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denial
The thing is, everything about life with Sherlock Holmes is so steeped in the unbelievable that it's hard to know what's actually real. The thing is, Sherlock routinely does the impossible, and it's part of what John loves about him.
The thing is, John knows Sherlock, actually knows him, and there's no way he lied about all this, not with them living together, not with them spending practically every waking moment together, and John writing it all down because sometimes Sherlock's mind moves so quickly that this was the only way John can sort it out and make it all make sense. And it would be ten times more difficult to pretend to be that clever than it would be to actually be that clever, so why even bother? Especially if it wasn't for the fame or the money or the knighthoods or any of it. What would be the point?
"It's all a trick," Sherlock had said. "Just a magic trick."
And that's the truth, the real truth. All of this, everything Sherlock told him on that rooftop, it's all misdirection. Sherlock toppling over the edge is simply sleight of hand, and John just has to wait for Sherlock to finally reveal himself again. John just has to wait for Sherlock to do the impossible once more.
So he leaves the hospital that night, goes to bed, and looks for Sherlock curled up on the sofa the next morning, finally having crashed after all this madness. He goes down to the shops for beans and bread and listens for the sound of Sherlock's violin as he makes his way back up the stairs. He wakes up in the middle of the night quite suddenly and holds his breath, waiting for Sherlock to run up, burst into the room, and demand that he get dressed at once so they can go dashing across London in pursuit of some smuggler or kidnapper or murderer.
John knows Sherlock. And Sherlock wouldn't just leave him like this, with nothing, even if it was all lies. So John waits.
The thing is, Sherlock never shows.
bargaining
Every time he visits Sherlock's grave, he asks. Pleads. Begs.
"Come back. If anyone could do it, you could because I don't believe a fucking word of that nonsense in the papers. So just do it. And I promise I won't nag you about the shopping or make you do the washing up or make a fuss about the experiments or your moods or the violin in the middle of the night. I actually like the violin in the middle of the night. It was nice. I never told you that. I'll tell you that if you come back. I'll tell you that every time. Just come home. Please, Sherlock. Please."
There's never any response for the cold headstone before him.
anger
It's the bloody chair that does it, empty and sullen in the front room. The sleek, sharp angles taunt him as he sits each day with nothing to fill his hours, no Sherlock to fill his life. He shoves it in the corner in the middle of yet another sleepless night, buries it beneath old newspapers, and then old case files (and everything is old these days, isn't it, because everything just stopped when--), and finally everything of Sherlock's he can find is being tossed in that corner like if he can only confine Sherlock's presence in the flat to that one bit of space, it won't hurt every time John turns a corner and sees some other reminder. It won't hurt every time he opens the fridge and finds the jar with the human tongue that he can't bring himself to throw away because Sherlock might still need them, but then, no, that goes to and he whips it in to the corner, the smashing sound of the glass jagged against his nerves, but god, it helps somehow, so he does it again. Petri dishes. Flasks. Sherlock's favorite mug, the one he never called his favorite like preferring one to another was absurd, but the one he reached for first every time. A dusty Latin dictionary that's been in the kitchen since August, and John refused to put it back on the shelf on principle because Sherlock needed to learn to clean up after himself for once, and then it became a battle of wills over who would give in and finally put it in its rightful place, only John's lost now, hasn't he? He throws everything he can get his hands on until the entire flat is wrecked, and he stands in the middle of it all, sucking in quick, sharp breaths, hands shaking, and wishing he never met Sherlock Holmes because even that miserable emptiness, that hollowness in his stomach that he couldn't drink or sleep away when he first came back, the long stretch of empty hours that greeted him each morning and the cold, familiar weight of his gun in his hand when he picked it up each night, like a ritual, like a prayer--all of it had to be better than this.
depression
"Are you talking to someone?" Sarah asks.
John slowly spins his coffee cup on the dingy café table and does not drink. It's the first time he's left the flat in weeks. Every breath he takes of the stale, dark air hurts, but it's nothing compared to the bustle and noise of the London streets all moving too fast around him.
He shrugs. "I'm talking to you."
"John." She stills his fiddling with a hand over his and waits for him to look up at her. It takes a moment. "It might help."
"Nothing helps."
"The only things you've given a proper go are vast amounts of cheap lager and smashing up your flat. Forgive me if I question your coping methods." She squeezes his hand and offers him a small, crooked smile full of sympathy and worry and years of medical training. "You should talk to someone."
He takes a deep breath. And another. And another. They don't make things any easier. "I don't know how to talk about this," he tells her, his voice scraping along his throat, raw and disused. "The things I want to say... I can't say them. I can't. I've tried and I..." He winces because he can't even say that he can't say these things without stumbling over the words.
Sarah doesn't offer platitudes or encouragement. She doesn't tell him it will get easier or that she understands what he's going through. She doesn't say that she understands what Sherlock meant to him because no one did, not her, not Sherlock, not even John until suddenly Sherlock was gone. Instead, she sits with him and ignores her own coffee in favor of letting him squeeze her hands too tightly in his own as he struggles through every inhale and exhale.
She walks him the two blocks back to Baker Street, and it's pathetic that that's as far as he was able to get away from a place that he doesn't want to be in the first place. He can't seem to make himself leave, though.
"Thursday," Sarah tells him at the door. "I'll come round after work. I'll bring dinner."
"You don't have to--"
"You're not eating, and you've got a beautiful woman standing in front of you, and you refuse to talk to her. That's not the John Watson I know."
But he's not the John Watson she knows. He's a John Watson she never met, the one who doesn't quite fit anywhere.
"I'm worried is all," she says. "And I'm not the only one."
"I know."
"So. Thursday?"
"Thursday," he agrees, even though it's the last thing he feels like doing. "I'll be here."
She gives him a quick, uncertain hug, her hands smoothing down his lapels when she pulls away. "Think about what I said, yeah? And call me if you need anything. Or even if you don't, and you just want to do that creepy breathing thing over the phone that nutters do when they can't talk to women."
She's trying to make him laugh, so he offers a reasonable facsimile of a smile even though it feels wrong.
She kisses his cheek and turns to head for the station. He watches until she disappears around the corner, the stairs of Baker Street a challenge he has to work himself up to facing. His leg is stiff from being tucked under the café table for so long, which is ridiculous because there's nothing actually wrong with the bloody thing. But he leans heavily against the wall as he makes his way up to the flat and before he lets himself collapse into the sofa for a night of mindless telly that he won't even pay attention to, he digs a box out of the back of the closet. Finds his old cane. Finds Ella's card.
He doesn't call that day. Or the next. The card is still sitting there Thursday evening when Sarah shows up at his door with enough curry to feed ten people for a week. He sees the moment when she notices the card on the kitchen table as she helps him pull out plates, and she doesn't ask. She simply clears it out of the way along with a pile of old newspapers and pauses to stick it beneath a magnet on the fridge, front and center, before dumping the papers in the bin.
When she turns around and finds him watching her, she offers him an encouraging smile. "Maybe next week," she says with a shrug.
"Yeah. Maybe," he agrees.
She doesn't mention it again, but three weeks and seven half-eaten dinners later, he finally picks up the phone.
acceptance
It's a year before John wakes up, stares blearily at the ceiling as he musters enough courage to get out of bed, and he tells himself, Enough. He makes tea and toast and does the washing up for the first time since...whenever Mrs. Hudson last came by and tidied while he slept through most of the day. He makes an appointment with Ella for the first time in months, having given up after the first few seemed to only make him more miserable. He doesn't leave the flat that day, but by the time the sun sets, he's filled three black bin liners with rubbish, hoovered, and made a list of groceries with the hope that he'll be able to convince himself to go down to the shops in the morning.
At the end of the day, he's exhausted. He aches in ways he shouldn't from so little exertion, particularly for someone who used to keep pace with Sherlock Holmes. He eats leftover takeaway cold from the carton, climbs into the bed, and tells himself, It's a start.
It's two years before the limp goes away, before this casual thing with that friend of Sarah's he started seeing stops being quite so casual, and the flat starts to fill with Mary's things, her clothes, her shampoo, lesson plans for her class, and her favorite kind of tea, until Sherlock's presence is all but erased. It's two years before he takes the considerable amount of money that Sherlock left him (couldn't afford Baker Street on his own? The lying sod.) and buys a house for himself like a proper grown up, albeit one who is absolutely running away from a flat full of too many memories that sting and ache and bite at unsuspecting times. There are good days, days when he wakes up and the first thought in his head isn't of Sherlock and how he isn't there. And there are bad days, those days when he wakes, having forgotten somehow in the night, and it's a long, glorious, aching five minutes before he remembers again. He squeezes his eyes shut against a ceiling that is not Baker Street and a life that still feels unfamiliar, a life that he still battles with daily, and takes a few deep breaths before moving on.
Sometimes he wakes to Mary's hand on his chest, Mary's hair brushing beneath his chin, Mary's lips pressing a kiss beneath his navel and lower. Sometimes he wakes in the middle of the night, gasping, shoving out of bed before he's even aware of it, and she sits with him in the dark until the tension in his body slowly eases and the blood and bone and sand and gunmetal flashing behind his eyelids fade. Sometimes he wakes to a bed just recently vacated, and rolls over and breathes her in on the sheets until she returns, and she always does. She does not fill the hole. She does not try. But she makes a space inside him, against all odds, that will echo just as empty should she leave as the one Sherlock left behind.
"Stay?" he asks her, and he does it properly, with a ring, something Sherlock never would have accepted, and she promises, "Always," just as Sherlock never could.
It's three years before there is a man at the door, just a little bit wild-eyed, just a little bit tense in a way that doesn't suit him. He struggles to hold John's gaze, his hands clenched in tight fists with with no coat, no suit to hide them in. He looks like a student with shorter, lighter hair, faded jeans, and a stretched out jumper that hangs nearly to his knees, but his face is weary in a way John doesn't remember, his movements a bit cautious, a bit slow, a bit careful in a way Sherlock never used to be. John can only stare, his voice refusing to work, his heart beating wildly in his chest.
Sherlock glances him over, looks down at the tulips Mary planted the week before, and clears his throat abruptly. "I shouldn't have come," he says and turns to head back down the path. John catches his arm.
"Don't you dare," he rasps out, and Sherlock doesn't.
"You... How?" John asks.
Sherlock looks down at where John's fingers are curled around his bicep. He doesn't try to pull away, and John makes no move to release him. "It's complicated," he says.
"Don't," John warns. "Don't treat me like I'm an idiot. Not after three years of this."
"I never said you wouldn't understand," Sherlock explains softly. "I said it was complicated. Too complicated for a doorstep. If you cared to invite me in--"
John shakes his head. "I don't know if I'm ready to do that. Not yet." Sherlock starts to pull away, and John tightens his grip on Sherlock's arm as he rushes to try to explain. "Through that door is life without you. Life after you. It's a good life, Sherlock, and it took a lot of work to get it. I'm not sure yet if you could fit in there somehow, or if you'll send it all crashing down the second you cross the threshold." He takes a deep breath. "And I'm not sure which I'd prefer."
Sherlock nods and looks away. "I shouldn't have come," he says again.
"Stop. Stop that," John says, and he tugs Sherlock forward until he can wrap his arms around him, feels the heart beating in Sherlock's chest, feels the surprised breath he sucks in, feels warm flesh beneath a scratchy jumper, and forbids all of him from going anywhere until John is good and ready to let him go.
Sherlock goes stiff at first, but then carefully brings his arms up around John and returns the embrace, squeezes just a bit too tight, and god, Sherlock is alive.
"Why? Why did you do it? Don't tell me it was complicated."
"There was a gun to your head. I didn't have a choice." And that is remarkably uncomplicated because in that second John knows he would have done the same for Sherlock even if there wasn't a chance in hell of him actually getting away with it.
"And now?"
Sherlock takes a deep breath, and John can feel it through every inch of him. "Now there isn't. Now it's done."
John nods against Sherlock's shoulder, and when he realizes his cheeks are wet, he pulls back and quickly skims a hand down his face. He can feel Sherlock watching him, the shrewdness of his eyes taking in every detail, the slight tremor in his hands, the stiffness in his jaw as he forces himself to take slow, even breaths, the lines on his face that weren't there three years ago.
"It was all true, wasn't it? Moriarty. He was real. And you...you're cleverer than anyone, and that's real, right?"
Sherlock smiles a bit, but he still looks as brittle as John feels. "I never lied to you. Not until that day. And even then, only because I had to."
"You lied all the time, you berk," John says with a broken laugh.
"Yes, obviously, but not about anything important," Sherlock says. "Don't you see?"
"I do."
"But I had to--" Sherlock blinks and sounds genuinely surprised when he says, "You do?"
"You still have a lot of explaining to do," John says, "but yeah. I think I do."
"Oh. Good," Sherlock says. "That's good." He looks at the door behind John and swallows. "But I still can't come in."
"No. Not yet."
Sherlock presses his lips together and looks around. "Shall we...go for a walk then?"
It's a warm Sunday afternoon, clear-skied and dry for the first time in three days, and Sherlock Holmes is alive so John says, "All right."
He expects Sherlock to begin his explanations, but he doesn't. They walk side by side along the pavement with no real destination in mind, and it's good, not having to process it all, the lies and the waiting and whatever awful things Sherlock must have done in the past three years without John there by his side reminding him to be human. It's good to have a moment to process that Sherlock is actually here, walking beside him, their shoulders brushing occasionally. It's good to have a chance to just get used to the way the air changes when Sherlock is around. He had forgotten.
"You can't do this again," John says finally. "I won't survive it, Sherlock."
Sherlock glances over at him out of the corner of his eye before returning his gaze to the road ahead. "I can't make you any promises."
"After all this? Not even one? 'I, Sherlock Holmes, won't fake my death and disappear without a word ever again.' Doesn't seem too much to ask."
"It is," Sherlock snaps, stepping out to block John's way. "If your life is in danger, know that I am going to do whatever it is within my power to do to save it. Even if it means offering my own life in exchange, faked or otherwise. I'm surprised you find that so difficult to understand given your own indulgences in sentiment."
John swallows around the lump that's suddenly lodged in his throat and whispers, "Okay."
Sherlock turns as if to start walking again, but stops himself. His looks somewhere around John's chest as he speaks, unable to properly meet his gaze. "If it's any consolation, if I had to do it all again, I doubt very much that I would survive it either. But that wouldn't be enough to stop me."
It's hardly consolation, but it's something John appreciates just the same, that every bit of these last three years wore down Sherlock just as much as they did John, that they both reached bottom at some point and it's nothing short of a miracle that they're both standing here, together, on the other side of it all.
"Okay," John says again.
Sherlock gives a sharp nod. "So long as we understand each other."
He starts walking again, and John falls in step beside him.
"Still, though," John says when he's properly found his voice. "Don't do it again?"
Sherlock smiles properly, his eyes wrinkling at the corners, and he looks over at John. "I'll do my best."