The Lie

AU - The Lie
└ John finds out that Sherlock faked his death before he returns. He decides to give the detective a taste of his own medicine. - GIF by doomslock

Sherlock stepped inside his brother's office, footsteps muffled by the thick pile carpeting. "You called, brother dear?"

"Sit down," Mycroft intoned.

Three years ago, Sherlock would have retorted with some verbal jab aimed at Mycroft's waistline, but the stress and the separation from John had taken their toll on the detective. He sat down, looking over at his older brother, eyes dimmed and haunted by the ghosts of everything he had seen and done.

Mycroft took a big breath and exhaled slowly. He steepled his fingers under his chin in the way both Holmes brothers did and fixed Sherlock with an even stare. "I'm sorry, Sherlock," he began. "He's gone. John's gone." He sat back, waiting for the news to sink in.

"No," was Sherlock's immediate reaction. "No, he can't be." When Mycroft's expression didn't waver in the slightest, Sherlock's face crumpled. "Mycroft, please, tell me you're joking." He kept his voice carefully even and calm, but anyone could hear the shakiness threatening to break right under the surface.

"Sherlock, I would never joke about something like this," Mycroft said quietly. "John took his own life, yesterday evening. His own gun. He left a note," he said, proffering the small scrap of paper.

Sherlock took the note with shaking hands and began to read.

To Whoever Finds This Note

I hope it's not you, Mrs Hudson. You've been so kind to me, ever since Sherlock, well, since three years ago. I tried to clean up as much as I could. It was something to do to fill the hours. You all know I had to give up my job at the clinic. I couldn't work anymore. And Sherlock, if you can somehow read this, this bit's for you. I loved you, you selfish bastard. And you didn't know it, but you killed me, that day you jumped and took your own selfish life. I died, Sherlock. You took me with you that day. And so now, don't think of it as me taking my own life. Just think of it as me finishing what you started.

Ever yours,

Captain John Hamish Watson

Sherlock stared at the note for a long time, eyes reading and rereading, committing it to memory without even realising it. He looked up at Mycroft. "Why?" he asked, voice thick with repressed emotion. "Why would he do this? I thought...I thought he was stronger. I thought he could handle it. He's lost friends before, My, he's a soldier! Surely... why me?" He buried his head in his hands, eyes burning with tears he would never let flow. "I want evidence," he said after a long moment. "Obituary. Will. Gravestone."
"I'm so sorry, Sherlock," Mycroft said softly, hardly above a whisper. He handed over a horrifically boring manila file. It contained John's obituary, a photocopy of his note, a picture of his gravestone. It looked startlingly like Sherlock's, a dark, shiny stone with a simple inscription. John's had his military honours on it. He reached out a hand to pat Sherlock's back, but retracted it, thinking better of it. The two men sat awkwardly across from each other in Mycroft's deathly silent office until Sherlock rose quickly to his feet. He put John's note carefully down on the desk, smoothing out the wrinkles he'd created. He clutched the folder in his hand so tightly his knuckles turned white. He spun on his heel and stalked out the door in a swirl of coat. He made it all the way out of the Diogenes Club and into a cab to take him home before he let himself break down in sobs, hiding himself away in that great big coat, all of London swirling past him as his heart shattered for the thousandth time.

Weeks passed and the world continued to turn on without Sherlock Holmes. He stayed curled up in a tiny flat a few streets from his old home on Baker Street, where he'd been hiding for the last three years. He had memorised the folder, to no avail. He'd found John's grave, a small plot in the same cemetery as his own. He felt sick and couldn't stay long, memories flashing through his head and obscuring his vision. It just felt so much... colder in the little flat. More alone. Even less like home than it ever had, now, knowing there was no real 'home' to go back to. No 221B Baker Street with John and Mrs Hudson and the good old days of cases by starlight. None of that. No more. Ever again. Because how could there be? All of those things were intrinsically tied up with John.
They hadn't always been, Sherlock told himself. You used to go to cases by yourself all the time. Hell, even after you met John you still sometimes did cases alone. Ah, but you always had John to come home to, said the evil side of his brain that filled him with self-doubt, the part that was keeping him huddled in a ball in his depressing flat instead of working to untangle Moriarty's web.

Sherlock spent a lot of time thinking about why John's death had affected him so severely, so dramatically. Eventually, he could only come up with one conclusion.

The day Sherlock met John, he became something new and different entirely. Someone who needed another person for his very survival. When they had both been living together, neither one of them had noticed it, but they'd become completely interdependent, like moss on a tree, or –no, that wasn't right. One of them hadn't been leeching off of the other. They had been helping each other, mutually benefitting. Sherlock had provided John with the excitement and the danger he craved, needed to distract him from his psychosomatic limp. And John had given Sherlock... stability. A sounding board. A friend when no one else would be. Someone who would never judge him, but would keep him in line when he needed it. Pull him back when he started to revert back into his bad old ways. John had never managed to cure him entirely of the cocaine, the self-induced starvation ("It's bad for brainwork, John!") and the never sleeping ("Why should I sleep when there's work to be done?"). Not even John could keep Sherlock from screeching away at the violin at two o'clock in the morning ("John, you know sleeping is irrelevant when I have a case." "But Sherlock, you prat, I have work tomorrow morning!") or blowing up the kitchen with crazy experiments ("You're paying Mrs Hudson this time, Sherlock, and explaining the mess to her.") Sherlock wished now that he had listened to John. He wished he'd done and said a whole lot of things differently, and now he would never get the chance to. He stared glassy-eyed at the depressingly beige wall and prayed for sleep to take him.

Another few weeks passed before there came the knock on the door. Sherlock looked up from his bed, moving for the first time in two days. The last time had been to fend off an overzealous door-to-door salesman; Sherlock had left the poor man in tears. The former detective sighed and got up off of the bed, moving over to the door. "What do you want?" he snapped as he opened the door. He looked up and nearly fell over as he saw who was standing in the doorway. "John?" he choked out, gripping the doorframe for support. "No...what? You were dead!" Anger started to rise in his throat. "You were dead, you bloody bastard! You died and you left a goddamn note! I went to your fucking grave!" He raised his hand to strike John, before thinking better of it. What kind of impression would it leave, to backhand his best friend, miraculously returned from the dead, right when he first saw him? He lowered his hand and chuckled darkly. "So. Two dead men meeting in a dingy old flat. Sounds like the setup to some ridiculous horror movie." His weak attempt at a joke sounded flat even in his own ears.
John stood somewhat awkwardly in the door, watching the range of emotions play across Sherlock's face. He knew them well, for they'd played on his face three years ago. He could watch disbelief turn into anger into bitter resignation. He looked up somewhat bashfully at Sherlock. "Can I come in?" he asked quietly.
Sherlock stepped to the side, allowing John in. The doctor's limp had returned and so he hobbled painfully to a chair in the front room of Sherlock's flat, sitting heavily in a chair. Sherlock walked back over to stand in front of John, still completely in shock. He opened and closed his mouth a few times, trying to figure out what to say. The tiny bit of weight he'd put on while living with John had come right back off again, and he was skeletally thin. He paced around in front of John, trying to figure out what to say. He sat down on the coffee table across from the doctor and just stared at him a moment, re-learning the planes and lines of his face. He worked his jaw. "So," he said after a long moment. "You're not dead. We're not dead. What a change."
John snorted a bit. "Yeah. Faked our own suicides, we did. So. You first. Why did you jump?"
Sherlock thought John had a hell of a lot of nerve, reappearing like this out of nowhere. "Excuse me; I did it to save you. You and Mrs Hudson and Lestrade. I had to jump off of that goddamn roof because if I hadn't, you and everyone else would have been shot where you stood. Are you happy now?" He didn't know why he was so angry at John. It was bad, he told himself, to greet his best friend with fury, but he couldn't help it. He needed John to see all the pain and suffering he'd been through.

"Do you think it didn't affect me?" Sherlock hissed in a voice that would have turned water to ice. "Do you think I didn't wish every second of the goddamn day that I could just come home? But no. I couldn't do that. I had to stand aside, trying to work at coming home while I watched your heart break, knowing it was my fault. That I could have stepped in any day, taken the pain away. But do you know what would have happened then, John? You would have gotten shot, and I wasn't going to risk your life just to make myself feel better."

John took his words in for a moment before countering, "Oh, Sherlock, this is just you and your typical narcissistic bullshit again, isn't it? It's not all about me, oh no, I'm Sherlock Holmes, I'm perfectly humble and everything I do is for my friends!" He put as much derision as he could into his words. "So you know what? I decided to give you a taste of your own goddamn medicine! I found out you were fucking alive, Sherlock, and I decided that you needed to know what hell I'd been living through for three bloody years. So I faked my own death too! How do you like that! Do you understand the absolute agony? You know, after you were gone, I found this quote. "A suicide kills two people" And isn't that the fucking truth. All that I said in my note was true. You killed me that day-"

Sherlock couldn't take it anymore. He interjected, "And you killed me!" he screamed at John, rage radiating from every pore. "When I got your fucking note, John! So fucking clever! I had to read it in Mycroft's bloody office! Why-" his voice cracked. "So he helped in the double deception, didn't he," he said, anger fading and his voice turning hollow. "He lied to you and to me. Wow. Sonofabitch." He made a mental note to punch Mycroft in his smug little face the next time he saw him. He turned back to John. "So here we stand. Murderers and victims. Both the others'. How poetic." His voice was acidic. Sherlock had never like poetry much, and the irony of it here didn't sit well with him.

John sighed sadly. It had taken a lot of convincing to get Mycroft to agree to trick Sherlock like this, knowing what it would do to him. They had arranged the fake obit, the headstone, all of it. "I have to do this, Mycroft!" John had screamed at the elder Holmes. "He lied to me, so badly; he needs to know what it feels like!" After three days of relentless nagging, Mycroft had finally given in and helped John, setting him up with a flat just like Sherlock's precisely equidistant from Baker Street, and paid off Mrs Hudson to keep the flat unoccupied, just as they had left it, for a little while. Let it never be said that Mycroft Holmes did not commit fully when he did something, or that he didn't have the cruellest sense of irony. He hated that he had to do this to Sherlock, but it was true. Sherlock ran around London like he owned it, never stopping to realise the effects his actions had on other people. Yes, he was hurting, but he never understood precisely what it felt like to lose someone and know, deep down in your soul, that they were gone. It might slow his work for a while, but in the end, Mycroft hoped (prayed) that it would help him, bring John and Sherlock closer again, allow them to rebuild what they'd once had.

The two men sat across from each other in resentful silence for a long time, neither one of them willing to break the fragile, fucked-up peace they had happened to find in that moment. After a painfully long time, John dared to speak first.

"Sherlock?" he said quietly. For all of his lies and his harshness, John still did care for Sherlock deeply and he hoped they could be friends again. It had been a rash decision, one made in anger, not with a level head. He regretted it deeply, and that's why he'd relented and come tonight. He had realised what a mistake he had made and he needed to amend his error before it became permanent.

"Yeah?" Sherlock replied, his pain evident in his voice.

"I'm sorry."

Silence filled the air for a long moment.

"I'm sorry too."

And with that, the terrible, acrimonious tension between them broke and they stood and just hugged, for a long time, holding each other close. They both needed the warmth of the other's body, the steady reassurance of their heartbeats close together. It was just two friends, hugging, needing the physical contact as a final proof that they really were alive and maybe, just maybe, if everything played out just right, they could be friends again.

Neither one of them knew how long they stood there, but eventually, they pulled away from each other. Neither one of them remembered crying, but their faces were streaked with tears. They looked at each other and burst out laughing. An odd reaction, perhaps, but an understandable one given all the stress they'd been through. They laughed together, and held each other, until the sun rose.

They looked out the window, seemingly startled that the sun had managed to rise all by itself without either one of them noticing.

"It's dawn," said John, incredulous.

"Sound analysis, if a bit dull," Sherlock deadpanned with a small smile.

They looked at each other, sharing a knowing look. They smiled. It was good to be back.