You do know you're completely mad, don't you? (1/?)
anonymous
January 8 2011, 14:53:07 UTC
Mike Stamford met John Watson on his fifth day at University and his first lecture. It was to be the start of a bizarre friendship.
Waiting outside the lecture hall in a mass of chattering, expectant and slightly worried first year medical students, Mike had been lost. He already felt out of his depth and he hadn’t even started studying yet. Fresher’s week had been a mass of drinking and half remembered faces and now he was going to start working towards being a doctor. He should have taken his father’s advice and tried accountancy.
He’d stumbled backwards into someone, and turned to apologise only to find himself face to face with a pretty girl with overly made up eyes and a frown.
Mike stammered out an apology and she huffed, before shouldering her bag, which he had knocked from her arm when he stepped back, and pushing past to find some companion she found more acceptable.
He was still continuing his apology to the back of her head when a warm hand patted him on the shoulder.
“Don’t worry, you’re not missing out on much, she’s a stuck up cow.”
“Pardon?”
“Threw her drink over me yesterday in the student bar,” the young man next to him said with a small grin. Mike blinked at him in amazement. “I wasn’t even trying to chat her up. I was talking to the girl next to her.”
“Uhm…” Mike said rather eloquently. The person talking was about half a head shorter than him with hair that looked a sort of faded brown, like he’d been out in the sun too long, and a relaxed face that smiled easily.
“John Watson,” he said, offering a hand. Mike took it with one of his own and shook it.
“Mike Stamford.”
“Well, now I at least know someone,” John said, laughing a little. It was infectious, and Mike felt himself smiling. “Now, it looks like we’re going in. Let’s get some seats where we can actually see what’s going on.”
So they did. And that, as Mike remembers, was pretty much that.
*
Medical students have a reputation for being the most rowdy, the most insane, the most irresponsible of the student population. In fact, if given a handful of students and asked which you’d feel most comfortable holding your life in their hands, the medical student is probably the last person you would pick.
John Watson was not an exception to the rule, he was, rather, the definition of it.
At first glance, John Watson seemed normal, pleasant and down to earth. Mike took about three days to realise that the comfortable, sensible outside that John showed the world was, while real enough, a little bit like a wolf in sheep’s clothing.
Of course, that was the night John helped get him laid for the first time, so he wasn’t exactly complaining.
John Watson had a talent with women. It was almost supernatural. They seemed to melt when they saw him smile and he could talk to them completely naturally. Mike, on the other hand, at that point in his life, had been rather too thin, his legs and elbows had never seemed to know where to go, and he wore glasses that looked like he was trying to be Dennis Taylor.
So when John had introduced him to Lucy and Mary he had thought immediately that he was in for another night of awkward conversation followed by nothing more than drowning his sorrows in the cheap cider that the student bar sold at obscenely low prices.
But five minutes later and somehow the four of them had been laughing at a joke he had made and Lucy had been looking at him like he was interesting. And it was all because of John Watson.
And from the next morning, having found Lucy’s number, stuck on his notice board with a drawing pin, and having lost his virginity in a fairly decisive manner, Mike decided that John Watson was probably the best person in the world.
He told him this in their morning lecture, and John just laughed and grinned that deceptively pleasant smile.
You do know you're completely mad, don't you? (2/?)
anonymous
January 8 2011, 14:54:51 UTC
Of course, meeting Lucy, whom he’d gone out with for six months, was only one of the things.
John lived in different halls from him, across the quad. He shared a room with George Brown, another first year medical student, while Mike had a single room to himself on the ground floor.
George, unlike Mike, didn’t seem to think that John was the best person in the world.
“He’s a nice guy,” George would say earnestly, “but he’s driving me mad.”
“What is it?” Mike, or whoever George was moaning at, would ask.
“Everything… I mean, he’s neat, which is good. But he got drunk last week and organised my stuff in alphabetical order. And then there are the girls.”
“The girls?” Was always the next question for everyone who wasn’t Mike. Most people didn’t think that quiet John Watson, who paid attention in lectures and labs, and was not particularly handsome, especially intelligent, nor outstanding in any distinct way, could possibly be that good with women.
“I’ve barely spent a night in my own room in the last two weeks,” George would then moan, dropping his head into his arms. He’s always got a girl in there. Always. He sticks a hanger on the door to warn me. He only forgot the once…” here George would blush furiously. “I don’t understand.”
“But no one says anything,” was the traditional response, whispered usually with a hint of scandal.
“It’s not like he’s breaking their hearts or anything,” George said.
And John Watson didn’t break their hearts, not really. Though Mike knew a group of second year girls who would sigh after him a little when he smiled at them. John had the mysterious yet brilliant talent of being able to have a one night stand with a girl and staying friends with her afterwards. If Mike went looking for him, he’d find him in the library talking to some girl and when Mike walked up there would be introductions.
“Hey Mike,” John said, still chuckling at some unheard joke, “this is Lauren, she’s a friend of mine,” and Lauren would smile and say hello and it was never until she walked away that Mike realised that he had seen John leaving the bar with her the week before.
*
The girls weren’t the only thing, but they did rise to an unprecedented level at the end of first year, when Mike walked into the bar (not the student bar for once) to find John at a table entirely surrounded by girls in matching red rugby shirts. He waved Mike over and introduced the girls as the Netball team of a Scottish university and told them to make space for Mike.
That was the night they visited six bars and four clubs in one night and were thrown out of every single one of them (and banned for life from three).
It was also the night when John Watson and George Brown became famous across the entire university for having an entire netball team sleep in their room.
“We didn’t do anything,” John said the next day as Mike was goggling at him over lunch. “George and I slept on the floor with a few of them, the others used our beds.”
“But they were in your bed,” Mike pointed out around a mouthful of soggy sandwich.
“Yeah… They weren’t naked or anything, they kept their shirts and underwear on.”
Mike knew that image was going to haunt his dreams for the rest of his life.
“You, John Watson, are a jammy git.”
“Yeah,” John said, swigging some water, “I am, aren’t I?”
You do know you're completely mad, don't you? (3/?)
anonymous
January 8 2011, 14:57:02 UTC
A night out with John Watson was guaranteed to be spectacular, even if you couldn’t remember it very well the next morning.
In the aftermath of Lucy, they went out. Mike had been expecting to get drunk and possibly do something ridiculous and unreasonable, hopefully not being arrested. What he wasn’t expecting was to end up on an aeroplane to Norway.
“Why Norway?” he remembered asking and John had had not answered more than a shrug, a grin and the words ‘why not?’ Which was how Mike had spent a weekend in Oslo getting drunk on things he couldn’t even pronounce and attempting to chat up Norwegian women and failing miserably. They had stumbled back into the hotel room one night only to find that they were on the wrong floor, in the wrong room.
On his own, Mike probably would have ended up blushing furiously and backing out of the room with stammered apologies in English and attempted Norwegian. John, however, managed to apologise with his usual self-deprecating charm, making the two men whose room they had walked into laugh at the idiotic drunk students, and invite them for a drink.
Then the world had got weird, as it turned out that the men were actors in some Scandinavian soap opera and they invited both John and Mike to a cast party.
Which explains why, years later, one of Mike Stamford’s students, a young Norwegian girl, would swear blind that she had seen him on TV. The video can also be found on YouTube.
They got back from their impromptu trip a week later, and stumbled into John’s room at three am, trying their hardest to be quiet and not wake up George from his snoring.
It didn’t work. John had tripped rather spectacularly over his own text book, done an impressive head over heels and ended up on his back with his feet in George’s face.
The swearing had lasted about half an hour. Punctuated with ‘where have you even been’ and ‘this is worse than the time I came back to find you duct taped to the ceiling!’
Mike let John sleep on the floor of his room for the night, only to find him in the corridor the next morning, talking to the hot girl from down the corridor who was clad only in a towel.
“You,” Mike told him as they watched the girl walk away, “are unbelievable.”
“Me?” John asked. “She was asking about you.”
It turned out later that John was telling the truth and, when Mike eventually got up the courage to talk to the girl down the corridor, her name was Amanda and she was very interested in having a drink with him (and eventually she would be very interested in walking down the aisle to him and saying I do).
*
One night, the pair of them ended up getting stuck in a toyshop overnight, where John found out about Mike’s rather extreme aversion to dolls.
And by extreme, he meant that he went running screaming when John hid behind the doll display and made on turn its face to look at him with wide, unblinking eyes.
They both agreed never to talk about that again.
*
Matthew would always tell anyone who listened about the time that he and John Watson had ended up stuck in the back of a lorry owned by some London drug lord, surrounded by teddy bears filled with cocaine (or so he claimed) and had to sneak out before it rolled onto the ferry at Dover.
When Mike asked John about it, he is informed that the funniest part of that night was the look on Matthews face as they saw the police surrounding the very same lorry they had been stuck in and dragging its driver to the ground.
“If we’d been in there three more minutes,” he said, shaking his head as tears streamed out of his eyes.
“You do know you’re completely mad, don’t you?” Mike asked, looking at him. John had laughed some more and nodded.
“Best way to be.”
Mike couldn’t really find an argument.
*
Beth, who John actually had a relationship with, rather than a friendship with added extras, says that he once took her for a moonlight picnic on top of tower bridge.
But then Beth’s always making things sound more impressive than they are, and John doesn’t comment when Mike asks him.
You do know you're completely mad, don't you? (4/?)
anonymous
January 8 2011, 14:58:40 UTC
Then there was the time with tiger.
At least, that’s what Mike would always call it in his head, despite the fact that in the end there had been no tigers, apart from at a distance.
They had, somehow, ended up at a circus, soaking wet and certain that they were god’s gift to the tightrope, or the trapeze - Mike wasn’t sure which of the apparatus he had had a burning desire to try afterwards, but he did remember that he had been absolutely positive that he would be bloody brilliant at it.
John, on the other hand, had wanted a tiger.
“Just a small one,” he’d argued to the clown. “I just want a small one. It’d be great. I’d take care of it and everything!”
The clown had glared at them both and escorted them off the premises, his hostile expression just made extremely funny by the bright red painted smile across his cheeks.
They had been concocting a rather insane plan to steal a tiger (and a trapeze) when a police officer had pulled up and asked if they were alright. Scared and a little overawed by the situation, they had told him they were fine, and he had given them a lift back to the halls of residence, telling them that they were idiots and they should leave tigers to the professionals.
*
The rugby team could often be heard to remark that a party without John Watson wasn’t a party at all. This could be because he was the one who accidentally walked them into the VIP section of a club where there were a bunch of supermodels sitting (and one rather well known film star, whose name they had all ‘forgotten’ conveniently).
IT could also be because of the fact that the last five times John had been at a rugby team social the next morning had begun with most of them waking up naked, with girls’ phone numbers written on interesting parts of their anatomy and memories of creating human pyramids infront of prominent London landmarks (or so the photos later informed them.
John Watson was their king. By half way through third year (after the incident with the body paint and the ballet dancers - don’t ask - it’s practically the team motto.
*
One time when Mike had wandered into John’s room out of sheer boredom and annoyance that he couldn’t work out any of the work he was supposed to be doing for the next day, he found the entire place filled with brilliantly coloured helium balloons, and John SAS crawling towards the door underneath them.
“Birthday present from the rugby team,” he explained as he managed to squeeze himself out, a few balloons leaping to liberty with him. “It’s better than what we did to James, the guys put condoms on all his milk bottles.”
“George isn’t going to be happy.” Mike pointed out. John winced but shrugged.
“At least his mattress isn’t on the ceiling again. That’s what they did last time they snuck into my room - they got our beds mixed up.”
*
Second year came, and with it Mike moved into a flat with John and he became acquainted with the slightly less obvious of John’s personality quirks, such as the way he would always tap his teaspoon against his tea cup in little erratic rattles. And the way sometimes he’d try to make himself toast at four in the morning only to set off the fire alarm, and the thing with the bath.
Mike wished he’d never found out about the thing with the bath.
John was probably still his favourite person in the whole world, but to be honest, he was a crap flatmate. Books found their way to his room and never came back out again. He played the clarinet well, but only when he couldn’t sleep.
He would also sit upside down in chairs, his legs curled over the backs, his head dangling off the seat. It was… disconcerting.
The singing constantly, under his breath. Beach boys, Beatles and, on strange occasions, Blondie, all slightly off key and with little embellishments.
He broke plates and glasses on an almost daily basis. He left dirty dishes in the sink for days, couldn’t hoover properly to save his life and Mike didn’t know if he was making friends with the clump of mould in the bathroom, but he did seem incapable of getting rid of it.
You do know you're completely mad, don't you? (5/?)
anonymous
January 8 2011, 14:59:50 UTC
They went out for Mike’s birthday and ended up in a brawl outside their new local. Some guy had taken exception to the way John was talking to his girlfriend and thrown a punch. They had ended up with bloody lips and covered in bruises. John had a concussion while Mike thought he had broken one of his knuckles for a time.
But when they had walked away, they’d been laughing. So it wasn’t that bad.
*
Years passed, slowly. Placements and rotations came along. They spent three hours racing wheelchairs until their supervisor tore strips out of them. John flirted with the nurses and was shot down every single time and Mike and Amanda were beginning to get into territory that might be called serious. They didn’t see as much of each other as before, especially since Mike had moved out of the flat after second year.
“You’re my friend, and I sort of want you to stay my friend…” he said, laughing a little. A few years ago he would have been too afraid of upsetting John to dare say anything like that. “If I keep living with you, I’m not sure that’ll happen. I mean… you tried to make tea using a fishing line.”
“It almost worked!” John pointed out.
“You spilled boiling water over the entire kitchen.”
“I didn’t have the…” John trailed off. “In retrospect that was a stupid idea.”
“And the TV remote?”
“I found that, eventually.”
“Under the toilet.”
“True.”
“You kept a dead rat in an ice-cream box in our freezer.”
“I wanted to dissect it.”
“I wanted ice cream,” Mike replied. John sighed and nodded, sipping at his tea.
“I suppose dead animals is going a bit far. But it’s not like I’m stealing human body parts, or anything like that.”
“You’re a great guy,” Mike said with a laugh, “you’re a great friend, but you’re a rubbish flatmate.” John had laughed again, properly and nodded.
You do know you're completely mad, don't you? (6/7)
anonymous
January 8 2011, 15:00:43 UTC
And, on top of all these incidents, there had been Harry. John’s sister was older than him by three years and she lived in London. In first year, her drunken phone calls and her unexpected arrivals at his door with a pack of beer had been welcome. And Mike had been fascinated to find out that it wasn’t just John who had the curious magnetic ability with women, Harry had it as well. She could chat up anyone. And Mike had walked in on her a couple of times as well, which had been… entertaining.
But then she’d turn up drunk and depressed, yelling, or she’d come to them hung-over and tell them she’d been kicked out of her flat by her girlfriend again and things had been awkward. The drunken revelry had changed to drunken rants and the unexpected visits had come at two, four or five am.
Mike was used to waking up in their flat to Harry yelling that John was an ungrateful brat and hadn’t she helped raise him. And over breakfast he was used to hearing her apologise profusely as John sat coffee down in front of her and sighed.
Like it or not, the Watson siblings came as a pair and with the accessories of slamming doors, tearful confessions and the sound of throwing up into a toilet.
Especially after Harry stole Clara.
Clara was a nurse that John had finally managed to get to agree to going out with him. She was the first girl Mike had ever seen John vaguely serious about and within two days of meeting Harry, the two of them were found snogging on the sofa like teenagers and Mike watched John sigh and pull a smile on.
“Should have known this would happen,” he said philosophically. Harry and Clara had tried to explain, but he had waved it off, though he had told Harry that it didn’t seem appropriate for her to continue sleeping on his sofa that evening.
Harry and John hadn’t spoken for weeks after that, and John had toned down his usual flirting, becoming quieter than Mike could ever remember seeing him before. He and John they had ended up in Edinburgh one morning with no idea of how they had got there, though. It had been an interesting trip, though he knew he was never going to sleep on a park bench again, ever.
Mike asked John if he was okay, but always received a smile and ‘Fine’ for his troubles.
He gave up after a while, and their placements became more intensive. They didn’t go drinking so much and, no longer sharing a flat, they weren’t in each other’s pockets, so it came as a surprise when he found out through a friend of a friend that John was selling the flat and joining the army.
But then, when he thought about it, he couldn’t think of anything more appropriate really.
You do know you're completely mad, don't you? (7/7)
anonymous
January 8 2011, 15:07:45 UTC
When he sees John in the park, he doesn’t recognise him at first. His face is older, which is to be expected, but he doesn’t have the look of barely contained amusement anymore, like he’s laughing at the world, and that’s jarringly wrong on John Watson’s face. The man had always seemed to be laughing at the world, and now he looks like he thinks the world is laughing at him.
He’s not an idiot, he knows John recognises him as soon as he sees him, Mike can see the way he’s suddenly moving more determinedly, faster. But, for old time’s sake, and to see if he’s right about that face, he calls after him, because if there’s one thing that John taught him, it’s that persistence pays off.
So they sit down and have coffee and John’s not right, he’s jagged edges and barely holding on. Mike doesn’t see the person who threw him into a fountain in Trafalgar square or sang drinking songs at the top of his voice whenever he’d just won a rugby match.
He remembers himself in that first week at University, not quite able to feel comfortable in his own skin, and he remembers John coaxing him out to bars and introducing him to Lucy and later giving him advice with Amanda. John helped him out back then, and it looks like this time it’s his turn.
“Who’d want me for a flatmate?” John asks. It’s an old joke, but there’s more than one memory that it stirs now because that’s the second time Mike’s heard that exact line today and…
Something clicks together in Mike’s mind as he chuckles. Because he knows someone even more mad than John Watson used to be, and somehow he thinks they’re going to get on like a fireworks’ factory on fire.
So he drags John into Bart’s and introduces him to Sherlock Holmes and he watches as they fit together perfectly.
Now this is the start of a bizarre and beautiful friendship.
-*-
Notes: It should be mentioned that while most of the things above I have never done, nor seen done, there are a few exceptions. The condoms over milk is a common university prank, I have duct taped someone to a wall, I have helped put someone's mattress on a ceiling (we were going to go for the roof, but we didn't quite manage it). The netball team thing is based on fact (though it wasn't a netball team and I have no idea what actually happened in the room).
Also, disturbingly, I do know a medical student who kept a squirrel corpse in an ice cream tub in his communal freezer. Luckily none of his housemates wanted ice cream, Mike wasn't quite so fortunate.
Re: You do know you're completely mad, don't you? (7/7)
anonymous
January 8 2011, 15:23:34 UTC
HEADCANONEST HEADCANON THAT EVER FUCKING HEADCANONED!!!
This is beautiful and perfect and wonderful and yes and it's like, thinking that this was what John used to be like before Harry and Afghanistan makes his brokenness and subsequent becoming-unbrokenness after meeting Sherlock so much more poignant.
For the love of apple tarts and little green fishies, please repost this somewhere it can be properly mem'd? Pleeeeease?
Re: You do know you're completely mad, don't you? (7/7)
anonymous
January 8 2011, 16:00:29 UTC
WOW. AWESOME. I made this prompt with actually no idea of what I would want to see in a story and when I read this I was like, yes, THIS. EXACTLY THIS. This is now my head!canon. It also fits, the way John just sort of looks resigned when he sees the head in the freezer, the way he honestly can say he doesn't mind the violin being played at night, the sort of fond tolerance he has for Sherlock who, after all, even if he doesn't know it, is just sort of constantly one-upping John in the great scheme of things.
Terrific. I am un-anoning because you deserve to know that you've just made my day.
Waiting outside the lecture hall in a mass of chattering, expectant and slightly worried first year medical students, Mike had been lost. He already felt out of his depth and he hadn’t even started studying yet. Fresher’s week had been a mass of drinking and half remembered faces and now he was going to start working towards being a doctor. He should have taken his father’s advice and tried accountancy.
He’d stumbled backwards into someone, and turned to apologise only to find himself face to face with a pretty girl with overly made up eyes and a frown.
Mike stammered out an apology and she huffed, before shouldering her bag, which he had knocked from her arm when he stepped back, and pushing past to find some companion she found more acceptable.
He was still continuing his apology to the back of her head when a warm hand patted him on the shoulder.
“Don’t worry, you’re not missing out on much, she’s a stuck up cow.”
“Pardon?”
“Threw her drink over me yesterday in the student bar,” the young man next to him said with a small grin. Mike blinked at him in amazement. “I wasn’t even trying to chat her up. I was talking to the girl next to her.”
“Uhm…” Mike said rather eloquently. The person talking was about half a head shorter than him with hair that looked a sort of faded brown, like he’d been out in the sun too long, and a relaxed face that smiled easily.
“John Watson,” he said, offering a hand. Mike took it with one of his own and shook it.
“Mike Stamford.”
“Well, now I at least know someone,” John said, laughing a little. It was infectious, and Mike felt himself smiling. “Now, it looks like we’re going in. Let’s get some seats where we can actually see what’s going on.”
So they did. And that, as Mike remembers, was pretty much that.
*
Medical students have a reputation for being the most rowdy, the most insane, the most irresponsible of the student population. In fact, if given a handful of students and asked which you’d feel most comfortable holding your life in their hands, the medical student is probably the last person you would pick.
John Watson was not an exception to the rule, he was, rather, the definition of it.
At first glance, John Watson seemed normal, pleasant and down to earth. Mike took about three days to realise that the comfortable, sensible outside that John showed the world was, while real enough, a little bit like a wolf in sheep’s clothing.
Of course, that was the night John helped get him laid for the first time, so he wasn’t exactly complaining.
John Watson had a talent with women. It was almost supernatural. They seemed to melt when they saw him smile and he could talk to them completely naturally. Mike, on the other hand, at that point in his life, had been rather too thin, his legs and elbows had never seemed to know where to go, and he wore glasses that looked like he was trying to be Dennis Taylor.
So when John had introduced him to Lucy and Mary he had thought immediately that he was in for another night of awkward conversation followed by nothing more than drowning his sorrows in the cheap cider that the student bar sold at obscenely low prices.
But five minutes later and somehow the four of them had been laughing at a joke he had made and Lucy had been looking at him like he was interesting. And it was all because of John Watson.
And from the next morning, having found Lucy’s number, stuck on his notice board with a drawing pin, and having lost his virginity in a fairly decisive manner, Mike decided that John Watson was probably the best person in the world.
He told him this in their morning lecture, and John just laughed and grinned that deceptively pleasant smile.
*
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John lived in different halls from him, across the quad. He shared a room with George Brown, another first year medical student, while Mike had a single room to himself on the ground floor.
George, unlike Mike, didn’t seem to think that John was the best person in the world.
“He’s a nice guy,” George would say earnestly, “but he’s driving me mad.”
“What is it?” Mike, or whoever George was moaning at, would ask.
“Everything… I mean, he’s neat, which is good. But he got drunk last week and organised my stuff in alphabetical order. And then there are the girls.”
“The girls?” Was always the next question for everyone who wasn’t Mike. Most people didn’t think that quiet John Watson, who paid attention in lectures and labs, and was not particularly handsome, especially intelligent, nor outstanding in any distinct way, could possibly be that good with women.
“I’ve barely spent a night in my own room in the last two weeks,” George would then moan, dropping his head into his arms. He’s always got a girl in there. Always. He sticks a hanger on the door to warn me. He only forgot the once…” here George would blush furiously. “I don’t understand.”
“But no one says anything,” was the traditional response, whispered usually with a hint of scandal.
“It’s not like he’s breaking their hearts or anything,” George said.
And John Watson didn’t break their hearts, not really. Though Mike knew a group of second year girls who would sigh after him a little when he smiled at them. John had the mysterious yet brilliant talent of being able to have a one night stand with a girl and staying friends with her afterwards. If Mike went looking for him, he’d find him in the library talking to some girl and when Mike walked up there would be introductions.
“Hey Mike,” John said, still chuckling at some unheard joke, “this is Lauren, she’s a friend of mine,” and Lauren would smile and say hello and it was never until she walked away that Mike realised that he had seen John leaving the bar with her the week before.
*
The girls weren’t the only thing, but they did rise to an unprecedented level at the end of first year, when Mike walked into the bar (not the student bar for once) to find John at a table entirely surrounded by girls in matching red rugby shirts. He waved Mike over and introduced the girls as the Netball team of a Scottish university and told them to make space for Mike.
That was the night they visited six bars and four clubs in one night and were thrown out of every single one of them (and banned for life from three).
It was also the night when John Watson and George Brown became famous across the entire university for having an entire netball team sleep in their room.
“We didn’t do anything,” John said the next day as Mike was goggling at him over lunch. “George and I slept on the floor with a few of them, the others used our beds.”
“But they were in your bed,” Mike pointed out around a mouthful of soggy sandwich.
“Yeah… They weren’t naked or anything, they kept their shirts and underwear on.”
Mike knew that image was going to haunt his dreams for the rest of his life.
“You, John Watson, are a jammy git.”
“Yeah,” John said, swigging some water, “I am, aren’t I?”
“Bastard.”
*
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In the aftermath of Lucy, they went out. Mike had been expecting to get drunk and possibly do something ridiculous and unreasonable, hopefully not being arrested. What he wasn’t expecting was to end up on an aeroplane to Norway.
“Why Norway?” he remembered asking and John had had not answered more than a shrug, a grin and the words ‘why not?’ Which was how Mike had spent a weekend in Oslo getting drunk on things he couldn’t even pronounce and attempting to chat up Norwegian women and failing miserably. They had stumbled back into the hotel room one night only to find that they were on the wrong floor, in the wrong room.
On his own, Mike probably would have ended up blushing furiously and backing out of the room with stammered apologies in English and attempted Norwegian. John, however, managed to apologise with his usual self-deprecating charm, making the two men whose room they had walked into laugh at the idiotic drunk students, and invite them for a drink.
Then the world had got weird, as it turned out that the men were actors in some Scandinavian soap opera and they invited both John and Mike to a cast party.
Which explains why, years later, one of Mike Stamford’s students, a young Norwegian girl, would swear blind that she had seen him on TV. The video can also be found on YouTube.
They got back from their impromptu trip a week later, and stumbled into John’s room at three am, trying their hardest to be quiet and not wake up George from his snoring.
It didn’t work. John had tripped rather spectacularly over his own text book, done an impressive head over heels and ended up on his back with his feet in George’s face.
The swearing had lasted about half an hour. Punctuated with ‘where have you even been’ and ‘this is worse than the time I came back to find you duct taped to the ceiling!’
Mike let John sleep on the floor of his room for the night, only to find him in the corridor the next morning, talking to the hot girl from down the corridor who was clad only in a towel.
“You,” Mike told him as they watched the girl walk away, “are unbelievable.”
“Me?” John asked. “She was asking about you.”
It turned out later that John was telling the truth and, when Mike eventually got up the courage to talk to the girl down the corridor, her name was Amanda and she was very interested in having a drink with him (and eventually she would be very interested in walking down the aisle to him and saying I do).
*
One night, the pair of them ended up getting stuck in a toyshop overnight, where John found out about Mike’s rather extreme aversion to dolls.
And by extreme, he meant that he went running screaming when John hid behind the doll display and made on turn its face to look at him with wide, unblinking eyes.
They both agreed never to talk about that again.
*
Matthew would always tell anyone who listened about the time that he and John Watson had ended up stuck in the back of a lorry owned by some London drug lord, surrounded by teddy bears filled with cocaine (or so he claimed) and had to sneak out before it rolled onto the ferry at Dover.
When Mike asked John about it, he is informed that the funniest part of that night was the look on Matthews face as they saw the police surrounding the very same lorry they had been stuck in and dragging its driver to the ground.
“If we’d been in there three more minutes,” he said, shaking his head as tears streamed out of his eyes.
“You do know you’re completely mad, don’t you?” Mike asked, looking at him. John had laughed some more and nodded.
“Best way to be.”
Mike couldn’t really find an argument.
*
Beth, who John actually had a relationship with, rather than a friendship with added extras, says that he once took her for a moonlight picnic on top of tower bridge.
But then Beth’s always making things sound more impressive than they are, and John doesn’t comment when Mike asks him.
*
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At least, that’s what Mike would always call it in his head, despite the fact that in the end there had been no tigers, apart from at a distance.
They had, somehow, ended up at a circus, soaking wet and certain that they were god’s gift to the tightrope, or the trapeze - Mike wasn’t sure which of the apparatus he had had a burning desire to try afterwards, but he did remember that he had been absolutely positive that he would be bloody brilliant at it.
John, on the other hand, had wanted a tiger.
“Just a small one,” he’d argued to the clown. “I just want a small one. It’d be great. I’d take care of it and everything!”
The clown had glared at them both and escorted them off the premises, his hostile expression just made extremely funny by the bright red painted smile across his cheeks.
They had been concocting a rather insane plan to steal a tiger (and a trapeze) when a police officer had pulled up and asked if they were alright. Scared and a little overawed by the situation, they had told him they were fine, and he had given them a lift back to the halls of residence, telling them that they were idiots and they should leave tigers to the professionals.
*
The rugby team could often be heard to remark that a party without John Watson wasn’t a party at all. This could be because he was the one who accidentally walked them into the VIP section of a club where there were a bunch of supermodels sitting (and one rather well known film star, whose name they had all ‘forgotten’ conveniently).
IT could also be because of the fact that the last five times John had been at a rugby team social the next morning had begun with most of them waking up naked, with girls’ phone numbers written on interesting parts of their anatomy and memories of creating human pyramids infront of prominent London landmarks (or so the photos later informed them.
John Watson was their king. By half way through third year (after the incident with the body paint and the ballet dancers - don’t ask - it’s practically the team motto.
*
One time when Mike had wandered into John’s room out of sheer boredom and annoyance that he couldn’t work out any of the work he was supposed to be doing for the next day, he found the entire place filled with brilliantly coloured helium balloons, and John SAS crawling towards the door underneath them.
“Birthday present from the rugby team,” he explained as he managed to squeeze himself out, a few balloons leaping to liberty with him. “It’s better than what we did to James, the guys put condoms on all his milk bottles.”
“George isn’t going to be happy.” Mike pointed out. John winced but shrugged.
“At least his mattress isn’t on the ceiling again. That’s what they did last time they snuck into my room - they got our beds mixed up.”
*
Second year came, and with it Mike moved into a flat with John and he became acquainted with the slightly less obvious of John’s personality quirks, such as the way he would always tap his teaspoon against his tea cup in little erratic rattles. And the way sometimes he’d try to make himself toast at four in the morning only to set off the fire alarm, and the thing with the bath.
Mike wished he’d never found out about the thing with the bath.
John was probably still his favourite person in the whole world, but to be honest, he was a crap flatmate. Books found their way to his room and never came back out again. He played the clarinet well, but only when he couldn’t sleep.
He would also sit upside down in chairs, his legs curled over the backs, his head dangling off the seat. It was… disconcerting.
The singing constantly, under his breath. Beach boys, Beatles and, on strange occasions, Blondie, all slightly off key and with little embellishments.
He broke plates and glasses on an almost daily basis. He left dirty dishes in the sink for days, couldn’t hoover properly to save his life and Mike didn’t know if he was making friends with the clump of mould in the bathroom, but he did seem incapable of getting rid of it.
*
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But when they had walked away, they’d been laughing. So it wasn’t that bad.
*
Years passed, slowly. Placements and rotations came along. They spent three hours racing wheelchairs until their supervisor tore strips out of them. John flirted with the nurses and was shot down every single time and Mike and Amanda were beginning to get into territory that might be called serious. They didn’t see as much of each other as before, especially since Mike had moved out of the flat after second year.
“You’re my friend, and I sort of want you to stay my friend…” he said, laughing a little. A few years ago he would have been too afraid of upsetting John to dare say anything like that. “If I keep living with you, I’m not sure that’ll happen. I mean… you tried to make tea using a fishing line.”
“It almost worked!” John pointed out.
“You spilled boiling water over the entire kitchen.”
“I didn’t have the…” John trailed off. “In retrospect that was a stupid idea.”
“And the TV remote?”
“I found that, eventually.”
“Under the toilet.”
“True.”
“You kept a dead rat in an ice-cream box in our freezer.”
“I wanted to dissect it.”
“I wanted ice cream,” Mike replied. John sighed and nodded, sipping at his tea.
“I suppose dead animals is going a bit far. But it’s not like I’m stealing human body parts, or anything like that.”
“You’re a great guy,” Mike said with a laugh, “you’re a great friend, but you’re a rubbish flatmate.” John had laughed again, properly and nodded.
“Yeah, I suppose I am. Sorry about that.”
“It’s okay. We’ll just have to keep in touch.”
*
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But then she’d turn up drunk and depressed, yelling, or she’d come to them hung-over and tell them she’d been kicked out of her flat by her girlfriend again and things had been awkward. The drunken revelry had changed to drunken rants and the unexpected visits had come at two, four or five am.
Mike was used to waking up in their flat to Harry yelling that John was an ungrateful brat and hadn’t she helped raise him. And over breakfast he was used to hearing her apologise profusely as John sat coffee down in front of her and sighed.
Like it or not, the Watson siblings came as a pair and with the accessories of slamming doors, tearful confessions and the sound of throwing up into a toilet.
Especially after Harry stole Clara.
Clara was a nurse that John had finally managed to get to agree to going out with him. She was the first girl Mike had ever seen John vaguely serious about and within two days of meeting Harry, the two of them were found snogging on the sofa like teenagers and Mike watched John sigh and pull a smile on.
“Should have known this would happen,” he said philosophically. Harry and Clara had tried to explain, but he had waved it off, though he had told Harry that it didn’t seem appropriate for her to continue sleeping on his sofa that evening.
Harry and John hadn’t spoken for weeks after that, and John had toned down his usual flirting, becoming quieter than Mike could ever remember seeing him before. He and John they had ended up in Edinburgh one morning with no idea of how they had got there, though. It had been an interesting trip, though he knew he was never going to sleep on a park bench again, ever.
Mike asked John if he was okay, but always received a smile and ‘Fine’ for his troubles.
He gave up after a while, and their placements became more intensive. They didn’t go drinking so much and, no longer sharing a flat, they weren’t in each other’s pockets, so it came as a surprise when he found out through a friend of a friend that John was selling the flat and joining the army.
But then, when he thought about it, he couldn’t think of anything more appropriate really.
*
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He’s not an idiot, he knows John recognises him as soon as he sees him, Mike can see the way he’s suddenly moving more determinedly, faster. But, for old time’s sake, and to see if he’s right about that face, he calls after him, because if there’s one thing that John taught him, it’s that persistence pays off.
So they sit down and have coffee and John’s not right, he’s jagged edges and barely holding on. Mike doesn’t see the person who threw him into a fountain in Trafalgar square or sang drinking songs at the top of his voice whenever he’d just won a rugby match.
He remembers himself in that first week at University, not quite able to feel comfortable in his own skin, and he remembers John coaxing him out to bars and introducing him to Lucy and later giving him advice with Amanda. John helped him out back then, and it looks like this time it’s his turn.
“Who’d want me for a flatmate?” John asks. It’s an old joke, but there’s more than one memory that it stirs now because that’s the second time Mike’s heard that exact line today and…
Something clicks together in Mike’s mind as he chuckles. Because he knows someone even more mad than John Watson used to be, and somehow he thinks they’re going to get on like a fireworks’ factory on fire.
So he drags John into Bart’s and introduces him to Sherlock Holmes and he watches as they fit together perfectly.
Now this is the start of a bizarre and beautiful friendship.
-*-
Notes: It should be mentioned that while most of the things above I have never done, nor seen done, there are a few exceptions. The condoms over milk is a common university prank, I have duct taped someone to a wall, I have helped put someone's mattress on a ceiling (we were going to go for the roof, but we didn't quite manage it). The netball team thing is based on fact (though it wasn't a netball team and I have no idea what actually happened in the room).
Also, disturbingly, I do know a medical student who kept a squirrel corpse in an ice cream tub in his communal freezer. Luckily none of his housemates wanted ice cream, Mike wasn't quite so fortunate.
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This is beautiful and perfect and wonderful and yes and it's like, thinking that this was what John used to be like before Harry and Afghanistan makes his brokenness and subsequent becoming-unbrokenness after meeting Sherlock so much more poignant.
For the love of apple tarts and little green fishies, please repost this somewhere it can be properly mem'd? Pleeeeease?
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Terrific. I am un-anoning because you deserve to know that you've just made my day.
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and that last part D: D: D: Oh John.
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