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1.
She was his drug, taking over each aspect of his life and haunting each of his thoughts and making the rest of the world appear bland before his ever-curious eyes. She was his drug, that rush of adrenaline, that much-needed release after years of loneliness and thinly veiled bitterness. She was his drug but not in the poetic sense - a drug devoid of all romantic imagery of attachment and promises of forever and overwhelming… love.
The only way she’d entered his heart was by sliding painfully yet inconspicuously through his veins, making him feel in ways he never could have imagined but also numbing the edges of his buzzing, overly wary, not cautious enough mind. Like some high-grade anaesthetic. Like heroin.
She was the sensation creeping over his skin at night, accompanying his sleepless sweats and threatening to choke him with the feeling of too much. She was in the back of his eye whenever he solved a new puzzle, because no puzzle could ever be as viciously beautiful and beautifully vicious as her. She was the rush of nervous energy he chased away with drumming fingertips and twitching wrists. She was in his every grey hair, his every tattoo, his every scar.
She’d created her own little space in his brain attic. But that little space, never to go away, often strained against its boundaries seeking to invade all that was around it. Through her attic within his attic, she whispered soft betrayals and made him want to claw the flesh out of his face so that she'd finally implode.
She was the trigger to his gun full of drugs, the start of his downfall. His addiction. She had changed his brain’s structure for heaven’s sake. His physiology was never to be the same after her - Irene’s - demise. He had given her love (what an empty word that sounded now). She had given him an addict’s brain in return.
And so a piece of her was etched into his mind forever, a piece that changed his very chemistry. A piece that still haunted him and always would. A piece that came back to laugh at him in his addled state under that tunnel, to mock him in the fevered dreams and dry heaving accompanying his comedown.
Whatever he does, he can still see her sly smirk and milky skin and naked chest and bleeding heart - a heart that also happens to be ice-cold. He is stronger than her and he is more than her, but that took too long to understand. Hell, sometimes he still can’t understand - forgetting is so easy when she’d been the first to make him feel, to make him love in the way all other humans succumb to emotion, in the way he always swore he’d be above.
Of course, looking back now he can see a myriad of signs that he'd missed. Signs that he shouldn’t have missed but had needed to miss, too wrapped up in his blinding need and dopamine and oxytocin and vasopressin and every other chemical he could blame for this - this disease.
He now knows she was never the affectionate, honey-dipped love promised by the tales his nanny used to read him, most probably to bore him into sleep. She was never the late-night phone calls and i miss yous and domesticity that he’d never even longed for in the first place.
She was the bitter taste of tears, she was him lying in the middle of a dark alley near a fetid trash can, unconscious. Stumbling on words and eyes glossed over and sweating all the illicit drugs out of his body. Warm blood after getting into trouble. Hospital fluids and syringes and evanescing vows of something which was never to come.
2.
But Watson.
Watson is the calm serenity not only settling before the storm, but stopping the storm in its tracks. Watson is honey and tea, an abyss of everything good in his life that he could get lost in - and yet, a grounding presence better than any head bust or substance could be.
Her raven hair, her balmy scent, her million tiny freckles resembling constellations on the olive cosmos of her skin - all are imprinted onto the very essence of his being. But, she does not have a space in his brain attic.
That is because she owns it. She owns all of him, he is hers, and despite knowing everything about his ghosts - she stays.
She understands him even when he himself can’t. She accepts unconditionally and loves groundlessly and his life post-rehab does not include Watson, does not even revolve around Watson, because it is Watson. Has been ever since he first smelled the beeswax on her hands.
With her it’s agápē and érōs and philía and storgē, it’s all the words the Greeks had and hadn’t used to refer to that one damn emotion. (Its two-sided face had previously led him to the deepest hole of his life, but that is no matter, because with Watson he could not be more certain that he is looking the right way). It’s eye rolls and case files and breakfast trays and feeding Clyde, it’s her presence making it all… okay.
She once said she was lucky to have fallen into his orbit, but the truth is he’s been orbiting around her since the start; at first that wasn’t acceptable to him because he was still so lost and hurt, but now it’s just the state of, well, everything. He’s let go and surrounded to it - whatever it is. This it that means more than romantic passion, that deserves more than the four-letter word he’d once associated with The Woman.
She is, in all senses of the word, his soulmate. They are bound. There is no Sherlock without Joan and - he suspects - no Joan without Sherlock, orbiting around each other, two pieces of the same comet that crashed back together and changed everything. Because she is not his everything - she is everything. The world.
And though all this is very different from The Woman, Joan understands The Woman. And although the old wound will never go away Joan is much more than the bandaid covering it up; she is her skilled surgeon hands stitching his soul back together, she is a practitioner’s patience, and she can treat it - as she has been for the past years - until all is left is a scar among many. A scar making him more... whole.
But even when he is whole a piece of him would always be missing without Watson. He knows she truly saved his life; in fact, everyone knows. Marcus knows, Gregson knows, everyone who happens to so much as look at them knows. Hell, even Mycroft and his father know. The universe knows he does not want to - he cannot - disappoint her. And he has. He has failed countless times, thought she would leave him to fend off his demons on his own as he so deserves and most importantly, thought she would free herself from him as she so deserves.
Yet, Watson always comes back to stitch him up and wrap her whole around him and bring him back to life. In turn he does the same for her, he supposes, although he truly does not see it. Nothing else matters and he doubts nothing will ever matter as much.
For her he will slay all his monsters, he will enter hell ready to face the Devil himself, and when he inevitably fails she will be there to catch him. Just like he will always aim to catch her. He wants to promise again, as he once had, that he will never allow harm to come to her - but that is unfair. He himself has been the root of harm on several occasions and always undeservedly been graced with her forgiveness. He is terrified he cannot fulfil his promise, so what he can swear is that he will die trying. Because he doesn’t deserve her - and yet, she chose him.
He is undeniably hers, she is undeniably his, they are each other’s; no matter what, that is enough.