A/N: Short detailing of the aftermath of Reichenbach. Tell me what you think of it in a review, please!
John has seen many deaths. He's watched a friend's eyes as their light fell into the depths, never to surface, and he's felt the heat seep out of someone's hand and into his. He's seen people shot, and been shot. He's seen people fall before. He has.
He doesn't want this to be any different than the others because that wouldn't be fair. But it wouldn't be fair to Him if it wasn't, and He deserved the special attention, because He always had, because He was special, in fact he was the cleverest man, he was the best man John had ever known and-
-and John hated him. Not for dying, not for fooling him, not for being special. He hated him because he was the only human being he knew that got to control his own death, and it wasn't fucking fair. Please God let me live and John had given up his control, and his friends gave up too, and he lived, they didn't, and none of it was fair.
But he still loved him. He didn't know how, or in what way, he only knew it was true. He watched them struggle on the rooftop and he loved him, watched him fall, couldn't watch him die (of all the people he didn't have the courage to watch die, why him), watched his still body and his still eyes, loved him even then though death felt like betrayal.
As he fell, John saw a waterfall. In the morgue, he saw his bones laying under the current. He saw Moriarty washed up on the river bank, heard the waterfall rage, deafening, in his ears. He didn't know why the waterfall, but he knew it made sense because it's what's stuck in his head.
Now he stood in the empty flat on Baker Street, watched the wall behind him in the mirror. Everything was empty space. Now he loved Sherlock and hated him, wished he would stop living in his mind, building waterfalls in all the corners and grappling with his memories, playing the strings that attached him to the earth and filling the backs of his eyes with smoke until they watered. He talked to him aloud when he didn't think. And most of all, he dreamed about him.
He damned his heart for making this death affect him more than any other, any other thing in his life, but he was okay with feeling so hurt all the while, because that way he stayed. That way, he could tell him he hated him and loved him, missed him and wanted him at a distance. That way, he could go on and not feel bad about it, because there was a part of him still living in all the spaces in John's head.
He went on. Sherlock Holmes tumbled over a waterfall - no, a building - and brought the most dangerous man in Britain down with him, and left John living. It was all fine, though - just except when it wasn't.
Everything was okay, except when he dreamed. The dreams weren't about the fall, or the light gone out of his bright eyes, or the warmth gone out of his beating, beating heart. In his dreams, John saw his bones in the water, sleeping soundly on the bedrock, beautiful and haunting, cerulean and clear like the irises he'd known so well.
Eventually, he stopped feeling selfless and guilty and just loved him. He left the other deaths alone. He thought of Sherlock and didn't stop thinking of Sherlock, and dreamt of Sherlock and never stopped dreaming of Sherlock, for three long years.
And Sherlock never died.