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marysutherlandBBC Sherlock
Rating 15 (explicit het)
Summary: Sarah never falls for the right sort of man.
Betaed by the wonderful 2ndskin
NOTE: This was written for Prompt 78 of the Sherlockmas Summer Vacay festival: "John/Sarah; When Sherlock's away, John tracks her down hoping for another chance."
It's not essential to have read my previous Sherlockmas story Summertime Blues before this, but there is a link between them.
Friday 24th June 2011
Tomorrow is Helen Fitzpatrick's wedding day and Sarah knows it's going to be a disaster. Thank goodness she wasn't invited. Though a small part of her still feels that she should have gone along and piped up when the vicar asked if anyone knew any reason why Helen and Roger should not marry.
Because Roger's an arsehole and Helen's only marrying him in the forlorn hope that'll make him stop cheating on her. Because everyone at Elmswood Surgery knows that the marriage won't work and that Helen will be weeping over the patient files again within a year. And that's both horrible and inconvenient for the rest of the receptionists.
It wouldn't make any difference, of course, even if she did have the nerve to say it. There are women who are just irresistibly attracted to hopeless men. Like Sarah herself.
***
There's always a point in any discussion of marriage in which Sarah's friends and colleagues tell her she's too cynical. Just because her own marriage didn't work out, just because she sees too many harassed mothers needing antidepressants because their relationship has broken up, and others with the dubious, badly-explained injuries that make you wish it would break up, that isn't the whole story. There are good men out there, her friends remind her. They know better by now than to tell her that her true love is out there waiting for her, but she can still sometimes catch them thinking it, wanting to pair her off safely, because surely she must still want someone...
And, yes, she does. Just not the right sort of man.
***
It's supposed to be cool and drizzly in the morning, but fine tomorrow afternoon. Helen will get married in the dry; Sarah will rush through the week's cleaning, go for a run in Kelsey Park and then have the afternoon free for reading Wolf Hall. Her book club is meeting next week, and for once she is going to go along having read the whole novel, not just bluffing her way through the last four chapters, like some schoolgirl who hasn't done her homework properly.
But it's the start of summer and once again her thoughts are drifting to impossible men. In the winter, it's fine being on her own; she can snuggle up in her own little flat and feel secure and warm and happy. But there's something about summer – about June – that drags her back to her youth, before the reality of life bore down on her. She always gets an end of term feeling about now. The urge to rebel, to do something ridiculous.
***
Summer 1988
Glen Thomas is a rebel; that's his main attraction to the fifteen year-old Sarah. She waits eagerly for the summer holidays and then spends what seems like the whole of them snogging him and letting him feel her breasts. Nothing else matters, even when the start of the school year means they're tragically reduced to a few hours of groping a day. Homework, chores, helping out with the Brownies: they all go by the wayside, when she can hang out with Glen and his mates and pretend to be wild.
Glen's the reason Sarah nearly messes up her GCSEs. But all too soon he's leaving school, while she is staying on for A levels; her teachers give her stern warnings about how hard she'll have to work if she's serious about becoming a doctor. And when Glen gets a moped, even she can tell that it's going to end badly. Sure enough, three weeks after they split up he's in St Richard's hospital, where she's volunteering, with a broken leg.
***
You don't get to be a doctor by wasting your time pining after impossible boys. Or by lying around in the sun, enjoying yourself. Instead Sarah has summer after summer of studying and training placements. When she finally becomes a GP, June and July are for treating sunburn and hay fever and food poisoning and whatever more exotic ailments people manage to bring back from package holidays. And then rejigging the practice rotas so the doctors with families can fly off somewhere themselves, while she and the other childless partners cover for them.
Every year Sarah takes a long holiday out of peak season to make up for sacrificing her summer for other people's children. It's cheaper and less crowded. And also far more enjoyable, to have that kind of freedom. She doesn't want a family; at least not enough to look for someone to have one with. (Single parenthood requires more devotion than Sarah's prepared to give; she knows her own limits). She's met men who would make wonderful fathers; she's dated them sometimes. But always, in the end, she's realised that they're not for her.
Ever since Glen, all the men she has fallen for – fallen for hard – have been wild ones, and she's learned from experience that marrying that sort of man is a terrible move. She did marry Mark Brasher and look what happened. Three years of promises and arguments and lies, of Sarah gradually turning into her mother and Mark turning into a feckless layabout who would break any mother's heart. Little left of the exuberant jazz musician who'd charmed Sarah; just a man channelling his improvising skills into freeform destructiveness. As if being married to a GP was such an affront to his image that he had to smash up everything.
Sarah had left when Mark had missed one audition too many with a hangover; stepped over the invisible line between impossible and unbearable. She's learned her lesson. She might crave wild men, but not a lifetime of clearing up after them.
She's stuck to more or less casual relationships since Mark, but it's getting harder to find someone she likes. The men she meets socially now come with too much baggage: marriages, stepchildren, psychotherapists. But she's also growing wary of one-night stands; too many Monday mornings contemplating the patients whose search for adventure has gone badly wrong. And even though there are eight million people in London, she seems doomed always to meet someone she knows on the rare occasions she does decide to go out on the pull. There's nothing worse than chatting up someone and then realising that they're your new trainee's cousin.
***
The late afternoon sunshine is trying to make the grimy street outside the surgery look vaguely attractive and almost managing it. What she needs, Sarah thinks, is a convenient seaside conference. Nothing like a drug company freebie, where your eyes meet someone else's during a tedious presentation on managing asthma...And the thing about doctors is that they mainly have more of a clue about female anatomy than your average male. But there's nothing coming up soon that she can possibly justify spending the training budget on.
She sighs and tries to concentrate on the paperwork that needs to be completed tonight. No, that needed to be completed last week by Dr Thompson before he buggered off on holiday to Germany. She's going to have a talk with James when he gets back. Sarah may have a weakness for unreliable men in the bedroom, but not in the surgery. Well, not often.
Her phone rings; she's not supposed to be on duty, but maybe the queue for the evening surgery is building up to impossible proportions.
"Sarah," Janice says, "I've got a Dr Watson on the line for you. John Watson. I think he worked here as a locum for a while. He wants to talk to you."
"Put him through," Sarah says, trying to think how to tell John that there really, really isn't any work for him. It's not that he's a bad doctor – in some ways he's very good – but after Sherlock causing the anthrax scare, there is no way that she can ever again allow John within a mile of the surgery.
"Hi, John," she says cheerfully. "How are you doing?"
"Fine, thanks. I've been meaning to phone you, but I wasn't quite sure what to say."
Shit. He really is angling for a job, isn't he?
"Fire ahead," she says, because she wants to get this over with.
"Look, I know it's a terrible cheek, especially when I haven't really kept in touch, and I don't know how you're placed, but I was wondering..." He comes to a halt.
I'm sorry, but I don't feel that I could agree to you working here again... No, better to say that the partners wouldn't like it, spread the blame onto that anonymous group.
"I'm sorry," John goes on. "This is a bit awkward, isn't it? Only I thought, maybe if you were willing to give me another chance..." His voice dies away again.
I can't just sit here and listen to this, Sarah thinks. She's fond of John, even now. She doesn't like hearing him make a fool of himself.
"I'm so sorry, but we're fully staffed at the moment," she says, and there's an odd kind of grunt at the other end of the phone and then John's voice rings out indignantly. "I don't need a job, Sarah! I was trying to ask you out."
She can't help it. She starts giggling and a moment later she can hear John start to giggle too. He is just so hopeless sometimes. The sweetest, most impossible man she's ever fallen for.
"I'm busy tonight," she manages to get out after a while, and she can hear him abruptly stop giggling, imagine the wearily sober look come back onto his face.
"I should have expected that," he replies quietly and then adds. "But if you're free some other time?"
His persistence has always been ridiculous and yet somehow admirable; her mind flashes back to him lying exhausted in a disused railway tunnel, insisting that their second date would be better.
But it's not just that; she wants to see him, see how he's getting on. She still feels uncomfortable about how she dumped him last year. It'd be good to be friends again, at least.
"I...I was going running tomorrow. Would you like to come along?" she blurts out, and she knows even as she says it that it's a ludicrous suggestion. You don't invite an ex to come for a run with you. It's at once too intimate and too obviously a brush-off.
Except she's talking to John Hamish Watson, whose already hazy grasp of social decencies has been further eroded by his time with Sherlock. So he replies enthusiastically, and the next thing she knows, they're agreeing to meet by the Kelsey Park tennis courts tomorrow at half-past nine. As she puts the phone down, she realises that once again she's ended up doing something completely stupid on account of John.
There's something about John that always gets her slightly off-balance, lures her into his skewed world, she thinks, as she sits in the surgery, grinning ridiculously, despite the remaining paperwork. She should never have got involved with him in the first place, of course. It was terribly unprofessional of her.
***
March 2010
Job interviews aren't supposed to end up with the interviewer flirting with the interviewee. Dr Watson's CV makes him by far the best of the prospective locums on paper, but Sarah suspects there's some other problem with him, if he's applying for such lowly jobs. An army doctor will have a terrible bedside manner, doubtless used to bellowing orders at soldiers; he's probably also going to be about six foot three, with bulging muscles and that'll upset Dr Jones, who enjoys being the unofficial surgery pin-up.
So it's disarming to find that John's small and friendly and rather cute, and it's easy – as well as totally justified – to offer him the job. What is absolutely unjustified, she knows, is not sacking him when he falls asleep in the surgery on his first day there. She can persuade herself – she could if necessary persuade the other partners – that he's still a better bet than the alternatives the locum agency is offering, at least one of whom she suspects of having acquired his qualifications wholesale online. But agreeing to go out on a date with John afterwards is simply rewarding poor behaviour.
Very unprofessional, she knows. But she's tired of every recent decision she's made – at work, in her personal life – being sensible. She wants to go out with John and she doesn't want to sack him, so damn the consequences.
***
She doesn't expect the consequences to be her nearly getting killed. But she's in too far by now, and she doesn't care. Stupidly in love with another impossible man who flips between being a sensible doctor and a thrill-seeking ex-soldier. A man who exists in some kind of improbable world of nine million pound hairpins and the Secret Service popping round to his flat to ask for help. John's job – his other job – at once fascinates and terrifies Sarah. He follows after Sherlock and she follows after John and it can't last. She knows that already, but she can't bear to break the spell just yet.
***
Saturday 25th June 2011
When Sarah reaches the tennis courts on Saturday morning, there's no sign of John and she's torn between disappointment and relief. And then a familiar figure in a grey T-shirt, faded shorts and army boots emerges from the toilets and greets her. John doesn't look like a runner, she thinks, and belatedly remembers that the reason he's an ex-army doctor is because he got shot.
"Is your leg going to be up to this?" she demands, and then realises she could have phrased that a lot more tactfully.
But John just smiles and says, "The limp was psychosomatic, like I said at the time." And then the grin gets a little strained, as he adds, "And my nightmares have stopped as well."
"Good," Sarah replies brightly, but as she puts his kit bag in her car and then hastily starts doing some warm-up stretches, she remembers why, even though John's such a straightforward man generally, it's sometimes unexpectedly complicated being with him.
***
March 2010
John tells Sarah about the nightmares when she suggests they sleep together for the first time – which is less than a week since they met. And several days after they first have sex, because frankly they can't keep their hands off one another during the second date. It's embarrassing how like a giddy teenager John can make her feel.
He's such an odd mix of the ridiculous and the practical, she thinks. Take tonight. John turns up mid-evening, asking slightly pathetically if he can stay the night, because Sherlock's being impossible. And then wants to know if it's OK to cook himself something, because he's starving and at least her fridge will be free of severed heads. The next thing she knows, he's cooking an enormous fry-up for them both, while they swap tall tales about medical school pranks with body parts. (She wins with the story of the hand glued to a handrail in a Circle Line carriage).
Obviously, they then end up having energetic sex purely to burn off all the excess calories from the fry-up. It's only after they've cleaned themselves up that John turns to her and says, slightly shamefacedly, "It might be better if I slept on the sofa."
She looks at him in surprise.
"I have nightmares sometimes," he says, "I don't want to disturb you." She's been a GP long enough to recognise the sudden wary note in his voice. The one that says: I would rather have my fingernails pulled out than tell you the details of my mental health problems.
"That's fine," she replies hastily. "I've got a lilo you can sleep on."
"The sofa's fine," John mutters and she can see him closing in on himself, the pain that lurks behind his normal cheery facade.
So she smiles reassuringly and says, "Well, at least you won't discover if I snore or not."
In the morning, she makes a stupid joke about letting him sleep on the end of her bed next time, trying to make it sound as if it's no big deal. And a rumpled John mutters some question about the time after that, as if he worries that there's something broken about him that Sarah won't be able to accept. She smiles and tells him casually to make his own breakfast and it all seems fine. Till he has to rush off to rescue Sherlock because someone's blown up a bit of Baker Street.
She understands why he feels the need to check on his friend. But it does remind her again what a dangerous life that pair lead.
***
June 2011
As Sarah stretches her hamstrings, she tries to work out the minimum distance she can suggest jogging without being too blatant, just in case John's being over-optimistic about his leg. It's about a mile round the circuit; three laps instead of her normal four? Or even two laps?
"How long do you have?" she asks – God, that sounds like I think he's dying – "I mean, do you have appointments you need to keep, armed gangs you have to go and thwart?"
John grins. "Nothing. I'm all yours today." And then he starts to blush, and hastily bends down to check his bootlaces.
"When you're ready, we can go," Sarah says, and jogs slowly off before either of them says anything even more stupid.
***
Once they get going, John runs better than she expected. No style, but he's determinedly pacing himself, not trying to outrun her but very steadily matching her speed. One lap, two laps and he's still got the air of a man who can keep this up all morning.
"Shall we try for five?" she asks, and he nods.
By the fifth time round, they're both definitely feeling it and when Sarah goes past the Rose Garden for the last time, she would be walking if she was on her own. She keeps on running though, and John stumbles wearily after her, his normal grin nowhere to be seen. But when they finally make it back to the tennis courts and he collapses unashamedly against the fence, gasping for breath, the grin's soon back.
"God, I've got no stamina any more," John says, smiling at Sarah as she props herself up next to him. "Good job I'm with someone who can do CPR, isn't it? Do you get a lot of middle-aged men keeling over at this point?"
"You did very well," Sarah replies, trying to sound like she's not exhausted.
"I spend half my life running like crazy after Sherlock...but that's mostly short sprints. You normally either catch someone or lose them within a mile or two."
"Do you want to come and have a drink in the cafe?" she asks. "Give us an excuse to sit down for a bit."
"Sounds good to me."
***
"So how are things at the surgery?" John asks, once they've got their coffees, and Sarah ends up telling him. In detail. She's bottled things up for far too long, and he's a sympathetic listener and knows most of the people concerned.
"I'm sorry," she says, when she realises that her coffee's got cold, because she's been talking for nearly half an hour.
"It's fine," he says. "It's hard sometimes, if you haven't got anyone to talk to."
From John, that's a surprisingly tactful way of asking if there's a new boyfriend around, so she smiles and says, "No-one who wants to hear that much about the NHS; my sister always asks after about five minutes why I can't get a nice job in Harley Street."
John nods, and there's a hopefulness about his smile now that she's familiar with, that's probably echoed in her own face. The spark is still there between them, isn't it? No, more than just a spark, she realises. The warm glow she's starting to feel inside isn't just from the exercise. But she ought to check that John really is free today. It'd be just her luck to find that Sherlock's decided it's a good day to track down the hitherto unknown criminal mastermind controlling the mean streets of Beckenham.
"So have you got a case on at the moment?" she asks, and John licks his lips, looks down at his mug, and says quietly, "Sherlock flew off to Washington yesterday. Some problem at the British embassy."
"How long will he be in the States?" Sarah asks and John's voice is bleak as he replies:
"I don't know."
She's wrecked the mood now, hasn't she? Clearly something has gone badly wrong between John and Sherlock; she waits in silence for him to tell her what's happened. But when John opens his mouth again, all he says is:
"Sherlock...does go abroad for cases sometimes."
Without you, she thinks, and she wishes that men – that John – could just talk about what's bothering them. But she knows he won't, that whatever's making him miserable is something he can't yet put into words. And she can't bear it – it hurts even now – to see him look like that, his face falling back into the weary lines she's familiar with. But there's one thing she can do to cheer him up, she decides. Her hand moves under the table to rest on his thigh and the pain abruptly vanishes from his eyes. Because John Watson is not gay.
***
April 2010
"You really do pick them, don't you, Sarah?" Marie tells her on the phone, with the smugness that only a married younger sister can manage. "So the latest boyfriend's short and he has PTSD and now it turns out he's gay as well?"
"John's not gay," Sarah says and hears Marie's snort of derision.
"He spends all his time on his blog raving about his flatmate. Of course he's gay. Can't you just find someone sane for once?"
Sarah murmurs something non-committal at that point, because there are things she can't tell her sister without shocking her. Like: I know John's not gay, because I know exactly what expression he has on his face when he's desperate to have sex with someone. And it's me, not Sherlock, he looks at like that.
***
June 2011
Five minutes of surreptitious groping later and Sarah decides they'd better leave the cafe while John can still walk straight. She also doesn't want to get either of them banned from the park for upsetting children. It's starting to rain as they go outside, which immediately cuts out any half-baked ideas of outdoor sex. Instead, they race to Sarah's car as fast as their weary legs can take them.
"My flat is nearer," she says, and John sits down hastily in the passenger seat, dumping his kitbag in his lap in a way that simply emphasises the fact that his shorts are bulging rather obscenely. It's probably just as well that she's driving and that there isn't too far to go because she can feel the tension building within her as well. The urge to grab what she wants – who she wants – and hold on tight.
When they get home, she slams the front door behind them and then starts snogging John right against it. An enthusiastic, tongue-battling snog and then their already sweaty bodies are grinding against each other, John's erection pushing against Sarah's groin as she stretches up on her toes. She feels like the horniest of teenagers again, but she's also picked up a few tricks since she left school. And she's reasonably confident that as long as they stay near the door, no-one will be able to see them from outside. Well, at least unless they're staring in very intently. Won't they get a surprise if they do?
She drops to her knees and unbuttons John's shorts. His eyes widen in delighted surprise and then his hands come down, carefully pulling down his shorts and Y-fronts. Sarah was twenty before she realised that oral sex didn't just mean talking about it, but she's learned a lot since then. And as she takes John's sturdy cock in her mouth, there's something satisfying about the breathy sounds of pleasure that he's already making, as he braces himself against the door. She is all John wants, all he needs right now.
Sarah can feel John's legs tremble when he comes, gasping and calling out her name, and she wonders for a moment whether he's going to collapse on top of her. But he steadies himself and then bends down to kiss her very gently on the forehead. His hair is standing on end at the back where he's leant across the door, and he's flushed and has a dopy grin on his face. Then his arms go round her body and he's helping her back to her feet. He's not much taller than her, but he's quite a bit stronger. And there's something in his eyes now that reminds her that he's not sixteen any more either. That he's learnt a thing or two from twenty years of studying anatomy and travelling three continents. She smiles up at him, because there are advantages in being old enough to know what she wants.
"Bedroom?" John asks, his grey eyes gazing enthusiastically into hers. "Living room? Kitchen? Remember, I'm all yours today."
He doesn't blush as he says it this time. One of his hands is resting lightly on the waistband of her jogging pants now, waiting for her permission before heading down inside it. There are reasons she's always enjoyed having sex with him; he has the twin advantages of a lot of stamina and being willing to take instructions.
"Bedroom," she says, and he grins and follows after her.
***
She screams unashamedly when she comes, and to hell with what the neighbours think. Then she rests her head on John's shoulder and curls her arm round his chest and just lets time pass. The adult world can wait for a bit till she rejoins it.
"So what do you want to do now?" John murmurs eventually, and as she lies there with her eyes almost closed, the words bubble out of her subconscious:
"Run away somewhere."
"I've probably got enough for the bus fare, and they won't miss us at first," John replies, and when she opens her eyes, he's grinning down at her in a completely irresponsible way.
"Oh God, were you like that as a kid as well?" she asks.
He shakes his head. "No, it was Harry who was the runaway, always desperate to get out of Wiltshire. She hitchhiked to London once when she was fourteen. Terrified my parents."
"The most I ever managed was sneaking off to a late night disco in Kings Lynn," Sarah says.
"I didn't even manage that. I was a good little boy, didn't get into trouble." He leans back onto the pillow and adds quietly. "And then I signed up for the Army at eighteen and broke my mother's heart."
"If it was what you wanted to do–"
"What I had to do. But it probably helped that it got me far away from Calne." He stares at the ceiling for a moment and then asks, "So where would you like to run away to today? London's a bit over-rated."
"I want the seaside," she says, sitting up with sudden decision. Why not? Why does she have to stay at home when the sun's coming out and it's turning into a lovely day?
"Southend?"
"Brighton's easier to get to," she says. "An hour on the train I think. It's years since I've been there."
"Nor sure I ever have," John says, and he's up on his feet now, reaching for some tissues. "Shall we go and explore it then?"
***
"Sure it's Brighton you want?" John says, when they're queuing for tickets at Beckenham Junction station. "It's Sherlock's credit card, so we can go as far as we want."
"Anywhere?"
"Any beach in the world you want," he says, and his smile suddenly loses its intensity.
"Brighton's fine. I haven't brought my passport," she says quickly, and John nods and looks away and she knows he's remembering New Zealand.
Part 2
Rating 15 (explicit het)
Summary: Sarah never falls for the right sort of man.
Betaed by the wonderful 2ndskin
NOTE: This was written for Prompt 78 of the Sherlockmas Summer Vacay festival: "John/Sarah; When Sherlock's away, John tracks her down hoping for another chance."
It's not essential to have read my previous Sherlockmas story Summertime Blues before this, but there is a link between them.
Friday 24th June 2011
Tomorrow is Helen Fitzpatrick's wedding day and Sarah knows it's going to be a disaster. Thank goodness she wasn't invited. Though a small part of her still feels that she should have gone along and piped up when the vicar asked if anyone knew any reason why Helen and Roger should not marry.
Because Roger's an arsehole and Helen's only marrying him in the forlorn hope that'll make him stop cheating on her. Because everyone at Elmswood Surgery knows that the marriage won't work and that Helen will be weeping over the patient files again within a year. And that's both horrible and inconvenient for the rest of the receptionists.
It wouldn't make any difference, of course, even if she did have the nerve to say it. There are women who are just irresistibly attracted to hopeless men. Like Sarah herself.
***
There's always a point in any discussion of marriage in which Sarah's friends and colleagues tell her she's too cynical. Just because her own marriage didn't work out, just because she sees too many harassed mothers needing antidepressants because their relationship has broken up, and others with the dubious, badly-explained injuries that make you wish it would break up, that isn't the whole story. There are good men out there, her friends remind her. They know better by now than to tell her that her true love is out there waiting for her, but she can still sometimes catch them thinking it, wanting to pair her off safely, because surely she must still want someone...
And, yes, she does. Just not the right sort of man.
***
It's supposed to be cool and drizzly in the morning, but fine tomorrow afternoon. Helen will get married in the dry; Sarah will rush through the week's cleaning, go for a run in Kelsey Park and then have the afternoon free for reading Wolf Hall. Her book club is meeting next week, and for once she is going to go along having read the whole novel, not just bluffing her way through the last four chapters, like some schoolgirl who hasn't done her homework properly.
But it's the start of summer and once again her thoughts are drifting to impossible men. In the winter, it's fine being on her own; she can snuggle up in her own little flat and feel secure and warm and happy. But there's something about summer – about June – that drags her back to her youth, before the reality of life bore down on her. She always gets an end of term feeling about now. The urge to rebel, to do something ridiculous.
***
Summer 1988
Glen Thomas is a rebel; that's his main attraction to the fifteen year-old Sarah. She waits eagerly for the summer holidays and then spends what seems like the whole of them snogging him and letting him feel her breasts. Nothing else matters, even when the start of the school year means they're tragically reduced to a few hours of groping a day. Homework, chores, helping out with the Brownies: they all go by the wayside, when she can hang out with Glen and his mates and pretend to be wild.
Glen's the reason Sarah nearly messes up her GCSEs. But all too soon he's leaving school, while she is staying on for A levels; her teachers give her stern warnings about how hard she'll have to work if she's serious about becoming a doctor. And when Glen gets a moped, even she can tell that it's going to end badly. Sure enough, three weeks after they split up he's in St Richard's hospital, where she's volunteering, with a broken leg.
***
You don't get to be a doctor by wasting your time pining after impossible boys. Or by lying around in the sun, enjoying yourself. Instead Sarah has summer after summer of studying and training placements. When she finally becomes a GP, June and July are for treating sunburn and hay fever and food poisoning and whatever more exotic ailments people manage to bring back from package holidays. And then rejigging the practice rotas so the doctors with families can fly off somewhere themselves, while she and the other childless partners cover for them.
Every year Sarah takes a long holiday out of peak season to make up for sacrificing her summer for other people's children. It's cheaper and less crowded. And also far more enjoyable, to have that kind of freedom. She doesn't want a family; at least not enough to look for someone to have one with. (Single parenthood requires more devotion than Sarah's prepared to give; she knows her own limits). She's met men who would make wonderful fathers; she's dated them sometimes. But always, in the end, she's realised that they're not for her.
Ever since Glen, all the men she has fallen for – fallen for hard – have been wild ones, and she's learned from experience that marrying that sort of man is a terrible move. She did marry Mark Brasher and look what happened. Three years of promises and arguments and lies, of Sarah gradually turning into her mother and Mark turning into a feckless layabout who would break any mother's heart. Little left of the exuberant jazz musician who'd charmed Sarah; just a man channelling his improvising skills into freeform destructiveness. As if being married to a GP was such an affront to his image that he had to smash up everything.
Sarah had left when Mark had missed one audition too many with a hangover; stepped over the invisible line between impossible and unbearable. She's learned her lesson. She might crave wild men, but not a lifetime of clearing up after them.
She's stuck to more or less casual relationships since Mark, but it's getting harder to find someone she likes. The men she meets socially now come with too much baggage: marriages, stepchildren, psychotherapists. But she's also growing wary of one-night stands; too many Monday mornings contemplating the patients whose search for adventure has gone badly wrong. And even though there are eight million people in London, she seems doomed always to meet someone she knows on the rare occasions she does decide to go out on the pull. There's nothing worse than chatting up someone and then realising that they're your new trainee's cousin.
***
The late afternoon sunshine is trying to make the grimy street outside the surgery look vaguely attractive and almost managing it. What she needs, Sarah thinks, is a convenient seaside conference. Nothing like a drug company freebie, where your eyes meet someone else's during a tedious presentation on managing asthma...And the thing about doctors is that they mainly have more of a clue about female anatomy than your average male. But there's nothing coming up soon that she can possibly justify spending the training budget on.
She sighs and tries to concentrate on the paperwork that needs to be completed tonight. No, that needed to be completed last week by Dr Thompson before he buggered off on holiday to Germany. She's going to have a talk with James when he gets back. Sarah may have a weakness for unreliable men in the bedroom, but not in the surgery. Well, not often.
Her phone rings; she's not supposed to be on duty, but maybe the queue for the evening surgery is building up to impossible proportions.
"Sarah," Janice says, "I've got a Dr Watson on the line for you. John Watson. I think he worked here as a locum for a while. He wants to talk to you."
"Put him through," Sarah says, trying to think how to tell John that there really, really isn't any work for him. It's not that he's a bad doctor – in some ways he's very good – but after Sherlock causing the anthrax scare, there is no way that she can ever again allow John within a mile of the surgery.
"Hi, John," she says cheerfully. "How are you doing?"
"Fine, thanks. I've been meaning to phone you, but I wasn't quite sure what to say."
Shit. He really is angling for a job, isn't he?
"Fire ahead," she says, because she wants to get this over with.
"Look, I know it's a terrible cheek, especially when I haven't really kept in touch, and I don't know how you're placed, but I was wondering..." He comes to a halt.
I'm sorry, but I don't feel that I could agree to you working here again... No, better to say that the partners wouldn't like it, spread the blame onto that anonymous group.
"I'm sorry," John goes on. "This is a bit awkward, isn't it? Only I thought, maybe if you were willing to give me another chance..." His voice dies away again.
I can't just sit here and listen to this, Sarah thinks. She's fond of John, even now. She doesn't like hearing him make a fool of himself.
"I'm so sorry, but we're fully staffed at the moment," she says, and there's an odd kind of grunt at the other end of the phone and then John's voice rings out indignantly. "I don't need a job, Sarah! I was trying to ask you out."
She can't help it. She starts giggling and a moment later she can hear John start to giggle too. He is just so hopeless sometimes. The sweetest, most impossible man she's ever fallen for.
"I'm busy tonight," she manages to get out after a while, and she can hear him abruptly stop giggling, imagine the wearily sober look come back onto his face.
"I should have expected that," he replies quietly and then adds. "But if you're free some other time?"
His persistence has always been ridiculous and yet somehow admirable; her mind flashes back to him lying exhausted in a disused railway tunnel, insisting that their second date would be better.
But it's not just that; she wants to see him, see how he's getting on. She still feels uncomfortable about how she dumped him last year. It'd be good to be friends again, at least.
"I...I was going running tomorrow. Would you like to come along?" she blurts out, and she knows even as she says it that it's a ludicrous suggestion. You don't invite an ex to come for a run with you. It's at once too intimate and too obviously a brush-off.
Except she's talking to John Hamish Watson, whose already hazy grasp of social decencies has been further eroded by his time with Sherlock. So he replies enthusiastically, and the next thing she knows, they're agreeing to meet by the Kelsey Park tennis courts tomorrow at half-past nine. As she puts the phone down, she realises that once again she's ended up doing something completely stupid on account of John.
There's something about John that always gets her slightly off-balance, lures her into his skewed world, she thinks, as she sits in the surgery, grinning ridiculously, despite the remaining paperwork. She should never have got involved with him in the first place, of course. It was terribly unprofessional of her.
***
March 2010
Job interviews aren't supposed to end up with the interviewer flirting with the interviewee. Dr Watson's CV makes him by far the best of the prospective locums on paper, but Sarah suspects there's some other problem with him, if he's applying for such lowly jobs. An army doctor will have a terrible bedside manner, doubtless used to bellowing orders at soldiers; he's probably also going to be about six foot three, with bulging muscles and that'll upset Dr Jones, who enjoys being the unofficial surgery pin-up.
So it's disarming to find that John's small and friendly and rather cute, and it's easy – as well as totally justified – to offer him the job. What is absolutely unjustified, she knows, is not sacking him when he falls asleep in the surgery on his first day there. She can persuade herself – she could if necessary persuade the other partners – that he's still a better bet than the alternatives the locum agency is offering, at least one of whom she suspects of having acquired his qualifications wholesale online. But agreeing to go out on a date with John afterwards is simply rewarding poor behaviour.
Very unprofessional, she knows. But she's tired of every recent decision she's made – at work, in her personal life – being sensible. She wants to go out with John and she doesn't want to sack him, so damn the consequences.
***
She doesn't expect the consequences to be her nearly getting killed. But she's in too far by now, and she doesn't care. Stupidly in love with another impossible man who flips between being a sensible doctor and a thrill-seeking ex-soldier. A man who exists in some kind of improbable world of nine million pound hairpins and the Secret Service popping round to his flat to ask for help. John's job – his other job – at once fascinates and terrifies Sarah. He follows after Sherlock and she follows after John and it can't last. She knows that already, but she can't bear to break the spell just yet.
***
Saturday 25th June 2011
When Sarah reaches the tennis courts on Saturday morning, there's no sign of John and she's torn between disappointment and relief. And then a familiar figure in a grey T-shirt, faded shorts and army boots emerges from the toilets and greets her. John doesn't look like a runner, she thinks, and belatedly remembers that the reason he's an ex-army doctor is because he got shot.
"Is your leg going to be up to this?" she demands, and then realises she could have phrased that a lot more tactfully.
But John just smiles and says, "The limp was psychosomatic, like I said at the time." And then the grin gets a little strained, as he adds, "And my nightmares have stopped as well."
"Good," Sarah replies brightly, but as she puts his kit bag in her car and then hastily starts doing some warm-up stretches, she remembers why, even though John's such a straightforward man generally, it's sometimes unexpectedly complicated being with him.
***
March 2010
John tells Sarah about the nightmares when she suggests they sleep together for the first time – which is less than a week since they met. And several days after they first have sex, because frankly they can't keep their hands off one another during the second date. It's embarrassing how like a giddy teenager John can make her feel.
He's such an odd mix of the ridiculous and the practical, she thinks. Take tonight. John turns up mid-evening, asking slightly pathetically if he can stay the night, because Sherlock's being impossible. And then wants to know if it's OK to cook himself something, because he's starving and at least her fridge will be free of severed heads. The next thing she knows, he's cooking an enormous fry-up for them both, while they swap tall tales about medical school pranks with body parts. (She wins with the story of the hand glued to a handrail in a Circle Line carriage).
Obviously, they then end up having energetic sex purely to burn off all the excess calories from the fry-up. It's only after they've cleaned themselves up that John turns to her and says, slightly shamefacedly, "It might be better if I slept on the sofa."
She looks at him in surprise.
"I have nightmares sometimes," he says, "I don't want to disturb you." She's been a GP long enough to recognise the sudden wary note in his voice. The one that says: I would rather have my fingernails pulled out than tell you the details of my mental health problems.
"That's fine," she replies hastily. "I've got a lilo you can sleep on."
"The sofa's fine," John mutters and she can see him closing in on himself, the pain that lurks behind his normal cheery facade.
So she smiles reassuringly and says, "Well, at least you won't discover if I snore or not."
In the morning, she makes a stupid joke about letting him sleep on the end of her bed next time, trying to make it sound as if it's no big deal. And a rumpled John mutters some question about the time after that, as if he worries that there's something broken about him that Sarah won't be able to accept. She smiles and tells him casually to make his own breakfast and it all seems fine. Till he has to rush off to rescue Sherlock because someone's blown up a bit of Baker Street.
She understands why he feels the need to check on his friend. But it does remind her again what a dangerous life that pair lead.
***
June 2011
As Sarah stretches her hamstrings, she tries to work out the minimum distance she can suggest jogging without being too blatant, just in case John's being over-optimistic about his leg. It's about a mile round the circuit; three laps instead of her normal four? Or even two laps?
"How long do you have?" she asks – God, that sounds like I think he's dying – "I mean, do you have appointments you need to keep, armed gangs you have to go and thwart?"
John grins. "Nothing. I'm all yours today." And then he starts to blush, and hastily bends down to check his bootlaces.
"When you're ready, we can go," Sarah says, and jogs slowly off before either of them says anything even more stupid.
***
Once they get going, John runs better than she expected. No style, but he's determinedly pacing himself, not trying to outrun her but very steadily matching her speed. One lap, two laps and he's still got the air of a man who can keep this up all morning.
"Shall we try for five?" she asks, and he nods.
By the fifth time round, they're both definitely feeling it and when Sarah goes past the Rose Garden for the last time, she would be walking if she was on her own. She keeps on running though, and John stumbles wearily after her, his normal grin nowhere to be seen. But when they finally make it back to the tennis courts and he collapses unashamedly against the fence, gasping for breath, the grin's soon back.
"God, I've got no stamina any more," John says, smiling at Sarah as she props herself up next to him. "Good job I'm with someone who can do CPR, isn't it? Do you get a lot of middle-aged men keeling over at this point?"
"You did very well," Sarah replies, trying to sound like she's not exhausted.
"I spend half my life running like crazy after Sherlock...but that's mostly short sprints. You normally either catch someone or lose them within a mile or two."
"Do you want to come and have a drink in the cafe?" she asks. "Give us an excuse to sit down for a bit."
"Sounds good to me."
***
"So how are things at the surgery?" John asks, once they've got their coffees, and Sarah ends up telling him. In detail. She's bottled things up for far too long, and he's a sympathetic listener and knows most of the people concerned.
"I'm sorry," she says, when she realises that her coffee's got cold, because she's been talking for nearly half an hour.
"It's fine," he says. "It's hard sometimes, if you haven't got anyone to talk to."
From John, that's a surprisingly tactful way of asking if there's a new boyfriend around, so she smiles and says, "No-one who wants to hear that much about the NHS; my sister always asks after about five minutes why I can't get a nice job in Harley Street."
John nods, and there's a hopefulness about his smile now that she's familiar with, that's probably echoed in her own face. The spark is still there between them, isn't it? No, more than just a spark, she realises. The warm glow she's starting to feel inside isn't just from the exercise. But she ought to check that John really is free today. It'd be just her luck to find that Sherlock's decided it's a good day to track down the hitherto unknown criminal mastermind controlling the mean streets of Beckenham.
"So have you got a case on at the moment?" she asks, and John licks his lips, looks down at his mug, and says quietly, "Sherlock flew off to Washington yesterday. Some problem at the British embassy."
"How long will he be in the States?" Sarah asks and John's voice is bleak as he replies:
"I don't know."
She's wrecked the mood now, hasn't she? Clearly something has gone badly wrong between John and Sherlock; she waits in silence for him to tell her what's happened. But when John opens his mouth again, all he says is:
"Sherlock...does go abroad for cases sometimes."
Without you, she thinks, and she wishes that men – that John – could just talk about what's bothering them. But she knows he won't, that whatever's making him miserable is something he can't yet put into words. And she can't bear it – it hurts even now – to see him look like that, his face falling back into the weary lines she's familiar with. But there's one thing she can do to cheer him up, she decides. Her hand moves under the table to rest on his thigh and the pain abruptly vanishes from his eyes. Because John Watson is not gay.
***
April 2010
"You really do pick them, don't you, Sarah?" Marie tells her on the phone, with the smugness that only a married younger sister can manage. "So the latest boyfriend's short and he has PTSD and now it turns out he's gay as well?"
"John's not gay," Sarah says and hears Marie's snort of derision.
"He spends all his time on his blog raving about his flatmate. Of course he's gay. Can't you just find someone sane for once?"
Sarah murmurs something non-committal at that point, because there are things she can't tell her sister without shocking her. Like: I know John's not gay, because I know exactly what expression he has on his face when he's desperate to have sex with someone. And it's me, not Sherlock, he looks at like that.
***
June 2011
Five minutes of surreptitious groping later and Sarah decides they'd better leave the cafe while John can still walk straight. She also doesn't want to get either of them banned from the park for upsetting children. It's starting to rain as they go outside, which immediately cuts out any half-baked ideas of outdoor sex. Instead, they race to Sarah's car as fast as their weary legs can take them.
"My flat is nearer," she says, and John sits down hastily in the passenger seat, dumping his kitbag in his lap in a way that simply emphasises the fact that his shorts are bulging rather obscenely. It's probably just as well that she's driving and that there isn't too far to go because she can feel the tension building within her as well. The urge to grab what she wants – who she wants – and hold on tight.
When they get home, she slams the front door behind them and then starts snogging John right against it. An enthusiastic, tongue-battling snog and then their already sweaty bodies are grinding against each other, John's erection pushing against Sarah's groin as she stretches up on her toes. She feels like the horniest of teenagers again, but she's also picked up a few tricks since she left school. And she's reasonably confident that as long as they stay near the door, no-one will be able to see them from outside. Well, at least unless they're staring in very intently. Won't they get a surprise if they do?
She drops to her knees and unbuttons John's shorts. His eyes widen in delighted surprise and then his hands come down, carefully pulling down his shorts and Y-fronts. Sarah was twenty before she realised that oral sex didn't just mean talking about it, but she's learned a lot since then. And as she takes John's sturdy cock in her mouth, there's something satisfying about the breathy sounds of pleasure that he's already making, as he braces himself against the door. She is all John wants, all he needs right now.
Sarah can feel John's legs tremble when he comes, gasping and calling out her name, and she wonders for a moment whether he's going to collapse on top of her. But he steadies himself and then bends down to kiss her very gently on the forehead. His hair is standing on end at the back where he's leant across the door, and he's flushed and has a dopy grin on his face. Then his arms go round her body and he's helping her back to her feet. He's not much taller than her, but he's quite a bit stronger. And there's something in his eyes now that reminds her that he's not sixteen any more either. That he's learnt a thing or two from twenty years of studying anatomy and travelling three continents. She smiles up at him, because there are advantages in being old enough to know what she wants.
"Bedroom?" John asks, his grey eyes gazing enthusiastically into hers. "Living room? Kitchen? Remember, I'm all yours today."
He doesn't blush as he says it this time. One of his hands is resting lightly on the waistband of her jogging pants now, waiting for her permission before heading down inside it. There are reasons she's always enjoyed having sex with him; he has the twin advantages of a lot of stamina and being willing to take instructions.
"Bedroom," she says, and he grins and follows after her.
***
She screams unashamedly when she comes, and to hell with what the neighbours think. Then she rests her head on John's shoulder and curls her arm round his chest and just lets time pass. The adult world can wait for a bit till she rejoins it.
"So what do you want to do now?" John murmurs eventually, and as she lies there with her eyes almost closed, the words bubble out of her subconscious:
"Run away somewhere."
"I've probably got enough for the bus fare, and they won't miss us at first," John replies, and when she opens her eyes, he's grinning down at her in a completely irresponsible way.
"Oh God, were you like that as a kid as well?" she asks.
He shakes his head. "No, it was Harry who was the runaway, always desperate to get out of Wiltshire. She hitchhiked to London once when she was fourteen. Terrified my parents."
"The most I ever managed was sneaking off to a late night disco in Kings Lynn," Sarah says.
"I didn't even manage that. I was a good little boy, didn't get into trouble." He leans back onto the pillow and adds quietly. "And then I signed up for the Army at eighteen and broke my mother's heart."
"If it was what you wanted to do–"
"What I had to do. But it probably helped that it got me far away from Calne." He stares at the ceiling for a moment and then asks, "So where would you like to run away to today? London's a bit over-rated."
"I want the seaside," she says, sitting up with sudden decision. Why not? Why does she have to stay at home when the sun's coming out and it's turning into a lovely day?
"Southend?"
"Brighton's easier to get to," she says. "An hour on the train I think. It's years since I've been there."
"Nor sure I ever have," John says, and he's up on his feet now, reaching for some tissues. "Shall we go and explore it then?"
***
"Sure it's Brighton you want?" John says, when they're queuing for tickets at Beckenham Junction station. "It's Sherlock's credit card, so we can go as far as we want."
"Anywhere?"
"Any beach in the world you want," he says, and his smile suddenly loses its intensity.
"Brighton's fine. I haven't brought my passport," she says quickly, and John nods and looks away and she knows he's remembering New Zealand.
Part 2
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Wednesday, August 8th, 2012
Date: 2012-08-08 10:20 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-08-09 02:46 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-08-11 06:48 am (UTC)You're right about the dichotomy - and it's also disappointing that Sarah just disappears from Series 2. So given the blog post from John about New Zealand and the fact that it clearly isn't either being put in peril or the existence of Sherlock that leads Sarah to the break-up, I thought there was some interesting material to work with. (Though I hadn't intended to end up with 9000 words!).
no subject
Date: 2012-08-11 11:18 am (UTC)And I like this account in parallel with Summertime Blues, because it highlights that she's a mature pragmatist, who understands John clearly enough to see that it's not a good idea long-term while fully appreciating his appeal. Whereas Kate is a young romantic, still willing to stake everything on a crazy love.