Application: Snowblind

[jumpthegun]

Player Information

Name: Terri
Age: 20+
Contact Info: switalia
Other Characters: Gregory House

Character Information

Name: John Watson
Canon: Sherlock
Age: Late 30s/early 40s
Gender: Male
Canon Point: After the end of Season 2 (the Reichenbach Fall)
Background Link: Wiki Link
Inventory:

• 1 pair of work boots
  
• 1 pair of blue jeans
  
• 1 plaid, button-down shirt
  
• 1 black sweater
  
• 1 black coat (to replace the one that the admin usually hands out)
  
• 1 leather belt
  
• 1 mini-torch and attached keyring
  
• 1 set of keys
  
• 1 wallet with Clinic ID, driver's license, credit cards, and the like
  
• 1 mobile phone
  
  Personality:
  John Watson is a regular English bloke. It’s how he thinks of himself and how most people who meet him in passing would describe him. He likes having a pint with the lads at the pub, tea, and the occasional night in for a James Bond marathon. In dealing with others, he’s patient, inquisitive, and polite provided they extend him the same courtesy. Even when they don’t, the military and a flatmate who has acted with all the maturity of a 5-year-old on a sugar high have trained him to at least keep his temper in check when there are more important things to be dealt with. He will make his displeasure known – usually in as snarky a tone as possible – but he will do what’s required of him if the situation is truly pressing (e.g. Helping to look for clues in a murder case even after he’s just had a major clash with his flatmate on world views and morality). Due to this attitude and a general propensity to follow orders, John comes off as somewhat submissive. He is to a degree, but he will typically only defer to those he respects or views as superiors in some context. He has no problem pulling rank when there is an opportunity and (in his view) a need to.
  
  Even though there are very few situations John will allow to faze him for any extended period of time, he is a man of emotion, especially compassion. He is pathos incarnate. He always looks for the human element in any situation and has a talent for reading and charming others when he decides to do so. He relies on humor and not a bit of cheekiness to diffuse tension and build bonds. This helps with his bedside manner as a doctor and in drawing information from others he might encounter. He truly enjoys engaging people. He started writing a blog as part of his post-war therapy and it morphed into the stories of his flatmate’s crime solving. It was a way to share his experiences and to show the world the ‘real’ side of Sherlock Holmes, a man known for living and breathing on pure logic.
  
  John is generally optimistic, loyal, and has faith in other people, especially those he counts as friends. Though, actually making friends with him can be challenging at times, even with he acts friendly; John is a relatively guarded man with his emotions around most people. This way of thinking and viewing the world can be as much a hindrance as help. He has several varying responses depending on the circumstances and can become visibly flustered and frustrated when he has to deal with things like uncooperative technology, his flatmate’s more disturbed moments, or his alcoholic sister. He will typically respond by shouting when dealing with machines, fully displaying his disappointment in his body language and tone when dealing with his flatmate (or others he's friends with), or withdrawing and putting up a wall with his sister. His relationship with his sister, Harry, is particularly important to him and indicative of how he deals with personal conflict in relation to those with whom he is very close. He will build a wall, but even then, he's willing to reconcile and believe that people change. He's given Harry more than one 'last 2nd chance.'
  
  In spite of his optimism and 'stiff upper lip' British attitude, John has suffered from some severe psychiatric disorders including a psychosomatic limp and ongoing problems related to PTSD, specifically issues trusting people, and explosive anger. These have shaped the way he thinks about himself as the symptoms all but disappeared once he was engaged in a dangerous and active pursuit. He’s come to realize that while he might not be quite to Sherlock's level, he is an adrenaline junkie, and he can’t stand the comfortable stability of a 9-5 job for extended periods. He needs stimulation, and works best under pressure, in battle. In the first episode, one of his initial exchanges with Sherlock ran such:
  
  Sherlock: Seen a lot of injuries, then? ...Violent deaths?
  John: Yes.
  Sherlock: Bit of trouble, too, I bet.
  John: Of course, yes. Enough for a lifetime... far too much.
  Sherlock: Want to see some more?
  John: Oh God, yes.
  
  Without that stimulation and 'trouble,' he tends to have nightmares, psychosomatic pain and tremors, withdraws in on himself and can become depressed and paranoid.
  
  Most of all, John just needs people and he needs purpose beyond something typical. He felt well and truly alone and adrift after he was honorably discharged from the Army. Sherlock took him and gave him something to do that was fun, exciting, and just a little mad. That is the kind of thing that brings him to life.
  
  Pulling him from where I have, he's also still dealing with the loss of his closest friend who was lambasted by the press, painting Sherlock as a fake genius and criminal. John's a bit quieter and fallen back into some of his bad habits of withdrawing and distrusting others, but he's doing much better than when he initially met Sherlock.
  
  Flavor Abilities: None.
  
  Suitability: John is an army doctor and thrives in dangerous and difficult situations. He's also picked up a bit of Sherlock's sleuthing habits and skills over the course of their acquaintance. While he's no master detective, he'll be trying to sort out the puzzles in Norfinbury, eager to get to the bottom of things and try to connect with people like the ADMIN and Winter on a more human level in the hopes that they'll be able to help. He's also very much a field medic who is used to using just about anything to hand to do what needs doing for an injury. I would like to get him into the position of treating someone in Norfinbury with whatever random items are available and either having that go miraculously well or horribly wrong. He'd also be interested in assisting with the efforts to corral the Dangerous Criminals of Snowblind. Jack and Joker wouldn't be the first psychopaths he's dealt with.
  
  RP Samples:
  One non-SB Thread
  Some Snowblind threads

Comments

Canon Update (cw: suicidal ideations)

[jumpthegun]

Five years is a long time. Five years can change a man. Five years has changed John Watson.

For the first six months after Sherlock Holmes' death, John mourned. He mourned the loss of his friend and the support network that came with him. He mourned the loss of a second life, his whole world. But after six months, he started getting on with things again. It was hard, some days were worse than others, and there wasn't a week that went by when he didn't visit Sherlock's graveside just to stand with his friend, refresh the flowers, make certain everything was neat. Sometimes he talked to Sherlock aloud. Most of the time, it was in his head. Six months turned to a year and John began publishing back stories in his blog, recounting the tales of Sherlock Holmes. There were sneers that he was just a liar, of course. There would always be, even after Sherlock was exonerated in the press and the truth came out.

And then one day at the surgery he'd found work at, one of the nurses smiled at him. That was it, just a smile, but it sparked something. John began going out for coffee with Mary Morstan, then dinner, and then rather more. He was officially dating Mary for only nine months when he decided to pop the question.

That was the night that everything changed again. On the night of John's proposal to Mary Morstan, Sherlock Holmes barreled back into his life with a fake mustache and accent and a very poor understanding of why his sudden appearance and flippant attitude about the intervening years of mourning would so enrage John. John attacked and injured Sherlock repeatedly that night, his anger, hurt, and betrayal coming out in shouted words and raised fists. Mary, however, found the consulting detective absolutely intriguing and a little funny in his flippancy. Where John overreacted, Mary took Sherlock's side, trying to soothe her fiance's ire and get him to return to Sherlock.

John did, eventually try to go and meet with Sherlock again, only to find himself drugged, kidnapped, and thrown into the bottom of a bonfire just ahead of Bonfire Night. Sherlock and Mary raced to rescue him from this predicament, and John found himself returning to Baker Street and getting swept up into a conspiracy and terrorist plot. There wasn't much chance to breathe or work on apologies as John and Sherlock located a bomb set to destroy Parliament during a crucial debate on immigration and terrorism.

They found a car rigged to explode beneath Parliament and ended up in a near-death situation where Sherlock (being an absolute lying dick) managed to convince John that they were about to die. In the moments he thought he had left, John forgave Sherlock for what he'd done, for leaving him without a word of the fact that he'd faked his death for two years. John took it more or less gracefully when Sherlock revealed the ruse, just accepting that this man was his best friend and he loved him, even when he absolutely hated him sometimes.

Following this, Sherlock and John rekindled their friendship in full with Sherlock being looped into plans for John and Mary's wedding as John's best man. They also found themselves fighting crime together around planning and work. During the wedding, we're introduced to another major figure from John's past, Major Sholto. It's revealed that he was John's favored and most respected commander during his service in the military. While he never spoke to Sherlock about Major Sholto, he spoke fondly of the other man to Mary quite often.

What followed the wedding (the near murder at the reception, and the revelation that Mary was pregnant) was a period of unintended separation for John and Sherlock. John went to live the quiet and polite family life with his new wife and Sherlock pursued his cases, absent John's assistance. This only aggravated John who found he couldn't stand this kind of existence. It was too easy, there wasn't excitement, and he found his anger and aggression surfacing more readily than it used to. This culminated in a one-man semi-raid on a drug den to find a neighbor's missing son. In the process, John sprained a junkie who was pointing a knife at him, found the neighbor's son, and also found Sherlock, high on drugs.

The relationship between John and Sherlock was somewhat strained by the separation until John was once more drawn into the case Sherlock was working on--Charles Augustus Magnussen, a horrible businessman who seemed to have dirt on every single person and a disregard for anything like polite society. He was a loathsome man. In infiltrating Magnussen's office, John and Sherlock came across a strange scene, though, someone was ahead of them seeming to try to corner Magnussen. As it turned out, it was John's wife, Mary. While John was tending to an injured person, Sherlock discovered Mary about to shoot Magnussen to prevent information he had about her from getting out.

She turned the gun on Sherlock, instead, shooting and nearly killing him in an effort to get him out of the way without him being deemed somehow culpable in anything to do with Magnussen or her attempt on his life... it was to save John from potentially being fingered as a murderer, as well. Sherlock eventually revealed Mary's deception to John through a deception of his own making. Mary explained that she was an ex-assassin-for-hire who'd been trying to get away from that life, but Magnussen had information that could destroy that and destroy her. John took the news that his wife had been lying to him since they met and nearly murdered his best friend rather poorly and ended up separating from her for a time, going back to live at Baker Street with Sherlock during the estrangement.

Eventually, he worked through at least some of that anger and betrayal and accepted Mary back, telling her that it was only her future he was concerned about, not her past. The past has a way of catching up with you, though. Magnussen used his leverage on Mary to get to John to get to Sherlock to get to Mycroft Holmes. It was a chain reaction of unfortunate circumstances that allowed Magnussen to taunt, abuse, and straight out humiliate not only Sherlock, but John while Sherlock watched. Eventually, to protect Mary and John, Sherlock did the only thing he could think of to escape Magnussen's trap: he shot the man pointblank in the head while John and the British Secret Service watched.

For this crime, Sherlock was going to be sent away by Mycroft and the government on a suicide mission. John and Sherlock exchanged heartfelt words on the tarmac, John not realizing this would be the last he'd probably see of his friend and Sherlock wishing him the best with Mary. Luckily for everyone involved, about ten minutes into the flight, a video of Moriarty, Sherlock's nemesis, popped up on screens all around Britain. Sherlock's plane was diverted back to London where John, Mary, and Mycroft found him high off his tits on drugs, trying desperately to figure out how Moriarty was alive and how he'd pulled this all off.

This led directly into the events of the next great adventure. While Sherlock was still trying to work out the mystery of Moriarty, he was sent back to Baker Street with John as his dutiful companion. With Rosie's birth and Sherlock's seemingly manic energy following his return, not to mention his apparent growing reliance on Mary, John found himself being pushed more and more to the side in his own life. While he was honestly happy for this connection between Sherlock and Mary, some resentment toward her as the woman who had lied to him and nearly killed Sherlock remained. He wanted more than what he had with either of them, in spite of himself, in spite of knowing that he had what was, ostensibly, his perfect life. He was fighting crime, coming home to a baby, and spending time with people he liked and loved. But John wanted more.

All it took was a smile. Just a smile from a woman on the bus. She gave him her number and they began a quiet affair. It was just texting, only texting, but John found himself feeling exhilarated by her interest, craving the validation she offered. He broke it off eventually and kept it at texting, just texting, but the guilt following that was immense. It began to eat away at John even as Mary's past came back to haunt them in the worst possible way, tied up with one of Sherlock's cases.

John and Sherlock discovered that Mary's team, AGRA, had botched a mission and that's what had led to their end and Mary disappearing to a new life. Or rather, that AGRA had been betrayed. Mary fled once more, leaving behind a note for John not to follow her and tracing a random path across Europe to evade her old friends and spare John and their baby, Rosie, from danger. Before she could, though, John advised Sherlock to put a tracker inside the USB with AGRA's information on it. They used it to easily hunt down Mary and convinced her to come back home after the last surviving member of her old team was killed.

John's lingering resentments toward Mary mounted even as his guilt over his affair did. She tried to reassure him that he was the best man she knew, always brave, always true, never one to complain. John knew that he was not that man, that he'd slipped with the woman on the bus. They made it back to England in time for the matter of A.G.R.A. and who betrayed them to come to a head. John was just about to confess his affair to Mary when Sherlock texted them to come and meet him for a showdown with the person who had done it. Mary went first while John arranged for a babysitter for their daughter.

Unfortunately, when John arrived, he found Mary shot, having apparently taken a bullet meant for Sherlock from the woman he'd goaded into shooting with his standard, thoughtless deduction. John ordered that an ambulance be called, he tried to get Mary down and stop the bleeding on the wound, but it was too late with too few supplies. Mary died in John's arms, telling him he was the best thing in her life and that being his wife had been the life she always wanted.

The guilt about the affair, about telling Mary to go ahead of him, about not being in time, about all of the little resentments that had made him appreciate her less than he should have broke through as rage and self-loathing. He lashed out, and Sherlock just happened to be the closest and easiest target. John blasted Sherlock, rejected the other man, blaming him for Mary's death. Sherlock's callous disregard for feelings and need to show off had led to this. If he'd just been able to shut up, Mary would still be alive, and John would have the chance to tell her he wasn't as perfect as she thought, that he wasn't everything she needed him to be. That he was a failure. He would never have that chance.

Another separation from Sherlock followed this, John withdrawing from virtually everyone and developing severe depression and associated psychosis. He began hallucinating that Mary was with him, that he could see and talk to her, even when the hallucination, itself, told him she wasn't real and that she was dead. Insomnia took over and he began self-medicating with alcohol. He ended up having to ask his remaining friends for assistance with his daughter Rosie. She bounced between Mike Stamford and Molly's houses along with a daycare with John visiting her on the weekends. It was a distant relationship, and he knew he was failing again--failing as a father, just as his father had failed him.

The depression and the stronger resurgence of his PTSD symptoms did little to help with the situation. His paranoia, irrational bouts of anger, and suicidal and violent ideations only mounted.

So, he changed everything. Or at least he attempted to. John was still working at his surgery, albeit on reduced hours, and he was still seeing a therapist, but he switched from Ella to someone new, someone he didn't trust to tell about his hallucinations. It might have gone on from there if not for Sherlock Holmes being forcibly thrust back into his life by Mrs. Hudson. She drove an Aston Martin right up to John's therapy session with Sherlock in the boot and demanded that John have a look at him. Sherlock had, apparently, been destroying himself with drugs while John was destroying himself with guilt and alcohol.

John found himself swept up into the case of Culverton Smith, a man Sherlock insisted was a psychotic serial killer, but who, to the public eye, was a billionaire businessman and philanthropist. Sherlock enlisted John to assist him in bringing Culverton down, even as John resisted at every turn. While he couldn't help being drawn in, John's remaining misdirected rage at Sherlock and his violent outbursts came to a head when Sherlock brandished a scalpel and tried to stab Culverton. John fought him off, but found himself unable to stop beating Sherlock once he started. John had to be dragged off and taken away.

While Sherlock was placed in care for his injuries and his self-inflicted issues thanks to his drug use, John returned to Baker Street on Mycroft's command, only to find a DVD that Mary had sent to Sherlock following her death. He watched Mary explaining that Sherlock would need to save John if she died and that she had a plan to help with this: he needed to go pick a fight with someone bad, put himself into harm's way, and go through hell, so that John could be there to pull him out. That, she said, was the way to save John Watson; let him save you.

Realizing his mistake in ever doubting Sherlock or trusting him to a hospital that was part of Culverton's domain, John raced toward the hospital to try to rescue his friend from the serial killer. While he didn't know what was going on, Sherlock was in the process of being murdered.

This is where I'll be taking John from, just as he's driving to Culverton's hospital to rescue Sherlock. He is experiencing visual and auditory hallucinations of his dead wife, and is in a rather bad way. Perfect for Snowhell times!