Post-Reichenbach.
John thought he'd been doing okay.
He'd managed to leave the flat today. Go out, go to a job interview, pick up some groceries from the supermarket. He could walk through the door of 221B now without falling apart, because he knew Sherlock Holmes wasn't there anymore. It was just him. Just his flat, and two months later John had gotten used to living on his own again. He had thought he'd never be able to live in 221B again, but he could. He was a soldier, after all. Stronger than people gave him credit for.
He put away the groceries. He couldn't remember when he'd stopped hesitating before opening the fridge door for fear of finding a severed head or bag of toes, but he'd gotten out of the habit. Everything in the fridge was his. Mrs Hudson had cleared it all out within days of Sherlock's death. She couldn't wait to get rid of those specimens, and John couldn't blame her.
He pulled open the freezer and stopped dead. Tucked into the back corner were several small dishes, filled with colourful substances and marked with the spidery handwriting Sherlock used for his notes.
The remains of an experiment he'd never completed, dated two days before he died.
John sank to his knees on the floor, the pain washing over him anew as he clutched the frozen dishes in his hand. Why Sherlock? The most brilliant mind, the most brilliant man John had ever known, the kind who conducted scientific experiments in his kitchen and could read someone's life story in an instant – why did he have to die? Why was he taken so early – so prematurely from his life and his work?
John slammed the dishes down on the floor, shattering them into a thousand pieces. Reminders of Sherlock were everywhere – John could see them all now, how could he have missed them? The groove in the mantlepiece where Sherlock had shoved a knife through a pile of letters. The holes in the wallpaper where he'd shot at it in a fit of boredom. A squashed, empty box of nicotine patches down the side of one of the armchairs. Taunting him with their permanence while the man who had put them there was rotting in the ground.
All John was left with were memories. Memories of a man who, despite his coldness and his prickliness and his maddening superiority, had brought a light and a joy into John Watson's life that he'd never known before. They were equals, him and Sherlock, even though it sometimes didn't feel like it. Two halves of a whole. A team. A partnership. Friends.
Until he met Sherlock, John hadn't even known the true meaning of that word. He remembered the conversation he'd had with Sherlock that first night, with the murder in Lauriston Gardens and the cabbie.
"What do real people have, then, in their real lives?"
"Friends. People they know, people they like, people they don't like. Girlfriends, boyfriends."
"Like I was saying, dull."
John didn't realise it, but Sherlock had been right. It was all dull. Boring. Average. Sherlock Holmes inhabited a world where everything was larger than life, where there were such things as archenemies and, conversely, where the word friend took on a far greater, more powerful meaning. He had people who respected him and people who cared about him, but only one person in the world who understood him, who trusted him no matter what, who could say he knew Sherlock Holmes.
He didn't have friends. He only had one. And with that new definition of the word that Sherlock had brought, John realised he'd only ever had one friend as well.
The thought tore him apart more than any other.