A/N: Angst & reichenbach feels. What a delightful mix.
Enjoy, lovelies!
The air up here is cold and your coat isn't nearly as resistant to wind as it seems. Somewhere behind you, the world's most intelligent psychopath is spilling brain matter and blood all across the rooftop and somewhere beneath you, an ex-army doctor is pleading and biting back a sob, mobile pressed to his ear.
Somewhere within you, your heart aches.
The thing is, John was never supposed to stay.
He came thundering into your life without warning—as unexpected as a hurricane and as pleasantly surprising as a summer storm—and uprooted everything you thought you knew, sent you careening into confusion. He threw your entire existence into utter chaos. With his small smiles and bright eyes and sharp wit, he demolished everything.
(When you asked him to come to the crime scene that first night, he wasn't supposed to say yes, let alone, oh god yes)
If he'd just left like you thought he would—after staying for two weeks minimum, two months maximum—then you wouldn't be here right now, standing on top of Bart's with death waiting patiently by your side.
The air smells bitter, but John—he smelled like warm skin and laundry soap from the corner shop and cinnamon and tea and something darker, something fairly rough in nature, which you now realize was gunmetal. Not gunpowder, though: it wasn't sour enough, not strong enough. John was an enigma. Is an enigma. The one case you will never solve. There were grains of sand from Afghanistan stuck beneath his nails and the smell of blood still glued to his skin, and even though tragedy and loss trailed behind him like ghosts he still emitted light like a luminous star within a dying galaxy. He was the sun.
Regret scuttles through your hollow chest like a cockroach. You feel filthy with things you didn't do.
There were times when John was across the universe at the other end of the sitting room leaning against the bookcase or reading in his chair, and you wondered what would happen if you waded through the distance and curled around him like smoke—just wrapped your arms wherever they fit and tucked your face into the warm skin of his neck and just breathed. You wondered if he'd cup the sides of your face in his hands—warm and rough like the desert—and brush his thumb over the top of your cheekbones and the slope of your nose. Or run the pads of his fingertips across your bottom lip. The warm low light of the lamp would dance across half his face, turning one eye golden-blue and the other dark navy and the only sounds would be the clock and your heart—and his heart, of course, which you'd hear from your close proximity. Maybe you'd feel it too. Ba-boom. Ba-boom. Each beat blooming against the open plane of your palm like a rose.
You wanted to kiss him and you could have—scratch that. You should have.
But fear ran through your veins like liquid nitrogen, cold and unforgiving, so instead of spilling towards him like a flood you faced the window and carved your pain into the crooning notes of your violin.
John's eyes were the kind of blue that made you want to stop. Stop everything. Drop the experiment bubbling in your hand and rush over and examine them—count the flecks of navy and deep cerulean before they disappeared with the changing light. On some days there were little speckles of chocolate brown and black. On most days you couldn't look away.
In the quiet corners of your mind, you kissed him.
At night you played Wagner and Schubert until your fingers ached just to make sure he fell asleep to something beautiful.
In the mint chocolate darkness, he held your hand and followed when you said 'run'.
You are tired of many things, some of them shaped like criminals and others like heartache, and the overwhelming urge to sleep claws at your insides like a starving animal. It's done, it's over, this chapter of your life has burned away with the rest of the book and the only thing left to do is scratch the pen off the paper mid word and leave the readers guessing. Though, someone did once say that unfinished stories are tragedies which makes you wonder, is this a tragedy? Some Shakespearean tale of woe and unrequited love and dramatic suicide?
Speaking of unanswerable nothings, where is the soul located? One would think it'd be in near proximity of the heart, but for all you know it could reside within your heel or earlobe. Maybe everyone's soul is in a different place, thrumming alive and brilliant beneath their skin like an Easter egg waiting to be discovered.
You think your soul might be within your hands. Stored in your cold fingertips or maybe in the white joint of your wrist. Perhaps along the lines of your index or the pad of your thumb.
(John held your hand, once)
You're watching this love story from the corner of your eye and you're not quite sure where it ends. You're not even sure if it's a love story. The pen is running out of ink, the characters are pulling themselves from the pages and running free, and the binding of the book is falling apart, busted seam by busted seam.
This wasn't supposed to happen, you were never supposed to care for someone like this. You didn't even know you could. After all, your heart was only an organ until you met John.
Because the thing is, once you've chewed through the meager history of your life, past the sugary rinds of drug indulgence and spicy-sweet days of chasing after murderers, there is only a single seed left at the bottom of the bowl that holds any sort of significance and his name is John. He is the trophy you've earned for this miserable life, the token you've won for your troubles.
And he is more than worth it. You'd crawl through hell a dozen times just to hold onto the mere memory of him.
On your gravestone you wouldn't mind if they left out your name and simply wrote "John's" and perhaps shortened your 'lifespan' so that you only lived for the two and some years that you knew him. Semantics aside, you were dead before you met him. You were a dead man in a living man's shoes with a heart that ought to have been healed with touch instead of glue, and if John hadn't walked into your life when he had, who knows which gutter you might've ended up dead in? Needle in your arm, bullet in your brain, knife wedged somewhere fatal—who bloody knows. Either way, he saved you in more ways than one.
The mobile feels cold when you press it to your ear. Your hands are shaking. I'm a fake. None of it was real. It was all a trick.
By doing this you are saving him but you are also destroying him beyond belief. You wish this weren't the case, but that's the thing about consequences: they always end up circling back and catching up on you and running away from them is like trying to escape your own reflection in a room of mirrors. You're leaving him. You're hurting him. He is going to hate you because your last words to him are lies.
It is inevitable.
That's something to hold on to—inevitability. You're comfortable with certainty. You know your way around logic. You've always known you were bound to die in some terribly unconventional way because you've led a terribly unconventional life and it's only right for the beginning and ending of a story to draw parallels, isn't it? Besides, this is vitally important. This is to save John, to preserve the one drop of gold floating within your endless pool of black, oily regrets.
You think about dark nights spent running down alleyways, black puddles splashing, star twinkling overhead, harsh pants ghosting in the cold night air, John shouting slow down and laughing breathlessly while your heart just about pounded out of your chest. Then those warm, low lit evenings spent on the sofa watching telly or in the sitting room talking about nothing until one of you nodded off (always John) or in the kitchen watching John make tea while you catalogued every inch of his smile.
He held your soul within his hands. He cradled it unknowingly and didn't let it seep between his fingers, as if it were something precious. As if you were something precious.
You close your eyes, step forward.
"Sherlock!"
And then you fall.
A/N: Thanks so much for reading, darlings! Your feedback would mean the world :)
Until next time! X0X0