A/N: So that's a big ol' "nope" on the active voice thing; enjoy some more narrative.
I had a little trouble figuring out how I wanted to respond to this prompt and it strayed somewhat; have to admit I'm not completely happy with it, but I hope it works for you.
D: Defiant/Daunting
The fact of the matter was, the only relationship Sherlock had ever considered himself to be in was with Mycroft. Everything else, everyone else, was either an obstacle or a helpmeet, and in either case just an object to be manipulated. This was because other people were so different from him as to be almost alien (a viewpoint, he later realized, which he had learned almost solely from Mycroft in the first place).
But Mycroft didn't love the danger of a footrace across London or the rush of solving things at the last minute. He didn't think Sherlock was smart, and Sherlock couldn't make him laugh. John Watson might have had a perfectly ordinary brain, but there were parts of him that Sherlock recognized instantly. And he thought, well, why not?
He learned why not very quickly.
Having never had a relationship with anyone but his brother, and the societal definition of "brothers" already being fairly well mapped out, Sherlock found himself completely unprepared to define a new relationship with a new person. And there was something very puzzling, something indefinable, about John himself. He was completely normal, but Sherlock was still interested in him. Sherlock had an obsessive personality, but his obsessions changed frequently; as soon as he solved all the mysteries and found out all the interesting parts about someone, he would move on. It was what most people called being an asshole, but Sherlock couldn't understand how he could be expected to act any other way. Just as he couldn't understand how John, who by rights he should have deduced everything he could ever want to know about within the first 24 hours, became a subject he couldn't get off of. It wasn't enough to declare themselves friends, give him a key to the flat, and be done with it. Sherlock found himself compulsively stealing John's laptop (without knowing why he was doing it), examining John's mail before it got to John, getting in the habit of occasionally following John around town without John's knowledge. He could tell from John's first step on the stairs each morning how he'd slept, tell from the sound of his vowels where he grew up, and from the state of his shirt how many patients he saw at the surgery.
And what bothered Sherlock about all that is that he could tell those things about anybody. He wanted to know something about John, have something about John, that he didn't know or have with other people. How did normal people do it? When you knew someone was important, how were you supposed to go from the first realization of importance to knowing how they were important, and why, and what you needed from them?
He might have lowered his pride and asked John how one was supposed to do this, but the lack of normal relationships in John's life proved that he didn't know how, either. So all Sherlock could do was continue taking notes on how worn each pair of John's shoes were, and how long it took him to eat his meals, and at what point he gave up changing the password on his laptop, and hope that somewhere in his collection of facts about John Watson some sort of synergy would occur and he would understand why he was endlessly fascinated by these things.