pockets and slips from the sleeve a quarter-folded bit of paper.

John's breaths come softly as he unfolds the paper—gently, as though his surgeon's fingers are handling the delicacy of the human body instead of a lined sheet that looks like it was torn haphazardly from a spare notebook.

Which, he remembers, with a warm ache in his chest, it was.

The scribbles on the paper bring back a flood of sensations—memories, thoughts, feelings, and in the sudden swaying of his senses under the rush, he nearly loses his grip on the sheet when the wind starts picking up again. He presses his fingers down hard on one of the much-worn creases and then stares at the page, drinking it in.

Much of the surface is taken over by drawings; there is a game of hangman stretching diagonally across most of the top left-hand quadrant, and lines of lettering beneath it that begin to intrude below the crease halfway down the page. In what was once blank spaces, the answer now says Sunshine, lollipops, and rainbows, and a choked laugh leaves John's mouth as he reads it. A good portion of the lower half sports an odd array of lines and dots; the latter, inked in black, are arranged in a square grid, while the former in red and blue dart seemingly at random between them, forming boxes and half-boxes and longer lines. Next to the grid, there are two columns marked with the letters J and D, and tallies under both. John runs his finger under the little bunches of tic-marks, quietly smiling.

There are other things on the page, too, less prominent: smiley faces with tongues and absurd-looking goatees, words floating at random across the paper, scribbles whose meaning he has forgotten, and there, at the very bottom, in John's own handwriting—

Daniel Henderson.

The face swims and flickers to the forefront of his mind again, grinning. John shuts his eyes tightly, resisting the impulse to clench his hand around the paper in a mirroring movement. It's all he has left; there are no photos, no letters—what need for those, after all, when their subject is flesh-and-blood by your side, talking and fighting and fearing and laughing, sometimes all at once? It's a moment, a moment in time that they were caught in, together, with hundreds of others, and when such a moment comes to an end, there is—was—no time to turn around and say just one more thing.

He never remembers, even later, how long he sits there, lost in thought. The longer he stares at the page, the more prominent the memories become, and this time he doesn't fight them, but embraces them, despite the strange jerking of his heart that comes with each new remembrance. The cold wind cuts through his clothing again, but by now he hardly notices it, for he is wrapped in another time, another place, where a moment of silence is a piece of heaven and the blazing heat shimmers like a mirage over the broken ground.

Oddly, irrationally, he still misses it. Mycroft saw it, Sherlock probably sees it daily, and John himself has known it all along. He hadn't wanted to come back; the feeling of helplessness, of uselessness, that had come with the realisation that he was being sent back to England had been almost as painful as the shot that caused the transfer in the first place.

He'd seen many men die and many more injured, and had hoped, at least for the latter, that they would make it home as soon as possible; but, for himself, John had never considered the possibility until it was abruptly forced upon him in the form of a speeding bullet to his left shoulder.

More than anything else, though, he still misses Dan Henderson.

Dan was the laughing, freckled thirty year-old who had become John's best friend for five months in the midst of one of hell's little subdivisions. The man who had berated him, smiling, for taking life too seriously. The man whose life he had saved, even though he'd only been doing his job. The man he couldn't save twice.

John's eyes are stark and dry when he finally stands up again; he pauses, blinking into the wind whistling through the park, and suddenly notices how dark it's become since he sat down in the first place. But it's not raining yet. With numbed fingers, he tucks the paper carefully back in his wallet, and walks on.

It's only when he sees the bronze memorial tucked in the corner of the park that he realises he was looking for one from the start. For a war statue, it's fairly small and unassuming: three figures standing calm and straight above a smooth, square-faced pedestal. There is an inscription on two sides, in thin, elegant capital letters, but John deliberately avoids reading it as he approaches slowly with his hands tucked in his jacket pockets. It doesn't matter what year or what conflict. Some things will always remain the same.

The smooth bronze faces look out changelessly at him, and John looks back—a short, straight-backed figure in a dark jacket, standing with its face uplifted to meet the first drops of rain that fall crisp and clear to the mottled earth. The cold swirls around him, strangely comforting in its harshness. He thinks he should say something, but he doesn't know what.

As the rain begins to fall in earnest, he turns slowly from the memorial, and walks away, with Dan Henderson's voice echoing in his head.

"Are... you alright?"

It's the hesitance in Sherlock's voice that makes John look up, much later that night. He glances over to the darkened window, where Sherlock is standing with his hands clasped behind his back and an odd, puzzled look on his face, as though he senses that something is wrong and yet is still at a loss as to why he can't figure out exactly what it is.

"Yeah, fine," John says, and by this time it's mostly true.

But that reluctance, that concern, that is so unusual in his friend's voice and that he hears in it now seems to have broken the barrier of his own uncertainty. He leans back in his chair with a long sigh.

"I've been acting a bit off-colour today, haven't I?"

"Quite," replies Sherlock, seeming to regain some of his brisk composure.

John meets his gaze with a wry half-smile. "Sorry," he says, before the smile fades again. "I'd almost forgotten that it's been three years, today."

The detective frowns. "An anniversary?"

"Of sorts."

He lets the silence creep into the room again—a soft, companionable silence—while he exhales a second time and gathers his thoughts. But Sherlock doesn't interrupt, doesn't break that silence with even the smallest movement. Sherlock, with that indefinable ability to understand exactly what is going through John's mind if John has not put up walls to prevent him, has come to the perfect conclusion that he needs only to wait, this time. It is one of those moments where they are faultlessly in tune, the detective and the doctor, and John knows that if he suddenly decides that he doesn't want to explain, Sherlock will not try to change his mind. And for that very reason, John feels that he must.

He says, very quietly, "Dan Henderson."

Sherlock's dark head tilts to the side, and there is a moment's pause. "Sorry?"

John breathes a soft, aching laugh. "You don't think you're the first friend I've had, do you?" he asks. "The first in a long while, but—not the first." He looks at Sherlock, then into the hearth, where the embers of a two hour-old fire are glowing gently.

"We were in Afghanistan together, me and Dan. I knew him for all of five months." He pauses; it seems like so much longer than that. "And—he was my best friend, for those five months. Really nice bloke—and a good man. He always—he always used to think I took life a bit too seriously, so he would do stupid things, say stupid things, just to make me laugh or something." John feels something catching in his throat here and breaks off, shaking his head quickly and wishing the laughter would come again now. To his surprise, it almost does.

Sherlock's expression is unreadable in the dim light. "He was killed."

It's definitely not a question, and had the observation come from anyone else, John might have cut the conversation off right then and there. But he hears again that soft concern in his friend's voice, the quiet need to understand, and with some effort he stills the thudding reaction of his heart to the blunt words. He nods.

"I saved his life, I guess. Over there, that's sometimes the easiest way to get to know someone; you patch them up, hold their hand, and—suddenly you're with them all the time."

John struggles to get the words out so that they sound coherent; it's not easy to explain to someone who's never been there what the war zone does to you, how it's so easy to make a friend and so terribly easy to lose them again before you're even sure what's happened. The world is in constant flux around you, merciless and volatile, and you treasure the little moments of laughter as if they are the most precious things in all your life, because you never know when they will come again—or if they will come at all.

"We were best mates, up until the—until it happened." John takes a deep breath, not looking at Sherlock, trying to keep a screen over the flashbacks in his head. "But... I couldn't do it. I wasn't—there—soon enough, and... couldn't save him the second time."

In fact, Dan had already been dead when John had gotten there. He'd dropped to his knees behind the low, crumbled wall, ignoring the sharp retorts of missiles and automatics all around him, and the friend in his mind had rebelled against the more rational doctor when it saw this young, laughing man lying there with blood and dust mingling on the ground beneath him. Move on, the doctor had told him, move on, he's dead, there are others who need you; but the friend had let out hoarse, breathless sob and fallen back in shock and disbelief, asking Why? over and over in that desperate tone the doctor never knew how to answer.

John's face is tight and controlled as he sits there, remembering. There is a gravestone somewhere, he knows; somewhere in Brighton, a plain stone marker commemorates Captain Daniel E. Henderson and his honourable service to fellows and queen and country. John has never visited it. He's never wanted to. It's an empty grave, a memorial only, for in the confusion of that day, Dan's body was never recovered. John had written one letter of condolence to his dead friend's parents, but received no reply, and had never tried to contact them again.

"John," Sherlock says, breaking the silence with his soft, low voice, "how many friends do you consider you've had over the course of your life? Close friends, that is."

Startled by the question, John looks around again. "I don't—well, not counting primary school? Dunno, not many—maybe a half dozen or so. And you," he adds, feeling it somehow necessary. "Dan was the last, I think."

"I see." Thoughtfully, Sherlock moves from the window and seats himself across from John. His hands move almost immediately, fingers meeting at the tips in front of his face. "But at the moment—"

"—it's just you, yeah." John grins faintly.

"What happened to the others?"

The question is so jarringly unlike Sherlock that for a few seconds John can only stare in bewilderment. He doesn't understand what the detective is going for here, and Sherlock's features are still shadowed and indecipherable.

"They just sort of—drifted away," he replies haltingly. "It happens a lot. People change. Friends change. Mostly, you don't even notice it until you realise you haven't heard from someone in half a year. Then you think, oh, well, it's not really worth it, trying to meet up with them again."

Sherlock makes no reply this time; John feels no particular need himself to continue the conversation. Silence descends again with its warm and muffling darkness, and soon both men have drifted into slow, steady currents of their own separate thoughts. The face of Dan Henderson still glimmers in the forefront of John's mind as he stares into the fading embers of the fire, but this time, oddly, the features are overlaid with Sherlock's. The faces coalesce for a moment, like two halves of John's life meeting, but when he blinks again, both are gone.

John glances up, just once, at his best friend. He blinks once more.

Later, when he's again lying in his own room with his arms stretched behind his head, he thinks he must have imagined the flicker of something close to sadness playing across Sherlock's eyes, like a remote reflection of the last dying flame in the worn fireplace.

Many thanks for reading! Reviews mean a great deal to me, so please do leave one on your way out. :)