Living up to their parents’ standards was difficult at best, impossible at worst. She never managed. John did, but only barely. He was shrewd when it came to hiding his secret from them, and before that, he behaved like a boy was supposed to – playing football, hanging around with his mates, getting reasonable grades at school.
Their parents were beyond themselves when he decided to be a doctor and got into medical school.
By then, she was a lost case. They threw her out when she refused to go to some exorcism ritual at church to cure her of her queerness.
“No child of mine shall be prone to…such indecencies,” their father had proclaimed with his doomsday voice.
“Fuck you!”
Those were the last words she’d said to them – or shouted more like.
John – the golden boy – had been a helpless bystander. Harry knew that he was under a lot of stress too, although it played out differently for him than for her.
“You can choose, Johnny, so choose wisely,” she whispered as she hugged him goodbye.
The horror written all over his face at having his bisexuality revealed like that, made her heart bleed for him. Being so-called “free” to choose which gender to fall in love with wasn’t actual freedom. Harry knew that. Nevertheless, John didn’t have to pretend he couldn’t be attracted to girls.
***
They kept in contact. Sporadically. When Harry wasn’t sloshed and incoherent. John didn’t like her when she drank. Because she didn’t know when or how to stop once she’d started.
She ranted relentlessly at him when he told her he’d enlisted.
“Do you have a death wish I didn’t know about? How can you do this to me? First Clara, now you.”
Even though it had been Harry who shouted and created havoc, John’s temper was just as short-fused as hers. He just had a way of channelling it. But after her rather egotistical outburst, he snapped.
“Do you know what, Harry? Not everything in this world is about you and your needs. There are people out there who’s much worse off than you. And I am going to help them. I don’t need your blessing!”
The last sentence was yelled more than spoken, and then John was gone for more than three years.
***
In the meantime, she and Clara had reconciled, married, and divorced. Harry saw an opportunity to get rid of her mobile when John came home; a shell of the man he used to be.
“I told you so,” was on the tip of her tongue, but she managed to keep mum.
Harry’s sobriety was precarious, and John refused to stay with her when she’d told him about Clara and the disaster of the years he’d been absent.
Neither of them had attended their parents’ funeral after the car crash that killed them. John was out of reach somewhere in the Afghan desert, and Harry had just kicked Clara out and drank for three weeks straight. Twenty text messages and ten voice mails told her the story when she ran out of alcohol and managed to surface long enough to locate and charge the phone Clara had gifted her.
***
It was an utter surprise to run into John and his new flatmate. They were an odd couple, though Harry could see that they hadn’t jumped over the fence from friends to lovers. Yet. It was bound to happen, no question about it. The looks they shared and the ones they hid from the other, spoke volumes. To her at least.
So, she started to read John’s blog.
“Do you even know how deeply in love you are, Johnny?” she whispered.
The whole thing was a string of obscure love letters, from the descriptions of Sherlock’s deductions to John’s unmasked admiration of the detective’s attire and looks.
“I wonder if Sherlock’s deduced that?” Harry mused to herself.
If he was the genius John described, surely, he would know.
John had become a public figure, and Harry saw him and Sherlock on the news or in the papers regularly. To herself, she could admit that she envied him. He seemed much happier than when he returned from Afghanistan. His limp was gone – apparently thanks to Sherlock – and he looked so very much alive. Of course, that grated on her, who barely was able to keep her job, much less her friends. Unless you were an alcoholic yourself, you turned away from those kinds of friends.
***
Instead of being happy for her brother when the news about his romantic relationship to Sherlock Holmes broke, Harry thrashed her flat completely and got injured in the process.
“Of course, you waited until they were dead and buried before you finally came out of the closet!” she shouted at her ruined flat. “I was never good enough for their bloody Puritanism. No, it was only John this, and John that. Why can’t you be more like John, Harriet? Just be normal. Well, fuck them, and fuck you, John Hamish Watson!”
Despite it all, Clara was still her emergency contact, and she had apparently called John, damn her. He brought his posh boyfriend to the hospital, and she braced herself for accusations and platitudes, but to her astonishment she got neither.
Seemingly, Sherlock bloody Holmes was an addict, like her. Recovered, but like he said to her: “And addict will always be an addict.”
“If you want, we’ll help,” John said quietly, “but only if you’re willing. We both know that rehab is a thing you have to work to get through, there’s no quick fix. But we will support you.”
So, maybe she should stop being envious of a brother who’s struggled too, albeit in other areas than her.
“Time to slay the green-eyed monster,” Harry Watson whispered, determined to keep her promise for once.
Summary: Sherlock has just moved into 221B; John is still in Afghanistan. They haven't yet met. Mrs Hudson is having her hip replaced, and has brought in someone to help with her recovery and see to any problems with the building.
Sherlock Holmes, meet Harry Watson.
Author Note: This is my Fandom Trumps Hate story for @thegildedbee 🐝 The idea of Harry and Sherlock meeting before John is in the picture was hers, and has been so much fun to imagine.
A gazillion thanks to @keirgreeneyes, who read this and helped me whip it into shape. 💕
I like that Sherlock focuses so much on John's "brother" Harry in his deductions.
He makes a "shot in the dark" about Harry's drinking problem that John disapproves of, and it turns out to be right, and part of what led to this deduction might be that the idea of a brother disapproving of his addict brother's destructive habit was very much in his head. And of course, he is also familiar with the notion of a worried brother.
And it's interesting to me that while John Watson is supposed to be the warmer, more "human" character, Sherlock and Mycroft, the "caring is not an advantage" siblings, have a much stronger emotional bond than John and Harry.
Sherlock does everything he can to excel at his work and prove that he's clever, and the desire to "keep up with Mycroft" drives this obsession. His brother is always present in his mind, holding court in his mind palace.
Mycroft obsessively worries about Sherlock, and takes great measures (that most people would consider inappropriate) to monitor him. Nothing drives him more than his need to protect his little brother, whom he still sees as the child he once was.
Despite having a "difficult relationship", they are viscerally close, and have a powerful hold over each other.
In contrast, John does not get on with Harry, and that's that. He scoffs at Mike's suggestion of asking for her help when he's at the bottom. (This is very different from Sherlock, who doesn't hesitate to go to Mycroft for help, regardless of any problems he and his brother might have with each other.) He clearly has affection for her, as he's happy to spend Christmas with her when she manages to be sober, but he and Harry don't seem to have any kind of significant hold over each other. We never meet Harry, but from what we see of John he doesn't let his relationship with Harry have any impact on him.
Perhaps, at least in some ways, John finds it much easier to be free from excessive emotion than Sherlock, or even Mycroft.
john sent harry letters from Afghanistan but never thought she read them due to lack of reply, when in reality it’s one of her motivations to be sober on days she doesn't feel like it just so she can be completely sober to read his letters. she never missed a single word.
Written for prompts posted by @chriscalledmesweetie.
John makes a fraught phone call. Chapter rating T.
----------------------------
I’m pants at this kind of thing, but a not-quite-emergency session with Ella persuaded me I had to try. We didn’t exactly quarrel, after all. I just stopped answering her texts, which is something I’d said I would do anyway if she went back on the drink, and it was pretty clear she had. But it doesn’t change the fact that our last exchange was her telling me It’s obvious the person you always loved is still alive and Little brother, you so don’t know yourself, and me telling her to drop the big sister act and deal with her own shite. But I gather she’s stayed sober for a while; I heard from Clara a time or two, and the last time, they were dating again.
She answers on the first ring, which surprises me. Brusque. She never wasted words. “Yes?”
“Er… Harry. It’s John.”
“I can see that. The phone tells me.”
“I, uh, thanks for taking my call.”
“Saves playing back the voice mail. I hate that.”
“It’s just, um, how are you doing?”
“You mean am I drinking? No, I got on this naltrexone thing. It’s the dog’s bollocks. You take a drink and it doesn’t do shite for you, so you finally figure out you’re really and truly going to have to deal with things. Wish we could’ve slipped some to Dad.”
I’d read some preprints about that. Not like Antabuse, where you take a drink and boke your guts out; no punishment, just no reward. “That, um, that’s great news. I, I heard from Clara.”
“Yeah, she told me. Figured you’d get around to it. So? You?”
“Well I’m. I wanted you to know. I’m getting married.”
“Seriously? How long have you known her?”
“It’s, well, there’s something I have to tell you – it’s not her, it’s –”
“Oh my God. You finally figured it out.”
“Harry, I just want to say you were right about a lot of things –”
“I know –”
“ – and I’m with Sherlock now and –”
“Aaaaah!! CLARA! You owe me five quid!”
“ – and I’d like you to be my, uh, my best, um, human,” I finish desperately.
She’s laughing and whooping too much to answer at first. When she finally gets hold of herself – I can hear Clara in the background, and Harry turning away from the phone to say yes he fucking did – she manages to ask, between snorts and wheezes, “What, give a speech? Wear one of those suits with tails and a stripe down the leg?”
“Well – speech – doesn’t have to be a big deal, you just say a few embarrassing things about me –”
“I could go on for hours.”
“Uh, already had that – five minutes and a toast is fine –”
“I like Zero. And Oddbird. Clara got me some for Valentine’s, like champagne but no kick.”
“And it’s not full formal, Sherlock and I already had that too, hated it – we decided on just dress clothes –”
“Ah, c’mon, always wanted to do the Marlene Dietrich thing. So I finally get to meet him? Family?”
“His brother’s a berk.”
“Isn’t everyone’s?”
And there it is, twenty, thirty years falling away, and we’re laughing the way we used to laugh when you’re a kid and you can forget for the moment that last night was shouting and doors slamming, and you’re just wrestling and slagging each other off and trying out swears. “Best Human,” she snorts. “You utter prat.”
Maybe I’m not so bad at this, after all.
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