Note: Written as a fill for marill_chan's prompt on the kink meme: Because reason says I should've died three years ago
Disclaimer: The characters of Sherlock are not mine, nor is the story, nor are the characters from the original stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and neither is the song from Rent that I make references to. I make no monetary profit from this.
Life Support
When John Watson is asked how he's been doing, he answers that he is still alive, thank you. Most people take it as a tongue-in-cheek sort of joke, a small protest against the mundanity of saying that he's doing fine, and laugh before clapping him on the shoulder and telling him the latest about the missus.
It's not a joke. Still being alive is an accomplishment.
He supposes he ought to be proud of himself, he thinks as he pours himself his first cup of coffee (it was almost two in the afternoon). Three years ago, almost to the day, his reason for living walked off the roof of a building, and he is constantly surprised - every time he remembers, which is always, upon waking - that he didn't follow.
To tell the God's honest truth, he didn't think of Sherlock Holmes in that way, didn't know exactly how important the man was to him until after his flatmate committed himself irrevocably to gravity. He wonders if things would have been different if he had realized this sooner. If he could have said anything that would have prevented it. If maybe he could have shocked Sherlock into backing off of the ledge by shouting I love you at him in the middle of his suicide note.
No.
As long as John Watson is being honest - and he might as well be honest with himself if he is going to think about this - he has to admit that he doesn't know what he feels about Sherlock. Or to put it precisely, he isn't able to say exactly how he loves (yes, that word, and, yes, present tense) Sherlock Holmes. Oh, achingly, yes, and certainly more than he thought possible, but the color and quality of it...
Some days - and he spends an unhealthy amount of time contemplating this - he thinks that it's definitely ridiculously platonic, best friends in the very best sense of the word. On others he thinks, to Hell with everything, he'd have gone gay for Sherlock and would shag the man senseless if only he would stop being dead and let him.
He wishes he could have had the opportunity to figure out which it really was. It is so much worse that he'll never know.
John, mug in hand, looks out of the window, and the view isn't Baker Street. He misses the old flat, but he can't stay there. Sherlock's ghost doesn't haunt it, but his memory does, which in many ways is worse. John's managed to give away a few books, has donated the chemistry set, but when it came to taking the Cluedo board down off the wall he had been assaulted by a vision of Sherlock shouting that Mrs. Peacock couldn't be the killer, she had to be pushing eighty going by the photograph, how the Hell was she supposed to have done the victim in with the rope, and he'd sat down, simply sat in the middle of the floor, not crying or anything, but unable to do anything else, until the room had gone dark and a worried Mrs. Hudson had come up the stairs because he'd been up there for hours with the lights off.
Mrs. Hudson visits every once in a while, bless her. She says that Mycroft is still paying the rent for 221B, and has given her strict instructions that everything should be kept in order. As it was. Guilt, John thinks. He doesn't speak to Mycroft, and actively avoids any smooth black cars that happen to slow down as he passes them in the street.
John sits down at his desk, stares at the screen of his laptop. He doesn't keep the blog anymore, not publicly, but on Ella's advice he makes two lists everyday: six impossible things to believe before breakfast, and eight things to be happy about before he goes to bed.
Invariably, Sherlock isn't dead tops the six impossible things he tries to believe in.
The eight things, however, vary considerably. They're small things, usually. Good coffee and better tea, for instance, or My football team won their last match, or even Made it inside the flat just before the rain started. Met up with Lestrade, he's doing fine is another thing he counts whenever it happens - Lestrade (still Lestrade in his head, even though John calls him Greg to his face, because that was how Sherlock thought of him) has left the force, too much fire from Internal Affairs he says, and is doing some private detecting of his own. He thinks for a long time about Someone came up to me in the street and said they believed in Sherlock Holmes before putting that in the list too.
It's not too hard, most days.
There are days, though, when he can't list anything that made him happy (because none of them was Sherlock), and he doesn't even bother with the impossible things one (because Sherlock is dead, fucking dead, six feet in the ground and fucking decomposing like the bits of dead people he used to take home, wouldn't he have liked to watch that). On those days John doesn't leave the flat because he can't see the point.
That's what he tells himself anyway, and what he tells Ella.
The truth, John.
All right, that isn't entirely true, it's not true at all, in fact. He doesn't see the point, yes, but what keeps him indoors, in his bedroom, in bed, is that he can't damage himself there. Because on those cold, black, bleak days, John Watson isn't sure if being alive is an accomplishment at all, he thinks that maybe he's got it wrong, that Sherlock hasn't gone where he can't follow, he can, he only needs the guts to do it.
Today feels like one of those days, and John shuts his eyes, leans back in his chair, and hates the world.
Somehow he hasn't done it yet. He hasn't even tried - John is a doctor after all, and is rather sure that if he tried to off himself he would end up in the morgue - but he's made preparations, and one day he might, just might, finally go through with it.
In the meantime, John does other things. Sometimes he breaks things, systematically, like the old jumper he cut carefully to pieces or the set of dishes he broke one by one on the kitchen floor. Sometimes, like today, he texts Sherlock even if he had the old number discontinued himself - angry messages, little stories (Tried a new Chinese place, failed at predicting the fortune cookies, and they wouldn't let me try an eleventh), and admonitions to stop this being dead nonsense. Against all odds, he continues to expect a reply, though nobody, alive or otherwise, really texts him these days.
Reason says he should have died three years ago. And sentiment holds that part of him did die with Sherlock Holmes. But for all practical intents and purposes, John Watson is still alive, barely holding on, maybe, but still there. On life support, if you will.
His phone buzzes. He has a text.