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“It was the gardener,” he says. “See the dirt?”
I don’t look up. Instead I say to Lestrade, “The gardener.” He looks at me. “See the dirt?” I motion towards it, very easy to miss, really only just a small pinprick of it.
“So oblivious,” he continues, true incomprehension in his voice. I do not look up, knowing that I won’t see him, afraid that I might.
I return to the flat. It is just as it has always been, books and papers scattered in the living room, lab equipment littered in the kitchen, the door to his bedroom is closed. His computer still sits where he’d left it, his violin still leaning against the back of his couch, bow beside it, probably out of tune by now. By the window the music stand remains with the sheafs of music he had been in the midst of composing. Over all this lays a thick layer of dust, apart from my armchair and the desk.
Six months. It had been six months since it had happened. And yet-
“Boring,” his voice cuts through the silence. “That was hardly even worth my time.” I hear him move through the flat, soft footsteps on carpet and the sound of him falling onto his sofa as he was apt to do. I do not turn to look. “I need a case John, a real case, not this bloody-” He huffs, apparently not finding an appropriate word.
I quietly make myself some tea, taking my time with it. No sugar. I sip at it and it burns my tongue in a pleasant way. I slowly make my way towards the living room and just before entering I close my eyes for a fraction of a second, bracing myself, and enter, looking to his couch to see it empty. Just the lonesome violin, abandoned. I let out a breath, a strange mixture of relief and disappointment coming over me. A part of me hopes that one day I will really see him, that he will actually be there. The other part, the larger part knows that the day I do will be the day I have well and truly lost my mind past the point of no return.
Lestrade does not contact me for over a week. A week during which I have to listen to him bemoaning how his mind is tearing itself to pieces without having The Work, how boring everything is. I am glad that when I leave the flat to do the shopping or go on a date he remains at the flat, as he has always done.
Sometimes when I return I can hear the violin singing from the floor above. Other times I hear gunshots or loud thumps and dull thuds as books and other things are being tossed around the flat. “I’m going to predict where they fall,” he said once, in answer to an unspoken question, as I heard sheafs of paper suddenly explode into the air and waft to the floor.
But sometimes he accompanies me out. When I’m going to the park or going to get some take-out. Sometimes he appears suddenly in the cab, saying something about the cabbie, how his wife has died or his son has just gone to university.
Sometimes he asks why I’m so quiet, how he supposes that being around him for so long must have rubbed off on me. Sometimes he wonders if he’s disappointed me, or made me angry with him. “You know I don’t mean it,” he says. “At least not the way you hear it.” And sometimes he will even continue with, “But for what it’s worth, I am sorry.”
It’s the hardest at these times, to not answer, to not look. I cannot answer him. I cannot. But every time it’s harder, every time a part of me is worn away like a stone in a river, bits of my resolve crumbling away.
Lestrade still calls me in on the tough cases. “Because you’re all we’ve got,” he’d said in the beginning. Now he says, “You really learned from him, didn’t you?” To which I purse my lips and say nothing as I hear his voice speaking to me all the while, so clear that I half wonder how Lestrade can’t hear him. It’s not me solving these cases, I don’t say. It’s him, it’s still him.
I don’t blog anymore, not like I used to. It has been months since the last blog post. He asks why I’ve stopped, he says it’s about time I’ve finally abandoned the worthless thing, he says that at least his own blog documents the important things that matter. I do not answer him. The followers on my old blog dwindle away and the hit count goes down until it is stuck at zero. The only views it ever gets anymore is when I’m looking through the blog myself at my past entires, remembering. Browsing through his blog, smiling. I find that I do this more often when I haven’t heard him for more than a couple days. And then suddenly he will be there like he’d never gone and I listen, intent and silent and close my laptop.
The time stretches longer now. Days pass, many days and I do not hear a whisper of him. This should be a good thing for me, let me know that my mind is finally letting go. But I am frightened, well and truly scared. I am losing him. What will become of him if he is lost? What will become of me? Who will remember him if not me?
Despair grips me like hands around my neck and I am unable to breath as these horrid thoughts surface. There have been three cases in the last two months that I have been unable to solve, because he was not with me at the time. He was not there. This had never happened before. The times he is with me are growing small and short.
“Make some tea.” He says.
I open my eyes and take a deep shuddering breath like I had been drowning. I take another gulp of air. Three weeks. It had been three weeks.
“Tea,” he says again, impatience in his voice now. I smile, unable to help it.
He begins to speak, as he usually does. Thoughts spilling from him like a dam and into me. I soak up every word, every tone of voice.
Two months have passed. At least I think it must be something like that. I can’t really remember the last time I’d left the flat, or done a case for Lestrade. Sometimes I’ll wake to the smell of food that had been left for me next to my bed. Mrs. Hudson, I think, but do not remember her being in my room. I think that Lestrade may have visited once. He’s called once or twice too, a case, he’d said, but I did not go because he was not with me and if he was not with me I was nothing.
I do not know whether it is day or night. The curtains are closed and no light leaks through. Sometimes I’ll rouse myself from bed and make a cup of tea, sit in the armchair for an immeasurable amount of time, hoping. I’ve picked up the violin once because I know he doesn’t like anyone to touch it, I’ve even dragged the bow across it, terrible evil notes shrieking from it as if it knew I wasn’t it’s master. But he did not come. I’ve tossed books and papers all over the flat, messing up everything of his, all his meticulously placed and sorted things that looks to be clutter to others. I’ve broken the lab equipment in the kitchen, glass litters the floor now, paper crunches underfoot.
Once I stood in front of his bedroom door for a very long time. He didn’t like people to go into his room. He surely wouldn’t like it if I were to scatter his things in there, ruin his sock index and his color and weather sorted shirts. He would hate that or at least be irritated by it, probably say one or two sharp things before falling into a brooding silence and demand that I make tea. But I could never reach out my hand and turn the door knob. His room remains untouched.
And no matter what I did, he did not appear. And now, I lay in silence, in my room, on my bed, my fears having been realized. I do not know what to do, think that there is nothing that needs doing. After all, what does it matter in the end?
I know I haven’t eaten in a while. My stomach, which had hurt before while I curled further into the mattress no longer complains. Not a good sign, my medical mind tells me but I ignore it. I rouse myself from my bed, a headache pulsing behind my eyes and at my temples. I stumble weakly down the stairs and nearly fall twice and finally make it to his couch. I fall into it, not unlike how he had sometimes done in a fit of utter boredom. I curl myself up into a little ball, feeling vaguely cold, my robe a thin barrier. Was it winter? I’m unsure and find that I don’t care.
I wake much later, still curled up on his couch. I hear the front door click shut downstairs, very quietly. I blink in the darkness. I hear faint steps come up the stairs, barely squeaking on the floorboards. Familiar with it, then, my mind whispers to me. I can’t bring myself to care and am too tired to rouse myself.
The footsteps slow and stop just before the threshold to the flat. The concentration I’m affording this makes the headache hurt all the more but I ignore it. I listen.
The footsteps slowly come into the room, I hear them whisper over the carpet, stop for a moment and then slowly make their way towards me. I am still, my eyes are closed, I keep my breathing under control. There is a rustling sort of noise before the couch, the whisper of clothes as the person moves. I feel their presence closer now.
“John?” The voice came, uncharacteristically tentative, almost frightened. Anxious. Loud in the silence, sounding unaccountably so real that I jerk. I take in a deep shuddering breath but don’t open my eyes, don’t want to break the illusion.
“John,” he says again, the voice now holding an edge of worry, more distinct than before. Extremely alive, very physically there. I almost feel the vibrations of his voice in the air. It had never seemed so real before.
My will is crumbling. What did it matter, if for once I answered him? If I could not function without even the ghost of him, why fight it?
I feel a light touch on my shoulder.
In all the time after he has never touched me. In all that time all I ever did was hear him, hear him and the noises of whatever he was doing, but never did he physically affect anything, even me. Because he was not real.
My eyes pop open and I see a gloved hand on my shoulder, black gloves. I follow the arm with my eyes which is covered with the thick black sleeve of a cotton winter coat. My eyes trace over a blue scarf and then finally look up to the face.
Grey eyes gleam at me through the dark like winter clouds over London. Eyes that I had not seen for what felt a lifetime. Eyes that my mind could never be able to replicate no matter what kind of hallucination I might have.
“Sherlock?” I whisper, voice low and dry. My throat burns from dehydration and now from something else. A pressure behind my eyes. My hands shoot out and clutch at him, feel the solidity, the physical reality that he was there, really there. I pull myself up, my hands still gripping his coat weakly but as strong as I can manage. I want to embrace him but that would mean letting his eyes disappear from mine. I stare and lean forward until my forehead is leaning against his, my eyes staring straight into his despite the blurriness from them being so close to mine. I breath and smell him, a smell that has been gone from this flat for so long now. So long. The smell of wool, parchment, soap, the London streets and something else that all those smells alone lacked.
“Sherlock,” I whisper again, not a question this time. A soft exclamation, a cry of relief, of so much pain, of despair, of everything that the past year had been, everything that it had not been. I feel the wetness at my eyes streak down my cheeks and see in utter shock a mirror of the same in his eyes, a tear slipping slowly down his right check and dripping, followed by another one on the left.
“John,” he says, the emotion in it astounding me, an echo of the emotion within me, but above all pain. So much pain in that one word. “John,” the pain eats into my very soul and doesn’t help stop the flood at my eyes.
He clutches at me then, arms encircling me and crushing me to him as his face buries into my neck, shudders wracking through him though he was silent. His hands are fisted into my robe and my own hands are buried in his coat, his hair; it tickles my face. I breath. I breath.
“I’m sorry,” he whispers, and all I can do is nod.