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[stillhastrustissues]

PLAYER INFORMATION
Your Name: Dani
OOC Journal: comatoseroses
Under 18? If yes, what is your age?: Over 18!
Email + IM: t.fantasyfan@gmail.com, [AIM] tfantasyfan17
Characters Played at Ataraxion: N/A

CHARACTER INFORMATION
Name: John Watson
Canon: BBC's Sherlock
Original or Alternate Universe: AU (coming in from amatomnes)
Canon Point: Post- 'Reichenbach Fall' canonically, same Amat point in time, keeping AX memories.
Number: 082, but I'm fine getting assigned one at random if that's taken up.

Setting: The series wiki is here. Putting it simply, the setting is modern-day London, with all the same technologies and amenities available in the years 2011/2012.

History: We begin with episode one: A Study in Pink. John Watson is a soldier recently returned from Afghanistan, using a cane to walk, living in a bedsit and seeing a therapist that he sees no point in seeing. He's encouraged to keep a blog about the things that happen to him to help him adjust to civilian life. His therapist is informed, very bluntly, that nothing happens to him. Which is more or less the case.

We also witness the mysterious deaths of three people- self-administered poison with no history of suicidal tendencies, or recent reasons to have any. Detective Inspector Lestrade answers questions in a press conference to the best of his ability. This would be more successful if someone weren't texting everyone in the room simultaneously to point out when he says something that's supposedly Wrong! They call the conference to a close and exit- Sally Donovan, one of his sergeants, is angry that the texter is making them look like idiots, and says he should be stopped. Lestrade replies that if she can tell him how he does it, he'll stop him.

On a walk through the park, John runs into an old university friend by the name of Mike Stamford, who he winds up sitting down with to have an awkward cup of coffee. It's revealed that John's having money troubles and is unwilling to go to 'Harry' for help with the matter- Mike suggests finding a flatshare with someone, to which John replies with a skeptical "Who would want me for a flatmate?"

As luck would have it, Mike had heard just that same sort of thing from an acquaintance of his earlier that day. He takes John to St. Bart's to meet Sherlock Holmes. Sherlock's entrance into the series comes with his beating a corpse with a riding crop to study the bruising patterns and an apparent obliviousness to the romantic intentions of one Molly Hooper. When John walks into the laboratory, he immediately questions "Afghanistan or Iraq?" as well as informing John of some of his less than pleasant habits, as 'flatmates ought to know the worst about each other'. He was able to deduce from his talking about not being able to find a flatmate with Stamford earlier and the fact that Mike was bringing in an old friend to introduce to him that same day. He goes on the assumption that they'll be looking at a flat together, and when John questions this because they don't even know each other, he rattles off a string of very impressive deductions about John Watson which are (mostly) entirely true, including the fact that the limp responsible for his walking with a cane is psychosomatic. Having got what he came to the lab for, Sherlock Holmes leaves his name and an address for John to meet him at the next day. John is quite impressed. He blogs about it.

He and Sherlock meet at 221B Baker Street (with due introduction to their landlady, Mrs. Hudson), which Sherlock has already moved into under the assumption that they'll both find it to their liking. He's fairly quick to get into the fact that he's bored. The day is interrupted by the timely arrival of D.I. Greg Lestrade, as fate would have it: there's been a fourth suicide, and this one is different by dint of having a note left behind (scratched into the floor with her fingernails, "rache"). He asks if Sherlock will come to help, and Sherlock agrees (after a bit of a tiff about the fact that he needs an assistant and nobody on Lestrade's team will work with him). He flies out and tells John to make himself at home. John is more or less mystified and shown to be very frustrated as well, shouting at Mrs. Hudson when his leg is mentioned (and apologizing immediately after).

It's then that Sherlock arrives again, seeming to have come to the realization that John's medical knowledge and potentially his military history could be useful in assisting him, and asks him if he'd like to see a little more trouble. John offers one very sincere "oh god, yes." And they leave for the crime scene. The two of them have a talk in the cab on the way over, mostly John questioning Sherlock on his career and how he knew so much about him after just a couple of minutes in his presence. Sherlock lists off his reasoning and deductions, including that John's brother is an alcoholic and how he knew he'd been a soldier. John tells him that his reasoning is amazing, which takes Sherlock off-guard as people are usually very angered by Sherlock listing off personal details about their lives. As they arrive on the scene, John casually informs Sherlock that he has a sister, not a brother.

Sherlock swoops onto the crime scene, where we see more of the contempt that some of the police have for him (namely Donovan and the forensics specialist, Anderson) as well as more of his incredible abilities (which John is quite willing to call 'brilliant' and 'fantastic' out loud). He can come up with a detailed profile of the victim after just a couple of minutes, as well as the fact that she'd had a pink traveling case that's apparently gone missing. This seems to give him some sort of epiphany and he runs from the scene to do who knows what, leaving John behind. John, feeling decidedly out of place, asks for directions to possibly get a cab back home... only to wind up followed by ringing phones until he answers in a phone booth. Someone very crafty and capable of turning the CCTV cameras away from his location tells him politely to get into a car that's pulled up, with the implied threat of consequences should he not comply. He gets into the car.

It happens to be inhabited by a very pretty woman absorbed in texting. John flirts to no avail and tries to get information about where he's going, to no avail. He winds up in a warehouse with a man in a suit holding an umbrella, asking him pointedly what his relationship is to Sherlock Holmes. John receives texts from Sherlock asking him to come to 221B, pointedly adding that it could be dangerous. The man offers a large sum of money to give him information on little things that Sherlock gets up to, which John immediately refuses. This is apparently quite amusing. The man has gotten into his therapist's notes and informs John that he should find a new one- her diagnosis of trauma from the war (in the form of a tremor in his left hand) is apparently wrong. "You're not haunted by the war, Doctor Watson. You miss it. Welcome back." John seems to be upset and shaken by this encounter, but elects to return to 221B to help Sherlock anyway- though not after returning to the bedsit to retrieve his gun.

"Could be dangerous," as it turns out, is mostly just Sherlock wearing three nicotine patches and needing to borrow his phone to send a text. Sherlock dug around and found the dead woman's suitcase (which the killer had tossed as soon as he could, since a pink case would have been conspicuous in his ownership), which didn't include her phone. It must have been planted on the killer, and Sherlock had had John send a text with hopes of setting the killer up to be caught by them. He asks John along to have someone to talk at and not be talking to himself which would get him distracting looks, and they wind up in a restaurant by the name of Angelo's. The owner owes Sherlock a favor and the killer was instructed to be across the street to meet, so they would be staking it out from the window table.

After a while of talking, generally just getting to know the characters more, a cab pulls to a long stop across the street. Sherlock takes off running after it starts to pull away and John immediately follows- leaving his cane behind. They have a long chase down alleys and over roofs by a course designed by Sherlock's mental map of London and wind up cutting the cab off. Unfortunately, the passenger is American, only just arrived, and can't have been the killer. Sherlock sends it off with an awkward "welcome to London", which John finds ridiculous and hilarious, as it would seem. In lieu of being set upon by the police for harassing a cab passenger, the two of them run back for Baker Street. Basically they laugh like twelve year old girls, I won't lie. Sherlock says that actually catching the killer that way was a bit of a long shot anyway, but the night was a success. John asks what the point was, and is told to ask the man at the door. That would be Angelo, holding John's cane. Psychosomatic limp, promptly eliminated.

But the night doesn't stop there. Mrs. Hudson comes downstairs crying, asking what Sherlock's done, and it turns out the police have arrived to turn the flat over. A 'drugs bust,' according to Lestrade. We find out here that Sherlock has an apparent history of drug use and that Lestrade will do what he has to in order to get Sherlock to cooperate and not withhold evidence such as the pink suitcase. "Rache", which according to Sherlock was really most of the name "Rachel", turns out to be Rachel the stillborn daughter of the woman in pink, some years prior. Sherlock manages to puzzle out that Rachel is a password to the woman's account for her phone, which they can use to track the phone and find the killer. She planted it on him deliberately and left clues so that they would. When they track the phone, it's apparently in 221B. Which is impossible given Sherlock never found the woman's phone.

Mrs. Hudson informs Sherlock that his taxi has arrived, which he is initially dismissive of but eventually comes to a conclusion about while everyone searches the flat and John attempts the phone tracking program once again. It turns out the killer was a cabbie, who's now come for Sherlock- Sherlock, who will go with him willingly because he can't take the puzzle of not knowing why and how he killed those people. John notices him taking off in the taxi and the police disperse, frustrated. He's just about to turn in and expect not to understand when the program pings-- the phone is on the move. Apparently putting two and two together, John follows him and calls the police.

Meanwhile, Sherlock accompanies the cabbie to an emptied college, where they sit and have a little chat. We discover that the cabbie is dying, killing people so that his employer will leave money to his children (the more he kills, the more they get), and unwilling to speak the name of said employer. His method was to give the victims their choice of pills in bottles. They would take one and he would take one, and whoever lived, lived. And he manages to convince Sherlock to play the game as well (it's not all that difficult, given Sherlock's tendency to want to prove how much more clever he is, to jump into danger). John is shown running through one of the two similar buildings of the college, looking for Sherlock. He bursts into a room just in time to see Sherlock about to take the pill he'd chosen- in the building across the way. Sherlock and the cabbie are just about to take their pills when the cabbie is shot by John- left shoulder, eventually fatal. He runs off before Sherlock can turn and see who did it. Leaving that opportunity off as wasted, Sherlock uses the cabbie's wound to get the name of his employer before he dies, which is Moriarty.

The police arrive, Sherlock is given an unnecessary shock blanket and questioned by Lestrade for a bit. They've found nothing on the mysterious shooter- not quite true, as Sherlock has a profile all summed up for them. Handgun, likely a military man acclimatized to violence, strong morals, nerves of steel...

Which is where he notices John Watson standing off to the side of the police cars, respectfully behind the barriers, and tells Lestrade to ignore what he'd just said. He walks off, as he tends to do, and through subtle conversation informs John not to pretend he hadn't shot the man. He doesn't expect John would go to prison, but to avoid the court case they'd be better off not telling the police. They make their way from the crime scene actually giggling, naturally at a highly inappropriate time, and then the man who arranged John's kidnapping earlier arrives on the scene as well. As it turns out, he's Sherlock's older brother, Mycroft, occupying a minor position in the British government. More accurately, he is the British Government. Definitely not a criminal mastermind. Whatever concerns he appears to be expressing, Sherlock brushes off, opting instead to ask John if he's hungry. We learn very quickly that John was invalided due to a bullet to the left shoulder and that Sherlock can identify a good Chinese restaurant from the bottom of the door handle.

Mycroft Holmes increases surveillance on them post-haste.
Episode Two: the Blind Banker. A woman shows a display on ancient teapots at a museum- that they need to be used to be useful and the like. Her name is Soo Lin Yao, and she goes missing the next day.

Sherlock and John, meanwhile, are adjusting to living around one another. John returns from the store where the checkout machine turned down his card and is clearly frustrated by the fact that Sherlock has apparently done nothing all day (patently untrue, he had a sword fight). Sherlock is amused by his shouting down a chip and pin machine and tells him to use his card to pay at the store instead. John is relatively grateful for this and seems to come to the conclusion that it's time for him to start looking for a proper job again. Sherlock takes John "to the bank," which turns out to be a consult with someone he knew back in university by the name of Sebastian. Someone broke into the offices quite a few floors up, vandalized a painting and got out, somehow without appearing on security footage or setting off any alarms. All he wants Sherlock to do is figure out how they did it, and he'll pay a very large sum. Sherlock initially turns down the payment, but John is not so foolish as to do it. Through various investigative means, Sherlock figures out that the intruder could really only have come in through the window somehow, seemingly impossible though it was, and that the vandalized painting was meant to be a warning to one of the employees. And the employee hadn't come in to work that day, either.

Sherlock takes John along to break into the employee's apartment, only to find him dead. The police are called in, Detective Inspector Dimmock heading the investigation instead of Lestrade, and they're very prepared to rule it a suicide, seeing as it was a single bullet to the temple and there was no sign of forced entry. Sherlock states through pointing out various hints in the apartment that the employee would have had to contort a bit oddly to use his left hand on the right side of his head, but the police are skeptical. Sherlock still goes to Sebastian and very firmly tells him it was a murder, and something bigger must have been going on. Sebastian informs him that he's still generally more interested in how they got into the building.

John interviews at a local surgery for some part-time work that he's a bit overqualified for. But money is money, and the woman interviewing him is cute.

Someone else is killed inside their locked apartment not long after- a journalist who, it turns out, had been warned with the same sort of graffiti that the vandalized painting warning the bank employee had been. There's a connection between the two in that they both stopped at a curio shop called The Lucky Cat shortly after returning from trips to China, and that the mysterious graffiti symbols used to warn them off were ancient Chinese numerals. When they go to the museum in hopes of finding someone who could tell them what they are, they discover that the person who most likely could is Soo Lin Yao, who's been missing. Sherlock breaks into her apartment and is very nearly strangled to death while John's left waiting outside. It's a warning for him to back off, more or less. They discover that the same symbols had been left on a statue in the museum where Soo Lin would have seen them, which either drove her off. How interesting, then, that the teapots she'd been working on exclusively had continued to be worked on.

Lacking that sort of expertise for the moment, they seek the help of a 'graffiti expert' on the paint and symbols used, eventually coming across a full message printed on the wall by a railroad. It's very quickly covered up when John goes to fetch Sherlock to see it, but John was smart enough to take a picture with his phone before that happened.

Soo Lin has been hiding out in the museum, it turns out, which Sherlock suspected. He and John are there waiting for her late at night to question her about what's going on. It turns out that the symbols are a cipher from the Black Lotus Tong, a criminal organization involved in smuggling. She begins work decoding the message they got a picture of, informing them that her brother is the assassin, and how she escaped working for the organization to London. She's unable to finish the message before her brother comes around to attempt to kill them. Unfortunately, Soo Lin does not survive. Sherlock and John return to 221B, where every book the first two victims owned is waiting. This is one way to be informed by Sherlock that it's a book cipher, and he and John stay up all night trying to figure out which book holds the key.

Having been up all night doing this, John winds up falling asleep at his new part-time job. Sarah Sawyer, the woman who interviewed him, covers his patients. He apologizes for being so unprofessional and hedges a vague sort of answer about why he was up late, and then winds up asking her out on a date. He informs Sherlock of this when he gets home and is prodded to do something for the case, and- at Sherlock's suggestion- winds up taking Sarah to the Chinese circus. As it turns out, taking Sherlock's suggestions means he will also turn up for the date because it's to do with the case. While the show is ongoing, Sherlock sneaks backstage and discovers the same paint used to put on the number symbols. He also winds up in a fight with one of the circus members. John and Sarah jump in to help out and they all go back to Baker Street. Sherlock is clearly annoyed by Sarah's presence, but John tells her she can stay. Just as well, since Sarah points out that Soo Lin had already started decoding the message (something the boys had somehow missed).

Sherlock winds up going out for a walk and discovering which book it is that the smugglers were using. A nine million pounds' worth jade pin was missing, and apparently one of the men had stolen it. John and Sarah order food and wind up getting knocked out and kidnapped instead. When Sherlock heads back to 221B to inform the two of them what's going on, he instead finds them missing and a graffiti message on the walls telling him where to go if he wants them to remain alive. John and Sarah are tied up in a tunnel, kidnapped by the smugglers who are under the impression that John is Sherlock Holmes. They set Sarah up in front of a particularly slow deathtrap in hopes of encouraging him to tell them where the pin is, as he had to have figured it out by now. Naturally, John hasn't. Sherlock turns up and saves the day, albeit with a lot of fighting and Sarah nearly being killed by an arrow involved. The police are called. Sherlock informs Dimmock that he foresees a glittering career for him, provided he does what he's told. And the leader of the Chinese smugglers apologizes to Moriarty, who she apparently has been working for.

Such failure won't happen again, which is mostly brought across by the fact that a sniper is aimed at her forehead. She doesn't make it.
Episode Three: the Great Game. Sherlock is very bored and very lacking in worthwhile cases, which means he is very volatile. So great is his boredom that he takes to shooting the wall, something John is not very pleased to be called into the living room by. In fact he is quite annoyed, by that and the fact that there's a severed head in the fridge. He and Sherlock wind up having something of an argument- like a very opinionated debate where Sherlock is manic and full of pent-up energy and thinks that getting into a nice fight will relieve things a bit. We also learn that he doesn't know the order of the solar system. John eventually goes out for a walk to get some air. Mrs. Hudson scolds Sherlock for shooting her wall, goes downstairs, and then an explosion knocks out the windows.

As it turns out, John crashed on Sarah's couch for the night. They're talking and watching tv and planning breakfast when John hears on the news that there's been an explosion on Baker Street and rushes off. He pushes through the crows and police, makes his way upstairs, worried, and finds Sherlock and Mycroft having a calm conversation. Mycroft wants Sherlock's assistance in a case of a government employee found dead on railroad tracks- a very important flash drive he was holding had gone missing. Sherlock refuses the case.

He's then called to Scotland Yard and receives a phone that looks very similar to the one from Study in Pink, which has a message left on it. Five pips (related to an old way people used to send warnings to enemies), and a picture of the basement flat in 221B. After heading there and finding just an old pair of shoes, they receive a call and a message read out by a woman strapped to a bomb- Sherlock has 12 hours to solve the puzzle or she'll be blown up. Sherlock and John take the shoes to the lab at St. Barts to study the sneakers. After informing Molly that her new boyfriend Jim is gay (mostly evidenced by the fact that he left Sherlock his number), they get back to work and Sherlock discovers that the shoes belonged to Carl Powers. Carl was a boy on the swim team who drowned, back when Sherlock was growing up. He wasn't able to convince the police it was foul play, but manages to figure out that Carl was poisoned through his skin medication. The solution is delivered and the woman strapped to a bomb is allowed to give her location.

At some point after this, John goes to Mycroft about the missing Bruce Partington Plans (the flash drive the dead employee was involved in). Bit of a sucker for Queen and Country, John Watson. The employee was found by the railroad without so much as a bank card or a train ticket, when the previous night he'd been out with his fiancee. John pretends that Sherlock's changed his mind and is fully focused on this case.

The next case Sherlock really is interested in that's sent, he only has 8 hours to solve. It's the case of a missing man who left behind only a very bloodstained car. Through investigating the rental company he'd had the car out from (the company owner's tan and recent travels to Colombia, the fact that it had been exactly one pint of previously frozen blood in the car), Sherlock deduces that the agency owner was paid to help the missing man disappear and get out of his debts. He posts the solution on his website and waits for the next call, convinced that he's dealing with the mysterious Moriarty. The hostage who made the call is freed.

The next case is the death of a talk show host, Connie Price, who died of tetanus, even though it turns out the wound she supposedly contracted it through was made after her death. The call is from a blind old woman, who tells Sherlock he'll have another 12 hours to solve it. Sherlock determines the killer was the houseboy (her brother's lover), done through her botox injections. With the puzzle solved in time, they ask the old woman where she is so they can help her. Unfortunately she starts describing her kidnapper's voice, even after Sherlock tells her not to tell him anything, and the bomb she's strapped to is detonated, killing quite a few people.

Sherlock and John return to 221B to wait for the next call, where they see the death count on the news and Sherlock claims he lost that round. He also deduces that Moriarty must be some sort of crime consultant who never gets himself directly caught out. It's here that John and Sherlock have a brief but serious argument about the fact that lives are at stake and Sherlock just seems to be enjoying the challenge without caring about them. Sherlock informs John that if caring won't help save lives, he won't be bothered to "make that mistake." John wants to refuse to help him, but the fact that lives are at stake make that not an option.

The fourth clue is a picture of the Thames, where the body of an asphyxiated man washed up. The manner of his asphyxiation is a signature style of an assassin called The Golem. Sherlock deduces that the man was a security guard of some sort, and when it's discovered that he worked at a certain art gallery where a recently-discovered painting was being housed, Sherlock becomes sure that the painting is somehow a fake and he has to find out how to prove it. He utilizes the network of homeless in the city to find out where the Golem is hiding out and heads to the gallery to see if he can discover anything about the painting. Meanwhile, John gets the guard's address and questions his roommate, finding out that the guard was an amateur astronomist but no expert in art- and that he'd been left a voicemail by a Professor Cairns (asking to meet at a certain place with a planetarium presentation) telling him he was right about something. When he and Sherlock meet back up, Sherlock gets the Golem's location from his network and they set out to find him- when they do, however, he gets away from them in a car. John knows where he'll be heading and the two rush to beat him there. Unfortunately they don't arrive in time to save Professor Cairns from being silenced by the Golem, who escapes again after a brief fight in the planetarium. Running out of time, Sherlock calls the others to the gallery and seems to be struggling for an answer to why the painting is a fake- the answer comes in the form of the Van Buren Supernova, which wouldn't have been visible at the time the painting was supposedly done. He delivers the answer with seconds to spare. The gallery owner is arrested for the fraud and admits she was working with Moriarty.

John then returns to investigating the mysterious death of Andrew West (the employee Mycroft wanted Sherlock investigating), and is confused to hear that there wasn't much blood found on the tracks near the body. Sherlock appears, apparently having been following John the entire time, and agrees that the victim was probably killed somewhere else and then moved by being placed on top of a train (and falling off when the train switched tracks). They question Andrew's fiancee and her brother, then wind up breaking into the brother's apartment. The brother returns home and confesses to stealing the flash drive he'd heard was so valuable and accidentally killing West when West found out about it. He hands the flash drive over to Sherlock, who later tells John he returned it to Mycroft, and the two return to 221B. Sherlock sits by the pink phone watching television and John heads out to meet up with Sarah.

And then as soon as John's out the door, Sherlock posts on his website arranging a meeting at the pool where Carl Powers drowned all those years ago and heads out to meet Moriarty. He arrives at the pool, plans in hand, calls out to Moriarty, and John Watson steps out of the shadows. For a few moments it seems as though John has somehow been Moriarty all along, until he opens his coat and reveals that he's been strapped to explosives and aimed at by a sniper like the rest of the hostages, a mouthpiece for Moriarty. Moriarty reveals himself shortly after, turning out to be Molly's gay boyfriend Jim- having pretended to be, that is, of course. Sherlock pulls a gun and offers up the plans, which he expected Moriarty was after. Jim takes the plans, throws them in the pool because he doesn't care about them, and tells Sherlock to stop prying in his business or he'll "burn the heart out of him." While Moriarty and Sherlock are in their faceoff, John comes up from behind Moriarty and holds him there, telling Sherlock to run- if the sniper fires, he and John will both go up. Unfortunately this turn in events was one that Moriarty predicted, and it's revealed that there are quite a few snipers in the woodwork, some of which are more than happy to aim at Sherlock's forehead. John lets go and steps back again. Having delivered his warning, Moriarty strolls out and the dots representing the snipers vanish. This leaves Sherlock to frantically free John of the explosives he's strapped to and make sure he's all right- which he is, more or less, or enough to make a half-assed joke about having his clothes torn off in a darkened swimming pool.

Moriarty changes his mind. The snipers reappear and so does he, telling Sherlock and John that they can't be allowed to continue. Sherlock and John lock eyes and seem to come to an agreement. Sherlock levels his gun at the explosive vest lying on the tile and stares Moriarty down. And that's where the first season comes to an end.

Series Two. Episode One, A Scandal in Belgravia. The second season picks up exactly where the first left off- Sherlock, Moriarty, John, a Semtex vest and a standoff to end all standoffs. Lucky for the boys, Moriarty's phone rings at a critical moment and he has to reschedule their demise. John and Sherlock are confused by his sudden exit. Sherlock determines that someone must have changed his mind... but who?

We are treated to a shot of a mysterious woman who apparently made the call, dressed in lingerie and apparently in the middle of 'business.'

A few weeks later, Sherlock has become a bit of an internet celebrity, thanks to John's blogging. They go through a long string of accepted, potential and (according to Sherlock) boring clients in that time, and a man eventually stumbles into the flat and faints. He has a case of mysterious death out in the countryside, that happened in an instant with no means they've been able to find as of yet. Sherlock sends John out to investigate the case himself, carrying the laptop so Sherlock can investigate from the comfort of home. They're in the middle of things when government officials walk into 221B and close Sherlock's end of the conversation off. A helicopter arrives for John. They wind up on a couch in Buckingham Palace, Sherlock wearing nothing but the sheet he'd been wrapped in back at the flat, and giggle like twelve year olds as they are wont to do. They're greeted by Mycroft and an employee of... a certain high-standing employer, as someone of particularly high standing appears to have hired a dominatrix and had unfortunate photos taken. Sherlock is wanted to retrieve them so they can't be used as a future blackmail attempt. Sherlock- eventually- agrees.

This leads John and Sherlock to Irene Adler's home, Sherlock incognito as a priest who's been mugged and John not really bothering with an excuse and just being a doctor in the house. Through carefully constructed conversation, a fire alarm and ignoring the fact that Irene conducts their little interview in the buff, Sherlock manages to get locate where she's keeping the photos. His attempt to get the code to the safe they're in is interrupted by Americans with guns and a grudge to hold. His job is to open the safe or watch John get shot. He opens the safe and, realizing it's booby-trapped, uses it against them to free everyone who happens to be at gunpoint. He also manages to nab the phone the pictures are on, which Irene notices. They all head upstairs to check for more intruders and check on Irene's assistant, who is unconscious. After sending John downstairs to secure the back door, Irene drugs Sherlock and manages to get the phone off of him. It's made a point that her life depends on the information she keeps in this phone, that she wouldn't give it up for anything.

Sherlock has a very confusing drug dream sequence where Irene deduces how the man in the field was killed, something that was entirely possibly a reality, as she also made a point to return his coat to him and change the text alert ringtone to something very conspicuous. After a few months of being continually texted by Irene, Christmas rolls around and it turns out that Irene has sent the phone and the information on it to Sherlock- he deduces that this means she'll turn up dead very shortly. Surprise surprise, her body is in the morgue at St. Bart's soon after. Sherlock identifies it himself and spends a while being withdrawn, composing sad music on his violin. Mourning, for all intents and purposes, the death of Irene Adler, who was so very interesting.

The time comes when John is picked up by an attractive woman on her phone and a sleek black car. Thinking it's Mycroft wanting to harass him about Sherlock, he goes quietly and willingly, only for it to turn out that Irene wasn't dead after all and arranged the day's abduction. He immediately appeals to her to tell Sherlock she's alive. She asks him to retrieve the phone she left at Baker Street, which he refuses to do. They have a discussion about Sherlock and their unique relationships of sorts with him, and Irene texts Sherlock informing him that she is alive... at which point it turns out he'd followed John to the warehouse he'd been dropped off at and listened in. Sherlock leaves and John doesn't go after him.

Upon arriving at 221B again, it turns out the Americans have made another attempt to steal the phone, this time by breaking in, assaulting Mrs. Hudson and keeping her tied to a chair. Sherlock is rightfully pissed by this. He has the lackeys of the leader sent off and then subdues the leader himself, so that he may throw him out the window a few times before the police arrive. John returns home to find him holding the American at gunpoint and receives a basic explanation. The man is taken away in an ambulance and Lestrade is more or less filled in about the incident as well. Not long after this, John and Sherlock return home to find Irene Adler sleeping in Sherlock's bed and in need of their assistance. She has some sort of code that she needs deciphered- one that Sherlock manages to crack very easily. It's a number for an airline seat, which Irene later texts to none other than Moriarty, having been working with him the whole time. Moriarty sends a text about it to Mycroft Holmes, who is visibly shaken. The boys are unaware of this and she sticks around Baker Street for a while, not shy about her interest in Sherlock and coming very close to some sort of seductive breaking point- which is interrupted.

Government officials arrive to relocate Sherlock to an airport. We discover that the British government had found out about a terrorist cell's plot to bomb a plane- rather than alert the cell that they'd found them out, they would let the flight go as planned, but with corpses in the seats instead of live passengers, to avoid casualties. Sherlock decoding Irene Adler's little request ruined the operation entirely. Irene arrives, dismisses Sherlock entirely and submits a list of demands to Mycroft, offering her phone and the information on it in exchange for having them met. She informs Sherlock that he had no meaning to her, that it was all a game... and he proves her wrong with the simple fact that he'd taken her pulse earlier and determined she was genuinely attracted to him. It's through this that he cracks the password on her phone, which would allow Mycroft access to all the blackmail material on it. Irene begs for protection, as she's incredibly vulnerable without that information, and is denied.

Some time later, Mycroft informs John that Irene Adler has been killed by a terrorist cell, and leaves it up to him whether Sherlock hears that or a story about her going into witness protection in America somehow. John opts to tell him that she's in witness protection, to spare his feelings (whatever they may be). Sherlock keeps her phone, the last sent text on it one to him reading "Goodbye, Mr. Holmes." We then discover that Sherlock flew out to the terrorist cell and saved Irene's life, helping her to fake her death one last time and freeing her. The episode ends.
Episode Two: the Hound of Baskerville. Sherlock is once more taken up with a ton of restless energy and wanting a case to alleviate his boredom- a lot of which may have to do with the fact that he's quit smoking cold turkey. He's gotten a lot of nothing, the most interesting of which is apparently a little girl's missing rabbit (that glowed in the dark).

Relief comes in the form of Henry Knight. When he was a child, he and his father went walking out on the moors and his father was killed. He can't remember a lot of the incident, but when he went back to the moors as an adult he found the footprints of an enormous hound. Sherlock initially plans to send John to investigate alone but appears to change his mind, and they head out to Dartmoor together.

After asking around the town and hearing tales of a monstrous dog and government experimentation, Sherlock uses a stolen pass card to gain entrance to (and a tour of) the Baskerville research facility for him and John. They question several people and one scientist about the sort of experiments they run there, the kinds of things they could create, as well as Sherlock actually following through on the case of the missing glowing rabbit. The two are almost caught out lying before they can leave, having used Mycroft's pass to enter, but a scientist by the name of Robert Frankland (a friend of Henry Knight's father, concerned for him) vouches for their identity even knowing they're frauds.

While speaking with his therapist, Henry recalls seeing the words "Liberty In" in his dreams about the incident, and the three of them go out to the moors to see if they can't confront this supposed hound. John winds up separated from Sherlock and Henry, catching sight of flashing lights in morse code (it spells out U M Q R A), while Sherlock and Henry apparently catch sight of the hound itself. Henry is devastated and frightened, and Sherlock is apparently effected himself. When John catches them up, he insists that he didn't see anything (which upsets Henry greatly- with no one believing a monstrous hound killed his father, he's been feeling like he's going mad) and the three leave, Henry returning to his home. At their inn, Sherlock shows how upset he was by the sighting- he's shaking, unlike himself, admits he was scared and winds up snapping at John, who leaves the inn for air. John spots more morse code flashing and follows it, only to discover that it was a dead end: headlights on a car with... involved passengers, from a distance. Sherlock texts him to return and question Henry's therapist for more information, which he does until Doctor Frankland interrupts and blows his cover. Henry seems to hallucinate the hound appearing just outside his home, and is incredibly shaken.

Sherlock and John reconcile the next morning, more or less, and Sherlock lends thought to the theory that the word "hound" from Henry's memory may be an acronym (H.O.U.N.D.). While they walk and discuss this, they run into D.I. Lestrade, who'd been sent to keep an eye on Sherlock by Mycroft, apparently. They ask him to question their innkeepers, who John noticed had ordered a large quantity of meat even though they run a vegetarian restaurant. It turns out the owners had been feeding a wild dog for a while to keep up tourism- and eventually it got too wild and they stopped and put it down. Apparently satisfied with this explanation for events, Lestrade takes his leave for the time being, while Sherlock calls in to Mycroft to get another pass to Baskerville. Once there, he sends John to investigate the lower lab levels alone, where John winds up trapped and hearing vicious growls. He locks himself in a cage and calls Sherlock to come help him, clearly frightened, and when Sherlock arrives there's no sign of the hound he'd hallucinated. And hallucinated is what he'd done- seeing what he'd expected to see based on Sherlock's false description of the hound he'd seen. Sherlock is convinced the two of them and Henry had been drugged somehow. While there, he also finds out that the missing rabbit had accidentally been given to the daughter of a lead scientist and had to be taken away. Wrap up all your little plotlines, that's the motto.

Sherlock retreats to his mind palace, a memory technique he uses not to forget anything that's worth remembering, and deeply thinks for some time. Eventually, he comes to the conclusion that "Liberty In" actually means "Liberty, Indiana," and the H.O.U.N.D. acronym turns out to have been a discarded secret military project- and that Doctor Frankland had been a part of the team.

John receives a call from Henry's therapist that he's very disturbed: threatened her with a gun, realized what he'd done and taken off (with the gun still in possession). Sherlock calls Lestrade, who joins him and John in going to the moors. They find Henry prepared to commit suicide but Sherlock stops him, explaining what had really happened. Doctor Frankland had killed his father all those years ago, wearing a shirt that displayed Project H.O.U.N.D. in Liberty, Indiana, and had been dosing Henry with a fear-inducing hallucinogen for some time to make him question his memory and be harder for the police to take seriously. The hallucinogen was the H.O.U.N.D. project that had been scrapped, triggered by pressure pads and released as fog all through the moor, dosing anyone who spent time there (which Henry had been encouraged to, in order to conquer his fears and try to remember more clearly). Henry seems to calm down, and then they all hear a growling- it's a monstrous dog, which John shoots and kills, and which turns out not to be so monstrous. It's the dog the innkeepers had been feeding- they couldn't bring themselves to put it down and had lied. Frankland arrives on the scene and promptly flees, only to wind up stepping on a mine in the field surrounding Baskerville's testing areas and dying.

Sherlock and John eat breakfast, preparing to return to London. John isn't sure why he hallucinated the hound at all, having not been dosed in the moors on the night Henry and Sherlock saw their hound. He apparently must have absorbed it some other way or experienced a delayed reaction. Though we do find out that the conciliatory cup of coffee Sherlock had made for him the morning he hallucinated was one Sherlock believed to be drugged. Sherlock had locked him in the lab, and Sherlock had played the sounds of an angered hound over the PA system to induce a hallucination. John is not pleased.

At the end of the episode, we see Mycroft giving the order to release Moriarty from a holding cell. Moriarty had written Sherlock's name over and over on the walls.

Episode Three, the Reichenbach Fall. Sherlock and John return to London, where Sherlock solved the case of a missing painting titled "The Reichenbach Fall." Sherlock promptly sees an increase in popularity and media coverage with each new case he takes, making it hard to keep to his usual low-profile methods. This concerns John, who knows that the press will eventually have to turn on him. Sherlock can’t puzzle out why.

James Moriarty engineers the vault opening at the Bank of England, all cells opening at Pentonville Prison, and breaks into the case where the Crown Jewels are kept... simultaneously. He makes sure to write the words "Get Sherlock" on the outside of the case, and is also sure to allow himself to be caught in the act. Sherlock is called as a witness in the trial of James Moriarty. He gives his testimony as only he can, winds up tossed in a cell for contempt of court because of this, and is bailed out by a displeased John. James Moriarty is found not guilty, in spite of putting up no evidence or witnesses to dispute his guilt during trial (achieved by threatening the families of all the jurors).

Sherlock prepares tea for Moriarty's inevitable visit to 221B, where Jim tells him that he owes him a fall. He also drops hints that there was an ultimate code of sorts he used to pull off his three big heists. A key to open any door. While Sherlock and Moriarty have tea, John is "summoned" to a meeting with Mycroft, who explains that very professional assassins have moved in around Baker Street recently- and then asks him to watch out for his brother with this knowledge in mind.

When John arrives home he discovers an envelope full of breadcrumbs and unmarked, only to forget about it when he makes his way upstairs and finds the police consulting with Sherlock. The children of the British Ambassador to the United States are kidnapped and Sherlock is brought in on the case. He solves it in time to save their lives by analyzing samples he could get from the kidnapper's footprint: their location is narrowed down to an abandoned candy factory where they were slowly being poisoned with mercury. While he's analyzing, they seek the assistance of Molly and the lab at St. Bart's. She tells Sherlock that he looks sad when he thinks John isn't looking. That she noticed this clearly surprises Sherlock

Sherlock asks to be allowed to interrogate the child who remained conscious (her brother in the hospital), but doesn't manage to do more than step into the room before she screams and cowers away from him. Sgt. Donovan expresses her suspicion of Sherlock getting everything he did from nothing more than a footprint, coupled with the little girl's reaction to him. After realizing he should follow through on her request to look more deeply into it, Lestrade goes to 221B to ask Sherlock to come in for questioning voluntarily and is refused. Donovan and Anderson accompany him to see his superior, who, furious that a civilian was allowed onto so many crime scenes, demands Sherlock be arrested and brought in for questioning. Lestrade lets John know they're on their way.

Sherlock is arrested. John punches the Chief Superintendent in the face when he walks into the flat and insults Sherlock, getting arrested himself. Sherlock distracts the police, takes one of their guns and holds it on them, takes John as a "hostage" and flees police custody with him (they are handcuffed together and all). They come to the realization that they're being followed by one of the assassins living on Baker Street- and that Moriarty's note of "Get Sherlock" has proved as some sort of indication to the criminal underworld that he told Sherlock the code he used to pull off his heists, explaining why so many international assassins have moved in but not tried to kill them (have, in fact, saved Sherlock's life on one occasion earlier only to be killed for touching him by someone unseen, to keep the other party from getting the code he supposedly has).

John and Sherlock break into the home of Kitty Riley, a journalist who has been wanting to publish an exposé on Sherlock: only to discover that Moriarty has been staying with her, creating a new harmless identity in Richard Brook (an actor, hired by Sherlock Holmes to play James Moriarty). He's been giving the reporter detail after detail about his life and also about Sherlock's life, things he couldn't have known. Moriarty flees, and Sherlock comes to some sort of silent realization on his escape. He hails a cab and tells John to take another, he needs to think on his own.

John opts to return to the place of his meeting with Mycroft to confront him on the details given to the reporter by Moriarty, knowing that there are very few people in the world who could possibly have them to give. Mycroft admits to giving Moriarty the information in order to get him to talk- that it was the only thing that could get him to talk, and he expresses his regret. John is very short with him. Moriarty was looking to ruin Sherlock, and Mycroft gave him exactly the sort of leverage he needed to do it. Having gotten this point across, John takes his leave.

Sherlock seeks Molly out at St. Bart's again, this time without John. He tells her that he thinks he's going to die and that he needs her. She agrees without hesitation.

John finds Sherlock in the lab at St. Bart's. Their conversation is interrupted by a chilling phone call- Mrs. Hudson has been shot and it seems that she'll die. Sherlock refuses to go to Baker Street with him after hearing the news. John is upset by this. They argue, John leaves alone, and Sherlock quickly texts Moriarty to meet him on the roof of the hospital to solve their little problem. He’s got a history of that. Moriarty and Sherlock meet and go through the typical dramatic banter spiel. Sherlock is positive that, with the code Moriarty used, he can erase Richard Brook and get his reputation back. Moriarty reveals that there is no code- just well done bribery and damn good acting.

John reaches Baker Street and finds Mrs. Hudson is alive and whole- entirely unharmed. Realizing something is about to go very, very wrong, he immediately rushes back out the door and flags down a cab back to the hospital.

Moriarty informs Sherlock that he has gunmen set up to kill John, Mrs. Hudson and Lestrade... unless Sherlock jumps from the roof of the hospital and kills himself. Sherlock, of course, realizes there must be a failsafe, a backup command to call the gunmen off, and informs Moriarty that he has no qualms in doing what it takes to get the command out of him. Moriarty realizes this is the truth, that Sherlock is like him in that regard, thanks Sherlock genuinely, and promptly shoots himself in the head. With no failsafe, Sherlock has no other choice. Sherlock calls John just as he arrives back at the hospital. He makes him stay standing on the street, says that it's all true, he's a fake and he created Moriarty, that he researched John wanting to impress him. That this phone call is his "note." John doesn't believe what he has to say about being a fake. Sherlock jumps from the roof of St. Bartholomew's Hospital. John is hit by a bicyclist and gets back up to stumble over to the body and try to take a pulse, which he presumably doesn't find. Sherlock's body is carted into the hospital.

The journalist publishes her article and Sherlock's reputation is entirely ruined. Headlines read "Suicide of Fake Genius." Mycroft is visibly upset by this. John returns to his therapist 3 months after it all happens- after 18 months of not bothering- grief-stricken, and is advised to say the things he didn't get a chance to say (as well as being made to say that Sherlock Holmes is dead, which happens at the beginning of the episode, but I moved here for the sake of chronology in the summary). John visits Sherlock's grave with Mrs. Hudson. He offers a short and meaningful speech about how Sherlock changed him, how he’ll never believe he was lied to, and a plea for one more miracle- don't be dead- before doing an about-face and leaving. It's revealed that Sherlock, alive and well enough, was watching the entire visit from a distance, but for some reason has continued to allow John to think him dead. Annnd that's where we're left until series three.

Personality: A first look at John Watson by the average eye wouldn't reveal much of anything special about him. John's not the type of man who stands out in a crowd and even less the type of man to want to. Spending about an hour in his company, I imagine it would be easy to get a basic feel of his character, or as much of it as he tends to show on the fly. John is an ordinary bloke, a skilled doctor, and very much a pragmatist. He's the kind of man who cares about the duller details of living and often the first one to take care of them, even if they're not quite the things people enjoy doing. He'll tidy up around the flat, go out for the groceries, look through the bills, go to work, every day, like clockwork, because he understands that he has responsibilities and can't just leave them off. He's also quite a personable man- friendly, easy to relate to, and surprisingly good at accepting just about anything that gets thrown into his path- the last of which can be maintained by the fact that he's not only willingly friends with someone as difficult and complicated as Sherlock Holmes, but that he's also pretty damn good at being friends with him to boot. This is a man you have a friendly conversation with at random and nine times out of ten wouldn't expect could be dangerous at all.

That is entirely far from the truth.

It's entirely accurate that John is a kind man, good at heart and responsible, of course, but beneath all of that there is a constant current of soldier. John joined the army as a doctor of his own volition, knowing exactly the kind of danger he could be sent into, and he made it to the rank of Captain when he did get sent into it (as referenced in the Baskerville episode). While he was there primarily to treat the wounded, he has killed people in the line of duty, and it's not something that he's just forgotten. John served for quite some time in the invasion of Afghanistan before he was injured and invalided home. He's a crack shot with a pistol and he throws a mean right hook, and his idea of what's too dangerous, what he should honestly panic over- well, they definitely take his experiences at war into account when he reviews them. For all that he blends into a crowd and converses nicely, for all that he has very few problems connecting with women to date, John Watson is extremely capable of being dangerous if he feels the need to.

He's also a pretty damaged man, though he's been improving since the beginning of the series. Going to war isn't something that happened until he returned home and completely brushed it away, forgetting it ever happened. John has nightmares, returned with a wounded shoulder, a psychosomatic limp and got sent to a therapist. While it couldn't be said that he's traumatized beyond belief from his experiences, or that he wouldn't have enlisted all over again if he had the chance to go back, the first few minutes of 'A Study In Pink' alone go to show how much of an effect Afghanistan had on him. While having a stilted conversation with an old college buddy, who comments on how different he seems, he starts to say "I'm not the John Watson you know." Because it's fairly clear that he's not who he used to be. He spent his days talking to no one, staring at the spartan conditions of the room he'd taken up in, not contacting his sister because they don't get on, she's an alcoholic, and he was too proud to ask for monetary assistance. Like with many people, John has a hell of a lot of pride and it takes a hell of a lot to get him to let go of it.

Further, he's also a bit of an adrenaline junkie. And by a bit, I mean he's absolutely an adrenaline junkie, if very good at hiding it. He prefers to be useful, active, having something to do above all else- an uneventful life is something that he appears to have a lot of trouble handling, just judging by the social discomfort and silence that we get to see from him in his first few minutes on screen. When his therapist tells him that writing a blog about what happens to him will honestly help him, his only response is a quiet, almost pained "Nothing happens to me." John wants to be occupied instead of staring at the walls thinking most of the time, even while his time in action means he appreciates quiet moments and the basic comforts of modern living. It rather seemed like he had every intention of making the army a lifelong career, and had no idea what he was supposed to do once that was taken from him. This is even pointed out by Mycroft Holmes during their meeting face to face. When he refers to what John's therapist has written about him (the benefits of holding that position in the government, naturally), he sums up a lot of John's character point-blank. To derive from quotes of their conversation, he tells John that when John walks with Sherlock Holmes, he sees the battlefield. That the tremors in his left hand aren't the result of post-traumatic stress disorder, but from distaste for what his situation had turned into.
Or, as he puts it, "you're not haunted by the war, Doctor Watson. You miss it."

Of course, we might have figured out that he desires action and purpose earlier on. Sherlock offers him the chance to see a little more trouble, and he goes along with an "oh god, yes." Not so much as a second thought on the matter, and no looking back since.

Something else to mention, I suppose: his left hand is on occasion prone to tremors (not from the trauma of having been at war, but from a lack of that adrenaline he's so secretly addicted to), an occurrence which has all but disappeared since getting involved in such an active life with Sherlock. Speaking of vanished habits, after being thrust into a very uneventful civilian life (this quite probably to do with trauma), John also used to walk with a significant limp from pain in his left leg. These really only vanished after meeting Sherlock and starting up a life that's just... full of distraction and unpredictability and running across rooftops. This is something that's mostly insignificant in his life as it stands, but I felt it would be only fair to have it out in the open, just in case something comes into question.

Dr. Watson also possesses an uncanny ability to keep a cool head under pressure. Considering he was taken with the career of an army doctor and shipped out to service for a while, it makes a lot of sense. In fact, high-pressure situations tend to mean he'll excel. We see people strapped to explosives and forced to read off instructions in the episode "The Great Game," and towards the end John is put in that same position. He does as he's told with a steady voice, even keeping his wits about him enough to make a move against the consulting criminal responsible later. Towards the beginning of the scene when Sherlock arrives, he even thinks to blink S.O.S. in Morse code while he's talking, trying to get that message across. He can think most of the time when the stakes are high, can treat wounded soldiers under fire, accept his apparent kidnapping by Mycroft with an almost-casual "okay" in the first episode, and even offer up a sarcastic thanks to the men holding him at gunpoint (see A Scandal in Belgravia).The man has courage in spades, and a sense of humor both dark and dry enough to calmly get through most of the situations that a life with Sherlock Holmes produces.

Which isn't to say he's completely unaffected by great personal danger- following the removal of the bombs that were strapped to him in The Great Game, he could barely get through two or three steps before the rush of it all caught up to him and his legs nearly gave out. He still has nightmares about his service in Afghanistan as far back as the first episode. John is an extraordinary man by all means, but he's still just a man, after all.

He's also quite the foil to Sherlock, emotionally speaking. John is a man of pride, strong morals and not a small amount of nobility. He became a doctor because he genuinely cares about people, wants to help them, and an army doctor at least partly for that very same reason. Lives that are lost and saved and put in danger- he cares. John is too proud to put the majority of his emotions on deliberate, dramatic display, but he's still an emotional man and well aware of it. He has no qualms with shouting at Sherlock over the fact that he doesn't seem to care about the people in danger in The Great Game, and he likely never will have a problem telling Sherlock when he's got a problem with him. John wants to believe there's some good in people, as much as he believes in doing what he considers to be the right thing, therapist-noted trust issues aside. From his military time and the fact that he was willing to sacrifice himself in order to kill Moriarty and see Sherlock safely out of danger (The Great Game), it also appears he can look at the matter of his own life very objectively compared to those of others. One life to save his friend and put an end to a criminal mastermind once and for all? Fine. His actions were obviously also influenced by the fact that he cares about Sherlock, which is a relationship I'll get into shortly. Suffice it to say, the actions he takes for this man in canon, his personality in general, make it easy to see that he is a GOOD man. Unbelievably loyal, even only a day after meeting somebody, and he would take a bullet for the people he cares about any day (it's not like he hasn't taken one in the line of duty saving people already).

And of course, Sherlock Holmes has to be mentioned. It's... really hard to know where to begin, in terms of who he is to John and what he's done for him, and how they balance each other. A good start off to explaining their friendship would be to say it's not hard to see why so many people are under the impression that they're romantically involved. Because Sherlock really is responsible for the majority of John's character evolution in canon so far: this man just sort of swept into his life, told him all about himself within five minutes of their meeting, became his flatmate, apparently cured him of a psychosomatic limp, took him along on a crime-solving spree and became someone he had literally killed for in less than two days (A Study in Pink). It would be a bit melodramatic to say that John's life was empty without Sherlock in it, but it would be entirely accurate to say that it's improved immensely by his standards since they became flatmates. John thinks that Sherlock is brilliant (which he is), as brilliant as he is exasperating and awkward and childish. With Sherlock in his life, things never just fall into monotony. Judging by how unhappy he was with that sort of routine in the first episode, I would say it's safe to think he's grateful for that much.

In all honesty, it's probably not a friendship that should even work. An ex-army doctor and a consulting detective who calls serial killers Christmas come early and solves cases just because he can? But we come to see over the course of canon, from being in the thick of criminal chases to John and Sherlock bickering in an almost casually domestic way, that they just... suit each other. Sherlock gave John drive and purpose, ensures just by being so completely himself that nothing will ever be bleak and boring, and John takes on the mantle of being a moral compass of sorts (even when they'd only known each other for a day or two. When Sherlock expressed an indignant sort of surprise that a woman had been upset over her stillborn infant years later, the silence following had him turning to John and asking "Not good?"), of making sure Sherlock eats and sleeps and going out to pick up groceries. For all that Sherlock leaves body parts in the fridge and John supposedly nags, neither of them wants to see the other come to harm. Just the last few minutes of The Great Game is all you really need to see for the proof. The two of them are so completely different, but they balance each other out flawlessly- they work as an incredible team and bring each other up to their very best seamlessly.

Sherlock is always something of a complicated subject where John is concerned. Within 48 hours of meeting him, John was willing and able to shoot and kill a man to save his life- and I won't say it's just because it's Sherlock, having nothing to do with his moral standings, but Sherlock had quite a bit to do with it. As the people in Sherlock's life go, John seems to develop the best understanding of him that's really possible (Mycroft Holmes aside for obvious reasons)- walking away from the scene of the climax in 'A Study In Pink,' he asks in a tone of... almost fond exasperation, mixed in with genuine frustration, "You were going to take that bloody pill, weren't you?" In their time as flatmates, John's just plain gotten to know him and his habits, to the point where Sherlock walks in bloodstained, holding a harpoon, and John just asks if he really rode the tubes looking like that (Hound of the Baskervilles).

John very clearly considers this man a good friend, his best friend possibly, and becomes extremely protective of him- especially of his emotional state. He's aware that Sherlock and emotions don't tend to mesh well, if Sherlock allows himself to get mixed in with them at all, and sometimes the way he discusses matters of the heart with him seem like he's talking to a child. John really has become a moral grounding of sorts for him (it's very openly theorized that when Moriarty spoke of burning the heart out of Sherlock, John was what he was referring to)- the progression that Sherlock's made emotionally since they met is fascinating to see. In 'A Scandal in Belgravia,' he arrives at Buckingham Palace to find Sherlock, wrapped in nothing but a sheet, clearly tense and a bit sore at being dragged out of the flat, and manages to diffuse a lot of that tension in minutes. He's been able to make Sherlock genuinely laugh since they chased down a taxi in the very first episode, a skill that hasn't been developed by anybody else just yet.

From the very first day they met, they were just sort of drawn to each other. He so clearly admires Sherlock's abilities (and has no problem with saying as much out loud several times in episode one) and Sherlock clearly has respect for him, even when it almost makes no sense for him to. Simply put, they met by chance and have since managed to fill voids for each other, help each other in ways that nobody else could manage, without even being romantically involved.

So all in all, Watson can be summed up as one great big walking contradiction of a man. Both a doctor and a soldier- he knows how to save lives in the heat of battle, and at the same time he's taken lives as well. He appreciates the comforts of home (hot tea, jumpers, crap television), but his deep-seated desire to have a purpose and be useful keep him from being content with a quiet life at this point. He's got the patience and understanding of a saint, except for when he hasn't and he's bickering with his flatmate like they're an old married couple. John can be friendly, personable, and he can be stern, wary, angry, awkward, off-putting. He cares about people but he would kill to save a friend's life- would sacrifice himself and tell them to run. It can take him a while to trust somebody, but if he does he's loyal to a fault and not ashamed of the fact. John Watson can be kind and equally hard-hearted, long-suffering and short-tempered, not want anybody to know if something's wrong with him but berate a person for doing the same thing.

At the end of the day, he's just overwhelmingly... human. Hell, maybe that's why his friendship with Sherlock balances out so well.

Abilities, Weaknesses and Power Limitations: John has absolutely no supernatural abilities to speak of, possibly barring a capability to be enormously patient with the world's most frustrating man. He's quite fit for his age, able to be up to extended periods of running full-speed, and appears to be fairly meticulous in personal health and hygiene, but again there isn't anything truly remarkable to speak of there. His left shoulder is likely something of a weak spot- it's healed from the bullet wound, of course, but may be prone to stiffness and lack of mobility. John's got very good aim with a firearm, evidenced in both A Study in Pink and The Hound of Baskerville, as well as sound judgement and very firm morals regarding when to make use of it. He's typically very much in control of himself, especially when it comes to the fact that he very much does have a temper to him, and that takes admirable effort at times. On the whole, John Watson can be very dangerous just in the fact that he doesn't tend to let himself be dangerous.

That said, he's still only human, and definitely the more emotional one of the boys of 221B. John can be wounded and killed, exhausted, fall ill, manipulated, make bad decisions based on his personal biases and emotional hunches... humans are fragile creatures, in their way. He has a bit of a leaning towards too much pride and grudge holding- unwilling to stay with his sister after his discharge because they've never really gotten on. While he's capable of great caring and patience, he can also be very stubborn. When he's on the verge of losing his temper, he'll walk away rather than get into the conflict he's losing it over. Long story short, he has the weaknesses of any other typical human, and his closeness to Sherlock is also something that could really be used against him.

Inventory:
1 plain copper collar, at a size very fitted to his neck (221B Baker St is etched into the side) AU Sherlock has the collar in his possession.
1 amatomnes communications device (disabled)

Appearance: It's hard to pinpoint the first thing that a person would notice about John Watson upon meeting him- a lot of this comes from the fact that he is a man who just doesn't stand out. Where Sherlock is tall, pale, willowy, with a flair for the dramatic, John is his opposite in even that.

John Watson stands at about five and half feet, pushing five foot seven. His build is rather stocky and quite fit- fit enough to spend the majority of his time running around the streets of London with his flatmate, at least. Not incredibly muscular, but very sturdy. In terms of posture, he typically keeps his back straight and his arms at his sides, something of a leftover from his years in the military. His discharge from the army came from being shot in the left shoulder, which it is safe to assume bears a scar from the incident.

John's face falls into the same sort of category as his body type, really- nothing very extraordinary, but not unattractive. No scars there, no birthmarks. His eyes are typically blue, with a few more lines around them (and occasionally more bags under them) than the typical person would have. Though honestly, a lot of the time it seems like the color of his eyes change from episode to episode- something darker green to hazel to bright blue... I have no idea how they did this, so I'm really just sticking to blue. Generally, he has a face that would lend itself more to warmer expressions even while he tends to look neutral, grave and definitely deadpan more often than anything these days. He has darker blond hair, which he keeps cut close to his head, and also has a bit of a penchant for wearing sweaters.
Age: 38

AU Clarification:
History: Well, for starters, John actually went to the effort of making a blog entry about his first few days on the island of Atia. Nothing is omitted or exaggerated, this I solemnly swear. To summarize, John woke up naked (except for a collar) in a very nice hotel room, then fiddled around with the little computer... thing that got left with his clothes until it produced a network of people who'd been in the same boat and who could answer his questions. As it turned out, Sherlock had arrived before him by just a couple of days, he was on an island where you have sex every so often or you die every so often, and there was no way out yet. He met up with Sherlock, who refused to have sex just to live, and refused to have sex to live if Sherlock wouldn't be having sex to live, which would lead to a "I go if you go" standoff. Molly arrived about a day after John and had things explained to her as well.

Sherlock and John went shopping for flats and picked one, and Molly then moved in with them! They also did a little suit-shopping for a ball that they didn't enjoy greatly. Naturally, with extended time in a relatively uneventful place, Sherlock's downhill slope of being stir-crazy started up (not helped along by the fact that his canonpoint was ahead of John's, who had no idea what was coming in the future). He took up smoking again, to John's disdain.

The hero Megamind arrived on Atia not very long after that! John may or may not have fanboyed a little over superhero status and invited him to stay with him, Sherlock and Molly for a while until he got his feet under him. He came over for tea to determine if this would be an okay venture, and eventually decided to stay on. Not long after that, Irene Adler also arrived, and was invited by Sherlock to live with them. John was unfortunately spoiled for the fact that she did not in fact die and Sherlock had been aware of this. This was less than pleasing.

In conjunction with a hiatus, John spent two weeks in the Forest of the island of Atia- this is not a venture one makes voluntarily (or at least ought not to), as the time spent there is riddled with hallucinations of one's fears and worst moments. He left the forest dirty, hungry, angry and on edge, and as it turned out, Sherlock had also just walked out of spending some time there himself. And of course Sherlock decided this was more than an appropriate time to discuss collar partners with John and make a logical proposal. A basic summary of that thread is this: Sherlock asks John if he has a collar partner yet and proposes that the two of them should... engage. For familiarity and trust reasons, because it is just logical to do so. John replies with a firm "no."

It was two or three weeks after this, if I recall correctly, that the island was struck with a curse- the first one John had the privilege of being present for. Island inhabitants were plagued with increasingly vivid dreams about other island inhabitants and very strongly compelled to make them a reality. John wound up with three partners over the duration of this curse (separately, which hopefully came across): Angela Montenagro (from the Bones canon), River Song (of Doctor Who), and (because irony has a way) Sherlock Holmes. Which pissed John off a little bit, actually, since he'd just been making a point of the fact that he wouldn't be sleeping with Sherlock. Also included was the discovery that Sherlock had at some point taken up a cocaine habit on the island. Plenty of being pissed off.

John strategically avoided him for a few days while he had his panic, rage and crises of sexuality to push down, and eventually approached Sherlock to talk about what happened. It was a very awkward conversation, but necessary, and John did his part to get his points across. He still didn't think being regular collar partners was the best idea, and he wouldn't just be sitting back and letting Sherlock use drugs, to the best of his abilities. Sherlock still thought partnering to be logical and more or less waved off the idea that John could stop him from using drugs, but let him say his piece and acknowledged it. While not the most successful venture they'd ever undertaken, the conversation eased up on a good portion of the awkwardness between the two of them and left their current standing fairly clear. Things returned to an equilibrium of sorts.

Molly Hooper and Irene Adler both disappeared from the island, presumably to return home where they belonged. Molly made a return (a new player brought her in from an earlier canonpoint) and Irene also made a return, but Irene would shortly leave the island again and not be coming back quite so shortly. Molly's canonpoint, which in her previous stay had been level with Sherlock's and provided him some relief in not being alone with his knowledge, now added just that bit much more stress for him. This naturally made an appearance with more mood swings and lashing out, which inadvertently led to Sherlock and Megamind having a very big, very shouty argument. Megamind moved out. John contacted him for a night out a couple of days later- not with hopes of getting him to move back in so much as hoping to reestablish a good connection with him. They wound up in a sizable bar fight together, which helped. It couldn't quite be said that they were friends, but acquaintances on good terms isn't so bad when you're hanging with a superhero.

Another event was on the horizon a week and a half or so after this. A quick note on the island of Atia to clarify- upon coming into the game, supernatural powers are stripped from the characters. They are possibly even altered physically to make them more suited to the game's premise. On this occasion, Atia allowed for supernatural powers to make a return in full. Sherlock found this exciting, interesting and new, and was naturally very excited over the whole affair, and John couldn't strictly say he wasn't enjoying a change of pace. The influx of returned powers led to a lot of destruction to the island and then a very personal problem in the form of a demon called Ruby (from the canon Supernatural). She made the rounds in possessing quite a few people while the goddess allowed, and John was one of the unlucky number. Ruby, while in his body, mutilated him and broadcast it over the network (knife wounds, which were severe but I won't get explicit about just to be on the safe side and not overly disturb anyone). Sherlock entered the scene and had a bit of a snarkfest with her until she abandoned John's body. Molly arrived with medical supplies to try to help with the bleeding and Sherlock put out a call for someone with healing powers. Help came in the form of Rapunzel, who used her hair to clear off John's fresh wounds. Very helpful, indeed. A day or so after these events, John and Sherlock entered into a fairly tense conversation with Lucifer (also from the Supernatural canon), which was lucky enough not to end with bodily harm.

The next morning, John and Sherlock had a very important talk. While in John's body, Ruby had taunted Sherlock (naturally) with the lengths John would go to for him. She used the words "he practically loves you," which Sherlock wanted to bring up in discussion, being equal parts curious and confused on the matter. He asked very point-blank if it was true that John had certain feelings for him and John responded that no, he wouldn't say it is true. This led into a discussion on the fact that there are different kinds of love, that John cared about Sherlock. There was a faint moment of John realizing that he had no idea how to categorize whatever sort of odd, codependent mess of a relationship he and Sherlock even had, and he was okay not to try categorizing it. Sherlock did some fairly appropriate guilty inner angsting over the fact that John didn't know he'd more or less be breaking him in the future, and John more or less told him "shut up, no regrets here." They also had toast.

The goddess was understandably not okay with all the wreckage that came of allowing abilities to return, and revoked them once again. A curse was very swift on the heels of this- residents would awaken believing they were married to select other residents, and presumably sexual shenanigans would ensue. Sherlock, John and Molly found themselves neatly matched up for this curse. It ended with fairly high levels of awkwardness and confusion on all their parts, and equilibrium was not quite so quick to restore. Particularly for Sherlock, who'd never quite experienced feelings of the romantic variety in strength before. No powerful discussions were had on the matter, really. The three of them more or less attempted to pretend it hadn't happened.

Things settled down for a while. Then Kurt Hummel (of Glee), who John had formed something of a friendship/watching-over relationship with, announced that his boyfriend had been returned home and was very upset by it. Sherlock wound up snapping at him to extensive degrees. Extensive to the point of a bit of an overreaction, which John tried to calm him down from and only moderately seemed to succeed in. Just another of those sharp turns in mood that Sherlock had been having from the get-go, really. He wasn't sure what to do with him. A rut, most definitely.

A party thrown by Sherlock's drug dealer was attended. Though nothing of particular note happened during it, John got to see Sherlock actually being fond of someone for the first time since... roughly meeting Mrs. Hudson back in London, actually. Which was always something nice to see. It wasn't much change for Sherlock, and thus commenced operation Get Sherlock Drunk a couple days later with Molly. Sherlock wound up trying to teach them how to dance. It was not the most successful endeavor, sadly, and neither was the night itself in terms of relieving stress for a time.

Sherlock's returned cocaine habit made itself known in full swing with a slip of logic and an overdose, which he was just lucky enough not to die from. John was very, very angry. Molly was also very, very angry, actually, which was rare and somewhat frightening. Sherlock and John had something of a discussion while Sherlock was in the hospital, the more notable points of which would be that a drug habit was unacceptable and Sherlock was a complete asshole. Sherlock would remain in the hospital for the duration of his withdrawal- plenty enough opportunity for John and Molly to go over all they could think to remorselessly search of the flat for stashes. He'd be needing extra-vigilant watching over from then on, clearly, as they couldn't trust him on his own.

Looking to attempt to reconcile some of the very unpleasant tension and attitude left over from the overdose and Sherlock's personality while going through withdrawal, he and John decided to have a night out at dinner for the first time in quite a while. Atia is very lacking in a plethora of places willing to give Sherlock free meals, after all, and they could typically order in just as easily as ever for that much. They had awkward small talk, casual conversation, their typical brand of conversations-that-normal-people-don't-enjoy-having, and slowly, inevitably, came around to the realization that they were kind of on a date, weren't they? Which, you know, John was not about to let put him off of his eating, so dinner was destined to continue. They went their separate ways at the end of the evening, confused and generally apprehensive.

And, naturally, after this turn in events, John vanished from the island to head out for a canon update to the Reichenbach Fall, outlined in the canon history above. It's from the end of his canon update that he was pulled into AX the first time, and he'll be keeping his memories of the time he spent aboard, if that's all right.

Personality: John coming in from amatomnes is still very much John Watson in the fundamental basics, as John is ever a stubborn sort of man in that regard. He's still the walking contradiction of soldier and doctor, still a willing tagalong to Sherlock Holmes if he happens to be lucky enough to find something exciting and worth the chase on Atia (which is admittedly a lot more rare an occasion than it is back in London), he still wears jumpers whenever he damn well feels like it and makes a great cup of tea and finds life a little easier to tackle when the problems can be handled by determination and/or skill with firearms. He craves things that break past the mundane, adrenaline rushes, not being bored, even while he's adamant about paying the bills on time and merging well with society.

I can think of a couple of things that merit noting.

First of all, there's the general attitude that comes with almost five months spent on Atia. While John is still John, he's definitely gotten adjusted to the strangeness that can come from panfandom games. For the most part, your typical fare: different worlds, supernatural abilities, alien species, advanced technologies and meeting someone you know who's from a different point in time than you are. It's true that he was already an accepting sort of man where unusual circumstances were concerned, but it's also safe to say that things have been much more unusual than he'd normally have expected. John hardly bats an eye at talking about separate universes and how they differ from his own- actually, he finds it to be one of the most interesting things he has left to talk about anymore. Hardly chasing down a serial killer on stale biscuits and forty-five minutes of napping, but it's usually something new and highly unorthodox that he'll be learning as a result. He's harder to rattle with unfamiliar language and shows of power. He's just had an extended stay on an island where his choices were "have sex" or "slowly strangle to death"; AX will (at first, at least) prove to be an interesting reprieve. But the Ruby incident has also left him more aware that one has to be cautious dealing with people trapped in the same situation. You never know what could happen, and it pays to try to avoid it happening anyway.

Secondly comes the more complicated nature of his dynamic with Sherlock, which was on confusing and highly uncertain grounds where last he left it. Sherlock is still... Sherlock, after all. Much of their relationship is very par for the course. They bicker and barter and live around body parts being kept in the kitchen. They both possess the same need for change and excitement and deal with it in very different ways. There's just the possibly unfortunate matter of having seen each other naked in a non-professional capacity. John's got exactly no idea what's going on or what he's supposed to do with his flatmate, or if they'll just be opting to pretend there's nothing unusual going on and cease all discussions on the matter because it's not worth investigating (a possibility he always tends to lean towards, to be honest).

Keeping his AX memories, some of the Sherlock issues have been... not quite settled, but lightly prodded at and kept at a firm distance because he doesn't like the idea of approaching them just yet. He'll throw himself back into medbay, try to be more social on the network, all that sort of thing.

SAMPLES
Log Sample:
John could safely say he never meant to go so long without having this conversation. His plan hadn't been to avoid it at all, actually, fresh in from London again and hurt, fully prepared to be demanding until he got all his answers.

And then it seemed like everything else got in the way from there. Epidemics, curses, the forest, one more death than he'd been wanting to experience anytime soon, new arrivals; god, maybe the entire island was in on it, maybe more than just the two of them want to act like they don't know what's in store for either of them back home. Don't talk about it. Act normal (whatever passes for normal for them).

Normal hasn't been working. Normal translated into short tempers, low tolerance, stress on top of what they'd already have just from life on Atia in general, from the strange need to be entirely in control of when something happened again. Days of silence and slumped shoulders and horrible weight on everything. It's probably too late to do anything to make that go away, probably has been for ages, but John thinks that if he can do something to make it more tolerable, maybe- maybe things can get that much better. Wonderful odds, he's sure.

He meant to dive into it the minute he got back through the flat door and he couldn't, couldn't stop anything, couldn't change anything. And Sherlock won't give him the answers he wants no matter how long he waits, but at least when he first got back he didn't know that yet.

It's selfish to still be angry when Sherlock's the dead man and couldn't ever be bothered to turn to his only friend to help him not throw himself from a building. He imagines it is, at the least. When he's the one who called him a machine and took for granted that he'd eventually say the things he had to say, if he really would have needed to say them at all.

John doesn't usually think about saying them now, while he can. Just every so often, something to brush off before the next argument.

Today might be a good day for all of it. The dead weight, the useless tissue. Best to cut it out while you can, isn't it? Before it ruins you completely as opposed to partially.

So John makes himself get up instead of staring at his room wall, puts in his absence at the hospital, moves to the sitting room where he can take a chair and stare at the carpet instead, and think about what to say.

Not that he expects any amount of time is really preparation enough. He and Sherlock always operated a bit better on spontaneity.

(from a log I posted in amatomnes last month. if it's not okay to use it, just say the word!)

Comms Sample:
I'm back in again, I suppose. This is Doctor John Watson- the one from the seventh cycle, if that helps keep things less confusing. Apparently I've missed a few since the last jump I remember, if the numbers are right.

Sorry about that. Haven't got much to say for myself, since I'm not entirely sure where I got to. Is that a typical problem out here, or should I worry for my life? [ He will not be worrying for his life either way, really. It's a bit more frustrating than anything. ]

And I'll take a check-in from any Sherlocks or John Watsons reading that I haven't spoken with yet. Might save me the trouble of hearing about all your trouble secondhand.

((and a cautionary link to John's reserve comment, since he doesn't seem to be on the reserved list slfkasj))