1864
John Watson was ten years old when his mother died. It was a terrible age to have a parent pass on; one was old enough to remember the event with sickening clarity and yet not quite old enough to fully grasp the concept of death being a natural if not upsetting end and being decidedly final.
No matter how many times their father, a very loving man who was able to remain strong for his boys even though he could feel the fine cracks on his heart wedged wider every day, explained to John that his mother was dying, the boy would linger by her beside and watch her laboured sleep, wondering when she would be well enough to play with him. She had been sick many times before, but she had always recovered. He was too young to notice that each recovery came with a little strength, a little life, lost, until the woman who had once been quite pretty and wonderfully full of energy was little more than a shell, able to smile weakly but little else in the presence of her cherished youngest son.
The thing John remembered most after the fact was the condition of Edward, his stuffed bear. It was subjected to the tears and worn spots the toys of little boys were often subjective to. His mother had always mended him, but now he grew worse alongside her. He eventually put Edward in a box in his closet, only looking at him, never again playing with him. Something in his undeveloped logic believed that if Edward stopped getting worse, so would his mother.
Andrew Watson was fifteen when his mother died. Fifteen is a worse age than ten to be when a parent passes on. If a ten-year-old breaks a vase in frustration of inevitable death, everyone pities the child for his pain. If a fifteen-year-old takes to the bottle for the very first time to try to numb the pain of watching ones mother fade away like a cut lily left in the sun, there was precious little sympathy for him.
John was sleeping peacefully when the doctor came to pronounce his mother dead of natural causes, blissfully unaware that his life would change upon his waking.
Andrew was drinking, having been there for her last breath. He was less and less aware with each burning sip that anything was wrong or that anything would ever be wrong again.
John Watson lost both his mother and the his brother as he knew him while he slept.
1873
Nine years passed and Lucas Watson passed away. His death had been mercifully brief; a quick heart attack that was painful only to those still alive.
John had not expected Andrew to attend the funeral or else he would have asked someone to watch for him and keep him from the chapel. A very cruel gesture, to keep a son from his father's last service, but John Watson did not exercise cruelty without true reason.
He staggered in during the middle of the service and sat near the back. Had he tried to sit by his little brother, his little brother might have broken his nose.
Instead, John let him be. He looked drunk, but he was not being distributive and he did not want to cause a scene at his father's funeral. A part of him hoped his brother shared his grief, and upon sobering up they could talk for a bit between then and the next bottle of cheap whiskey.
He should have been on his guard, he later thought, as he watched his brother shuffle up like any other mourner to touch the top of the casket in respect (it being a closed casket service; Lucas Watson has always found displaying a body at either wake or funeral far too morbid). John could not have been expected to keep an eye on his older brother. He was nineteen and grieving, and besides that, his brother was twenty-four, supposedly old enough to be responsible.
Andrew Watson made it to the front of the church just fine, but then a wave of vertigo commonly associated with excessive amounts of alcohol struck him like a barrage of salt water. His arms flailed out for any support he could grasp. His hand came heavily upon the corner of the coffin and he fell upon it. The support splintered, sending the polished box containing his father's earthly remains teetering and crashing to the floor of the chapel.
The casket's latched held, John was always thankful for that. Two of their second cousins (or were they third) took charge of the wayward son and escorted him outside with as much force as they would not need to explain later. They left him far enough away so that he could not do the family any more damage.
John remained seated in the uncomfortable pew, not truly seeing the minister and a curator scramble for a chair to prop the coffin of Lucas Watson back up, nor did he truly hear the sympathies of his various relatives, many of whom he had never seen before and more of which he would never see again.
John marched into Afghanistan. Andrew crawled back to his bottles.
1885
Jezail bullets proved less deadly than Scottish moonshine. Andrew Watson reached thirty-six and he did not get any older.
John Watson was thirty-one and beyond the need for a big brother, in his solemn opinion. He was not entirely surprised to hear of his brother's death, nor was he entirely saddened. He thought of the death as a very long terminal illness beginning with the death of their mother and claiming its life with their father.
Andrew had been dead to him the day their father's coffin had fallen. He had worn mourning clothes from them both, he felt no compulsion to mourn a man who had been dead to him for many years.
If John was apathetic, even relieved, by the death of his brother, logic would dictate that he would not carry about his brother's watch, one of the few things Andrew had left to be inherited. Logically, this implied he was in fact affected by the loss of Andrew Watson.
Not wanting to deal with such logic, the doctor spoke not a word on the matter to Sherlock Holmes.
1887
Sherlock Holmes had not known of the existence of his friend's brother.
In all fairness, he could not be insulted or hurt, for John Watson did not know of the existence of his friend's brother, and so unable to feel shunned from this all-important information, he instead berated himself and his so-called powers of observation for missing such a crucial point of a personality portfolio.
It had taken an idle distraction to draw his attention to the fact. Had Watson given him the watch wanting him to know of his brother's birth and death without having to speak of it himself, to stir up the long-settled silt and muddy the waters of his good nature after so many years? Or had he not expected him to probe so deep and only used the watch as a shiny bauble to keep his fingers busy with something other than a syringe?
He thought of his own reasons for not telling Watson of Mycroft. In the beginning, it had been a simple matter of trust. He would not put it past an assassin to befriend the brother of a very important man to gain access to him. As the time passed, however, it was more about pride. He hated to relish praise, but he often felt his brightest when his friend extolled him for his gifts. If he released the information that not all the solutions were his own, would Watson question if he bent the truth to give himself more credit?
Under the judgemental lens of his friendship with the observed, the detective was dismayed to discover that he could not deduce the reason why he had not been given so much as an inkling about this brother. Had he been ashamed, thinking his friend would see in him a piece of his alcoholic brother? Or merely tight-lipped, keeping a family skeleton firmly in the closet?
It was over breakfast tea that the truth came out without Holmes even having to pry.
"I did not tell you about Andrew," Watson spoke softly, hazel gaze entirely level on his almost startled friend. "Because I was pitied with the death of each of my parents, I was pitied for being the brother of a failure, and I was pitied from the time I was shot and carted back to London. I did not need pity from you, dear friend. I did not want pity from you, because by being treated as a capable man by my first new friend, I believed in my new life, I would hold no pity for myself."
The detective did not comment upon this string of faulty logic, for even he was forced to admit that every once in a blue moon, fragments of emotion existed outside the confines of logic.