Hey everyone! Here's a little drabble that came after another viewing of Reichenbach, because this hiatus is too long to sit through without some reflection. Just a glimpse at John's life without Sherlock.
Enjoy!
"Goodbye, John."
Those words were the words of a madman, John was convinced. They were the words not of a human, but of a demon.
Because what followed was something straight from Hell itself.
He didn't see the body hit the street, but in his sharp consciousness he saw clearly the flailing, falling man as he tumbled through the air. That image would haunt him in his nightmares; he knew it the instant it happened.
His consciousness blurred then, and in later months he could only remember bits and pieces of what happened. A biker hitting him. Dropping his phone sometime. Seeing the body there on the ground, blood darkening the street in sickly wet puddles. He tried to get close to the body, to what had been his friend, but for some reason he couldn't. All he could do was grab hold of the wrist and wait.
He would wait forever for that pulse.
The body in the street wasn't his friend at all. It was a shell.
xxx
The first day was the worst.
He got all of the necessary treatment when the ambulances arrived; he got the shock blanket and the concussion check. Somewhere along the way he even got his phone back, handed to him by a hesitant and troubled-looking Lestrade. But John didn't care about any of that.
He found himself in his flat, sitting in his chair, utterly alone. Completely, irrevocably, alone.
That fact weighed on him so much he felt he could never surface for air. He would suffocate and die in this flat, and nobody would be there to wonder what had killed John Watson.
He stared at the empty chair across from him, and by the time his brain finally made sense of what all had happened in front of St. Bart's he had broken down into sobbing that didn't stop until well into the night.
xxx
Three years he waited, a shell. Three years the nightmares plagued him and haunted him and tortured his sleeping and waking hours. Three years he felt the crushing weight of loneliness in every particle of dead air in the flat.
On the outside, he moved on with his life. He did everything that was expected of him, from going to work to eating to going on the occasional date. To everyone who didn't know him, he was just John Watson, the man whose friend had never died.
The inside was a different story. On the inside, his nerves were severed and his emotions burned to blackened stumps. In his mind, the events of three years ago replayed over and over whenever he got too close.
Three years to the day, as he was sitting in his lonely chair again, there was a knock on the door to the flat. The dust had settled nicely around the flat, and nobody ever dared to visit, but John invited in the stranger numbly.
He didn't even turn around when the footsteps sounded in the flat just behind him, just kept on staring. Sometimes it felt like all he could do was stare, stare and try not to remember the blood and the falling.
But the next words, the words that came out of the stranger's mouth, were deep and rich and heart-striking and all too familiar:
"Hello, John."
Thank you for reading! If you liked it, please leave a comment! Till next time!
~Penn