Once I was a man named John Watson. I was a doctor first, then a soldier.

I was never quite whole, even before I shipped out to Afghanistan and managed to get shot. If you'd have asked me then, I suppose I would have said I was... but no, not anymore.

Because that is what my life has been cleanly divided by: There is life before Sherlock, and life without.

Most people assume – assumed – we were gay. I'd protest, they'd shrug it off, mention it the next time we came around. Some people finally realized after my long string of failed girlfriends that I wasn't romantically involved with my flat mate – or they assumed I was just hopeless with both sexes.

Once I'd make the comment to Lestrade that I couldn't decide which was funnier: That people thought I was gay or the fact that they thought Sherlock was interested – in anyone.

He was the brain. His life was synonymous with his work.

I suppose I became his heart. Tried to spoon-feed the concept of other people's emotions to his one-track mind.

All the girls I had been with were lovely. Judging by what romantic success I had witnessed in other people's lives, finding someone to spend your life with was like two gears fitting together. Meshing perfectly.

But Sherlock and I... we weren't gears.

We were puzzles pieces. Without each other, part of ourselves were missing. Put together, we finally made one fully functioning human being. I felt for him, slept for him, ate for him, was human for him. He supplied the adventure, the mystery, the thrills.

Before Afghanistan, I wasn't whole. I did not know of the genius consulting detective sulking through the streets of London. But I considered myself reasonably happy.

There was a brief moment when we were whole, the two of us. When even the gay comments and my disaster of a love life and us nearly dying on every other case we took couldn't even interfere with how right everything was.

But now...

After the fall I'm just as broken as before I met him, but it is worse because now... now I know exactly what I'm missing. I know that a part of me is lying six feet underground, guarded by a slab of marble and a tarnished reputation. A lie printed on every newspaper that ever celebrated him. I can still see his eyes, set into his pale face, glazed over with his own scarlet blood. Lying on the sidewalk. And his eyes studying carefully my eternal sentiment even after the life was extinguished from them.

Once there was a man named Sherlock Holmes. He was a genius always, and then became a consulting detective when it suited him.

The universe – or Mike or whomever – pushed us into each other's lives, and we fused. Two puzzle pieces, clicking together. Sherlock and John.

Then I stayed with both feet on the ground, he jumped, and we both broke.

I am now Sherlock and John minus Sherlock. But somehow, that doesn't just equal the me I was before.

There was life without Sherlock that was not truly living.

There was the sliver of time with the detective when I was whole. I lived.

Now there is just after. And it is me, broken, waiting to die.