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Sherlock is standing in the spotlight.
He is standing in the spotlight and raising his arms above his head and looking back at John, who is staring with mouth open and eyes wide and hands dumb at his sides, stock still and in the line of fire. Sherlock shouts, half-hysterical, “Get away from me, John!” and John doesn’t move.
There are a dozen armed police and any one of them might shoot, even now with the handgun lying uselessly on the patio. If John makes a sudden movement, if John reaches for him, it would only take a single burst of gunfire to make this all for naught.
He shouldn’t have brought him, he should not have brought John.
When John finally comes back into the moment he startles forward and Sherlock’s breath catches in his ribs, but John stops himself, meets Sherlock's eyes and cries out, "Christ, Sherlock!" Over the microphone Mycroft is giving the order to stand fire but there’s a frantic edge in his voice and Sherlock needs to get away from John because the order might not stick.
Sherlock turns into the wind from the rotor blades and it buffets his hair, whips the length of the greatcoat out behind him, stings his eyes into watering, fails to carry him away.
The heel of his palm is still reverberating with the jolt of the handgun.
A flash cuts across his vision and through the night he can just make out the thin threads of red laser boresights. His stomach twists and he knows they’re aiming at him, dotting his face and chest and hands with at least a dozen pale red lights. He knows without looking that at least one light is aimed beyond him and god, he shouldn't have, he shouldn’t have brought John.
"Oh Christ, Sherlock," John says again, and Sherlock feels irritation rise alongside horror because John sounds as though Sherlock has merely lost his mind, as though he doesn’t realise what Sherlock has given him in that one resounding shot.
There wasn’t another way, didn't John realise?
It was all or nothing and they couldn’t walk away from this without retaliation, and now that they know there is never any proof beyond what would appear in tomorrow's paper it was hardly a choice at all. Sherlock's miscalculations are still searing through his mind, a parachuting sensation of having been wrong leaving a familiar gritty ache in his chest. He should have been better, he should have known, and he should not have brought John, because now John will always remember this, will always be tainted with this, the sociopathic friend who fired a round into a man's forehead, who jumped off a building, who gave everything, desperate and pathetic, so that John could live.
Sherlock turns to face him again and the sight of anguish and horror on John's face turns his tone cold, because how can John not realise that there wasn’t any other way? "Give my love to Mary," he instructs, and John’s hands fall a little with a disbelieving breath. "Tell her she’s safe now."
The pulsing of the rotor blades drowns John out as he tries to say Sherlock’s name. Sherlock can just barely make out his stuttering gasp, his voice caught behind his teeth, and Sherlock is grateful, really, because it doesn’t matter what John might have to say about it and he doesn't want to hear John berating him about impulsive decisions, not now, not when it no longer matters.
Magnussen’s body is splayed out on the concrete tile, lying over its own spray of blood and brain matter. The coppery-iron smell of him hits Sherlock’s nose and takes him back to dozens of different cities, bodies strewn along Moriarty’s path and in Moriarty’s name. Takes him back to a dozen different kill shots and a life he thought he’d left behind, a life John knew nothing about, a life he had hoped John would never imagine him living.
Sherlock closes his eyes and both the smell and the memories burn at his nostrils.
Inside, John had looked at him, disappointed and angry, demanding, Sherlock, do we have a plan? John had relied on him to know what he was doing, he relied on Sherlock to have all the possibilities mapped out and accounted for, but Sherlock hadn’t accounted for this one.
The plan was to save Mary.
The plan was always to save Mary because John wanted him to, John needed him to, so that is what Sherlock did. He did it the only way he could have.
John had needed Sherlock to allow him to forgive Mary, and Sherlock had managed that already, had absolved Mary of the crime punched into his chest cavity. Now John needed him to help her, to save her from her own past and her own lies and her own atrocities.
John needed Sherlock to do this so he could go home to her without the weight of her crimes on his conscience, smooth his palms over the stretch of her pregnant belly, take her to bed and love her with the whole of his heart.
Sherlock had always imagined that John would be good at that: loving someone with the whole of his heart, once John decided on the person.
And John’s decided on Mary.
John has decided on Mary after months of helping Sherlock through recovery and rehab, after going with him to appointment after appointment, after helping Sherlock and his surgeon decide on an IVC stent to head off the threat of renal failure, after hours of lecturing about the long-term consequences of being shot in the chest. After all that, John had looked at Mary and decided to see only Mary as she had been before. After months of helping Sherlock suss out what life would be like now, after helping him trudge through the monotonous anxiety of trying to survive, John looked at his wife and chose to believe the lie.
John has chosen a Mary with her hands filled with the future, instead of her past; Mary with her fingers curled around an infant and a wedding ring instead of curled around a gun.
John loves her.
Sherlock is standing in the spotlight and watching the twitch of communication moving through the armed police and he is slowly sinking to his knees. In the helicopter, he can make out the look of stupefaction on Mycroft’s face but finds he can’t enjoy it; all it says is that not even Mycroft can protect him now.
He lowers his eyes, unable to control the wetness on his cheeks. He had thought, when John moved back into Baker Street after Sherlock came home from hospital, that maybe John would stay. He had seen something familiar in John’s eyes, something he might have seen reflected in his own a dozen times, and he allowed himself to hope. But after months of silence between him and Mary, John had accepted Sherlock’s parents’ invitation to Christmas and said, quietly, d’you think I should invite her? And Sherlock had swallowed until the ache in his chest subsided and said, if that’s what you want, John.
And it's gone all wrong, he got it wrong, and it will be the second time he’s giving up his life for John and John still won’t understand what it will mean.
It’s excruciating to know that’s true even as the thought crosses through Sherlock's mind. After all this, after giving up his life for two and a half years so that John might carry on in his, after quietly putting aside his own feelings to plan John and Mary’s wedding, after pouring forth his own forgiveness to absolve John of the guilt in giving his, John still doesn’t know why.
Sherlock would do anything, give anything, so John could have the life he wanted, and John still doesn’t understand that this incredible compulsion has taken Sherlock over because Sherlock loves him.
How many times will I give you my life before you understand? Sherlock wonders. How many times do I have to give you everything before you realise that I’m even doing it?
Sherlock has just killed a man in front of a dozen armed police and he doesn’t even know if John understands what he has given him and at what price: Mary’s freedom at the cost of his own.
John will be arrested alongside him; a dozen witnesses had seen Sherlock pulling the weapon out of John’s coat pocket to ensure that. But he’ll be questioned and he’ll say, I didn’t know, and because Sherlock will be down the hall confirming his ignorance, John will probably be held for less than forty-eight hours before being released. He’ll go home, back to the house in the suburbs where Mary will be waiting, and he’ll take her into his arms and hold her close and say, “Sherlock killed him,” and wonder why.
I love you, Sherlock thinks, and for the first time he wishes John could hear it in his head. I love you.
I love you.
Please, let this have been enough.