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Here is the problem that confronts him at every turn, at nearly every moment of every goddamn day: it turns out he didn’t know Sherlock Holmes nearly as well as he’d thought. He didn’t know him at all.
*
Sherlock Holmes is dead. This is a fact. When John wakes up the morning after his best friend – or, rather, the man whom he had come to consider his best friend, with whom he had been living these past few years, whom he now supposes he cannot really term a best friend since it has become manifestly obvious in the wake of his suicide that John had utterly failed in more than one of the many duties of friendship – throws himself off of a building, he experiences perhaps fifteen seconds’ worth of glorious ignorance. And then he remembers that Sherlock Holmes is dead, and any interest he has in getting out of bed vanishes, as though it had never been there at all.
*
He does get up, of course. He is a practical man. He gets up and shuffles across the hotel room he’d checked himself into the night before, which is so relentlessly sterile and sanitary that he really should never have been able to mistake it for Baker Street, even with his eyes closed, into the toilet. He winds up, somehow by accident, staring at himself in the mirror. His face feels peculiarly unfamiliar to him. It is a shade of grey that the eminently rational part of John that will always be a medical professional identifies as distinctly worrying, but that the rest of him finds considerably less worrying than the weird cast of his eyes, which seem to contain as much feeling as a dead man’s. He blinks once, twice, and a third time before concluding that he can do nothing to make them look any more alive.
He thinks about Sherlock’s eyes, which unlike John’s had actually been a dead man’s eyes, which leads him to think about the blood that he’d seen flowing from Sherlock’s head onto the pavement, which makes him turn and vomit into the toilet bowl, without fuss, until the entire meager contents of his stomach have come back up. He stays kneeling over the toilet for a few more minutes, though, hacking up nothing but phlegm, until he realizes that he’s making a strange kind of howling noise as he retches, entirely unconsciously, so he gets up, wipes off his mouth and rinses it out with a glass of water before brushing his teeth and getting into the shower.
By the time he remembers himself, something like a half-hour must have passed already, because his skin is red and almost scalded and the room is full of steam, which is odd, because he can’t remember feeling anything.
*
It is only in the aftermath of a person’s death, John has come to believe, that you can truly understand what that person meant to you. The idea gets stuck in his brain somehow and he cannot get it out. It is not particularly complicated – it is, in fact, fairly self-evident. But for whatever reason it has never really occurred to him before, at least not with the force or clarity with which it now burrows into his brain. He has applied it retroactively, to his father, who died when he was only thirteen, and then to his mother, who went in the middle of his deployment. It seems valid enough.
The problem with Sherlock – and it amuses John, in a morbid way, to even entertain the notion that there is or has ever been only one “problem with Sherlock” – is that this little aphorism operates both on the emotional and practical levels in his case. The extent to which John’s life has, for these last years, revolved utterly and without exception around Sherlock has become extremely clear to him now that Sherlock – whom he did not know, who threw himself off a building – is gone (by which he means, of course, dead, dead dead dead, and never coming back). Lestrade has called him once, and not again, because he is a coward and because John is also a coward who cannot bear to have a simple conversation with a friend because it might make him feel even guiltier for all of the things that he, like Lestrade, missed in those last hours and days of Sherlock’s life. Molly has not gotten in touch with him, and he is certainly not going to ring her up for a chat – Molly, whose ridiculous devotion to Sherlock was outstripped only by his own. Mrs. Hudson calls him every Sunday at his new flat because she’s worried he’s going to do something stupid. He knows this because she said so, in explicit terms that left nothing to the imagination. I’m worried about you, love, she said. I’m worried about where your head is at. Don’t you go doing anything foolish now, do you hear? I’ve about had enough of that. And the way her voice trembled on the last sentence was enough, they both knew, to ensure that he did nothing of the sort.
He wouldn’t, anyway. He’s not that sort of person. He’s practical. Emotional, yes; sentimental – according to Sherlock, John has excess reserves of sentimentality that can only be matched by women who write novels for Mills & Boon; so yes, John is sentimental, too. But he’s always been practical first. His mother used to say that when his father died she thought he’d go either mad or quiet. He didn’t really do either. He got responsible. That was the mutation of his trauma. He took care of people. His mother, Harry – it didn’t matter that she was older. She was, John had always thought, more sad, and their mother had been more sad, and everybody who counted, it seemed, was more sad than he was, and so it was his job to take care of them. But he doesn’t quite know whether that was true, anymore. He’s beginning to think he was the saddest of all of them.
Now Sherlock is gone – dead, he died, he threw himself off of a building – and John doesn’t have anybody he needs to take care of anymore. There is nobody in particular he needs to pretend for, except himself. Nobody knows him anymore, and perhaps never did.
It is a very frightening thought.
*
Molly does get in touch with him – she shows up at his door, in fact, which is not something he was expecting at all. He stares at her, standing in the doorway, looking uncomfortable, twisting her hands together.
“Hi,” she says. “I was just – do you want to go get coffee? Or tea. I don’t really mind what it is. Um.”
He can’t decide, on such short notice, whether he does or not, but it would be more difficult, in a certain way, to tell her no, to close the door in her face, to extricate himself from her concern, and so he says “All right,” and leaves her standing there while he gets his coat.
They don’t say anything on the walk to the bland, chain café down the street from John’s new place, or while waiting in line to place their orders, or while they’re waiting for them to be finished. Molly’s staring at him in a way that she probably considers subtle but which isn’t, really; it isn’t at all. John can’t help but wonder what she sees. It’s so difficult to know, really, how you look to other people. You can’t ever get outside of yourself. It’s a stupid thought – self-evident, Sherlock would say – would have said – but something about it bothers him. He gets stuck on it, his brain turning it around and around until it hardly means anything anymore.
What did Sherlock think of himself? There is no conceivable way he could have begun to understand how people looked at him. Oh, he knew they hated him, and they often did; he thought they were in awe of him, sometimes, and they sometimes were; but John does not think he ever properly understood that people might look at him and love him, and particularly that they might look at him and see all his flaws (Sherlock was not good at acknowledging that he had flaws, out loud or even to himself, John suspects, but oh, he knew he had them; he attributed far more flaws to himself than he had ever possessed) and still love him. Sherlock could not have possibly understood what John saw when he looked at him.
Finally, they have sat down, and Molly looks like she wants to say something but doesn’t know what, or maybe like she doesn’t know how to say anything at all, so John asks her how she’s been, and watches as her face breaks down and she starts to cry. She’s not a pretty crier, Molly; she looks terrible.
“Here –” he says, helplessly, handing her the stack of napkins he grabbed before sitting down. She takes them and holds them up to her face, not very effectively, while he rummages around for his handkerchief.
“It’s just,” she manages, a few moments later, still hiccoughing, “you shouldn’t – you shouldn’t be asking me that –”
*
Sherlock’s father died – it must have been around the same time that John’s did, because he was younger. How does John know this? Sherlock has certainly never talked about it, not in any real way. Mycroft? No, that doesn’t make sense, either. How? It bothers him, suddenly, this untraceable knowledge – what if he invented it? But he feels certain that he did not. He knows, somehow; he does know. He has thought about it at length before. Sherlock was – what, nine, when his father killed himself? He saw him do it, that was what he told John. He saw him put a bullet in his own temple. Children of suicides are more prone to commit suicide themselves. How had that affected him? The image of his father destroying himself. John doesn’t know where it happened, how it happened. Was there even a gun involved? He can’t remember, possibly he never knew. John’s father died in a traffic accident, nothing so obscene, and he certainly wasn’t there to witness it. He went responsible. He went caring. Sherlock, Sherlock was the one who went mad, and went loud. Sherlock, who John knew craved affection like a dying animal craves water, craves sustenance. Nine years old – no father and a mother whom he’d still be calling Mummy in twenty-five years’ time. He can see him, almost, Sherlock, as he might have been at nine, at twelve, at seventeen; he always looks so lonely.
I was lonely, too, John wishes he could tell him. I was alone for such a long time. He’s never realized before, he doesn’t think, quite how alone he has always been, even in the company of friends. How tired he was for all those many long years of responsibility. Until – until –
Sherlock at seventeen is the vision that haunts him the most. He is the one who can see what’s coming, not in specific but in broad, general terms. His misery is concentrated, though never really understood. Sherlock understood so very little about himself, ultimately.
Or at least, that is what John has thought for – quite some time. It may not be true. Nothing that he thought was true was necessarily the case. Don’t you see? Sherlock Holmes is dead. He threw himself off of a building.
*
This has nothing to do, of course, with Sherlock being a fraud. Nothing could be more absurd, as John knows perfectly well. That any paper has the gall to publish such rubbish gnaws at him daily. Every morning, when he wakes up and remembers that Sherlock is dead, he is forced to remember not long after that in addition to Sherlock’s absence he must also contend with the presence of any number of vicious, hateful lies about him and his character that John does not as yet have the tenacity to disprove.
He does not feel like he has much in the way of tenacity at all, in fact. He does not suffer from many of the practical symptoms of depression – not bathing, not eating, drinking in excess, never leaving the house, et cetera – but his shoulders and arms feel weighted down from the inside, as though his bones have turned into lead, and although he does not fail to continue going through the motions of his life – such as it is, now that Sherlock has run rampant through it and vanished without bothering to pick up the pieces – he knows perfectly well what is happening to him. He feels, sometimes, like he is watching himself perform some kind of mordant piece of theater for an audience of one, or perhaps zero. He feels as though the world is beyond an arm’s reach away, and therefore utterly inaccessible. He stands in the shower for far too long every morning and his water bill will suffer as a result. He could not possibly bring himself to care.
No, the problem with Sherlock is not that he was a fraud but that he was a suicide. That, John cannot wrap his mind around. That he cannot understand at all.
Who was the man you knew? an unpleasant voice in his head asks him at least five times a day. Who was he? And how were you so stupidly, incomprehensibly wrong about him?
This is the problem, then: this. Every memory he has of Sherlock has become about his decision to throw himself off of a building. Every one. He cannot look back at anything Sherlock said or did without wondering: was that a clue? Was that a sign? Was he thinking about it even then? Or even if he wasn’t, if nothing about it was premeditated, the fact remains that somewhere inside of him resided some impulse, some urge, a kind of self-destruction that went far beyond hypodermic needles and a seven percent solution.
You missed it, the voice tells him, almost gleeful. There were so many signs, so many obvious signs he left for you, and you missed them, and now he’s dead.
John has come to conclude that he was never nearly as good a friend as he always liked to think.
*
“I liked him because he was smart,” Molly tells him, once she’s finished mauling his handkerchief. “That was all my mum wanted, was for us to be smart, and I was the smartest one. And I wasn’t even that clever.”
“You’re clever, Molly,” John tells her, because she is; she’s awfully clever, and very good at her job; she’s lovely, really, in an almost pitiable way. Almost pitiable, but not quite.
“Thanks,” she whispers, and pauses. “You are, too.”
John snorts. He’s not clever. He’s never been remotely clever. If he were clever, he would understand things better. He would know why Sherlock did what he did – he would have been able to stop it from happening. He would not merely have observed; he would have deduced.
“Not really,” he says, without looking at her.
“Sherlock couldn’t have put up with anybody that long if they weren’t clever,” she says. Which isn’t true: Sherlock had to put up with people who weren’t as clever as he was every day, every time he talked to anybody except Mycroft, and Irene Adler, maybe.
“He told me –” John starts, hesitant. “He said I wasn’t a – a particularly luminous person, but that as a – conductor of light, I was unbeatable.” He pauses. “I wasn’t sure whether to take it as a compliment or not.”
When he looks up at her, Molly is smiling through the streaky remnants of her tears. “I think that’s just about the nicest thing I ever heard him say about anybody,” she says, and John feels the ghost of a smile grace his face for the first time in a long time. It’s not going to last long – by the time he gets home it’ll be like a dream, half-forgotten already. But it feels nice, all the same.
*
The problem – and oh, there are too many problems, too many to count; there has never been just one – is that John Watson, without the assistance and influence of one Mr. Sherlock Holmes, lives an almost shockingly mundane life. He’s taken shifts at the clinic again, to keep himself from going legitimately mad, but it has become very difficult for him to care about his work, or the patients he is supposed to be caring for. He does care about them, but it is in a distant, abstract way – he cares for them because they are people and he knows that they have their own lives and that they matter. But he does not, himself, feel moved by their distress. He smiles at them, just like always, he even manages to joke around a bit with the littlest ones, who don’t like going to the doctor because everything about hospitals scares them, but he doesn’t care. He hasn’t shot a gun in a long time. This pernicious boredom that he feels is far worse than any of the prolonged, violent traumas he’s endured in his time. Perversely, this makes him feel closer to Sherlock, somehow. I understand you a bit better now, I think, he tells him silently, during a visit to his grave. There’s a man visiting somebody else, a few rows away – too close, that is, for John to talk to Sherlock aloud comfortably.
He finds himself going back over old cases of Sherlock’s obsessively, in his head. He understands, again on some abstract level, that what Sherlock did was important to a lot of people – that he saved lives, and livelihoods, and fortunes; it wouldn’t be too much of an exaggeration to suggest that he kept much of London safe all by himself. But just as he can’t find it in himself to care about his patients, the plights of the people Sherlock helped seem small and irrelevant to him now.
What was the point? If Sherlock was – if he was – if he was just going to kill himself – if he was going to leave John alone – and if John was going to die, someday, probably a terrifying number of years in the future (is it always going to be like this? Is every single day going to be as difficult as this one?), then did any of it matter? It mattered to the people he helped, what he did – John knows this. But then, they’re all going to die, too.
That, after all, is what people do!
This line of thinking is not productive. John knows this. It is doing him no good to go round in circles this way. He needs to snap out of it. He needs to deal with his life, with his problems. He is a responsible person. He is stoical. He has never yet met an obstacle he couldn’t overcome, even if only by slow degrees.
But no matter how many times he tells himself this, he still finds himself thinking it. And his arms still feel like lead. And he hates, he hates getting up in the morning. Because there are no days left when Sherlock is alive. He has used them all up. He was greedy. He should have hoarded them, deployed them slowly enough to make them last until the final golden years of his life. But he did not. They are all gone now.
*
He does not know whether to be surprised or not, exactly, by the fact that it is Molly who sticks to him like a burr, who won’t let up and won’t let up and won’t let up, because on the one hand Molly is the most loyal creature on the earth, and on the other hand it was never John she was loyal to; it was always, always Sherlock.
Maybe, John sometimes thinks, it’s just that she’s lonely, that she misses him, and he’s sure that’s part of it, too, but it can’t be all of it; no, she is watching him, she is watching out for him, like she’s worried, like she cares.
John is not sure what to make of this.
In a distant way, he cares about her, too; he wants her to be healthy and happy and loved; he wants her to have a better life than she has had, falling in love with a man who was fundamentally incapable of loving her back, a man who was one day going to go up to the roof of the building where she worked and throw himself off, a man whose cadaver would one day come to her, a man she would autopsy. Life has been unfair to him and Molly both, but he has nobody to blame but himself for these most recent tragedies, and she never did anything worse than loving somebody ill-advisedly.
He knows he feels all of these things – he does, he does – but he also knows he can’t actually feel the feeling, can’t touch it; it exists independently of him and yet inside of him, somehow, and maybe it is just compounded into the general air of melancholy that pervades his every waking moment, but he feels deficient in this, too: that he cannot even pity her as purely, as genuinely, as he should.
The thing about Molly, though, is that she listens with such fixity, with such unbelievably – almost unbearably – focused attention. John never noticed this, before; it makes it all the more perplexing and sad that he fell in love with Sherlock, because she has something of him in her, he thinks; she has some sharp glimmer of observation that Sherlock had in spades. Or maybe that’s just John projecting Sherlock onto everything, seeing fragments of him everywhere he is not, because he cannot possibly bear to continue existing otherwise. Sherlock could not have been as unique as he seemed. He came from the same Britain that John did; he too came from parents and was damaged by them, as everybody is; he too was lonely and proud and self-loathing. These are, John knows, common qualities. These are qualities he himself possesses.
But in Sherlock all of these things became more interesting, more compelling; they made John’s heart ache in ways that made him (make him) uncomfortable, in ways that he does not really recognize. And so he clings to the sharp edge of Molly’s gaze because that, that was like Sherlock; but it does not make him care about her more. It only serves to remind him that Sherlock (infinitely more interesting, more compelling than anybody else on the planet, living or dead) no longer has any of those things. He is a body rotting in the ground. He is gone. He is gone, gone, gone.
Molly never pries but her silence ferrets things out of him, somehow, things he knows are inside of him but that he doesn’t like thinking about; he says things, sometimes, that he would never say to a therapist, never say to somebody who wasn’t Sherlock; he says – he says –
*
“I just wish – I just wish I knew why,” he says, why, why, why Sherlock has done this to him, to himself – why, for what possible reason has he left him here all alone again, chewing on ash and steel wool, lying awake at night, waking up in the morning and having to realize, again and again, that he is dead and that he killed himself, oh, he hates him for it, he hates him so much he can barely contain his hatred; it’s gnawing at him from the inside out; he doesn’t understand it. He doesn’t understand his hatred. He has never been this angry about anything, at anybody, and maybe that’s because he never loved anybody like this, either; he would always have thrown himself in front of a bullet to save somebody but only for Sherlock would he have done so with a kind of effortlessness, a pure and unadulterated joy at the sacrifice. But he could not step in front of Sherlock to save him, because there was no bullet, there was no aggressor save Sherlock himself, and John could not divide the Sherlock he knew and the foreign Sherlock he clearly never knew at all; he could not stand between those two selves and give himself up. He wishes he could have. He would have done it without thinking twice.
*
The one time Molly does ask, really asks something, he’s not prepared for it and he is, he is, because it’s the question that she was always going to ask; it’s the question John has been trying to answer all this time; it’s the worst question and the most necessary.
“You two weren’t,” she says. “I mean – everybody wondered –”
He looks down at his coffee. He doesn’t really see it.
“No,” he tells her.
“You wish you had, though,” and in the end it turns out it’s not a question at all; it’s a statement of fact. And he can’t say anything at all in return.
*
But of course, of course he wishes that; he wishes a lot of things, but maybe that most of all, if he’s being selfish and stupid; he should want Sherlock back one way or another most of all, and he does, he does; he’d give himself up in an instant if that would do the trick. But what he really wants most of all is to have curled his hand around the back of Sherlock’s skull, to have looked him straight in the eye and told him he loved him, loved him properly, every part of him. And maybe it’s not so selfish after all, because he finds, thinking about it, that really what he wants out of this is not anything for himself, but rather to be able to know that Sherlock had known, just once, that he was loved, that he was worthy of being loved, that it was possible. Maybe that would have changed things. Maybe. It’s impossible to say.
*
When, in two years’ time, Sherlock comes back from the dead, flies back up, away from the pavement, when he knocks on John’s door and John opens the door and sees him there, looking worse for the wear, blackening bruises ringing his eye, hair shorn off except a quarter-inch, maybe, he will take him inside, and sit him down on the couch, and go fetch his medicine kit without saying anything, and he still won’t say anything while he looks after Sherlock’s face and his left hand, which isn’t looking too much better; he’ll carefully pull Sherlock’s coat off and roll his sleeve up to get a better look, and only once he’s applied all the appropriate antiseptic cream and bandages, only then will he look up at Sherlock, who will be watching him with eyes that remind John of the seventeen-year-old Sherlock he’s always imagined, fearful and unbelieving, waiting, always, to be rejected, to be sent away, to be nullified.
It’s only then that John will allow himself to touch the soft dark hair on Sherlock’s damaged, battered head, and tell him that he’s going to bloody kill him in the morning, and that he’s got a lot of explaining to do, and also that he loves him, he loves him, he loves –