Chapter Text
“You have an old soul, John.”
Whenever they say that, they smile as though this is both a good thing and a bad one, something to be praised and something to be pitied. John doesn’t know what it means, exactly, or how adults seem to have a universal understanding of this complicated idea and a universal agreement not to explain it to him, but whatever it is, they treat him differently because of it; he’s smarter than the other children, able to understand things they can’t. He fits into worlds he shouldn’t, has room to move in spaces reserved for other sorts of people.
His life is comprised of many moving pieces.
Sometimes in his dreams, he’s a kaleidoscope.
---
John has a sister called Harriet who goes by “Harry” and likes to tell her friends that her brother is prophetic. The first time John overhears, he mistakes the word for “pathetic” and interrupts that she’s a wanker, so she punches him; it takes a little while to sort out the situation, but then John looks up “prophetic” in the dictionary and figures it’s okay, even if it’s not quite true. He tried to explain it to her once, but not very well, and he forgives her for not understanding.
There are good days, in which time flows normally, new things are new and surprising things are surprising, and there are bad days, in which time flows with an overlap, new things are old and surprising things are cliché. Déjà vu days, sometimes whole weeks or months he’s mostly lived through already.
On those days, every decision he makes feels important.
They probably aren’t.
---
One night, the 29th of January, John lies in bed and stares at the ceiling as he remembers a day several years in the future when he will be shot in the shoulder during a combat mission in Afghanistan. The terrain is sandy and the sun is hot, and it hurts to breathe, and all he’s asking is for God to please let him live.
Vowing to never join the military under any circumstances or for any reason, John tries to will himself to sleep.
But this is important.
Some decisions are bigger than others.
---
When John is fifteen, his mother sits him down and snaps that he needs to give up on his fucking dream of becoming a doctor because it’s never going to happen, and she knows he’s just trying to make her feel guilty because she and his father can’t pay for him to go to university. He snaps back that maybe they could if she didn’t drink so much of their money away, and at least he has a dream, dammit, what has she ever done?
Then his father hits him for screaming too loudly, and he leaves before they can kick him out.
In the twilight, he walks slowly with his hands in his pockets and his eyes on the ground and thinks about the choices he’s made.
A black rabbit hops across his path, fixing him with its big red eyes.
Many good things are started accidentally.
---
In the end, it makes the most sense to join the military for any number of reasons, so John does. For one thing, it pays for him to attend St Bartholomew’s Hospital Medical College, which isn’t exactly close to the rehabilitation clinic he shoves Harry into but is close enough for him to drop by most weekends.
The astronaut at the front desk waves him in and John taps the counter on his way to the visitors’ room.
“So,” he says when Harry sits across from him, folding her hands on the tabletop. “How’s it going?”
She scoffs and rolls her shoulders back. “It’d be going a lot better if there was anything to do here.”
John smiles, looking down at his lap. “Are you making progress?”
“That’s what they tell me.”
They have almost the same conversation every time he comes to see her. Once, she said she’d made a friend, but then Harry got a little better and the other girl didn’t and suddenly Harry’s new friend was the worst person she’d ever met; John hasn’t heard about her since. By now, she must have been kicked out of the program. Maybe she’s dead.
“Do you think you are?”
Harry laughs tersely. “Sure.”
John decides to believe her, even though he doesn’t know if it’s true.
They chat aimlessly for another few minutes before she has to meet with her case manager. He kisses her on the cheek, a habit from years past, and she scuffs her heels a little as she walks away; John watches her go and thinks wearily about all the lab work waiting for him back at Barts.
“She won’t last long on the outside.”
His hackles raise at the assertion, maybe because who is this arrogant stranger stepping in to make claims about his sister, and what does he know, what right does he have. Maybe because it’s a fear he’s harbored for awhile that there will never be any recovery for her from this, that all his efforts will be in vain no matter what. Maybe because he couldn’t solve the problem on his own a long time ago, even before it started.
He shouldn’t engage.
“What makes you say that?”
You know her, John, you know she’s barely hanging on.
“You know her, John, you know she’s barely hanging on.”
John clenches his left hand into a fist, nails biting into his palm. This again.
“Do I know you?”
The man smirks, falling into Harry’s vacated chair.
“I don’t believe we’ve met.”
Sherlock, John realizes abruptly. This is Sherlock.
“The name is Sherlock Holmes.”
True.
“John Watson.”
Sherlock quirks his brow, folds his arms across his chest.
“I’m aware.”
Simultaneously, John is frozen in place and pulled in all directions; how does he— Could he be— Do they maybe— Is this the—
“Harry is your sister, obviously,” Sherlock explains without prompting, “your unattached sister, given that you’re the only visitor she’s had thus far, so ‘Watson’ isn’t a married name; and surely you’re aware that she referred to you multiple times over the course of your little…chat. John. I’d’ve been a fool to miss it.”
No. No, of course not.
This is both for the best and a terrible disappointment (not that the two have ever been mutually exclusive).
“What are you in for?” John asks as he reclaims his seat, because if they’re going to be brazen, then they’re going to be brazen. Sherlock smiles as though he appreciates the candor.
“I have a list.”
John has a feeling that Sherlock is a very important decision.
---
A slight increase in the number of John’s visits to the clinic is the direct result of his introduction to Sherlock. (Correlation does not imply causation.) His chats with Harry remain brief and are occasionally perfunctory, but Sherlock is always in the visitors’ lounge even though he never seems to have any visitors of his own, and he never makes John feel like he’s wasting his time.
Sherlock is perpetually bored by life and everything in it; John thinks he’s too smart for his own good, and everything about him is fascinating.
“I would think you’d want to get out of here, do something more with your life,” John muses one day, and Sherlock laughs.
“Remaining here is the simplest way to keep my overbearing brother off my back,” he says. “I could get myself discharged at any time, obviously.”
To Sherlock, most things are obvious. Sometimes, John agrees.
“You mean you can get yourself clean whenever you want?” John asks, even though he’s reasonably sure it doesn’t work that way.
“Oh, John,” Sherlock says fondly, “you’ve studied dependence. Surely you know that no one deceives like an addict in need of a fix.”
It’s probably true that if anyone is capable of lying their way out of rehab, it’s Sherlock.
“Don’t they have someone monitoring these conversations?” John asks. Sherlock smirks.
“You’re learning.”
---
Two weeks later, when John visits Harry at the clinic, Sherlock isn’t in the visitors’ room. Discharged, the nurses explain, though if you aren’t family we really shouldn’t be telling you these things.
The trip feels more or less pointless.
---
John has always known that finishing his degree meant deployment to Afghanistan. It wasn’t a condition of his enrollment, exactly, more of a warning, and he took it in stride because he knows enough to be grateful for all he’s been given.
He hasn’t forgotten that he’s going to be shot, but he’d like to put it off as long as possible.
John is able to attend to the wounds of three soldiers before he begins to die. Lying on the ground, unable to move his arm or cry for help in a way that distinguishes him from the others, he clutches a convolvulus to his chest as blood gushes from his wounded left shoulder. Please, God, let me live.
In the hospital, he apologizes for not warning his superior officers that this was going to happen.
They assume it’s a side effect of the morphine and honorably discharge him.
---
One night, the 29th of January, John lies in bed and stares at the ceiling as he remembers a day several years in the future when he will be shot in the shoulder during a combat mission in Afghanistan.
He won’t be old enough to join the military for quite awhile yet, but it’s of the utmost importance that he does so as soon as he's allowed.
Some decisions are easier than others.