Dr. John H. Watson (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
nothaunted) wrote2012-02-20 11:00 am
nothaunted) wrote2012-02-20 11:00 am
Entry tags:
The Application + some additional info
[nick / name]: Nikki
[personal LJ/DW name]:nikkernoodle
[other characters currently played]: n/a
[e-mail]: nikki.nudelman[at]gmail[dot]com
[AIM / messenger]: xnikkernoodlex
[series]: Sherlock (BBC)
[character]: Dr. John H. Watson
[character history / background]:
John Watson was an army doctor, a member of the 5th Northumberland Fusiliers deployed in Afganistan before he was shot in the shoulder and discharged. He wound up back in London, and well...life goes on.
[Additional info]: I've picked Watson's birthday to be March 31st due to this article and several others like it. This, of course, is subject to change depending on what canon throws at us :|a
[character abilities]:
Being an army doctor, John has knowledge of everything one would learn both as a soldier and as a physician. This includes a familiarity with many types of guns as well as the ability to be, in Sherlock's own words, "a crack shot," even with a handgun. He goes on further to add that John has "nerves of steel," inherently calm in a dangerous situation. In addition to these, he also has the extensive knowledge of a doctor: anatomy, sickness, and causes of death, as he's able to determine during his and Sherlock's first case together that one of the victim choked on her own vomit.
[character personality]:
Phase 1 of basic training in the British Army instills six core values into their recruits: courage, discipline, respect, integrity, loyalty and commitment. The goal is to have their soldiers embody these traits. If one were to ask for demonstration of their success at instilling these values, then they could easily point out John Watson as an example.
John is a man of courage. Not everyone would go gallivanting after someone he himself calls “completely and utterly mad.” In fact, most would turn tail and run, but John? He follows a serial killer in a taxi, braves an assassin who kills people by smothering them with their bare hands, a mad man who plants bombs on people for fun, and a gigantic hound that roams a darkened Moor, among others. He does all of this without flinching or hesitation. Most people run from danger. John puts himself in the line of fire again and again because at the end of the day it will help Sherlock solve cases and help the people they’re solving the cases for.
John is a man of discipline. He has (nearly) infinite patience with Sherlock, accepting him with all his quirks and putting up with nearly all of them, from leaving his experiments on the kitchen table to interrupting John’s dates. That’s not to say that John isn’t above arguing with his flatmate if things get very tense, or sometimes yelling at him out of frustration. Most of the time, however, he keeps his calm, even when Sherlock goes so far to experiment on John himself.
John is a man of respect. He does his best to be polite and courteous to those around him, especially when Sherlock isn’t. He is often a person one would want to have a conversation with; he is friendly and genial and often kind. He respects both the people around him and himself. That is, unless there’s an unjustifiable (and often even when there is a justifiable) slight against Sherlock. It’s often then that his respect for them disappears, and it never returns.
John is a man of integrity. He is Sherlock’s moral compass; the man the genius goes to when he is uncertain of the ethical line. “A bit not good?” Sherlock asks. “A bit not good, yeah,” John replies. He turns Mycroft Holmes down on an offer to spy on Sherlock, even denying that it is loyalty that spurs him: “I’m just not interested.” It is beneath his moral standards to take bribes to spy on someone, even one he’s just met (a trait easily mistaken for loyalty.) His integrity is also exemplified in the writing on his blog: straight forward and honest. He is direct about experiences living and working with Sherlock Holmes. It should be noted, however, that John has his own idea of integrity that might be a bit different from those around him. He’s not above breaking into a top-secret government facility if it is in the pursuit of a case. To him, it is a necessary action in order to find justice for the people whose cases they take.
John is a man of loyalty. He doesn’t trust easily, but when someone earns his loyalty, it is absolute. John and Sherlock’s experience during the season two finale is a stunning example of this in its entirety. As the stories of their exploits grows more popular, John becomes concerned that the media will turn on Sherlock. The idea of anyone saying anything against Sherlock rankles him. When he admits this to Sherlock, his friend accuses him of believing in the web of lies Moriarty has already begun to spin. John responds simply: “No, I know you for real.” He is completely certain of his friend’s skills and abilities even as the police come to arrest him. In fact, he goes so far as to punch the Chief Superintendent in the face when he calls Sherlock “a bit of a weirdo.” He remains loyal even as Moriarty stacks fake evidence against Sherlock, even as the reporter Kitty Pride shows him documents claiming Moriarty is in fact the actor Richard Brooks, hired by Sherlock Holmes to trick them all. Later, once they leave, he asks “can he do that?” Not a question about Sherlock’s own integrity, but that of Moriarty, of the extent of his reach. He's even loyal in the face of Sherlock Holmes himself telling John that he was a fraud. When Sherlock persists: “No one could ever be that clever,” John’s response is immediate: “You could.” His loyalty is so absolute that even when the evidence is so strong to the contrary, that even when everyone else believes him to be a fraud, John stays firm in his belief in Sherlock Holmes. The last entry on his blog states simply: “He was my best friend and I'll always believe in him.”
John is a man of commitment. He’s dedicated himself to helping people through solving cases with Sherlock wholeheartedly, documenting their exploits as faithfully and honestly as he can. He does many things that others would deem a bit unsafe in the pursuit of justice for their clients, whether throwing himself into dangerous situations or dressing up in a ridiculous costume and fighting someone in the subway. He’s committed himself to helping Sherlock in his cases and out of them, sacrificing his relationships with other people (including his various girlfriends) in order to be at Sherlock’s side, even if it means missing his Christmas plans. As one disgruntled girlfriend states: “It’s heartwarming. You’ll do anything for him.” Well, not anything. There is a line that John draws sometimes for Sherlock’s own good (the refusal to give him a cigarette while going through withdraw, for example,) though even these instances are rare.
Outside of being a model soldier, John is a bit of a womanizer. Bill Murray, an army nurse who saved his life, openly calls him Casanova on John’s blog. Sherlock gets John to interview a client’s therapist by showing him a picture of her, and when a beautiful woman asks him what his plans are for New Years, John responds that he’s not doing anything that he “couldn’t heartlessly abandon.”
John’s PTSD should also be touched on. His therapist, Ella, believes that it is PTSD which causes reoccurring nightmares, a tremor in his left hand, and a psychosomatic limp. Mycroft Holmes instructed John to fire her because he believes that John was misdiagnosed, pointing out his steady left hand when under stress. I’m now going to put out a bit of an “unpopular opinion” on this:
They’re both wrong.
Not entirely, however. According to Wiki (which makes geniuses of us all, myself included,) PTSD is a disorder where the subject experiences negative side effects (reoccurring nightmares, psychosomatic effects, hypervigilance,) caused by the stress of a traumatic experience. John Watson’s traumatic experience was being shot and discharged. Ella is correct in her diagnosis in that he does, in fact, have PTSD, but incorrect in her assumption of where that stress comes from. She, like most people, seems to assume it is the trauma of being shot. John’s stress stems, instead, from the discharge itself. John Watson thrives in a war-like environment. Had he not been shot, he would’ve stayed in the army well past the time his required tours were over. War suits him; it gives him a purpose, a place to stand. To John, life without the war is a terrifying and stress-inducing because he’s lost what defines him. To quote Wiki, one of the main symptoms of PTSD is “an expectation that one's future will be somehow constrained in ways not normal to other people.” This is the stress that John Watson is under; the emotional fear that his life is now compromised due to his discharge from the military.
Most people would assume that to recover from PTSD one would need rest and relaxation; an attempt to adjust to normal life once again. This is what lead’s Mycroft to his misdiagnosis: that John does not, in fact, have PTSD. He encounters John in an inherently stressful situation after kidnapping him. He points out that the tremor in John’s hand has gone away even though he is under stress right at that moment, which leads him believe that John is misdiagnosed. Where Mycroft makes a mistake is his failure to recognize that John is now under the right kind of stress: the stress of a dangerous and uncertain situation. In this, John Watson thrives as he once did in the sand of Afganistan. He’s found another sort of war to ensconce himself in, and it is this, rather than rest and relaxation, which makes the PTSD symptoms disappear. There is the possibility that some of these symptoms might return now that Sherlock is no longer in his life, therefore no longer providing what allowed him to get over the symptoms in the first place, however it might be a bit unlikely, seeing as he seemed to recover from those symptoms completely. If they do come back, it will probably be fleeting.
When John Watson arrives in the City, he will be taken from past the end of the season two: The Reichenbach Fall. As such, John will be mourning the loss of a man he calls his best friend, Sherlock Holmes, a man who took away his loneliness and gave him a purpose. “I was so alone, and I owe you so much.” John handles his grief quietly and internally. He does not even allow himself the relief of tears until he is alone with Sherlock’s gravestone, and even then it is a short thing, barely a hitch in breath and fingers pressed to his eyes.
[point in timeline you're picking your character from]: Post-Season 2
[journal post]:
The Personal Blog of Dr. John H. Watson
February 16th: The New Dimension
I think I had a dream like this once. That I was whisked away to an alternate dimension where I met The Eigth Doctor, Bruce Wayne, and Lord Voldemort all in one evening in a pub in Surrey. I woke up from that one fairly easily, and spent the day wondering what I’d eaten last night that made me dream up something so strange. I never thought that anything like this could ever come true.
Granted, it hasn’t come true to quite that exact extent. Trade The Eigth Doctor for the Nineth, Tenth, AND Eleventh Doctors, swap Bruce Wayne out with Tony Stark and Lord Voldemort with Ron Weasley and you have my evening in a nutshell. Save for the pub, of course, though a pint sounds rather good right about now. And this place is definitely not Surrey.
What this place is, according to these guides that I’ve been helpfully supplied with by the Welcome Center, The City. Not really a very inspired name, but definitely to the point in a very general sense. What it doesn’t cover is a forest filled with monsters, a fountain that might possibly show you visions of your home world, a creepy carousel, and a set of gates that apparently teleport you from The City to the beach surrounding the outside of the forest. We don’t even have that kind of technology where I’m from! This is quite literally the strangest place I have ever been. And that’s before bringing up these so-called curses.
I have yet to experience them myself but I can’t help but find the idea of them disturbing. Especially that you could be affected by a curse and never even know it. Some of them seem less harmful like the one that was mentioned where you have a flavor for the day. Others seem far more dangerous like thinking you’re someone else entirely, not remembering certain people, and getting caught in a death trap. I can’t say that any of those are high on my list of things that I want to experience. I can only hope that I’ll be sent home before I’m subjected to them.
What I have experienced is the ticking. I didn’t hear it when I first arrived I think because I was in the large public square. The guides did warn me about how you hear it when you’re alone, which I have now experienced first-hand. Last night when I was alone in my flat, it was so loud it seemed that nothing would shut it out. I tried plugging my ears with cotton and putting a pillow over my head, but they didn’t have any effect. It kept me up all night. This morning it went away when I went down to a nearby café for some breakfast, so I ended up spending the day there. They’ll be closing in less than an hour, and I’m not entirely sure where to go from here. I could go back to my flat, but then the ticking will start up again and I’m not looking forward to a sleepless night. Does anyone have any suggestions? Any tricks that they’ve tried that work to shut it out? I’d really appreciate any help.
[third person / log sample]:
He’s sitting in Ella’s chair when it happens. He’s returned to his therapist’s office for the second time this month, this time after visiting Sherlock’s grave. Ella’s going on in her quiet, soft, soothing voice about working through the grief and saying all the things he meant to say, though he’s already said them to Sherlock’s headstone. He closes his eyes at her instruction and pictures the gravestone, hears his own words inside his head-"-one more miracle, Sherlock, for me. Don’t be..." His throat closes up, then, and he swallows against it, careful not to let it go anywhere past his mind, because Ella will know and she’ll say things and try and be comforting and the last thing he wants is anyone’s comfort...
It’s then that he realizes her voice has stopped. She’s no longer speaking and he can no longer hear the birds outside or the wind blowing past the large windows in her office. Instead there’s the tinkle of music, light and coy, like a music box. It’s then that he opens his eyes. The first thing to greet him is a carousel, spinning brightly, lights blurring a bit as the carousel turns and the figures move up and down on its various gilded poles, and well...THAT wasn’t there before. He frowns in confusion. Did he fall asleep in her chair and he's dreaming? Rude of him, to fall asleep in her office like that. She won’t bring it up probably, but she’ll give him that look that she knows the nightmares have come back one night already this week, this time not of Afganistan but of standing on the pavement of the street in front of St. Barts and looking up and seeing—
No, stop, veto, abort; he doesn’t want to think of that. He needs to wake up now before this dream turns into one of those, so he’s pushing up his sleeve to pinch at the tender skin of his inner arm, where he knows it will hurt. It does, predictably, but he doesn’t wake up. He frowns, searching his mind for an explanation. Hypnosis, then? But no, Ella’s not allowed to do such a thing without his consent, and he never consented to hypnosis nor did any hypnotizing ever happen. At least, he can’t recall any happening.
A dream then; it has to be. A strong one, too, because he’s pinched himself already and he hasn’t woken up, and "dream" is a much more comfortable definition because one doesn’t just close their eyes in the middle of their therapist’s office and open them again in a completely different place. Maybe it’s one of those dreams where he’s supposed to get a certain place and when he does he’ll wake up in Ella’s office and she’ll be giving him a concerned look (always so concerned but that’s not fair she’s just trying to help—) He pushes to his feet to cut off his own thoughts, looking around, taking stock. Behind him: a fountain. Apparently he was sitting on the edge of it. It’s an average fountain, certainly interesting in design. Very "new age," probably with some sort of special meaning that goes right over his head. Not much of a help to him, really, so he moves on. He’s in the middle of some sort of public square. Granted it’s more circular in design, but that’s only a detail. He takes in the different shops around the outside of the circle before his attention settles on one, the blue letters easily decipherable from where he’s standing:
"Welcome Center"
It is, quite frankly, as good a place to start as any. He won't get any closer to solving this dream just standing around. John Watson starts walking.
[personal LJ/DW name]:
nikkernoodle[other characters currently played]: n/a
[e-mail]: nikki.nudelman[at]gmail[dot]com
[AIM / messenger]: xnikkernoodlex
[series]: Sherlock (BBC)
[character]: Dr. John H. Watson
[character history / background]:
John Watson was an army doctor, a member of the 5th Northumberland Fusiliers deployed in Afganistan before he was shot in the shoulder and discharged. He wound up back in London, and well...life goes on.
[Additional info]: I've picked Watson's birthday to be March 31st due to this article and several others like it. This, of course, is subject to change depending on what canon throws at us :|a
[character abilities]:
Being an army doctor, John has knowledge of everything one would learn both as a soldier and as a physician. This includes a familiarity with many types of guns as well as the ability to be, in Sherlock's own words, "a crack shot," even with a handgun. He goes on further to add that John has "nerves of steel," inherently calm in a dangerous situation. In addition to these, he also has the extensive knowledge of a doctor: anatomy, sickness, and causes of death, as he's able to determine during his and Sherlock's first case together that one of the victim choked on her own vomit.
[character personality]:
Phase 1 of basic training in the British Army instills six core values into their recruits: courage, discipline, respect, integrity, loyalty and commitment. The goal is to have their soldiers embody these traits. If one were to ask for demonstration of their success at instilling these values, then they could easily point out John Watson as an example.
John is a man of courage. Not everyone would go gallivanting after someone he himself calls “completely and utterly mad.” In fact, most would turn tail and run, but John? He follows a serial killer in a taxi, braves an assassin who kills people by smothering them with their bare hands, a mad man who plants bombs on people for fun, and a gigantic hound that roams a darkened Moor, among others. He does all of this without flinching or hesitation. Most people run from danger. John puts himself in the line of fire again and again because at the end of the day it will help Sherlock solve cases and help the people they’re solving the cases for.
John is a man of discipline. He has (nearly) infinite patience with Sherlock, accepting him with all his quirks and putting up with nearly all of them, from leaving his experiments on the kitchen table to interrupting John’s dates. That’s not to say that John isn’t above arguing with his flatmate if things get very tense, or sometimes yelling at him out of frustration. Most of the time, however, he keeps his calm, even when Sherlock goes so far to experiment on John himself.
John is a man of respect. He does his best to be polite and courteous to those around him, especially when Sherlock isn’t. He is often a person one would want to have a conversation with; he is friendly and genial and often kind. He respects both the people around him and himself. That is, unless there’s an unjustifiable (and often even when there is a justifiable) slight against Sherlock. It’s often then that his respect for them disappears, and it never returns.
John is a man of integrity. He is Sherlock’s moral compass; the man the genius goes to when he is uncertain of the ethical line. “A bit not good?” Sherlock asks. “A bit not good, yeah,” John replies. He turns Mycroft Holmes down on an offer to spy on Sherlock, even denying that it is loyalty that spurs him: “I’m just not interested.” It is beneath his moral standards to take bribes to spy on someone, even one he’s just met (a trait easily mistaken for loyalty.) His integrity is also exemplified in the writing on his blog: straight forward and honest. He is direct about experiences living and working with Sherlock Holmes. It should be noted, however, that John has his own idea of integrity that might be a bit different from those around him. He’s not above breaking into a top-secret government facility if it is in the pursuit of a case. To him, it is a necessary action in order to find justice for the people whose cases they take.
John is a man of loyalty. He doesn’t trust easily, but when someone earns his loyalty, it is absolute. John and Sherlock’s experience during the season two finale is a stunning example of this in its entirety. As the stories of their exploits grows more popular, John becomes concerned that the media will turn on Sherlock. The idea of anyone saying anything against Sherlock rankles him. When he admits this to Sherlock, his friend accuses him of believing in the web of lies Moriarty has already begun to spin. John responds simply: “No, I know you for real.” He is completely certain of his friend’s skills and abilities even as the police come to arrest him. In fact, he goes so far as to punch the Chief Superintendent in the face when he calls Sherlock “a bit of a weirdo.” He remains loyal even as Moriarty stacks fake evidence against Sherlock, even as the reporter Kitty Pride shows him documents claiming Moriarty is in fact the actor Richard Brooks, hired by Sherlock Holmes to trick them all. Later, once they leave, he asks “can he do that?” Not a question about Sherlock’s own integrity, but that of Moriarty, of the extent of his reach. He's even loyal in the face of Sherlock Holmes himself telling John that he was a fraud. When Sherlock persists: “No one could ever be that clever,” John’s response is immediate: “You could.” His loyalty is so absolute that even when the evidence is so strong to the contrary, that even when everyone else believes him to be a fraud, John stays firm in his belief in Sherlock Holmes. The last entry on his blog states simply: “He was my best friend and I'll always believe in him.”
John is a man of commitment. He’s dedicated himself to helping people through solving cases with Sherlock wholeheartedly, documenting their exploits as faithfully and honestly as he can. He does many things that others would deem a bit unsafe in the pursuit of justice for their clients, whether throwing himself into dangerous situations or dressing up in a ridiculous costume and fighting someone in the subway. He’s committed himself to helping Sherlock in his cases and out of them, sacrificing his relationships with other people (including his various girlfriends) in order to be at Sherlock’s side, even if it means missing his Christmas plans. As one disgruntled girlfriend states: “It’s heartwarming. You’ll do anything for him.” Well, not anything. There is a line that John draws sometimes for Sherlock’s own good (the refusal to give him a cigarette while going through withdraw, for example,) though even these instances are rare.
Outside of being a model soldier, John is a bit of a womanizer. Bill Murray, an army nurse who saved his life, openly calls him Casanova on John’s blog. Sherlock gets John to interview a client’s therapist by showing him a picture of her, and when a beautiful woman asks him what his plans are for New Years, John responds that he’s not doing anything that he “couldn’t heartlessly abandon.”
John’s PTSD should also be touched on. His therapist, Ella, believes that it is PTSD which causes reoccurring nightmares, a tremor in his left hand, and a psychosomatic limp. Mycroft Holmes instructed John to fire her because he believes that John was misdiagnosed, pointing out his steady left hand when under stress. I’m now going to put out a bit of an “unpopular opinion” on this:
They’re both wrong.
Not entirely, however. According to Wiki (which makes geniuses of us all, myself included,) PTSD is a disorder where the subject experiences negative side effects (reoccurring nightmares, psychosomatic effects, hypervigilance,) caused by the stress of a traumatic experience. John Watson’s traumatic experience was being shot and discharged. Ella is correct in her diagnosis in that he does, in fact, have PTSD, but incorrect in her assumption of where that stress comes from. She, like most people, seems to assume it is the trauma of being shot. John’s stress stems, instead, from the discharge itself. John Watson thrives in a war-like environment. Had he not been shot, he would’ve stayed in the army well past the time his required tours were over. War suits him; it gives him a purpose, a place to stand. To John, life without the war is a terrifying and stress-inducing because he’s lost what defines him. To quote Wiki, one of the main symptoms of PTSD is “an expectation that one's future will be somehow constrained in ways not normal to other people.” This is the stress that John Watson is under; the emotional fear that his life is now compromised due to his discharge from the military.
Most people would assume that to recover from PTSD one would need rest and relaxation; an attempt to adjust to normal life once again. This is what lead’s Mycroft to his misdiagnosis: that John does not, in fact, have PTSD. He encounters John in an inherently stressful situation after kidnapping him. He points out that the tremor in John’s hand has gone away even though he is under stress right at that moment, which leads him believe that John is misdiagnosed. Where Mycroft makes a mistake is his failure to recognize that John is now under the right kind of stress: the stress of a dangerous and uncertain situation. In this, John Watson thrives as he once did in the sand of Afganistan. He’s found another sort of war to ensconce himself in, and it is this, rather than rest and relaxation, which makes the PTSD symptoms disappear. There is the possibility that some of these symptoms might return now that Sherlock is no longer in his life, therefore no longer providing what allowed him to get over the symptoms in the first place, however it might be a bit unlikely, seeing as he seemed to recover from those symptoms completely. If they do come back, it will probably be fleeting.
When John Watson arrives in the City, he will be taken from past the end of the season two: The Reichenbach Fall. As such, John will be mourning the loss of a man he calls his best friend, Sherlock Holmes, a man who took away his loneliness and gave him a purpose. “I was so alone, and I owe you so much.” John handles his grief quietly and internally. He does not even allow himself the relief of tears until he is alone with Sherlock’s gravestone, and even then it is a short thing, barely a hitch in breath and fingers pressed to his eyes.
[point in timeline you're picking your character from]: Post-Season 2
[journal post]:
The Personal Blog of Dr. John H. Watson
February 16th: The New Dimension
I think I had a dream like this once. That I was whisked away to an alternate dimension where I met The Eigth Doctor, Bruce Wayne, and Lord Voldemort all in one evening in a pub in Surrey. I woke up from that one fairly easily, and spent the day wondering what I’d eaten last night that made me dream up something so strange. I never thought that anything like this could ever come true.
Granted, it hasn’t come true to quite that exact extent. Trade The Eigth Doctor for the Nineth, Tenth, AND Eleventh Doctors, swap Bruce Wayne out with Tony Stark and Lord Voldemort with Ron Weasley and you have my evening in a nutshell. Save for the pub, of course, though a pint sounds rather good right about now. And this place is definitely not Surrey.
What this place is, according to these guides that I’ve been helpfully supplied with by the Welcome Center, The City. Not really a very inspired name, but definitely to the point in a very general sense. What it doesn’t cover is a forest filled with monsters, a fountain that might possibly show you visions of your home world, a creepy carousel, and a set of gates that apparently teleport you from The City to the beach surrounding the outside of the forest. We don’t even have that kind of technology where I’m from! This is quite literally the strangest place I have ever been. And that’s before bringing up these so-called curses.
I have yet to experience them myself but I can’t help but find the idea of them disturbing. Especially that you could be affected by a curse and never even know it. Some of them seem less harmful like the one that was mentioned where you have a flavor for the day. Others seem far more dangerous like thinking you’re someone else entirely, not remembering certain people, and getting caught in a death trap. I can’t say that any of those are high on my list of things that I want to experience. I can only hope that I’ll be sent home before I’m subjected to them.
What I have experienced is the ticking. I didn’t hear it when I first arrived I think because I was in the large public square. The guides did warn me about how you hear it when you’re alone, which I have now experienced first-hand. Last night when I was alone in my flat, it was so loud it seemed that nothing would shut it out. I tried plugging my ears with cotton and putting a pillow over my head, but they didn’t have any effect. It kept me up all night. This morning it went away when I went down to a nearby café for some breakfast, so I ended up spending the day there. They’ll be closing in less than an hour, and I’m not entirely sure where to go from here. I could go back to my flat, but then the ticking will start up again and I’m not looking forward to a sleepless night. Does anyone have any suggestions? Any tricks that they’ve tried that work to shut it out? I’d really appreciate any help.
[third person / log sample]:
He’s sitting in Ella’s chair when it happens. He’s returned to his therapist’s office for the second time this month, this time after visiting Sherlock’s grave. Ella’s going on in her quiet, soft, soothing voice about working through the grief and saying all the things he meant to say, though he’s already said them to Sherlock’s headstone. He closes his eyes at her instruction and pictures the gravestone, hears his own words inside his head-"-one more miracle, Sherlock, for me. Don’t be..." His throat closes up, then, and he swallows against it, careful not to let it go anywhere past his mind, because Ella will know and she’ll say things and try and be comforting and the last thing he wants is anyone’s comfort...
It’s then that he realizes her voice has stopped. She’s no longer speaking and he can no longer hear the birds outside or the wind blowing past the large windows in her office. Instead there’s the tinkle of music, light and coy, like a music box. It’s then that he opens his eyes. The first thing to greet him is a carousel, spinning brightly, lights blurring a bit as the carousel turns and the figures move up and down on its various gilded poles, and well...THAT wasn’t there before. He frowns in confusion. Did he fall asleep in her chair and he's dreaming? Rude of him, to fall asleep in her office like that. She won’t bring it up probably, but she’ll give him that look that she knows the nightmares have come back one night already this week, this time not of Afganistan but of standing on the pavement of the street in front of St. Barts and looking up and seeing—
No, stop, veto, abort; he doesn’t want to think of that. He needs to wake up now before this dream turns into one of those, so he’s pushing up his sleeve to pinch at the tender skin of his inner arm, where he knows it will hurt. It does, predictably, but he doesn’t wake up. He frowns, searching his mind for an explanation. Hypnosis, then? But no, Ella’s not allowed to do such a thing without his consent, and he never consented to hypnosis nor did any hypnotizing ever happen. At least, he can’t recall any happening.
A dream then; it has to be. A strong one, too, because he’s pinched himself already and he hasn’t woken up, and "dream" is a much more comfortable definition because one doesn’t just close their eyes in the middle of their therapist’s office and open them again in a completely different place. Maybe it’s one of those dreams where he’s supposed to get a certain place and when he does he’ll wake up in Ella’s office and she’ll be giving him a concerned look (always so concerned but that’s not fair she’s just trying to help—) He pushes to his feet to cut off his own thoughts, looking around, taking stock. Behind him: a fountain. Apparently he was sitting on the edge of it. It’s an average fountain, certainly interesting in design. Very "new age," probably with some sort of special meaning that goes right over his head. Not much of a help to him, really, so he moves on. He’s in the middle of some sort of public square. Granted it’s more circular in design, but that’s only a detail. He takes in the different shops around the outside of the circle before his attention settles on one, the blue letters easily decipherable from where he’s standing:
"Welcome Center"
It is, quite frankly, as good a place to start as any. He won't get any closer to solving this dream just standing around. John Watson starts walking.