Dear Sherlock,

I found your letter in the desk draw. It was so like you, to have said such things. I read it in your voice. You would have simply drawn them from a small, forgotten ante-room in your mind palace, teased them from behind the mirror and out of drawers and into distinguishable words to go down on paper. And I read them. And I loved them.

And I love you, too. I always did.

And I know it's far too late now, because you're gone, and you've been gone for over a year now. But I've been trying to get my life back on track, and it's just not working. Something is holding me back, and I think I know what it is. And writing it all out to you – well, it just might help.

I want you to know that this isn't going to be easy for me. I don't tell this story often. I don't really tell this story at all. But I want to be able to tell it properly, to you. I'll leave it where you can find it and read it, if you'd like. Hopefully that will be enough to seal you off so that I can move on with my life and maybe find a nice young man. With dark curly hair, and a tendency for always being obnoxiously cocky and always right.

Yes, that's right. I'm admitting it to you now, in a letter, when you're dead and buried. Coward. Though of course, I'd bet my life that you knew the entire time anyway. You knew everything, always. And I hated you for it.

I'm trying to be more open about it now. Tell a few more people, open up about who I am. It's hard for me. Which of course, you also knew. You'd have known it all. But I want to say it aloud, essentially. Or rather, write it all down, so it can be something that I told you first, rather than something you deduced. I suppose we'll never know. But this way hurts a little more, yet simultaneously a little less, because you won't be able to look at me at the end of it with shame and disgust in your eyes.

I will make this as brief as I possibly can.

You of course know that I was in the army. An all-male regiment, as of course was the norm in those days. These days, still, really. Women are frowned upon in the armed forces. It's not something that's broadcasted, but the prejudice is still there. Not as strong, however, as the prejudice of homosexuality in the forces.

They say the army is embracing equality.

There's no way I would be the same today if they had.

Because I was one of the bad guys, Sherlock. I was the bully. I was, I am terrified to admit, in love. He was older than me. More senior in rank, intelligence, integrity. He befriended me, and I fell down the dark, tumbling hole into unfamiliar territory. I was beside myself with self-loathing and guilt. This was not the way a man should feel about another man. This was the way a man should feel about a woman.

So I took it out on him. I left hateful letters, Sherlock, combined with a bizarre passion and self-loathing that I didn't know what to do with. I affected him so badly, in the end, that he nearly quit his post in the army.

Of course, he was injured a year later and was forced to leave. I couldn't watch him go. I feigned a headache and went to the infirmary. I know I did the right thing. I couldn't have looked him in the eye as he left.

And there, amongst all his friends in his moment of glory, he wouldn't have wanted to see me, short, junior, eyes full of regret and embarrassment.

After I was injured, I stayed in Quebec a while. Stayed with cousins. Saw a therapist there for a while, who suggested the idea that I might have had feelings for this man and not known how to deal with them.

I brushed the man aside angrily, and didn't return to the sessions after that.

And then I moved to London and met you.

I didn't tell you any of this when you were here, really, because I was scared it would tear us apart. I was scared you would think I was going to do to you the same thing I did to that man.

I made a lot of mistakes that year, Sherlock, too many. It's as though that version of myself is an entirely different person, one whom I look back upon with an indiscernible amount of hatred and contempt. I can barely even consider the self that I used to be without spiraling into a dizzying hole of guilt and self-loathing. I really did make a lot of unhealthy, unwise decisions back then, and they cost me friendships, and my position, and respect, admittedly of others, but chiefly of myself.

And essentially, all you need to know is that I was not a good person. And I don't know if I still am.

But I'd like to make a confession. I had known you for about two years before you died. We grew to be good friends, perhaps a little more than that. And particularly over the last three or four months before that day at St Barts, I felt that we grew especially close, past the simple point of friendship. Not to a stage of a relationship, perhaps, but as close as one may get to it without being labeled as such. We were Sherlock and John. John and Sherlock.

I know I've made mistakes, Sherlock. And I regret them every day of my life. But having known you, having worked with you, lived with you, been with you, seems to have cancelled them out.

I will say up front that you have by no means made me a better person. I will not allow you to take such a statement and use it to boost your ego even further. No, it was not you who made me a better man. But having known you has inspired me to make myself better.

And because of you, I've learned so much more about myself, and how to view things, and think about things, and hold an attitude to everything I do and say.

And I'm proud to admit that without you and your influence, and your habits and your violin, and your long periods of silence, and your quirks and qualms, I would definitely not be the man that I am today.

So I guess I just want to say thanks.

How could I possibly move on from you, Sherlock. You, who lie there now in the ground, rotting.

I will love you until the day I die.

I have to sign off now, Sherlock. I'm sorry.

I'm getting married in the morning. I know I'm letting you down.

I know how you'd be looking at me.

I need to find that dark, curly-haired man with a passion for being right, and riding the subway covered in blood.

But there could never be anybody to replace you.

So Molly will have to do.

Yours forever,

John

He licked the envelope, and sealed it, before placing it on the grave, turning, and walking away for the last time.