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Four thirty was when visiting hours started. Everyone knew. Lestrade knew not to call. Donovan knew not to heckle as he dropped his train of thought mid-sentence and walked out of whichever crime scene or office they were occupying. Mycroft knew that he would sooner break his phone than answer it. Even Moriarty had known, laughing through blood and bruises in the face of his defeat.
My, is that the time? You’ll be late, you don’t want to upset his routine.
That was the only day he had missed. They told him later that John hadn’t noticed.
The nurses said you could set your watch by him, the near skeletal man that swept through the corridors as if he owned them at exactly half past four, not acknowledging anyone until he got to John’s room. He would walk in, and John would look up, and lock eyes with him, and ask. Always the same question.
“Where’s Jim?”
They had tried for months to get through to him, to understand what was going on in that once robust mind. There had been any number of needles, vials of liquid and bottles of pills in the tiny bedsit where they had found him after seven frantic weeks, exhausted, emaciated, barely conscious, three IV lines feeding into him and rope burns on his arms and ankles. Now he sat in a small white room in a large grey building, and Sherlock sat with him for two hours every day, unrecognised. After visiting him Sherlock would spoke to his consultant for between ninety and one hundred and fifty seconds, heard that there was no significant change, and went home alone.
The day they had found him, John’s eyes had fluttered open, and he had looked up at his rescuer and smiled.
“Sherlock,” he had whispered.
Only once had he whispered that name. Now it was Jim, always Jim. First he had asked for him quietly, pleading, but when Sherlock tried to explain what Moriarty had done, who he was, John had flown into a rage and for weeks thereafter screamed bloody murder every time Sherlock came near him, always calling for another.
A couple of months down the line he settled again, but he no longer gave Sherlock the vulnerable and hopeful look he had borne in the early days. Now he looked up with shuttered eyes and asked in a dull voice for the man Sherlock had killed.
Self-defence, they were calling it. As if Scotland Yard at large didn’t know that Mycroft’s people had spotted him attempting to get into the facility where John was held, his vanity becoming his downfall as he opened himself to pursuit and Sherlock followed him tirelessly across London until he could get near enough to exact revenge.
Self-defence, Lestrade insisted, and his bosses nodded along.
These days they kept Sherlock distracted until it was time for visiting hours, and then he went to sit with John for two hours every day. These days John was quiet, asking for Jim and then wandering back into the world in his head, sometimes writing long strings of disconnected random thoughts or a single idea, over and over. He only spoke to ask for Jim.
Today was eight months, two weeks and three days since Sherlock had found him, heard him speak his name. He spoke briefly, as he always did, doing as the doctors commanded and speaking normally about his day, common acquaintances, whatever cases he had on, before tiring of John ignoring him and exhorting, pleading with him to remember, to try, and finally lapsing into silence as the futility of it bore down on him. Just as it did every day.
“Remember,” said John, fifteen minutes later.
Sherlock stared at him, nonplussed.
“Remember?” he repeated stupidly.
“Remember me.”
“Of course...” Sherlock began, but John was still speaking.
“Remember me when... when...”
Something seemed to chime in Sherlock’s memory, and he dug back through his thoughts for some information discarded as useless but not yet erased. A drunken night, over a year ago, John clearly needing the distraction and only telling him six beers in that it was the anniversary of his father’s funeral, when he had been made to stand in front of a room of strangers and recite a poem he didn’t care for about a man that had disappointed him time and time again. How he could never now forget the poem or the man, no matter how much he wanted to.
“Remember... when...”
“Remember me when I have gone away,” murmured Sherlock softly, and John did look up now, caught his eye, listened. “Gone far away into the silent land. When you can no more hold me by the hand...”
“Nor I half turn to go, yet turning stay,” replied John. He looked down at his paper, and Sherlock registered dimly that his two hours were up. He rose to his feet.
“Same time tomorrow then,” he said, as he always did. He did not expect a response.
“Better by far that you should forget and smile, than that you should remember and be sad,” John said to his back.
Sherlock froze, the question he had been ignoring for eight months, two weeks and a day coming into focus. Undoubtedly he would be better off without the memory of John, without these months of pain following not quite two brilliant, sparkling years. If he could go back to what he was, before he hurt, before he cared, when he was just a sharp and agile mind.
Maybe John would be better off too, if he stopped coming. Maybe he would forget, eventually, that he was looking for someone called Jim, a dead man that he didn’t realise had tortured him half into his own grave, and find some peace and a new life. Maybe Harry would come back, step up to the mark and be John’s big sister, if Sherlock left.
“Is that what you want?” he asked, without turning around. “Would it be better to be deleted, John?”
John made a non-committal noise behind him, and Sherlock knew the moment was over. He left.
***
At half past four, Sherlock swept through the corridors as if he owned them, and just paused for a fraction of a second before entering. He wasn’t ready to give up, not yet. John looked up at his visitor and smiled.
“Sherlock,” he whispered. Then he blinked once, twice. “Where’s Jim?”