A/N: This is based on a post on tumblr that I saw with intense feels so I wrote a story for it. Enjoy!
Disclaimer: Don't own Sherlock, yada yada yada
John sat on the stairs, head in his hands. It had been three months since Sherlock's death but it still hurt. It hurt so much he didn't even want to live through it sometimes, but Sherlock wouldn't have wanted to have to look at John's body, would he? Maybe not, but it had a horrible rainy day and John couldn't cope. He pulled out his phone and sent a quick text reading: Horrible weather, anything new?-JW.
The texts had started as a way for John to pretend Sherlock was just away on case. He'd text him every day as if he'd respond. But the phone he kept on the mantel would buzz and he'd be reminded that Sherlock wasn't away, that he'd never respond, that the only person reading those texts was John himself.
At first they'd only been little things, like asking for his grocery list or if he was going to be late. he hadn't meant to text him, it was just out of habit. But eventually he'd turned it into a ritual. It helped him forget. He'd tried to delete his blog, but John couldn't erase those memories and he couldn't erase the blog either. Instead, he'd abandoned it, deleted any Internet history that contained anything mentioning his blog.
The first real text he'd sent to deal with the pain had been a simple Going to be back late tonight-JW and somehow, it had helped. John had been able to finally stop his tears and continue up the stairs. The second one had been a few weeks later, Asking him if he wanted to order pizza for dinner. After that, they became more frequent, every second day at least. They'd been mostly questions asking Sherlock about his "case", anything for dinner or groceries, simple little things like that. Before the fall, those texts were daily occurrences, so Sherlock wouldn't forget to eat, again. When they'd become tools for coping, John wasn't sure. He'd sent thousands of them to Sherlock in his head the first few days after the most horrible day of John's life but he'd never actually sent them.
John tried to send them while he was out of the apartment, somewhere he couldn't hear the buzz of Sherlock's phone sitting on the mantel beside his gun and the skull. When he sent them outside the apartment, he could almost forget that they went unanswered, that Sherlock could never read them because Sherlock Holmes was dead.
Almost a year after the fall, when John had a really crappy day, he finally sent it. He'd had it typed for ages, but didn't have the guts to press the little green button. John was going to tell Sherlock, sometime after the day he fell, but didn't get the chance to do anything but whisper it to Sherlock's grave. He'd probably known, with all his deducing, but thank god he'd never said it out loud because John didn't want Sherlock to say it for him, John wanted himself to say it to the great detective. He stared at the words on the phone screen for a while, tears streaming down his face. Doctor John Watson took a deep breath and pressed the little button, finally saying the hardest thing he'd ever needed to say.
I love you. Please come back.-JW