Unfallen 1/4, Sherlock, R
Unfallen [1/4]
[sherlock/john, R]
After the fall, John does not move on.
1. the loneliness and the scream [listen]
Getting out of bed has never been a problem.
Even in the months after he’d first got back to London, back at the bedsit when he’d wake up shuddering and soaked if he’d slept at all, he’d never hesitate to get up. He’d had nothing to get up for, but it hadn’t mattered.
But now.
He’s been staring at the same spot on his wall for the past 37 minutes, ever since he woke up at seven as he always has.
There’s always that too-brief window between sleep and waking when his mind is empty, a blank canvas. If he tries hard in these few seconds, he can hear the sound of pacing footsteps down the hall.
The truth settles over him like a muzzle, and he struggles and lashes out uselessly against it and then there’s a moment where he can’t breathe for aching.
He’d stopped counting the hours. It isn’t healthy. He knows this.
Two months and nine days since Sherlock died.
*~*
“Why do you think it’s important for you to measure the passage of time?” Tanya asks.
He doesn’t respond. She’s used to it.
He wonders what she thinks about, during the endless blanks that make up their so-called sessions. Family? Dinner? Other patients? He sincerely hopes she’s not spending all that time trying to figure him out.
He sits perfectly still across from her and thinks about falling.
*~*
It’s 8.24 by the time he finally makes it into the kitchen.
What he’d told Mrs Hudson at the grave had been true, and yet after five weeks he’d found himself back here, at the flat, because what else is there?
Sherlock’s lab equipment, his books, his clothing, lies in boxes neatly stacked against the living room’s west wall. Mrs Hudson hasn’t raised the question of what to do with them again, and for this he’s grateful.
He makes tea and toast out of habit, doesn’t notice until halfway through the slice that it’s bone dry and desperately in need of butter, spread, something. It’s all become pretty much the same.
He’s always dismissed it as hyperbole when patients had described food as tasting like ash. Temporary loss of taste can be attributed to depression, shock, anxiety, psychosis, but there is no medical reason for all food to literally taste ashen. And yet.
Everything in the world makes him sick. This world that believes Sherlock Holmes was a fraud and he’s the deluded sidekick who just can’t face the truth.
You should be fighting for him.
The thought plagues him, a tiny pinprick of nauseous guilt. He should be contacting the press, gathering evidence, building a case against Moriarty, because Sherlock deserves so much better than to be remembered like this.
Death of a conman: Tragic fraudster plummets to his grave - Full story page 9
But he doesn’t know where to begin and his head’s fuzzy and he can’t bear to hear what the world thinks, let alone try to fight it.
Holmes, 31, was understood to habitually abuse Class A drugs, a source told the Daily Mail.
And when it comes down to it, he has no explanation for what happened.
In the hours leading up to his death, Holmes resisted arrest and threatened police officers with a firearm before fleeing.
Lestrade had tried to speak to him at the funeral. A cold weight like a fist had settled around John’s chest and he’d dug his nails hard into his palms, barely hearing the words.
“Never come near me again,” he’d managed to get out, and Lestrade had looked stricken. John couldn’t have given less of a fuck.
“And if I ever see you at his grave...”
The sentence doesn’t need to be finished. If he’s honest, he doesn’t know how he would have finished it.
*~*
“You’re very focused on the facts,” Tanya comments at their next session.
“Sorry?”
“Everything you’ve said about that day, about what happened, about the events leading up to it. I feel as though I’ve got a good grasp of the facts.”
“Right.”
“But there’s one fact you don’t ever mention,” she presses.
“Oh?”
His fists are clenching again, nails finding their deep familiar grooves.
“When you describe him, you use the word ‘fell’. You don’t ever use the word ‘jumped’.”
He hates crying in here. It feels contrived, like he’s performing or maybe auditioning.
Not to mention it’s completely impractical since he pays by the hour.
He knows from experience that once he starts crying for Sherlock, he can’t stop.
*~*
There’s a metallic taste in his mouth - side effect from the pills he shouldn’t be taking any more, inappropriate for long-term use, habit forming. But he can’t go back to before, when he’d feel sleep begin to take hold and jerk violently awake with a sob as Sherlock’s marble face rushed to him, head half caved in and bloodied, blank slate eyes staring.
Some nights even with the pills he doesn’t sleep. He stays awake in a half-drugged haze and thinks of Moriarty, who he doesn’t allow himself to think of in the day because he’s truly afraid he will harm someone.
“Richard Brook’s” body had been found, on the rooftop, and an initial forensics report had come out indicating suicide as the cause of death. The coroner’s report was pending. That hadn’t stopped the tabloids painting Sherlock as the killer, and Brook as the sacrificial lamb in his sad, sick game of pretending.
He half-dreams of strangling Moriarty, of wrapping his hands around his neck and crushing his windpipe, snapping his neck, pushing thumbs into his eyeballs until they rupture.
What did you do to him? What the fuck did you do to him he’ll ask, and Moriarty will grin inanely back at him even with his eyes gouged and his neck broken and there will still be no answers.
Two months and twenty-eight days since Sherlock killed himself.
*~*
“Okay, here’s a hypothetical one for you.”
She raises her eyebrows expectantly.
“A person - somebody self-assured, competent, confident, supremely bloody confident in fact - suddenly offs themselves. No warning. No reason. No note.”
“Okay,” she says, looking at him with sorrow he resents.
“What would you say? As a psychiatric professional, about that person? Because there’s no logic to it, is there, somebody who was just...so...okay.”
He wouldn’t kill himself. He wouldn’t. He wouldn’t. His mind screams suddenly, again, with the lunacy of it all.
“Hypothetically,” she says, gently, “I’d say that that person probably wasn’t as okay as they seemed to be.”
John swallows, pressing fingertips hard against his forehead.
“Some nights I wake up, suddenly, and I know - I just, I know, completely, that he isn’t dead. I’m more sure of it than I am of this room around me now. Because he wouldn’t-” he breaks off just before his voice cracks.
Tanya waits.
“He wouldn’t kill himself.”
She waits.
“He was okay. He was better than okay, he was…”
Brilliant. Beautiful. Fucking perfect.
He doesn’t speak for the rest of the session.
*~*
At 3.34 am, he wakes up screaming.
*~*
When it’s finally, finally light outside, he takes his keys and gets out of the flat.
He walks up to Marylebone Road, past an unusually deserted Madame Tussaud’s (too early for even the keenest of tourists) and along into Regent’s Park.
Green space soothes him, to an extent. It’s streets he can’t face nowadays, sheer vertical walls and flat roofs and the blank-eyed stare of windows. He sees blood on every other paving stone.
He wishes now that he’d dressed for running - he needs to be in motion, fast motion, the kind of motion where all you’re thinking about is your next five strides - but instead he power-walks, head bowed.
If he hadn’t gone out for a walk last January, if the four walls of his bedsit hadn’t pressed so heavily that day, he’d never have run into Stamford. The odds of them running into each other in a city this size were pretty remote to begin with.
No Stamford, no Sherlock.
And this is what’s left.
Three months and seven days since Sherlock threw himself from the rooftop of St Bart’s and his spine, his brain, his heart shattered against the pavement and everything he ever was had been extinguished and John had stood by and watched and done. nothing.
He stops, abruptly, knees weak.
*~*
“You said before that you were angry.”
“I just don’t. Understand.”
The heels of his hands are grinding hard into his closed eyelids, lurid worms dancing in the dark.
She’s talking again, but all he hears is Sherlock’s voice, choked with tears.
I’m a fake. I researched you.
*~*
“Excuse me?”
A young woman is looking down at him.
“Are you okay? Do...do you need help?”
He’s looking at her trainers.
All the things Sherlock could have gleaned from these trainers. Her weight, her shoe size, how far she’s run, how often she runs or doesn’t and why, how long she’s had the trainers, does she overpronate or supinate, every injury she’s ever had, whether she’s single, whether she has pets, whether she gets on with her mother, how many hours she slept last night.
All he gets is Asics, pretty well-worn, she’s got a Nike clip-on pouch on her left shoe storing keys, maybe a few coins, so she’s probably a regular runner, bit specialist for a newbie.
“Are you okay?” she asks again.
“What do you think of Sherlock Holmes?’
He’s still looking at her feet.
“Sorry?”
“Sherlock Holmes. The detective. Threw himself off a roof. What, you don’t read the papers?”
He almost apologises for being rude. Pointless.
“No, I know who you mean,” she replies. “Um...I didn’t really know what to think. It was a horrible story.”
His throat closes up. She’s shifting her weight from one foot to the other now, probably regretting the decision to be a good Samaritan and check on the lunatic.
“Um, look, are you sure you’re okay?”
“What do you think about him?” John repeats, voice tight, and finally he looks up at her face. And maybe she recognises him (confirmed bachelor John Watson), or maybe she just feels sorry for him.
“I don’t think he was a fraud,” she says, gently. “My flatmate works with a guy who hired him - Sherlock Holmes, he helped to find this guy’s brother. He says he was the real deal.”
He’s now positive that she recognises him. She looks very, very sympathetic.
“Listen, do you want me to maybe...is there someone I can phone for you? Or there’s the boathouse café, should be open by now if you want a hot drink, or something?”
Shaking his head, he waves her away.
“It’s fine,” he says, then, almost absently, “it’s all fine.”
*~*
He walks back to the flat and closes the door behind him and walks straight to his bedroom and takes out his gun and sits with it just resting against his temple.
This, too, soothes him. The reassurance that death’s within his reach. Easy. His hand is perfectly steady.
Nerves of steel.
Later, he drinks Scotch until he can’t feel his limbs and sits foetal in the living room, wedged between two boxes of lab equipment.
He knows he won’t go on like this for much longer.
*~*
Psychosis. It was only a matter of time.
He’s hallucinated before - from dehydration, exhaustion, there’d been days in the desert where reality was best kept at a distance - but never like this.
He blinks, hard, staggering upright against the wall.
“John,” Sherlock says, and it’s his voice, his voice his voice rich and low and everything he’s ached to hear again just one more time.
His own heartbeat is deafening.
“I d-“
He starts the sentence but there’s no breath in his body. The edges of his vision are dark, the room shifting into gray. He falls.
[sherlock/john, R]
After the fall, John does not move on.
1. the loneliness and the scream [listen]
Getting out of bed has never been a problem.
Even in the months after he’d first got back to London, back at the bedsit when he’d wake up shuddering and soaked if he’d slept at all, he’d never hesitate to get up. He’d had nothing to get up for, but it hadn’t mattered.
But now.
He’s been staring at the same spot on his wall for the past 37 minutes, ever since he woke up at seven as he always has.
There’s always that too-brief window between sleep and waking when his mind is empty, a blank canvas. If he tries hard in these few seconds, he can hear the sound of pacing footsteps down the hall.
The truth settles over him like a muzzle, and he struggles and lashes out uselessly against it and then there’s a moment where he can’t breathe for aching.
He’d stopped counting the hours. It isn’t healthy. He knows this.
Two months and nine days since Sherlock died.
*~*
“Why do you think it’s important for you to measure the passage of time?” Tanya asks.
He doesn’t respond. She’s used to it.
He wonders what she thinks about, during the endless blanks that make up their so-called sessions. Family? Dinner? Other patients? He sincerely hopes she’s not spending all that time trying to figure him out.
He sits perfectly still across from her and thinks about falling.
*~*
It’s 8.24 by the time he finally makes it into the kitchen.
What he’d told Mrs Hudson at the grave had been true, and yet after five weeks he’d found himself back here, at the flat, because what else is there?
Sherlock’s lab equipment, his books, his clothing, lies in boxes neatly stacked against the living room’s west wall. Mrs Hudson hasn’t raised the question of what to do with them again, and for this he’s grateful.
He makes tea and toast out of habit, doesn’t notice until halfway through the slice that it’s bone dry and desperately in need of butter, spread, something. It’s all become pretty much the same.
He’s always dismissed it as hyperbole when patients had described food as tasting like ash. Temporary loss of taste can be attributed to depression, shock, anxiety, psychosis, but there is no medical reason for all food to literally taste ashen. And yet.
Everything in the world makes him sick. This world that believes Sherlock Holmes was a fraud and he’s the deluded sidekick who just can’t face the truth.
You should be fighting for him.
The thought plagues him, a tiny pinprick of nauseous guilt. He should be contacting the press, gathering evidence, building a case against Moriarty, because Sherlock deserves so much better than to be remembered like this.
Death of a conman: Tragic fraudster plummets to his grave - Full story page 9
But he doesn’t know where to begin and his head’s fuzzy and he can’t bear to hear what the world thinks, let alone try to fight it.
Holmes, 31, was understood to habitually abuse Class A drugs, a source told the Daily Mail.
And when it comes down to it, he has no explanation for what happened.
In the hours leading up to his death, Holmes resisted arrest and threatened police officers with a firearm before fleeing.
Lestrade had tried to speak to him at the funeral. A cold weight like a fist had settled around John’s chest and he’d dug his nails hard into his palms, barely hearing the words.
“Never come near me again,” he’d managed to get out, and Lestrade had looked stricken. John couldn’t have given less of a fuck.
“And if I ever see you at his grave...”
The sentence doesn’t need to be finished. If he’s honest, he doesn’t know how he would have finished it.
*~*
“You’re very focused on the facts,” Tanya comments at their next session.
“Sorry?”
“Everything you’ve said about that day, about what happened, about the events leading up to it. I feel as though I’ve got a good grasp of the facts.”
“Right.”
“But there’s one fact you don’t ever mention,” she presses.
“Oh?”
His fists are clenching again, nails finding their deep familiar grooves.
“When you describe him, you use the word ‘fell’. You don’t ever use the word ‘jumped’.”
He hates crying in here. It feels contrived, like he’s performing or maybe auditioning.
Not to mention it’s completely impractical since he pays by the hour.
He knows from experience that once he starts crying for Sherlock, he can’t stop.
*~*
There’s a metallic taste in his mouth - side effect from the pills he shouldn’t be taking any more, inappropriate for long-term use, habit forming. But he can’t go back to before, when he’d feel sleep begin to take hold and jerk violently awake with a sob as Sherlock’s marble face rushed to him, head half caved in and bloodied, blank slate eyes staring.
Some nights even with the pills he doesn’t sleep. He stays awake in a half-drugged haze and thinks of Moriarty, who he doesn’t allow himself to think of in the day because he’s truly afraid he will harm someone.
“Richard Brook’s” body had been found, on the rooftop, and an initial forensics report had come out indicating suicide as the cause of death. The coroner’s report was pending. That hadn’t stopped the tabloids painting Sherlock as the killer, and Brook as the sacrificial lamb in his sad, sick game of pretending.
He half-dreams of strangling Moriarty, of wrapping his hands around his neck and crushing his windpipe, snapping his neck, pushing thumbs into his eyeballs until they rupture.
What did you do to him? What the fuck did you do to him he’ll ask, and Moriarty will grin inanely back at him even with his eyes gouged and his neck broken and there will still be no answers.
Two months and twenty-eight days since Sherlock killed himself.
*~*
“Okay, here’s a hypothetical one for you.”
She raises her eyebrows expectantly.
“A person - somebody self-assured, competent, confident, supremely bloody confident in fact - suddenly offs themselves. No warning. No reason. No note.”
“Okay,” she says, looking at him with sorrow he resents.
“What would you say? As a psychiatric professional, about that person? Because there’s no logic to it, is there, somebody who was just...so...okay.”
He wouldn’t kill himself. He wouldn’t. He wouldn’t. His mind screams suddenly, again, with the lunacy of it all.
“Hypothetically,” she says, gently, “I’d say that that person probably wasn’t as okay as they seemed to be.”
John swallows, pressing fingertips hard against his forehead.
“Some nights I wake up, suddenly, and I know - I just, I know, completely, that he isn’t dead. I’m more sure of it than I am of this room around me now. Because he wouldn’t-” he breaks off just before his voice cracks.
Tanya waits.
“He wouldn’t kill himself.”
She waits.
“He was okay. He was better than okay, he was…”
Brilliant. Beautiful. Fucking perfect.
He doesn’t speak for the rest of the session.
*~*
At 3.34 am, he wakes up screaming.
*~*
When it’s finally, finally light outside, he takes his keys and gets out of the flat.
He walks up to Marylebone Road, past an unusually deserted Madame Tussaud’s (too early for even the keenest of tourists) and along into Regent’s Park.
Green space soothes him, to an extent. It’s streets he can’t face nowadays, sheer vertical walls and flat roofs and the blank-eyed stare of windows. He sees blood on every other paving stone.
He wishes now that he’d dressed for running - he needs to be in motion, fast motion, the kind of motion where all you’re thinking about is your next five strides - but instead he power-walks, head bowed.
If he hadn’t gone out for a walk last January, if the four walls of his bedsit hadn’t pressed so heavily that day, he’d never have run into Stamford. The odds of them running into each other in a city this size were pretty remote to begin with.
No Stamford, no Sherlock.
And this is what’s left.
Three months and seven days since Sherlock threw himself from the rooftop of St Bart’s and his spine, his brain, his heart shattered against the pavement and everything he ever was had been extinguished and John had stood by and watched and done. nothing.
He stops, abruptly, knees weak.
*~*
“You said before that you were angry.”
“I just don’t. Understand.”
The heels of his hands are grinding hard into his closed eyelids, lurid worms dancing in the dark.
She’s talking again, but all he hears is Sherlock’s voice, choked with tears.
I’m a fake. I researched you.
*~*
“Excuse me?”
A young woman is looking down at him.
“Are you okay? Do...do you need help?”
He’s looking at her trainers.
All the things Sherlock could have gleaned from these trainers. Her weight, her shoe size, how far she’s run, how often she runs or doesn’t and why, how long she’s had the trainers, does she overpronate or supinate, every injury she’s ever had, whether she’s single, whether she has pets, whether she gets on with her mother, how many hours she slept last night.
All he gets is Asics, pretty well-worn, she’s got a Nike clip-on pouch on her left shoe storing keys, maybe a few coins, so she’s probably a regular runner, bit specialist for a newbie.
“Are you okay?” she asks again.
“What do you think of Sherlock Holmes?’
He’s still looking at her feet.
“Sorry?”
“Sherlock Holmes. The detective. Threw himself off a roof. What, you don’t read the papers?”
He almost apologises for being rude. Pointless.
“No, I know who you mean,” she replies. “Um...I didn’t really know what to think. It was a horrible story.”
His throat closes up. She’s shifting her weight from one foot to the other now, probably regretting the decision to be a good Samaritan and check on the lunatic.
“Um, look, are you sure you’re okay?”
“What do you think about him?” John repeats, voice tight, and finally he looks up at her face. And maybe she recognises him (confirmed bachelor John Watson), or maybe she just feels sorry for him.
“I don’t think he was a fraud,” she says, gently. “My flatmate works with a guy who hired him - Sherlock Holmes, he helped to find this guy’s brother. He says he was the real deal.”
He’s now positive that she recognises him. She looks very, very sympathetic.
“Listen, do you want me to maybe...is there someone I can phone for you? Or there’s the boathouse café, should be open by now if you want a hot drink, or something?”
Shaking his head, he waves her away.
“It’s fine,” he says, then, almost absently, “it’s all fine.”
*~*
He walks back to the flat and closes the door behind him and walks straight to his bedroom and takes out his gun and sits with it just resting against his temple.
This, too, soothes him. The reassurance that death’s within his reach. Easy. His hand is perfectly steady.
Nerves of steel.
Later, he drinks Scotch until he can’t feel his limbs and sits foetal in the living room, wedged between two boxes of lab equipment.
He knows he won’t go on like this for much longer.
*~*
Psychosis. It was only a matter of time.
He’s hallucinated before - from dehydration, exhaustion, there’d been days in the desert where reality was best kept at a distance - but never like this.
He blinks, hard, staggering upright against the wall.
“John,” Sherlock says, and it’s his voice, his voice his voice rich and low and everything he’s ached to hear again just one more time.
His own heartbeat is deafening.
“I d-“
He starts the sentence but there’s no breath in his body. The edges of his vision are dark, the room shifting into gray. He falls.