Notes: I started writing this in July, and actually had it mostly finished and lying around Scrivener collecting dust. I figured––hey, I'll go over it a final time, edit it, and publish it. To be honest, usually I have ideas that come to me without a clear end goal. A major weakness in an authoress, I know. My favorite kind of fanfiction is where the characters as we know them actually have awesome differences. Everyone expects Naruto to be a moron, Harry to be unprepared, and stuff like that. I like putting a spin on things, and those are the ideas that usually pop into my head.

Lots of people make fun of John because he's not as smart as Sherlock––but to be honest, John is an army doctor. He's pretty cool. My favorite Sherlock Holmes fanfiction stories are ones that surprise Mr. Holmes because Mr. Watson does something completely unexpected. Because, really, seeing a genius stare blankly in confusion is fun. ^_^ (At least when they're fictional. I wouldn't actually try it with a living Sherlock Holmes. It's doomed to failure and frankly impossible.)

7/26/16: I originally meant this to have a few more chapters and life out its life as a short story. Alas, it was not to be! However, it makes an acceptable one-shot.

From the comic books of his long-ago youth, John Watson had always thought that telepaths could just hear other peoples' thoughts. Maybe those fictional telepaths could also manipulate thoughts, but nothing else besides––amazing as the idea was. He thought that there was no actual effect upon the telepaths themselves besides the knowledge they'd taken from someone else's head.

He was wrong.

~ oOo ~

When he awoke in an small English-staffed Afghanistan hospital with a hole in his shoulder, John stared at the ceiling for a long while and there was nothing but silence.

Then a young nurse walked in and looked over his vitals for a moment, double-checking that everything was working fine. Equipment was known to malfunction sometimes when the funding got low––it was always best to double-check––didn't double-check with Reena and she died––always, always, always double-check.

John studied the young woman with confused, glazed eyes. The nurse gave a small, sympathetic smile when she saw that he was aware of his surroundings. She turned around toward the hall to fetch a doctor.

Bad case, she told him as she left. She spoke in words that he himself had understood and used. Wound, infection, fever, hallucinations, almost guaranteed psychological problems. Likely Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. There's no chance that he'll be sent anywhere but straight back home.

Except she didn't open her mouth.

~ oOo ~

At first, the voices were only murmurs. Then, as he woke up fully, they began to get louder and louder. Soon, he couldn't shut them out no matter how he covered his ears or thought of other things––because John didn't just hear them. He experienced those thoughts.

It wasn't at all like listening to an invisible radio, like he'd seen the special effects people on telly make telepathy look like. Not at all, and John sometimes wanted to punch those same special effects people for putting the wrong idea into his head.

As John recovered and the pain medicine was lessened, he began to be in three or four or five places at once. He began to feel spread thin. He was only one man, and he reminded himself that he was not named Samantha Crewe (the nurse), or Jonathan Gates (the doctor), or Jimmy Greckar (his roommate with a broken leg). He wasn't Greg Olsen (the man in the room on the other side of the wall). His name was John Hamish Watson.

Sometimes he just forgot.

~ oOo ~

Just like that nurse had privately predicted, John was sent home as soon as he was sufficiently recovered. There were hundreds of people moving through the English airport, and John had a hand held up to his head at all times to sooth the ache. He pressed his index and middle finger against the side of his forehead and concentrated on shutting the voices out––mercifully, the shouting became a murmur.

It wasn't just the people at the airport, though those were the loudest. It was also the thousands of little whispers from the city itself. Little flickers of thought, at the very back of his mind, but so very, very many of them. Old, young, local, foreign, happy, sad, angry, afraid, and he just wanted them all to show a little courtesy and shut up!

Is this what London would be like now?

~ oOo ~

When John settled in London upon his return to England, he contemplated moving out of the city altogether to escape the noise. Even when he was physically alone, he could still hear the thoughts of those around him––flashes of color in a black and white world. He thought that this might be what people had experienced when they had watched the first color films. John had to place aside a portion of his concentration to shove the most heavy thoughts away, but still heard those flashes when in conversation. It was like subtext, every word connected to thoughts in the other person's head.

Add that to his nightmares of Afghanistan and his psychosomatic limp, and he was practically a textbook example of an disturbed mind.

Thankfully, with time, his ability to control his telepathy improved. The formerly troublesome whispers were like a constant soothing lullaby now. He could drown out the magnetic pull––being pushed into someone else's head––and only involuntarily followed the consciousness of people when physically in contact with them.

John was better able to understand where he ended and where everyone else began. Instead of falling into other peoples' heads, he was able to pull the thoughts into his own head for control. As time passed, he became able to stretch himself farther and farther and became able to dive further and further.

Having an ability and actually using that ability, however, were two very different things. John tried to stay away from other peoples' thoughts as much as he could. He wasn't afraid of his telepathy, exactly. He just wasn't really fond of it either.

Telepathy was like having an x-tray into a person's true self. It was like stealing, if he plunged into their minds. Seeing mere surface thoughts wasn't bad, but a full Plunge always left John feeling like a horrible person. After all, they didn't know what they were doing when they accidentally brushed shoulders in the grocery store.

John never tried manipulating thoughts. He couldn't even consider that. He wasn't like Charles Xavier. Telepathy was a gift, or a curse, or something. But even though John wasn't entirely sure how it had happened, he was somehow absolutely certain that there were things that he just Shouldn't Do, and manipulating thoughts was one of them.

The telepathy changed John. He could hear . . . so much. He didn't spend a day without having some other person jump into his mind and out of it again, though it happened less and less as time passed.

Walking down the street was like repeatedly poking his finger into an electrical socket. On/Off/On/Off. Black and white, color picture. Mute, sound. Like the Energizer bunny with a spinning switch and a lot of sugar in its system.

Such a royal jerk!––Cute puppy-dog, mommy. Can I please have one?––So annoying . . .––He's handsome, isn't he? So happy to finally get married.––How troublesome. Just leave me alone, for heaven's sake. Stop calling me in the middle of the day.––Stupid. Moron. Idiot.

John's brow furrowed at the last one, as a tall man in a long coat ran on the other side of the street. There was a body in that mind, the yellow tape of a crime scene, and a long string of insults to someone named Anderson. John pulled his defenses higher, shoulders relaxing.

Must have been a police officer.

John had come to realize, with time, that the mind was a complex thing that he could never fully understand, telepath or not. It was hard to explain it in physical terms, but the minds all looked––felt––so very different. Some minds are purple and some are green and some have polka dots and some are striped.

Some people thought in terms of sports, or friends, or emotion, or pictures, or music. There was even a time when John heard someone think in numbers. Introverts usually had quiet surface thoughts, extroverts usually had loud ones. Some thoughts bounced around and around and some were closer to the clunky purring of a machine. There were harsh thoughts and gentle thoughts and excited thoughts.

And then the colors and the pictures and the emotions and the volume and the processes all mix together while still remaining a bit separate and create the different facets of a mind, completely unique.

The very core of that person's being. And John could see it.

~ oOo ~

It was a few months later afterwards when John Watson met Sherlock Holmes. It was unforgettable, but not in the manner than most people would have found it.

John followed Stamford into the lab at St. Bart's, peering around and remembering the old days. He had been here, once, as a student. Over ten years ago, now. Had it really been so long?

Normally, John heard the loud, hyperactive thoughts that usually came with the appearance of someone in the room. First, who? Then, blue-eyes, brown-hair, lumpy-sweater. Then, people scrambled for a name and usually found themselves unable to remember his forgettable face. He was usually greeted with an embarrassed, "Hello," and a notable silence afterwards. It was pathetically similar to watching a dog trying to tackle a bouncing ball, seeing the shape of those thoughts.

Having gotten used to this, John nearly overlooked the silent mind whirring quietly away over a microscope.

"Can I borrow your phone?" the man asked Stamford.

"Sorry, I left mine in my coat," Stamford responded. "Can't you use the landline?"

"I prefer to text," the man replied with a grimace.

John peered at the man curiously. Upon second look, his mind was not silent at all. It was simply that his thoughts were compressed, efficient. Streamlined. It was like this man had taken his mind and then applied aerodynamics to it, cutting off the blunt edges and leaving behind sharp knives in their place.

It was one of the stranger minds that John had seen. To be quite honest, he was curious.

"Oh, here, you can use mine," John said, digging into his pocket and holding out his phone. It had been given to him a little while ago, but he honestly normally didn't have any use for it––and subsequently, no important messages or notes in it that he might have wanted to hide. Besides, what could someone find out about him from his private messages? John could see their very thoughts, even when he tried to keep them quiet.

The man wordlessly took it from his hand, sent off a text, and then returned it in short order. As he gave it back, his fingers accidentally touched John's though John had mostly learned to avoid physical contact, usually wearing gloves but––drat!––he'd taken them off when he entered the heated hallways of Bart's.

Suddenly, there was a vortex of––Tan lines (from uniform), military bearing, psychosomatic limp, shot in shoulder, honorable discharge, doctor, wait: clarify: army doctor, Afghanistan or Iraq? To Harry, from Clara, XXX, doesn't fit, must be alcoholic brother. Conversation with Mike Stamford earlier today subject: flatmate, Stamford invites an old friend of his to meet me, potential flatmate, perhaps useful to the Work instead of DULL, DULL, DULL like most people––thoughts, all flying past each other in intricate circles, darting in and out of other thought processes like some sort of intricate paper airplane dance.

"Afghanistan or Iraq?" Sherlock Holmes, the only consulting detective in the world, asked.

"Afghanistan," John answered easily, standing casually and without tension.

Behind his neutral mask, however, the telepath stumbled around like an extremely catnipped feline, mind still dizzy from the whirling spinning of Sherlock Holmes' mind, if the natural disaster could be called that. A hurricane, perhaps. It was only the extensive embarrassing mishaps of the first month or so in London that had given John the training to stop himself from making a fool of himself at the shock.

Sherlock shot a mildly surprised look at him, obviously waiting for a question that didn't come. Why would John ask how Sherlock knew what he knew when John knew exactly how Sherlock knew and––oh, bloody heck, telepathy was an absolute pain at times. What other comic superpower could get their users tangled in mental knots? The physical knots were troublesome enough, thank you very much, what with the tremors in his fingers and his limp and the gunshot wound to boot.

There was a moment of silence. "Do you mind the violin?" Sherlock asked after a short pause.

"No," John replied. Then, he took a short breath and had to clarify, "As long as it isn't intentionally bad. Then I will object." He had caught a few suspicious snippets of what he could only refer to as the unnatural and cruel murder of an innocent instrument.

"Sometimes I don't speak for days at a time. Would that bother you?" Sherlock continued, studying John's reaction.

Actually, that was rather a positive point. With so many thoughts reaching out to him with their sticky fingers, John had found himself questioning, often, if someone had actually been talking to him or just thinking really really loud.

"Not at all," John replied serenely, tucking his hands in his pockets. "I do, however, object to body parts in the fridge, even for experiments. You'll have to move them to the lower shelves, at least." And there was a flash of thought and … oh dear, was that a head?!

The room froze and there was a chasm of silence. The mind before him, currently focused on John with a few minor processes still multitasking, suddenly had a minor crash. ERROR, that mind announced. Then, Sherlock narrowed his eyes, brain glowing with curiosity, and said, "221B Baker Street," storming out of the room to do research on a certain army doctor recently discharged from Afghanistan, already making a beeline for the Homeless Network for gossip.

Stamford stared at John with wide eyes. "I don't remember you being like that," he said.

"Things change," John said without concern, once again aware of the pain in his leg and leaning against his cane.

"And now there's two of them," Stamford groaned to himself, burying his face in his hands. "Oh, have mercy."

Please Review; Constructive Criticism Welcomed!