John arrived home at Baker Street. It had been a good day; he hadn't thought of him once. A good day, but ordinary. Ordinary were the only kinds of days he had now.
After dropping his jacket on the back of his chair, he made his way to the kitchen and put on the kettle, his hand working more from memory than conscious thought. He sighed, then absently opened the refrigerator door. Its harsh light threw his face into stark relief, dark circles betraying his sleeplessness.
The refrigerator was clean and well-stocked with milk and fresh groceries. John's breath caught for a moment. The refrigerator's ordinary appearance suddenly made him want to retch, and nudged his mind to think of things he didn't want to remember…to calculate how long Sherlock had been…gone. Not going there, he resolutely told himself.
But the pull was too strong. Everything before him screamed at what was absent. No acrid smells from experiments gone awry; no unlabelled containers of putrefying flesh; no mysterious mould-covered blobs nicked from the autopsy lab. The kettle shrilled behind him, but John could not tear his eyes from the appallingly normal appearance of the traitorous appliance before him. "No fingers," he whispered through his tightening throat. "No heads." A choked cry shattered his carefully contained demeanour. He sobbed, "No eye balls."