The first time she saw him, Mary Morstan thought that John Watson was too nice, too attractive to be ignoring all the life around him. He couldn't have been more than 35. It seemed a shame.

The second time she saw him, Mary tried to talk to him, and even though he was perfectly friendly, she noticed he made no attempt to prolong the conversation. Instead of being affronted, she found herself wondering why. She thought he looked sad.

The third time Mary saw John, she decided she wasn't going to take no for an answer. Well, that wasn't strictly true. John bumped into her and spilled his lunch all over her.

"Oh, I'm sorry, I'm so sorry. Here, let me make it up to you."

"Do you like tea? Everyone likes tea, don't they?" Mary asked brightly, not letting the opportunity pass.

John paused, looking somewhat hesitant before smiling civilly and agreeing to a quick cup of tea in a nearby cafe.

It was a good thing Mary wasn't fazed by awkward conversations, because it was the most awkward one she'd had for a while.

"Are you from London?"

"Not originally, no." Flat tone, no invitation to ask further.

Mary pressed on. "I've seen you come in here a few times, do you work nearby?"

John smiled patiently, "At a hospital."

"Oh, the one two blocks over?"

"That's the one," John answered before going back to his tea. "You?"

"Oh, I'm a teacher," Mary said. "At the grammar school on Barron's Street."

"Hmm," John said, and Mary realized he was only trying to keep up the minimum level of politeness required. It only made her more interested. There had to be something underneath that polite exterior.

The next few times they ran into each other they said hi, followed by a few hurried conversations in the doorway until Mary decided to try again.

"I was just heading out to lunch. Care to join me?"

"Um...sure," John said uncertainly.

The conversation over their paninis was as stilted and awkward as it had been the first time, until Mary sat back and said, "So what's your story, anyway?"

John half-chuckled, "What do you mean, what's my story?"

"I mean, you're always alone and you never want to talk to anyone. I had to pry conversation out of you last time. So what is it?"

"Maybe I'm just not friendly?" John suggested.

"No, that's not it," Mary said. "Unfriendly people don't make a point of accepting lunch invitations from people they barely know."

John started to laugh quietly, followed by what she could have sworn was a flinch.

"What's the matter? I'm not that painful to be with, am I?"

John shook his head, "Oh, no, it's not you. Not at all." She waited for him to go on. "It's just, what you said, it reminded me of someone." The look that crossed his face then wasn't just a flinch; it was as if windows had opened onto a freezing January day, with no hope of anything other than emptiness and cold.

Realizing he'd let on more than he intended, John looked away. "Look, it's a long story, and you probably won't believe me anyway."

Mary shrugged, "I've got time. Besides, you look like you could do with telling someone, and you don't know how I'll react."

John paused, and Mary gave his foot a gentle prod under the table, "I'm listening."

Seeming to reach a decision, John took a breath and started. "To answer your earlier question, I've been in London for a little over two years. I was an Army doctor and was invalided out of Afghanistan. And…I was lost. I couldn't afford London, I didn't have any family I wanted to see. I came back with a limp and no prospects."

Mary nodded sympathetically. She'd seen London chew up and spit out more than one person who'd come there in hopes of something better. It wasn't a matter of strength, but of circumstances.

"Anyway," John went on, "one day, I ran into an old friend from med school, and he introduced me to someone who needed a flatmate." He took a minute as the memories came back and almost laughed. "He introduced me to someone who told me my life story just by looking at me, and the next day we were looking at a flat together."

"His name was Sherlock Holmes." It was obvious even saying the name was painful, because he winced visibly before going on.

"He told me he was a consulting detective, he solved crimes the police couldn't figure out, and took cases from the public. Only the interesting ones, not the ones that could be figured out with a little simple forensics. And for some reason, he took me on the case he was working on that day."

"Hang on," Mary said. "Sherlock Holmes…was he…?"

"The Hero of Reichenbach? St. Bart's?" John asked. "Yes, that was him."

"Oh, God," Mary said. "I never followed his career but I read the story in the papers."

Almost as if he hadn't heard her, John went on. "Sherlock nearly died on that first case, but he caught the serial killer we were chasing. Well, I say it was the first case, it wasn't. Not for him. But it was our first case."

"After that, I moved in, and soon we were a unit. Sherlock and John, solving crimes, catching the criminals. We were a good team. Hardly any of them got away." John held no pride in his voice saying this, but he didn't try to hide it either.

"Sorry," he added, "He hated false modesty, Sherlock. He'd be livid if I downplayed his reputation. Over the next year, the crimes got bigger, and so did we. I started keeping a blog of our cases and it had a pretty big following. But then, there was Moriarty."

"The jewel thief?" Mary asked.

"That's the one," John said. "He was obsessed with Sherlock. He went after us just to play games with him, just to pitch their brainpower against each other. And finally, it worked."

"What happened?" Mary asked, who hadn't followed the case that closely.

"He somehow got everyone believing that Sherlock was a fake; that he couldn't know the things he did and that he'd set up all the cases he'd solved. And Sherlock…" John stopped, then continued, his voice breaking. "The thing is, I still can't get why he did it. He didn't care what anyone thought of him. He was angry with me for caring about them. But whatever the reason, he jumped off the roof of St. Bart's. And I was there."

John said the last part very quickly; clearly he didn't want to dwell on it. "And that was it. He was gone. Nothing's been the same since then."

"Of course not," Mary said.

Having a sympathetic ear was making John more talkative, "Doing the cases with Sherlock, they gave me a purpose after I got back from Afghanistan. Once that was gone, I had nothing again. And that's it. My story."

Mary watched him for a few seconds before saying, "Well, you've taken me through the events. Now, what was he like? Sherlock?"

"What was Sherlock like?" John asked, before letting out a brief laugh. "Well, he was annoying as hell most of the time. He thought he knew better than everyone else, and he let you know it. Thing is, he was usually right. He was a real-life genius. But he was on a completely different wavelength from everyone else. He didn't get things that were so obvious to the rest of the world. Like why you should care what people think of you. That you don't get the best results if you insult your colleagues' intelligence constantly. That the Earth went around the Sun."

Mary was staring at him in disbelief when John shook his head, "Oh, no that one's true. We once had a whole argument about it. Anyway, what else was he like? Oh, he liked to do experiments. On body parts. And leave them all over the flat. He'd play the violin at 3 AM, he wouldn't talk for days if he was in the wrong mood, which was whenever he didn't have a case. Once he got so bored he shot a happy face into our sitting room wall. He really didn't care about anyone. Except me."

"Why you?" Mary asked.

"I don't know," John said. "I've never been able to figure it out. I'm nothing special. But I was to him. The first time we met Moriarty, he'd kidnapped me. Strapped a bomb to my chest and made me confront Sherlock in his place. He told me what to say over a wire and when I did, the look on Sherlock's face. He thought I was Moriarty for a brief second and it was like…the only person he'd ever trusted had betrayed him. It was the worst moment of my life. Up until the day at St. Bart's."

For a second, he looked as if he was going to go one before he held himself back and said simply, "He was the best friend I've ever had, weird as that sounds. And I miss him, every day."

Mary sat forward and placed her hand over John's. He looked at her a little oddly but it felt natural to her. "I'm sorry, John. Really, I am. He obviously meant a lot to you."

"Yes, well, now you know. Why I'm always alone."

Mary wrote her number on a little slip of paper and slid it across the table. "You don't have to be. If you ever want to talk, or just to see another person, someone who won't remind you of everything, call me."

"Why? Why me?" John asked.

"He obviously thought you were worth it," Mary said. "If he was the genius you say he was, don't you think he could be right?"

The first signs of a true smile, not one based in sarcasm or a fake one trying to hide the pain, crossed John's face, and he pulled out his wallet, prepared to pay.

"No charge for you," the owner said, swooping in to intercept them, "You're Sherlock's friend, right? He got me out of a very tight spot once. I owe him. So you don't pay here, OK?"

"Oh, well, thank you, thank you very much," John said.

"It's no problem, Dr. Watson. We read the blog. We still believe." John nodded and left, Mary behind him, wondering about the eccentric, arrogant genius who'd inspired such loyalty in so many people. She didn't have to wonder about John Watson. She already knew he was worth it.

A/N So this wasn't actually the chapter I meant to post, I got mixed up between this and one of my others. That's what you get for posting too quickly -_-

It's probably pretty obvious this isn't canon, I wrote this long before S3 aired just as an exercise. I'll leave it up since it's been up there now. Sorry everyone!