I Don't Want To Believe

Irritating Earthlings

    John woke up groggily, not feeling as though he should be awake at all. His body was coming back to consciousness but his mind was still out cold, his very soul was running on empty. He groaned, seeing a bright light next to him, like a lamp or something, and heard desperate whispers around him. Well, he thought they were whispers, that was all his ears could pick up. In fact he was quite sure his family was now screaming in glee, he was home, he was alive, yippee. John's eyes opened and the ceiling of his bedroom came into focus, the familiar white wash that he stared at so often.
"John, John, oh thank god!" he heard his mother cry. Suddenly there was a very powerful, crushing force on top of him, and John could only assume she was trying to hug him rather than suffocate him. He groaned desperately and that seemed to get the message across. Finally she let him go, and John blinked rapidly, trying his best to sit up and look around. His old family was all gathered around the bed, his father looking very relieved, his mother sobbing next to him, and Harry looking as though she were going to jump for joy.
"You're alive!" Harry insisted, jumping onto the bed and cuddling next to John's broken form.
"Ya, funny how that works." John groaned, trying to sit up the best he could, or at least elevate his head.
"John, oh, my son, my baby, what happened, where did you go?" Mrs. Watson asked desperately, trading her aggressive hug for a very forceful hand holding. John just groaned, forcing a smile on his face.
"If I told you, you wouldn't believe me." he decided.
"You went to space, didn't you?" Harry asked excitedly, her little eyes glowing with excitement. John almost laughed, but he remembered what else had come back with him.
"Sherlock, where...where's Sherlock?" he asked desperately, sitting up as tall as he could as if Sherlock was hiding somewhere in his room.
"Is that the boy who was in the wagon?" Mr. Watson asked. John nodded furiously, not knowing what else to do.
"Where is he?" he insisted.
"He's in the guest room with that clay thing, don't know what it was, looked pretty gross." Mrs. Watson decided, tears still streaming down her face.
"Oh, no, that's my son. You're a grandmother." John shrugged, and with that he tumbled out of his bed onto the floor.
"Wait...what?" Mr. Watson asked as Mrs. Watson started hyperventilating once more. John scrambled to his feet, pushing his father's desperate arms off of him and scrambling to the guest room.
"I knew it, he went to space daddy, John went to space!" Harry insisted as John struggled to Sherlock. His legs were so sore, his body ached and he was sure he had a concussion, but that was all behind him now, he needed to move forward, to Sherlock. He struggled to open the door, but as promised Sherlock lay still in the bed, the covers pulled over top of him and his hair looking freshly washed. John breathed a sigh of relief, stumbling over to the bed and collapsing next to Sherlock, pressing his ear to his leather clad chest to make sure he was still breathing. To John's relief he could still feel his chest rising and falling, he could hear his lungs inflating, he could hear the dull thud of his heart.
"John, please tell us, that thing is your son?" Mrs. Watson asked, the whole family once more appearing at the side of the bed. John cradled Sherlock's form in his arms and nodded weakly, not really caring what the family thought anymore, this was all he had left of whatever he had just given up.
"John, tell us what's going on!" Mr. Watson demanded. John groaned, rolling away and sitting up against the headboard. The baby was floating around in the liquid once more on the bedside table, looking a lot more defined now. In fact, John thought he could almost see little arms and legs folded against the rubbery torso.
"Harry was right, I did go to space." John agreed. Harry squealed with excitement, wandering over to the side of the bed to get a closer look at Sherlock.
"Don't lie to us John." Mr. Watson insisted.
"I believe him, he wouldn't lie!" Mrs. Watson exclaimed, wiping her eyes furiously with a tissue.
"It might be a coping method; obviously the experience was very traumatic..." Mr. Watson started.
"Dad, I don't have PSD, I'm fine, I swear, I went to space, the proof is lying next to me." John insisted, pointing weakly at Sherlock.
"He's an alien?" Harry asked excitedly, poking at Sherlock's high cheekbones with interest.
"Don't do that." Mrs. Watson insisted, but Harry continued to examine the alien in the guest room.
"Tell us everything John, we need to know, we deserve to know." Mr. Watson decided. His mother sat on the bed, stroking John's feet since that was the only part of him she could reach. John just sighed, looking over at Sherlock once more, admiring his beautiful chiseled features before trying to start at the beginning.
"I saw him, Sherlock, follow me around, Harry knows, I saw a face in my window." John decided.
"I do know, you told me that!" she exclaimed with glee, as if happy to be part of something so important.
"Well, I noticed him following me around, in school, at practice, I thought I was crazy, but I wasn't, and he showed up at our back door and I took off after him, I had to find out what was going on, and I got to the crop circle and they abducted me." John decided.
"With a big blue light?" Harry asked.
"Yes, with a big blue light." John agreed. Mrs. Watson squeaked with emotion, looking at her husband for support.
"We thought that was just a search light, we thought they took you away, we thought they were tracking you." She muttered, squeezing John's foot in relief.
"Well, they did some tests, and they introduced me to Sherlock, who pretty much brought me through this whole thing, and they took my DNA and blood and bone or whatever, and they combined it with his, and they made this baby thing, an Alpha Male, to be their supreme life form or whatever, but they were going to kill me and only experiment on the child, so we had to run. And we were going down to earth, and the light turned off, and we fell, and Sherlock broke the fall and the guards are still looking for us and that's how we're here." John finished in a breath, looking up to see if his parents actually believed his very quick version of the extraterrestrial events.
"John, you should get some rest; I think you're going a bit..."
"I'm not crazy dad, look, look at the child! Look at Sherlock, look at his clothes, I was abducted dad, I was on a spaceship, he's an alien!" John insisted, pointing furiously at Sherlock as if his father didn't believe him.
"John, I know what you're saying, it just doesn't make sense, there is no such thing as aliens, if there we, we'd know about them." Mr. Watson insisted.
"We do know about them, they are real, I can tell you who they are, what they are!" John insisted desperately. His father still didn't look convinced.
"John's not lying, I can tell, he wouldn't..." Mrs. Watson broke into another fit of tears, and John was officially worried about circulation in his foot.
"You know what, if you don't believe me, fine, but I was there, I don't need your approval." John decided. This wasn't worth the effort, who cares what his father believed? There would be a living, breathing alien baby in this house sooner or later, that would really smack him back into reality. The only thing that mattered was Sherlock's recovery, but he didn't look any different from the corn field, it didn't seem like he had gotten the slightest bit better, other than his newly washed hair.
"We didn't know what to do, we thought to bring him to the hospital but we didn't even know his name." Mrs. Watson admitted. Harry was now pulling at Sherlock's curls and watching them bounce back, as if that didn't happen with human hair.
"Why isn't he green?" she asked.
"They descended from humans, it's a long story, I shouldn't say too much." John admitted. Mr. Watson breathed heavily from the end of the bed, but John ignored him. Skeptics, am I right?
"John honey, do you need to go to the hospital?" Mrs. Watson asked nervously, as if her son's ramblings were concerning her a little bit.
"I'm fine, mom, I'm fine. When he wakes up he'll tell you everything and more, I'm not crazy. Not yet." John assured. Mr. Watson sighed, eyeing his wife apprehensively.
"Well why don't we go down and have some tea or something, you must be starving." Mrs. Watson suggested. John sighed, but nodded, slapping Harry's hand away from trying to open Sherlock's eyes ("They must be slit, like a cat's!"). So John rolled out of the bed, pulling the covers once more over Sherlock to make sure he was snuggly and followed his parents down the stairs. Harry pranced down the stairs with her alien action figures, saying something about gluing curly black hair to one of them to make it a more realistic. John just nodded and muttered agreements as he clung to the handrail, his legs still too weak to support him fully.
"Do you have any broken bones, any pains?" Mrs. Watson asked, supporting his shoulders the best she could as he made his way down the stairs. She really was pestering him now that he returned, as if trying to make up for all of those days when no one was there to ask him if he was interested in girls or needed to have the talk again.
"Like I said, Sherlock took the fall; I just got the shock waves." John insisted, trying to shake his mother's helping hands away.
"Does he have any broken bones?" she asked uncertainly, as if she didn't really know if alien had any bones to break.
"Probably, but I wouldn't worry about it. I think they heal faster than we do." John guessed. Mrs. Watson sighed, but didn't say anything more on the topic, as if not wanting to encourage these fantasies. Obviously they think this whole alien 'story' was just as way for John to cope with what actually happened. But of course it wasn't, what could possibly have happened? Might he have been kidnapped, murdered, ran away and got raised by a pack of wolves? No, he got abducted by aliens, and maybe John would think they were right if Sherlock wasn't unconscious upstairs. John seated himself at the familiar kitchen table, with real chairs and real dishes, and nothing was made from white metal. It was almost like a dream, and he would wake up with his feet sticking off of his race car bed on that ship again. In the hands of the enemy. Mrs. Watson poured John a cup of hot tea and heated up some leftover chicken noodle soup, the perfect food for post abduction victims. The rest of the family simply sat at the table and stared at him. Mr. Watson looked as if he was trying to decide which mental hospital was best, and Harry seemed like she wanted to know every single detail but was afraid to ask. Mrs. Watson carried over the steaming soup and tea, which looked very inviting at the moment for his sore muscles.
"So, long hike over here?" she asked as she sat down.
"What do you mean?" John asked. It had been a pretty short hike, just a long fall.
"Well, you show up at my door step and pass out, I could only assume you came from two states over." she decided.
"We landed in a corn field, not far from here. I'm sure the crop circle will be on the news sooner or later." John guessed. Mrs. Watson sighed, her eyes flicking towards the TV as if tempted to turn it on and look.
"We've seen enough news reporters as it is." Mr. Watson insisted.
"What have they been doing?" John asked.
"They were here interviewing us about you; they thought you were taken by aliens too." Harry piped in. "I told them it was the only logical explanation."
"And I told them how ridiculous that was." Mr. Watson agreed. John just rolled his eyes, sipping his human drink and eating his human soup and overall enjoying life.
"Well, what do you think happened then?" John asked, wondering what his dad might conjure up to defend himself and his point of view.
"Obviously you were kidnapped, maybe drugged to think the whole thing was aliens." Mr. Watson decided.
"Then who's Sherlock?" John asked.
"A very good question, who is he?" Mrs. Watson agreed.
"Dad, answer the question, if I was kidnapped, how do you explain Sherlock? Or the baby for that matter?" John asked.
"Some local crazy that decided to help you out and his wacky science experiment. Obviously." Mr. Watson decided, not sounding very convinced about his own argument. John just hummed in sarcastic agreement, hoping his father realized how ridiculous he sounded right now.
"Who is this Sherlock?" Mrs. Watson asked, having poured herself a cup of tea as well. She was now stirring the spoon around the edge of the cup nervously, as if worried John had brought home a serial killer, or possibly his own kidnapper. Then again, in a way he had.
"He's my friend, he was sent here to pick a human for the experiment, he picked me. That baby is as much his as it is mine." John pointed out. Mrs. Watson choked on her tea but tried to pass it off as a little cough. John never really did consider that his parents might not be into this whole father thing.
"You had a child with another boy?" Mr. Watson asked doubtfully, as if this proved his point even more.
"I thought you could only have a baby with a girl?" Harry asked. She was right of course, but she didn't know why she was right.
"It was a science experiment, I told you, they created the baby out of our blood and tissue and cells. But we found out that when the experiment was over, they were going to kill me. So Sherlock took the baby, and he took me, and we broke out, we beamed ourselves down but they turned off the light, I don't know what it's called, and we fell about a hundred feet. He took the impact, and I dragged him back here. He's family now, so don't kick him out." John insisted.
"Family? He's not family, he's a kidnapper, a pedophile, a...I don't know what he is, but I refuse to call him family! As soon as he wakes up, he's leaving!" Mr. Watson yelled.
"Sherlock is the father of your grandchild!" John insisted. Mr. Watson's face went so white that John was sure he drained all the blood in his face. Of course any words that followed this amazing color change was obviously going to be bad.
"The father of my grandchild? That lump of clay floating in someone else's pee you say is my grandchild? I refuse; I...get those things out of my house right now." Mr. Watson demanded.
"You're not kicking them out, the guards are looking..." John started, but Mr. Watson rose violently from his chair, pointing an accusing finger at John as if this were all his fault.
"Stop talking now John, there are no guards, there are no aliens, there are no children, I want that psychopath and his little art project out of my house if it kills me!" Mr. Watson demanded. John stood up as well, he never imagined this would be difficult, but of course his father stuck in his old ways.
"Just sit down, John, let your father take care of this." Mrs. Watson insisted, patting John's shoulder calmingly.
"No, Dad, I won't let you." John decided, ignoring his mother's pacifism.
"John you will listen to me, I'm not going to hear about your heroics and your alien friends right now." Mr. Watson insisted, storming up the stairs angrily.
"Mommy what's he going to do to John's alien?" Harry asked nervously. John took after his father right away, he's faced extraterrestrial guards, he's faced Sherlock when he got angry, he could face this puny little human he was forced to call his father.
"Dad, don't do that, you'll hurt him!" John exclaimed, but Mr. Watson was already opening the door. John ran to catch up when there was a pitiful scream from inside the room. Maybe something had happened, maybe the baby was born too early, but when John got inside himself fearing the worst, he saw that it wasn't his father screaming, but Sherlock.