The Rope Dancer (John, Sherlock/John, John/Mary, PG)
Title: The Rope Dancer
Characters: John-centric, a smidgen of Sherlock/John and some John/Mary
Rating: PG
Word count: 8,120
Warnings: Spoilers for The Reichenbach Fall.
Summary: John tries to become a person again.
John never falters in those first moments. After a week he's doing shifts at the clinic again, pushing his stubbornness squarely against Sarah's startled concern, daring her to say something. He goes back to 221B after ten days and tells Mrs. Hudson that he can afford it with Mycroft's silent help, that he will re-organise the flat, and that he will buy milk for her if she wants, with the if you won't talk to me, please don't talk to me implied, and she seems to hear it. He calls Harry dutifully, every Tuesday at three in the afternoon, because she asked him to, and because he knows that she won't be fully drunk by then.
He picks up his life, polishes it against his sleeve and tries to see what is reflected in it.
He likes to think that he's doing all right, like he has been all his life, all his normal, sane life, and he avoids everyone who will tell him otherwise - Molly, Greg, Mike, Sally, anyone who knew Sherlock as something, something of the many things he was.
-
But of course nothing is all right, because what is reflected back at him is an orbit without a central star, a scrambled cosmology, gravity folding back on itself, shivering, slow explosions without sound. As though Sherlock even from beyond that frontier that he stepped over is still the silent orchestrator of John's life, and as though with the stilling of his limbs the lines that drew John into motion have gone slack.
And there is something else, because he stops being angry. It was always Sherlock fueling that - whenever he shut John out of the winding road of his thoughts, the road down which John very much wanted to follow; or whenever he shut himself out of himself, ran into the wall of an emotion he couldn't or wouldn't climb, the wall John very much wanted to help him scale; or sometimes indirectly when someone else's eyes passed over Sherlock and they presumed to know things about him, and John felt as though they hadn't the right, and after trying to be Sherlock's second in command he sometimes worried if anyone had the right, including him. And at first, in the timeless hours after the fall, it was all Sherlock, of course, and he raged and raged and raged until Harry asked him what sedative he wanted, and he yelled at her until she cried, and she hadn't done that in front of him since they were children - because Sherlock threw himself off a roof and had the gall, the cruelty, the selfishness entirely particular to Sherlock to have John watch, this phone call, John, it's my note. that's what people do, isn't it?; to - most cruel of all - have John not see his face as he said the final things that would ever be carried on his breath, to have John be his walking will, to reduce John more expertly than ever to his shadow. To force John to be Sherlock, in a way, and that's so pointedly Sherlock, to not even be able to kill himself without implicating someone in carrying him on, that for a shocking, shocking moment of about thirty seconds, mere hours after Sherlock had died and he was on his twelfth cup of tea that Harry had helpfully heavily spiked with bourbon for him, so it wasn't really tea anymore, and after a while it was just bourbon anyway, he felt sure that it would have been better if John had killed Sherlock himself. Because if he had to die it would have been better if he hadn't been Sherlock while doing it, but something else entirely, finally someone who could have someone else do something for them, maybe then Sherlock could have died a different man, which, John thinks with the despair of an animal he didn't know he had inside him, is likely the reason he wanted to die in the first place; and surely John deserved nothing else than a lifetime in prison anyway, for not seeing that the pull and push of his life for the past eighteen months was a suicidal man. For a shocking, shocking moment of about thirty seconds, during which he feels his blood in his extremities as though it's trying to get away from his heart, he knows for sure that he would have killed Sherlock if Sherlock had just asked him, if he had just explained why he wanted to be dead, and then he could have granted him a death that wasn't precisely the reason why he thinks Sherlock might have wanted to die. Then, it passes, and he's John Watson again to some extent and no longer a twisted shadow of Sherlock Holmes, and he knows himself to be incapable of that, not feeling it to be a kindness like Sherlock probably would. He knows that he would never want Sherlock to be anything else than he was, infuriating, confusing, disappointing, illuminating, overpowering, inspiring - and if that was why Sherlock wanted to die then he knows he could never have helped him, never. And that is when he stops being angry, because there is a plug inside him and it pulls itself out, because if he were ever to allow this - he could never have helped him, never - to reach his heart then he's not entirely sure he won't want to take out his own brain and smash it onto something.
So he stops. And knows, with a strange, professional detachment, that this is a phase that will pass in the grieving process, and he sees in Sarah's careful eyes that she's waiting for the next stage, that will be the more violent for every day of this strange limbo, and it's what he would do if he saw anyone else in the same state, but then he doesn't believe that it will come, ever, because apparently Sherlock took with him John's synapses, his neural connections, the way that he could bring things together, and it all plunged down, and ran together with Sherlock's blood, smashing up the tentative biology of his thinking and his feeling, and really, it's just like Sherlock to take with him John's feelings, because that was the only thing he didn't yet fully understand.
He switches between days of only going to the clinic and sleeping, and days of only going to the clinic and not sleeping, not a wink, not a moment, he takes too many showers or not enough, and his skin is flaking at times, and he only looks at himself in the mirror by accident, and then finds it hard to not hear Sherlock's low comments on how John had no right to badger him about eating when he's looking like that.
-
He tries to become a person again. Greg rings him up irregularly, the phone always stilling too early for him to have reached voice mail, because Greg is just like him someone who crumbles under their obligations but can only half fulfill them - and one day he picks up before Greg can stop and think himself relatively okay for a while more, because he needs to become a person again, and then silence on the phone is so much worse than any other kind, except the kind that Sherlock left.
They have a drink, which they never did when Sherlock was alive. John finds it hard to talk to Greg without a Sherlock to have to explain, to translate, and he remembers that he's trying to become a person again, so he asks Greg about his wife.
And he's never really seen Greg cry, though he sometimes throws up during the most gruesome cases, but now there is something there that John can only call a sob as he says that they're okay, even with Greg having lost his job, and it doesn't make sense that he should cry when they're okay - and it takes him a few more days to realise that Greg was probably thinking about how he couldn't ask John how Sherlock was, nowadays, because that was always the logical response after John asked after his wife but it can never be again.
And he doesn't feel angry at Sherlock for continuing to be in every word he says, because Sherlock took that with him, that ability to feel angry.
-
Molly continues to try to see him, but he rebuffs her, time and time again, and he doesn't even really know why - maybe it's because he knows that she will try to hide how much she loved Sherlock, because Molly is sweet, and she will think that whatever it is she felt for Sherlock is nothing compared to what John felt for Sherlock, and it still feels wrong to think of it in those terms, but he fears it's not untruthful, and he can't take her asking him how he is when he already knows she will have been crying moments before. Maybe he's taken a page from Sherlock's book about selfishness and has inscribed it in himself, because he can't feel guilty. Not about anything else than Sherlock, anyway, and that's less guilt than a perpetual state of blankness, because he isn't really anyone anymore if he isn't Sherlock's friend, and he wasn't, because he didn't know that Sherlock was going to throw himself off a building, he had no idea, and the final thing he said to Sherlock to his face was that he was a machine, and that friends is what protect people, and there is nothing that is bigger than that, those words, the final thing that Sherlock saw from his lips before John went away, before John turned and didn't protect him, before Sherlock got up and went to the roof. Sometimes John thinks about if he wouldn't have done it if John had said something different in that moment, that is in hindsight so absurdly pregnant with meaning Sherlock would laugh at him if he expressed it, but then something unplugs itself in him out of an instinct, because if he ever really thinks about that then he can't say that he won't want to take his brain out and smash it on something.
The phone call doesn't count, because John couldn't do anything then, not even say anything except that it wasn't true.
He could say none of the things that were true, like: I don't want you to do this and purely out of selfish reasons because you have given me something back that I didn't even know I'd lost and you deserve to live, and that's my professional opinion, Sherlock and I need you to not do this and of course, so obvious Sherlock would have smirked at his sentimentality, I love you please don't do this I love you.
-
And he's not even sure anymore if he loves Sherlock now, though he can remember that he did, because the strange lull in his feelings is all-encompassing.
-
Mycroft just sends money now, exactly the number that is 221B's rent halved, and sometimes John feels an urge to laugh at the fact that Mycroft, who is the British government to some extent, sends him cash money in old-fashioned envelopes.
And then he's glad, painfully, sickeningly glad that Mycroft doesn't try to visit him, because he can't be sure he won't want to claw at Mycroft until he resembles his brother more, won't want to pull at Mycroft's mouth until it looks like Sherlock's, won't want to kill Mycroft just for having spent so much more time with Sherlock than John will now ever have the chance to.
-
The only thing that really provokes emotion anymore, apart from the flashes of forgetfulness just before sleep or just after it in which he's blissfully unaware of Sherlock being a rotting body in the ground, is the newspapers. He sets light to them, feeds them to the hearth, watches them crumple into ash particles, looks on as Sherlock's face disintegrates and the gleeful headlines fold back on themselves. It's not true. None of it is.
He cuts Sherlock's name out of every headline and eats the strips of paper until his mouth is stinging with paper cut.
And then he remembers that he's trying to become a person again, and this is nothing short of madness, and he lingers in front of Mrs. Hudson's door for a while that is too long whichever way he looks at it, and then in the end still can't do it, and goes back up.
-
Surely it shouldn't surprise him, because he is a professional after all, and he knows what grieving does to people. Especially mourners who go through the phase where everything is constricted, everything is so tight around them that they can't even swallow, they can't really speak, they don't feel anything, and it is surprisingly easy to do things the way they did before, although they no longer care.
But there was nothing in his textbooks to suggest that the authors knew what they were talking about first-hand, and though he remembers wondering about it all he was still only a student, a John Watson who was still somewhat of a newborn, who hadn't been close to death, who hadn't been close to Sherlock Holmes, who was someone he wouldn't get along with now, he suspects.
It shouldn't surprise him to start seeing Sherlock everywhere but it does, of course, and then he has a moment in which he thinks it would be nice to burn his medical books, and there is only one thing that stops him from doing it: Sherlock's face at being disrespectful to science, Sherlock's taunts at his predictability, Sherlock's gibes at his see-through attempt of trying to allow himself to have feelings again. And then for another moment he really still wants to do it, just to spite Sherlock, and then he remembers that Sherlock is dead, and that this was the most genuine emotion that he's had in a while, because for a small, shocking second he'd forgotten that Sherlock's reaction could never take place.
The first time, it feels like a heart attack; it feels like his blood, finally getting accustomed again to flowing through his heart, has once more tried to get away from it. It's only the stature that fits, the tallness, the almost glide of limbs - but this person turns to him readily when he catches his sleeve, and of course nothing of it is Sherlock, and afterward he's a bit proud of himself for not punching him in the face but instead asking him where he could find the tube station, and then not correcting him when the man gave him wrong directions. He's not as proud of himself for actually going to the tube station and then crying the entire ride with his palms pressing into his eyes, and he's also not proud that he didn't pay for a ticket.
It's all wrong, it's all scrambled.
-
It's all wrong that he can only cry when he thinks he's seen Sherlock, as if even the idea of his presence loosens up something in him, shakes him up a bit the way only Sherlock could.
The second time feels exactly the same, though he doesn't go after the tall, dark-coated man this time, because he knows that Sherlock is dead, and he knows simultaneously that Sherlock would be better at disguising himself, as if there is still some question about whether he would, about how he'd do it if he were doing it.
And yet, he knows that Sherlock is dead, it's like a stone, even if he sometimes reminds himself that he never saw the impact, and Sherlock is, well, is Sherlock, and maybe, maybe; but something unplugs itself in him because if he ever really thinks about it he doesn't know that he won't want to take out his brain and smash it on something, he can't do it, he can't let something like that inside him, because he needs to become a person again, at some point.
But deep in the night, he's still in denial, and sometimes he just can't be in denial about being in denial anymore.
-
The third time is the most upsetting because the man doesn't actually look like Sherlock at all, and he's a shade of tan that Sherlock would never be able to achieve, and his hair is all wrong, and his eyes aren't right, and he does have a peculiar mouth peeking out from behind his collar, but it's not the right kind of peculiar, his nose is right though, it's narrow and straight, and his face could be Sherlock's if John closes his eyes, and he isn't quite tall enough, but then he's also stooping a bit, and he seems to be looking at John for a second too long to be a stranger, and his eyebrows don't match his hair, and the lashes that close themselves over his brown eyes as John passes him are exactly right, and John has a moment in which he wonders at himself, in which he wonders with detachment whether he should just kiss this man to know for sure because he thinks that even Sherlock wouldn't be able to keep any front up during the surprise of that and John would know from his reaction, and because even if this man isn't Sherlock the fact that John just noticed his eyelashes and felt a rock drop into his stomach at them should be enough to excuse an unannounced kiss. And then he wonders when he stopped caring about anyone but himself and Sherlock.
-
And then back at 221B he knocks on Mrs. Hudson's door for the first time in four months, and she lets him in without even the barest hint of surprise, and her old-lady frame is fragile in his hug, his desperate, clinging hug, that is far too heavy for her to support. He's making noises he didn't think were humanly possible, and his lungs feel like they can't contain his breath, and his blood wants to come out of his nose, his ears, will do anything to just get away from his heart, and his eyes feel like they're bursting. She allows him to slobber all over her, to get his snot and tears all over her, and what she says is nothing new, she tells him it will be okay, that it is okay, that it's all right, let it all out dear, it's all right, it will be all right, oh my, there you go, there there, sit down here love, I'll make you some tea, it's okay, here's a hanky, oh dear me, oh no, here you go, have another, oh dear, it's all right, it's all right, it's all right
And nothing is, of course, and she's crying too, turning around to busy herself with the tea so he won't see.
-
And then of course he has to call in sick to the hospital, and he wants to reach into the phone and simultaneously strangle and kiss Sarah when she says: of course, John, I understand.
Because she saw this coming, obviously, and for a long, long while he had thought she was completely wrong, because how could anyone predict what happens to someone who loses Sherlock Holmes, who has ever lost Sherlock Holmes before John, and how could anything that has to do with Sherlock Holmes be like any other experience ever?
But he's like every other mourner, ever, and that's all wrong. It's an insult to Sherlock to have a normal grieving process. He doesn't doubt that Sherlock would do it all differently, would switch everything up, would go into denial by the end instead of at the beginning, and through all of it would understand so much more, and work on a cure for death, and if anyone were to find it, well. And then he has that feeling again, a feeling anyway, before he realises that Sherlock is dead, and none of that can ever happen again, there is no way to know. And now that the dams have broken he can't do anything but hold on to the phone and cry, and cry, he doesn't know for how long, until Sarah tells him, voice thick, that she has patients and God I'm sorry John, but I have to. He continues crying to the dial tone.
-
She does come to see him that evening, and he really wishes she hadn't, and the strength of that surprises him.
So he's back to feeling, then. Like Sherlock has grown tired of keeping his emotions, dull, dull, dull, honestly John how can you be so predictable, and has finally returned them to sender.
-
There is an insistence in Molly's voice mails that surprises him, when he's regained the ability to be surprised. It's almost as though some external force is pushing her to continue to contact him. So he texts her, because he doesn't want her voice, not yet, he can't do that yet: You can come over if you want.
And it bothers him for a bit that she waited for his permission to do that, but then he remembers that normal people do that when others they don't know that well are in pain, they try to feel them out, they try to pick up what they need, and in all fairness to Molly he definitely hadn't been communicating to her that he needed her to come over. He remembers that no one quite does things the way Sherlock did, Sherlock who would know that John needed to just be shaken by the shoulders at times, and slapped in the face, and spoken to icily, told to get a grip on himself already, but then the reason that he needs to get a grip is precisely that Sherlock isn't here to tell him so anymore.
Molly is thinner than he remembers, and she looks colourless. It returns to him with the sting of a wound-up rubber that she had to perform a post-mortem on a man she loved. Yes, his emotions seem to be back in place, because when he accepts her tentative, loose hug he feels sorry for her, in a way that he hasn't felt sorry for anyone in a long while, not even for himself, because that is so muddled up with so many other things that it's different alltogether.
She sits in the one chair he couldn't bring himself to chuck, the armchair Sherlock liked to think in or leave his violin in, and the sensation that something isn't fundamentally wrong with her sitting in it is unfamiliar.
He makes her coffee and is surprised to find he still remembers how she takes it, even though they've only had coffee together a handful of times.
She talks about some of the bodies she has in, and he knows she's thinking as much of Sherlock as he is, but he's grateful that she doesn't spell out the: he'd think that was interesting. She also says Greg Lestrade has been by a number of times, and he's grateful that she doesn't spell out the: and we talk about you, and we're worried. Because John had returned to letting Greg hang up too soon after that one drink, because it was all a bit too much trouble, though now he suspects that maybe he'll pick up again. So he tells Molly to say hello to Greg. She says she will.
“I sometimes think I see him,” he says to her, almost without thinking about it.
And for a split second she looks like someone has hit her in the face, hard, an intriguing panic blooming across her face, and then she covers it up quickly with a more general concerned expression; and if he wasn't past denial (well past it, the knowledge that Sherlock is just a body now, not a mind, and that there is nothing left of him to hate that, by now such a heavy part of him he couldn't get rid of it except by jumping into a pond or something) he'd be jumping on that expression with something like hope. It's good that he's past denial already and squashing it is actually quite easy, and it's with a wholly honest feeling that he thinks: no. it's because she is still in denial.
“That's... that's normal, isn't it?” she falters, and he likes that she couches it as a question. Sweet Molly.
“Yes, it is,” John says, and hopes that it will help her to feel more like a person again, and even feels his mouth twitching in a smile at her.
When she leaves, she looks somewhat relieved. He tells her she can come over anytime, and finds that he means it. Her phone buzzes as they're saying goodbye, and she looks nervous about that, and he wonders if maybe she's seeing someone new. She should. She should see someone she can actually see, who isn't just a see-through spectre, someone who she can touch, who isn't Sherlock; so fundamentally unavailable to her even before he threw himself off the roof of her hospital, before he came to her in tatters, just a body now.
She promises to come back. He doesn't really expect her to, but then she comes back two days later, and another two days later, she comes back again.
-
He dreams for the first time about a Sherlock who is just Sherlock, who isn't everything at once, who isn't everywhere, who isn't a killer and a victim and Harry and his mother and the corpse of his dead comrades. A Sherlock who is just Sherlock, looking in from a door, mouth set in that half-smile with one of the corners of his mouth raised.
He wakes up and his eyes are burning, and his pillow is streaked with water, and his chest hurts, and he can't breathe.
-
The rage is back, and it's at Sherlock how dare he how dare he how dare he how dare he how dare he how could he how could he how could he how could he how could he as much as at himself how dare I how dare I how dare I how dare I how dare I how could I how could I how could I how could I and after a while the two are the same, just like everything that was theirs was the same after a while.
When he calls Harry on Tuesday at three in the afternoon, she's still sober, and he shouts at her, just for daring to be alive, just for being there, he chooses her to shout at because she's the only one who really doesn't deserve it, she's the only one who never knew Sherlock at all, and that's enough.
She comes over, braver than he thought her to be. She tries to stop him, she tries stop his hands from punching the wall, and then of course isn't strong enough, and then drives him to the emergency room with a broken hand, and doesn't listen to his furious proclamations that he's a doctor, he can do this himself, and doesn't listen to his crying when she takes him back home.
She tells him things can't go on this way, and has the grace to blush at being the one to tell him something like that.
So he goes back to his therapist, something that he'd sworn he wouldn't after that disastrous first session a few weeks after Sherlock's death.
-
He almost breaks Sherlock's violin.
That's when he steps back and feels something break inside of him, as though it was a substitute for the priceless Stradivarius.
He's destroyed pretty much everything; he threw around the new chairs, the ones that never felt Sherlock's weight, he tore at the pillows, slashing open the Britannia one, he threw the table over, he pulled the paper from the wall - and then he had that moment where he had Sherlock's violin in his hands and was about to smash it onto the arm of the arm chair.
He drops it onto the carpet, and it's absolutely unharmed, but it feels as though he killed Sherlock, even moreso than he already had, and he sinks to his knees and vomits until he almost chokes.
-
He spends a night of insanity reading every single word on Sherlock's website, trying to read it as though he hasn't already, hasn't already read every article the night after Sherlock published it - both because he was in spite of himself actually interested in what Sherlock wrote on his site, and because it gave him endless amounts of material to poke fun with at Sherlock.
At one point the words begin to get read in his head by Sherlock's voice, and that's when he breaks down, and with a genuine, animalistic growl throws the laptop at the wall, where it breaks cleanly in two, and lies like a beheaded totem, its magic lost.
He pushes his hands into his eyes until he can feel that the pressure will be damaging them soon if he doesn't stop now, and just wants the tears to roll back up and go back in, because none of it helps, and nothing is all right, and the silence that doesn't laugh at him for being so utterly sentimental, the silence that doesn't offer an off-hand witty comment about his drama is so heavy it threatens to strangle him.
-
“I feel... guilty,” he says during the third session, because he can't come here anymore if he doesn't offer her anything.
She nods, writes something down.
“About not being able to stop him from jumping?” she asks.
And of course that's not all of it - it's not even just guilt, it's such a mess of emotions that he can't make any sense of it, will never be able to, it's like a white-hot ball in his chest, and it's not just about the jump, it's about not seeing anything, it's about not saying things, it's about the final thing they said, it's about the phone call, it's about how John couldn't say anything of importance, it's about how his brain froze up and he could only say no no no no, it's about Moriarty, it's about how John never properly thanked Sherlock for saving his life, it's for not telling Sherlock how easy it was for John to save his life, it's about how Sherlock deep in the night sometimes knocked at his door and how John, pissed off at something or other, always ignored him, it's about ruining important experiments, it's about not seeing when Sherlock was vulnerable, it's about not acting on it when he wanted to hug Sherlock, it's about not asking Sherlock anything about his childhood, it's about not knowing whether Sherlock was ever in love with anyone, it's about not bothering to find out because he thought there would be so much more time, it's about never telling Sherlock how much he changed his life, it's about not forgiving Sherlock quickly enough, it's for that short, deeply traitorous moment in which there was a pinprick of doubt about Sherlock, it's about missing time with Sherlock, choosing to go away to do other things than just sit around together, it's about not realising that the time they had was limited, it's about not using what they had to the fullest.
But he nods, because it's a start.
-
The anger fades after a while, because it doesn't have a point of focus, and after a while what Harry was saying - for Christ's sake, John, I know you're hurting, but you can't keep putting this on me - actually begins to make sense. No, it's not fair to do that to her, and it's not fair to give Greg the cold treatment again, and it's not fair to sneer at Molly when she tries to do small talk in that helpless way of hers, it's not fair when the only people who really deserve his anger are Sherlock and himself.
So he actually spends an evening writing awkward apologies and sends them to them in e-mails. Their responses are awkward, heartfelt, too kind.
He'll try to be better, he'll try, he'll try to become a person again.
-
He doesn't know when exactly he starts to forgive Sherlock, but at one point he thinks about him and only feels crushing sadness, and wanting, and no longer the confusing, horrible desire to kill him if he wasn't already dead.
He sees another man who could be Sherlock very easily and doesn't want to punch him, just wants to run after him, run until he stops, and wheel him around, and fit his head into his throat, and stand there, and just stand there. And tell him that John will keep him safe this time, and will tell him if he needs it that he's loved, that he's loved despite everything he is, that he's loved because of everything he is, and that what he is is enough, it's enough, it's more than enough.
He doesn't run after him. He's long past denial now.
-
It feels extremely strange to know that he's gone into a new stage, as though it's not something that's happening to himself but to a patient. If it were a patient he'd write in their file Moved on to new stage of grief: bargaining, with underlying depressive symptoms and, well, he is a patient now in every sense but the official one.
And he stays up nights because it genuinely feels like if he will give up his comfortability some of it will be passed on to Sherlock, and something might be pardoned, and it might work backwards and some of Sherlock's past pain might be alleviated. He knows it's not something that could actually work, but it feels so right to suffer because Sherlock suffered, and though no amount of suffering can ever be anything like what Sherlock must have gone through to do that, to have that desire and then follow it through, to throw himself off a roof, it still, agonizingly, horribly, feels as though John is repenting for something.
For not seeing things. For not being the one thing he really thought he still was: Sherlock's friend.
He can't get up in the mornings. He just can't.
-
He wishes he believed in God just so he could amuse himself with the images of Sherlock trying to reason or bully his way into heaven, only to find it incredibly dull and try to stage a new rebellion just to see what hell is like.
-
He knows he should probably prescribe himself some kind of anti-depressant, just for a while. It's what he would do for any patient. It's what Sarah clumsily suggests one day when she finds him still sitting in the cafeteria staring at his food an hour and a half after he went in to have lunch.
He doesn't do it because it's already an insult to Sherlock to be this predictable, to have this normal development, and he doesn't do it because everything in him forbids him to ever go to acceptance, because nothing about this is acceptable, and he doesn't do it because it is the only way to ever feel close to Sherlock again.
He knows it's stupid. He just wishes Sherlock were here to tell him so. He just wishes Sherlock were here to say: John, you moron, does the pain of one person diminish the pain of another? And John would have to say: no, not in any tangible sense. And Sherlock would say, visibly irritated: not in any sense, so stop it.
And maybe then, he'd be able to stop it.
-
Molly brings his favourite kind of tea, and she's bought milk for Mrs. Hudson, too. They sit in a silence that has grown companionable of late, and then they flick through the channels of the telly together, and he finds himself laughing at her comments on the presenters of the daytime television shopping channel. She makes them some pasta. He's hungry.
In the evening he catches his own face in the mirror by accident, and he looks more okay than he's looked in a while, and he spends a moment trying to remember when was the last time he laughed out loud before today, and honestly, truthfully can't recall.
-
Six months after Sherlock's death, he wakes up one morning and finds that he slept for an entire night, and the realisation is so shocking it takes him his whole morning routine to have a first, real, focused thought of Sherlock.
And then he panics, and spends the rest of his day frantically thinking about Sherlock, because there is still so much he hasn't repented for, so much debt left unpaid.
When he rolls into bed, a fatigue on him that doesn't feel unnatural for once, it doesn't take long to fall asleep, despite everything.
-
And things slowly rearrange themselves, and his trying to become a person again becomes more tangible, and gravity seems to restore itself bit by bit, hoisting him up again, bringing him to his feet. The black hole sucking everything into it at the centre of his orbit seems to have gone into sleep. Not gone, but peaceful.
He fights it for a week, because he doesn't want to feel better, he doesn't want any of it, he doesn't want to cope. For a moment he's back in denial, not about Sherlock, because there's nothing to deny there anymore, even his body won't be there anymore by now, but about himself.
But he has a drink with Greg and in spite of himself has quite a pleasant time, and forgets to think about Sherlock for a grand total of twenty-something minutes. Molly comes over and has him picking out the colours for a re-paint of her living room and he does, trying to match it to what he knows of her tastes but still trying to steer clear of the hopeful pink she brought, and he forgets to think about Sherlock for the entirety of their conversation about walls - he doesn't even think about his own, that have borne the brunt of Sherlock's anger so often. Mike sends him an e-mail asking to get a pint, and they talk about rugby for a bit, and Mike's new attempt at a diet, and they joke about why he's doing it, and Mike stammers and blushes and John is genuinely glad for him, and he forgets about Sherlock until he steps outside of the pub. Clara calls him up at one point, which she's done sporadically, and asks him over for a glass of wine, and because he likes her he goes, and they talk about her life, and a bit, stilted, about Harry, and he forgets about Sherlock until she asks him about it.
And because it's Clara, who is even more removed than Harry, he dares to say it: “I wish I wasn't moving on.” He wishes it wasn't like a stream with him in it, he wishes he could stay still, or maybe even swim upstream until he got back to where Sherlock was, but it beats at him with the violence of the tide, and he really feels like a shore sometimes, getting polished, his edges getting knocked off with every wave.
She puts a hand on his arm. “Moving on doesn't mean forgetting.”
He closes his eyes. Because no, it doesn't, but still nothing is all right, and there is nothing all right about just remembering Sherlock. He knows that as time passes Sherlock's face will maybe become a bit more indistinct, and John will start to only recognise the pieces he used to play without knowing when, exactly, Sherlock played them, and John will have to focus to remember what his hands looked like, and maybe even the memory of his voice will become a pale shadow of what it really was.
“I don't want things to fade,” he says tersely.
“You're still here,” she simply says, and he loves her for it, with a surprising intensity.
Yes, he is. And he will uphold his part of what he had with Sherlock and maybe that's really all he can do. He knows with a certainty that he's been lacking about everything lately that Sherlock wouldn't ask any more of him.
-
And of course he still has to put his fist into his mouth the next morning when he's sitting at the table and there is a small article in the newspaper on Sherlock Holmes, with the picture with the hat Sherlock hated so, a small article that is just stating that the crime rate in London is up with a considerable percentage. That's it, there's nothing there that will make anything better or that will redeem anyone.
He has to put his fist into his mouth to keep himself from crying like a howling dog, and instead just cries like a normal dog.
He carefully cuts out Sherlock's name from the headline, but doesn't eat it, because it doesn't seem to have a point anymore.
-
And of course it still hits him the week after that he's walking the exact route they took that first evening, going to Angelo's. It still makes him have to lean against the building next to him for support, shaking.
-
And of course he still has to sit down in Sherlock's favourite chair, crying a little, and clench his fingers around the fabric to stop his hands from shaking after coming back from a trip to the store and having been almost sure he saw him, again, a figure retreating down the cigarette aisle, tall, almost running.
-
And of course he still thinks of Sherlock every time he sees the fridge, empty except for actual food. It makes him not hungry, but then he remembers himself and eats something anyway, even though it tastes of nothing.
-
And of course he still says Sherlock's name when he wakes up from another dream where Sherlock's looking in from a doorway, and he cries without sound into his pillow remembering how the door had closed between them, but after a while he finds the strength to swing his legs off the bed and head to the shower, where the water feels good on his eyes.
-
And of course he still has to purse his lips and close his eyes for a bit when Mrs. Hudson asks him with a soft kind of sympathy about his leg, where that twitching, that ghostly ache is as strong as it ever was.
-
And of course he still thinks of Sherlock when he's on his first date in ten months, and has to swallow when he remembers how Sherlock used to mess up his dates, all of them, as though he got some kind of perverted kick out of it, and he has to swallow a bit more when he realises that that will never be happening again. Mary is perceptive, though, and she asks him if he's all right, and nothing is all right, but maybe she is, and he tells her a bit of it; he says: my best friend, I lost him recently... And I was just thinking about him for a bit. But don't worry. You were saying?
And the next date she asks what his name was, and in spite of himself he tells her not only that it was Sherlock but also that he killed himself, and the look on her face is so genuine with empathy he kisses her with more abandon than maybe he should on a second date.
The third date he almost forgets about Sherlock the entire time, until his phone buzzes and for a split second he expects it be Sherlock, and she catches it and impossibly knows what he's thinking about and he tells her a bit more, and she says: sounds like you really miss him, and he says, quietly: well, yeah.
The fourth date she asks to go home with him, and he tries to say no without upsetting her, because he can't have her there yet, but she gets it and suggests her own flat, and that he will gladly do. And she's beautiful and soft and smart and wonderful and he forgets about Sherlock the entire night and then the entire morning.
-
Something is all right. Not most things. But something.
-
He tells Molly about Mary when she visits, and his cheeks feel unaccustomed to so much smiling.
Molly looks at him and underneath her happiness that he's doing so much better he spots a strange kind of worry, and then laughs at himself for a bit, at him acting as though Sherlock's skills of observation have passed to him in some kind of twisted stipulation to his will.
It does seem to be there, though, and she's tapping out something on her phone before she's out the door, not really responding to his final goodbye, which seems out of character.
-
“Um, John?” She looks pained. “What about Sherlock?”
He looks up from his book to where Molly is sitting on the sofa, the telly on mute.
“What about him?” he says, a bit puzzled.
“I mean, with Mary and everything?” She's blushing.
He blinks.
“I thought you... Weren't you two...” she stammers.
That again, he thinks, and almost laughs, because it's been so long since anyone has talked about that. So long, because Sherlock is dead now and there's nothing to talk about anymore, really, and at that his almost-laugh doesn't become an actual laugh.
He's not sure how to answer it. He settles for “No,” because that's the truth, if only part of it.
“But wouldn't it... Wouldn't it have happened maybe if...”
“How does it even matter anymore?” he says, and then feels a bit guilty for being snappish. “I mean, maybe... I don't...” He shakes his head. He struggled with this question for so long, even for a while when Sherlock was still alive, and then more unbearably when he was dead, because then there was a finality, an air of unfinishedness that was part of the reason John sometimes screamed when he was alone at home in the beginning, but everything is calmer now, and some things are the same but others are different. “There's no knowing now, is there?” He can't quite stop his voice from trembling.
She's silent, chews on the inside of her cheek. “No,” she says quietly after a while, when he's already gone back to his book, “I guess not.”
And he wonders for a bit at the sadness in her voice, the page of his book unfocused before him.
“Just don't... Don't forget him, okay?” she eventually squeaks, as though she doesn't want to say it, but something is making her.
He frowns at her, a forceful indignation sparking in his chest, the beginning of an anger. “Are you serious?” he says, incredulously.
She looks at him from the couch, a strange kind of pinchedness in her expression.
“Molly,” he then says, closing his book, “if you don't know by now that I will never, ever forget him, then I'll have to ask you to leave.”
Her smile is watery, wavering, and doesn't quite reach her eyes. “I do know.”
“Good,” he says, and they look at each other, in the living room of 221B Baker Street, where a springtime light is falling in through the window on which Sherlock once drew a detailed map of the human brain, the black stains of which are still there in places. She's sitting where Sherlock often sat, sprawled out in boredom, his blue robe wrapped around his knees. The violin is on its usual spot, untouched for far too long now, except for when John carefully cleans it and sometimes dares to touch the strings, quickly, as though he's committing a crime. And maybe he is. Either way, no one else will be touching that violin in his lifetime, and he can't imagine the Stradivarius would want to be touched by anyone after Sherlock.
Though he can't be sure. He didn't think he ever would want to be touched by anyone after Sherlock. For a while it seemed like no one would ever be able to again. And yet, here he is.
Here he is.
Characters: John-centric, a smidgen of Sherlock/John and some John/Mary
Rating: PG
Word count: 8,120
Warnings: Spoilers for The Reichenbach Fall.
Summary: John tries to become a person again.
John never falters in those first moments. After a week he's doing shifts at the clinic again, pushing his stubbornness squarely against Sarah's startled concern, daring her to say something. He goes back to 221B after ten days and tells Mrs. Hudson that he can afford it with Mycroft's silent help, that he will re-organise the flat, and that he will buy milk for her if she wants, with the if you won't talk to me, please don't talk to me implied, and she seems to hear it. He calls Harry dutifully, every Tuesday at three in the afternoon, because she asked him to, and because he knows that she won't be fully drunk by then.
He picks up his life, polishes it against his sleeve and tries to see what is reflected in it.
He likes to think that he's doing all right, like he has been all his life, all his normal, sane life, and he avoids everyone who will tell him otherwise - Molly, Greg, Mike, Sally, anyone who knew Sherlock as something, something of the many things he was.
-
But of course nothing is all right, because what is reflected back at him is an orbit without a central star, a scrambled cosmology, gravity folding back on itself, shivering, slow explosions without sound. As though Sherlock even from beyond that frontier that he stepped over is still the silent orchestrator of John's life, and as though with the stilling of his limbs the lines that drew John into motion have gone slack.
And there is something else, because he stops being angry. It was always Sherlock fueling that - whenever he shut John out of the winding road of his thoughts, the road down which John very much wanted to follow; or whenever he shut himself out of himself, ran into the wall of an emotion he couldn't or wouldn't climb, the wall John very much wanted to help him scale; or sometimes indirectly when someone else's eyes passed over Sherlock and they presumed to know things about him, and John felt as though they hadn't the right, and after trying to be Sherlock's second in command he sometimes worried if anyone had the right, including him. And at first, in the timeless hours after the fall, it was all Sherlock, of course, and he raged and raged and raged until Harry asked him what sedative he wanted, and he yelled at her until she cried, and she hadn't done that in front of him since they were children - because Sherlock threw himself off a roof and had the gall, the cruelty, the selfishness entirely particular to Sherlock to have John watch, this phone call, John, it's my note. that's what people do, isn't it?; to - most cruel of all - have John not see his face as he said the final things that would ever be carried on his breath, to have John be his walking will, to reduce John more expertly than ever to his shadow. To force John to be Sherlock, in a way, and that's so pointedly Sherlock, to not even be able to kill himself without implicating someone in carrying him on, that for a shocking, shocking moment of about thirty seconds, mere hours after Sherlock had died and he was on his twelfth cup of tea that Harry had helpfully heavily spiked with bourbon for him, so it wasn't really tea anymore, and after a while it was just bourbon anyway, he felt sure that it would have been better if John had killed Sherlock himself. Because if he had to die it would have been better if he hadn't been Sherlock while doing it, but something else entirely, finally someone who could have someone else do something for them, maybe then Sherlock could have died a different man, which, John thinks with the despair of an animal he didn't know he had inside him, is likely the reason he wanted to die in the first place; and surely John deserved nothing else than a lifetime in prison anyway, for not seeing that the pull and push of his life for the past eighteen months was a suicidal man. For a shocking, shocking moment of about thirty seconds, during which he feels his blood in his extremities as though it's trying to get away from his heart, he knows for sure that he would have killed Sherlock if Sherlock had just asked him, if he had just explained why he wanted to be dead, and then he could have granted him a death that wasn't precisely the reason why he thinks Sherlock might have wanted to die. Then, it passes, and he's John Watson again to some extent and no longer a twisted shadow of Sherlock Holmes, and he knows himself to be incapable of that, not feeling it to be a kindness like Sherlock probably would. He knows that he would never want Sherlock to be anything else than he was, infuriating, confusing, disappointing, illuminating, overpowering, inspiring - and if that was why Sherlock wanted to die then he knows he could never have helped him, never. And that is when he stops being angry, because there is a plug inside him and it pulls itself out, because if he were ever to allow this - he could never have helped him, never - to reach his heart then he's not entirely sure he won't want to take out his own brain and smash it onto something.
So he stops. And knows, with a strange, professional detachment, that this is a phase that will pass in the grieving process, and he sees in Sarah's careful eyes that she's waiting for the next stage, that will be the more violent for every day of this strange limbo, and it's what he would do if he saw anyone else in the same state, but then he doesn't believe that it will come, ever, because apparently Sherlock took with him John's synapses, his neural connections, the way that he could bring things together, and it all plunged down, and ran together with Sherlock's blood, smashing up the tentative biology of his thinking and his feeling, and really, it's just like Sherlock to take with him John's feelings, because that was the only thing he didn't yet fully understand.
He switches between days of only going to the clinic and sleeping, and days of only going to the clinic and not sleeping, not a wink, not a moment, he takes too many showers or not enough, and his skin is flaking at times, and he only looks at himself in the mirror by accident, and then finds it hard to not hear Sherlock's low comments on how John had no right to badger him about eating when he's looking like that.
-
He tries to become a person again. Greg rings him up irregularly, the phone always stilling too early for him to have reached voice mail, because Greg is just like him someone who crumbles under their obligations but can only half fulfill them - and one day he picks up before Greg can stop and think himself relatively okay for a while more, because he needs to become a person again, and then silence on the phone is so much worse than any other kind, except the kind that Sherlock left.
They have a drink, which they never did when Sherlock was alive. John finds it hard to talk to Greg without a Sherlock to have to explain, to translate, and he remembers that he's trying to become a person again, so he asks Greg about his wife.
And he's never really seen Greg cry, though he sometimes throws up during the most gruesome cases, but now there is something there that John can only call a sob as he says that they're okay, even with Greg having lost his job, and it doesn't make sense that he should cry when they're okay - and it takes him a few more days to realise that Greg was probably thinking about how he couldn't ask John how Sherlock was, nowadays, because that was always the logical response after John asked after his wife but it can never be again.
And he doesn't feel angry at Sherlock for continuing to be in every word he says, because Sherlock took that with him, that ability to feel angry.
-
Molly continues to try to see him, but he rebuffs her, time and time again, and he doesn't even really know why - maybe it's because he knows that she will try to hide how much she loved Sherlock, because Molly is sweet, and she will think that whatever it is she felt for Sherlock is nothing compared to what John felt for Sherlock, and it still feels wrong to think of it in those terms, but he fears it's not untruthful, and he can't take her asking him how he is when he already knows she will have been crying moments before. Maybe he's taken a page from Sherlock's book about selfishness and has inscribed it in himself, because he can't feel guilty. Not about anything else than Sherlock, anyway, and that's less guilt than a perpetual state of blankness, because he isn't really anyone anymore if he isn't Sherlock's friend, and he wasn't, because he didn't know that Sherlock was going to throw himself off a building, he had no idea, and the final thing he said to Sherlock to his face was that he was a machine, and that friends is what protect people, and there is nothing that is bigger than that, those words, the final thing that Sherlock saw from his lips before John went away, before John turned and didn't protect him, before Sherlock got up and went to the roof. Sometimes John thinks about if he wouldn't have done it if John had said something different in that moment, that is in hindsight so absurdly pregnant with meaning Sherlock would laugh at him if he expressed it, but then something unplugs itself in him out of an instinct, because if he ever really thinks about that then he can't say that he won't want to take his brain out and smash it on something.
The phone call doesn't count, because John couldn't do anything then, not even say anything except that it wasn't true.
He could say none of the things that were true, like: I don't want you to do this and purely out of selfish reasons because you have given me something back that I didn't even know I'd lost and you deserve to live, and that's my professional opinion, Sherlock and I need you to not do this and of course, so obvious Sherlock would have smirked at his sentimentality, I love you please don't do this I love you.
-
And he's not even sure anymore if he loves Sherlock now, though he can remember that he did, because the strange lull in his feelings is all-encompassing.
-
Mycroft just sends money now, exactly the number that is 221B's rent halved, and sometimes John feels an urge to laugh at the fact that Mycroft, who is the British government to some extent, sends him cash money in old-fashioned envelopes.
And then he's glad, painfully, sickeningly glad that Mycroft doesn't try to visit him, because he can't be sure he won't want to claw at Mycroft until he resembles his brother more, won't want to pull at Mycroft's mouth until it looks like Sherlock's, won't want to kill Mycroft just for having spent so much more time with Sherlock than John will now ever have the chance to.
-
The only thing that really provokes emotion anymore, apart from the flashes of forgetfulness just before sleep or just after it in which he's blissfully unaware of Sherlock being a rotting body in the ground, is the newspapers. He sets light to them, feeds them to the hearth, watches them crumple into ash particles, looks on as Sherlock's face disintegrates and the gleeful headlines fold back on themselves. It's not true. None of it is.
He cuts Sherlock's name out of every headline and eats the strips of paper until his mouth is stinging with paper cut.
And then he remembers that he's trying to become a person again, and this is nothing short of madness, and he lingers in front of Mrs. Hudson's door for a while that is too long whichever way he looks at it, and then in the end still can't do it, and goes back up.
-
Surely it shouldn't surprise him, because he is a professional after all, and he knows what grieving does to people. Especially mourners who go through the phase where everything is constricted, everything is so tight around them that they can't even swallow, they can't really speak, they don't feel anything, and it is surprisingly easy to do things the way they did before, although they no longer care.
But there was nothing in his textbooks to suggest that the authors knew what they were talking about first-hand, and though he remembers wondering about it all he was still only a student, a John Watson who was still somewhat of a newborn, who hadn't been close to death, who hadn't been close to Sherlock Holmes, who was someone he wouldn't get along with now, he suspects.
It shouldn't surprise him to start seeing Sherlock everywhere but it does, of course, and then he has a moment in which he thinks it would be nice to burn his medical books, and there is only one thing that stops him from doing it: Sherlock's face at being disrespectful to science, Sherlock's taunts at his predictability, Sherlock's gibes at his see-through attempt of trying to allow himself to have feelings again. And then for another moment he really still wants to do it, just to spite Sherlock, and then he remembers that Sherlock is dead, and that this was the most genuine emotion that he's had in a while, because for a small, shocking second he'd forgotten that Sherlock's reaction could never take place.
The first time, it feels like a heart attack; it feels like his blood, finally getting accustomed again to flowing through his heart, has once more tried to get away from it. It's only the stature that fits, the tallness, the almost glide of limbs - but this person turns to him readily when he catches his sleeve, and of course nothing of it is Sherlock, and afterward he's a bit proud of himself for not punching him in the face but instead asking him where he could find the tube station, and then not correcting him when the man gave him wrong directions. He's not as proud of himself for actually going to the tube station and then crying the entire ride with his palms pressing into his eyes, and he's also not proud that he didn't pay for a ticket.
It's all wrong, it's all scrambled.
-
It's all wrong that he can only cry when he thinks he's seen Sherlock, as if even the idea of his presence loosens up something in him, shakes him up a bit the way only Sherlock could.
The second time feels exactly the same, though he doesn't go after the tall, dark-coated man this time, because he knows that Sherlock is dead, and he knows simultaneously that Sherlock would be better at disguising himself, as if there is still some question about whether he would, about how he'd do it if he were doing it.
And yet, he knows that Sherlock is dead, it's like a stone, even if he sometimes reminds himself that he never saw the impact, and Sherlock is, well, is Sherlock, and maybe, maybe; but something unplugs itself in him because if he ever really thinks about it he doesn't know that he won't want to take out his brain and smash it on something, he can't do it, he can't let something like that inside him, because he needs to become a person again, at some point.
But deep in the night, he's still in denial, and sometimes he just can't be in denial about being in denial anymore.
-
The third time is the most upsetting because the man doesn't actually look like Sherlock at all, and he's a shade of tan that Sherlock would never be able to achieve, and his hair is all wrong, and his eyes aren't right, and he does have a peculiar mouth peeking out from behind his collar, but it's not the right kind of peculiar, his nose is right though, it's narrow and straight, and his face could be Sherlock's if John closes his eyes, and he isn't quite tall enough, but then he's also stooping a bit, and he seems to be looking at John for a second too long to be a stranger, and his eyebrows don't match his hair, and the lashes that close themselves over his brown eyes as John passes him are exactly right, and John has a moment in which he wonders at himself, in which he wonders with detachment whether he should just kiss this man to know for sure because he thinks that even Sherlock wouldn't be able to keep any front up during the surprise of that and John would know from his reaction, and because even if this man isn't Sherlock the fact that John just noticed his eyelashes and felt a rock drop into his stomach at them should be enough to excuse an unannounced kiss. And then he wonders when he stopped caring about anyone but himself and Sherlock.
-
And then back at 221B he knocks on Mrs. Hudson's door for the first time in four months, and she lets him in without even the barest hint of surprise, and her old-lady frame is fragile in his hug, his desperate, clinging hug, that is far too heavy for her to support. He's making noises he didn't think were humanly possible, and his lungs feel like they can't contain his breath, and his blood wants to come out of his nose, his ears, will do anything to just get away from his heart, and his eyes feel like they're bursting. She allows him to slobber all over her, to get his snot and tears all over her, and what she says is nothing new, she tells him it will be okay, that it is okay, that it's all right, let it all out dear, it's all right, it will be all right, oh my, there you go, there there, sit down here love, I'll make you some tea, it's okay, here's a hanky, oh dear me, oh no, here you go, have another, oh dear, it's all right, it's all right, it's all right
And nothing is, of course, and she's crying too, turning around to busy herself with the tea so he won't see.
-
And then of course he has to call in sick to the hospital, and he wants to reach into the phone and simultaneously strangle and kiss Sarah when she says: of course, John, I understand.
Because she saw this coming, obviously, and for a long, long while he had thought she was completely wrong, because how could anyone predict what happens to someone who loses Sherlock Holmes, who has ever lost Sherlock Holmes before John, and how could anything that has to do with Sherlock Holmes be like any other experience ever?
But he's like every other mourner, ever, and that's all wrong. It's an insult to Sherlock to have a normal grieving process. He doesn't doubt that Sherlock would do it all differently, would switch everything up, would go into denial by the end instead of at the beginning, and through all of it would understand so much more, and work on a cure for death, and if anyone were to find it, well. And then he has that feeling again, a feeling anyway, before he realises that Sherlock is dead, and none of that can ever happen again, there is no way to know. And now that the dams have broken he can't do anything but hold on to the phone and cry, and cry, he doesn't know for how long, until Sarah tells him, voice thick, that she has patients and God I'm sorry John, but I have to. He continues crying to the dial tone.
-
She does come to see him that evening, and he really wishes she hadn't, and the strength of that surprises him.
So he's back to feeling, then. Like Sherlock has grown tired of keeping his emotions, dull, dull, dull, honestly John how can you be so predictable, and has finally returned them to sender.
-
There is an insistence in Molly's voice mails that surprises him, when he's regained the ability to be surprised. It's almost as though some external force is pushing her to continue to contact him. So he texts her, because he doesn't want her voice, not yet, he can't do that yet: You can come over if you want.
And it bothers him for a bit that she waited for his permission to do that, but then he remembers that normal people do that when others they don't know that well are in pain, they try to feel them out, they try to pick up what they need, and in all fairness to Molly he definitely hadn't been communicating to her that he needed her to come over. He remembers that no one quite does things the way Sherlock did, Sherlock who would know that John needed to just be shaken by the shoulders at times, and slapped in the face, and spoken to icily, told to get a grip on himself already, but then the reason that he needs to get a grip is precisely that Sherlock isn't here to tell him so anymore.
Molly is thinner than he remembers, and she looks colourless. It returns to him with the sting of a wound-up rubber that she had to perform a post-mortem on a man she loved. Yes, his emotions seem to be back in place, because when he accepts her tentative, loose hug he feels sorry for her, in a way that he hasn't felt sorry for anyone in a long while, not even for himself, because that is so muddled up with so many other things that it's different alltogether.
She sits in the one chair he couldn't bring himself to chuck, the armchair Sherlock liked to think in or leave his violin in, and the sensation that something isn't fundamentally wrong with her sitting in it is unfamiliar.
He makes her coffee and is surprised to find he still remembers how she takes it, even though they've only had coffee together a handful of times.
She talks about some of the bodies she has in, and he knows she's thinking as much of Sherlock as he is, but he's grateful that she doesn't spell out the: he'd think that was interesting. She also says Greg Lestrade has been by a number of times, and he's grateful that she doesn't spell out the: and we talk about you, and we're worried. Because John had returned to letting Greg hang up too soon after that one drink, because it was all a bit too much trouble, though now he suspects that maybe he'll pick up again. So he tells Molly to say hello to Greg. She says she will.
“I sometimes think I see him,” he says to her, almost without thinking about it.
And for a split second she looks like someone has hit her in the face, hard, an intriguing panic blooming across her face, and then she covers it up quickly with a more general concerned expression; and if he wasn't past denial (well past it, the knowledge that Sherlock is just a body now, not a mind, and that there is nothing left of him to hate that, by now such a heavy part of him he couldn't get rid of it except by jumping into a pond or something) he'd be jumping on that expression with something like hope. It's good that he's past denial already and squashing it is actually quite easy, and it's with a wholly honest feeling that he thinks: no. it's because she is still in denial.
“That's... that's normal, isn't it?” she falters, and he likes that she couches it as a question. Sweet Molly.
“Yes, it is,” John says, and hopes that it will help her to feel more like a person again, and even feels his mouth twitching in a smile at her.
When she leaves, she looks somewhat relieved. He tells her she can come over anytime, and finds that he means it. Her phone buzzes as they're saying goodbye, and she looks nervous about that, and he wonders if maybe she's seeing someone new. She should. She should see someone she can actually see, who isn't just a see-through spectre, someone who she can touch, who isn't Sherlock; so fundamentally unavailable to her even before he threw himself off the roof of her hospital, before he came to her in tatters, just a body now.
She promises to come back. He doesn't really expect her to, but then she comes back two days later, and another two days later, she comes back again.
-
He dreams for the first time about a Sherlock who is just Sherlock, who isn't everything at once, who isn't everywhere, who isn't a killer and a victim and Harry and his mother and the corpse of his dead comrades. A Sherlock who is just Sherlock, looking in from a door, mouth set in that half-smile with one of the corners of his mouth raised.
He wakes up and his eyes are burning, and his pillow is streaked with water, and his chest hurts, and he can't breathe.
-
The rage is back, and it's at Sherlock how dare he how dare he how dare he how dare he how dare he how could he how could he how could he how could he how could he as much as at himself how dare I how dare I how dare I how dare I how dare I how could I how could I how could I how could I and after a while the two are the same, just like everything that was theirs was the same after a while.
When he calls Harry on Tuesday at three in the afternoon, she's still sober, and he shouts at her, just for daring to be alive, just for being there, he chooses her to shout at because she's the only one who really doesn't deserve it, she's the only one who never knew Sherlock at all, and that's enough.
She comes over, braver than he thought her to be. She tries to stop him, she tries stop his hands from punching the wall, and then of course isn't strong enough, and then drives him to the emergency room with a broken hand, and doesn't listen to his furious proclamations that he's a doctor, he can do this himself, and doesn't listen to his crying when she takes him back home.
She tells him things can't go on this way, and has the grace to blush at being the one to tell him something like that.
So he goes back to his therapist, something that he'd sworn he wouldn't after that disastrous first session a few weeks after Sherlock's death.
-
He almost breaks Sherlock's violin.
That's when he steps back and feels something break inside of him, as though it was a substitute for the priceless Stradivarius.
He's destroyed pretty much everything; he threw around the new chairs, the ones that never felt Sherlock's weight, he tore at the pillows, slashing open the Britannia one, he threw the table over, he pulled the paper from the wall - and then he had that moment where he had Sherlock's violin in his hands and was about to smash it onto the arm of the arm chair.
He drops it onto the carpet, and it's absolutely unharmed, but it feels as though he killed Sherlock, even moreso than he already had, and he sinks to his knees and vomits until he almost chokes.
-
He spends a night of insanity reading every single word on Sherlock's website, trying to read it as though he hasn't already, hasn't already read every article the night after Sherlock published it - both because he was in spite of himself actually interested in what Sherlock wrote on his site, and because it gave him endless amounts of material to poke fun with at Sherlock.
At one point the words begin to get read in his head by Sherlock's voice, and that's when he breaks down, and with a genuine, animalistic growl throws the laptop at the wall, where it breaks cleanly in two, and lies like a beheaded totem, its magic lost.
He pushes his hands into his eyes until he can feel that the pressure will be damaging them soon if he doesn't stop now, and just wants the tears to roll back up and go back in, because none of it helps, and nothing is all right, and the silence that doesn't laugh at him for being so utterly sentimental, the silence that doesn't offer an off-hand witty comment about his drama is so heavy it threatens to strangle him.
-
“I feel... guilty,” he says during the third session, because he can't come here anymore if he doesn't offer her anything.
She nods, writes something down.
“About not being able to stop him from jumping?” she asks.
And of course that's not all of it - it's not even just guilt, it's such a mess of emotions that he can't make any sense of it, will never be able to, it's like a white-hot ball in his chest, and it's not just about the jump, it's about not seeing anything, it's about not saying things, it's about the final thing they said, it's about the phone call, it's about how John couldn't say anything of importance, it's about how his brain froze up and he could only say no no no no, it's about Moriarty, it's about how John never properly thanked Sherlock for saving his life, it's for not telling Sherlock how easy it was for John to save his life, it's about how Sherlock deep in the night sometimes knocked at his door and how John, pissed off at something or other, always ignored him, it's about ruining important experiments, it's about not seeing when Sherlock was vulnerable, it's about not acting on it when he wanted to hug Sherlock, it's about not asking Sherlock anything about his childhood, it's about not knowing whether Sherlock was ever in love with anyone, it's about not bothering to find out because he thought there would be so much more time, it's about never telling Sherlock how much he changed his life, it's about not forgiving Sherlock quickly enough, it's for that short, deeply traitorous moment in which there was a pinprick of doubt about Sherlock, it's about missing time with Sherlock, choosing to go away to do other things than just sit around together, it's about not realising that the time they had was limited, it's about not using what they had to the fullest.
But he nods, because it's a start.
-
The anger fades after a while, because it doesn't have a point of focus, and after a while what Harry was saying - for Christ's sake, John, I know you're hurting, but you can't keep putting this on me - actually begins to make sense. No, it's not fair to do that to her, and it's not fair to give Greg the cold treatment again, and it's not fair to sneer at Molly when she tries to do small talk in that helpless way of hers, it's not fair when the only people who really deserve his anger are Sherlock and himself.
So he actually spends an evening writing awkward apologies and sends them to them in e-mails. Their responses are awkward, heartfelt, too kind.
He'll try to be better, he'll try, he'll try to become a person again.
-
He doesn't know when exactly he starts to forgive Sherlock, but at one point he thinks about him and only feels crushing sadness, and wanting, and no longer the confusing, horrible desire to kill him if he wasn't already dead.
He sees another man who could be Sherlock very easily and doesn't want to punch him, just wants to run after him, run until he stops, and wheel him around, and fit his head into his throat, and stand there, and just stand there. And tell him that John will keep him safe this time, and will tell him if he needs it that he's loved, that he's loved despite everything he is, that he's loved because of everything he is, and that what he is is enough, it's enough, it's more than enough.
He doesn't run after him. He's long past denial now.
-
It feels extremely strange to know that he's gone into a new stage, as though it's not something that's happening to himself but to a patient. If it were a patient he'd write in their file Moved on to new stage of grief: bargaining, with underlying depressive symptoms and, well, he is a patient now in every sense but the official one.
And he stays up nights because it genuinely feels like if he will give up his comfortability some of it will be passed on to Sherlock, and something might be pardoned, and it might work backwards and some of Sherlock's past pain might be alleviated. He knows it's not something that could actually work, but it feels so right to suffer because Sherlock suffered, and though no amount of suffering can ever be anything like what Sherlock must have gone through to do that, to have that desire and then follow it through, to throw himself off a roof, it still, agonizingly, horribly, feels as though John is repenting for something.
For not seeing things. For not being the one thing he really thought he still was: Sherlock's friend.
He can't get up in the mornings. He just can't.
-
He wishes he believed in God just so he could amuse himself with the images of Sherlock trying to reason or bully his way into heaven, only to find it incredibly dull and try to stage a new rebellion just to see what hell is like.
-
He knows he should probably prescribe himself some kind of anti-depressant, just for a while. It's what he would do for any patient. It's what Sarah clumsily suggests one day when she finds him still sitting in the cafeteria staring at his food an hour and a half after he went in to have lunch.
He doesn't do it because it's already an insult to Sherlock to be this predictable, to have this normal development, and he doesn't do it because everything in him forbids him to ever go to acceptance, because nothing about this is acceptable, and he doesn't do it because it is the only way to ever feel close to Sherlock again.
He knows it's stupid. He just wishes Sherlock were here to tell him so. He just wishes Sherlock were here to say: John, you moron, does the pain of one person diminish the pain of another? And John would have to say: no, not in any tangible sense. And Sherlock would say, visibly irritated: not in any sense, so stop it.
And maybe then, he'd be able to stop it.
-
Molly brings his favourite kind of tea, and she's bought milk for Mrs. Hudson, too. They sit in a silence that has grown companionable of late, and then they flick through the channels of the telly together, and he finds himself laughing at her comments on the presenters of the daytime television shopping channel. She makes them some pasta. He's hungry.
In the evening he catches his own face in the mirror by accident, and he looks more okay than he's looked in a while, and he spends a moment trying to remember when was the last time he laughed out loud before today, and honestly, truthfully can't recall.
-
Six months after Sherlock's death, he wakes up one morning and finds that he slept for an entire night, and the realisation is so shocking it takes him his whole morning routine to have a first, real, focused thought of Sherlock.
And then he panics, and spends the rest of his day frantically thinking about Sherlock, because there is still so much he hasn't repented for, so much debt left unpaid.
When he rolls into bed, a fatigue on him that doesn't feel unnatural for once, it doesn't take long to fall asleep, despite everything.
-
And things slowly rearrange themselves, and his trying to become a person again becomes more tangible, and gravity seems to restore itself bit by bit, hoisting him up again, bringing him to his feet. The black hole sucking everything into it at the centre of his orbit seems to have gone into sleep. Not gone, but peaceful.
He fights it for a week, because he doesn't want to feel better, he doesn't want any of it, he doesn't want to cope. For a moment he's back in denial, not about Sherlock, because there's nothing to deny there anymore, even his body won't be there anymore by now, but about himself.
But he has a drink with Greg and in spite of himself has quite a pleasant time, and forgets to think about Sherlock for a grand total of twenty-something minutes. Molly comes over and has him picking out the colours for a re-paint of her living room and he does, trying to match it to what he knows of her tastes but still trying to steer clear of the hopeful pink she brought, and he forgets to think about Sherlock for the entirety of their conversation about walls - he doesn't even think about his own, that have borne the brunt of Sherlock's anger so often. Mike sends him an e-mail asking to get a pint, and they talk about rugby for a bit, and Mike's new attempt at a diet, and they joke about why he's doing it, and Mike stammers and blushes and John is genuinely glad for him, and he forgets about Sherlock until he steps outside of the pub. Clara calls him up at one point, which she's done sporadically, and asks him over for a glass of wine, and because he likes her he goes, and they talk about her life, and a bit, stilted, about Harry, and he forgets about Sherlock until she asks him about it.
And because it's Clara, who is even more removed than Harry, he dares to say it: “I wish I wasn't moving on.” He wishes it wasn't like a stream with him in it, he wishes he could stay still, or maybe even swim upstream until he got back to where Sherlock was, but it beats at him with the violence of the tide, and he really feels like a shore sometimes, getting polished, his edges getting knocked off with every wave.
She puts a hand on his arm. “Moving on doesn't mean forgetting.”
He closes his eyes. Because no, it doesn't, but still nothing is all right, and there is nothing all right about just remembering Sherlock. He knows that as time passes Sherlock's face will maybe become a bit more indistinct, and John will start to only recognise the pieces he used to play without knowing when, exactly, Sherlock played them, and John will have to focus to remember what his hands looked like, and maybe even the memory of his voice will become a pale shadow of what it really was.
“I don't want things to fade,” he says tersely.
“You're still here,” she simply says, and he loves her for it, with a surprising intensity.
Yes, he is. And he will uphold his part of what he had with Sherlock and maybe that's really all he can do. He knows with a certainty that he's been lacking about everything lately that Sherlock wouldn't ask any more of him.
-
And of course he still has to put his fist into his mouth the next morning when he's sitting at the table and there is a small article in the newspaper on Sherlock Holmes, with the picture with the hat Sherlock hated so, a small article that is just stating that the crime rate in London is up with a considerable percentage. That's it, there's nothing there that will make anything better or that will redeem anyone.
He has to put his fist into his mouth to keep himself from crying like a howling dog, and instead just cries like a normal dog.
He carefully cuts out Sherlock's name from the headline, but doesn't eat it, because it doesn't seem to have a point anymore.
-
And of course it still hits him the week after that he's walking the exact route they took that first evening, going to Angelo's. It still makes him have to lean against the building next to him for support, shaking.
-
And of course he still has to sit down in Sherlock's favourite chair, crying a little, and clench his fingers around the fabric to stop his hands from shaking after coming back from a trip to the store and having been almost sure he saw him, again, a figure retreating down the cigarette aisle, tall, almost running.
-
And of course he still thinks of Sherlock every time he sees the fridge, empty except for actual food. It makes him not hungry, but then he remembers himself and eats something anyway, even though it tastes of nothing.
-
And of course he still says Sherlock's name when he wakes up from another dream where Sherlock's looking in from a doorway, and he cries without sound into his pillow remembering how the door had closed between them, but after a while he finds the strength to swing his legs off the bed and head to the shower, where the water feels good on his eyes.
-
And of course he still has to purse his lips and close his eyes for a bit when Mrs. Hudson asks him with a soft kind of sympathy about his leg, where that twitching, that ghostly ache is as strong as it ever was.
-
And of course he still thinks of Sherlock when he's on his first date in ten months, and has to swallow when he remembers how Sherlock used to mess up his dates, all of them, as though he got some kind of perverted kick out of it, and he has to swallow a bit more when he realises that that will never be happening again. Mary is perceptive, though, and she asks him if he's all right, and nothing is all right, but maybe she is, and he tells her a bit of it; he says: my best friend, I lost him recently... And I was just thinking about him for a bit. But don't worry. You were saying?
And the next date she asks what his name was, and in spite of himself he tells her not only that it was Sherlock but also that he killed himself, and the look on her face is so genuine with empathy he kisses her with more abandon than maybe he should on a second date.
The third date he almost forgets about Sherlock the entire time, until his phone buzzes and for a split second he expects it be Sherlock, and she catches it and impossibly knows what he's thinking about and he tells her a bit more, and she says: sounds like you really miss him, and he says, quietly: well, yeah.
The fourth date she asks to go home with him, and he tries to say no without upsetting her, because he can't have her there yet, but she gets it and suggests her own flat, and that he will gladly do. And she's beautiful and soft and smart and wonderful and he forgets about Sherlock the entire night and then the entire morning.
-
Something is all right. Not most things. But something.
-
He tells Molly about Mary when she visits, and his cheeks feel unaccustomed to so much smiling.
Molly looks at him and underneath her happiness that he's doing so much better he spots a strange kind of worry, and then laughs at himself for a bit, at him acting as though Sherlock's skills of observation have passed to him in some kind of twisted stipulation to his will.
It does seem to be there, though, and she's tapping out something on her phone before she's out the door, not really responding to his final goodbye, which seems out of character.
-
“Um, John?” She looks pained. “What about Sherlock?”
He looks up from his book to where Molly is sitting on the sofa, the telly on mute.
“What about him?” he says, a bit puzzled.
“I mean, with Mary and everything?” She's blushing.
He blinks.
“I thought you... Weren't you two...” she stammers.
That again, he thinks, and almost laughs, because it's been so long since anyone has talked about that. So long, because Sherlock is dead now and there's nothing to talk about anymore, really, and at that his almost-laugh doesn't become an actual laugh.
He's not sure how to answer it. He settles for “No,” because that's the truth, if only part of it.
“But wouldn't it... Wouldn't it have happened maybe if...”
“How does it even matter anymore?” he says, and then feels a bit guilty for being snappish. “I mean, maybe... I don't...” He shakes his head. He struggled with this question for so long, even for a while when Sherlock was still alive, and then more unbearably when he was dead, because then there was a finality, an air of unfinishedness that was part of the reason John sometimes screamed when he was alone at home in the beginning, but everything is calmer now, and some things are the same but others are different. “There's no knowing now, is there?” He can't quite stop his voice from trembling.
She's silent, chews on the inside of her cheek. “No,” she says quietly after a while, when he's already gone back to his book, “I guess not.”
And he wonders for a bit at the sadness in her voice, the page of his book unfocused before him.
“Just don't... Don't forget him, okay?” she eventually squeaks, as though she doesn't want to say it, but something is making her.
He frowns at her, a forceful indignation sparking in his chest, the beginning of an anger. “Are you serious?” he says, incredulously.
She looks at him from the couch, a strange kind of pinchedness in her expression.
“Molly,” he then says, closing his book, “if you don't know by now that I will never, ever forget him, then I'll have to ask you to leave.”
Her smile is watery, wavering, and doesn't quite reach her eyes. “I do know.”
“Good,” he says, and they look at each other, in the living room of 221B Baker Street, where a springtime light is falling in through the window on which Sherlock once drew a detailed map of the human brain, the black stains of which are still there in places. She's sitting where Sherlock often sat, sprawled out in boredom, his blue robe wrapped around his knees. The violin is on its usual spot, untouched for far too long now, except for when John carefully cleans it and sometimes dares to touch the strings, quickly, as though he's committing a crime. And maybe he is. Either way, no one else will be touching that violin in his lifetime, and he can't imagine the Stradivarius would want to be touched by anyone after Sherlock.
Though he can't be sure. He didn't think he ever would want to be touched by anyone after Sherlock. For a while it seemed like no one would ever be able to again. And yet, here he is.
Here he is.