Sherlock snorts, indignant. “No. Little bit, maybe. Waiting for you to hate me, but I’ve been waiting for that since the start.”

His tone is light, amused, but there’s honesty in the statement too. He’s said it before – it’s what he expects, once the truth of him sinks in. That he’s only ever this. Strange. Irritating. Always on, never off, never a moment’s rest. He wants to knock his forehead against John’s, shake the reality of it into him now, spare himself the trouble of untangling himself later.

“If you’re going to, better now than later. So I told you. I told you most of it, anyway.” The relevant bits. The most relevant bit.

“The underlying cause; you can extrapolate the rest for yourself.” Not that anybody ever does follow Sherlock’s statements to their furthest conclusions. He expects John will take the statement, the ‘I want to know everything’ as hyperbole. It isn’t. Not an inch of exaggeration in it. Every little detail is important.

If Sherlock’s going to build a John Watson inside his head to carry around with him, he’ll have to know the lot of it, after all.