Note: I own nothing but my own plot, everything else is the BBC's, Stephen Moffat/Mark Gatiss's, and Arthur Conan Doyle's. I just like to play here. Not beta'd or Brit-picked.

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John stared at his computer screen and just sighed. The cursor was mocking him, he was sure of it. Why else would it be blinking so smugly?

It used to be different. He'd been writing since he was a boy. His parents' attic was filled with dozens of notebooks of scribbles, stories, sketches … if he hadn't been studying, out playing with his friends or asleep, chances were always good that John would have a pen in his hand. Writing was like breathing—essential. It was unthinkable to pass a day without putting something down on paper.

Not that he'd let that interfere with his practical plans for the future. When he wasn't writing character sketches and stories, he was studying, determined to become a doctor. He spent hours trying to concentrate on his dry, badly-written science textbooks and wondered what law forbad inserting the tiniest bit of life or personality into them. Just because the facts were dry and unyielding didn't mean the prose needed to be. Sometimes he had joked that he got such high grades because his teachers appreciated that his essays were written in English, rather than obfuscating technical jargon.

He had taken his empty journals with him everywhere—university, medical training, and into the army. He would spend hours of his free time (when he could find free time) recording thoughts and impressions. The look of hope mingled with dread on family faces when they saw him come out of the operating theatre. The desperate need of his fellow soldiers when he bent over their bloody bodies. The beauty of the Afghanistan mountains early in the morning. The powerful silence that fell between hearing there were casualties on the way and the explosion of activity to prepare for it.

No, for more than three decades, John Watson and the written word had been the best and closest of friends. Even when he hadn't been writing himself, he had immersed himself in works by other people—anyone from Marcus Aurelius, to Dickens, to Jasper Fforde. Fiction. Nonfiction. Memoirs. Poetry. Novels. Short stories. Even song lyrics if he could find nothing better (and some song lyrics were very good indeed).

And then, he'd been shot.

How a bullet through his shoulder had left him bereft of words, he didn't know.

Not that he was silent. He held conversations with his doctors, with his therapists. He talked to fellow patients. He might not be verbose, but it wasn't like words had escaped him altogether.

Until he tried to put them on paper.

The minute he held a pen to a page, or sat in front of a keyboard … there was nothing. Not physically. He could still form the letters, could force himself through the army's innumerable forms and requisitions. He could manage a couple of sentences to Harry to reassure her that he was alive, and that nothing permanent was damaged, but somehow, he was starting to doubt that.

Somehow, he had lost the ability to write, as if the network of nerves and ligaments that had connected his brain to his hand, allowing words to flow so liberally, so generously, for as long as he could remember had been blocked. As if the scar tissue spread through his shoulder was a dam he couldn't traverse.

When he said he couldn't write, he didn't mean the act of forming the words. He meant … writing. That magical transmutation of thoughts and impressions into a series of words that conveyed depth and meaning to a reader. The ability to take words so straightly, stiffly listed in the dictionary like long lines of soldiers and release them to find their own way, their own partners, creating towns and networks of words to build their own world. All that was gone. Anything other than the strictest, most direct sentences was lost to him. Suddenly his emails home sounded like something a seven-year old would write. ("Dear Harry. How are you? I'm fine.")

He hadn't written like a seven-year old even when he'd been seven.

It was no wonder, he thought, that his hand had developed a tremor. The power of all those words trapped, unable to escape, was like a flood being held back by a dyke. It was only ironic that the fingers keeping the words dammed and held belonged to himself. It was even more ironic that, rather than feeling the pressure of blocked words, waiting to explode out onto paper, John felt emptier than he ever had in his life.

#

He almost laughed when his therapist told him to keep a blog, explaining that writing down the things that happened to him would help.

It was so pathetic it was funny. John knew, better than anyone of his acquaintance, the value of keeping a journal to record thoughts, feelings, events, and so on. Didn't he have boxes of them? Hadn't that been a cornerstone of his life since the beginning of time?

To be fair, he could understand the hints of frustration in her voice as she tried to explain. How many knuckle-headed soldiers had she told this to over the years? John was realistic when he thought about some of his (former) comrades-in-arms. Most of them rarely cracked a newspaper much less a book, and as to writing? They might manage to force out an email home, but verbosity was never exactly a problem. Neither was proper spelling, grammar, or punctuation.

No, the fact his therapist failed to grasp was that John wanted to keep a journal again. He yearned to, ached to put words on paper with the same felicity he'd taken for granted. Somehow the fact that he used to have a gift for writing never found its way into her notes, and he couldn't bring himself to enlighten her. Talking about his lost writing was worse than talking about his now-defunct surgical skills. Why dwell on what was lost? Any wake that was necessary was being held in his hand and his heart on a daily basis. He didn't need public mourners.

And so he sat in his chair with the same pose he'd seen in countless other faces over the years—that of pure scepticism that writing could do anyone any good.

"Nothing happens to me."

Limping out of his bedsit, he tried not to think about the utter irony that, for the first time in his life he had all the time in the world to write, and there wasn't a single word he could find worth recording, however fleetingly, even as pixels on a screen.

#

John walked through the park, thinking about libraries and bookstores. Maybe he could find inspiration from someone else's writing? Or at least find comfort in knowing that at least some writers were finding a way past their word-eating ghosts and demons….

"John? John Watson?"

He paused, turning on his heel to look over his shoulder at the round man beaming at him. "Mike Stamford. I know, I got fat."

They chatted for a bit, catching up over a cup of the Criterion's coffee. "So what are you doing now?"

John just shook his head and tapped his leg with his cane. "At loose ends for the moment."

Mike nodded, veering away from the awkward topic. "Still writing, then?" he finally asked, as if John's writing was as eternal as the weather, and then looked stunned as John shook his head. "That's not the John Watson I know."

"I'm not the John Watson…" he shook his head, forcibly, as if shaking the recalcitrant words loose, clenching his fist as if to let the words drip from his fingers. "So, what are you doing these days?"

They talked about Barts then, and costs of living in London, and when John mumbled his bitter, "Who would want me for a flatmate?" and Mike replied, "You're the second person to say that to me today," John was surprised to feel a glimmer of interest.

"Who was the first?"

#

Meeting Sherlock Holmes was a revelation.

For the first time in months, words danced behind John's eyes—enigmatic, stunning, brilliant, confusing, contradictory, interesting—and it was all he could do to stumble along behind the conversation, reaching for the thread of it, just out of his grasp as he fought the flood of impressions.

He felt breathless as the door swung shut behind the man, leaving John staring blankly at Mike, feeling as blind-sided as he had been when the bullet slammed through his shoulder. Nothing could have prepared him for the force of it, the sudden shock, as if all the oxygen had been pulled from the air.

"He's always like that," Mike said, looking all too entertained as John floundered in front of him.

There were too many questions crowding in his brain, the words all pressing against his tongue, weighing it down with tangles and lines of words. Why would Mike introduce him to someone like that? What was that, anyway? What kind of person …? How did he…?

He finally managed, "Who was that?"

"Sherlock Holmes. I told you, he's looking for a flatmate. You might want to jot down the address before you forget—that was 221B Baker Street, if you didn't hear it correctly. You look a little shell-shocked."

Shell-shocked, thought John. A phrase dating back to WWI when the powers-that-be believed post-traumatic stress was actually a physical reaction to the blast of an artillery shell, somehow interfering with brain waves or the blood flow … he couldn't quite remember. He just knew that that perfectly described how he was feeling. Bowled over and blown away by an invisible force of nature.

He nodded absently at Mike, as he stared, dazed, at his phone a minute, trying to rally his thoughts enough to record that address before he forgot it. He remembered that he'd been irritated a minute ago at the man's assumption that he would come, but there was a part of him that felt like it had just caught the edge of a fresh breeze, and suddenly he didn't want to miss this chance.

"Here." Mike's hand came into his field of vision, holding out a piece of paper with the details written down and sounding more amused than ever. "Do you need to sit down, John?"

He shook his head and pulled in one more, deep breath before giving a rueful smile. "No, I'm fine. Always like that, you say?"

Mike didn't even try to hide his grin as he nodded. "Possibly the most annoying man in England, but never boring."

I could use less boredom in my life, thought John, but all he did was nod a bit and say thanks before excusing himself, trying to remember the way the man's words had blasted through him. Did he want to live near that kind of flashpoint? To experience that kind of seismic activity every day? His nerves weren't what they used to be, after all, and peace and quiet was supposed to be the sovereign remedy for everything that could ail a sufferer of PTSD.

Except, sometimes John didn't feel he had been traumatized back on the battlefield. It wasn't the war or the loss of adrenalin that had left him wounded. It was the way his muse had abandoned him once his nerves had started jangling rather than smoothly humming that hurt.

#

That night, he pulled up a page for a new blog post and, typing slowly, carefully, as if afraid he would frighten the circling words away like timid fawns (eager for attention but wary), he wrote a new entry. "I met an interesting man today," he began, and awkwardly, as if learning to walk again, tapped out a brief description of his meeting with Sherlock.

The prose was awful, he thought. Clunky, unskilled. Certainly nothing to be proud of, but still, it was the first time he'd managed to put words on a page since a lifetime ago

Maybe he was getting better after all, he thought, as he fell into the most restful sleep he'd had since a bullet shattered his shoulder.

#

Bemused, John watched his new (maybe?) flatmate spin around the room as if his personal gravity worked like centrifugal force instead of the steadying constant it was for most people. The energy and enthusiasm was infectious. They had been in the flat less than fifteen minutes and John already felt he had met several different people. There had been the civil gentleman who had met him at the door, making polite introductions to the landlady. Then there'd been the eager-to-please young man who began straightening up as soon as John mentioned the mess. The proud professional who was hurt when John scoffed. (He felt a twinge of remorse at that, as Sherlock's face fell.)

And then this. This whirlwind of excitement and eagerness, blathering about suicides and Christmas, and John was suddenly wondering what he was getting himself into. When, moments later, Sherlock whirled back into the room long enough to pull John, helpless, along in his wake, John began to realize what a human-sized force of nature was like.

What he didn't expect was the draw he felt to this changeable, intriguing man. No matter which face he showed, he was totally himself, untroubled by what people might expect of him. The gravity of his personality drew John to him with a kind of wondering awe, an urge to simply watch and observe this force of nature go about his day.

It was a type of charisma John had never met before—total self-involvement wrapped up in a unique kind of brilliance. And if he had seemed a trifle hurt at John's dismissal of his website's findings … John got the feeling that was an aberration, and that was even more intriguing. Why would this man, Sherlock, care about what John thought? Because he saw the look of surprise when, later in the evening, John told him he was extraordinary.

And, well, he was, thought John a little bitterly. He stared out the cab window as he listened as Sherlock explained his frankly brilliant deductions and had to admit to a bit of jealousy along with the awe. Unlike himself, Sherlock had a firm grasp of his gift and was plying it with skill and enthusiasm.

Because, John admitted to himself, it hurt, it did, that his own gift had abandoned him, leaving him just a shell of facts for Sherlock to observe and deduce. Not really all that long ago, he had had that kind of fire burning inside him, too. He would find himself shaping words and phrases to events as his day went on, thinking about how to describe, how to translate his experiences to the page. It had been a driving need, not just a hobby, and until he'd lost it, he hadn't realized how much it had defined him.

To watch Sherlock … well, it twinged, because while his gift might be utterly different than John's had been, he was in control of it and using it (apparently) to solve crimes and befuddle innocent army doctors that crossed his path.

Still, John thought, gazing out the window as they approached the crime scene, lights flashing in the distance, maybe the gifts weren't quite so different. A writer and a detective both observed things, took note of details others might miss. It was just what they did with them that differed.

Which was why he couldn't help the chuckle moments later when he corrected Sherlock's one error by saying, "Harry's short for Harriet," because, from a writer's perspective, wasn't that a delicious plot twist? Something unexpected but necessary, foreshadowed by a series of viable but misdirecting plot points, all so that the writer could turn it on its ear at just the right moment for a laugh or a surprise. And it had taken Sherlock by surprise because he was so focused on the details of the scene in front of him; he'd forgotten to look at the big picture.

Well, big picture, laughed John to himself. That hardly described him. He was just a minor character, no doubt fleeting, in the story of Sherlock's life. Because of course Sherlock was the main character while John was in the supporting role.

Honestly, he'd always suspected he was destined to be a chronicler, a spinner-of-tales, rather than holding a part in the story himself—even in his own story. Part of him had never lost the childhood tendency to narrate his own life ("With a bound, John leapt over the fallen lamp, nimbly avoiding the cord stretched across the room as he rushed to help his fallen mother.")

But then, that was just another thing taken in Afghanistan. He just hoped somebody would see Sherlock for the leading man he deserved to be, long after he was gone.

#

Or, maybe Sherlock was an anti-hero, he wondered shortly after as Sherlock tromped around the crime scene, crushing opinions and egos as he went.

And yet … he was brilliant. John had never met anyone like him. He had been impressed before, watching what Sherlock could do with nothing more to go on than John's phone. But now? When there was a life lost, a murderer to catch? It was nothing less than inspiring. Details on the victim's marriage, how she'd come from Wales to spend the night … how was that even possible?

He was dazzled by the intelligence, even as he was appalled by the behaviour, but still, he couldn't keep his admiration inside. It had been too long since he'd felt anything like that—or, anything at all other than bitterness and emptiness. He found himself drawn to that warmth, that incredibly satisfying moment when inspiration hit and illuminated everything, like a frozen man pulling close to a fire from pure instinct.

In fact, as he watched Sherlock bound down the stairs, he saw the flash strike him in a burst of revelation and for a moment, felt even more lost—not so much because he'd been left behind, but because he had been bereft of that kind of spark for so long now. He thought his life would never be anything other than grey and dull.

Still, if he moved in with Sherlock, he would be able to witness his passion, his enthusiasm … that was better than nothing, wasn't it? John wasn't a selfish man, after all. Just because his muse had abandoned him (and who could blame her), he couldn't begrudge that joy for someone else.

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