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snowdarkred) wrote2010-11-05 08:40 pm
Sherlock BBC fic: Settling
Title: Settling
Author:
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snowdarkred Word Count: ~770
Pairings: gen, none.
Rating/Warnings: PG-13, some swearing and suicidal thoughts due to, well, duh.
Author's Note: Thanks to
shanachie_quill for looking this over for me! You're awesome, babe. <3 This is so not what I was supposed to be working on....Summary: John Watson liked to think that he was a simple man. He had simple needs, simple desires, simple hopes.
Settling
John Watson liked to think that he was a simple man.
He had simple needs, simple desires, simple hopes. He wanted a place to sleep that was whole and clean and relatively leak free. He wanted food that was decently cooked and tea that wasn't brewed too strong. He wanted clothes that didn't have holes and shoes that didn't pinch. He wanted his damn limp to go away. He wanted a home, a family, some place where he could rest his head and be at peace with the world. He wanted to stop thinking about the gun in his drawer or the blinking cursor that greeted him every time he opened his blog. He wanted to dream of something other than heat and violence and death and not death and death that would be a blessing. He wanted something to happen to him.
John was not a simple man. His needs, desires, and hopes were too great for that. It was, however, a convenient lie, one of many, because John was not one to let his nature inconvenience the rest of humanity.
John Watson was many things, but mostly, he was tired.
---
He hadn't had a full night of sleep since he returned from Afghanistan. It took the average person between forty-five minutes to an hour to reach their first REM cycle, and that was always what woke him. It was impossible to sleep beyond that, not with the sharp patter of machine gun fire and roaring thunder of explosions echoing in his ears. That would wake anyone.
Instead, he paced about his little dorm room, limping back and forth the like a mad man. After the first week, the man below him had offered to switch because he couldn't take the thump-thump-thump any more. John had agreed, if only because he had started to find himself eying the window once too often, and he knew full well that a jump from this height wouldn't kill him. Safer to remove temptation and stay on the ground.
Of course, that was not the explanation he gave his therapist, though from she wrote on her pad, she had already figured it out. Trust issues.
Doesn't trust other people.
Doesn't trust himself.
Possibly suicidal.
John had bags under his eyes and a tremor in his hands; his damn leg hurt. He woke up every hour, every night, and even drugs barely kept the dreams away. After two months, he knew that he was becoming dependent on sleep aids, and so he stopped taking them.
He had also found him looking at the bottle a little too long. Better to remove—
---
Sherlock Holmes was going to be the death of him. The man didn't settle for anything less than everything, and John found himself giving it, again and again. Each time with that glimmer of death dancing around the edges.
John, at this point, was tired of denying himself.
---
The thing was, he didn't die, and then he wasn't sure he wanted to anymore.
---
John still dreamed, of course. He still woke up in the night with orders he never had the chance to issue choking him with heavy uselessness. He still got phantom pains up and down his bad leg that wasn't actually bad. He had what he would like to consider a home, but he wasn't so sure that he was ready to call 221b Baker Street that, not yet. It was too soon.
He had food that was, mostly, decent, except when he accidentally cooked one of Sherlock's experiments instead of the actual food and had to be rescued from the fumes. Mrs. Hudson made a mean cuppa, and she made sure that the roof didn't leak anymore than could ever be helped in a city as wet as London. The gun moved from the bottom of his drawer to the small of his back, and while it was still on his mind, it was less, It'll feel cool against my temple, and more, Can I get it before this latest mad man tries to kill my flatmate?
He had plenty write about, so much so that he was actually leaving things out. (And not the I thought about killing myself today things like before. Actual things. Sometimes silly things, like how Sherlock liked his tea or his inability to remember which chair was his.)
Something had happened to him, and its name was Sherlock.
He hadn't gotten everything he wanted, but he had more than most, and unlike some people, he was quite willing to settle. It hardly felt like settling at all.
---
Nrg, what is this I don't even....
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<3
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They do leave quite a bit as subtext, but you've rescued it. Lovely.
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I think you captured John's... Practicality? Very well.
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That makes no sense. Sorry.
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