Well hey there people. I have been sitting on this for a while now, but the plot bunnies will not rest until satisfied (and mine tend to be rabid). Anyway, this is my look inside John's head for most of series one, and is about as in character as I can make it.

Please tell me what you think, I'm always looking to improve, and it dont happen without you people =-D

Disclaimer: I do not own Sherlock, or John, or any characters mentioned here. Unfortunately.

"How's your blog going?"

"Yeah, good…" I cleared my throat. "Very good…"

"You haven't written a word, have you?"

The words echoed in his head as he stared at the blank post in front of him for what seemed like the millionth time.

"You just wrote 'still has trust issues.'"

"And you read my writing upside down."

Trapped in an endless loop. That was how it had seemed, before…

"Nothing happens to me."

Nothing had. Not one thing, in three years. He snapped his old, now clanky laptop closed in frustration. His head was as blank as it had ever been, in those long and utterly pointless 'therapy' sessions.

John Watson stared around the quiet, tidy living room of 221B. Even now, after all these years, the silence, and the lack of mad, rake-thin, curly-haired consulting detective as he banged around the flat, complaining because Molly hadn't given him enough teeth for his current experiment or Lestrade wasn't consulting him on a case that had an 'obvious solution,' seemed unnatural. John had learnt to tune his ramblings out unless he was being used as a sounding board. Now he found himself constantly listening for it, or for the banging of feet on the stairs as he bounded up them, ready with some new and insanely brilliant deduction… 'Stupid. He's not coming back. He's never coming…'

I had come home, unlike many of my comrades. I had seen so many things in Afghanistan – the rather harsh beauty of the desert, the picturesque buildings that retained a certain charm even after they'd been bombed out, or had their walls riddled with bullets after a particularly brutal engagement. Other things, too. An eighteen year old bleeding out in my arms as I desperately tried to staunch his arterial wound. Mothers running, keening and wailing down the streets after a vicious bombing, their children trapped in the burning wreckage they left behind. My best friend, a Northumbrian chap with the loudest laugh in the whole damn war, shot through the eye next to me. Over in a flash. My name being screamed by Corporals and Captains and Sergeants up and down the line and knowing that I could only get to one at a time. Knowing that, by the time I get there, most of this multitude of faceless men would be too far gone to be saved.

But they never left me. Even after the stray bullet that had ripped through my shoulder as our Jeep turned over, even after the pain in that shoulder had faded and my leg injury became a vague stiffness, after the long flight home, the discharge, the days in the care centre stretching into weeks…I would wake, sweating and shaking, choking back tears as the adrenaline faded from my body.

At first I thought the blog would be a good idea. I soon found that so little happened to me I wondered what the point was as I stared at the screen. 'This is your life now, John. A blank sheet of paper. How depressing.' Used to the rigours of life on tour, I wasn't exactly well adapted to inactivity.

'Face it, Johnny. Nothing is ever going to happen to you again.' I thought as I sat on my bed and watched the dawn break through the crack in the curtains. Yet another nightmare, yet another day.

Returned to that state of inactivity – well, not quite, he still went into the surgery – John had found his old depression returning. But 'still has trust issues' still applied, and he would never dream of asking for help.

Mrs Hudson guessed, yes, as she brought him a cup of tea some afternoons, tried to get him to chat, but since the doctor would neither confirm nor deny her suspicions, there was little she could do. He knew what she thought, and she knew that he knew, yet he still said nothing. His silence was worrying. The only people he spoke to, the only people he had spoken to in nearly a year and a half now were his patients.

She wished Sherlock would return, that he hadn't been killed. They had been good for one another. Mad Sherlock needed someone to massage his ego and stop him getting so bored, not least because it saved her having to fix the walls or replace the kitchen cupboards. Steady John had needed someone to inject the adrenaline back into his system. They were two halves of the same whole. Mrs Hudson was many things – a landlady, arthritic, getting on in years – but she was not blind and the man that lay on the sofa most evenings, staring at the ceiling, needed his detective.

The phrase goes 'stuck in a rut.' I wondered what I was going to do. I hated the thought of leaving London, but on an army pension? I shuddered at the thought of what would be available for that kind of money.

I simply had to get out of the centre, so I went for a walk in the park, limping heavily on my stick. 'Barely thirty-three and already a cripple,' I thought every time I looked at it.

I supposed it was a nice day – a nice day for London. I wasn't paying much attention, so it came as a surprise when somebody hailed me from behind.

"John? John Waston!"

I turned. An overweight man of about my age got up from a bench and approached me. He seemed oddly familiar…

"Stamford? Mike Stamford, we were at Barts together!"

Oh.

"Yes, Mike, hello." Mike had been one of those chaps that flew under the radar – likeable, clever in his own right, but would never set the world on fire. We'd been friendly acquaintances and frequent lab partners rather than really close friends. I tried to disguise the fact that I had completely forgotten his existence up until now.

We bought coffee and sat on the bench for a while. He seemed surprised at how much I'd changed. Obviously he hadn't realised that when a man is stationed for a long time in a war zone, it tends to change him in obvious ways.

Inevitably, the conversation turned to what I was going to do now. "Couldn't Harry help?"

An image flashed up of me living with my alcoholic, emotionally unstable, regularly broke sister. "Yeah, like that's going to happen."

"I dunno, get a flatshare?"

The man was clearly trying too hard. "Come on. Who'd want me for a flatmate?"

To my surprise and confusion, the man began to chuckle.

"What?"

"You're the second person to say that to me today."

Despite the worrying images that came into my mind at the thought of someone who was as bad as I was, I would jump at any chance to stay in London and my curiosity piqued. "Who was the first?"

London. Not his childhood home, but where he'd come to escape a family falling apart. The place he'd first felt at home. Funny that, now it felt like his prison. So many memories…and yet, there was still nowhere else he would rather be. Just in case…but Mycroft had made that perfectly plain, and he had always been more forthcoming with his true agenda than his brother. He still called around, once a week, without fail. Most of his visits descended into a loaded silence.

His violin case still leant against the wall. John hadn't touched it. There were many memories surrounding this as well, usually of being kept awake at 2am as his flatmate wailed out a tune on it to help him think. But the strongest was the first day they'd met, even though not a single note had been played…

The upstairs lab at Bart's had been revamped. New clinical white tables lined the walls and the place smelled of cleaning rather than spilt chemicals. There was also only one occupant, a whip-lean young man of around twenty-eight with cropped curly black hair bent avidly over a microscope. He barely looked up from what he was doing as we entered.

"Bit different from my day," I idly observed, glancing around the almost unfamiliar room.

"You've no idea," chuckled Mike.

"Mike, can I borrow your phone, there's no signal on mine." The man in the corner didn't so much as glance up as he made his request. He had a musical baritone.

Mike gave me a look which told me he was used to this. "And what's wrong with a landline?"

"I prefer to text." He still didn't glance up. I realised this must be the potential flatmate. 'Bit rude, aren't you?'

Mike rolled his eyes and checked his pockets. "Sorry, other coat."

'May as well be nice to the chap if I might be sharing a flat with him,' I thought. "Here, use mine."

The young man glanced up as though seeing me for the first time. "Oh…thank you." He stood up and I got my first good look at him.

He was like a cat, the way he unfolded himself from his stool and languidly strolled over to me. Over six feet of well-cut suit and high cheekbones, towering over my own 5ft 9".There was something magnetic about him – he seemed to fill the room, though there was nothing on his person, no badge or insignia to denote authority. I wondered if he even worked here.

"This is a friend of mine," said Mike. "John Watson."

He grabbed the phone and flipped it up. "Afghanistan or Iraq?"

Floored, I glanced at Mike. He smiled.

"Sorry, what?"

"Which was it, Afghanistan or Iraq?" He looked at me, as though annoyed at having to repeat himself.

"…Afghanistan. Sorry how did you…?"

"Ah, Molly, coffee, thank you." We were interrupted , this time by a young and pretty woman holding a steaming mug, which the tall man accepted. "What happened to the lipstick?"

"It…wasn't working for me."

"Really? I thought it was a big improvement. Your mouth's too small now." He was already walking away.

"Okay…" She left. 'Definitely a history there. Probably unrequited attachment on her part, poor girl.' But there was no time to think more on it.

"How do you feel about the violin?"

'Derailed for the second time in less than a minute Watson. Who is this guy?' Feeling like a total idiot, all I could repeat was, "What?"

"I play the violin when I'm thinking, sometimes I don't talk for days on end – would that bother you? Potential flatmates should know the worst about each other."

'And again.' "You told him about me?" I asked Mike.

Mike shook his head, that small smile still in place. "Not a word."

So the guy had just pulled it out of thin air. Again. I didn't appreciate this, this random deducing and secret telling. I could already tell there would be no such thing as privacy in this 'flatshare.'

"Then who said anything about flatmates?" I asked defensively. A small voice in the back of my head said Still has trust issues…

"I did," said the man breezily, now pulling on a coat. "Told Mike this morning I must be a difficult man to find a flatmate for. Now here he is, just after lunch, with an old friend clearly just home from military service in Afghanistan. Wasn't a difficult leap."

His last words sounded so patronising it was difficult not to snap out a blunt response about manners. Instead what I said was "How did you know about Afghanistan?"

This was ignored, which rankled. "Got my eye on a nice little place in central London, together we should be able to afford it. We'll meet there tomorrow, 7 o'clock. Sorry, must dash, I think I left my riding crop in the mortuary."

By now utterly bewildered by this frankly bizarre and more than a little disturbing exchange, I went for the principle that attack was the best form of defence. "Is that it?" I asked sharply as the lean man brushed past me.

He swivelled. "Is that what?"

"We've only just met, and we're going to go look at a flat."

"Problem?" And now he was the one sounding confused. I bit down a stream of profanities you can only pick up from prolonged exposure to servicemen at this presumptuous...

"We don't know a thing about each other, I don't know where were meeting. I don't even know your name," I replied in a tight voice.

He fixed his eyes on my face with an intense expression that emphasised his high cheekbones. They were a mixture of grey and green and bore into mine with the intensity of a laser sight on a sniper rifle.

"I know you're an army doctor and you've recently been invalided home from Afghanistan. I know you've got a brother who lives in London but you won't go to him for help because you don't approve of him, possibly because he's an alcoholic, more likely because he recently walked out on his wife. And I know your therapist thinks your limp's psychosomatic. Quite correctly I'm afraid." His tone suddenly became lighter. "That's enough to be getting on with, don't you think?"

'How the hell…how the hell did he get that?' my brain screamed at me. All I could do was stand there dumbly and stare. Floored, completely, three times in five minutes.

The man turned to leave but stopped, just inside the door.

"The name's Sherlock Holmes and the address is 221B Baker Street." He flashed a cocky wink at me. "Afternoon." The door banged shut behind him.

Sherlock Holmes. The man with the laser-beam eyes. The man with no social filters in his brain. The man who would annoy me, laugh at my habits and do whatever he wanted, regardless of the consequences for either the carpet or the budget.

The man who would change my life.