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There is of course, a before. Everything that precedes what they become to one another. There are times before they become friends, there is a whole world and decades and decades. These times are quite relevant and they help to shape both men. There are births, death, graduations, everything in between and more. There are first loves and second loves and first times and so much pain.
There’s nothing of what they need and what they want but there is the pain.
Between them, so much pain and perhaps too much but they are both the sort of men who buck up and move on, swallow the dent in their throat and bottle it all up and in.
---
There are fourteen years previous that pass without much consequence;
-John’s father leaving in the night without so much as a word
-John falling from a tree and breaking his ankle, spending the entire summer indoors reading Proust, of all things
-John kissing a girl in the wood behind primary and then ignoring her and forgetting her
-John kissing a boy in the wood behind primary and wishing he could ignore it
-John watching Harry steal money out of his mother’s purse and he, feeling so very, very guilty for it without reason.
Fourteen years come before fifteen, but it’s then when John realizes there is more, and there is nothing more. He feels real conflict for the very first time.
John’s mother dies when he’s fifteen (cirrhosis) and he bites his lip and sobs when he’s alone, for two days. Harriet takes control of the estate and all of the paperwork and meets all of the extended family. John remains locked up in his room, his head beneath a pillow, not understanding how to move on, not understanding how life ends, but vowing to. Harriet says “yes” and “thank you” and accepts the trays of food and condolences from the neighbors, from their mother’s friends.
He let’s her handle everything because he still feels he’s just a boy and he doesn’t know how to do anything like this and Harry is twenty for christsakes and shouldn’t she... shouldn't she...
His father comes calling too; John refuses to speak to him, but his father uncorks the wine (the last of it, a bottle John had hidden) for Harry and that’s where it all begins. Through paper-thin walls, there’s a soul that isn’t ready for the head-on and laughing and too many tears and John clutches his head in the shadows and wonders if this is how it all ends.
Or perhaps it’s the beginning of the end.
The second bottle is uncorked and, well, and-
That’s half of the reason why he hates his father forever after.
His capstone year and John’s of a single mind, comes home from courses to Harriet spilled out over the expansive kitchen table (they never really wanted for anything and everything John’s mother owned was nice and now just falling into disrepair) and lifts her cheek. A paper sticks to it. and John is utterly disgusted.
John hates for the first time in his life, with a very real and violent passion. He’s not sure he hates Harriet (he doesn’t not really, couldn’t ever) or their father for passing on the genes or just everything all at once.
John bites his lip.
“The darkness comes and the darkness goes,” Harry says and John is torn between wanting to hit her and wanting to save her, so he stomps to his room, finishes filling out his applications for university and then seeks out every bottle in the house with so much as a drop in it, and smashes them out in the drive.
John knows it’s time to leave.
He spends the last three months of college rarely at home, either on Mike’s couch or on another mate’s floor; he finishes with top marks and an offer to read at the University of London. His father phones exactly twice, once asking if the estate has been settled (a call which John promptly hangs up on, the man as no right) and then once more to congratulate his son on his graduation.
“Piss off,” John says, manages to seem almost bored. The words echo in his head for ages.
He goes off to uni and is overwhelmed and consumed and in love for the first time in his life, because it’s London. And London is everything that his life was missing, it seems. Bright lights and a harried atmosphere and everything he could possibly want all at once and all of the time and he’s in love.
First year he takes an anatomy course and falls in love all over again (oh his heart, his heart) and it truly feels as though he may burst, having found medicine. It’s all he can do to consume the science, works in an outpatient clinic, goes to the hospital on weekends to volunteer, reads and writes and learns voraciously. John becomes so skilled with his hands -- practices endlessly -- and knows: come hell or high water he’s going to be a doctor.
There is time for other things too; he runs through the course of several relationships (Britta, Mary, Mark, Thelma) and makes new friends. He buys pints for people he’ll never see again and in turn has pints bought for him. He goes and spends a semester in Dublin because it sounds like an adventure, something almost dangerous.
John is normal, almost exceedingly so, and it’s after his third year of medical school (top of his class and he doesn’t really have to put in anything above and beyond) that he receives an email from his Resident, telling him about an opportunity in Netley, to train with the British Army.
He doesn’t really take the time to consider it, just thinks about the change and a challenge and goes; nine months later he’s issued a rifle and a bunk and told to get acquainted with the Afghan desert.
It is how he expected war to look, but it isn’t.
The terror and the pain are a terrific toll but he finds he thrives on the danger, that his blood hums with it. Love and hate he both feels about the war because here he’s found a home.
It is the sound of machine gun fire all evening, coming from somewhere far away and seeming so close. There are the bodies, of men and women who just yesterday he’d sat at the mess with, with whom now he is working to sew their guts back into their bodies. Horror, plenty of that, plenty of that for a lifetime and he feels as though he’s run through his quota but it keeps coming, endless.
There are stolen nights away with a Sergeant he calls Jackson but who goes by Jack and he knows just how his come tastes and it’s exceptional and somehow surprisingly not shameful and thrilling.
He finds he’s an exceptional shot, surprisingly exceptional. John enjoys the weight of a pistol in his hand, the slide of cold metal as he loads a rifle, the sound of a magazine locking into place.
There are long, long periods during which nothing happens and others that seem far too long for his brain to process. An IED, tossed over the wall into camp and the terror that is the scramble to safely detonate it. Returning fire on what’s supposed to be a peaceful mission but that turns dangerous in a portion of time so minuscule that John nearly feels like he’s moving backwards.
There is trauma and pain and John taking the bullet for a wounded colleague, too weak to shield himself.
(People say he’s brave but he’s not, he’s stupid and probably selfish too, he doesn’t want to see another good man die.)
When John’s father dies he is on an operating table in Afghanistan, having his heart restarted by a team of fellow surgeons, it takes him weeks to get the news and when he does, he feels nothing, save a pain of regret for Harry, the only person who bothered writing to him in Afghanistan...
Even if he never read her letters.
His wound smarts, a bit though; he supposes that’ll do for pain.
It all ends rather abruptly and he doesn’t have time to process. He’s ripped away from it all, placed on a military transport, a plane full of the wounded and dead, just more people who would no longer be soldiers.
He thinks several times about killing himself, during the flight.
John Watson, M.D., returns to London by way of:
-”Wounded in battle, commendable in service, above and beyond, really...”
-”Your pension will be the standard rate, though as you’ve been wounded in action there is a consideration for Army Housing if you choose...”
-”Blimey, brother, you’ve lost weight!” and then arms around him and everything, just like that.
All back to normal.
Everything, everything is gray, at the edges.
---
Sherlock’s father isn’t a tyrant, isn’t a hard man like many would think. He’s understanding and has a wealth of books and loves Sherlock’s and Mycroft’s mother so vividly that sometimes, when the boys catch them looking at each other, time actually stops.
He plays pirates with Sherlock and spies with Mycroft and when he’s gone neither knows what to make of it. Their mother slips away, cold and distant and the brothers mimic that. Because it’s grief and much with every other human interaction, they learn it visually. Catherine Holmes slips away, is curt and commanding in the years after her husband is gone.
Her two boys know nothing of walking on eggshells and thus they take the social cues from their mother. They too become cold, distant, calculating.
Sherlock is bedraggled and lanky and hates living in the county because it’s so quiet. He is cross legged and staring on the front steps of their expansive estate, watching the torrential rain. The school year had been particularly boring, he’d been reprimanded more than once for sneaking into the anatomy and physiology lab to poke at the fetal pigs.
His classmates had stolen his books, and his shoes and before Sherlock had had a chance to lace the shower heads in the their dorms with sodium hydroxide, Mycroft had somehow managed to get the culprits expelled.
Sherlock hates school, he hates the boys he’s supposed to be friendly with and he’s fairly certain that he hates his brother. And this rain, oh, he hates that too.
There are footsteps behind him, the clip of kitten heels. Sherlock does not turn around, but waits; he no longer gives his mother the satisfaction of having his attention, but she speaks, before he can begin to think about what she wants.
“Your father would have wanted you to know this,” she tells a thirteen year old Sherlock; he turns his head slowly and bites his lip.
“Mother?” he asks, taking the book carefully and glancing up at her; it’s the closest thing to a smile he’s seen on her face in seven years.
Later on, in their father’s library, Mycroft says, “She said know and not have, did you notice that?”
“I did,” Sherlock says, clipped and vows to notice more things, because things like this are important. He busies himself reading Anatomy of the Human Body.
Everything sort of bleeds together for a bit, after that.
Mycroft goes to uni and Sherlock finishes his studies with excellent marks and spends his days in the garden with his father’s books. When he realizes the gardener begins smiling more as he trims the hedges and that his mother has started keeping large vases of roses around the house he feels betrayed and confused and asks his mother, “Jerome, mother?”
“He’s a nice man,” is all she will say, as she clips the ends of the flowers.
Sherlock leaves home, after that.
He reads, and reads, and watches and reads for Chemistry because it seems the least boring of the subjects. But he watches, too; it’s all he does during his courses. He watches the man in front of him make eyes at the professor (sleeping together, grade inflation) and the woman to the far right of the room twitch (hungover, alcohol abuser, possible sexual transmitted disease with the way she shifts in her seat.) It’s not a skill he means to hone, but before he knows it, he finds he knows his peers better than they know themselves.
“Don’t write those formulas on your wrist, Michael,” he instructs one morning at breakfast as his dorm mate begins scribbling a calculus theorem on his skin.
The man stops, glances across the table, “And why’s that, you wanker?”
Sherlock’s eyes flash and he doesn’t know what to say. Does he hold back, let the man dig his own grave, or does he divulge the real reason? “Doctor Radcliff has seen you do it before, he’s going to catch you out this time round and you’ll be sacked from uni.”
He sips at his coffee, watches the man’s face transform-awe, anger, acceptance. “Right, right,” he says as he packs up his books. Sherlock isn’t sure of the reaction he hoped for but this certainly wasn’t it, casual indifference.
It stings a bit and Sherlock isn’t sure why; he’d given advice, friendly advice, well-informed advice and yet he is rebuffed. It... angers him. “And I would advise that you end whatever sort of relations you have with Cynthia Thurston, she has what some might consider a defect if one wants to have unprotected sexual intercourse with her, unless, of course, you enjoy that sort of risk.”
“Sod off!” Michael shouts and storms off, is caught cheating and is kicked out of uni. Cynthia’s name makes the rounds on the rumor mill, not too long afterward. That is Sherlock’s only attempt at ever making a “friend”.
At twenty-one he takes what he considers his first case, the assault of a first year English Literature student who is so shell-shocked that she cannot speak about the encounter. He manages to track down the assailant in less than forty-eight hours and instead of giving the name to the proper authorities, hands it over to the student’s sister and calls it solved.
His reputation, from there on out, precedes him. People give him things, want things from him, women want him to be inside them, brilliant man.
He takes them up on it, exactly four times and they find him to be boring and unfulfilling and they leave swearing to smear his name across campus but he just lights up a cigarette and waits for the door to slam, turns to his notebooks and records the experience.
It’s all a bit manic, how he manages his coursework and his cases and he learns to do without sleep or food; he’s never been particularly fond of either, anyway.
The cocaine happens thus: the course of an experiment (possible co-ed overdose, cocaine found in the room, testing potency) he is assured that no second-hand description of the experience would be good enough. The fact that it’s flying and color and speed and he can’t shut his brain off, well, that’s just a wonderful discovery.
He can work and breathe and think and learn and speak faster, now. He takes only the cases that tickle the base of his brain, strikes up a working relationship with the one police officer that seems to be hovering about campus, investigating a string of assault and batteries.
“This whole process would go much faster if you realized the assailant does not live in this dormitory but rather on the other end of campus, inspector.” Sherlock finds himself hovering around after that, nicking Lestrade’s casefiles from his car, turning up in his office with casual observations that turn out to be case-breaking.
It’s not as though the older man takes him under his wing, but he tolerates him, to a point.
Sherlock is not normal, is even less normal when under the influence and there’s a near breaking point at twenty-four after four nights and no food and too much caffeine and no resolution. Sherlock is careful to dilute the solution, preps his needle and slides it into his arm and there is-
Such a delicious slide but nothing comes to him. Sherlock is swimming but in the dark and for the first time since the death of his father he feels well and truly lost.
He’s in a rage, fueled by drugs and a maddening desire to solve the case, walks straight under the police barrier, through a pool of blood, carelessly kicks a .22 shell beneath a shrub and finds himself chin to chin with the Detective Inspector. “You haven’t been providing me with the information I need, Lestrade!”
He’s pressed up against a squad car in a matter of moments. Lestrade’s hips keep him in place while he pats Sherlock down, palm resting over a bulge in his trouser pocket.
“Is that what I think it is in your pocket, young man?” the D.I. asks as he clamps Sherlock’s wrists behind his back and his brain swims a little more; it feels dangerous and too right.
Gregory Lestrade can’t have him poking around at crime scenes while high and Sherlock cannot be imprisoned for possession of a controlled substance and so a deal is struck up. It’s quite simple, really, Sherlock can keep using the police’s resources on his private cases as long as he assists Lestrade in his work.
And if he stays clean.
“You’re a nutter, Sherlock, but you’re brilliant too and if you don’t kick all of this nonsense, you’re not going to find a future in this, right?”
So, he dries out, finishes uni with honors, takes no work afterward, instead using the tiny trust set up for him to use after his graduation, takes a flat at 221b Baker Street. There is the matter of setting up the website which takes him a day or two and then Lestrade refers a friend-of-a-friend’s brother’s roommate and he’s an entrepreneur of sorts.
It’s two years before he runs out of money and realizes that he has absolutely no furniture in the flat, save for his bed. Things must change and though he knows he could rely on his brother for money, he would rather set himself aflame. Crime pays, it turns out, and he is allowed to charge his clients what he wishes because they are so entirely desperate for his help.
Thus, Sherlock becomes selective, taking paid consultant work only when he needs it, leaves himself to become obsessed with the other cases, the interesting ones, the fascinating ones.
Sherlock gains a new reputation.
Sherlock decides he’s had entirely enough of Anderson and that is where our story begins, technically.