Archive of Our Own ^beta

The Personal Blog of Dr. John H. Watson

In most instances, when someone says that there are things they wish they had said to a loved one before they died, it is because they fear that person did not know. Such things don't really apply to Sherlock. When it comes came to him, he knew everything. No--more than everything; just plain too much, really. Too much for one man, one brain. He was a genius. Anyone who has had ever met him knew as much. His pride and boyish delight in being clever were impossible to disguise and I validated every bit of pleasure he derived from his quick deductions with my astonishment and words of praise and wonder. It's like trying not to shout when something jumps in front of you; some things are just automatic. So incredible was his mind that I could not hide from the world how amazing I found him to be. How on earth could I ever expect to hide anything from Sherlock himself?

No, Sherlock knew. Up there; on the edge of that roof at Saint Bart's. He knew. He knew with his voice shaking with the effort it took to lie to me, he knew with the tremble of tears and the sniffle of snot ringing in my ear. He knew and in that beautiful mind of his, so full of everything, it did not amount to more than the knowledge that made him jump. I am so angry. Not so much at him as at the world. Because I know why a man with that much intellect and pride would kill himself and it has very little to do with a tarnished reputation. This world is just too boring for the likes of Sherlock Holmes if he is no longer employed.

I know why he lied to me--the real lie, not the false one hidden within it. He wanted me to hate him. He wanted to make it easier on me to live in a world without him. Of course he had to know. It's an odd sort of double bluff: him lying, me knowing it's a lie, him knowing I know but continuing with it anyway. I think sometimes that I was what made him cry, not the thought of death. If he were resolute in his decision, he wouldn’t have a reason to cry.

I know he worried I would turn on him and believe in Moriarty's fable. Maybe the idiot thought I'd believe it coming from his own lips. I know that pompous git better than maybe he thought I did. Or maybe he knew I'd know even before he started and just wanted to reaffirm for himself just how much faith I put in him. I don't know. I'm not a man for these sorts of deductions. I can't say what goes went on in that head of his. All I do know is that his "note" was for my benefit alone. I was never really meant to tell the world he was a fraud. I was meant to understand and move on and to put my hate and anger into him and not the world. I'm sorry, but I can't do that.

If he were a normal man, I could hate him. I could call the fear of prison and of having to change careers something plebeian and stupid and shout at ghosts till my throat bled for the selfish stupidity of it all. Sherlock's leap saved us both from a much slower end. He'd have gone mad, he'd have torn himself to pieces out of boredom.Cocaine, cigarettes, megalomaniac delusions driving him to do just what Moriarty said he had—all of it just to have something to do, and me as the surrogate strength of his will to hold it together and be the man I knew. I've seen him bored on many occasions. Unpredictable does not begin to describe it. The things he conjured up just to fill his mind with something ranged from insanity to absurd. It used to make me nervous. I think someone like him really could die from boredom. And I think someone like me would watch it happen like a slow moving train-wreck, expecting a miracle and so very out of my depth. You can make a starving man eat even the foods he hates but you cannot fill an idle mind with just any sort of fodder and expect to resurrect a genius from the pits of despair. Sherlock was a dying man the instant Moriarty began to play this game. Selfishly, I want more of my life to be in the company of my best friend, even if the quality of that life would have been the most hellish torture imaginable. Sherlock did me a favor in making it a quick death but he can’t make me resent him more than I do the world. Why couldn't London see what I saw? For a moment, it did. For a moment everyone loved him and now it's as though everyone has forgotten what it was that made him so special in the first place. We create our gods and our heroes and then we destroy them.

Adjusting to him being gone is worse than adjusting to being back in normal society. I've seen the world in microscopic clarity, multicolored in her details and so full and exotic a place that my normal eyes can no longer see what the world is like for us normal people. I'm used to his narrative, his description of my surroundings which painted for us a separate reality. I'm accustomed to his views and the way he sculpted mine. Now all I see is a grey world full of plain people and know the instant I open my eyes that I have missed the greatest parts of it through my own failure to observe as he could. I can't just go back. There's a reason why Lestrade always came back to Sherlock with more. Once you see it, once you see him and hear him and know him, you can't just move on. He is a drug and there is no substitute, no placebo, nothing in this world that can recreate the feeling of being with him.

I miss my best friend. And the things I never said, the things I still can't say, I have to believe he knew. Everyone else did. I hate his mercy but I can't hate him. I just want him back.

This blog is in memory of the greatest man I've ever known. This entry belongs here as part of the story that I began writing all that time ago. This is my note, I guess. You don’t normally find a homicide note but he took the better part of my own life when he took his own. That life deserves its own eulogy even if it is buried in the same plot.

You know, he was right. My writing is a little on the romantic side. I don’t think there is a scientific way to go about describing life after the death of your best mate, though. Sorry, Sherlock. Guess you’ll just have to hate this entry too.

 

-Dr. John H. Watson
August 27th, 2012