Fic: Gone to Feed the Roses (Elegant and Curled) (1/4)
Title: Gone to Feed the Roses (Elegant and Curled)
Rating: PG-13
Pairing: Sherlock/John
Word Count: 6,543
Summary: John Watson is no one's weeping widow, and he knows that it's not impossible to cheat death. Spoilers for 2.03 - The Reichenbach Fall; Warnings for Suicidal Ideation.
Disclaimer: I own nothing but the plot. Title credit to Edna St. Vincent Millay.
Author's Notes: This was a long time in coming, and it's only here now because of the talents of the incomparable sangueuk and the encouragement of weepingnaiad, togoboldly, na_shao, and savetomorrow.
Gone to Feed the Roses (Elegant and Curled)
Part One
John Watson’s not an idiot. He can see the signs.
John Watson is a doctor, a soldier; he knows what depression looks like, can recite the stages that grief is meant to (and often doesn’t) follow. John Watson knows how to take a life in more ways than most men: quickly, painlessly, ruthlessly, prolonged. John Watson doesn’t have to think on it much, before he knows how he’s going to play the hand he’s been dealt. His grip doesn’t shake, though his heart races; nerves of steel and all that. But it takes less than an instant for him to be sure, for him to be certain where he might have hesitated before.
John Watson credits Sherlock, for that.
_______________________________
The first week doesn’t exist, save in fleeting impressions, little notations of the passage of time and the persistence of life where it isn’t welcome: the ache along his ribs where he fell, for instance, where he hit the pavement after the world collapsed around him; the tenderness below the bones-far less physical, but somehow more acute. The aluminium rattle, the clang-and-drag of the wheels of a trolley bearing dead weight off toward a lesser sort of oblivion, left to cool in a morgue where they'd laughed, once, bickered; how flippant, how insolent-a blasphemy, so fucking obscene. There are dreams in those days, like the ones from before, like the ones full of blood, but these are darker, colder; these ones don’t pass. These one’s stab at the centre of him, tear at the core, rage at a heart that’s a bit absent, mostly vacant, that goes on because it doesn’t know what else to do, because John doesn’t know what else to do.
The second week, well: looking back on it, John can’t really tell it apart from the first.
_______________________________
It’s difficult to process change-internal, external; transformation over time-without distance, without a reprieve from consistent acclimatisation to the alterations taking place. John understands that.
Scratch that, no: John doesn’t understand. John doesn’t comprehend how anyone can fail to notice the way that something, someone close to them reshapes and reforms under the influence of pressure and weight and the unforgiving passage of moments, of hours into days. John doesn’t see how people can fail to read those signs. He remembers watching himself change, the subtle shifts of his reflection in a pool of water: the fit of his uniform, the shape of his hand around his weapon. He’s watched his sister slip into the void of addiction, step by step, refusing his help until it hurt too much for him to offer it anymore, to stand by and watch it all slip past, too close at hand. He’s watched his flatmate, his best friend, his best everything, even, maybe, his-
Well, he’d watched Sherlock change, in little ways. All the time.
And the months he’d spent, that he’d lived and breathed with Sherlock Holmes under the same roof, watching him work and hearing him theorise, deducing on his own the things that Sherlock, in all his brilliance, failed to see himself: those months stretched out like lifetimes, in practice, and no man can live a lifetime without the scars to show for it.
John Watson’s got his share of scars to show; John’s no fucking exception.
The thing is, though, the important thing, is that John’s been changed, fundamentally altered-all the equal and opposite reactions to Sherlock’s infinite action, his momentum. John’s been broken and flattened and reshaped and made anew, and the elemental parts of him are still the same, for the most part, but he’s a whole new shape, a configuration that’s recognisable from some angles, if not from others. Sherlock left his mark in more places than even he could likely fathom.
But there’s something about change, really; something about reduction and division and removal, transmutation and the like: something John remembers from his chemistry labs, from Lavoisier and the shift from mysticism to rationality, from alchemy to empiricism: matter doesn’t fluctuate. The fundamental system remains constant, always. There is no destruction, despite appearances. We can burn again and again, unending, and yet we still remain. So while John has come to understand certain truths that remained hidden to him, once; has come to question convictions that he’d never once been known to doubt-while John is not what he once was, while he has been remade into something new and better and stronger and weaker and lighter and bolder and braver and fearful, more tainted, and yet, the beating heart of him had never been so goddamned bright: for all of that, John’s never not been himself. John’s never lost the pieces that have always made him up; he’s just had the parts remoulded, so that they’d fit. So they’d make a whole.
And sometimes, a man simply knows what he has to do. Knows what sort of life’s worth living, and what sort of life isn’t really a life at all.
John Watson, well: he’s the sort of man who knows-always has been.
_______________________________
The third week, John spends in a state of sheer fluidity, ambiguity: formlessness and fervent focus. Facts and figures, details flood his mind and distract him, a running backdrop to his daily routine as he returns to the surgery, as he brews tea for two because anything less is unthinkable-as he hums symphonies to himself, only the strings, because that’s the only bit he knows.
The heart of a human adult weighs approximately two-hundred to four-hundred grams (it’s heavy, but not that heavy, and John thinks idly, dramatically, that maybe there’s something extra in his chest for it to feel so full, so leaden; for it to seem like a fucking trial to simply raise up and make himself be, make himself do).
Current research suggests that dream-frequency and intelligence quotient may, in fact, be positively correlated (John thinks he’d like to look into that, if only to prove it wrong, to prove that the smartest man he’s ever known barely slept, barely paused, danced on the edge of oblivion at every moment, and he couldn’t have had time for dreams).
(John wonders what kinds of dreams Sherlock Holmes might have had, though, on those off days, the anomalies: where even the mighty deign to rest.)
Human bone is as strong as granite with regard for its capacity to support weight (and yet the physics of it, momentum and gravity and force and speed and collision: that awful thud-and-crack on the concrete, and Sherlock had never been unbreakable, of course-had never been untouchable, and the doctor who had mended the fissures, the cracks and crevices; the man whose hands had touched and felt the softness, the warmness, the unrelenting humanity that seeped from those pores; John of all people would know it. John knew the feel of those bones, knew the structure and the shape and the jut of them beneath the skin and he knew the twist in his gut when they looked all wrong, from the wrist to the clavicle to those goddamned cheekbones, all skewed and snapped and shifted, impossibly realigned and then painted over red).
A definitive capacity for the human brain remains scientifically elusive, but if the analogy is to be drawn, some liberal estimates suggest one might be able to store upwards of a thousand terabytes of data inside such a hard drive (John doesn’t believe those theories, really, because he believes in the limits of a human being, has always held that you could praise a person for their shortcomings, their restraint as just as well as your could for their strengths. And yet there’s Sherlock, Sherlock whose hard drive needed deleting and yet whose Mind Palace was infinite, and John wonders which was the lie or if the paradox was where the beauty dwelled, if the suspension between two poles was Sherlock at his core, unhinged, and to live in tension between the two was the marvel to be praised, the most honest he could get. John wonders which parts of Sherlock’s life merited saving, which were condemned to removal, wonders how the process of selection became underway; wonders if they remembered the same things, any of the same things-wonders how much of their time together would have been saved, would have found a place in the hallowed halls of the Chateau in Sherlock’s head).
There is a rather vague precision inherent to the phenomenon of rigor mortis; the fact that it sets in somewhere between minutes and hours following time of death (and the stiffness, that eerie stiffness is something that John has never got used to in his profession, his line of work; and then in Sherlock, in Sherlock who tried to be so hard and so rigid, who maybe tried because in truth he was softness, warm flesh that gave beneath a touch and a pulse that surged and met John’s fingertips as he tended a wound or set a break, realigned a dislocation; to feel Sherlock still and stiff and cold was wrong, is wrong, will always be wrong not just for what it means, but at some deeper level of how the universe works, how the world comes together and stays solid without shattering under the weight of all the hurt and rage and loss).
And so John thinks these things over, and over, and over, until his own dreams don’t have room to torment him anymore, until they’re nothing because they’re everything, these memories, these thoughts: over-saturation, excess exposure, desensitisation. Textbook.
John discovers, once again, that textbooks sometimes lie.
_______________________________
The fourth week, John finds the stack of newspapers.
Apparently, they were always being delivered-a failing of both sight and observation, on John’s part-from all over the world, in more languages than John could figure, small ones and thick ones, broadsheets and tabloids alike. Mrs. Hudson had been stacking them in Sherlock’s room-not binning them; sentiment-but she’d missed one, this one, the pile of them on the doorstep as he undoes the lock, at least thirty different publications, and something intangible tells him to pick them up, to take them, to know them and ponder them: a memorial, a remembrance, a way to get him through the day.
So he does it, he reads the newspapers when they come, all of them-or else, all the ones he can recognise to any limited degree. He’d only ever bothered to read the national publications, before; had never noticed the bylines traced in letters he recognised alongside characters he couldn’t parse, unfamiliar amalgamations, left-to-right and right-to-left alike.
He wonders if that ink had ever betrayed itself on Sherlock’s hand, if foreign letters had stuck to his skin and screamed to John to look and see and know just this thing, this one little thing that, like all of the little things about that larger-than-life man, would be like gold, like water in a desert and shelter from a storm. He wonders if he’d simply learned to heed the call too late.
Far too late.
So he reads them, and looks for crimes, for clues and patterns, steeps himself in the familiar. He smiles to himself, the nausea in his stomach somehow tightening, deepening even as it eases, and he can almost see the upturn of those lips, that mouth; can almost hear a breath that’s not his own in the empty rooms of the flat when he double-takes, when he ponders loose ends and vagaries, when he digs deeper even to find nothing of note. It’s the routine, the practise of it, the circling of words and the underlining of titles, the scouring of obituaries and the connecting of dots. It feels like home and safety and the closest he’s allowed to order, to peace in this post-war world where nothing’s the right way up and he’s going to go with that, because he’s tired of feeling dizzy all the time, like the blood’s rushing to his head; tired of feel disoriented on top of feeling gutted.
It’s an elaborate, maladaptive coping mechanism, John knows this. But it is something, and really: John’s got no right to be picky.
_______________________________
The truth is that the pity doesn’t surprise him, when he emerges enough from the haze to recognise it for what it is, for how it twists in the gazes, the stares of everyone-everyone, from strangers to friends to own fucking sister, they stare at him with that watery sort of guilt, degrading: they look at him like he’s mad, deluded, lost, and he is, possibly, he knows that, but it’s not new. Any man would have to be a bit bonkers to follow Sherlock Holmes about, to live with him. A person would have to be deluded to believe in miracles from even the most amazing of men-a mortal, finite, human being, as blissfully, brilliantly brokenly human as they come-but damn it all, there’s a part of him that still hopes.
And true, he’d found something at 221B, in London again, and yes, in Sherlock-he’d been shockingly and blissfully and recklessly anchored for a time there, in him-but the hard fact is that John’s no stranger to being lost.
So, true: all of it’s rather unfortunate, heartily tragic and that rot, and it kills him slowly, all slow-motion bullets that shatter and dig into the tissue, deep until they penetrate bone: but the pity stings like salt in the wounds. And all John is anymore is a string of open sores, aching, slowly bleeding out. The pity reminds him, sears it anew against the torn flesh of his soul, as if he needs reminding, as if he could forget. The pity just makes it that much worse.
And then there’s Molly: Molly, who always looks at him like she’s got something she wants to say, just at the edge of her tongue: something timid and tortuous, something dire that she’s holding back, that wants desperately to fall and spill and bleed on impact, and John can tell that it burns, that it would hurt when it came, when it hit. The metaphor’s wretched, of course: makes him taste acid and bile at the back of his throat at times; sets him off laughing until his cheeks are wet and he can’t remember the sun, at others.
He wants to tell Molly, wants to just tell her that it’s fine; that words weren’t meant for this, anyway.
_______________________________
He marks the fifth week by getting into the black sedan that sits outside of Baker Street every day, from dawn to dusk, waiting.
Mycroft doesn’t look at him when he arrives, reads The Post in silence, and John sits, refuses a drink and takes in the patrons, the scenery, the whole fucking show. Old men with tobacco stained fingertips, some drinking water and others something stronger, yet John can read the difference, has learned to see the signs of it in the position of their hands on the glass.
Mycroft turns a page, and John glances, notices a stack of files on the side-table at his right, sandwiched between a foreign paper, Belorusy i rynok-one of the publications John’s collected, that he blinks at guilelessly, utterly lost, at his kitchen table when it arrives every week-and a tattered, aged volume, the title peeling at the spine: Practical Handbook of Bee Culture.
John sighs, shifts in his chair, and almost wishes he’d taken the drink.
_______________________________
The sixth week is when Greg comes to him, at Baker Street, and asks the question that John’s been waiting for.
“What in god’s name are you doing, John?”
John’s staring at an article from the Telgraf Turk, highlighting a line that pops out to him for some reason he can’t entirely pin down just yet as he struggles with the little Turkish-English phrasebook he’d found on one of the bookshelves. He looks up, notices Greg’s eyes on the wall adjacent the windows: the map, the web, the slowly-building mural made of clues to an unknown crime, and John wonders for a moment why it’s strange-strange, because Greg looks befuddled and horrified and then of course, there’s still the pity-when John does this, but perfectly normal for Sherlock.
Oh, well. For Sherlock. Of course.
But the thing is, if it was normal for Sherlock, it swiftly became normal for John as well, and normal, boring: they’re not one and the same, anymore. Normal, for John, is the rush, the absurdity, the humour in the obscene, the endless questioning and the obviousness and the observation and the dull roar that never flags in the background. John’s normal is motion and friction and running and thinking and asking and chasing and risking and danger and the sodding map of the world in the little revelations of words on his fucking wall, thank you kindly.
And he’s lost his balance, and he’s always feeling a little like he’s falling, and if he’s ever going to find his bearings again, if he’s ever going to calculate the proper course-to get over, to get through, to be done, to move forward, to halt momentum and find his answers and seek his truth and stop it all-he needs to find a foothold. He needs to hold a still-point long enough to breathe without the hitch in his lungs, in the flow of his blood.
Just a bit of normal, really. Routine.
That’s what he’s doing.
_______________________________
John’s not sure what sparks it, what drives the impulse-not that he’s sure of much these days, but he wonders if maybe that’s alright, because not being sure leaves room for doubt in even the most certain of scenarios, leaves some space to breathe-but John decides, at the very core of him, beneath and above all intellect and reason: he decides to venture into Sherlock’s room.
It smells less musty than it should, or else, less than John thinks it should. It feels much less like a shrine than he’d feared. He’d been in it enough times, though he’d not put much thought into studying the scenery, into really seeing, let alone trying to observe or deduce. Then, he’d had the genuine article. He was fascinating enough on his own.
John’s throat feels tight, at that thought.
There aren’t any experiments here, aren’t any beakers or flasks, no Bunsen burners, no knives or acids or vials, no bits of human beings, no tissue samples or slides or microscopes or chemical reactions left to peter out; the room is devoid of all these things and yet it feels so intimately like Sherlock that John wants to gasp and laugh and cry at it, wants to savour it and drown inside it, all at once.
There are boxes, though-stacks of things, random papers and such; meticulously organised, barely touched, and maybe that’s what draws John to them, maybe that’s why he slips the lid off and looks in the first place, maybe that’s what leads him to find the things that cut him to the core, to find the secrets that had been so distasteful to Sherlock, that had been kept so close by the man himself.
Sentiment. Buried, and hidden, and brilliant, and blinding.
It’s photographs, mostly, in the first box; photographs, faded, worn: John can see the oils from fingers where the prints were touched, some more than others, but he knows they were looked at, maybe even treasured. Old ones, some tintypes even, people with faces like Sherlock’s, and Mycroft’s, some dead-ringers and others who just share a trait or two. Newer ones, black and white still, or sepia. Modern shots, colours, row upon row, and there’s a method to them, a system, John can tell, but it’s not chronological.
He almost doesn’t want to know the logic; almost just wants to savour the bits of the man he misses more than he can bear.
There might be tears on his face when he finally stands and closes the door-thinks better of it, leaves it open just a crack-but that sort of thing is trivial, so he doesn’t bother to check for certain.
_______________________________
It’s in the middle of week nine that John makes his way to the Diogenes Club once again. Mycroft is skimming a paper called La Voz del Interior, though he folds it quickly when John arrives.
“Doctor Watson,” Mycroft says, and there’s a hesitation that’s uncommon for him, more than the formality of his title, his profession. “To what do I owe the pleasure?” He gestures to the chair across from him, but John intends to be brief.
“It was hard, at first, to see the resemblance,” John says, looks at Mycroft, can’t find Sherlock in the shape of his face or the set of his eyes, not without looking too hard, not without fearing he’s superimposing one face upon another.
“It’s not so much physical, though, is it? More a matter of disposition,” Mycroft stares, silent, his expression tight and tense and yet loose around the jaw; strange. Contradictory. Apropos, given John’s deductions. “You’re both fucking maddening.”
Mycroft tilts his head, parts his lips and takes in air as if he means to speak, but John’s heard enough from this man, John’s not sure what else might be said between them, and he’s not even sure he should be here, saying this, but he is. He is.
“I don’t understand it,” John shakes his head, brushes the back of his hand over his mouth and traces his lips with his fingertips. “Anyone who cared, who gave a toss about the bastard would have hurt when he was gone. And then there’s you. His brother. There’s you, and yet,” John chuckles, then, and it’s a broken, twisted imitation of the sound it’s meant to be.
“Your world’s not upside-down,” John leans in, says it, delivers the words like a death sentence, a noose around the neck. “You’ve still got a purpose.”
Mycroft blinks, but his chest rises, falls more quickly, more shallow. His throat works under his collar and John sighs out a laugh again, though this one’s cutting, sardonic: like venom off his tongue.
“Maddening.”
He realises, then, as he’s walking out, that hatred isn’t what he feels for Mycroft Holmes. He doesn’t know what it is he does feel, exactly, but he knows that hatred’s the wrong word entirely.
_______________________________
On his way to work, John walks past Barts every day. He could change his route, but he doesn’t.
Part of it’s penance, he figures. Part of it is a sort of self-flagellation that’s more effective, that hurts harder than anything he could literally do to his flesh. He can see the crime scene vividly in his mind’s eye, as if it had never been cleared; he can see it, and it stings too much to try and observe for too long. The ringing in his ears, the ache from his own impact with the ground comes back, seeps in like muscle memory, subconscious associations as he tastes the air and picks up salt and iron, the scent of blood.
Another part is curiosity. All sorts. The need to see from all the angles, to have that picture in his head of his own heart breaking, wanting to watch the ventricles comes undone from all sides, the need to know. The need to feel it, to not forget-as if that were possible, as if it could happen, ever; like it’s a danger at all. The need to see if there’s another part of the trick, the part when what disappears gets returned again, no worse for wear. The need to be sure that this all hasn’t been a vivid nightmare, a hallucination from Baskerville, some bad sugar in his coffee.
But there’s something else, as well: something nagging and insistent that makes John keep walking past, makes him go that way, that beats his heart into submission every morning, every day; makes him sit there on a bench and do the daily crossword, just down a bit from that fateful point of impact. It’s as if something’s telling him that he’s missing the point, that he’s got all the signals but he’s looked past the sign. It’s amorphous, may not even be real, but it’s there, and it drives his steps and directs his motions more than he’s really comfortable with, but the fact remains.
The fact remains, and he walks that path, unending.
He needs a fucking ending.
_______________________________
The fifteenth week is when he stops counting the days, because the passage of time feels strangely, vibrantly irrelevant. There’s before, and there’s the whole stretch of after leading up to the finish, culminating in only thing left for John to do here, now, in this brave new world where it’s just him, where there’s no one else to blaze a path or follow the trails, to play the game or piece together the puzzles, to drink the tea and dissect the bodies and mourn and laugh and live, and John’s just a man, one man, and he can’t do all of those things on his own. He doesn’t know how.
And, to be honest, most days it feels as if failing to do all of those things-those crucial, necessary things-it feels as if failing makes doing any one of them pointless.
There’s before, and there’s inevitability, and they’re all tied up inside each other, knots in the gut and the chest and the soul, all fucking tangled until there’s no separating one from the next, until the now poisons the then, and what was begins to colour the promise, the resolve of what’s to come.
It gets better-imperceptibly so, just that little bit easier to breathe in, if not out-when John stops marking time and just does, just plans, just is.
Until he isn’t.
_______________________________
He’s staring at the wall, staring at newspaper clippings-ones he’d tacked up, and ones he hadn’t the heart to tear down, which makes his head hurt for the confusion it breeds, and his chest ache for feeling-and post-its and bullet holes and acid burns in the plaster board and memories painted on the wallpaper when he hears the creak of the stairs, the cadence of steps, and he knows before the click of the heels resounds who it is that’s come to visit.
Mrs. Hudson’s delicate, eases her way into the flat without a knock, and John hears in the way that she breathes that she’s hesitant, apprehensive.
John suddenly realises that he hasn’t slept in more than three days. It’s entirely possible that he hasn’t moved in almost twelve hours.
He’s not hungry, or thirsty. He’s not tired. The bits of information, the little scraps of data, everything, the scribbles he’s made on paper and the mess of word documents on his laptop: all of the thoughts and ideas seem to flow differently, seem to spring up and swirl in the air before him, rearranging themselves in odd patterns, searching for an optimum fit, a way to make it all come together, to give him an answer and a bearing and a reason and a fucking prayer for anything, for the future or the present or, perhaps preferably, the end. It might be dehydration, exhaustion, or maybe a stroke of real genius, but John thinks maybe he gets it, maybe he understands some of the unthinkable things his flatmate has done, his best friend had been. Maybe he understands.
And that had been the point of it, really.
“John,” Mrs. Hudson ventures, and John blinks; the words are tossed into the melee of his thoughts, tied up in the trail, the breadcrumbs, burnt and raw alike, and it takes a moment for John to incline his head-not to look, but to indicate some scrap of attention that was better than no scrap at all.
“Are you,” she steps forward, looks at him carefully, critically, and he wonders if she sees the wheels turning, the parts coalescing, the obvious revealing itself behind John’s eyes because there were never questions, really, and John realises suddenly that if the choice had been offered before he’d taken to playing detective as if he had the foggiest clue what the hell he was doing, before he’d started mimicking so well that he’d begun to become-well, the answer would have been the same.
This conclusion, in essence, was a long time in coming.
“Are you alright, love?”
And John breathes, for the first time, without any pain, without any pressure on his lungs. There’s a vindication that’s taken place here: an ache released in the process of doing and being and steeping himself in what he knows in order to navigate the unknowable, thinking so that he can survive the unthinkable, only to find out that there are no unthinkable things, and he was never meant to merely survive.
“You know,” John blinks, exhales-filled with moonlight and the thrill of cornering a kill, giddy with an end that’s eluded him too long, that’s on the horizon now, within John’s reach. “I think I am.”
He is. He hasn’t felt this right since, well-not since. Because there’s a resolve in him, there’s a decision and a knowledge and a certainty in the marrow of his bones that he’s doing the right thing, that he knows himself well enough to understand that this is true, this is fact, this is the correct course, the only course left; that it’s high time to end this farce, this half-life he’s been leading, keeping the loss at bay just to stumble through survival without ever feeling truly whole. It’s selfish, maybe. It’s madness, possibly. It’s extreme, most definitely. It’s foolish, perhaps.
But it’s right.
It’s right, and it’s fine. It’s all fine and strangely, morbidly-fucked entirely, like giggling at a crime scene and eating breakfast next to a severed head or a hanging mannequin, and damn it all to hell if John doesn’t miss it like a goddamned limb-it’s the only thing left. Last move in the game.
He’s sure of it.
_______________________________
He puts his affairs in order, makes sure everything’s arranged and taken care of, as best he can. John does this, because he knows what it feels like to be left out in the cold, to be blindsided and bereft and left with the pieces in your lap, ready to cut everything open each time you try to move, try to breathe, try to think. John wouldn’t wish that on his second-worst enemy.
The worst enemy, though-the first-worst; he’d have sent that bastard to a hell worse than this in a heartbeat, if he’d ever been given the chance.
It’s not hard to sort, really; not like he’s never pondered it before, planned it out in his head when the days were dark. He’s got a foundation to spring from, tucked in a drawer in a flat he left a lifetime ago, with a long-forgotten cane and the kinds of aches that seem meaningless, now; the kind that seem foolish to have ever lamented or bemoaned, because they were the simple wounds-the easy hurts, really.
But he knows how to arrange it so that he causes the least pain for the fewest people, and so the harm that is inflicted, unavoidably, won’t be known, won’t be felt or seen until it’s already too late. He plans it out so that there’s no fuss, no questions, no mess. He’s meticulous. He’s seen enough deaths to know how to keep his own from going pear-shaped.
He can control this much, at least. He can have this one last say.
Of course, he knows how he’ll do it. Quiet. Simple. Effective. That’s always been the easy part. His particular means were learned in the desert; the catalyst uncovered in that faraway land: fruit of the coarse soil, that unforgiving sand. A devilish secret from that place he almost misses now, the last real danger left in the world, save for staying like this; apart from keeping on this downward trajectory and waiting-not bracing-for collision.
He looks at the vial, ponders it, turns it in the light; breathes in air that’s been starched, bleached in too much sun so that the oxygen in it shrivels, recedes, and his throat, his lungs feel parched.
The colour-mercury against midday sky, not quite anything and yet so many things, so much; the colour of the liquid used to stare at him, used to pierce him to the core.
And sometimes, John knows, God is tragically ironic. Sometimes, losing your sanity is the only way to regain your selfhood. Sometimes, the wound that breaks your spirit is the one that saves your soul.
Sometimes, the universe bleeds a poetic sort of justice from her very pores.
Sometimes, John’s a just sentimental sod, but fuck it. He doesn’t even mind, anymore.
_______________________________
He says goodbye in his way; nothing to arouse suspicion, of course, but he thinks it’s better than a call on his mobile from a fucking rooftop.
To Stamford, he gives his tags. Because Mike knows what they mean, what it means to leave them behind. It’s the closest thing to a letter he’s going to sign off on, to put his name to. He wants to make sure they know who’s handiwork they’re finding, when it’s done.
Sarah, he leaves a letter of resignation, very official-like, on her desk in the morning before she makes it in, held down by a blueberry crumb-cake-her favourite-from the cafe they’d gone to on their very first date.
Lestrade, he gives most of the snippets of cases, real ones, potential bits of evidence among the things that had decorated the walls and had brought John peace and purpose in the tumult while he’d reached his decision and found the end of his road. He doesn’t know if there’s anything worthwhile in the fray, the piles he ties up and leaves for him at NSY, but if there is something, even just a glimpse, he trusts Greg to follow through.
Anderson and Donovan, well: John’s envisioned them tumbling from a roof and oozing viscera on the concrete instead of someone braver-better-far too often for him to ever want to leave either one of them a bloody thing.
Harry; he gives Harry back her phone. Because he understands losing now in a new and fearsome way-understands it in the marrow of his bones and the chambers of his heart-and he thinks that most fences are probably worth mending when the slats are still there, and there’s still life in you yet. There are too many times when that isn’t the case, and there aren’t any more chances, John figures; it’s best not to take the ones you do get and just toss them, out of hand.
Mrs. Hudson, he gets her some soothers that’ll do the job better than whatever street-grade rubbish she’s been taking, and buys her enough tea to last at least a year or two-it’s not sufficient, really, but he’s not sure there’s anything that would be.
For Molly, he leaves a bit of residue from the silver liquid, the compound-The Compound-on a slide he doesn’t clean. She’s a clever girl. It’ll take time-enough, so that it’s far too late to change the past once she realises what he’s done-but he knows she’ll see what he can’t say.
John’s wasted too much time on all the things he can’t say. He’s done with it, now.
_______________________________
Twenty-three weeks and three days after-after-he leaves the city in order to finish things; goes where no one will find him, where no one will dig too deep or know too soon: he goes where no one will even think to try and stop him, to halt the momentum of the runaway train that’s taken hold in him, that had been out of control since that day in June when the world turned cold around the edges and the colour seeped away.
Of course he never stopped counting the days. Days were never irrelevant.
So it’s one hundred and sixty-four days after he watched the world end that John Watson leaves it all behind: a Tuesday, monochrome, his own fingers wrapped against his wrist, counting the slowing pace of his pulse until his grasp slackens, slips; until the spaces in between the beats grow long, languid: until they consume the ether and the rhythm gets lost.
One hundred and sixty-four days after everything changes and enough stays the same, John Watson dies with a smile on his face, and there was never any doubt, really.
He was always going to follow that bastard, one way or another.
Next: Part Two
Rating: PG-13
Pairing: Sherlock/John
Word Count: 6,543
Summary: John Watson is no one's weeping widow, and he knows that it's not impossible to cheat death. Spoilers for 2.03 - The Reichenbach Fall; Warnings for Suicidal Ideation.
Disclaimer: I own nothing but the plot. Title credit to Edna St. Vincent Millay.
Author's Notes: This was a long time in coming, and it's only here now because of the talents of the incomparable sangueuk and the encouragement of weepingnaiad, togoboldly, na_shao, and savetomorrow.
Gone to Feed the Roses (Elegant and Curled)
Part One
John Watson’s not an idiot. He can see the signs.
John Watson is a doctor, a soldier; he knows what depression looks like, can recite the stages that grief is meant to (and often doesn’t) follow. John Watson knows how to take a life in more ways than most men: quickly, painlessly, ruthlessly, prolonged. John Watson doesn’t have to think on it much, before he knows how he’s going to play the hand he’s been dealt. His grip doesn’t shake, though his heart races; nerves of steel and all that. But it takes less than an instant for him to be sure, for him to be certain where he might have hesitated before.
John Watson credits Sherlock, for that.
_______________________________
The first week doesn’t exist, save in fleeting impressions, little notations of the passage of time and the persistence of life where it isn’t welcome: the ache along his ribs where he fell, for instance, where he hit the pavement after the world collapsed around him; the tenderness below the bones-far less physical, but somehow more acute. The aluminium rattle, the clang-and-drag of the wheels of a trolley bearing dead weight off toward a lesser sort of oblivion, left to cool in a morgue where they'd laughed, once, bickered; how flippant, how insolent-a blasphemy, so fucking obscene. There are dreams in those days, like the ones from before, like the ones full of blood, but these are darker, colder; these ones don’t pass. These one’s stab at the centre of him, tear at the core, rage at a heart that’s a bit absent, mostly vacant, that goes on because it doesn’t know what else to do, because John doesn’t know what else to do.
The second week, well: looking back on it, John can’t really tell it apart from the first.
_______________________________
It’s difficult to process change-internal, external; transformation over time-without distance, without a reprieve from consistent acclimatisation to the alterations taking place. John understands that.
Scratch that, no: John doesn’t understand. John doesn’t comprehend how anyone can fail to notice the way that something, someone close to them reshapes and reforms under the influence of pressure and weight and the unforgiving passage of moments, of hours into days. John doesn’t see how people can fail to read those signs. He remembers watching himself change, the subtle shifts of his reflection in a pool of water: the fit of his uniform, the shape of his hand around his weapon. He’s watched his sister slip into the void of addiction, step by step, refusing his help until it hurt too much for him to offer it anymore, to stand by and watch it all slip past, too close at hand. He’s watched his flatmate, his best friend, his best everything, even, maybe, his-
Well, he’d watched Sherlock change, in little ways. All the time.
And the months he’d spent, that he’d lived and breathed with Sherlock Holmes under the same roof, watching him work and hearing him theorise, deducing on his own the things that Sherlock, in all his brilliance, failed to see himself: those months stretched out like lifetimes, in practice, and no man can live a lifetime without the scars to show for it.
John Watson’s got his share of scars to show; John’s no fucking exception.
The thing is, though, the important thing, is that John’s been changed, fundamentally altered-all the equal and opposite reactions to Sherlock’s infinite action, his momentum. John’s been broken and flattened and reshaped and made anew, and the elemental parts of him are still the same, for the most part, but he’s a whole new shape, a configuration that’s recognisable from some angles, if not from others. Sherlock left his mark in more places than even he could likely fathom.
But there’s something about change, really; something about reduction and division and removal, transmutation and the like: something John remembers from his chemistry labs, from Lavoisier and the shift from mysticism to rationality, from alchemy to empiricism: matter doesn’t fluctuate. The fundamental system remains constant, always. There is no destruction, despite appearances. We can burn again and again, unending, and yet we still remain. So while John has come to understand certain truths that remained hidden to him, once; has come to question convictions that he’d never once been known to doubt-while John is not what he once was, while he has been remade into something new and better and stronger and weaker and lighter and bolder and braver and fearful, more tainted, and yet, the beating heart of him had never been so goddamned bright: for all of that, John’s never not been himself. John’s never lost the pieces that have always made him up; he’s just had the parts remoulded, so that they’d fit. So they’d make a whole.
And sometimes, a man simply knows what he has to do. Knows what sort of life’s worth living, and what sort of life isn’t really a life at all.
John Watson, well: he’s the sort of man who knows-always has been.
_______________________________
The third week, John spends in a state of sheer fluidity, ambiguity: formlessness and fervent focus. Facts and figures, details flood his mind and distract him, a running backdrop to his daily routine as he returns to the surgery, as he brews tea for two because anything less is unthinkable-as he hums symphonies to himself, only the strings, because that’s the only bit he knows.
The heart of a human adult weighs approximately two-hundred to four-hundred grams (it’s heavy, but not that heavy, and John thinks idly, dramatically, that maybe there’s something extra in his chest for it to feel so full, so leaden; for it to seem like a fucking trial to simply raise up and make himself be, make himself do).
Current research suggests that dream-frequency and intelligence quotient may, in fact, be positively correlated (John thinks he’d like to look into that, if only to prove it wrong, to prove that the smartest man he’s ever known barely slept, barely paused, danced on the edge of oblivion at every moment, and he couldn’t have had time for dreams).
(John wonders what kinds of dreams Sherlock Holmes might have had, though, on those off days, the anomalies: where even the mighty deign to rest.)
Human bone is as strong as granite with regard for its capacity to support weight (and yet the physics of it, momentum and gravity and force and speed and collision: that awful thud-and-crack on the concrete, and Sherlock had never been unbreakable, of course-had never been untouchable, and the doctor who had mended the fissures, the cracks and crevices; the man whose hands had touched and felt the softness, the warmness, the unrelenting humanity that seeped from those pores; John of all people would know it. John knew the feel of those bones, knew the structure and the shape and the jut of them beneath the skin and he knew the twist in his gut when they looked all wrong, from the wrist to the clavicle to those goddamned cheekbones, all skewed and snapped and shifted, impossibly realigned and then painted over red).
A definitive capacity for the human brain remains scientifically elusive, but if the analogy is to be drawn, some liberal estimates suggest one might be able to store upwards of a thousand terabytes of data inside such a hard drive (John doesn’t believe those theories, really, because he believes in the limits of a human being, has always held that you could praise a person for their shortcomings, their restraint as just as well as your could for their strengths. And yet there’s Sherlock, Sherlock whose hard drive needed deleting and yet whose Mind Palace was infinite, and John wonders which was the lie or if the paradox was where the beauty dwelled, if the suspension between two poles was Sherlock at his core, unhinged, and to live in tension between the two was the marvel to be praised, the most honest he could get. John wonders which parts of Sherlock’s life merited saving, which were condemned to removal, wonders how the process of selection became underway; wonders if they remembered the same things, any of the same things-wonders how much of their time together would have been saved, would have found a place in the hallowed halls of the Chateau in Sherlock’s head).
There is a rather vague precision inherent to the phenomenon of rigor mortis; the fact that it sets in somewhere between minutes and hours following time of death (and the stiffness, that eerie stiffness is something that John has never got used to in his profession, his line of work; and then in Sherlock, in Sherlock who tried to be so hard and so rigid, who maybe tried because in truth he was softness, warm flesh that gave beneath a touch and a pulse that surged and met John’s fingertips as he tended a wound or set a break, realigned a dislocation; to feel Sherlock still and stiff and cold was wrong, is wrong, will always be wrong not just for what it means, but at some deeper level of how the universe works, how the world comes together and stays solid without shattering under the weight of all the hurt and rage and loss).
And so John thinks these things over, and over, and over, until his own dreams don’t have room to torment him anymore, until they’re nothing because they’re everything, these memories, these thoughts: over-saturation, excess exposure, desensitisation. Textbook.
John discovers, once again, that textbooks sometimes lie.
_______________________________
The fourth week, John finds the stack of newspapers.
Apparently, they were always being delivered-a failing of both sight and observation, on John’s part-from all over the world, in more languages than John could figure, small ones and thick ones, broadsheets and tabloids alike. Mrs. Hudson had been stacking them in Sherlock’s room-not binning them; sentiment-but she’d missed one, this one, the pile of them on the doorstep as he undoes the lock, at least thirty different publications, and something intangible tells him to pick them up, to take them, to know them and ponder them: a memorial, a remembrance, a way to get him through the day.
So he does it, he reads the newspapers when they come, all of them-or else, all the ones he can recognise to any limited degree. He’d only ever bothered to read the national publications, before; had never noticed the bylines traced in letters he recognised alongside characters he couldn’t parse, unfamiliar amalgamations, left-to-right and right-to-left alike.
He wonders if that ink had ever betrayed itself on Sherlock’s hand, if foreign letters had stuck to his skin and screamed to John to look and see and know just this thing, this one little thing that, like all of the little things about that larger-than-life man, would be like gold, like water in a desert and shelter from a storm. He wonders if he’d simply learned to heed the call too late.
Far too late.
So he reads them, and looks for crimes, for clues and patterns, steeps himself in the familiar. He smiles to himself, the nausea in his stomach somehow tightening, deepening even as it eases, and he can almost see the upturn of those lips, that mouth; can almost hear a breath that’s not his own in the empty rooms of the flat when he double-takes, when he ponders loose ends and vagaries, when he digs deeper even to find nothing of note. It’s the routine, the practise of it, the circling of words and the underlining of titles, the scouring of obituaries and the connecting of dots. It feels like home and safety and the closest he’s allowed to order, to peace in this post-war world where nothing’s the right way up and he’s going to go with that, because he’s tired of feeling dizzy all the time, like the blood’s rushing to his head; tired of feel disoriented on top of feeling gutted.
It’s an elaborate, maladaptive coping mechanism, John knows this. But it is something, and really: John’s got no right to be picky.
_______________________________
The truth is that the pity doesn’t surprise him, when he emerges enough from the haze to recognise it for what it is, for how it twists in the gazes, the stares of everyone-everyone, from strangers to friends to own fucking sister, they stare at him with that watery sort of guilt, degrading: they look at him like he’s mad, deluded, lost, and he is, possibly, he knows that, but it’s not new. Any man would have to be a bit bonkers to follow Sherlock Holmes about, to live with him. A person would have to be deluded to believe in miracles from even the most amazing of men-a mortal, finite, human being, as blissfully, brilliantly brokenly human as they come-but damn it all, there’s a part of him that still hopes.
And true, he’d found something at 221B, in London again, and yes, in Sherlock-he’d been shockingly and blissfully and recklessly anchored for a time there, in him-but the hard fact is that John’s no stranger to being lost.
So, true: all of it’s rather unfortunate, heartily tragic and that rot, and it kills him slowly, all slow-motion bullets that shatter and dig into the tissue, deep until they penetrate bone: but the pity stings like salt in the wounds. And all John is anymore is a string of open sores, aching, slowly bleeding out. The pity reminds him, sears it anew against the torn flesh of his soul, as if he needs reminding, as if he could forget. The pity just makes it that much worse.
And then there’s Molly: Molly, who always looks at him like she’s got something she wants to say, just at the edge of her tongue: something timid and tortuous, something dire that she’s holding back, that wants desperately to fall and spill and bleed on impact, and John can tell that it burns, that it would hurt when it came, when it hit. The metaphor’s wretched, of course: makes him taste acid and bile at the back of his throat at times; sets him off laughing until his cheeks are wet and he can’t remember the sun, at others.
He wants to tell Molly, wants to just tell her that it’s fine; that words weren’t meant for this, anyway.
_______________________________
He marks the fifth week by getting into the black sedan that sits outside of Baker Street every day, from dawn to dusk, waiting.
Mycroft doesn’t look at him when he arrives, reads The Post in silence, and John sits, refuses a drink and takes in the patrons, the scenery, the whole fucking show. Old men with tobacco stained fingertips, some drinking water and others something stronger, yet John can read the difference, has learned to see the signs of it in the position of their hands on the glass.
Mycroft turns a page, and John glances, notices a stack of files on the side-table at his right, sandwiched between a foreign paper, Belorusy i rynok-one of the publications John’s collected, that he blinks at guilelessly, utterly lost, at his kitchen table when it arrives every week-and a tattered, aged volume, the title peeling at the spine: Practical Handbook of Bee Culture.
John sighs, shifts in his chair, and almost wishes he’d taken the drink.
_______________________________
The sixth week is when Greg comes to him, at Baker Street, and asks the question that John’s been waiting for.
“What in god’s name are you doing, John?”
John’s staring at an article from the Telgraf Turk, highlighting a line that pops out to him for some reason he can’t entirely pin down just yet as he struggles with the little Turkish-English phrasebook he’d found on one of the bookshelves. He looks up, notices Greg’s eyes on the wall adjacent the windows: the map, the web, the slowly-building mural made of clues to an unknown crime, and John wonders for a moment why it’s strange-strange, because Greg looks befuddled and horrified and then of course, there’s still the pity-when John does this, but perfectly normal for Sherlock.
Oh, well. For Sherlock. Of course.
But the thing is, if it was normal for Sherlock, it swiftly became normal for John as well, and normal, boring: they’re not one and the same, anymore. Normal, for John, is the rush, the absurdity, the humour in the obscene, the endless questioning and the obviousness and the observation and the dull roar that never flags in the background. John’s normal is motion and friction and running and thinking and asking and chasing and risking and danger and the sodding map of the world in the little revelations of words on his fucking wall, thank you kindly.
And he’s lost his balance, and he’s always feeling a little like he’s falling, and if he’s ever going to find his bearings again, if he’s ever going to calculate the proper course-to get over, to get through, to be done, to move forward, to halt momentum and find his answers and seek his truth and stop it all-he needs to find a foothold. He needs to hold a still-point long enough to breathe without the hitch in his lungs, in the flow of his blood.
Just a bit of normal, really. Routine.
That’s what he’s doing.
_______________________________
John’s not sure what sparks it, what drives the impulse-not that he’s sure of much these days, but he wonders if maybe that’s alright, because not being sure leaves room for doubt in even the most certain of scenarios, leaves some space to breathe-but John decides, at the very core of him, beneath and above all intellect and reason: he decides to venture into Sherlock’s room.
It smells less musty than it should, or else, less than John thinks it should. It feels much less like a shrine than he’d feared. He’d been in it enough times, though he’d not put much thought into studying the scenery, into really seeing, let alone trying to observe or deduce. Then, he’d had the genuine article. He was fascinating enough on his own.
John’s throat feels tight, at that thought.
There aren’t any experiments here, aren’t any beakers or flasks, no Bunsen burners, no knives or acids or vials, no bits of human beings, no tissue samples or slides or microscopes or chemical reactions left to peter out; the room is devoid of all these things and yet it feels so intimately like Sherlock that John wants to gasp and laugh and cry at it, wants to savour it and drown inside it, all at once.
There are boxes, though-stacks of things, random papers and such; meticulously organised, barely touched, and maybe that’s what draws John to them, maybe that’s why he slips the lid off and looks in the first place, maybe that’s what leads him to find the things that cut him to the core, to find the secrets that had been so distasteful to Sherlock, that had been kept so close by the man himself.
Sentiment. Buried, and hidden, and brilliant, and blinding.
It’s photographs, mostly, in the first box; photographs, faded, worn: John can see the oils from fingers where the prints were touched, some more than others, but he knows they were looked at, maybe even treasured. Old ones, some tintypes even, people with faces like Sherlock’s, and Mycroft’s, some dead-ringers and others who just share a trait or two. Newer ones, black and white still, or sepia. Modern shots, colours, row upon row, and there’s a method to them, a system, John can tell, but it’s not chronological.
He almost doesn’t want to know the logic; almost just wants to savour the bits of the man he misses more than he can bear.
There might be tears on his face when he finally stands and closes the door-thinks better of it, leaves it open just a crack-but that sort of thing is trivial, so he doesn’t bother to check for certain.
_______________________________
It’s in the middle of week nine that John makes his way to the Diogenes Club once again. Mycroft is skimming a paper called La Voz del Interior, though he folds it quickly when John arrives.
“Doctor Watson,” Mycroft says, and there’s a hesitation that’s uncommon for him, more than the formality of his title, his profession. “To what do I owe the pleasure?” He gestures to the chair across from him, but John intends to be brief.
“It was hard, at first, to see the resemblance,” John says, looks at Mycroft, can’t find Sherlock in the shape of his face or the set of his eyes, not without looking too hard, not without fearing he’s superimposing one face upon another.
“It’s not so much physical, though, is it? More a matter of disposition,” Mycroft stares, silent, his expression tight and tense and yet loose around the jaw; strange. Contradictory. Apropos, given John’s deductions. “You’re both fucking maddening.”
Mycroft tilts his head, parts his lips and takes in air as if he means to speak, but John’s heard enough from this man, John’s not sure what else might be said between them, and he’s not even sure he should be here, saying this, but he is. He is.
“I don’t understand it,” John shakes his head, brushes the back of his hand over his mouth and traces his lips with his fingertips. “Anyone who cared, who gave a toss about the bastard would have hurt when he was gone. And then there’s you. His brother. There’s you, and yet,” John chuckles, then, and it’s a broken, twisted imitation of the sound it’s meant to be.
“Your world’s not upside-down,” John leans in, says it, delivers the words like a death sentence, a noose around the neck. “You’ve still got a purpose.”
Mycroft blinks, but his chest rises, falls more quickly, more shallow. His throat works under his collar and John sighs out a laugh again, though this one’s cutting, sardonic: like venom off his tongue.
“Maddening.”
He realises, then, as he’s walking out, that hatred isn’t what he feels for Mycroft Holmes. He doesn’t know what it is he does feel, exactly, but he knows that hatred’s the wrong word entirely.
_______________________________
On his way to work, John walks past Barts every day. He could change his route, but he doesn’t.
Part of it’s penance, he figures. Part of it is a sort of self-flagellation that’s more effective, that hurts harder than anything he could literally do to his flesh. He can see the crime scene vividly in his mind’s eye, as if it had never been cleared; he can see it, and it stings too much to try and observe for too long. The ringing in his ears, the ache from his own impact with the ground comes back, seeps in like muscle memory, subconscious associations as he tastes the air and picks up salt and iron, the scent of blood.
Another part is curiosity. All sorts. The need to see from all the angles, to have that picture in his head of his own heart breaking, wanting to watch the ventricles comes undone from all sides, the need to know. The need to feel it, to not forget-as if that were possible, as if it could happen, ever; like it’s a danger at all. The need to see if there’s another part of the trick, the part when what disappears gets returned again, no worse for wear. The need to be sure that this all hasn’t been a vivid nightmare, a hallucination from Baskerville, some bad sugar in his coffee.
But there’s something else, as well: something nagging and insistent that makes John keep walking past, makes him go that way, that beats his heart into submission every morning, every day; makes him sit there on a bench and do the daily crossword, just down a bit from that fateful point of impact. It’s as if something’s telling him that he’s missing the point, that he’s got all the signals but he’s looked past the sign. It’s amorphous, may not even be real, but it’s there, and it drives his steps and directs his motions more than he’s really comfortable with, but the fact remains.
The fact remains, and he walks that path, unending.
He needs a fucking ending.
_______________________________
The fifteenth week is when he stops counting the days, because the passage of time feels strangely, vibrantly irrelevant. There’s before, and there’s the whole stretch of after leading up to the finish, culminating in only thing left for John to do here, now, in this brave new world where it’s just him, where there’s no one else to blaze a path or follow the trails, to play the game or piece together the puzzles, to drink the tea and dissect the bodies and mourn and laugh and live, and John’s just a man, one man, and he can’t do all of those things on his own. He doesn’t know how.
And, to be honest, most days it feels as if failing to do all of those things-those crucial, necessary things-it feels as if failing makes doing any one of them pointless.
There’s before, and there’s inevitability, and they’re all tied up inside each other, knots in the gut and the chest and the soul, all fucking tangled until there’s no separating one from the next, until the now poisons the then, and what was begins to colour the promise, the resolve of what’s to come.
It gets better-imperceptibly so, just that little bit easier to breathe in, if not out-when John stops marking time and just does, just plans, just is.
Until he isn’t.
_______________________________
He’s staring at the wall, staring at newspaper clippings-ones he’d tacked up, and ones he hadn’t the heart to tear down, which makes his head hurt for the confusion it breeds, and his chest ache for feeling-and post-its and bullet holes and acid burns in the plaster board and memories painted on the wallpaper when he hears the creak of the stairs, the cadence of steps, and he knows before the click of the heels resounds who it is that’s come to visit.
Mrs. Hudson’s delicate, eases her way into the flat without a knock, and John hears in the way that she breathes that she’s hesitant, apprehensive.
John suddenly realises that he hasn’t slept in more than three days. It’s entirely possible that he hasn’t moved in almost twelve hours.
He’s not hungry, or thirsty. He’s not tired. The bits of information, the little scraps of data, everything, the scribbles he’s made on paper and the mess of word documents on his laptop: all of the thoughts and ideas seem to flow differently, seem to spring up and swirl in the air before him, rearranging themselves in odd patterns, searching for an optimum fit, a way to make it all come together, to give him an answer and a bearing and a reason and a fucking prayer for anything, for the future or the present or, perhaps preferably, the end. It might be dehydration, exhaustion, or maybe a stroke of real genius, but John thinks maybe he gets it, maybe he understands some of the unthinkable things his flatmate has done, his best friend had been. Maybe he understands.
And that had been the point of it, really.
“John,” Mrs. Hudson ventures, and John blinks; the words are tossed into the melee of his thoughts, tied up in the trail, the breadcrumbs, burnt and raw alike, and it takes a moment for John to incline his head-not to look, but to indicate some scrap of attention that was better than no scrap at all.
“Are you,” she steps forward, looks at him carefully, critically, and he wonders if she sees the wheels turning, the parts coalescing, the obvious revealing itself behind John’s eyes because there were never questions, really, and John realises suddenly that if the choice had been offered before he’d taken to playing detective as if he had the foggiest clue what the hell he was doing, before he’d started mimicking so well that he’d begun to become-well, the answer would have been the same.
This conclusion, in essence, was a long time in coming.
“Are you alright, love?”
And John breathes, for the first time, without any pain, without any pressure on his lungs. There’s a vindication that’s taken place here: an ache released in the process of doing and being and steeping himself in what he knows in order to navigate the unknowable, thinking so that he can survive the unthinkable, only to find out that there are no unthinkable things, and he was never meant to merely survive.
“You know,” John blinks, exhales-filled with moonlight and the thrill of cornering a kill, giddy with an end that’s eluded him too long, that’s on the horizon now, within John’s reach. “I think I am.”
He is. He hasn’t felt this right since, well-not since. Because there’s a resolve in him, there’s a decision and a knowledge and a certainty in the marrow of his bones that he’s doing the right thing, that he knows himself well enough to understand that this is true, this is fact, this is the correct course, the only course left; that it’s high time to end this farce, this half-life he’s been leading, keeping the loss at bay just to stumble through survival without ever feeling truly whole. It’s selfish, maybe. It’s madness, possibly. It’s extreme, most definitely. It’s foolish, perhaps.
But it’s right.
It’s right, and it’s fine. It’s all fine and strangely, morbidly-fucked entirely, like giggling at a crime scene and eating breakfast next to a severed head or a hanging mannequin, and damn it all to hell if John doesn’t miss it like a goddamned limb-it’s the only thing left. Last move in the game.
He’s sure of it.
_______________________________
He puts his affairs in order, makes sure everything’s arranged and taken care of, as best he can. John does this, because he knows what it feels like to be left out in the cold, to be blindsided and bereft and left with the pieces in your lap, ready to cut everything open each time you try to move, try to breathe, try to think. John wouldn’t wish that on his second-worst enemy.
The worst enemy, though-the first-worst; he’d have sent that bastard to a hell worse than this in a heartbeat, if he’d ever been given the chance.
It’s not hard to sort, really; not like he’s never pondered it before, planned it out in his head when the days were dark. He’s got a foundation to spring from, tucked in a drawer in a flat he left a lifetime ago, with a long-forgotten cane and the kinds of aches that seem meaningless, now; the kind that seem foolish to have ever lamented or bemoaned, because they were the simple wounds-the easy hurts, really.
But he knows how to arrange it so that he causes the least pain for the fewest people, and so the harm that is inflicted, unavoidably, won’t be known, won’t be felt or seen until it’s already too late. He plans it out so that there’s no fuss, no questions, no mess. He’s meticulous. He’s seen enough deaths to know how to keep his own from going pear-shaped.
He can control this much, at least. He can have this one last say.
Of course, he knows how he’ll do it. Quiet. Simple. Effective. That’s always been the easy part. His particular means were learned in the desert; the catalyst uncovered in that faraway land: fruit of the coarse soil, that unforgiving sand. A devilish secret from that place he almost misses now, the last real danger left in the world, save for staying like this; apart from keeping on this downward trajectory and waiting-not bracing-for collision.
He looks at the vial, ponders it, turns it in the light; breathes in air that’s been starched, bleached in too much sun so that the oxygen in it shrivels, recedes, and his throat, his lungs feel parched.
The colour-mercury against midday sky, not quite anything and yet so many things, so much; the colour of the liquid used to stare at him, used to pierce him to the core.
And sometimes, John knows, God is tragically ironic. Sometimes, losing your sanity is the only way to regain your selfhood. Sometimes, the wound that breaks your spirit is the one that saves your soul.
Sometimes, the universe bleeds a poetic sort of justice from her very pores.
Sometimes, John’s a just sentimental sod, but fuck it. He doesn’t even mind, anymore.
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He says goodbye in his way; nothing to arouse suspicion, of course, but he thinks it’s better than a call on his mobile from a fucking rooftop.
To Stamford, he gives his tags. Because Mike knows what they mean, what it means to leave them behind. It’s the closest thing to a letter he’s going to sign off on, to put his name to. He wants to make sure they know who’s handiwork they’re finding, when it’s done.
Sarah, he leaves a letter of resignation, very official-like, on her desk in the morning before she makes it in, held down by a blueberry crumb-cake-her favourite-from the cafe they’d gone to on their very first date.
Lestrade, he gives most of the snippets of cases, real ones, potential bits of evidence among the things that had decorated the walls and had brought John peace and purpose in the tumult while he’d reached his decision and found the end of his road. He doesn’t know if there’s anything worthwhile in the fray, the piles he ties up and leaves for him at NSY, but if there is something, even just a glimpse, he trusts Greg to follow through.
Anderson and Donovan, well: John’s envisioned them tumbling from a roof and oozing viscera on the concrete instead of someone braver-better-far too often for him to ever want to leave either one of them a bloody thing.
Harry; he gives Harry back her phone. Because he understands losing now in a new and fearsome way-understands it in the marrow of his bones and the chambers of his heart-and he thinks that most fences are probably worth mending when the slats are still there, and there’s still life in you yet. There are too many times when that isn’t the case, and there aren’t any more chances, John figures; it’s best not to take the ones you do get and just toss them, out of hand.
Mrs. Hudson, he gets her some soothers that’ll do the job better than whatever street-grade rubbish she’s been taking, and buys her enough tea to last at least a year or two-it’s not sufficient, really, but he’s not sure there’s anything that would be.
For Molly, he leaves a bit of residue from the silver liquid, the compound-The Compound-on a slide he doesn’t clean. She’s a clever girl. It’ll take time-enough, so that it’s far too late to change the past once she realises what he’s done-but he knows she’ll see what he can’t say.
John’s wasted too much time on all the things he can’t say. He’s done with it, now.
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Twenty-three weeks and three days after-after-he leaves the city in order to finish things; goes where no one will find him, where no one will dig too deep or know too soon: he goes where no one will even think to try and stop him, to halt the momentum of the runaway train that’s taken hold in him, that had been out of control since that day in June when the world turned cold around the edges and the colour seeped away.
Of course he never stopped counting the days. Days were never irrelevant.
So it’s one hundred and sixty-four days after he watched the world end that John Watson leaves it all behind: a Tuesday, monochrome, his own fingers wrapped against his wrist, counting the slowing pace of his pulse until his grasp slackens, slips; until the spaces in between the beats grow long, languid: until they consume the ether and the rhythm gets lost.
One hundred and sixty-four days after everything changes and enough stays the same, John Watson dies with a smile on his face, and there was never any doubt, really.
He was always going to follow that bastard, one way or another.
Next: Part Two