Work Text:
Sometimes all John can do is make a list.
Mostly they’re just jumbled words and made-up shorthand, notes taken while Sherlock rattles off a deduction at the speed of light. Sometimes they don’t make sense, but as time goes on, John becomes more efficient at judging which bits to record and which to simply ask Sherlock to repeat later. It’s the sentiment and filler that his companion erases, the small parts of the story that make it readable for an audience, make them invest instead of clicking the back button.
On certain days John’s notebook is kinder than others. There are times when all he writes is ‘absolute cock’, but these are balanced by pages and pages of platitudes. His use of the word amazing becomes indulgent, repeated so much it becomes redundant in describing the singular phenomenon of the man he is attempting to capture.
Instead, John tries to tie his astonishment to physical attributes – the way Sherlock’s infinite irises turn a slightly deeper shade of glacier blue when he laughs, the crinkles that cut valleys between his eyebrows when confronted with some sentiment he doesn’t understand. An entire afternoon is spent trying to accurately express the way Sherlock tips his chin when he’s about to tear someone down, John writing and re-writing the sentence, removing the parts that make him seem obsessive, until really it’s nothing at all.
On a rainy Tuesday sat at his slowly dying laptop, the cursor blinking at him from the middle of their latest case blog, John decides to open another document.
He takes out the empty USB stick in his pocket and pushes it in. For a few tentative seconds the ancient machine doesn’t know what to do with this new intrusion, but eventually it settles and John begins to write. The words flow quicker than his fingers can type, stumbling over the keys until his page is full of tiny wiggly red lines.
It doesn’t matter though, this isn’t for publication. Not yet, anyway.
When John looks at his watch again, over an hour has passed. Sherlock will be back from the morgue soon, so he scans the mess of words in front of him one final time. Somehow he’s filled pages with his rambling, collections of memories and observations that only make sense to him. It’s all the parts of their days together than John can’t publicise, even to Sherlock himself. John scrubs a hand over his face, groaning at the lyrical way he’s encapsulated his life with an extraordinary man. There’s no adventure there, nothing that would interest any of their fans.
One entire paragraph is dedicated to the first time Sherlock finally made his tea correctly, the early morning light falling across his face all golden, making him appear soft and sad. He talks about the man’s protective arms around Mrs Hudson’s small frame, the delicate press of his lips to the top of her head as she leant into him. The way Sherlock’s fingers shook, frantic and struggling to unstrap the explosives lining John’s coat by the side of a pool. He mentions those hands a lot, actually. The steadiness of them when Sherlock is poised at the kitchen table, moving from one slide to the next, the strength of them when he’s throwing himself over railings or pulling them into alleyways, the purposeful gentleness of his palm when he leans over John’s shoulder to read his paper.
It reads like poetry, not prose.
John clicks the save button and stares blankly at the title space. Sherlock, he writes, and closes the laptop just as the door to Baker Street swings open.
//
Some years later, John opens the document again.
Rosie is asleep, the baby monitor emitting soft tiny snores as he sits at his kitchen table. The glass of whisky next to the keyboard is almost empty by the time he manages to summon the courage to read his own words.
He hasn’t spoken to Sherlock for eight days. Has only seen him, secretly, through the gap in the bedroom curtain as he ignored the doorbell.
It’s almost been too easy, to be apart. John just pretends the man is dead, which is incredibly simple to do. He’s had lots of practice, after all. The grief slips over him like a comfort, pooling to his stomach into the ocean of loss that already churns there.
John reads, the glare of the laptop making his retinas sting.
When he reaches the end there’s a tear slowly carving down his cheek, just the one he allows to tremble from his eye. Most of what he’s written was typed by someone else, he’s sure, a version of John from long ago who still believed that Sherlock could save the both of them.
He gets up and takes the laptop over to his printer. John has to hit it a few times but eventually it eats the paper being fed to it, slowly painting his words into black and white reality.
“Goodbye” John says, to nothing.
He scribbles his own name at the bottom, then folds the paper in two. Tomorrow, he’ll give it to Molly. She’ll hand it to Sherlock and it will all be over, the weight of those words will disappear into the man’s mind and finally, John will be able to sleep.
Except he won’t. Because John never gets what he wants, and his insomnia can’t be cured by breaking someone else’s heart.
He will try, though.