Long Walks Home
John fell into a routine almost immediately.
The day after the funeral he fell into it with military precision. Wake up 7:10, shower, pull on his soft bomber jacket, and make his way to the café for coffee. John was a tea person by nature, but he found the need for something bracing in order to venture into a Sherlock-less London. He'd cut through downtown, merging in with the foot traffic and hardly looking around as he walked. His pace was brisk, very much a man on a mission.
It took him the better part of half-an-hour to make it to the cemetery. His pace remained steady, face expressionless, almost absent, as he weaved between headstones and solemn angels.
Finally, at the shadow-sheened headstone, cut fresh less than a week ago, his pacing stopped.
Sherlock watched from his traditional place just behind a tree.
He had found in his brief absence from the living that a cemetery was perhaps an ingenious place to pretend to be dead. Mycroft had hardly glanced at his fake cadaver; he certainly wasn't putting surveillance on his brother's eternal resting ground, preferring instead with mundane topics like Sherlock's posthumous honor and legacy. The price and the luxury of this cemetery alone meant that Sherlock was guaranteed the privacy, space, and time he needed to wait for Mycroft to clear his name, and allow the air of Moriarty's criminals to settle.
The only small risk to his membranous enclosure was John.
His John.
The first morning John had walked through the cemetery; Sherlock was surprised, but realistically not taken off-guard. He'd known he'd been seeing John's face once and awhile around here, but he hadn't expected it so soon after the funeral, and didn't entirely expect him to be alone.
Sherlock timed John's meditative state in front of his own headstone. Unlike yesterday, after his funeral, the captain said nothing, offered no final pleas, didn't do more than shift his foam cup in his hands and stare, reflective, at the bright, black rock with Sherlock's name inscribed on it.
That headstone was a source of annoyance for Sherlock. The only thing he was grateful for was the lack of purple prose normally hacked into these things, flurries of sentimentality, dates, the best father in the world type of inscriptions. Mycroft had simply ordered the most expensive, pretentious headstone he could find, and placed it like a landmark at the top of a hill between two willows.
The melodrama sickened him.
The first thing he would do when he broke back into the public sphere was blow up this mark of his brother's egomania. Hopefully John would help.
The former soldier would stay for a half-hour and then wandered off, pace slower, eyes fixed firmly on the ground, depositing his coffee cup in the trash on his way out. Sherlock wouldn't risk movement in the stillness of the cemetery and accompanied John with his eyes, before returning to his place within the church.
The next day, out of curiosity, Sherlock emerged and waited behind the tree, five minutes before John had arrived yesterday. He normally didn't go outside during the day; actually, he managed to accomplish all his work from within the church, with only fast, furtive phone calls to Molly and a fresh, transmitter-free laptop from one of his secret lock-boxes around the city. She was his spokesperson on the outside, sharing news, telling him how close his brother was to releasing the investigation by the Yard (with liberal help from The British Government) which proved his innocence as well as Moriarty's existence.
Otherwise, he worked on tracking international incidents, ensuring his brother had either murdered, imprisoned, or employed the many assassins Moriarty had surrounded Baker Street with.
Sherlock had set the date for his return for the day of the press conference. Dramatic. Quick. Enigmatic flair. Just what they all needed, one big slap on the face.
Really Sherlock just wanted to see Mycroft's expression of pure, unadulterated horror when he stood up at the end of the pronouncement and asked if the body of Sherlock Holmes had been proved to be the body of Sherlock Holmes, and if Mycroft had been angry when Sherlock had left half of their family's fortune to John?
Two weeks. Two weeks until that fateful day and honestly Sherlock wasn't positive he had enough patience to wait. The solitude didn't bother him half as much as the boredom. The constant, unfettered boredom with only the irritatingly painful arrival of his best friend every morning to break up the silence.
The fifth day John arrived, same time, same coat, same coffee (two spoons of sugar and half-and-half, overly sweet just as John preferred), Sherlock was itching for an excuse. He began picking his friend apart every time he saw him, looking for signs of drug abuse, alcoholism, sleeplessness, cutting emotional sentiment, anything at all that would tell him that John needed him and needed him now.
John never gave up his secrets. He drank his coffee. Remained quiet.
Sherlock fidgeted for hours after John left, going over and over the stockpiled images of his friend.
By nine days, Sherlock had a dark suspicion.
It was confirmed the eleventh day.
John was beginning to look better, not worse. He'd even gotten a cat in the last few days!
Sherlock threw his fist into the wall, five minutes after John had left, imagining Moriarty's face, Mycroft's face, John's face, colored, healthy, smirking John's fucking face!
Scotland Yard announced a press conference for seven days from the eleventh day after Sherlock's supposed death. At this stuttering, sickly joyful news coming from Molly's voice across the receiver, Sherlock whipped the disposable cell phone against the moth-ridden armchair and punched the wall five more times, this time for Lestrade.
"Can nothing be done on time!" he raged to the empty crypt. "The second thing I'm going to do is rip Lestrade a second hemisphere; it doesn't take three weeks to prove my own innocence!"
Fuming, Sherlock set about destroying as much as the basement of the church as possible, which wasn't much, considering most of it was made of marble.
The next morning he positively stomped to his place by the false gravestone, standing stonily with what was close becoming his most faithful friend, the tree which he could tell was slowly rotting from the inside out. Complete with his thermos of scorching tea, (Molly had paid one of her grad students to drop off necessities in the bus station lockers across the street, which included a small kettle and a laboratory hotplate) Sherlock glared at John from the fork in the trees. His feet were locked against the snarled roots, biting into the soft soil beneath.
Towards the end of John's stay, when the man was finally beginning to relax from his internal conversation with Sherlock's headstone, Sherlock's eyes fixed on his empty can of tea and whispered, speculatively, "I thought you would miss me more."
Contrary to Sherlock's muttering and sour opinion, John was not the happiest soldier in the camp. He went through his daily routine a delicate balance of trying to appear not overtly depressed but not normal enough to arouse anyone's suspicions that he might, in fact, not be grieving anymore for Sherlock.
It was a thin tightrope to walk, and John thought that Sherlock would probably walk it better than he.
The only reason he escaped close scrutiny was because there wasn't anyone to scrutinize him, aside from Mrs. Hudson, who went about her routine trying to keep Baker street as normal as possible.
Mycroft avoided him at all costs, aside from the cutting text, He left everything to you, and the knowledge that John could probably rent out Baker Street for the rest of his life on Sherlock's money alone.
Why the man had needed at flat mate was beyond him.
He was filthy with money.
John's profession as a Doctor wasn't exactly short on funding or need as well, especially while he was still getting monthly compensation from the army for his years of service. John found that immediately following his best friend's death he was in a comfortable place.
Hence, the daily masochism of standing by Sherlock's grave. It just wasn't right. Living without him, in practical luxury. The only thing he'd changed about the flat was he'd emptied out the rotting body parts from the kitchen, but all the questionable chemistry, the messy couch, the collection of library titles stolen from Sherlock's university, all had remained the same. John still never managed to buy milk when he was out.
So he came to the graveyard every morning. He went over the facts every morning. He thought about all his stupid, misguided, dangerous adventures with his best friend, every morning.
In his head it usually started out like this:
Sherlock jumped off St. Bart's on Wednesday.
Four days later he was buried.
At this point John did all he could to recollect his time spent between the fall and the funeral, but it was like a white slate. He remembered being in the hospital for his concussion, a tussle with Mycroft to see the morgue, and after that, he thought he could remember going home, collapsing on his bed and closing his eyes.
From then on it was blackness.
He supposed he dreamed that reality wasn't there anymore. He might've carried on sleeping; hoping when he'd wake it would all just be a nightmare.
Every day, I wake up and visit him.
For the first five days of his new tradition of slowly killing himself, John had gotten that far before his chest swelled up so tight he just slipped into a daze and imagined the world carrying on before they knew the name Moriarty at all.
Then, on the sixth day, something happened.
John knew Sherlock would call him 'sentimental.' Dead bodies don't know anything, John, he would drawl. Don't be so…predictable. But John visited his friend twice a day in the mornings to find his center, (Sherlock had been his center for so long he found it was impossible to manage to find it without him), and in the afternoons on his way back from the Surgery. He got off at 2 every day; Sarah had to cut his hours because they were housing some interns for a medical school. Also, she wanted him to get some rest. Everyone did these days.
So John walked back from a typical day at the office, thinking of not a lot at all, and wandered through the graveyard. Except, on the sixth day, instead of walking straight back to the entrance after pausing to tell Sherlock about his day, (even though John was sure, as in life, a dead Sherlock couldn't care less about his mundane interactions with the med students), he was distracted by a fairly fluffy white cat sitting in the fork of a tree.
John loved cats. And dogs. And hamsters. He loved anything particularly soft and loving, actually, so he immediately crept towards it, singing carefully as he eased up on the tree. The cat, a stray from the quality of its long coat and thinness of its shoulders, let out a soundless mewl and crawled willingly into his arms. John smiled and held it carefully, feeling the cat's purr rumble deep in its skinny chest.
"I should call you something ridiculous, like 'Snowflake' or 'Handkerchief'. That would've driven him crazy." John saddened a little, but found it was hard to take a nose dive into depression with a cat in your arms.
Curiously, he circled the tree. Perhaps the cat was a mommy, and had kittens. John tried not exciting himself too much at that prospect. He only had two arms, after all. And no cell phone seeing as he deliberately left it home so he wouldn't throw it into the Thames in a fit of agony.
What he found instead was just another side of the same tree, nothing particularly interesting about it. In keeping with the neatness of the graveyard, the grass looked perfectly combed. A small bald patch of mud, from the consistent afternoon showers, marred the effect slightly.
At the sight John sighed and shifted the cat, preparing to go. Mrs. Hudson would probably be glad John had brought home a new friend.
She'll deduce you, Sherlock's voice whispered. Everyone will. A cat John? Well, don't name it after me. They'll surly talk the.
"They do little else," John murmured, looking down at the cat.
John almost started to leave, but a something nipped him in the back of his head, incessantly. A small detail. Something he'd missed that Sherlock would've reamed him for. Warily, he gave the tree another slow look-over.
There. In the mud.
A foot print.
John looked at it, unimpressed, until he realized with the dawning surprise of a man about to crash into a brick wall at the end of the highway that the shoeprints he was looking at were old, solidified in the mud, meaning someone had to have made them early this morning when the ground was soft with dew and the shoes he was looking at…
…he had looked at them countless times.
When he'd said something that made John look away to collect himself.
When he was bracing against his knees after a desperate chase.
When he kicked off his trainers after a day at the Surgery.
Sherlock's shoes. He could see the point of the toe, the precise, tailored hug along the foot, the braced arch to help him run down criminals.
John gasped and leaned against the tree, clutching the cat. When he turned his face up to the disagreeable, overcast sky he was grinning like a madman. His shoulders shook, helplessly, something like a sob and a shout of I fucking knew it! Fighting its way out. The cat in his arms twisted in his arms, but the fit was over soon, and John was left staring with wonder at the shoeprints, breathing heavily, smiling so hard his teeth might break.
Sherlock was alive. And he was watching him.
It felt like he was born again. It felt like the world had become crystal clear and beautiful, a war zone still, but just as it had been when Sherlock was alive—rather, still with him, everything suddenly changed. For the better.
So while Sherlock punched walls and ripped out his hair in frustration and moodily drank cups and cups of tea, plotting his return from death, John found himself preparing the flat for Sherlock's arrival. He had the crumpled dress shirts and pants dry cleaned, the clutter rearranged slightly so that Sherlock's things stood out prominently, he even dusted the skull.
He hoped Sherlock wouldn't object to Sir, the new cat (who was certainly not a mommy) as John had found him very therapeutic as he counted down the days to Sherlock's no-doubt melodramatic resurrection.
John knew just where it would be.
The press conference.
Lestrade had invited him to it the week before, when they'd set the date, and muttered, "Justice for him—you know, you should come."
John would come. In fact, he'd even bring Sherlock a little welcoming present.
A nice, new deerstalker.
A.N- Possible two-shot but this was intended really to just be a small contribution to the fandom. In my head, there is no possible way Sherlock can even survive without John for more than two weeks, or the average time it takes a grown man to starve to death, or die of anemia. This is the only post-fall fic I will ever write, this is the only type I will ever read. Three months is unthinkable, I can't fathom three years.
Love you if you read it! It went un-beta'd, and I tend to make tiny grammatical errors when I type fast. I'm not illiterate, I promise. Sorry for the mistakes. If you want my take on the Press Conference, drop me a line!