5:03am.

The movement of the clock startles me out of a pause. I quickly delete the file again, untangling myself from my hunched posture, and finally go about inventory.

Memories. Sixth level. One long continuous hallway, one room for every significant experience in my life, preserving them for later use (should such be required of me). Fifth level is top-secret. Information is the fourth level - I imagine it as a seemingly endless library where I had saved exactly and precisely every shred of knowledge I had torn out of books, television, experimentation, and study. The third and second level are combined, as a huge web of possibilities and theories They stand in the middle of the other levels because I use the levels above and below to mild the second and third. The first level is observation. A sitting room with an old-fashioned photo reel. The images stream past on the little screen at an incredible speed, but I see everything. I remember everything. I remember how many sun-spots formed on the faces of every neighbor on our block. I remember every train schedule, weekday, weekend, holiday, and state of emergency, in all European nations for the last 300 years. I remember every intricate and intimate detail of my flatmate, including but not limited to how many hairs are on his knuckles, what newspaper articles he The basement is for bad things. Indulgence. Drugs. Morally questionable interests.

For the thirty-thousandth time, I wonder what it must be like to be normal. So ignorant. So free. Probably something like an eternal high. Of course, if I should attain it I won't be able to appreciate it.

Laughable really.

Lastly, I check the sub-basement again, see no sign of the anomaly (though I feel the recently deleted file rewriting itself, violating my mind with its infuriating little existence) and set to waking John up with my fiddle. I like to share a cab and drop him off at the clinic in the mornings, and I can't do that if he wakes up at the time he'll have inevitably set his alarm to.

He stumbles into the main room (angry and teetering), yells at me, and gets to his morning routine for hygiene, tea, & griping.

I enjoy his griping in a non-romantic sense. I enjoy our friendship. More than I'd care to admit really. Emotions are (of course) for the weak, but if anything was to be learned from my scuffles with Moriarty, it was that I was a better man with Watson at my side.

The human is a social animal after all. While I am the rare exception in that I have absolutely no need for socialization, I do appreciate John's respect and reverence of my gifts. I need something to bounce ideas off of as well, and perhaps it may even be true that a part of me is being filled. Even a lone wolf in nature is only so unwillingly; every wolf has an internal longing to be part of a pack.

Also I like how he'll tidy when I'm out.

More than anything else though... more even than my intellect and curiosity (which were my only comforts in the days before my 5:00am problem) the friendship John and I shared helped me. Moving through this numb-minded unappreciative populace was rather trying for me, and when I could I've avoided it, but there are many instances where there's simply no alternate option. I've always gotten to where I needed to go, one way or another, but with John it was easy. He could maneuver through the crowds like one of them. By no means was he like them, try as he may to be so. To blend in. To find normal love. To have a normal life. John constantly strives for these things, but I know he'll never have them.

It's painful to watch, but I know there's a 99% chance he'll hate me (at least for a little while) if I tell him that he has all the tools for the life he wants, but he's too like me to take it. First he'll have to admit it to himself that he's addicted to danger, poor choices, high stakes, grand mysteries, and the notion of justice. Then I'll be able to tell him he'll never be happy.

After all, I'm not, and I am indisputably the master of all these things.

What sets us apart though is that John is a good man, by modern definition. Instead of debating morality vs benefit and weighing the results against consequence in his head as I often must, John naturally knows what he thinks is the right decision. He may have trouble doing something like euthanizing an elderly man in pain, but at the very first instant that he sees the man he naturally knows that mercy is the route he wants to take. I would simply euthanize the man to make his complaining stop. What's more, John genuinely cares, and wants to help people, not just use them to understand them. I like doing things my way, but it's nice to have someone like John around to care for me.

Hard working, brave, brilliant, compassionate, and most importantly, curious - without curiosity, the human race is nothing. What is it that should drive us to new horizons if not for this attuned sense of emptiness waiting to be filled with knowledge - and yes, even talented. John is a good man, and a good friend. Someone I value more than myself sometimes, though I highly doubt John's life is worth more to the world in way of accomplishments and use than mine.

'Perhaps,' I muse to myself, 'I am a bad friend'. I reach a bony hand up to John, who is busying himself making tea in front of me. I tug at his shirt - an excuse to touch him. To feel the warmth on the fabric that clung to him. To be connected to him in a small way, "This thing makes you look like a buffoon,"

In the beginning of our relationship there were two possible outcomes. Both involved me falling in love with John. One ended with one of our deaths. Neither involve me telling him, but there's something about 'love' that I hadn't counted on back then.

This was that there happens to be very little choice involved on the obsessed man's part when something as vile as love has gripped his mind.

It's stronger than an urge, or a simple compulsion. There comes, with love, a physical need to...act.

Delete me all you want it says, mocking me, I'll just come back stronger.

John shrugs me off and makes a retort about me always looking like one.

I can't handle this much longer.

Deductions be damned, if anyone can win John Watson against all odds, it's Sherlock Holmes.