De Vertitate Unicornis Modernus

It was an incredible chance, that meeting. The unicorn hadn't even meant to go to therapy that day, hadn't been in weeks really. And it was a minor miracle that he'd even paid any attention to Mike Stamford - he actually remembered that old classmate of the real John Watson's: he had attempted to pay suit to Harry back in the day – much less maintained civil conversation with the man, except for a growled "I'm not the John Watson you knew" when Mike had presumed to know where he'd rather spend the rest of his life. (It was remarkable, that – the unicorn didn't think he'd ever growled before.)

He doubted he'd ever be able to satisfactorily explain why he'd let himself be led to St. Bartholomew's Hospital to see a man about a flat. At the time, the unicorn put it down to the tedium, his new twisty impatience with the world that, he supposed, came from the knowledge that his body would only last a few more decades at best. (Boredom had never been a problem when he'd had the rest of eternity to look forward to. It had to be a mortal trait born, perhaps, from the stark reality that you could be running out of time.)

Whatever the reason, he'd somehow let it slip that if he was going to go on living, he couldn't afford to do it in London, not even living – such as it was – as he did, but he didn't want a flatmate, didn't want to share space with any poking, prying, living, breathing human being. Hell, he didn't even want to stay in London: there was too much life in the city, and it hurt to be in a place like that, with all that living going on just a wall's thickness away, when all you were doing was waiting to die. Yet there he was, climbing up stairs behind a wheezing Mike Stamford – yes, the man had gotten fat – to meet Sherlock Holmes.

Much later, when the unicorn no longer viewed everything with a crippling cynicism, he would wonder if providence hadn't deserted him after all, after the change. He'd met someone like Sherlock once, in the fourteenth century - the man wasn't entirely unique - but the resemblance ended at the pale eyes and the ability to tell entire life histories from fingernail clippings. The unicorn had wanted to kick the fourteenth century man's teeth in. But Sherlock Holmes…

He wasn't the sort of person the unicorn would have followed if he had been whole and entire. There were too many dark spaces inside his head, too many shadows; the man certainly had one of those Pasts with a capital P that nobody liked to talk about. And there was Pride, also with a capital P, but the unicorn understood pride. Pride, like being gay and working on a Sunday, was only a sin depending on who you talked to, and a modicum of it wasn't always a bad thing (otherwise, thought the unicorn, he'd be in trouble too, and would spend eternity in some quarter of Hell not described in Dante's Inferno – there was another man who'd known about pride – when he died). But there was no true evil in him. Just a tiny little germ of actual good, maybe, but nothing truly damnable. He was like a child, actually, a huge bundle of potential that could go either way.

He was also a virgin. Not, as far as the unicorn could tell (and to be honest, he was amazed that he still could tell at all), out of any particular desire to keep himself pure - it just seemed to be a genuine disinterest in sex.

It didn't matter. John Watson, erstwhile unicorn, was fascinated. He'd been hooked from the first question of "Afghanistan or Iraq?"

He blogged about the meeting that night, painstakingly writing his longest entry yet by poking at his laptop with two fingers (he hadn't gotten the hang of making his fingers fly over the keyboard, and he doubted he ever would). It was the first time he'd felt the need to articulate something, to put something into words so that he could look at the shape of it to understand things better. He'd never needed to do that in his proper shape - things just were back then, unicorns didn't have internal struggles or identity crises or, for that matter, brilliant, life-changing revelations that they just had to talk about.

It was also the first time since the change that he'd felt alive.