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He had not anticipated how quiet pain could be.
Not the pain of injury, or loss, or even disappointment. No, this was something more refined—more civilised. Like grief in its Sunday best. There were no tears, no shouts, no tremor in the hands. Only silence, perfectly stitched into the lining of his thoughts. A silence so loud it flattened the room, dulled the music, swallowed the air.
Sherlock Holmes was not a man prone to fantasy. But if he had been, he might have said that the world had grown blurry around the edges, as if his mind had decided it was no longer necessary to process the finer details of a reality that did not want him in it.
He could not recall what colour the cake had been. He had no idea which song was playing. Someone laughed—he did not know who. None of it mattered.
He had been wrong, of course. That was the worst of it.
Not about the facts—never the facts. He had predicted Mary’s dress with unsettling precision, had deduced the seating chart weeks ago, had written and rewritten his best man speech in his head until the rhythm of the words matched John’s heartbeat.
But he had been wrong about something far more crucial.
He had believed, however foolishly, that he would be immune.
And yet, there it was: a hollow ache expanding in his chest like steam under pressure, rising and rising and refusing to be expelled. No distraction could reach it. No violin, no logic, no deduction. It sat beneath his ribs with the quiet finality of a sealed envelope. Unsent. Undelivered. Unopened.
He had not expected to feel… replaced.
Even now, even here, he hated the word. It sounded childish. Possessive. It was unbecoming of a man who claimed to value reason above all. But there it was, heavy and unrelenting: the sense that something that had once been his—not owned, never owned, but known, shared—now belonged to someone else.
Worse: it wanted to belong to someone else.
He had tried, briefly, to name the emotion. Loneliness, perhaps. But that was too general, too worn. Jealousy? No, too base. Too crude. No single word sufficed.
It was love. That was the unbearable part.
Not lust, not longing, not even friendship twisted into something inconvenient. Just love, in its most pathetic, unremarkable, unreciprocated form. The kind that sits in quiet rooms and clings to things unsaid.
He wondered, in that strange clinical corner of his mind that still operated, how long it had been there. Lurking. Building. Was it there the first time John smiled at him across the lab table? When he returned to Baker Street, broken from Afghanistan but still noble in a way that refused to decay?
Or had it come later, in the way he spoke Sherlock’s name differently from anyone else? Not reverently, not disdainfully. Just… gently. As though the syllables required care.
It hardly mattered now.
What mattered was this: it was too late.
He had always assumed there would be more time. That John would drift back, orbiting as he always had. But people like Mary had gravity. They pulled. And John—stubborn, loyal John—was not a man who resisted a good pull. He gave himself completely.
And now he was gone.
Not gone in body. Not even gone in friendship. But gone from where Sherlock had secretly kept him—just behind the sternum, beside the violin string that never quite stayed in tune.
Gone from the silent places.
Gone from the dreams he denied having.
It wasn’t envy. It wasn’t even bitterness. It was the quiet death of possibility. And that, he suspected, was grief in its purest form: not loss of the actual, but the loss of what could have been. What almost was. What never would be.
He did not blame John. Not even for a second.
That was the cruelty of it all. That John had done everything right. Had chosen kindness. Had chosen love. Had chosen well.
Sherlock could not even hate the woman. Mary, with her soft voice and careful eyes. She had been generous. Patient. She had, in her own way, seen Sherlock too.
But she wasn’t him.
And that difference would echo forever in a space Sherlock could never share.
He had no memory of standing up. No recollection of crossing the garden. The moments blurred, like sound through thick curtains. One minute he was seated beneath a canopy of lights, the next he was at the edge of the night.
It was not escape.
There was no drama in his leaving. No slammed doors. No tears. Only the quiet decision that his presence no longer served anyone. Least of all himself.
He didn’t look back.
What good would it do? The sight of them—still dancing, or laughing, or locked in some tender exchange—would only deepen the wound. And Sherlock Holmes had always been surgical in his pain.
Cut clean.
Leave before the rot sets in.
Even now, with his insides a strange mixture of glass and salt, he could not bring himself to ruin it for them. He had destroyed too many things. Not this. Not them.
He heard his name, faintly, from behind.
He did not turn.
Not out of pride. Nor fear.
Only because he knew exactly what he would see.
John, standing there in his suit, with a face full of concern and words full of compassion. Words that would soothe and stall but never satisfy.
Words that might have come too late.
Or perhaps just on time, to remind Sherlock of the one truth he had spent a lifetime trying not to need:
That he was not enough.
Not for this.
Not for love.