Fic: A Space Like Drowning
Title: A Space Like Drowning
Pairing: Sherlock/John
Rating: PG-13
Spoilers: Reichenbach Fall, mild ones for Hound.
Warnings: Language, major character death, epic sads.
Words: 1,061
Summary: Sherlock manages to creep in around the edges somehow, and John knows it shouldn’t be a surprise, understands, theoretically, how grieving works, but it still comes as a shock when the feel of blue cashmere is enough to send him into a catatonic silence that lasts for nearly two days.
Author's Notes: My catharsis for Reichenbach (aka I have a lot of feels and don't know what to do with them so I wrote a fic).
There are things that John can’t say.
Not to Mrs. Hudson, her tiny bird-boned hands grasping for answers that he doesn’t have, wouldn’t give her if he could because they share a domestic nature and an affinity for bad television but Sherlock was first and he’s always been the favorite son, all the more adored for every wall he puts a bullet through, and all John can do is point wordlessly to the gurney and give her the courtesy of pretending not to notice how she crumbles.
Not to Lestrade, not aside from incoherent half-utterances that veer from he’s not dead let me see him please just let me see him I can prove it I know him I know him better than anyone please to you bastard you did this to him you helped you blamed him I can’t believe you he trusted you you were his friend you complete and utter fuck I can’t believe and either way he dissolves into a silence that’s two shades away from sobbing and one and a half from screaming and punching something, and Lestrade may not be a genius but he knows when to back the fuck up.
Not to Harry when he turns up on her doorstep, three AM and hair insomnia-ruffled and eyes hollow, but then again he doesn’t have to say much: she takes one look at him and sees the unbearable emptiness of the flat, the mocking grimace of the yellow smiley face on the wall, the impossibility of sleep without atonal violin shrieks leaping from the floor below. Harry’s flat is small, dingy, dank with the smell of misery and cheap beer, but it’s not Baker Street.
Still, Sherlock manages to creep in around the edges somehow, and John knows it shouldn’t be a surprise, understands, theoretically, how grieving works, but it still comes as a shock when the feel of blue cashmere-a sweater of Harry’s that gets mixed in with his things in the wash-is enough to send him into a catatonic silence that lasts for nearly two days. He passes a particularly large hound-dog, it’s a dog, in the street one day and has to duck into the nearest coffee shop to sit down and try to breathe. Miraculously, no one says a thing; he’s not sure if the barista recognizes him from the papers or if she just recognizes the look in his eyes, the look that says that he’s always there, in the wallpaper pattern on the napkins and the Paganini concerto on the sound system and the smell of dumplings from the takeout place next door and the couple at the next table over bickering about whose turn it is to do the shopping.
He knows enough about grief to not turn on the television, knows that if he does he’ll never turn it off because it’s easy, it’s too easy to sit there and not think and pretend that if he stares at the screen for long enough he won’t see Sherlock’s body hit the ground every time he closes his eyes. It’s the same reason he doesn’t drink the beers that Harry sets down in front of him night after night, and they’ve never been good with words, the Watson kids, but he thinks it might just be her kind of sympathy even though all she ever does is shake her head and say fucking hell, John.
There are things he doesn’t say into his pillow, late at night with police sirens flashing through Harry’s living room and he’s gritting out something that might be you bastard you bastard and might just be wordless tearless sobbing but definitely isn’t any of the things that he meant to say.
There are mounds, heaps, great towering piles of things that he can’t say to his therapist, not with the rain like a waterfall thundering outside and her eyes on him like she’s trying so hard to understand, to pierce and penetrate him with a gaze like cotton wool, so far from the only therapist he’s ever needed, grey eyes like scalpels that took him apart in a fraction of a glance and told him more about himself than he’d ever really wanted to know.
Tell me what happened, she says, and he tries, really does, but all that comes out are words, words like he used to throw away so easily, that used to mean so little until they started to mean a whole fucking lot, that bite at his own ears like paper cuts because all words are riddles, really, and he’s always been rubbish at riddles, never saw the point of them before a riddle meant the difference between life and death, an IOU and a blood-stained rooftop, a bicycle and a gurney, an outstretched hand and a trench coat fluttering in the wind.
Watch me, he said, and John did, John still does, every night when he’s trying to sleep with his neck craned up the arm of Harry’s couch, every time the tube shuttles into the darkness underground and there’s nothing but black in his vision, every moment that he runs it all through his head, everything Sherlock said and did because he’s trying to understand but Sherlock and Moriarty, they live in a world of fairytales and John, John exists between the pull of the trigger and the explosion, the sole of the shoe and the wet pavement, the expansion of the lungs and the contraction of the heart.
Gently, his therapist corrects him every time he refers to Sherlock in the present tense.
There are things he can’t even say at the graveside, grass damp beneath his shoes and the ghost of Sherlock’s hand in his and what might just be tears pricking like pins in his eyes as he says stop it, stop this, and it’s almost funny because since when has he ever been able to tell Sherlock what not to do and it’s not like that will ever change, but it’s not funny because it’s still not really what he means to say.
He only manages it halfway across the cemetery with the wind at his back and his head held high, all ramrod military posture and steady hands and dry eyes and firm mouth and a faint, tiny voice that reaches below the ground and whispers, I love you.
Pairing: Sherlock/John
Rating: PG-13
Spoilers: Reichenbach Fall, mild ones for Hound.
Warnings: Language, major character death, epic sads.
Words: 1,061
Summary: Sherlock manages to creep in around the edges somehow, and John knows it shouldn’t be a surprise, understands, theoretically, how grieving works, but it still comes as a shock when the feel of blue cashmere is enough to send him into a catatonic silence that lasts for nearly two days.
Author's Notes: My catharsis for Reichenbach (aka I have a lot of feels and don't know what to do with them so I wrote a fic).
There are things that John can’t say.
Not to Mrs. Hudson, her tiny bird-boned hands grasping for answers that he doesn’t have, wouldn’t give her if he could because they share a domestic nature and an affinity for bad television but Sherlock was first and he’s always been the favorite son, all the more adored for every wall he puts a bullet through, and all John can do is point wordlessly to the gurney and give her the courtesy of pretending not to notice how she crumbles.
Not to Lestrade, not aside from incoherent half-utterances that veer from he’s not dead let me see him please just let me see him I can prove it I know him I know him better than anyone please to you bastard you did this to him you helped you blamed him I can’t believe you he trusted you you were his friend you complete and utter fuck I can’t believe and either way he dissolves into a silence that’s two shades away from sobbing and one and a half from screaming and punching something, and Lestrade may not be a genius but he knows when to back the fuck up.
Not to Harry when he turns up on her doorstep, three AM and hair insomnia-ruffled and eyes hollow, but then again he doesn’t have to say much: she takes one look at him and sees the unbearable emptiness of the flat, the mocking grimace of the yellow smiley face on the wall, the impossibility of sleep without atonal violin shrieks leaping from the floor below. Harry’s flat is small, dingy, dank with the smell of misery and cheap beer, but it’s not Baker Street.
Still, Sherlock manages to creep in around the edges somehow, and John knows it shouldn’t be a surprise, understands, theoretically, how grieving works, but it still comes as a shock when the feel of blue cashmere-a sweater of Harry’s that gets mixed in with his things in the wash-is enough to send him into a catatonic silence that lasts for nearly two days. He passes a particularly large hound-dog, it’s a dog, in the street one day and has to duck into the nearest coffee shop to sit down and try to breathe. Miraculously, no one says a thing; he’s not sure if the barista recognizes him from the papers or if she just recognizes the look in his eyes, the look that says that he’s always there, in the wallpaper pattern on the napkins and the Paganini concerto on the sound system and the smell of dumplings from the takeout place next door and the couple at the next table over bickering about whose turn it is to do the shopping.
He knows enough about grief to not turn on the television, knows that if he does he’ll never turn it off because it’s easy, it’s too easy to sit there and not think and pretend that if he stares at the screen for long enough he won’t see Sherlock’s body hit the ground every time he closes his eyes. It’s the same reason he doesn’t drink the beers that Harry sets down in front of him night after night, and they’ve never been good with words, the Watson kids, but he thinks it might just be her kind of sympathy even though all she ever does is shake her head and say fucking hell, John.
There are things he doesn’t say into his pillow, late at night with police sirens flashing through Harry’s living room and he’s gritting out something that might be you bastard you bastard and might just be wordless tearless sobbing but definitely isn’t any of the things that he meant to say.
There are mounds, heaps, great towering piles of things that he can’t say to his therapist, not with the rain like a waterfall thundering outside and her eyes on him like she’s trying so hard to understand, to pierce and penetrate him with a gaze like cotton wool, so far from the only therapist he’s ever needed, grey eyes like scalpels that took him apart in a fraction of a glance and told him more about himself than he’d ever really wanted to know.
Tell me what happened, she says, and he tries, really does, but all that comes out are words, words like he used to throw away so easily, that used to mean so little until they started to mean a whole fucking lot, that bite at his own ears like paper cuts because all words are riddles, really, and he’s always been rubbish at riddles, never saw the point of them before a riddle meant the difference between life and death, an IOU and a blood-stained rooftop, a bicycle and a gurney, an outstretched hand and a trench coat fluttering in the wind.
Watch me, he said, and John did, John still does, every night when he’s trying to sleep with his neck craned up the arm of Harry’s couch, every time the tube shuttles into the darkness underground and there’s nothing but black in his vision, every moment that he runs it all through his head, everything Sherlock said and did because he’s trying to understand but Sherlock and Moriarty, they live in a world of fairytales and John, John exists between the pull of the trigger and the explosion, the sole of the shoe and the wet pavement, the expansion of the lungs and the contraction of the heart.
Gently, his therapist corrects him every time he refers to Sherlock in the present tense.
There are things he can’t even say at the graveside, grass damp beneath his shoes and the ghost of Sherlock’s hand in his and what might just be tears pricking like pins in his eyes as he says stop it, stop this, and it’s almost funny because since when has he ever been able to tell Sherlock what not to do and it’s not like that will ever change, but it’s not funny because it’s still not really what he means to say.
He only manages it halfway across the cemetery with the wind at his back and his head held high, all ramrod military posture and steady hands and dry eyes and firm mouth and a faint, tiny voice that reaches below the ground and whispers, I love you.