221B Fic - Learned Behaviours
Title: Learned Behaviours
Author: Livia_Carica
Rating: PG
Word count: 221
Summary: John follows in his family's footsteps
"Why?" Ella asks constantly.
"I don't know..." It's almost a refrain nowadays.
One day he snaps back, the reins of his temper slipping through his fingers and a part of him can't help feeling elated that somewhere in the numb slab of meat that makes up John Watson, something has sparked a reaction.
"Why does anybody do any fucking thing?"
She has no answer. Years of university, countless hours spent opposite sadsacks like himself, asking "why?" have never given her an answer, not really. John laughs, a bitter, huffing laugh that sounds foreign even to his own ears. He pushes himself out of the artfully neutral chair, leaves, doesn't come back.
He wanders the streets, sometimes for hours, hands in his pockets and eyes on the ground. Inevitably he finds himself in line at the corner shop with a bottle of cheap red wine and a six pack of Heineken and he's aware he shouldn't be doing it, that he's following in the well worn grooves of his family but he can't seem to stop. As he pays, he knows it's wrong but he also knows he'll carry on because when 2 a.m. arrives and there should be a violin wailing through a Saint-Saëns concerto, it's easier to ignore the silence with alcohol bubbling through his veins. It's easier to believe.