Don't chase ghosts, -Sarah Fimm, "Be Like Water"
Don't get too close,
Don't get caught,
Don't get spent,
Don't get bought.
Don't sell out,
Don't give in.
Don't fuck your best friend.
If everything is just the way it should be,
Why am I, why am I still hungry?
John had never been a brilliant man. That had never bothered him. He didn't need to be in England's top percentile in order to feel successful. He was smart, yes, not unintelligent in the slightest, but he wasn't what most would consider... well, noticeable. Uni had been kind to him, the Army had not been, but in either case, Jonathan Hamish Watson was nothing more than another man in the line.
He was short, stocky and firm, built for self defense. Though John knew how to fire a gun, and fire it well - he had been quite the marksman back in Afghanistan - his moral compass was far too strong to ever show that off as something worthy of noticing. He could cook the basic comfort foods that either his father or Harry had taught him in their moments of generosity, but he wasn't any sort of grand chef, nor did he pretend to be, and though he took care of the domestics that Sherlock needed handling (laundry, general picking up, dishes and grocery shopping), he wasn't...
John wasn't anything special.
That hadn't bothered him much in his life. John was at least somewhat good looking, going by the dates that came and went like changing shirts. He could take care of himself. He had stories to tell, though a powerful need to avoid those stories had him dancing around the subject of the war on most dinner dates if it was ever questioned. He wasn't all bad, even if he wasn't particularly a special and unique snowflake like all of his elementary school teachers had told him he would be.
It hadn't bothered him one bit.
Not until he met Irene Adler.
Irene was everything that John wasn't, it seemed. Sherlock had known the woman for half an hour tops, talking about God knows what while Sherlock tried to unlock her safe, but she obviously had him wrapped around her finger in precisely the way that made John's stomach turn.
John had never seen Sherlock so utterly fixated on anyone. Not unless one counted Moriarty, but even that was a different sort of fascination, a sick game the two played with each other, a question of who truly pulled the strings. Irene hadn't been a criminal mastermind, but she had certainly captured Sherlock's attention wholeheartedly. In the months after the Vatican cameos, after Irene had whipped Sherlock into submission and drugged him into incoherency, Sherlock didn't have to speak of her for John to know precisely what was on his mind at every waking moment.
Four numbers. A combination of mobile phone buttons that would be able to unlock that damned thing and obtain the photographs and videos and whatever the hell else was on the bloody device.
But no. Sherlock was really thinking about her lipstick, her perfume - rosy and subtle. Her eyes. That wicked smile.
('My measurements.')
John didn't hate her. But he didn't like her either, not one bit. From autumn into winter, Irene Adler sent Sherlock precisely thirty-two text messages. John never knew what they said, but he did know that the phone made a rude noise and that Sherlock was refusing to change it. He knew that Sherlock always seemed mildly interested in a way that anyone else would simply overlook, but that John knew meant something much more than a merely intellectual fascination with The Woman.
She was manipulating him, and Sherlock didn't even seem to realize. In fact, his friend seemed almost happy to allow her to do so.
It was Christmas that made John absolutely sure what was going on in that funny head. When Sherlock had returned from St. Bart's with an empty expression on his face and snow clinging to his coat, with vacancy in his eyes and grief hanging heavy in his body over a woman he'd barely known. The teasing, jovial nature from earlier had completely drained from every inch of him, and the long, lean body merely wandered off to close himself up in his bedroom.
Sherlock Holmes had fallen in love with her.
And the thought made John's stomach clench.
In the four days that Irene was dead, Sherlock had nearly overdosed on his damn cocaine, resulting in John sitting on a protesting, screaming 29-year-old in the middle of an ice cold shower. Sherlock didn't speak to him, didn't eat, didn't do anything but watch telly and play that tune ("The Woman," the piece was titled; John had seen the sheet of paper against the music stand, the places where Sherlock had crossed out notes that hadn't worked, smudged the pencil lead, nearly crumpled the paper to throw it in the bin) on his Stradivarius.
And then suddenly she was back and John was furious and she was in their flat and flirting with Sherlock and-
"I would have you, right here on this desk, until you begged for mercy twice."
John had never been more speechless in his life and oh god did he need this woman out of their lives.
When it was all over - Irene caught, dead in some terrorist cell in Karachi, Sherlock busy as ever - when it was all over, Sherlock asked to keep the phone.
After seeing how Sherlock had crumpled at the thought of Irene being out of his life permanently, how could John have said no?
How could John ever say no?
John was ordinary, is what Moriarty would call it. John was nothing more than an Army doctor, a medical man trying to make a living in a 24-hour clinic, dating the women who came his way out of pity because it meant a warm bed for the night. He was boring, and simple, and compact.
Irene Adler was brilliant and vibrant, and Sherlock was strange and beautiful, and the two fit together far better than John could have ever imagined.
John was plain, but Irene- Irene was special to Sherlock in a way John knew he never would be.