Title: To The Water

Author: Still Waters

Fandom: Sherlock (BBC)

Disclaimer: I do not own Sherlock. Just playing, with love and respect to those who brought these characters to life.

Summary: When John Watson grieves, he goes to the water.

Written: 4/27/15. Edited 5/11/15.

Notes: An edit and re-post of a previous piece "They Go To The Water" which bookended two fandoms. I went back to nitpick one or two things that were bothering me and ended up splitting it into two separate stories. I truly hope I did the characters justice. Thank you for reading and thank you to those who supported the first version.

John Watson is known for his stillness.

His minute shifts in facial expression, his military-drilled posture and crisp, efficient movements, his economy of words - a seemingly impossible trait with Sherlock Holmes counted as his closest friend. Anger is a whitening of knuckles, the twitch of a clenched jaw, measured breathing. Movement is sparse, controlled - the loosening and tightening of fisted fingers, a thin-lipped smile that is anything but pleased, a tilt of the head. Explosions of words are rare, just as the words themselves are. And if the words do come, there is stillness in them too – low, even, icy, dangerous. All the explosive, destructive radiation of a supernova without the bright, showy display.

And when John Watson grieves….he goes to the water.

His stillness, somehow, intensifies. He is the cliff faces withstanding thousands of years of pounding wind and water and still standing defiant; the boulders with jagged edges hidden under an unmovable facade. He stands as still as those cliffs, unmovable as those boulders, the only motion that of nature against him. His clothing lashed by the wind, his face wet and dripping with salt spray, his shoes crackling with skittered sand. His clenched fists are the planted rocks, his hardened jaw the jagged outcroppings of proud geologic sentinels. He does not speak, does not shout, does not cry. The water does it for him. The crashing waves scream his grief to echo off the rock faces and over the great expanses where life began. The sea spray slides down his face as hard-pressed tears, sand and wind reddening his cheeks and eyes. And the wind moves the sand through all the stages of loss: tentative, knee-jerk brushes of denial, furious gusts and punches of anger, gentler shifts of bargaining, the absent emptiness of depression, until finally settling into the natural ebb and flow of the waves, of nature's rhythmic inspiration and expiration - acceptance. John is a soldier who has seen loss, a doctor who understands the science of it. He comes to the water in his own loss, his own grief, a man of tight control…..and lets go. Keeps his stillness, his core self, and lets the wind, the water, the sand and rocks and cawing birds, all give voice and feeling and movement to the emotions raging behind his straining knuckles, his stiffened spine, his aching jaw. He gives up a fraction of prided control in order to keep the majority intact, to release a maelstrom without collapsing from the force of it, to weather a storm amongst geology's still-standing victors.

He is never rushed. No interruptions, no platitudes or sympathies, however well-meaning. There is an unspoken rule at the water – people respect one another's solitude there, whatever the reason.

And when the sand is rough in his hair and deep in his shoes, vision blurred from dry corneas and wind-forced watering, face stiff from dried salt-spray, ears aching, nose running, and fingernails pale in chilled hands, John goes back to the world that knows him for his stillness.

And feels lighter for it.