Hi! I really really really love you and your blog, and there's been something bugging me for a while. In A Study In Pink, John says, "Damn my leg!" and then is all apologetic as if it was sudden onset tourettes syndrome or something. But it wasn't. So what made him so angry? Is it because he wants to go with Sherlock and see trouble? Is it because he doesn't like being treated differently because of his leg? I don't know. Am I just over-thinking it? Anyway, thanks. <3 <3
Well, here’s how I parse that.
When John meets Sherlock for the first time at Barts, his reaction to Sherlock’s deductions is not immediately apparent. He’s surprised and taken aback. He quite literally has to readjust after Sherlock leaves; he shifts his stance a little, as if the world has just shifted on its axis a bit. And it has.
Other people find Sherlock’s deductions about them unnerving, but we already know that John does not. He’s fascinated by Sherlock immediately, from Afghanistan or Iraq? forward. John is deeply, deeply impressed by Sherlock. And he is not easily impressed, as we see later when Mycroft tries to intimidate him. But Sherlock impresses him, and John is very much charmed by him and attracted to him. (I don’t mean that in a slashy way, but you can interpret it that way should you so wish, as I very often do.)
Once John gets over his initial disbelief that Sherlock could possibly know so much about him just by being in the same room with him for four minutes, he is absolutely gobsmacked by what he’s just seen. After that performance, I don’t think anything could keep John from meeting Sherlock the following evening.
John goes home and googles Sherlock. He finds Sherlock’s website and reads through it. This is evidence, I’d say, of his ongoing fascination.
I think what we have, when we arrive at 221b, are two men who are both quite keen to make this work; John because he is utterly fascinated by Sherlock, and Sherlock because he needs a flatmate he can stand who can stand him. When John discovers that Sherlock helps the police to solve crimes, his heart must leap into his throat.
John loves danger, we know that. He’s an adrenaline junkie with a wide and straight moral streak. A madman with a blatant disregard for rules who solves violent crimes has got to be like catnip for him. Lestrade drops by; John notes Lestrade’s face in the paper. The evidence is right in front of him: this guy is legit. He digs into violent crimes and takes down murderers with his remarkable deductive abilities. Sherlock is like a gift John didn’t know he’d been hoping for.
And then he watches Sherlock leave without him. He clearly wants to go along; he wants nothing more than that. But Sherlock didn’t invite him, and John isn’t the type to demand anything, no matter how much he wants it. They just met, after all; who is he to say, take me with you! At this point John has no idea that he could be helpful in anyway; we see that when they actually get to Brixton and he doesn’t really know what to do with the body. But he really, really wants to go anyway. He finds Sherlock fascinating and he wants to watch him; he wants to go see violent crime scenes and see how Sherlock works it all out. But Sherlock goes off without him.
John must be devastated. He’s sort of powerless then, an injured man who is so close to something he wants, but it’s cruelly snatched away from him. When Mrs Hudson tells him he’s the sitting down type, that makes him boil over. He is most emphatically not the sitting down type.
So imagine that: he sits, he’s going to wait until Sherlock comes back and tells him all the exciting things he’s missed. He’ll sit and wait because of his ridiculous, psychosomatic limp. He must be so frustrated. Something he desires more than anything is right in front of him and he can’t have it because his inexplicable limp has made him the sitting down type.
It’s not even an actual injury. He must be so confused by his limp; he must hate it more than anything just then.
When Sherlock comes back, the first thing John does is struggle back up out of the chair. He’s practically salivating when Sherlock evaluates him, entirely for his own purposes, as a potential “assistant”. He wants an invite, he wants to demonstrate the degree to which he is not the sitting down type.
Fortunately, Sherlock can tell.
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