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It occurred to John Watson, in the dead of a random Tuesday night one year and four months in, that all of his pain had always been anger, and that all of his anger, grief.
Seething and gnawing inside of him, he held it: the deep, unacknowledged sadness for every loss and blow. Every wound and terror pooling, circular and occult, in the throbbing well of his incorporeal heart.
That night the wound was especially bothersome; its jagged, neglected margins nagged red and hot like something that wasn't healing but festering, languishing, gathering putrescence in the absence of care.
He needed to mourn. He needed to mourn but never let himself and he never let himself because he was never taught how to. In fact, he was taught the opposite- pack it in, son, soldier on. There will be a time for tears, private and shameful, later.
But that was a lie. To cry- that hideous, hateful release- he needed to be alone. He needed to sit with himself and his pain, silent and unaccompanied. But he never could bring himself to do so. He couldn’t exist in the quiet of just him and just his anguish. And so, the opportunity for crying vanished and because he could no longer feel it there- tickling, squeezing, cramping- he erroneously assumed the need for it had dissipated as well.
No. Unfortunately no. In his conclusion he was utterly mistaken. The grief hadn't disappeared. It'd alchemically transformed into something he thought could handle. Something a man could manage on the surface, something he could be seen possessing and expressing.
Anger.
The grief had transformed and multiplied, metastasized until everything he felt was anger. Sick anger. Burning anger. Sad anger, all threatening dissolution into tears, but turning instead into stitches, sutures in skin both his and others’.
After Afghanistan, the burden of all he'd seen and experienced at war had become too heavy to bear. That black dog hanging cloud had misted his vision of the world, obscuring his perception of anything that didn't smell like burning flesh and begging not to die. It had all become so heavy and so opaque that, in desperation, he'd sought help. He was diagnosed with PTSD. Traumatic stress. Heavy on the stress, because stress he could accept in its proximity to anger.
But trauma? What is trauma? Everyone has trauma and suffers trauma, is what John thought. Not everyone was crippled by it, though. So why was he? Invalided, is what they called it. Why did he have a limp? Why was he suffering pain every day, in his actual body? Pain that doctors, lesser than he, could not assign a physiological diagnosis to.
Psychosomatic, they decided. Psychosis of the somatic system is how he read it, that prefix sitting in the lines of his chart like a brand he tried to keep hidden under sensible woolen jumpers. Somatic theory was a holistic concept that, though he could see the merit of and benefit in, was not something he ever considered applicable to his own medical practice. Nor did he care to apply it to the diagnosis and treatment of his own maladies. After all, he was just John. The simplest creature on the planet. He knew he was clever, sure. He was above average intellectually- he was a doctor, after all. But besides that, he considered himself the standard stamp of British lower-middle class identity and conformity. He'd do talk therapy, sure. Start a journal- or a blog, as it became. But all beyond that was simply unnecessary. There was nothing out of the ordinary about what he experienced, so there was nothing out of the ordinary in how he thought he should feel about it.
Other people lost limbs. Other people lost their lives. He got shot in the shoulder. Big fucking deal. He wasn't exceptional.
But Sherlock Holmes...that man was exceptional. Amazing mind, accomplished in so many things and ways, and there was never a truer friend once you'd earned it.
And he had. John had become Sherlock's supposed only friend. He wasn't sure what it was that Sherlock had seen in him, but he was glad for it. Over their short time together...
...before the...
...they'd shared moments big and small, highs and lows and intrigue and danger. Excitement and laughs. He'd shared a life with that man in a way he never thought he'd share with anyone. It wasn't long into knowing Sherlock that John had begun to feel something besides the dread of a continued existence above ground. Possibilities existed in his life in a way he wasn't sure they ever had before.
...but then...
And then it was that random Tuesday night. Sweating, tangled in sheets, and the moonlight streaming too brightly into his bleary, damp eyes. He cursed himself, the bedding, the weather, the heavens...and then, all at once, his perception transmogrified. His flat, and the world all around it, all tilted twenty whole degrees askew...and he suddenly felt in his heart- spiritual, emotional, heaving muscle, or whatever heart really meant- that he was sad.
John missed his friend. He missed Sherlock and he'd never see him again. He'd never lay eyes on him across the street or in the middle of a crowded train car. Never curse Sherlock's name as he threw his arms around his best friend's neck, sighing and sobbing with great relief that they'd found each other once more. He'd never haul off and hit him in the face; God damn him for making John worry. He'd never kiss him there all the same, just grateful to have him back.
Sherlock was gone. Dead, and buried, and no amount of anger could bring him back.
As long as John had held that anger inside of him, he imagined, then the sadness would be indefinitely displaced. And that was imperative, because if the sadness ever got in, it never would have left. He'd be nothing but sad, and weak, and he'd cry and he'd bleed, and it would almost be like he was just a human, after all. Maybe above average, maybe not. Definitely not exceptional, not like his best friend Sherlock Holmes. And the memory of Sherlock would be disappointed in him forever for turning from a brave and strong and capable soldier that Sherlock found fondness for and usefulness in, into a sad sack of feelings that never stopped crying because...
...God fucking damnit...
...he missed his friend.
But the truth of it was, he was already like that. Already a pale imitation of the vibrant adventurer Sherlock ran around London with. John was small now. Quiet and angry. And that anger he'd carried within him hadn't been filling him up at all. It had only been holding an open space, an aperture to a vacancy inside himself that left him hollow for the cold winds of despondent isolation to blow right through him. Like he wasn't even there, like he didn't matter, like he didn't even exist anymore.
On the edge of that realization, truly seeing what he'd evolved- or rather, devolved- into, he found himself teetering on a precipice. He could remain the creature he'd become during that unendingly dark time...
...post fall...
...or he could begin to mourn. He could start right then...but how? Well, he could start crying. Even as he recognized that there was a decent chance he'd never actually stop. Literally, he feared he might never stop.
But despite the fear that once broken open, he'd never knit together again, John made a decision. He decided that a life spent mourning Sherlock Holmes would be better than one spent angrily denying that Sherlock had meant anything to him at all.
And so, that night, he began to mourn.