What did John Watson expect Sherlock to tell him att the tarmac?

 (Sherlock meta by Ivy Blossom)

Question:

Hello Ivy! When Sherlock and John are saying "goodbye" in His Last Vow and Sherlock starts "there's something I should say, that I've always meant to say and never have..." what do you think John was expecting to hear? He doesn't look like someone who is expecting a love declaration or a joke. But I can't quite imagine what his thoughts at that particular moment. What do you think? Do you believe that by then John still can't see Sherlock is in love with him? Maybe he wanted to hear a "I'll come back"?

Ivy Blossom:

It’s an interesting question. To come close to answering it, I think we have to get some kind of grip on what John thinks he knows about Sherlock at that point. I’m going to get there taking the long road, if you don’t mind. So sorry if you do mind.

If you just want the disappointing summary, here it is: I don’t know. I’m not sure John knows what to expect, either.

John is pretty convinced that Sherlock is a sociopath. Not because Sherlock shot a guy. John understands shooting a guy, he’s done that himself. John is convinced of Sherlock’s sociopathy for other reasons.

John believes Sherlock is a sociopath because Sherlock keeps telling John and others that he is. There is very little that John witnesses in his life with Sherlock that would make him question that diagnosis, but we have evidence that he has questioned it before. In series two he seems to be toying with the possibility that Sherlock has Asperger’s rather than antisocial personality disorder, but possibly that was a one off bit of daydreaming on his part. Now, as John’s blog makes crystal clear, he’s convinced that what Sherlock keeps saying about his brain disorder is true. As far as John knows, Sherlock is a charming, manipulative, remorseless, lawless, sensation-seeking man who is neurologically incapable of loving another person. This is what John sees, and it’s what Sherlock tells him is true.

John has a lot of evidence that Sherlock can’t even conceive of what love means. If Sherlock understood what it meant to love another person and be loved in return, he wouldn’t have hurt John the way he did when he faked his death, and he wouldn’t have thought everything would be fine if he jokingly turned up again. If John didn’t believe Sherlock was really a sociopath before the fall, he definitely believes it after he comes back.

In series three it became clearer to us that Sherlock has constructed his misshapen identity on purpose to jettison the parts of himself that get in the way of his pure reasoning ability, but John has no access to that information. John cannot see into Sherlock’s mind palace. He has no idea what Sherlock is really like, as much as he thinks he does.

In any case, John doesn’t have much doubt that Sherlock is a sociopath. I think understanding that might help explain some of John’s behaviour towards Sherlock in series three. John’s misunderstanding about Sherlock is most glaringly apparent when Sherlock goes into mental meltdown when John tells him he loves him. I love that moment, because it might be one of the most honest moments Sherlock has in all three series. It’s a moment when Sherlock is completely without his armour, experiencing emotions he cannot control. Sherlock’s face in meltdown is the same face we see in his mind palace. That is an emotional, confused, lost Sherlock grasping for reason, method, and understanding, and terrifyingly coming up blank.

But John misses all this. He doesn’t give Sherlock time to process that information, or talk him through it in any way. He’s fairly callous about it, really. He immediately wants to talk about the speech. Practical matters only! Of course, John is always bad at talking about Big Feelings, but he doesn’t look uncomfortable when Sherlock melts down. He doesn’t know that’s a feelings meltdown, then. Or he’d be uncomfortable, wouldn’t he? He must not think Sherlock is capable of a feelings meltdown. That would be consistent with what John appears to believe about Sherlock to that point. He must think Sherlock is melting down at the prospect of accomplishing this task. Not melting down because the stunning revelation about John’s feelings have torn all of Sherlock’s defenses down. John must not be aware that Sherlock has defenses. Heck, we didn’t know about them until just recently either, so we can hardly blame him.

If John had understood Sherlock’s reaction, I think the content of Sherlock’s speech would have come as less of a surprise to him. John was stunned into hugging Sherlock in front of an audience, practically against his own will, when Sherlock merely acknowledged that he feels the same about John as John feels about him. Normally we would expect John to be uncomfortable around big declarations like that, but he’s beside himself instead. He can’t hold himself back! He expresses an emotion then too, giving Sherlock a big hug. His hug says, I love you, too. John doesn’t think Sherlock is capable of that, but that moment, when he says it as part of his Best Man’s speech, John believes him. He absolutely believes him.

While John has a thing for psychopaths, apparently, he doesn’t actually want them to be psychopaths deep down. John is ready to hear and instantly accept any evidence that Sherlock is capable of loving him. And it provokes that most telling emotional moment. John hugging Sherlock is pure, unadulterated teary love and joy. That’s the kind of thing he struggles to declare and accept in himself normally, but it jumped right out of them there. In spite of the audience of everyone he knows.

That must have been a confusing day for John. You can see it on his face, too, dancing to the waltz Sherlock wrote for him. He has to re-think everything he thought he knew about Sherlock. No wonder he finds that month without him after the wedding so difficult. I would love to see the texts he sent, and the ones he typed out but didn’t send, and the ones he thought about writing but didn’t, during that month when he believed that Sherlock loved him. It doesn’t last.

Because suddenly: the fresh new image John has of Sherlock from the wedding shatters. Sherlock fakes a relationship with Janine to break into an office, which John finds at first galling, and then horrifying. That is not the act of a man capable of love. It’s a classic sociopath move. The wedding was just a speech, wasn’t it. Maybe he didn’t mean what he was saying. Maybe Sherlock just parroted back what John had said to him. Sherlock didn’t hug him back, after all.

As far as John knows, and he has all the evidence to support this as fact and nothing to contradict it, Sherlock slept with Janine like an rock star and then proposed to her for a case, and has no remorse and feels no guilt about it whatsoever. Classic pyschopath. If John thought Sherlock really did love him in TSOT, he’s got to be seriously questioning that in HLV. His chair is gone, the girlfriend has arrived and started renaming everyone and moving things around in the ktichen, and Sherlock is a cold, manipulative monster incapable of real love or concern for another human being.

Wait, let me add an adjective to that list: a heterosexual cold, manipulative monster incapable of real love or concern for another human being. Zing!

John has never been clear about Sherlock’s sexuality, as we know. He’s asked around about it, but he’s not sure. First he thought Sherlock was straight (asking about a girlfriend), then assumed he was probably gay for quite a while, as far as we can tell. Once Irene came into the picture, he started to question it all over again. What is Sherlock? Does anyone know? Is he Gay? Asexual? Bisexual? Heterosexual? John has no idea. He was jealous of Irene, and he saw Sherlock go catatonic over her. And John left. He walked out of the flat, leaving them alone together. Sherlock wrote her the saddest music in the world. John thought they had a thing of some kind or other. He doesn’t know for a fact, but John clearly suspects that Sherlock fell in love with Irene.

Sherlock has never expressed an interest, or demonstrated anything John would class as an interest, in a man, as far as he can tell. Mostly because he can’t see Sherlock mooning over him the way we can. So I can understand why he starts to think Sherlock is a closet heterosexual who’s not interested in relationships or recreational sex. That is a logical inference based on the information John has.

Sherlock’s liaison with Janine (and, I’m sure, all the details in the papers that he surely pored over) seem to confirm that Sherlock is heterosexual when he bothers to be anything. We don’t see Sherlock disabusing John of the notion that he slept with Janine any number of times in one night, and his silence on the subject is, to all appearances, Sherlock’s very mature attempt to lash out at John for leaving him, but John doesn’t know that. I would be surprised if Sherlock came clean with John about that. Janine wasn’t going to admit the truth to anyone, was she.

So now what John knows for what passes for a fact is that Sherlock is his heterosexual, aromantic, sociopathic best friend.

There’s a gap here because I don’t know what happened between them at the hospital. Sherlock goes back to the hospital after the confrontation with Mary, and comes out at christmas. Since we know John was frequently at Sherlock’s side in the first week post-shooting, I have no doubt that he was Sherlock’s constant visitor afterwards. He wasn’t speaking to Mary, so Sherlock would have been his world, I imagine. And Sherlock for once wasn’t going anywhere, so I suspect they hung out in the hospital together a lot. What passes between them during this time is a mystery. Maybe they played Cluedo. Or solved crimes by proxy. Maybe John ran around with an iphone and facetimed Sherlock everywhere he went, it’s hard to say. I hope we get to see some of it, if it’s plot relevant, in series 4, but who knows.

All we know for sure is that Sherlock and John are in a good place in their relationship by Christmas, and Sherlock is deeply invested in John’s relationship with Mary. I suspect there’s more to know here, but it’s a blank spot at the moment.

Then Sherlock shoots a guy. He shoots that guy for everyone he knows, really, but also for John. He shoots a guy so John doesn’t have to. So John can have a life. He fulfills his vow on some level, but abdicates it on another. If you say you’ll always be there, you can’t go run off on a suicide mission, can you? But he protects John and Mary, and their unborn daughter, and his brother, and Janine, and everyone else in his orbit. I came back to life to get you out of trouble, John. So here I go. Getting you out of trouble. Right? John understands that on some level. He’s not angry at Sherlock for doing it. He’s overwhelmed by it.

Okay, all of that to get here, on the tarmac. John is looking at his heterosexual, aromantic, sociopathic best friend who made a promise to him and kept it. When he says, “There’s something I should say…” what can John possibly think it will be?

Let’s back up a tiny bit more. John has been brought to this air field with basically no information whatsoever. All he appears to know is that Sherlock is leaving for good as his punishment for killing Magnussen. He knows that, but he doesn’t know where Sherlock is going, and he doesn’t know that Sherlock expects to die there. So while this is a terribly fraught moment for John, I think it’s more fraught for Sherlock.

So: John’s heterosexual, aromantic, sociopathic best friend is jetting off on a life of non-english crime fighting, and John is going to stay in London with a wife who lied about everything and raise their daughter, a life Sherlock made sure would be possible on every single front. John can’t offer to come with Sherlock, though I suspects he’d like to. He has other responsibilities now. John must think Sherlock was off having a good time the first time he “died,” so I imagine he thinks Sherlock will have a good time this time around as well, right? John isn’t worried about Sherlock, is he? He has no reason to be, not really. He’s not going to prison. He’s off to have adventures instead. John is only sad that they’re being separated again, as Sherlock says, permanently. Sherlock is going somewhere John can’t follow.

Sherlock is sad because he knows he’s going to die, and John, the only person Sherlock loves, is going somewhere Sherlock will never be welcome again. But John doesn’t know any of that.

John’s heterosexual, aromantic, sociopathic best friend made a vow to him and kept it, and is now jetting off on adventures unknown, never to be seen again. What does he think Sherlock always meant to say to him?

To us, it’s obvious that the only thing left for Sherlock to say is, I’m in love with you. He’s said everything else already, and we know he’s capable of it. We know that all John’s evidence for Sherlock’s heterosexuality is a sham, that he’s not actually a sociopath, and it’s pretty obvious that he has romantic feelings for John. (We did get the little romantic wink from him, didn’t we?) He’s already said you saved me. He said I love and care about you more than anyone else in the world. I don’t think there’s actually anything else Sherlock could have said to John, other than, I’m in love with you, by the way. Always have been. Well, since you shot that cabbie. That was really hot. Just thought you should know. But what would John be expecting?

Probably not that. It goes against everything he thinks is true about Sherlock. Well, maybe there’s a part of him hoping for that. Hoping against hope. I’m sure there is. But it’s a stretch to expect it from your heterosexual, aromantic, sociopathic best friend.

Maybe he thinks it will be another perfectly logical thing for Sherlock to say, which would be: thank you. Thanks for being my flatmate, for helping me, for getting as excited about what I do as I do. Thanks for being my friend, my only real friend. Thanks for putting up with me. Thanks for seeing what I can do and not thinking I’m a freak. Thanks for thinking I’m extraordinary instead.

Or maybe it was something far more mundane. John: that deodorant you like doesn’t work on you as well as you think it does. John: if you adjusted your genitals slightly to the left, you wouldn’t have to walk like that.

I don’t know. Maybe John doesn’t know. I don’t think it’s as obvious to him as it is to us. He hasn’t seen the inside of Sherlock’s mind palace like we have. He doesn’t know what Sherlock is capable of.
It will be fun to watch him find out.