A fatal mistake
John slams the door open and marches in. His feelings are in turmoil. All he can think about is how Sherlock could do it, how he could just walk out and flirt with another when they had been so happy in the five years they had been together? And with a woman! John turns to Sherlock and says with venom in his voice:
"You are welcome to flirt with others, but then you're going to do it as single! I just can't understand what you see in her!" Sherlock turns away from the coat hanger, where he was hanging his jacket up, looking confused at John.
"What on earth are you talking about? I have not been flirting with someone. And certainly not a woman, you know that I don't like women that way?" While Sherlock speaks he moves further and further into their apartment and begins to put on water for tea.
"It was clear that you were flirting with the waitress you might as well not bother denying it and judging from her reaction, she was also interested in you so why don't you just go find her? Or were you going to wait until I wasn't home and then invite her over? Then have your way!" Sherlock's head flies up and his expression changes from confused to injured.
"Of course I didn't flirt with the waitress, why would I do that? I have you! I don't need more in life." But John will not hear it, he turns around and takes his wallet and his keys as he walks out the door, he turns his head and shouting over his shoulder. "I won't come back soon, and when I do it will be just to get my stuff!"
Sherlock stand confused back, his heart just split into a thousand little pieces. Now that he thinks about it he can see that perhaps it seemed as if he was flirting with the waitress, but that was just because he wanted to have the best date possible now that he had wanted to ask the big question.
While Sherlock had been thinking, John had gradually walked away. He began to trot, almost as if he tried to run from the last hour when everything had gone wrong. Where he was going, he did not know, but his body seemed as if it knew the way and did it without any input from him. Slowly he began to speed up, no matter how strange the other pedestrians looked at him, he just wanted to get away, back to the day before when he and Sherlock had spent the whole day watching the old James Bond movies.
He looks up from his feet and finds himself standing in front of the building where his sister Harriet lives. He presses the button to her apartment. As soon as she hears that it is him, she rushes to open for him. Each steps up to the 5th floor feels like several miles. Harriet stands in the door and when he finally gets there, she pulls him into a hug.
"John, what happened?" She exclaims and holds him out in front of her. At that moment the dams finally breaks and he begins to cry.
"Sherlock was flirting with another person" he stammers. "A woman with dull brown hair and ugly green eyes!" It only takes Harriet milliseconds to respond.
"What? No he could never do that! He loves you too much. Now go home and talk with him, then you will probably see it is a misunderstanding." As soon as Harriet is finished speaking, John turns and stands with his back to her and she gives him a nudge toward the stairs. While she spoke John had, to try to deal with his feelings, pushed it all down to the back of his head and ignored them, so that he could not feel anything. His eyes were as dead and numb as the sharks in London Aquarium.
John walks down all of the stairs again and out on the street then he turns to the left towards the curb, over the curb and straight out in front of a truck. The truck does not react fast enough to brake and hit him with so much force that he is flung into the air and back. When he lands, he lies with his head bent at an odd angle and one arm bent the wrong way. The ambulance first comes 10 minutes after a spectator called and at that point it's almost too late they rush to drive him to the hospital and only after he was wheeled into the operation room, someone thinks to call Sherlock.
Sherlock is home and is in the process of cleaning the whole apartment and make the best three-course meal he can possibly find, so everything will be ready when John comes home again. He's just finished the chili marinated deer club and put it into the oven, when his cell phone rings he wipes his dirty hands in a towel and places the phone to his ear.
"It's Sherlock," he says in his deep voice.
"Hello, my name is Alex Baker; I'm calling from St. Bart's Hospital. I am calling because you stand as contact person for John Watson and he has been involved in an accident in which he was badly injured, right now he is on the operating table and it is uncertain whether he will wake again." Sherlock do not get to hear anything else before the phone slip out of his hand and he runs out of the building where he hails a cab and almost cries the hospital's address. As the cab takes off from the curb, he discovers that he did not get either shoes or jacket with him, but he is too worried to care right now.
The minute the taxi drives up next to the hospital, he throws the money for the trip into the seat beside the cabbie, while he jumps out. He rushes into the hospital and goes to the reception, where he does not waste a second to wait for his turn, he calls John's name and wait the few seconds it takes the receptionist to look him up in the computer.
"He is in room 21B on the second floor." Sherlock does not even say thank you before he sprints for the lifts and slams on the button for the second floor. As he opens the door to the room he is aware that there is another person inside the room. He barely even puts his foot in the door before the person begins to speak.
"Hello, my name is Sanne and I am the doctor who supervises John. You must be Sherlock. Currently John is in a coma, but it is impossible to say when or if he will wake up. He broke three ribs and his left arm, in addition he has sprained his neck and severe injuries to the head, and therefore it is possible that when or if he wakes up, he will not be the same as he was before. "
In the few hours Sherlock is sitting at John's side the night. He says nothing, he just sits there and pray that John will wake up again, so when multiple alarms sounds from the various machines John is hooked to, his first thought is that he has fallen asleep and have nightmares, but when all the doctors and nurses come in and throws him out he understands that it is no dream. This does not prevent his heart from stopping when he hears that it is what John's has done.
Sherlock walks the final steps to the black headstone with gold writing and squats.
"You have no idea how much the final hours with you have tormented me. I can't help thinking that it's all my fault, had I not chosen the day or not been so kind to the waitress, you hadn't stormed out, and then you had not been here. It always seemed as if you could get miracles to happen, then will you not do one last thing for me? Don't be dead." In the last six words, his voice so weak that he almost couldn't even understand what he said. Sherlock gets up and wipes the tears away from his face, then he turns around and gets his act together, before he, with heavy footsteps, walks away.
