John’s Third Way: Lie to me, Mary. Keep Lying to me.

 (Sherlock Meta by Ivy Blossom)

Can you imagine what it would be like to live with someone after you’ve decided you don’t want to know anything about their past? Is that even possible, really? A relentlessly future-focused existence, no reminiscing, no childhood memories, nothing?

That’s an intense, complicated discipline, never asking questions that might require a lie, never bringing up the past in any way.

I suppse you’d have to agree to a particular lie and live with the cognitive dissonance of the knowledge that it is in fact a lie. Your name is Mary, you grew up in, what, Croydon, or something, Surrey, you went to a regular school, you started out reading history and then decided you wanted to be a nurse. Then you worked up north for a while, had a bad relationship, drifted back to London, another relationship here, it ended amicably. Then you met John Watson, who seemed terribly sad. And here you are. Do they just pretend that’s true? When you both know it’s not?

I know the “the problems of your future are my privilege” statement is all romantic and everything, but he genuinely doesn’t want to know her actual name. Or know about what made her what she is. I would have thought, in a situation like this, that John’s options were basically two: accept who your wife is, or no, reject her. But he found some kind of weird middle way. Yes, I accept you, but only if we pretend those things you lied about aren’t true, even while we both know they are. And I don’t want to ever know about them. I’m going to call you a name that isn’t your name. I want your facade, not you.

Her real self isn’t the person she is when she’s with John, we know that. We’ve seen her when she’s being her actual self. And she’s much colder, much harsher, much less emotional. She kills people she actually appears to like. She doesn’t react at all when John’s as angry as he’s ever been, unlike everyone else in the room. She has that psychopathic stare. She chose to lie to John, and she wanted to keep lying to him. In the end, John is asking her to.