Chapter Text
“No!” the shout is ripped from John’s throat as he wakes, sweaty and trembling, hands reaching for the other side of the bed in the hope it will prove his dream a lie.
Which is futile since it is cold and empty; bereft of the man who filled John’s life and heart with the warmth of a love he never thought he would find.
A good representation of me, John thinks as he stares at Sherlock’s pillow, existing but without purpose because he is gone.
In the daylight he doesn’t have such thoughts as he’s able to rationalise his fears. To read the well worn note once more and know that it was all a trick, a play elaborately staged to satisfy Moriarty and the web he left behind. To know that Sherlock still lives, somewhere, and is working to bring the web down so he can come back to life. To know that he, John, does still have a purpose because although Sherlock would have died to keep John alive he chose to live for him instead.
But in the darkness he cannot escape what he cannot forget; the terror of the fall and the pulseless wrist and, above all, the horror of seeing that face, those eyes - the eyes that lit up John’s world - lifeless and smeared with blood.