A/N: If I had to guess, I'd say this takes place in mid-summer of 2013. (Same universe as Recovery Position, but you don't need to have read that; the action proper takes place before that story.) John's military career is roughly the same as the one outlined in the fabulous, madly NSFW Two Two One Bravo Baker ( Archive of Our Own #180121) because I like that fic so much; but it's not that universe, obviously.

"What was it like, when you met him?" Polly asks, when she's caught her breath.
She has bright dark eyes and hair that is subject to change. Lately it's been blondish. She's my webmistress, and hauling me up the stairs is above her pay-grade. We're friends—not that kind of friends—and she does a decent job reading my mind. Though I have had it done better, possibly because Polly understands ordinary courtesy and Sherlock never bothered with that.

Or it may be she knows I'm thinking of him because I often am. Thinking of Sherlock. Particularly whenever I come home. There should be a plaque in the hallway. Above the patches. We repapered, but knowing an assassin has made holes in your wall trying to pretend he was from the Gas Board…I know Mrs. H and I can still see them.

"You're asking about him because I'm drunk."

"I'm asking because tomorrow we can agree you were incoherent. Here's a glass of water, by the way."

I drink most of it. "You are very kind."

"I am very curious," she says. "And if it helps you that would be nice, too."

"I don't need help," I tell her automatically.

Even through the.. Ooh, what have I had? Barley wine, which accounts for a lot of this. I think. Anyway, through the very welcome an-aesthetic (does it mean I can't appreciate paintings? No, John, don't be silly. It means the pain is sitting next to me for a bit instead of inhabiting the pit of my stomach) RIGHT, I am definitely unsafe to drive, but I can still tell when she doesn't believe me. And it isn't that I don't need help, it's that the help I need is unavailable. Or that I've already had so much, and what I need these days is to manage using that, to keep on being the person I was when I was with Sherlock.

"Everyone needs help," Polly tells me confidently. She does not, in fact, need anyone's help, and will say so on the slightest provocation. It's one of those statements that Sherlock detested. An un-truism. "But you… I know it hurts, but you also sometimes look so alive, remembering him. I like seeing you look that way. And I do want to know. So tell me what it was like, becoming friends with him."

Polly usually pulls me back from thinking about the loss. She's good like that. Only tonight she's asking about Sherlock, which is really a big step for her. She worries so much about being a fan, because she wants to be a friend. And I love her for both. I still don't really want to talk about him. But thinking about what I had, who, is better than thinking about the empty place he's left. Is this what they mean by it getting better, actually beginning to find his memory a good thing?

"So tired of crying," but that isn't where I am so much, tonight. A definite improvement. Not being maudlin even while intoxicated. Could be all right. Polly is looking at me, wants to be encouraging, sees I'm not going to the broken place. She pats me on the shoulder.

"Then take a deep breath and use your words, John."

"Will you make tea? You wouldn't believe how much tea we drank."

"Here's me putting the kettle on, all right?"

What can I possibly say about what he was like? She knows what I've written about him better than I do, better than anyone; she'll quote paragraphs at me that I barely remember writing. Unnerving, not just because of her attention to me, but because I can understand how little I could have seen when I looked at Sherlock. I suppose I can't really blame myself for that; I do remember the first few times I was surprised.

How little I knew of him? How little I observed. He was right about that.

Anyway, when I started writing the blog, really started—by which I mean started writing about Sherlock instead of saying anything about myself—I wrote unvarnished facts, the kind of thing I thought was undebatable. Mostly, that he was amazing.

Sherlock doubted every word, of course, because his unvarnished facts were written in stone—blood, individual hairs, traces of paint and lipstick and threads of fibre—things you wouldn't varnish with description, let alone sentimentality or unnecessary background; and he wasn't likely to admit he was amazing. People had told him too often that it was bad, to the exactly same degree that it was amazing. Working as a detective gave him one place that was relatively safe to do what he did, to be who he was, without being condemned. Relatively safe. For a time.

Polly is looking at me with concern, because I have gone so quiet.

"I'm just thinking," I said. " 'What it was like becoming friends with him', you said. We weren't friends, exactly, not the way you and I are. He was very tall. All sorts of tall. He stood out. People used to call him freak but he sort of was, which was why I hated that so much. Mycroft can pass but I don't think Sherlock ever could."

"Pass?"

"For normal. Like us. Ordinary."

"I got teased at school for being a nerd, and not running after boys the way everyone thought I ought to. I know it wasn't anything like what it must have been for Sherlock, though. Everyone says he was different."

"Different isn't bad. What killed me then was he thought it was. It made him horrible, nasty, suspicious, unkind, every word like that. Made him stupid about people."

"What do you mean? He could tell everything about everyone from looking at them, how could he be stupid about people?"

"He was really good at telling what had happened in a particular place at a particular time with a particular result, which was often—not always—what someone had done. Ideally, a trail of dismembered bodies. One of the things he liked about crimes was that they were usually committed for a relatively small set of reasons: money, revenge, hiding something, a very small set of motives, really, for a nicely defined set of actions. Take him out of crime scene and it was unknown territory. And people in unknown territory aren't always at their best."

"But you liked him anyway."

"Well, eventually. I suppose. Not quite the right word."

I can't really tell you what it was like to come back to London after Afghanistan. I'd been in Somalia for a year before the tours in Afghanistan and I hadn't spent time in England in the winter in years. It was dark all the time, and it was so cold. The damp got into the shoulder and it felt like it was in the leg all the time. I couldn't get warm except in the sauna at PT. I'd spent four months in various hospitals, first with the shoulder proper, then with typhoid, for God's sake. Who gets typhoid nowadays? Someone whose vaccine was compromised? or was exposed to an interesting variant with antibiotic resistance?

Someone who was beyond tired of the army because I'd lost one or two (or forty) too many mates, who was tired of patching up people so they could go hurt more people who wanted to hurt them. Who used to believe in what I was doing, if not quite where or why I was doing it. Who had begun to be battered before becoming broken.

Well. Enough of that. The typhoid was certainly resistant. I wasn't. I wasn't in the best of shape before I got shot, and in the dark of night—one of the things I ought to have been telling the therapist—was a streak of magical thinking suggesting I'd done this to myself because I needed to get out, and resigning my commission was not an option (that would have been healthy). How I had arranged to be hit by a shooter from a quarter-mile away—not even aimed at me personally, just someone taking potshots at a bunch of invaders—not even I in my self-loathing could be sure, but I knew I had done it to myself. And some days I was angry I hadn't made a proper job of it and missed the operations and the rehab and the typhoid and the response to the antibiotics and the rehab and the therapy and the rehab… everything hurt.

And then one day—not really that it hurt less, but that it hurt less often—I was out of the fluorescent, antiseptic, echoey place that was familiar and at least orderly, and set free in London. Out of the army, not that it was a good place, not that it had been home for awhile before I got shot—well, all right, a dysfunctional home, but a familiar one with lots of siblings who weren't Harry—and in a bedsit suitable for a Tokyo airport sleeping pod. In a mindless retraining scheme dedicated to taking people used to combat medicine and deadly gushing wounds and teaching them to notice the difference between Rubella and Fifth Disease. And to care about that.

I might have been better off retraining for an A&E practice but I did tend to shake (and fall over) and they said there was a greater need for GPs. I went through the retraining with higher marks than I worked for, thanks to spending most of my leaves between tours and a good number of the quiet moments trying to keep up my qualifications so I could still be a trauma surgeon even though, really, I preferred being a commando.

Even I saw a bit of a disconnect there, but both occupations are for arrogant men (and women, if they'd let them) who make split-second, life-and-death decisions about other people's lives and deaths. I hadn't liked being a patient at all. But being, as it were, on the other side of the clipboard, in hospital, was still more familiar than being out of one, and being out of the army. And being alone.

They need half-way houses for soldiers. The suicide rate in America is famously shameful, but it's not much better here. No matter how glad anyone is to be home, with loved ones if you're lucky enough to have any, glad to be to be sound enough of mind and body not to be spending all the time in one kind of therapy or another: you miss the orderly life, the defined expectations. The catering and the laundry and the housecleaning service. You miss being with people you don't have to explain everything to, even if you like the ones you're with now, love them, care enough not to tell them to bugger off and stop staring. Even telling someone to do that is a good deal more personal, takes a great deal more energy, than I think many of us returning have to spare. I suppose being alone meant I didn't have to try to act as though I were really at home. I didn't have one.

Did I have PSTD? One of the things that did catch my interest in the how-to-be-a-tame-doctor course was a completely superficial segment about the autism spectrum. Mostly enough to let you know when someone's kid was farther off the wall than usual (Have you ever met a sane two-year-old? Or a sane teen, for that matter?) and that you might need to refer them to a different kind of specialist (rather than just give the parents anti-anxiety meds and a strong talking-to about whether they could call in the grandparents for respite care).

But the whole idea that someone in conventional medicine could recognise a spectrum of disability (difference, if you like, but I was thinking about myself) fascinated me. We so like 'on and off', 'healthy/unhealthy'. If only it were so easy as 'pregnant/not pregnant' (and God knows the abortion wars have made even that harder to define). But for all kinds of illness—diabetes, obesity, anything we class under mental health and hope like hell will just go away—a range from 'you might keep this in mind' to 'barely treatable' to 'Go directly to a doctor and GET HELP' seems like common sense, if harder to issue codes for, if less simple to deal with than yes or no.
I regarded myself as somewhere pale-coloured on the PTSD spectrum, and that seemed right and actually comforting. It made sense. Something to keep an eye on. Oh, and depression.

I don't know whether people who aren't something to do with the profession think about diagnoses as much as I did. I get patients who have spent enough time thinking and researching to be completely misled (not all of them). Doctors make the worst patients partly because, compared to the rest of the population, we actually do know more about what's going on, and we also resent being Them, patients, instead of Us, the ones who fix things. No matter how much I knew about depression, which was quite a lot, I didn't like to think of it in myself. But it was definitely there.

So I had at least three people in my head: the doctor, who noticed John wasn't sleeping well, and that in fact John was not doing the things he ought to be doing like going out and meeting people and trying to chat up women; the sad sick person I didn't want to know about who wanted to lie under the bed, instead of on it, and not come out again, who certainly had Seasonal Affective Disorder, if you want a label, and who was afraid none of the pain—of the different kinds of pain—would get better, because why should they?; and the one I thought of as myself, good old reliable calm I-really-don't-need-to-shoot-anyone John Watson, who I was supposed to be when I wasn't holding a clipboard.

That John Watson was an awful lot of trouble to maintain.

He was losing ground.

He might not have been getting out of the way of oncoming traffic as automatically as he should have been.

He was envious of people with pneumonia sometimes.

He wasn't really looking at his illegally-owned weapon the way he should have.

In fact, what the hell was he, I, doing with a gun in the first place? Someone in the same room in the last stage of my inpatient life had managed to smuggle it out of Iraq. He had told me one night, over covert and completely counter-indicated whiskey (my alcoholic relative had never been so thoughtful as to bring me anything but a phone and a series of headaches) how he was worried about having it, would I hold onto it for him? He was sectioned a couple of days later, suggesting he'd been entirely correct. Having accepted the thing, I should have passed it along to a responsible authority, but I didn't.

Even the doctor inside me was quite pleased to have it, though I knew buying the ammunition was a sign of the kind of problem I should have passed along as well.
I would have hotly denied I was anywhere on a 'suicidal' spectrum, and then explained that perhaps I was, a little, but nothing anyone needed to be concerned about.
I didn't like any of the people in the retraining scheme but I missed it when it ended, and then I was officially unemployed. Trying to persuade someone to hire you when you don't think you're worth interviewing is practically impossible.

Nor are the weeks before Christmas the best times to look for work. I knew that perfectly well, just as I knew that I had to spend Christmas week with Harry, who was, at that time, two months into having formally chosen vodka over her civil partnership. She even said so. After splitting up with Clara, Harry was having her own financial troubles; their little house was full of empty places and Harry was talking about selling it in the new year. It was the first Christmas we had been alone together since our parents died, and the only thing we agreed on was now much neither of us wanted to move back to our home town. It made my empty bedsit look like Paradise.

And it was still the darkest time of year.