Title: Nothing Short of Death
Summary: It is a monumental mistake to theorize before you have all the data. It is an even bigger mistake to underestimate the depths Doctor John Hamish Watson will go to for Sherlock Holmes. Second Person Narrative, in which John realizes something is up and there is nothing that can stand in his way. References to thoughts of suicide and vague, minor character death.
Rating: M (for vague depictions of death and references to suicide)
Disclaimer: Sadly, I own no part of the BBC's Sherlock, nor Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's eternal characters Sherlock Holmes and John Watson. I just like to play with them.
There is nothing like watching your whole world take a dive onto cold, hard, concrete, plummeting almost as fast as your heart as he says goodbye, for you to realize what an incredible idiot you have been.
The newspapers state it plainly, "Suicide of fake genius; Sherlock Holmes was a fraud." They are repetitive yet blaring, making it hard for you to look at them, making you avert your eyes as you pass by a news stand, making you turn off the telly every time you accidentally flick to the news. Every word is like another bullet wound, this time to your heart, and every reporter to come up to you leaves with a bloody nose.
For weeks you continue on, living, but only just, because a world without Sherlock Holmes by your side is not a world you want to live in at all.
You think about joining him often.
You nearly do, several times.
But there is something nagging at you, a thought in the back of your head, something that isn't right about all of this, and that is enough to make you put down the gun.
You realize now, how you feel. How you have felt for months, and it renews the pain, knowing how much time you wasted letting those feelings go unrealized.
You wonder if things would have turned out differently if you had made those feelings known.
But something isn't right, and somewhere deep down you realize this. Beneath the fog of grief, there is a spark, a hunch, something small and insignificant, but that makes you feel as if there is something more to all of this than what you originally thought.
Just a magic trick.
They would not let you see the body. You, a doctor. You, his closest friend. You were not allowed near him, not allowed to see his face one last time before he was lowered into the ground. Closed caskets were never much of a way to say goodbye.
Molly avoided your phone calls, kept you locked out of the morgue. It would have taken an entire army to keep you away from him, and it was the worst kind of luck that it seemed his brother had that very thing at his disposal. Mycroft arrived to identify the remains, looked away from you and your grief stricken eyes, did not say a word as the door clicked shut in your face.
You find your way up to the roof instead, ignoring the yellow police tape as he often did, climbing each step even as your leg starts to protest.
It seems there was a cure for psychosomatic limps, and that cure ran out the day it decided to take a fall.
You expected more of a fight to get onto the roof. Security should have been tighter, just after a suicide. Repeat incidents would be killer on the hospital's reputation. And isn't that all anyone cares about? Their reputation?
You would have thought he cared about more.
Just being on the roof is enough to take your breath away. You almost fall to your knees, but you have to see. You have to see the last thing his pale eyes ever saw.
You step up to the edge, and are surprised by a gust of wind. Your eyes quickly find the street on which you stood, stubbornly avoiding the sidewalk down below.
You wonder if he closed his eyes. You wonder if he meant for you to be the last thing he ever saw, your voice the last thing he ever heard, besides the rush of the wind past his ears as he fell, fell, fell.
You turn away, you know that you are teetering on the edge, in more ways than one, and you have to step away before you decide to do something that you will forever be unable to regret.
You do fall to your knees then, because it is much too much, and your eyes are wet and your chest is heaving and you wonder if the people down below can hear your strangled sobs.
You do not know for how long you are there, do not know how long it takes for your eyes to run dry, but when they do, they catch on something, something small and insignificant, and the colour of dried blood. You make your way over to it, still on your knees, and you lean down to examine, uncaring of the dirt accumulating on your trousers, of the harsh feeling of the roof beneath your knees.
It was cleaned up, must have been. But roofs are full of grooves, they are rough, and gravel-like in texture, and much too hard to clean up. You see the small spot, and then your eyes are able to search for more. The cleanup was good, but you are desperate, and that makes you better. Your eyes map out a large pool, and then you know.
Someone was with Sherlock on this roof.
Someone that did not leave it.
The knowledge is the fuel that makes you pick yourself up off your knees, burning in your blood like the sweet tang of adrenaline, and your eyes are searching, a sad echo of his quick observations. You leave the roof behind you, your eyes scanning on your way down the stairs.
There is a window ledge, just like many others that you passed on the way up, but this one is different. The dust is disturbed in pattern that any eyes but yours, those of a trained military man that spent over a year and a half chasing the mad brilliance that made up Sherlock Holmes would have missed.
You remember him telling you about the wonders of dust, after he berated your ever patient land lady for doing a bit of tidying up around the flat. You remember how he ranted on and on about how much could be read in the disturbance of dust if one knew how to look.
So look you do, and you find the outline of something that trained marksman like you could never miss. You have to get closer, so you do. You look out the window, and you find a familiar scene.
It is the same as the one you just saw from the roof.
A clear shot, and you're sure of it.
The realization is staggering, and you have to take a minute to catch your breath.
But now you know. The pieces are sliding together and things are starting to make sense and it hurts, hurts so much you can't stand it, that there is even the smallest chance that you may be wrong.
Hurts even more that he may have taken his own life in exchange for yours.
You expect that he thought he taught you nothing. That months and months spent by his side left you still without an ability to deduce. But that has been all that you have been doing, ever since the fall.
Now is no different. His funeral comes quickly after your trip to the roof. After your mind realizes that it has to look, to observe the world around you, that your brain must now work through the pain, work to understand what your eyes see.
A blinder man would have attributed the rush of the funeral to the grief of an older brother having to bury his closest relation. But it is the look that Mycroft gives you, the one that seems to say "I'm sorry" just as much as it says "you are better than this, Doctor Watson." And you listen to that look, and you ignore his words, and you know, you know now more than ever that there is more to this than meets the eye.
So you keep your eyes open, and you begin to notice. You notice them, the people on the streets, the ones that are watching you. There are two types. One, cleverly hidden, blending in with the people on the street and disappearing from view almost the instant they catch your eye. This type makes you itch for your gun, and you begin carrying it with you whenever you venture from the flat.
The other kind is the homeless, the vagrants. They watch you and they do not try to hide this fact. The knowledge of this nags at something in the back of your mind, the memory of a passing comment long forgotten, and though you do not realize why at first, you are comforted by their presence, as if they are a protection sent from someone dear.
In addition to your new observation of life, you open your ears up to hear, and unlike the masses that surround you, you begin to listen. You hear whispers. Whispers of a web and it is what finally sparks you into action. It is what makes you follow one of your watchers into an alley late at night.
He is one of the former, the kind that makes the hair on the back of your neck stand on end, the kind that stops the trembling of your hand.
He turns on you, and a fight ensues. Your mind clears, adrenaline pumps, and you thrive. Guns may be your preference, but hand-to-hand combat has always been a specialty of yours. You get a few punches in, but it is not long before he pulls a knife.
A flash of pain, the deep red of your blood as the blade slices across your skin, and then you are wrestling the knife from his hand. There is a twist of your wrists as your hands clench around his, and then the knife is plunged in, and up into soft flesh.
He gasps, his eyes wide as he looks at you. It didn't take long. He underestimated you. You want to question him, but the words do not make it past your lips before he is staggering forward, his fingers white as he grips the knife, blood coming up to dribble out of the side of his mouth.
You watch as the colour leaves his eyes, and the only thing you regret is not getting the answers you seek.
You try again, this time on a man that followed you into the park. You use your own knife this time, and you get a confirmation for your troubles.
You now know for certain for whom they work for, and you begin taking them down one by one. Continuing the destruction of a web that had so captivated a man that you are no longer sure is entirely gone.
They follow you, but you stalk them. You leave some of them handcuffed and unconscious for the police. Others do not last that long.
You do not regret the outcome either way.
It is not long before you begin to draw attention, and you know it is time to take action.
The headlines are much more romantic this time around, the papers taking liberties with your relationship as they always have. It is six months after that day, and they take your faked suicide as you following your lost lover into the dark. A modern day Romeo and Juliet, they call you, a similar tragedy but of a different kind.
You found it to be much too easy, to fake your own death. It does not bother you that their easy acceptance must have been because it was what they were expecting.
They never find a body. You do not have those resources, and the bodies that have stacked up since you began your mission will bear marks that you are not trying to portray.
They accept your death anyway.
Without the benefit of people following you, you begin to do real work. Hunting henchmen down by subtle clues. A text message of a location, the receipt from a shared meeting place.
It brings you across the country; it brings you too close to home. For weeks you do this, for weeks you work alone to bring down the network, each cut tie a step closer to something for which your heart aches, and nothing, nothing, will stand in your way to get there.
You work alone, until...
Until you are no longer alone.
He crashes into the room as a gun is pressed to your temple. You have the situation under control, but you know that that is not what his eyes are seeing. He seems unsurprised to find you there, and you know that beyond the shock of his black curls and pale skin that you feel the same. You knew, had known for weeks that he was still alive. That this meeting was what you had been working towards, why you had faked your own death and what you had torn your way through more people than you bothered to count to find. A gun goes off before your heart has a chance to leap at the sight of him, and a body falls to the floor next to you.
He rushes over to you, checking you for damage as he did at the pool, over a year ago now. You wonder why you didn't see it then.
You wonder why you still aren't kissing him.
You decide to change that and you bring his lips crashing down to yours just as he opens them to speak. The kiss is harsh and demanding and wet with the tears you did not realize you were shedding, and when you pull away his pale eyes finally meet yours. They are broken and vulnerable and full of more pain than you ever want to see in him again, and you clutch at him, desperately, and his arms wind around you in return.
You look away from that gaze, promise yourself to fix whatever was broken in your time apart, promise to kill a dozen more men to avenge whatever is missing of his strange and beautiful heart, and you burrow into his chest, his coat soaking up the tears that you do not fight from coming. He holds you, and the two of you stand there, a corpse at your feet and a slight blush on your cheeks as his lips find yours once more.
You both know that this is not the last of them. That Moriarty's web was vast and sinister, and your combined efforts have worked to bring much of it down, but that that work is not yet over.
But now you can work together. You are no longer waging a war to find him, bringing the destruction of whoever stands in your way, taking down a web that is much bigger than you ever imagined, your hatred for what these people have done, what they have done to him, fuelling you on when you feel like giving in.
Now you stand side by side, his weight a comforting presence at your shoulder as you track down the rest of Moriarty's network, together.
It would take more than an army to keep you away from this man. You say it would take nothing short of death to keep you from Sherlock Holmes, but it seems that even death, could not take you from his side.
AN: Hello all! I am terribly sorry for my absence. Life has been murder on my fics and my muse. I offer this story up for forgiveness.