Driveby rec
I just need to swing through quickly and tell you all to read this Sherlock fanfic on Ao3 by M_Leigh. It is agonising, one story that I think hardly needs the touch of slash to reinforce its emotional punch. It deals, unlike any other post-Reichenbach fic I've seen, with the particular agony not of "simply" losing one's best friend, but of losing him to suicide, a form of torture Canon Watson is at least partially spared. But John cannot stop re-examining his every memory of Sherlock's life in the awful light of its apparent ending, cannot stop speculating about his earlier years as always unbearably focused towards self-destruction.
Every memory he has of Sherlock has become about his decision to throw himself off of a building. Every one. He cannot look back at anything Sherlock said or did without wondering: was that a clue? Was that a sign? Was he thinking about it even then? Or even if he wasn’t, if nothing about it was premeditated, the fact remains that somewhere inside of him resided some impulse, some urge, a kind of self-destruction that went far beyond hypodermic needles and a seven percent solution.
You missed it, the voice tells him, almost gleeful.There were so many signs, so many obvious signs he left for you, and you missed them, and now he’s dead.
And John's regrets. Oh my God. I won't spoil the chief of them, but I cannot resist quoting this passage:
He has never been this angry about anything, at anybody, and maybe that’s because he never loved anybody like this, either; he would always have thrown himself in front of a bullet to save somebody but only for Sherlock would he have done so with a kind of effortlessness, a pure and unadulterated joy at the sacrifice. But he could not step in front of Sherlock to save him, because there was no bullet, there was no aggressor save Sherlock himself, and John could not divide the Sherlock he knew and the foreign Sherlock he clearly never knew at all; he could not stand between those two selves and give himself up. He wishes he could have. He would have done it without thinking twice.
*CRIES AND CRIES AND CRIES FOREVER.*
There's a little comfort at the end, thank God, but prepare for severe cardiac gouging.