Sometimes John sat in his flat in the quiet with a cuppa and just stared at the wall. With Sherlock gone, in the flat much smaller than 221b, things were quiet. That quiet, what should have been calm and relaxing, set him on edge. It drove him mad slowly. He had learned something very important about himself when he met Sherlock. He was calm in the chaos. When life moved fast and people were loud, that was where he found his serenity.

So of course, even though he tried to fight it, when Sebastia came along and tried to kill him, he rather enjoyed it. They played cat and mouse, and he spent less time staring at his wall. She would pull him off the street or drop into his flat just to mess with him, and if he was completely honest with himself, he was grateful.

He hated the quiet after Sherlock's death, the quiet days with his cuppa and the long nights with his gun. Now he had her to stir him up, to keep him on his toes. After a while their cat and mouse slipped into something a bit more companionable, but even then, it wasn't serene. She was a hurricane and he had been sucked in. His life was as calm as a typhoon, just how he liked it.