got no right to take my place in the human game
More fic about my crush on John Watson. Now with notes!
Three People John Watson Coincidentally Knows
i.
John stepped out of the front door and saw a familiar face.
“Rory, isn’t it?”
He looked startled.
“Sorry, yes? I mean, yes, Rory, I am. I am Rory. Sorry, you?”
“You don’t remember me then?” John grinned, Rory smiled, mostly puzzled. “You saved my life.”
“Really? I was your nurse?”
“More then my nurse, you got me out of the line of fire, patched me, kept me conscious. Six months ago, in Zabul?”
“Zabul?” He pronounced it slowly, face creased over. He looked over John’s shoulder. There was a bloke in a bow tie running full tilt towards them.
“Rory! Rory, you made a friend. Hello Rory’s friend!”
“You! I thought I hallucinated you!”
“Did you? Might’ve. It’s happened. When was this?”
“Six months ago! Afghanistan! I was shot, you were treating me, you knew my name and told me yours, and you were babbling and waving a weird light around. I thought it was the blood loss. You kept saying I was too important to die.”
“Are you really?” He stepped close and dropped his voice. “Why?”
“Look, mate,” John should have learned by now to not talk to people he recognised. It only ever ended badly.
“JOHN.” It was Sherlock, craning out the window. “DID YOU MOVE THE CENTRIFUGE.”
He stared back up, incredulous. “No?”
“Oh.” He disappeared back inside. That left only one skinny nutter staring at him.
“John? John, John, millions of Johns, I’ve been John, which one are you?”
He glanced at Rory, who made the face John found himself making at crime scenes. Part shrug, part apology, part commiseration.
“Watson. I was Captain John Watson when you met me. You don’t remember at all?”
“Sorry. All those years in uniform sort of blend together.” John nodded. Rory gestured at the other one, who was peering at the house numbers, swinging about on the pavement. “And the Doctor’s just... like that.”
“ARE YOU SURE YOU DIDN’T MOVE THE CENTRIFUGE?”
“QUITE SURE. WHAT ABOUT MRS HUDSON?” The window snapped shut. John turned back to Rory. “Yeah, I know what that’s like.”
“You get told to not touch the experiments on pain of lecture?”
“And left places because there’s something crucially important, right now, somewhere else?”
“And that face, like you’re far too dim to even talk to?”
“I don’t have that face. Do I? I don’t mean to. I like talking to you. Don’t ever think that! You neither, Doctor John Watson.”
“Now you remember.”
“Can’t believe I forgot! But here we are, on Baker Street, and that’s Sherlock Holmes complaining about his centrifuge, and you really are too important to die.” He smiled like he’d just given John a present.
“How do you figure that?”
He smiled slyly, from under his fringe. “Deduction.” Like a light switch, his attention was elsewhere. It was familiar. “Rory, come on, Amy’s waiting with the Enthorians. Nice to meet you John!” He was already trailing down the street.
“I’ve got to go, but, uh, glad I saved you. Cheers!” and Rory started off down the road, after the doctor.
John watched them go, then just looked at the street until Sherlock came out the door.
“Who was that you were talking to?”
“Military nurse and doctor, I think.”
“No they weren’t.” John might have scoffed, just a bit.
“They patched me up when I was shot, Sherlock.”
“Maybe so, but that nurse was not trained by the British army and that doctor has never received any training at all.”
John considered this. His shoulder ached.
“You know, I honestly don’t care. What are you doing down here anyway?”
Sherlock stuck his hands in his pockets and fixed a distrustful gaze on a point near the letter slot. He looked nothing so much as a child that’s been sent out for taking up to much space in the drawing room. “Mrs Hudson is using the centrifuge to separate jam because of something she saw on television.”
“Heston Blumenthal is a hazard. Lunch?”
“Yes.”
ii.
John had always hated Tower Bridge. The architecture just dipleased him, ever since he was a boy, made him think of hangings and suicides. It was the perfect place, undoubtably, for a shady meeting with someone Sherlock described as “a different kind of detective”.
The man in the shadows of the bridge offered a pack of cigarettes.
“I’ve quit.”
The smoker laughed. “You never.”
“He’s on patches,” John offered.
“Who’re you?” he said, lips loose.
“He’s with me.”
“With you? With you, life partners with-you, or you folded to narrative causality and gotten a good cop to your creepy cop with-you? Do tell me the latter, or I’ve just lost a bet.”
John was getting the not-actually-gay-though-there’s-nothing-wrong-with-that speech ready when the man’s lighter flickered his face into relief. “Constantine?”
He took a drag, stepped into the light, squinted.
“Bugger me. Watson, aren’t you meant to be at war? What are you doing with this geezer?”
“Flatshare. And some good cop, sort of. What about you?”
“How do you know each other?” all the words tumbled out of Sherlock, as though they had been pressed down. Constantine grinned around his cigarette.
“What, you don’t know from looking? Wait ‘till I tell the rest of the trench coat brigade.”
“You seem to have a comrade-at-arms interaction, rather than a familial or romantic one, the use of last names implies army or school, but John Constantine has never been in any military, nor did he attend very much school, and John Watson went to a Wembley comprehensive. Punctually.”
“I don’t even want to hear why you know what school I went to.”
“Tell me.” His eyes were bright, angry and curious.
It had been a training exercise in the Scottish highlands. Solo mission. A storm, a strange lightning strike and an even stranger mudslide had knocked him down, and John had been half drowned and bleeding from the leg when Constantine appeared out of the rain and called him a daft bastard.
“Were an accident,” said Constantine. “Watson and me got caught in a storm, shared a hut for two days holed up against it.”
“You, me and that goth girl,” said John.
“You remember her, hey? Most don’t.”
“Not likely to forget her, she looked like Robert bloody Smith.”
“And you had that stupid argument about pop music with her.”
“Come on! Love Cats versus Bigmouth Strikes Again! How is that even a conversation!”
“A chance meeting. No way any one could have known.” Sherlock was ruffled. It was ridiculous.
“Yeah, don’t worry mate, I wasn’t really going to tell the trench coats.”
“Recollections and explanations done with, can we get to business?”
“Your occult murders? Not really that occult. Whoever’s doing them is cribbing out of this one book, Isis Unveiled. The killer’ll have a copy. Love to chat, but I’ve got a flight to catch.”
“Constantine, if you see that girl, Dee, tell her to listen to Cemetry Gates.”
“I’m sure she does.”
iii.
“I will stab him in the face!”
“Please don’t stab him, he’s just being a dickhead.”
“He’ll just be getting a stabbed face in a minute!”
“Shut up Harry, you fucking drunk.”
She grabbed his wrist.
“I am drunk, and he,” she pointed with her glass, “is a dickhead. Tomorrow, I will be sober and he’ll be stabbed in the face!”
John laughed loudly, for a long time. Harry kept her hand loosely around his wrist, as though they were going to cross the street.
“John. John. John, it wasn’t that funny. John, I’m going to get us a drink. What do you want? You want to keep being hysterical, John? Right, then.”
She wobbled slightly in her pencil skirt and business heels as John wiped tears from his eyes. Harry was useless at households and fantastic at pubs.
He rubbed his face and looked around. Mostly city boys and women like Harry, high flyers slumming on Friday night. Donovan stepped through the swinging door and stared at him.
“Small city, is it?” She planted herself in front of him, head canted. “Freak send you sniffing?”
“What? What, no. No no no.” Lager made him look like he was always lying. “I don’t actually do everything with him, you know. I do, curiously enough, have a life. Sometimes.” She looked doubtful. “I’m here with my sister. I have a sister. She’s over there.”
“Right.” She shifted her weight back and somehow stopped being a copper entirely. “Coincidence?”
“They happen. It is a small city.” He waited a moment, unsure. “Having a good night?”
She raised her eyebrows.
“Here with anyone?” he ventured, and regretted it.
She lowered her eyebrows.
“I wonder if it’s spending so much time with the freak that make you like this, or maybe this is why you hang about with him.”
“No, no. I’ve always been like this.” She laughed, just a bit. It was the first smile he’d seen on her, and he was charmed.
“Leave you alone for two seconds together and you start chatting up a pair of legs. A very nice pair of legs and all. I’m Harry Watson, and I’m a lot better at most things then my brother.”
She had managed to offload the drinks, elbow John, give Donovan the once over and shake her hand without making it look ridiculous. Yet she couldn’t plug in a phone without scratching it.
Donovan held Harry’s gaze and smiled again. It was still stunning.
“This might explain some things,” she said to John, hand still in Harry’s.
“Doesn’t it?” John sipped his drink.
“You know her, John? You know people? Beautiful people that you’ve been hiding from me, for fucking mad war veteran reasons I imagine.”
“Harry, this is Sergeant Sally Donovan, with Scotland Yard.” Harry seemed to find these labels of authority no inhibition against staring at the sergeant’s breasts.
“How exciting!”
John tried to hide behind his pint. He had known getting a drink with Harry would be a terrible idea. Clearly he had been unambitious.
"You must work with that bloody nutter John's living with. He sounds godawful, but that's just like John. Give his heart away if someone needed it, but never thinks to ask for help himself. But I'm being maudlin, Sally, tell me all about you."
He's not sure if Harry is trying to charm Donovan into her bed or his, but he's pretty sure it would be catastrophic either way. Harry leans on him, sisterly rather then unstable, and John finds himself completely trapped.
Harry flashes her lovely liar's grin and Donovan laughs again.
It's not so bad.
NB:
Keeley and Martin also have the same eyes. SIBLINGS.
Heston Blumenthal is a culinary alchemist or molecular gastronomist, depending on who you ask, with a brilliant insanely expensive restaurant and a couple of TV shows where he makes hot ice cream and duck lollies.
That's comic!Constantine, not Keanu!Constantine, with a non-cameo from Gaiman's Endless Death. She would love John, soldier and doctor both. She does so look like Robert Smith, lead singer of the Cure (miming was standard, Robert was drunk), philosophical enemy* of Morrissey, lead singer of the Smiths. Cemetry Gates is not a typo. All clear?
*They hated each others music and it escalated into weird petty personal loathings. For example, Morrissey is a vegetarian who loves to recommend it to others. Robert Smith, when asked about his stance on vegetarianism apparently stated "If Morrissey tells me not to eat meat, then I will EAT Morrissey because I HATE Morrissey."
I would love for someone to write Sally/Watson. I would love it a lot.
Three People John Watson Coincidentally Knows
i.
John stepped out of the front door and saw a familiar face.
“Rory, isn’t it?”
He looked startled.
“Sorry, yes? I mean, yes, Rory, I am. I am Rory. Sorry, you?”
“You don’t remember me then?” John grinned, Rory smiled, mostly puzzled. “You saved my life.”
“Really? I was your nurse?”
“More then my nurse, you got me out of the line of fire, patched me, kept me conscious. Six months ago, in Zabul?”
“Zabul?” He pronounced it slowly, face creased over. He looked over John’s shoulder. There was a bloke in a bow tie running full tilt towards them.
“Rory! Rory, you made a friend. Hello Rory’s friend!”
“You! I thought I hallucinated you!”
“Did you? Might’ve. It’s happened. When was this?”
“Six months ago! Afghanistan! I was shot, you were treating me, you knew my name and told me yours, and you were babbling and waving a weird light around. I thought it was the blood loss. You kept saying I was too important to die.”
“Are you really?” He stepped close and dropped his voice. “Why?”
“Look, mate,” John should have learned by now to not talk to people he recognised. It only ever ended badly.
“JOHN.” It was Sherlock, craning out the window. “DID YOU MOVE THE CENTRIFUGE.”
He stared back up, incredulous. “No?”
“Oh.” He disappeared back inside. That left only one skinny nutter staring at him.
“John? John, John, millions of Johns, I’ve been John, which one are you?”
He glanced at Rory, who made the face John found himself making at crime scenes. Part shrug, part apology, part commiseration.
“Watson. I was Captain John Watson when you met me. You don’t remember at all?”
“Sorry. All those years in uniform sort of blend together.” John nodded. Rory gestured at the other one, who was peering at the house numbers, swinging about on the pavement. “And the Doctor’s just... like that.”
“ARE YOU SURE YOU DIDN’T MOVE THE CENTRIFUGE?”
“QUITE SURE. WHAT ABOUT MRS HUDSON?” The window snapped shut. John turned back to Rory. “Yeah, I know what that’s like.”
“You get told to not touch the experiments on pain of lecture?”
“And left places because there’s something crucially important, right now, somewhere else?”
“And that face, like you’re far too dim to even talk to?”
“I don’t have that face. Do I? I don’t mean to. I like talking to you. Don’t ever think that! You neither, Doctor John Watson.”
“Now you remember.”
“Can’t believe I forgot! But here we are, on Baker Street, and that’s Sherlock Holmes complaining about his centrifuge, and you really are too important to die.” He smiled like he’d just given John a present.
“How do you figure that?”
He smiled slyly, from under his fringe. “Deduction.” Like a light switch, his attention was elsewhere. It was familiar. “Rory, come on, Amy’s waiting with the Enthorians. Nice to meet you John!” He was already trailing down the street.
“I’ve got to go, but, uh, glad I saved you. Cheers!” and Rory started off down the road, after the doctor.
John watched them go, then just looked at the street until Sherlock came out the door.
“Who was that you were talking to?”
“Military nurse and doctor, I think.”
“No they weren’t.” John might have scoffed, just a bit.
“They patched me up when I was shot, Sherlock.”
“Maybe so, but that nurse was not trained by the British army and that doctor has never received any training at all.”
John considered this. His shoulder ached.
“You know, I honestly don’t care. What are you doing down here anyway?”
Sherlock stuck his hands in his pockets and fixed a distrustful gaze on a point near the letter slot. He looked nothing so much as a child that’s been sent out for taking up to much space in the drawing room. “Mrs Hudson is using the centrifuge to separate jam because of something she saw on television.”
“Heston Blumenthal is a hazard. Lunch?”
“Yes.”
ii.
John had always hated Tower Bridge. The architecture just dipleased him, ever since he was a boy, made him think of hangings and suicides. It was the perfect place, undoubtably, for a shady meeting with someone Sherlock described as “a different kind of detective”.
The man in the shadows of the bridge offered a pack of cigarettes.
“I’ve quit.”
The smoker laughed. “You never.”
“He’s on patches,” John offered.
“Who’re you?” he said, lips loose.
“He’s with me.”
“With you? With you, life partners with-you, or you folded to narrative causality and gotten a good cop to your creepy cop with-you? Do tell me the latter, or I’ve just lost a bet.”
John was getting the not-actually-gay-though-there’s-nothing-wrong-with-that speech ready when the man’s lighter flickered his face into relief. “Constantine?”
He took a drag, stepped into the light, squinted.
“Bugger me. Watson, aren’t you meant to be at war? What are you doing with this geezer?”
“Flatshare. And some good cop, sort of. What about you?”
“How do you know each other?” all the words tumbled out of Sherlock, as though they had been pressed down. Constantine grinned around his cigarette.
“What, you don’t know from looking? Wait ‘till I tell the rest of the trench coat brigade.”
“You seem to have a comrade-at-arms interaction, rather than a familial or romantic one, the use of last names implies army or school, but John Constantine has never been in any military, nor did he attend very much school, and John Watson went to a Wembley comprehensive. Punctually.”
“I don’t even want to hear why you know what school I went to.”
“Tell me.” His eyes were bright, angry and curious.
It had been a training exercise in the Scottish highlands. Solo mission. A storm, a strange lightning strike and an even stranger mudslide had knocked him down, and John had been half drowned and bleeding from the leg when Constantine appeared out of the rain and called him a daft bastard.
“Were an accident,” said Constantine. “Watson and me got caught in a storm, shared a hut for two days holed up against it.”
“You, me and that goth girl,” said John.
“You remember her, hey? Most don’t.”
“Not likely to forget her, she looked like Robert bloody Smith.”
“And you had that stupid argument about pop music with her.”
“Come on! Love Cats versus Bigmouth Strikes Again! How is that even a conversation!”
“A chance meeting. No way any one could have known.” Sherlock was ruffled. It was ridiculous.
“Yeah, don’t worry mate, I wasn’t really going to tell the trench coats.”
“Recollections and explanations done with, can we get to business?”
“Your occult murders? Not really that occult. Whoever’s doing them is cribbing out of this one book, Isis Unveiled. The killer’ll have a copy. Love to chat, but I’ve got a flight to catch.”
“Constantine, if you see that girl, Dee, tell her to listen to Cemetry Gates.”
“I’m sure she does.”
iii.
“I will stab him in the face!”
“Please don’t stab him, he’s just being a dickhead.”
“He’ll just be getting a stabbed face in a minute!”
“Shut up Harry, you fucking drunk.”
She grabbed his wrist.
“I am drunk, and he,” she pointed with her glass, “is a dickhead. Tomorrow, I will be sober and he’ll be stabbed in the face!”
John laughed loudly, for a long time. Harry kept her hand loosely around his wrist, as though they were going to cross the street.
“John. John. John, it wasn’t that funny. John, I’m going to get us a drink. What do you want? You want to keep being hysterical, John? Right, then.”
She wobbled slightly in her pencil skirt and business heels as John wiped tears from his eyes. Harry was useless at households and fantastic at pubs.
He rubbed his face and looked around. Mostly city boys and women like Harry, high flyers slumming on Friday night. Donovan stepped through the swinging door and stared at him.
“Small city, is it?” She planted herself in front of him, head canted. “Freak send you sniffing?”
“What? What, no. No no no.” Lager made him look like he was always lying. “I don’t actually do everything with him, you know. I do, curiously enough, have a life. Sometimes.” She looked doubtful. “I’m here with my sister. I have a sister. She’s over there.”
“Right.” She shifted her weight back and somehow stopped being a copper entirely. “Coincidence?”
“They happen. It is a small city.” He waited a moment, unsure. “Having a good night?”
She raised her eyebrows.
“Here with anyone?” he ventured, and regretted it.
She lowered her eyebrows.
“I wonder if it’s spending so much time with the freak that make you like this, or maybe this is why you hang about with him.”
“No, no. I’ve always been like this.” She laughed, just a bit. It was the first smile he’d seen on her, and he was charmed.
“Leave you alone for two seconds together and you start chatting up a pair of legs. A very nice pair of legs and all. I’m Harry Watson, and I’m a lot better at most things then my brother.”
She had managed to offload the drinks, elbow John, give Donovan the once over and shake her hand without making it look ridiculous. Yet she couldn’t plug in a phone without scratching it.
Donovan held Harry’s gaze and smiled again. It was still stunning.
“This might explain some things,” she said to John, hand still in Harry’s.
“Doesn’t it?” John sipped his drink.
“You know her, John? You know people? Beautiful people that you’ve been hiding from me, for fucking mad war veteran reasons I imagine.”
“Harry, this is Sergeant Sally Donovan, with Scotland Yard.” Harry seemed to find these labels of authority no inhibition against staring at the sergeant’s breasts.
“How exciting!”
John tried to hide behind his pint. He had known getting a drink with Harry would be a terrible idea. Clearly he had been unambitious.
"You must work with that bloody nutter John's living with. He sounds godawful, but that's just like John. Give his heart away if someone needed it, but never thinks to ask for help himself. But I'm being maudlin, Sally, tell me all about you."
He's not sure if Harry is trying to charm Donovan into her bed or his, but he's pretty sure it would be catastrophic either way. Harry leans on him, sisterly rather then unstable, and John finds himself completely trapped.
Harry flashes her lovely liar's grin and Donovan laughs again.
It's not so bad.
NB:
Keeley and Martin also have the same eyes. SIBLINGS.
Heston Blumenthal is a culinary alchemist or molecular gastronomist, depending on who you ask, with a brilliant insanely expensive restaurant and a couple of TV shows where he makes hot ice cream and duck lollies.
That's comic!Constantine, not Keanu!Constantine, with a non-cameo from Gaiman's Endless Death. She would love John, soldier and doctor both. She does so look like Robert Smith, lead singer of the Cure (miming was standard, Robert was drunk), philosophical enemy* of Morrissey, lead singer of the Smiths. Cemetry Gates is not a typo. All clear?
*They hated each others music and it escalated into weird petty personal loathings. For example, Morrissey is a vegetarian who loves to recommend it to others. Robert Smith, when asked about his stance on vegetarianism apparently stated "If Morrissey tells me not to eat meat, then I will EAT Morrissey because I HATE Morrissey."
I would love for someone to write Sally/Watson. I would love it a lot.