Work Text:
Here Alone
“John,” Ella, his therapist, asks from across the room. “How are you today?”
John sighs. He turns to stare out the window at the perpetually gray skies of London.
He hates this question. It’s the same question he’s obligated to ask when patients come into the surgery.
It used to be a pleasantry, a greeting, or an assessment, a gathering of information on the wellbeing of another person. Now it is painful. Now the question mocks him. He’s tired of it.
Other people always have such simple answers: “Fine; Well; My throat is sore; My ear hurts; I think I’ve got pink eye,” but John’s answer is more complex, more difficult to put into words. He can’t help but feel his problems are more important that his patients’ silly, basic illnesses.
He has real problems. He hates to think of it that way but there are days that he can barely keep from screaming at some of the people he treats. It’s become worse lately; especially at work. He’s been key diagnostic factors in his patients. Last week he almost prescribed eye drops to a man with swimmer’s ear.
John looks at his hands, permanently roughened from hot days in Afghanistan. “I’m…fine…” he chooses.
His therapist begins to write and, as he hears the pen scratch on the paper, John feels the frustration rise inside of him.
“Stop that!” he exclaims suddenly, looking up. The pen stops moving. “I’ve not said anything, how can you possibly take notes on anything if I’ve not said anything! How am I today?” he shouts now as the outburst leaves his control. She just sits there looking sympathetic. This, of course, only infuriates John further. “How am I today? I’m bloody awful!”
His therapist doesn’t write this time. She doesn’t do anything. She just sits there and waits for him to continue. She doesn’t speak. She only nods once, very slightly, to encourage him.
“I can’t eat, I can’t sleep, I can’t think!” John declares, his ranting falling into repetition. “I can’t do anything! I can’t write, I can’t read, I can’t even practice medicine anymore because I can’t stand listening to my patients prattling on about their problems, which are so insignificant that they could mostly be solved with two ibuprofen and a good night’s sleep!” he barely pauses to breath. “I can’t communicate like I used to. I used to be the one who could talk to people – who enjoyed it even. Now, I can’t even have a cuppa with my sister without one of us storming off angry and it’s usually me because she can’t begin to understand it, she can’t begin to feel the way I feel – no one can!” He pauses and can’t hel but notice how selfish he sounds. He continues, slower, “Sure, people lose loved ones all the time, but they’ve never lost…” He tries to bring himself to say the name but he can’t. He’s not been able to say it often. He breathes carefully. Then, “They’ve never lost him. They don’t know what it’s like.”
Another pause, John sighs and his therapist still doesn’t say anything.
“I suppose,” he breathes again. “I suppose I’m angry.”
“Angry with whom, John?” Ella asks. “With yourself?” she offers. “With James Moriarty?” the names makes his skin crawl, but still, he does not speak. With Sherlock?”
“Don’t say his name!” John snaps. He’s on the edge of his seat, like he’s about to leave at any moment just as he does when he fights with Harry. Then, he slowly resigns himself back into the chair. “I don’t know who I’m angry with. I guess with everyone, with everything, the world. I don’t know how they can carry on like they do. I cannot fathom how the world has not stopped turning. The world lost one of the greatest minds it had and they act like he never even existed. They act like they believe that he was a fake but anyone who knew him had to have known that he wasn’t,” he thinks on Sergeant Donovan and Anderson with a frown. “Well, almost anyone.” He shakes his head. “I just – I wish I knew why he did it. I wish I could understand. It’s the not knowing that makes it unbearable.”
His voice goes soft now as he admits the scariest thing of all for him, “I just wonder if there’s anything I could have done. What I should have done differently. If I hadn’t gone back to check on Mrs. Hudson, would things have been different? Would Moriarty be dead? Would…” The name, again, evades him. “…He? I mean, If I could have made him realize just how much he meant – mattered – fraud or not…” he looks down at his feet. “I don’t think I ever told him how much I cared for him…”
John and his therapist sit in silence for some times after that. John appears to calm down for the time being and the therapist lets him, watching his every move and not writing anything down.
“John,” she says finally. “there’s nothing you could have done. You did your best but Sher-” John tenses and she corrects herself. “He was ready to jump. There was nothing you could have done just then to change his mind.” She shifts her legs. “Guilt is common in those who are left behind when someone who is close to them commits suicide, but, John, you must understand. This was not your fault.”
There is silence as John takes this in.
“When was the last time you went to the flat?”
“When I cleared it out.” He had moved in with his sister, Harry, not long after the incident. He had tried to stick it out but his mind had started to play tricks on him and he found himself hearing Sherlock’s foots on the stairs or the incessant tapping of fingers on the keyboard of a phone.
“You haven’t been writing in your blog, either.”
“No,” John agrees. “No much to write about, I’m afraid.”
“You said you can’t do much, and you mentioned writing. Had writing been helping you get through some of your problems?”
John laughs at the woman’s stupidity. “He helped me get through my problems. He made them disappear. He made me forget everything except the moment, except the then and there of a case, of anything. He lived in the moment and made everyone else around him catch up. He showed us how to live in the present and assess what was in front of us.”
Ella nods, seeming to understand. She still doesn’t write. This both pleases and infuriates John. John’s not like… him, he can’t read a person’s thoughts by where they move their eyes or how they fidget in their seat. While he hates being studied and recorded, he cannot be sure what his therapist is thinking and at the moment, he wants to know. He wants to be able to tell her she’s wrong, he wants to be able to shout at her some more for being an imbecile and not being able to cure him of this aching in his heart, this longing for a man who never did him any good anyways, this need for his unfounded vivacity. A man who had always insisted that life bored him but it hadn’t – to him it had been the most exciting thing of all and the only person he had ever let see that had been John.
“John,” Ella calls to him softly. “We’re about done with our time, here,” she informs him. Can an hour really go by so quickly? “I want you to try something for next week.”
“I’m not ruddy writing in that blog again.” John insists.
His therapist, however, is not thwarted. “I know,” she says simply. “I want you to write him.”
John looks up incredulously, “Write him?” his therapist nods. “Is that a joke? You want me to write him. Write a letter? To him?” she nods again, overenthusiastically as if to a child. “He’s dead.” He hates saying it, but it needs to be done. This might be the last straw for him, he might just not come back next time. He may just stop coming altogether. Write a letter to the deceased? He stands to leave.
“John,” Ella says, also rising. “I want you to, at least, consider it.”
Out on the wintery streets of London, John tries to hail a cab. After a few failed attempts, he stops and walks on by himself. He leaves therapy every week feeling worse than he did when he arrived. He’s not quite sure who’s to blame for this but he’s finding talk therapy to be a bunch of psychobabble. It isn’t making him feel better; it’s only making him feel worse. Of course, he is feeling, which is a massive improvement over the not-feeling thing he had been doing as of late. But there seems, to him, to be no way to make these feelings better.
It is mid-afternoon, he could still get lunch at a café nearby but he decides against it, not feeling particularly hungry. He pulls out his phone still expecting a thousand texts waiting from his old flatmate. Instead, there’s nothing. No calls, no texts, no e-mails. He taps out a quick message to his sister.
Done at therapy.
He waits a moment, still expecting the instantaneous response he’s used to. When it doesn’t come, he shoves his phone in his pocket. He doesn’t want to go back to Harry’s just yet.
That’s where he’s been staying the past few months. She has a new girlfriend and, lately, she’s been so preoccupied with taking care of John that she’s not had time to make destructive decisions.
John’s walk helps to calm him down. He’s moving slowly but surely. Cabs, cars and cyclists are passing by him on the street and busied business people and school children are passing him on the sidewalks. The world keeps going, keeps moving at the breakneck pace that had once been too slow for him.
He’s beginning to debate between whether he should start looking for a flat in London again so that he can be close to the surgery and his therapist’s office – the only two places he ever seems to go anymore – or if he should just find a flat, job and therapist in Cambridge to save himself the move and expenses. He wonders about a flatshare and he considers whether he would be relieved to live with a normal person or if he would feel like he was betraying his old flatmate.
He’s navigating the streets of London without even thinking about where’s going. He assumes his feet are leading him to Kings Cross. So, he begins to think about the preposterous proposition his therapist made.
Write a letter.
Write a letter?
Write a bloody letter!
Write a letter saying what? That everything is fine? What good would a letter do? John would know that the intended recipient would never read it, so why bother? Why bother writing a letter saying all the things John wanted to say? Why bother sending his love and anger and frustration and belief with every line. It would only make him think and feel more of the thoughts and feelings he’s been attempting to suppress for months now.
Oh, God, has it been months?
Yes.
Still walking, John thinks about the idiocy of the idea. Writing a letter will not help him put his thoughts of the tall, gangly man at ease, it will only perpetuate them. Every would would just bring him closer when all John wants to do is bury him and be left alone.
Hereafter, he will always be alone. No amount of patients or dates or bloody letters could change the fact that he will be alone forever.
There’s a train leaving when John reaches the station. He can catch it if he runs but he opts for the next one – twenty minutes. He hopes to find a place to sit alone. He texts Harry to let her know. As the train gets closer to departing, a few people join him in solitude. There’s an old man wearing a suit and looking morose. There’s also a young woman with headphones on, but they’re good, no sound pours out from them. She’s most likely a uni student at Cambridge, in London for the day. As she settles in, she pulls out a notebook. John concludes that he must be in London on business about his dead or dying wife. He knows of one person who would know definitively if she were dead or dying or if there’s a wife at all. He also knows of one person who would know the reason for the girl’s trip. He finds himself making up stories about them. Fanaticizing the lives they may or may night have. But, as he knows, fiction is not fact and by the time the train is moving, he’s only frustrated with himself.
John pulls out his phone again and checks again for an unprecedented amount of texts; he is greeted by two from Harry instead.
I will pick you up in about an hour.
I’m going out with Melanie tonight.
John quickly replies.
OK.
He puts the phone away and drums his fingers on his knee, looking out the window as the train picks up speed, rushing out of the city.
Fifteen minutes into the ride, he’s bored. He considers asking the girl for a page out of her notebook and a pen so he can write his stupid, bloody letter. It takes him only a minute to realize what he’s thinking. He’s thinking about writing a letter to him. He’s thinking about writing to a dead person. Writing to a person who will never read what he’s written. Writing to a person who will never be able to respond.
He decides against asking the girl for the paper. It’s too much effort, too much social interaction that he couldn’t possibly stand.
Still bored, he pulls out his phone again. The messages screen pops up first and he sees all the people he’s conversed with in the past few weeks.
Harry
Ella
Sarah
Molly
Greg
Mike
Mycroft Holmes
Sherlock Holmes
He sighs, realizing how pathetic his lack of contacts really is.
Sarah texts him now and again to chat and confirm his work days. They’ve gone out once or twice since the day, but John’s life has mainly been a commute to and from places that make him sad and angry
Molly’s the surprising one. Every now and again, she texts him lovely little things. She’s made his life bearable when it seemed he was at his wits end. Every time he begins thinking about more destructive ways of making his pain disappear, she coincidentally texts him a lovely little message about leafs or daffodils or children playing in the park. It’s never anything more than that, not a “buck up, John” or “shape up, soldier,” just a sweet and simple “saw two boys playing hide and seek in the trees, reminded me of you.” He doesn’t know how she knows when to send the texts or what they mean to her or what they’re supposed to mean to him. He assumes they’re not to be taken romantically, but past that, he can’t be sure. He just appreciates them and their impeccable timing. He taps her name, opening to their conversations.
I’ve got some brilliant kneecaps here, if you’re interested! – Molly x
The leaves are looking quite pretty today, don’t you think? – Molly x
Popped in for tea with Mrs. Hudson today, she makes lovely biscuits. – Molly x
Last month, during a case, she had even shown him the greatest hospitality.
Greg’s asked me to the pub after this case! Can you believe it? – Molly x
Would you like to join us at the pub? We do miss you, you know. – Molly x
Hope you had fun last night, you’re welcome at my flat anytime, even if you barely know what you’re saying! Tea’s in the micro if you want it! – Molly x
He had agreed to go out to the pub after the case. He hadn’t been working on it, of course, but he had just finished work at the surgery and happened to be nearby, so he had gone. From what he’s been told, he got very drunk and wanted to sleep at 221B. Molly had seen to it that that did not happen, instead bringing him back to her place. In the morning, she had been gone, off to Bart’s to do the case’s paperwork.
Lestrade is another number he gets frequent texts from, usually an ignored invitation to the pub after work, other times a medical consultation, “time of death?” or “injuries before or after death?” accompanied by a picture and a few other important factors. He did visit John in Cambridge a few times earlier on to ensure he was settling in all right. They have not talked about the elephant in the room, but both are content to keep it that way, they both know it’s there and neither of them care to mention it.
Mike is a similar figure in his life. Every now and again, he’ll ask him to the pub or to dinner, trying to get him out.
But John doesn’t want to go out.
Mycroft has been in touch infrequently, they met shortly after… the fall… but they’ve not had any personal contact since. He received a few notices about how he’ll “continue to pay the rent on the flat until everything’s cleared out – or if you ever wish to return.” John responses were short and frustrated. He has had no real inclination to ever speak to the elder Holmes brother again.
Finally, on the remarkably short list of contacts:
Him.
Write a letter.
Sod that.
Write a letter, be inventive.
Right. Cheers, idiot therapist.
Write a letter.
How can he write a letter? How can he possibly do that? How can he begin to describe what he’s feeling.
Most of all, John is feeling lonely in this war. For that’s what his new life has become – a new war. A war waged against himself in, which he is one side and his aching heart is the other. It is almost impossible for him to determine which side is “right.”
This should be nothing new to him. He’s seen combat. He knows what war is.
Then again, he wasn’t alone in Afghanistan. In this war against himself, he is a lone soldier with no direction. Every day is a losing battle. There is no strategy. John starts every daily battle without a plan of attack and ends it with both sides nursing wounds for the next morning.
His days are wild; his nights are sad.
Some nights are worse than others. Most nights, his mind internalizes the war in heart and brings him nightmares of the hot, terrible desert. The next morning, wound in his left shoulder, just above the new battlefield, aches.
Cambridge is coated a slick fresh rain. Cyclists, more dangerous than drivers, speed down the cobblestone without fear. Harry’s house is north of the station, off Mill Road, past the cemetery and a few streets away from the dental surgery. It’s close enough that John usually walks but this evening he lets Harry pick him up.
When he finally spots her car, he gets in, shivering from the few minues he waited. They’re silent as she pulls the car out of the park until, “So, how was therapy?”
John scoffs, “I barely remember why I started going back to her! Some days I feel like she’s completely useless! I’ve not gotten anywhere in the past few months. I’m still taking up life and I’m not feeling any better about everything that’s happened!”
“John,” Hary starts, repeating the mantra she adopted when she took him in. “You know I don’t mind you living with me.” She looks at him. “I want you to get better.”
“But I’m not getting better, am I, Harry? I’m not!”
“It’s not something that happens overnight, John,” Harry persists. “You have to be patient. You’re going through a lot. I went through the same thing last year.” John cringes, trying to forget the fact that they had finally put her in a facility to get help. “You just want to be fixed and you want it so bad but you wan’t it to be easy. You don’t want to have to work at it because it sucks to have to work at being happy – at feeling normal – when other people go through life completely content and never see therapists and never have to talk about their problems because they don’t have them.” She smiles gently, looking over at her brother. “It’s not a criticism, it’s just true. But, John, Rome wasn’t built in a day.”
John watches her for a moment. She’s changed so much. “I know. You’re right. I’m sorry,” he apologizes. “It’s just… Harry, she asked me to write him a letter.”
Harry, to John’s immense relief, laughs. “What? A letter?”
John, for the first time since the session earlier that day, laughs about the notion too. “Yeah,” he says. “I know, right? It’s completely barking! She says I have to rediscover my writing outlet and that the only way to do that is to start writing again. She suggests that writing to him will help to start out.”
“I mean, it makes sense, but it does sound ridiculous.” Harry pulls the car into the driveway in front of her sweet, small house. “I’m leaving to meet Melanie,” she tells him as he climbs out.
“Not even a little bit,” John says with a cheeky grin. “But I’ll do what I can, okay?”
She frowns but nods all the same. He closes the door and she puts the car in reverse.
He waves briefly as she pulls out of sight. He stands there for a moment, just in the driveway. Then, nodding, with a quick “right,” and, stuffing his hands in his pockets, he goes inside.
He forgoes any food in the kitchen, he knows someone who never ate. If he didn’t have to, why should John?
This thought process was extremely detrimental to John at first, until he got used to it. In the past few months, John – who had always been a fit individual – shrunk down two and a half trouser sizes. Jumpers that had once made him appear cuddly and warm hung on him now like the fur of a wet dog. Everyone’s noticed this dramatic change but no one really knows how to respond. John supposes that they don’t know what to do about it. Harry makes dinner and hopes that John will want to eat it. Greg and Molly force food on him at the pub but they know it can’t be enough. John, of course, has also noticed the change, but he can’t bring himself to feel hungry enough to eat of his own volition. He finds a way to rationalize it, insisting he’d been putting on weight before all the unpleasantness.
Some nights, he feels the same way about sleep – it evades him as he runs after it in a ferocious pursuit, not wanting to spend another moment with his own conscious mind.
He ascends the stairs to the guest room though he supposes he should just call it his room now. But it’s not his, it’s just a room he’s sleeping in. Just one stop on his never-ending commute. He makes another stop at the bathroom before continuing. As he goes about his business, he feels like a machine, not even thinking about the mechanics of what he’s doing. It just happens and his body is merely a means to an end.
In his room, he pulls off his jumper, having abandoned his coat and shoes in the foyer. He hangs it up neatly in the closet with the rest of the clothes that barely fit him anymore. In the closet, he does have one thing that doesn’t belong to him. It’s a scarf. His scarf. The scarf he was wearing that day he had jumped. Molly gave it to him a few weeks after the funeral. She had had it, along with the other clothes from that day, dry cleaned. It had been a nice gesture. It was clean now, no blood more blood on it, that was for sure. But along with the blood went any feeling of the man who had worn it. There is no smell of him, no creases in the fabric to indicate how he might have worn it, it was just some fabric, nicely cleaned and pressed. Still, it hangs in the closet on its own hanger.
As John gets undressed and lazily dons pajama bottoms and a tee shirt, he begins to ponder his predicament once again.
Write a letter.
Write a letter.
Write a bloody letter.
And tell him what? That just thinking about him brings the battle in his hear to his life, to his door, to his house, to his chair, to his desk, to his bed?
“How can I bloody write a letter?” John asks the air. “What would I say?” He wants to pace and so he does, his mind willing his body to do it without a thought.
With closed eyes and an exhausted mind, he thinks back to “the day.”
“What do I say?” he continues to the empty room. “That I wish things had been different? I wish you hadn’t been so stupid to go up there alone? I wish a thousand things that don’t mean anything because they can’t bring you back to me!” He pushes the dresser drawers with more force than necessary. “Do I tell you that I trust you and that I wish you had trusted me? That I know you didn’t lie to me? That I know you are who you said you were? Well, even if that is what I’m meant to say, it’s all bollocks anyways, because what’s the bloody point?!”
He punches the wall and it hurts but not enough. He punches it again, and again, and a third time, and a fourth until the wall paper becomes weak and he can’t feel either of his hands.
After all this time, he can’t bring himself to cry because he blames himself.
He still can’t believe he fell for the text about Mrs. Hudson and left him all alone to play games with the madman, let him be taunted and tormented to his death.
“Neither can I,” he hears the man’s voice in his mind. He opens his eyes and sees him, in a full suit, reclining on his bed, relaxed as always, James Moriarty’s devilish grin teases his subconscious. “I always knew you were stupid, John, but I didn’t know I could trick you that easily.” His bored expression never leaves his face even as his voice lilts with the strange accent. “It wasn’t even difficult. Just a thought placed in your head and without a second one, off you scurried and left me alone to play with your lovely detective.”
“You’re wrong!” John shouts at the man in his imagination.
“Prove it,” Moriarty snarls challengingly. John feels himself falter. Slowly, the man tells him what he fears to hear, “You can’t.” The man sits up now, menacing, but his voice is discrete, it does not waver. “You can’t prove it because he’s a liar. He lied to you. I’m a figment of his, and now your, imagination. I don’t exist. I’m one gigantic lie. It’s all some make-believe story that he created in his mind,” he smirks. “And he made you believe it.”
John shakes his head. This is one of the worst parts. Never knowing which side is right. He can’t decide which is worse, knowing the truth – knowing that the wonderful man he knew could never lie to him – or knowing what everyone else believes is true – assumptions that he had been a lying murderer.
“He lied to you, John,” the melodic voice tells him now. “He lied to everyone. He killed all those people and set it up as a fantastic chase for himself. He paid me so well that I didn’t ask questions.”
Knowing his thoughts, the figment rationalizes them, “The people with the bombs? Fellow actors, John! Friends of mine who needed some extra money! He paid so well! No one was ever in any danger except those who knew and trusted Sherlock Holmes and the only reason for that was because they were in his constant line of fire. He was a madman who could have snapped and turned on you at any moment. You, Mrs. Hudson, Lestrade, even Ms. Hooper. At any time, any of you could have been his next target.”
“It’s lies!” John rages at the bed. He knows there’s no one there, but he cannot help it. “You’re lying! You’re a liar! You always have been!”
“Then prove it, John!”
How? John pleads to himself.
“Prove it, John!” Moriarty snaps.
“I believe in Sherlock Holmes!” John bellows at the bed. It’s the first time he’s said the name in weeks. “I don’t know why! I just! I do!”
“Why?” The madman mocks him. “Because it’s easer that way, John? Is it easier to believe in him than to think for a moment that you have been egregiously bamboozled? Is it easier to believe that you’ve mattered in some grand scheme of things than recognize when you’ve been used?”
“LIAR!” John screams. He feels his throat go raw at the effort. He leans against the wall, breathing heavily.
His body, the machine, takes over and begins its repairs on the mind. It tells him to close his eyes and try to breathe. John does it. He breathes in counts of eight and waits for his chest to relax and his stomach to stop churning.
He does not sleep.
He does not cry.
He does not yell.
He just stays there.
When he finally opens his eyes, the brightness from the lamp on the bedside over takes him. He glances over at the bed. Moriarty is gone. He lets out a sigh of relief. He wants to stay like this forever. He knows he cannot.
He doesn’t get up all at once. He thinks about the date. It’s been four months and some-odd number of days. He could count them exactly if he wanted but that’d take being able to recall which months have thirty days and which ones have thirty-one.
The most pressing thing is the first part – four months.
It’s now almost two years since they first met that fated day through the random happenstance of Mike. He thinks about that day now, and wonders if he would do it all over again knowing where it would lead him.
Where had it led him? On countless adventures with a brilliant man? To a new vivacity of life? To a purpose? To this? To this hell and misery of never understanding? To the endless shadow of never knowing the truth, of never knowing who he can trust?
How has he lived the past four months? Is he even still alive? What would Sherlock say if he could see John now? The embarrassing wreck of a man who has had all his certainties ripped apart at the seams? What would he say?
Write a letter.
“And say what?” John mutters bitterly, picking at a loose thread on his pants. “And say, wow, y’know, I do rather miss your perpetual introvertedness and constant attempts to impress me and everyone else around you? But more than that, I miss our evenings together in the flat? Even when we weren’t doing anything? Even when we were two rooms apart just listening to see if we could hear each other breath or not? Write a letter and tell you that?”
Write a letter.
John reaches up and gropes for the cool metal of his phone, moving like a machine, never thinking too much.
Write a letter.
He drags the unlock bar across the smooth front of the phone.
Write a letter.
“Write a letter, send a text message,” John murmurs quietly. “Same difference.”
He opens the message screen and scrolls to the name:
Sherlock Holmes.
He clicks it and types out four words, only adding the first to make it sound like a letter.
Sherlock, I miss you.
He waits.
When he message has been sent, John locks the phone again.
He waits.
He closes his eyes.
He breathes.
He waits.
The phone dings loudly in the silence and vibrates in his hands. Without thinking he hurriedly slides the bar across. As he waits for the screen to load, he realizes it could be anyone texting him and most likely not the man he’s hoping it is.
The screen goes back to the Sherlock Holmes messages but rather than a reply, a generic message sits staring back at him:
Message Send Failure. This number is no longer in service. This message could not be sent.
John just stares at the screen for a moment. Taking in the information. The number hasn’t been released yet, the phone’s been disconnected but the number hasn’t been given away yet. It makes sense, he decides, theydon’t usually recycle the numbers right away. Mycroft will probably pull strings until the day he dies to make sure the number never gets used again.
Write a letter.
“Well,” he tells the ceiling. “I wrote the bloody letter. It didn’t get me anywhere.”
Yet, he taps out another message.
Sherlock, come home.
It’s not a request, it’s a demand.
He stares at the screen until the automatic reply pops up.
Message Send Failure. This number is no longer in service. This message could not be sent.
This number is no longer in service.
He’s gone. He’s dead. His number is no longer in service.
“What could I have done?” John pleads to the empty room. He wills himself to have another hallucination, to see the man he misses most again. He needs to see him, he needs to know the truth. He needs to know if he was enough, if he was a disappointment. He needs to know. Nevermind that the hallucination will tell him what he wants to hear.
How could he have been enough? He was just John. John Watson. Ex army captain, a doctor discharged for an injury. John Watson who liked tea and cuddly jumpers and eating food despite the fact that it was encumbering and time consuming. John Watson with social graces but no observational skills. Idiot, plain, average, normal John Watson.
Of course it was all a lie, it was the only sensible answer. But why him? Why John Watson? Why was he entrapped in the web of lies?
Why was he tortured by Sherlock Holmes? Why was he made to feel so special only to discover he wasn’t anything worth a damn? How had the sociopath convinced the world to indulge his insanity simply to amuse himself and how had he made John Watson feel useful only to have it ripped out from under him like a carpet?
That’s the only thing it could have been. A game for the mind of Sherlock Holmes to be played against one John Watson, an innocent civilian.
No.
No.
Lies.
Lying.
Liar.
Though, who’s the liar?
No.
“No, I believe in Sherlock Holmes!”
He says the name for the second time this evening. And the words feel strange in his mouth. The syllables don’t fit nicely with his tongue and his lips now.
He waits. His adrenaline rush fading.
Calmer now, he considers his life, what the future holds for him. None of the possibilities are particularly desirable.
He is a bomb of frustration and anger, ready to explode. Only Captain Watson is not sure when or how it will detonate.
He could become completely catatonic. He could go berserk and need locking up in a loony bin. He could mimic his idol and take a jump. He could borrow his gun back from Lestrade. He could wind up hanging by a scarf in his sister’s closet.
John rises slowly, using the bureau to steady himself. He goes to the closet, slowly sliding the door open. He looks at the sparse hanger with just the dry cleaned scarf on it. He reaches out to it, his fingers grazing the soft, clean, warm material as they slide down one side. Gently, he gives it a tug and it falls off the shoulders of the hanger into his hand.
Gently, John doubles the scarf and wraps it around his neck, before looping the ends through the hole. The way he had worn it. He sighs, wishing it had a trace of him – that it smelled like him or just something.
He sighs again and closes the door of the closet gently. Going back downstairs, he draws himself a glass of water and eyes an apple in the fruit bowl.
Maybe tomorrow, he tells himself.
He shakes his head every step of the way on the stairs until he’s up in his room once more.
He places the glass on the bedside table and pulls back his sheets, climbing in.
Under the blankets, he is warm and protected. The scarf covers his neck and keeps him cozy as he pulls his comforter up around his shoulders. He lays on his side, breathing and thinking. Trying not to think too much.
Just as sleep is starting to envelop him, he feels his phone vibrate in his hand. With a strange, impossible, and faint glimmer of hope, he opens up the message without looking at the screen and is slightly disappointed when he sees it’s from Molly.
Hey, John! I don’t know if it’s too soon or if you want to be alone or something but I have a friend I’d like you to meet! She’s really lovely and I think you’d really hit it off! Would you mind terribly if I set you two up? Molly x
John rolls his eyes, it was only a matter of time before Molly decided to set him up set up with someone new as well. But then again, if anyone in this knows him, surprisingly enough, it’s Molly. Sleepily he replies,
Fine, I suppose. Couldn’t hurt. What’s her name?
He’s almost asleep again when his phone buzzes.
Fantastic! I’ll set something up for this Friday! Her name is Mary Morstan. I know you’ll like her! She’s absolutely lovely! Molly x
Well, John thinks to himself as he drifts off into sleep. Mary’s not a bad name at all…