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Envy, n. a feeling of discontented or resentful longing aroused by someone else's possessions, qualities, or luck
Sherlock Holmes is a lot of things. He's the world's only consulting detective, brother to the man who is the British government, the cleverest man anyone could meet, an occasional drug addict, and my flat mate. He's also a great bloody git most of the time, but I suppose he can afford to be. People bore him. We're too predictable, blind to the obvious (obvious only to him), and just plain dull. He doesn't understand how life works for normal people, he's condescending and blunt, and no one can get on with him.
And I burn up with envy every time I look at him.
I'm not jealous of the attention he gets, despite what people think. He may be the Sherlock Holmes, but I'm fine with being just John Watson or, on occasion, Doctor Watson. It's his brain I want. What must it be like to have the measure of a man by the cut of his trousers or the scars on his palm or the flush of his cheek? To know how a woman will treat me by the type of shoes she has on or her shade of lipstick?
And what could it be like to stand at a crime scene over some poor bloke's body and know exactly what happened, coupled with the satisfaction of being the only one who could? That brain, that perfect deductive mind that knew so much, that was what I was jealous of. Why would you need to know that the Earth orbits the Sun when you can identify 243 types of tobacco ash?
This is a hard thing to admit, because who would believe it of me? The very ordinary, often lonely John Watson wanted the mind of Sherlock Holmes, the man with only one friend? But that was the thing of it– he wasn't lonely. That brain of his desired no company, so he was never lonely.
For that I envied him most of all.
John Watson is the bravest man I have ever met. It's not that he's fearless, as I am– curiosity has a way of canceling out fear, and good thing. All the interesting things were what made other people afraid. No, it's simply that he can move past his fear and do extraordinary things.
Things like befriending me.
I am not an easy person to like. I fully embrace this fact and indeed, it does not bother me. I never actively campaigned to make John like me, though I refrained from openly driving him away. I still needed a flat mate. He was good, he was, he tried to keep up and I couldn't pretend his flattery didn't make me want to blush, if I were so inclined to do such a thing.
He was so kind, so very… accommodating. He had the biggest heart of anyone I had ever met, and while that should have irritated me– another weak, soft-hearted fool to muddy up the issue at hand– it didn't.
It did, however, force me to admit that jealousy had hit me hard.
I had never had the "emotional" touch. Nor did Mycroft, come to that. We were simply not those kind of people. We were distant and often cold, factual, precise. It is simply the most logical way to behave, but since people are not motivated by logic in murder cases, I occasionally found myself wishing I had a touch for the softer passions. That I knew what it was like to be held and loved, to love in return, to want nothing more than the happiness of another person, to be willing to give up my life to save another.
Well… that last one wasn't entirely true. I would have given up my life for John without looking back, without a blink.
Still, I was unreasonably and irrevocably envious of John's heart, the way it went out to anyone in distress in empathy, the way he could give it away so easily or harden it for battle.
I have been reliably informed that I have no heart, and I used to have no desire to change that. It was only very recently I realized that John Watson, ordinary in every way and inferior to myself, had something I envied, desired, coveted.
He had a heart.