Chapter Text
And John soldiered on. He went to work and had dinner alone in his flat. He went out with Greg and Sally, and he sometimes had lunch with Mike Stanford and Molly. He didn’t write in his blog anymore but he continued going to his therapist. Mycroft always seemed to know when John had been eyeing his gun or had been mentally tallying up his stash of pharmaceuticals and would arrive at 221B unannounced and stay for tea that he barely drank and conversation they didn’t make but instead would stare at John.
Each time he visited he asked John how he was doing.
“Fine,” John would answer, “I’m fine,” and Mycroft would eye him, appraising, and then would reward John’s perseverance and dedication to live by not saying his name and by agreeing to not exchange stories of his childhood with John.
Because John didn’t want to hear of before; John wanted to remember the man he knew, not the one he could imagine, fabricate in his mind, led and guided by Mycroft’s descriptions of childhood traumas and dissections and their old home, of Mummy. John wanted to remember crime scenes and constellations, stale smoke and cold cups of tea. He wanted to remember the swirling coat and blue dressing gown and his sulks and how he never pronounced the ou in obviously and it made him sound awfully twee but was so unbearably Sherlock that John couldn’t help but love it, every ugly and beautiful part of that great, gorgeous, gone man.
John knew Sherlock had named John as his heir, had left everything he had to John, and John wondered when Sherlock decided that. Was it after the pool, or after Irene, or the first night of Jennifer Wilson and John’s crack shot through the window?
Sherlock knew everything, but how much did he predict?
John imagines, and wishes, and dreams, but generally manages to not make a hash of his life in the months following Sherlock’s death. He doesn’t know how he manages, and when he asks himself the best he can come up with is that it’s simply not real. He’s living in a haze, in a blur of PTSD and heartbreak, feeling like he’s lost a limb and can’t catch his breath because each night he comes home to the silent flat and doesn’t worry about toxic chemicals in his dinner or the risks of walking around barefoot because there’s not a madman living with him anymore. In fact, no one’s living in the flat anymore, just a shadow and an empty shell.
But John soldiers on, the only way he knows how.
***
After thirteen months of continuing on like this, John goes out on a date.
Her name is Mary and she’s a teacher. She is petite and has a slight accent when she gets excited and concentrates more on what she’s saying than how she’s saying it and John is charmed by her kindness and her honesty and her laughter. She is just exciting enough for him, just naturally outgoing and spontaneous enough to make him giggle ridiculously in public places and pause each time she texts him about a child in her class or the book she’s reading or the odd shop she found that weekend, to stop and accept each time she invites him to join her, to get on the Star and go over to France for the weekend, to stay in a cheap bed and breakfast and sleep too little and drink too much wine. He is charmed by her wit and how she can be so still and silent when he needs her to and how he never has to ask.
The first time he wakes her up unintentionally it is because he is screaming and seeing the wind rushing through Sherlock’s hair, his coat a ridiculous cloak around him, Sherlock’s face staring blankly at the sky, looking beyond John, his face bloodied and lovely and horrible. He wakes her up with his screams and she doesn’t grab him, doesn’t shake him, just moves to the edge of the bed and waits it out.
When he wakes himself up with his trembling, she gently touches his hand and has him tell her what to do. She wraps herself around him, protecting him, calming him with her warmth and her scent and her breath, just holding him close, holding him together. She shushes his apologies and when he asks she describes the time she spent a week in Amsterdam, taking boat tours and eating too much fish.
He is so grateful for her.
Months later, into the breaking sunlight of his life, they are about to get married, but it happens again, death, and then they don’t.
And now John has lost both the greatest and the best love of his life and he doesn’t think he can survive this one not after he barely made it through the first time.
He moves again, this time out of Mary’s flat, away from those bad memories, and begins taking fewer hours at the surgery and doesn’t let anyone know where he lives. He responds to calls and texts and emails and he goes out to eat with his (Sherlock’s) friends, but he doesn’t let anyone see how much he’s disappeared already.
He begins to sleep with his gun above his pillow instead of under it.
This is how he knows he hasn’t got long left.
***
Sherlock comes back from beyond death and sees the changes.
He sees Lestrade’s even lower success rate and Molly’s increased number of teary outbursts and Mrs. Hudson’s numerous visits to the hospital for her hip and he sees the woman that is now around John.
“Mary,” Mycroft tells him “Mary Morstan. Teacher. She’s been with Dr. Watson for five months now.”
This woman has been there when Sherlock wasn’t.
Sherlock watches and he sees how John and Mary fit, how John is her stability and introspection, and her very best friend. To John, Mary is a friend, a savior, beloved. She is his hope and his encouragement.
When she is killed, Sherlock wishes he could have stopped it. He will always be haunted by that failure, just another way that he has ruined the most important person in his life, ruined him because he cared too much.
It was a freak accident with no connection to Sherlock or Moriarty or even John. Just a kid who decided he needed to do what he did and took her life as he took her money.
Sherlock goes to the funeral and watches John’s face, deep and dark and still (and old, oh, so old) as they lower Mary to the ground. Afterwards, Sherlock knows he is stuck. He didn’t return because of Mary, of John, of Sherlock’s renewed presence in John’s life and the conflicts of loyalties and interests it would pose. Sherlock is not one to share so he is better off not interfering at all.
But he cannot just turn up now, now that John has just lost Mary and he seemed have finally adjusted to Sherlock's absence.
Sherlock tries to convince himself that this is the right thing to do as he walks away. He doesn't succeed.
***
Mycroft makes him do it, guilts him into it.
“He is dying, Sherlock.”
“He is fine, don’t say such melodramatic things. He will survive.”
“Perhaps you’re right, but Sherlock, you have to consider; how long will Dr. Watson ‘survive’?”
And Sherlock sees in his mind’s eye John’s gun in his desk drawer and John’s medical bag in the bathroom and Sherlock’s lab in the kitchen (gone now, surely) and he forgets to insult Mycroft as he leaves, so appalled by the thought of John not existing in the world, not being present any longer.
When Sherlock had been away, John had always maintained an unconscious representation in Sherlock’s mind. He was there in the world: alive and safe and away from Sherlock.
The thought of Sherlock existing and not John…this is the thought that drives Sherlock into London, into the cab, onto the street, up into John’s new apartment to wait for him.
He imagines what he’ll say but can’t think of anything good enough. John doesn't show up.
Sherlock leaves and goes to Lestrade who punches him and calls him things that are too kind for what Sherlock knows that he is but cries and accepts Sherlock’s handshake and forces a hug of his own. Sherlock holds on to him, grateful for the forgiveness and acceptance, and he waits for John there. Lestrade says he’ll stay until he’s sure that John won’t shoot him on the spot and then he’ll leave them to sort things out. Sherlock doesn't say that he’s not sure there’s much to sort with.
It’s six months since Mary died and Sherlock’s mouth is just as dry as it was at the funeral where John wore his best suit, the same one he planned to marry her in, the same one he went with Sherlock to testify against a psychopath in, the suit in which he was good and useful and valued.
John knocks and Lestrade calls him up.
When John sees Sherlock, he says nothing.
The universe is still, Sherlock thinks of all the possibilities, each outcome he had considered before, and twelve more, mostly including the violence of one ex-soldier John Watson. John’s fist to my throat, to my stomach, his knee to my side, his hands to my shoulders to fight me off as I try and calm him, as I gulp for air beneath his fingertips and his face, too close, much too close but never close enough, his existence never close enough after the enforced distance, of separation from the dearest and only friend, and John Watson’s forward momentum shoves me back, over Lestrade’s coffee table and onto the floor and I bleed again against the corner and I am nonresistant as John hits me again and again and again. John breathes faster and faster and clenches his fists before he begins to shout, to scream, to yell, not moving from his spot (the paradox of a man, reaction always either to hit or to defend, the soldier and the doctor in one) as he bites into me, tears into me for my idiocy and selfishness and absence. He’ll ask “why now?” and “what for?”’ and “why did you leave for three years, Sherlock? Leave your brother and Lestrade and me? Why did you leave me?” and I will try and find words, the words I’ve planned and ordered according to his reactions, I will try to explain. (I am distracted from my plans by his hair, longer than it should be [approximately 63 days since he last had it cut] and his shoes and his new watch [I got him the old for Christmas 5 years ago] and Lestrade will watch in horror and try to pull him off me but will not defend me at all wanting to know the same answers and I will watch as John shakes apart above me and I try and support him from below—
But John says nothing. John looks at Sherlock, their eyes meet, and Sherlock is choked by the unspeakable terror and sorrow and joy of the moment, of his John, this man he adores in front of him again, Sherlock Holmes and John Watson, together at last, as it should be, breathing the same air and responding to the same circumstances once more, finally. But each of Sherlock’s scenarios proves insufficient as John looks at him…and then looks away. John ignores him as he stands there, hair too short and entirely the wrong colour, dressed as he is, awkwardly, in a suit and trousers that don’t properly fit anymore, unused to the elegance of his clothing, after his three years of exquisite hell.
John does what he’s hardly ever done before and ignores Sherlock.
He looks at Lestrade and asks for what he’s come over for, asks if Lestrade’s ready to go to the pub for the evening, wanting to know how the last case has gone, and Lestrade looks like he’s been kicked and is going to be ill all over his carpet.
“John…” he says and steps forward past Sherlock who is silent and gaping, left behind in the whirl of John’s denial.
John halts and his body is still turned toward Lestrade but he keeps glancing at Sherlock, inexorably drawn towards him. “Alright,” he says, “you’re right; I’m feeling a bit off today too. How about we stay in? I’ll put the kettle on,” and John moves past Lestrade and has to actually step around Sherlock to get to the hallway that leads to the kitchen. The two men watch him leave. Lestrade will never know that when he glances at Sherlock they are thinking the same thing:
If Sherlock leaves now, the three of them would each pretend that Sherlock wasn't ever here at all and John will kill himself within the week.
Unimaginable, Sherlock thinks, and he follows Lestrade into the kitchen.
***
John enters the kitchen, leaving a sick-looking Greg and a hallucination behind him. He digs around for the tea Greg keeps solely for John and puts on the water boiler. He leans on the counter, bowed over the sink, facing away from the man he knows is staring at him from the doorway. “Sorry,” he calls, “I’ll just be a tic. There’s a match on tonight, isn't there?” he forces a small self-depreciating laugh, “I haven’t been paying attention to any of it, to be honest. If not I’m sure something’s on. And you’ll have to tell me about that last case. Got it solved already, I saw in the paper yesterday morning. Good on you, mate.” He rambles on as the water boils and Greg comes up behind him.
“John.” John ignores him and pours the water into two cups, letting them steep.
“John. John.” Greg grips John by his shoulders and turns him around. John shuts his eyes. Lestrade makes an aborted movement that could have almost been a hug. John reaches around him for the tea he’s just fixed and takes a scalding sip. He’s shaking and the tea sloshes in the cup, nearly spilling over the sides.
The hallucination steps forward from its place in the doorway and croaks out his name, “John, I-“
“NO!” John doesn't look at him, won’t look, can’t look. The cup has slipped from his fingers, shattering on the floor and spraying scalding tea all over him and Greg. “No!” he shouts again, pressing his back to the counter, moving away. He shakes and shivers as Lestrade moves between him and that man, and finally opens his eyes. He looks at Greg, lost, and sees his own expression mirrored back at him.
His gaze slides past him and settles on Sherlock, wrecked and uncertain, hair straight and ginger, standing in the middle of Greg’s kitchen three years after John and Mycroft put him in the ground.
John feels his brain shut down, his heart give out, sees his vision go.
He falls and isn't awake long enough to feel Greg catch him as he does.